Rip this
MPAA: We are Committed to Fair Use, Interoperability, and DRM
Nate Anderson
At a LexisNexis conference on DRM this week, MPAA boss Dan Glickman said the movie studios were now fully committed to interoperable DRM, and they recognize that consumers should be able to use legitimate video material on any item in the house, including home networks. In a major shift for the industry, Glickman also announced a plan to let consumers rip DVDs for use on home media servers and iPods.
Unfortunately, this plan is not yet well developed. In his speech to industry insiders at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel, Glickman repeatedly stressed that DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers. The goal, he said, was "to make things simpler for the consumer," and he added that the movie studios were open to "a technology summit" featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved. He also pointed to the $30 million MovieLabs project that the studios are currently funding as proof of their commitment to interoperability.
Speaking to Ars after the speech, Glickman acknowledged that the plan was still in the early stages. I asked him specifically about DVDs, which are currently illegal to rip under the DMCA, and how the law would square with his vision of allowing consumers to use such content on iPods and other devices. "You notice that I said 'legally' and in a protected way," Glickman responded, suggesting that some form of DRM would still be required before the studios would sign off on such a plan. He noted, however, that no specific plans have been made.
The MPAA does recognize that progress on DRM needs to be made soon, or impatient consumers will increasingly turn to unauthorized sources for content. "We're working on this right now, trying to find ways to make it interoperable," he said, but added that pricing and business models for such a system are "way beyond my pay grade."
Dean Garfield, VP of Legal Affairs for the MPAA, told me that he has confidence in the market to sort all of these issues out. "You have to give some thought to how young the digital distribution market is," he said. "I suspect that the issues confounding people today won't be the issues challenging the industry six months from now."
But will consumers sit idly by, twiddling their thumbs while content owners and consumer electronics manufacturers get their act together? Garfield recognizes that consumers are impatient, which means that "we also have to be impatient."
In his speech, Glickman said that the industry needs "a collective philosophical commitment" to move forward on issues of interoperability and authorized use, and said that the MPAA has now made that commitment. He called on other companies in the industry to sit down and work out a solution. Though he never mentioned Apple by name, it's clear that the Cupertino-based company was number one on the list of companies that need to get involved; whether interoperable DRM and legitimate DVD ripping actually mesh with Apple's own business priorities is another question, though.
Despite the lack of specificity, Glickman's speech marks a step forward for the MPAA, which says it is now committed to allowing content to play on any device, from any manufacturer. As other presenters at the conference made clear, this is largely a result of self-interest: consumers are frustrated with current limitations, and movie studios aren't thrilled about having to sign off on Apple's terms in order to get content onto iPods. Still, hearing Glickman speak with conviction about consumer rights to use material in "fair ways" and to wax eloquent about interoperability was an encouraging sign—even if he views DRM as a necessary "enabling tool" that's not going away anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-rippable.html
Jack Valenti, a Confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Is Dead at 85
David M. Halbfinger
Jack Valenti, who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then a Hollywood institution, leading the Motion Picture Association of America and conceiving of a voluntary film-rating system that gave new meaning to letters like G, R and X, died today in his home in Washington. He was 85.
The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his family said.For 38 years, Mr. Valenti was the public face of the movie and television production industry and one of its fiercest advocates. He lobbied Congress to protect filmmakers’ intellectual property from piracy and to ease trade barriers overseas. And he fended off lawmakers’ recurring campaigns to curb violence and sex on the screen, arguing for free expression. He devised the film-rating system precisely to avoid censorship by local review boards.
He also remained a starry-eyed fan, cherishing his friendships with Kirk Douglas, Sidney Poitier and Frank Sinatra, falling speechless before Sophia Loren and savoring his seconds in the spotlight as a regular presenter at the Academy Awards.
As a Houston political consultant, he was in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, and he watched as Johnson was sworn in beside Jacqueline Kennedy aboard Air Force One.
Mr. Valenti soon became known, and for a time mocked, for his unfailing loyalty to Johnson, if not outright idolatry of him. “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my president,” he once said in Boston, inviting guffaws nationwide.
Even after leaving a senior post at the White House in 1966, Mr. Valenti remained at Johnson’s service, secretly arranging the president’s surprise detour to the Vatican to meet with Pope Paul VI on the way back from Vietnam in December 1967.
His fidelity was lifelong. Mr. Valenti, a bantam 5-foot-7 who forever looked up to the towering Johnson, picked fights with critical Johnson biographers like Robert Caro and Robert Dallek. When a cable-television documentary suggested in 2003 that Johnson had a role in the Kennedy assassination, Mr. Valenti worked behind the scenes to discredit it.
Mr. Valenti’s forthcoming memoir, “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood” (Crown), does as much to polish Johnson’s legacy as his own. He was to have begun a six-city tour on June 5 to promote the book.
In 1966 Mr. Valenti took his talents for personal politicking — and lionizing his bosses — to Hollywood, heeding the request of Lew Wasserman and Arthur Krim, then chairmen of MCA/Universal and United Artists respectively, that he take over the Motion Picture Association. “If Hollywood is Mount Olympus,” Mr. Valenti once said of his new liege, “Lew Wasserman is Zeus.”
At the time Hollywood was still officially operating under the Hays Production Code, the industry’s draconian and increasingly outmoded self-censoring rules that flatly barred nudity, profanity, miscegenation and even childbirth scenes from being depicted on film.
Mr. Valenti was soon confronted with two films in 1966 that convinced him that the code had become obsolete. He dealt with one, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” by negotiating a compromise in which three out of four particular vulgarisms were cut.
Later that year, M.G.M. released Antonioni’s “Blowup” even though that film, showing brief scenes of nudity, lacked Production Code approval. Sensing that other films would also begin flouting the code and in turn create a vacuum into which local politicians and censorship boards might rush, Mr. Valenti decided to act.
“I knew I had to move swiftly, and I did,” he later recalled. “I was determined to free the screen from anything like the Hays Code. But I also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.”
So by late 1968 he persuaded the national theater-owners association to buy into a system of voluntary ratings, based on an ascending scale of adult content, that would be enforced at the box office: G, M (later PG), R and X.
The system was not without flaws and detractors, and it required some tinkering. In 1984, after receiving complaints about frightening parts of PG-rated movies (“parental guidance suggested”) like “Gremlins,” the association added the PG-13 category (“parents strongly cautioned”). Though the other ratings were trademarked, the X was not, and pornographers quickly co-opted it. In 1990 the association replaced the X with NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted), hoping it would be embraced, but distributors have mostly spurned it for commercial reasons, leaving many filmmakers to make wrenching cuts to adult-themed films in pursuit of an R rating.
Mr. Valenti always rebutted critics by citing an annual survey, paid for by the association, showing that parents of young children strongly believed that the ratings were useful.
In 1983, at the height of the Reagan administration’s deregulation efforts, Mr. Valenti led a fight to preserve federal rules intended to protect television producers and studios from the market power of the three major networks. The Federal Communications Commission was considering repealing the rules and allowing the networks to produce programs, thus giving them vertical control over production, distribution and exhibition.
In his memoir, he said he asked Mr. Wasserman, who had once been Ronald Reagan’s agent, and Charlton Heston to urge the president to oppose the repeal. The White House did just that, and the federal rules remained in place until 1995, by which time mergers between studios and networks had rendered them unnecessary.
In Mr. Valenti’s last decade at the association, it became consumed with fighting digital piracy. But one of his bolder strokes, in 2003, blew up in his face. He had learned that half the films being sent to industry people on DVD, known as screeners, for awards campaigns were turning up on sale illegally around the world. So he banned screeners altogether. A storm of protest ensued — loudest of all from the major studios’ own specialty divisions, which rely heavily on awards attention to publicize their films — and the policy was overturned by a federal judge, who said it ran afoul of antitrust laws.
Jack Joseph Valenti was born in Houston on Sept. 5, 1921, to the son and daughter of Italian immigrants from Sicily. He traced his passion for politics to the day his father, a clerk for the city government, took him to a political rally, where the 10-year-old Jack was invited to give his first speech, from a flatbed truck, for the Harris County sheriff. “I never recovered from it,” Mr. Valenti wrote.
As a youth he worked for a chain of second-run movie theaters in downtown Houston, roaming the city putting up posters in storefront windows in exchange for free passes. Hired as an office boy at the Humble Oil Company (an antecedent of ExxonMobil), he attended the University of Houston at night but still managed to be elected class president his sophomore year.
A voracious reader, he devoured everything by Macaulay, Churchill and Gibbon, and his speaking and writing style would mix his native twang with the rhetorical flourishes of his heroes, in a brew of cliché, cornpone, compelling phrases and clunkers that one critic called “a kind of Texas baroque.”
In 1982 Mr. Valenti published a guide to oratory, “Speak Up With Confidence,” which was revised and reissued in 2002. He also wrote “The Bitter Taste of Glory,” a book of essays (World, 1971); “A Very Human President” (W. W. Norton, 1975), about Johnson; and a political novel, “Protect and Defend” (Doubleday, 1992), edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
As an Army B-25 pilot in World War II — the Naval air corps had rejected him because of a heart murmur — he flew 51 missions over Italy, but never piloted a plane again after returning his flak-battered bomber to the United States. He went to Harvard Business School on the G.I. bill, then returned to Humble Oil’s advertising department, where he helped its Texas gas stations jump from fifth to first in sales through a “cleanest restrooms” campaign. He co-founded an advertising agency in 1952, with a rival oil company, Conoco, as its first client. He later added Representative Albert Thomas, a Johnson ally, as a client.
It was in 1956 that he met Senator Johnson Johnson at a gathering of young Houston Democrats. As a sideline, Mr. Valenti had begun writing a weekly column in The Houston Post, and he rhapsodized there about the senator’s “strength, unbending as a mountain crag, tough as a jungle fighter.” Their friendship grew, and when Johnson became Kennedy’s running mate, he had Mr. Valenti run the ticket’s campaign in Texas. Mr. Valenti helped stage Kennedy’s televised meeting on Sept. 12, 1960, with a group of Protestant Houston ministers, an event that was instrumental in helping him overcome anti-Catholic bias.
Mr. Valenti cemented his ties to Johnson in 1962 when he married Mary Margaret Wiley, a Johnson secretary. The couple accompanied Johnson to Rome for the funeral of Pope John XXIII, and Mr. Valenti was put in charge of the Houston leg of Kennedy’s 1963 swing through Texas. After a dinner there on Nov. 21, Johnson asked Mr. Valenti to fly on Air Force Two the next day. Moments after learning Kennedy was dead, Mr. Valenti was summoned to Air Force One, where he was hired on the spot as a special assistant.
In his memoir he recalled helping rustle up votes for Johnson’s monumental Great Society legislation; witnessing Johnson’s private browbeating of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama after the attacks on civil-rights marchers in Selma; and being accused (unfairly, he maintained) by Robert F. Kennedy of leaking to the news media stories about Kennedy’s chances of being made Johnson’s 1964 running mate.
But Mr. Valenti may have rendered his most vital White House service by being a source of companionship, public praise and private candor: before leaving the White House, he warned Johnson how much the war was hurting his credibility with voters, Mr. Dallek said Mr. Valenti spent more time socially with the president than any other aide, often bringing along his wife and their toddler daughter, Courtenay Lynda, a Johnson favorite.
In addition to his wife of 45 years and his daughter, now an executive vice president for production at Warner Brothers Pictures, Mr. Valenti is survived by a son, John Lyndon, of Los Angeles, the chief executive of icreate.com, an informational service for the film industry; another daughter, Alexandra Alice, a photographer and video director in Austin, Tex.; and two grandchildren. Mr. Valenti, who was four days shy of 83 when he stepped down from the motion picture association, continued to come to work, nattily dressed, long afterward. “Retirement to me is a synonym for decay,” he wrote in his memoir. “The idea of just knocking about, playing golf or whatever, is so unattractive to me that I would rather be nibbled to death by ducks. So long as I am doing what I choose to do and love to do, work is not work but total fun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/ob...cndcnd.html?hp
The Ratings System, Built to Endure
Michael Cieply
As David S. Goyer readied his new movie for release this weekend, he joined the long list of filmmakers who have been frustrated, flummoxed or downright infuriated by what may turn out to be Jack Valenti’s most enduring legacy, the film rating system.
On its first run through the ratings board, Mr. Goyer’s “Invisible,” a supernatural thriller whose central characters are teenagers and that deals with teenage suicide, was assigned an R for, among other things, what Mr. Goyer described as “dark themes.” Some tinkering and a bit of dialogue with the raters eventually got the movie its PG-13 rating, essential if its young target audience were ever to see it in theaters. But not before the director had spent considerable time puzzling over a ratings rationale that seemed ambiguous enough to have put the tale of the sad orphan in “Bambi” at risk of an R.
“The paradox is, the more realistically and more accurately you try to portray something, the heavier it becomes,” said Mr. Goyer, whose film opened on Friday.
Mr. Valenti, who died on Thursday at 85, created what is officially named the Classification and Rating Administration 38 years ago in one of his first policy initiatives upon taking charge of the Motion Picture Association of America. Since then the ratings board has been accused of Star Chamber-like censorship, compared to a fussy church lady tougher on sex than violence, and perennially second-guessed in its decisions.
But the system is almost certain to long survive Mr. Valenti. And that is precisely because of a remarkable fluidity — some would say capriciousness — that would have let it shut the young out of “The Invisible” this year if not for the director’s changes, while having waived such changes two years before, in the PG-13-rated “Batman Begins,” of which Mr. Goyer was a writer.
“In the end, it endures because it works,” Sidney Ganis, a film producer and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said of the ratings system. For the major studios the system has been a bulwark against outside interference, though it has often galled filmmakers and hasn’t done enough for many parents, who increasingly want to know more about what their children are going to see in a picture. When the ratings administration was founded, in 1968, two years after Mr. Valenti joined the movie association, it warded off a threatened surge in locally imposed ratings. In later years periodic retooling — like a 1996 shift in which NC-17 became more restrictive by switching its prohibition from those under 17 to those 17 and under — helped to keep the culture wars and the politicians at bay.
That did not happen, of course, without a thwacking now and then by sophisticates, as in Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary critique, “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” or an occasional accommodation of the family-values crowd, like the industry-sponsored Web site pauseparentplay.org, which links to supplemental ratings.
Mostly, filmmakers complain that they must work against muddled or moving boundaries. And parents’ groups grouse about “ratings creep,” a perceived tendency for a category like PG-13 to permit ever more violence, sex and profanity over the years to reach impressionable youth. Yet it was Mr. Valenti’s genius to have devised an apparatus that is not bound by precedent, changes its definitions at will and, ultimately, serves the motion picture industry by becoming, at any given moment, as permissive or restrictive as the prevailing climate seems to demand.
Under Dan Glickman, who in 2004 succeeded Mr. Valenti as the motion picture association’s top officer, the ratings board, which is overseen jointly with the National Association of Theater Owners, has become more generous in explaining itself to the public. In the description now posted on the mpaa.org Web site, the board says its dozen or so raters, all parents, are expected to judge films according to “factors that parents consider when deciding whether to allow their children to view that motion picture.”
Meeting that loose, impressionistic and ever-changing standard has been about as much fun for filmmakers as talking sex with Mom and Dad, and real understanding has just as often been lost in the process. Extreme verbal crudity initially tagged “Clerks” with the dreaded NC-17 restriction in 1994, but more of the same and flat-out bestiality did not keep “Clerks II” from waltzing to an R in 2006.
Mr. Ganis has had his own misadventures with the raters, recalling making six trips to the board in a failed effort to reverse an R rating on his “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.” Still, Mr. Ganis remains a defender of the system, even with what he called its “strange ways.”
And Mr. Goyer, though frustrated by a standard that is “a moving target,” said he could see the wisdom in letting standards quietly “expand and contract, based on the public acceptance of things.”
Indeed, for nearly 40 years, Mr. Valenti’s raters have largely kept politicians and busybodies out of the film business, even if that meant playing somewhat unpredictable busybodies themselves. They haven’t always been fair, and not entirely pleasant to deal with. But in the end, theirs was no mean achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/movies/28lega.html
Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth:
a tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune, and bring the Internet to Iraq.
Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions "drug deals" – but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.
Getting to Anaconda is no joke. Incoming airplanes make a 'tactical descent' landing, better known to military cognoscenti as the 'death spiral'; a nose-down plummet, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane is dragged back to level only just in time to land, and brakes so hard that anything not strapped down goes flying forward. Welcome to "Mortaritaville" – the airbase's mordant nickname, thanks to the insurgent mortars that hit the base daily.
From above, the base looks like a child's sandbox full of thousands of military toys. Dozens of helicopters litter the runways: Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks. F-16 fighters and C-17 cargo planes perch in huge igloo-like hangars built by Saddam. The roads are full of Humvees and armored personnel carriers. Rows of gunboats rest inexplicably on arid desert. A specific Act of Congress is required to build a permanent building on any US military base, so Anaconda is full of tents the size of football fields, temporary only in name, that look like giant caterpillars. Its 25,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilian contractors like Ryan, are housed in tent cities and huge fields of trailers.
Ryan came to Iraq in July 2004 to work for ServiceSat International, hired sight unseen by their CTO Tyler Wagner. Three months later, Ryan quit and founded Blue Iraq. He left few friends behind. "I think if Ryan had stayed," Tyler says drily, "the staff would have sold him to the insurgents."
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Iraq is new to the Internet. Thanks to sanctions and Saddam, ordinary citizens had no access until 1999. Prewar, there were a mere 1.1 million telephone lines in this nation of 26 million people, and fewer than 75 Net cafés, connecting via a censored satellite connection. Then the American invasion knocked nearly half of Baghdad's landlines out of service, and the local exchanges that survived could not connect to one another.
After the invasion, an army of contractors flooded into Baghdad. Billions of reconstruction dollars were being handed out in cash, and everybody – local Internet cafés, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, the US military itself – wanted Internet access. With the landline service destroyed by war, and sabotage a continuing problem, satellite access was the only realistic option. Among the companies vying to provide this access in early 2003, scant months after the invasion, was ServiceSat International. SSI, a startup founded by Kurdish expats, needed an American CTO: partly to import America's culture of technical excellence, partly to help deal with Western clients and authorities. They called Tyler Wagner. He was 25 years old.
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San Francisco, aka Baghdad-by-the-Bay, July 2003. Tyler Wagner is a typical counterculture California techie: a Cal Poly CS graduate, part of the California punk scene, working for Greenpeace as a network engineer. Then an old friend in London recommends him to SSI. They call him. They need a capable Westerner willing to move to Iraq. Is he interested?
When he hangs up the phone, Tyler is shaking with excitement. The risks of relocating to a war zone are obvious. But it is a lucrative senior management position, offered to a man only two years out of university. "Life doesn't often offer you a hand up like that," he reminisces two years later, "and when it does, you can't afford to turn it down." One big complication: Tyler's girlfriend, Jayme. They have been dating only six months. He doesn't want to lose her. He calls and tells her the news – and they both ask at the same time if she can come with him.
Three weeks later, Tyler and Jayme fly into Amman, Jordan, and take a GMC Suburban taxi across the desert to Baghdad. Once they reach the city, their driver tells them to get beneath window level, to avoid snipers. They stay on the floor of the Suburban until they reach SSI's office in Baghdad's affluent al-Mansour neighbourhood.
- - -
Baghdad, August 2003. Tyler wakes in his house/office, rolls out of bed, walks into his office next door, and begins another fifteen-hour day. The house is full of SSI-employed drivers, engineers, tea-boys, housekeepers, and Kurdish peshmerga guards armed with AK-47s. Generators and air conditioners whir. Outside, the Iraqi summer heat regularly hits 130.
Other than the bicultural Kurdish/British directors, Tyler is the company's only Westerner. He has to build SSI's internal systems, manage the satellite installs, deal with Western clients, and train the team of Iraqi engineers, most of whom are older than he. All the problems of a fast-growing start-up, plus massive culture shock – in a war zone. Bombs and gunfire serenade them nightly. Meanwhile, Jayme is going stir-crazy; she has nothing to do, but cannot leave the house. The first few weeks are rough.
Things get better. Tyler and Jayme adapt to their new lives. If they want to buy Pop-Tarts or root beer, at the nearby shop that sells American delicacies at a 1000% markup, they are driven there in a car full of gunmen. This soon seems normal. Jayme gets a job at Erinys, one of Baghdad's many thriving private security companies. They go to parties in the Green Zone with South African mercenaries, American diplomats, and KBR contractors. Tyler learns new skills: how to install a VSAT satellite system from scratch; how to open a beer bottle with the Browning pistol he carries; how to distinguish between an AK-47 and an M-16 by sound alone; how to use tampons as battle dressings; the fine art of bribery.
Months pass. Business booms. SSI has plenty of competitors, but almost uniquely, they combine Western funding and technical expertise with a team of local engineers – a team who have become a band of brothers. Tyler fosters a community atmosphere, encourages his engineers to stay after work, play Half-Life and Settlers of Catan together, or watch South Park en masse. He attends their weddings, first as an honoured guest, then as a friend. He hires a tutor to teach him Arabic, even though all business is done in English. SSI has become half employer, half family. Iraq isn't just his workplace; it's his new home.
Tyler visits monstrous palaces built by Saddam. He meets native speakers of Aramaic, the language of Biblical times. He travels to Kirkuk, in the north, and installs a satellite dish in an oilfield straight out of Dante's Inferno, surrounded by massive pipes vomiting flame and bright green gas. And he hacks US military security with a digital camera, a $2,000 card printer, and a little social engineering.
Baghdad is a occupied city of walls and roadblocks. Most of SSI's clients are guarded by the US military. Many of them are US military. There are two free passes through checkpoints and gates: white skin, or a Department of Defense ID card. With neither, you line up for hours to be searched. Tyler is tired of his engineers losing days at checkpoints. He constructs SSI's secret weapon: an internal corporate ID that happens to look very much like a DoD card, right down to an empty smart card, a bar code, and a magnetic-strip-like line of black ink across the back. And for months, his engineers are regularly waved past inspection points by US soldiers.
But the insurgency intensifies; security grows tighter, particularly after the Sadr City revolt and the assault on Fallujah; and the US military starts denying SSI's engineers access to military bases. What's more, most Western clients won't take Iraqis seriously, and sales have grown beyond Tyler's capacity. They need another Westerner. SSI briefly hires a friend of Tyler's, but Baghdad is too much for him. One day, Tyler mentions on his blog that he needs a technically skilled Westerner who can handle an extreme environment. Among his readers is Ryan Lackey.
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San Luis Obispo, July 2004. Late one night, Ryan stops his car here, in Tyler's hometown, opens his laptop, connects it to Sprint's network, and caps their months-long email and instant-messaging conversation with an brief IM: he'll take the job.
Ryan is viscerally aware of the risks. He went to high school with Nicholas Berg, the American network engineer beheaded by insurgents only two months earlier. He is led to Iraq by what he calls the "dark calculus" of risk arbitrage; in his judgement, while the perceived risk of working in Iraq has caused prices to rocket, it is still possible to operate without much personal risk. And Ryan is used to intense environments. He dropped out of MIT at age 19 to work at a startup in Anguilla. Two years later he moved to Sealand, an offshore oil rig that claimed independent sovereignty, and cofounded a data haven theoretically beyond the reach of any nation's laws. Ryan is a libertarian cipherpunk, gun aficionado, and free-market purist: the notion of Iraq as the new Wild West, untrammeled by laws and regulations, appeals to him greatly.
By the time he arrives in Baghdad, SSI has outgrown their first house and moved to a walled compound. By now the company numbers about eighty, including a dozen engineers. Ryan moves in. He sells to Western clients, and increasingly is sent with teams of engineers to American military bases; he has no ID whatsoever, but his passport and American accent always gets them through the gate. But Ryan isn't adopted into the SSI family. He oozes ambition and technical skill, but he isn't a people person. Laconic, iconoclastic, brilliant and contemptuous of anyone who is not, he wants to make money, build systems, and grow the business, not train Iraqi engineers or build a community. He is impressed by what Tyler has done, calling him, "probably the best Westerner who's ever managed Iraqis," but he has no interest in doing the same. He does not fit in.
Meanwhile, the insurgency gets steadily worse. Mohammed, one of Tyler's engineers, receives a death threat signed in blood for allegedly working with the Americans. Two other employees are carjacked by an organized ring of car thieves, and SSI has to pay thousands to get their vehicle back. Then Mohammed is kidnapped by insurgents while driving back from LSA Anaconda. Incredibly, Mohammed manages to beat his guard to death with his own AK-47, escape, hitch a ride back to SSI, and stagger shaking and bloody back into the office – just in time for the insurgents, who don't know their captive has escaped, to call and demand his ransom.
August 2004. Tyler and Jayme are married in an Iraqi Catholic ceremony attended by all of SSI. The subsequent party features copious celebratory gunfire. Shortly afterwards, they travel back to the USA for a month-long vacation. Ryan is meant to step into Tyler's shoes while he's away.
One month later, when Tyler and Jayme return, Baghdad is locked down. It isn't safe to go to the Green Zone. It isn't safe to go to the shop around the corner. They are effectively under house arrest, with direct orders from SSI not to leave the compound for any reason short of an emergency.
- - -
September 2004. As the sun sets, Ryan drives back to Baghdad from a job on LSA Anaconda, with two SSI engineers – and no guards. They have to stop for gas on a stretch of road that the US military seems unable to secure, famous for mujahedeen attacks. The gas station is a concrete hut next to a pump. The power is out. Ryan waits, knowing that if any passerby calls his location in to the insurgents, they will be there in minutes. Power eventually returns, the car is refuelled, they continue on – and reach a roadblock with no American supervision, which Ryan believes is a false checkpoint run by insurgents. He huddles in the back of the car, clutching his Browning pistol, ready to try to shoot his way out rather than be taken hostage. They are waved through without inspection. Then the engineers decide to get food, meaning they stop on a busy Baghdad street and wait in the open for 15 nervewracking minutes.
Not long after this experience, Ryan spends a day flying around Iraq in an air ambulance helicopter, installing satellite dishes at five different locations. When they return to Anaconda, the Marine Corps captain who accompanied him offers him a tent to stay in, indefinitely, in exchange for technical support. The US military is rife with these unofficial exchanges of services, widely known as "drug deals"; agreements which, while technically against regulations, bypass the months and reams of paperwork that would be necessary to do them officially. Ryan spends two months living in this tent. He barely sees the SSI compound again.
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October 2004. Tyler and Jayme reluctantly accept that they can no longer safely stay in Baghdad. They move north to Arbil, in relatively free and safe Kurdistan. The departure is wrenching. They are leaving friendships forged by the searing intensity of a year's mutual struggle, and they don't know when, if ever, they might return. Weeks later, insurgents bomb the al-Jazeera headquarters in Baghdad, and Hassan, one of SSI's engineers, the man who chauffered Tyler and Jayme on their wedding day, is killed in the blast. Tyler is devastated. His team, his family, has been struck by tragedy, and he can't be there for them.
In November, Ryan officially leaves SSI. According to Ryan, "It was clear, with the security situation, that there was no way we could continue to operate in the way we were operating." He says, since he was living on Anaconda rather than at SSI, and doing satellite installs rather than sales, while being paid on commission, there was no point in continuing as an employee. Tyler says Ryan alienated the staff, treated the Iraqi engineers badly, and was about to be fired when he left. One thing everyone agrees on is that his exit was for the best.
With Ryan gone, and Tyler in Arbil, SSI is effectively shut out of the military market. Despite a theoretical "buy Iraqi" policy, it is impossible to get Iraqi engineers onto bases. Ryan finds himself living on an American military base, with a few important contacts, a lot of technical knowhow, a large prepaid contract that eliminated any need for startup funding – and a technical advantage over every competitor.
- - -
If you want to call Ryan Lackey in his trailer in Iraq today, you dial a Virginia phone number. The 703 area code just means that it's Virginia where the sound of your voice is packetized into VOIP and shipped via fiber to London, where Blue Iraq's teleport operator is located. This company pops your voice packets off the Internet, encodes them for satellite transmission, and beams them as 14 GHz radio waves from a five-metre dish to a Greek satellite. The signal bounces down to Ryan's own 1.2-metre iDirect dish, on a table weighed down with sandbags just behind his trailer. The iDirect system, robust enough to handle Iraq's extreme heat, dust, and wind, converts the signal back to IP packets and outputs them via Ethernet to Ryan's VOIP phone.
If you talk to Ryan, the conversation will be scratchy, and you'll be aware of a half-second delay, but the amazing thing is that you can talk to him at all. iDirect, the latest generation of VSAT technology, can be difficult to set up, which is why his competitors use older Hughes or Tachyon technology, but it is the first that can manage usable VOIP. When you compare the price Ryan charges – circa $1,000 per month for 1 megabit download and 384 kilobit upload, plus 1-5 cents per minute for prioritized VOIP traffic, for a dish generally shared by 20-30 people – to the dollars-per-minute price of an analog satellite telephone, it's easy to see where Blue Iraq's customers come from.
At its peak, SSI had nearly a hundred employees. Blue Iraq has three, and almost no overhead. They pay no rent for their trailer on Anaconda. They eat for free at military dining facilities, which on Anaconda serve good food prepared by a horde of Halliburton-managed "TCNs" – Third Country Nationals, mostly Filipino and Sri Lankan.
That doesn't mean business is easy. The technical problems are trivial; the logistical problems are crippling. Ryan has to to buy hardware remotely, have it shipped to Anaconda, and then get it to the customer. His clients are official military facilities, private DoD contractors, or units of troops who have all chipped in to pay for their own Internet access. If, as is often the case, they are stationed at one of Iraq's dozens of other American military bases, he flies there on a Blackhawk.
- - -
To book space on a Blackhawk from LSA Anaconda, you flash your DoD ID card and sign up at the space-available tent. There are daily shuttle flights to and from most of the scores of US military bases in Iraq. At your appointed hour, a minibus takes you out to the flight line, where dozens of aircraft await.
Inside the helicopter, there isn't quite enough room to stand. The door gunners sit on padded seats behind the cockpit. Machine guns are mounted on flexible arms in the open windows before them. Everything is painted black. Behind the door gunners are three forward-facing seats; behind them, two facing five-seat benches. The seats are canvas and metal pipe. The safety buckle is circular, with apertures for the belt and two shoulder straps; to release, you twist its propellor-shaped top.
Earplugs are distributed. The aircrew slide shut the windowed side doors and power up the engine. The rotors start to turn. They are like fifteen-foot knife blades with the sharp edge away from the rotation direction, the last foot or so bent back about thirty degrees, forming a vaguely swastika shape. Taxi out onto the runway, and up you go, as if in an elevator, in sync with the other Blackhawk next to you – they almost always travel in buddy-system pairs. The ground falls away. But not too far. Blackhawks fly about 100 feet above the ground, at circa 200 miles per hour.
The area outside Anaconda is much greener, a patchwork of farming fields fissured with canals and pocked with clusters of palm trees. Then villages, big L-shaped concrete blocks and crude brick buildings with thatch/mud roofs. Roads, smooth and modern, well-trafficked. Herds of goats flee from the helicopter noise. Lots of people wave; some keep their arms lowered and stare; some just ignore the noise. There are wide muddy rivers, vast barren brown patches, more roads, towns, farmland. At night, you can see street lights in the larger towns, fluorescent tubes mounted on hockey-stick-shaped poles. The door gunners occasionally drop stuffed animals from their windows, part of a hearts-and-minds initiative.
It's a remarkably smooth ride. The whole aircraft vibrates, but it's a soothing white-noise vibration rather than anything jarring. The journey is exhilirating, landscape zooming past and disappearing under you, like a dream of flying. As commutes go, it can't be beat.
But Blackhawk flights are risky. Passengers are required to wear helmets and body armor. There are a few Forward Operating Bases that space-a flights do not go to; Ryan has to ride to them on convoys, which is even riskier. Then, when the dish is installed and functional, after the paperwork is finally processed and Blue Iraq is paid, Ryan has to hitch a ride to Dubai on cargo planes with unpredictable schedules, and physically carry a large wad of cash into his bank.
Business as usual, it's not. But it suits Ryan. He doesn't plan to ever move back to the USA, except possibly to finish his MIT degree. He is full of ambitions. He wants to build a mobile phone network for Anaconda. If Iraq stabilizes, he would like to build its first ATM network. If not, Blue Iraq has plenty of room for expansion, into Afghanistan and, as he says with a bleak grin, "other markets that the US military opens up for us." He doubts those markets will be saturated any time soon.
- - -
Tyler and Jayme left Iraq in May 2005. The Arbil office failed; there wasn't enough business in Kurdistan. They moved to London, where Tyler still works for SSI. His time in Iraq has transformed him to the extent that, like Ryan, he doesn't think he can ever move back to the USA. His years of living hyperintensely, carrying a gun, building an organization from scratch in a war zone, have distanced him from his home. His friends seem to him to have stagnated. Their concerns seem trivial. And living with real, known, tangible danger has bred contempt for what he calls America's "culture of fear."
- - -
One of the few things Ryan and Tyler agree on is their scorn for America's attempt to secure and rebuild Iraq. Tyler rages that the US military "couldn't bother to protect" the road between Baghdad and Anaconda, or even the four-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International and the Green Zone. And he found that when most other Americans dealt with Iraqis, "they were very insulting, they were often very condescending, and in many cases I felt that they treated them like subhumans."
Both of them lament the sorry state of the electrical system. "Not having power was probably the single biggest problem that created animosity among Iraqis," Ryan says. "The US tried to rebuild it in the Western industrialized-country model. The way Iraqis install a power system is, they put a bunch of small generators on neighbourhood blocks, with power cables running to everyone's house, and just sell them access directly. And it's easy to have a market-driven pricing mechanism. But the US solution was to give large US companies business here … If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence."
Iraqis desperately want to work. "You don't see people begging for money. You see people selling gas for money, selling cigarettes by the side of the road," Ryan says. Tyler agrees: "I interviewed a lot of people, and I never met one that wasn't so painfully eager it almost hurt to turn them away." But their economy remains paralyzed.
"The best way to deal with terrorism in the long run is to fix the underlying conditions that create terrorism," Ryan says. "It's difficult to fix their ideology, but it's easy to fix their infrastructure. But the US has done a bad job … It's like a feedback loop. They got on the wrong side of the feedback loop." Iraqi frustration breeds insurgents; insurgent violence cripples reconstruction efforts; and the resulting lack of power, communications, finances, and jobs breeds more frustration.
In the face of this feedback loop, American forces have withdrawn into heavily guarded enclaves. SSI's modern, globalized, best-of-both-worlds strategy, bringing Americans and Iraqis together to help rebuild the shattered country, has faltered. Blue Iraq's neo-colonial approach, living and working exclusively on military bases, continues to thrive. The seeds Tyler has helped to plant – a team of crack engineers still erecting dishes around the country – may someday help drag Iraq into the 21st century, one satellite link at a time. But not until the rain of insurgent bombs and bullets has ended. And neither Ryan nor Tyler expects that to happen for years.
http://rezendi.com/travels/bbbb.html
Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” Exposes the Media’s Failure to do Their Job.
Joanne Ostrow
In some quarters, this week is set aside as “turn off your TV week.”Beyond the fact that it’s a silly enterprise - Pick and choose, people! Pick and choose! - there is one important offering on the nonfiction front that should not be missed.
If we could retroactively pull the plug, say during the saturation coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith saga, that might have been a good week to skip the tube.
But - do-gooders take note - this week a devastating 90-minute documentary should be required viewing. This is the kind of work television can do brilliantly when given time and resources and the talents of a questioner like Bill Moyers.
A point-by-point explanation of how the media failed the public en route to the war in Iraq is carefully assembled and patiently related Wednesday by Moyers on PBS.
“Bill Moyers Journal,” at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KRMA-Channel 6, presents “Buying the War,” an eye-opening view of how the mainstream press got things exactly wrong in the ramp-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The passing of unchecked information, the fear of appearing unpatriotic in the wake of 9/11, the readiness to join the drumbeat of misinformation about weapons of mass destruction and the willingness of the rest of the media to follow The New York Times - all contributed to the media buying in and failing to help readers and viewers separate fact from propaganda.
Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, tells Moyers, “I don’t think there is any excuse for my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll-up to the war. Overall … there’s no question that we didn’t do a good job.”
Tim Russert of NBC’s “Meet the Press” has a tougher time admitting complicity, or allowing that his influential program was used by the administration. Russert says he simply followed the lead of the front-page story of The New York Times. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went on the Sunday-morning shows and cited the infamous “smoking gun as mushroom cloud” story, which they gave the Times.
Bob Simon of CBS’s “60 Minutes” sums up that performance: “Remarkable. You leak a story, and then you quote the story.”
As in so many phases of the administration’s marketing of the war, the media simply stood by.
Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN, says, “Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time.”
A particularly embarrassing news conference with President Bush two weeks before he ordered the country to war demonstrates the passive state of the press at the time.
“At least a dozen times during this press conference he will invoke 9/11 and Al-Qaeda to justify a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not attacked America,” Moyers narrates.
The president calls on reporters designated by his staff. The questions are friendly to the point of puffy. The press corps wouldn’t awaken until after Hurricane Katrina. They knew the war was going to happen, so they got out of the way.
The work of an investigative team from Knight Ridder newspapers (acquired by The McClatchy Co. last year) is singled out as a rare example of healthy, skeptical reporting. Yet while almost all the Bush claims about WMD would prove to be false, the story citing “lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons” got little play.
Among the cheerleaders for the war who refused to talk to Moyers for this report are (no surprises here) columnist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, conservative pundit William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, president of Fox News and former Nixon and Reagan strategist Roger Ailes, Washington Post columnist and Fox news commentator Charles Krauthammer, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and Times political columnist William Safire.
It’s easy to campaign in favor of turning off the television. The bumper sticker “Kill your TV” is ever popular. But if more of us were better informed, as this documentary makes painfully clear, the world outside the box would be a better place.
Members of the media will be parsing this historic lapse for years to come, trying to explain how the watchdogs dozed.
Journalism students everywhere should watch and take notes.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/730/
Yale Backs off Ban on Weapons in Plays; Audience Will be Notified
Dave Collins
A week after a Yale University official banned prop weapons from school plays in response to the Virginia Tech killings, the Ivy League school has reversed course and said audiences will be notified in advance of the use of fake guns, swords and knives.
The university released a statement Monday, following complaints that Yale was censoring the arts and reacting inappropriately to the April 16 massacre that left 33 people dead.
"As part of our long-standing policy regarding the use of weapons in undergraduate student theatrical productions, the use of real or facsimile weapons has been permitted on a case-by-case basis, with the approval of the dean of students' office," Helaine Klasky, director of public affairs, said in the statement.
"Effective immediately, when a weapon or facsimile is being used, the audience will be appropriately notified in advance," she said.
The issue arose last week when Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg informed two student directors that they could not use facsimile weapons in their plays.
"Given the events of a few days ago in Virginia I question, at this time, the use of even a prop hand gun in this (or other productions). I suggest that you find another way," Trachtenberg wrote in an e-mail to Yale sophomore Leah Franqui and others on April 18.
Franqui, 19, is directing "Accidental Death of an Anarchist," which begins on Friday. The satire by Nobel Prize for literature winner Dario Fo is about a police investigation of a bank bombing in Milan, Italy.
Franqui said she had to scrap plans to rent a prop gun for a minor scene in the play.
"I don't have problems in terms of the integrity of my show," the Philadelphia resident said. "But I think it's really terrible in general. It's censoring the arts. It's a completely empty gesture."
Franqui said the scene with the gun has been rewritten to make fun of the university's ban. She said a police officer who takes another hostage and tries to grab his gun is surprised when he can't find it.
"Where's the gun, Josh," the officer asks.
"Didn't you hear? We're not allowed to have one," the other responds.
Telephone and e-mails seeking comment were left Monday with Trachtenberg and Yale President Richard Levin.
Sarah Holdren, a 21-year-old junior majoring in theater studies, directed "Red Noses" last week and learned a few hours before the play opened Thursday that weapons were not allowed.
The play, set in the Middle Ages and featuring several sword fights, tells the story of a group of clowns that brings hope to people suffering during the time of the Black Plague.
Holdren said she met with Trachtenberg before the play began and received permission to use "very fake-looking" wooden swords, instead of metal ones.
"Basically we got to use toys," said Holdren, from Greenwood, Va., about 40 minutes from Virginia Tech. "I resent much less the last-minute changes we had to make rather than the reasoning behind the decision.
"I think attempting to cover up issues of violence in the real world by censoring art is fundamentally wrong," she said. "Especially at a time like this, art and theater have the potential to help so many people and to get them through these very dark situations."
Holdren gave an opening statement to the audience before the play, criticizing Yale for its censorship and telling the crowd that "Red Noses" was about hope, joy and fellowship.
Holdren said that while she has only compassion and sympathy for the Virginia Tech community, she is protesting "the careless manner" in which Yale reacted.
She said it is appropriate that Yale has backed away from banning weapons on stage.
"I hope that this change in the policy heralds further changes and that we can get back to a relative state of artistic freedom," Holdren said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...04-23-19-55-59
Russell Simmons: Ban 3 Epithets Consistently in Clean Music
AP
Offensive words often are scrubbed out of rap songs in so-called clean versions, but there is no uniform standard for deleting such words, according to hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.
Suggesting a start toward creating a standard, Simmons said Monday that the recording and broadcast industries should consistently ban three racial and sexist epithets from all clean versions of rap songs and the airwaves.
Such epithets are currently banned from most clean versions, but record companies sometimes "arbitrarily" decide which offensive words to exclude, Simmons said.
The recommendations drew mixed reaction and came two weeks after some began carping anew about rap lyrics after radio personality Don Imus was fired by CBS Radio and NBC for referring to the players on the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."
Expressing concern about the "growing public outrage" over the use of such words in rap lyrics, Simmons said the words "bitch," "ho" and "nigger" should be considered "extreme curse words."
"We recommend (they're) always out," Simmons, the pioneering entrepreneur who made millions of dollars as he helped shape hip-hop culture, said in an interview Monday. "This is a first step. It's a clear message and a consistency that we want the industry to accept for more corporate social responsibility."
Last week, Simmons called a private meeting of influential music industry executives to discuss the issue. However, no music executives were associated with Monday's announcement by Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network.
Telephone calls by The Associated Press to Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Atlantic Records were not immediately returned Monday. The Recording Industry Association of America and Warner Music Group declined to comment.
Reaction to the announcement was mixed.
Bakari Kitwana, who has written about rap in books such as "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop," said it was a step in the right direction. Kitwana said there needed to be uniformity in removing obscenities from music. He pointed out that in some songs curse words are replaced with clean words, while in others, epithets and curse words are merely covered up by silence, allowing listeners to infer from context the edited words.
"It shows that people in the industry are realizing that the pendulum is swinging and that there's a national conversation that they don't want to be on the wrong side of," Kitwana said of the recommendations. "This is further along than we could have expected them to go 10 years ago. But there has to be more. I think they can do more around the question of content."
Writer Joan Morgan said the announcement amounted to "absolutely nothing." She called the recommendations "shortsighted at best and disingenuous at worst." They were, she said, an "anemic, insufficient response" that failed to address homophobia and other issues in certain strains of hip-hop culture and rap music.
Morgan, author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down," said calling for the removal of the three epithets assumes "all of the violence, misogyny and sexism in hip-hop is only expressed in" those words.
"It says, 'Let's take the responsibility away from people creating the content and put it back on the corporations,'" said Morgan.
The recommendations also included forums to foster dialogue among entertainers, hip-hop fans and executives and the creation of a mentoring program for entertainers. Another recommendation called for the establishment of a coalition of music, radio and television executives to advise those industries on "lyrical and visual standards."
The announcement cautioned against violating free-speech rights but said that freedom of expression comes with responsibility.
"Our discussions are about the corporate social responsibility of the industry to voluntarily show respect to African-Americans and other people of color, African-American women and to all women in lyrics and images," read a joint statement from Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, the network's executive director.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1045269
NYC Radio Hosts Suspended for Racially Charged Segment
Still recovering from the Don Imus scandal, CBS Radio suspended two local hosts after they twice broadcast a racially charged prank call that targeted employees at a Chinese restaurant.
The hosts of the daily morning show, WFNY-FM's "The Dog House With JV and Elvis," have been suspended indefinitely without pay, CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo told The New York Times in an e-mail Monday. One of the hosts, Jeff Vandergrift, apologized on Monday's show, she said.
Local chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans, an advocacy group, released a statement Sunday protesting the segment. By Monday, California State Sen. Leland Yee and others joined the campaign.
In the segment, broadcast on April 5 and again last week, a caller to a Chinese restaurant intersperses an order for takeout with lewd language and racial slurs.
The caller tells one female employee he wants to come to the restaurant to see her naked and refers to a part of her body as "hot, Asian, spicy."
The caller attempts to order "shrimp flied lice" and refers to a male employee as "Chinese man" before claiming himself to be a student of kung fu.
At one point he refers to a part of the employee's body as a "tiny egg roll."
The show's hosts, Vandergrift and Dan Lay, have been campaigning online and on the air in support of Imus since his firing for making sexist and racist comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
There was no telephone listing for Vandergrift in the New York metropolitan area. A call late Monday to a Daniel Lay in New York City was not immediately returned.
A CBS Radio spokeswoman did not immediately respond to telephone and e-mail messages from The Associated Press late Monday.
Community advocates pushed for CBS to fire the hosts of the show, which can be heard only in the New York City area and on the Internet.
"If they don't fire the DJ's, it will be a double standard," said Vicki Shu Smolin, president of the New York City chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans.
http://www.1010wins.com/pages/382899...ntentId=436551
Under Fire, an Actor Lashes Back With a Plan
Alessandra Stanley
The fate of “30 Rock” looks dire. Alec Baldwin said on “The View” yesterday that he wanted to quit that NBC sitcom to write a book about “parental alienation.”
For the good of viewers — and readers — Mr. Baldwin must not leave the show.
His performance yesterday suggests that he may need some persuading to stay with the sitcom, in which he is brilliant, and away from talk show couches, where he is anything but.
It’s certainly in the best interest of the child. As bad as all the publicity over her father’s ranting voice-mail message must be for 11-year-old Ireland, she will have to live it all over again if her father quits show business. The book reviews — let alone the stand-up comedy routines — would surely inflict even more emotional damage.
Mr. Baldwin told Barbara Walters and Rosie O’Donnell that he wanted to devote his life to exposing the injustices perpetrated on divorced dads, and that he hoped to publish a book this fall on divorce litigation. Mr. Baldwin’s long-winded, self-obsessed soliloquy on his usurped rights as a father and the fiendish acts of his ex-wife, Kim Basinger, was so impassioned that Ms. Walters had to remind him that his first concern should be his relationship with Ireland. (When he mentioned his daughter, it was to make a point about her mother’s perfidy.)
He was looking to persuade but was mostly painful to watch — a little like Captain Queeg melting down on the witness stand in “The Caine Mutiny.”
And Mr. Baldwin added more fuel to his pyre by lashing out at the celebrity gossip industry, including the journalist who first distributed the phone message, whom he did not identify by name. “Everybody who works in tabloid media are people who are filled with self-hatred and shame,” he said. “And the way that they manage those feelings is that they destroy the lives of other people and reveal your secrets.”
He has a reason to feel ill-used by the press, of course. His hectoring message and the words he used — “thoughtless little pig” — unleashed an almost Don Imus-size national debate over his behavior. Some people want Mr. Baldwin in irons; others wonder how and why on earth his phone message for Ireland found its way to the public. Mr. Baldwin began his interview by saying, “I got a huge bouquet of flowers from Don Imus.”
Ms. Walters looked startled. “Did you really?” she asked. He said he was joking.
If NBC has to gin up an intemperate fathers’ solidarity drive to keep him on the show, so be it. After yesterday’s appearance, Mr. Baldwin may require something along the lines of the scene in “Spartacus,” when the Roman commander demands to know which of a horde of rebel slaves is their leader, and one, two and then all of the slaves step forward, saying, “I am Spartacus.” Perhaps all parents could call their children’s cellphones and simultaneously holler something mean and borderline abusive.
Mr. Baldwin’s defense was unfortunate, and so was his timing. This is not a good moment for middle-aged actors to act out. Richard Gere is a wanted man in India after showering the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty with kisses at an AIDS awareness rally in New Delhi; Indians frown on public displays of affection. Hugh Grant was arrested in London for throwing a tub of baked beans at a photographer.
Mr. Baldwin, who is known in The New York Post as “the Bloviator,” is not as winning in speeches and on talk shows as Mr. Gere or Mr. Grant.
But Mr. Baldwin’s career matters more, and not just because he neither publicly offended cultural sensibilities (this time) nor physically injured anyone (this time). He is a gifted actor who at the moment is peerlessly funny as Jack Donaghy, a silky-smooth, loony NBC executive in charge of a sketch comedy show.
The show was created by the former “Saturday Night Live” head writer and star Tina Fey, who also plays the fictional show’s head writer, Liz Lemon. The writing is sharp and funny, and so is the cast. But Mr. Baldwin steals every scene and has turned “30 Rock” into one of the best comedies on television. In Thursday’s season finale, which included his fiancée, Phoebe (Emily Mortimer), an art dealer who says she suffers from avian bone syndrome and cannot be touched, Jack is so stressed that he has a mild heart attack.
On his hospital bed he tells Liz that in a near-death moment, he saw his life flash before his eyes.
“In all the time I’ve been on this earth, I have only one regret,” Jack tells her. “I should have worked more.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/ar...on/28watc.html
NBC Believes They Own Political Discourse, They Are Shameful and Wrong
Kevin Bondelli
Buzz Machine has really been on top of the BS that is MSNBC’s strangle-hold on the Presidential Primary Debates.
For shame, NBC News: Stealing the debate
USAGE RULES FOR USE OF AUDIO OR VIDEO OF MSNBC MATERIAL RULES FOR “THE SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES DEBATE” FROM MSNBC:
(The following rules apply to all media organizations that are not part of NBC)
News organizations, including radio, network television, cable television and local television may use excerpts of “The South Carolina Democratic Candidates Debate” subject to the following restrictions (internet use is not permitted):
1. An unobstructed onscreen credit “MSNBC” must appear during each debate excerpt and remain on screen for the entire excerpt.
2. Each debate excerpt must be introduced with an audio credit to MSNBC.
3. No excerpt may air in any medium until the live debate concludes at 8:30 pm ET.
4. No more than a combined total of 2 minutes of excerpts may be chosen for use during the period from the end of the live debate (8:30 pm ET) until 1:00 am ET on Friday, April 27. After 1:00 am ET, Friday, April 27, a total of 10 minutes may be selected (including any excerpts aired before 1:00AM). The selected excerpts may air as often as desired but the total of excerpts chosen may not exceed the limits outlined.
5. No excerpts may be aired after 8:30 pm on Saturday, May 26th. Excerpts may not be archived. Any further use of excerpts is by express permission of MSNBC only.
6. All debate excerpts must be taped directly from MSNBC’s cablecast or obtained directly from MSNBC and may not be obtained from other sources, such as satellite or other forms of transmission. No portions of the live event not aired by MSNBC may be used.
A feed of MSNBC’s telecast of the debate will be provided (details below), additionally limited audio/video mults will be available on site in the media center.
Advice for MSNBC
If MSNBC had any sense, which it doesn’t, it would have taken every one-minute answer from last night’s ping-pong debate and put them up on YouTube themselves. Then, today, we’d be able to watch each one without feeling as if we were trying to count cars on a speeding train. And, more important, we’d be able to comment on them and embed them in our blogs. We’d see which clips are the most popular, the most talked about. We’d get a new sense of what the electorate thinks, which itself would be news. If NBC also made the video files available, we’d see the post-debate commentary not from the same old made-up faces on the networks but from the people who matter, the voters: us. MSNBC would be part of the conversation, in the thick of it, which is exactly where it should want to be. Instead, the network is acting like the bratty and unpopular rich kid who takes him marbles and harumphs home, ruining the game for everyone.
So not only are MSNBC’s draconian usage rules preventing interested American’s from becoming involved in our democracy’s most important decision, it is not even a smart business move.
What bothers me the most is that MSNBC is a cable network channel, which means that only cable subscribers were able to watch the debate. That seems inherently unfair to me. It isn’t like they immediately put the entire debate on the MSNBC website for people to watch, so by the time anyone is going to see any part of the debate they are going to have heard from pundits galore about what they should think about it.
Give me a break. The fact that a corporation owns and monopolizes an important piece of the process of electing a President is un-American. They are much more willing to spread Cho Seung-Hui’s message to the vast majority of the American people than the messages of our Presidential candidates. Then again NBC did get to put their peacock on every frame of Cho’s school shooter recruitment video. Very al-jazeera of them.
Shame on you NBC, you do not own public discourse in this country, the American people do.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. ~William Faulkner
http://www.kevinbondelli.com/article...eful-and-wrong
Hi-Def Over Freeview? The BBC Has a Cunning Plan
Ian Morris
Now the era of the flat panel has arrived, we're all falling in love with high-definition video. We've got games consoles, HD DVD and Blu-ray and some patchy TV services from the likes of Sky and Virgin Media. The problem is that Freeview has never been seen as a viable platform for high definition, because bandwidth is severely limited. What little space there is appears to be stuffed to the brim with cheap shopping channels.
So if we want hi-def via Freeview, what do we do that doesn't involve storming bid-up tv and forcing it off the air? The BBC thinks it has a peaceful solution. Auntie's R&D boffins have published a white paper in which they claim it's possible to double the available bandwidth by using some clever technologies. Doubling the space would mean we could easily have HD channels on Freeview, although everyone would need to buy a new receiver and aerial to pick them up.
So how does it work? Well, Crave skipped some important physics lessons at school, but we've got the gist of it. Pay attention, here comes the science part: the signals are spatially multiplexed. Multiplexing isn't really new, and indeed it's already used in digital television for transmitting multiple channels on one frequency. These channels are multiplexed together into one stream of data, transmitted and then at the receiver they're de-multiplexed and viewed as separate channels.
Spatial multiplexing allows you to send two bitstreams on one frequency. It works by sending the signals at different times. This means in addition to packing several channels into a bitstream, you can pack two bitstreams into one frequency. As long as the receiver can tell which one is which, it will be able to decode them into two separate bitstreams and from there decode them into the various channels.
The key to all this is something called MIMO, which stands for multiple-input multiple-output. MIMO works using two transmitters, and two receivers. The two transmitters mean the two sets of data -- sent on the same frequency -- will arrive at the receivers at different times. Different arrival times are what allow the receiver to differentiate between the two separate signals and subsequently decode them. The process is further assisted using polarisation. One bitstream is sent horizontally polarised, the other is vertically polarised -- this makes the difference between the two bitstreams more obvious to the decoder, and makes separating the two lots of data much easier.
The BBC has conducted a small-scale test of this technology and has found that it does indeed double the available bandwidth. With that much extra space available, transmitting hi-def over Freeview would be a real possibility. Of course, we could still storm the shopping channels and force them off the air -- it would be time and energy well spent.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/televisions/...9289930,00.htm
It’s Not a Sequel, but It Might Seem Like One After the Ads
Michael Cieply
If the Walt Disney Company and its Pixar Animation Studios unit have their way, by the time “Ratatouille” is released on June 29, millions will have learned not only to pronounce the movie’s title — Pixar’s Web site insists on the somewhat un-French “rat-a-too-ee” — but to love the idea of a rodent in the kitchen.
But not without some extraordinary effort. Next Tuesday, Disney will unleash an unusual all-day television advertising campaign, culminating with a 90-second spot on “American Idol,” intended to drive viewers to a nine-and-a-half-minute clip from the film at disney.com.
In effect, the studio is promoting its promotion.
Such bravura is necessary in this case because Disney and Pixar have once again staked their fortunes on a big-budget film that is completely original in concept and execution at a time when ticket buyers have shown a growing preference for repeat performances of known commodities like “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and Disney’s own “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
“It takes a lot more work,” Richard Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said of the effort to introduce original films. “The rewards can be unbelievable. But they’re clearly more difficult to market.”
That originality is a dying value on the blockbuster end of the movie business is no secret. In the last five years, only about 20 percent of the films with more than $200 million in domestic ticket sales were purely original in concept, rather than a sequel or an adaptation of some pre-existing material like “The Da Vinci Code.”
In the 1990s, originals accounted for more than twice that share, led by “Titanic,” which took in more than $600 million at the box office after its release in 1997.
Pixar and Disney have enviable name recognition among moviegoers compared with virtually any other studio. But when an original like “Ratatouille” costs roughly $100 million to make and perhaps half that to market in the United States alone, even they cannot trust viewers to show up without a painstaking introduction.
“Wonder takes time,” said Brad Bird, the movie’s director. “You don’t rush wonder. You have to coax the audience toward you a little bit.”
Born of an idea from the animator Jan Pinkava (“A Bug’s Life”) and others, “Ratatouille” is not only original but also a bit subtler than some of its Pixar predecessors. Without superheroes, as in Mr. Bird’s “Incredibles,” or talking toys, as in the “Toy Story” films, it is about a rat who wants to cook in a French restaurant that once had five stars, but has slipped a couple of notches.
The conceit brings with it something of an “ick” factor, Mr. Bird acknowledged. Yet he resisted calls during production to make the lead character, Remy, more human and less ratlike. And he predicted that even the whiff of aversion would become an asset in seeking attention in a crowded season.
“That ‘ick’ is something in our favor,” he said. “It makes the story more interesting.”
(Disney, for its part, has generally done well with rodents, from Mickey and Minnie Mouse through the creatures in “Cinderella” and the “Rescuers” films.)
“Ratatouille” has already appeared in a trailer, attached to “Cars” almost a year ago. And Mr. Bird helped produce an elaborate promotional video that circulated on the Web this spring, even as he scrambled to finish the film, which he took over two years ago from its original director, Mr. Pinkava.
As the release date nears, Disney will add ploys like a scratch-and-sniff book from Random House (“I Smell a Rat”) and a 10-city “Ratatouille Big Cheese Tour.”
Led by its founder, Steven Jobs, and its top officers, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, Pixar has been ferocious in its insistence on originality through a cycle of hits that has included only one sequel, “Toy Story 2” in 1999. That policy led to a rift with its partner, Disney, which once planned its own follow-ups to Pixar films.
Disney finally backed off when it acquired Pixar last year. According to Mr. Cook, Pixar — which has agreed to make “Toy Story 3” — will now be in charge of its own sequels.
Devotion to freshness can have its price. Since the release of “Finding Nemo,” which had about $340 million in domestic ticket sales, each succeeding Pixar film, first “The Incredibles” in 2004, then “Cars” in 2006, has done less business than its predecessor.
In addition, the entertainment conglomerates that now own studios may only bring their full resources to bear on the second or third in a series of films. Next month, for instance, Disney will unveil a “massive multiplayer” online game keyed to its three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. This potentially lucrative enterprise took three years to develop, and would be far more difficult to build around a one-time success like “The Incredibles.”
“Branding is the word of the day and it will remain that way,” Russell Schwartz, president of New Line Cinema’s domestic marketing, said of the growing preference by audiences and the industry for known quantities.
Mr. Schwartz, whose own company had huge hits in recent years both with high-profile adaptations in the “Lord of the Rings” cycle and with an unexpected blockbuster from scratch in “The Wedding Crashers,” noted that executives would rather not depend on the latter sort of success. “There’s a zeitgeist about that kind of movie you can’t control,” he said.
The drift away from pure inventiveness is limited to the industry’s most expensive and commercial films. According to the Writers Guild of America, West, the balance between original and adapted scripts in overall feature film production has remained constant in recent years, with slightly more than half of the screenplays being original.
Old hands in the film business argue nonetheless that the industry cheats itself of something precious when it leaves the creation of its blockbuster bets to a graphic novelist like Frank Miller, whose work was behind this year’s “300,” or a distant predecessor, like the makers of the original “King Kong.”
“It’s tragic,” the screenwriter Bob Gale said of what he sees as Hollywood’s lost inventiveness. Missing, he said, is the nonpareil thrill he experienced in creating, with Robert Zemeckis, the early drafts of “Back to the Future,” a 1985 hit provoked by his own question: Would he have liked his own father if he had known him in high school?
Still, Mr. Bird confessed that pure invention can be “scary” even for those at Pixar. The director pointed, for instance, to a moment in “Ratatouille” when he felt compelled to forgo a climactic action sequence that was demanded by conventional movie logic, but that did not fit the story he and his peers had invented. “You have to let the movie be what it wants to be,” he said.
Yet that can be easier, he added, than trying to follow in the tracks of the audience. “When you just make something you want to see,” he said, “it becomes very simple.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/movies/24orig.html
Sony to Launch Video-Sharing Network Friday
Sony Corp. said on Thursday it will launch a video-sharing site in Japan on Friday, marking the electronics and entertainment firm's first step towards challenging Google Inc.'s YouTube service.
News Corp. and NBC Universal said last month they would also launch a free online video site this year, as traditional media firms scramble to keep up with video sharing.
Sony also hopes to introduce its service, called eyeVio, abroad, but said it first wanted to gauge the reception at home before drawing up an overseas launch schedule.
"This is part of Sony's quiet software revolution," CEO Howard Stringer said at a news conference.
"It's an opportunity to transmit user-generated video anywhere you want to, anytime to anybody, in a protected environment," Stringer said.
Unlike YouTube, which has drawn criticism that it tolerates user piracy and faces a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom Inc. alleging copyright violation, Sony said it would closely monitor content on the service.
Such a model would appeal to companies looking to release content and to protect their image, said Sony spokesman Takeshi Honma.
"We believe there's a need for a clean and safe place where companies can place their advertisements," Honma said.
Earlier this year Google agreed to display warnings on YouTube in Japanese telling users not to upload copyright materials. Last year it removed nearly 30,000 video files from the site at the request of Japanese media firms.
Users will also be able to select who can view their content, and for how long.
The site will be free to users, but spokesman Honma said Sony hoped it would eventually generate revenue through advertisements and tie-ups with media companies.
Shares in Sony closed up 0.9 percent at 6,460 yen, compared with a 1.12 percent rise in the Nikkei average.
Story
Stephen Colbert Parodies on YouTube = Legal
Pete Cashmore
If you want to parody Stephen Colbert clips on YouTube, go right ahead: Viacom admitted today that it had made an error by pulling a parody clip during its YouTube cleansing, and the lawsuit against Viacom by the EFF was dropped.
Viacom used the DMCA to pull down more than 100,000 clips, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation complained that the takedown had included those clips that are allowed under fair use - including the Colbert parody. Viacom is also setting up an “email hotline” for those who have their clips pulled without merit. Viacom’s release today, meanwhile, was along the lines of “woulda been nice if you’d sent a letter before suing us”. (Essentially that the case wouldn’t have happened if the EFF had been more communicative beforehand.)
The parody is below - it’s pretty funny, and seems to be inspired by Outfoxed, the documentary that highlights the biases of Fox News. The Colbert Report, of course, is largely a parody of Fox News.
http://mashable.com/2007/04/23/steph...youtube-legal/
New tube
Modernity Drills Through Rock Toward an Alpine Hamlet
Mark Landler
Years from now, if Sarah Leitner ever wants to regale her children with stories about her daily walk to school, she will not have to embellish, even a little: this plucky 8-year-old must hike a mountain to get to her home in this remote Alpine valley.
True, there are 300 wooden steps winding up the steep slope. And her mother, Ursula, waits for her at the top, in a rusty, mud-spattered car that bears no license plates because it never sees a regular road.
The Leitners live in the Kaisertal, one of the last inhabited valleys in the Alps not connected by road to the outside world. In this isolated mountain settlement, food and fuel are carried in on an aerial ropeway. Its few vehicles were winched up the stairs many years ago, and are now stranded there, in an Arcadian landscape of fields and farmhouses, circled by jagged, snow-capped peaks.
For the 30 people who live in the Kaisertal, there has always been one way in and one way out: on foot.
Next March, however, work will be completed on a 2,690-foot tunnel through the mountain, and the valley’s splendid isolation will come to an abrupt end. It cannot end fast enough for Sarah Leitner.
“I’ll be really glad when the road comes,” she said the other day, trudging up the steps, her backpack bobbing like a buoy in a choppy sea. “Finally, my friends will be able to come visit me.”
The decision to build the tunnel was made after decades of dispute over whether to make the valley more accessible, and it is still arousing complex emotions among people in this gentle land of gingerbread houses and onion-domed churches near the German border.
Residents of the Kaisertal generally welcome the connection, citing the ease of shopping, going to a doctor or seeing a movie, without having to put on hiking boots and go on a wilderness walk.
But nature lovers who savor such pursuits say the tunnel will bring taxis and tourists, followed by real estate development — spoiling one of the last truly pristine valleys in the Tyrolean Alps.
To prevent that, Ebbs, the town that includes the Kaisertal, plans to limit access to residents, emergency vehicles and service people. It will issue them a plastic card, with an encoded chip, that will open a gate at the mouth of the tunnel, next to the town.
Over time, however, critics predict that the limitations on access will be relaxed, particularly as the economic incentives of opening up the valley to outside traffic become more tantalizing.
“This region is an El Dorado for people who live in Bavaria; they can drive here in an hour,” said Norbert Wolf, an environmentalist who has campaigned against the tunnel for years. “I’m very skeptical that this tunnel will only be used by the people who live there.”
Today, the 30 residents subsist on farming and running small guesthouses, which also sell beer and apple strudel to passing hikers. The valley’s population was once about 70, but it has dwindled as residents, particularly young ones, have left for opportunities in the outside world.
Josef Ritzer, the mayor of Ebbs, said the remainder would eventually have packed up, too. Showing visitors around the other day, he pointed to an abandoned Alpine house, clinging stubbornly to a hillside.
“Without the tunnel, the rest of the valley will end up like that,” Mr. Ritzer said. “We want people to stay, but to do that, we have to give them the same opportunities as people in the town.”
The project is budgeted at nearly $9 million, of which the province of Tyrol is kicking in roughly three-quarters. Austria specializes in highly engineered tunnels, and this one has its own marvels, including a 180-degree curve in the middle.
Workers are blasting a path through a ridge to connect the tunnel to a dirt road in the valley. Their jackhammers echo noisily off the mountains, something not lost on the project’s critics.
Mr. Wolf does not dispute that the residents needed something more convenient than a winding staircase. His solution would have been to replace the aerial ropeway — a rickety contraption — with a modern gondola that could have carried people as well as provisions.
He noted that other places thrive while banning private cars. The glamorous Swiss ski resort Zermatt, for example, requires visitors to park outside town and take a train or taxi the rest of the way.
In the Kaisertal, however, people have simpler desires. Ursula Leitner said she would like to be able to carry her groceries home, rather than putting them on the ropeway. She would like to go the annual ball in Ebbs without having to hike down with her shoes and gown in a bag.
More important, the family could get prompt access to medical treatment. Last fall, Sarah became violently ill with a stomach virus and had to hike down to a doctor. A group of walkers, not understanding the girl’s distress, poked fun at her as she and her parents hurried past.
There are longer-term drawbacks to life in the Kaisertal. Young people struggle to find spouses willing to move here. Failed relationships are common. Loneliness hangs in the thin mountain air.
Yet there is also romance and idealism to living in this Alpine version of Walden Pond. Neighbors take care of one another. Each Monday, they gather at one of the guesthouses to play cards.
It’s like one big family, though, as Josef Schwaighofer, 43, the owner of the guesthouse, notes, “None of the families is related.” Pausing, he adds with a twinkle, “that we know of.”
Mr. Schwaighofer, who grew up here, has never considered leaving. But he said fewer and fewer people appreciate the valley’s slow rhythm of life. For them, the tunnel is an escape hatch. “They want to get into town quickly,” he said with a hint of sadness. “Life today is getting faster and faster.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...pe/journal.php
Microsoft Admits Vista Failure
Actions speak louder than PR
Charlie Demerjian
WITH TWO OVERLAPPING events, Microsoft admitted what we have been saying all along, Vista, aka Windows Me Two (Me II), is a joke that no one wants.
It did two unprecedented things this week that frankly stunned us.
Dell announced that it would be offering XP again on home PCs. The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can't do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled.
This is classic abusive monopoly behaviour, Microsoft wrote the modern book on it. It pulled all the major OEMs in by twisting their arms with the usual methods, and they again all fell into line. Never before has anyone backpedalled on this, to do so would earn you the wrath of Microsoft.
But Dell just did. This means that Me II sales are at least as bad as we think, the software and driver situation is just as miserable, and Dell had no choice but to buck the trend. If anyone thinks this is an act of atonement for foisting such a steaming pile on us, think again, it doesn't care about the consumer.
What happened is, the OEMs revolted in the background and forced Microsoft's hand. This is a big neon sign above Me II saying 'FAILURE'. Blink blink blink. OK, Me II won't fail, Microsoft has OEMs whipped and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed.
The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled XP. Why is this not altruism? Well, it goes back to piracy and how it helped enforce the MS monopoly. If you can easily pirate Windows, Linux has no price advantage, they both cost zero.
With Me II, Microsoft made it very hard to pirate. It is do-able, you can use the BIOS hack and probably a host of others, but the point is, it raised the bar enough so lots of people have to buy it. Want to bet that in a country with $100 average monthly salary, people aren't going to shell out $299 for Me II Broken Edition?
What did MS do? It dropped the price about 100x or so. I can't say this is unprecedented, when it made Office 2003 hard to pirate it had to backpedal with the student edition for about $150. This time though, things are much more desperate.
If you fit Microsoft's somewhat convoluted definition of poor, it still wants to lock you in, you might get rich enough to afford the full-priced stuff someday. It is at a dangerous crossroads, if its software bumps up the price of a computer by 100 per cent, people might look to alternatives.
That means no Me II DRM infection lock in, no mass migration to the newer Office obfuscated and patented file formats, and worse yet, people might utter the W word. Yes, you guessed it, 'why'. People might ask why it is sticking with the MS lock in, and at that point, it is in deep trouble.
So, it did the unthinkable, and dropped the price. I won't bother to hunt down all the exec quotes saying how people can't afford clean water would be overjoyed to sell kidneys to upgrade to the new version of Office, but they are out there. This was a sacred cow, and it is now hamburger backed up against the wall.
These two actions by Microsoft are proof of what I suggested three years ago. Microsoft has lost its ability to twist arms, and now it is going to die. It can't compete on level ground, so is left with backpedalling and discounts of almost 100 times.
What we are seeing is an unprecedented shift of power. It is also an unprecedented admission of failure. And the funniest part about the moves made? They are the wrong things to do. Microsoft is in deep trouble.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39087
Macintosh and iPod Drive Apple
Laurie J. Flynn
Apple Inc. surpassed even the most optimistic forecasts for its usually tepid second quarter, delivering an 88 percent increase in profit on strong sales of Macintosh computers and iPod music players.
The company said on Wednesday that its profit rose to $770 million from $410 million in the comparable quarter last year. Apple sold 1.5 million Macs in the quarter, a record for the company.
In an interview, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, called the quarter a “blowout,” and noted that the strong sales and market share gains came even though the company had not made any major upgrades to its lines of portable and desktop computers.
“The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent — more than three times the industry growth rate,” Mr. Jobs said. Overall personal computer sales increased only about 11 percent during the quarter, according to the market researcher IDC.
Apple’s strength was particularly notable in that it came during the quarter in which Microsoft finally released the long-awaited Vista version of its Windows operating system, an event that the PC industry was counting on to spur a wave of computer upgrades.
Mr. Jobs noted that Dell had recently returned an earlier version of Windows to its product line, which he said was an indication that demand for Vista had not been overwhelming.
Apple reported revenue of $5.26 billion, an increase of more than 20 percent over the $4.36 billion in the same period last year. Per-share profit increased to 87 cents from 47 cents.
On average, analysts were expecting earnings of 64 cents a share on sales of $5.17 billion for the quarter, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.
Apple executives said the company benefited from lower component costs, as well as surging demand for notebook computers. Of Apple’s total computer sales, 59 percent were notebooks.
The earnings report sent shares of Apple up more than 7 percent to $102.44 in after-hours trading on Wednesday, topping the $100 mark for the first time. The shares rose $2.11 to close at $95.35 in the regular trading session.
It was Apple’s profitability during the quarter that most impressed Wall Street analysts. Its gross profit margin reached 35.1 percent, up from 29.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. Company executives said it was the company’s most profitable second quarter ever. Sales typically slow in the second quarter as it comes between the holidays and buying for school in the fall.
“They’re defying the laws of gravity when it comes to profitability,” said Eugene A. Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief finance officer, told analysts +that he expected gross margins to decline during the third quarter, to about 32 percent. Apple tends to sell lower margin computers to school districts in the third quarter, and component prices are also expected to be higher, he said.
In the third quarter the company expects revenue to climb to about $5.1 billion and earnings to reach about 66 cents a share, slightly lower than analysts’ forecasts.
Mr. Munster said the appeal of the Macintosh was clearly expanding beyond its traditional niche. “There’s a global shift in how people see personal computers — for entertainment, creativity and good looks,” Mr. Munster said. “Apple has found that sweet spot, and with almost no competition.”
Apple said Mac sales accounted for 56 percent of revenue during the second quarter, with music-related products, including iPods and iTunes sales accounting for the other 44 percent.
Apple sold 10.5 million iPods during the quarter. Earlier this month the company said it had sold a total of 100 million iPods.
Apple had earlier said it was delaying the release of the next version of its Mac operating system, called Leopard, because it needed to divert resources to its iPhone project. The iPhone is scheduled to ship in late June, through an agreement with Cingular, and cost between $500 and $600. Mr. Oppenheimer said that because Apple planned to deliver periodic software enhancements to the iPhone, accounting rules would require it to book deferred revenue and costs and amortize both over a two-year period.
Apple said it ended the second quarter with $12.6 billion in cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/te...apple-web.html
Microsoft Reaps Vista's Dividends
Robert A. Guth
Microsoft Corp.'s 65% jump in fiscal third-quarter earnings and an upbeat forecast for the next year point to solid gains from the company's long-delayed Windows Vista operating system.
But a hefty chunk of the third-quarter revenue was deferred from the quarter ended in December, when the company issued coupons to personal-computer buyers that could be redeemed for Windows Vista this calendar year. Questions also remain about the impact of a recent accounting change, which could allow Microsoft to recognize revenue from the new operating system more quickly than in the past.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1177..._whats_news_us
Russinovich: Malware Will Thrive, Even With Vista’s UAC
Ryan Naraine
Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, a senior Microsoft official is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system.
Mark Russinovich (right), technical fellow in Microsoft's Platform and Services Division, used the spotlight of the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver to discuss the implementation of UAC (User Account Control) in Windows Vista and made it clear that the feature is not meant to be a security barrier.
"It's a best effort to raise the bar and stop malware from making changes to the operating system but it's not a security boundary," Russinovich said of UAC, the oft-criticized mechanism that requires that all users run without full admin rights.
In a straightforward assessment of the threat landscape in a Vista world, Russinovich described malware authors as ISVs that will code for a standard user environment.
"There is no guarantee that malware can't hijack the elevation process or compromise an elevated application," Russinovich said after providing a blow-by-blow description of how UAC works in tandem with Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) to limit the damage from malicious files.
Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.
"We'll see malware developing its own elevation techniques," Russinovich said. He demonstrated a social engineering attack scenario where a fake elevation prompt can be used to trick users into clicking "allow" to give elevated rights to a malicious file.
He predicted a world where malware authors create programs that elevate rights to jump accounts and disable security or develop general and application-specific elevation hijacking.
"You will see malware spoofing over-the-shoulder credential prompt and even launching a medium integrity level process int he administrator's account," Russinovich said.
At this level, the malware author has access to all the administrators data and can inject itself into the admin's account (e.g. the Runkey) to use additional elevation techniques.
"The malware author will say, 'I can live in a Vista world without needing to take over the entire box'. They will end up thriving in the standard user environment, setting up botnets, grabbing your keystrokes," he declared.
Russinovich stressed that UAC's fundamental contribution is to make it possible (in most cases) to run as standard user to protect the system and other users on the system.
"Elevations are a convenience and not a security boundary," Russinovich reiterated, hinting that Windows will evolve further to promote the standard user concept with things like per-user installations and secure elevations.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175
Wi-Fi Startup Inks First U.S. ISP Deal
Jessica Mintz
In a big win for a little Wi-Fi startup called Fon, Time Warner Cable Inc. will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hotspots, a practice shunned by most U.S. Internet service providers.
For Fon, which has forged similar agreements with ISPs across Europe, the deal will boost its credibility with U.S. consumers. For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available.
Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running.
In the fall of 2006, Fon, which counts Google Inc. and eBay Inc.'s Skype among its investors, started selling and sometimes giving away its own branded wireless router, called La Fonera. Since then, it has distributed about 370,000 of them worldwide.
La Fonera splits a Wi-Fi connection in two: an encrypted channel for the Fonero and a public one for neighbors or passers-by. Foneros can decide how much of their bandwidth to share with the public and can log on to any Fon router without charge. "Aliens," as Fon calls nonmembers, can register on a Web page and pay a modest $2 or $3 for 24 hours of access.
In the U.S., where it costs $10 for a day pass to use a T-Mobile HotSpot at a Starbucks, Fon's economics seem particularly appealing.
Joanna Rees, chief executive of Fon USA, said such rates at coffee shops, airports and hotels might work for a business person with an expense account but are too high for people who just want to quickly check e-mail, make a call on a Wi-Fi phone or play on a wireless video game device.
"They're extorting people," Rees said.
Starbucks Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. representatives responded that they provide a premium service, and that customers see value in paying for speed, security and reliability.
Fon has about 60,000 Foneros in the U.S. In February, the company launched "Fonbucks," a one-month router giveaway aimed at people who live above or next-door to a Starbucks. It was an amusing way to get more La Foneras into high-density areas, and it worked to the tune of 6,800 free routers.
But until now, ISPs in the U.S. have resisted the Fon model. Most big companies' end-user license agreements prohibit subscribers from sharing their connection outside the home or business. Verizon Communications Inc., for example, can terminate contracts if it finds an ad-hoc hotspot.
Those policies are antiquated and don't mesh with the reality of untold thousands of people using their neighbors' unsecured Wi-Fi connections, Rees argues.
"It's a dirty secret how much leeching" goes on, Rees said. She said ISPs should embrace Fon because the routers, which require that "aliens" enter a valid credit card number before getting online, put a sharp stop to the leeching. And getting free access to the worldwide network of La Fonera routers encourages people to get or keep a broadband connection at home.
In the Time Warner deal expected to be announced Monday, Fon and the cable company will split what "aliens" pay to use the hotspots. Rees said the two companies are still working out details on how the partnership will be marketed. Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Maureen Huff confirmed the broad outlines of the deal but declined to discuss any details.
Time Warner may be looking ahead to the not-so-distant future when some of the 300 or so municipal wireless projects -- featuring free or at least inexpensive broadband -- being considered today become reality.
Godfrey Chua of the research group IDC said the threat is most serious to ISPs that still offer dial-up access, because budget-minded customers who don't need a fast home connection might be swayed by the access-everywhere advantage of municipal Wi-Fi.
Still, that doesn't mean ISPs should start knocking down Fon's door, Chua said. After all, it's unclear whether a revenue-sharing agreement with Fon would offset the added costs of supporting all the additional traffic that Wi-Fi users would bring to a broadband network.
So while Fon's value grows as the number of Foneros increases, so does the burden on the ISPs. Chua compares Fon's situation to two popular Internet phone providers, Skype and Vonage Holdings Corp.
"Both of those folks so far have been allowed to do what they're doing because the traffic loads created haven't been so onerous for the service providers," Chua said. "As soon as that becomes a pain point for the ISPs, they're going to clamp down on it."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8OMI8E02.htm
Vonage Wins Permanent Stay of Patent Ruling
"Business as usual" for VoIP pioneer as it awaits appeal in Verizon case
Jim Duffy
Vonage this week received a permanent stay of injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C. that would have barred it from signing up new customers.
Vonage sought the stay following an April 6 decision by the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. enjoining the company from using certain VoIP technology to add new customers. The court ruled that the VoIP technology Vonage was using infringed on three patents awarded to Verizon.
The permanent stay enables Vonage to add new customers as the company pursues an appeal to that ruling. Existing customers remain unaffected by the company's ongoing patent litigation, Vonage said.
"We thank the appellate court for its thoughtful consideration of the merits of our case," said Jeffrey Citron, Vonage chairman and interim CEO, in a statement. "It's business as usual for us."
Some Vonage users believe they won a stay too -- but only a temporary one.
"It's a breather for Vonage, but only that," says Mark Leahy, a project manager for IBM Global Service's American IT services department.
"I don't see it as the end of the argument -- just a way for Vonage to survive until they resolve the rest of the case (and the Sprint case, too)," he says. "Right now, anything extending Vonage's survival is good news for them, and thus for me."
Vonage will continue to serve existing customers by paying into escrow a quarterly royalty of 5.5% throughout the appeals process and by posting a $66 million bond as required by the court. The company says its current cash position allows it to pay these fees to secure the stay as it continues to make progress on workaround solutions and pursues its legal appeal over the coming months.
Vonage says it remains “highly confident” in the strength of its appeal.
The company said it believes the original verdict defined the patents in an overly broad in a “legally unprecedented way." Vonage said it believes the district court's decisions repeatedly neglected well-established law on claim construction and, as a result, artificially expanded the coverage of Verizon's patents beyond what was intended by the patent trademark process.
Vonage believes the appeals court will interpret the patents correctly.
"We continue to believe we have not infringed on any of Verizon's technology and remain optimistic that we will ultimately prevail in this litigation," Citron stated.
Verizon was not immediately available for comment.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...nent-stay.html
AT&T Riding High on Merger, Wireless Revenues
Katherine Noyes
AT&T doubled its earnings in 2007's Q1. The company's net income was $2.8 billion, compared with $1.4 billion during the same period a year ago. AT&T also reported gains in wireless data revenue, which was up 66.8 percent over the same quarter a year ago, and reductions in subscriber "churn," or the rate at which subscribers drop the service.
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AT&T (NYSE: T) reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2007 on Tuesday, including doubling its earnings over those from the same quarter a year ago.
The San Antonio-based company reported net income of US$2.8 billion, or 45 cents per share, for the period ending March 31, compared with $1.4 billion, or 37 cents per share, a year ago.
Behind those rosy results are the acquisition of BellSouth (NYSE: BLS) -- which the company said resulted in savings of about $300 million in the first quarter -- along with growth in wireless revenue, which was up to $10 billion, an increase of more than 11 percent since last year.
Less 'Churn'
AT&T acquired BellSouth last year for $67 billion; this was the company's first full quarter since the merger took place.
"We had an outstanding start to the year," said Edward E. Whitacre Jr., AT&T chairman and chief executive officer. "Merger integration is on track, volumes continue to be solid and we expanded margins in both wireless and wireline."
AT&T also reported gains in wireless data revenue, which was up 66.8 percent over the same quarter a year ago, and reductions in subscriber "churn," or the rate at which subscribers drop the service. Average monthly subscriber churn for AT&T's postpaid wireless customer base was 1.3 percent in the first quarter -- its best rate ever, down from 1.6 percent in the year-ago quarter and 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006.
"They beat our estimates by 5 cents thanks to cost savings and a faster share-buyback program," Standard & Poor's analyst Todd Rosenbluth told the E-Commerce Times. "We think these trends are going to continue throughout 2007."
Cause for Concern?
The number of new subscribers added to AT&T's wireless service was the one area that caused some widespread disappointment among observers, with 1.2 million added in the first quarter, for a total of 62.2 million. That's up 11.5 percent, but many analysts were hoping for gains more like 1.5 million, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King told the E-Commerce Times.
"Certainly wireless growth disappointed the street, and that had a negative impact," King said, though the numbers were in line with his firm's expectations.
The company's shares were down 56 cents to $39.21 in early afternoon trading on Tuesday.
"Compared with prior periods, the growth was a little more limited," agreed Rosenbluth. However, when growth exceeded the 1.5 million mark in the past, it was generally through prepaid customer growth, he noted, whereas in this quarter's report, much of the growth came from postpaid customers, he said. "We think the postpaid market is the most important for the company. It bodes well that that's where it's seeing gains."
Looking Ahead
AT&T's traditional wireline business is facing challenges, Rosenbluth said. "More important, however, the stock has been an extremely strong performer," he added. Standard & Poor's currently has a hold rating on the stock.
Stifel Nicolaus also has a hold rating on AT&T stock, King said, and that has been in place since before the first-quarter report. "I don't think there's anything that's hugely impactful one way or the other out of these numbers," he stated. "It was largely in line."
Because AT&T has excluded so many costs from its pro forma, however -- amounting to roughly $2 billion, King said -- "It's a company that's difficult for us to get our arms around."
Moving forward, two factors could limit AT&T's top-line growth potential, King added. First, wireless penetration rates in the United States have reached about 80 percent, and could indicate slowing growth throughout the industry. Second, "we're beginning to see a slowdown in IT spending across the board," he said, "and that could pressure the top line even more."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/57057.html
AT&T Chief Who Weathered a Sea Change Is Retiring in June
Matt Richtel
When Edward E. Whitacre Jr. joined Southwestern Bell in 1963 as a facilities engineer, the land-line telephone was the state of the art and the Bell operating companies were dominant.
Yesterday, Mr. Whitacre announced that in June — after 44 years climbing the corporate ladder — he would retire as chief executive and chairman of AT&T.
The industry he leaves is markedly changed from the one he joined, given the breakup of the Bell System, the reconsolidation of the industry and the now-powerful influence of cellphones and the Internet. The land-line telephone business is in its decline.
Mr. Whitacre, 65, has not only survived the changes, but helped drive them by means of an aggressive acquisition strategy that turned AT&T into the world’s largest telecommunications provider.
AT&T said Mr. Whitacre would be succeeded by Randall L. Stephenson, currently the company’s chief operating officer. Mr. Stephenson, 47, began his own career with Southwestern Bell in 1982 in information technology and has held positions in finance, performance assurance and marketing.
Despite Mr. Whitacre’s prominent role in shaping AT&T, Wall Street investors and analysts appeared to take his departure in stride. They said AT&T under Mr. Whitacre’s leadership had been preparing employees and investors for a passing of the torch.
Mr. Stephenson inherits a company with a $240 billion market capitalization, one that Mr. Whitacre has built into a multifaceted telecommunications giant through an aggressive acquisition strategy. Its multibillion-dollar deals — most recently the acquisition of BellSouth — have been in keeping with Mr. Whitacre’s philosophy that his industry demands immense size and scale.
The change in command was announced at AT&T’s annual shareholder meeting in San Antonio, where the company is based.
Industry analysts said Mr. Stephenson tended to be more detail-oriented than his predecessor and had the kind of skills that would be in demand as AT&T sought to focus on execution, not acquisition.
The transition to Mr. Stephenson should be smooth, said Christopher C. King, a telecommunications industry analyst with Stifel Nicolaus.
“I’m not sure you’ll see any grand strategic shift,” he said. Mr. Stephenson “is very well thought of and has been a primary contact with Wall Street over the last several years.”
Mr. Whitacre will leave AT&T with a lucrative retirement package, according to a proxy statement filed last month. He has a pension valued at $84.7 million and has $73.8 million of previously earned pay in a deferred compensation plan.
A native Texan, Mr. Whitacre has been credited with transforming Southwestern Bell, the smallest of the seven Bells when he took it over in 1990, into SBC, a giant that acquired AT&T and took its name.
“No one has done more to reshape the telecommunications industry than Ed Whitacre,” said John Hodulik, an industry analyst with UBS Investment Bank. “He took what was probably the most disadvantaged of the Baby Bells and turned it into the largest telecommunications company in the world.”
For his part, Mr. Whitacre said recently in an interview with The New York Times that he felt comfortable at last with the breadth of his company.
“I’ve always been trying to put all the pieces together,” he said. “We’ve got them now.”
Mr. Stephenson echoed that sentiment in an interview yesterday, after the announcement of his promotion.
“The big building blocks are in place,” he said. “Our task is laid before us: execute. We have to integrate these businesses.”
Wall Street has backed Mr. Whitacre’s acquisition strategy by sending the stock on a steady two-year rise to the high $30s from the low $20s. The stock finished regular trading yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange at $38.64, down 32 cents.
The company still faces considerable long-term challenges in light of fundamental changes overtaking the industry. Thanks in large part to Internet and mobile technology, which is allowing less expensive and more versatile communications, AT&T and its competitors have been forced to find new ways to maintain a growing chunk of the lucrative monthly fees Americans pay to stay connected and entertained.
The fiercest competition now comes from cable companies, which have bolstered their traditional television service with Internet and phone service.
One aspect of AT&T’s response has been the introduction of a television service called U-verse that it has just begun introducing around the country. It has only 20,000 customers and is adding 2,000 a week.
Mr. King said a crucial question facing AT&T and Mr. Stephenson was whether that product, which relies on sending programming over broadband lines, would be an effective competitor in the future.
“One of the major challenges is whether their video strategy, U-verse, will ultimately be enough for consumers five or 10 years down the line,” Mr. King said.
Mr. Stephenson said in the interview yesterday that he saw his own greatest operational challenge as making a success of U-verse. “That’s absolutely critical,” he said. “We have really just begun.”
Mr. Stephenson said he was “humbled” to be following Mr. Whitacre.
AT&T has 66.5 million land-based telephone lines, 61 million wireless subscribers, 12 million broadband lines, and sells local phone service in 22 states. Its market capitalization is double that of the nearest American competitor, Verizon Communications, at $110 billion.
Mr. Whitacre took home about $31.5 million in pay last year, according to the recent proxy filing, about 94 percent more than the $16.2 million that he earned in 2005. AT&T shareholders, on the other hand, saw a total return of about 53 percent, including reinvested dividends.
His compensation has rankled some corporate watchdogs who have said Mr. Whitacre was overpaid during the telecommunications downturn that followed the dot-com bust. Mr. Hodulik, the analyst from UBS, defended Mr. Whitacre’s retirement package, saying it reflected a career of contribution.
“Ed has worked there the majority of his life and done a huge amount to build value for shareholders,” Mr. Hodulik said. “Look at the length and depth of his contribution.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/te...y/28phone.html
Harman to Be Acquired by KKR and Goldman Sachs
Jeremy W. Peters
Harman International Industries, the maker of JBL speakers, Harman Kardon home theater systems and Infiniti car stereos, agreed to be acquired by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs in a deal worth about $8 billion, the companies said today.
Owners of Harman stock would receive $120 a share, a 17 percent premium over the closing price on Wednesday. Shares of Harman rose more than 19 percent, above the offer price, suggesting that investors may be anticipating a higher rival offer. Harman can solicit competing bids for 50 days under terms of the agreement.
For Sidney Harman, the 88-year-old founder of the company, who owns about 5 percent of its stock, the sale does not mark the end his long personal stake in the business, which he started in 1953. As part of the deal, which is expected to be finalized this summer, he will remain as executive chairman.
Mr. Harman has sold the company before, once for $100 million in 1977 after he joined the Carter administration as an assistant commerce secretary. (His wife, Jane Harman, is a United States representative from California.) The company performed poorly under the owners at the time, the Beatrice Company, and Mr. Harman bought it back in 1980 for $55 million.
The deal with KKR and Goldman contains a unique provision, known as a stub, under which shareholders of Harman can choose to receive part of their payment in the form of stock in the new company. They would then have a share of any profits if the firm is sold or taken public again. This provision — the first in a major deal in the United States — could result in Harman’s current shareholders owning as much as 27 percent of the new company.
“Our board of directors strongly believes that this transaction will create attractive long-term opportunities for our employees, customers and business partners,” Mr. Harman said in a written statement today.
KKR and Goldman are buying the company while its fortunes are on the rise. Harman reported today that its profits for its fiscal third quarter, which ended on March 31, increased 11 percent, to $71 million. Sales rose across each of Harman’s operating divisions, the company said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/business/27audio.html
G.E. Should Shed NBC, Citi Analyst Says
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Some Citigroup analysts have big plans for General Electric, the world’s second-largest company by market capitalization after ExxonMobil.
The giant conglomerate, which makes jet engines, provides commercial loans and brings “The Apprentice” to the world each week, should sell its NBC Universal media group as well as other business units, Citigroup analysts said in a research report published Friday. Citi’s Jeffrey Sprague said a string of big divestitures would turn the company into a “focused infrastructure juggernaut” and might fix its lackluster stock performance, which G.E. chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt recently called “frustrating.”
A partial breakup could value G.E. and its offspring at $45 per share, up nearly 26 percent from Thursday’s close, Mr. Sprague estimated.
The Citi report argued that G.E. should focus on its infrastructure-related businesses. That would mean spinning off its GE Money arm and a sale or spinoff of its real estate business as well.
While conglomerates were once in vogue, breakups have become a popular strategy for boosting share prices at companies with diverse businesses. In many cases, the units that are spun off become takeover targets for other companies.
Cendant last year divided itself into four pieces, and Tyco International is in the process of carving itself up. Cadbury-Schweppes, under pressure from activist investors, recently agreed to split into two separate companies: a drinks business and a candy business.
NBC has been the top network in news and late-night programs, but it trails its rivals in prime time. Thanks to recent hits such as “The Office,” however, NBC’s prime-time lineup has started to show some gains.
In February, The New York Post reported that Mr. Immelt might look to sell NBC if it did not significantly improve in the next 12 months. Bob Wright, who in February said he was stepping down as NBC Universal’s chairman and chief executive, told The Post “if the business doesn’t have good prospects, as with any business within G.E., it is going to come under a lot of scrutiny.”
A day later, however, Mr. Immelt called the Post report “made-up stupid drivel.”
“I don’t know how to be clearer. We’re here to stay and here to play,” he said.
If G.E. did sell NBC, it would end a relationship that has lasted more than two decades. General Electric acquired NBC in 1986 as part of its takeover of RCA. Mr. Sprague said the NBC business is a “distraction” for G.E. and “has no meaningful synergy with the rest of the portfolio”. He continued:
Immelt and team have done an excellent job playing the hand they were dealt. However, valuation has been trending lower again reflecting the cumulative effect of investor frustration over earnings quality issues and setbacks at NBC, Reinsurance, subprime mortgages. At the end of the day, G.E. has to deliver shareholder returns.
Based on estimated net income of nearly $1.9 billion in 2007, Mr. Sprague calculates that NBC Universal could have an equity value of about $37.7 billion. He put the equity value of GE Money, which began as a small captive finance company to help consumers buy G.E. appliances, at about $63 billion.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-analyst-says/
Spot remover
A Commercial Radio Station in Texas, KZPS, is Getting Rid of the Ads
Andrew Adam Newman
Facing increasing competition from satellite radio and iPods, Clear Channel Communications is trying something radically different at a commercial radio station in Texas: getting rid of the commercials.
As of Monday, KZPS in Dallas — on the dial at 92.5 FM or online at lonestar925.com — will no longer run traditional 30- or 60-second advertisements. Instead, advertisers sponsor an hour of programming, during which a disc jockey will promote its product conversationally in what the company calls integration.
For example, the disc jockey will identify Southwest Airlines, one of the station's first advertisers, as the sponsor at the beginning of the program. In a prototype provided by the station, the disc jockey later discusses the South by Southwest music festival, a popular annual event held in Austin, Texas, and concludes, "You know, the best way to get down to Austin for South by Southwest is Southwest Airlines. They have tons of flights. It's the way I travel."
The product-themed chitchat will account for about two minutes peppered throughout the hour, in contrast to the 12 minutes to 16 minutes of commercials that most stations broadcast each hour.
Advertisers will own not just the hour but also their categories. The station has four initial sponsors — Southwest Airlines, AT&T, Coors Brewing and Guitar Center — and will not sell advertising space to other airlines, phone companies, breweries or musical instrument stores.
Clear Channel's move is not unprecedented. In 2005, three stations near New York owned by the Morey Organization experimented with a similar model but eventually returned to conventional commercials.
"At a time like this, it's easier to postulate sponsorships and product placement than actually walk away from your spot-advertising revenue," said Sean Ross, a radio analyst with Edison Media Research.
While commercial radio stations once had automobile drivers' ears all to themselves, competition today is intense. The satellite companies Sirius and XM offer scores of noncommercial stations, and new cars are increasingly factory-equipped to play iPods.
"People are not as willing to listen to the commercials, and soon we'll have the Internet streaming directly into cars," said Robert Unmacht, a radio consultant based in Nashville, Tennessee.
He called the Dallas station's sponsorship approach "an interesting experiment and I applaud them for it. The key is to give it enough time to develop it, which is hard in a world that's judged in 13-week periods."
J.D. Freeman, market manager for the Dallas station, said Clear Channel intended to give the experiment some time to show a profit.
"Corporate has insulated us from having to get everything done in the next 90 days," Freeman said. "It's going to take a while to get the revenue model revved up, but we believe we'll be successful in Dallas."
Success would be most welcome for the station, which according to Arbitron slipped to 17th place in the autumn of 2006, the most recent ratings period, from 7th in the fall of 2000, when Clear Channel acquired it.
Shareholders of Clear Channel are to vote on a $19.4 billion takeover bid from Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital Partners on May 8. Clear Channel owns about 1,150 radio stations.
The Dallas station is also overhauling its format, switching from classic rock to a Texas-inflected rock-country hybrid. An average hour will include the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Drive-By Truckers. That, too, is raising eyebrows.
"In a major market, for a classic rock station to change formats is really an anomaly," said Fred Jacobs, a radio industry consultant from Detroit who helped popularize the classic rock format.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...radio-asia.php
Congress May Loosen Noose on Internet Radio
Bill seeks to reverse Copyright Royalty Board decision
Austin Modine
A bill introduced in Congress today could nullify the new rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) which advocates say would put webcasters out of business.
Rep. Jay inslee (D-WA) and Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL) have headed the "Internet Radio Equality Act," which aims to stop the controversial March 2 decision which puts royalty of a .08 cent per song per listener, retroactively from 2006 to 2010 on internet radio.
Advocates have dreaded the CRB ruling, which they say could raise rates between 300 to 1200 per cent for webcasters. Earlier this month, the CRB threw out an appeal by commercial webcasters, National Public Radio and others to review the new rates and postpone a May 15 deadline for the introduction of the royalty schedule.
If passed, today's bill would set new rates at 7.5 per cent of the webcaster's revenue— the same rate paid by satellite radio. Alternatively, webcasters could decide to pay 33 cents per hour of sound recordings transmitted to a single user.
"The illogical and unrealistic royalty rates set by the CRB have placed the future of an entire industry in jeopardy," said Jake Ward of the SaveNetRadio coalition. "This bill is a critical step to preserve this vibrant and growing medium, and to develop a truly level playing field where webcasters can compete with satellite radio."
The bill would also reset royalty rules for non-profit radio such as NPR. Public radio would be required present a report to Congress on how it should determine rates for their internet streaming media.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04...ct_introduced/
VJs for the Digital Age
Andreas Tzortzis
Media traditionalists already struggling with the transition to the digital world would not have liked the DVD playing on Wolfgang Stoltz's office computer screen.
It was the first episode of "24 Stunden - My Story," a new series the seasoned television journalist helped to produce for the German private TV channel Sat.1. Filmed by so-called video journalists, each of whom acted simultaneously as sound engineer, camera operator and producer, its first-person narratives take into the news mainstream a format that has been associated until now with reality shows and MTV.
Armed with lightweight cameras and laptops, the video journalists not only film the stories, but report and edit them as well.
Stoltz, a producer at Sat.1 for more than a decade, said he believed that viewers wanted the distance reduced between viewers and journalists. "They have the desire to have the world explained to them not by us, but by the protagonist," he said.
Once the exclusive territory of war correspondents and "parachute" journalists who needed the flexibility of a small camera and a laptop editing suite to file stories from hot spots, video journalism and its close-encounter format are now gaining currency at television stations around the world.
Falling prices for high-quality digital video cameras, the popularity of video streaming on the Web and viewers' apparent thirst for intimate, no-holds-barred television have accompanied the rise of the new approach.
As video journalism grows, unions and television traditionalists are watching with some wariness. The new technology might promise lower costs and higher flexibility, but it also signals the loss of jobs that have been around since the dawn of television.
"For those people who spent their lives as functionaries, dragging equipment around, holding cameras, they are facing the end of their careers," said Michael Rosenblum, president of Rosenblum Associates, his video journalism consultancy based in New York. "And they're not pleased about this."
If video journalists have a chief lobbyist, and critics their pariah, it is Rosenblum. An early advocate of the technology, the former freelance television journalist who took solo trips to some of the world's crisis regions began a new career training radio and television journalists to operate cameras and produce stories by themselves in 1990.
To hear the native New Yorker tell it, the advent of video journalism is comparable to the encroachment of the Web on the newspaper industry or, with a further historical leap, the threat of the Gutenberg press for town criers. The upheaval is as painful as the change is inevitable, he said.
"With Web 2.0, the Web is starting to impinge on broadcasters and they're just where newspapers were 10 years ago - in denial," he said.
In Rosenblum's view, the advantages of video journalism are obvious: Costs drop as three-person teams are reduced to one, a heavy $60,000 camera is reduced to a small one that costs $3,500, and a $5,000 editing room is replaced by a $1,500 laptop. In addition, Rosenblum said, solo video journalists are able to get closer to their subjects and are able to pounce quickly when a story takes a new direction.
He has found a willing audience in Europe, where his clients include the BBC, RTV Utrecht in Holland, the Belgian multimedia broadcaster Concentra and stations in Sweden and Germany.
RTV Utrecht, a regional commercial station and a Rosenblum client, became the first in the Netherlands to retrain their entire staff as video journalists. The editor in chief, Wim Kramer, said that his station wanted to "take television closer to our viewers."
"We don't have hot news items every day in Holland. We're a regional station," Kramer said. "Although I have 24 minutes for news every day, it's not 24 minutes of news - it's 24 minutes of storytelling. And people enjoy it."
Video journalist storytelling for RTV has included following a singer through process of his first stage appearance, but the station has also seen the benefits of video journalists for breaking news.
Within minutes of a riot in early April in which one person died, RTV had footage on its Internet site from a video journalist sent to the scene.
"We had 20,000 viewers on the site at the same time," Kramer said, adding that the station's share of broadcast viewers has increased from 14 percent to 20 percent since it started using video journalists.
The Web might be the eventual home of future video journalists, but for now it is regional broadcasters - with their emphasis on shorter, softer news stories and their limited budgets - that have been the quickest to benefit.
The BBC and other major broadcasters are starting to follow suit. The most well-known BBC video journalist, Mike Kraus, produces "The Golden Pin," a regionally broadcast show telling stories about people he meets on the streets of London.
"I think there will be more and more people who work alone as video journalists," said Stefan Kämpf, who has been training video journalists at Deutsche Welle, the German government-funded broadcaster for foreign markets, since 2003. "But as far as a change of guard, or as Rosenblum says, a 'paradigm shift,' " he said, "that's nonsense."
At the moment, Deutsche Welle sees video journalism more as an addition to its current offerings than as a replacement, though Kämpf said that the cost benefits are persuasive.
"If the quality isn't great, that's fine," Kämpf said of the video stories he receives from freelance video journalists. "They're cheap, and that argument counts for a lot in television nowadays."
Unions have so far taken a measured approach to the new technology. Though concerned about a drop in quality and accuracy when one person does the job of three, the unions ver.di in Berlin and Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union in London have also encouraged their members to get retrained as video journalists.
"All we can do is advise our people to prepare for digitalization," said Ines Kühn, a ver.di spokeswoman. "Job profiles are changing, and that's very normal."
The change is not coming without some difficulty. As reluctant as journalists have been to toting cameras around, so have trained camera people, film editors and engineers found it hard to slip into a journalist's skin.
"Many of them have a very strong division between their private and professional lives," Kämpf said, referring to the round-the-clock demands required of a journalist reporting a story. "I tell them: 'If you want to work as video journalists, then the emphasis has to be on journalist.' "
There are other factors that speak against a future where most television news will be shot by a journalist working solo. Out-of-focus shots and camera wobbles will be on full display as European television stations move closer to replacing traditional TV with high-definition programming.
There are few wobbles in the first episode of "My Story," in which Stoltz follows around a 23-year-old Berlin native taking her first job as a concierge at a hotel in Vietnam. If the occasional shot is out of focus, Stoltz said, viewers "accept it, because you're able to get that close."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/22/news/video.php
Jobs Says Apple Customers Not Into Renting Music
Duncan Martell
Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple's wildly popular iTunes online music store.
"Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. "The subscription model has failed so far."
His comments come as the company he co-founded gears up for contract renewal negotiations with the major record labels over the next month.
Since Apple launched iTunes in 2003, it has sold more than 2.5 billion songs and now offers increasing numbers of television shows and movies.
Many in the music industry hope iTunes will ultimately start, in effect, renting music online, so record companies can make more money from recurring income. But Jobs said he had seen little consumer demand for that.
"People want to own their music," he said.
Industry executives and analysts told Reuters last week that they expect Apple to push for further concessions from record companies on selling music without copy-protection software known as digital rights management (DRM).
In February, Jobs urged all four major record labels to drop DRM, a move that some observers at the time said was sparked by the pressure Apple faces from European regulators to open the iPod/iTunes family to other technology platforms.
Already Apple, owner of the market-leading iPod digital media player as well as iTunes, has cut an early deal with EMI Group Plc, the third largest-record company, to sell music without copy protection software.
"There are a lot of people in the other music companies who are very intrigued by it," Jobs said of the move to sell songs without copy-protection software. "They're thinking very hard about it right now."
The Apple/EMI deal leaves Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment -- a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann -- and Warner Music Group Corp. in a tough spot, analysts say.
"We've said by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions," Jobs said. "I think we're going to achieve that."
(Additional reporting by Yinka Adegoke in New York)
http://www.reuters.com/article/reute...46496120070426
From February
Apple's Bid to end Music Piracy Protection May Signal End to Copyright System
Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computers, has issued a challenge to the music industry, saying Apple would support an open online music marketplace if the four-largest music companies would drop the use of digital-rights management software — the technology that prevents the copying of music sold online.
Jobs' challenge, which some consider shocking, is just the latest brick to fall in the inevitable collapse of a legal wall that since 1999 has been obstructing technological progress and preventing people from enjoying more and better music at a lower price, suggests Michele Boldrin, Ph.D., an economist who studies the hidden costs of intellectual property rights protections.
Boldrin and David K. Levine, Ph.D., both professors of economics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, are co-authors of a number of academic articles and a forthcoming book arguing that intellectual monopoly — patents, copyrights and restrictive licensing agreements — should be swept away.
Their theories, also deemed controversial, call for the eventual abolition of most intellectual property right protections. They view Jobs' plea for the abolition of the digital rights management (DRM) system as validation of their call for a new approach to intellectual property, one necessitated by the Internet's power to make digital content readily available worldwide.
In an open letter on Apple's Web site Feb. 6, Steve Jobs seems to concur with arguments put forth by Boldrin and Levine, suggesting "DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."
Music companies, Jobs argues, receive few benefits from selling 90 percent of their music on CDs, which don't have DRM software built in, and the remaining amount online with DRM technology. Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes Music Store is currently listed as the world top-selling online music store with more than 2 billion songs sold.
Wall is coming down, one brick at a time
Boldrin and Levin argue that there is plenty of money — in fact, probably more money than there has ever been — in distributing and selling digital content via the Web without the obstacles created either by DRM or by any similar attempt to prevent people to do what they want with the digital files they lawfully purchased.
"Digital content can now be sold very efficiently and in very large quantities via the Web," Boldrin explains. "Copies of that same digital content can easily be made and distributed via the Web — hence they should be allowed to be made — without the obstructions that current "anti-piracy" regulations impose upon this economic activity.
"The cost reduction that digital-web distribution of music makes possible is so large, that a competitive market for music could leave plenty of room for charging the lawful purchaser of originals for the implicit value of the copies he/she will eventually donate or sell to others, again via the Web," Boldrin continues.
"Imposing copyright protection and anti-piracy restrictions, such as the DRM software, on this flourishing economic activity is a costly, silly and eventually useless tentative to block economic progress. To preserve the old rents of a few incompetent people who cannot, or are not willing to, adapt to the new ways of doing business is not the goal of a good property rights legislation.
"One brick at a time, the wall is coming down," Boldrin concludes. "It had to come down. Tower Records is gone, and soon the music industry as a whole will realize that distributing music via CDs or similar devices is also gone for good.
"The movie industry is, apparently, slowly learning the same lesson as Wal-Mart is entering a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site," Boldrin adds. "The bricks are being removed, one at a time, but the process is made slow and painful by the silly resistance of vested rent-seeking interests."
http://www.physorg.com/news90177994.html
Criminalising the Consumer
Where digital rights went wrong
IS IT legal to make a copy of that DVD you’ve just bought so the family can watch it around the home or in the car? In one of the most watched copyright cases in recent years, a judge in northern California ruled last month that copying DVDs for personal use was legal, given the terms of the industry’s licence and the way the copies were made.
The wider implication of the ruling remains clouded—not least because the DVD Copy Control Association, the loser in the case, has 60 days to appeal. But whatever the video industry may like to think, the writing is on the wall for copy protection.
Copyright is a tricky thing. It protects only the way that an author, designer, photographer, film-maker or composer has expressed himself. It does not cover the ideas or the factual information conveyed in the work.
What constitutes fair use or an infringement is trickier still. Much depends on the purpose and character of the borrowed material’s use. Limited reproduction for the purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research is considered fair game. But the wholesale repackaging of the content for commercial use is a flagrant infringement.
In America, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 made it legal for people to record copyrighted radio broadcasts for personal use. But while the act said nothing about making digital recordings, ripping copyrighted music tracks off CDs and storing them on an iPod has become an everyday occurrence. Despite the number of iTunes downloaded for a fee, Apple would be in trouble if people were prevented from transferring legitimately owned CDs to their iPods. The software Apple gives away to iPod customers is designed to let them do just that.
Most people think it ludicrous that they can’t do the same with the DVDs they own. Now it seems, despite squeals from the movie industry, the law is finally moving in the video fan’s favour.
The issue in the recent case was whether Kaleidescape, a maker of digital “jukeboxes” that store a person’s video and music collections and distribute the entertainment around the home, had breached the terms of the DVD Content Control Association’s CSS (content scrambling system) licence.
A Kaleidescape server stores digital content ripped from CDs and DVDs on its hard drive. The content is then encrypted and fed to various screens and speakers around the home by a secure cable. Kaleidescape claimed that content distributed this way was even safer than it was on the original polycarbonate disks. The judge not only agreed, but couldn’t find any breach of the copy-protection licence either.
If the case ends there, to all intents and purposes the notion of fair use would appear to apply to DVDs as well as CDs. The movie industry, which nowadays depends as much on DVD sales as on box-office receipts, still seems to think that making life difficult for its customers is a recipe for success.
After likewise shooting itself in the foot for ages, the record industry is now falling over itself to abandon DRM (digital rights management) on CDs. A number of online music stores such as eMusic, Audio Lunchbox and Anthology have given up using DRM altogether. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research, two out of three music industry executives in Europe reckoned that dropping DRM would improve sales.
The latest music publisher to do so is EMI, which announced in January that it had stopped producing CDs with DRM protection. “The costs of DRM,” it declared, “do not measure up to the results.”
In an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music”, even Steve Jobs, Apple’s charismatic boss and chief evangelist, recently called for the elimination of DRM. From this month, Apple’s iTunes will sell EMI’s highest quality recordings (those with sampling rates of 256 kilobits per second) without DRM for a small premium.
Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine copying plants that churn out pirate copies.
Now the copy protection on DVDs is proving just as easy to bypass. The biggest flop has been the CSS technology featured in the recent Kaleidescape case. It was first cracked back in 1999 by a Norwegian programmer called Jon Lech Johansen, who showed, in a few short lines of elegant code called DeCSS, just how trivial such lauded protection systems really were. Since then, even the DRM used to protect the new high-definition video disks (the Blu-ray format from the Sony camp and its HD-DVD rival from the Toshiba alliance) have been cracked wide open.
While most of today’s DRM schemes that come embedded on CDs and DVDs are likely to disappear over the next year or two, the need to protect copyrighted music and video will remain. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing this than treating customers as if they were criminals.
One of the most promising is Audible Magic’s content protection technology. Google is currently testing this to find the “fingerprints” of miscreants who have posted unauthorised television or movie clips on YouTube.
The beauty of such schemes is that they don’t actually prevent anyone from making copies of original content. Their purpose is simply to collect royalties when a breach of copyright has occurred. By being reactive rather than pre-emptive, normal law-abiding consumers are then left in peace to enjoy their music and video collections in any way they choose. Why couldn’t we have thought of that in the beginning?
http://www.economist.com/daily/colum...96421&fsrc=nwl
New England Bank Associations to Sue TJX Cos. Over Data Theft
Mark Jewell
Bank associations in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine said Tuesday they will sue TJX Cos. over a data theft that exposed at least 45 million credit and debit cards to potential fraud.
Banks have been saddled with costs to replace cards and cover fraudulent charges tied to the theft from TJX, the owner of nearly 2,500 discount stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. Since it disclosed the data theft three months ago, Framingham-based TJX has been hit with several lawsuits filed in the U.S. and Canada by consumers, financial institutions and investors.
The Massachusetts Bankers Association said the Connecticut Bankers Association, Maine Association of Community Banks and at least three individuals banks are joining in a lawsuit to be filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston. The associations represent nearly 300 banks.
Dan Forte, president and chief executive of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, said his organization will contact other state bank groups nationwide to see if they're interested in joining the lawsuit, which seeks class-action status.
The complaint will make an unfair trade practices claim under Massachusetts law alleging that TJX failed to adequately protect sensitive customer data, and misrepresented how it handled data.
TJX spokeswoman Sherry Lang said the company does not comment on pending litigation, but also said, "TJX will defend itself vigorously."
The Massachusetts Bankers Association said in January its members had been contacted by credit and debit card companies of fraudulent purchases tied to the TJX breach that had been made in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, and overseas in Hong Kong and Sweden. Reports continue to come in from "around the world," bankers association spokesman Bruce Spitzer said.
Spitzer said the banks will try to recover "tens of millions of dollars," although the damages the banks ultimately will seek depends on future expenses from replacing cards and covering fraudulent purchases.
On Jan. 17, TJX disclosed a breach of its computer systems by an unknown hacker or hackers who accessed card data from transactions as long ago as late 2002. On March 28, TJX said at least 45.7 million of its shoppers' cards had been compromised. Independent organizations that track data thefts say the TJX case is believed to be the largest in the U.S. based on the number of customer records compromised.
TJX says about three-quarters of the 45.7 million cards had either expired by the time of the theft, or the stolen information didn't include security code data from the cards' magnetic stripes. However, TJX also has said the intruders could have tapped the unencrypted flow of information to card issuers as customers checked out with their credit cards.
The company and the U.S. Secret Service are investigating. The only arrests so far have come in Florida, where 10 people who aren't believed to be the TJX hackers are accused of using stolen TJX customer data to buy Wal-Mart gift cards.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...04-24-19-03-39
Spy Act Only Protects Vendors and Their DRM
Ed Foster
Here we go again. Congress has decided it needs to protect us from spyware, but - surprise, surprise - the bill they are most seriously considering actually offers no help in that regard. What's worse, the bill seems designed to make it harder for you to legally go after those who spy on you, particularly if they are doing so to determine if you're authorized to use a software product.
Last week a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved H.R. 964, the Spy Act, which bans some of the more blatant forms of spyware such as those that hijack computer or log keystrokes. The bill now goes to the full committee for approval, and it's expected to move quickly as it has strong bipartisan support.
But why? There are already plenty of federal and state laws regarding computer fraud, trespass, and deceptive trade practices that make spyware illegal. The existing laws have been sufficient to allow the FTC and/or state attorneys general to even successfully go after some of the nastier adware companies like Direct Revenue and Zango/180 Solutions. So what is the purpose of this law?
A clue can be found in the Limitations section of the Act, which features this rather broad exception:
Exception Relating to Security- Nothing in this Act shall apply to--
(1) any monitoring of, or interaction with, a subscriber's Internet or other network connection or service, or a protected computer, by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service or interactive computer service, to the extent that such monitoring or interaction is for network or computer security purposes, diagnostics, technical support, or repair, or for the detection or prevention of fraudulent activities; or
(2) a discrete interaction with a protected computer by a provider of computer software solely to determine whether the user of the computer is authorized to use such software, that occurs upon -- (A) initialization of the software; or (B) an affirmative request by the owner or authorized user for an update of, addition to, or technical service for, the software.
In other words, it's perfectly OK for basically any vendor you do business with, or maybe thinks you do business with them for that matter, to use any of the deceptive practices the bill prohibits to load spyware on your computer. The company doesn't have to give you notice and it can collect whatever information it thinks necessary to make sure there's no funny business going on. And by the way, another exception provision specifically protects computer manufacturers from any liability for spyware they load on your computer before they send it to you. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Of course, the exception for software companies checking to make sure you're an authorized user is the strongest evidence of what this bill is all about. After all, in terms of function, there's not much difference between spyware and DRM. Too bad for Sony this bill wasn't already the law when its rootkit-infected CDs came to light.
Another disturbing aspect of the bill is its enforcement provisions. The bill very specifically pre-empts all state laws that regulate "unfair or deceptive conduct" similar to that covered by the Spy Act. Now, the state spyware laws are pretty useless anyway, so that may not seem like a big problem. But the bill vests all enforcement power in the FTC and says that "no person other than the Attorney General of a State may bring a civil action" under the law. Private rights of action under state consumer protection laws are eliminated. So if you're victimized by a spyware-like deception and want to sue the perpetrator, you've got to talk the FTC or your state attorney general into taking up your case.
Let's sum up. If the Spy Act become law, hardware, software, and network vendors will be granted carte blanche to use spyware themselves to police their customers' use of their products and services. Incredibly broad exceptions will probably allow even the worst of the adware outfits to operate with legal cover. State attempts to deal with the spyware problem will be pre-empted and enforcement left up almost entirely to the FTC. Gee, what's not to like in that deal?
If Congress' approach on this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. It's basically the same formula Congress adopted four years to deal with spam. As we know, the dreadful Can Spam Act of 2003 proved to be the "Yes, You Can Spam Act." If wiser heads in Congress don't prevail - and who knows if there are any - I fear the Spy Act of 2007 will just prove to be the "Vendors Can Spy Act."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripelin...cgd=2007-04-24
Suspended Deputy Convicted of Felony Eavesdropping
AP
A suspended sheriff's deputy was convicted Tuesday of felony eavesdropping for his unsanctioned investigation with computer spyware of a neighbor.
After a non-jury trial, acting state Supreme Court Justice Stephen Sirkin also convicted Investigator R. Michael Hildreth of misdemeanor official misconduct. He was acquitted of felony third-degree computer trespassing against the man he thought posed a threat to young girls in their suburban Rochester neighborhood.
Hildreth, 45, could face up to four years in prison at sentencing June 26. In 1999, he became one of the first Monroe County deputies assigned full-time to a computer crimes unit.
Prosecutors said Hildreth in 2005 sent Penfield neighbor James Missel an email about potential job prospects with an attachment that, when opened, planted the spyware program Blaster on Missel's computer, allowing the investigator to monitor every keystroke, Web site visited and chat room entered on the computer.
Hildreth also left a computer disk in his neighbor's mailbox, purportedly from the same potential employer, with the same job information. When inserted in the computer's disc drive, it also downloaded the spyware.
Hildreth was been suspended without pay from the sheriff's office since his arrest in June 2006.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Monaghan said a follow-up investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by Missel, who had volunteered for more than 30 years with a private school.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=
Poison Put Cover Songs Online
Poison is giving fans a sneak peak at its new covers album. The band has posted four songs online -- the Romantics' "What I Like About You," David Bowie's "Suffragette City," Sweet's "Little Willy," and the Marshall Tucker Band's "Can't You See." To listen to the full-length tracks, go to myspace.com/poison.
The tracks are among the 13 that will be included on the new album called Poison'd, which comes out June 5th. The record also features songs originally done by the Cars, the Rolling Stones, Kiss, Grand Funk Railroad, and Loggins & Messina.
Poison hits the road June 12th on a bill that also features Ratt.
In addition to the new album and tour, frontman Bret Michaels will be the star of a VH1 reality show in July called Rock Of Love With Bret Michaels, which will show him looking for his ideal woman.
http://www.therockradio.com/2007/04/...gs-online.html
Nine Inch Nails Releases Tracks on The Pirate Bay
Thomas Mennecke
Releasing Nine Inch Nail material online is an avenue the industrial rock band has been familiar with some time. Many tracks are readily available one the NIN.com website, downloadable via the traditional client/server method. However in a brief announcement made yesterday, a surprising element appeared. Not that new material was available for download, but that it was available via the BitTorrent protocol. Even more surprisingly, the torrents were uploaded to The Pirate Bay.
The Pirate Bay has been a quandary for the entertainment industry, as it has defiantly remained one of the largest - if not most popular - BitTorrent trackers/indexers. Despite a brief shut down in May of 2006, The Pirate Bay continues to remain a symbol of the P2P and BitTorrent community.
Although it has earned the scorn of the US entertainment industry, it appears that not all entertainers feel hostile towards the Swedish BitTorrent site - particularly Trent Reznor. Three audio tracks are currently being indexed by The Pirate Bay, "Capital G", "My Violent Heart", and "Me, I'm Not." This is an interesting move by NIN, and one that lends a hand of legitimacy to The Pirate Bay - as it shows that entertainers realize the importance of reaching out to their target audience.
http://www.slyck.com/story1461.html
Can Music Survive Inside the Big Box?
Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy tighten their grip on CDs as sales, choices, decrease
Ethan Smith
When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. informed record labels it was looking for CDs to include in a promotion of Jewish music last year, executives at Naxos of America Inc. leapt at the chance to get some of their ethnic recordings onto the shelves of the big-box retailer.
But within months of shipping thousands of CDs to Wal-Mart, the classical music distributor's loading docks were swamped with unsold copies of "Klezmer Concertos & Encores" and "Great Songs of the Yiddish Stage." Since they hadn't sold quickly enough to meet the retailing giant's standards, 80% of the CDs Naxos shipped to Wal-Mart were returned. Record stores typically return only 20%.
"In hindsight, if we'd thought about this a little more, we wouldn't have done it," says Naxos Chief Operating Officer Jim Selby. "Jewish classical music, going into a Wal-Mart store, it's pretty farfetched that we'd have 60% or 70% sell through." He adds, "It's niche-y music."
Music executives -- and not just those who traffic in obscure genres -- are in an increasing bind when it comes to selling their wares on CD. As dedicated music stores, including Tower Records, have closed up shop by the thousands, big, generalist chains like Wal-Mart, Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. have tightened their already firm grip on the sale of physical CDs. The chains order huge quantities of some titles, while other releases find it hard to get a foothold.
In past decades, deejays and music critics helped shape musical trends. Today, many music industry executives agree, the big boxes have become the new tastemakers. Even as compact disc sales fall, their choices dictate which CDs are widely available on store shelves across the U.S. Big boxes are the industry's biggest distribution channel -- and the rock, hip-hop, jazz and classical music titles they choose not to carry face drastically reduced chances of reaching mass audiences.
Thanks largely to aggressive pricing and advertising, big-box chains are now responsible in the U.S. for at least 65% of music sales (including online and physical recordings), according to estimates by distribution executives, up from 20% a decade ago. Where a store that depends on CDs for the bulk of its sales needs a profit margin of around 30%, big chains get by making just 14% on music, say label executives who handle distribution. One of these executives describes the shift as "a tidal wave." Despite the growth in online digital music sales, physical CDs still are the core of the recording industry, accounting for about 85% of music sales.
Big-box chains say they're trying to give customers what they want. "We also are making changes to the CD selections in our stores to reflect customer preferences in each market," says a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.
But some labels worry that the big boxes are becoming even more restrictive in what they carry. That's partly because, with CD sales falling steeply, the discs aren't as hot as other products the stores sell. Also in the wake of the Don Imus controversy, the debate over the lyrical content of rap, rock and pop has flared up again. Oprah Winfrey recently has focused on rap lyrics on her talk show.
Wal-Mart, for example, has long refused to carry any album bearing a "parental advisory" label warning of lyrics that are potentially inappropriate for minors. As a result, major record labels typically create sanitized versions of albums for sale there and at other sensitive retailers. People in the music industry, however, say some hip hop and rock albums can be difficult to sell to the big chain -- even if the releases lack controversial content. "Even Target's getting more difficult," says Jeff Rabhan, a talent manager who has pop and hip hop clients. "Especially with everything that's going on right now with Imus and Oprah, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get hip hop records prominently displayed and even in some cases stocked," Mr. Rabhan adds.
Wal-Mart's stores don't sell a number of prominent, popular releases, including the punk band Green Day's best-selling album "American Idiot," the critically acclaimed alternative rock band The Strokes' "First Impressions of Earth," and rapper Mos Def's "Black on Both Sides." A Wal-Mart spokeswoman says these releases aren't carried because edited versions aren't available.
The chains tend to emphasize fast-selling hits that move tens of thousands of units a week. A typical Best Buy stocks 8,000 to 20,000 different music CDs titles, according to Gary Arnold, the chain's senior vice president for entertainment. Some chains carry even fewer titles. By contrast, the biggest of the defunct Tower's 89 locations carried more than 100,000 titles. (Tower still has some online operations.)
It's not just classical music and jazz that have trouble making it into the big boxes. Up-and-coming pop, rock or hip hop acts are unlikely to be welcome until they are proven sellers. And back catalog titles are also feeling the squeeze; even the Beatles are frequently represented in big chain outlets by just one or two albums. That means there are fewer places than ever to buy any CDs but the newest, most heavily promoted titles.
What's more, as CD sales have slipped -- sales have plunged 20% so far this year -- big chains are starting to de-emphasize them. Best Buy's Mr. Arnold says his chain has reduced the square footage allotted to CDs across the chain over the past year, though the size of the reduction varies by store. "Certain businesses are starting to flourish at the expense of others," says Mr. Arnold. "Right now the hottest categories in entertainment are gaming and the movie business."
Recently, Wal-Mart has quietly circulated word to major-label distribution executives that it will reduce the space devoted to music, perhaps by as much 20%, in hundreds of its stores. Some record label executives say they have heard similar warnings in the past that have not materialized.
Managers and lawyers who work with record labels say that partly as a result of the big-box squeeze, labels have become more conservative in the kinds of artists they are willing to sign.
For his part, Best Buy's Mr. Arnold says the blame for waning consumer interest in CDs lies with the record labels, not with stores like his. "Music has become a commoditized item," he says. "The CD is perceived by the consumer to be a $10 item, and the manufacturers continue to release new titles at $15 to $18.98." To remedy that situation, he says he has urged labels to move to a "paperback-book model," with no-frills packages priced cheaply for most customers, and more deluxe presentations for die-hard fans.
Chain retailers are unlikely to eliminate music altogether. Big-box chains often set CD prices so low the retailer loses a dollar or two on the most aggressively priced titles. If nothing else, Mr. Arnold readily acknowledges, music remains cheap bait to lure customers who may end up purchasing, say, a brushed-steel refrigerator. "I couldn't imagine Best Buy without music," he says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1177..._editors_picks
Beyonce Song in Licensing Dispute
Alex Veiga
New shipments of a Beyonce album released earlier this month will not include a remake of the song "I'm Kissing You" until a dispute about legal clearances are resolved, the pop star's management company said Friday.
The company's decision came after a copyright infringement lawsuit was filed against the singer and her record label on behalf of the song's co-writers, Des'ree Weeks and Timothy Atack.
"Unfortunately, there were some misunderstandings regarding whether Des'ree's song '(I'm) Kissing You' was cleared for release in the United States," said Music World Entertainment, which represents Beyonce.
Versions of Beyonce's album, "B'Day Deluxe Edition," released internationally will not be affected by the change, as they did not include the remake of the disputed track, the firm said.
"Kissing You" was originally recorded by singer Weeks and released in 1996.
Beyonce's remake, titled "Still In Love (Kissing You)," was included on versions of "B'Day Deluxe Edition" that were released in the U.S. beginning on April 3. A companion DVD to Beyonce's album also included a music video for the song.
In the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in New York, The Royalty Network Inc., argues that even though Beyonce's version of the song has an altered title and additional lyrics, the singer and her record company failed to get a written agreement to release their remake.
The Royalty Network Inc., asked the court to order Sony BMG to stop distributing copies of the album with the song. The lawsuit also seeks to recover damages in excess of $150,000.
Representatives for The Royalty Network and Sony BMG declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday.
E-mails seeking comment were sent to Beyonce's record label.
Music World Entertainment declined to comment on the lawsuit.
http://nwitimes.com/articles/2007/04.../d8opbbn80.txt
Weighing Jobs’s Role in a Scandal
Joe Nocera
In June 2001, Fortune magazine put Steven P. Jobs on its cover. This, I realize, is not exactly breaking news; the magazine put Mr. Jobs on its cover with shameless regularity.
This time was different, though. The headline read, “Inside the Great CEO Pay Heist,” and Mr. Jobs, Apple’s legendary chief executive, was showcased not because he had some slick new product to peddle, but because in January 2000, he had been granted 10 million stock options.
Fortune valued the grant, disclosed in Apple’s 2001 proxy statement, at $872 million, making it “by far” the largest option grant ever. (Apple’s stock split in June 2000, giving Mr. Jobs 20 million options.)
The reason I remember that cover is because I worked on it. As a Fortune editor, I was part of a team that put together a package of articles about the “highway robbery”— to use our phrase — that executive compensation had become. I also recall being quite happy with the cover.
What a delicious surprise to discover that Mr. Jobs, who had ostentatiously taken only $1 in salary since returning to Apple in 1997, had a stock option package bigger than any ever bestowed on such well-known greed heads as Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup or Michael D. Eisner of Disney.
Mr. Jobs, however, was not so happy. He railed about the “unfairness” of the cover. And he wrote a scornful letter to the editor, asserting that because Apple’s stock had fallen almost $20 a share since the options grant was made, they weren’t worth $872 million — “they are worth zero.”
That is not how options are valued, but never mind. In a tone dripping with sarcasm, Mr. Jobs offered to sell Fortune the options for half their supposed $872 million value.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the article so infuriated Mr. Jobs that he began agitating to have the options package canceled. The options were so far underwater that he felt it wasn’t worth the bad press to hold onto them.
Did that mean that Mr. Jobs was willing to go back to his $1 a year salary? Hardly. At the same time, he and the board began negotiating a new package: 7.5 million stock options this time, at a price of $17.83.
Those options were agreed to by the board in August 2001, barely two months after the Fortune article, but the final negotiations with Mr. Jobs weren’t completed until mid-December.
And although those options also never paid off for him, and were finally replaced in 2003 by a huge restricted stock grant, they had enormous consequences. They were one of two big options grants that ultimately embroiled Apple and its leader in the backdating scandal.
Among other things, an Apple underling created fictitious board minutes, two of Mr. Jobs’s closest associates were forced out of the company and faced charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Mr. Jobs’s own actions and ethics were brought into question.
Rarely have so many avoidable problems been created by one man’s obsession with his own image. Then again, this is Steve Jobs we’re talking about.
THIS has been quite the week for Apple shareholders. The company reported an incredible quarter, with profits up 88 percent, blowing past analysts’ estimates. Its stock pushed above $100 a share for the first time ever. (It closed yesterday at $99.92.)
And then there was this week’s options backdating news: The S.E.C. brought formal charges against Apple’s former general counsel, Nancy Heinen, and its former chief financial officer, Fred Anderson.
(Mr. Anderson settled the charges against him for $3.5 million without admitting or denying guilt, while Ms. Heinen’s lawyers vowed to fight the charges against her.)
These were the two executives the Apple board has been pointing the finger at ever since it completed its internal investigation last fall.
The S.E.C. seemed to agree: its body language this week strongly suggested that it had zero interest in pursuing Mr. Jobs.
The agency’s position seems to be that the financial chief and general counsel are the ones who are supposed to ensure that options are handled correctly, and therefore both Mr. Jobs and the Apple board are off the hook.
But almost immediately upon settling the charges, Mr. Anderson pointed the finger right back at his old boss.
Mr. Anderson had been involved in an options grant that Mr. Jobs made to his executive team in early 2001 — it was the second big grant under scrutiny — and he claimed that he told Mr. Jobs there might have to be an accounting charge if the options were not handled correctly.
There is not much doubt that Mr. Anderson made his statement this week because he felt unfairly scapegoated by Apple and Mr. Jobs.
With all the finger-pointing, it is difficult to parse whether Mr. Anderson, a wealthy, widely respected figure in Silicon Valley, did something deserving of government sanction. What is clear, however, is that Mr. Jobs does not deserve the free ride he’s been getting from the Apple board, the company’s investors and government regulators.
I am not saying Mr. Jobs committed a crime. What I am saying is that it is pretty obvious by now that he was extremely involved in both of the options grants that have become such problems.
So it is hard to see how he doesn’t deserve his share of the blame for what happened.
Let’s start with the “executive team” grant that Mr. Anderson was involved in. At the time, Mr. Jobs was under pressure to make large grants to key executives to keep them from leaving. (Remember, this was the tail end of the dot-com bubble.) The board gave him free rein to hand out options as he saw fit.
The directors approved the grants, a total of 4.8 million options, which were set to go into effect on Jan. 2.
So far, so good. But then Ms. Heinen suggested the date be changed to later in January to move it past the company’s MacWorld event. She didn’t want it to look as if Apple executives were taking options in anticipation of a stock bump. Mr. Jobs agreed.
At the end of January, after some back and forth, he chose Jan. 17 as the new date, according to an e-mail message Ms. Heinen sent around at the time.
The board, in turn, approved the Jan. 17 options on Feb. 7. By then, though, Apple’s stock price had indeed bumped up, by $3.94 more than the Jan. 17 strike price. Which meant, of course, the options had been backdated, and should have been both expensed and disclosed. Neither happened.
There are lots of people in Silicon Valley who strongly believe that this sequence of events is hardly worth a parking ticket, much less a big-time S.E.C. investigation. But the S.E.C. clearly viewed it as serious enough to charge Mr. Anderson.
So why not Mr. Jobs? He’s the one who made the grants in the first place. He was clearly involved in choosing the new date — two weeks after it had come and gone. And as chairman of the board, he knew — or should have known — that the grants weren’t final until Feb. 7.
To conclude that Mr. Anderson, but not Mr. Jobs, did something wrong requires some serious mental gymnastics.
Now let’s look at the other grant: the 7.5 million options to Mr. Jobs himself. This was the case in which one of Ms. Heinen’s subordinates drew up fictitious board minutes to make it appear that the Apple board had approved the grant in October when the real date was December.
(The underling says she was instructed to do so by her boss, which Ms. Heinen denies.) Certainly, you can’t blame Steve Jobs for that.
What you can blame him for is creating an atmosphere in which these things could happen in the first place.
Consider, first, Mr. Jobs’s desire to replace the 20 million options with the 7.5 million options. What he was really trying to do was reprice his options without actually admitting that — because repricing would entail an accounting expense. To avoid the expense, he was supposed to wait six months and a day after the cancellation of the first package before Apple gave him the new package.
But he was Steve Jobs, and he wasn’t about to go optionless for six months and a day.
The Apple directors would later claim that they didn’t want him to go optionless either — because then he would have an incentive to drive down the stock price until he got his new options package. (Have you ever heard a nuttier rationale?)
In any case, Mr. Jobs held onto the 20 million options while negotiating at length for a better vesting schedule for the 7.5 million. If he had accepted a normal vesting schedule — he wound up getting a quarter of his options vested immediately — the issue would have been avoided.
Instead, the negotiations went on so long that they bumped into a new fiscal year, causing all kinds of problems for people like Nancy Heinen.
You get the strong impression that nobody dared to say no to Mr. Jobs, a notoriously difficult and abrasive chief executive. One imagines the trepidation of the compensation committee members — or Ms. Heinen — in telling him that he couldn’t get a low option price because the stock had risen during the negotiations.
So instead, they found a date in October that approximated the stock price in August — and an underling created phony board minutes.
What is particularly galling is the double standard. You hear from lots of sophisticated investors that it would be terrible if Mr. Jobs were forced out at Apple. How, they say, would that help Apple shareholders?
But lots of other chiefs have lost their jobs because of options backdating, and several have even been indicted. However indispensable he may be, the notion that Mr. Jobs can’t be touched because he’s Steve Jobs is something terribly corrosive.
If the S.E.C. is coming to the view that options backdating is just a peccadillo, as Silicon Valley has claimed all along, it should say so. But if it believes this is serious stuff, then it shouldn’t be making excuses for Steve Jobs, as it appears to be doing.
As for Mr. Jobs, as hard as he’s worked to convey the image of an above-the-fray visionary, that’s not quite the reality, is it? I recently stumbled across this comment from him, circa 1985: “I’m at a stage where I don’t have to do things just to get by. But then I’ve always been that way, because I’ve never really cared about money.”
Yeah, right.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/28.../28nocera.html
Ouch
Todd "Goliath" Goldman's Amazing Art Odyssey
Something very important has come to my attention: Todd "Goliath" Goldman, founder of trendy t-shirt slogan company David and Goliath and the supposed "brains" behind a number of its highly profitable works of art, is a creature of infinite wonder and intrigue! Somehow, through a miracle of time and space, Goldman apparently unknowingly duplicated a piece of art drawn many years previous by SA's resident artist, Shmorky, and then turned around to sell this divine coincidence for profit. How the heck did this happen?! Let's get to the bottom of this crazy mystery!
The story began early in April 2007, when my main man Shmorky received an email from a very nice lady. (The following is an artistic reenactment. Pretend it's just like on "Rescue 911" when the camera is all blurry and jerky and everything is in slow motion.)
Nice Lady: Shmorky, I think you're being ripped off! Oh, my heaaart!!
Cousin Pete: Oh no, Momma's hurt!
The drawing on the left was posted by Shmorky himself on his old webcomic, Purple Pussy, all the way back on September 19, 2001-- a mere 8 days after our nation's first ever tragedy. The familiar looking recreation you see on the right was produced by the art genius himself, Todd "Goliath" Goldman, and made absolutely and entirely out of thoughts from inside his own brain (you can tell this because it has TODD written in really big letters all over the corner of it). Everything down to the witty saying and exact same perspective on the bed and exact same curly squirrel tail came out of that beautiful big noggin of his. Oh Todd, you did a great job! Sign your name, buddy! Work that alphabet!
Around the time he found out, Shmorky went and posted a thread in the forums about this discovery, but at the same time, one must wonder: How did this amazing occurrence happen? How did two men, who both use the Internet and draw things on it, end up drawing the same thing several years apart? Some may say wizardry played a part, or perhaps sorcery. My own personal theory is that a Wiccan sandwich artist may have accidentally sneezed on Shmorky's meatball sub, damning him to a life of unending curses.
Around this time, some of our more observant forum members began to stick their slimy heads into the thread. What they found was an
amazing amount of bizarre coincidences between Goldman's works and works from artists around the world. It was around this time that I really began to think... is it possible that we're dealing with a supernatural being?!
With a newfound sense of purpose in my heart, I tallied up the public's theories for as long as I could stand and charted it. Let's go to the graph:
That's really odd, the Wiccan theory didn't even make the cut! What's even more puzzling, is Todd for whatever reason, fired back and called Shmorky names. What the heck??? He's like your soulmate, Todd! You guys drew the same thing! You have a bond! Why would you do this?! TODD, THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL THING, DON'T THROW IT ALL AWAY!! Oh God, why?? WWWHHYYYYY?!
On the 12th of April, and with the odds stacked against our hero, Todd employed the help of a "publicist" to register an account and post an apology on our forums. I really have no clue as to why, since it's so painfully obvious he didn't do anything wrong. At all. Ever. In his entire life.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
POST POP-ARTIST, TODD GOLDMAN, CONTROVERSAL PAINTING
CLEARWATER, FL, April 11, 2007- Popular post pop-artist, Todd Goldman who has made a career of making fun of the world with his sarcastic commentary and cartoon icons, has mistakenly used the design of an another artist in two of his recent paintings. Todd's painting, "Dear God, Please Make Everyone Die", was inspired from a drawing he received unbeknownst to him belonging to an underground web comic artist David "Shmorky" Kelly.
In addition to painting, Todd designs t-shirts for his clothing company, David & Goliath. Todd and his design team create and receive thousands of design ideas every month. It's no secret that Goldman creates a lot of his painting ideas from his t-shirt designs. Goldman says "I made a judgment error and didn't research the background of this particular submission. "My intention was not to copy Mr. Kelly. I have never seen his work before and would never intentionally knock-off someone else's idea."
Goldman has issued a formal apology to Mr. Kelly and has stated that he will not be using his design again in the future. As a gesture of good faith, Goldman has pledged not profit from his mistake. He will instead donate his proceeds from the painting directly to Mr. Kelly or his charity of choice.
See that, folks? "My intention was not to copy Mr. Kelly." He didn't set out to draw a thing just like that other thing, even down to the cute little animal and the cute little bed and the cute little saying! How could anyone think that he'd stoop as low as to plagiarize a fellow artist so blatantly? It goes without saying how entirely unethical that would be, and you should be ashamed for even dreaming for a moment that Mr. Goldman might be such an unscrupulous fellow! Look, it's all here in this Internet press release which you can believe with every fiber of your being! He says he "would never intentionally knock-off someone else's idea." That means he wouldn't ever sit down and think, "Oh boy, I'm going to draw this cartoon almost exactly as it looks here and sell it for big money!" because he's not the type to do that! We're talking about Todd "Goliath" Goldman here, people! Not some guy who steals stuff from people who work hard to make a living! Todd... "Goliath"... Goldman!
On top of all that, he's offering to give Shmorky the profits from his sale. Not the actual sale price of the painting, just the profits. You know, because Todd never did anything wrong (in his entire life, ever), he shouldn't have to pay out of his pocket! He can just give Shmorky his profits and forget about this unpleasant matter forever without losing a single cent! That spells "Grade A" businessman, right there.
Also, for whatever reason, it would appear to me that there is a rogue lawyer running around telling folks to shut up about Todd Goldman and to stop publishing wild accusations and "libel" regarding him. Certainly there are some trouble-making clowns out there who want nothing more than to put a huge, ever-thinking monster of original abstract thought like Todd Goldman out of business. I don't know anything about that, I'm too busy reading this article about the genius that is Todd Goldman's brain. That same brain that thinks up its own ideas. And I quote:
Goldman attributes his inspiration to his wittiness and weird sense of humor.
"I'm just wacked out of my mind. Things just come to me really quickly. I have complete ADD so I've never finished a book before. I haven't really watched cartoons or read comic books. It's just my witty sense of humor and my love to draw," Goldman said.
"I love my job, I couldn't imagine doing anything else, and I meet so many girls. I just did this to meet girls."
High five one of those chicks for the rest of the hardworking artists out there, Todd. Everyone back here on the ol' Internet is completely envious of your success, which you attained completely fairly and without stealing ideas from anyone else, at all, ever, in your entire life! Ever!
- Johnny "DocEvil" Titanium
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news...th-goldman.php
Until next week,
-
js.
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