[JackSpratts]

Profiles

Putting the Napster Genie Back in the Bottle
Saul Hansell

San Francisco

SHAWN FANNING turns 25 on Tuesday, and it's been a very long seven years since he wrote a little computer program that let him trade electronic music files with his dorm mates at Northeastern University in Boston, where he was a freshman. He called it Napster, after his nickname, and it quickly grew into an Internet phenomenon - not to mention the music industry's bête noire until it was shut down by the courts four years ago.

Now the public spotlight is turning back to Mr. Fanning, this time as a symbol of how big business and the disruptive force of the Internet just might find a way to get along. This month, Grokster, one of the file-sharing services that emerged after the original Napster vanished, stopped distributing its software and agreed to pay the record industry $50 million, which it has no prospect of ever raising. Grokster decided to give up on a legal battle that had effectively been lost when the Supreme Court unanimously decided in June that it and other file-sharing services could be held liable if people used them to steal copyrighted works.

By year-end, a new version of Grokster will appear - this one sanctioned by the record industry because it will use technology, built by Mr. Fanning, that requires file-swappers to pay for copyrighted material. In other words, Mr. Fanning, who let the genie out of the bottle when he created the copyright-busting Napster, is now selling a way to put the genie back into the bottle.

His new company, called Snocap, has produced software that can enable music services to fulfill the original promise of Napster - a community of dedicated fans exchanging a wide selection of music - while monitoring the file-trading for copyrighted works. The new Grokster will still use peer-to-peer technology, which lets users download songs directly to one another's computers. But when a user tries to get a copyrighted file, Snocap can block the download or force the user to pay for it, depending on what the artist and label want.

IF Snocap catches on - still a very big "if" because only one file-sharing service has signed up to use the software - it will vindicate Mr. Fanning's passionately held belief that if Napster had been allowed to live, it would have become a legitimate and profitable sales outlet for artists and music companies. After the original Napster closed, the name was sold to a new company that sells licensed music under paid subscriptions and does not use peer-to-peer technology.

"Nobody has ever built a reliable peer-to-peer service, where people can really access all the music they want in one location," Mr. Fanning said. "Once I got it into my head, I couldn't imagine the media space without one."

Yet curiously, at this crucial time for his young company, Mr. Fanning is pulling back from day-to-day operations and declining most opportunities to appear in public to champion it. Always painfully shy, Mr. Fanning says he wants to defer to the company's management, including a newly hired chief executive, Rusty Rueff, who had been a senior executive at Electronic Arts.

In the meantime, of course, Apple Computer and other companies have built thriving, unquestionably legal music-downloading businesses. And others are trying to build authorized paid services using peer-to-peer technology.

Mr. Fanning's vision is much more ambitious than these others. He doesn't simply want to impose fees for the same songs that are available through Apple's iTunes and other stores. He wants to create an open system that would allow anyone with music to share - big labels and garage bands alike - to register their works with Snocap and set the economic terms under which songs could be traded. Snocap would collect the fees, using software that listens to each song in participating file-sharing services, matching songs that listeners order with those in the registry and forcing users to pay the price the song owner demands.

If this works for music, Snocap may ultimately serve as a template for resolving some of the thorniest problems facing all sorts of copyrighted material, according to Jonathan Spalter, a former Vivendi official who worked as Snocap's chief executive in 2003 and 2004; he left after differences with Mr. Fanning.

"They have a shot, but it's a nine-bank billiard shot and they have only one stroke of the cue to get it right," Mr. Spalter said. "You need to get consensus from a firmament of major labels, independent labels, the publishers, courts, legislature, the peer-to-peer to companies, retailers and other actors. This is the ultimate, purest form of herding cats."

The record companies, meanwhile, have escalated their attack on digital piracy, suing file-sharing software makers and the people who share music and hiring white-hat hackers to pollute the file-sharing networks with songs that purport to be the latest hits, but actually contain only static or worse.

If any of these tactics have restrained piracy, the effect is modest. Album sales are 30 percent below their level the year when Mr. Fanning let Napster loose, and 10 times as many songs are downloaded from file-sharing services as are bought from paid services like iTunes. So it should come as no surprise that the record companies are starting to embrace Mr. Fanning's idea that peer-to-peer file-sharing services can be reconstituted as legal sales outlets.

"Many of the people on these networks are not so much there to get their music free, although some of them certainly do," said Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chief executive of the Warner Music Group. "In the next year or two or three, we can develop legal services with the same availability of music, the same vibrant communities, that free services will not be so compelling." Last week, Warner became the last of the four major labels to agree to supply music to Snocap.

It is still unclear how many users of those free peer-to-peer services will start to pay when software like Grokster starts to demand money for copyrighted songs. It is not that difficult to find so-called open source file-sharing software, which is developed by elusive networks of volunteers who may well be out of the reach of the recording industry's lawsuits. And Grokster users who don't update to the new version of the service will still be able to trade songs with one another free.

"I don't know if someone can be successful transferring from regular, free file-sharing to paid file-sharing," said Thomas Mennecke, a news editor at Slyck, an online site for file-sharing users. "If you are going to pay for a song, why not use iTunes, which has the Apple iPod coolness?"

He doesn't see much impetus for hard-core users to start paying for their music. "I only see file sharing getting bigger and better," he said. "If you shut down the commercial guys, the open-source systems will always be there."

Snocap will not necessarily be the main beneficiary if legal file sharing takes off. The only service that has agreed to use its technology is Mashboxx, a start-up backed by Sony Music. It has agreed to buy the Grokster name and use it to sell a version of its service. Complicating this partnership is the fact that Mr. Fanning has a stormy relationship with the man who created Mashboxx, a loquacious former music publicist and file-sharing promoter named Wayne Rosso.

Snocap still hopes to recruit other customers from the major file-sharing services, many of which are negotiating with the record industry to see if they can avoid being sued. Some services are simply shutting down and some are being courted by IMesh, which has its own approach to a legal peer-to-peer system.

Mr. Fanning began working on what would become Snocap the day after the old Napster closed in September 2001. Gathering a few of his close friends and compatriots in a San Francisco music studio, he tried to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. He had been on an emotional roller coaster, becoming a hero to millions delighted with instant free music and then an archvillain to the music industry, even though he was pushed to Napster's sidelines by the series of grown-ups who tried to profit from his invention.

In the end, Napster was the quintessential Internet company: it upended a huge and powerful industry without ever earning a dime itself. And after all the plans failed, all the lawsuits were lost, all the money was spent and all the outside managers departed, Mr. Fanning decided to try to get his revolution back.

HE started over, working with Jordan Mendelssohn, a programmer who was an early Napster employee, and won the backing of Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley angel investor who had provided crucial early financing to Napster. He also hired two prominent lawyers - John T. Frankenheimer of Loeb & Loeb in Hollywood and Fred Davis, son of the recording executive Clive Davis, in New York - to persuade the record companies to cooperate with him, the person most closely identified with all their troubles. "My job was to market the so-called Antichrist back to the music industry," Mr. Davis said.

Executives at the major labels received Mr. Fanning's idea enthusiastically. After all, it was as if he had found a way to put a police officer and a cashier in the satchel of every shoplifter on the planet. But Snocap stalled nonetheless. Developing the software turned out to be much more complicated than Mr. Fanning had anticipated, and he could not win the cooperation of file-sharing companies. And despite the music executives' enthusiasm, negotiations with their lawyers dragged on for months.

As Mr. Fanning struggled, Andrew R. Lack, the former head of NBC who took over Sony's music operation in 2003, wondered if he could make peace with the users of file-sharing systems, and approached Mr. Rosso, the former president of Grokster. Mr. Rosso says Mr. Lack had an idea: Was it possible to let people try out songs free? What if they could get whole songs, not the 30-second samples available on iTunes, but require them to buy the songs they really liked? The response from most other file-sharing services was chilly, but Mr. Rosso thought enough of the idea to create a new service - Mashboxx - along the lines that Mr. Lack had outlined. Soon, he found that Snocap's technology offered the best way to identify copyrighted songs on the network. (Mr. Lack was not available to be interviewed for this article.)

Unlike iTunes and other "closed" systems, where people can buy only what the retailer chooses to sell, Mashboxx is a true "open" peer-to-peer system that in theory can download any song from any computer that participates in a file-sharing network. This could include something that a garage band recorded by itself or a free release by an up-and-coming indie group.

If a Mashboxx user tries to download a song that has been registered as copyrighted in Snocap's database, however, Mashboxx will either block the download or substitute a free but low-quality version on which an announcer invites listeners to pay for a high-quality version without announcements if they like what they hear. The free version would expire after being played five times.

Mr. Rosso says that this tests the theory that people use peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing networks to try out songs, and that they will pay for music they like. "It is the great hypocrisy leveler," he said. "We will see if people use P2P to sample music or not."

Mr. Fanning and Mr. Rosso are now in a wary dance. Mashboxx and Snocap need each other, but their founders are mutually antagonistic. Indeed, Mr. Rosso is everything that Mr. Fanning isn't. Mr. Fanning is young, a gifted technologist, deadly serious about Snocap and terminally shy. Mr. Rosso is 56, a technological neophyte driven by opportunity rather than conviction, and a blue-ribbon publicity hound who once represented Harry Connick Jr. and Aerosmith, among others.

These days, Snocap's bustling offices fill a floor of an old warehouse building nestled between two skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco. Surrounding two dozen cubicles filled with programmers and dealmakers are a few conference rooms; a kitchen with free Twizzlers, gorp and soda; a computer room; and another small room with a foosball table and a set of Mr. Fanning's drums.

"I hate mornings," Mr. Fanning said as he arrived one bright day last spring, dressed in torn black jeans, a black ribbed pullover and gray sneakers, looking much as he did five years ago on the cover of Time magazine. He grabbed a Pepsi and wandered out to buy a sandwich for breakfast. Never a coffee drinker, he is trying to cut back on soda; at least he has downgraded from Red Bull.

Now Mr. Fanning is on the verge of settling, somewhat reluctantly, into a more adult phase of his life. He left the house he shared with two buddies in Silicon Valley and moved into a loft on Potrero Hill in San Francisco with his girlfriend, who works at Apple Computer.

Neither she nor the neighbors are quite so accommodating as his old roommates when it comes to his desire to play drums and guitar; when he really wants to cut loose, he says he now has to visit a friend's music studio.

When Mr. Fanning starts to explain the details of the complex software and business arrangements behind Snocap, his eyes glow with the intensity of many of the 20-something entrepreneurs of the dot-com boom. But he is living their dreams in reverse: first he revolutionized an industry, then he made the cover of Time and now he is figuring out the PowerPoint presentations for the business model.

The heart of Snocap is its sophisticated registry, which will index electronically all the files on the file-sharing networks. "Rights holders," which are what he calls musicians and their labels, will use the system to find those songs on which they hold copyrights and claim them electronically. Then they will enter into the registry the terms on which those files can be traded. It could be just like iTunes - pay 99 cents, and you own it - or it could be trickier: listen to it five times free, then buy it if you like it. Or it could be beneficent: listen to it free forever and (hopefully) buy tickets to the artist's next concert. Of course, the rights holders could also play tough: this is not for sale or for trading, and you can't have it.

One of the more interesting aspects of the software Mr. Fanning has built is called "missing masters." After a label sends Snocap all the music it currently publishes, the label's executives can use the software to see all the other tracks available from any particular artist. These are what Mr. Fanning calls "gray tracks" - bootleg recordings made by fans at concerts or in secret by recording engineers in studios. By some counts there are 25 million unique files available on the file-sharing networks, and no more than two million available in authorized download stores.

Some artists and labels may well want to quash these gray tracks, which many consider to be inferior versions of their work. But Mr. Fanning predicted that many would choose to make available - and possibly profit from - music that until now was simply contraband. "There is a huge interest on the part of your fans in this stuff," he said, "and it is already traded, if you don't make available, then you will hinder the growth of your artists' careers."

EVEN as he bubbles with these kinds of ideas, Mr. Fanning is rarely seen in Snocap's offices. Nor is he appearing much in public. He accepted an invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, then backed out, people close to him said, because of his shyness. He says he is confident in Snocap's management and needs time to spend on his personal life.

"I'm trying to step back and look at the big picture," he said last month over a Perrier at his favorite San Francisco steakhouse. "It has been seven years since I started Napster, and I didn't take a break when I started Snocap. That's a quarter of my life."

Moreover, he argued that the ideas behind Snocap were so powerful and inevitable that his second invention would eventually take on a life of its own, as Napster did - albeit far more slowly. "Ultimately," he said, "people will recognize the value of what we have done."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/bu...20fanning.html





Music Is Listening to Him

The record business once spurned tech geeks like Ted Cohen. But he's now a guru in an industry desperate to adapt to digital tastes.
Charles Duhigg

Ted Cohen is an unlikely rock star.

The 56-year-old computer fanatic has a high-pitched giggle and thinning gray hair. Instead of slinging a guitar over his shoulder, Cohen carries a backpack filled with nine cellphones, three iPods, two portable video players and enough wires, cables and tape to mummify Mariah Carey. At 5 feet 8 and 240 pounds, he will never be mistaken for one of the crooning waifs on MTV.

But among music executives, Cohen is something of an American Idol. As senior vice president of digital development at EMI Group, home of Coldplay and the Rolling Stones, Cohen has been in on the ground floor of dozens of online music ventures, including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. And he's one of the most sought-after speakers on the recording industry's endless conference-and-gala circuit.

During a recent Santa Monica symposium, so many people wanted a moment of Cohen's time that he resorted to holding back-to-back meetings in a hallway, where petitioners stood in line to win a brief audience with him.

"Ted is very high-profile," said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Assn. of America. "He's part ambassador and part evangelist." Cohen's celebrity is surprising, even to him. For decades, technologists were relegated to the lower levels of the music business. Then, in the late 1990s, when peer-to-peer computer networks such as Napster Inc. made music easy to steal, techies became outright pariahs.

But now, after half a decade of fighting high-tech change, the recording industry is rushing to embrace it. As consumers spend billions of dollars downloading songs and ring tones online and via cellphones, music executives have become desperate to convince Wall Street that they understand the Internet marketplace.

Suddenly, Cohen and other tech-savvy executives capable of translating between Silicon Valley and Tin Pan Alley are essential. The once-spurned geeks are becoming some of the music world's most respected leaders, and as they ascend, they are changing the industry's culture.

"What Ted is working on is embedded in everything we do as a company now," said David Munns, CEO of EMI Recorded Music North America.

Such change was on display last month when Cohen joined a panel on innovations in music distribution. One by one, speakers from the nation's largest music, computer and peer-to-peer corporations launched into serious forecasts of the industry's bleak future. Cohen managed to keep quiet for almost three minutes before the dire predictions proved too much.

"Listen to this!" he said, cuing the Beatles' "Help!" on his cellphone. "Isn't that great?" he shouted into the microphone.

From then on, it was Cohen's show. In the space of a quarter-hour, he challenged a Yahoo Inc. executive to a mud-wrestling contest, high-fived a friend in the front row, snickered when another speaker mentioned an outdated music player and weighed in on half a dozen other subjects.

"The future has never been more exciting!" he told the room. "We're going to figure out how to make this work!"

When the panel ended, people rushed the stage like groupies at a concert. Cohen's fans, like those of Bono or Cher, hailed him by his first name: "Ted!"

"Ted has made music fun again," said Gabe Adiv of Gracenote, a music software company, as he looked on.

But Cohen's antics are more than eccentricities. They are the key to how he bridges the disparate worlds of music and tech. Under Cohen's guidance, EMI has negotiated with just about any high-tech entrepreneur who stood still long enough to talk.

Sean Ryan, who helped create Listen.com in the late 1990s, said, "EMI was in front of everyone else because Ted was willing to talk to anyone."

It's more than friendliness, Cohen says. It's strategy.

"I try to embody what the industry should become," he said.

Music's love-hate relationship with technology is as old as the recording industry itself.

It began in the early 1900s, when songwriters, fearing for their jobs, begged the federal government to outlaw what they called "ungodly machines": player pianos. Instead of criminalizing the new invention, Congress created the copyright system that exists today, and songwriters relented when they began receiving royalty checks.

It was the start of a pattern: Innovation led to panic, which slowly turned to celebration when profits soared. In the '50s, recording executives said FM radio would kill the music industry. Then they discovered that broadcasts helped sell albums. In the '70s, record companies warned that cassette tapes would make piracy rampant. Then Sony released the Walkman, and music sales hit new heights.

In the 1980s and '90s, some insiders cautioned that the compact disc would make it easier for listeners to steal perfect copies. But when sales skyrocketed, the industry embraced the new format. By 1999, music corporations were larger than ever, shipping $14.6 billion worth of albums and growing at 6% a year.

But disaster loomed. As computer users began trading illegal copies of songs online, music sales began a free fall that has yet to hit bottom.

Cohen was about to find himself in the right place at precisely the right time.

An early adopter of technology and a music fanatic, he had begun collecting clunky reel-to-reel records and computer prototypes in high school. Working as a concert promoter in those days, he hoped to accomplish what were then his two goals: learning how to be cool and earning enough money to buy the gadgets that fascinated him.

After dropping out of Ithaca College after his junior year in 1968, Cohen scored a low-level job with a record label accompanying rock stars such as Alice Cooper and the band Van Halen on tour. But he failed to vault up the corporate ladder. "Technology was not seen as a good career move," he recalled. "You got promoted by finding the next hot band or schmoozing with DJs."

Cohen kept at it, visiting computer companies in his spare time. In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of an upstart company called Apple Computer, couldn't get record executives to return their calls. Cohen, then charged with learning about new gizmos for Warner Music, helped trade a friend's stereo for one of the first Apple computer systems.

Cohen spent much of the 1990s working on interactive videos at technology giant Philips Consumer Electronics, then became an independent consultant, helping computer companies such as Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Liquid Audio Inc. sell music online.

Then in 1999 he was offered the CEO position at a new peer-to-peer music company named Napster. He accepted a job at EMI instead, but the message was clear: Being a techie had suddenly become an asset.

Since peer-to-peer music-sharing networks became popular in 1999, U.S. shipments of recorded music have dropped by more than 30%, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, and U.S. music sales have fallen or remained flat every year.

Which is why there are now so many Teds.

Music's technology visionaries include Larry Kenswil and Rio Caraeff at Universal Music; Thomas Hesse at Sony BMG Music Entertainment; Alex Zubillaga and Michael Nash at Warner Music Group; and many others. Kenswil, Hesse and Zubillaga are among their companies' top policymakers.

"The record industry used to think of technology as termites they could ignore," said Stan Cornyn, who spent 34 years as an executive at Warner Music. "Now the west wing of the house has fallen off. They're desperate for people who can build better places."

Techies are entering the music industry at every level.

"The music world was a pretty insular place before," said Robin Bechtel, who oversees technology initiatives at Warner Bros. Records. Now, Bechtel employs law school dropouts, Internet entrepreneurs and recluses more comfortable navigating online chat rooms than concert auditoriums.

As new executives get their footing, they are pushing record companies to invest in new businesses. Warner Bros. Records has manufactured band merchandise, cut deals with mobile phone service providers and built websites for Internet-based fan clubs. Universal Music is in the cosmetics and nightclub business, thanks to a partnership with the group Pussycat Dolls.

In 2001, Cohen urged EMI to be the first company to make its entire repertoire available to newly created digital music services.

The next year, Cohen helped EMI cement distribution deals with nine Internet firms, more than any other major company. EMI was also the first among its rivals to allow listeners to download permanent copies of songs, transfer tunes to portable music players and make copies to blank CDs. Cohen helped work out the licensing agreements upon which the iTunes Music Store was built.

This year, EMI released a new song by Coldplay via cellular phones, offered listeners podcasts from the band OK Go and launched download services in China and Latin America. Then, in September, Cohen negotiated to release the Rolling Stones' latest album on a memory card playable on mobile phones and computers.

"The only way we win is if we're willing to try everything," Cohen said.

Many of Cohen's efforts have worked. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than 500 million songs. In the last year, U.S. digital music sales have grown by more than 300%.

But technological enthusiasm hasn't been a magic bullet. The music industry's rush online has created bewilderingly incompatible formats. For example, Internet music vendors sell at least four versions of EMI's songs, each of which requires a different player.

EMI's operating profit has declined in each of the last three years. And although U.S. digital music sales are growing, they still have not offset the decline in CD purchases. No company has provided an online service compelling enough to drive most music fans away from file-sharing networks that offer free, illegal downloads.

But to hear Cohen talk, the future has never been brighter.

Just a few years ago, EMI's Wilshire Boulevard headquarters housed several litigation "war rooms," where executives discussed lawsuits against illegal peer-to-peer networks and other companies invading their turf.

Now Cohen makes a habit of hosting the very people the music industry once sued.

The other day, when three executives from a cellphone technology firm arrived at his office for a visit, they found Cohen sitting under a "sound dome" speaker the size of a manhole cover. Gold-plated records hung on his walls, just as you'd expect. But there were also the trappings of a techno-geek: a huge video game terminal, a refrigerator full of Red Bull and a baseball cap that read simply "Napster."

Cohen peppered his visitors with questions about their favorite scenes from the indie sleeper hit movie "Napoleon Dynamite." At the same time, he took a phone call from Hong Kong, fiddled around with a new hand-held DVD player and kept tabs on his e-mail in-box.

When Cohen received an e-mail from EMI's chairman, Eric Nicoli, he laughed, then shared it with the room.

"It says, 'I have no opinion. Once you tell me what the answer is, then I'll have an opinion,' " Cohen said giddily.

Not so long ago, EMI's chairman would not have known Cohen existed, much less sought out his counsel. Now, after years of waiting, Cohen is improbably cool. He turned to his guests, his face flushed.

"OK!" he said. "Let's invent a new business!"
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=1&cset=true





Amazon Wins 1-Click Patent Case
Declan McCullagh

Amazon.com has won what could have been an embarrassing and expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld (PDF here) a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon.

Amazon gained notoriety years ago for attempting to enforce its own 1-Click patent system against Barnes & Noble's Web operations. IPXL, which could try to seek Supreme Court review, claimed in the lawsuit that Amazon's 1-Click system was covered by a patent on electronic transactions.
http://news.com.com/Amazon+wins+1-Cl...3-5967945.html





CoreMedia interview: Multimedia and DRM

With digital downloads remaining a big issues and Sony's DRM implementation in particular making headlines for the wrong reason, we have a timely interview with Dr. Willms Buhse, director products & marketing for CoreMedia, a company specialising in DRM systems.

Music

Online download services are a hot topic, and the role of mobile phones as music players is gaining attention, so let's start with a very topical question: What is your reaction to Motorola's first iTunes phones? A first step in the right direction or a wrong turning?

Proprietary systems like the Apple iPod all meet boundaries sooner or later. The reason is simple: when I buy music I want to play it not only on my PC but also on my mobile phone or my home entertainment system, and vice versa. With the Apple iTunes, digital music services have certainly become very popular and it is certainly a step towards interoperability since the usage is no longer limited to a single device.

But to allow consumers to play their music anywhere on phones from many different manufacturers - within the legal framework as defined by the content owner - the usage of open DRM standards as defined from the OMA is required.

The mobile phone itself was a first step into this market, but I believe, the deal between Apple and Motorola to limit it to only 100 songs was not in the consumer interest.

The obvious disadvantages to music on a mobile phone music centre concern battery life and storage capacity. How do you see these issues playing out over the next couple of years?

Regarding the new iPods I clearly see the advantages of flash based memory and I am very confident that we will see an improvement for the life of batteries as well. I do not see that these minor tech issues are limiting the mobility of consuming digital content in the mid-term.

Even if mobiles do become established as 'content centres' - i.e. people use music download services direct to their phone - phone models are constantly changing. Will this not provide a barrier against phones becoming a personal media centre?

CoreMedia DRM has the broadest reach of all DRM solutions. Setting the benchmark for interoperability and flexibility it works seamlessly with over 400 handsets on the world market and the number is steadily increasing.

Vodafone

You have worked closely with Vodafone recently...

Vodafone, is currently implementing our system into the service delivery platform of its global 3G multimedia services, Vodafone live! With CoreMedia DRM, Vodafone can offer content providers such as music labels a secure platform for the mobile distribution of premium content to Vodafone live! customers.

The DRM was developed in close cooperation between Vodafone, CoreMedia and leading mobile phone manufacturers. We have developed a cost-efficient, secure and scalable DRM solution based on the OMA standards. In view of the fact that 400 different mobile phones are now equipped for OMA DRM, Vodafone has significantly improved the interoperability and user friendliness of Vodafone live! through the implementation of CoreMedia DRM. They are now fully prepared for the rapidly growing premium content business.

Vodafone's move is the biggest step ever taken by the mobile business to implement a DRM solution. Actually, with the Vodafone deal, being the largest DRM deal so far in history, CoreMedia is now on the forefront of DRM technology worldwide. We supply Vodafone's global networks - servicing over 250 million mobile users - with our OMA DRM-based solution.

Does a close relationship with one service provider prejudice relations with the other major players?

No, certainly not. To work with a strong partner like Vodafone has strengthened our expertise in mobile DRM. And it helped to strengthen our partner network with very strong partners such as IBM, HP, Hitachi or Siemens in the Asia-Pacific region.

Telecommunications companies require high-performance and future-proof software solutions to process and market new types of mobile services. They require solutions to optimise existing business processes and open up new areas of success. That is what we deliver. Today, CoreMedia DRM is deployed by mobile operators across the globe on all continents.

What is to stop the likes of Vodafone, or O2 or, perhaps best of all, Virgin Mobile (with direct access to content) from carrying out the work that you do themselves? DRM issues are often carried out unseen behind the scenes as far as end-users are concerned...

We have a strong expertise in content and telco infrastructures. With our large number of content technology experts, we can actually respond at a high speed and be the fastest to implement innovations. Also, we are able to implement additional components that go way beyond the standard including work flows, interfaces or management capabilities - elements that we learnt very early from the area of content management. Combining our knowledge from digital rights management and content management actually is a very compelling offer for all our clients.

Where do you believe power lies between original content creators, service providers and handset manufacturers when it comes to mobile DRM implementations? Which party has the upper hand? Service providers have sourced the content, but handset manufacturers provide the hardware that can control the encryption/DRM that is possible...

The mobile content market will grow to $30 billion globally by 2008.
Mobile music alone is expected to be worth around $3 billion, or 10 per cent of the total music market. For operators to maximize the revenue from this opportunity, they need premium content. To gain access to content such as ringtones, full-track music, video clips and games, content providers need to be reassured that their copyrights will remain secure throughout the whole distribution chain.

This is what CoreMedia DRM is designed to deliver. And our recent news from today, the CMLA licence, underlines this strategy. We help ensure that digital media can only be played when the consumer acquires digital rights to do so in advance - either for preview or rental, with a limitation of usage frequency or of time - or with complete purchase of the media file.

Microsoft

Core Media recently introduced a PC element into its DRM support, providing interoperability between the Mobile OMA standard and Microsoft Windows Media DRM. How difficult a technical challenge was that, or are the Microsoft APIs quite straightforward?

CoreMedia is the only company offering this technology at this point - so it's not easy! APIs are not the issue but combining two different DRM schemes in a robust manner.

Is it inevitable that Microsoft eventually makes the most of its installed Windows user base to capture the DRM market, controlling access to content that flows across the Windows operating system?

Many operators are afraid of Microsoft's dominance and at the same time, Microsoft has had difficulties entering the cell phone and consumer electronics sector. So there will be co-existence of different platforms for a long, long time. And it needs players like CoreMedia to deliver technologies that overcome these platform gaps.

3G

Mobile DRM technology for 3G services is an important area for you, how is that market shaping up?

As a recent study of the EU-project INDICARE has shown, consumers set a high value on music they can share between different devices and they are willing to pay for that ability. The study says that consumers prefer paying €1 for a song that runs on any device over paying only 50 cents for a song that runs on only one device. So, it is all about convergence.

It is important for content owners and operators to offer their music services with cross platform capabilities, allowing their customers the choice of where to listen to purchased music. With the combination of OMA DRM and Microsoft DRM, CoreMedia is setting the pace as the leader for multi-DRM, with a strong commitment to open standards and interoperability.

What is the outlook for 3G content services - pickup has still been slow in the UK?

The future of 3G content services lies in new and innovative distribution concepts. Our system pioneers interoperable and innovative peer-to-peer business models such as gifting and viral marketing through superdistribution. The concept of superdistribution allows mobile operators and content providers to transform viral pass-along referrals and peer-to-peer networks into solid sales opportunities with true content revenue opportunities.

It enables consumers to recommend, forward and exchange content amongst each other, through cheap distribution channels. They also can receive rewards such as free minutes or bonus points - one can compare this mechanism with 'digital tupperware'.

Or one can compare it to shareware. But while shareware usually includes voluntary payment procedures, superdistribution has business rules, set by the content provider, that need to be adhered to. Superdistribution requires the standardization and interoperability of systems. Rather than compete, alliances can be formed that can turn this competition, which comes with high costs for competing enterprises, into a peaceful coexistence.

Still, 3G services are in the early days - also in the UK. But in Japan or Korea we can see that compelling services are well accepted by consumers.

DRM

Turning to the wider issues of DRM, in a recent survey we found that only 17 per cent of respondents perceived DRM as a form of copyright protection (which is its core function), which presumably means the remaining 83 per cent see it as a unique, additional constraint. Does DRM have an image problem?

One has to understand that DRM, apart from protecting the rights of the content owner, enables a new business models and gives customers security in the digital content world.

Digital content distribution allows new business and distribution models. In addition one can use a lot of viral mechanisms like peer-to-peer sharing. For example, a system that allows users to share music files with their friends. By creating copies for their friends they would be able to listen to it once. After listening to the songs they would get connected to the billing mechanism where they can decide to purchase it or not. If they decide to purchase the songs forwarded rewards such as free minutes or bonus points would be credited to the original user. This is a very interesting mechanism for creating a new sales channel for digital products such as music.

What is your response to people who take a strong stance against DRM in all its forms - that it represents the dark forces of control that work against information being free?

DRM systems like CoreMedia DRM are the basis for secure and interoperable distribution of digital goods.

Consumers demand seamless access to various types of content using multiple devices for an affordable price. And they are seeking to share various types of content between their own rich media devices and networked systems as well as with friends and family. In addition they expect secure content, which means no viruses.

In the end, I think, it is up to the artists, or whoever are the content owners, to provide it in the way they want it to be perceived. If it is entertainment and was created with a lot of investment one should be able to decide if people who do not want to pay for it should be excluded.

The DRM market is currently booming, I believe - what are the forces driving this, and will they continue?

Consumers demand for 'light media content' like ringtones, games, logos and wallpapers have exploded in the past years, according to the European Information Technology Observatory, reaching €214 million in Germany alone and more than €2bn in Europe in 2004. The trend with ringtones and the like is set to continue with news, entertainment and sports related information services.

Consumer demand for mobile content is set to exceed €7.6bn in 2006. With the total number of mobile users approaching two billion worldwide even the most conservative estimates support these numbers.
With such explosive growth forecasted the need for DRM will become increasingly evident. Content owners are wary of consumers being able to copy and pass-on files, resulting in lost revenues. Thus, they are going to force content and service providers to employ copy protection systems.

Finally, what is your response to the Sony XCP fiasco - how damaging will this be to the industry, and to Sony in particular?

This is unfortunately a disaster. Especially since "xcp" is not a DRM technology, but copy protection. It only prevents consumers from sharing rather than enabling it in a legal way. Sony BMG will most likely be faced with several law suits, which might get it into deep trouble, even endangering its future.

Media companies should learn two things in regards of DRM from this. First, they need to get more involved in technologies that become a critical part of their daily business. Second, selecting the right vendors and building trusted relationships is highly important for media companies.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news/80433 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/80523/co...rm-part-2.html





Holiday Gift Spending To Ease: Survey

U.S. holiday gift spending will likely fall slightly this year and stores will have to offer discounts to satisfy shoppers hunting for bargains, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

U.S. households are expected to spend an average of $466 on gifts this holiday season, down from last year's estimate of $476, the survey by The Conference Board showed.

"Consumers appear to have less Christmas spirit heading into Thanksgiving this year than last year," said Lynn Franco, director of the private research group's Consumer Research Center, in a statement.

"This cautious attitude will have consumers shopping for bargains this season -- retailers will need to offer discounts and promotions to get shoppers into their stores," she said.

About 34 percent of consumers will buy holiday gifts on the Internet, up from 33 percent a year ago, The Conference Board said. Books top the list of online holiday buying intentions.

The top holiday spending region will be New England, where households will spend an average of $568, the survey said.

The lowest spending is expected in the hurricane-ravaged East South Central and West South Central regions, where an average outlay of $423 per household is expected.

Slightly more than 32 percent of households will spend $500 or more on holiday gifts, while 37 percent will spend between $200 and $500, and the remaining 30 percent are expected to spend less than $200, according to the survey.

The survey of holiday gift spending intentions covers a sample of 5,000 households, The Conference Board said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...Y-SPENDING.xml





Mix of Shock and Resignation on G.M. Shop Floors Set to Close
Jeremy W. Peters

When Dan Fairbanks received word from General Motors early Monday morning that his plant had been tagged for closing next year, there were few people in the factory to tell.

About two-thirds of the 300 hourly employees at the Lansing Craft Center, where Mr. Fairbanks is the president of a local chapter of the United Automobile Workers, are temporarily laid off. In fact, they have not worked for most of the year. The Lansing Craft Center is still scheduled to ratchet up production early next month but will close for good sometime next year.

"There are going to be some casualties, and we are one of them," Mr. Fairbanks said. In many ways, the plant is symbolic of the problems facing General Motors. The automaker slowed production there to a trickle as demand for the vehicle it produces, the $40,000 high- performance Chevrolet SSR pickup truck, failed to keep pace with capacity. Although most employees do not come to work, under their union contract G.M. is still required to pay them.

A cold drizzle fell in a mainly empty parking lot at the center as this city took in the news that G.M. would close all or part of 12 operations in North America. Here in Lansing, where two of those plants are situated, the automaker's cuts will be deep.

Still, G.M. employs thousands of people in the area at four plants and is currently building a new factory, with modern equipment. The plants that will remain open will provide some cushion for workers who do not take buyouts.

On Monday, G.M. workers across the country met the news of the plant closings and the job cuts with a mixture of shock, resignation and frustration at the company's management.

"There's a lot of people who rely on G.M., especially in this town," said Michael McCoy, 52, a production worker at the Lansing Metal Center with 30 years at the company. The metal center, a sprawling industrial complex across the street from the craft center that makes sheet metal parts for various vehicles, is also scheduled to close.

About the time the G.M. corporate headquarters in Detroit informed union officials at the craft center of the closing next year, Mr. McCoy and his co-workers on the morning shift at the metal center were summoned to the shop floor by their union chairman and told the news.

Art Baker, the chairman of the local auto workers union that represents the 950 hourly workers at the metal center, said he learned of G.M.'s decision just 15 minutes before he told employees. "It was not the expectation that General Motors was going to get lean and mean," Mr. Baker said. "It was a real shock."

The union called the job cuts and plant closings "extremely disappointing, unfair and unfortunate." The union's president, Ron Gettelfinger, and its vice president, Richard Shoemaker, said in a statement that for workers, "hope is diminished, the future is unclear and communities are less stable."

In Oklahoma, Georgia and other states where G.M. is closing its only plants, G.M. workers will have fewer options than their counterparts in Lansing for jobs that offer such high pay and generous benefits.

"I was awakened out of my sleep and told the plant was closing," said Tammy Andrews, 35, a line worker at the General Motors assembly plant in Doraville, Ga., just outside Atlanta. "I'm going to cry when I go home tonight."

Many of the plants that will close, like Doraville Assembly and the Lansing Metal Center, are more than 50 years old and date back to an era when G.M. held a commanding share of the American car market. As Asian competitors with lower labor costs and vehicles that many Americans consider more desirable have cut G.M.'s market share down to about a quarter of all American vehicles, the automaker has grappled to regain its competitiveness. Closing under-used plants and trimming its work force is one way it hopes to do that.

For cities like Lansing and Flint, Mich., that have for decades looked to the American auto industry to provide much of their livelihood, G.M.'s downsizing means the end of an era in which generations of families could depend on steady work at a car company and a generous retirement plan after 30 years of service.

"It used to be our kids would come in here and follow us, but that's not the trend anymore," Mr. McCoy said. "I just think it'd be nice if General Motors could get everything together, get it fixed and get going again."

Alvin Jones, 59, a line worker at the metal plant, has 40 years of experience but said he resented the idea of taking a retirement buyout. "Once you take the buyout, what's going to be left for you to do?" he asked. Mr. Jones moved to Lansing from the South in the mid-1960's to take a job with G.M. that he assumed would be his as long as he wanted to work.

Throughout his four decades at G.M., Mr. Jones said he had seen the domestic auto industry at some of its highest and lowest points. As he stood outside the Lansing metal plant on Monday and absorbed the news his plant would be closed, he said, "I've never seen it this bad, and I've been around for a lot of years."

Daniel Crane, 27, who installs glass on minivans at the Doraville plant, criticized G.M. for not making cars that sell well. "Who buys a minivan?" he asked. "G.M.'s not coming out with a product anybody wants."

As news of billion-dollar losses, job cuts and benefit reductions has rolled out of G.M. with alarming regularity this year, some workers said they saw the writing on the wall well before Monday. "Everybody in the G.M. system is trying to speculate on where they stand," said Mr. Fairbanks, the Lansing union president. "A total surprise? No. Not with the way things are going."

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Doraville, Ga., for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/bu...22workers.html





I Vant to Drink Your Vatts
Matthew L. Wald

Households across the land are infested with vampires. That's what energy experts call those gizmos with two sharp teeth that dig into a wall socket and suck juice all night long. All day long, too, and all year long.

Most people assume that when they turn off the television set it stops drawing power.

But that's not how most TV's (and VCR's and other electronic devices) work. They remain ever in standby mode, silently sipping energy to the tune of 1,000 kilowatt hours a year per household, awaiting the signal to roar into action.

"As a country we pay $1 billion a year to power our TV's and VCR's while they're turned off," said Maria T. Vargas, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, which sets voluntary standards for energy use, and grants its ratings to the most efficient products.

There are billions of vampires in the United States, drawing more than enough current in the typical house to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department.

These silent energy users include the chargers for devices that run on batteries, like cellphones, iPods and personal digital assistants, and all the devices around the house that have adapters because they run on direct current, like answering machines. Some have both batteries and steady power use, like cordless phones. Experts call all those adapters "wall warts." Many deliver in direct current only half as much energy as they suck out of the wall; the rest is wasted.

Vampires and wall warts are only part of the problem. DSL or cable modems, among other things, are increasingly likely to be left on around the clock. A computer left on continuously can draw nearly as much power as an efficient refrigerator - 70 to 250 watts, depending on the model and how it is used.

It's not that hard to engineer a more energy-aware computer: Dell introduced one in 2004 that drew 1.4 watts in "sleep" mode and just under one watt when "off." But energy-efficient design is not necessarily rewarded in the marketplace, where people who are shopping for the latest shiny electronic device are unlikely to put its energy consumption rate while "off" topmost on a list of considerations.

Energy efficiency experts say the answer lies instead in industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with low consumption when in standby.

Just about everyone supports such a move. President Bush early on announced that electric devices purchased by the federal government would need to meet a standby consumption standard. Congress is pushing forward, too. This summer it passed a bill to set testing protocols for measuring energy use, clearing the way for nationwide consumption standards. The Energy Department held a meeting this week to discuss developing the standards. California has already adopted its own, to take effect in 2006.

Among the worst vampires are big-screen televisions, mainly because of satellite and cable boxes, which can draw up to 30 watts when turned off, experts say.

Indeed, the words "off" and "on" no longer seem to apply; a better word might be "idling."

"They won't even say 'off' now; they'll say 'power,' " noted Alan K. Meier, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency, a consortium based in Paris. "My washing machine draws five watts even when there's no sign of intelligent life."

One culprit is the microchip, whose presence is revealed by a "soft button" instead of a switch. Microchips are generally an improvement over mechanical controls because they are more durable and sophisticated. They also help reduce the size and weight of consumer products. But they require a continuous trickle of electricity. Energy experts say it would be simple to cut that trickle in half - not by running around the house unplugging everything in sight, which would require much resetting of clocks, but by engineering products differently.

It doesn't cost much to make a more efficient device: sometimes just 50 cents a unit, they say. But consumers don't consider invisible energy use - "there's no labeling of power use in 'standby,' " Mr. Meier said, and "no way for people to recognize what a low-standby device is" - making government-imposed energy efficiency the best hope, he said.

The Energy Department would be in charge of setting standby mode standards that would apply to all consumer products sold in the United States. "Things may be a small step for each individual consumer," said Douglas Faulkner, the acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, "but they can add up across the country."

The Energy Star program, whose labels on electronics help consumers comparison shop, has announced that it will not rate a product that fails its standby mode requirements (consumers in the market for VCR's, among other things, can see how they rate at energystar.gov).

"Consumers are buying more electronics, and there are more consumers," Mr. Faulkner said. "So the amount used by these devices is going up."

All the more reason to make each item as energy efficient as possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/garden/17vampire.html





Microsoft to Open the Standard Behind Office

Microsoft took a step toward creating an open standard of technology behind Word and Excel in a move to appease governments and ensure data in documents and accounts can be accessed in decades to come.

The submission of Microsoft's Office Open XML to the Switzerland-based standardisation body Ecma is supported by Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corp, NextPage Inc, Statoil ASA and Toshiba.

"The European Commission, European member states and governments around the world have asked us to open up file formats, and we're going to do that," Alan Yates, business strategy manager at the unit that sells Office applications, including Word and Excel, said on Tuesday.

Government agencies, although not included in the initial list of supporters, were expected to endorse the move in coming days and weeks, Yates told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The move was announced in Europe, because "this is really a hotbed for standardisation efforts, and it is where people appreciate what we're doing in greater detail," Yates added.

Microsoft has been in a long-running battle against antitrust sanctions imposed by the European Commission for abuse of its dominant Windows software. In March 2004, the European Union executive found Microsoft abused dominance of the Windows operating system so it could damage rival makers of work-group servers and media players.

Barclays Capital welcomed the move, because it could start mixing its massive amounts of financial and other data in different applications from many software vendors. "We won't be trapped in Excel and Word," said Stephen Deakin, director for information technology at Barclays Capital, adding it may even strengthen the position of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft's Yates hoped the move to standardise the Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) without charging royalties would build trust among companies and consumers who will use the standard in coming decades.

"It's a matter of trust. There's not the same level of trust in a technology owned by one company, as a technology in the hands of an open standards organization," he said.

Adam Farquhar, head of e-Architecture at the British Library, said the move would ensure digital archives would still be accessible to future generations.

Microsoft, Barclays and others expect Office XML technology to code and tag data will be developed further by many other companies after it has been approved as an open standard.

"This is the start of a great industry," Deakin said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...crosoft+office





File Sharing Program Exposes Hard Drives
Dan Ronan reports

Users of LimeWire may be one click away from their personal information being exposed. Users of LimeWire, a file sharing program used by millions of Americans, might be making their private financial and personal information vulnerable.

A major security flaw with LimeWire makes it easy to search the hard drive of anyone who is also using the program while sending files back and forth.

While News 8 won't expose how to do that, when showed to people who were running LimeWire on their computer they were shocked.

With a few clicks of the keyboard, in just a matter of minutes and with Chrystal Snow's permission, News 8 found out a lot about the Dallas business woman.

"Anything from my bank statements are on there, my resumes, personal information, photos, you name it," Chrystal Snow said about her computer.

She let News 8 try to search her private computer files using LimeWire, and it turned out to be amazingly easy.

News 8 found her credit card records, banking information and proprietary business information.

In an earlier era, the famous bank robber Willie Sutton once said he robbed banks because that's where the money was.

With LimeWire, it is possible to take someone's identity and money.

"I thought you got on LimeWire to share music, and I'm shocked my information is out there for anyone to find," Snow said.

The problem occurred from something written into the program, which was more than likely not an accident.

Dallas computer security consultant Ed Chiarini is one of many warning about the dangers of file sharing. He said what someone can find goes far beyond identity theft.

"There are national security issues when it comes to some files on there," said Chiarini, from WellAwareNet.com.

Experts said what makes LimeWire so dangerous is that anyone using the program can do a secret search of someone else's computer information without the victim knowing it.

"It's the equivalent of you walking into someone's house with their permission and noticing a pile of papers on the table, picking them up and looking at them and realizing I have got your social security number, your tax forms," said Paul Schmehl, University of Texas Dallas computer security expert. "I've got sensitive information you would never let me see."

LimeWire declined repeated requests for an on-camera interview. Instead, the company issued a statement insisting it fixed the problem last spring, and that no further action is needed because the company said the program is safe.

For her part, Snow took LimeWire off her computer immediately and vows never to use it again.

"You never know who it is, or where they are or what they're involved with," she said. "If you can sit down at a computer and in five minutes find really sensitive information, then someone who wants to find it will have already done so."

News 8 also did the same experiment using the most current LimeWire software. The company said you can customize the installation of the program on the computer to avoid making information vulnerable.

But experts said most people who download LimeWire would simply use the default settings.

As News 8 discovered, personal data is there for everyone to find.
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dw...e.495ad3f.html





Law Can't Slow Down Illegal File Sharing

Recently released data from research consultancy XTN Data shows that file sharing over the Internet continues to grow and that most users are unconcerned by potential legal action. Two thirds of people using file sharing software to access music were not concerned by legal action by record labels. Greig Harper, founder of XTN Data commented, "We estimate there to be 52 million people in the US using file sharing software. In the past two years legal action in the US has seen 3,500 cases resolved."

The survey results show that legitimate music download services are rising in popularity but 58% thought they were expensive, 41% thought they were difficult to use and 43% said they didn't offer music they were interested in. Users who were disappointed with legitimate music download services were more likely to illegally download music. For the first time ever illegal download of movies and TV content overtook demand for music downloads. 26% of internet users said they used the internet to download DVDs with those under thirty most likely to do so. For more information, visit www.xtndata.com
http://www.integratedmar.com/ECLbrie...em=BRI112005-2





Mad at cavalier consumers

View From Here: Copyright Clampdown
Carolyn Boyle

Enforcement agencies and IP rights owners are struggling to contain the modern scourge of piracy. Markets are still flooded with fakes, while a pervasive apathy towards intellectual property means that otherwise law-abiding citizens will routinely exploit new technologies to commit copyright infringement without batting an eyelid.

Around the world, efforts have thus redoubled to tackle the pirates head-on through tighter legislation and tougher penalties. In Asia in particular - where the problem is perhaps at its most acute - governments are increasingly adopting a zero-tolerance approach to this contemporary crime and are spearheading vigorous campaigns to stamp out piracy in all its forms.

Copyright infringement

In Malaysia - recently identified by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry as a leading exporter of pirate optical discs - the Government has effectively declared open war on pirates and has shown itself willing to use all weapons at its disposal to win the battle, no matter how deadly. In 2004, the Copyright Act 1987 was revised to beef up penalties for infringement and allow Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs enforcement officers to arrest suspects without a warrant.

Increased police powers

Then earlier this year the Malaysian Government announced that it was considering turning the draconian provisions of the Internal Security Act 1960 against repeat infringers as a last resort. Michael Soo of Shook Lin & Bok explains that the Act empowers police officers to arrest without warrant anyone they "have reason to believe" has acted or is likely to act "in any manner that is prejudicial to the security of Malaysia".

Suspects may initially be detained in solitary confinement for up to 60 days - extendable for up to two years with the approval of the Minister for Home Affairs - and may be denied legal representation and access to relatives during this time.

Working in tandem with the revamped Copyright Act, these sweeping powers of arrest without trial should act as a powerful deterrent against would-be pirates.

Government clampdown

In a separate initiative, the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs has teamed up with the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM) to crack down on the estimated 3,000 outlets that offer truetone mobile phone ringtones without paying royalties to the artists whose songs they use.

This relatively new form of infringement is soaring alarmingly: piracy rates have already topped 90% and one company is reportedly raking in almost RM4.7m (723,000) in illegal ringtone sales. In a bid to nip this disturbing trend in the bud, the ministry and the RIM recently sent out more than 100 warning letters to known truetone pirates, spelling out the potential consequences of their illicit activities: the courts can impose a fine of between RM2,000 (307) and RM20,000 (3,070) for each infringement, as well as a possible jail term of up to five years.

The initiative appears to have had some success: at least four major ringtone companies which previously advertised truetones in local newspapers have fallen conspicuously silent since receiving the warning letters.

Hong Kong, too, has thrown its weight behind the copyright enforcement drive, according to IP lawyers at Wilkinson & Grist. After government dithering last year over whether facilitating the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing would incur liability, the recent arrest of a P2P infringer for the illegal online distribution of copyrighted movies using BitTorrent technology suggests that this question has now been answered in the affirmative.

The customs authorities cooperated closely with the film industry in cracking the case, setting up a special taskforce whose in-depth investigation ultimately unmasked the culprit. Under Hong Kong copyright law, the penalty for distributing illegal copies of a copyrighted work is a fine of up to HK$50,000 (3,750) per infringing copy, plus a maximum four years' imprisonment. The arrest - the first of its kind - hit the headlines in Hong Kong and has also piqued international interest among rights holders, IP practitioners and file-sharers alike. The Hong Kong Government cautioned that the incident should serve as a salutary lesson of the inherent risks of copyright infringement.

In China, meanwhile, new measures jointly introduced by the National Copyright Administration and the Ministry of Information Industry have increased the options available to victims of online copyright infringement, who can now seek administrative relief from internet service providers (ISPs) in addition to civil remedies as before.

An ISP that hosts a website, bulletin board or chat room will be held jointly liable with the content provider either if it knows from the outset that content is infringing, or if it fails to delete or disable access to infringing material after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright owner. Where a takedown notice is ignored, the copyright owner can launch court proceedings and/or seek administrative relief by filing a complaint with the National Copyright Administration, which may order the ISP to cease the infringement immediately, confiscate any illegal income generated from the infringement and fine the ISP either up to three times the illegal income earned, or a statutory fine of up to $12,000 (7,000).

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's Connie Carnabuci and Jennifer Li note that since an administrative action is swifter than court proceedings, the new measures afford a more efficient alternative for copyright owners to protect their rights online. One shortcoming, however, is that no mention is made of how quickly an ISP must react to a takedown notice in order to avoid either administrative penalties or civil liability.

Software piracy

Like copyright infringement, software piracy is rampant thanks to the public's relaxed approach to licensing and the ease with which computer programs can be ripped off. In Malaysia, the Government is casting the enforcement net wider to ensnare software thieves across the whole spectrum of society.

According to Shook Lin & Bok's Michael Soo, large companies are a new target: a series of raids this year revealed that many otherwise reputable businesses habitually use pirated software. The Ministry of Domestic Trade & Consumer Affairs has responded to this revelation with a media campaign intended to educate company directors of the dangers of turning a blind eye to software piracy: they may be held personally liable for such violations, and face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to RM20,000 (3,080) if found guilty.

The ministry also has cybercafe owners in its sights and has advised them to take immediate steps to ensure that all software used on their premises is duly licensed and that licensing terms and conditions are strictly observed.

Indian courts get tough

The Indian courts have also begun to clamp down on software piracy. This represents a turnaround in judicial practice, as for years IP theft was not taken very seriously in India, viewed more as a petty white-collar infraction rather than a true criminal offence.

The Delhi High Court recently heard a case in which an Indian company was accused of loading unlicensed Microsoft programs onto the hard drives of computers it sold. The software giant produced incontrovertible evidence of the infringement in court: it caught the defendant red-handed when an incognito Microsoft employee purchased a computer chock-full of pirate Microsoft software.

Microsoft also submitted as evidence an affidavit from a chartered accountant showing how long the defendant had been in business and the sale price of the computers it sold. Weighing up the evidence, the court awarded substantial damages in an amount of rup1.98mn ($25,150), plus interest at a rate of 9% until the date of payment, based on the software's popularity and an assumption that 100 computers with stolen software were sold each year.

Singh notes that the Delhi High Court judgment should lay the foundations for a vigorous new enforcement regime across the country.

Hard-line Danish approach

Outside of Asia, the Danish judiciary is also taking a hard-line stance towards software theft. Sentences were recently handed down in the biggest piracy case ever to come before the Danish courts. Eight defendants were in the dock, accused of producing, importing and reselling hundreds of thousands of illicit copies of protected computer programs created by cutting-edge software houses such as Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia. The pirate copies were manufactured by companies in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel and Poland, and were then sold online to Danish buyers.

Lawyers representing some of the rights holders made undercover purchases of the pirate software with the aim of launching a civil action against the pirates, but passed this evidence over to the police after they realised the extent of the infringement. Seven of the eight defendants were found guilty by the Copenhagen City Court.

In sentencing the pirates, the court took account of the sheer extent and sophistication of the racket, as well as the handsome profits generated. The two ringleaders were imprisoned for one year and eight months respectively; as the remaining defendants played a lesser role in the infringement, four received jail terms of between two and four months while the fifth escaped with a fine of DKR25,000 (2,300).

The litigation team at Plesner notes that the custodial sentences could conceivably have been longer, given the magnitude of the case - under the Criminal Code, serious copyright infringements can attract penalties of up to six years' imprisonment; but they nonetheless send out a strong message that software piracy will not be tolerated.

Counterfeiting

Today's brand-saturated society is characterised by an insatiable demand for designer labels, but many consumers are unwilling to pay top dollar for high-end goods. The result is a surging trade in counterfeits which shows no sign of abating.

In Hong Kong, whose night markets are still thronged with vendors hawking knock-off products, an anti-fakes campaign originally launched back in 1998 has been revived following the conclusion of a new cooperation framework agreement with Guangdong province. The agreement was hammered out at the inaugural meeting of the Guangdong/Hong Kong Expert Group on the Protection of IP Rights, which aims to enhance cooperation on IP enforcement between Hong Kong and the mainland.

Shops participating in the campaign pledge to trade only in authentic products, and to identify themselves as fake-free outlets on their signage. Rights owners and customs officials have also joined forces to set up the IP Rights Protection Alliance, which will monitor compliance with the anti-fakes pledge.

Elsewhere, the detrimental effects of counterfeiting are felt particularly acutely in Italy, home to some of the world's leading fashion houses. The near-ubiquitous availability of cheap imitations is tarnishing the exclusive image and pristine reputation of luxury Italian brands.

The Government has thus moved to safeguard its celebrated fashion industry with the enactment of a new Competitiveness Decree, which bolsters anti-counterfeiting laws.

As before, fines may be imposed not only on the vendors of fake products, but also on anyone who buys or accepts counterfeit goods, or who persuades others to buy or accept such goods without first determining their origin. But there has been a staggering increase in the level of administrative fines that may be imposed for such offences, from 1,000 (680) to a whopping 20,000 (13,700).

Similarly, the administrative fine that may be imposed for buying or accepting goods which appear fake, due to their quality and the circumstances of their sale or supply, has gone up from 3,000 (2,060) to 10,000 (6,870). Vendors that fail to determine the legitimate origin of goods before offering them for sale can also be fined, and goods purchased `imprudently' - that is, at a price which should raise suspicions that the goods are of dubious provenance - may be seized.

Since the decree came into force, the Italian police have made successful swoops on several historic towns where the summer influx of tourists generates a booming trade in counterfeit goods. Trevisan & Cuonzo's Julia Holden notes that the decree may finally turn the tide in the fight against IP theft, tackling as it does not only the pirates, but also those consumers whose cavalier attitude towards IP rights is the fuel that drives piracy itself.

Carolyn Boyle is editor of the International Law Office.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/nov/1213264.htm





Sony Spyware Debacle Heats Up Copyright War
John M. Moran

You might think the music industry would be satisfied with the progress of its anti-piracy efforts.

Its lawsuits have already led to the shutdown of Napster, the Internet's first peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and more recently to the demise of Kazaa, another popular file-sharing service.

Thousands more lawsuits against individuals accused of illegally sharing files online has convinced many that trading music online isn't worth the risk. That's one reason digital music sales through legitimate online services like iTunes have soared.

But a recent furor involving one of the world's largest music labels, Sony BMG, shows that the industry's fight to protect its product from piracy isn't over. That same furor, however, also shows how tough that fight can be.

The trouble began when Sony BMG added special copy-protection software to about 50 new audio CDs. The software was designed to prevent the songs on the discs from unlimited copying.

According to press reports, about 4.7 million of the CDs were manufactured, and more than 2 million were already in the hands of consumers when problems arose with the copy- protection software known as XCP.

Specifically, a technique used by XCP to hide itself on the consumer's personal computer could be hijacked by viruses and other malicious software. Sure enough, examples of "Trojan Horse" programs that could take advantage of XCP soon surfaced.

The outcry from users was immediate. Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon by announcing that its anti-spyware tool would detect and remove XCP.

And so Sony BMG began a full-scale retreat from its copy-protection scheme, which was included on CDs by such diverse artists as Burt Bacharach, Cyndi Lauper, Frank Sinatra and Trey Anastasio.

The company said it had "ceased manufacturing compact discs with XCP software" and was withdrawing remaining discs from store shelves.

The company also announced it was creating an exchange program that would allow those who had already purchased any XCP-enabled audio CDs to trade them in for a non-copy protected replacement.

At first glance, that might seem like the end of the story - just another failed attempt at copy protection. But Sony BMG gave every indication that it expects to continue developing technologies that aim to limit the right of consumers to copy music from CDs.

"Sony BMG is reviewing all aspects of its content protection initiatives to be sure that they are secure and user-friendly for consumers," the company said in a statement. It added that it "will continue to seek new ways to meet consumers' demands for flexibility in how they listen to music, while protecting property rights."

In short, the days of your unrestricted right to drop a CD into your personal computer, rip the tracks to MP3s and move them over to your iPod or other digital music player may be numbered.

It doesn't matter whether you ever share those songs with friends or strangers. The fact that some people do is keeping the music industry focused on new copy-protection techniques.

The problem is that in trying to protect itself, the music industry makes it harder on the rest of us.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-m...ility-business





Digital Libraries to Aid Teachers Affected by Hurricane Katrina

Two of the nation's leading digital science libraries will offer free online workshops on December 6 and 8 to teachers in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Textbooks and other traditional materials remain in short supply there. The libraries are operated by the Office of Programs at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Program Center will hold the online workshops for science and math teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms. The goal is to familiarize the teachers with online educational materials that are freely available through the libraries and can help compensate for a scarcity of other materials.

"After an event like Hurricane Katrina--with textbooks, lab materials, and even entire schools destroyed--online resources are critical for ensuring that students continue to get a top-quality education," explains Russanne Low, director of strategic partnerships at the DLESE Program Center at UCAR.

The workshops will provide practical ideas for finding and using digital library resources. Instructors will emphasize strategies that can be easily implemented in Louisiana and Mississippi classrooms affected by the storm. They will also address methods for distance learning courses being offered to displaced students. Interactive sessions will include insights from teachers already using NSDL and DLESE resources who will share advice and answer questions.

Despite the storm damage, most of the schools that have been able to open have access to online resources, according to Louisiana educators working with the libraries.

Teachers may register by going to http://www.dlese.org and clicking on the link to Free professional development for teachers impacted by Katrina.

Coming in January: Nationwide Workshops

Building on the workshops for teachers in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, NSDL in January will begin launching free monthly workshops for teachers across the nation. Each workshop will focus on a different theme, such as helping primary and secondary school teachers and university professors use digital libraries for information about particular subject areas.

"Our goal is to assist teachers who want to find, as efficiently as possible, exemplary online teaching materials that will engage their students," says Susan Van Gundy, director of education and outreach at NSDL.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/516241/?sc=swtn





Christian hardball

School Radio Stations Face Competition Over Licenses
Samuel G. Freedman

THE week before classes started in August 2004 at Franklin Central High School here, Steve George stopped in to prepare the school radio station for the coming year. As the faculty adviser to WRFT, he wanted to make sure his students were writing and producing public-service announcements. He had to contact a few of Franklin Central's football rivals to arrange for WRFT to broadcast away games. He was pricing replacements for a 20-year-old remote unit.

Then, on Mr. George's way to the station's studio, the principal intercepted him to pass along an unexpected piece of mail. It was a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking that WRFT be denied its license, which was due for renewal, and that its frequency be given to an outfit called the Hoosier Public Radio Corporation.

Through his 34 years in commercial radio, the career he left to become a teacher, Mr. George had never once been on a station confronted in this way. He could not imagine why anyone would want to take over WRFT in particular, a 50-watt station with an annual budget of $4,200 and inoffensive programs like "Wakin' Up in a Flash," a talk show run by two seniors at the local Chick-fil-A restaurant.

"I thought, 'Is this fiction?' " Mr. George recalled. "Who could do this?"

He has since learned the answer. Hoosier Public Radio is largely the enterprise of one man, Martin Hensley, a former radio engineer who now describes his occupation as "serving God." And the effort by Mr. Hensley to take the F.C.C. license from WRFT, or at least force it to share broadcast time with him, offers but one example of a series of similar conflicts involving student radio stations. At least 20 high school stations, and a handful of college ones, have been fending off challenges to their licenses by Christian broadcasters in the last year.

This flurry of action, which seemed so inexplicable to Mr. George, actually has a fierce logic to it. A loophole in commission regulations makes educational stations unusually vulnerable to takeover attempts.

Moreover, their frequencies are a lucrative commodity, a bargain-basement way to get onto the air. The commission rarely auctions new frequencies on the crowded radio dial, and existing ones sell for $200,000 or so for a 50-watt operation like WRFT's to more than $10 million for a major commercial station.

"It's opportunistic," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that provides legal assistance for student journalists. "People see this as a way to go after stations that are of value and of use. In the process, student voices can be lost, and the entire society loses. From teen pregnancy to school testing, we understand our world better and our teenagers better when we hear them."

In its original rules, the commission allowed competitors to file applications for existing licenses when they came up for renewal but also put the burden of proof on a challenger to prove the current licensee's unsuitability.

When that concept of "renewal expectancy" failed to contain the number of unsuccessful, time-consuming challenges, Congress acted in the mid-1990's to bar petitions to take over a license. At most, under the amended commission statute, a petitioner could ask the F.C.C. not to renew a given license. A loophole in the law, Section 73.561, left educational stations exposed. Such stations must broadcast at least five hours a day six days a week, and have a weekly total of at least 36 hours, to hold a license. The stations are permitted to shut down entirely when school is out of session for weekends and vacations.

Yet if those same stations operate for less than 12 hours a day, every day, they can be made to share their frequency "upon grant of an appropriate application" by a competitor.

Because the commission renews licenses every eight years, taking up applications sequentially from 18 geographical sections of the nation, the loophole went largely unused until the current round of evaluations began in June 2003.

Then the challenges came in a wave, especially as the commission took up stations in the Midwest. The petitions took aim especially at school stations close to or inside major cities - Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis. WRFT's 50-watt transmitter, for instance, can reach virtually the entire city of 781,000.

While Mr. Hensley went after five stations in Indiana and Kentucky, a company named R B Schools spread its efforts from Colorado to Michigan. Based in Keene, Tex., about 25 miles southwest of Dallas, R B Schools is led by Linda de Romanett, who also owns a Christian station in South Carolina.

Thus far, the commission has not upheld any of the challenges. Which is not to say the high schools have been left unscathed. Franklin Central has already paid more than $16,000 in fees to a Washington lawyer who specializes in F.C.C. law, Kathryn Schmeltzer. Some stations have bought service from National Public Radio and others, including WRFT, have bought and installed automation equipment so they can meet the 12-hour requirement without keeping pupils in the studio around the clock.

Seventeen of the stations that ultimately were granted renewals in 2004 and 2005, including WRFT, still face appeals by Hoosier Public Radio and R B Schools.

MR. HENSLEY, for one, sounds unlikely to go away quietly. He presents himself as the victim of an "emotional hate issue" all because "someone finally stood up and said these stations haven't served the public all these years." He specifically faults the high school stations for playing too much music and doing too little "community-oriented" programming, which he says should include Christian shows. Asked why he simply does not buy a station - one of the commercial Christian stations in the Indianapolis area was up for sale last summer - he points out that it ultimately brought $3 million.

Mr. George has prided himself on treating his students like radio professionals. They know from him to dress up when they broadcast from the Chick-fil-A. They know from him to avoid not only profane words but also scatological slang on the air. He has entrusted them to sell sponsorships to local businesses, much as NPR member stations do.

They have been rewarded with first-and second-place finishes for WRFT the last two years in the statewide student radio competition.

There is at least one lesson, though, that Mr. George surely wishes his students never had to learn.

"The radio station has been the best choice of my high school career," said Nicole Fisher, a 17-year-old senior who intends to major in broadcast journalism in college. "I can't believe someone would swoop in here and take it from us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/ny...education.html





This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis
Sandra Blakeslee

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.

One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:

"Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

"This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self."

Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.

Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.

Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22hypno.html

















Until next week,

- js.

















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