[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The record company doesn’t know. They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?" – Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist


"I got the mother of all pouts when I had to take the [OLPC] XO-1 back from my 9-year-old tester (my daughter). I'd say that's a stirring endorsement from the target market." – Joel Santo Domingo


"If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think." – Jim Krantz



































December 8th, 2007





DoJ Says $222,000 Damages in Capitol v. Thomas Trial Not Unconstitutional
Eric Bangeman

The US government has weighed in on the constitutionality of the $222,000 damage award in Capitol v. Thomas with a brief filed yesterday. The government suggests that the court avoid ruling on the constitutionality of the statutory damages clause of the Copyright Act. Should the court feel the need to rule on the constitutionality, it should find that the damages award does not violate the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

After a three-day trial, single mother Jammie Thomas was found to have willfully infringed on the record label's copyrights. The jury awarded the RIAA statutory damages of $9,250 per song, for a total of $222,000, out of a maximum of $150,000 per track.

Thomas quickly vowed to appeal the verdict, and when her motion of remittur was filed the following week, she asked for a ruling that the damages handed down by the jury were unconstitutionally excessive. The Copyright Act allows for statutory damages of $750 to $150,000. Thomas argued—as have other defendants—that since the labels make around 70¢ per song, even the $750 damage floor violates the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

In its reply to Thomas' motion, the RIAA argued that statutory damages need not have any relationship to actual damages. Furthermore, the group said that she had no basis to challenge the constitutionality of the damages since she had not objected to the jury instructions.

The Department of Justice agrees. "This Court may find that defendant has waived her challenge to Congress's statutory damages provision by submitting 'jury instructions and approv[ing] the verdict form that allowed the jury to consider the full range of statutory damages under the Copyright Act," the DoJ argued in its brief.

The DoJ also says that Thomas' motion ignores the fact that statutory damages are given in place of actual damages. "Statutory damages compensate those wronged in areas in which actual damages are hard to quantify in addition to providing deterrence to those inclined to commit a public wrong," argues the DoJ.

It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement. That's significant, because it shows that the DoJ is siding with the RIAA when it comes to the issue of whether making a file available for download on a P2P network constitutes distribution. It was a contentious issue during the Thomas trial, with the jury instructions originally stating that making songs available is not the same as distribution. The RIAA objected to that instruction, and in its final form, all the jury had to do was find that Thomas made the files available.

"[G]iven the findings of copyright infringement in this case, the damages awarded under the Copyright Act’s statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable,'" concludes the DoJ.

Given that Capitol v. Thomas was the first file-sharing lawsuit to go to trial and the fact that statutory damages have become a significant issue in a number of P2P lawsuits, the judge's decision in this case will be very closely watched.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...itutional.html





Judge Finds Copyright Misuse Defense Unconvincing in RIAA Lawsuit
Eric Bangeman

As the RIAA's legal campaign against file-sharers has unfolded, one of the arguments made by a number of the defendants is that record companies are guilty of copyright misuses and are therefore disqualified from enforcing them. A federal judge in New York has thrown cold water on that argument, upholding the RIAA's motion to strike P2P defendant Marie Lindor's copyright misuse defense in UMG v. Lindor.

Lindor was sued in 2005 and retained copyright attorney Ray Beckerman (whose Recording Industry vs The People blog has tracked the progress of many of the RIAA's lawsuits) as her counsel. One of her defenses was that the record labels misused their their copyrights by acting in concert with the nearly 30,000 lawsuits filed so far.

"The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have," argued Lindor.

The RIAA argued that it was free to lawfully litigate the cases as it sees fit and that copyright misuse was not a recognized affirmative defense against allegations of copyright infringement. Copyright misuse was applicable only in cases where restraint of trade is involved, argued the labels.

Judge David G. Trager agreed with the RIAA's position. "In general, copyright owners commit copyright misuse when they attempt to extend the scope of their copyrights and use them anticompetitively in violation of antitrust laws," wrote the judge in his opinion. "Collectively bringing infringement suits, however, exhibits none of the hallmarks of anticompetitive copyright pooling, and cannot be classified as such."

Judge Trager found that Lindor had failed to show "any viable anticompetitive aspects" of the RIAA's members colluding in their legal campaign. As a result, Lindor will not be able to argue copyright misuse in her lawsuit, and it's less likely that the defense will stand up to scrutiny in other cases.

UMG v. Lindor was originally expected to go to trial this year, but that's not going to happen now. Although the copyright misuse defense has apparently gone out the window, Lindor has raised a number of other arguments in her defense which should still get a hearing. Those include the constitutionality of the statutory damages sought by the RIAA, the amount of money the labels make on each download, and the RIAA's actual expenses per download.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...a-lawsuit.html





LimeWire Antitrust Claims Against RIAA Dismissed
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The antitrust counterclaims imposed by Lime Wire against the RIAA record companies have been dismissed. In a 45-page decision (pdf), the Court relied principally upon the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly that "A party's obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do." Ironically, the Twombly decision was the authority upon which the RIAA's copyright infringement complaint was dismissed in Interscope v. Rodriguez.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/04/1326204.shtml





The Pirate Bay Loses IFPI.com Domain
Thomas Mennecke

The Pirate Bay, one of the largest BitTorrent trackers, obtained the IFPI.com domain in early October of this year. The IFPI.com domain originally belonged to the industry trade group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Claiming it was the donation of an anonymous donor, The Pirate Bay quickly reworked the site, creating the International Federation of Pirate Interests. And all hell broke loose.

The Pirate Bay was able to obtain IFPI.com because of a simple reason, the IFPI forgot to renew the domain. Currently, there are hundreds, if not thousands of individuals out there at this very moment monitoring the top Internet domains, waiting for an organization to slip up. An anonymous individual managed to pick up the IFPI.com domain, and from there donated it to The Pirate Bay.

Considering The Pirate Bay and the IFPI are polar opposites with regards to the online copyright debate, an attempt to settle this amicably was in all likelihood out of the question. The IFPI filed a complaint with the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), requesting that the domain be returned to their ownership. It seems their complaint paid off, as The Pirate Bay has been ordered by WIPO to return the domain.

"For all the foregoing reasons, in accordance with Paragraphs 4(i) of the Policy and 15 of the Rules, the Panel orders that the domain name, be transferred to the Complainant."

The authority of the WIPO is far reaching. A common reaction may suggest that since The Pirate Bay has little respect for the IFPI or copyright law in general, why bother returning the domain. However the WIPO has the authority to compel the domain registrar to hand ownership back to the IFPI. As Peter Sunde, an administrator of The Pirate Bay told Slyck.com, he currently can do little about it.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1623





The Views From The Pirate Bay
Dan Simmons

The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular file-sharing websites in the world and much of the content reachable via the site is pirated. Here the founders of the site and those that keep it running talk about what they do, why they do it and how hard it is to stop them.

In times when the laws of many nations criminalise the swapping of pirated content, be it music, movies or software, the continued existence of The Pirate Bay might seem to be an anomaly.

Those behind the site say they do not fall foul of those laws because it acts as a search engine and does not directly host any of the content

Extended interview with The Pirate Bay's co-founders The IFPI's view on The Pirate Bay

But although it may not break Swedish laws that has not prevented the authorities from trying to close it down. Last year police raided the building and seized its servers.

But what the authorities did not expect were the public protests that followed.

In the main the protesters were angry about the US film industry telling their parliament what to do. They believed that senior US politicians forced their government to shut The Pirate Bay down, even though it was not doing anything illegal under Swedish law. And that really sparked public debate.

The raid happened during an election year and file-sharing became a mainstream issue - it spawned a dedicated political party that quickly became Sweden's third largest outside of parliament.

"You could argue that this is stealing," says Rick Falk Vinge, Pirate Party leader. "The point is it doesn't matter."

"If you are to enforce copyright in the digital age, where a lot of this takes place in private communications, if you are to enforce that you need to monitor all private communications, and that's not worth it to society or politically."

'Okay to copy'

Three days after The Pirate Bay was shut down it came back to life and now Sweden's pirates say they cannot be stopped.

This is partly because now The Pirate Bay servers have moved abroad. The site's controllers say that they do not even know where they are. At least one server stayed in Sweden and it is in the vaults of a bank in Stockholm, where it is hoped it will remain safe.

The re-location of the servers is all part of the cat and mouse game the site plays with police.

Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde make up half of team behind The Pirate Bay. Their weapons are standard laptops, hardwired to the net because they do not trust wireless connections.

Fredrik does all the technical stuff: the server maintenance, the upgrading, the hardware and Peter works with the media and does a bit of programming on the site.

Neither one sheds a tear for makers of movies, music and software.

Says Peter: "I think it's okay to copy. They get their money from so many places that the sales is just one small part.

"Take the latest Bond movie. What car was it? Oh, it's a BMW. His phone is a Sony Ericsson. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think they got a load of money for having those products in the movie."

Both Fredrik and Peter use their site to download content.

"I don't care," says Peter. "That's the big thing, I don't care. If I want it, I take it, 'cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it's up to me to decide.

"Why should they [take action against me]? I still go to the movies, I still spend money on the movies. Everybody does it so everybody wants to download movies. The public opinion is it should be legal."

Nor does Peter feel obliged to pay for what he is downloading.

"I do pay for it by listening to music, by bringing the music to my friends, they bring it to their friends and they go to concerts, I go to concerts," he says. "The actual product doesn't have to cost anything in order to make money."

Targeting the file-sharers

Unsurprisingly, that is not a view shared by the entertainment industry, as Jo Oliver from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry explains.

"It's just not practical to give away a creation for free," she insists. "There are people that need to be paid, who have worked on those recordings.

"Copyright is the mechanism and the law to make sure that that investment is rewarded and therefore that there will be more money to foster new artists, bring new content to the public.

"That's how it works."

For those not persuaded, legal action awaits. The UK music sharing site OiNK has recently been taken down as has the popular TV Links sharing site.

There have also been wins for the industry in France, where the president is pressing for file-sharers to be tracked and disconnected should they persist.

"We don't want The Pirate Bay to continue to operate in its current form just simply because of the damage that it's causing," says Jo Oliver.

"There is a Swedish criminal action underway. We'll see what happens in the criminal trial in Sweden next year. Hopefully that will lead to the closure of The Pirate Bay, but that remains to be seen."

The future

Rough waters may lie ahead for The Pirate Bay - but even if the legal challenge succeeds, not all are sure anything will change.

At least one national newspaper reporter thinks politicians have little appetite here to start changing Sweden's laws, just to close down the site.

"In Sweden, surprisingly many people have been file-sharing," explains Mats Carlbom, a Swedish political reporter. "And it's not only young people, obviously. Maybe over a million, maybe two million people have been file sharing.

"The politicians haven't solved the problem. That's why I think the whole issue is put on hold. They don't know how to tackle this problem."

As Swedish society ponders the way forward, Fredrik is busy shoring up defences. He is working on a new system of sharing files. He says it will be faster, more reliable, and make users harder to track.

The open source version, he says, cannot be brought up or brought down by commercial interests. They are both taking the music and film industries to court for what they claim are illegal attacks on their site. And if The Pirate Bay is outlawed they will just move abroad and run it from another country.

The ship, they claim, can no longer be sunk.

"Nobody is crying that people who used to go around selling ice to people do not have a job anymore because of the fridge," says Peter. "It would be stupid but it is the same thing.

"Technology has changed. You can't go back, there's no way to go back. And I don't think there's a will to go back."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ne/7120845.stm





Congress' Copyright Reform: Seize Computers, Boost Penalties, Spend Money
Nate Anderson

A bipartisan group of Congressmen (and one woman) yesterday introduced a major bill aimed at boosting US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them. While much of the legislation targets industrial counterfeiting and knockoff drugs, it also allows the government to seize people's computers.
"Attempted infringement" appears in new House intellectual property bill

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan) Act of 2007 has the backing of many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA).

In addition to strengthening both civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement, the big development here is the proposed creation of the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). This is a new executive branch office tasked with coordinating IP enforcement at the national and international level. To do this work internationally, the bill also authorizes US intellectual property officers to be sent to other countries in order to assist with crackdowns there. In addition, the Department of Justice gets additional funding and a new unit to help prosecute IP crimes.

The bill, which will have a committee hearing soon, is supposed to kick-start the copyright reform process talked about for so long. But copyright reform means one thing to the PRO IP sponsors and another to the consumer groups that have been advocating for it.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, said in a statement, "seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family's general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate."

In addition, she protests the increase in "already extraordinary copyright damages" and calls for damages to be linked more closely to actual harm suffered by copyright holders.

The Digital Freedom Campaign, backed by the EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Consumer Electronics Association, was more muted in its criticism, instead choosing to praise the legislation for launching a "conversation" about copyright reform. The Digital Freedom Campaign's Maura Corbett said that meaningful copyright reform "must include limits on statutory damages and the codification of the vital principles of fair use," and she hopes that PRO IP "will serve as a catalyst to larger, more meaningful reform."

Fortunately, at least some members of the Judiciary Committee are at least aware that the consumer groups have legitimate points to make. Berman, who chairs the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, announced that his subcommittee would hold a hearing next week on the issue.

"As a cosponsor, I obviously feel very strongly that we must strengthen enforcement efforts to fight piracy and counterfeiting," Berman said. "At the hearing, we will be hearing testimony from both industry experts and from labor and consumer advocates to make sure that in doing so, we don't deny appropriate access to America's intellectual property."

Who is thrilled with the bill? The MPAA, for one. MPAA head Dan Glickman, in a statement praising the new bill, said that "films left costs foreign and domestic distributors, retailers and others $18 billion a year," a significant increase from the $6 billion it allegedly costs the studios.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...end-money.html





Review

The Laptop That Could Change the World
Joel Santo Domingo

It has taken more than two years, but the One Laptop Per Child initiative has finally released its much-anticipated laptop: the OLPC XO-1.

The XO-1 costs $200 each to donate, but for a limited time — until Dec. 31, 2007 — people can avail themselves of the "Give One, Get One" promotion to give a $399 donation ($200 of which is tax-deductible).

One laptop goes to a disadvantaged child in a developing nation, while OLPC gives you another one as a thank-you gift of sorts. (Think of a PBS pledge drive, where they offer a gift to you of a DVD set for a $200 donation.)

This is certainly a different business model in this "me, me, me" holiday season: Instead of buying something for yourself, you buy technology for a child who needs it, with a fringe benefit of a gift laptop for your household.

Just be advised, this limited-time offer is the only way you'll be able to get your hands on the XO-1 for the foreseeable future. After the end of the year, people can still donate the laptops, but they won't be getting one as a gift.

The OLPC XO-1 is intriguing blend of opposites.

On the one hand it contains technology that would barely be called sufficient in today's terms (sub-500-MHz processor, only 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash storage), though that is more than enough for the ultimate recipient of the notebook, a child in a developing country who has never used a computer before.

On the other hand, it includes features found in a notebook worth $2,000 or more. It's encased in a rugged exterior that is splash-, drop-, and hot/cold-resistant.

It has an LED backlit screen; it's compatible with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi; and it also offers 802.11s "mesh networking" — a type of peer-to-peer ad hoc networking that requires zero configuration. And it uses so little power that an external hand generator or a solar panel can power the system.

That screen can pivot 180 degrees to lie flat on top of the keyboard like a tablet; in this configuration, the laptop can work in an "e-book" mode.

You can scroll text with the included game-style D-pad and function buttons, but, to save costs, the screen isn't touch-sensitive like that of a tablet PC.

It is designed so as to be usable in broad daylight. For my testing (indoors, in the labs) I used the LED backlight, which was bright enough, though it can look a bit dim when viewed from the wrong angle. The screen pivot and hinge help alleviate this problem.

If you think you're buying a full-featured laptop PC for $199 net cost, you're deluding yourself, yet for children in the target age range (6 to 12 years old), the XO-1 is as appealing as the other "most desirable object" of 2007, the Apple iPhone.

The colors are bright and friendly, the rubber-sealed keyboard is protected against splashes from beverages, and the keys are responsive.

I got the mother of all pouts when I had to take the XO-1 back from my 9-year-old tester (my daughter). I'd say that's a stirring endorsement from the target market.

The XO-1 is designed and built to work in any environment where you find children, including a one-room school with wooden desks, the dirt floor of a mud brick hut or a sunlit soybean field.

The antennas on either side of the screen double as the laptop's screen latches, so children can swing the XO-1 around its built-in handle with abandon. A drop from child height is unlikely to break the impact-resistant plastic case.

Those same antennas cover the three USB ports and headphone and microphone jacks, so all ports are protected.

The three-panel touch pad is capacitive in the center (touch-sensitive like most touch pads), while the three panels together are resistive: You can use a nonconducting stylus, even a wooden stick (the unit doesn't come with a stylus), to draw or to move the cursor.

The keyboard has a lot of new symbols on it, including a row of buttons representing the neighborhood, classroom and individual.

These buttons modify the GUI so that you see the world in general (over Wi-Fi or mesh networks), local users (if you are in a classroom environment with an OLPC XS school server) or the activities you are working on now or in the past.

So far it's up to the individual countries' respective departments of education or local organizations to get the laptops actually into students' hands.

The XO-1 really comes into its own in its intended environment, where a school's teachers and administration facilitate shared learning and communication among students.

The laptop's mesh networking helps students collaborate on music, writing and many other activities. It works rather like Bluetooth — if you can "see" the other laptops wirelessly, you can connect to them — but without all the tedious configuration that Bluetooth requires.

OLPC designed the system as a laptop because it wants students to take their computers home and engage their families in their work and play activities.

Speaking of activities, the XO-1 uses an activity metaphor instead of calling its open-source programs "applications."

The customized Fedora Linux–based interface is a more elegant implementation of Linux than the gOS we saw on the Everex gPC: Both operating systems use a taskbar at the bottom with a row of icons (à la Mac OS X), but the XO-1's interface forgoes flashy graphics with "bouncing" icons and is therefore, ultimately, more responsive and usable.

Activities like Chat, Browse (Internet), Write, Paint, and Calculate are self-explanatory.

The XO-1 has a suite of music programs called TamTam; they range from a simple beat-making and keyboard mashing toy to a fairly sophisticated music sequencer.

Applications are included to teach programming, too, ranging from the simple TurtleArt (which employs LOGO, an old-school programming language that was used to teach rudimentary programming back in the early 1980s) to the sophisticated Pippy (an interactive interpreter of Python, one of the major programming languages of the Internet, used by Google and YouTube).

There's a Record function, which can be used with the built-in camera, microphone or both to relay messages between a child's teacher and parents or to save the child's own memories.

Internet-connected children will be able to download and install additional activities from OLPC's wiki-based support site. The downloadable activities on the support site are open-source programs specifically developed for the XO-1 platform.

The XO-1's Internet Browser is a highly customized version of Mozilla Firefox. It supports Flash- and Ajax-based sites such as YouTube and Google Maps; performance is sluggish but usable.

Word-processing performance and general browsing was as fast as you'd expect on a smartphone, which is to say fast enough.

The original prototype showed an integrated hand crank to power the XO-1. Unfortunately that feature is absent from the shipping model, which comes with an AC adapter, but the XO-1 will still run off external kinetic power sources such as hand cranks or a foot-powered generators — features likely to be available on the laptops going to developing countries.

As part of its deployment for use in developing countries, the XO-1 runs on 8-to-11-volt power systems (from solar panels to hand or foot cranks to a car battery), and it does so efficiently. I measured 18 watts of power usage while the battery was charging and 6W after the battery was fully charged.

This is a far cry from the 60W to 100W usage of an energy-efficient value desktop. By comparison, the ASUS Eee PC 4G used over 23W while charging and 14W when charged.

The XO-1's LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) battery is more environmentally friendly than an NiMH or an NiCd, and it will support more than 2,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with the 800 to 1,200 you get from other battery technologies, such as lithium-ion.

Untrained personnel (older children, perhaps) can repair the XO-1 in the field: Undo four screws using just your hand, then pop open the screen bezel (all the electronics save the keyboard and the battery are in the screen).

Once the screen is open the backlight can be replaced with a $2 part, and there are extra screws in the chassis in case one is lost.

The motherboard with integrated CPU pops out in one piece and is also user-replaceable, so you can easily take two semi-working XO-1 laptops (say one with a broken screen, and another with a fried motherboard) and make one good one out of the pair.

I have to reiterate that this is a donation rather than a true-blue consumer PC, since we've come to one of the XO-1's biggest drawbacks for users: There's a 30-day replacement warranty, but once that's done, you're on your own.

You can try going to the wiki-based support site for updates and community-based help, but since OLPC isn't a consumer PC entity, you'll be expected to handle your own tech support. OLPC claims that there will be a fee-based tech support service, but that's in the future.

As part of the "Give One, Get One" promotion, donors will receive one-year subscription to T-Mobile's HotSpot Wi-Fi network, so you can use your XO-1 in Starbucks cafés and airports around the country.

Also, if you just want to donate $200 (or more) per laptop and not receive the gift XO-1, OLPC will put the entire sum toward the $200 cost per unit to supply laptops to children.

Your entire contribution in this case is 100 percent tax-deductible — depending of course on your local and federal tax laws.

Compared with its rivals, the XO-1 has the advantage of actually being available.

Intel's Classmate PC has two strikes against it: It's only a reference design (original equipment manufacturers like ASUS or Dell will still have to brand and build it), and so far it is vaporware.

The Classmate PC will have the benefit of being x86-compatible, so it will run Windows XP or various versions of Linux (the XO-1 can run only its custom version of Fedora Linux).

The $400 ASUS Eee PC is a vastly better choice for adult users because it's available now from public sources like NewEgg, and it will still be available to the public after Dec. 31, 2007; furthermore, it comes with a suite of programs that includes Google Docs and a full version of Firefox.

The philanthropic aspect of the XO-1, however, can't be denied, and the Eee PC isn't ruggedized like the XO-1.

If what you're after is an inexpensive system, there's also the option of buying a used PC on eBay or low-powered new desktop like the Everex gPC, but the XO-1 is compelling considering the target market.

Probably the biggest strike against the OLPC XO-1 (from an admittedly selfish perspective) as a consumer PC is that OLPC isn't a consumer PC company, so all over its Web site are disclaimers stating that while it will strive to get the gift PCs to you by the holidays, delivery isn't guaranteed.

What is guaranteed is that your contribution will result in a new XO-1 PC for a needy child somewhere in the world.

If this were a full-blown comparison review, I'd probably give the nod to the Eee PC for adults and the OLPC XO-1 for children, but the XO-1 isn't a consumer PC in the strict definition of the term.

For a $399 donation (50 percent tax-deductible), you'll be contributing to a charity whose goal is to get laptops into the hands of children around the world, and as a fringe benefit, you'll get the same laptop for your child as a gift.

After Jan. 1, 2008, you'll still be able to contribute to the OLPC effort monetarily, but you won't get the XO-1 as a gift for yourself or your kids.

In either case, you don't get to choose what country your charitable laptop goes to if you buy an individual unit, but if you donate 100 to 10,000 units or more, you get to choose where they go.

The OLPC XO-1 is already a game changer; that much is certain, with other laptop manufacturers and chip giants like Intel (with its Classmate PC), developing competing products.

What remains to be seen is whether either OLPC itself or its competitors can get the laptops into the hands of students worldwide. Like other game changers and version 1.0 products, mass adoption will be the key to the success of the "cheap educational laptop."

While the XO-1 is attractive and totally kid-friendly, it's ultimately up to the bureaucrats in the target countries to choose which platform to use.

Unfortunately for OLPC, lobbyists, marketing and PR agents cost money, and Intel has deep pockets. So Intel can still gain the edge, if it can get the Classmate PC laptop past the reference design and prototype stages.

I'd say this gives OLPC about 6 to 12 months to get the traction it needs to become established before the Classmate PC and its ubiquitous x86 technology catches up.

No matter who "wins" this phase of the computer wars, ultimately children in developing countries will start to be familiar and comfortable with the technology that industrialized countries enjoy.

Maybe then communication will become a dialogue, instead of a monologue directed from the rich nations to the poor. That will be something to see.

BOTTOM LINE: The XO-1 laptop by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a game-changer for disadvantaged children in developing countries. For a limited time you can benefit as well.

PROS: Uses very little energy to run. Preloaded with educational software. Wireless, with mesh networking. Flash-compatible browser preinstalled. Long-cycle LiFePO4 battery. Rugged construction. Easy to service.

CONS: Not compatible with store-bought Windows or Mac OS programs. Sluggish flash performance. Much less compelling for adults. Business model isn't consumer-oriented (shipping, customer support). You can't specify where your donated computer goes, unless you donate a lot. For experienced computer users, requires learning a new way of doing things. You must act before Dec. 31, 2007 if you want one for yourself.

COMPANY: One Laptop Per Child

SPEC DATA:

Price: $399.00
Type: Ultraportable, Value
Operating System: Fedora Core 7 Linux
Processor Name: AMD Geode LX700
Processor Speed: 433 MHz
RAM: 256 MB
Weight: 3.2 lb
Screen Size: 7.5 inches
Screen Size Type: standard
Graphics Card: Integrated
Storage Capacity: 1 GB
Networking Options: 802.11s

EDITOR RATING: Four out of five stars

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314802,00.html





One Laptop Per Child Orders Surge

Peru wants 260,000 machines; Mexican billionaire signs up
Hiawatha Bray

Despite slower-than-expected sales and tough competition from commercial rivals, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation of Cambridge is enjoying a surge of new orders.

Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who set up the foundation to provide low-cost laptops to poor schoolchildren around the globe, said in an interview yesterday that the government of Peru has signed a contract to purchase 260,000 of the $188 machines. "It was notarized five minutes ago," he said, adding that the Peruvian order will make it easier for the foundation to sign up more countries to the program. "It's momentum."

Negroponte also said Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has purchased 50,000 of the machines for distribution in his country. "He's an old friend, and he's been involved in this from the beginning," Negroponte said.

The nonprofit has designed its laptop to eventually cost less than $100 each. It hopes to persuade governments in developing countries to buy millions of the machines and hand them out free of charge as educational tools.

But foreign governments haven't placed as many orders as Negroponte expected when he launched the foundation in 2005. So OLPC has asked affluent American individuals and charitable groups to buy machines and donate them to children in poor countries. Participants in the Give One Get One program pay $400 for two of the machines - one for their own use and the other to be donated. Participants also receive a year of free wireless Internet access at hundreds of public hotspots operated by T-Mobile. A separate program, called Give Many, encourages charities to pay for hundreds or thousands of OLPC laptops.

Robert Fadel, the foundation's director of finance and operations, said both programs are paying off. Since the Give One Get One program began Nov. 12, the foundation has received about $2 million in orders every day, he said. That works out to 190,000 laptops total, with at least half donated to children in developing countries. Fadel said many customers end up donating both the computers they buy. Fadel didn't have numbers on how many machines have been sold through the Give Many system, but said the number runs into the thousands.

The surge in sales of the nonprofit's laptops comes as OLPC faces growing competition from commercial vendors of cheap laptops. Intel Corp. is pushing a rival computer called the Classmate, while Asus Computer International of Taiwan offers the Eee PC, designed for use in affluent nations such as the United States as well as in poor countries.

OLPC also has been hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit in Nigeria filed by Lagos Analysis Corp. of Natick. The suit claims the foundation stole the company's keyboard design. Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed.

The founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison. Oyegbola insists his Nigerian patent is legitimate and said he plans to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit against OLPC in an American court.

Computer industry analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland, a longtime skeptic of the OLPC plan, was impressed by the foundation's early sales. "I remain generally skeptical, but that's some good news," said Kay. "If you were a budding computer company, you'd be happy to sell 300,000 or so units in your first season."

But Kay still predicted trouble ahead for the foundation, unless it stops acting like a charity and more like a traditional computer business. "They have to survive on selling products, having satisfied customers, and having people come back for more," he said.

However, Negroponte said OLPC's nonprofit status is essential, as it enables the foundation to collaborate with leading technology companies in designing and building the laptop. He said many of the foundation's partners would not offer assistance if they viewed OLPC as a business rival rather than a charity.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn..._orders_surge/





Microsoft Wants One Laptop Per Child System to Run Windows XP
Paul McDougall

Microsoft has asked the designers of a low-cost Linux laptop intended for children in developing nations to redesign the system so it can accommodate its Windows XP operating system.

In a move sure to provoke controversy, Microsoft wants the designers of the XO laptop, available through a non-profit initiative called One Laptop Per Child, to add a port through which the storage capacity required by Windows XP can be added to the system.

The XO currently runs on a Red Hat Linux operating system. Making the laptop compatible with XP would give students in poor countries access to "tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows," said James Utzschneider, a Microsoft general manager, in a blog post Wednesday.

Utzschneider says a shrunken version of Windows XP could potentially run on 2 Gbytes of flash memory. The XO, however, can only hold 1 Gbyte. As a result, Microsoft wants the XO's designers to add a slot through which more memory can be added via a secure digital (SD) card, Utzschneider said.

"We asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 Gbytes of extra memory," Utzschneider wrote. It was not immediately clear if the OLPC has responded to Microsoft's request.

The OLPC project was launched in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The aim is to build industry support for the production of low cost laptops for poor children on the wrong side of the so-called "digital divide."

The group's first offering, the XO, runs on the Linux operating system and an Advanced Micro Devices processor and is priced at less than $200.

Last year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates chided the XO for its lack of functionality, insisting that the fact it requires a hand crank for power would make it difficult for children to use.

Microsoft's call for changes to the system that would add features but increase its price could provoke a backlash from OLPC purists who maintain that the XO must be produced at the lowest cost possible.

Microsoft's renewed interest in participating in OLPC might be viewed by skeptics as an admission that a rival offering for developing markets called Classmate -- which uses an Intel processor on Microsoft software -- has failed to catch on.

Virtually all major U.S. tech vendors are looking to emerging markets to drive the bulk of their sales growth in the 21st century, and are loathe to see rivals establish an early footprint.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it's planning "limited field trials" in January of an XO system running Windows XP.
http://itnews.com.au/News/66442,micr...indows-xp.aspx





Linux is About to Take Over the Low End of PCs
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Opinion -- Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue with a straight face that people can't get their work done on Linux-powered PCs. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, OpenSUSE, Xandros, Linspire Mint, the list goes on and on of desktop Linuxes that PC owner can use without knowing a thing about Linux's technical side. People can argue that Vista or Mac OS X is better, but when Michael Dell runs Ubuntu Linux on one of his own home systems, it can't be said that Linux isn't a real choice for anyone's desktop.

Another change occurred when Nicholas Negroponte proposed the so-called $100-laptop, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machine. He couldn't get them built for quite that price -- they cost about $200 -- but that's still remarkably cheap and they're available today.

Not long after OLPC was announced, Intel and other companies came up with their own take on an inexpensive PC: the Classmate PC. By 2007, it had become clear that you could build a laptop that was good enough to run desktop Linux for about $200.

That gave other hardware vendors an idea. If you could build a no-frills PCs that ran Linux, why not make sub-$500 computers with a bit more power and sell them to consumers? That's exactly what Asus did with its Xandros Linux-powered ASUS Eee UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC), which lists for about $400. At about the same time, Everex introduced its gOS TC2502 gPC. Available first only from Wal-Mart, these $199 desktop systems are also now also available from ZaReason, an open-source VAR.

And how are these sub $500 computers and laptops doing? Everex is building them as fast as it can and has announced that its forthcoming laptop version, the CloudBook, has already been picked up by a major U.S. reseller. At the same time, according to an unconfirmed report, ASUS is planning on selling 3.8 million Eees in its next fiscal year.

While all this has been going on, broadband Internet connectivity has become almost as easily available as cell phone coverage. It is a small town indeed where there's not some kind of free Wi-Fi available at a local coffee shop or library. You may have to pay for Wi-Fi at the airport or in your hotel, but Wi-Fi is almost always there. And, at home, well I'm living on a rural mountain overlooking a national forest and I have 3M-bps DSL coming in to my house.

Google has made billions from this simple fact. It's not just about search and ads anymore, though. Google has found that there's a big demand for its office Google Apps. And not just from home users; Capgemini, a multibillion dollar international consulting company, is using GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition) for one of its offices.

Four trends: user-friendly Linux desktops, useful under-$500 laptops and desktops, near-universal broadband, and business-ready Internet office applications. Put them together and you have a revolution.

For the last two decades, we've been buying expensive desktop operating systems on business PCs running from $1,000 to $2,000. On those systems, we've been putting pricey desktop-centric office suites like Microsoft Office. That's a lot of money, and the convergence of the above trends is about to knock it for a loop.

Here's the business case. You tell me if it's not compelling. You can buy 100 $500 PCs running a free version of Linux, hook them to a high-speed Internet connection for a $1,000 a year and use GAPE at $50 per user account per year. Finally, we'll throw in a grand for a Linux server. That's $57,000 for your equipment, your connectivity, your operating system and your applications.

Now, let's say you want to run Vista Business. First, you'll need 100 PCs that can run it. The cheapest deal I can find today for machines I'd consider adequate for Vista Business, which is to say they must have at least 2GB of RAM, is for the Dell OptiPlex 320 at $707 a PC. Of course -- unlike with Linux, which always includes an office suite, OpenOffice -- for those times when the Internet is down, you'll need to buy an office suite. If you went with Microsoft Standard 2007, with a little shopping you can get it for the upgrade price of about $200 per copy. So, on the PC side alone, we're looking at $90,700.

All done? Not quite. To get the most from Microsoft Office 2007, you really need to be operating it with a minimum of Microsoft Server 2003 ($4,994 base price plus 100 CALs (client access licenses)), Exchange 2007 ($7,399 base price plus 100 CALs) and SharePoint 2007 ($13,824 base price plus 100 standard CALS). If you're running Windows you probably already have Server, so we won't count it. Throw in another two grand for the Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 servers, and a grand for the Internet connection, and (insert sound of old-fashioned adding machine) the final total is $114,923.

So, by my calculations, all those trends have joined together to make a Linux-based small business using Google applications instead of Exchange and SharePoint cost less than half its Microsoft-based twin.

Worse still, if you're Microsoft, you can't really defend yourself. Linux desktops run just dandy on low-end, under-$500 PCs. Vista Basic, which comes the closest to being able to run on these systems, is unacceptable since it doesn't support business networking. Office 2007 also won't run worth a darn on these systems. And somehow, I can't see Microsoft optimizing its applications to work with Google Apps instead of Exchange and SharePoint.

Put it all together, and here's what I see happening. In the next few quarters, low-end Linux-based PCs are going to quickly take over the bottom rung of computing. Then, as businesses continue to get comfortable with SAAS (software as a service) and open-source software, the price benefits will start leading them toward switching to the new Linux/SAAS office model.

You'll see this really kick into gear once Vista Service Pack 1 appears and business customers start seriously looking at what it will cost to migrate to Vista. That Tiffany-level price tag will make all but the most Microsoft-centric businesses start considering the Linux/SAAS alternative.

Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html





Pout and Shout
Mireya Navarro

ALL is not well in MileyWorld.

Members of mileyworld.com, mostly preteen and young teenage girls devoted to the Disney TV show “Hannah Montana” and the show’s star, Miley Cyrus, are suing the singer’s official fan Web site for allegedly promising them first dibs on concert tickets and leaving them empty-handed.

“I really don’t want to be in the fan club anymore,” said one of the plaintiffs, Mia Piazza, a 9-year-old from Pittsburgh.

Over in the principality of Prince, subjects are also rebelling. Three fan Web sites have banded together as “Prince Fans United” to fight the music performer’s attempts to stop them from posting photos and other content related to him.

One of the sites declared: “We at prince.org will not stand for this and have joined forces with the other affected sites to tell our side of the story and stand up to what are, in our opinion, bullying tactics designed to silence freedom of speech.”

By definition, members of fan clubs are passionate, but these days they also seem cranky and some are even at war with the performers they supposedly slavishly admire. Fan clubs today are online communities that vent on Internet message boards and gripe directly to performers about everything, including song lists, merchandise and the prices and availability of tickets. And when sounding off is met by dead air, fans sue, complain to consumer protection agencies and even plot concerted action on a global scale.

"There’s all kinds of ways to be indignant," said Jerry M. Lewis, an emeritus professor of sociology at Kent State University, who studies fan behavior.

Ticket woes are a major source of anger. Average ticket prices for concerts keep rising, and many fans are priced out or forced to buy at exorbitant markups from brokers and other resellers. Last year, some Barbra Streisand fans were fuming when they learned she was staging her final concert tour — this after they had already paid steep prices for her previous, supposedly, last-ever tour in 2000. (The average ticket cost nearly $300, according to Pollstar, a concert trade magazine ).

But Streisand fans are not unique. When any hot concert tour is announced, some fans are already seething.

“The attitude is, “How am I going to get taken advantage of this time?’” said Tim McQuaid, the president of Fan Asylum, a company that manages fan clubs, ticket sales and V.I.P. packages for artists such as Maroon 5 and Whitney Houston.

Fans often join a performer’s “official” fan club for the specific benefit of having access to tickets before they go on sale to the general public. But some of the fan clubs have become suspect — serving mainly as a profit center, charging membership fees that can reach more than $100 and making even more money selling “exclusive” merchandise and other items.

Mr. McQuaid, who has been managing fan clubs since 1980, beginning with the band Journey, said when the mission shifts from an emphasis on service to one of revenue, “You’re just asking for trouble from the fan base.”

Some MileyWorld members want their membership money back. They are suing the two companies that run the club for the artist, Interactive Media Marketing and Smiley Miley, which is owned by Ms. Cyrus.

Although MileyWorld has benefits like exclusive “webisodes” of the singer backstage, contests, games and access to her “secret diary,” it was the offer “to do our best” to secure an allotment of concert tickets for members that persuaded Mia’s mother, Debbie Piazza, to let her daughter join the club for $29.95.

Ms. Piazza, 32, who works for U.S. Steel adjusting invoices, said she had joined fan sites for Kenny Chesney and Bon Jovi to buy concert tickets and was successful in both cases. But with MileyWorld, she said, she found no tickets even when she logged on to Ticketmaster at the exact time they went on sale.

In defense, Miss Cyrus’s representatives said that 70,000 of MileyWorld’s 200,000 members were able to buy tickets, and issued a public statement: “MileyWorld members had far greater access to concert tickets than the general public and other fan clubs. The claim that the vast majority of MileyWorld members were unable to obtain concert tickets is simply false. MileyWorld will vigorously defend itself from the frivolous claims in the lawsuit.”

Robert Peirce, the lawyer suing on behalf of members, said the site should have revealed the size of the membership at each concert location so that fans could have figured out their chances and made an informed decision about whether to fork over almost $30.

“I felt I was misled,” Ms. Piazza said. “All I want is my $30 back and I hope they put some kind of disclaimer so it doesn’t happen to somebody else again.”

Fans have long come together in another type of club — the free unofficial sites used to trade information about tickets and the artist. Most exist harmoniously with the official sites. But the informal sites can develop existences of their own, with members as loyal to each other as to the artist.

On their Web site, the leaders of Prince Fans United say they believe the performer is using copyright concerns to hide his real goal: “to stifle all critical commentary about Prince.”

Calls to AEG Live, the singer’s promoter, and to the Web Sheriff, the copyright enforcement company handling Prince’s cease-and-desist notices, were not returned. The fan sites, based in California and Europe, said they were negotiating a resolution and couldn’t comment on the dispute, but their message boards have not demonstrated noticeable new restraint.

As a fan wrote to prince.org: “The more I think about it, I say just drop him, remove all content, let him have his way. It’s obvious he doesn’t want us as fans anymore, so why should we want him?”

Ben Margolin, 36, a software engineering manager from Millbrae, Calif., said he became a founder of prince.org 10 years ago because “I really connected with his music.” But now the site functions more as an international social network where people discuss politics and other topics, he said.

“People stay for the community that’s evolved, the personalities and environment,” he said. “It’s a virtual hang-out.”

Andrea Baker, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University who specializes in online relationships and is studying two fan sites dedicated to the Rolling Stones, said that with communication comes the ability not only to swap intelligence but to complain collectively.

Ms. Baker said many fans are encouraged to gripe by the assumption that their favorite artists may be tuning in to their boards.

“There’s a closer connection between the fan and the performer,” she said. “Some of the assertiveness comes from their knowing they are being heard.”

Once all fans expected was an autographed picture, but now many demand blogs, MySpace pages and V.I.P access to the artist, some fan club managers say.

“Before, an artist could do a concert and disappear into the ether,” said Nathan Hubbard, the chief executive officer of Musictoday, a subsidiary of Live Nation that manages fan sites for 30 artists, including John Mayer, Celine Dion and the Rolling Stones. “Today fans expect you to be present and the connection doesn’t stop when the artist leaves the stage.”

Performers, he said, must be clear about what they will do. “If you underdeliver, the Internet gives everybody an equal voice.”

But almost anything can spark fan ire. A group of Clay Aiken fans fired off a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission last year accusing his record label of false advertising for promoting him as heterosexual. Mr. Aiken, who has faced relentless rumors that he is gay, does not talk about his sexuality. The F.T.C. has taken no action.

“People will complain about everything,” said Tim Bierman, the manager of Pearl Jam’s Ten Club, which is run in-house by the band. “We might hear a whole day’s worth of criticism about a particular shade of color for a T-shirt.”

But fan club managers say artists are aware that fan clubs are their most loyal audience and strive to reward them. The Ten Club offers members perks like an exclusive new single at Christmas.

And Ms. Baker said that despite all the griping, fans are still fans. When Keith Richards fell from a tree and was injured last year, she said, “there was an outpouring of concern” on boards. “The fans were very preoccupied with finding out every detail of what happened,” she said.

Even Ms. Piazza is trying to find tickets for Ms. Cyrus’s concert in Pittsburgh on Jan. 4, four days before her daughter Mia’s 10th birthday. She checks three or four times a day with Ticketmaster, hoping a corporate sponsor has released a batch of tickets. And she test-drove a car from a dealership in order to be eligible for a drawing for tickets.

Mia says the ticket snafu has not soured her on her favorite artist.

“No matter what, I’ll always be her fan,” she said. “I just love her music.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/fashion/02fans.html





As U.S. Pop Wanes Abroad, Talent Scout Looks Wide
Jeff Leeds

Leslie Feist, a former punk rocker from Calgary, Alberta, now known professionally as the indie torch singer Feist, recorded her 2004 album, “Let It Die,” in Paris. But if listeners detect any hint of French flavoring, she insisted, it is entirely imaginary.

“If I’d said, ‘Oh, I made my record in Istanbul,’ then everyone would be like, ‘We can hear the sweetened mint tea in small glass cups,’” she said. “Like, ‘We can just feel the hookah smoke running through the veins of the songs.’ People need a context to understand things through. In reality, I had no intention to stay in France. I was going to take this and go tour where it made sense.”

So it came as little surprise that Feist — whose cosmopolitan touch and offbeat voice are on display on her newest album, “The Reminder,” which many consider a contender for Grammy nominations on Thursday — drew the attention of Martin Kierszenbaum. Mr. Kierszenbaum, who is head of international operations for the record-industry heavyweight Interscope Records, signed Feist as the first artist to his own minilabel, Cherrytree Records.

Though Mr. Kierszenbaum devotes much of his energies to devising global marketing plans for big Interscope acts like Nelly Furtado and 50 Cent, with Cherrytree he has been quietly flirting with the boundaries, artistic and geographic, of mainstream pop by scouting performers from around the world and trying to establish them as stars far removed from their native countries.

In addition to Feist, for whom Cherrytree secured the domestic rights, Mr. Kierszenbaum, 40, is betting on acts including the Pipettes, a Ronettes-inspired British girl group that is percolating in Japan; and Flipsyde, a Latin-tinged rap collective from Oakland, Calif., with a hit in Germany. Next stop: Robyn, a Swedish pop singer who is making her return to the United States.

Mr. Kierszenbaum said such acts reflected his bent toward musicians who are “inside the pop tradition, but push the envelope.”

But he acknowledged that his choices also reflected a dramatic shift in global sales patterns. Though corporate-owned record labels continue to rely heavily on exports of English-speaking stars, mainly from the United States, the top sellers in many countries increasingly are albums released by homegrown acts.

Sales began shifting more than a decade ago. In 2000 roughly 68 percent of worldwide sales derived from so-called local repertory — artists working in their native country — up from 58 percent in 1991, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London. Though American stars like Beyoncé and the Red Hot Chili Peppers still connect with fans in territories around the world, the ranks and global appeal of major United States acts appear to be waning, many music executives say. In Spain, for instance, only one American album — the soundtrack to “High School Musical 2” — is in the most recent Top 10 chart.

The surge by foreign talent has arisen partly from the spread of state-of-the-art recording equipment and software, as well as the expansion of previously limited avenues for promotion. MTV, for example, has started more than 50 music-video channels customized for viewers in Europe, Asia and other regions. The decline of an American presence among acts abroad also stems from old-fashioned cultural differences: Genres that fed a domestic boom in the 1990s, including country music and certain strains of rap, do not sell as well overseas.

“There’s more of a nationalistic trend generally in all these countries — not just in music, but I think politically,” said Richard Griffiths, a former senior record-label executive who now runs the British talent management firm Modest Management. And repeated layoffs at the labels’ affiliates have weakened their ability to push acts imported from the United States. “It used to be they’d be breaking those huge artists in America, and then the word would go out, ‘You will break these around the world,’ and generally speaking, they did,” he said. “Mariah, Celine, Michael Jackson. Those days are obviously gone.”

Mr. Kierszenbaum, though, is counting on what he sees as the flip side to the trend: Emerging talent that appeals to fans in one international market can be marketed in another territory, and, potentially, the United States. “I just think that human beings aren’t that different when it comes to pop music,” he said. “I really believe that if something can resonate somewhere, it’s got a good chance of resonating elsewhere. You may have to tweak it, adapt it, change the approach, but it can work.”

The American-born son of two Argentine scientists, Mr. Kierszenbaum played in a band and a bilingual rap act, Maroon, in college, but broke into the music business 19 years ago as a clerk in the mailroom of PolyGram Music Group.

He was later hired as a publicist in the international division of A&M Records, where he worked with acts like Soundgarden and Sting, and eventually ran the department. But in 1999 layoffs swept the label after PolyGram, its parent company, was sold to the liquor giant Seagram and merged into that conglomerate’s Universal Music Group.

A handful of artists and employees, among them Mr. Kierszenbaum, were folded into Universal’s Interscope unit, which despite a roster of cutting-edge acts like Nine Inch Nails and Snoop Dogg, suffered from a lackluster international presence. So Mr. Kierszenbaum helped devise marketing strategies to export the label’s acts.

But Interscope’s chairman, Jimmy Iovine, also decided to test Mr. Kierszenbaum’s ear for new prospects and encouraged him to sign talent himself. One of his first discoveries — signed in a partnership with Universal’s Russian affiliate — was the Russian teenage girl duo t.A.T.u.

Mr. Kierszenbaum encouraged Universal’s arm in Japan to enlist a native performer to record a cover version of t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” in Japanese. That version was offered as a selection in karaoke bars — a crucial outlet for music discovery in Asia — as t.A.T.u.’s album, “200Km/H in the Wrong Lane,” was hitting record shops. The album became an international hit, selling roughly 1.7 million copies in Japan alone, he said.

Such successes prompted Mr. Iovine to agree in early 2005 to give Mr. Kierszenbaum his own imprint. “He’s eclectic,” Mr. Iovine said of Mr. Kierszenbaum’s discoveries for his label, “but most of the stuff is capable of hitting mass appeal. He’s very driven. Signing a Russian band and teaching them English? He’s picking up that lane.” So far, Feist has been Cherrytree’s biggest hit. “The Reminder,” her second album for the label, received an extra boost when a song was tapped for an iPod commercial, and has sold more than 370,000 copies domestically, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But not everything has translated. For instance, the Lovemakers, a raunchy electro-rock act from Oakland, did not attract much of an audience outside the Bay Area. The Fratellis, a Scottish rock band that released its debut album in the United States earlier this year, attracted some critical acclaim and exposure in an Apple advertisement, but topped out at a modest 129,000 copies.

In other cases, however, Mr. Kierszenbaum’s cross-continental viewpoint is showing signs of promise. There is strong buzz around Robyn, the Swedish singer who — after a short-lived pop hit in the United States a decade ago — is returning with a genre-bending album that has already topped the charts in her native country. Potential avenues for re-introducing her to American fans, Mr. Kierszenbaum said, might include featuring her as a guest vocalist on a hip-hop artist’s single.

And in Japan, the high-concept imagery of the Pipettes, who sport polka-dot outfits and retro, candy-coated melodies, has fueled brisk sales for their album, which was released there two months ago. The trio and one of its songs, “Because It’s Not Love,” are featured in a new music video, paid for by Panasonic, that doubles as a commercial.

Though the Pipettes are also trying to win fans in the United States, Mr. Kierszenbaum said he thought the trio had a better shot at connecting in Asia early on. The label has advanced money for three Pipettes tours in Japan on the theory that breaking there should come “first and easiest.”

“Nothing’s easy,” he added, “but it’s easier than trying to break the Pipettes in Iowa at the beginning. We’ve got to start a fire somewhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/ar...ic/05cher.html





Pay What You Want for This Article
Jon Pareles

SHORTLY after Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” online in October, the band misplaced its password for Max/MSP, a geek-oriented music software package that the guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, Mr. Greenwood said over a cup of tea at the venerable Randolph Hotel here. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP’s developers, Cycling ’74, for another password. “They wrote back,” Mr. Greenwood said, “‘Why don’t you pay us what you think it’s worth?’”

Well, Radiohead was asking for it. Those are the exact terms on which the band is selling the downloadable version of “In Rainbows”: Buyers can pay zero or whatever they please up to £99.99 (about $212) for the album in MP3 form. Sixteen years and seven albums into the career that has made Radiohead the most widely pondered band in rock, it is taking chances with its commerce as well as its art. For the beleaguered recording business Radiohead has put in motion the most audacious experiment in years.

Radiohead is not the first act to try what one of its managers, Chris Hufford, calls “virtual busking.” But it’s the first one that can easily fill arenas whenever it tours. “It feels good,” said Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, over a pint of hard cider at his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. “It was a way of letting everybody judge for themselves.”

Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose gambit didn’t just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the superstar free agent. After fulfilling its contract in 2003 with its last album for EMI, “Hail to the Thief,” Radiohead turned down multimillion-dollar offers for a new major-label deal, preferring to stay independent.

“It was tough to do anything else,” Mr. Yorke said during Radiohead’s first extensive interviews since the release of the album. “The worst-case scenario would have been: Sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la.”

Signing a new major-label contract “would have killed us straight off,” he added. “Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, it’s tempting to have someone say to you, ‘You will never have to worry about money ever again,’ but no matter how much money someone gives you — what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.”

The Eagles and Madonna, both with sales that dwarf Radiohead’s, also abandoned major labels in 2007, as did songwriters as influential as Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, who moved to Hear Music, the independent label partly owned by Starbucks. Meanwhile Prince has followed his own wayward path, from one-album distribution deals through major labels to giving away CDs at concerts or, lately, bound into a British Sunday paper.

The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the Internet. Of course that has been anything but sudden. Music has been bouncing around online, sold or shared, since the days of dial-up, and bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy gave away full albums online years ago. But the momentum of online music has been accelerating. Apple’s iTunes became the third-largest music retailer in the United States this year. Amazon added MP3 downloads alongside physical album sales. Hip-hop mixtapes, singled out for copyright prosecution by record labels, disappeared from stores and street corners only to thrive online, where the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam’ron and Kanye West release their latest innovations.

And Radiohead was able to draw worldwide attention to “In Rainbows” with no more promotion than a modest 24-word announcement on its Web site on Oct. 1. To the band’s glee, it could release its music almost immediately, without the months of lead time necessary to manufacture discs. Mr. Hufford said “In Rainbows” has been downloaded in places as far-flung — and largely unwired — as North Korea and Afghanistan.

On Nov. 9, as a kind of workaholic lark, Radiohead staged a free, thoroughly informal Webcast called “Thumbs Down,” with real-time performances of new songs and covers of Bjork and the Smiths, from its cluttered studio in Oxford. (Many clips are on YouTube.)

Yet Radiohead’s online choices, band members said, were among the easier decisions made during the protracted recording process of “In Rainbows.” The band and its producer, Nigel Godrich, focused on 16 songs and worked them over in the studio, on the road and in the studio again, for well over two years of torturous rearranging and rewriting.

“We kept on ripping the guts out of it all the time and starting again,” the drummer Phil Selway said in Oxford.

The band chose 10 concise, tuneful songs for the album. In them Mr. Yorke sings about displacement, disorientation, memories and moving on. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” wonders “Why should I stay here?,” imagines decomposing underwater and being eaten by worms, then concludes, “Hit the bottom and escape.”

Throughout “In Rainbows” Mr. Yorke’s lyrics can be mapped onto personal relationships, the state of the world or the state of the band.

Behind much of the album “was a sudden realization of the day-t0-day, tenuous nature of life,” Mr. Yorke said. “Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That’s all.”

The Internet had already witnessed much of the gestation of “In Rainbows,” as Radiohead tested songs in public, knowing they would be bootlegged immediately. “The first time we ever did ‘All I Need,’ boom! It was up on YouTube,” Mr. Yorke said. “I think it’s fantastic. The instant you finish something, you’re really excited about it, you’re really proud of it, you hope someone’s heard it, and then, by God, they have. It’s O.K. because it’s on a phone or a video recorder. It’s a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that’s good. At that stage that’s all you need to worry about.”

The band worried over other things. After releasing “Hail to the Thief” and touring the world, Radiohead took a year off. The members, all in their 30s, turned to raising families as they mulled over the future. Early in 2005 they began rehearsing together tentatively, although, Mr. Selway said, mentioning the word “album” was taboo for a year. They had a list of songs, most of which would appear two years later on “In Rainbows,” by September.

But as 2005 ended, Radiohead still had not regained its momentum. Mr. Yorke, a prolific songwriter, made his own album, “The Eraser,” working mostly alone with his computer and samples.

Mr. Godrich was busy recording Beck, so the band tried some sessions with Spike Stent, who had worked with Bjork, at the beginning of 2006. It was disappointed with the results. Then it decided that performing might put the songs into shape. It booked a summer tour in 2006, playing half a dozen new songs at every show. Soon, thanks to bootlegged recordings online, fans were clearly recognizing each one. After the tour Radiohead returned to the studio, only to decide that the songs weren’t ready yet.

“To be brutally honest,” the guitarist Ed O’Brien said over lunch at Shoreditch House in London, “the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death. It just didn’t happen when we got back into the studio initially.”

Once again the band began tinkering. “We have a song and we’ve got lots of different ways we can try it, but we don’t know what’s going to work, and that’s why it still sort of feels a bit weirdly amateur,” Mr. Greenwood said. “You’d think by now we’d know what’s going to work, and what’s still frustrating, or kind of encouraging in a way, is that we don’t know whether it’s going to work on a laptop or whether it has to be a piano or. ...”

He half-smiled. “It’s got so twisted,” he added. “What we’ve learned is that you can’t repeat a method that you’ve already used for a song when it did work.”

The sound of “In Rainbows” often seems straightforward, almost like a live band; it is Radiohead’s most gracefully melodic album in a decade. But Radiohead arrived at the music circuitously, and there’s often more tucked into a track than is apparent at first. “Videotape,” with lyrics about recording a happy moment in a tape to be viewed posthumously, has a tolling piano and a beat so elusive that “we spent about a year in rehearsal on that song actually all trying to agree on where the one was,” Mr. Selway said. “Each of us, over the course of a year, we’d all lose it.”

The “Reckoner” that was part of the band’s live sets sounds nothing like the “Reckoner” on the album, which includes the lyrics “in rainbows.” When the band returned from touring, it decided the song needed a second part, and then a third one; eventually it discarded the original. For “All I Need,” Mr. Greenwood said, he wanted to recapture the white noise generated by a band playing loudly in a room, when “all this chaos kicks up.” That sound never materializes in the more analytical confines of a studio. His solution was to have a string section, and his own overdubbed violas, sustaining every note of the scale, blanketing the frequencies.

Mr. Yorke worked on many of the songs in the Rose and Crown. “I sit there, on the way in, because it’s a really nice little table,” he said, pointing. “And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they’re just scraps of paper, and I’m going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don’t know yet. I’m just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn’t know.”

The band and its managers are not releasing the download’s sales figures or average price, and may never do so. “It’s our linen,” Mr. Hufford said. “We don’t want to wash it in public.” A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of worldwide downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid an average of $6.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was $2.26. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead Web site, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 percent of an album’s wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead’s advantage — not to mention the worldwide publicity.

Both Mr. Hufford and the members of Radiohead said the strategy had been a success. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Mr. Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”

“This was a solution to a series of issues,” Mr. Hufford added. “I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”

Radiohead has not abandoned the physical disc. A mail-order deluxe version of “In Rainbows” — the album and a bonus CD, two vinyl albums, artwork and a fancy package for $80 — went on sale alongside the downloaded version on Oct. 10, directly from the band’s own mail-order merchandising company, W.A.S.T.E., and was shipped to the first buyers last week.

Mr. Hufford said that he and Bryce Edge, Radiohead’s other manager, had come up with the pay-what-you-want plan during a stoned philosophical conversation about the value of music. They had initially proposed releasing only the download and the deluxe box, but the band overruled them, noting that many of its fans are neither downloaders nor elite collectors. On Jan. 1 — a day when few albums are usually released — the single-disc “In Rainbows” is due as a retail CD and vinyl LP, in joint ventures with the independent labels TBD (part of ATO Records, partly owned by Dave Matthews) in the United States and XL in most other countries.

Will Botwin, the president and chief executive of ATO Records Group, optimistically described the download as “the world’s largest listening party,” drawing attention to the album among Radiohead’s core fans. The label plans to market to a broader audience with everything from television advertisements to in-store displays. Radio stations have already been sent the bruising rocker “Bodysnatchers” — a song, Mr. Yorke said, inspired by Victorian ghost stories, “The Stepford Wives” and his own feeling of “your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else” — and the tense folk-rocker “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

The music business awaits results on how the worldwide downloads of “In Rainbows” will affect disc sales. “The record company doesn’t know,” said a grinning Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist, over tea in London. “They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?” For Radiohead, uncertainty is home turf.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/ar...ic/09pare.html





Radiohead To End In Rainbows Download
FMQB

Radiohead have announced on their "Dead Air Space" blog that the In Rainbows "it's up to you" download option will be taken down as of December 10. The band writes, "A big thank you to everyone who came and downloaded the music. It’s been the most positive thing we’ve done and we hope you shared the experience with others."

The limited edition "discbox" edition of In Rainbows will be available via the band's online store until they run out. They add that there are no plans to make any more discboxes once they are all sold. U.K. fans began receiving the expanded, deluxe sets in the mail this week.

In Rainbows will be released on CD and vinyl via TBD Records/ATO Records in the U.S. on January 1 and overseas on XL Recordings on December 31.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=526369





Press release

A PROPOSAL FOR THE MONETIZATION OF THE FILE SHARING OF MUSIC FROM THE SONGWRITERS AND RECORDING ARTISTS OF CANADA

Summary of proposal:

Most Canadians are aware that the Internet and mobile phone networks have become major sources of music. What they may not know is that songwriters and performers typically receive no compensation of any kind when their music is shared or illegally downloaded.

We believe the time has come to put in place a reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation for creators of music in regard to this popular and growing use of their work.

The plan we propose would not change or interfere with the way Canadians receive their music. No one would be sued for the online sharing of songs. On the contrary, the sharing of music on Peer-to-Peer networks and similar technologies would become perfectly legal. In addition, Music Publishers and Record Labels would be fairly compensated for the crucial role they play in supporting Canadian music creators.

Canada has given the world some of the greatest music ever produced. We believe that implementing a fair way of compensating Canada’s music creators for the online sharing of their music will usher in a new Golden Age of creativity.


DETAILS OF PROPOSAL

1. Whereas:
An estimated 1.6 billion music files are shared online in Canada each year. 1
The total number of purchased downloads in Canada was 38 million in 2005. 2
The proportion between these two is 98 to 2 – 98% shared file and 2% purchased downloads.

We Therefore Believe:
Consumers have clearly demonstrated their wish to access music by file sharing.

2. Whereas:
Virtually every song ever recorded is available through P2P file sharing 3 (more than 79 million recordings) 4
Only 3 million songs are available on legal sites. 5

We Therefore Believe:File sharing is both a revolution in music distribution and a very positive phenomenon. The volunteer efforts of millions of music fans creates a much greater choice of repertoire for consumers while allowing songs - both new and old, well known and obscure - to be heard.

All that’s needed to fulfill this revolution in distribution is a way for Creators and rights holders to be paid.


OUR PROPOSAL

3. We propose an amendment to the Copyright Act which would establish a new right: The Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing.

4. We define Music File Sharing as the sharing of a copy of a copyrighted musical work without motive of financial gain.

Since the new right is limited to activities that take place without motive of financial gain, parties who receive compensation for file sharing would not be covered by this right. Therefore, this new right is distinct from rights licensed by legal music sites like iTunes and PureTracks.

5. The new right would make it legal to share music between two or more parties, whether over Peer to Peer networks, wireless networks, email, CD, DVD, hard drives etc. Distinct from private copying, this new right would authorize the sharing of music with other individuals.

6. In exchange for this sharing of their work, Creators and rights holders would be entitled to receive a monthly license fee from each internet and wireless account in Canada.

7. We propose a licence fee of $5.00 per internet subscription, per month. Payment of this fee would remove the stigma of illegality from file sharing. In addition, it would represent excellent value to the consumer, since this fee would grant access to the majority of the world’s repertoire of music. Existing download subscription services generally charge considerably more than $5.00 per month, while offering a mere fraction of the file-sharing repertoire. 6

8. In addition, this would present a major financial improvement for the music industry. Since the license fee would be paid by all internet and wireless accounts, the amount of income generated annually could adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues, and would dramatically enhance current legal digital music income. Sales of physical product would continue to earn substantial amounts, albeit gradually decreasing. Masters would continue to be licensed to movies and television. Radio would continue to sell advertising and pay royalties on music. 7

We believe strongly that by giving Canadian music Creators a solid business model for the 21st century, this endeavor would initiate a golden era for music in Canada. Ultimately, we see this model being adopted internationally, and we are working with Creators groups around the world to effect a global system of remuneration for the sharing of music files.

9. Existing music sites like iTunes and PureTracks would continue to be licenced directly by Creators and rights holders and would continue to develop the attractive “value added” services and security features that keep them distinct from file sharing activities.

10. The collective would track internet and wireless file sharing activity on a census basis. Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. Companies who currently do this type of tracking have prepared themselves and are “waiting in the wings”. Creators and rights holders will be paid with a level of speed and accuracy never before possible.

11. CANADIAN COPYRIGHT AND LEGISLATIVE ISSUES
Regarding WIPO implementation, we are not opposed to the legal protection of Technical Protection Measures (TPM) or “digital locks”, however we believe the obvious economic benefits of the $5.00 per month model make such protection measures obsolete. Given the consumer aversion to TPM’s, we believe their use will inhibit the success of recordings in which they are embedded, and they will simply fall out of use.

We support Rights Management Information (RMI) protection since RMIs will assist in the identification of files and the attribution of rights without posing any problems for consumers.

The Songwriters and Recording Artists of Canada are in the process of consultation with the broader music industry, as well as consumer groups and Internet Service Providers, in order to gather support both in Canada and internationally for this proposal. We look forward to discussions with all concerned to make this proposal a reality that will be of great benefit to all.
http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php





Writers See Little Progress in Talks
Lynn Elber

The West Coast head of the striking writers guild is calling on producers to break ranks with the studio alliance he said is allowing "hard-liners" to obstruct negotiations.

"If any of these companies want to come forward and bargain with us individually, we think we can make a deal," Patric Verrone, head of the Writers Guild of America West, told The Associated Press on Monday while talking to picketing writers at NBC's studio in Burbank.

Verrone criticized the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios.

Talks were set to resume Tuesday after the alliance made a new proposal Thursday regarding compensation for work shown on the Internet, a central issue in negotiations. Verrone declined to provide details about the talks.

"I don't really feel like they're negotiating, and part of how they operate is the AMPTP allows bottom-line hard-liners to rule the day," Verrone said.

The alliance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The alliance's offer calls for writers to accept a flat fee of about $250 for a year's reuse of an hour-long program shown on the Internet. The guild is seeking a percentage of gross revenues for new-media distribution.

A Wall Street analyst said that if the strike continues into next year, it will begin to affect the first- and second-quarter outlooks for the TV divisions of media conglomerates.

The strike could cost CBS, ABC and Fox a combined $300 million, according to a report from Alan Gould, senior analyst with New York-based Natixis Bleichroeder. The report did not mention NBC.

Gould said he was warning clients that, given the complexity of the issues, the strike might not end quickly.

Fallout from the labor dispute has been growing. NBC had agreed to pay the staff of "The Tonight Show" for two weeks, then extended that for another two weeks before announcing layoffs Friday.

The workers will be paid at least through this week, courtesy of host Jay Leno. With Leno honoring picket lines, "Tonight" has been in reruns since the strike began Nov. 5.

He agreed to cover the salaries of about 80 non-writing staff members of the top-rated late-night talk show, an NBC executive said.

Leno will reassess the situation week by week, depending on what happens with the contract talks, said the executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person lacked authorization to comment publicly.

The comedian also gave out his Christmas checks to staff members earlier than usual. Some unidentified workers were quoted in trade publications complaining the gifts were smaller than in years past.

Dick Guttman, Leno's publicist, said the host has routinely given out millions in anniversary celebration bonuses as well as holiday gifts.

"There is a reason he's viewed as a good guy," Guttman said.

Last month, staffers with "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" on CBS were promised continued payment at least through December by Letterman, whose production company, Worldwide Pants, owns both shows. Those programs are in reruns as well.

Conan O'Brien had promised to cover the salaries of about 75 non-striking "Late Night" staffers out of his own pocket.

The only late-night show to resume production so far has been NBC's "Last Call With Carson Daly."

The NBC programs are owned by Universal Media Studios, which, like the network, is owned by General Electric Co. ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co., while Fox is a unit of News Corp.

------

Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles contributed to this report for The Associated Press.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8TABIA80.htm





Late-Night Hosts Calculate Their Losses
Bill Carter

Few of the hosts of television’s late-night entertainment shows are turning up in their offices these days, because there’s nothing for them to do.

The strike by the Writers Guild has shut down television’s favorite late-night shows, leaving the hosts to spend their days calling around to their agents and friends to check out the latest rumors — and their financial advisors to determine how much the strike is costing them.

It is not only lost income that now has to be factored into those financial assessments. For at least four of the eight hosts who have stayed off the air, the strike has become a serious financial drain, because they have stepped in to pay the salaries of their non-writing staff members, who otherwise would be laid off while the strike lasts.

David Letterman of CBS’s “Late Show” (who has to pay for two CBS shows, since his company, Worldwide Pants, also owns the “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”), Conan O’Brien of NBC’s “Late Night,” Jay Leno of NBC’s “Tonight,” and most recently Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” have all committed to pay their staff out of their own funds. At least for the moment.

Estimates of what it is costing each host range from about $150,000 a week to as high as $250,000 a week, depending on the size of the staffs.

(Two other late-night stars, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have so far been spared, because the cable network that airs their programs, Comedy Central, has picked up the tab — and the channel said this week that it would probably keep picking up the tab at least through next week.)

The financial impact on the networks that broadcast the shows has been largely muted so far. Ratings generally have been down. Among viewers 18-49 years old, Mr. Leno was down 19 per cent and Mr. O’Brien, 14 per cent but Mr. Letterman was actually up 4 per cent over the past few weeks, according to Nielsen estimates. But one show representative said CBS and NBC were both saving more than $1 million a week in costs for Mr. Leno’s and Mr. Letterman’s shows, and still were taking in significant revenue from advertisers for the repeats that have been running.

A crunch may come for the networks, the representative said, if the strike is prolonged and the shows return to diminished ratings. Then a network might have to lower ad rates for future editions of the shows.

The same show representative said that, so far, the networks have been applying only moderate pressure to get back on the air. “They understand the situation these guys are in, that they want to be good guys to both their writers and their staffs,” the representative said.

The question the hosts are struggling with is how long they can continue to stay off the air and subsidize their staffs, and what happens when they decide they can’t do it anymore.

None of the late-night hosts has yet made a move to return to the air, and according to representatives of several hosts, none is likely to do so as long as negotiations to end the strike continue.

“We all want the strike to end with good news for everybody,” one show representative said.

Those talks resumed Tuesday, but no particular movement has been reported yet by either side.

The writers went on strike on Nov. 5, after three months of negotiations failed to bridge the differences between the producers and the 12,000 writers represented by the Writers Guild West and Writers Guild East. The main stumbling block was how much writers would be compensated for their work delivered over the Internet and through other new media.

Writers have been demanding payments for electronic downloads many times higher than the companies initially offered, and have sought to limit promotional showings to a matter of days, at most.

The hosts are facing a dilemma that could come if the talks were to break down. The hosts, all of whom are members of the Writers Guild themselves, have made it clear that they are seriously reluctant to go against their writers, whose cause they all support. But faced with the prospect of a prolonged strike, representatives of several the late-night hosts say they would at least contemplate the wrenching decision to go back to work.

“If the talks fail, we’d consider it,” said one late-night show representative. Like all the others, the representative asked not to be identified so as not to alienate the writers, who have made it clear they will respond critically to any host who does return to the air before a settlement of the strike. “There’s obviously going to be a limit to how long the hosts can continue to pay out of their own pockets to keep their staff together,” the late-night representative said.

That limit could vary greatly from host to host. Mr. Letterman is the best paid among them, making about $35 million a year. Some of the other hosts are making single-digit millions — still a lot of money, but obviously not enough to pay out hundreds of thousands a week indefinitely, especially while the hosts themselves are going without pay during the strike. Mr. Letterman announced to his staff that his company would write checks for them at least through Jan. 7; but one company representative said that did not mean that the host would not return to the air before then.

Mr. Letterman, who originally was cited as the most likely star to lead a return to the air, given his seniority as a late-night host, is said by some of those close to him to be especially reluctant to be the first host back. In the 1988 writers’ strike Johnny Carson, then the longest-tenured host, was the first to return, and Mr. Letterman followed his lead.

“Even if one of the others breaks,” said one of Mr. Letterman’s representatives, “I don’t think Dave will go back right away.”

A different host was wavering a bit more, largely out of concern about staff members who have no stake in the strike, everyone from segment producers to office assistants. This host, who also requested anonymity so as not to offend his writers, noted that some writers for films or prime-time television shows have been allowed to perform non-writing duties during the strike, like directing or acting, without protest from the Guild. He asked why hosts who did no writing and only did interviewing would face criticism. He also said he was unhappy with the hostility that the strike had unleashed because, like most of the hosts, he counted his writers as good friends.

Two hosts of similar-style shows who have returned to the air already, Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly, have been assailed by the writers for doing so.

Ms. DeGeneres argued that her syndication contract requires her to deliver shows to the stations that have purchased it, and that she was contractually obligated to go back to work. Mr. Daly is not a Guild member, though his show employs Guild writers.

Sherry Goldman, a spokeswoman for the Writers Guild East, said of Ms. DeGeneres, who abandoned a plan to do a week of shows in New York after learning that picketers would greet her, “We kept her out of New York.”

And of Mr. Daly, Ms. Goldman said, “We think he should have supported his writers. When he went back, he was picketed and harassed.”

That is exactly the kind of treatment many of the late-night hosts expect would happen to any of them — with some reason. “I can’t say we would be happy if any of them went back,” Ms. Goldman said. “If they go back, they are going to be prolonging the strike.”

They also might have some trouble finding guests to interview. “All the publicists are telling us their stars won’t cross a picket line,” a show representative said. “It’s going to be tough booking people.”

Another show representative said the shows would have to get creative, looking to guests like book authors or fashion models and other celebrities. “I don’t think we’d get many movie stars,” the representative said.

Ms. DeGeneres has encountered some similar problems. Her recent guests have included Jenna Bush and Paris Hilton, though she has also scheduled one significant movie star, Keira Knightley. On Mr. Daly’s return show on Monday night, his lead guest was a women’s-underwear model.

But the second show representative said, “We’ll work it out if we have to.”

Timing may be a factor. In 1988, Mr. Carson, who paid staff members from his own pocket during the strike, went back on the air after five months. He was not generally vilified. Ms. Goldman said, “That was a different time.”

She applauded the late-night hosts who have seen to it that nonwriting staff members continue to be paid. “It’s lovely,” she said. “We appreciate what they’re doing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/bu...d-late.html?hp





NBC to Pay for Blocks of Programs
Bill Carter

NBC has made an ambitious deal, apparently the first of its kind, to buy a two-hour — or perhaps even three-hour — block of prime-time programming from outside producers, including Thom Beers, the creator of adventure documentary series like “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers.”

Under the plan, NBC has agreed to broadcast at least two new hours produced by Mr. Beers back to back on a single night, with many more hours possible. The terms guarantee Mr. Beers and his partners 30 hours of programs on NBC — three separate 10-episode series.

These 30 hours would come at a fraction of the cost of standard network scripted or reality programming, a factor that made the deal attractive to NBC.

The project is not related to the current strike by Hollywood writers but the background forces are somewhat similar as networks struggle to revise their financial formulas to face a future of diminishing ratings and growing uncertainties about how the Internet will figure in viewers’ choices. The programs, which are all documentary in style, would not have staff writers.

The principals in the arrangement are prominent television names, Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, both former top network programmers, who created a production company that has what is known as a “first look” deal that gives NBC the first crack at buying their productions. Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun contracted with Mr. Beers to create the shows and then went to NBC to pitch the idea of filling an entire night — or at least two-thirds of it — with real-life action.

The idea for mounting a block of shows that would play together on a night started with conversations Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun had with NBC’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, this year. The discussions centered on the way the broadcast networks have generally abandoned Saturday night, filling it with repeats because ratings on that night have been too low to sustain the high costs of original programs.

Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun suggested that a new form of lower-cost programming, perhaps as an entire three-hour block of shows. The producers were already fans of Mr. Beers’s shows. “It’s just about all I watch,” said Mr. Braun.

He declined to describe the specifics of the deal. But participants on both sides described its main elements, on condition that they not be identified because they had not been authorized to discuss specific terms. “It certainly has the potential to dramatically change the network economics of a given night,” Mr. Braun said.

In the past, networks have contracted with outside producers to assemble a slate of Saturday morning children’s programming— mostly cartoons— but networks have not commissioned outsiders previously to fill a block of prime-time programming.

The chief economic benefit of programs from Mr. Beers is that they are strikingly cheap to produce by network standards. Shows like “Ice Road Truckers” cost about well under $500,000 an hour, a modest figure next to a typical cost of about $3 million for an hourlong scripted network series. Conventional network reality shows are also much more expensive at $1.5 million to $2 million an hour. The producers will will split ownership with NBC, giving the network control of domestic rights and the producers the international rights.

After contracting with Mr. Beers to produce the shows, Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun met with NBC executives and pitched a roster of 10 potential series. The participants in the deal said that the NBC executives most involved were the two co-chairmen of the network’s entertainment division, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, both of whom were described as enthusiastic supporters of the idea. Neither would comment on the deal yesterday.

The original plan was to place the shows on Saturday night, the participants said — perhaps under an overall title, like “Saturday Night on the Edge.” But NBC declined to commit to Saturday for the shows, seeking to retain discretion on when to broadcast them. So the program block may be shown on any night — and at the moment Saturday is not the choice, one participant said. The contract commits NBC to run as at least a two-hour block, however.

NBC retained the right to cancel one or more of the linked shows if they perform below a certain ratings threshold; but it may not break up the block for any other reason — if it did, it would open the shows up to moving to another network, the participants said.

“Deadliest Catch,” which is shown on the Discovery Channel, and “Ice Road Truckers,” on the History Channel, have become among the most popular programs on cable television. The finale of “Ice Road Truckers” attracted close to 5 million viewers. Mr. Beers, a former producer at Turner Broadcasting and Paramount’s syndicated division, started his own company, Original Productions, in 1999, with a heavy emphasis on motorcycle shows and documentaries like “Plastic Surgery: Before and After” and “Ballroom Bootcamp.” The company’s signature hit was “Monster Garage,” in which a standard car was “monsterized” into another kind of machine.

The shows Mr. Beers and his partners are planning for NBC would not be ready to serve as fill-ins during the strike because they are unlikely to be seen until the third quarter of 2008. Mr. Beers uses real people in real situations in extreme locations like the Arctic. Shows set there have to be shot in warmer months, for example.

By the time the shows do get on the air, at least three of them will be finished shooting. Two will go on in the initial block with the third ready to replace any that might fall short in ratings, the participants said.

At the same time, NBC agreed to pay for several other ideas pitched by Mr. Beers to be turned into pilots. But these will be unlike any other pilots NBC makes, the participants in the deal said.

Instead of shooting hourlong pilot episodes, NBC plans to have Mr. Beers shoot 5- to 10-minute films on some topic that can then be tried out as reports on the network’s “Today” show or “Dateline” newsmagazine show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu.../03nbc.html?hp





Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape
Denise Caruso

INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.

And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.

According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.

The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs.

“What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”

A market that size provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.

Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands, for example, have both developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.

ON does not distribute any traditional TV shows. Instead, it works with professional content creators who develop original programs in HDTV. So far, it has produced hundreds of episodes for 25 programs, all of which are available at the ON Web site, as well as through iTunes and AT&T, its distribution partners. They include a dating show, produced in partnership with NBC, and a home-building show called “Mainstream Green.”

Blip Networks, based in New York, is another company working to create its own established brands, providing thousands of short-form videos from all comers. In addition to one-off documentaries like “Gotham Girls Roller Derby,” Blip’s library includes weekly news satires like “Goodnight Burbank,” which drew favorable notice from several mainstream media outlets, including USA Today and The Los Angeles Times.

Blip syndicates its programming to America Online, Yahoo, Google, iTunes, Facebook and other big Web distributors. Vuze, Joost, Blip and ON all share as much as 50 percent of their revenue with the content producers, regardless of distribution medium. “If that model existed today, writers wouldn’t be on strike,” said Mr. McClanahan.

René Pinnell, the director of “Backpack Picnic,” a popular sketch comedy show that came to ON after the troupe produced two pilots that were never shown by MTV, said the online environment is a “really good deal” for many reasons.

“The biggest one is that it allows us a tremendous amount of creative freedom we wouldn’t get in a more traditional media environment,” he said. “The investment is low for them — nowhere near the $500,000 a network will spend on one episode. They can afford to trust us.”

For its part, Hulu of Los Angeles has turned a traditional TV library into a promotional vehicle for, well, more TV. The joint venture between NBC Universal and the News Corporation offers scores of popular prime-time shows from all the major networks and channels, as well as past hits like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Because people can watch TV shows when and where they want, they can sample a lot more shows,” said Jason Kilar, chief executive of Hulu.

As a means to that end, Hulu may have persuaded the industry to relax a bit. Hulu’s player allows viewers to create short video clips from the shows they watch and put them in e-mail messages or on Web sites, including blogs, an activity that in the past has drawn nasty letters from copyright lawyers. “This is a key way that we can make sure the content finds the audience,” said Mr. Kilar.

But what happens to the television industry when the traditional way for content to find its audience becomes obsolete?

“There’s a lot of rewriting of the concept of windows in the TV network world today — the timing of when and where shows appear,” said Allen Weiner, the managing vice president for media and consumer technologies for the Gartner Group in Scottsdale, Ariz.

In the old days, after something appeared on TV, its release to other distribution channels was carefully staged — from the timing of reruns to the DVD release to when it would be available on-demand. “We’re seeing all kinds of new windows occurring, and no one knows what the magic formula will be,” he said. “A lot depends on advertiser reaction and on user behavior.”

One closely watched approach is the new online series “Quarterlife,” by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who produced “My So-Called Life.” Episodes first appear on MySpace TV, then are available the next day on Quarterlife.com, and a week later on YouTube, Facebook and Imeem. There is talk that they may even appear later on network TV — but as the last window, rather than the first.

As far as ON is concerned, Mr. McClanahan intends to put his programs in every single window he can find. Unlike other companies, ON optimizes all its shows for viewing on any video-capable device, a feature he calls “lifestyle distribution.”

That’s why he has deals with partners like iTunes and AT&T’s Television, Broadband and Wireless Services, both of which can deliver video programs to multiple devices, from plasma TVs to computer screens and cellphones.

“You can’t expect to control consumers and force them to come to prime time at 7 p.m. on a Monday night,” said Mr. McClanahan. “If the consumer wants it on their phone at 3 p.m. while they’re on the golf course, then that’s where we have to deliver it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02frame.html





YouTube Breeding Ground for Anti-Vaccination Views

Press release

As cold and flu season hits this year amid growing debate over the necessity of vaccinations, University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in related videos on YouTube.

In the first-ever study of its kind, U of T researchers Dr. Kumanan Wilson and Dr. Jennifer Keelan analyzed 153 videos about vaccination and immunization on YouTube, a popular online video-sharing site. Researchers found that more than half of the videos portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. Of those videos, a staggering 45 per cent contained messages that contradict the 2006 Canadian Immunization Guide, which provides national guidelines for immunization practices. The Canadian recommendations are similar to guidelines from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination,” says first author Keelan, an assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Public Health Sciences. “Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.”

The research team also found that videos skeptical of vaccinations – many of them highly provocative and powerful – received more views and better ratings by YouTube users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light.

“Health care professionals need to be aware that individuals critical of immunization are using YouTube to communicate their viewpoints and that patients may be obtaining information from these videos” says Wilson, senior author and an associate professor with U of T’s Department of Medicine. “YouTube users also need to be aware of this, so they can filter information from the site accordingly.”

“The findings also indicate that public health officials should consider how to effectively communicate their viewpoints through Internet video portals,” Wilson says.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ybg120507.php





Is Macrovision Bringing More Cops to Your Living Room?
Saul Hansell

Macrovision’s business is mainly about what you can’t watch and listen to. Its main products have been producing methods to prevent people from copying audio and video programs.

Today, Macrovision agreed to buy a company that has been at the center of telling you what you should watch: Gemstar TV Guide.

Dealbook has the details of the $2.8 billion deal, which was prompted in part by agitation by Citadel Investment Group, the large hedge fund run by Kenneth C. Griffin.

Citadel is a large Gemstar shareholder. The largest holder is the News Corp., which merged its TV Guide unit with Gemstar in 2000, as a way to resolve a brewing patent battle over electronic program guides on cable set top boxes.

That deal of course was a mess. The government accused Gemstar of inflating its revenue by at least $223 million. The company paid $10 million to settle the charges in 2004, and last year its former chief executive was fined $61 million dollars for his role in the affair. In the mean time, the TV Guide magazine has deteriorated and the electronic program guide business didn’t turn out to be the huge generator of advertising revenue that it had hoped.

The agreement announced today may be a graceful way out of a bad deal for Mr. Murdoch, but raises questions for consumers who enjoy at least some freedom in how they use audio and video services. The press release says Macrovision envisions combining its content protection systems into Gemstar’s guides as well as developing new products meant to distribute programming onto various devices.

The latter part is a trend that I find rather troubling: electronics makers choosing to police copyright disputes between Hollywood and users. Jeff Zucker gave a speech in October where he asked for help from both electronics makers and Internet providers. And today BoingBoing notes that a hard disk drive from Western Digital made for computer networks blocks music and video files because of “unverifiable media license authentication.”

I’m sure that Macrovision will argue that their merger is good for consumers because it will build technology that will help verify authorized uses of copyrighted work. And indeed there may be some value creating more sophisticated copy protection schemes than the ones we have now, such as the system that prevents people—rather imperfectly—from making any copies of DVDs.

But this is still electronic vigilantism. If my hard drive says I can’t share my own home movies, who can I appeal to? The same question may arise if my set cable top box running Gemstar software decides to no longer cooperate with my Tivo because of “unverifiable media license authentication.” These are questions I hope Macrovision will be able to answer.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...oom/index.html





Comcast - Heading the Way of the Dinosaurs
Triston McIntyre

Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don’t have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required.

The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distance back seat to Verizon’s FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage.

In rural areas or college towns, Comcast serves as the only acceptable source of both cable tv and high-speed internet. However, because no other companies like Verizon can focus resources on installing alternative services, Comcast completely neglects both good business practices and the needs its customers.

Many times speeds are so poor that many people in such areas are turning to DSL or even satellite internet to serve their needs. Comcast recognizes that too many people are being forced onto single lines, and that speeds are deplorably slow, but will not move to remedy the situation because there isn’t any direct competitor to worry about.

To make matters worse, recent research has revealed that Comcast is working diligently to deter use of any P2P platforms like Bittorrent, both by limiting uploads and by disrupting downloads directly with software from broadband management company Sandvine.

In all of this, Comcast is still charging prices indicative of a quality product with quality service. Quality service is not exemplified by having a technician coming to your house to analyze why your internet is going at sub-dialup speeds, and that technician telling you the reason the internet is slow is because there are too many people using your street’s cable line; Comcast should be increasing the bandwidth to the street sometime, but no one knows when.

Comcast just announced they would start implementing the next step in cable technology, DOCSIS 3.0, by 2008; this new technology supposedly will allow for 160 Mbps download and 120 Mbps upload speeds, according to Ars Technica. However, none of that will matter when too many customers are forced to cram onto a single cable line and suffer from speeds that could be easily surpassed by other technologies.

For a short time, Comcast will be able to sit on the customer base it has developed and sap money from customers that could receive better products at a more competitive price. But, just like AOL, once people get a taste of where technology is heading, that pile of money will deplete to nearly nothing…unless Comcast can step up, stop functioning like a monopoly, and start being competive.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...the-dinosaurs/





AT&T TOS

Network Usage

Bandwidth, disk utilization, simultaneous connections, and aggregate data downloads/uploads will be computed or determined by AT&T from time to time in developing its product and service offerings. In the event AT&T determines that an account is exceeding the relevant bandwidth, disk utilization, aggregate data download/upload limits, simultaneous connections, or reasonable session times, the account owner will generally be notified by E-mail. If the excess use continues after such notification, the owner may be requested to upgrade the type of account or to modify the activity creating the excess use, or the account may be terminated.

If excessive bandwidth, disk space utilization, simultaneous connections, aggregate data download or upload, or session length is determined to adversely affect AT&T's ability to provide service, immediate action may be taken. The account owner may be notified by e-mail as soon as practical thereafter.
http://www.att.net/csbellsouth/s/s.d...gal/tosaup.htm





MPAA Head: Content Filtering is in ISPs' Best Interests
Nate Anderson

As befits a man who has spent years in DC, the MPAA's Dan Glickman has polished his share of folksy analogies to a shine. "I used to grow popcorn, and now I sell it," he told a crowd of bankers and analysts yesterday at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York, a reference to his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Now, though, Glickman is the self-described "chief hired gun or mercenary for the [motion picture] industry," and his comments give us a window into what the movie studios are thinking. His words yesterday revealed that movie execs are thinking about one thing in particular: the technology that can be used to halt film piracy. And they expect ISPs to implement it.

Calling "protection of content from theft" the MPAA's number one issue, Glickman reiterated claims that piracy costs the studios $6 billion worldwide every year. Half the MPAA budget goes toward reducing this number, and the trade group believes that the single best way to do so is through technology. "Technology will be the key to determine how successful we will become," Glickman said.

But "technology" in isolation won't do much to help the movie business. The MPAA needs the support of those companies best in a position to implement filtering technology: ISPs. Acknowledging that the studios have often been "in tension with" the ISP community, Glickman claimed that the two groups have a much better relationship these days.

Dan Glickman

Case in point: AT&T and its publicly-stated plan to implement some sort of filtering system on its network. No technical details of such a system have yet been revealed, but the announcement has warmed the cold cockles of the MPAA's heart and has garnered support from companies like NBC Universal.

Glickman also held out the hope that filtering technology would quickly be adopted by many more ISPs. "The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected," he said, "and I think that's a great opportunity." It's not the first time he's asked ISPs to do more.
ISPs: what's in it for us?

ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high. Should such a system work, it could lower overall bandwidth usage, but whether that would make up for the cost and PR headaches of a filtering regime is unclear. It won't do much for liability issues, since ISPs are already protected under "safe harbor" provisions.

ISPs concerned with getting into the content distribution game, though, could have much to gain from pleasing the content owners. AT&T is in such a situation as it ramps up the national rollout of its U-verse IPTV system.

Glickman understands that "you will never stop piracy" because "traditional organized criminals would drool" over the margins made by pirates. But you do your best, he said, and you try to offer customers a better-quality legal product at a reasonable price (and you filter everything you can).

Will more ISPs follow the pied piping of the MPAA? Though he sounded hopeful, Glickman had nothing specific to announce.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...interests.html





US FCC Eyes Plan to Limit Cable Companies' Size
Peter Kaplan

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is moving toward resurrecting a proposal that would limit the size cable operators could reach on a nationwide basis, sources said on Friday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has enough support on the five-member commission to pass a measure that would bar cable companies from owning systems that have more than a 30-percent share of U.S. multichannel video subscribers, according to one FCC source.

Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus said in a research note that Martin is aiming for a vote on the cable ownership cap no later than the commission's next meeting on Dec. 18.

The proposal could affect merger deals among large cable operators like Comcast Corp, Charter Communications and Cablevision, Stifel Nicolaus said.

But Stifel Nicolaus said the FCC could have a difficult time defending the 30-percent cap in court. The move comes six years after a federal appeals court threw out an identical FCC rule on the grounds that the agency did not have enough evidence to justify it.

Comcast issued a statement saying there was still no justification for 30-percent ownership cap and noted that the FCC had approved merger deals among the largest telephone carriers in recent years.

"In an era of increased and intensifying competition among telephone, satellite and cable companies, the case for a cap is even weaker than when the courts rejected it six years ago," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said in a statement.

One FCC source said the idea of a cable ownership cap had been subjected to further agency study over the last six years, along with two rounds of public comments. The FCC could use that data to try to build a better case for the ownership cap, this source said. (Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/gover...42292920071130





SoundExchange Responds To New Satellite Royalty Rates
FMQB

Yesterday, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) issued an order to increase the royalty rates paid by satellite radio providers for the music they play on the air. The order covers the performance of sound recordings for the six-year period starting January 1, 2007 and ending December 31, 2012, and the new royalty rate calls for 6 percent of those gross revenues subject to the fees for 2007 and 2008, 6.5 percent for 2009, 7 percent for 2010, 7.5 percent for 2011 and 8 percent for 2012.

SoundExchange, the organization that collects and distributes royalties to artists, has offered a mixed reaction to the news. It said that while the CRB dramatically increased the royalty rate paid by XM and Sirius, the amount is still below the true value of the music. In its decision, the CRB said that the value of music to the satellite services should start at a benchmark of 13 percent of total subscriber revenue, but due to a federal law requiring that any new royalty rate avoid creating an overly “disruptive” impact on the satellite services, the CRB reduced the final number.

"This result once again highlights the inequity of a rate standard that forces creators of music to subsidize certain music services with below market rates," said John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange. "We are glad that the decision affirmed the importance of music to XM and Sirius, but disappointed that the rate standard led to a lack of full and fair compensation because of the business circumstances created by XM and Sirius."

During the proceedings with the CRB, SoundExchange lobbied for rates starting at eight percent, while the satcasters argued for a royalty rate of approximately one percent.

"While not agreeing to our rates, the CRB fully recognized that music is not free. It has value, and the people who invest in and create music deserve to be paid," said Michael Huppe, General Counsel of SoundExchange. "Though the final rate is below the actual value that music provides to these services, it nonetheless represents a significant increase over the royalties previously paid by satellite radio. As a result of this decision, recording artists and record labels are finally on the right track towards fair compensation."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=526322





A Chastened Imus Returns to Radio
Jacques Steinberg

Nearly eight months after he was fired for making a racially and sexually disparaging remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Don Imus went back on the radio at 6 a.m. today and vowed he would not say anything like that again.

He also introduced two new cast members — a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell, both of them comedians — and said they would join him in conducting “an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”

“I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me,” Mr. Imus told an audience that was listening in person at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and at home and in their cars on WABC-AM, his new radio home. “And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance.”

Still, in many ways, it felt as if the clock had been turned back before last April, when Mr. Imus said what he said and was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC, which had simulcast his program on cable television. On stage at Town Hall this morning, he was flanked on his right by his longtime news reader and sidekick, Charles McCord. Seated to his left, with a microphone conspicuously in front of him, was Bernard McGuirk, the producer whose initial reference on April 4 to the Rutgers team as “some hard-core hos” had prompted Mr. Imus to pile on by calling them “nappy-headed hos.”

The roster of announced guests was familiar to any regular Imus listener. They included Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.

And some long-time advertisers, too, came back, including the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey; NetJets, the corporate aircraft leasing company; the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and Bigelow teas. The house band was led by Levon Helm, who had played for Mr. Imus on April 12, which had wound up being his last day.

“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”

Mr. Imus wore a tan cowboy hat, a gold-colored vest under a tan barn jacket and worn boots. In his initial remarks, Mr. Imus spoke to the audience from a lone microphone positioned at center stage. At some points, he was defiant, acknowledging that the Rutgers team, which met with him the night of his firing, had found it easier to forgive him than had some of his detractors.

“We signed for five years,” he said of his contracts with Citadel Radio, the parent of WABC, as well as with RFD-TV, which will simulcast his program. “That’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”

And yet, for all his bravado, Mr. Imus acknowledged that he had been chastened and, at times, humiliated these last few months, and that he ultimately deserved his punishment.

“I think things worked out the way they should have worked out,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast.”

He added, though: “The program is not going to change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu...3cnd-imus.html





Vivendi to Acquire Control of Activision
Matt Richtel

In a deal that creates the biggest independent video game publisher in the world, Vivendi announced Sunday it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Activision.

Under the arrangement, the companies said Vivendi would pay $1.7 billion in cash and fold its games operations into Activision’s. The deal will leave Vivendi with a 68 percent share of the combined company, to be called Activision Blizzard.

The companies said the new entity would continue to trade publicly on Nasdaq. Blizzard Entertainment is the name of the most successful game studio in Vivendi’s game operations.

Under the deal, Vivendi, based in Paris, will pay $27.50 a share for Activision, a 24 percent premium over Friday’s close of $22.15.

The deal combines companies with different areas of strength in the booming video game business. Activision’s emphasis is on making games for consoles, like the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Its game franchises include the Tony Hawk skateboarding games, the Call of Duty war game series and one of the industry’s current best sellers, Guitar Hero, which allows players to strum along on a plastic guitar to tunes played on the television.

Vivendi’s strength is in online multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, which has more than nine million players worldwide.

The two companies said that their combined revenue for the 2007 calendar year would be $3.8 billion. The new entity will surpass Electronic Arts, with revenue of $3.1 billion, as the largest video game publisher in the world that is not affiliated with a console maker, like Microsoft or Nintendo. The two companies said they expected operating income for the new company of $1.1 billion, or $1.20 a share, in the 2009 calendar year and also said it would have the highest profit margins in the industry.

In the merger, expected to be completed in the first half of 2008, shares of Vivendi Games will be converted into 295.3 million new shares of Activision common stock, a transaction that values Vivendi Games at $8.1 billion. Vivendi will also buy 62.9 million newly issued shares of Activision for $1.7 billion in cash.

The two companies also said that within five business days after closing the transaction, Activision Blizzard would begin a $4 billion all-cash tender offer to purchase up to 146.5 million Activision Blizzard common shares at $27.50 a share. If the tender offer is fully subscribed, Vivendi said it would own 68 percent of Activision Blizzard on a fully diluted basis.

Despite Vivendi’s taking the larger stake in the new company, Robert A. Kotick, chief executive of Activision, will remain as chief executive of the combined companies. Bruce Hack, the chief executive of Vivendi Games, will become vice chairman and chief corporate officer and lead the merger integration as well as head finance, human resources and legal functions, the two companies said.

Even as the deal puts Activision Blizzard in the top spot in terms of revenue, the question that will face investors is whether Activision can duplicate the business model of Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts has built its business on creating numerous game franchises that deliver reliable streams of annual revenue. For instance, in its 2007 fiscal year, the company had 24 titles that sold more than a million copies each, and four games — Madden NFL 07, Need for Speed Carbon, FIFA 07, and The Sims 2 Pets — that sold more than five million copies.

It has done that, in part, by buying studios with popular games. Compared with its competitors, Electronic Arts has invested relatively heavily in the new platforms of casual and mobile games, and popular multiplayer games, industry analysts said. The investments have yet to pay off, but if they do, they could be a big boost to Electronic Arts, analysts said.

In recent years, there have been many examples of major publishers’ buying video game development studios. But the Activision Blizzard merger represents a substantially more significant deal, and one with immense stakes. The video game software industry is poised for a record year, driven by the recent introduction of the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 game consoles.

But the industry also needs companies to create hits and be able to sustain them. Mr. Kotick has said he is eager for Activision to catch Electronic Arts and become the largest video game company. “By joining forces with Vivendi Games, we will become the immediate leader in the highly profitable online games business and gain a large footprint in the rapidly growing Asian markets, including China and Korea, while maintaining our leading operating performance across North America and Europe,” Mr. Kotick said in a statement Sunday morning.

Activision, based in Santa Monica, Calif., has been an industry darling of late, in large part because of the popularity of Guitar Hero III, the latest iteration of the franchise. It was introduced on Oct. 28, and sold 1.3 million copies within seven days. Through October, Activision had three of the eight best-selling games in the United States this year, according to NPD Group, which compiles sales data.

Activision’s sales and stock have risen with the momentum. The company’s revenue for the 2007 fiscal year was $1.5 billion, a 74 percent increase from 2003. During that same period, Electronic Arts’ revenue rose 25 percent to $3.1 billion. This year, Activision’s stock is up about 28 percent to $22, while E.A.’s is up 13 percent. And since March 2003, Activision’s shares are up nearly sixfold from $3.68 (on a split-adjusted basis).

But even as Activision has been on a roll, industry analysts have questioned whether it can build the kind of library of franchises to compete with Electronic Arts. The addition of Vivendi Games gives Activision access to Vivendi’s portfolio of multiplayer games.

Mr. Kotick also said that because Vivendi owns the Universal Music Group, the transaction “will benefit Guitar Hero and further extend our sizable leadership position in music-based games.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...vision.html?hp





The Cult of Kindle
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

I’d not given Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader much chance of succeeding given the stratospheric price tag combined with DRM, but then I started reading the customer reviews for it and just realized that the Kindle has already amassed quite a considerable cult following, and this could be crucial to its success.

When I look at the Kindle I see a device that holds a lot of promise, but this has been true for every other ebook reader that’s entered the market. And history is littered with the tombstones of failed ebook readers. And for every pro feature of the Kindle (nice screen, wireless download, and good battery life) there are some serious negatives to contend with (price, DRM, Sprint network coverage). It’s also ugly. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit the peak of popularity and the only way for it to go was down.

But then I realized that the Kindle had a cult. The Cult of Kindle. A group of people willing to give it a five star rating just because someone else didn’t, willing to back up every design, engineering and marketing decision that Amazon made, willing to defend the Kindle with their last dying breath. The Kindle doesn’t cost money, it saves money. Why only buy one! That 0.75 second flash as the pages turn isn’t a downside, it gives you an opportunity to absorb the previous page and admire the Kindle’s prefection. It doesn’t harm your eyes, in fact, it fixes them. Ergonomic issues that other reviewers have bought up are dismissed by the Cult of Kindle as flaws with the reviewer, not the device. The Kindle is perfect, and the Kindle 2.0 will be a little more perfect.

When I look at the Kindle what I see is a $400 blank book. Sure, it has features that go beyond being an electronic book reader, but these are vague and lacking is specifics. Really the features of the Kindle boil down to three things - click, buy, and read, with extra emphasis on the second step. For a blank book, the price is high. I had an exchange with David Berlind over on his blog yesterday (my three comments can be found here, here and here) and when I mentioned price he tried to counter my argument this way:

But if cost is still bugging you, I can remember a lot of people laughing at the premium that Starbucks was charging for a cup of coffee.

My counter to this point is that to make use of Starbucks you don’t have to buy a $400 cup.

The DRM issue also bothers me. Well, not the DRM so much but the feeling that if this service did tank, you’d end up with a $400 paperweight and no access to the books you bought. Those who think that this can’t happen then it’s worth bearing in mind what happened to services such as Virgin Digital and Google Video. I’m always wary of the investment I have tied up in Audible.com, but at least there I didn’t have to buy a $400 reader to take advantage of the service. Remember, what DRM giveth, DRM can taketh away.

The real test for the Kindle will ultimately be the test of time. Will people who’ve bought one continue to buy books, will Amazon continue to be able to generate enough buzz to keep them selling (and drop the price), will people who’ve made an investment in books for the Kindle buy another when their first Kindle dies or becomes obsolete? Also, and crucially, will the service last? I’m sure that Amazon will be able to count on the Cult of Kindle to do their part.

Looking at the Kindle service as a whole and the areas where Amazon have got it right are areas where the company already excel at - and that’s adopting the path of least resistance to online commerce. In a single iteration Amazon has bettered what Apple have been trying to acheive for years with the iTunes store.

Would I buy one now? No. Would I buy one in a year’s time? Hmmm … maybe.

Before I close, I’ll leave you with the first act of The Future of Reading (a Play in Six Acts):

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Thoughts?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1023





Publishers seeking web controls

News Organizations Propose Tighter Search Engine Rules
Anick Jesdanun

The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display Web sites is driving an effort launched yesterday by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access.

Currently, Google, Yahoo and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as robots.txt, which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site.

But as search engines expanded to offer services for displaying news and scanning printed books, news organizations and book publishers began to complain.

News publishers said that Google was posting their news summaries, headlines and photos without permission. Google claimed that "fair use" provisions of copyright laws applied, though it eventually settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse and agreed to pay the Associated Press without a lawsuit filed. Financial terms haven't been disclosed.

The proposed extensions, known as Automated Content Access Protocol, partly grew out of those disputes. Leading the ACAP effort were groups representing publishers of newspapers, magazines, online databases, books and journals. The AP is one of dozens of organizations that have joined ACAP.

The new rules allow a site to block indexing of individual Web pages, specific directories or the entire site, though some search engines have added their own commands.

The proposal, unveiled by a consortium of publishers at the global headquarters of the AP, seeks to have those extra commands -- and more -- apply across the board. Sites could try to limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, for instance, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a Web page.

"ACAP was born, in part at least, against a growing backdrop of mistrust," said Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers.

The current system doesn't give sites "enough flexibility to express our terms and conditions on access and use of content," said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, one of the organizations behind the proposal. "That is not surprising. It was invented in the 1990s and things move on."

Tom Curley, the AP's chief executive, said the news cooperative spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually covering the world, and that its employees risk often their lives doing so. Technologies such as ACAP, he said, are important to protect AP's original news reports from sites that distribute them without permission.

"The free riding deprives AP of economic returns on its investments," he said.

Jessica Powell, a spokesman for Google, said the company supported all efforts to bring Web sites and search engines together but needed to evaluate ACAP to ensure it can meet the needs of millions of Web sites, not just those of a single community.

"Before you go and take something entirely on board, you need to make sure it works for everyone," Powell said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112902207.html





For the 2008 Race, Google Is a Crucial Constituency
Randall Stross

LAST century, General Motors assembly plants were a regular stop on the itineraries of presidential candidates. This election cycle, Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has become a favorite destination.

Hillary Rodham Clinton made the pilgrimage in February. Then came John McCain, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and most recently, Barack Obama.

In terms of theatrical symbolism, the trip to Google is similar to the G.M. plant visit. In both cases, the visits gave the candidate the chance for a photo opportunity at the most technologically advanced edge of the economy, “signaling identification with the future,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

On a more mundane level, candidates in the pre-mass-media era were concerned with reaching as many prospective voters as possible in one place, and any large factory would do. At Google, the number of employees who can see the candidates in person is limited: the largest space at the Googleplex holds only a few hundred people.

Everyone in the 16,000-employee company can watch the event in real time over the company’s internal network in their offices scattered around the globe. But Google employees, like almost everyone else, prefer the live version. At Senator Obama’s talk last month, the atrium and overhanging balcony filled well in advance, and streams of employees poured into the building and then had to be turned away.

The politicians visiting auto plants could control what was said during the event. Today, candidates must place themselves at the tender mercies of the audience. Those who go to Google sit exposed on the stage, without the protective lectern provided in a debate, answering questions for 45 to 60 minutes. But without the escape hatch of a timekeeper’s buzzer, and as the only speaker, the candidate cannot evade uncomfortable questions. Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, for example, asked Senator Obama for his views on Iran, Pakistan, and Guantánamo — and that was a single question.

The proceedings at Google are not unremittingly serious affairs. Mr. Schmidt asked Senator McCain, “How do you determine good ways of sorting one million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” Immediately signaling that the question was asked in jest, Mr. Schmidt moved on. Six months later, Senator Obama faced the same question, but his staff had prepared him. When he replied in fluent tech-speak (“A bubble sort is the wrong way to go”), the quip brought down the house.

Among the seven visiting candidates, only Senator Obama used his Google visit to announce details of policy proposals related to technology. Until his visit, he and Senator Edwards were widely viewed among technology bloggers as the two candidates who had the strongest positions on Internet neutrality, expanded broadband access and other technology issues. With his Google visit, however, Senator Obama succeeded in drawing attention to his plans for using technology to make government more accessible and transparent with, for example, live Internet feeds of all executive branch department and agency meetings. This was old-school campaigning, organized around a company visit, done well.

Though all of the candidate sessions at Google are available on YouTube, they are not YouTube-like: they require an investment of time that, by YouTube viewer standards, is inconceivable. A 43-minute video of Senator Clinton’s Google session has been available since February and has drawn only about 54,000 “views,” which count as soon as the video is begun but leave unknown the more interesting number: completed views.

Senator Edwards’s and Senator Obama’s videos, both of which run longer than an hour, have not been up as long and have still fewer viewers. The biggest draw has turned out to be Representative Ron Paul, whose July visit has been viewed, or at least started, more than 350,000 times.

For perspective, consider the numbers that short-form videos of a less serious nature draw. Search for “Barack Obama” on YouTube and you will find that the most-viewed video is titled “I Got a Crush ... on Obama.” It lacks narrative, content and anything other than a young woman with large breasts lip-synching, but it has tallied more than four million views. The most-viewed video that turns up for a “Hillary Clinton” search is “Vote Different,” a dark parody of Apple’s “1984” commercial that portrays the senator most unflatteringly, as a giant TV image that is shattered. It is also approaching four million views.

YouTube has a separate section, “YouChoose ’08,” that gives each candidate a protected space for more serious discourse, similar to the way the broadcast networks give Sunday mornings over to civic uplift. YouChoose also provides access to last Wednesday’s CNN/YouTube debate with the Republican candidates, and the earlier one in July with the Democrats.

Professor Jamieson credits YouTube with broadening the range of questions in the debates, making them more memorable by having users submit the questions in the form of personal videos, and making everything searchable afterward. In the past, she said, “if you missed a debate, you missed it.”

The ability to select for playback any question in the debate and the candidates’ responses provides easy, precise access to the contents, sliced and diced, that was never possible before. But it also contributes to a shortening of our collective attention span.

THIS is hardly new — we’ve already come a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 for a Senate seat, which held the audience rapt, on one occasion, for three hours — then everyone dispersed for dinner and came back for the four-hour rebuttal. The contrast with the public’s attenuated attention in the age of television, which Neil Postman pointed out in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” was great. The contrast is all the greater today, with the advent of the short, nonlinear clips of YouTube.

It is easy to forget that this is YouTube’s first presidential campaign: the company was founded in only 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006. By the time the next campaign cycle rolls around in 2011, YouTube’s influence on the culture may be so complete that a 45-minute linear video of a question-answer session will seem to most people to be about 43 minutes too long.

A midcampaign trek to Google headquarters in Silicon Valley may soon seem no less quaint than one to a G.M. plant in Flint, Mich. The candidates need not seek out the cameras — from now on, the cameras will always find them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02digi.html





Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat?
Roi Carthy

New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 million conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored - IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks.

There are few IRC search engines today, and most focus on specific niches or single networks, the Company says. Nearly two decades worth of data contained on IRC servers has effectively been lost. IRSeek wants to make sure that future conversations are properly indexed and and searchable. It’s a huge untapped knowledge-base.

So if you want to see what people are saying on IRC about, say, iPhone unlocks, now you can. The most popular search terms populate a query could on the front page of the site.

The company was founded by Eran Cohen (CEO), and Ariel Berkman (CTO). Development began in mid-2006.

The company says a channel is dropped when file sharing activity is detected and private conversations are not eavesdropped in anyway. Still, some IRC users, who have a possibly unreasonable expectation of privacy, may be troubled by IRSeeK. Personal information is often revealed in IRC chats. That information is now indexed and searchable. Searches can also be conducted by IRC nicknames, and all conversations involving that nickname (or even if they were just in the room) are linked. Of course, nicknames aren’t unique and many users may choose the same nickname over time. But even so, the knowledge that everything being typed can be later found by others may have a chilling effect on users.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30...ct-on-irc-chat





YouTube Restores Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account - Minus All His Videos
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Wael Abbas, an award winning journalist who has posted videos documenting police brutality and torture in Egypt over the last 3 years, had his shut-down YouTube account restored by Google last night after a week of international pressure. The restored account, though, no longer contains any of Abbas's more than 100 videos. YouTube told media tonight that Abbas can freely upload his videos again and if satisfactory explanation of the violence is included then they will be allowed to remain on the site.

The Context

Two weeks ago Wael Abbas traveled to Washington DC to be awarded the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award along with Burmese investigative reporter May Thingyan Hein and Founders Award winner Tom Brokaw. One week later, Abbas's YouTube account was shut down by the video hosting service, citing the prohibition against "gratuitous violence."

Far from gratuitous, the videos Abbas posted were in part of his own collection and in part from cell-phone video sent to him by people around Egypt. One clip he helped publicize depicted a bus driver's being sexually assaulted by police officers and resulted in the very unusual criminal conviction of the officers. It's widely acknowledged that torture by government officials is widespread in Egypt. See also our coverage earlier this month of Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman's first of four planned years in prison for the crime of "defaming the President of Egypt." The country is one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid in the world.

YouTube's Response

A YouTube spokesperson made the following statement to Fox News tonight.
"Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas — and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site."

I wonder if an explanation posted in Arabic would meet YouTube's standards of sufficient context for users of the site to understand what's happening in the clips. None the less, links to the videos still lead to a message reading "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." As if these were ripped-off copies of the Daily Show.

Abbas has archived copies of all the videos he had uploaded, but requiring him to upload them again and breaking the URLs of all the original embeds around the web, links and viewership analytics is a low blow by YouTube. It's also another spot that will remain on the human rights record of Google, one of the world's most powerful companies and ostensible forces for free communication.

For updates, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers - where you can read daily about authoritarian efforts around the world to squash the democratizing potential of the web.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...an_account.php





Did GameSpot Commit Brand Suicide with Jeff Gerstmann Firing?

If the highly detailed rumors surrounding Jeff Gerstmann’s firing are true, then the people who run GameSpot have, by their own hand, utterly trashed a great media brand.

The Spot has long been regarded as the most professional of all the game-oriented news and review sites. It’s a personal favorite of mine, so this news makes me especially sad. When GamePolitics occasionally links to a review for a particular game, it has always been to GameSpot.

I don’t know Jeff Gerstmann, although I met him once or twice at various E3 shows. But any working journalist can summon righteous indignation over what appears to have happened here. Fired because an advertiser didn’t like your review of their crappy product?

Disgraceful, if true.

Impossible to defend.

There’s no official confirmation, of course, and that may never come. Corporate apparatchiks - like those at CNET who apparently pulled the trigger on Gerstmann - will invariably hunker down in times like these, preferring to ride out the storm behind vague press releases which pretend they are protecting their victim’s privacy. And Gerstmann may have obligated himself to keep quiet in return for some type of severance package. But the mounting unofficial evidence is so detailed that it rings true.

If there’s any legitimate damage control to be done here, CNET should do it, and quickly. Frankly, I don’t expect any.

And GamePolitics readers shouldn’t expect to see any more links to GameSpot.

UPDATE: Check out this compilation of Gerstmann news by GameSpot reader Subrosian. Penny Arcade has a great cartoon (we’re showing one panel at left) and commentary on the scandal.

This Valleywag post, citing an anonymous commenter with the screen name “gamespot” is probably the most daming information on the Gerstmann affair:

…I’m sure management wants to spin this as the G-Man being unprofessional to take away from the egg on their face… This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building…

There has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process…

When companies make games as downright contemptible as Kane and Lynch, they deserve to be called on it… everyone at GS now thinks that if they give a low score to a high-profile game, they’ll be shitcanned…

Joystiq has tracked down more commentary from past and present GameSpot staffers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/12/01/d...stmann-firing/





Eleven Questions for a Warez Site Owner

The operator of a software-piracy site takes us behind the scenes of the warez business.

You need a copy of Adobe's Photoshop or maybe the latest version of CorelDraw? Or how about downloading Beowulf or a DVD rip of American Gangster? If you know where to go, they're all available for free, at rogue sites that link to pirated software and other content--also known as "warez."

I recently interviewed a warez site operator to find out how he started the site, how he makes money, and how he justifies passing out illegal copies of practically everything under the sun.

Oh, right--you want to know how to get to this site. That was my editor's only restriction: the guy's name and his site's name need to be kept secret.

Okay, first, the obvious question: What's your payoff for running the site?

Now it's not a lot, and I mostly keep it for the community. It makes about $20/day. But before Google's AdSense banned the site, it was making $150 to $200 per day. Those were the good times.

What was the inspiration for starting your site? And has the site done what you expected it to do?

I didn't start it. I bought it from a friend for $3000. It was making about $10 per day. After I optimized the ads, it jumped to $150, so I got my investment back in one month. It was a good deal.

In your Terms of Service, you say people coming to your site cannot, "upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, rights of privacy or publicity, or other proprietary rights of any person or entity." Kind of ironic, no?

This is the standard TOS I guess. Anyway, we don't host any of the files on our servers. The files are hosted on sites like [free Web-hosting service sites].

Granted you're not hosting the files; but what would you do if someone hacked into your warez site or legitimate Web-based business and was able to drain off half your income--something that hundreds of software vendors might feel like you're doing to them?

Of course, no one would like that. However, the visitors have the choice of buying software--or getting it for free from warez sites. If they don't get it from my site they could easily get it elsewhere.

Is there any software you won't distribute via the site? If so, what's your criteria?

I don't write the posts from the site. Our members (more than 20,000) write the posts. I have a moderator that selects the best ones which appear on the front page. Since our site is visited by lots of teenagers we don't display anything that is adult related.

Members? It appears they're just registered users. Either way, I've heard the argument that you're innocent and simply a portal for others posting links to pirated software and movies. Do you really believe it? And your claim that you're protecting kids from porn takes the high ground. What about the morality of your site being a conduit for stolen software and first-run, pirated movies?

I wouldn't call the site innocent, but it's not evil either. I say this because the content posted on our site is not produced by our members, and is present on lots of other sites, too.

Also, I believe people should be able to test a product before buying it. Warez sites offer this opportunity. I'm sure many visitors bought a software application or purchased a movie after getting it from a warez site.

Again, if they don't visit our site, they'll find another--so even if we close our site, it won't stop the problem. The problem is solved only if all sources of warez are eliminated.

Your IP address shows your site is headquartered in Moscow. But I did some digging and it looks as if you live in Romania. Either way, you're probably aware that every company seeing its product available on your site would like to string you up. Aren't you worried about prosecution, even from the Russian authorities?

To tell you the truth, we receive only about one copyright complaint per month; and I remove the post with the issue. The site isn't big enough for anyone to notice. The domain is registered by a Russian friend--I live in Romania, and the site is hosted in Germany.

And you don't think Romanian or German authorities might come after you--and shut down your legit businesses as well?

No, because they first have to ask for the site to be shut down. We haven't received such a request so far.

Your ads rotate. I've seen legit-looking companies pitching auto insurance; a company boasting Steve Case, Colin Powell, and Carly Fiorina on its board; and even IBM. How do you get mainstream companies to pay for ads? I mean, do they really know what you're offering on your site?

The ads are automatically fed by the network ads we use. I don't think the advertisers actually know where their ads are displayed.

Pushing aside the ethics, my guess is many people would visit warez sites like yours if they weren't worried about spyware, viruses, and other dangers. Do you do anything to keep your site's downloads free of malware?

No. But when a bad post is displayed on the site, the members comment on it almost instantly, so the next downloader will know the issue. When someone is posting infected stuff regularly, the members contact us and we warn the author.

So people posting are on their honor, so to speak. Yet some of the ads I've spotted--from Hotbar, Zango, Zwinky, and the Starware Toolbar--might be considered by some as risky. I asked Eric L. Howes [Director of Malware Research at Sunbelt Software, makers of CounterSpy, an antispyware application] for his take on the products in the ads.

He said, "Hotbar and Zango could be called 'spyware' and Zwinky, Consumer Incentive Rewards, and the Starware Toolbar are at worst 'potentially unwanted programs' [PUPs] that often wind up on PCs where they're not really wanted. Unfortunately, the author of the blog does nothing to warn visitors of the other programs piggybacking on the stuff he's plugging--not very cool."

"Also, some of the programs the author is foisting on users violates three of the site's Terms of Service prohibited activities. As this is a warez site, presumably, the site owner himself isn't not bound by the same ethical obligations as the users of the site."

You don't display adult-related content, yet you're willing to expose those same teenagers and other visitors to the toolbars posted in the ads. Anything to say?

I can't control the content of the ads. That is the job of the ad provider.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112900171.html





Amazon and Wal-Mart Unwittingly Team Up Against DRM
David Chartier

As if DRM needed more of a hint to get its coat and leave, Amazon is set to announce a promotional giveaway of one billion MP3s during next year's Super Bowl. Billboard was first to note that this announcement signals an all-out offensive on DRM, which is made even more powerful by parallel pressures brought by Wal-Mart. In a bid for more of the digital download space, the brick-and-mortar retailer heavyweight has reportedly given an ultimatum to some of the largest record labels, including Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, to provide more of their respective music catalogs in MP3 format (that is, without DRM) next year.

While the timing of these consumer-focused drives from two separate retail giants is probably nothing more than a coincidence, the market forces that prompted them are a beacon for consumers who demand the choice they deserve. Wal-Mart has actually sold digital music for years, though it's always been wrapped in Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM which doesn't work on an iPod or even, ironically, Microsoft's own Zune. Things picked up a little when Wal-Mart's online music store ditched DRM in August for rich 256KB MP3 files, though like Amazon's MP3 store, EMI and Universal have been the only two labels with the foresight to give customers what they want. And Universal is only testing the waters.

Like Wal-Mart, Amazon's MP3 store launched in September with DRM-free tracks only from EMI and Universal, but with 20,000 indie labels along for the ride as well. Disney-owned Hollywood Records has also provided MP3s of about 40 of its artists, including Queen, Indigo Girls and Hilary Duff, to these two retailers, making it the latest in major labels to have made the leap to DRM-free pastures.

As far as Amazon's 1 Billion MP3 Giveaway next year is concerned, participation will be pretty standard, if not tedious and slightly more expensive than similar promotions in the past. Each bottle of Pepsi and some of its other brands will contain a coupon code under the bottle cap. Customers can then redeem five codes for one free download from the Amazon MP3 store. Considering that Apple's industry-leading iTunes Store has only gone as far as 100 million tracks during its own Pepsi + Super Bowl promotions, Amazon is certainly wearing an ambitious hat for its first foray into giving music away for free to promote its digital music download service. Of course, by way of quick calculation, users will have to submit a total 5 billion cap codes to get at those songs, and frankly, that's a load of codes. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 codes per US citizen.

With Amazon spreading the word next year in a big way for DRM-free media and Wal-Mart trying to knock some sense into more major labels, 2008 is already looking to be a strong year for the fight against DRM.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ainst-drm.html





Digital Developments Could be Tipping Point for MP3
Billboard

Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony BMG Music Entertainment are feeling increased pressure to follow EMI and Universal Music Group's lead in distributing music in the MP3 format, which forgoes restrictive digital rights management technology.

A yearlong download promotion planned between Pepsi and Amazon is among several developments forcing WMG and Sony to consider the format, Billboard has learned,

News of the Pepsi promotion, which is expected to be announced February 3 during the Super Bowl, coincides with Wal-Mart's ultimatum that major labels supply walmart.com with their music in MP3, sources said.

Labels said they have been watching the success of an MP3 test that Universal Music Group (UMG) began in August. The major label continues to allow the sale of 85 percent of its current catalog as MP3s. Sources said UMG is on the verge of permanently embracing that digital format. But a source close to the testing insisted that the decision is still up in the air while the company awaits conclusive results from the trial, which are due in mid-January.

Meanwhile, Disney's Hollywood Records has joined the list of major-distributed labels testing MP3 at Amazon and walmart.com. The company has supplied 30 to 40 titles from its mammoth catalog in the MP3 format. A check of those sites shows the latest albums from Atreyu and Grace Potter & the Nocturnals on the Hollywood label available in the MP3 format, though they are not available at iTunes.

EMI began selling its music in MP3 format in June. WMG and Sony BMG Music Entertainment both declined to comment, but have continued to publicly maintain their separate stances in favor of using digital rights management for downloads.

Sources said Sony BMG is considering an MP3 test. The company initially was steadfast against MP3 and wouldn't allow its independent distributor, RED Distribution, to engage in negotiations on behalf of its labels with Amazon when the merchant was trying to set up its MP3 download store. But Sony BMG management relented and let RED become involved in those negotiations. The parent company, however, refused to supply Amazon with its catalog in the MP3 format.

Pepsi Free

Pepsi's track record with download giveaways may be motivating labels. According to sources, Pepsi will feature a download promotion on the inside of 5 billion of its soda bottlecaps. Sources said Pepsi customers will need to collect five caps in order to exchange them for a download; this yields the potential for 1 billion redeemable tracks. A Pepsi spokesperson declined to comment.

Pepsi's first stab at giving away free music downloads, which was conducted in partnership with iTunes in 2004, was also promoted via a highly visible Super Bowl campaign. It resulted in 5 million people downloading free songs in the space of three months -- 5 percent of the 100 million tracks that were offered.

While the 5 million digital tracks redeemed in the campaign reportedly fell short of the 25 million target redemption rate, that was in the early days of digital distribution, when Apple was reporting selling digital tracks at a rate of 2.7 million per week.

Since then, with the widespread success of the iPod -- which is likely to be even more popular come Christmas -- digital track sales have grown by 416 percent, from the 142.6 million tracks scanned in 2004 to the 735.4 million tracks accumulated so far this year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on trends of the past few years, Billboard estimates that digital download sales could increase by another 5 million per week in 2008.

In the week after Christmas in 2006, track sales totaled 30.1 million, a 51 percent increase from the 19.9 million scanned in the corresponding week of the previous year -- which was, in turn, a 197 percent increase over the 6.7 million scans generated during the corresponding week of 2005. Digital downloads generally increase drastically after consumers receive iPods and iPod gift cards for Christmas.

In the new Pepsi promotion, sources said, Amazon will serve as the supplier for the downloads, and customers will need to visit a specific redemption store on the Amazon site to access music from participating labels. All majors have been approached about participating in the offer, but the price that Amazon is willing to pay appears to be a sticking point for some labels.

Sources said that Amazon will pay labels in the area of 40 cents per track. This compares with the 65-70 cents labels currently receive from Amazon for digital track sales and the 70 cents they get from Apple.

Regardless of which labels ultimately sign on, the Super Bowl commercials will nonetheless double as the coming-out party for Amazon's digital download site, which soft-launched September 25. Since then, without aggressively promoting its download business, Amazon has captured about a 3 percent market share of the digital download channel, Billboard estimates. The store has a 6 percent market share of all CD sales.

Wal-Mart's Wishes

Another factor driving the labels' decisions, sources said, involves mass merchant Wal-Mart alerting WMG and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format.

Wal-Mart declined comment. "It's a matter of policy that we don't publicly comment on speculation," walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said. "We know digital music is important to our customers, and we're very pleased with the recent performance and customer response to our digital music offering."

Though Wal-Mart maintains a modest 2 percent market share in the digital download arena, its market share for physical CDs is considerably larger: about 22 percent, Billboard estimates.

Finally, given the steep decline in U.S. CD sales -- so far, down 18.6 percent year to date compared with 2006 -- music executives have expressed their worries about what the new year will bring for the physical format. Switching to a digital format that is compatible with all portable devices, including the all-important iPod, could help merchants like Wal-Mart and Amazon capture some of iTunes' 70 percent market share, and perhaps boost the size of the digital marketplace.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...32743320071203





Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy
Richard Pérez-Peña

Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody’s personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.

Facebook tried last week to force the magazine 02138 to remove some unflattering documents about Mr. Zuckerberg from its Web site. But a federal judge turned down the company’s request for a court order to take down the material, according to the magazine’s lawyers.

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit charging that in 2003 and 2004, as a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea and some of the computer source code for Facebook from some fellow students. They were planning a networking site of their own and had hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help with the programming.

Their project fizzled, while Facebook made Mr. Zuckerberg a billionaire — at least on paper — at the age of 23.

02138, which refers to Harvard College’s ZIP code in Cambridge, Mass., and consists primarily of articles about Harvard and Harvard alumni, published an article last week about the genesis of Facebook and the resulting lawsuit. The piece is sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ account and questions the validity of Mr. Zuckerberg’s claims.

The article relied in part on documents submitted in the lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Boston, that were ordered sealed by the judge in the case, Douglas P. Woodlock. On its Web site, 02138 posted not only the article, but also the documents, which include Mr. Zuckerberg’s handwritten application for admission to Harvard and an excerpt from an online journal he kept as a student that contains biting comments about himself and others.

Luke O’Brien, the freelance reporter who wrote the article, said that he had done nothing wrong in obtaining the documents and that neither side in the lawsuit had improperly leaked them to him. He said he had obtained the papers in mid-September from the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which considered a part of the case, where a clerk apparently made a mistake and let him read and copy sealed documents, along with those that were still supposed to be open to the public.

“There were a whole bunch of manila envelopes taped shut, clearly sealed, and I did not open those,” he said.

Some of the pages he copied were stamped “Confidential” or “Redacted.” Bom Kim, founder and editor of 02138, which is not affiliated with the university or its alumni association, said that gave him pause.

“We cleared it with our lawyers,” he said, who said that any order sealing the documents would apply only to the parties to the lawsuit. “We did wonder if they were under seal. But since we had obtained them legally, we got clearance.”

On Thursday, Facebook asked Judge Woodlock to order 02138 to strike the documents from its Web site. Lawyers for 02138 said that late Friday, the judge, in an oral ruling, turned down the request; Facebook and its lawyer refused to confirm or deny that account. Calls to the court went unanswered.

“We filed the motions to let the court know that its orders were being violated,” Facebook said in a statement Friday. “One reason the court ordered certain documents’ protection was to prevent exactly what has happened: misusing documents and taking documents out of context to sling mud.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...3facebook.html





Poking Facebook

Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg created one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and became a paper billionaire as a result. But ongoing lawsuits suggest that Facebook's origins are murkier than Zuckerberg would like to admit. Is the man many are calling Harvard’s next Bill Gates telling the truth?
Luke O'Brien

We spent a lot of our time trying to get Mark to sort of follow up with us... He would say 'I should have something done in the next couple of weeks.'

It’s May 24, 2007, and on stage at the San Francisco Design Center, Mark Zuckerberg stares out at an audience of 800 software developers and looks terrified. Loud techno music pulses. Behind him, a slick slideshow cues up on a big screen. “Today ... together ... we’re going to start a movement,” he begins. A few seconds later, as Zuckerberg—all 5’8”, 150 pounds, and 23 years of him—launches into his presentation, his voice cracks.

The young man often hailed as the next Bill Gates is onstage to announce the latest advance in Facebook, the website he cooked up in his Kirkland House room in early 2004 that has blossomed into one of the Internet’s most-trafficked sites. Facebook allows users to create online profiles and interact with friends, and the site’s clean interface has distinguished it from more cluttered social networks such as MySpace and Friendster. Facebook users swap photos, play games, compare movie interests, plan parties, or simply “poke” hot strangers.

Once only open to students, Facebook opened its doors to the world late last year, allowing anyone to sign up. A hockey-stick graphic on the screen behind Zuckerberg shows the resulting surge in membership, from about 100,000 in June ’04 to over 24 million in May ’07. (As of November, Facebook had nearly 50 million users.) But now Facebook is going further, allowing outside developers to design programs that can work on members’ pages and reach millions of potential users. It’s a bold step that will do even more to bolster the site’s popularity.

Decked out in his geek uniform of jeans, Adidas sandals, a T-shirt, and a North Face fleece, Zuckerberg tries to convey the gravitas of the moment: “Right now, social networks are closed platforms,” he says, “and, today, we’re going to end that.”

Hands uplifted, he waits for the applause.

Mark Zuckerberg may not yet have the stage presence of, say, Steve Jobs, but give him time; he has plenty of ego and ambition, and he is quickly developing a mythology. A confluence of intelligence, naïveté, and hubris, Zuckerberg can be both brilliant and immature. A self-styled revolutionary who speaks often of “trying to make the world a more open place,” he is sometimes smug and often comes across as brash. He once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”

Zuckerberg has regularly suggested that money does not much interest him, that he only wants to “make revolutionary things.” In the past, he deflected billion-dollar Facebook suitors such as Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal reported that, during March 2006 negotiations with Yahoo executives, Zuckerberg refused to meet over a weekend because his girlfriend was in town. “When I’m hanging out with her, I tend not to be that engaged [in work],” he later said. Then again, he might just have been holding out for a better price: In late October, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook, a sum that valued the company at $15 billion. Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, a $3-billion stake.

It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg is increasingly compared to Gates, an earlier generation’s high-tech billionaire and Harvard dropout. But geek style and enormous net worth aren’t all that Zuckerberg has in common with Gates: Like the Microsoft co-founder, he has had to weather allegations that his greatest achievement is the result of ripping off the ideas of others. Now, Zuckerberg finds himself ensnared by several lawsuits, none more potentially damaging than that brought by three Harvard grads in the wake of Facebook’s 2004 launch. The recent graduates charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them, and they have spent years in court trying to prove it.

The media have mostly glossed over ConnectU Inc. v. Facebook Inc., now unfolding in a Boston courthouse. Most articles depict the case as either a cash grab or a blip on Facebook’s march to global domination. But interviews with people familiar with the lawsuit, and a close examination of court records, suggest that, at the least, the case raises troubling questions about the ethics of this new billionaire.

The plaintiffs are three Harvard grads: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin rowers currently training for the Beijing Olympics, and Divya Narendra, who since graduation has worked in finance in New York and Boston. In 2002, the three friends dreamed up an online social network called Harvard Connection (subsequently renamed ConnectU), later asking Zuckerberg to finish programming it. Instead of fulfilling his end of the bargain, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg stole their ideas and source code to build his own competing social network. “We got royally screwed,” Narendra says in a deposition.

Now this four-year “blood feud,” as one judge described it, is set to finally play out. Court-authorized forensic data experts are rifling through Zuckerberg’s computer hard drives, searching for code and evidence of intellectual property theft. If they find anything, the ConnectU group hopes to take over Facebook, asks that the site be shut down, and demands damages equal to or greater than the site’s value. If they don’t, the case will likely be tossed out.

Onstage at the developers’ conference, Zuckerberg shows no signs of being a man with the world on his shoulders. “This has been fun,” he says. “It’s working exactly as I thought it would.”

Growing up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., an affluent enclave just north of New York City, Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, showed an early interest in computer programming. Just before sixth grade, armed with his first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies, he began teaching himself how to code. At first, he struggled. “It was too hard for me, so I quit,” he said in court documents. (Zuckerberg and other participants in the lawsuit declined to be interviewed for this article.) “I guess, like, a little while after that, I started learning other [computer] languages and just making random things … I’d make games for myself that I thought were fun, just like dorky things.” In ninth grade, Zuckerberg made a computerized version of Risk, the popular board game. His version was set during the Roman Empire, a period of history that has long fascinated him; he can read and write Latin and Greek, and considered concentrating in classics at Harvard. After his junior year in high school, he attended Harvard Summer School for a three-month intensive course in ancient Greek. On Zuckerberg’s Harvard application, David Petrain, his summer-school instructor, described his pupil as a “rare combination of brilliant student and thoroughly likable human being.”

By that point, Zuckerberg had left Dobbs Ferry for Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Excelling in math and science, he threw himself into his classes. He also joined the fencing team, a sport about which he rhapsodized on his Harvard application: “[Fencing] has always proven to be the perfect medium. … I rarely find myself doing anything more enjoyable than fencing a good bout.” While a senior at Exeter, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that would play songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. Zuckerberg and D’Angelo, who is now Facebook’s chief technology officer, made it freely available online. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, Zuckerberg got his first taste of the big money in computer programming: WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others all wanted to buy Synapse; Zuckerberg later claimed that Microsoft was ready to shell out $2 million. But the two friends decided not to sell just then.

“I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” Zuckerberg would tell the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

It can be difficult to know when Zuckerberg is serious. He has a dry, mischievous sense of humor that sometimes verges on obnoxious. He did subsequently try to sell Synapse, he told the Crimson, only to find that interest had waned. But, thanks to his self-abnegating public statements, that missed opportunity has been portrayed as an act of noble volition.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg behaved like a typical college kid. He rushed Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. According to the Boston Globe, he declared an affinity for Asian women. He skipped classes and blew off homework. “It’s a good thing I can B.S. math proofs on the board in real time,” he wrote in an online journal he kept during one project.

During his freshman and sophomore years, his approach to Web design began to crystallize. “Whenever I’m about to begin a coding project, I always get sort of overwhelmed … ,” he explained in the journal. “I know I can code well, but I’m not so confident about the design and I know how important that is to the final product, so I always like to get the design out of the way first … I start with a simple design and build pages on top of that.”

A stripped-down design is, of course, one of the hallmarks of Facebook; by contrast, MySpace looks like Times Square at night. Equally important to the site’s early success, it met a need for a college-specific social network. That aspect of Facebook is also one of the main reasons Zuckerberg is being sued.

As boys, Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses were practically neighbors. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, 26, are from Greenwich, Conn., less than 20 miles from Dobbs Ferry. Aside from being smart children from well-to-do families, however, they share few similarities. The twins, Olympic crew hopefuls, are the sons of a former Wharton School professor who now works as an investment consultant. The “craggy, Neanderthal-esque” twosome, as the Crimson described them, studied economics. Where Zuckerberg is pale and thin, the Winklevoss twins are tall and fit. Their style is more prepster than geek: They once rowed a crew race while wearing button-down shirts and ties. Since their graduation in 2004, the twins have raced all over the world, recently winning gold medals at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. Their father supports their training. When Zuckerberg moved to California in the summer of 2004, by contrast, his parents paid only for his cell phone bills and health insurance.

During their junior year, the twins began sketching out the social network that they hoped would unify Harvard students. The idea came from Narendra, an applied math major from Bayside, N.Y., whom Cameron had met in freshman Spanish class; Narendra and the Winklevosses later lived together in Pforzheimer House. “The three of us were the best of friends,” Tyler would say. “Whenever any of us acted, we all trusted in the other person to act for the betterment of everybody in the group.”

In December 2002, Narendra told the Winklevosses of his vision for an online social network for college students. The Winklevosses liked the idea, and the three decided to bring it to life, naming it Harvard Connection. “It was intended to be a collection of profiles of individuals who wanted to get to know other individuals … at Harvard or abroad or outside of Harvard,” Narenda would say.

They would have to build a website, but none of the budding entrepreneurs had enough coding experience to do so. They needed programmers—which meant that they would have to share their ideas with outsiders. By November 2003, Narendra and the Winklevosses were ready to get Harvard Connection off the ground. The three friends, now seniors, had mapped out much of the site’s design and discussed how to attract users and advertisers. Their programmers—Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao—had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, and back-end coding. “All three of us were fairly excited about … the idea,” Narendra said. “I [knew] it had potential to be something that was really big and something that we could down the road make money on.” Half the network would be a dating section, where Harvard students could upload profiles. The other half would help make connections, whether to look for jobs, swap information about classes, or just hang out online. There was even a way users could connect with each other; Victor Gao called it a “handshake.”

The group planned to establish the network at Harvard, then expand to other schools. But first they had to finish the “connect” portion of the site. Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture. Instead, he asked to be compensated for hours worked and was paid about $400. The team sought an ace replacement to finish the job.

“We needed a programmer who was as committed to the overall business as we were,” Narendra said in a court statement. “We decided that the next programmer brought in should be made an equal member of the development team … [and] would receive equal financial benefit from the eventual website … ”

Zuckerberg was an easy choice. Then a sophomore computer science concentrator, he had recently gained campus notoriety by creating a website called “facemash” that flashed photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to click on the one they considered more attractive. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into school servers and copied pictures from house directories, informally known as facebooks. He suspected from the start that his program would land him in trouble. “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... ),” Zuckerberg wrote in his online journal. “But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... ”

Facemash’s questionable taste and Zuckerberg’s hacking caused a furor. The Harvard College Administration Board, the college’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board), placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior,” but his exploits caught Narendra’s eye. In early November, he e-mailed the programmer: “We’re very deep into developing a site which we would like you to be a part of and ... which we know will make some waves on campus.”

Within days, Zuckerberg was talking to the Harvard Connection team and preparing to take over programming duties from Gao. The plaintiffs say Zuckerberg was briefed on the confidential nature of the project and the plan to expand to other schools, using the site as an advertising base. According to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg was intrigued by the idea. “We were very concerned the whole time about … letting the cat out of the bag,” Cameron Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We communicated this multiple times to Mr. Zuckerberg—that it’s very important to get this to market first.” Zuckerberg’s attorneys have denied those claims. The plaintiffs also say that Zuckerberg was given a choice about the terms of his partnership. Although his attorneys have denied that any formal discussion about compensation or ownership of Harvard Connection took place, Gao claims otherwise: “I told him that [Narendra and the Winklevosses] would either pay him on a rolling basis or take him on as a partner with the possibility of taking an equal stake,” Gao told the court. “He became visibly excited. He told me that he wanted the latter option … because he thought the Harvard Connection website had the potential to reach out to a very large user base.”

Gao relayed Zuckerberg’s alleged decision to the team and handed over the keys to the Harvard Connection code. On or about November 12, according to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg began work. Ten days later, he e-mailed Gao and Narendra to tell them that the site was almost ready. “I have most of the coding done, and I think that once I get the graphics we’ll be able to launch this thing,” Zuckerberg e-mailed.

But for the next two months, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg made himself scarce. He postponed meetings, was slow to return calls and e-mails, and allegedly refused to let the team see his work. He offered a variety of explanations: His cell phone was muted, his computer science problem sets were taking up too much time, he forgot to bring his laptop charger home for Thanksgiving and his computer died. As the Harvard Connection launch date was pushed back week after week, the plaintiffs grew increasingly anxious. “We spent a lot of our time trying to get Mark to sort of follow up with us,” Narendra said. "Cameron sent him emails … We would, you know, call him and ask him, ‘Hey, what’s the latest on the website?’… He would say, ‘… I should have something done in the next couple weeks.’”

In mid-December, Narendra and the Winklevosses finally met with Zuckerberg in his dorm room. Though nothing was ever put down on paper—an oversight that would weaken their subsequent case— they claim that they again promised Zuckerberg a fair share of any future revenue. Zuckerberg allegedly confirmed his interest and assured them that the site was almost complete. On the whiteboard in his room, Cameron says, Zuckerberg had scrawled multiple lines of code under the heading “Harvard Connection.” This would be the only time the plaintiffs saw any of his work.

On January 14, 2004, the Harvard Connection team went to talk to Zuckerberg once more; Zuckerberg informed them that he was involved with another project. He did not elaborate, and the two sides did not substantively speak again.

On February 4, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook.

“None of us knew about it until we picked up the [Crimson],” Tyler Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We read this article that says ‘thefacebook’”—Zuckerberg’s original name for the site— “‘launched by Mark Zuckerberg,’ and we sort of stepped back and were like, ‘Well, that sounds like our idea …’”

Within a few days, hundreds of students had signed up for Facebook. Within two weeks, that number had swelled to 4,000; after a month, 10,000; by June, 100,000. Zuckerberg and his early teammates—Eduardo Saverin, a frat brother who was the company’s first CEO; Dustin Moskovitz, who helped with the early programming and is now a VP of engineering at Facebook; Chris Hughes, who became a Facebook spokesman; and Andrew McCollum, who helped expand the site soon after it launched—were adding schools to Facebook as quickly as they could code.

Harvard Connection never had a chance.

Success in the tech world is usually about execution, not ideas—original ideas are rare in such a competitive field—and, when Facebook launched in February 2004, the notion of an online social network was hardly novel. Friendster was thriving. A handful of rudimentary college-specific networks already existed. “Innovation often happens collaboratively,” says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at HLS. “It’s very rarely a single person coming up with a single idea who makes a breakthrough. It’s not surprising at all that some people had similar ideas.”

One of those people was Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard student, who, six months before Facebook, had created a Harvard social network called houseSYSTEM. It featured a “Universal Face Book” that allowed students to upload photos and personal information. Zuckerberg, whom Greenspan had told about the site early on, was a user, and Greenspan has since accused him of poaching ideas, in particular features that allowed members to create event reminders, access course schedules, and buy and sell textbooks.

“I don’t know if Mark copied things intentionally or it’s just the most amazing coincidence of all time, but I know he’s dishonest,” Greenspan says. “I’ve seen him lie.”

But Greenspan also points out that many elements of social networks aren’t new. “Some of these concepts are generic and existed as far back as 1997,” he says. “That’s when I first got an invitation to a social network. I was in eighth grade.” Even Zuckerberg’s high school had an online facebook. Kris Tillery, one of Zuckerberg’s Exeter classmates, created an application that allowed students to upload profile information and perform searches; it all but replaced the school’s printed student handbook. Zuckerberg, Tillery says now, is “a smart and capable programmer and businessman, and generally a good guy.” Even if the Exeter directory inspired Zuckerberg, says Tillery, that wouldn’t explain Facebook’s success.

What can, in large part, is Zuckerberg. Tales of Zuckerberg forgoing food to program through the night are near legendary. He coded facemash in a two-day, half-drunk frenzy, according to his online journal. “I haven’t really eaten all day,” he wrote. “My diet and sleeping patterns really go to shit when I have a coding project ... or when I don’t.”

Around the time that the Ad Board punished Zuckerberg for facemash, a Crimson editorial explored the possibility of an online directory with stronger privacy controls. “Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated if only the site had limited itself to students who voluntarily uploaded their own photos,” the Crimson editors argued. “A site that allows us to succumb to the guilty pleasure of judging our friends and enemies in an e-Darwinist free-for-all would be acceptable—and hilarious—so long as its targets all choose to opt themselves into the spotlight.”

This, Zuckerberg has said, was the real inspiration for Facebook. “I basically took that article ... and made a site with those exact privacy controls and that was Facebook,” Zuckerberg said in a deposition. Yet the Crimson had only suggested a site that ranked relative attractiveness.

So why did Zuckerberg bail on Harvard Connection? In court documents and press interviews, he usually cites the unwieldy source code he inherited from the site’s previous programmers. Zuckerberg has also said that he lost interest in Harvard Connection because it lacked a cohesive vision and was never intended to be more than a dating and professional site. “I’m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run,” he e-mailed Cameron Winklevoss at one point.

But it’s hard to imagine that Zuckerberg didn’t know that the site he was designing for himself was very much like the site he was supposed to be creating for the Harvard Connection team. The similarities between Facebook and the concept for Harvard Connect are abundant and obvious, and the plaintiffs have accused Zuckerberg of stealing several ideas, including: the concept of an online social network for the college community; registration with .edu e-mail addresses to encourage users to enter accurate information into their profiles; grouping users by schools, starting with Harvard and then moving on to the rest of the Ivy League and beyond, and allowing them to connect to other groups; letting users adjust privacy settings within their groups; allowing users to request connections with other users; enabling people to upload, post, and share photos, videos, and information and exchange goods such as books or personal items.

As evidence has trickled to light over the last three years, Zuckerberg’s story has changed in ways that contradict previous explanations. Immediately after Facebook launched, the plaintiffs sent Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter and filed a complaint with the Ad Board. The plaintiffs argued that Zuckerberg had violated Harvard’s honor code. Zuckerberg e-mailed a letter to the Ad Board presenting his version of events. Although the Ad Board chose not to pursue the matter, Zuckerberg’s letter, presented by the plaintiffs as evidence, raises questions about his veracity.

In his letter, Zuckerberg admits—contrary to what his attorneys would later claim—that the Harvard Connection team discussed payment with him. “[The plaintiffs] told me that if I wanted to get involved, they needed about 10 hours of programming done and there could be some pay in it for me,” Zuckerberg wrote. (In the same letter, he also asserted that he was working for free.) Although a discussion about payment could help establish an oral contract between the parties and bolster the plaintiffs’s complaint, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in the case. “Oral contracts are worth the paper they’re written on,” Palfrey says. “But it’s enough of a case that they’ve been able to get themselves in front of a judge … You can have just enough to kick open the doors of justice.”

Zuckerberg also substantiated much of what the plaintiffs have said with respect to the Harvard Connection concept. He confirmed that it was divided into dating and connecting sections, and that users could upload images and personal information and search for other people based on interests, then contact them for dates or non-romantic reasons. Most revealing is what Zuckerberg said about the connecting side of Harvard Connection: “Instead of the information being based around dating, it had a professional focus, and instead of requesting dates from people, users would request connections. I never really understand [sic] what requesting a connection would do for a user …” That admission suggests that forming platonic connections on a website—for Facebook users, perhaps the site’s most central function—was not actually Zuckerberg’s idea nor intent when he launched his site. Then again, it’s also possible that he was simply misrepresenting the ambition of the Harvard Connection site.

Aaron Greenspan, shown here in 2001: "I don't know if [Zuckerberg] copied things intentionally or it's just the most amazing coincidence of all time, but I know he's dishonest."

The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg stalled Harvard Connection while working on Facebook to gain a first-mover advantage; Zuckerberg has denied the accusation. In the Ad Board letter, he says he began work on Facebook only after his final meeting with the plaintiffs on January 14, 2004.

“I let them know that I probably wouldn’t be able to devote the kind of time I would have liked to the site, and that they should get another developer on board,” he wrote. “After that meeting I began making thefacebook … ” Zuckerberg subsequently claimed that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during exam period.

But court documents suggest that the claims Zuckerberg made to the Harvard Ad Board may be false. Zuckerberg registered the original Facebook website on January 11, and his lawyers have told the court that it was “on or about” this date that he started coding. On January 12, however—two days before meeting with the Harvard Connect group—Zuckerberg e-mailed Eduardo Saverin, saying that the site was almost complete and that they should discuss marketing strategies.

A week earlier, Zuckerberg had e-mailed Greenspan for legal advice about a new “web app.” When Greenspan inquired further, Zuckerberg became cryptic: “For now I’m trying to keep the project on the dl, so I’d rather not discuss the details,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg’s letter to the Ad Board suggests his frustration with the whole episode. “I try not to get involved with other students’ ventures since they are generally too time-consuming and don’t provide me with enough room to be creative and do my own thing,” Zuckerberg told the Ad Board. “I do, however, make an effort to use my skills to help out those who are trying to develop their own ideas for websites … Perhaps there was some confusion, and I can see why they might be upset that I released a successful website while theirs was still unfinished, but I definitely didn’t promise them anything … Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

As Facebook’s membership soared, Zuckerberg showed a gift for making sound decisions without overreaching. When the time was right, he created a “Groups” application that let users join or create groups and connect with people with similar interests. Facebook would eventually expand to high-school networks and added a photo application that let users upload pictures. By the summer of 2004, Facebook was growing so fast that Zuckerberg, who had just finished his sophomore year, headed to Palo Alto to search for investment capital and further develop the site. He took one bag of clothes. “I had a couple friends that were going to be out there for the summer who had internships,” he explained later, “I wanted to hang out with them.”

Zuckerberg enlisted several Harvard roommates and friends to help with Facebook. They rented a group house, planted tiki torches, and ran a zip-line from the roof. They also coded day and night. By the end of the summer, 250,000 people had signed up for Facebook. Zuckerberg decided to stay in California.

That summer, he also befriended Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and opened donor doors for him in Silicon Valley. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg would later force his friend to step down after Parker was arrested for cocaine possession, according to a deposition by Zuckerberg. (Parker has denied cocaine-related allegations.) But the more-seasoned tech entepreneur helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.

Harvard Connection, however, remained a Dickensian contrast in fortune. Since the launch of Facebook, the trio of seniors had been scrambling to make up lost ground. “Every second ticking was … a second lost,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Zuckerberg had turned over none of the code he claimed to have finished for Harvard Connection, so the plaintiffs contracted two Web development firms to finish their site. In May 2004, they launched their new site, renamed ConnectU, and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t very good; by then, Facebook was steamrolling everything in its path, and today, ConnectU is all but moribund. Narendra turned his attention to Wall Street, landing a job at Credit Suisse. But the Winklevoss twins kept at it. Last year, the twins testified that they had pumped some $800,000 into ConnectU. Furious at Zuckerberg, the Winklevosses even OK’d programs to “scrape” user information off Facebook, then e-mail invites to those users to join ConnectU. When Zuckerberg discovered the alleged subterfuge, he filed a lawsuit accusing ConnectU of hacking into Facebook and spamming his customer base. That litigation is ongoing.

Zuckerberg was already embroiled in still another lawsuit, filed five months earlier, this one against Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg claims that Saverin tried to hijack the company by freezing its bank account when Facebook desperately needed cash in its formative months. Zuckerberg used money his parents had saved for his college tuition to keep the company afloat. Saverin, who originally owned a third of Facebook, has counter-sued. He claims that the approximately $20,000 involved was his money—Facebook seed capital that Zuckerberg promised to match and never did. Instead, Saverin says, Zuckerberg used the money to cover personal expenses. Then, when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook and became sole director, he cut Saverin out of the power structure of the company and watered down his shares.

By chance, Saverin ran into Cameron Winklevoss in a Manhattan bar in the summer of 2004. Over the din of music and loud voices, Saverin apologized for Zuckerberg’s behavior, according to a deposition by Winklevoss.

“Sorry that he screwed you … Mark screwed [me] too,” Winklevoss recalled Saverin saying.

In September 2004, only a few weeks after that encounter, the ConnectU team filed a federal lawsuit against Zuckerberg and his early teammates, including Saverin.

Lawyers for ConnectU have successfully pushed to recover Zuckerberg’s original source code for Facebook, arguing that it will show him guilty of copyright infringement. Zuckerberg says that the code will absolve him of wrongdoing. “We know that we didn’t take anything from them,” he told the New Yorker last year. “There is really good documentation of this: our code base versus theirs. At some point, that will come out in court.”

But it has not come out in court. Zuckerberg has been on notice since September 2004 to preserve information relevant to the case, but for some time Facebook claimed they couldn’t produce a shred of source code from when Zuckerberg first began working for Harvard Connection, the original Facebook code, or even the Facebook code in October 2004, one month after the original suit was filed. Zuckerberg’s lawyers have held that nearly all the early Facebook code has disappeared, wiped from outside servers long ago or lost on missing or corrupted hard drives.

“Mr. Zuckerberg should have known better than to fail to back up the work that he allegedly performed on the Harvard Connection code,” ConnectU attorneys have argued. “It is fishy indeed, if not impossible, that the Harvard Connection code, the pre-launch thefacebook.com code, and the facemash code supposedly do not exist from launch until October 2004 …”

What evidence Facebook has turned over to ConnectU—and some memory devices once thought lost have recently surfaced—may be all that exists. The court has ruled that outside consultants can image and analyze the devices for code or other intellectual property. Their findings could be decisive.

“Computer forensics is an extraordinary science,” Palfrey says. “If they go through a legitimate ... process, you’ll get an answer.”

Whatever the legal outcome, we will probably never know what really happened in the Harvard dorms four years ago. And as Facebook mushrooms into one of the biggest databases of personal information in the world, the controversy over the site’s origins will almost certainly be overshadowed by a battle over how it protects users’ privacy. Until a better social network comes along, however, people are logging on to Facebook by the millions. It’s safe to say that Zuckerberg capitalized on the right idea at the right time. The question remains: Whose idea was it?
http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1724.html





I’m Ready to Bail on Facebook - the New Face of Evil
marc orchant

I’ve been increasingly irritated with the noise-to-signal ration Facebook creates in my life. I definitely had the “I just threw up in the back of my mouth a little” feeling during the Web 2.0 Summit Zuckerberg love-fest. And now there’s increasing evidence that Facebook Beacon, their ill-considered advertising engine (or is it their privacy invasion engine?) is potentially a new vector for so-called affiliate marketers, spammers, scammers, and other vermin to gain access to unsuspecting users. Worse, it turns out that protecting yourself from this new attack by trying to leave Facebook is no easy task.

Henry Blodgett reports that Facebook is in deep doo-doo with both the New York Times and Coca-Cola over their misrepresentations about the opt-in/opt-out nature of Beacon:

The “Beacon” fallout continues. The New York Times’ Louise Story essentially accuses Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of lying to her about Beacon’s being “opt-in.” Coca-Cola got a similar impression from the company – and, having learned the truth, is holding off on using the program. Meanwhile, Facebook’s spokesman attempts to explain to the NYT’s Louise Story what Zuckerberg really meant – and makes matters worse.

And Dare Obasanjo blows the lid on why Beacon is totally broken and almost certainly unfixable:

Anyway, back to the title of this blog post (Facebook Beacon is Unfixable). The problem with Facebook Beacon is that it is designed in a way that makes it easy for Facebook Beacon affiliates to integrate into their sites at the cost of user’s privacy. From Jay Goldman’s excellent post where he Deconstructed the Facebook Beacon Javascript we learn
Beacon from 10,000 Feet

That basically wraps up our tour of how Beacon does what it does. It’s a fairly long explanation, so here’s a quick summary:

1. The partner site page includes the beacon.js file, sets a <meta> tag with a name, and then calls Facebook.publish_action.
2. Facebook.publish_action builds a query_params object and then passes it to Facebook._send_request.
3. Facebook._send_request dynamically generates an <iframe>which loads the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php and passes the query_params. At this point, Facebook now knows about the news feed item whether you choose to publish it or not.

When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. F*ck.

Game over. This is more than enough to convince me that Facebook has more downside than upside for me. Look, I freely admit I am not the core demographic for Facebook. I’m a 50-year-old guy who’s been happily married for 25 years (and so doesn’t want to find a date or a new “special friend”), doesn’t play games, could care less about drinking games, zombie bites, and other frippery, and initially believed in the potential this framework offered.

Chatting with Tris Hussey and Sam Sethi on Twitter just now, I learn that jumping ship might not be as easy as I thought.

On Twitter, Sam Sethi says: “… just try and leave. You need to unsubscribe from every group and jump through a few more hoops,” and points here.

Facebook does allow people to ‘deactivate’ their accounts. This means that most of their information becomes invisible to other viewers, but it remains on Facebook’s servers - indefinitely.

This is handy for anyone who changes their mind and wants to rejoin. They can just type their old user name and password in, and they’ll pop straight back up on the site - it will be like they never left.

But not everyone will want to grant Facebook the right to keep all their data indefinitely when they aren’t using it for any obvious purpose. If they do want to delete it permanently, they need to go round the site and delete everything they’ve ever done.
That includes every wall post, every picture, and every group membership. For a heavy Facebook user, that could take hours. Even days. And it could violate the UK’s Data Protection Act.

Summary - leaving Facebook has been made almost impossible and proportionately harder the more you’ve participated. Sorry. That sounds pretty much like my definition of EVIL. When will these people learn that this sh*t doesn’t fly? I agree with Open Garden who says:

and thats why opensocial is a step in the right direction ..

Here’s the final proof I’m right and it’s time to nuke any trace of my casual flirtation with Facebook. Fake Steve Jobs says so (and of course he’s always right… about everything:

See this story on CNET which refers to this story from some Harvard publication. Gist is that the Harvard publication dug up some documents involved in a lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook claims it’s an invasion of Zuckerberg’s privacy and went to court trying to have the documents yanked. As CNET points out this is a little bit odd considering that in recent weeks Facebook has been bagged for publishing info about its users’ online purchases and has defended itself, claiming it has every right to share private info about its users. Oh, the Harvard article also suggested Zuckerberg is kind of a sh*tbag. No idea where they got that idea.
http://us.blognation.com/2007/12/01/...-face-of-evil/





Facebook Apologizes Over Handling of Ad Feature
Louise Story

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the social networking site Facebook, apologized to the site’s users yesterday about the way it introduced a controversial new advertising feature last month.

Facebook also introduced a way for members to entirely avoid the feature, known as Beacon, which tracks the actions of its members when they use other sites around the Internet.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s apology — in the form of a blog post on Facebook — followed weeks of criticism from members, privacy groups and advertisers.

“I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has also been meeting with advertising agencies in recent days and discussing their concerns about Beacon, according to one executive who was invited. Facebook originally presented Beacon to the advertising community as an opt-in program that its members would choose to use. It planned to sell ads alongside the messages sent to people’s friends about their purchases and activities on other sites. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola have expressed surprise that Beacon then required users to take action if they did not want the messages sent out.

“This is a bit of an example of Facebook being, as we refer to it, ‘out over your skis.’ They got a little bit ahead of themselves,” said Elizabeth Ross, president of the digital advertising agency Tribal DDB West, a part of the Omnicom Group.

Ms. Ross said advertisers did not want Facebook to push its users into a system like Beacon against their will.

But that is what happened for a few weeks after Beacon was introduced on Nov. 6. Facebook gave users two notices that it planned to broadcast their actions to their friends — one when they were on the external Web site making a purchase, and the other when they came back to Facebook. The notices were small at first, and when users ignored them, Facebook assumed they had granted permission.

After more than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition about Beacon that was set up by the political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, Facebook changed that policy last Thursday so that users who ignored the warnings were considered to have said ‘no.’ But a Facebook executive said then that the company would not offer users a universal opt-out for Beacon.

“We need to make sure we give them the ability to see what things can do for them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations at Facebook.

Although Facebook has now made the changes that MoveOn.org and others requested, some users said they felt the company had not been forthcoming with its members.

“I feel like my trust in Facebook has been violated,” said Christopher Lynn, 30, a Facebook user who also writes a blog on social media. “Facebook created this space that was a private space, where we share our experiences, and to share this data behind our backs is upsetting.”

Robert French, a communications professor at Auburn University in Alabama, has been lecturing about Beacon recently, and he said his students — nearly all Facebook users — were shocked to learn about Beacon.

Privacy groups are still working on a complaint to federal regulators about Facebook’s advertising program. In addition to Beacon, the new program includes profile pages created by advertisers and ads sent to users based on what they write about in their profiles.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Mr. Zuckerberg should have explained Facebook’s full advertising and data collection program to users yesterday.

“The user needs to decide how their information is going to be used, whether it’s going to be used for targeting at all, which advertisers have access to it and whether Facebook has the right to collect and analyze it,” he said. “Facebook is saying it is a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets; what’s not being told to users is that they are selling those secrets.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/te...6facebook.html





Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads
Louise Story

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages–despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.

They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Facebook does not allow users to sell ads on their profile pages. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told me on Nov. 6 that is because Facebook does not want people’s profile pages to become cluttered.

“We don’t want a free-for-all,” he said.

But Weblo’s chief executive Rocky Mirza says that people should be able to sell space on their pages on Facebook (and a variety of other sites like MySpace and YouTube) because they are the content creators on those sites. Facebook would have no content if not for its users, he said, which makes it different from media organizations, for example, that have content because they pay reporters.

Weblo started the service in October. In the past month the number of people using it on Facebook has grown from 200 to 1500.

“Obviously Facebook is providing the infrastructure, so they can place ads on the left side,” Mr. Mirza said. “But users should be getting paid for the time they spend on the Internet and the friends they draw to their pages.”

Facebook does allow people and companies that design widgets for use on the site to sell ads in the widget interface page, called the “canvas page.” But those widget companies cannot sell ads on the profile pages, either.

Weblo shares ad revenues with the people who let it place ads on their pages. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook allows them to carry on. Facebook clearly would not want to alienate even more users now, after its Beacon debacle over the past month.

Weblo gets to the heart of a question of ownership that will will generate more debate as more people spend more of their time looking at content created by other ordinary people. When users post reviews of restaurants on a media site, for example, should they get to share in the ad revenues generated?

Facebook has also yet to respond to my inquiry about Weblo, but I will update you when they do.

People can also sign up to run weblo ads on their pages by using a Weblo widget on the site called Internet Worth.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...ads/index.html





Small Merchants Gain Large Presence on Web
Bob Tedeschi

MOM-AND-POP retailers have helplessly stood by over the last decade as big-box merchants steamrolled over them. Online, though, small merchants are not going down without a fight.

The number of small- and medium-size retailers selling online has swelled in the last two years, from 21 percent to 32 percent, according to a survey by IDC, a consulting firm. Aided by less expensive and more sophisticated technology, stores like RealmDekor.com, CleanAirGardening.com and SitStay.com are competing with retailers as well as bigger sites like Amazon.

These businesses lack the huge marketing budgets of their bigger peers, of course, but they are unearthing cheap advertising methods that, in some cases, help them compete with million-dollar promotions.

The retailer of quirky home goods, RealmDekor.com, has experienced occasional sales increases not because of catalog shipments or television commercials, but because it formed relationships with bloggers and posted its products on new “social shopping sites” like ThisNext.com and StyleHive.com.

“People started posting about my goods and it snowballed from there,” said Lisa Mathisen, RealmDekor’s owner. “I know people think these sites are new and underground, but they’re becoming more mainstream. Even my mother checks them out to find gifts.”

Social shopping sites emerged last year as places for dedicated shoppers to exchange tips on popular items or designers. Tens of thousands of users list their raves and vie for trendsetter supremacy, while the site owners collect dollars for referring customers to retailers.

Gordon Gould, chief executive of ThisNext.com, said the site features hundreds of thousands of products, with a majority of the items coming from smaller retailers. “Social shopping sites help the smaller retailers surface their products and open people up to their specific point of view,” he said.

CleanAirGardening.com, an online retailer of environmentally friendly gardening supplies based in Dallas, recently began posting product demonstration videos on YouTube and other sites, along with links to the site. According to Lars Hundley, the company’s owner, visitors who arrive from video-sharing sites purchase goods 20 percent more often than those who come from elsewhere.

Most online shoppers are so experienced that they feel safer venturing away from Amazon to buy from lesser-known sites, said Ray Boggs, an IDC analyst. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the Web sites now built by many small merchants lack the amateurish feel of a few years ago.

Companies like Yahoo, Amazon and thousands of independent Web developers have become considerably better at building slick sites for merchants, sometimes within a few minutes, for less than $100. Yahoo Store merchants, for instance, pay $40 to $300 a month, and a commission of 0.75 percent to 1 percent on each sale. Merchants on the Amazon WebStore pay $60 monthly, along with a 7 percent commission.

Jimmy Duvall, who oversees the Yahoo Stores service for Yahoo’s small business division, said the company recently introduced a series of enhancements, intended to simplify the site-building process and improve merchandising.

For instance, Yahoo merchants can now automatically offer a shirt to match a pair of slacks a customer bought previously, or a tablecloth to complement silverware a customer placed into the shopping cart. (In retail parlance, these techniques are called cross-selling or up-selling.)

“They can do some pretty advanced merchandising now, without having to dedicate staff to picking items,” Mr. Duvall said.

In some respects, Yahoo’s cross-selling improvements are a response to Amazon’s entry into the market last year. The Amazon WebStore service began with technology that mimics Amazon.com’s recommendation feature, which displays the purchases of customers who searched for items similar to those on a given page.

In Amazon’s latest quarterly results, 32 percent of the goods sold on Amazon’s sites were offered by other merchants.

Those numbers could climb after a technology failure by Yahoo last week left its 45,000 merchants without functioning Web sites for much of the big Cyber Monday holiday shopping day. Matt Williams, who oversees the Amazon WebStore division, said his company had calls from Yahoo clients who were looking to transfer their stores quickly to his service.

Like Yahoo, Amazon helps its clients attract customers by listing its products on the site, and by helping ensure the stores appear on search engines. Such help is critical for beginners, but for more seasoned merchants hoping to reach the upper tiers of online retailing, it is not enough.

SitStay.com, an online retailer of goods for dog owners, grew steadily since its began in 1996. It now operates from a 20,000-square-foot facility in Lincoln, Neb. The owners of the 13-employee company, Darcie and Kent Krueger, invested slightly less than $100,000 in new Web site technology from I.B.M. that, starting last month, allowed them to more quickly post sales and product recommendations, among other things.

But because the new technology required SitStay to replace all of its old Web pages with new ones, search engines no longer rank the site’s products near the top of the results. Because few consumers click to the second or third page of search results, the effect was significant. Bigger merchants like Petco and Petsmart, meanwhile, can easily outbid SitStay for prominent ads.

“And more and more sites are coming out all the time, some with a lot of money they can invest in their search ads,” Mr. Krueger said. “So we’ve got everything in place to handle a lot more customers. Now, we’ve just got to find ways to bring them to us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...gy/03ecom.html





Spam’s End? Maybe, if Time Allows
John Markoff

Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap — for spam, not mice — if he has enough time to finish his project.

An M.I.T.-trained engineer, Mr. Kirsch was frustrated by the quality of the first computer mice in 1982, so he set out to improve them by incorporating an optical sensor.

Since then he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services. He has made forays into word processing document design, accelerating the Web, and in 1997 Infoseek, his search engine company, was the third ranking company in Web search. In many ways Mr. Kirsch, who is 50 years old, has come to exemplify what distinguishes Silicon Valley — a blend of engineering skills with persistent entrepreneurship.

Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million, a success that has permitted him and his wife to become significant philanthropists in Silicon Valley by contributing more than $75 million to the United Way campaign and other causes through his foundation.

Recently he has taken on the challenge of e-mail spam. This year he founded Abaca, a company with a new approach in the crowded market for stopping junk electronic mail.

Abaca claims that it can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee. According to the result of an independent survey last February by Opus One, a computer industry consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., that would be significantly better than the results of six leading spam blockers.

Abaca has taken on a new urgency for Mr. Kirsch — during the summer, he was discovered to have a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, that is found in about 1,500 Americans every year and is considered incurable, although it can be managed beyond the five- to seven-year longevity that new patients are usually told to expect.

So far he has shown no effects from the disease, and he said he is intent on applying his engineer’s approach to the problem.

“This is harder on my wife than it is on me,” he said during a recent interview. “I just look at it as a problem. Here’s a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don’t get to solve any more problems.”

Mr. Kirsch is not the first prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to battle cancer. Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel, has survived prostate cancer. In May 1996 Mr. Grove wrote about his battle with the disease in intimate detail in a Fortune magazine cover story. More recently Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, also underwent an operation and has survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

As he has in confronting his earlier challenges, Mr. Kirsch outlined his situation and what he is doing to try to solve it in great detail on his Web home page. His approach to surviving is outlined in painstaking detail. However, it is listed as the third of his current projects, after “Eliminating spam,” and “Who would make the best president?”

In his description, he writes: “I have enough time to change the outcome and I’m going to try to do that. This is my story.”

His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is “Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years.” He writes, “My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.”

Once a registered Republican, Mr. Kirsch has moved closer to Democratic candidates and was a significant backer of Al Gore, in particular because of his environmental stance.

“He’s done a lot of fund-raising and he’s really been willing to put himself out there,” said John Shoch, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “He says what he believes in and supports political causes, and he’s not bashful about getting into the fray.”

The most visible change that he has made as a result of his cancer is the recent decision to change the financing direction of the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation, which until late last month had focused on a wide range of community philanthropic goals.

At the end of October, however, the foundation announced that in the future it would focus its financing on research associated with his cancer, which because of its rare nature receives almost no federal money.

For the moment, between weekly visits to the Stanford Medical Center, Mr. Kirsch is continuing to put much of his time into persuading the world that he has stumbled on a better way to block spam.

He has been thinking about the spam problem for a number of years and has several patents covering other approaches, but Mr. Kirsch said he had hit on the idea underlying Abaca — profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender — quite by accident.

“We were sitting around thinking of ways to obfuscate the description about how our system worked so the spammers would be misdirected,” he said. “So I came up with receiver reputation as something that might sound plausible. Then as I thought about it more and more, the more sense it made to me.”

The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.

Unlike most of its competitors, he said, Abaca’s technology does not require a training period, is language independent and is faster than many competitors because it does not scan the entire contents of a message to determine whether it is spam.

Mr. Kirsch has invested about $5 million in developing his idea, and he said he expects Abaca to reach profitability by the middle of next year.

“I have to admit it sounds innovative and novel,” said Sunil Paul, the founder of Brightmail, one of the leading providers of antispam technology, which was sold to Symantec in 1997 for $370 million.

At the same time Mr. Paul is dubious about the ability of a stand-alone antispam company in today’s computer security market. “Remember Bill Gate’s promise to rid the Internet of spam in a few years?” he said. “That was over seven years ago. Once any of these solutions scale up, though, thousands of other clever, smart people start to work on how to defeat the system.”

Mr. Kirsch insists that Abaca is unlikely to be caught soon. “Most people like me get 99.8 percent or so with the current volume of users,” he said, referring to the percentage of good e-mail he now sees using his system. “Our performance gets better as we add more users; our competitors already have scale, and we are way ahead even with just 20,000 users. When we get to scale, our performance should be nearly 100 times better than our closest competitor.”

In February, Opus One tested six antispam products on a stream of 10,000 messages during a 10-day period. Spam catch rates ranged from a high of 97.36 percent to a low of 74.10 percent. “At 99.8 percent you miss two out of 1000,” said Mr. Kirsch. “At 95 percent you miss 50 out of 1,000. So other systems give you 25 times as much spam. Who wants that? Nobody we know.”

Opus One has not yet tested the Abaca system. However, the testing group has been briefed by a representative of Abaca. “Generally, I am very skeptical of antispam techniques that get put forth with the pseudo-math that you hear from Abaca,” said Joel M. Snyder, a senior partner with Opus One. “In their case, however, the math has a face validity that’s unusual in this business. The only obvious issue with their system is that it really requires a lot of participants in order to work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te.../03kirsch.html





U.S. Plans to Screen All Who Enter, Leave Country

Personal Data Will Be Cross-Checked With Terrorism Watch Lists; Risk Profiles to Be Stored for Years
Ellen Nakashima and Spencer S. Hsu

The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years.

The details, released in a notice published yesterday in the Federal Register, open a new window on the government's broad and often controversial data-collection effort directed at American and foreign travelers, which was implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

While long known to scrutinize air travelers, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country "by automobile or on foot," the notice said.

The department intends to use a program called the Automated Targeting System, originally designed to screen shipping cargo, to store and analyze the data.

"We have been doing risk assessments of cargo and passengers coming into and out of the U.S.," DHS spokesman Jarrod Agen said. "We have the authority and the ability to do it for passengers coming by land and sea."

In practice, he said, the government has not conducted risk assessments on travelers at land crossings for logistical reasons.

"We gather, collect information that is needed to protect the borders," Agen said. "We store the information we see as pertinent to keeping Americans safe."

Civil libertarians expressed concern that risk profiling on such a scale would be intrusive and would not adequately protect citizens' privacy rights, issues similar to those that have surrounded systems profiling air passengers.

"They are assigning a suspicion level to millions of law-abiding citizens," said David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is about as Kafkaesque as you can get."

DHS officials said that by publishing the notice, they are simply providing "expanded notice and transparency" about an existing program disclosed in October 2001, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System.

But others said Congress has been unaware of the potential of the Automated Targeting System to assess non-aviation travelers.

"ATS started as a tool to prevent the entry of drugs with cargo into the U.S.," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "We are not aware of Congress specifically legislating to make this expansion possible."

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), yesterday asked Homeland Security to brief staff members on the program, Collins's spokeswoman, Jen Burita, said.

The notice comes as the department is tightening its ability to identify people at the borders. At the end of the year, for example, Homeland Security is expanding its Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, under which 32 million noncitizens entering the country annually are fingerprinted and photographed at 115 airports, 15 seaports and 154 land ports.

Stephen E. Flynn, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed doubts about the department's ability to conduct risk assessments of individuals on a wide scale.

He said customs investigators are so focused on finding drugs and weapons of mass destruction that it would be difficult to screen all individual border crossers, other than cargo-truck drivers and shipping crews.

"There is an ability in theory for government to cast a wider net," he said. "The reality of it is customs is barely able to manage the data they have."

The data-mining program stemmed from an effort in the early 1990s by customs officials to begin assessing the risk of cargo originating in certain countries and from certain shippers. Risk assessment turned more heavily to automated, computer-driven systems after the 2001 attacks.

The risk assessment is created by analysts at the National Targeting Center, a high-tech facility opened in November 2001 and now run by Customs and Border Protection.

In a round-the-clock operation, targeters match names against terrorist watch lists and a host of other data to determine whether a person's background or behavior indicates a terrorist threat, a risk to border security or the potential for illegal activity. They also assess cargo.

Each traveler assessed by the center is assigned a numeric score: The higher the score, the higher the risk. A certain number of points send the traveler back for a full interview.

The Automated Targeting System relies on government databases that include law enforcement data, shipping manifests, travel itineraries and airline passenger data, such as names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers.

The parent program, Treasury Enforcement Communications System, houses "every possible type of information from a variety of federal, state and local sources," according to a 2001 Federal Register notice.

It includes arrest records, physical descriptions and "wanted" notices. The 5.3 billion-record database was accessed 766 million times a day to process 475 million travelers, according to a 2003 Transportation Research Board study.

In yesterday's Federal Register notice, Homeland Security said it will keep people's risk profiles for up to 40 years "to cover the potentially active lifespan of individuals associated with terrorism or other criminal activities," and because "the risk assessment for individuals who are deemed low risk will be relevant if their risk profile changes in the future, for example, if terrorist associations are identified."

DHS will keep a "pointer or reference" to the underlying records that resulted in the profile.

The DHS notice specified that the Automated Targeting System does not call for any new means of collecting information but rather for the use of existing systems. The notice did not spell out what will determine whether someone is high risk.

But documents and former officials say the system relies on hundreds of "rules" to factor a score for each individual, vehicle or piece of cargo.

According to yesterday's notice, the program is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act of 1974 that allow, for instance, people to access records to determine "if the system contains a record pertaining to a particular individual" and "for the purpose of contesting the content of the record."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...av=hcmoduletmv





Kucinich on HR 1955
IndyBlog

Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said that he believes the proposed Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959) is unconstitutional.

Speaking to a crowd of supporters in New York City Nov. 29, Kucinich took several questions from the audience, including my question on why he voted against the bill. Kucinich was one of only six representatives to oppose the bill, which passed the House 404-6 on Oct. 23.

“If you understand what his bill does, it really sets the stage for further criminalization of protest,” Kucinich said. “This is the way our democracy little, by little, by little, is being stripped away from us. This bill, I believe, is a clear violation of the first amendment.”

Kucinich referred to the bill as the “thought crime bill,” when he explained in a joking fashion that, “We have freedom of speech. Thoughts, sometimes, proceed speech. There is usually a unity in thought, word and deed.”

The bill would create a National Commission, who would be charged with the task making legislative recommendations on how to prevent, disrupt and mitigate violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Many activists, scholars and civil liberties experts are worried that in order to prevent an act of “homegrown terrorism,” people who have radical or “extreme belief systems” would have to be monitored before a criminal act might occur. This, they surmise, would amount to unlawful surveillance of individuals who are critical to the Bush administration and those who hold power in the current economic and political system.

He pointed to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) of 2006 as an example of another bill that, he says, also “criminalizes dissent.” According to the bill, anyone who engages in acts of “force, violence, or threats” that would interfere or cause damage to businesses engaged in animal enterprise, could be charged with a felony. This includes acts that could cause a “loss of profits” to the business. The businesses noted in the bill include, “a commercial or academic enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products for profit, food or fiber production, agriculture, education, research, or testing; a zoo, aquarium, animal shelter, pet store, breeder, furrier, circus, or rodeo, or other lawful competitive animal event; or any fair or similar event intended to advance agricultural arts and sciences.”

Interestingly, like H.R. 1955, the AETA was also passed under the “suspension of the rules,” a provision that allows the House to quickly pass non-controversial bills. When the suspension was requested Nov. 16, 2006, only six members of the house were present for the vote. Kucinich was the only one to oppose the bill. He noted that the bill was, “written in such a way as to have a chilling effect on the exercise of the constitutional rights of protest…”
http://www.indypendent.org/2007/12/0...ch-on-hr-1955/





What Do the Cops Have on Me?

What turns up when a police officer punches your name into the computer.
Brad Flora

Drew Peterson, the former Bolingbrook, Ill., police sergeant suspected of murdering his third and fourth wives, is now also under investigation for police misconduct. New evidence suggests that Peterson used official law-enforcement databases to check up on his fourth wife and her associates before she disappeared. Peterson's attorney says it was common practice for Bolingbrook police to run checks for friends and family, and to run prank names to alleviate boredom. What can the police learn about you from these database queries?

Your name and aliases; your Social Security number; where you live; when you were born; the color of your skin and eyes; any scars, tattoos, or identifying marks; your height, vision, and gender; what kind of car you drive, whether it's a stolen vehicle, and your license and plate numbers; your traffic violation history; your local, state, and federal criminal history; and your fingerprints

Local police gather this information from five main databases. A search of records from the state registration agency (called the "Department of Motor Vehicles" in most places) yields information on your car and to whom it's registered. There's another archive of driver's license records, kept in some states by the DMV and in other states by a separate licensing agency, which has facts on where you live, your driving record, and sometimes a digital copy of your license photo. Outstanding arrest warrants will show up in a third database, and a person's criminal history can be found in either the local police records or the federally operated National Crime Information Center database, which culls from local, state, and federal files. (Some police agencies also subscribe to research tools that are available to the general public, like LexisNexis and credit reporting services.)

Access to the databases works a little differently in every agency. In general, police have unrestricted access to the DMV, driver's license, and warrant databases, as well as the local police records. In some departments, the information can be obtained via Windows-based graphical user interfaces, while other offices still use DOS-like text interfaces. Either way, it works a lot like searching for a book at the library: Officers click a shortcut on their computer desktop to open a window that will let them search by name, license number, date of birth, or Social Security number, and return all matching records.

Looking up a person's federal and state criminal history is more complicated, though this also varies from local agency to agency. In some departments, officers can query the NCIC database directly from their office computers or the mobile data computer in their squad car; in others, officers must submit a formal request to their records department and sign a statement saying it's part of an ongoing investigation—and that the record will be destroyed when the investigation is over.
http://www.slate.com/id/2179180/





C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations
Mark Mazzetti

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself” and were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss refused to comment this afternoon on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes is likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially-appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

The Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish in Friday’s paper a story about the destruction of the tapes.. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaouior to the Sept. 11 Commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

Staff members of the 9/11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the 9/11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said that the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” General Hayden said the agency had stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read

In October, federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case were forced to write a letter to the court amending those C.I.A. declarations. The letter stated that in September, the C.I.A. notified the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., that it had discovered a videotape documenting the interrogation of a detainee. After a more thorough search, the letter stated, C.I.A. officials discovered a second video tape and one audio tape.

The letter is heavily redacted and sentences stating which detainees’ interrogations the recordings document are blacked out. Signed by U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

There is no mention in the letter of the tapes C.I.A. officials destroyed last year. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer between 2002 and 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said that the videotaping was ordered after reports of unauthorized techniques as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites. He said that the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

“People know what happened, but to see it in living color would have far greater power,” the official said.

Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.
Rep. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. does not record the interrogation of detainees.

“When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said ‘What tapes?”’ he said.

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/wa...-intel.html?hp





Police Extend OiNK’s Bail Date and Returns Servers, Wiped!
Ernesto

The OiNK servers that were raided in October have been returned to OiNK’s ISP. Strangely enough all the data, and thus the evidence, has been wiped. In addition, the bail date for OiNK admin Alan Ellis, who was arrested during the raid, has today been extended until the 4th of February 2008.

The initial bail date was December 21, it is not clear what the reason for the extension is, but it is likely that the police don’t have the strong evidence they would like to have.

In fact, the police returned the servers last week, not before deleting all the “evidence” that it held. The police made images of the servers, but it is doubtful if destroying OiNK’s property, and the original evidence is even legal.

The British and the Dutch police both contributed to what they named “Operation Ark Royal”, allegedly acting upon twisted information fed to them by the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations.

Among other things, the police claimed that OiNK was a money machine, and that Alan was making hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, everyone knows that OiNK was free to use and this fact was backed up by Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

The IFPI and BPI did not only misinform the police, they also hijacked the OiNK.cd domain and displayed an ominous message indicating an investigation into the site’s users had begun. These propagandistic threats were supposed to scare former OiNK members, and they succeeded in this until OiNK reclaimed the domain.

What once was the best BitTorrent music tracker on the Internet is now gone and wont return. Although most of its members and releasing talent found a new homes by now, there is little doubt that the music industry will continue to alienate itself from their customers until they are dead and gone.

For those who want to help Alan out, there is an official OiNK legal defense fundraiser where money can be donated to cover the legal costs. If for some reason the money isn’t needed it will be donated to an animal charity. At this point it is still unclear what the charges against Alan will be, if there will be any at all.

Stay tuned.

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-bail-date-extended-071207/