[JackSpratts]

"It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, 'Tha Carter II', sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate." – Kelefa Sanneh


"Judge Tries to Unring Bell Hanging Around Neck of Horse Already Out of Barn Being Carried on Ship That Has Sailed." – William G. Childs


"We are living through the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race. And it wouldn’t be a revolution if there were no losers." – Clay Shirky


"I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well." – Kurt Bollacker


"To be featured in a video game is probably the greatest way to reach a large audience right now." – Dave Navarro


"People magazine’s article this week on Britney Spears and her 'new guy,' model Isaac Cohen, is five paragraphs long. It was reported and written by seven people. To be fair, they were long paragraphs." – Katharine Q. Seelye and Richard Siklos


"Flat is the new up." – Time Inc. executive


"I think this is all complete nonsense." – Michael Arrington


"You know, you don't think water is going to kill you." – Lucy Davidson


"Paying for something this awful hurts." – Adam Gillitt


"This was a huge mistake, me coming on here." – Bill O'Reilly

















Mabel

ATT is finally getting around to offering DSL to people who don’t use their brand of telephone service. It took the latest merger to do it but you have to wonder why they waited so long. As it is the FCC forced it on them as a condition of approval. They broke up Ma Bell for a reason and if she’s going to pull herself back together again she can expect demands from regulators. Had they not broken up the old A.T.&T. it’s doubtful I’d be writing this or you’d be at this forum reading it. The explosion of the telecom-based Internet undoubtedly happened because ATT was pushed out of the way and no one besides ATT itself seems to be in any hurry to return to the old days. So ATT had to take a few hits to get the merger going but it really is more life support than onerous reg. So-called naked DSL was one requirement. I’m not sure this will have much traction however, it’s probably too little too late.

Friends in the property management business tell me new tenants don’t subscribe to land lines and they haven’t for some time. They all have cell phones but no wired home phone. They have TV of course so they pick what they want from the cable company. A bundled Comcast package of TV and broadband works just fine. The local telco isn’t needed.

They get their cable TV and Internet access and sometimes even the VoIP telephone thing, all with speeds well in excess of what ATT is offering. Monthly gig caps don't seem to bother them much. I guess most of them aren't BT junkies, but they like the quick hit that comes with higher speed cable.

Cable isn’t cheap. The new ATT deal is though, and maybe the 20 dollar price looks attractive, but whoa that 768 speed is from hunger. You can't even stream video at those rates, and they gotta have YouTube.

On the other hand it might be a decent first time price for geezers, but along with their land yachts and their pals Toots and Mabel flapping in the rolodex those folks still have their land lines. Naked DSL won’t float their boat.

No siree, it’s those Internet savvy whippersnappers ATT is trying to woo, and boy do they need them. They’ve been dropping home phones faster than yesterday’s papers. This latest offer won't change that though. Not a chance.

I’ve spoken at length with these kids. I’m familiar with ATT services, both POTS and DSL, and they are good values; rock steady and cap-free - but for young people that ship has sailed. I can talk up the benefits of ATT all I like yet they won't even call for a quote, let alone buy a package. They look at me as if I’m trying to sell them membership in AARP.

They’ve left Ma Bell. She simply lost her allure. Whether cheap DSL, TV over phone lines or anything else in the way of new services can change that cold fact remains to be seen. I suppose if the guy who hates net neutrality and is infamous for greedily claiming he “owns the pipes” buys ATT and tries to Frankenstein a dead phone monopoly back to life it means there is plenty to keep an eye on. Lucky for us however he’s just not the kind of operator who gets kids hot, nor one able to get the money they spend to finance his monopolistic Internet dream.

There is the coup he pulled with Jobs and his iPhone though, but did you notice? The celebration was grand for one day, then the hangover hit hard the next. Steve Jobs’ vision of total control is getting even weirder than the ATT guy.

So there’s my Nightmare of the Week: AT&T and Apple in bed together, along with Disney and the **AA. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with Orrin Hatch and his Digitally Restricted Manure bringing up the rear. Here’s hoping it’s just the DT’s.













Enjoy,

Jack















January 20th, '07







RIAA getting new law

Senate DRM Bill Aimed At Satcasters
FMQB

A bill has been introduced to Congress which would set new rules for satellite radio, creating new rates and content protection standards similar to those of Internet radio. The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN).

The bill is part of the ongoing debate over the ability of satellite radio subscribers to record high-quality, digital copies of songs directly from broadcasts. The RIAA and other organizations have spoken out against the possibility of recording directly from satellite broadcasts, and has asked for similar rules to be put into play that are in effect for Internet radio broadcasters.

The RIAA has hailed the bill, with Chairman/CEO Mitch Bainwol stating, "This early play by Sen. Feinstein and her colleagues should leave no doubt that policymakers continue to view parity among digital music services as a top priority. And a top priority it should be. Under the current system, satellite radio has been allowed to morph into a digital distribution service – shorting the creators of music, displacing licensed sales and threatening the integrity of the digital music marketplace in the process. We love satellite radio. But this is simply no way to do business. It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure a marketplace where fair competition can thrive.”
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=332444





With Arrest of DJ Drama, the Law Takes Aim at Mixtapes
Kelefa Sanneh

In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”

Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.

On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.

DJ Drama (whose real name is Tyree Simmons) and Mr. Cannon were each charged with a felony violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization law(known as RICO) and held on $100,000 bond.

The compilations produced by DJ Drama and his protégés are known as mixtapes, though they appear on CDs, not cassettes. Mixtapes have become a vital part of the hip-hop world. They are often the only way for listeners to keep up with a genre that moves too quickly to be captured on albums. On a mixtape you can hear unreleased remixes, sneak previews from coming CDs, casual freestyle rhymes, never-to-be-released goofs.

Mixtapes are, by definition, unregulated: DJs don’t get permission from record companies, and record companies have traditionally ignored and sometimes bankrolled mixtapes, reasoning that they serve as valuable promotional tools. And rappers have grown increasingly canny at using mixtapes to promote themselves. The career of 50 Cent has a lot to do with his mastery of the mixtape form, and now no serious rapper can afford to be absent from this market for too long.

As mixtapes evolved from a street-corner phenomenon to a cornerstone of the hip-hop industry, record companies tried to figure out ways to cash in. Mixtape D.J.’s like DJ Clue, DJ Kay Slay and others have released major-label compilations full of tracks that abide by copyright rules. But it’s not easy to turn a mixtape into something you can legally sell: part of the fun is hearing rappers remake one another’s songs and respond to one another’s taunts; a great mixtape captures the controlled chaos that hip-hop thrives on.

DJ Drama’s mixtapes are often great. He has turned “Gangsta Grillz” into a prestige brand: each is a carefully compiled disc, full of exclusive tracks, devoted to a single rapper who is also the host. Rappers often seem proud to be considered good enough for a “Gangsta Grillz” mixtape. On “Dedication,” the first of his two excellent “Gangsta Grillz” mixtapes, Lil Wayne announces, “I hooked up with dude, now we ’bout to make history.” The compilation showed off Lil Wayne more effectively than his albums ever had, and “Dedication” helped revive his career. When some unreleased tracks by T.I. leaked to the Internet, T.I. teamed up with DJ Drama for a pre-emptive strike: together, they created a mixtape called “The Leak.”

As mixtapes have grown more popular, they have also grown easier to purchase, despite that official-sounding declaration — “For Promotional Use Only” — printed on every one. Sites like mixunit.com specialize in selling them, and big record shops and online stores have followed suit. As of yesterday DJ Drama was sitting in jail, but dozens of his unlicensed compilations were still available at the iTunes shop.

Brad A. Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “A sound recording is either copyrighted or it’s not.” And he said the DJ Drama case, like most piracy cases, began with illegal product, which was then traced back to the distributor. Chief Baker said that before the raid, DJ Drama and Mr. Cannon were sent cease-and-desist letters from a local lawyer.

There have been mixtape busts before: in 2005, five employees of Mondo Kim’s, in the East Village in New York, were jailed after the store was found to be selling unlicensed mixtapes. But the arrest of a figure as prominent as DJ Drama is unprecedented. Record companies usually portray the fight against piracy as a fight for artists’ rights, but this case complicates that argument: most of DJ Drama’s mixtapes begin with enthusiastic endorsements from the artists themselves.

It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, “Tha Carter II” (Cash Money/Universal), sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate.

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/ar...ic/18dram.html





History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers
Mike

As regular readers know, I've been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven't read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they're interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject. It's Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Beyond giving readers a general overview of a variety of different economic theories, the book actually makes them all sound really interesting. It's a good book not necessarily because of the nitty gritty of economics (which it doesn't cover), but because it makes economics interesting, and gives people a good basis to then dig into actual economic theory and not find it boring and meaningless, but see it as a way to better understand what these "philosophers" were discussing.

Reading through an early chapter, though, it struck me how eerily a specific story Heilbroner told about France in 1666 matches up with what's happening today with the way the recording industry has reacted to innovations that have challenged their business models. Just two paragraphs highlight a couple of situations with striking similarities to the world today:

"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.

Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods."

Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070110/004225.shtml





Connecticut 'Toilet Bomber' Pleads Guilty
AP

A Weston man once called one of the Internet's most notorious pirates of music and movies plans to plead guilty to a federal charge that he blew up a portable toilet last year, according to court records filed Thursday.

Bruce Forest was charged last year with seven counts of using explosives to destroy property and seven counts of discharging a firearm in connection with a series of toilet explosions in 2005 and 2006.

No one was injured.

Under a plea agreement, Forest intends to plead guilty on Feb. 12 to a charge that he blew up a toilet in Weston in February 2006, according to court papers his attorney, Bernard Grossberg, filed Thursday.

Telephone messages were left Thursday for Grossberg and prosecutors.

"We're at a loss to explain why he was doing this, other than the excitement of blowing things up," Weston Police Chief Anthony Land said last year when Forest was arrested on state charges.

Forest is also asking to be released from prison so he can get medical treatment. He proposes remaining in the custody of his wife and mother under home confinement with electronic monitoring.

Under the proposed conditions of the release, Forest's home would be subject to random searches and he would not be allowed to possess a gun.

Last year, U.S. Magistrate Holly Fitzsimmons ruled that Forest was too dangerous to be released from prison and ordered him to undergo a medical evaluation.

Fitzsimmons said that an arsenal of weapons was found at his home and the charges involved "an escalating pattern of destruction." The judge also cited evidence that Forest was using drugs or medications illegally obtained over the Internet and told a neighbor he was working for the government and was responsible for repelling any terrorist attack on the neighborhood.

Most of the explosions occurred at night in isolated areas, but the last blast in Norwalk occurred during the day in a heavily populated area, authorities said. The explosives involved a mixture of chemicals, police said.

Forest was being treated for anxiety, depression and migraine headaches stemming from a fall that caused head trauma, according to a court-appointed social worker.

Forest was a notorious Internet pirate in the late 1990s, said J.D. Lasica, a San Francisco writer who dubbed Forest "Prince of the Darknet" in his 2005 book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1028781





Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs
Randall Stross

STEVE JOBS, Apple’s showman nonpareil, provided the first public glimpse of the iPhone last week — gorgeous, feature-laden and pricey. While following the master magician’s gestures, it was easy to overlook a most disappointing aspect: like its slimmer iPod siblings, the iPhone’s music-playing function will be limited by factory-installed “crippleware.”

If “crippleware” seems an unduly harsh description, it balances the euphemistic names that the industry uses for copy protection. Apple officially calls its own standard “FairPlay,” but fair it is not.

The term “crippleware” comes from the plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit, Melanie Tucker v. Apple Computer Inc., that is making its way through Federal District Court in Northern California. The suit contends that Apple unfairly restricts consumer choice because it does not load onto the iPod the software needed to play music that uses Microsoft’s copy-protection standard, in addition to Apple’s own.

Ms. Tucker’s core argument is that the absence of another company’s software on the iPod constitutes “crippleware.” I disagree. It is Apple’s own copy-protection software itself that cripples the device.

Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one — and only one — line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one — and only one — online music store, the iTunes Music Store.

The only legal way around this built-in limitation is to strip out the copy protection by burning a CD with the tracks, then uploading the music back to the computer. If you’re willing to go to that trouble, you can play the music where and how you choose — the equivalent to rights that would have been granted automatically at the cash register if you had bought the same music on a CD in the first place.

Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.

Unlike Apple, Microsoft has been willing to license its copy-protection software to third-party hardware vendors. But copy protection is copy protection: a headache only for the law-abiding.

Microsoft used to promote its PlaysForSure copy-protection standard, but there must have been some difficulty with the “for sure” because the company has dropped it in favor of an entirely new copy-protection standard for its new Zune player, which, incidentally, is incompatible with the old one.

Pity the overly trusting customers who invested earlier in music collections before the Zune arrived. Their music cannot be played on the new Zune because it is locked up by software enforcing the earlier copy-protection standard: PlaysFor(Pretty)Sure — ButNotTheNewStuff.

The name for the umbrella category for copy-protection software is itself an indefensible euphemism: Digital Rights Management. As consumers, the “rights” enjoyed are few. As some wags have said, the initials D.R.M. should really stand for “Digital Restrictions Management.”

As consumers become more aware of how copy protection limits perfectly lawful behavior, they should throw their support behind the music labels that offer digital music for sale in plain-vanilla MP3 format, without copy protection.

Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.”

In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies’, not Apple’s.

This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales.

Unlike the four major labels — Universal, Warner Music Group, EMI and Sony BMG — the independents provide eMusic with permission to distribute the music in plain MP3 format. There is no copy protection, no customer lock-in, no restrictions on what kind of music player or media center a customer chooses to use — the MP3 standard is accommodated by all players.

EMusic recently celebrated the sale of its 100 millionth download; it trails only iTunes as the largest online seller of digital music. (Of course, iTunes, with 2 billion downloads, has a substantial lead.)

Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection.

But when the same tracks are sold by the iTunes Music Store, Apple insists on attaching FairPlay copy protection that limits their use to only one portable player, the iPod. Terry McBride, Nettwerk’s chief executive, said that the artists initially required Apple to use copy protection, but that this was no longer the case. At this point, he said, copy protection serves only Apple’s interests .

Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, saying copy protection “just locks people into Apple.” He said he had recently asked Apple when the company would remove copy protection and was told, “We see no need to do so.”

Apple’s statement is a detailed treatise on the subject, compared with what I received when I asked the company last week whether it would offer tracks without copy protection if the publisher did not insist on it: the Apple spokesman took my query and never got back to me.

David Pakman, the C.E.O. of eMusic, said the major labels have watched their revenues decline about $10 billion since a 2001 peak; meanwhile, revenue earned by the independents has held steady. He said his service offers music from 9,800 labels, each of which has embraced downloads in MP3 format. Only four labels still cling to copy protection, even though piracy has not declined, and those are the four major labels.

Mr. McBride, of Nettwerk, predicted that in 2007 the major labels would finally move to drop copy protection in order to provide iPod owners the option of shopping at online music stores other than iTunes; by doing so, he added, they would “break the monopoly of Apple” that dictates terms and conditions for music industry suppliers and customers. Some encouraging signs have appeared recently. Dave Goldberg, the head of Yahoo Music, persuaded EMI to try some experiments last month with MP3 downloads — a Norah Jones single here, a Reliant K single there.

With sales of physical CDs falling faster than digital music sales are growing, he said, the major labels “have got to make it easier for people to do the right thing” — that is, to buy recorded music unencumbered with copy protection rather than to engage in illegal file-sharing.

IN the long view, Mr. Goldberg said he believes that today’s copy-protection battles will prove short-lived. Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee.

It’s a prediction that has a high probability of realization because such a system is already found in South Korea, where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month. He noted, however, that music companies in South Korea did not agree to such a radically different business model until sales of physical CDs had collapsed.

Pointing to South Korea, where copy protection has disappeared, Mr. Goldberg invoked the pithy aphorism attributed to the author William Gibson: “The future is here; it’s just not widely distributed yet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/bu...ey/14digi.html





iPhone Skins Irk Apple


The iPhone user interface running on a Windows Mobile handheld.


Australian Apple devotees may not have to wait until next year to get their hands on the iPhone, as its user interface (UI) can be downloaded onto competing devices that are available now.

Savvy coders have developed iPhone "skins" that work with most smartphones based on the Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems.

The issue has angered Apple to such an extent that it has sent its lawyers after a number of those involved - both directly and indirectly.

The skins don't add any new functionality to the devices, but make use of the iPhone's copyrighted icons to create a UI that distinctly resembles Apple's hybrid mobile phone.

Soon after the skins were uploaded to the Brighthand and Xda-developers internet message boards, Apple unleashed its legal team, who sent removal letters to at least one of the websites hosting the files.

Apple's lawyers also sent letters to journalists who simply reported on the fact that the skins were available.

"It has come to our attention that you have posted a screenshot of Apple's new iPhone and links that facilitate the installation of that screenshot on a PocketPC device," law firm O'Melveny & Myers LLP wrote to Paul O'Brien, who runs the MoDaCo website.

"While we appreciate your interest in the iPhone, the icons and screenshot displayed on your website are copyrighted by Apple.

"Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website and refrain from facilitating the further dissemination of Apple's copyrighted material by removing the link to http://forum.xda-developers.com, where said icons and screenshot are being distributed."

Apple's actions have sparked fury among tech industry watchers, who have accused the company of bullying and being notoriously litigious.

"I think this is all complete nonsense," Michael Arrington, of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, said.

"If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter."

Ironically, Apple's attempts to have the files removed from the web have only given the skins greater publicity, and they have already begun spreading to other websites.

The issue marks a distinct change in tone for many bloggers and journalists, who just last week praised Apple for its "revolutionary" and "game-changing" phone despite being unable to conduct a proper hands-on test of the product.

But this isn't the first example of Apple's legal team targeting individual bloggers and website owners.

In a high-profile US lawsuit that was filed in late 2004, Apple sued three bloggers after they published information - which Apple labelled "trade secrets" - of an unreleased Apple product.

By filing the suit, Apple hoped to determine who in the company was leaking information to the media.

The court initially ruled in favour of Apple, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organisation representing the bloggers, lodged an appeal.

Judge Franklin Elia of the 6th District Court of Appeal rejected Apple's arguments that the bloggers were not true "journalists" protected by First Amendment rights to keep their sources secret.

"All you want here is the name of a snitch, so you're saying you have the right to invade the privacy of the email system and to trump the First Amendment ... just to find out who in your organisation is giving out inappropriate information?" Judge Elia asked Apple's attorney.

Apple later dropped the case, deciding against taking it to the Supreme Court.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment for this story.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/mobile...09656280.html#





Why Hollywood Snubbed Jobs at Macworld

Most of Tinseltown won't buy into the Apple chief's digital vision until he ponies up more money and gets more serious about protecting content
Ronald Grover

By all accounts, Steve Jobs gave a socko performance, delivered with his usual charm and controversial style, Jan. 9 at Apple's (AAPL) annual Macworld gathering. Apple TV, which Jobs says has licked the problem of linking your TV to content downloaded from the Internet, was introduced as thousands cheered in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Among the faithful were some tech companies, Walt Disney Co. (DIS) Chief Executive Robert Iger, and a smattering of TV executives.

Most of the rest of Hollywood was conspicuously absent. Only four months back, when Iger announced that Jack Sparrow and the rest of Disney's movie characters could be downloaded to Apple's video iPod, it looked like Jobs was on his way toward taming the beast called Hollywood. A prototype of Apple TV, then code-named iTV, would soon link to the iPod and ship movies from Steve's world to our TVs—or so the whiskered one led us to believe.

But no other Hollywood studio has yet joined Disney in giving Jobs their most precious commodity: new-to-the-home-market movies, which continue to be the studios' hottest sellers in the still-robust $32-billion-a-year DVD market. To be fair, Jobs & Co. did manage to lure a second studio, when Paramount Pictures announced it was joining the iPod brigade. The Viacom (VIA) unit, eager to overcome its image as a digital Neanderthal, said it would license to Apple 100 or so of its older movies. You want Breakfast at Tiffany's and Mean Girls, you can get them. But try to get Dreamgirls when it comes out on video in a few months, or Shrek 3, which Paramount will release this summer for DreamWorks Animation (DWA).

Wanted: Stricter Sharing Rules

Paramount may eventually give Apple its hot new flicks, but not yet and not until it sees how its maiden iPod voyage goes. But as Jobs was making his starlit announcement at Macworld, I was several hundred miles away in Las Vegas, getting the lowdown at the Consumer Electronics Show from studio executives who aren't likely to join Paramount and Disney anytime soon.

Hollywood, I was told, still doesn't trust Steve Jobs with its crown jewels. Yes, everyone loves that ratings for shows like NBC's (GE) The Office and ABC's Lost seem to be up thanks to the promotional exposure of being available via iPod download. But while just about every TV network quickly followed Disney's 2005 decision to give its TV shows to Apple, few have yet to join the Mouse with movies. When you have a piece of content than can cost upward of $100 million to produce, you don't give it up without a lot of soul-searching and number-crunching.

What does Hollywood want from Steve Jobs? For starters, more protection for their films. "His user rules just scare the heck out of us," one studio executive told me. Indeed, under Apple's video iPod digital-rights-management scheme, folks can share their flicks with as many as three other iPod users.

Balking at Movie Download Prices

That's good for the guys who get free flicks, but it's bad for Hollywood, which goes bat crazy over the notion of pirated freebies on the Internet. To them, losing a customer courtesy of the video iPod is just as bad. Add into the equation the new Apple TV, which would allow folks to put that movie on their TVs, and Hollywood sees more and more of its DVD bucks headed out the door.

Then, there is the issue of price. Charging $14.99 for new flicks and $9.99 for older ones, Jobs clearly wants to undercut big-box retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT), which sell the great majority of the newer DVDs these days for as much as $19 a pop. That's a bad move on Jobs's part. Both Wal-Mart and Target have made their feelings known about being undercut by Apple. Big surprise—they're not happy about it, and Hollywood has been paying attention to these all-important retailers.

Both Wal-Mart and Target have since moderated their stance, at least in public, but I was told the discussions between Hollywood and Apple of late have focused on how to raise the initial price, at least for the hottest hits.

Deal May Require Softer Touch

The big question, of course, is how much Jobs is listening. He didn't much care when the music industry came looking for more money when the music it licensed to him became huge thanks to iTunes. Why would he? He had the upper hand. This time around, with Microsoft (MSFT) already out with its own link to the tube (which it's called iTV, it seems, just to rub it in), Jobs has real competition. And movies aren't nearly the hit on the video iPod that music almost instantly became. If you're a Hollywood suit, you figure you can wait out the whiskered one this time around.

Disney had valid reasons for being first to the video iPod party. Iger loves to show people that the first image you see when you log on to the iTunes video page is a screen shot of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. That's free promotion, and any movie exec would take that. Plus, Iger needed to show the world that Disney, after years of stumbles, had become a champion of new technology. But others aren't so eager to be the second, third, or fourth out of the box, it appears. None of the studios involved would comment for this story.

My money is on Steve Jobs eventually winning over Hollywood. He didn't build his reputation as the high priest and visionary of the tech world without the ability to divine which way the wind is blowing. But it will be a little tricky for a marketing master not known for his light touch at the negotiating table. I'm betting that Jack Sparrow and friends will have company soon enough on the Good Ship Apple. But the swashbuckler from Apple may have to put away his sword.
http://businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnfl...112_399642.htm





Kernel Developer, Alan Cox, Files Patent on DRM
Benanzo

A series of patents have been filed by the well-known Linux kernel developer, Alan Cox, asserting ownership of any DRM technology employed in software to modify the behavior of a system if certain conditions are not met. Since Red Hat and Cox himself are staunch open-source proponents, if this patent is granted it is likely that they will choose not to license this technology, and instead, sue for any use of it as a defense of OSS. Red Hat's patent policy (http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html) states that any patents they own will be used to defend FOSS developers if attacked. It also states that their patents may be used freely in OSS under gpl.

I certainly hope this is granted. Is it defendable though??
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?p=2574359





Universal and Sony Prohibit Zune Sharing for Certain Artists
Paul Miller

It's official: record companies don't like you. After all that griping about signing up for the Zune music store -- and keep in mind that these record companies receive monies for selling songs here -- that resulted in Universal Music Group getting some sort of fat royalty check from Microsoft for Zune sales, not to mention whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors to come up with that ridiculously minimal "three days or three plays" sharing scheme, a couple of labels have once again gone out of their way to make life hard on you.

It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as "prohibited" for sharing, meaning that just because you've paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn't mean you'll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics.

In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail. Oh well, maybe you can just hum a few bars or something -- just make sure the labels don't hear you!
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/19/u...rtain-artists/





Microsoft Considered IPod Rival, Apple Partnership
Dina Bass and Bob Van Voris

Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, as early as 2003 considered a partnership with Apple Inc. or creating its own digital music player to rival Apple's dominant iPod.

Microsoft, displeased with hardware partners Creative Technology Ltd. and Dell Inc. that made players using Microsoft's Windows Media software, talked about building its own device, according to an e-mail exchange between Windows chief Jim Allchin and media software executive Amir Majidimehr. The correspondence, introduced into evidence in a civil antitrust trial against Microsoft in Des Moines, Iowa, was made public today.

Allchin, who started the exchange in an e-mail entitled ``sucking on media players,'' also suggested he talk to Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft's media software for fear the iPod would ``drive people away from Windows Media Player.'' Microsoft introduced its Zune music player in November.

``My goodness it's terrible,'' Allchin wrote about one of Creative's devices. ``What I don't understand though is I was told the new Creative Labs device would be comparable to Apple. That is so not the case.''

Majidimehr replied ``Now you feel our pain.'' He said Microsoft was providing cash incentives to get the partners to improve devices. If that doesn't work ``it is time for us to roll up our sleeves and do our own hardware,'' he wrote.

Changed Course

Microsoft had been working with partners on music devices for at least a year before Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and catapulted to a dominant position in the market. Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.

In July 2006 Microsoft announced it would change course and sell its own device, software and music service under the brand Zune. A spokesman for Microsoft's digital media group didn't have an immediate comment.

Microsoft sold ``hundreds of thousands'' of Zune devices during Christmas, according to Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach. Apple sold 21.1 million iPods last quarter.

Microsoft is defending itself in a private antitrust class action in Iowa that began in December. In the trial, a statewide class of consumers claim Microsoft used its monopoly position in computer operating systems and software applications to overcharge for its software, including Windows, Word and Excel. The consumers claim $329 million in damages since 1994. That amount may be tripled under Iowa law.

Allchin

Earlier this week the trial judge gave permission for plaintiffs' lawyers to tell the U.S. Department of Justice that they believe Microsoft violated a 2002 court order in the U.S. government's antitrust suit against the company. The lawyers say Microsoft hasn't disclosed certain application programming interfaces as required.

The e-mails mark the second set of conversations exhibited in the trial in which Allchin, a 16-year Microsoft veteran, expresses concern about competition with Apple products. In a 2004 e-mail to Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer made public during opening arguments in December, Allchin criticized Windows and said ``I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.''

Allchin at the time was leading development of Longhorn, the code name for Windows Vista, which reaches stores Jan. 30. Allchin, who is retiring after Vista is released, referred to Longhorn as ``a pig'' and said ``we have lost our way.''

Shares of Microsoft rose 11 cents to $31.11 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They have risen 4.2 percent this month.

The case is Comes v. Microsoft Corp., CL 82311, Iowa District Court, Polk County.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...anhaQOstu8 3g





The Streamburst Antipiracy Plan: Don't Use DRM
Nate Anderson

A UK startup has some interesting ideas about protecting video content: offer it as high-quality, unencrypted MPEG-4 files already formatted for various user devices. Instead of shackling users with artificial technological limitations on what they can do with their files, Streamburst hopes to secure content using a bit of personalization and a unique watermarking system, and they've already put their system to work selling the Ewan McGregor motorcycle trip documentary Long Way Round.

Burn to DVD? Fine. Transfer video to any portable device? No problem. Don't treat users like criminals? Check.

This approach to content is so different from the one taken by most Hollywood studios that we caught up with Róbert Bjarnason at his home in the UK to talk about his new company and to ask him one simple question: is he crazy?

Long way round

It's become a mantra of sorts, not just on this site but among the content industry at large: piracy is a business model. To compete with it effectively, content companies have two choices. They can pour millions into robust new DRM schemes (see HD DVD, Blu-ray, and Windows Vista for examples) and then use the power of the law to hammer any users who are found violating their copyrights. That approach hasn't been working so well. It's slow and expensive; it generates the worst sort of PR; and it risks creating a new generation of pirates who discover that they have no alternative if they want to exercise their fair-use rights.

The other way to compete with piracy is by actually attempting to compete: lower prices, no DRM, and making it easier to pay for a high-quality legal file than to pirate it.

Bjarnason and his two partners are taking this approach with their new UK company, Streamburst. Last summer, Bjarnason was looking for something new. He'd been working on web sites for Long Way Round, the 2004 documentary about Ewan McGregor's 19,000-mile trip across Europe, Asia, and North America on motorcycle. The show had been off the air for some time, and the producers had plans to repackage the episodes as mobile phone clips.

The project evolved as the team realized that laptops and iPods offered a much superior viewing experience and decided to offer the shows for all three devices. Bjarnason and two partners formed Streamburst to make the project a reality, and they coded the entire backend system using Ruby on Rails and standard open-source tools, all in under four months. Because they already had work from Long Way Round, the company was launched without any external funding—it was just the proverbial "guys in a garage."

Building the storefront and encoding the video clips at different resolutions was straightforward stuff; the team's real innovation came when they looked at the piracy problem and decided on a novel approach to it.

Don't call it DRM

Bjarnason and Co. wanted the video files to be open and unencumbered, but they still needed to make it easy for for honest people to stay honest. The scheme they hit on does not resemble any traditional DRM. Bjarnason tells me it's an "anti-piracy scheme," not a restriction mechanism.

The first part of the scheme appends a five-second introduction to each purchased show. It's simply a screen that shows the name of the person who paid for the download. It functions as a reminder that the file is intended for personal use, but it's not heavy-handed, and it doesn't restrict use. The video files are unencrypted MPEG-4 and can be burned to DVD for archiving or for watching on a home theater.

But can't people simply strip their names out of the file? Sure they can, says Bjarnason, if they have an MPEG-4 editor. But it would take more time to do that (and to reencode the file) than it would to simply pirate a copy; Bjarnason says it's "harder than downloading." Besides, people who have just paid money to download a show shouldn't be treated like criminals, and are less likely to be the ones seeding P2P networks around the world.

The second part of the scheme is a "watermark." That is, it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.

The goal is to make people more accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions. Because of its design, the watermark even survives most editing changes and format shifts; burning to DVD and then ripping back onto a computer doesn't eliminate it.

Finally, the price is kept low. Although Streamburst doesn't make these decisions, its first partnerships with McGregor's production company have sold videos for £1.35 each—less than the £1.89 charge for individual music videos in the iTunes UK store.

Their first storefronts opened on December 18, selling episodes of shows like Long Way Round and Missing Face (a documentary which donates all profits to UNICEF). In their first month, they managed to sell more than 1,000 video clips. No, they won't be giving iTunes execs sleepless nights for quite some time, but they aren't trying to. Instead, the focus is on allowing independent producers to put out their work and get paid for it without shackling customers into restrictive DRM schemes.

I've seen the future... and it is Iceland

Streamburst is brand new—they first set up shop in September and only launched their corporate web site this week—but they already have plans to expand. Bjarnason hails from Iceland, and though he works in the UK, he'd love to get involved with the film industry in his native country. The Streamburst system is unlikely to be adopted by major Hollywood and European studios in the near term, so Bjarnason next hopes to turn to Iceland's indie film community.

The team has also developed a technique for distributing the files via BitTorrent without losing the customized watermark; the video comes bundled inside a activation program that encodes the username and watermark into the file when it's purchased. But until Streamburst stores get a critical mass of users, it's actually more efficient to distribute files through the web. Should traffic pick up, the team already has a new distribution system ready to go.

Will a system that relies on a Reagenesque "trust, but verify" approach to protecting content gain any traction in a famously paranoid industry? Here's hoping. DRM doesn't stop piracy anyway, so it's not impossible to imagine some future day in which the lion will lay down with the lamb, and studios will stop making criminals of those who want to rip a DVD to their iPod to get them through a long commute.

Unfortunately, as Ken recently noted, DRM isn't really about piracy at all, but more about making users pay a second time for the "privilege" of format-shifting their purchased content. Even Apple loves the current regime. Companies that "think different"—like Streamburst—face a tough battle, but it's one worth fighting, and the company stands a decent chance of carving out a niche in the independent video market. Here's hoping for more such innovative thinking in 2007.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070119-8657.html





Privately, Hollywood Admits DRM Isn't About Piracy
Ken Fisher

For almost ten years now I have argued that digital rights management has little to do with piracy, but that is instead a carefully plotted ruse to undercut fair use and then create new revenue streams where there were previously none. I will briefly repeat my argument here before relating a prime example of it in the wild.

The theory

Access control technologies such as DRM create "scarcity" where there is immeasurable abundance, that is, in a world of digital reproduction. The early years saw tech such as CSS tapped to prevent the copying of DVDs, but DRM has become much more than that. It's now a behavioral modification scheme that permits this, prohibits that, monitors you, and auto-expires when. Oh, and sometimes you can to watch a video or listen to some music.

The basic point is that access control technologies are becoming more and more refined. To create new, desirable product markets (e.g., movies for portable digital devices), the studios have turned to DRM (and the law) to create the scarcity (illegality of ripping DVDs) needed to both create the need for it and sustain it. Rather than admit that this is what they're doing, they trot out bogus studies claiming that this is all caused by piracy. It's the classic nannying scheme: "Because some of you can't be trusted, everyone has to be treated this way." But everybody knows that this nanny is in it for her own interests.

Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.

In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.

The history

History repeats itself, especially the bad parts. What I find most puzzling, however, is how history hasn't taught the movie industry this lesson yet.

In 1982, then-MPAA head Jack Valenti testified before the House of Representatives on the emerging phenomenon of VCR ownership. He famously said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." Valenti said this in response to a claim that the VCR would be the greatest friend the American film producer ever had. Valenti was vehement in his opposition to the idea that the VCR could be a good thing. He, and many in the industry, believed that it was fundamentally wrong to allow the public to make decisions for themselves about how to use a VCR. They even expressed worry that multiple people could watch the same movie on a VCR, but not all of them would have to pay. The idea of Joe User buying a movie for a fixed price and then inviting friends over to see it was anathema to the industry.

Yet by the late 1990s, sales of VHS movies were generating more revenue than movie ticket sales. DVD, the successor to VHS and Betamax, greatly widened the gap thanks to outstanding profit margins. The "Boston Strangler" was nowhere in sight. Of course, Hollywood lost the battle over the VCR, and its enemy became the best friend it ever had... that is, until behavior-modifying DRM was born, and Hollywood saw another chance to take a crack at the holy grail.

The practice

As a quick aside, let's put this piracy excuse to rest. You can easily find almost any DVD online, for free, because CSS has long been cracked and the movies uploaded. All of these new DRM schemes can't change that one simple fact: at least for the DVD market, a pirate's lifestyle is a matter of downloading some easily obtainable software. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that DRM slows piracy. In fact, all of the evidence suggests the opposite, and arguments that DRM "keeps honest people honest" are frankly insulting. If they're already honest, they don't need DRM.

So given the windfall generated by the VCR, which was followed by an even greater explosion in revenue thanks to DVD, why aren't popular services like the iTunes Store being embraced? At a time when TV networks are seeing ratings boosts and fattened profits thanks to downloadable video, how come Disney is still the only movie studio to sell new releases on iTunes?

If we believe Ronald Grover's sources in his BusinessWeek article of last week, the problem is liberal DRM and not piracy, and this is a startling admission. According to him, an unnamed studio executive said that a major reason why studios weren't jumping on board with the iTunes Store and other similar services is that their DRM is too lax. "[Apple's] user rules just scare the heck out of us." It's not piracy that's the concern, it's their ability to control how you use the content you purchase.

As it turns out, five devices authorized for playback is too many, and the studios apparently believe that this is "just as bad" as piracy. Hollywood believes that iTunes Store customers will add their buddies' devices to their authorization list, and like evil communists, they'll share what they have purchased. This makes little sense, because the way iTunes works, you can only issue so many device authorizations at a time. You could share with a friend, but then your friend would have to be authorized to play all of your purchased content, taking up an authorization. Inconvenient, huh? But is it a big problem?

I can walk in to Best Buy right now, buy a DVD, and lend it to every person I know. Who hasn't lent a DVD to a friend or colleague? This is perfectly legal behavior, but you can see that Hollywood hopes to stop this kind of thing via DRM. Thanks to the DMCA, once copyrighted contents have been encrypted, your rights fly right out the window.

It sounds like a bad Hollywood tale: "In a world... where DRM is liberal... there's only one fowl that's not foul... Chicken Little. And the Sky. Is. Falling."</movievoice>
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8616.html





Hollywood Asks YouTube: Friend or Foe?
Laura M. Holson

Did you miss Eminem’s hit movie “8 Mile”? You’re in luck: Many of its rap battles and other major scenes are available for viewing on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google. Indeed, until recently, the entire film was there, broken up into 12 nine-minute chunks to get around YouTube’s ban on longer clips.

An 18-year-old YouTube user calling himself Yosickoyo posted the movie six months ago. He declined to give his real name, but said in an e-mail message that he had made the film available as a favor to others who had shared movies. “I just want to thank them by uploading a movie that I have,” he wrote.

NBC Universal, whose Universal Pictures distributed “8 Mile” in 2002, did not appreciate the gesture. The company asked YouTube to take down the clips after it learned of them from a reporter. It was not the first time. NBC Universal has three employees who troll the site every day looking for studio-owned material, and they send more than 1,000 such requests a month to YouTube.

“There is only so much we can do,” said Rick Cotton, NBC Universal’s general counsel, who estimated that more than half the videos on YouTube featuring NBC Universal’s television shows and films were unauthorized. As fast as a clip is taken down, he said, YouTube users “can always put up another.”

As YouTube, with the backing of Google, becomes a powerful force in the media world, Hollywood studios and other entertainment companies are trying to figure out if it is friend or foe. After all, YouTube distributes unauthorized clips of the movies that the studios spend an average of $96 million to make. But it can also help them build tremendous buzz, and that is driving Hollywood to try to work with it instead of against it.

Hoping to avoid some of the problems in the music industry that arose from illegal downloading of songs, all of the major studios — including NBC Universal, Warner Brothers Entertainment, which is owned by Time Warner, and the News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox, are in negotiations with YouTube seeking licensing agreements that would make their content legally available on the site.

In the meantime, they are also pressing YouTube to adopt filtering mechanisms more quickly to keep unlawful material from even showing up. And several media companies are in talks to create their own YouTube-like site, a move some in the industry suggest is a form of posturing to help push the licensing negotiations forward.

“I think studios will sue if they don’t get a licensing deal they like,” said Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “My guess is if I were a movie studio, getting a cut of the money is more profitable than shutting it down. But it’s complicated, very complicated, and it’s only going to get worse.”

Google also has a lot resting on how these copyright issues are resolved, because investors are eager to see whether the $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube was well-spent.

Chris Maxcy, vice president of business development for YouTube, declined to be interviewed, but he said in an e-mail message that YouTube had successfully worked with studios to market their movies and sought deals with studios to make their content more widely available. “In fact, we’re now in discussions with several studios to create both content partnerships and revenue-sharing opportunities,” he wrote.

Much of the content on YouTube, of course, has nothing to do with Hollywood — like the thousands of video blogs created by teenagers with Web cams. But there is enough copyrighted material there to warrant the attention of the studios and many other media companies — everything from the dancing penguins of the new film “Happy Feet” to the black-and-white television clips of the Beatles singing “Help.”

No one knows exactly how much Hollywood-derived content is uploaded to the site without the studios’ consent, but academics and media executives estimate it could be anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent.

The studios are happy to have some of their content on YouTube. Marc Shmuger, chairman of Universal Pictures, said that for each new release, Universal’s marketing team sends out a digital “tool kit” to sites like YouTube with studio-approved graphics, clips, sound effects and music videos that can be shared. Because “8 Mile” was released four years ago, its kit may have only included trailers and some clips.

“I think that the marketing side of our company and the copyright-protection side have contradictory impulses,” Mr. Shmuger said. “But there is a huge appetite for content, and we are well-advised to recognize that appetite and find constructive ways to feed it.”

Mr. Shmuger said the studios need to embrace sites like YouTube because they are the future of movie marketing. “If you want to be involved in the cultural debate, you have to allow consumers to be more actively involved,” he said. “That’s a different world order which we are not used to.”

One scene Mr. Shmuger said would most certainly not have been part of the “8 Mile” tool kit — one that shows up in 16 separate videos on YouTube — is the climactic rap battle between Eminem’s character Bunny Rabbit and Papa Doc.

But from the perspective of a YouTube user, it is hard to tell which clips are studio-approved and which are not. Some clips from companies like CBS and NBC that have deals with YouTube are fairly easy to identify as authorized material. For the rest, said Pamela Samuelson, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, “what you have is a gap between what people think is O.K. and what is over the line.”

Already, several major music companies, including Universal Music Group, once a corporate sibling to Universal Pictures but now owned by Vivendi, have forged agreements with YouTube, which makes its money from advertising, that allows music to be played in videos for a fee.

So in an odd twist, Eminem’s songs from “8 Mile” are cleared for use on YouTube, while much of the accompanying video is not. In what could be an indication of the kinds of deals the studios might strike, Universal Music earns the higher of two amounts when its songs are used in a video: a flat fee per clip or a percentage of advertising revenue.

“We don’t want to kill this,” said Larry Kenswil, a Universal Music executive. “We see this as a new source of revenue for us.”

Where studios and music companies see the most complicated copyright issue is in the posting of mashups — clips that incorporate video and music from various sources that has been “mashed up” to make something new. Most mashups are made by eager fans as a form of artistic expression or a demonstration of their editing skills.

“I don’t consider any of this stuff piracy,” said Professor Litman of the University of Michigan. “Folks are taking snippets and making them their own.”

One video posted last March, credited to Kusoyaro Productions, includes clips from the 20th Century Fox film “Napoleon Dynamite” that have been cleverly edited to create a new music video for Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself” from “8 Mile.”

The two movies’ heroes couldn’t be more different: Napoleon Dynamite is an awkward teenager in rural Idaho who stuffs his pockets with tater tots, while Eminem’s character in “8 Mile” finds refuge from his trailer-park life by rapping in clubs. The video has been watched more than 60,000 times.

Ron Wheeler, a senior vice president of content protection at Fox Entertainment Group, said that even though Fox was not being paid for the right to use the “Napoleon Dynamite” clips, the company had not asked that the video be taken down.

“We are not in the business of just saying no, but we do consider it unauthorized use,” Mr. Wheeler said.

He predicted, though, that the studio would be saying “no” more often in the future. Fox is working on a policy that will address the issue of mashups in a way that those creating them can understand.

“We will offer as much freedom as legally able, but at the same time it will be less than some people are doing now,” Mr. Wheeler added. “It won’t be ‘anything goes.’ ”

Brian Grazer, a producer of “8 Mile,” said some of the mashups he had seen were “pretty hip.” But he said he, too, viewed them as a form of piracy: “It bothers me artistically. Here’s this thing where you have no control; they are chopping it up and putting your memories in a blender.”

Directors may have a tough time accepting the wild world of mashups, particularly those who have been given control over the final cut of their movies. Mr. Grazer said he believed that Curtis Hanson, who directed “8 Mile,” would not be pleased. “Something like this drives an auteur nuts,” he said. Mr. Hanson did not return calls seeking comment. Eminem, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

But film, television and music companies are not the only ones in Hollywood seeking to protect their rights as online video spreads. The industry’s guilds, too, are exploring what rights directors, writers, producers and actors will be afforded in the digital era. “This is a thorny issue,” Mr. Wheeler said.

The Directors Guild of America is already taking a hard line. The guild’s president, Michael Apted, said in a statement that he and his fellow directors would challenge the unauthorized use of any work. “We will aggressively protect our members’ creative and economic rights,” he said.

For an indication of ways that the relationship between studios and YouTube might unfold, many in the industry are pointing to two recent events. Universal Music sued MySpace, the social networking site, for copyright infringement. And when Google closed the YouTube deal it set aside as much as $200 million for potential copyright litigation.

YouTube said in September that it would introduce a new mechanism to filter out unauthorized videos and let owners claim their content by the end of the year, but it is still being developed.

Mr. Cotton, the NBC Universal lawyer, said that the YouTube removal-request game could continue for only so long. “Sand is running out of the hourglass,” he said. “Companies aren’t prepared to sit by and not let this be addressed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/te...15youtube.html





Another Huge Ratings Success for 'American Idol'
AP

The parade of awful amateurs on "American Idol" attracted viewers in staggering numbers this week as the series continues to grow in popularity.

An estimated 36.9 million people watched the two-hour special on Fox Wednesday night, only slightly down from the 37.3 million who tuned in for Tuesday's two-hour season premiere, according to Nielsen Media Research.

They were the two biggest nights of prime-time entertainment on Fox since it came onto the air nearly two decades ago.

"We're fortunate it's on our air and we take good care of it and it rewards us with good ratings," said Preston Beckman, Fox's executive vice president for strategic planning.

The audience for what host Ryan Seacrest dubbed "the weirdest turnout in history" on Wednesday was 17 percent bigger than the corresponding night a year ago, Nielsen said.

To put the numbers into perspective, the most popular show on TV so far this season, ABC's "Desperate Housewives," averages 20.7 million viewers a week _ or a little more than half of what "Idol" delivered upon its return.

Wednesday's edition featured hopefuls from Seattle, one of seven cities where auditions were held last summer. And it provided plenty of fodder for cantankerous judge Simon Cowell.

"What the bloody hell was that?" judge Simon Cowell said after enduring a unique version of "Unchained Melody," adding, "It was almost non-human."

To another woman who insisted a drink of water would smooth her delivery, Cowell replied: "You could lie in a bath with your mouth open and you couldn't sing."

The ratings performance of "American Idol" defies traditional television rules, where series in their sixth season would normally see a slip in popularity.

But "American Idol" can legitimately claim to mint new pop stars, like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Clay Aiken and "Golden Globes" winner Jennifer Hudson. Keeping it as a once-a-year event has ratcheted up anticipation, Beckman said. Since the ill-fated "American Juniors" contest after the first season, Fox hasn't tried spinoffs, either.

"In some ways it's become like a sporting event," he said. "There's baseball season, basketball season, football season and `American Idol' season."

As gleeful as `Idol' makes the people at Fox, it depresses their network rivals.

"There's always that hope that the next iteration of `American Idol,' will show some weakness," said Nancy Tellem, president of the CBS Paramount Network, "and clearly it hasn't."

Fox's rivals jokingly _ it appears _ refer to "American Idol" as the death star. NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly said he was ready to declare the television season over on Tuesday, before Fox storms past everyone in the ratings.

Reilly said a network has to "rope-a-dope a little bit" to get through the "American Idol" onslaught. CBS has tended to have the most success, where a show like "NCIS" appeals to a different audience.

"Our shows hang in there OK," said CBS scheduling chief Kelly Kahl. "The other guys kind of get vaporized."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028787





Colbert and O'Reilly Trade Appearances in 'Meeting of the Guts'
AP

Parody met its inspiration Thursday when Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly traded guest appearances on each other's shows in an exchange that Colbert called "a meeting of the guts."

Colbert has molded his tough-talking, America-defending persona as host of the satirical "Colbert Report" largely on the Fox News pundit. On his Comedy Central program, Colbert has often spoken reverently of O'Reilly _ or as he affectionately calls him, "Papa Bear."

"The Colbert Report" and "The O'Reilly Factor," the top-rated program in cable news, were taped one after another early Thursday evening, with "The Factor" airing at 8 p.m. EST and "The Report" at 11:30 p.m. EST.

Once inside Colbert's studio _ decorated for the occasion with a large "Mission Accomplished" banner and a portrait of O'Reilly placed fireside _ O'Reilly seemed to be regretting the decision.

"This was a huge mistake, me coming on here," he muttered.

It may have been a greater error allowing Colbert into the Fox News headquarters, located near the "Colbert Report" studios in Manhattan. There, Colbert smuggled a microwave out of the green room, a bounty which he proudly displayed at the conclusion of his show.

A spokesman for Fox News confirmed that Colbert stole the microwave, but said it was all in good fun.

Appearing in the "No Spin Zone" of "The O'Reilly Factor," Colbert remained in character -- though it wasn't always easy to tell.

"Who are you? Are you Colbert or Colbert?" prodded O'Reilly, pronouncing the "T" in one case, leaving it silent in the other (as Colbert does on his program).

"Bill, I'm whoever you want me to be," answered the comedian.

O'Reilly interviewed Colbert with a generally bemused attitude: "Don't you owe me an enormous amount of money?" he wondered. The interview was followed by a discussion with several analysts on why "The Colbert Report" and its sister fake newscast "The Daily Show" are popular.

Colbert had spent the week preparing for the arrival of "Papa Bear," and hyped it Thursday as "the greatest TV crossover since the Flintstones met the Jetsons."

For the first time, Colbert began the show's interview segment seated, allowing O'Reilly to enter to applause. Well, mostly applause. O'Reilly blamed a handful of boos on "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, joking that he was in the audience.

Colbert's reception included a montage of clips from both shows, titled "Great Minds Think Alike." He also had O'Reilly read several lines for a new O'Reilly-based character in his "Tek Jansen" cartoon series.

O'Reilly also managed one dig of NBC, which he has recently criticized as a liberal-leaning network. When asked what was "destroying America" more _ NBC, activist judges, illegal immigration or gay marriage _ O'Reilly didn't hesitate in answering NBC.

But not all of Colbert's expectations were met. When he prompted O'Reilly to say who would win in a fight between him and his Fox News colleague Sean Hannity, O'Reilly demurred _ and nearly upset the delicate balance of parody and reality.

"Hannity would kick my butt," said O'Reilly. "I'm effete. I'm not a tough guy. This is all an act."

Colbert retorted as though his mirror-image of O'Reilly had been broken: "If you're an act, then what am I?"

Once the show was over and O'Reilly had left, Colbert turned to the studio audience as he exited the stage and said, finally out of character: "He seems like a nice enough guy."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028852





'South Park' Ruins Town's South Park
AP

There are not many fans of Cartman and Kenny on the city's recreation board, which has recommended renaming what has become known as South Park.

Having a park with the same name as Comedy Central's popular but often vulgar cartoon show about four elementary-school boys in the Colorado town of South Park has become inappropriate, said Kathy House, the city's director of administration.

Story lines of the show regularly revolve around skewering celebrities, politicians and religion, peppered with lots of cussing and defecation jokes.

The green space in the southern part of Marysville never had an official name, but people started calling it South Park because of the location, officials said.

"We wanted to get away from (the name) South Park," said Deborah Groat, a member of the Parks and Recreation Commission.

"Far away from South Park," added fellow parks commissioner Cathy Dwertman.

So, the commission voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of a change to Greenwood Park, after a nearby subdivision.

The final decision rests with the city council, which meets later this month.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1028855





Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC
Miguel Helft

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, lists more than five dozen personalities whose obituaries were published prematurely. Someone may want to add Netflix to that list.

The impending death of the company, with its online system for renting DVDs delivered by mail, was predicted late in 2002, when Wal-Mart said it would enter the business; again last year, when Apple and Amazon announced movie-downloading services; and again last week, after the introduction of a series of products and services intended to bring Internet video to television sets.

But Wal-Mart left the online rental business in 2005 and now refers customers to Netflix. Meanwhile, none of the movie-downloading services have gained much traction with consumers, the notion of taking Internet video content to TV sets remains a work in progress, and Netflix keeps signing up new customers at a fast clip. It was expected to end 2006 with 6.3 million subscribers and nearly $1 billion in revenue, or about 12 percent of the $8.4 billion annual DVD rental market.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said of the doomsday predictions. But Mr. Hastings also said he understood why questions about his business kept coming up. “Because DVD is not a hundred-year format, people wonder what will Netflix’s second act be.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.

But having a second act to talk about is not likely to end questions about Netflix’s future. Netflix shares dropped 6.3 percent on Friday to $22.71 after a JPMorgan Securities analyst downgraded the stock, citing increased competition. They are down more than 12 percent since Jan. 1. And the company said last year that the service would cost it about $40 million in 2007, an outlook that has not sat well with some investors.

“There’s clearly a strong demand for watching movies,” said Brian Pitz, an analyst with Banc of America Securities. “But the company’s earnings are going to be more negatively impacted,” said Mr. Pitz, who has a sell recommendation on Netflix shares.

Netflix is also entering a more crowded market that includes not only the likes of Apple and Amazon, but also MovieLink, CinemaNow and video-on-demand services offered by cable companies. And while Netflix’s DVD rental business has thrived in part because of the company’s superior logistics, that competitive edge will not mean much in the world of digital distribution.

Still, Mr. Hastings said Netflix has a product that compares well with those of his competitors. He particularly emphasized Netflix’s business model — free to subscribers — and its focus on instant gratification.

Last week, Mr. Hastings demonstrated the system at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. On a laptop PC, he pulled up a Netflix Web page where some titles displayed a “Play” button in addition to the company’s familiar “Add” button, which adds movies to a subscriber’s queue for mailing. Within a few seconds of hitting the “Play” button, the opening credits of “The World’s Fastest Indian” began rolling. The service uses streaming technology that Netflix built on top of Microsoft software.

First-time users of the service must download a special piece of software, which, if all goes well, also takes only a few seconds. (When a reporter tried the system at home, however, the process stalled because of a mismatch between the version of Microsoft’s antipiracy software expected by the Netflix viewer and the one loaded in the PC, and it took about 15 minutes to fix the problem with the help of a customer-support specialist. A Netflix spokesman said the problem was known, but occurred only rarely.)

Like most other electronic distribution services, Netflix’s system will work initially only with a limited catalog — about 1,000 movies and television shows, only a tiny fraction of the more than 70,000 titles that Netflix offers for rent. It offers titles from NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers and others.

The service, which will be introduced over six months, works only on recent versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. Over time, Mr. Hastings hopes to expand the catalog of titles and make the service available on other hardware and software combinations, including set-top boxes, television screens and portable devices.

The bulk of Netflix’s subscribers, who pay $18 a month and are allowed to keep three movies at home at all times, will receive 18 hours of free watching every month. Those with cheaper plans will have fewer free hours and those with premium services will receive more.

By comparison, typical movie rentals cost $3 to $4 on Amazon, and $3 to $5 on MovieLink, though special promotions are available. Mr. Hastings said he chose the instant delivery afforded by streaming technology over downloads, which can take a while, because it would encourage subscribers to use the system to browse the catalog and discover new movies. If they do not like a movie, they can stop it and will be charged only for the minutes they actually watched.

Yet even as he touts the benefits of his own service, Mr. Hastings does not believe that electronic distribution, be it through downloads or streaming services, is ready for prime time.

“The market is microscopic,” Mr. Hastings said. “DVD is going to be a very big market for a very long time.”

In the case of online movies, two forces, one technological and one commercial, are keeping the market from developing more quickly. On the technological front, it is still difficult to deliver various Internet video formats to a TV screen. And on the commercial front, movie studios are leery of piracy and, more important, are fearful of cannibalizing their existing distribution businesses.

Frances Manfredi, senior vice president for cable distribution at NBC Universal, said her company wanted to provide video content “where consumers want it, when they want it, how they want it.” But, she added, “we really recognize that the traditional distribution businesses of cable and syndication are our primary businesses, certainly with respect to revenue generation.”

Ms. Manfredi said the agreement with Netflix, which includes classic TV shows like “Kojak” and “Columbo,” as well as more recent ones like “The Office,” and “Law & Order Special Victims Unit,” and some 350 movies including “The Motorcycle Diaries,” would deliver new revenue without hurting existing businesses.

Some analysts believe the hurdles to mass digital distribution will not disappear any time soon. And if Mr. Hastings is right about the staying power of DVDs, his biggest challenge in the short term is likely to come from a business that appeared to be in freefall until recently: Blockbuster.

Facing competition from Netflix, and from growing DVD sales at big-box retailers, Blockbuster shares began a steady slide in late 2003, from more than $22 to a low of $3.20 in March last year. In 2005, the company eliminated late fees — an irritant to many customers, and the issue that had prompted Mr. Hastings to found Netflix. The move cost Blockbuster hundreds of millions in revenue.

But Blockbuster’s own online rental service, introduced in 2004, has finally taken off.

With aggressive promotion of a new service called Total Access, which costs the same as Netflix’s service for three movies, and allows subscribers to exchange movies in stores, Blockbuster has added a staggering 700,000 subscribers since Nov. 1. After the company announced that it ended 2006 with 2.2 million subscribers, Blockbuster shares now stand at $6.43, up from $5.48 at the beginning of the year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see our online subscribers double by the end of 2007,” John F. Antioco, the chief executive of Blockbuster, said. Mr. Antioco said Blockbuster was planning to offer a digital distribution service later this year. “We have everything that Netflix has, plus the immediate gratification of never having to wait for a movie.”

It is unclear whether Blockbuster’s growth has been at the expense of Netflix, though a first glimpse into that may be offered next week, when Netflix reports fourth-quarter earnings.

The two companies are fighting not just in the marketplace. Netflix has sued Blockbuster, accusing it of patent infringement, and Blockbuster has countersued Netflix, alleging antitrust violations.

Mr. Hastings played down the competition. “We have a lot of room to grow,” he said, adding that he expects Blockbuster’s online business to grow as well. “Our relative execution will determine what the share split is” between Netflix and Blockbuster, he added.

In the meantime, he said, Netflix’s digital delivery service represents insurance against technological obsolescence, and against more predictions of Netflix’s demise.

“We have seen so many Silicon Valley companies follow a single generation of computing,” Mr. Hastings said. “Investors are rightfully scared of single-model companies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/te...16netflix.html





Atop TV Sets, Basic Black Boxes Face Competition
Brad Stone

Adam Gillitt does not hate what is on his TV as much as he dislikes what is attached to it.

Mr. Gillitt, a graphic designer from Alameda, Calif., is exasperated by his high-definition cable box, made by the technology giant Motorola and leased to him by his local cable provider, Comcast. The $10-a-month device, he says, has a poorly designed electronic program guide and responds slowly, or not at all, to commands from the remote control.

“Paying for something this awful hurts,” Mr. Gillitt said.

For many Americans, the cable box — still commonly called the set-top box, though it is now too big to balance on top of increasingly thin TVs — may be the most disappointing piece of technology in their homes. As inventions like TiVo and YouTube alter the way people watch and control video, the traditional box has largely failed to keep up.

Now that is beginning to change.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, makers of set-top boxes exhibited devices with a host of new features: more hard-disk space for storing digitally recorded TV shows, easier-to-navigate program guides, connections to Web sites, DVD burners and video games.

The box manufacturers and the cable operators like Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable that they sell to, have an age-old motivation for improving their products: fear. New competitors are flooding into the TV business, including the industry’s rivals in the telephone business, and the computer kingpins Microsoft and Apple.

Consumers can buy those alternatives at regular retail outlets, including the newest high-definition version of TiVo. It sells for $800 (with a $20 monthly fee) and can replace the box that cable and satellite providers lease to customers, instead of merely sitting on top of it and adding to living room clutter.

Cable operators are being forced to play nice with these new entrants. The Federal Communications Commission has set a deadline of July 1 for all cable operators to make their services work with boxes from all third-party manufacturers, and last week it rejected a request from Comcast to extend the deadline.

“Set-top boxes are becoming the central piece of equipment in the home for accessing entertainment and information,” said Joshua Goldman, chief executive of Akimbo, a Silicon Valley start-up trying to bring programming to the TV over the Internet. “Consumers will buy their own device if they feel like they are not getting the services they want from their television operators.”

For decades, the cable industry did not worry much about introducing new features into their typically black set-top boxes. They faced little competition in their local markets and bought their equipment from one of two companies: General Instruments, which was purchased by Motorola in 2000, and Scientific Atlanta, acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005.

Both companies build TV boxes according to the specifications of cable companies, who lease them to customers and then make their money on monthly subscriptions. Because they are essentially giving the boxes away, the industry’s focus, not surprisingly, is on keeping the cost of the equipment low.

But now new players are offering more sophisticated alternatives to cable boxes. Over the last two years, 30 million personal computers have been sold with Media Center software from Microsoft, which enhances video viewing on the PC, making it more like a television. The computers come with a remote control and can pause and fast-forward through video.

Many of those PCs can now replace set-top boxes, thanks to a federal law passed over a decade ago that requires cable operators to sell credit-card-size devices called CableCards. These cards can plug into a Media Center PC, or other consumer electronics appliances like DVD players, allowing them to receive regular cable channels.

Last week, Apple also joined the fray with Apple TV, a slick silver box that connects to the television and displays programs and movies that have been downloaded from iTunes. It goes on sale next month for $299.

The message to cable companies and their equipment vendors is clear: if they want to keep up, they must build a better cable box.

They appear to be listening. At the Las Vegas show, just as many visitors swarmed around Motorola’s new set-top boxes as its latest mobile phones. The company showed a line of new boxes compatible with high-definition TV, with one-third more hard-disk space than its previous models, like the clumsy device Mr. Gillitt has under his TV.

The new boxes are designed to offer greater control over the television. For example, one new feature Motorola is promoting is called “program restart.” If cable customers miss a show by a few minutes and do not record it, they can click a button and get the cable company to retransmit it directly to them, instantly. Time Warner Cable is currently testing the service in San Antonio.

Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Motorola, said consumers now demand more from their televisions, largely thanks to TiVo, which has forced the cable companies to ask suppliers for more innovative set-top boxes. “Enough people are experienced with time-shifting that there’s a demand that the industry dynamics change,” Ms. Warrior said.

Across the showroom floor, Scientific Atlanta executives agreed that the old featureless TV tuner was quickly becoming a relic. Among its new boxes, the company showed off one called the MCP-100: a silver set-top box with a digital video recorder and one surprising new feature: a slot for DVDs. In addition to getting live TV, the device can play movies and burn programs and movies onto discs. It is now being tested by cable companies.

Scientific Atlanta is also building Internet connections into all its boxes, so consumers can get programming from the Web in addition to the traditional ways, by cable or satellite.

“There’s a growing need for high-quality video that goes right to where it’s supposed to, the television, and not to the PC, where only college kids are looking at it,” said Robert C. McIntryre, Scientific Atlanta’s chief technology officer.

The cable companies and their equipment vendors must adapt to the Internet age quickly, because soon customers will have more choices than ever. Telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon are investing heavily to bury fiber optic cables in most major cities and roll out their own TV offerings.

Because the telephone companies deliver television using Internet standards and typically package it with telephone and Internet service, they say they can offer consumers more choices and control over the viewing experience. AT&T, for example, showed off a set-top box at the Las Vegas show that received four different streams of programming (compared with most new digital cable boxes, which receive only two). That allows a customer to watch a program live while simultaneously recording three others.

One new feature that AT&T was showing, called picture-in-picture browsing, or PIP, lets a TV viewer channel surf on a small screen while continuing to watch another program on the rest of the screen.

AT&T hopes to have its TV service, called uVerse, accessible to 19 million homes by the end of next year. If it can pull it off, it would position AT&T as a serious rival to cable and satellite television providers.

All of these established companies also have to watch out for smaller rivals with their own set-top box innovations. TiVo’s Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder, which went on sale last fall at electronics stores like Best Buy, is CableCard-ready, which means buyers can plug in a card from their local cable operator and use it as a substitute for a cable box.

Another technology start-up at the show, Digeo, exhibited its new Moxi service, a set-top box with digital video recorder that it plans to start selling in the latter half of this year. The Moxi also works with a CableCard and comes with smaller optional “Moxi mates,” which buyers can connect to the other TVs in their homes. Those televisions will then have access to the programming received by and recorded on the primary set-top box.

Digeo’s chief executive, Mike Fidler, said increased competition was ushering in a renaissance in set-top-box design. “Companies can now come in with innovative products that change the consumer experience and bring a whole new level of enjoyment to television,” Mr. Fidler said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/te.../17settop.html





ISOHunt Offline

Update, Jan. 16, 2007
Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice, as of 14:45 PST. No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don't have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our current ISP, or we get new hardware ready at our new ISP.

Sit back and enjoy the rest of the internet in the mean time, while it last. For your torrent searching needs, try Google for now by searching for "SEARCH TERMS ext:torrent".

You can also come hang around our IRC channel (SSL on port +7000). We'll update on this page and on IRC when we have more information.

If you wish to help us out financially, you can donate via Paypal from the button below. Due to prior dis-taste from certain individuals misusing legal funds for their own purposes however, this is not a legal defense fund. Your donations will be used for the operational costs of our servers and development of our websites. You have our sincere thanks.


- The isoHunt crew


Update, Jan. 17
FYI, since this is a common topic, no, moving servers to Sweden or Sealand isn't going to help. I have no intention of hiding our servers. BitTorrent was created for legitimate distribution of large media files, and we stand by that philosophy as a search engine and aggregator. Our current ISP is in the US. Our new ISP is in Canada, where this temporary page is being served. Depending on whether we get our servers back in the US, we will be back in full operation sooner or later.

Update, Jan. 17, 2007 15:40 GMT - SecretSquirrel
So after screwing around with our gigabit switch for a few hours, I've given up on one particular task and I'm moving on, hopefully we'll have our data back today, because if we do, we should be at least halfway back up by friday. If we don't get our data back from our previous provider, it may take a little longer to come back live again, but we are working on it, so be patient. :-)
http://www.isohunt.com/





First Pirated HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent
Jeremy Reimer

The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64. The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software. To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material required obtaining that disc's volume or title key separately, which the software did not do. However, a key was later released on the Internet, and a method for extracting further keys is allegedly available as well.

Now that the genie is out of the lamp, so to speak, what will the reaction be from the content industry? CyberLink, the makers of PowerDVD playback software, have already stated that the title keys were not obtained through their software, although this has yet to be conclusively proven. As for the content providers themselves, they have already said that they reserve the right to invalidate known pirated keys in the future. But to be of any use, they'll first need to determine which software application is responsible for giving up the volume keys. If it is something like PowerDVD, future titles can require that the user upgrade their software in order to play discs—this can be made to happen automatically when new discs are first inserted.

Muslix64 and others involved in BackupHDDVD are deliberately not exposing the actual method by which the keys have been obtained. This is partly to protect themselves from legal repercussions, but also to ensure that whatever "hole" that is being exploited remains unpatched. In the ongoing war between the pirates and the content providers, the pirates appear to be winning, but who knows who will get caught in the crossfire?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8622.html





Net Pirates Beat '24' To The Screen; CBS Supercharges Online Plans

Frank Barnako (MarketWatch) submits: So, now we know how the first four episodes of the new "24" season got onto the Net. They came off one of the DVDs that Fox has been shipping to retailers over the past few days. The broadcaster needed time to press the discs and it's likely one "escaped" onto peer-to-peer file sharing sites.

While some networks have been streaming TV shows the day after their airing, Fox is not doing that. On the official "24" site, there are behind-the-scenes features and so forth, but no shows.

CBS on the other hand, is supercharging its plans for the Web. The network will offer most, if not all, of its Fall '07 schedule on the Web before it hits the air, according to David Poltrack, the network’s research chief. He also told Broadcasting & Cable that 53% of the people who watched previewed shows online last fall are still watching. "You could argue that any number of them would have watched the show anyway, but maybe it would be three or four episodes in with all the clutter in the fall," Poltrack said.

Disclaimer: I own shares of CBS.
http://media.seekingalpha.com/article/24297





P2P File Sharing 'Contained'
Jon Newton

Last summer, "The problem has not been eliminated," stated RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol on file sharing. But it had been "contained".

RIAA is short for Recording Industry Association of America and it's one of the many so-called 'trade' outfits run by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, to among other things, spread mis- and disinformation about the non-existent crime of file sharing.

The IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) is another Big 4 unit which exists to do much the same thing, and in a new 'report' it says legal actions against "large-scale P2P uploaders" have, "helped contain piracy, reducing the proportion of internet users frequently file-sharing in key European markets".

This is not, of course, true, or anywhere near it. In fact, according to statistics from p2p research firm Big Champagne, up until November, 2006, the average number of people logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment was 6,562,440.

It was 6,523,733 for the whole of 2005, 4,603,048 for 2004, and 3,004,873 for 2003, the year the RIAA launched its sue 'em all file sharing campaign in America.

Seen from another perspective, far from "containing" fle sharing, the war against it has publicized it hugely, resulting in increasing numbers of people tuning in and logging on.

IFPI boss John Kennedy admits that in spite of efforts by his and other units, "the market remains a challenge."

The Big 4 just don't get it. They should be reducing their ridiculously over-priced wholesale rates, opening their catalogues, dropping DRM and wooing instead of suing their customers. But instead, they plan to escalate saying they'll now zoom in on ISPs for special attention.

The "IFPI is stepping up its campaign for action from ISPs and will take whatever legal steps are necessary," it declares.

"Other industries, such as film and newspapers, are struggling with the same problems that we have had to live with," says Kennedy woefully. "As an industry we are enforcing our rights decisively in the fight against piracy and this will continue. However, we should not be doing this job alone. With cooperation from ISPs we could make huge strides in tackling internet piracy globally.

"It is very unfortunate that it seems to need pressure from governments or even action in the courts to achieve this, but as an industry we are determined to see this campaign through to the end."

That's it, guys. Keep stomping your customers, and also go after the people who keep them online. That'll do the trick.
http://p2pnet.net/story/11035





Music Industry Threatens ISPs Over Piracy
Nic Fildes

The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.

John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated "in weeks rather than months". Barney Wragg, the head of EMI's digital music division, said the industry had been left "with no other option" but to pursue ISPs in the courts.

The IFPI wants ISPs to disconnect users who refuse to stop exchanging music files illegally. Mr Kennedy said such activity is in breach of a customer's contract with the ISP and disconnecting offenders the IFPI had identified would significantly reduce illegal file sharing.

Mr Kennedy said talks with internet companies have been ongoing over the past year, but no action has been taken. "I realised I was being filibustered ... if they still want to filibuster, their time will run out," he said.

The IFPI took legal action against 10,000 individuals in 18 countries during 2006. It won a spate of significant legal victories against peer-to-peer platforms such as Kazaa that was forced to pay a $115m (£58m) settlement.

A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said ISPs are "mere conduits of information" that can not be held liable for offences committed by customers. "ISPs cannot inspect every packet of data transmitted over their networks," he said.

Geoff Taylor, the executive vice-president and general counsel of IFPI, said that ISPs are in the best position to stop copyright infringements. "While it might be possible to argue that an ISP is exempt from liability for damages, that does not mean rights holders can't obtain an injunction to stop infringements of their copyright," he said.

A spokeswoman for Tiscali, a UK ISP, said the onus is on the IFPI to prove that the user is engaged in illegal activity and that the music organisation should share the cost of resolving disputes. Last year, due to a lack of evidence, Tiscali refused to close the accounts or hand over the details of 17 customers who the British Phonographic Industry claimed were involved in illegal file sharing.

During 2006, global digital music sales doubled to about $2bn on the back of an 89 per cent surge in music downloads to 795 million. The success of the digital music market has been underlined by bands like Koopa which is expected to score a Top-40 hit this week despite having no record label or any physical copies of their CD on sale.
http://news.independent.co.uk/busine...cle2162919.ece





ISPs Hit Back at Music Industry

Internet service providers struck out at the record industry on Friday, following claims that the online companies were failing to prevent music piracy.

John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the IFPI, which represents record groups worldwide, earlier this week said that the organisation could sue ISPs if they continued to allow music pirates to use their networks and accused them of "filibustering".

"(Filibustering) is far from the truth," said Michael Bartholomew, director general of the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association. He added: "Taking legal action against us would be very inappropriate".

He said that ISPs could only move to cut users off based on a court order, and that the data protection legislation prevented the online companies from trying to prevent copyright infringement.

Tiscali, an internet service provider said that the music industry needed to take more time to develop with ISPs an approach that was practical and legally sound.

It said: "Dealing with cases is time-consuming for ISPs, so we need a reasonable level of proof before taking action. It is a complex international issue and targeting the 'industrial scale' offenders will help to raise awareness amongst individuals that downloading from unauthorised sources is wrong."

"ISPs derive virtually no revenue from legal music and certainly none from

The IFPI said it had been asking ISPs to cut off illegal music uploaders for more than a year. In Denmark last year the Supreme Court ruled that ISPs were obliged to terminate the connections of customers engaged in music piracy.

A report in the UK commissioned by the Treasury last year said that internet companies that fail to stop music piracy on sites they host could face a legislative clampdown. The Gowers report said internet service providers and music companies needed to show they could sort out the problem on a voluntary basis by the end of 2007 or face the prospect of legislation.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/pro...119&ID=6360205





GEMA Obtains Injunctions Against Data Exchange Services
Robert W. Smith

The German collecting society GEMA has obtained from the District Court in Cologne temporary injunctions against the operator of the data exchange services www.rapidshare.de and www.rapidshare.com. The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion. The services make virtual storage space available into which users can upload content that is thereby made publicly available to other users. GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer told heise online that the services should not be allowed to continue to operate in their present form. The collecting society is now demanding that the operator provide details on how many copyright protected works of GEMA members are currently stored on the said sites.

According to GEMA, the service www.rapidshare.de in particular has at times boasted of making some 15 million files available to its users. The operator had however failed to obtain from GEMA a license for making copyright protected files available, the collecting society spokesman observed. To date RapidShare had claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users and of not being in a position to control the same, the spokesman continued. Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne had now however made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator’s liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.

Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of GEMA, believes the court's decisions will have repercussions on the way "Web 2.0 services" such as YouTube and MySpace will be treated in future. What the decisions according to Mr. Heker show is that "the mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator's website(s)."
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/83948





Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Arrives on Mobile Devices
Ben Gross

Many high-end mobile phones include substantial computational power, multiple options for network connectivity, good displays, and modern operating systems. Effectively, a modern smartphone is roughly equivalent to a seven- to eight-year-old desktop computer. Consequently, applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications that previously only targeted desktops are migrating to mobile platforms. As mobile devices gain improved data connectivity from mobile carriers, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, they can become first-class nodes on the Internet with full IP connectivity.

Examples include recent implementations of the BitTorrent and Gnutella file sharing protocols for the Symbian platform, called SymTorrent and Symella. In addition, there is a Windows Mobile implementation of BitTorrent that, not surprisingly, is called WinMobile Torrent. However, more interestingly, there is WinMobile Fusion, which is a combined RSS aggregator and BitTorrent client.

All applications are capable of downloading multiple files from multiple peers simultaneously. There are many potential network efficiencies from peer-to-peer file sharing applications, especially if connections can be optimized to prefer the local network or the carrier's network rather than the Internet at large. For example, mobile devices could use peer-to-peer networks to efficiently receive audio, video, applications, or firmware upgrades. The WinMobile Fusion client provides a real-world example of the efficiencies. Large numbers of clients retrieving RSS enclosures can strain servers. BitTorrent RSS aggregators help to spread the bandwidth load to other clients.

Both SymTorrent and Symella were developed by teams from the Department of Automation and Applied Informatics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The applications are currently available for mobile devices capable of running second and third editions of the Symbian S60 platform and are open source licensed under the GNU General Public License. WinMobile Torrent and WinMobile Fusion are commercial applications from Adisasta Software and are available on the Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003/2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5 platforms.

Users are advised to be certain that they have an unlimited mobile data plan or use a Wi-Fi connection before attempting to use either of these applications. Users should also be aware that continuous network traffic, be it cellular data or Wi-Fi, could be a substantial battery drain.
http://blog.ferris.com/2007/01/peertopeer_file.html





Tubes: Simpler File Sharing
Rafe Needleman

Tubes, a new app going public Tuesday, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing and -synchronization system that can make it very easy to distribute files among multiple users and computers.

It's the application I've been looking for to solve this real-world problem: Every other year, my wife's family gets together for Christmas. This past December, her four siblings and their families gathered in her parents' house in Baltimore (the family doesn't believe in hotels, so it was cozy). There were eight digital cameras in operation. After the holidays, we all scattered back home, and the great photo archive of our time in Baltimore fragmented.

With the Tubes app installed on all our computers, we could simply all drag our photos into our shared Baltimore Christmas folder, and we'd all have access to all of them.

I tried it, and it works as advertised. Once set up, you can create as many "tubes" as you want and share them among your own PCs or with friends, family, and so on. Any files you drop into given tubes are replicated to the other machines. People you invite can be given read/write access or just be set up as readers. Those who have write access can add and change files, and those changes will be synced back to all subscribers.

The Tubes synchronization engine works in the background when a PC is online. When a PC is offline, its users still have access to all the files in its tubes and can continue to work with files in them and make changes. When they go back online, the files are synced again. If there are conflicts, Tubes copies all versions of a file.

In addition to my test case of sharing group photos, Tubes could also be very useful for geographically distributed workgroups and as a repository for files created by consultants for their customers.

It's cool because it works. It's easy to use. It appears quite robust. The replication engine means that when subscribers want to open a file, they don't have to download it--it's presumably already copied on to their machine. And Tubes even makes a cute pneumatic tube sound when you drop a file in it.

But there are snags. For one, it's Windows only, which is a real bummer if anyone you know is on a Mac or Linux box (this makes Tubes a nonstarter in my test case, since two people in my wife's family are Mac heads). And while the app itself is smallish, it requires the latest .Net framework, which is so much of a beast to install that I could not in good conscience point my less PC-savvy friends to the application.

Also, Tubes makes copies of all the files you drop in it, so if you're going to put a bunch of photos in a tube, you'll need to remember that the versions in your My Pictures folders are not the ones in the tube. This is a good security measure and good for communal work spaces, but it might be confusing for some users. (To share folders directly, you can use FolderShare or BeInSync.)

Finally, there's no chat associated with a tube, which seems to be a missing feature. It'd be nice if people could leave notes in a tube when they made file additions or changes.

Once there's a Mac version, Tubes could become a powerful collaboration and sharing platform. There are also other shared and online storage products worth looking at if Tubes sounds interesting to you: see BoxCloud, Box.net, Omnidrive, Pando, and Sharpcast.
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-96...d&subj=Webware





Study: Digital Music Consumers Are More Involved Music Fans
FMQB

A new study from the Digital Media Association (DiMA) finds that digital music consumers are more involved and passionate music fans. The organization surveyed over 1000 consumers, finding that 60 percent are listening to more music since they began using an online music service, including Internet radio and digital music download services.

The majority of those surveyed found that listening to music online has allowed them to discover new artists and try out more music than before. Over 60 percent said they have discovered "some new artists," with 25 percent saying they found "a lot of new artists." Additionally, over 35 percent said they now talk about music more than before, and more than 75 percent have recommended an online service to someone else. Also 15 percent of online music fans say they are now attending more concerts.

"These findings demonstrate that real music fans – and today’s music tastemakers – are online,” said DiMA Executive Director Jonathan Potter. “This makes the 2006 holiday sales jump in music devices and sound recordings exponentially more important to artists, songwriters, producers and music publishers, as online music’s impact extends way beyond immediate revenues. Consumers of innovative online music services are reviving the music economy as they enjoy more music and more new music in every way possible, and most importantly, as they introduce their friends to the music and online services they enjoy.”

DiMA also found that roughly half of digital music fans spend over $200 each year on music, with 30 percent spending over $300. "Prior to the digital age, someone who purchased six CDs per year – valued at just over $100 – was considered a significant music consumer,” said Potter. “Online music consumers’ spending habits, combined with what they are doing to promote and expand music enjoyment, is great for the entire music industry – artists, songwriters and producers."

The full study can be found at digmedia.org.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=328662





Baidu.com and EMI Launch Online Music Venture
AP

Chinese search engine Baidu.com and EMI Music launched an Internet venture Tuesday that will let users listen to streaming music free, adding to Baidu's growing entertainment business.

The venture will make EMI Group PLC's Chinese pop music by performers from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere available on Baidu's website, the companies said. They said they would look into the possibility of offering free music downloads.

Baidu.com Inc., which has more than 60 per cent of China's online search market, has been expanding entertainment offerings in an effort to stay competitive in an industry where other Chinese websites combine search with entertainment and games, financial analysts say.

In October, Baidu launched a venture with Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks to distribute music videos and other programming online.

China has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 132 million people online at the end of last year, and 30 per cent increase over 2005, according to the government.

China trails the United States, Japan, South Korea and other markets in financial terms, but Internet companies are competing aggressively for access to its increasingly affluent consumers.

The new Baidu-EMI service will offer performers such as Taiwan's Jolin Tsai, David Tao and Richie Ren; Singapore's Stephanie Sun; and Hong Kong's Sandy Lam.

“While consumers listen to the music for free they will be exposed to Internet advertising, and EMI and Baidu will share the revenue generated by the advertising,” the companies said in a joint statement.

The companies said the venture also might help to reduce China's rampant music piracy by creating a legitimate alternative to Web sites that offer unlicensed music downloads for free.

EMI's music labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, Capitol Nashville and Virgin.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...116.wbaidu0116





Portable Solar Power

To get power for larger devices, like laptops or video cameras, you need bigger portable power products. Brunton, a company that specializes in outdoor gear, has a foldable, thin-film solar panel. The Solaris 26, priced at $399, has a maximum output of 26 watts. It can fold up to be 11 inches by 8.5 inches by 1 inch.
http://news.com.com/2300-11395_3-614...tag=ne.gall.pg





Variation on Vampire Lore That Won’t Die
Lewis Beale

FROM the outside Robert Neville’s red brick home looks like all the other stately Greek revival town houses facing Washington Square Park. But the interior, actually a set inside a Brooklyn armory, is something else entirely. The kitchen is stacked top to bottom with what seems like several years’ worth of canned goods and packaged food, and all the windows have floor-to-ceiling retractable steel doors that can be locked down at a moment’s notice.

Robert Neville, after all, thinks he is the last man alive in a time when a biological plague has created a race of night-crawling human freaks who would like nothing better than to penetrate his sanctuary. As played by Will Smith, he is also one of the few noninfected characters in “I Am Legend,” a Warner Brothers production that has been shooting in New York for release in December.

Directed by Francis Lawrence (“Constantine”) and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman (an Oscar winner for “A Beautiful Mind”), “I Am Legend” is testimony to the unexpected durability of Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name. It is the third film based on a book whose original impulse was to one-up the screen vampires of an earlier era.

First published in 1953, the novel is a taut, realistic chiller about a postapocalyptic world in which germ warfare creates a biological plague that turns humans into bloodsuckers. The idea was born, said Mr. Matheson, now 80 and living in the Los Angeles area, “when I was a teenager and saw Bela Lugosi in ‘Dracula.’ ”

“I thought if the world was full of vampires, it would be more frightening than just one,” he continued. “And I explained vampires in biological terms.”

“I Am Legend” was almost immediately optioned for the movies (Hammer Films in Britain originally owned the rights), but it wasn’t until 1964 that Vincent Price appeared in “The Last Man on Earth,” a low-budget version shot in Italy. Then, in 1971, Warner released “The Omega Man,” a more expensive studio production, starring Charlton Heston, that made extensive use of Los Angeles’s deserted-looking downtown.

Both versions took certain liberties with Mr. Matheson’s original concept, largely sidestepping its startlingly prescient, and philosophical, ending: In the book, some vampires have developed a pill that keeps the disease in check and allows them to live relatively normal lives. This element now plays as an AIDS metaphor, though the book was written 30 years before H.I.V. was even identified.

It is this idea of pandemic, along with the concepts of vampirism and the effects of solitude on the human psyche, that have kept Mr. Matheson’s slim novel both contemporary and of interest to filmmakers. But the current version of “I Am Legend” nonetheless had a long road to the screen.

Warner Brothers has owned the rights to the book since 1970, and first decided to revive the project in 1994. “I Am Legend” was close to a start date in 1997, with Ridley Scott directing Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the studio pulled the plug when the budget climbed over $100 million, a huge sum at the time. (Studio executives declined to reveal the budget for the current version.) Then, in 2002, Michael Bay and Will Smith were set to hook up, but that pairing also fell through.

“There have been issues with the budget, script issues between director and actors, directors and the studio, even issues with what the creatures should look like,” said Mr. Lawrence, the director.

About two years ago Warner was about to drop the project for good when the studio’s president for production, Jeff Robinov, asked Mr. Smith if he would be willing to pair up with Mr. Goldsman to develop a new take on the material. Mr. Goldsman was one of the credited writers on “I, Robot,” which starred Mr. Smith. And he admired Mr. Lawrence for his work on “Constantine,” the 2005 fantasy-horror film.

Mr. Robinov says it is “the notion of isolation” that makes “I Am Legend” perennially attractive. “For an actor it involves a lot of character, the idea of being the last survivor,” he said. “And for a director it’s the story, the ability to create a different version of society, of where the world is at that point.”

Mr. Lawrence agreed. “I’ve always been fascinated by man’s isolation in an urban environment,” he said. “How someone survives when they’re by themselves for so long. Physically survives, mentally and emotionally survives with complete social deprivation.”

This time out the story is set in 2009, three years after something called the KV virus, developed in a laboratory but mutated out of control, has created a planet of bloodthirsty but still recognizably human freaks. Mr. Smith’s Neville, a former military scientist, has not been infected and is trying to find a cure for the pandemic. Manhattan had been quarantined back in 2006, and as far as Neville knows he is the only human left on the island, if not the world.

The story’s location was moved from California (the book is set in Compton) to New York. In addition to the interiors of Neville’s house, which were erected at the 66,000-square-foot Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg, the production has shot in TriBeCa and on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. The filmmakers have also rented the 152,000-square-foot Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, which they are using for a large special-effects-driven action sequence to be staged next month. And in a particularly brazen piece of logistics, the production company cleared the area around St. Patrick’s Cathedral for a ghostly New York-without-humans sequence.

“It’s hard to make Los Angeles feel empty,” Mr. Goldsman said. “Here, you just have to look down Fifth Avenue empty, and you understand something. There’s a conveyance of information and fantasy that is wonderful and amazing.”

This version of the story also updates it to reflect current concerns. While the Heston film had a subtext with its roots in the early days of the environmental movement, the current film moves back toward Mr. Matheson’s concept of a viral apocalypse.

“There is a little bit of an AIDS metaphor here, especially in terms of dealing with the infected, because the people Neville deals with are infected,” said Mr. Lawrence. “They’re not dead, they’re not vampires, they have a chronic disease.”

For Mr. Goldsman, Mr. Matheson’s seeming ability to foretell an epidemic reflects the magic of sophisticated fantasy.

“People infected with AIDS have been on the forefront of understanding the truths about how viruses work, contagion works, stigma works, which is something I think Matheson was finding in that early novel,” he said. “He is like H. G. Wells and William Gibson, people who do a little leapfrogging imaginatively. And you wait around long enough, and suddenly you’re in one of their books.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/movies/14beal.html





Hollywood Rethinks Its Ratings Process
David M. Halbfinger

Stung by a low-budget documentary that assailed the movie ratings system last year, motion picture industry officials are vowing to make the system more transparent to filmmakers and more accessible to parents.

The most substantive rule change will let aggrieved filmmakers refer on appeal to other movies — for example, to argue that because another film was permitted to run a similar scene, their film should be permitted to as well. Until now, directors were barred from citing other films when appearing before the appeals board. But ratings officials decline to say that they will cede to precedent; the “context of the entire film” will still guide their decisions.

Officials of the Motion Picture Association of America, its Classification and Ratings Administration and the National Association of Theater Owners plan to meet with filmmakers and producers Monday in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival to discuss other tweaks to the ratings system, a spokeswoman for the motion picture association said. The efforts to change the system were reported yesterday in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the motion picture association and overseer of the ratings administration, said that this round of changes wasn’t likely to be the last and that filmmakers were welcome to suggest others. (The previous procedures were set up by his predecessor, Jack Valenti, in the 1960s,) “My view is that we have a continuing obligation to listen,” he said. “Nothing is locked in forever.”

The changes come a year after a Sundance film, “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” excoriated the rating system as a supersecret star chamber. The film outed the otherwise anonymous ratings-board members and revealed that several were no longer parents of minor children, the only requirement for the job.

The documentary, which was directed by Kirby Dick and released by IFC Films in September, also disclosed the closely held names of the ratings system’s appeals-board members and revealed that lay representatives from the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant National Council of Churches sit in on the appeals process.

The association now says it will remove a film rater whose children have grown up. It will also post to a soon-to-be-revamped Web site the names of its three senior movie raters — whose names are already public — and limited demographic information about the others. But the identities of other board members will remain secret, and the appeals-board members still won’t be identified publicly, though the board will be expanded to include film industry people from outside the association and the theater owners’ group.

In addition, “observers from different backgrounds” will be admitted into the appeals process under an “occasional designation,” the association said, but it didn’t say if the Roman Catholic and Protestant observers would be grandfathered in.

Mr. Glickman said that he had seen Mr. Dick’s documentary but that he had begun work on updating the system much earlier, shortly after taking his job in late 2004. Still, he said, “if there’s any perceptions that the system is secret, I don’t want those out there.” He said he and the ratings board’s chairwoman, Joan Graves, would be reaching out more frequently to film schools, parents’ groups and members of Congress to demystify the process.

The new Web site will also include the ratings system’s rules, which until now were provided only in writing and on request, a spokeswoman said.

The association also said the ratings administration would work on clarifying how its ratings are defined so that, while adults would still be allowed to take children to R-rated movies, they would be made aware that many of those films were not appropriate for younger viewers.

The ratings administration last year began a program to send weekly e-mail alerts to parents about ratings for new movie releases, but its Red Carpet Ratings Service has signed up only about 2,000 people. Plans now call for advertising in theaters, schools and video stores, and on the radio, to explain the ratings, and for posters and a video to promote the e-mail alerts.

Mr. Dick, the documentary maker, said he welcomed the rule change allowing reference to other films on appeal but called the other changes cosmetic and said transparency was still a ways off. “If this is a ratings system for the public, it should be public, the entire process, and all the raters should be known to the public,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/movies/18rati.html





Sundance Cracks Down on Ticket Reselling

Desperate for tickets to see your favorite stars at their Sundance Film Festival premiere? EBay may be the answer — or not.

Sundance officials say they are scanning the online auction site and cracking down on ticket sales. Reselling tickets online is prohibited.

The festival gives locals a shot at purchasing tickets before they go on sale nationally. More than 2,460 Utah residents were selected at random for a chance to buy up to 20 tickets each at the locals-only sale last weekend.

Two tickets to the first screening of "Waitress," staring Keri Russell, sold for $385 on Saturday afternoon. About half an hour later, a second pair of "Waitress" tickets went for $255.

Sundance officials warn that tickets resold online can be remotely deactivated before the film's showing.

"We've contacted those sellers and informed them of our policy and what actions we are taking," said Patrick Hubley, festival spokesman. "I wouldn't advise people to buy tickets off of eBay or any other site," except for the official Sundance site, he said.

It appeared some of the 293 entries under a search for "Sundance tickets" on Saturday were trying to get around the prohibition. Several sellers were giving away "free" tickets with the "purchase" of festival venue instructions or a film guide, which are given to ticket holders.

Several venue instructions and film guides were selling for around $80 Saturday afternoon. A film guide with two "free" tickets to "Waitress" was going for $227 in an auction ending Sunday afternoon.

The Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday and runs through Jan. 28, with film screenings in Park City, Ogden, Sundance and Salt Lake City.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070114/.../sundance_ebay





Macworld Crack Offers VIP Passes, Hacker Says
Joris Evers

Alongside the VIPs and people who paid top dollar, a hacker claims he also got priority access to Steve Jobs' speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo this week.

A security weakness in the event's Web site allowed enterprising hackers to get free "platinum passes" to the event, a $1,695 value, a security professional claims. These passes--the most expensive sold for Macworld--included much-coveted priority seating for the Jobs keynote address on Tuesday. In that packed speech, Jobs unveiled Apple's new iPhone.

The hack was possible because special discount codes were available on the Macworld site without proper security, Kurt Grutzmacher, a Berkeley, Calif.-based security professional, wrote on his blog late Thursday. It was relatively easy to uncover the code that would make a platinum pass free, he wrote.

Grutzmacher picked up his free "Platinum Pass" on Monday and reported the issue to IDG on Tuesday, he wrote. IDG World Expo runs Macworld, which closes Friday.

"They'd spent most of the day looking back over their logs and found that others also had found this vulnerability and used it but I was the only one to report it," Grutzmacher wrote.

Macworld organizer IDG World Expo won't confirm or deny that the hack happened. Spokeswoman Charlotte McCormack on Friday said the company simply had "no comment." A representative for Registration Control Systems, the company that handled registrations for the event, referred all questions to IDG.

The claimed Macworld hack is an excellent example of security issues with Web 2.0 applications, Billy Hoffman, a researcher at Web security specialist SPI Dynamics, said in an e-mail interview Friday.

IDG tried to make their Web site more responsive by doing some of their validation on the PC of the user registering for the event, Hoffman said. They did this by pushing some JavaScript code to the browser. By doing that they leaked how the priority code is verified and used by the Web site, he said.

"I visited the IDG registration page today (Friday), and the priority codes are still in the JavaScript, available for anyone to steal," he said. "By trying to enrich the user's experience, the programmers exposed all of their discount offers in JavaScript, allowing an attacker to discovery them and perform fraud for thousands of dollars."

What Grutzmacher did isn't something that any layperson could do. When registering for the event, he discovered that the Macworld online registration page actually contained a list of possible discount codes, called "Priority Codes," he wrote.

This list was not in plain text, though. It was encrypted and showed a number of MD5 hashes, Grutzmacher wrote. The protection was easy to crack, however, because the Web site gave several key pieces of information that enabled a crack. In less than 10 seconds, he had the code that gave him a free platinum pass, he wrote.

"Ultimately, you don't want to give the client everything they need to gain access to something they shouldn't. Validate on the server rather than the client and keep the keys secret," Grutzmacher wrote. "Of course, you also shouldn't use a very easy key that will provide discounted access."
http://news.com.com/Macworld+crack+o...3-6149994.html




TJ Maxx, Marshalls Corporate Computers Hacked
AP

TJX Cos., operator of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls discount stores, said Wednesday its computer systems were hacked late last year and customer data has been stolen.

The company said the full extent of the intrusion is not yet known, but it is conducting a full investigation.

The hackers broke into a system that handles credit and debit card transactions, as well as checks and merchandise returns for customers in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and may also involve customers of T.J. Maxx stores in the U.K. and Ireland.

The break-in was discovered in mid-December, but was kept confidential upon the request of law enforcement officials.

TJX said it has hired General Dynamics Corp. and IBM Corp. to upgrade its security system.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1028770





Persistent Zombie Attacks Target Symantec Corporate Software
Joris Evers

Symantec first dismissed the threat, but worm attacks that exploit a known security hole in the company's corporate antivirus tool are proving to be persistent.

The attacks target computers running older versions of Symantec Client Security and Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition. Compromised systems are turned into remotely controlled zombies by the attacker and used to relay spam and other nefarious activities. Symantec's Norton consumer software is not affected.

"What we have been seeing in December and in the last week and a half is related to new variants of Spybot," Vincent Weafer, senior director of Symantec Security Response, said Tuesday. "We had a couple of versions of Spybot that went nowhere, but these ones found a way to propagate more effectively."

The Spybot variants break into computers through a known security hole in the widely used Symantec antivirus tools. When installed on a PC, Spybot opens a back door in the system and connects to an Internet Relay Chat server to let the remote attacker control the compromised computer. Spybot first surfaced in 2003 and has spawned many offshoots.

The first version of Spybot to exploit the Symantec security hole surfaced in November. This was followed in December by another pest dubbed Sagevo, or Big Yellow. Symantec initially dismissed both threats, stating that their impact was minimal. While Sagevo fizzled, Spybot is causing harm, Weafer said.

"We're definitely seeing Spybot out there and seeing that it is being trapped in customer environments," he said. The attacks have been escalating since December 20, when Symantec and its customers first saw increased activity on TCP port 2967, the network port used by the vulnerable software.

A fix for the flaw has been available since May 25, but it appears not all users have applied the fix. Unlike Symantec's consumer products, the corporate antivirus software doesn't include automatic product updates.

"Customers have to go to the support site and download the update," Weafer said. The security fix is different from the regular definition updates, which are automatically delivered to both consumer and corporate virus shields, he said.

Symantec is re-evaluating the update mechanism for its corporate tools, Weafer said. Additionally, the company on Wednesday plans to push out an update to its antivirus scanning engine that is designed to better detect Spybot, he said. The engine update will go out automatically to all users, he added.
http://news.com.com/Persistent+zombi...3-6150560.html





Swedish Bank Hit By 'Biggest Ever' Online Heist

Swedish police suspect Russian organised criminals to be behind a heist that has cost Nordea up to £580,000

Swedish bank Nordea has told ZDNet UK that it has been stung for between seven and eight million Swedish krona — up to £580,000 — in what security company McAfee is describing as the "biggest ever" online bank heist.

Over the last 15 months, Nordea customers have been targeted by emails containing a tailormade Trojan, said the bank.

Nordea believes that 250 customers have been affected by the fraud, after falling victim to phishing emails containing the Trojan. According to McAfee, Swedish police believe Russian organised criminals are behind the attacks. Currently, 121 people are suspected of being involved.

The attack started by a tailormade Trojan sent in the name of the bank to some of its clients, according to McAfee. The sender encouraged clients to download a "spam fighting" application. Users who downloaded the attached file, called raking.zip or raking.exe, were infected by the Trojan, which some security companies call haxdoor.ki.

Haxdoor typically installs keyloggers to record keystrokes, and hides itself using a rootkit. The payload of the .ki variant of the Trojan was activated when users attempted to log in to the Nordea online banking site. According to the bank, users were redirected to a false home page, where they entered important log-in information, including log-in numbers.

After the users entered the information an error message appeared, informed them that the site was experiencing technical difficulties. Criminals then used the harvested customer details on the real Nordea website to take money from customer accounts.

According to McAfee, Swedish police have established that the log-in information was sent to servers in the US, and then to Russia. Police believe the heist to be the work of organised criminals.

Nordea spokesman for Sweden, Boo Ehlin, said that most of the home users affected had not been running antivirus on their computers. The bank has borne the brunt of the attacks, and has refunded all the affected customers.

Ehlin blamed successful social engineering for the heist, rather than any deficiencies in Nordea security procedures.

"It is more of an information rather than a security problem," said Ehlin. "Codes are a very important thing. Our customers have been cheated into giving out the keys to our security, which they gave in good faith."

In an effort to combat fraud, most banks have a policy of monitoring the behaviour of people claiming to be their customers, so that unusual transaction behaviour can be investigated and halted if fraudulent.

Nordea was aware that some of the attempted transactions were false because of the large sums involved. However, over 15 months a large series of small transactions enabled the criminals to successfully transfer a huge sum overall.

"In some cases we saw the transactions were false, and in some cases we didn't," said Ehlin. "We can't look at every transfer, and it looked like our customers had made the transfer. Most of the cases were small amounts that we thought were ordinary. We lost approximately seven to eight million krona."

Nordea has two million internet banking customers in Sweden. The police investigation is underway, and the bank is currently reviewing its security procedures.

The Metropolitan Police warned in October last year that thousands of UK users had been affected by a variant of the Haxdoor Trojan.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1...9285547,00.htm





First Fruits of New e-Voting Certification Process: Two Companies Get Thumbs-Up From Federal Testers
Nate Anderson

How do Americans know that electronic voting machines are reliable? They have to trust the word of the private testing laboratories that examine the machines. But how do people know that the testing laboratories themselves are reliable? That's where the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) comes in. As part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the NIST is charged with providing technical guidance to the Election Assistance Commission as the EAC certifies testing laboratories. Yesterday, the NIST recommended that SysTest Labs and iBeta Quality Assurance receive the first full accreditations from the EAC.

Six labs have currently applied for accreditation: SysTest, iBeta, InfoGuard, BKP Security, Wyle, and Ciber. Last summer, the EAC granted interim accreditation to Wyle and SysTest, though it found some documentation problems at Ciber and refused to give the company the green light. Now that the NIST process is firmly in place, interim accreditation will be replaced by a full accreditation process that takes 9 to 18 months to complete.

NIST bases its program on ISO/IEC 17025, a set of "General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories." Because there are currently no standard tests for evaluating voting machines, each laboratory has created its own testing suite. NIST accreditation is designed to ensure that the testing process at each lab can produce precise data with repeatable results, not that the tests themselves are well-designed.

Recognizing that this is a weakness, NIST will start development work this year on a standard series of tasks that all laboratories will eventually be encouraged to adopt. There is no word on when the new tests will be ready.

The government does require seven basic areas to be tested. Voting machines first need to be evaluated to make sure they conform to federal design standards, and then they are run through a physical configuration audit in which the lab makes sure that the machine actually matches the documentation. The third part of the test is a source code review, followed by a functional configuration audit that tries to determine if every function mentioned in the manual actually exists and works. A system integration test, reliability and accuracy tests, and security testing round out the requirements.

Now that the EAC has received the first two NIST recommendations, it still needs to act on them for the accreditation to become official.

The EAC also issued a letter last week asking both voting machine manufacturers and testing labs to refrain from political activity. Saying that the companies involved had a "significant responsibility as the public places its trust in these organizations," the EAC asked labs and manufacturers to "adopt policies that prohibit the organization and its employees from engaging in act of these that may create the appearance of a conflict of interest or partisan bias."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070119-8663.html





JS Item of Note

The Mystery of "Authorization"
Sloppy

“The only legal way around this built-in [iTunes DRM] limitation is to strip out the copy protection by burning a CD with the tracks, then uploading the music back to the computer. If you're willing to go to that trouble, you can play the music where and how you choose -- the equivalent to rights that would have been granted automatically at the cash register if you had bought the same music on a CD in the first place.”

Sure, if you don't mind that this puts your music through a lossy compress+decompress step.

But that's not what annoys me. Nor the fact that iTunes' decompress-to-CD feature might go away at any time -- when you use proprietary software and become dependent on an upgrade path, you're making yourself someone else's bitch. But that's just the nature of the game and I'm sure most users have (at least unconsciously) come to terms with that by now.

No, the real slimey thing about decompressing to CD, is that nobody knows whether or not it's legal.

DMCA defines circumvention as bypassing DRM without authorization from the copyright holder. Did you get authorization to remove the DRM from a iTMS-purchased song, from the copyright holder? Do you even know what the copyright holder has authorized you to do, and not do?

DVDs don't contain any statement that says you're allowed to watch them. We assume that it's implied, because if MPAA starts suing people for merely watching DVDs, they might get a little money from one settlement, but then that'll be the end of the DVD market. One thing we do know, thanks to the 2600 case, is that running DeCSS isn't on the secret list of authorized uses.

What is on the secret list of authorized uses for iTMS-bought songs? We all assume it's ok to bypass the DRM as a necessary step of listening to the songs. Are we also assuming that these RIAA-member companies have granted authorization to remove the DRM for purposes of burning to an audio CD? That's a pretty amazing assumption. These companies are part of the lobby to remove or reduce Fair Use; they don't want you to burn music to a CD even when the original music is not DRMed. That's a situation where Fair Use law, not the copyright holder, has the final say as to what is legal and what is not. But when music has "technological measures to limit access," then DMCA says that the copyright holder, rather than any coded law, is who has the final say about the details of what is permitted and what isn't. And you just blissfully assume they're ok with it? Wow.

The beauty of never publicly stating what is authorized is that you can always change your mind, and revise your secret list of authorized uses. Somebody pisses you off? Just retroactively make them become a criminal, and now the government will be on your side when you attack them.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/01/14/1357213.shtml





Cingular: We Made Apple Bend
Sascha Segan

Movie studios and record labels have bent to Apple. But in the end, Apple bent to Cingular with a multi-year, exclusive US contract for an entire line of different iPhone models, Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007) today.

When asked about a give-and-take leading to the Apple-Cingular partnership, Lurie said, "I'm not sure we gave anything." Later, he commented, "I think they bent a lot." That bending included allowing the phone to be locked to Cingular, just one of several restrictions on the new iPhone. Press reports today said the phone will not accept third-party applications, though Apple may allow third parties to program mini-application "widgets."

"If you want an iPhone, you are going to get the luxury of being on the Cingular network," Lurie said.

While the Cingular logo will not appear on the body of the iPhone, the word "Cingular" will appear on the screen at all times.

The contract covers "all models" of the iPhone, including several other devices in the works that may be "coming out very quickly," Lurie said. His comment addressed in part a criticism that the iPhone doesn't use Cingular's new high-speed HSDPA network.

That isn't true worldwide, as Cingular only exists in the US. Apple is free to seek other partners for global distribution, he said. And Apple is also free to build other iPods without phone capability that won't be sold through Cingular—though he was unclear on whether a Wi-Fi only version of the iPhone would fall under Cingular's thumb.

While "there are bad guys out there that unlock phones," Lurie said, Apple and Cingular are taking unspecified steps to make the phone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US.

"We expect this to grow our business" by attracting other carriers' customers, Lurie said.

The phone will be sold exclusively through Apple and Cingular stores, Apple and Cingular's Web sites and Cingular's direct-mail unit, Lurie said. It will not be available through indirect retailers, the "Joe's cell phone shop" you see on every street corner—though Apple is free to go to big-box stores like Target and Wal-Mart, Lurie said.

Apple and Cingular will share tech support responsibilities, Lurie said, with reps being "cross-trained" so that Cingular staffers will get elementary questions, leading to a "warm handoff" to Apple's tech support experts.

So what did Apple get out of this partnership? Lurie said they were attracted to "the people," and the ability to work together to make deals and a product they could keep secret—which they have for two years.

"We found that our organizations meshed together better than either side anticipated," Lurie said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20070110/tc_zd/198403





Copyright Law Changes Could Leave Consumers Vulnerable

Ever recorded a television show or a movie so you can watch it later? Or ripped a CD so you can listen to it on your MP3 player?

With changes to Canada's copyright laws expected as early as next month, these mundane 21st century activities could theoretically be open to prosecution — unless the Conservative government steps in with expanded "fair use" or "fair dealing" protections for consumers.

Close observers of the file say all signs point to a new regime that will improve safeguards for major music, film and media companies and artists for unpaid use of their material, but neglect to make exemptions for personal use of copyrighted content.
'About as market interventionist as you can get'

"We're dealing with an industry minister [Maxime Bernier] that's tried to extricate government from the telecom area with a very strong deregulatory focus," said Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

"Yet the kind of copyright reform that is being contemplated is about as market interventionist as you can get."

Amendments to the Copyright Act are fraught with problems, since there are so many players with contradictory views.
Continue Article

Exacerbating the situation is intense pressure from the United States, where Canada is considered a rogue when it comes to copyright and intellectual property. It still hasn't ratified a 1997 World Intellectual Property Organization copyright treaty.

Sources say the new legislation is ready, but Bernier and Heritage Minister Bev Oda are struggling on final wording. Two of the most controversial issues are called digital rights management and the closely related technological protection measures.
'People just assume it's free'

Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, one of Canada's top lobbyists for stiffer copyright controls, notes that a variety of digital services have taken off in the United States and started to make up a large percentage of music revenues.

"In Canada, that's not happening and it's not happening because we have a culture here where people just assume it's free," said Henderson.

"It's a big black market effect and so instead of 25 per cent [of the market], it's eight per cent here. People are simply abandoning the marketplace altogether, and they've made the decision they'll just download the music and worry about how the artist gets paid later."
Exemptions for consumers urged

But what does this mean for the consumer who legitimately buys a song or a film, and wants to use it on several different devices?

Consumer advocates, such as Ottawa-based lawyer Howard Knopf, are urging the government to protect Canadians with wide exemptions in the Copyright Act for "fair use."

As well, a group of Canadian musicians, including the Barenaked Ladies and Broken Social Scene, have come out against the technological protection measures, arguing they actually stifle creativity and their relationship with consumers.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ht-canada.html





New Radio Web Service Powered By RCS
FMQB

RCS will be the technology provider for U.K. radio group GCap Media's launch of Mi-Xfm, a "personalized online player" branded by radio station Xfm and Microsoft's XBox. The service lets station listeners specify how much and how often specific artists and songs are played within four different programming options: "Xfm Chill," "Xfm Loud," "The X-List" and "Xfm Hits."

RCS International Division VP Mike Powell says, “The player is ‘X-tremely’ user-friendly and really quite simple: Mi-Xfm features four different musical flavors, all derived from the legendary London radio station Xfm and utilizing our customizable iSelector software.” He adds that, “Every listener literally ‘teaches’ the online player how they want their listening experience to be…play more of this, less of that. As the player ‘learns’ it produces better and better playlists. Imagine a radio station where you only hear the music you really like – that’s what GCap is doing with Mi-Xfm.”
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=329394





802.11n Spec Moves Closer to Completion
Eric Bangeman

By a unanimous vote, the IEEE's 802.11 working group has sent Draft 2.0 of the 802.11n WiFi spec out to the entire membership of the IEEE for approval. If it is approved by the membership, Draft 2.0 wil then become the basis for the final 802.11n spec.

802.11n has been hailed as an ideal, easy-to-use home networking solution because of its speed and backward compatibility with the slower 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking spec. 802.11n will have a maximum throughput of 600Mbps, but will typically operate at 200Mbps, about twice that of wired 100BaseT Ethernet and nearly four times the maximum of 802.11g.

Its relatively high speeds have networking companies excited, as there's enough bandwidth to easily stream high-definition video wirelessly. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Ruckus Wireless treated me to a demo of their draft 802.11n equipment. Using their own hardware, they were able to simultaneously stream 1080p video to a couple of TVs while also streaming standard-def video to other devices. Very impressive, and a workable solution for getting HD content from one place to another without relying on coaxial cable or Cat 5e wire.

So-called "Draft N" 802.11 gear has been available for several months from major vendors, with most of them touting 802.11n's 600Mbps ceiling. The rush to bring Draft N gear to market has actually outpaced the development of the spec itself, leading to some concerns over how well the early Draft N gear would work with the final spec. By mid-2006, Dell, Linksys, Belkin, D-Link, and many others were selling draft-compliant gear.

With the rush to bring faster WiFi gear to market, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it would begin certifying 802.11n equipment in two waves. Starting in March, the Wi-Fi Alliance will certify products as being compliant with Draft 2.0. Once the spec is finalized later this year or in early 2008, products will then be certified as fully 802.11n compliant.

802.11n's progress through the various steering committees and working groups has been much more arduous than the raft of products might lead one to believe. After Draft 1.0 was released in early 2006, Task Group N was deluged with over 12,000 comments—six times what was expected—as the draft spec lacked support from over half of the membership.

The big question facing early adopters right now is how well their Draft N equipment will work with Draft 2.0 as well as the final spec, which is expected to be something akin to Draft 2.0 with some minor tweaks. Many—but not all—wireless equipment vendors have promised that their equipment will be made compliant with the final spec via firmware updates. If that turns out to be the case, it should be smooth sailing from here to the final spec. Given the widespread agreement that Draft 2.0 will only need some very minor modifications in order to gain the "full" 802.11n designation, Draft 2.0-compliant equipment should be a safe choice for those with the itch to upgrade.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070119-8662.html





July 2006

'No Wireless' Policy Enforced at Blue Cross
Andrew R. Hickey

It's not necessarily for security reasons that Blue Cross of Idaho has a strict "no wireless" policy. And it's not really the additional costs generated by a wireless network that keep that policy in place.

Actually, the reasoning behind Blue Cross' anti-wireless policy is simple: They just don't need wireless.

"We have not found a real business need to support wireless," said Jan Marshall, Blue Cross of Idaho's manager of technical and network services.

It's been that way for years. No wireless, no worries.

While Blue Cross of Idaho makes a conscious decision not to deploy a wireless network and to bar the use of wireless within the company walls, other companies may see benefits from it. For example, a company where end users are not confined to desks and bounce from room to room may want the seamless connectivity of WLANs. For Blue Cross, however, the cost and potential security risks don't make a WLAN a worthwhile venture, Marshall said.

But a recent audit found that in order to enforce the no-wireless policy in its three buildings, Blue Cross of Idaho needed something that would monitor the wireless spectrum 24/7. Essentially, the auditors determined that a no-wireless policy was worthless if it was only on paper.

"The auditors said, 'You have a no-wireless policy. How are you enforcing that?'" Marshall said.

At the auditors' suggestion, Blue Cross of Idaho deployed a wireless threat detection and prevention system. The product they settled on was RFprotect Distributed from Network Chemistry, which ensures that no wireless access points or other devices are on the network.

But wrapping in RFprotect created some interesting conundrums. First, Blue Cross of Idaho had to make sure they weren't shutting down neighboring buildings' wireless networks, Marshall said. The Starbucks nearby certainly "wouldn't appreciate that."

Marshall stressed that RFprotect is not a jammer or blocker, but instead it lets his team see what wireless devices are popping up on the network and track them to a specific location.

Being able to track the location of a wireless network has made for an interesting game within Blue Cross of Idaho. Since a number of users have PDAs with wireless settings, some have had a few laughs tracking the whereabouts of those users within the building – kind of a Big Brother situation. Marshall said it's all in fun.

And if someone came in with a laptop or PDA and wanted to hop onto Starbucks' hot spot, the user wouldn't be able to see it from inside Blue Cross' walls.

"We have to have a secure network for keeping outside people from getting into it for whatever reason," Marshall said, adding that Blue Cross of Idaho must comply with HIPAA regulations because it handles medical billing. "A hard-wired network contained within the walls of the company is just more secure."

So far, Marshall said, no real wireless threats have been found since RFprotect was deployed. No one has tried to set up rogue access. In some instances, however, visiting vendors and other guests have had their wireless cards enabled. Marshall said it gives a little peace of mind to know what is on the network and when.

"This was all a proactive project to make sure we don't have any problems going forward," he said.
http://searchnetworking.techtarget.c...204536,00.html





24-Hour Newspaper People
David Carr

Like a lot of modern newspaper people, I have a blog.

For those of you who don’t have a blog yet, think of one as a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention.

Having a blog (mine, which happens to be about the Oscar race, is at carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com) makes me approachable, reader-friendly and engaged. Perhaps too engaged.

There is a serial commenter on my blog and others at The New York Times, “Mark Klein, M.D.,” an older, accomplished gentleman with a lot of opinions and time on his hands. He can be a bit of a crank, politically incorrect to the point of provocation, and yet he always writes as though we are friends.

And maybe we are. A week ago, he posted a note saying that he was traveling to Israel and that I wasn’t to interpret his sudden silence as a sign that he’d lost interest in me. As if I cared.

Except that I did. I sort of missed him. I dropped him a note and then called him in Israel about being off the grid (in particular, my grid).

“It’s nice to hear from you. I missed you too,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“There is an intimacy to the exchange of electrons — almost like an online romance — that means you are a real person to me,” he said. “We were already having a conversation of sorts.”

Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers’ every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.

“We are living through the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the graduate interactive telecommunications program at New York University. “And it wouldn’t be a revolution if there were no losers. The speed of conversation is a part of what is good about it, but then some of the reflectiveness, the ability for careful summation and expression, is lost.”

Even as Mr. Shirky is saying this, I peek at the comments section of my blog, and he goes on, “There is an obsessive, dollhouse pleasure in configuring and looking at it, a constant measure of social capital.”

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0 magazine, recently asked his writers to come up with blogs, and he writes his own. He decided to encourage them with (small) bonuses based on the number of visitors to their blogs, after one of his star reporters, Om Malik, left the magazine to tend to his own immensely popular blog. (Mr. Malik still contributes a column to the magazine.) “I don’t want that to happen here again,” Mr. Quittner explained.

“We are having an amazing good time,” he said, in the midst of a week when chatter about the new Apple phone was driving page views. “It is like Pinocchio when they are caught in the belly of the whale and very hungry. They finally figure out they should drop a fishing line in and start hauling in all sorts of tuna.”

“One of the wrong turns that we have taken in journalism is that to give people information they want and need is somehow pandering,” he said.

The desire to connect is a pure impulse, but it can lead to bad behavior on the part of writers. Sometimes, I feel a little lonely on my Oscar blog. The solution: I take a rhetorical baseball bat to a fan favorite, “Borat,” and hundreds of rabid commentators appear. Hey, I’ve got readers.

Web analytics — that ugly term of art — is changing newspapers, too. Here at The Times, the Most E-Mailed list on our Web site has gone from being an in-house curiosity to a measure of salience, as much as getting an article on the front page. The list can be wonderfully idiosyncratic — last Friday, a six-month-old goof on using animal training on husbands (“What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage”) reappeared alongside Thomas Friedman’s meditation on the president’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.

But at some point, ratings (which print journalists, unlike their television counterparts, have never had to contend with) will start to impinge on news judgment. “You can bemoan the crass decision-making driving by ratings, but you can’t really avoid the fact that page views are increasingly the coin of the realm,” said Jim Warren, co-managing editor of The Chicago Tribune.

So when that’s the case, what happens to those other qualities, “the reflectiveness, the ability for careful summation and expression,” in Mr. Shirky’s lovely phrase?

“The best thing about the Web — you have so much information about how people use it — is also the worst thing,” said Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com. “You can drive yourself crazy with that stuff. News judgment has to rule the day, and the home page cannot become a popularity contest.”

My personal referendum continues, albeit without Dr. Klein for the time being. When he returns home, he plans to test the waters for a presidential run on a platform of improved rights for noncustodial parents. That sounds like the kind of hobby that could cut into his time spent commenting on my blog. “No, I don’t think I’ll stop,” he said. “I think if I am successful in running for the White House, I would continue to blog and comment.”

I can’t help feeling a little pride. I could go on, but the results of the awards by the Broadcast Film Critics just came in at 1:17 a.m., and I need to update my blog. No time like the present.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/bu...carr.html?8dpc





O.J. Book: Evidence of Guilt?

O. J. Simpson's 'If I Did It' provoked major controversy before the book was canceled. But what did he actually say? An exclusive look at the crucial chapter.
Mark Miller

Jan. 22, 2007 issue - The firestorm burned hot and fast: within days of acknowledging one of its divisions was publishing O. J. Simpson's "hypothetical" account of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, News Corp. reversed course and canceled the book in late November. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.'s chairman, apologized for the "ill-conceived project." Then the company fired Judith Regan, the hard-charging publisher who acquired the book for her ReganBooks imprint and who had conducted a TV interview with Simpson to air on Fox. All 400,000 copies of the book were recalled for destruction, save for one locked away in a News Corp. vault.

Regan and News Corp. were pressured to drop the project (NEWSWEEK was among the critics) because they were, in effect, paying Simpson at least $880,000 to tell how he might have committed the murders, money that should have gone to satisfy the $33.5 million judgment a 1997 civil jury ordered him to pay to the victims' families. Throughout the uproar, however, almost no one knew what the proposed book, titled "If I Did It," actually said. As always with the so-called trial of the century, there were competing narratives. Regan called the book Simpson's "confession"; his attorney scoffed at the idea that the Juice had admitted to anything. But NEWSWEEK has obtained a copy of the book's key chapter from a source who asked not to be identified because of the ongoing controversy. The narrative is as revolting as one might expect, but it's also surprisingly revealing. What emerges from the chapter is something new in the nearly 13-year Simpson saga: a seeming confession in Simpson's own voice.

To be sure, Simpson never explicitly admits to slicing his ex-wife's neck so savagely that he almost decapitated her. (According to the source, he told the ghostwriter that he could not have his children read such gruesome details of the slashing.) Simpson's Florida attorney, Yale Galanter, said again last week that the account is "purely hypothetical": "In the final manuscript and in the book there is a clear, concise statement disclaiming anything that is contained in the chapter as being fact or close to fact." NEWSWEEK did not obtain the book's six other chapters.

As a correspondent for this magazine, I covered the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman through the criminal trial and acquittal of O. J. Simpson in 1995. What is striking about the chapter I read, "The Night in Question," is how closely it tracks with the evidence in the case—and how clearly Simpson invokes the classic language of a wife abuser. In his crude, expletive-laced account, Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her. He describes her as the "enemy." She is taunting him with her sexual dalliances, he says, and carrying on inappropriately in front of their two children.

On June 12, 1994, Simpson attends his daughter Sydney's dance recital. He writes that he is in a foul mood after the performance, stewing over the behavior of his ex-wife. He is due to fly to Chicago late that night. But first he races to Nicole's Bundy Drive condominium in Brentwood. He parks in the dark alley behind her condo and dons the knit wool cap and gloves he keeps handy to ward off the chill on the golf course. He also has a knife in the Bronco, protection against L.A. "crazies." He intends to scare her. He enters through a broken back gate—he's told her a "million times" to get the buzzer and latch fixed—and encounters Goldman, who is returning the glasses of Nicole's mother, Juditha. She had left them at Mezzaluna, where the Brown family dined after Sydney's recital and where Goldman is a waiter. Simpson accuses Goldman of planning a sexual encounter with Nicole, which Goldman denies. Nicole tells Simpson to leave him alone. Goldman's fate is sealed when Kato, Nicole's Akita, emerges and gives him a friendly tail wag. "You've been here before," Simpson screams at Goldman.

At Simpson's criminal trial, to explain how one man could have killed two people, the Los Angeles County coroner theorized that Simpson knocked out Nicole, then quickly slit her throat before turning to Goldman. If the book's account is true, the coroner's hypothesis was correct—almost. Simpson writes that his ex-wife came at him like a "banshee." She loses her balance and falls hard, her head cracking against the ground. Goldman assumes a karate stance, further angering Simpson. He dares the younger man to fight. Then, in the book, Simpson pulls back. He writes, "Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you exactly how."

Simpson writes that when he regains control of himself, he realizes he is drenched in blood and holding a bloody knife. Both Nicole and Goldman are dead. Simpson heads back to the alley but before getting into the Bronco to flee, strips down to his socks. He rolls his bloody clothes and the knife into a small pile. (That's an important detail. The police never recovered those clothes or the murder weapon, but they did find Simpson's socks—with Nicole's blood on them—at the foot of his bed at his Rockingham estate.) As he nears his house, Simpson sees the limo that will take him to the airport for his Chicago trip. He steals onto his estate via a darkened, hidden path that takes him directly behind the guesthouse where Kato Kaelin is living. Simpson describes how he stumbles into an air conditioner for Kaelin's room, making a terrific racket—just as Kaelin told police he had heard.

Simpson's account does diverge from the prosecution's theory of the case in one significant way. In his telling, a second man, a close friend he calls Charlie, is with him during the killings. Charlie is an unwilling accomplice, repeatedly urging Simpson to stop what he is doing. Does "Charlie" really exist? Perhaps. At the time, many wondered if Simpson had help, if not with the actual killings then with getting rid of evidence. The police never found sufficient evidence to charge anyone else. Fred Goldman, Ron's father, thinks the idea of a second man is absurd, but isn't surprised to hear what Simpson has written (he hasn't read it himself). "This is the guy who murdered them—of course he knows what the evidence is and how he did it," Goldman told NEWSWEEK. Denise Brown, Nicole's sister, told me in an e-mail that she agreed with my analysis. "It just goes to show you that he is guilty and that is what I have always said from the beginning ... Know this, though—I won't be reading [the book]."

By the end of the chapter, Simpson reverts to his more familiar public stance: outrage that anyone could believe he committed the murders. He tells his lawyers that he is, as he declared at an early legal proceeding, "absolutely 100 percent not guilty."

Readers may yet get their chance to judge the Simpson book for themselves. Galanter, Simpson's attorney, said last week that the rights to the book have already or will soon revert to the former football great (a spokesman for HarperCollins, of which ReganBooks was a part, declined to comment on any aspect of this story). Galanter wouldn't say if he has lined up a new publisher. More surprising was what Goldman family attorney Jonathan Polak had to say. Polak's pursuit of Simpson to pay the $33.5 million judgment has been largely fruitless; he's now attempting to claim the money ReganBooks paid for the book. He said he will also attempt to seize Simpson's copyright to the work. "This may be the one opportunity we have [to collect]," he said.

Of course, to do that, the book would have to be printed and put on sale. Would the Goldman family really seek to publish the book in which Simpson, hypothetically or not, describes the brutal murders? Fred Goldman was noncommittal; Polak wouldn't rule it out.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16610772/site/newsweek/





Editor of Turkey’s Armenian Paper Is Killed
Sebnem Arsu

The editor of Turkey’s only Armenian-language newspaper was assassinated today on an Istanbul street.

The editor, Hrant Dink, 53, was convicted last year of insulting the Turkish state and identity because of comments he made about the mass deaths of ethnic Armenians before World War I in what is now Turkey — events that Armenians and many foreign historians say was genocide by the Ottoman army, but the Turkish government denies took place.

Mr. Dink also criticized ethnic Armenians abroad for trying to make official Turkish recognition of those events a precondition for Turkish entry into the European Union, but that stance attracted less attention.

Mr. Dink was leaving the office of his newspaper, Agos, in the Sisli district of Istanbul early in the afternoon when he was gunned down in front of the building by one or more assailants, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported today.

Nuran Agan, 47, a colleague of Mr. Dink’s at Agos, sounded shaken as she described an ordinary day before he left the office. “I heard three gunshots after he left, but never associated it with him,” Ms. Agan said.

When she rushed downstairs to find out what had happened, she saw Mr. Dink lying in a pool of blood on the ground with a bullet wound in the back of his head.

“He received lots of threats, and had requested protection.” Ms. Agan said.

Television images broadcast live from the scene of the incident showed large crowds gathered nearby behind police cordons, and Mr. Dink’s body lying on the ground, awaiting the arrival of ambulances delayed by the traffic clogging the busy commercial district around the office.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a written statement condemning the attack. Later in the day, the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said in a broadcast news conference that the killing was a direct attack on Turkey’s peace and stability.

“A bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life in Turkey,” Mr. Erdogan said.

Witnesses told the police that they saw a young man in a white cap running away immediately after the shots were fired, according to a news report on NTV television. The police said they had detained two suspects in central Istanbul in connection with the attack.

Mr. Dink was prosecuted late last year under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, a controversial provision that makes negative remarks about Turkishness or the Turkish state a crime. It has been used to try several prominent intellectuals in recent years, and has been criticized by the European Union as an infringement on free speech.

An Istanbul court interpreted several comments Mr. Dink made as an insult to the Turkish identity. It sentenced him to six months in jail and then suspended the sentence.

In a recent article in Agos, Mr. Dink complained that extreme nationalists opponents were casting him as an enemy of Turks, and said the increasing threats against him were weighing on him.

“I do not know how real these threats are, but what’s really unbearable is the psychological torture that I’m living in,” he wrote. “Like a pigeon, turning my head up and down, left and right, my head quickly rotating.”

Haluk Sahin, a columnist for Radikal, a newspaper that has strongly supported Mr. Dink’s legal struggle as an intellectual, said that Turkey had been hit right in the heart by his murder.

“Those who wanted to harm Turkey couldn’t have chosen a better target,” Mr. Sahin said. “As opposed to other killings in the past, Turkish public reaction against this murder will show us where Turkey stands in the world.”

Shortly after the shooting, crowds gathered in front of Mr. Dink’s office and chanted “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians.”

NTV reported that the police are reviewing surveillance-camera videotapes from retail shops in the block in the hope that they recorded images of the suspects described by witnesses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/wo... tner=homepage





Belgian Newspapers Target Yahoo After Forcing Google to Bend on Linking
Eric Bangeman

Long known for making the best beer in the world, Belgium has also become known for applying its copyright laws to news aggregators that summarize and link to the country's newspapers. The latest tiff comes courtesy of Yahoo and Copiepresse, Belgium's copyright enforcement group.

Yahoo, like other news aggregators, publishes summaries and links to news articles all over the Internet. This isn't a problem in most places, but Belgian publishers aren't fans of the practice. Bernard Magrez, a lawyer for the Belgian copyright watchdog, has accused Yahoo of publishing articles without authorization. As a result, Copiepresse has sent a "cease and desist" letter to Yahoo, requesting that they stop linking to articles on the newspapers' websites.

If you're thinking that this sounds familiar, you're correct. Google went through the same thing with Copiepresse last year. The Belgian newspapers argued that Google's indexing of their sites constituted copyright infringement. A Belgian court agreed, ordering the search engine to remove the content from Google News and its search index while fining it €1.3 million for each day of noncompliance. Google is appealing the court's ruling, and a decision may be issued some time this month.

Yahoo released a statement saying that it "respects the copyright of content owners" and will "respond in an appropriate manner" to Copiepresse's complaints.

It's difficult to see how the Belgian newspapers will benefit by having their links and content summaries stripped from all the major search engines. Easily-found external links drive traffic to web sites, which most site operators agree is a good thing. Forcing search engines to stop indexing and linking their content may give the newspapers more control over how their content is displayed and used, but that short-term benefit is outweighed by the prospect of lower site traffic and increasing irrelevance on the Internet.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070119-8660.html





As Time Inc. Cuts Jobs, One Writer on Britney May Have to Do
Katharine Q. Seelye and Richard Siklos

People magazine’s article this week on Britney Spears and her “new guy,” model Isaac Cohen, is five paragraphs long. It was reported and written by seven people.

To be fair, they were long paragraphs. But with layoffs expected this week at Time Inc., which publishes People, such reporter-heavy treatment is headed the way of Kevin Federline, Ms. Spears’s soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner, is planning to cut more than 150 people, about half of them in editorial jobs across the company’s best-known titles, like People, Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune. The cuts follow about 600 last year, many of them from the company’s business side, and a decision to trim its roster by selling 18 of its roughly 150 titles.

Time Inc.’s top executive, Ann S. Moore, has not yet publicly outlined or discussed the cuts, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. But other executives said that, while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the Internet.

To prepare for the future, they said, the company is cutting costs now and continuing to shift resources to its branded Web sites.

That in turn is prompting big changes to the standard newsweekly formula of many correspondents contributing to heavily processed articles at magazines like Time and People.

Time Inc. is taking other steps to save money. Within a year or two, most of the company’s corporate offices and magazines at the Time-Life Building in Midtown Manhattan will have moved to lower floors so that the more valuable upper floors can be leased out. Time magazine is shutting some of its bureau buildings overseas, including in Paris, although it expects to maintain “laptop” correspondents, who can work from home.

“They’re amputating in order to save the patient,” said an executive at a competing publishing company.

Time Inc.’s challenges mirror those of the publishing business broadly: its strong brands generate plenty of cash and profit, but have not been growing, a profile that is highly unpopular on Wall Street these days. But, while its biggest competitors, Condé Nast Publications and the Hearst Corporation, are privately held, Time Inc. is part of a publicly traded conglomerate with big holdings in television, film, cable and the Internet and is on a mission to prove itself to restless investors.

Time Inc. still has nearly 11,000 employees worldwide and it is hiring more people at its Web sites, but its overall fate is unclear. When Carl C. Icahn, the financier, waged a brief assault on Time Warner last year, he said the publishing division was ripe for sale or a spinoff because it does not fit with the company’s other businesses.

For now, Time Warner’s president, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, and its chief executive, Richard D. Parsons, have said they intend to keep Time Warner whole. Despite its journalistic legacy and its position as the largest magazine publisher in the country, Time Inc., with annual revenues around $5 billion, is now the baby in the Time Warner family, which has annual revenues of more than $42 billion. In both revenue and profits, it was the smallest of the company’s five operating units in the first nine months of 2006, generating 11 percent of revenues and 8 percent of adjusted operating profits.

Advertising has been down for many magazines, in part because of troubles in the auto industry and a slump in financial services. Ad pages at several Time Inc. publications dropped last year, compared with 2005: Fortune, down 6.4 percent; Money, down 9.6 percent; People, down 2.9 percent.

The good news: Time magazine held its own, with ad pages up 0.8 percent, propped up by the pharmaceutical industry. Other Time Inc. magazines did well enough so that the total for all the company’s magazines was flat, not down. In this environment, one company executive said, “flat is the new up.”

Even People magazine, arguably the most successful magazine in history, is in for an overhaul, one guided in part by consultants from McKinsey. People remains by far the nation’s dominant celebrity magazine, with a weekly circulation of 3.8 million and more ad pages and revenue than any other magazine for the 16th year in a row. But some of its competitors, chiefly US Weekly, are growing faster.

People has one of the last vestiges of the classic newsmagazine reporting structure, in which several correspondents send files to a writer in New York, where stories are fact-checked by yet another department. The new model, which is standard at most news organizations, will be for one person to report, write and fact-check the article — much as Simon Perry, the London bureau chief, did with People’s take this week on Kate Middleton, Prince William’s girlfriend.

Larry Hackett, managing editor of People, said the new reporting model would not preclude putting several correspondents on one piece when the news warrants it, as it often does these days with the peripatetic Ms. Spears. But he said the changes would result in better journalism. Reporters are eager to craft their own articles and writers eager to do the original reporting on theirs, he said. More important, if one person is in control of the information, he or she can move it faster to the Web.

“We know there are cost pressures at Time Inc.,” he said. “But the changes we’re making aren’t to cut staff because we want to put out People on the cheap. I believe firmly and completely that this will yield better journalism, better career opportunities and more accountability.”

Last summer, Time Inc. shut down Teen People, which was losing advertising, but kept it alive online. The move was part of a broader decision by the company to pare its print portfolio and build what it sees as its six core strengths on the Web: news and information; celebrity and entertainment; sports; business and finance; home and food; and health and fitness.

It also put up for sale the group of smaller niche magazines, including Popular Science and Field & Stream, which the company did not expect would become big draws online. Ms. Moore, the chairman and chief executive of Time Inc., wrote in a memo last year that those magazines no longer fit the company’s strategy.

“I am confident that the biggest brands in print, with our expertise and support, will develop into the biggest brands online,” she wrote. Ms. Moore, the former People magazine president, who is 56, assumed her current job titles in 2002. She is in the first year of a new three-year contract, and she has told associates this stint will be her last before she retires — and has said that her goal over the next two years is to restore the business’s growth and solidify its position online.

At an annual retreat for senior Time Warner managers in late November in Malibu, Ms. Moore was the featured speaker among all of the company’s division heads, arguing that the company is progressing after unwinding a relationship last year under which most magazine content was being distributed online via AOL.

Her presentation featured charts that showed that Time Inc.’s titles ranked highly in competitive online categories — like celebrity news, with people.com, and financial news, with CNNmoney.com — and commanded increasing advertising rates. According to executives who attended, Ms. Moore said that at Sports Illustrated, for example, digital operations would account for 13 percent of profits in 2006 and are projected to rise to 18 percent this year.

Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated group, attributed the growth in part to programs that allow users to customize the Web site, and receive constantly refreshed news and pictures of their favorite teams. The pending cuts, he said, stem from a further melding of print and digital, with almost all print writers and photographers producing original material for the Web. “It’s all about being more efficient across all the platforms in the S.I. group,” Mr. McDonell said.

For the company, the focus on the Web may have come at the expense of new start-ups. In 2004, Time Inc. started four new titles, but it has not had a major new success since 2000, with Real Simple. A new humor Web site last year, officepirates.com, quickly fizzled. Fortune is also wrestling to contain costs while Conde Nast is pouring money into its new business magazine, Portfolio, due in April.

For all the changes at Time Inc., analysts said that investors were focused mainly on the performance of Time Warner’s cable unit and AOL as businesses that could drive up the company’s stock price. In the past year, Time Warner shares have risen 30 percent after a prolonged slump, due in part to a huge stock buyback by the company, a new strategy at AOL and the consummation of the company’s $13 billion acquisition of Adelphia Communications’ cable assets.

Michael Nathanson, a media analyst who follows Time Warner for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said that the question for investors was whether Time Inc. could resume growing its operating earnings at between 5 percent and 10 percent per year.

“Time Inc. only matters to the Time Warner investor if it’s sold or if they can get the profits growing in line with the rest of the content assets,” Mr. Nathanson said. “I think they’re on the path for the latter.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/bu...time.html?8dpc





Digital Music Sales Soaring, Industry Group Says
CBC News

Digital music rocks, a London-based music industry group says.

Record companies sold $2 billion US worth of digital music last year, nearly double the 2005 figure, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said in its annual review, released Wednesday.

The sales, which amount to 10 per cent of all wholesale music sales, include purchases made through online outlets or through cellphone companies.

Among other market indicators:

The number of titles available online doubled to four million.
Sales of classical music revived once more titles were put online, and a New York Philharmonic Mozart recording hit the iTunes top 40 in the U.S. and Britain.
Record companies began to make money from ads on their websites.

Record companies are experimenting with new business models and digital music products, which has involved the companies with hundreds of licensing partners.

Download services like iTunes are the main digital format, but subscription services, mobile mastertones — snips of music produced as ringtones by record companies — advertising-supported services and deals allowing music videos to be played on sites like YouTube are all evolving.

Mobile sales accounted for half of digital revenues in 2006 (90 per cent in phone-mad Japan), and are expected to jump this year as handset makers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson move deeper into music.

Consumers score

But users are the big winners, IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy said in the report. "They have effectively been given access to 24-hour music stores and services with unlimited shelf space. They can buy or consume music in new ways and formats — an iTunes download, a video on YouTube, a ringtone or a subscription library," he said.

Because of the virtually infinite shelf space, consumers are buying records that would have disappeared from even the largest traditional retailers, the report said.

But sales of digital music still have some way to go, because they're not offsetting the drop in CD sales, IFPI said. Piracy is a major reason why the digital market did not cover the decline in the "physical" market last year.

"Digital piracy and the devaluation of music content are a real threat to the emerging digital music business," despite the record industry's legal pursuit of digital pirates.

About 10,000 cases were launched in 18 countries against large scale peer-to-peer uploaders, the people who make illegal music file-sharing possible.

That helped, IFPI said, but the group is still pressuring internet service providers to stop uploaders, and wants governments and companies to help protect intellectual property rights.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tal-music.html





Group: Music Sales Down, Digital Music Sales Up
AP

Worldwide sales of downloaded music, including cellphone ringtones, rose 82 percent to about $2 billion in 2006 to account for around 10 percent of music industry sales, up from 5.5 percent, a global music industry trade group announced.

Sales were about evenly split between downloads to a PC and over-the-air downloads of ringtones and full music tracks to a cellphone.

Despite digital-music gains, worldwide music industry sales nonetheless fell, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Worldwide music industry sales slid to about $20 billion in 2006 from $21 billion in 2005, IFPI statistics show.

By 2010, digital music sales will grow to account for at least a quarter of all music sales worldwide, said IFPI chairman John Kennedy.

In the United States, the number of downloaded tracks grew in 2006 by 65 percent to 582 million, accounting for 73 percent of the 795 million individual tracks downloaded worldwide. The number of tracks downloaded worldwide grew 89 percent to 795 million.

In addition, the number of downloaded albums in the United States rose 101 percent to 33 million in 2006 to account for 6 percent of all albums sold. Worldwide album figures weren't available.

In other key findings, IFPI said that in the United States:

Growth factors: IFPI cited multiple reasons for the digital-music gains, including the rapid growth in ownership of portable MP3 players and a doubling of tracks authorized for downloading to 4 million. Other reasons include a rapidly growing number of authorized download sites and music industry lawsuits against P2P file-sharing services and individual P2P users.

Referring to MP3 portables capable of playing authorized protected downloads, IFPI contends that "the increasing popularity of portable digital music players is driving interest in music services" and "driving interest in legal music buying." The group cited statistics from two sources, an IFPI-authorized study of European consumers by M-Lab and a separate European study by Jupiter Research. IFPI concludes that "portable player owners are more likely to buy music legally than general Internet users, but the amount of purchased music stored on the devices is low."

The M-Lab survey of consumers in November 2006 found "portability is a key driver of growing demand for recorded music," IFPI said. Thirty-five percent of portable MP3 player owners in Europe bought online music at least once, and 47 percent of those people say they buy music only or mostly in digital form.

In addition, 14 percent of portable owners use paid downloads as their main source of music, or about the same percentage who use P2P networks and free Web sites.

Jupiter's European research, IFPI said, "found that iPod owners are three times more likely than general Internet users to be regular paying music downloaders." Jupiter also determined that 16 percent of iPod-owning Internet users download music legally every month compared with 5 percent of Internet users who don't own an iPod. Nonetheless, IFPI said, "a greater volume of music on portable players is obtained from P2P and free [illegal and legitimate] sources than is purchased on legal sites. And the frequency of purchase on legal sites is still low."

Protected downloads were available from 498 authorized download sites in more than 40 countries at the end of 2006, up from the year-ago 335, IFPI also said. At the end of 2006, 48 U.S. sites were authorized for music downloading.

Collectively among all sites, 4 million individual tracks were available for download at the end of 2006, up 100 percent from the year-ago period. The sites offer more song selection than the largest brick-and-mortar music store, IFPI added. The largest music stores stock a maximum of 150,000 CD titles, IFPI said, and if 10 tracks are available per disc, only 1.5 million songs are available at any one time in these stores.

The availability of such a broad selection of online songs 24 hours a day, IFPI contends, has reinvigorated sales of classical music and music videos. "Classical was the fastest growing [digital] music genre in the U.S., growing by 23 percent in 2006," the IFPI report said. Although DVD music-video sales peaked in 2004, the group continued, "the [music-video] format is now beginning to see the positive impact of digital delivery." Music video downloads accounted for 3 percent of total digital revenues in the first half of 2006, IFPI said.

Downloading has also boosted sales of music singles, which in 2006 hit an all-time worldwide high of more than 900 million in physical and download formats combined, IFPI said. In fact, digital singles accounted for more than 80 percent of singles sold worldwide, and in the United States, digital singles have completely replaced the physical singles market.

Similarly, the number of digital-only albums is on the rise, particularly in the United States, where more than 13,000 digital-only albums were released in the first half of 2006, accounting for almost 36 percent of all new albums released in the first half. In contrast, IFPI said in citing Nielsen SoundScan figures, 16,850 digital-only albums were released in all of 2005.

The IFPI report also found that music-download subscription services are growing in popularity but account only for a small share of digital music sales. The number of subscription-download subscribers grew 25 percent in 2006 to 3.5 million consumers worldwide, an unspecified majority of which are in the United States. Subscription-download revenues, however, accounted for only 7 percent of digital revenues in the first half of that year.

The portable versions of subscription services "have suffered significantly from lack of compatibility with the dominant music player, the iPod," IFPI contended.

In other findings, IFPI said 2006 was marked by several firsts, including the first time that a music company (Universal) negotiated an agreement with an MP3 player maker (Microsoft) to share in the revenues of an MP3 player's sales (Microsoft's Zune).
http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/art...e.jsp?id=98351





Record Labels Need a Digital Hit

S&P Ratings runs down the prospects for major players like Sony and Bertelsmann as they struggle to adapt to the MP3 era
From Standard & Poor's RatingsDirect

Entertainment companies are facing uncertain times as they redefine how they sell their goods. Determining the successful business model for Internet distribution is among the entertainment industry's highest priorities. In the first part of a two-part article, Standard & Poor's Ratings Services will look at the challenges facing music outfits. Part two will focus on filmed entertainment.

In contrast to the TV business, the recording industry has arrived at a consumer-friendly, commercial technology for online distribution that protects its copyrights. However, legal and illegal downloads continue to cannibalize CD sales. The movie business is at an earlier stage of development and must accommodate larger file sizes.

Digital music downloads of individual tracks have gone from zero only a few years ago to more than 525 million in 2006 (first 49 weeks), based on Nielsen Soundscan data. Growth of single tracks in this period amounted to 67%.

Growth has been aided by legal victories that have protected copyright holders and slowed piracy; the development of popular, inexpensive, and consumer-friendly digital music players; and the wide acceptance of the user-friendly iTunes Music Store, owned by Apple (AAPL).

Going the Way of the LP?

Internet research firm JupiterResearch has estimated that 62 million digital music players of various kinds are in use in the U.S., and that the number will jump to 196 million in 2011. Standard & Poor's believes that this may be a challenging projection. One major record company, EMI Group, says that digital music revenue will account for 25% of industry revenues by 2010—a projection that we view as reasonable.

Concurrent with the growth of digital revenue, sales of physical copies of music have dropped sharply. Worldwide, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, retailers sold only 750.4 million CDs in 2005 (the latest available full-year figure), down from 942.5 million in 2000.

The music industry sells digital music largely in single tracks, which are in general proportionately less profitable than album bundles. In the U.S. in 2005, consumers bought 353 million digital tracks but only 16 million digital albums, reflecting listeners' desires to fashion their own collections. Warner Music Group (WMG) has pursued the less-traveled road of selling digital albums at a premium to singles by bundling ancillary products such as song lyrics, music videos, and bonus tracks with its album offerings.

Consumer-Friendly Pricing

More than 70% of premium-priced album bundles sold on iTunes in the U.S. are from Warner Music Group. This has contributed to its relatively high proportion of digital sales, at roughly 10%, and its recent increases in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation and amortization) margins, because ancillary materials have little incremental cost.

The industry's pricing of digital music—already inexpensive at approximately $1 for a single downloaded song and $2 to $3 for a song downloaded to a mobile phone—could shift in the future. The dominant digital download service, iTunes Music Store, which accounts for about 70% of the paid digital-music download business, has resisted overtures by the major music labels to tier its download pricing based on various criteria such as top-selling vs. other artists and catalog vs. new releases. iTunes has steadfastly maintained that a consumer-friendly price will prove the best strategy for establishing a legal commercial-download model.

Mobile revenues, although still largely driven by purchases outside the U.S., continue to grow steadily and, for some labels, account for half of digital revenues. Consequently, major labels have rapidly entered into arrangements with mobile phone services, on both an á là carte and subscription basis.

But the sustainability of download prices, notably for mobile downloads, is very much in question. As the novelty fades, mobile phone operators may bring their prices down, and certain music labels may adopt a similar strategy to drive volume.

Label Adaptability

Universal Music Group (UMG; unrated) launched a permanent price reduction on album downloads in Europe, covering portions of its catalog, effective November, 2006. UMG also cut its mobile download prices. Pricing is likely to be an area of experimentation in the mobile distribution channel, possibly involving near- and long-term risk to the music labels' margins, but with the potential for expanded volume.

As to pricing, the extent to which subscription-based selling catches on could affect digital and mobile revenue potential. We believe that subscription models will not emerge as the dominant selling approach for digital downloads, even though mobile services are still taking shape in a mix of á là carte and subscription plans.

Even if EMI's projection of a 25% digital market share proves correct, several crucial questions remain: Will digital sales increases offset plunging revenues from CDs? Will digital sales provide any greater stability to total revenues? Will digital player penetration slow sooner than we had expected? And, finally, can the music labels' cost structures can be adapted to whatever scenario unfolds?

Recruiting the Talent

It is unclear whether, in the near term, digital sales growth will compensate for contracting CD volumes. Consumer penetration of digital player hardware could slow now that most early adopters own a device. Standard & Poor's is concerned that digital sales will not be significantly more weighted toward catalog works than are traditional CD sales, and that they therefore will not mitigate hit-driven sales volatility.

We also believe that company managements may have to tackle cost challenges in the important areas of marketing and talent recruiting. Still, the last week of 2006 showed promising signs of growth, according to Nielsen SoundScan, with 30.1 million digital track downloads, an all-time high for the seven-day period and a 51% increase from last year.

Although each of the five major music companies has specific issues, the unsettled profit outlook in the industry is an important context to the negative outlooks we have assigned to three of the five: Sony (SNE), EMI, and Bertelsmann. In Sony's case, missteps in launching its PlayStation 3 and intensifying competition with Microsoft (MSFT) and Nintendo were the precipitating factors in our Oct. 20, 2006, outlook revision.

EMI's underperformance, ongoing restructuring, high annual dividends, and limited prospects for leverage reduction prompted a negative outlook at the time of the Oct. 30, 2006, one-notch downgrade. The negative outlook on Bertelsmann reflects the weakening of credit measures after the company's buyout of a 25.1% minority stake held by Belgian investment firm Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and our expectation that debt leverage will remain high for the rating through 2006.

Here is a rundown of our views on the major music players (ratings information as of Jan. 9, 2007):

Sony

Rating: A-

Outlook: Negative

We will lower the rating if Sony's earnings and cash flow fall below its expectations and net debt to capital deteriorates by more than 10% in fiscal 2006, or if earnings appear unlikely to begin improving in fiscal 2007 and cash flow remains in the red.

Bertelsmann

Rating: BBB+

Outlook: Negative

The negative outlook reflects weaker debt-protection metrics after the buyout of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, and debt levels that we expect will stay high. We could lower the ratings because of weaker-than-expected revenues and profits, or if the company undertakes further acquisitions before gaining more financial flexibility. Bertelsmann owns 50% of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the combination of its music operations and Sony's.

Vivendi

Rating: BBB

Outlook: Stable

We see limited potential for a rating or outlook change if Vivendi continues to deliver sound operating performances while maintaining its current financial profile. Although the company is the world's largest seller of recorded music, it also has substantial European operations in wireless telephony and pay TV.

EMI Group

Rating: BB

Outlook: Negative

The negative outlook reflects our concerns about EMI's ability to further improve its stretched financial profile in challenging market conditions. Recent free cash flow generation has been limited, and dividends are relatively high, constraining the scope for debt reduction. We could lower ratings if prospects for a material improvement recede further.

Warner Music Group

Rating: BB-

Outlook: Stable

We expect the company to generate healthy discretionary cash flow over the intermediate term and to maintain its current credit profile, despite a challenging market environment. We could revise the outlook to negative if CD sales erode more quickly than expected, digital migration pressures margins, or discretionary cash flow deteriorates.

Standard & Poor's credit analyst Heather Goodchild, senior features editor Robert McNatt, and senior research assistant Paul Merwin contributed to this article.
http://businessweek.com/investor/con...111_817935.htm





Video Games, Rock 'N' Roll Find Common Beat

Misunderstood in the mainstream, scorned by parents and politicians and embraced by youth, video games are the rock 'n' roll of this generation and are locked in an increasingly tight embrace with U.S. musicians.

From music-focused games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero to sports titles with star-packed sound tracks such as NBA 2K7, music is playing an increasingly bigger role in U.S. video games and, artists agree, offering an important new way to connect with fans.

"To be featured in a video game is probably the greatest way to reach a large audience right now," said Panic Channel guitarist Dave Navarro, formerly of alternative rock bands Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

"They get to discover the music through the game, whereas you have corporate radio, MTV and VH1 shoving what they think is valuable down everybody's throat, and nobody else really gets a shot," Navarro told Reuters at the Los Angeles launch of Guitar Hero II in November.

That game comes with a downsized guitar controller and a playlist that includes "Stop" from Jane's Addiction and Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic "Free Bird." When players hit the right notes, they rack up points and progress from a garage to the ultimate giant stadium venue.

Guitar Hero was a surprise holiday hit in 2005, and last month Guitar Hero II sold more than 800,000 copies in the United States, landing behind No. 1 title Gears of War.

Music and dance games, in the 11 months ended November, rang up U.S. sales of $153 million--only a fraction of the $4.7 billion total sales for handhelds and consoles, according to research firm NPD.

The genre, however, is growing rapidly, with sales up 80 percent from a year earlier, NPD said.

Dance Dance Revolution debuted in Japanese arcades in 1998 and on video game consoles in 1999. It has since become a cult favorite at home and abroad.

In the early days, said Jason Enos, senior product manager for Konami's Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) and Karaoke Revolution series, labels and musicians weren't chomping at the bit to get in the game. That has since changed, as DDR's global unit sales hover around 10 million--not including arcade games.

"People get it now," Enos said. "Compared with other games, DDR and music games offer the label and the artist a much stronger chance at influencing the gamer to buy that music."

Games get a good rap

U.S. hip hop artists have long understood the promotional value of video games.

Chris "Ludacris" Bridges was the first rapper to have his music featured on a game sound track when he introduced his song Get Off Me in Electronic Art's popular football game Madden NFL 2000. He has since appeared in other games, including EA's 2003 title, Def Jam Vendetta and Midway Games' NBA Ballers: Phenom from last year.

San Francisco hip hop producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura scored the sound track for Take-Two Interactive Software's 2006 basketball title, NBA 2K7, which featured Mos Def, E-40, A Tribe Called Quest and others.

Nakamura said the project gave him the opportunity "to not work with the regular music label system, which is so screwed up right now. You can do the kind of record you want to get done and know it will reach a different audience."

While most video game music deals in the United States involve licensing, game publishers working with Hollywood-size budgets are also hiring well-known composers, said James Mielke, executive editor of Ziff Davis Media gaming site 1UP.com.

Tommy Tallarico, whose video game credits include Spy Hunter 2 and Wild 9, is one of the most successful North American video game composers. Still, his celebrity pales in comparison to Japan's Nobuo Uematsu, known as the video game industry's John Williams--the Academy Award-winning U.S. composer whose work included sound tracks for the Star Wars and Harry Potter blockbuster movies.

Uematsu composed all the music scores in versions one through nine of the famed Final Fantasy series and was listed as a co-composer for the first time in Final Fantasy X, according to the Internet Movie Database.

The ties between game makers and musicians are much deeper in Japan, where video games have a significant cultural impact.

"There's a lot more collaboration in Japan," said Mielke, who said that such work has not gone without notice in the United States, where music-steeped Japanese games such as Lumines II and Every Extend Extra have gained a following.

Final Fantasy music concerts are popular in Japan and Uematsu scored the first U.S. Final Fantasy symphony concert in 2004 in Los Angeles. He brought the house down.

"You would have thought that the Beatles had shown up," Mielke said.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN12280447





Indie Rock’s Patron Saint Inspires a New Flock
Will Hermes

WEARING a striped sports jacket and very sharp blue suede shoes, David Byrne stepped into an elevator at 32 East 57th Street in Manhattan last October. He was on his way to the Pace/MacGill Gallery for the opening of his art show “Furnishing the Self — Upholstering the Soul.”

Mr. Byrne was alone and running a bit late; the reception had begun a half-hour ago. “Anybody up there?” he asked cheerily.

Of course there was. There was a healthy crowd: a mix of what looked like well-heeled uptowners, scruffy Brooklyn bohemians and clean-scrubbed Asian art students. But those who still saw Mr. Byrne as the singer from Talking Heads, who came to catch a glimpse of a real live rock star, were surely surprised by the modesty of the event. And anyone might have been surprised by the artwork itself: simple, whimsical studies of chairs, either drawn with ink on paper, embroidered on framed furniture upholstery or constructed from odd materials, including a steel file cabinet, old encyclopedias and uncooked macaroni.

Yet the show (which has closed, but is documented at davidbyrne.com) was consistent with the idiosyncratic tone of Mr. Byrne’s whole post-Talking Heads career, which has balanced playfulness and erudition with a dollop of disorientation. He has been an author and photographer (the book “Strange Rituals”), a film director (the documentary “Ilé Aiyé” and the feature film “True Stories”), a television host (the sadly defunct PBS performance series “Sessions at West 54th”), a PowerPoint programmer (the DVD/book “E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information),” which documents his attempt to recast the Microsoft presentation software as an art medium), a record producer, a soundtrack composer.

These days this 54-year-old polymath has been particularly busy. He is the curator of the 2007 Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, which next month will feature a program of experimental folk music (including Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Adem, Cibelle and CocoRosie) and a multi-artist concert based on the conceit of a single drone note. It will also include two nights of Mr. Byrne’s work: a performance of music from “The Knee Plays,” his 1985 theatrical collaboration with Robert Wilson, and a preview of “Here Lies Love,” his new multimedia song cycle based on the life and reign of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.

If that seems an unlikely subject, well, consider the fact that Mr. Byrne, like Ms. Marcos, clearly appreciates a good pair of shoes. “Hush Puppies came out with all these wild colors like seven, eight years ago,” he said after his opening, referring to his turquoise footwear. “I thought: ‘Who the hell is going to buy these? They look like they’re for some Vegas singer.’ I figured they wouldn’t be around long, so I got those and a yellow pair and a lime-green pair.”

Perhaps more surprising is that while Mr. Byrne has been busy being a curator, sculpturing, drawing, mounting theatrical pieces about deposed foreign leaders and buying shoes, he has also become, without fanfare or Talking Heads reunion tours, perhaps the single greatest influence on the current generation of indie rockers. Four of the most hotly anticipated CDs of 2007 — by the Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, !!! and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — are coming from bands that, each in its individual way, show a clear stylistic debt to Mr. Byrne and his old group.

Mr. Byrne spoke recently over a late- afternoon coffee at his studio near Chinatown, sitting at a wooden farm table under a row of windows overlooking Broome Street. The walls of the loft space (a former sweatshop, he noted) are lined with book and CD shelves, or hung with curious objects, including a painting by the Rev. Howard Finster (who illustrated the cover of the Talking Heads album “Little Creatures”) and a pair of banners salvaged from a Mason hall.

Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow. He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. (“We didn’t get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines,” he said, “but we had a lot of fun.”) He has even become a blogger, and a self-disclosing one at that.

“I was a peculiar young man,” he wrote in a reflective entry last April. “Borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.”

Lately Mr. Byrne has also been creating book-art projects with the writer and graphic designer Dave Eggers. The most recent is “Arboretum,” a reproduced sketchbook of curious free-associative riffs in the form of evolutionary trees and Venn diagrams that he prefaced with a series of questions: “What are these drawings? Why did I do them? Will they be of interest to anyone else? Of any use? Do they need to be useful?”

Here’s another question: Why so many media? “Some are better for saying a particular thing than others,” Mr. Byrne explained. “I think it’s also part of that punk do-it-yourself attitude, of being like: ‘Well, I don’t care that I’m not an expert in this. I know my limitations, but I think I can express what I want to express within those limitations.’ You know — like I may only know three chords, but that’s all I need.”

Mr. Byrne knows far more than three chords. And having attended, albeit briefly, the Rhode Island School of Design, he is not a fine-art naïf. But his can-do attitude appeals to young musicians, who understand that music careers now often involve Web design, blogging and filmmaking. So does his reputation for forward thinking, as on last year’s Web-enhanced reissue of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” his 1981 collage-funk collaboration with Brian Eno, and his more recent solo work.

“He’s just kind of pursued what he finds interesting and hasn’t been specifically chasing after an audience, and I have a lot of respect for that,” said Win Butler of the Arcade Fire. That band has performed with Mr. Byrne on various occasions, and its cover of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” is a blogosphere favorite. “I don’t think of him as a pop star, really. He’s like a scientist, or a professor.”

Mr. Byrne appreciates being acknowledged by younger musicians, but he doesn’t seem nostalgic for the days when he was one himself. He likes the tributes best, he said, when they come from bands that “don’t sound anything like me, or Talking Heads.”

Relations between Mr. Byrne and his former bandmates are famously strained, although they did manage to reunite for a few songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2002. Mr. Byrne’s attitude seems best expressed in a short essay included in “Once in a Lifetime,” one of two extravagant Heads CD retrospectives released in the last few years.

Addressing himself and his music in the third person (something he does in conversation too), he noted that he was “just not the same person” who created his early work, and that he “can’t go to that place anymore.” Progress and evolution are more important, he wrote, at any cost.

Yet his latest musical project may capture the musical kinetics of Talking Heads better than anything Mr. Byrne has done since the band broke up in 1991. “Here Lies Love” was inspired by Imelda Marcos’s love of disco, so great that she installed a dance floor, complete with mirror ball, on the roof of the presidential palace in Manila. The work in progress was conceived for performance in a dance club, with an audience doing what one generally does in such places. (If the Carnegie Hall crowd needs to boogie at the Feb. 3 concert, perhaps the ushers will understand.)

Mr. Byrne, who was born in Scotland and raised in Baltimore and has traveled widely, says he was attracted to Ms. Marcos’s story in part as a way to understand the inner workings of dictators, always a timely endeavor.

“How do they justify — how does anyone justify — what might seem to be atrocious behavior?” he recalled wondering. In this case, he thought, maybe “dance music could be some sort of link: the way people sort of lose themselves at a rave or a club — maybe there’s something about it that connects to the feeling of somebody in power. Kind of a heady feeling, like you’re up in the clouds. And I thought maybe I could tell the story in that kind of setting. I thought that would be really neat.”

Last February, at a rehearsal space amid the art galleries on West 26th Street, he prepared the “Here Lies Love” material for its world premiere, which took place in March at the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts in Australia. Two Filipino singers flanked him on his right: Dana Diaz-Tutaan, who plays the Marcos role, and Ganda Suthivarakom, who plays Estrella Cumpas, the housekeeper-nanny who effectively raised Ms. Marcos. Dressed in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit branded with the logo of Luaka Bop (his world music label), with his glasses perched low on his nose, Mr. Byrne played chucka-chucka chords on a blond Fender guitar.

Above the musicians — the keyboardist Tim Regusis, the bassist Paul Frazier, the drummer Graham Hawthorne and the percussionist Mauro Refosco — the video designer Peter Norman projected remarkable clips from the Marcos era: Imelda dancing with Gerald R. Ford, dining with Donald Trump, kibitzing with Richard M. Nixon and George P. Shultz. Some scenes read as vaguely comic; others were genuinely disturbing, like a segment capturing hardscrabble street life in Manila.

The songs conjured New York disco-rock of the ’70s and ’80s: a fusion that Talking Heads spearheaded, of course, and that is currently undergoing a revival. But the sound is not simply Heads redux. For one thing, much of the material is sung by the female vocalists, not Mr. Byrne. Furthermore, his (absent) collaborator on the project is the D.J. Norman Cook, a k a Fatboy Slim, who seemed to have added modern heft and a techno sheen to some of the beats.

Another sign of Mr. Byrne’s constant forward motion is his voracious appetite for new music. He’s a regular visitor to the annual South by Southwest music festival Austin, Tex., where he will be a featured speaker in March. And any concertgoer in New York City is apt to spot him regularly, hanging out near the back of a room, generally without an entourage, his shock of near-white hair adding a few inches to his already impressive height. Last year he could be spotted sipping white wine in the lobby of Town Hall before a Cat Power performance, applauding the debut of Gnarls Barkley at Webster Hall and cheering the Brazilian funk artist Otto (who appears on a forthcoming Luaka Bop compilation) at Joe’s Pub.

“He really keeps his finger on the pulse,” said Ms. Diaz-Tutaan, whom Mr. Byrne became interested in after hearing the CD her band, Apsci, recorded for the tiny progressive hip-hop label Quannum. “That’s really inspiring to me — that this guy who has been around for such a long time and has been one of my musical influences is keeping up with things on a more underground level. He’ll just ride his bike to a venue, go in, check out the band and ride home.”

Mr. Byrne doesn’t seem to think there’s anything particularly remarkable about it. “Sure, I go out a lot,” he said. “I’m in New York, and I’m a music fan. But sometimes I go out to these shows and I go ‘Where are my peers?,’ you know? Where are the musicians from my generation, or the generation after mine? Don’t they go out to hear music? Do they just stay home? Are they doing drugs? What’s going on?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Or maybe they’re just not interested anymore. They’re watching ‘Desperate Housewives.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/ar...ic/14herm.html





The Turntables That Transform Vinyl
Anne Eisenberg

LONG-PLAYING records are gathering dust in the homes of many music lovers, who hope to hear their contents one day on a CD player or iPod.

Now, an updated version of another audio relic, the phonographic turntable, may provide a fairly inexpensive way to do that. Two new consumer turntables on the market at $200 or less connect directly to computers to transfer cherished vinyl to MP3 files and CDs.

The machines aren’t for audiophiles who have the skill to rig their own systems with special cables and preamplifiers. But they may offer a doable way for nontechies to thrill again to their favorite bit of analog Beethoven or Dylan.

Learning how to use these systems takes time — up to three or even four hours. The turntable has to be assembled, and the LPs cleaned carefully to remove the dust of ages — two jobs that those over 30 might remember well.

Then the recording software, which comes on a CD, takes about a half-hour to set up properly — or three times that if you skip the “frequently asked questions,” as I did, and then sheepishly return to them when you get stuck.

The software requires some attention even after you learn its ways. For example, it can’t automatically detect the end of each track between two songs or movements of a symphony. You have to mark these spots yourself in the program before burning a CD or making an MP3 file.

Still, once the learning curve is vanquished and the sounds of much-loved old recordings fill the air, you may wonder why you waited so long.

One of the new turntables is called the Ion USB or, more formally, the iTTUSB ($199 list price, about $150 on the Web through a site like Amazon.com). Made by Ion Audio, it works with both PCs and Macs. This lightweight plastic turntable plugs directly into the USB port of computers; inside, it has a preamplifier to bolster the sound, which is digitized and then sent to the computer through the USB cable.

When the Ion turntable is removed from its box, the rubber belt that drives the platter must be threaded into place, and the tone arm put together and balanced so that it produces just the right weight on the record. Be sure not to discard the Styrofoam blocks after you unpack the device: the tone arm and its counterweight are tucked within them.

The software goes on next. The Ion uses a venerable and free program called Audacity, which can do many jobs — like eliminating some scratches on the recording. Installing it is easy, though a few instructions in the Audacity manual are in high geek, particularly those that guide you through changing the settings so the internal sound card on the computer will be used for playback rather than the turntable, which has no speakers. The frequently asked questions, downloadable at the Ion site, www.ion-audio.com/ittusb_FAQ.php, are invaluable here.

One of the trickiest parts of the recording procedure is low-tech: cleaning the records. Unearth your old LP cleaning brush or buy a new one and carefully run it over the LP. And make sure that the turntable is on a level, relatively vibration-free surface.

When you press “record,” you’ll see the digitized wave forms of the music traveling across the monitor and hear the audio version through the computer speakers or headphones. (Ion suggests trying a short section of an LP as a test.) If you are ambitious, you can edit the file, deleting some of the scratches, for instance.

Once the recording is done, the album must be divided manually into tracks, by marking the beginning and end of each with the computer mouse. If you can’t tell from the wave forms where the break is — they drop off when there’s silence — you can always check by listening to the recording.

In Audacity, each track is stored as a separate file; if you are making multiple tracks, you send each on its way as a .wav file to your hard disk. The manual was too geekish on this step, but the frequently asked questions explained it clearly. Once the files are on the hard drive, they can be burned quickly to a CD. The Ion will also convert 78-r.p.m. records, as well as cassette tapes.

Another new turntable, Audio-Technica’s LP2Da ($170 to $199) works with PCs but not with Macs. And it has a sturdy dust cover, unlike the coverless Ion. The Audio-Technica’s tone arm comes assembled and can be set to raise and lower itself from the turntable automatically

The Audio-Technica model has a pre-amplifier, but no USB connection. It plugs into the computer the old-fashioned way: through an analog line input jack. That means that it won’t work with many laptops unless special hardware is bought, for laptops typically have a jack only for a microphone.

THE accompanying software, Cakewalk Pyro, is easier to use than Audacity: burning a CD, for instance, requires only one click for the entire LP, while Audacity requires that you send along each track separately. And it includes software for converting .wav files to MP3 files; by contrast, Audacity requires users to download a free plug-in in order to do this.

Ion users may soon have software that is easier to handle: in April, the company plans to replace Audacity with a program that detects tracks automatically and allows recording in MP3 format without a separate download. Buyers of the iTTUSB will be able to download the update at no charge. The company also plans to ship two models that are variations on the basic iTTUSB, both with dust covers.

Of course, there are other ways to digitize old LPs. Commercial services will transfer them, typically for $15 to $50 each, depending on the number of extra services. TEAC makes an all-in-one machine that doesn’t require a separate computer to convert LPs to CDs ($400). It does some automatic tracking, although incompletely.

To see how the new, inexpensive turntables sounded once they were set up, I invited a friend, George Basbas, a physicist, to bring over some of his treasured LPs. One was an old Columbia Masterworks album featuring the countertenor Russell Oberlin. We recorded it on the Audio-Technica turntable, burned a CD from the .wav files, then played both the CD and the LP on the stereo.

We couldn’t tell for sure which was the LP and which was the CD, although many experts probably could. “Any digitization process imposes limits on quality,” said Mark Schubin, a media technology consultant in Manhattan. “Be prepared: it won’t sound the same as you heard it through your analog system when you were playing back the record.”

But the new recording sounded good enough as we listened to Mr. Oberlin’s exquisite voice fill the room, ready to be taken along by CD or MP3 in the car or on a walk, freed after more than 50 years from its vinyl confinement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/bu...y/21novel.html





How to Hurt the RIAA aka Sony, Virgin, Philips, Warner Bros etc

Digg is a site I look at regularly. It has its problems but it does show strong opinion on certain subjects and one of those is the RIAA. Its no secret that the RIAA has built a large amount of hatred among the Internet Savvy and beyong. Their aggresive tactics are becoming common knowledge and there appears to be no limit to how far they will take something. One thing that has been highlighted is a point made by the EFF whereby the idiots over at the big brand police RIAA say that even copying your CD and ripping it on to your IPOD or backing it up is not fair use. As by their usual standards this generates an anger amongst users as you can expect.

Story aside I think its high time that the RIAA is not referenced by its name but rather by its members. The point here is that slagging off the RIAA has no effect and thats how they want it to be. It doesnt matter how many stories, user comments, discussion goes on, the RIAA only exists to take all of the abuse away from the brands it represents. Imagine how much it would hurt someone like Sony if each time a bad article, comment or story reached the masses it had the words representing Sony in the title. Enough of that would force a brand to leave the RIAA group because it was too damaging to their brand name. Consumers have power and all the tools are available to use right there in Digg with its big audience reach. Press the right buttons and those members will jump ship to prevent extremely costly damage to brands that have taken decades to build.
http://www.headenergy.com/the-riaa-a...-bros-etc.html





Wal-Mart Buying Ads at Illegal File-Sharing Networks?
Brian White

After reading this story, I was quite surprised that the world's largest retailer -- Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) -- would really place banner ads and other types of Internet advertisements in close proximity to illegal computer file-sharing websites and so forth.

The Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest purveyors of links to BitTorrent tracker files, which allow computer file traders worldwide to hook up with each other and trade anything in digital form -- movies, music, software, etc. In fact, the website has had numerous beefs with legal authorities worldwide as it continues to offer a central location for the connection between illegal file uploader and downloader.

With all the traffic that The Pirate Bay receives, it would naturally be attractive for other illegal networkers and such to buy advertisements at the website. But Wal-Mart? Could the retailer really be trying to recruit customers from The Pirate Bay to its own website? Something sound fishy here.

Alas, the retailer did not plant those ads itself, as they were placed there by Israeli ad agency Targetpoint, which -- according to its website -- "enables agencies and pay-per-click search engines ("PPSE") to expand their reach and present their ads in the most appropriate location."
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/0...ring-networks/





Google Takes a Pro File Sharing Stance
Steve Donaldson

With Google's recent investment in Chinese company Xunlei Network Technology Ltd, they have unequivocally taken a stance that is pro file sharing. Xunlei is the developer and creator of the Thunderbolt “Download Accelerator”, which in the style of GetRight or Flashget supports multi-source downloading and resumption if the transfer is interrupted. What hasn't been adequately reported are the details of what Thunderbolt in fact is, a P2P file sharing application or P2SP("S" for server).

Xunlei is a web portal first, but also produces the widely used Chinese P2P application which now includes a new Google tool bar installation option during setup. Google search is now also a prominent option on the Xunlei.com portal. It’s probable that Google is hoping to crack the second biggest online search market, of which they are a small player, by leveraging the over 100 million users estimated to have downloaded Thunderbolt in China.

After installing the Thunderbolt P2SP client, the end user is greeted with a fairly slick interface. Despite the animated advertising and banner ads, links to the latest media are prominent on the interface's main page. These links in the format “url=thunder://QUFodHR..../,” are reminiscent of BitTorent and include the typical meta data and a hash of the file in question. Right from the installation of Thunder, the purpose of the application is apparent. Upon opening of the Thunderbolt P2SP application the user is greeted with thumbnails of the latest releases in the right hand menu from which a couple of key presses will garner one a Thunder link to a file outright which is then automatically loaded into the Thunder client. The extent of the content available on the Thunder network is typical of most file-sharing networks; movies, music, applications and so on.

The Thunderbolt application itself features a sharing aspect and utilizes web caches to aid in accelerating downloads. Other features include streaming video, ala YouTube-like video streams, integrated chat and a ratings feature as well as built-in media playing functionality. Once the end user gets over the animated advertising and browser pop ups inherent in the client, it actually functions rather efficiently.

The impetus behind the client is to facilitate multi-source downloads to gain maximum download speeds within the underdeveloped Internet infrastructure currently in place in China. The current infrastructure closely resembles North America's dial-up heavy populous a decade ago - including the advertising model of pop ups and animated graphics, but with modern-day tools.

In short, Xunlei, sponsored by Google, is acting much like a typical file sharing network; they are facilitating the aggregating and locating of material via their Thunderbolt application, then creating and releasing free of charge the application with which to download copyrighted content and acting as a tracker for others with the same file including the unauthorized use of web caches containing the file. Xunlei is much more than just a streaming video company - that is certain.
http://www.slyck.com/story1378.html