[JackSpratts]

Where the Beat Goes On
Ben Sisario

CBGB may be gone, but the music isn’t.

When the doors closed 12 days ago at that cavelike, flier-encrusted Bowery temple to rock ’n’ roll, which opened in 1973 and served as the launching pad for countless New York bands — from the Ramones and Talking Heads to Sonic Youth and Living Colour — critics were quick to call it the end of an era. Its demise, brought about by a dispute with its landlord over unpaid rent, seemed to fit a sad and familiar pattern: a scrappy but vibrant rock club was yielding to economic pressure in a heated real estate market.

But CB’s is leaving a rock scene that, despite some high-profile departures, is as healthy as it has been in decades, with new clubs dotting the map from Midtown Manhattan to Greenpoint and Park Slope in Brooklyn. For every Bottom Line or Fez or Continental that has shut down or quit live music in the last couple of years, a Rockwood Music Hall, Union Hall or Studio B has opened up — and maybe a Fontana’s or Club Midway as well. And in the next few months, at least five major spaces are set to open, giving the city’s rock infrastructure its most substantial expansion in years.

“Right now there’s a renaissance of venues in New York,” said Adam Shore, the manager of Vice Records in Brooklyn and a veteran club trawler. “This is a great time. It’s going to be pretty cutthroat for promoters, but it’s great for bands and agents and fans.”

The best, if most exhausting, overview of the city’s rock clubs is the CMJ Music Marathon, the annual conference of hungry young bands and credential-toting music industry people that begins on Tuesday and runs through Nov. 4. In addition to daytime panels and workshops, the marathon this year includes some 1,000 bands playing at more than 50 performance spaces. And those are only the official gigs: to maximize exposure and schmoozing opportunities, ambitious bands often book another three or four shows at late-night parties and afternoon barbecues. (They’re not as exclusive as they sound: wait outside a band’s sold-out show and you’re likely to hear where it’s playing next.)

Though the names of a few clubs disappear from the CMJ calendar each year, new ones always pop up, more often than not in a cleverly reconfigured space — a basement, a backroom, a warehouse — that was never intended for live music. Typical of this is Cake Shop, a narrow storefront that opened 18 months ago on Ludlow Street, the center of the Lower East Side bar zone. Upstairs is a quaint counter where cookies, cupcakes and coffee are sold, and in the back is a small record store. But downstairs is a sweaty, noisy boîte, with a full bar and indie-rock shows almost every night of the week.

“Just when you think there’s nowhere else to do anything,” said Matt McDonald, CMJ’s showcase director, who has booked four nights of music at Cake Shop, “there’s some new place on the Lower East Side.”

They’re not all tiny basements, either. Some of the clubs new to CMJ this year include Fontana’s, a surprisingly cavernous room on Eldridge Street that opened last December with a full roster of — what else? — indie rock; Studio B, a disco-ball-and-smoke-machines former Polish nightclub in Greenpoint that opened in July and quickly established itself as one of the city’s premier dance and D.J. spaces; Union Hall, a Park Slope bar with a tweedy library décor and, somewhat incongruously, bocce ball courts upstairs, as well as a comfortable band area in the basement; and Rebel, a new 325-capacity club on West 30th Street in Manhattan with bare stone walls and a powerful sound system that will make it a home for big, bad rock.

Rebel, which opened three weeks ago with a show by the avant-metal band Isis, is also one move in a developing chess game between the city’s two competing club empires: the giant promoter Live Nation and the owners of the Mercury Lounge on Houston Street and the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey.

Two years ago the Mercury-Bowery group created a new company, The Bowery Presents, to present concerts at bigger spaces, including Webster Hall in the East Village, one of the biggest clubs in the city, and established a vertical-integration booking model: bands can be sent up the chain, from the 250-capacity Mercury to the 575-person Bowery to Webster Hall, at 1,400. To match this system and compete for acts, Live Nation — which operates Irving Plaza and Roseland in Manhattan — plans to book shows at Rebel and two other new, smallish clubs.

Besides Rebel, which is at the site formerly occupied by a musky dive called Downtime but greatly enlarged and reconfigured, Live Nation also plans to start presenting concerts in January at the former Gramercy Theater on East 23rd Street, which will hold about 600. It will also have a hand in booking the new Luna Lounge, reopening by the end of the year in Williamsburg at 300 to 350 capacity, more than double its former size on Ludlow Street, where it closed last year.

“We also want to say that we want to develop artists at that size,” said Sam Kinken, who books shows throughout New York for Live Nation.

To develop the Gramercy into a rock hall, Live Nation is removing the seats on the floor, redesigning the downstairs to accommodate three dressing rooms and a large bar area and converting the projection room into a studio for audio and video recording, Mr. Kinken said on a tour of the theater this week.

The Mercury-Bowery organization is also expanding. Its owners have acquired the lease for Northsix, a sizable club in Williamsburg that was a pioneer in the area when it opened in 2001. It will be renovated, with upstairs balconies added, and is to open in the spring as the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

“We want to treat it as a special little gem, as we do the Bowery Ballroom,” said Michael Swier, one of the owners.

Another new Lower East Side club on the horizon is the Box, a 5,000-square-foot room on Christie Street whose owner, Simon Hammerstein — a grandson of Oscar — said he intended to open in the next two months with theater and music performances. Booking agents say it will be a likely competitor to Joe’s Pub, the stylish cabaret at the Public Theater.

There are no reliable statistics about the flux of the quantity of clubs over the years, but in general the ashes-to-ashes principle applies: when one closes, another opens. The biggest growth area is Brooklyn, which had few major clubs before Northsix planted its stake. Since then it has developed into a world that almost rivals Manhattan, with enough spaces — from tiny rooms like Pete’s Candy Store and Barbès to roomier places like Southpaw and Galapagos Art Space — to accommodate a range of acts and audiences.

One promoter, Todd Patrick, a k a Todd P., has built a devoted underground following by mostly avoiding the clubs and putting on must-see shows in galleries, warehouses and vacant lots.

“People always move to New York and say, ‘I wish I had been there for something like CB’s was in 1976, or the Factory in ’66, or whatever,’ ” he said. “I hope that what I do is a part of something like that as well — that the people and the places I work with now make a scene that people will look back on in 20 years and wish they had been part of.”

Location counts. When Rob Sacher, an owner of the Luna Lounge, was considering where to move, he read the surveys his customers had filled out at his old Lower East Side club.

“Seventy percent of them lived in Williamsburg,” he said. “And I just thought, ‘Why am I swimming upstream?’ Seventy percent of the market is already in a neighborhood that I can afford.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/ar...ic/27club.html





E-Mail Time Capsule
David M. Ewalt

Greetings from your past.

Last year, Forbes.com collected thousands of letters and set out to deliver them up to two decades in the future.

Now, the first batch of more than 140,000 e-mails from the past have been successfully delivered. But we've got 19 years left before we're done.

The project, which we called an "E-mail Time Capsule," was part of our special report on Communicating and was designed as an experiment to allow readers to communicate with their future selves.

Nearly a third (32%) of the messages submitted were scheduled to be delivered in just one year. On Oct. 24, 2006, we opened the time capsule, and over the course of the next month, we will deliver those messages.

But many of our readers hope to communicate with themselves over much longer time frames: 15% chose three years, 18% chose five years, 16% chose ten years and 19% will wait two decades to get their message.

Preserving a physical time capsule is simple: Just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally.

Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--it's just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail programs will do it for you, and Web sites like Futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades.

You could protect the data on some physical medium, like a CD or magnetic tape. But we're not just storing messages in a box. Not only are we storing the e-mails, we need a mechanism to actually send them.

So how did we do it? By using the same strategy that helps keep the Internet up and running: redundancy. Obviously, we can't guarantee 100% that our system will work, but the built-in redundancy vastly increases our odds.

Even though Forbes magazine has been around for 90 years, and Forbes.com for a decade, we can't simply assume that the company will be around in another 20 years (although we certainly hope so!)--or even that a database and application will be safe sitting on our servers for that long. But we can be fairly certain that if several different entities are charged with storing and potentially sending our e-mails, at least one of them will come through. So we decided to recruit two very different kinds of partners to help with this effort.

The first, Codefix Consulting, is a small technology consultancy based in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. Its president, Garrison Hoffman, wrote the e-mail time capsule application and designed the database that stores the messages, so we know he has the expertise to keep it running. He can also adapt the software to work on any new networks and computers that might come online in the future. By asking him to contribute, we're vesting our hopes in the entrepreneurial model of getting things done--in other words, by making the time capsule one individual's personal project, they'll be less likely to forget about it or abandon it.

For our second partner, we decided to go the opposite route and choose a multibillion-dollar international corporation. The hope here is that a huge business can provide the support and expertise needed to keep our project going, and that it will survive in institutional memory--even if the individual employee in charge of it today drops the ball, someone else will pick it up.

We chose Internet giant Yahoo! as our "big" partner. Yahoo! has the savvy to shepherd our time capsule through whatever technological changes occur over the next 20 years. And its business is large enough and strong enough that we feel it will probably be around for a long time to come.

On Nov. 30, 2005, we sealed the time capsule, and copies of the data are now saved at Yahoo! and at Codefix Consulting.

At the time of the 2006 capsule opening, nearly everyone involved with the project's creation still worked at the same job. Coordinating the one-year deliveries was a relatively simple matter.

But decades from now, that’s unlikely to be the case. So we've designed software to autonomously keep the partners in touch with each other over the Internet. Once a year, a few days before that year's messages are set to go out, the application running on Codefix's servers will send a message to Yahoo!, to say that it's up and running, and that it's ready to send the e-mails. Once Yahoo! gets that message, it will stand down and won't send duplicates.

But if something happens to the Codefix server and that message doesn't get sent, Forbes.com and Yahoo! will know something is wrong. Yahoo! will then take over the year's mailings. All this happens automatically, so--in theory, at least--human intervention isn't needed.

There's still one weak link in the equation: What if you're using a different e-mail address in five, ten or 20 years? Well, if that happens, you're not going to get your message. But we encouraged submitters to use e-mail addresses that they thought they'd keep for a while, and from a provider that isn't likely to disappear, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) or Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ). We believe that enough people are maintaining permanent personal e-mail addresses that many of our long-term messages will get delivered with no problems.

The first year was a cake walk. But will the entrepreneur, the media company and the Internet giant be able to keep the project going? You'll find out ... in 19 years.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...1026email.html





Police Blotter: Web Cookies Become Defendant's Alibi
Declan McCullagh

What: A Texas man says the timestamp of cookies on his Web browser proves he was actually online and not where prosecutors claim he was.

When: The Texas Court of Appeals rules on Oct. 12.

Outcome: The appeals court upheld the conviction of Everett Eugene Russell.

What happened, according to court documents:

After a stormy divorce between Erin McRae and Everett Eugene Russell, a judge granted McRae a protective order requiring her ex-husband to stay away from her residence.

McRae moved to her stepfather's home in Shady Shores, Texas. Around 10 a.m. on Feb. 26, 2005, she noticed a white truck parked on the road. She and her friend Heather both claim they then spotted Russell walking down the fence line along the stepfather's house.

The two women called 911. Sgt. David Allen with the Corinth Police Department testified that he showed up at 10:47 a.m. and found nobody matching the ex-husband's description.

Russell's alibi after he was charged consisted of three portions. First, his mother said that he was at home at 9:45 a.m. that day--which, if true, wouldn't have given him enough time to drive some 45 minutes to Shady Shores. Second, his brother said that he spoke to Russell on the house phone between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.

The third component of the alibi is what makes this case relevant to Police blotter. Russell claimed he was surfing the Web that morning, checking on an IRS income tax return and shopping online at Home Depot's and Lowe's Web sites.

He made a disk showing the Web sites that he had visited on Feb. 26, 2005, and the cookies on the disk indicated that he was on the IRS Web site at 10:29 a.m. CST. The disk also indicated that Russell was online from 10:29 a.m. to 11 a.m. and again at 1:04 p.m. (Cookies are, of course, small chunks of data saved in text files that let a Web site recognize you upon future visits.)

But prosecutors argued that the cookie file could have been altered, and a jury agreed. There's no explanation in the opinion as to why Russell's attorney didn't subpoena logs from those Web sites or his Internet service provider that--if available--could have provided a much stronger alibi. It's also unclear if Russell was relying on information in individual cookies, which would be set by each Web site, or the file system's timestamp on the entire file.

On appeal, Russell's attorney argued there was insufficient evidence to establish that his client violated a protective order. The Texas appeals court disagreed, and upheld Russell's original sentence of 365 days of confinement and a $2,000 fine.

Excerpts from the opinion by Justice Sue Walker of the Texas Court of Appeals:

Russell's mother, Charlene, testified in his defense. She explained that she left her house at 9:45 a.m. on the date in question to attend a funeral. She said that when she left, Russell was awake. Charlene testified that Russell planned to get on the Internet to obtain some prices for products from Lowe's and Home Depot for remodeling her bathroom. She testified that Russell was at home when she returned from the funeral at 4 p.m. and that his car was in the same spot as when she had left. Charlene testified that she thought Russell was at home the previous night, but she did not get off work until 11:30 p.m. or 11:45 p.m.

Russell's older brother, Travis Todd Russell, also testified on Russell's behalf. He explained that he had called his mother's house between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Feb. 26, 2005, and had asked Russell to check on the status of his income tax refund. Russell took the stand and testified that he was at his mother's house at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 26, 2005. Russell said that his brother Travis called at 10:15 a.m. and that they talked for about 24 minutes.

Russell said he checked on his brother's income tax refund on the IRS Web site that morning and also checked prices on Home Depot's and Lowe's sites. Russell had made a disk showing the Web sites that he had visited on Feb. 26, 2005, and the "cookies" on the disk showed that he was on the IRS site at 10:29 a.m. CST. The disk also shows that Russell was online from 10:29 to 11 a.m., and again at 1:04 p.m. Russell testified that he did not leave his mother's house at all that morning and that he was there when his mother returned from the funeral.

With regard to the house in Shady Shores, Russell testified that he had been there once a few years ago. Russell said that the house was 27.4 miles from his mother's house and that it would have taken him 45 minutes to drive there. Russell denied knowing where McRae lived; he said that he knew only that the house on Pueblo Drive had been foreclosed on, so he knew she was not living at that location. Russell also denied owning or driving a white Suburban.

James Willingham, a felony investigator for the district attorney's office working in computer forensics, testified as a rebuttal witness. He explained that a "cookie," like the ones that Russell had copied to the disk, gets its date and time from the computer and that the computer's date and time are set by the user. Thus, he concluded that the dates and times on the disk purporting to show when Russell allegedly visited the Web sites are "valueless, absent any other context, to say when they were actually done."
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+W...3-6129993.html





We’re Google. So Sue Us.
Katie Hafner

Google attracts millions of Web users every day. And, increasingly, it’s attracting the attention of plenty of lawyers, too.

As Google has grown into the world’s most popular search engine and, arguably, the most powerful Internet company, it has become entangled in scores of lawsuits touching on a wide range of legal questions, including copyright violation, trademark infringement and its method of ranking Web sites.

Any company that is large and successful is going to attract lawsuits, and Google’s deep pockets make it an especially big target. But as it rushes to create innovative new services, Google sometimes operates in a way that almost seems to invite legal scrutiny.

A group of authors and publishers is challenging the company’s right to scan books that are still under copyright. A small Web site in California is suing Google because it was removed from the company’s search results. And European news agencies have sued over Google’s use of their headlines and photos in Google News.

In these cases and others, potential legal problems seem to give the company little pause before it plunges into new ventures.

“I think Google is wanting to push the boundaries,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University.

“The Internet ethos of the 90’s, the expansionist ethos, was, ‘Just do it, make it cool, make it great and we’ll cut the rough edges off later,’ ” Professor Zittrain said. “They’re really trying to preserve a culture that says, ‘Just do it, and consult with the lawyers as you go so you don’t do anything flagrantly ill-advised.’ ”

Now, with its planned $1.65 billion acquisition of the video site YouTube, which contains not just homemade videos but also copyrighted clips that users upload without permission, some observers say Google is exposing itself to a new spate of lawsuits.

Along with YouTube’s 34 million viewers, Google will inherit a lawsuit filed last summer against the company. Robert Tur, who owns a video from the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that shows a trucker being beaten by rioters, is suing YouTube, accusing it of copyright infringement.

“Clearly, we investigated that whole issue,” said David C. Drummond, Google’s general counsel and senior vice president of corporate development. Mr. Drummond pointed to the “safe harbor” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A number of courts have held that under this provision, Web sites are not liable for copyrighted content posted by users, as long as they promptly remove it when it is pointed out to them.

“We rely on the same safe harbor that YouTube relies on, so we’re fairly familiar with the issues,” Mr. Drummond said. “If you look at it, it’s somewhat illustrative of the kinds of lawsuits we face.”

Google has been known to settle, but for the most part it aggressively fights litigation — so far with a good deal of success.

Over the last few years, the company has spent millions in legal fees and hired a small army of bright young lawyers, many of them technically proficient and experts in the field of intellectual property.

The company’s legal department has grown from one lawyer in 2001 to nearly 100 lawyers now, not just at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but also overseas. The company has also retained counsel at many outside law firms.

Many of the lawsuits Google is facing carry little weight. Yet it has a vested interest in fighting all of them, even those of questionable merit, and seeing that they are resolved quickly. In part, this is because any lawsuit that reaches the discovery, the pretrial fact-finding phase, poses the danger of revealing too much about Google’s proprietary technology. Google also has an interest in establishing a solid body of legal interpretation in its favor.

Many of the plaintiffs are asking for damages, but money is not always the issue. There are several cases, focusing on questions of intellectual property and trademark protection, that challenge Google’s whole way of doing business. These plaintiffs are suing Google to protect their well-established practices; their interest is not so much in remuneration as it is in getting Google to change its approach.

Peter S. Menell, a professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that although Google’s well-established core search functions are not at risk, “there are a number of areas now in which new and exciting business models are being threatened.”

Cases addressing trademark protection in Google’s ad system could hurt its bottom line, as the company’s revenue comes mainly from advertising sales, said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law in California.

In one of the most important such cases to date, last year a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., dismissed a claim by Geico, the auto insurance company. Geico said that a Google policy of permitting Geico’s competitors to buy advertisements tied to searches for the keywords “Geico” and “Geico Direct” confused Web surfers looking for the company’s site. The two companies settled the case before the judge reached a full decision on the other issues involved.

“This is Google’s cash cow,” Professor Goldman said. “If they can’t sell keywords freely, they’re not worth their market valuation.”

Michael Kwun, a senior litigation counsel at Google, agreed that “the Geico case was very important.” Mr. Kwun said that establishing a body of precedent was a priority for Google, especially as legal interpretations continued to evolve. “If we don’t at least litigate to the point where we get rulings on the issues that matter to us, we’re left with less clarity in the law,” he said.

Yet in the course of a long run of legal triumphs there have been a few bumps, and Google is facing some uncertain outcomes in the coming months.

Copyright challenges are at the center of the uncertainty. In one case that could have large ramifications, Perfect 10, a publisher of pornographic magazines and Web sites, sued Google for using thumbnail-sized reproductions of photos in its image search results, among other things.

Earlier this year, a Federal District Court judge in California said Google had violated copyright because it had undermined Perfect 10’s ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users, and he issued a preliminary injunction. Google appealed the decision, and oral arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit are scheduled for next month.

Google’s use of snippets of copyrighted works has also raised the ire of news outlets.

Last month, a Belgian court ordered Google to stop publishing headlines from Belgian newspapers without permission or payment of fees. And in a case pending in a Federal District Court in Washington, Agence France-Presse is suing Google, accusing it of violating its copyright by using its headlines, photographs and story fragments in Google News.

Google is arguing that news headlines and short phrases are not copyrightable.

“From our perspective, these are simple issues that were decided a long time ago,” said Alex Macgillivray, 34, whose title at Google is senior product counsel.

The company is making the same argument in cases pending against its book search service. Representatives of publishers and authors are challenging the company’s practice of scanning books that are still under copyright. They argue that because Google must copy an entire book to make it searchable, it is violating the copyright of the author or publisher if it does so without permission.

Google has offered to let publishers opt out of the book search program but has refused to ask permission to make the copies in advance.

Google has been known to settle cases. But in general it mounts a vigorous defense, Mr. Goldman said. “If they get sued, they turn the tables on the plaintiff and file motions to get the upper hand in the case,” he said.

Last spring, KinderStart, a small search engine in Southern California that focuses on information for parents of young children, sued Google after it noticed that its site had been removed from Google’s search results — leading to a loss of traffic and revenue for the company.

Google said in court filings that an area of the site that permitted visitors to add links had been full of pointers to low-quality or pornographic sites, indicating that it was poorly maintained or was an effort to manipulate Google’s search results. KinderStart said the removal was unfair and unjustified and that Google’s guidelines on ways to avoid such punishment were too vague.

A federal judge in San Jose dismissed the first version of the complaint, in essence agreeing with Google that the company is free to shape its search results in any way it chooses. KinderStart has filed a second, amended complaint, which is scheduled to be heard by the same judge on Friday.

“We’re not against innovation at all,” said Gregory J. Yu, a lawyer for KinderStart. “But Google should not dictate what we should or should not see and find on the Web. They can knock off these small Web sites and there’s nothing the small Web sites can do.”

In the KinderStart case, Google was quick to take the offensive. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed last spring, Google responded with a motion that, if granted, would throw out several of KinderStart’s claims and require KinderStart to cover Google’s legal fees. The judge deferred consideration of the motion.

Professor Zittrain of Oxford said Google’s corporate mantra — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” — gives some insight into its approach.

“They actually see that as Promethean,” Mr. Zittrain said. “They think of it as bringing fire to humankind. And it may even cause them to be bolder than other companies.”

Google’s legal muscle and shrewdness are not lost on those on the other side of the fights.

“We’ve got a formidable legal team, but obviously it’s nowhere near the unlimited resources of Google,” said David A. Milman, the chief executive of Rescuecom, a nationwide computer repair company that sued Google on trademark infringement grounds similar to Geico’s — and quickly lost. The company said that it would appeal the decision.

“People say you can’t fight the government,” Mr. Milman said. “Google, in this case, is very similar to the government. They’re the government of the Internet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/te.../23google.html





Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems?

How the Bell Lobby Helped Midwife YouTube.
Tim Wu

When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom—expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons—was that they'd also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase "litigation-laden landmine." Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.

There's only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal "safe harbor," a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

But the most interesting thing is where all this legal armor protecting YouTube—and most of the Web 2.0 (user-generated content) industry—comes from. It's the product of the Bell lobby—Google's bitter opponent in the ongoing Net Neutrality debates. So, while YouTube may be the creative child of Silicon Valley, it is also, as much, the offspring of Bell lobbying power.

Back in the early 1990s, when the "information highway" was the talk of the town, Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any and all copyright infringement that happened via the Internet. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist, warned that without congressional action, "the information superhighway … will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property." The recording industry, for its part, dispatched Johnny Cash to rhetorically link Internet piracy and, yes, a "ring of fire."

This summer, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, earned the bemused contempt of geeks everywhere when he described the Internet as "a series of tubes." But back in 1995, Hollywood was insisting that the Internet be characterized as "a bookstore." And a bookstore, unlike a series of tubes, breaks the law if it "carries" pirated novels. So too, Hollywood urged, Internet companies should be liable if they carry any illegal materials, whether the companies know it or not.

Had that view prevailed, there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0. What venture capitalist would invest in a company already on the hook for everything its users might do? But, in one of the lesser-known turning points in Internet history, Hollywood never got its law. Its unstoppable lobbyists ran into an unmovable object: the Bell companies, who own those "tubes" over which the Internet runs. In the mid-1990s, fearing a future of liability, the Bells ordered their lobbyists to fight Hollywood's reforms, leading to one of the greatest political struggles in copyright history. (This paper provides a history of this and other struggles.)

Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean's campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the "copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet."

Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.

Why? Section 512(c) of the law applies to "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." In 1998, that meant Geocities and AOL user pages. But in 2006, that means Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and, yes, YouTube—all the companies whose shtick is "user-generated content."

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

Of course, as with any law, YouTube's legal status might not be 100-percent airtight. The law suggests (in §512(c)(1)(A)(ii)) that YouTube might be liable if, in the absence of notice, it is "aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent." Also, YouTube provides a search, and maybe it could be liable for that. There might be enough to make trouble in the hands of a judge who really hates "that whole Web 2.0 thing."

But we may never find out. What's really interesting is that the content industry actually likes §512 more than anyone will admit. The notice-and-takedown system gives content owners the twin advantages of exposure and control. When stuff is on YouTube, the owners have an option. They can leave it posted there, if they want people to see it, and build buzz. But they can also snap their fingers and bring it all down. And for someone who is juggling her desire for publicity against her need for control, that's ultimately a nice arrangement.

Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It's not "fair use," the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it's in the growing category of "tolerated use"—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as "don't ask, don't tell," you're getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of "pirates" and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube is trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.

The upshot is, as YouTube goes mainstream, copyright's etiquette rules are becoming clearer. Yes, these sites can make it easier to infringe copyright. But so long as that's not the principle aim of your company, you have more breathing room today than you once did. And under the emerging regime, if you do cause infringement, you have to be nice about it and make determined efforts to stop it. Apple has learned that dance well, even as its iPods make swapping music all the more part of being American. And YouTube has, in turn, learned from Apple the early lessons of Napster: You can act out in cyberspace. Just don't be a copyright pimp.
http://www.slate.com/id/2152264/





The Internet Black Hole That Is North Korea
Tom Zeller Jr.



THE tragically backward, sometimes absurdist hallmarks of North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-il, are well known. There is Mr. Kim’s Elton John eyeglasses and strangely whipped, cotton-candy hairdo. And there is the North Korean “No! Yeeesssss ... No! O.K. Fear the tiger!” school of diplomacy.

A newer, more dangerous sort of North Korean eccentricity registered around 4.0 on the Richter scale earlier this month — a nuclear weapon test that has had the world’s major powers scrambling, right up through last week, to develop a policy script that would account for Mr. Kim’s new toy.

But whatever the threat — and however lush the celebrations broadcast on state-controlled television from the streets of Pyongyang in the days afterward — the stark realities of life in North Korea were perhaps most evident in a simple satellite image over the shoulder of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld during an Oct. 11 briefing. The image showed the two Koreas — North and South — photographed at night.

The South was illuminated from coast to coast, suggesting that not just lights, but that other, arguably more bedrock utility of the modern age — information — was pulsating through the population.

The North was black.

This is an impoverished country where televisions and radios are hard-wired to receive only government-controlled frequencies. Cellphones were banned outright in 2004. In May, the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York ranked North Korea No. 1 — over also-rans like Burma, Syria and Uzbekistan — on its list of the “10 Most Censored Countries.”

That would seem to leave the question of Internet access in North Korea moot.

At a time when much of the world takes for granted a fat and growing network of digitized human knowledge, art, history, thought and debate, it is easy to forget just how much is being denied the people who live under the veil of darkness revealed in that satellite photograph.

While other restrictive regimes have sought to find ways to limit the Internet — through filters and blocks and threats — North Korea has chosen to stay wholly off the grid.

Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group which tracks censorship around the world, put it more bluntly. “It is by far the worst Internet black hole,” he said.

That is not to say that North Korean officials are not aware of the Internet.

As far back as 2000, at the conclusion of a visit to Pyongyang, Madeleine K. Albright, then secretary of state, bid Mr. Kim to “pick up the telephone any time,” to which the North Korean leader replied, “Please give me your e-mail address.” That signaled to everyone that at least he, if not the average North Korean, was cybersavvy. (It is unclear if Ms. Albright obliged.)

These days, the designated North Korean domain suffix, “.kp” remains dormant, but several “official” North Korean sites can be found delivering sweet nothings about the country and its leader to the global conversation (an example: www.kcckp.net/en/) — although these are typically hosted on servers in China or Japan.

Mr. Kim, embracing the concept of “distance learning,” has established the Kim Il-sung Open University Web site, www.ournation-school.com — aimed at educating the world on North Korea’s philosophy of “juche” or self-reliance. And the official North Korean news agency, at www.kcna.co.jp, provides tea leaves that are required reading for anyone following the great Quixote in the current nuclear crisis.

But to the extent that students and researchers at universities and a few other lucky souls have access to computers, these are linked only to each other — that is, to a nationwide, closely-monitored Intranet — according to the OpenNet Initiative, a human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge and Oxford Universities in Britain.

A handful of elites have access to the wider Web — via a pipeline through China — but this is almost certainly filtered, monitored and logged.

Some small “information technology stores” — crude cybercafes — have also cropped up. But these, too, connect only to the country’s closed network. According to The Daily NK, a pro-democracy news site based in South Korea, computer classes at one such store cost more than six months wages for the average North Korean (snipurl.com/DailyNK). The store, located in Chungjin, North Korea, has its own generator to keep the computers running if the power is cut, The Daily NK site said.

“It’s one thing for authoritarian regimes like China to try to blend the economic catalyst of access to the Internet with controls designed to sand off the rough edges, forcing citizens to make a little extra effort to see or create sensitive content,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford.

The problem is much more vexing for North Korea, Professor Zittrain said, because its “comprehensive official fantasy worldview” must remain inviolate. “In such a situation, any information leakage from the outside world could be devastating,” he said, “and Internet access for the citizenry would have to be so controlled as to be useless. It couldn’t even resemble the Internet as we know it.”

But how long can North Korea’s leadership keep the country in the dark?

Writing in The International Herald Tribune last year, Rebecca MacKinnon, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, suggested that North Korea’s ban on cellphones was being breached on the black market along China’s border. And as more and more cellphones there become Web-enabled, she suggested, that might mean that a growing number of North Koreans, in addition to talking to family in the South, would be quietly raising digital periscopes from the depths.

Of course, there are no polls indicating whether the average North Korean would prefer nuclear arms or Internet access (or food, or reliable power), but given Mr. Kim’s interest in weapons, it is a safe bet it would not matter.

“No doubt it’s harder to make nuclear warheads than to set up an Internet network,” Mr. Pain said. “It’s all a question of priority.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/te...gy/23link.html





North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea the Worst Violators of Press Freedom

France, the United States and Japan slip further Mauritania and Haiti gain much ground

New countries have moved ahead of some Western democracies in the fifth annual Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, issued today, while the most repressive countries are still the same ones.

“Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom,” the organisation said, “and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed. These situations are extremely serious and it is urgent that leaders of these countries accept criticism and stop routinely cracking down on the media so harshly.

"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The three worst violators of free expression - North Korea, bottom of the Index at 168th place, Turkmenistan (167th) and Eritrea (166th) - have clamped down further. The torture death of Turkmenistan journalist Ogulsapar Muradova shows that the country’s leader, “President-for-Life” Separmurad Nyazov, is willing to use extreme violence against those who dare to criticise him. Reporters Without Borders is also extremely concerned about a number of Eritrean journalists who have been imprisoned in secret for more than five years. The all-powerful North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, also continues to totally control the media.

Northern European countries once again come top of the Index, with no recorded censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands, which all share first place.

Deterioration in the United States and Japan, with France also slipping

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.

France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists’ homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November.

Rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which fell 14 places to 51st. The newspaper Nihon Keizai was firebombed and several journalists phsyically attacked by far-right activists (uyoku).

Fallout from the row over the "Mohammed cartoons”

Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious threats against the authors of the Mohammed cartoons published there in autumn 2005. For the first time in recent years in a country that is very observant of civil liberties, journalists had to have police protection due to threats against them because of their work.

Yemen (149th) slipped four places, mainly because of the arrest of several journalists and closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Journalists were harassed for the same reason in Algeria (126th), Jordan (109th), Indonesia (103rd) and India (105th).

But except for Yemen and Saudi Arabia (161st), all the Arab peninsula countries considerably improved their rank. Kuwait (73rd) kept its place at the top of the group, just ahead of the United Arab Emirates (77th) and Qatar (80th).

Newcomers to the top ranks

Two countries moved into the Index’s top 20 for the first time. Bolivia (16th) was best-placed among less-developed countries and during the year its journalists enjoyed the same level of freedom as colleagues in Canada or Austria. Bosnia-Herzegovina (19th) continued its gradual rise up the Index since the end of the war in ex-Yugoslavia and is now placed above its European Union member-state neighbours Greece (32nd) and Italy (40th).

Ghana (34th) rose 32 places to become fourth in Africa behind the continent’s three traditional leaders - Benin (23rd), Namibia (26th) and Mauritius (32nd). Economic conditions are still difficult for the Ghanaian media but it is no longer threatened by the authorities.

Panama (39th) is enjoying political peace which has helped the growth of a free and vigorous media and the country moved up 27 places over the year.

War, the destroyer of press freedom

Lebanon has fallen from 56th to 107th place in five years, as the country’s media continues to suffer from the region’s poisonous political atmosphere, with a series of bomb attacks in 2005 and Israeli military attacks this year. The Lebanese media - some of the freest and most experienced in the Arab world - desperately need peace and guarantees of security. The inability of the Palestinian Authority (134th) to maintain stability in its territories and the behaviour of Israel (135th) outside its borders seriously threaten freedom of expression in the Middle East.

Things are much the same in Sri Lanka, which ranked 51st in 2002, when there was peace, but has now sunk to 141st because fighting between government and rebel forces has resumed in earnest. Dozens of Tamil journalists have been physically attacked after being accused by one side or the other of being biased against them.

Press freedom in Nepal (159th) has shifted according to the state of the fighting that has disrupted the country for several years. The “democatic revolution” and the revolt against the monarchy in April this year led immediately to more basic freedoms and the country should gain a lot of ground in next year’s Index.

Welcome changes of regime

Changes of ruler are sometimes good for press freeedom, as in the case of Haiti, which has risen from 125th to 87th place in two years after the flight into exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in early 2004. Several murders of journalists remain unpunished but violence against the media has abated.

Togo (66th) has risen 29 places since the death of President Gnassingbe Eyadema in February 2005, the accession to power of his son and internationally-backed efforts to make peace with the opposition.

A coup in Mauritania in August 2005 ended the heavy censorship of the local media and the country has risen to 77th position after being 138th in 2004, one of the biggest improvements in the Index.

Reporters Without Borders compiled the Index by asking the 14 freedom of expression organisations that are its partners worldwide, its network of 130 correspondents, as well as journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists, to answer 50 questions about press freedom in their countries. The Index covers 168 nations. Others were not included for lack of data about them.
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=639





On TV as in Hollywood, Little Breathing Room for the Modest Success
Edward Wyatt

Few new television shows had as much going for them this fall as “Smith,” a CBS series about a career thief out for one last big score before he retires.

In most seasons, “Smith” would be considered a hit. Even after drawing mixed reviews from critics, its debut attracted 11 million viewers, and the first three episodes attracted an average audience of more than 9 million.

Then, like a thief in the night, “Smith” suddenly disappeared, pulled from the schedule by CBS after just three weeks — despite the fact that the producers had already shot or were well on their way to completing four more episodes.

The quick cancellation of “Smith” elucidates how television, like the movie industry, has become a business where there is little room for the modest success. Network executives might talk endlessly about how, in an era where the attention of audiences is ever more scattered, new shows need time to find themselves. But those same executives are often quick to pull the plug on an expensive production that does not immediately perform to expectations.

Combined with NBC’s announcement last week of plans to cut back on expensive programming, the experience of “Smith” demonstrates how the recent trend in television — costly serializations with large casts and complex plots — changes the basic rules of engagement for networks. Viewers cannot easily dip in and out of these kinds of shows, as they can with a half-hour situation comedy or game show. So networks have to make decisions on more expensive, more complex series based on very small samples — a few episodes, typically — to predict whether viewers will commit to an entire season, as they have for similar shows like “Lost” or “24.”

The calculation is perilous as well for the television studios, like Warner Brothers, which is experiencing a tough season. In addition to canceling “Smith,” CBS pulled out of another planned Warner Brothers series, “Waterfront.” Several other Warner series are also on the ropes, including “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which is broadcast on NBC; “The Nine” on ABC and “The Class” on CBS.

Among the new fall shows, “Smith” had one of the best pedigrees. The series starred two accomplished actors, Ray Liotta, an Emmy winner, and Virginia Madsen, an Oscar nominee, as the thief and his unsuspecting wife. The show was the product of John Wells, one of the most prolific and successful television producers of current times, who had a hand in the building of the hit shows “ER,” “Third Watch” and, along with Aaron Sorkin, “The West Wing.”

The first episode of “Smith” cost $7 million, roughly double the usual cost of a television premiere. CBS executives were so enthusiastic about the results that they agreed to let the first episode run nearly a third longer than most hour-long dramas; to accommodate the extra length, they recruited a single sponsor — the Warner Brothers film “The Departed” — and ran the show with limited commercials.

Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, said that “Smith” was not the victim of networks looking for quicker results. At a panel discussion here last week that featured the heads of all the major television networks, she said that at CBS the emphasis is on giving new shows the time and attention they need.

“One of the things we do very well is continue to work and develop a show well into its first year and second year,” Ms. Tassler said. She cited the network’s experience with “Criminal Minds,” which grew from a modest opening last year to last week attracting more viewers than ABC’s “Lost.”

When asked in an interview how those comments meshed with the network’s quick retreat on “Smith,” Ms. Tassler said the problems came from the show’s confusing story line. In addition, she said, “Smith” was keeping a shrinking portion of the audience of the two hit shows that preceded it on Tuesday nights, “The Unit” and “NCIS.”

“When you launch a new show, you certainly want it to retain a certain percentage of its lead-in,” she said. “You also want it to build in the second half hour, and we really weren’t doing that with ‘Smith.’ ”

In its first week, 11 million, or 93 percent, of the 11.8 million viewers of “The Unit” stuck around for the first episode of “Smith.” In the second week, that percentage fell to 81 percent, then plummeted to 63 percent in the third week.

Not only was “Smith” keeping less of its lead-in audience, but a shrinking portion of the previous week’s viewers returned each week to see the next installment of “Smith.” And the number of viewers also fell consistently from the first half hour to the second.

Still, those results were not so different from the experience of several other new shows this fall — most of which are still on the air. “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” has seen its ratings and viewers fall each week, from 13.4 million viewers for its first episode to 8.6 million for its fourth. “Vanished,” on Fox, “Kidnapped,” on NBC, “Brothers & Sisters,” on ABC, and “Jericho,” on CBS have all seen their audiences fall from week to week. But they are still on the air.

The problem with “Smith,” Ms. Tassler said, is that CBS executives did not believe it was going to get any better.

“We have a unique vantage point at the network,” she said. “I’ve seen cuts and read scripts for the next four to five episodes, so I could see where we’re headed creatively. And we weren’t 100 percent happy with what we were looking at.”

Specifically, she said, the show’s scripts were becoming harder to follow. “You have to have clarity in the story-telling,” she said. “Confusion kills. I think it was particularly challenged in that area.”

Neither Mr. Wells nor executives at Warner Brothers Television would agree to be interviewed for this story.

Despite cutting the series from its schedule after three weeks, CBS had a commitment to buy several more episodes, which Warner Brothers had spent handily to produce — well over $2.5 million a show, according to people close to the production.

Unlike most television series, which are filmed on studio lots in Los Angeles to help contain costs, “Smith” shot large segments of its debut episode on location — in Hawaii and Pittsburgh, for example — and made ample use of collisions, explosions and other special effects. “It was a gorgeous show,” Ms. Tassler said. “It looked beautiful. But an audience sits at home and they don’t watch a show influenced by how much it costs. It’s not a factor in why they become a fan of the show.”

Ms. Tassler said CBS was planning to put the already filmed episodes of “Smith” on its Internet site for viewing and to post synopses of the plans for the full season of shows.

From a financial standpoint, however, it might be hard to argue with CBS’s decision to can “Smith.” The week after the show was cancelled, the “CSI” re-run that replaced it drew more than 10 million viewers, 20 percent more viewers than the last episode of “Smith” and a far higher percentage of the lead-in audience from “The Unit.”

But with an average of nine million fans having tuned in, inevitably there were many disappointed viewers who went looking for the fourth episode of “Smith,” only to find yet another episode of “CSI.” Some of them took to Internet bulletin boards to express their outrage, like a viewer named Matthew on the Web site www.TVSeriesFinale.com.

“I just want to say how much of a relief it was to sit down and watch a show like ‘Smith’ without having to hear any medical mumble jumbo,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/bu...a/23smith.html





A New System Is Now a Waiting Game
Seth Schiesel

I never thought Ludacris would get in the way of my video game habit.

But there I was Thursday evening on the second floor of the warehouse Sony rented here to show off its soon-to-be-released PlayStation 3 game console, checking out the acrobatic skateboard moves in Tony Hawk’s Project 8, when the floor started shaking.

It was only then that I looked up and realized that the dozen other PS3 stations around the room had been shut down. Almost all of the journalists Sony had invited to test drive the new machine, and almost all of the Sony employees there to handle them, had decamped downstairs to watch Ludacris, in full blinged-out mode, perform a few yards away from the sushi bar.

I like Dirty South hip-hop, and I really like Ludacris. But the emotions that surged through me in that instant were not excitement and anticipation. Rather, they were anger and frustration: anger that I had to put down the controller and frustration that I had to go see Ludacris rather than keep playing.

That’s the kind of effect the PlayStation 3 can have on a person.

The PS3 will not be available to North American consumers until Nov. 17, but last week’s brief demonstration made clear that Sony has produced a powerful entertainment machine. As Japan’s digital champion, Sony has created an elegant paragon of domestic technology that seems set to hold its own against Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Wii console due next month from Nintendo.

It’s about time. The PS3 was originally scheduled to be released in the spring, but problems with Sony’s fancy new Blu-Ray disc system forced a delay. The machine was also originally supposed to be released in the world’s major markets at the same time, but the production problems have forced Sony to delay the European launch until next year.

And then there’s the fact that it will be all but impossible for normal, everyday consumers to actually find a PlayStation 3 for sale this holiday season. Sony will be able to deliver only 400,000 copies of the machine to North America at first, and those will almost certainly sell out within hours, even though the top version of the PS3 will cost a mighty $600 before you even buy any games. (There are going to be a lot of angst-ridden parents and frustrated kids out there this year.)

But for all of those caveats, just a few hours actually playing the thing last week made clear that for most gamers the wait will be worth it.

Start with the basics. Nongamers often think that video games are experienced mostly through the eyes and ears, but any player will tell you that the real interfaces for a video game are the hands.

So when you first pick it up, the PS3 controller feels exactly like the classic PlayStation 2 controller that has become familiar to millions of people around the world. That’s a good thing. Of course, the first big difference is that there aren’t any wires connecting the controller to the slick black base station. (In this next generation of game systems, wireless controllers have become de rigeur.)

The second thing one notices is what Sony is calling the controller’s Sixaxis feature: you can simply tilt, turn and twist the entire controller left and right, up and down, without pushing any buttons, to produce action on the screen. So in a game like Ubisoft’s Blazing Angels Squadrons of WWII, I could fly my Spitfire fighter over the Dunkirk evacuation in a dogfight against the Nazis in an entirely intuitive fashion as if I were holding an actual airplane control stick. Likewise, I can easily direct my dragon in the game Lair in swooping turns and dives.

In fairness, it has to be pointed out that Sony’s tilt-and-turn feature does not seem quite as robust or quite as integral to the system as the similar (but more powerful) functionality in Nintendo’s Wii. If it works as promised, the Nintendo system will let a player use the two hands separately, so one hand could hold a virtual sword and the other a virtual shield, for example, while the Sony system forces the user to hold the controller with two hands together. And it looks as if it will take some time before game developers learn to use the Sixaxis technology as more than a glorified gimmick in anything outside of flying games. But that said, the technology does seem to work properly and is one clear advantage the PlayStation 3 has over the Xbox 360, which does not include anything like it.

But what about the PS3’s graphics? They are simply gorgeous. Whether it was the almost photo-realistic rain spray coming off Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari in Formula 1, the ferocious aliens (or are they mutants?) in Resistance: Fall of Man, or the mist-shrouded links in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, at times I found myself almost mesmerized, just wanting to watch the screen rather than actually play the games. At some level it seems a shame that many of the people who get a PlayStation 3 will not have the high-definition television required to get the most out of the system.

Are the PlayStation 3 graphics leaps and bounds beyond those delivered by the Xbox 360? No, or more accurately, not yet. Out of the gate, the PS3 graphics and the Xbox 360 graphics will be almost indistinguishable. But I did come away with an impression that a year or two from now, once developers figure out how to harness more of the PS3’s prodigious silicon horsepower, the Sony machine may be able to deliver a level of overall graphical immersion beyond what is possible on the Microsoft unit.

All in all, Sony can consider its presentation on Thursday a success. The PS3 unquestionably delivers a next-generation digital entertainment experience. It is impossible to make any sweeping judgments based on only a few hours of play time (especially about the system’s online component). In just a few weeks players in North America and Japan will have the opportunity to truly put the machine through its paces. But for now it looks as if the PlayStation 3 just might live up to Sony’s hype.

Maybe even Ludacris will get one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/arts/23play.html





Columnist Settles Education Dept. Case

Columnist Armstrong Williams has reached a settlement with prosecutors regarding payments he received by the Education Department to promote President Bush's agenda.

Under the settlement, Williams admits no wrongdoing but will have to pay $34,000 that prosecutors determined he had been overpaid. The deal was reached last week by Williams, the Education Department and its subcontractor, Ketchum Communications.

"The department is happy to see this matter come to a close," Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said Sunday. "One of the first steps Secretary Spellings took when she came to office is to establish guidelines to prevent future occurrences of this type of situation."

A message left at Williams' office was not immediately returned Sunday.

The settlement brings to a close a yearlong investigation into the case after reports emerged that the Education Department contracted with several radio, television and print commentators to promote the No Child Left Behind Act.

Lawmakers criticized the contracts as an improper use of taxpayer dollars. Congressional auditors concluded the department engaged in illegal "covert propaganda" by hiring Williams without requiring him to disclose he was paid.

In the settlement, the Justice Department examined whether Williams actually performed the work that was promised in his $240,000 contract signed in late 2003 and cited in his monthly reports to the Education Department.

Ultimately, prosecutors determined he was overpaid $34,000. Their review did not examine whether he improperly promoted the Bush administration's agenda.

The settlement had been reported by The Washington Times and by USA Today on its Web site.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=politics





Flat Panels Drive Old TVs From Market
May Wong

The lone conventional television set at Anderson's TV store sat along a side wall like a castoff. Its screen was dark as dozens of other gleaming flat-panel and big-screen models flashed nearby with vivid color images.

The staff at the Redwood City store hadn't even bothered to turn on the cathode-ray tube TV until a reporter asked to see it on a recent afternoon.

The obvious neglect reflected the wallflower status of today's CRT TVs, as well as the mature technology's doomed future. Experts say the old-fashioned boob tube that catered to generations of Americans will soon be all but extinct.

"It's already dead, but it doesn't know it yet," said Jon Paul Belstler, an audio/video consultant at Anderson's. "It's just trying to hang on."

Across stores and in homes, sleek LCD and plasma televisions are taking over.

In North America, sales of the bulky traditional TVs are in steep decline.

By next year, the tube TV will cede its crown of dominance to LCD sets for the first time, according to the market research firm iSuppli Corp. Sales of CRTs will fall from an estimated 14.4 million units this year to 10.4 million in 2007, while sales of LCD TVs are predicted to rise from 10.9 million units to 17.8 million.

By 2010, iSuppli predicts CRTs will account for only 2.1 million of the 44 million televisions sold.

The decline comes despite the venerable CRT's bargain prices: $223, on average, compared with $1,007 for LCD or $2,335 for plasma, according to research firm DisplaySearch.

But consumers are increasingly enamored with the thin designs and stunningly sharp pictures available with newer sets.

And high-end, large-sized CRT TVs are already running close in price to similarly sized LCDs. The solitary tube TV at Anderson's was a 34-inch Sony WEGA HDTV model going for $999. At Amazon.com, you could find special deals for a 32-inch LCD HDTV for the same price.

"CRTs are just losing their buzz when you have competing TVs that have technology that's similar to the CRT for almost the same price," iSuppli analyst Riddhi Patel said.

LCD prices have fallen precipitously - about 30 percent annually since 2003, according to DisplaySearch - narrowing the price gap to CRT TVs. David Barnes, an analyst at DisplaySearch, expects a consumer will be able to find a 32-inch LCD TV for $500 by Christmas 2007.

"Sure you could buy a CRT at that point, but why?" Barnes said.

Besides, Americans love big TVs if they can handle it in budget and space.

The main draw of flat-panel displays is that they can be the size of an oven door or bigger without hogging the depth of, well, an oven. Even models in the 60-inch range are only a few inches thick and can be mounted like paintings.

By contrast, the largest CRTs left on the market are 36-inch models that rival washing machines in heft. Anything bigger proved too bulky for consumers' tastes, said Ali Atash, a senior marketing manager at Samsung Electronics Co., which introduced a short-lived 40-inch tube TV years ago.

Samsung has since developed slimmer CRT TVs, trying to capitalize on the lingering albeit dwindling demand for conventional sets. With the company's "SlimFit" technology, a 20-inch TV that previously stretched back 24 inches is now only 13 inches deep.

Retailers expect little to no demand for CRTs by 2009, partly because of a government-imposed deadline requiring television broadcasts nationwide to switch to all-digital by February of that year.

Industry observers predict many consumers will have purchased a digital TV by then.

Digital CRT sets sold today are capable of handling high-definition TV, and video experts say CRT technology still represents the gold standard in picture quality with the deepest blacks and best color accuracy.

But the performance of LCD and plasma displays have improved dramatically in just the past two years, making the differences in picture quality insignificant to all but discerning videophiles.

Major TV makers like Sony Corp. and LG Electronics Co. have been steadily reducing their CRT shipments to focus on what will soon be the larger flat-panel TV market.

LG, in fact, had followed Samsung in creating slimmer versions of CRTs two years ago but is no longer pushing the technology. Only two CRT models remain in LG's lineup of 50 televisions this year, spokesman John Taylor said.

"We saw the writing on the wall years ago, and flat panels have taken off much faster than a lot of people have expected," Taylor said.

At a Video Only store in San Francisco, only about three in 20 TVs currently sold are CRTs, store manager William Arias said.

Unlike Anderson's, which now devotes most of its showroom to the CRT's modern-day counterparts, Video Only still keeps about two dozen conventional sets on display.

"There are people who aren't ready to spend $1,000 on a TV yet," Arias said. "And lots of people still have big built-in TV cabinets. We tell them, that since saving space isn't an issue, they could still go with a CRT."

Circuit City Stores Inc., the nation's second-largest electronics retailer, plans to have very few CRT models in its stores by the end of 2007.

No. 1 electronics retailer Best Buy Co. Inc. hasn't declared a blackout on CRTs but is steadily devoting less retail space because more consumers are looking for flat panels.

"The CRT has served us well for many many years - since the early 1930s into the golden age of television and the advent of color in the 60s," said LG's Taylor. "The longevity of that technology is probably second to none in our industry, but time marches on, and flat panels have really captured the enthusiasm of the American public."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-22-19-03-12





Headgear Shows Images in 360-Degree View
Yuri Kageyama



It's about as glamorous as wearing an old-style TV set on your head, but the dome- shaped headgear from Japanese electronics maker Toshiba Corp. isn't meant to be fashionable. It's designed to show images in a 360-degree view - synched with the motion of the wearer's head to deliver the illusion of being someplace else: a cityscape at night, for example, or outer space.

The still experimental 6- pound bubble-headed helmet has infrared sensors on top that detect which way the wearer's head is moving. A projector in the back of the helmet displays corresponding images on a 16-inch screen right before the user's eyes.

Although the headgear looks bulky, it's actually smaller than older versions of the same technology, Toshiba spokeswoman Kaori Hiraki said.

But Toshiba has no plans yet to turn the helmet into a commercial virtual-reality product. Eventually, Toshiba believes, it will come in handy for computer games or enhancing the impact of movies.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-25-19-15-27





Cisco Launches 'Telepresence' Tool
Jordan Robertson

Video conferencing has long been plagued by the detached feel of talking to a television set, often with awkward audio delays and jerky video. But Cisco Systems Inc. on Monday launched a tool for orchestrating corporate meetings between far-flung parties that it claims will deliver a vastly more intimate experience.

The San Jose-based networking gear maker is releasing Cisco TelePresence, the company's first foray into the fledgling "telepresence" market.

The term is industry jargon for attempting to simulate real-time interactions between people in different locations using high-definition monitors, highly sensitive audio equipment and integrated networking gear.

The technology aims to be so realistic as to make conference-call participants believe the person talking on the monitor is actually in the same room.

Several companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co., already offer telepresence products. The market is projected to grow to $300 million by 2008, according to technology research firm Gartner Inc.

Cisco, which makes the routers and switches used to link networks, is banking that large corporate clients will flock to the technology and propel it into a billion-dollar business.

One of Cisco's newest products is a high-end room that can accommodate up to 12 people around the virtual table and comes with three 65-inch plasma displays, three high-definition cameras, and the table and lighting. Price: $299,000.

The other is a single-screen version that costs $79,000 and can accommodate four people.

Both products are designed to run across a company's existing network, said Marthin De Beer, vice president of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology Group.

Corporate clients must have robust bandwidth; the high-end room uses about 10 megabits of bandwidth per second.

De Beer said the technology marks a dramatic improvement in reliability, ease of use and overall realism over video conferencing products and solves a lingering business dilemma.

"This has been an elusive dream for many years," he said. "With all the technologies of the past, people were never comfortable to use it for real business, to close that deal or sign that contract."

David Willis, chief of research for Gartner, said the steep price and network requirements make Cisco's products irrelevant for all but the largest of customers. But he was impressed with the technology.

"It's an amazing illusion," he said. "It really pulls off the experience of a real meeting. And I hate video conferencing ... But this is like David Copperfield. This is like magic."

Cisco said the systems are already available and should begin shipping to customers in about four weeks.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-23-08-18-02





Spam Overwhelms Coffee Shop Wi-Fi
Taft Wireback

The Green Bean has been roasted by a rogue spammer who shut down the popular coffee shop's wireless Internet connection until early next week.

Somebody sabotaged the Green Bean's network connection Monday by sending out millions of unwanted e-mail messages, or spam, from the caf?.

"It seems like there's always someone willing to mess things up for other people," said Green Bean owner Pete Schroth.

The South Elm Street shop caters not just to people who like to sip a cup of Joe, but also to people who access the Web through the shop's wireless, or Wi-Fi, network.

It costs a dollar a day, and some customers use the Green Bean as their Internet connection rather than having service through a home computer.

Wi-Fi enables computer users to tap the Internet without wires. Data is sent via short-range radio signals, using a single router for numerous laptop connections. There are a fair number of wireless "hot spots" such as the Green Bean in the Triad.

Schroth said the agency that monitors the Internet for spam violations temporarily closed off the Green Bean's wireless access early this week after the spammer's mass mailing. The mailings included a variety of junk e-mails, such as advertisements for Viagra. Many people consider such messages annoying, and they clog Internet pathways, making them less efficient.

Schroth said it is virtually impossible to track down who did it because Wi-Fi users are anonymous, identified on computer networks only by the wireless locations from which they tap into the Web.

The Green Bean's wireless outage is shared by four or five other Wi-Fi locations in the Greensboro area, but Schroth said he does not know what those other businesses are or why they also were shut down.

His coffee shop should be able to reactivate wireless service Monday or Tuesday after he has developed a system to help prevent a recurrence of the mass spamming, Schroth said.

He is thinking about requiring laptop users to get a daily password to tap the Green Bean's wireless network so customers could be identified if necessary.

He also is considering a cap on the number of addresses to which Wi-Fi users can e-mail a single message, Schroth said.

Schroth said he does not think the spammer was targeting the Green Bean, just stirring up random mischief.

But it's mischief, he said, that has needlessly inconvenienced a lot of people.
http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs...-1/NEWSREC0201





Free Downloads Shoot 'Weird Al'-bum Into Sales Stratosphere

Revenge of the "Nerdy" for spoof artist Yankovic
Jeff Vrabel

Now this is weird. "Weird Al" Yankovic's new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood," has scored the enduring song parodist his biggest chart successes in a career that spans nearly three decades.

"Lynwood," Yankovic's 12th album, debuted this month at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, his first top 10 album ever. Meanwhile, the Chamillionaire parody "White and Nerdy," reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, besting his previous high of No. 12 with "Eat It" in 1984.

"I literally danced a little jig (when I found out)," Yankovic says. "It's just a number, but I've been obsessing over it for a long part of my career. Even with, you know, millions of records sold, I've never been in the top 10, and it's always been a goal of mine."

More distinctions: "Nerdy" made the biggest second-week jump of the year on the October 21 Hot 100, rising 28-9. And there may be more to come: "Canadian Idiot," a parody of Green Day's "American Idiot," debuted at No. 82 on the Hot 100 the same week.

So what's going on here? It could be the widespread appeal of comedy or that Yankovic's legacy and fame have expanded throughout his career (his first single, "My Bologna," was released in 1979). It could even be providential numerology associated with this being his 27th year of recording (Yankovic has a running joke with the number 27; witness the license plate on the cover of "Lynwood").

For his part, Yankovic tends to credit the Internet. "The ("Nerdy") video has gotten a lot of attention, and the proliferation of places like YouTube (has) been a big help," he says. Yankovic also has accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July -- all of which he says he personally added. "I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can."

New Audience

Once "Nerdy" hit outlets like YouTube, there was no stopping it. "We knew with 'Nerdy' that he'd hit on something incredibly relevant to different generations," Dan Mackta, senior director of marketing for Zomba Label Group, says. "Kids were discovering him like a new artist."

Plus, with the advent of download services, Mackta says, suddenly Yankovic can be a singles artist again, and indeed, "Nerdy" has been safely tucked into iTunes' top five for the past few weeks.

"I'd kind of written off the chance of ever having another hit single, since record labels weren't really releasing commercial ones," Yankovic says. "As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it's been a huge promotional tool for me."

"Lynwood" has also benefited from positive reviews and glowing responses from his targets -- even though Yankovic had to pull the song he originally slated for the first single, the James Blunt riff "You're Pitiful," after issues arose with Atlantic. (Yankovic released the track for free on his Web site.)

Chamillionaire, whose song "Ridin' " is spoofed as "Nerdy," even posted Yankovic's track on his own MySpace site.

"It seems like he's come full circle," Mackta says. "A lot of the artists he's parodied have come and gone, but Al is kind of a pop culture icon at this point."

Yankovic takes such props in stride. "It's a little dreamlike," he says. "I can't believe I'm getting this at this point in my life."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061022/...9mBHNlYwMxNjk3





Runaways Drummer Sandy West Dies at 47

Sandy West, whose ferocious drumming fueled the influential all-female `70s rock band the Runaways, which she co-founded with Joan Jett, has died of lung cancer. She was 47.

West died Saturday night at a hospice in San Dimas, east of Los Angeles, her manager Mara Fox said. She was diagnosed a year ago.

West was only 16 when she started the Runaways in 1975 with Jett, a singer and guitarist.

Along with band members Lita Ford and Cherie Currie, they had such hits as "Cherry Bomb" and "Born to Be Bad."

"We shared the dream of girls playing rock and roll. Sandy was an exuberant and powerful drummer," Jett said in a statement. "I am overcome from the loss of my friend. I always told her we changed the world."

Born in 1959 and raised in Huntington Beach, West was a bona fide California girl, splitting her time between surfing and skiing, Currie said.

After West's grandfather bought her a drum kit, she channeled her athleticism into music.

The Runaways headlined shows with such performers as Cheap Trick and
Tom Petty as opening acts.

Following the band's breakup in 1979, West continued to perform as a singer, guitarist and drummer with the Sandy West Band. She also released a solo CD.

"Sandy West loved her fans, her friends and family almost to a fault," Currie said in a statement. "It will never be the same for me again to step on a stage, because Sandy West was the best and I will miss her forever."

West completed her memoirs before she died, and Fox said she hoped to get the book published.

West is survived by her mother, Jeri Williams, stepfather Dick Williams, and six sisters.

A public memorial in Southern California for friends and family is pending, Fox said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061024/... rBHNlYwM3NjI-





White, Nerdy, and Here to Stay
James Parker

IT IS TIME to congratulate the man who once rewrote Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" as "Chicken Pot Pie." (McCartney, a vegetarian, denied him permission to record the song, on the grounds that it promoted the slaughter of animals.) "Weird Al" Yankovic, satirical pop-goblin and parody merchant, has not simply endured but triumphed: His new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood" (Volcano), shot into the Billboard Top 10 upon its release last month--his highest chart placing since he opened his one-man spoof-factory in the early '80s.

Back then, it was the platinum gods of pop on whom he was practicing his trade. Michael Jackson's "Bad," in Al's hands, became "Fat": "The pavement cracks when I fall down/ I've got more chins than Chinatown." Madonna's "Like a Virgin" emerged as "Like a Surgeon," the stone-faced luxury rock of Robert Plant's "Addicted to Love" as "Addicted to Spuds," and so on. The satire was fairly toothless (perhaps if Jacko had been overweight) but that wasn't the point: The point was to perturb the inhuman gloss of these artists with his homemade brand of wriggling idiocy.

Eighties pop had a merciless, airtight quality to it--the music seemed to have sealed itself off from outside influences or the possibility of change--and Al, in his wacky way, was an antidote. He also proved himself equal to the MTV age, taking to the new medium of video with great flair: in the case of "Fat," he made (with Jacko's blessing) a video on the set of the original "Bad" video. It won a Grammy.

Al's comedy is of a familiar kind--the kind in which it is taken as axiomatic that certain words connected to the human body (e.g. hernia, pancreas) and certain types of food (especially Italian food: bologna, lasagna) are always, always funny. Beyond that, there is also the perennial pleasure of deliberately mishearing something ("deck the halls with Buddy Holly," etc.): It seems to massage some rogue node of gibberish in the cerebral cortex. My father still fondly retails an episode from his school days, when subversive choristers delighted themselves by singing the phrase "deeply wailing"--from Charles Wesley's hymn "Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending"--as "deep-sea whaling."

Al's songbook is a litany of these genial distortions. He comes out of the tradition of mildly absurdist Jewish-American musical comedy that produced Allan Sherman and Tom Lehrer and, in an efflorescence of '70s freak-power, Shel Silverstein. Like Silverstein, Al was a regular on the weekly syndicated radio shows of Los Angeles DJ Barret Eugene Hansen, a.k.a. Dr. Demento. It was Demento who gave Al his first exposure, back in the days when he was accompanying himself on the accordion, by airing numbers like the Queen takeoff "Another One Rides the Bus."

His career hit the skids briefly with the 1986 album "Polka Party!" (not actually an all-polka record, although the cover shot of Al grinning in lederhosen may have frightened a few people off), but since his rebound two years later with "Even Worse" he has shown remarkable staying power--becoming, in effect, the music industry's satirist laureate. It is considered a sanctification of sorts to have one's material burlesqued by Al: Kurt Cobain was said to have been particularly gratified when the Yankovic version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ("Smells Like Nirvana") was released in 1992.

The question remains, though: Why is Al at the peak of his popularity in 2006? Why now? Mainstream pop is considerably more various and multi-hued than it was in his '80s heyday, and his targets--one would imagine--harder to locate.

But Al's aim is true: His new hit single "White and Nerdy" is a bull's-eye strike on Chamillionaire's rap anthem "Ridin'," turning the original's refrain of "tryin' to catch me ridin' dirty" into "I'm just too white and nerdy," and its ghetto prowess into the pale lament of a suburban hip-hop fan. "I wanna roll with the gangstas/ But oh well it's obvious I'm white and nerdy." The infatuation of whites with images of black outlawry has long been hip-hop's cash cow--why shouldn't it be Al's too? (And his fake rapping isn't bad either.)

"I'll Sue Ya," meanwhile, translates the indignant hyperbolics of activist punk-funkers Rage Against the Machine into a fit of consumer pique: "I sued Taco Bell, cuz I ate too many chalupas/ And I got fat!" Then there is the maniacal facility of "Polkarama," the album's by-now-traditional polka medley, in which the lyrics of various hits are spliced into a stream of accordion-aerated high velocity nonsense.

Novelty artists--and he is one--have a notoriously short lifespan. They age badly, they run out of gags. But Al, by simply refusing to stop, has turned himself into a sort of cultural Geiger counter, ticking and squawking around the hot zones. The oddity of a humorist titling himself like a pro wrestler (there's no "Funny Jerry" Seinfeld) has long since worn off--he's the champ, and he's earned it.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ide..._here_to_stay/





How Dare You Make My Content More Valuable!

Perhaps it's not that surprising, but it's a bit upsetting to still see so many people having difficulty with the idea that having others increase the value of your content is a good thing. There are the obvious cases, such as the entertainment industry lawsuits against sites and services that help promote their content. Or, publishers and authors suing Google over their book scanning project that basically will create a tremendous card catalog for books that is already helping to drive more sales. Earlier this year, in looking at some of these cases, it seemed that the only way to make sense of them was to chalk it up to jealousy. These other services were generally making some money themselves, but they were doing so by making others' content more valuable. That should be a win-win for everyone. After all, they weren't charging the original content owner to make his or her content more valuable, but just doing so on their own -- and therefore there should be nothing at all wrong with them monetizing that value for themselves. The payout to the content owner is increased anyway.

However, something started to become clear last week, when we wrote about the similar misunderstanding from News.com editor Charles Cooper, in that he claimed that Google was making money and giving nothing back. Specifically, Cooper was upset about the lack of a monetary payout, even though the content he produced is available for anyone to read free online. The problem was that Cooper had difficulty realizing that Google was paying. It was paying by driving additional traffic to News.com (and plenty of other sites) by providing a service that people enjoy using to find news. This weekend, a very similar situation played itself out. Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc., which is now owned by AOL, threatened to sue any RSS aggregator that placed ads next to any Weblogs Inc. RSS feed, and reiterated his claim that their full content (with ads, mind you) RSS feeds are for "individual and non-commercial use only." Almost two years ago, we had a discussion about how exactly this issue concerning RSS feeds was destined to be a messy situation.

How do you define individual and non-commercial use in this context? As we wrote at the time, if an investor reads something and makes a trade on it, is that non-commercial use, or does the trader owe Calacanis or AOL some money? What if someone views the feed in their Gmail account that has ads down the side? Is that a violation? How about the old Opera browser that had ads showing across the top? Someone in the comments to Calacanis' post notes that he paid for his RSS aggregator software and now uses it to read Weblogs Inc. feeds. Does Calacanis deserve some of the money that was used to pay for the aggregator? With Techdirt's InfoAdvisor product, we build information portfolios for customers that include (among other things) RSS feeds that they should read, where we manage the feeds (setting it up so when they login they see what they're subscribed to without having to bother figuring out how to subscribe and how to unsubscribe from stuff). Companies pay us for this. If we recommend a Weblogs Inc. feed, is that against their terms? Just to be safe, I've instructed our analyst staff to no longer include any Weblogs Inc. feeds for our customers. This is a shame, because sites like Engadget provide excellent content. Instead, we'll need to replace them with other gadget blogs to remain on the safe side.

Again, it's a situation where it appears that one side is oblivious to the value provided by the other. Calacanis complains in the comments to his post that it's a case of "let us make money off your backs and do nothing for you in return." Except, that's not true at all. We provide value by helping get people at various companies reading the content on his blogs. Newsgator and any other RSS aggregator does a ton in return for Weblogs Inc., in getting a lot more people regularly reading their content, pointing to it, commenting on it, writing about it on their own blogs and much, much more. In all of these cases, from Cooper to Calacanis to book publishers to the entertainment industry, they ignore the value these services provide back to them in increasing their traffic, giving them lots more attention and generally helping them get more viewers/buyers/customers... and they're doing it all for free. As with Cooper, where I suggested Google send him a bill, Newsgator should consider sending Calacanis a bill for all those years of freely delivering Weblogs' Inc. content to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of readers who probably wouldn't bother to visit his sites otherwise.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061023/140659.shtml





The Hitmaker Presents

The Hitmaker's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Hitmaker has remixed what is considered the greatest album in all of rock music history, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We'll be releasing the songs online, for listening only, one at a time. So, for your listening pleasure, The Hitmaker presents the first single, Getting Better, from his remix masterpiece, The Hitmaker's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
http://tierecords.com/thehitmaker/sgt_peppers/





The Formula

Malcolm Gladwell
What if you built a machine to predict hit movies?

One sunny afternoon not long ago, Dick Copaken sat in a booth at Daniel, one of those hushed, exclusive restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where the waiters glide spectrally from table to table. He was wearing a starched button-down shirt and a blue blazer. Every strand of his thinning hair was in place, and he spoke calmly and slowly, his large pink Charlie Brown head bobbing along evenly as he did. Copaken spent many years as a partner at the white-shoe Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, and he has a lawyer’s gravitas. One of his best friends calls him, admiringly, “relentless.” He likes to tell stories. Yet he is not, strictly, a storyteller, because storytellers are people who know when to leave things out, and Copaken never leaves anything out: each detail is adduced, considered, and laid on the table—and then adjusted and readjusted so that the corners of the new fact are flush with the corners of the fact that preceded it. This is especially true when Copaken is talking about things that he really cares about, such as questions of international law or his grandchildren or, most of all, the movies.

Dick Copaken loves the movies. His friend Richard Light, a statistician at Harvard, remembers summer vacations on Cape Cod with the Copakens, when Copaken would take his children and the Light children to the movies every day. “Fourteen nights out of fourteen,” Light said. “Dick would say at seven o’clock, ‘Hey, who’s up for the movies?’ And, all by himself, he would take the six kids to the movies. The kids had the time of their lives. And Dick would come back and give, with a completely straight face, a rigorous analysis of how each movie was put together, and the direction and the special effects and the animation.” This is a man who has seen two or three movies a week for the past fifty years, who has filed hundreds of plots and characters and scenes away in his mind, and at Daniel he was talking about a movie that touched him as much as any he’d ever seen.

“Nobody’s heard of it,” he said, and he clearly regarded this fact as a minor tragedy. “It’s called ‘Dear Frankie.’ I watched it on a Virgin Atlantic flight because it was the only movie they had that I hadn’t already seen. I had very low expectations. But I was blown away.” He began, in his lawyer-like manner, to lay out the plot. It takes place in Scotland. A woman has fled an abusive relationship with her infant son and is living in a port town. The boy, now nine, is deaf, and misses the father he has never known. His mother has told him that his father is a sailor on a ship that rarely comes to shore, and has suggested that he write his father letters. These she intercepts, and replies to, writing as if she were the father. One day, the boy finds out that what he thinks is his father’s ship is coming to shore. The mother has to find a man to stand in for the father. She does. The two fall in love. Unexpectedly, the real father reëmerges. He’s dying, and demands to see his son. The mother panics. Then the little boy reveals his secret: he knew about his mother’s ruse all along.

“I was in tears over this movie,” Copaken said. “You know, sometimes when you see a movie in the air you’re in such an out-of-body mood that things get exaggerated. So when I got home I sat down and saw it another time. I was bawling again, even though I knew what was coming.” Copaken shook his head, and then looked away. His cheeks were flushed. His voice was suddenly thick. There he was, a buttoned-down corporate lawyer, in a hushed restaurant where there is practically a sign on the wall forbidding displays of human emotion—and he was crying, a third time. “That absolutely hits me,” he said, his face still turned away. “He knew all along what the mother was doing.” He stopped to collect himself. “I can’t even retell the damn story without getting emotional.”

He tried to explain why he was crying. There was the little boy, first of all. He was just about the same age as Copaken’s grandson Jacob. So maybe that was part of it. Perhaps, as well, he was reacting to the idea of an absent parent. His own parents, Albert and Silvia, ran a modest community-law practice in Kansas City, and would shut down their office whenever Copaken or his brother had any kind of school activity or performance. In the Copaken world, it was an iron law that parents had to be present. He told a story about representing the Marshall Islands in negotiations with the U.S. government during the Cold War. A missile-testing range on the island was considered to be strategically critical. The case was enormously complex—involving something like fifty federal agencies and five countries—and, just as the negotiations were scheduled to begin, Copaken learned of a conflict: his eldest daughter was performing the lead role in a sixth-grade production of “The Wiz.” “I made an instant decision,” Copaken said. He told the President of the Marshall Islands that his daughter had to come first. Half an hour passed. “I get a frantic call from the State Department, very high levels: ‘Dick, I got a call from the President of the Marshall Islands. What’s going on?’ I told him. He said, ‘Dick, are you putting in jeopardy the national security of the United States for a sixth-grade production?’ ” In the end, the negotiations were suspended while Copaken flew home from Hawaii. “The point is,” Copaken said, “that absence at crucial moments has been a worry to me, and maybe this movie just grabbed at that issue.”

He stopped, seemingly dissatisfied. Was that really why he’d cried? Hollywood is awash in stories of bad fathers and abandoned children, and Copaken doesn’t cry in fancy restaurants every time he thinks of one of them. When he tried to remember the last time he cried at the movies, he was stumped. So he must have been responding to something else, too—some detail, some unconscious emotional trigger in the combination of the mother and the boy and the Scottish seaside town and the ship and the hired surrogate and the dying father. To say that he cried at “Dear Frankie” because of that lonely fatherless boy was as inadequate as saying that people cried at the death of Princess Diana because she was a beautiful princess. Surely it mattered as well that she was killed in the company of her lover, a man distrusted by the Royal Family. Wasn’t this “Romeo and Juliet”? And surely it mattered that she died in a tunnel, and that the tunnel was in Paris, and that she was chased by motorbikes, and that she was blond and her lover was dark—because each one of those additional narrative details has complicated emotional associations, and it is the subtle combination of all these associations that makes us laugh or choke up when we remember a certain movie, every single time, even when we’re sitting in a fancy restaurant.

Of course, the optimal combination of all those elements is a mystery. That’s why it’s so hard to make a really memorable movie, and why we reward so richly the few people who can. But suppose you really, really loved the movies, and suppose you were a relentless type, and suppose you used all of the skills you’d learned during the course of your career at the highest rungs of the law to put together an international team of story experts. Do you think you could figure it out?

The most famous dictum about Hollywood belongs to the screenwriter William Goldman. “Nobody knows anything,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade” a couple of decades ago. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.” One of the highest-grossing movies in history, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance. He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil’s hexameters to Horace’s could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames—someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody’s looking hard enough.

In a small New York loft, just below Union Square, for example, there is a tech startup called Platinum Blue that consults for companies in the music business. Record executives have tended to be Humean: though they can tell you how they feel when they listen to a song, they don’t believe anyone can know with confidence whether a song is going to be a hit, and, historically, fewer than twenty per cent of the songs picked as hits by music executives have fulfilled those expectations. Platinum Blue thinks it can do better. It has a proprietary computer program that uses “spectral deconvolution software” to measure the mathematical relationships among all of a song’s structural components: melody, harmony, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chord progression, cadence, sonic brilliance, frequency, and so on. On the basis of that analysis, the firm believes it can predict whether a song is likely to become a hit with eighty-per-cent accuracy. Platinum Blue is staunchly Kamesian, and, if you have a field dominated by those who say there are no rules, it is almost inevitable that someone will come along and say that there are. The head of Platinum Blue is a man named Mike McCready, and the service he is providing for the music business is an exact model of what Dick Copaken would like to do for the movie business.

McCready is in his thirties, baldish and laconic, with rectangular hipster glasses. His offices are in a large, open room, with a row of windows looking east, across the rooftops of downtown Manhattan. In the middle of the room is a conference table, and one morning recently McCready sat down and opened his laptop to demonstrate the Platinum Blue technology. On his screen was a cluster of thousands of white dots, resembling a cloud. This was a “map” of the songs his group had run through its software: each dot represented a single song, and each song was positioned in the cloud according to its particular mathematical signature. “You could have one piano sonata by Beethoven at this end and another one here,” McCready said, pointing at the opposite end, “as long as they have completely different chord progressions and completely different melodic structures.”

McCready then hit a button on his computer, which had the effect of eliminating all the songs that had not made the Billboard Top 30 in the past five years. The screen went from an undifferentiated cloud to sixty discrete clusters. This is what the universe of hit songs from the past five years looks like structurally; hits come out of a small, predictable, and highly conserved set of mathematical patterns. “We take a new CD far in advance of its release date,” McCready said. “We analyze all twelve tracks. Then we overlay them on top of the already existing hit clusters, and what we can tell a record company is which of those songs conform to the mathematical pattern of past hits. Now, that doesn’t mean that they will be hits. But what we are saying is that, almost certainly, songs that fall outside these clusters will not be hits—regardless of how much they sound and feel like hit songs, and regardless of how positive your call-out research or focus-group research is.” Four years ago, when McCready was working with a similar version of the program at a firm in Barcelona, he ran thirty just-released albums, chosen at random, through his system. One stood out. The computer said that nine of the fourteen songs on the album had clear hit potential—which was unheard of. Nobody in his group knew much about the artist or had even listened to the record before, but the numbers said the album was going to be big, and McCready and his crew were of the belief that numbers do not lie. “Right around that time, a local newspaper came by and asked us what we were doing,” McCready said. “We explained the hit-prediction thing, and that we were really turned on to a record by this artist called Norah Jones.” The record was “Come Away with Me.” It went on to sell twenty million copies and win eight Grammy awards.

The strength of McCready’s analysis is its precision. This past spring, for instance, he analyzed “Crazy,” by Gnarls Barkley. The computer calculated, first of all, the song’s Hit Grade—that is, how close it was to the center of any of those sixty hit clusters. Its Hit Grade was 755, on a scale where anything above 700 is exceptional. The computer also found that “Crazy” belonged to the same hit cluster as Dido’s “Thank You,” James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” and Ashanti’s “Baby,” as well as older hits like “Let Me Be There,” by Olivia Newton-John, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey, so that listeners who liked any of those songs would probably like “Crazy,” too. Finally, the computer gave “Crazy” a Periodicity Grade—which refers to the fact that, at any given time, only twelve to fifteen hit clusters are “active,” because from month to month the particular mathematical patterns that excite music listeners will shift around. “Crazy” ’s periodicity score was 658—which suggested a very good fit with current tastes. The data said, in other words, that “Crazy” was almost certainly going to be huge—and, sure enough, it was.

If “Crazy” hadn’t scored so high, though, the Platinum Blue people would have given the song’s producers broad suggestions for fixing it. McCready said, “We can tell a producer, ‘These are the elements that seem to be pushing your song into the hit cluster. These are the variables that are pulling your song away from the hit cluster. The problem seems to be in your bass line.’ And the producer will make a bunch of mixes, where they do something different with the bass lines—increase the decibel level, or muddy it up. Then they come back to us. And we say, ‘Whatever you were doing with mix No. 3, do a little bit more of that and you’ll be back inside the hit cluster.’ ”

McCready stressed that his system didn’t take the art out of hit-making. Someone still had to figure out what to do with mix No. 3, and it was entirely possible that whatever needed to be done to put the song in the hit cluster wouldn’t work, because it would make the song sound wrong—and in order to be a hit a song had to sound right. Still, for the first time you wouldn’t be guessing about what needed to be done. You would know. And what you needed to know in order to fix the song was much simpler than anyone would have thought. McCready didn’t care about who the artist was, or the cleverness of the lyrics. He didn’t even have a way of feeding lyrics into his computer. He cared only about a song’s underlying mathematical structure. “If you go back to the popular melodies written by Beethoven and Mozart three hundred years ago,” he went on, “they conform to the same mathematical patterns that we are looking at today. What sounded like a beautiful melody to them sounds like a beautiful melody to us. What has changed is simply that we have come up with new styles and new instruments. Our brains are wired in a way—we assume—that keeps us coming back, again and again, to the same answers, the same pleasure centers.” He had sales data and Top 30 lists and deconvolution software, and it seemed to him that if you put them together you had an objective way of measuring something like beauty. “We think we’ve figured out how the brain works regarding musical taste,” McCready said.

It requires a very particular kind of person, of course, to see the world as a code waiting to be broken. Hume once called Kames “the most arrogant man in the world,” and to take this side of the argument you have to be. Kames was also a brilliant lawyer, and no doubt that matters as well, because to be a good lawyer is to be invested with a reverence for rules. (Hume defied his family’s efforts to make him a lawyer.) And to think like Kames you probably have to be an outsider. Kames was born Henry Home, to a farming family, and grew up in the sparsely populated cropping-and-fishing county of Berwickshire; he became Lord Kames late in life, after he was elevated to the bench. (Hume was born and reared in Edinburgh.) His early published work was about law and its history, but he soon wandered into morality, religion, anthropology, soil chemistry, plant nutrition, and the physical sciences, and once asked his friend Benjamin Franklin to explain the movement of smoke in chimneys. Those who believe in the power of broad patterns and rules, rather than the authority of individuals or institutions, are not intimidated by the boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge. They don’t defer to the superior expertise of insiders; they set up shop in a small loft somewhere downtown and take on the whole music industry at once. The difference between Hume and Kames is, finally, a difference in kind, not degree. You’re either a Kamesian or you’re not. And if you were to create an archetypal Kamesian—to combine lawyerliness, outsiderness, and supreme self-confidence in one dapper, Charlie Brown-headed combination? You’d end up with Dick Copaken.

“I remember when I was a sophomore in high school and I went into the bathroom once to wash my hands,” Copaken said. “I noticed the bubbles on the sink, and it fascinated me the way these bubbles would form and move around and float and reform, and I sat there totally transfixed. My father called me, and I didn’t hear him. Finally, he comes in. ‘Son. What the . . . are you all right?’ I said, ‘Bubbles, Dad, look what they do.’ He said, ‘Son, if you’re going to waste your time, waste it on something that may have some future consequence.’ Well, I kind of rose to the challenge. That summer, I bicycled a couple of miles to a library in Kansas City and I spent every day reading every book and article I could find on bubbles.”

Bubbles looked completely random, but young Copaken wasn’t convinced. He built a bubble-making device involving an aerator from a fish tank, and at school he pleaded with the math department to teach him the quadratic equations he needed to show why the bubbles formed the way they did. Then he devised an experiment, and ended up with a bronze medal at the International Science Fair. His interest in bubbles was genuine, but the truth is that almost anything could have caught Copaken’s eye: pop songs, movies, the movement of chimney smoke. What drew him was not so much solving this particular problem as the general principle that problems were solvable—that he, little Dick Copaken from Kansas City, could climb on his bicycle and ride to the library and figure out something that his father thought wasn’t worth figuring out.

Copaken has written a memoir of his experience defending the tiny Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques against the U.S. Navy, which had been using their beaches for target practice. It is a riveting story. Copaken takes on the vast Navy bureaucracy, armed only with arcane provisions of environmental law. He investigates the nesting grounds of the endangered hawksbill turtle, and the mating habits of a tiny yet extremely loud tree frog known as the coqui, and at one point he transports four frozen whale heads from the Bahamas to Harvard Medical School. Copaken wins. The Navy loses.

The memoir reads like a David-and-Goliath story. It isn’t. David changed the rules on Goliath. He brought a slingshot to a sword fight. People like Copaken, though, don’t change the rules; they believe in rules. Copaken would have agreed to sword-on-sword combat. But then he would have asked the referee for a stay, deposed Goliath and his team at great length, and papered him with brief after brief until he conceded that his weapon did not qualify as a sword under §48(B)(6)(e) of the Samaria Convention of 321 B.C. (The Philistines would have settled.) And whereas David knew that he couldn’t win a conventional fight with Goliath, the conviction that sustained Copaken’s long battle with the Navy was, to the contrary, that so long as the battle remained conventional—so long as it followed the familiar pathways of the law and of due process—he really could win. Dick Copaken didn’t think he was an underdog at all. If you believe in rules, Goliath is just another Philistine, and the Navy is just another plaintiff. As for the ineffable mystery of the Hollywood blockbuster? Well, Mr. Goldman, you may not know anything. But I do.

Dick Copaken has a friend named Nick Meaney. They met on a case years ago. Meaney has thick dark hair. He is younger and much taller than Copaken, and seems to regard his friend with affectionate amusement. Meaney’s background is in risk management, and for years he’d been wanting to bring the principles of that world to the movie business. In 2003, Meaney and Copaken were driving through the English countryside to Durham when Meaney told Copaken about a friend of his from college. The friend and his business partner were students of popular narrative: the sort who write essays for obscure journals serving the small band of people who think deeply about, say, the evolution of the pilot episode in transnational TV crime dramas. And, for some time, they had been developing a system for evaluating the commercial potential of stories. The two men, Meaney told Copaken, had broken down the elements of screenplay narrative into multiple categories, and then drawn on their encyclopedic knowledge of television and film to assign scripts a score in each of those categories—creating a giant screenplay report card. The system was extraordinarily elaborate. It was under constant refinement. It was also top secret. Henceforth, Copaken and Meaney would refer to the two men publicly only as “Mr. Pink” and “Mr. Brown,” an homage to “Reservoir Dogs.”

“The guy had a big wall, and he started putting up little Post-its covering everything you can think of,” Copaken said. It was unclear whether he was talking about Mr. Pink or Mr. Brown or possibly some Obi-Wan Kenobi figure from whom Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown first learned their trade. “You know, the star wears a blue shirt. The star doesn’t zip up his pants. Whatever. So he put all these factors up and began moving them around as the scripts were either successful or unsuccessful, and he began grouping them and eventually this evolved to a kind of ad-hoc analytical system. He had no theory as to what would work, he just wanted to know what did work.”

Copaken and Meaney also shared a fascination with a powerful kind of computerized learning system called an artificial neural network. Neural networks are used for data mining—to look for patterns in very large amounts of data. In recent years, they have become a critical tool in many industries, and what Copaken and Meaney realized, when they thought about Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, was that it might now be possible to bring neural networks to Hollywood. They could treat screenplays as mathematical propositions, using Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown’s categories and scores as the motion-picture equivalents of melody, harmony, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chord progression, cadence, sonic brilliance, and frequency.

Copaken and Meaney brought in a former colleague of Meaney’s named Sean Verity, and the three of them signed up Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown. They called their company Epagogix—a reference to Aristotle’s discussion of epagogic, or inductive, learning—and they started with a “training set” of screenplays that Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown had graded. Copaken and Meaney won’t disclose how many scripts were in the training set. But let’s say it was two hundred. Those scores—along with the U.S. box-office receipts for each of the films made from those screenplays—were fed into a neural network built by a computer scientist of Meaney’s acquaintance. “I can’t tell you his name,” Meaney said, “but he’s English to his bootstraps.” Mr. Bootstraps then went to work, trying to use Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown’s scoring data to predict the box-office receipts of every movie in the training set. He started with the first film and had the neural network make a guess: maybe it said that the hero’s moral crisis in act one, which rated a 7 on the 10-point moral-crisis scale, was worth $7 million, and having a gorgeous red-headed eighteen-year-old female lead whose characterization came in at 6.5 was worth $3 million and a 9-point bonding moment between the male lead and a four-year-old boy in act three was worth $2 million, and so on, putting a dollar figure on every grade on Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown’s report card until the system came up with a prediction. Then it compared its guess with how that movie actually did. Was it close? Of course not. The neural network then went back and tried again. If it had guessed $20 million and the movie actually made $110 million, it would reweight the movie’s Pink/Brown scores and run the numbers a second time. And then it would take the formula that worked best on Movie One and apply it to Movie Two, and tweak that until it had a formula that worked on Movies One and Two, and take that formula to Movie Three, and then to four and five, and on through all two hundred movies, whereupon it would go back through all the movies again, through hundreds of thousands of iterations, until it had worked out a formula that did the best possible job of predicting the financial success of every one of the movies in its database.

That formula, the theory goes, can then be applied to new scripts. If you were developing a $75-million buddy picture for Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell, Epagogix says, it can tell you, based on past experience, what that script’s particular combination of narrative elements can be expected to make at the box office. If the formula says it’s a $50-million script, you pull the plug. “We shoot turkeys,” Meaney said. He had seen Mr. Bootstraps and the neural network in action: “It can sometimes go on for hours. If you look at the computer, you see lots of flashing numbers in a gigantic grid. It’s like ‘The Matrix.’ There are a lot of computations. The guy is there, the whole time, looking at it. It eventually stops flashing, and it tells us what it thinks the American box-office will be. A number comes out.”

The way the neural network thinks is not that different from the way a Hollywood executive thinks: if you pitch a movie to a studio, the executive uses an ad-hoc algorithm—perfected through years of trial and error—to put a value on all the components in the story. Neural networks, though, can handle problems that have a great many variables, and they never play favorites—which means (at least in theory) that as long as you can give the neural network the same range of information that a human decision-maker has, it ought to come out ahead. That’s what the University of Arizona computer scientist Hsinchun Chen demonstrated ten years ago, when he built a neural network to predict winners at the dog track. Chen used the ten variables that greyhound experts told him they used in making their bets—like fastest time and winning percentage and results for the past seven races—and trained his system with the results of two hundred races. Then he went to the greyhound track in Tucson and challenged three dog-racing handicappers to a contest. Everyone picked winners in a hundred races, at a modest two dollars a bet. The experts lost $71.40, $61.20, and $70.20, respectively. Chen won $124.80. It wasn’t close, and one of the main reasons was the special interest the neural network showed in something called “race grade”: greyhounds are moved up and down through a number of divisions, according to their ability, and dogs have a big edge when they’ve just been bumped down a level and a big handicap when they’ve just been bumped up. “The experts know race grade exists, but they don’t weight it sufficiently,” Chen said. “They are all looking at win percentage, place percentage, or thinking about the dogs’ times.”

Copaken and Meaney figured that Hollywood’s experts also had biases and skipped over things that really mattered. If a neural network won at the track, why not Hollywood? “One of the most powerful aspects of what we do is the ruthless objectivity of our system,” Copaken said. “It doesn’t care about maintaining relationships with stars or agents or getting invited to someone’s party. It doesn’t care about climbing the corporate ladder. It has one master and one master only: how do you get to bigger box-office? Nobody else in Hollywood is like that.”

In the summer of 2003, Copaken approached Josh Berger, a senior executive at Warner Bros. in Europe. Meaney was opposed to the idea: in his mind, it was too early. “I just screamed at Dick,” he said. But Copaken was adamant. He had Mr. Bootstraps, Mr. Pink, and Mr. Brown run sixteen television pilots through the neural network, and try to predict the size of each show’s eventual audience. “I told Josh, ‘Stick this in a drawer, and I’ll come back at the end of the season and we can check to see how we did,’ ” Copaken said. In January of 2004, Copaken tabulated the results. In six cases, Epagogix guessed the number of American homes that would tune in to a show to within .06 per cent. In thirteen of the sixteen cases, its predictions were within two per cent. Berger was floored. “It was incredible,” he recalls. “It was like someone saying to you, ‘We’re going to show you how to count cards in Vegas.’ It had that sort of quality.”

Copaken then approached another Hollywood studio. He was given nine unreleased movies to analyze. Mr. Pink, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Bootstraps worked only from the script—without reference to the stars or the director or the marketing budget or the producer. On three of the films—two of which were low-budget—the Epagogix estimates were way off. On the remaining six—including two of the studio’s biggest-budget productions—they correctly identified whether the film would make or lose money. On one film, the studio thought it had a picture that would make a good deal more than $100 million. Epagogix said $49 million. The movie made less than $40 million. On another, a big-budget picture, the team’s estimate came within $1.2 million of the final gross. On a number of films, they were surprisingly close. “They were basically within a few million,” a senior executive at the studio said. “It was shocking. It was kind of weird.” Had the studio used Epagogix on those nine scripts before filming started, it could have saved tens of millions of dollars. “I was impressed by a couple of things,” another executive at the same studio said. “I was impressed by the things they thought mattered to a movie. They weren’t the things that we typically give credit to. They cared about the venue, and whether it was a love story, and very specific things about the plot that they were convinced determined the outcome more than anything else. It felt very objective. And they could care less about whether the lead was Tom Cruise or Tom Jones.”

The Epagogix team knocked on other doors that weren’t quite so welcoming. This was the problem with being a Kamesian. Your belief in a rule-bound universe was what gave you, an outsider, a claim to real expertise. But you were still an outsider. You were still Dick Copaken, the blue-blazered corporate lawyer who majored in bubbles as a little boy in Kansas City, and a couple of guys from the risk-management business, and three men called Pink, Brown, and Bootstraps—and none of you had ever made a movie in your life. And what were you saying? That stars didn’t matter, that the director didn’t matter, and that all that mattered was story—and, by the way, that you understood story the way the people on the inside, people who had spent a lifetime in the motion-picture business, didn’t. “They called, and they said they had a way of predicting box-office success or failure, which is everyone’s fantasy,” one former studio chief recalled. “I said to them, ‘I hope you’re right.’ ” The executive seemed to think of the Epagogix team as a small band of Martians who had somehow slipped their U.F.O. past security. “In reality, there are so many circumstances that can affect a movie’s success,” the executive went on. “Maybe the actor or actress has an external problem. Or this great actor, for whatever reason, just fails. You have to fire a director. Or September 11th or some other thing happens. There are many people who have come forward saying they have a way of predicting box-office success, but so far nobody has been able to do it. I think we know something. We just don’t know enough. I still believe in something called that magical thing—talent, the unexpected. The movie god has to shine on you.” You were either a Kamesian or you weren’t, and this person wasn’t: “My first reaction to those guys? Bullshit.”

A few months ago, Dick Copaken agreed to lift the cloud of unknowing surrounding Epagogix, at least in part. He laid down three conditions: the meeting was to be in London, Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown would continue to be known only as Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, and no mention was to be made of the team’s current projects. After much discussion, an agreement was reached. Epagogix would analyze the 2005 movie “The Interpreter,” which was directed by Sydney Pollack and starred Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. “The Interpreter” had a complicated history, having gone through countless revisions, and there was a feeling that it could have done much better at the box office. If ever there was an ideal case study for the alleged wizardry of Epagogix, this was it.

The first draft of the movie was written by Charles Randolph, a philosophy professor turned screenwriter. It opened in the fictional African country of Matobo. Two men in a Land Rover pull up to a soccer stadium. A group of children lead them to a room inside the building. On the ground is a row of corpses.

Cut to the United Nations, where we meet Silvia Broome, a young woman who works as an interpreter. She goes to the U.N. Security Service and relates a terrifying story. The previous night, while working late in the interpreter’s booth, she overheard two people plotting the assassination of Matobo’s murderous dictator, Edmund Zuwanie, who is coming to New York to address the General Assembly. She says that the plotters saw her, and that her life may be in danger. The officer assigned to her case, Tobin Keller, is skeptical, particularly when he learns that she, too, is from Matobo, and that her parents were killed in the country’s civil war. But after Broome suffers a series of threatening incidents Keller starts to believe her. His job is to protect Zuwanie, but he now feels moved to act as Broome’s bodyguard as well. A quiet, slightly ambiguous romantic attraction begins to develop between them. Zuwanie’s visit draws closer. Broome’s job is to be his interpreter. On the day of the speech, Broome ends up in the greenroom with Zuwanie. Keller suddenly realizes the truth: that she has made up the whole story as a way of bringing Zuwanie to justice. He rushes to the greenroom. Broome, it seems, has poisoned Zuwanie and is withholding the antidote unless he goes onstage and confesses to the murder of his countrymen. He does. Broome escapes. A doctor takes a look at the poison. It’s harmless. The doctor turns to the dictator, who has just been tricked into writing his own prison sentence: “You were never in danger, Mr. Zuwanie.”

Randolph says that the film he was thinking of while he was writing “The Interpreter” was Francis Ford Coppola’s classic “The Conversation.” He wanted to make a spare, stark movie about an isolated figure. “She’s a terrorist,” Randolph said of Silvia Broome. “She comes to this country to do a very specific task, and when that task is done she’s gone again. I wanted to write about this idea of a noble terrorist, who tried to achieve her ends with a character assassination, not a real assassination.” Randolph realized that most moviegoers—and most Hollywood executives—prefer characters who have psychological motivations. But he wasn’t trying to make “Die Hard.” “Look, I’m the son of a preacher,” he said. “I believe that ideology motivates people.”

In 2004, Sydney Pollack signed on to direct the project. He loved the idea of an interpreter at the United Nations and the conceit of an overheard conversation. But he wanted to make a commercial movie, and parts of the script didn’t feel right to him. He didn’t like the twist at the end, for instance. “I felt like I had been tricked, because in fact there was no threat,” Pollack said. “As much as I liked the original script, I felt like an audience would somehow, at the end, feel cheated.” Pollack also felt that audiences would want much more from Silvia Broome’s relationship with Tobin Keller. “I’ve never been able to do a movie without a love story in it,” he said. “For me, the heart of it is always the man and the woman and who they are and what they are going through.” Pollack brought Randolph back for rewrites. He then hired Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian, two of the most highly sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood—and after several months the story was turned inside out. Now Broome didn’t tell the story of overhearing that conversation. It actually happened. She wasn’t a terrorist anymore. She was a victim. She wasn’t an isolated figure. She was given a social life. She wasn’t manipulating Keller. Their relationship was more prominent. A series of new characters—political allies and opponents of Zuwanie’s—were added, as was a scene in Brooklyn where a bus explodes, almost killing Broome. “I remember when I came on ‘Minority Report,’ and started over,” said Frank, who wrote many of the new scenes for “The Interpreter.” “There weren’t many characters. When I finished, there were two mysteries and a hundred characters. I have diarrhea of the plot. This movie cried out for that. There are never enough suspects and red herrings.”

The lingering problem, though, was the ending. If Broome wasn’t after Zuwanie, who was? “We struggled,” Pollack said. “It was a long process, to the point where we almost gave up.” In the end, Zuwanie was made the engineer of the plot: he fakes the attempt on his life in order to justify his attacks on his enemies back home. Zuwanie hires a man to shoot him, and then another of Zuwanie’s men shoots the assassin before he can do the job—and in the chaos Broome ends up with a gun in her hand, training it on Zuwanie. “The end was the hardest part,” Frank said. “All these balls were in the air. But I couldn’t find a satisfying way to resolve it. We had to put a gun in the hand of a pacifist. I couldn’t quite sew it up in the right way. Sydney kept saying, ‘You’re so close.’ But I kept saying, ‘Yeah, but I don’t believe what I’m writing.’ I wonder if I did a disservice to ‘The Interpreter.’ I don’t know that I made it better. I may have just made it different.”

This, then, was the question for Epagogix: If Pollack’s goal was to make “The Interpreter” a more commercial movie, how well did he succeed? And could he have done better?

The debriefing took place in central London, behind the glass walls of the private dining room of a Mayfair restaurant. The waiters came in waves, murmuring their announcements of the latest arrival from the kitchen. The table was round. Copaken, dapper as always in his navy blazer, sat next to Sean Verity, followed by Meaney, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Pink. Mr. Brown was very tall, and seemed to have a northern English accent. Mr. Pink was slender and graying, and had an air of authority about him. His academic training was in biochemistry. He said he thought that, in the highly emotional business of Hollywood, having a scientific background was quite useful. There was no sign of Mr. Bootstraps.

Mr. Pink began by explaining the origins of their system. “There were certain historical events that allowed us to go back and test how appealing one film was against another,” he said. “The very simple one is that in the English market, in the sixties on Sunday night, religious programming aired on the major networks. Nobody watched it. And, as soon as that finished, movies came on. There were no lead-ins, and only two competing channels. Plus, across the country you had a situation where the commercial sector was playing a whole variety of movies against the standard, the BBC. It might be a John Wayne movie in Yorkshire, and a musical in Somerset, and the BBC would be the same movie everywhere. So you had a control. It was very pure and very simple. That was a unique opportunity to try and make some guesstimates as to why movies were doing what they were doing.”

Brown nodded. “We built a body of evidence until we had something systematic,” he said.

Pink estimated that they had analyzed thousands of movies. “The thing is that not everything comes to you as a script. For a long period, we worked for a broadcaster who used to send us a couple of paragraphs. We made our predictions based on that much. Having the script is actually too much information sometimes. You’re trying to replicate what the audience is doing. They’re trying to make a choice between three movies, and all they have at that point is whatever they’ve seen in TV Guide or on any trailer they’ve seen. We have to take a piece here and a piece here. Take a couple of reference points. When I look at a story, there are certain things I’m looking for—certain themes, and characters you immediately focus on.” He thought for a moment. “That’s not to deny that it matters whether the lead character wears a hat,” he added, in a way that suggested he and Mr. Brown had actually thought long and hard about leads and hats.

“There’s always a pattern,” he went on. “There are certain stories that come back, time and time again, and that always work. You know, whenever we go into a market—and we work in fifty markets—the initial thing people say is ‘What do you know about our market?’ The assumption is that, say, Japan is different from us—that there has to be something else going on there. But, basically, they’re just like us. It’s the consistency of these reappearing things that I find amazing.”

“Biblical stories are a classic case,” Mr. Brown put in. “There is something about what they’re telling and the message that’s coming out that seems to be so universal. With Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion,’ people always say, ‘Who could have predicted that?’ And the answer is, we could have.”

They had looked at “The Interpreter” scripts a few weeks earlier. The process typically takes them a day. They read, they graded, and then they compared notes, because Mr. Pink was the sort who went for “Yojimbo” and Mr. Brown’s favorite movie was “Alien” (the first one), so they didn’t always agree. Mr. Brown couldn’t remember a single script he’d read where he thought there wasn’t room for improvement, and Mr. Pink, when asked the same question, could come up with just one: “Lethal Weapon.” “A friend of mine gave me the shooting script before it came out, and I remember reading it and thinking, It’s all there. It was all on the page.” Once Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown had scored “The Interpreter,” they gave their analyses to Mr. Bootstraps, who did fifteen runs through the neural network: the original Randolph script, the shooting script, and certain variants of the plot that Epagogix devised. Mr. Bootstraps then passed his results to Copaken, who wrote them up. The Epagogix reports are always written by Copaken, and they are models of lawyerly thoroughness. This one ran to thirty-eight pages. He had finished the final draft the night before, very late. He looked fresh as a daisy.

Mr. Pink started with the original script. “My pure reaction? I found it very difficult to read. I got confused. I had to reread bits. We do this a lot. If a project takes more than an hour to read, then there’s something going on that I’m not terribly keen on.”

“It didn’t feel to me like a mass-appeal movie,” Mr. Brown added. “It seemed more niche.”

When Mr. Bootstraps ran Randolph’s original draft through the neural network, the computer called it a $33-million movie—an “intelligent” thriller, in the same commercial range as “The Constant Gardener” or “Out of Sight.” According to the formula, the final shooting script was a $69-million picture (an estimate that came within $4 million of the actual box-office). Mr. Brown wasn’t surprised. The shooting script, he said, “felt more like an American movie, where the first one seemed European in style.”

Everyone agreed, though, that Pollack could have done much better. There was, first of all, the matter of the United Nations. “They had a unique opportunity to get inside the building,” Mr. Pink said. “But I came away thinking that it could have been set in any boxy office tower in Manhattan. An opportunity was missed. That’s when we get irritated—when there are opportunities that could very easily be turned into something that would actually have had an impact.”

“Locale is an extra character,” Mr. Brown said. “But in this case it’s a very bland character that didn’t really help.”

In the Epagogix secret formula, it seemed, locale matters a great deal. “You know, there’s a big difference between city and countryside,” Mr. Pink said. “It can have a huge effect on a movie’s ability to draw in viewers. And writers just do not take advantage of it. We have a certain set of values that we attach to certain places.”

Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown ticked off the movies and television shows that they thought understood the importance of locale: “Crimson Tide,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Lost,” “Survivor,” “Castaway,” “Deliverance.” Mr. Pink said, “The desert island is something that we have always recognized as a pungent backdrop, but it’s not used that often. In the same way, prisons can be a powerful environment, because they are so well defined.” The U.N. could have been like that, but it wasn’t. Then there was the problem of starting, as both scripts did, in Africa—and not just Africa but a fictional country in Africa. The whole team found that crazy. “Audiences are pretty parochial, by and large,” Mr. Pink said. “If you start off by telling them, ‘We’re going to begin this movie in Africa,’ you’re going to lose them. They’ve bought their tickets. But when they come out they’re going to say, ‘It was all right. But it was Africa.’ ” The whole thing seemed to leave Mr. Pink quite distressed. He looked at Mr. Brown beseechingly.

Mr. Brown changed the subject. “It’s amazing how often quite little things, quite small aspects, can spoil everything,” he said. “I remember seeing the trailer for ‘V for Vendetta’ and deciding against it right there, for one very simple reason: there was a ridiculous mask on the main character. If you can’t see the face of the character, you can’t tell what that person is thinking. You can’t tell who they are. With ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Superman,’ though, you do see the face, so you respond to them.”

The team once gave a studio a script analysis in which almost everything they suggested was, in Hollywood terms, small. They wanted the lead to jump off the page a little more. They wanted the lead to have a young sidekick—a relatively minor character—to connect with a younger demographic, and they wanted the city where the film was set to be much more of a presence. The neural network put the potential value of better characterization at an extra $2.46 million in U.S. box-office revenue; the value of locale adjustment at $4.92 million; the value of a sidekick at $12.3 million—and the value of all three together (given the resulting synergies) at $24.6 million. That’s another $25 million for a few weeks of rewrites and maybe a day or two of extra filming. Mr. Bootstraps, incidentally, ran the numbers and concluded that the script would make $47 million if the suggested changes were not made. The changes were not made. The movie made $50 million.

Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown went on to discuss the second “Interpreter” screenplay, the shooting script. They thought the ending was implausible. Charles Randolph had originally suggested that the Tobin Keller character be black, not white, in order to create the frisson of bringing together a white African and a black American. Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown independently came to the same conclusion. Apparently, the neural network ran the numbers on movies that paired black and white leads—“Lethal Weapon,” “The Crying Game,” “Independence Day,” “Men in Black,” “Die Another Day,” “The Pelican Brief”—and found that the black-white combination could increase box-office revenue. The computer did the same kind of analysis on Scott Frank’s “diarrhea of the plot,” and found that there were too many villains. And if Silvia Broome was going to be in danger, Mr. Bootstraps made clear, she really had to be in danger.

“Our feeling—and Dick, you may have to jump in here—is that the notion of a woman in peril is a very powerful narrative element,” Mr. Pink said. He glanced apprehensively at Copaken, evidently concerned that what he was about to say might fall in the sensitive category of the proprietary. “How powerful?” He chose his words carefully. “Well above average. And the problem is that we lack a sense of how much danger she is in, so an opportunity is missed. There were times when you were thinking, Is this something she has created herself? Is someone actually after her? You are confused. There is an element of doubt, and that ambiguity makes it possible to doubt the danger of the situation.” Of course, all that ambiguity was there because in the Randolph script she was making it all up, and we were supposed to doubt the danger of the situation. But Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown believed that, once you decided you weren’t going to make a European-style niche movie, you had to abandon ambiguity altogether.

“You’ve got to make the peril real,” Mr. Pink said.

The Epagogix revise of “The Interpreter” starts with an upbeat Silvia Broome walking into the United Nations, flirting with the security guard. The two men plotting the assassination later see her and chase her through the labyrinthine cor-ridors of what could only be the U.N. building. The ambiguous threats to Broome’s life are now explicit. At one point in the Epagogix version, a villain pushes Broome’s Vespa off one of Manhattan’s iconic East River bridges. She hangs on to her motorbike for dear life, as it swings precariously over the edge of the parapet. Tobin Keller, in a police helicopter, swoops into view: “As she clings to Tobin’s muscular body while the two of them are hoisted up into the hovering helicopter, we sense that she is feeling more than relief.” In the Epagogix ending, Broome stabs one of Zuwanie’s security men with a knife. Zuwanie storms off the stage, holds a press conference, and is shot dead by a friend of Broome’s brother. Broome cradles the dying man in her arms. He “dies peacefully,” with “a smile on his blood-spattered face.” Then she gets appointed Matobo’s U.N. ambassador. She turns to Keller. “‘This time,’ she notes with a wry smile . . . ‘you will have to protect me.’ ” Bootstraps’s verdict was that this version would result in a U.S. box-office of $111 million.

“It’s funny,” Mr. Pink said. “This past weekend, ‘The Bodyguard’ was on TV. Remember that piece of”—he winced—“entertainment? Which is about a bodyguard and a woman. The final scene is that they are right back together. It is very clearly and deliberately sown. That is the commercial way, if you want more bodies in the seats.”

“You have to either consummate it or allow for the possibility of that,” Copaken agreed.

They were thinking now of what would happen if they abandoned all fealty to the original, and simply pushed the movie’s premise as far as they could possibly go.

Mr. Pink went on, “If Dick had said, ‘You can take this project wherever you want,’ we probably would have ended up with something a lot closer to ‘The Bodyguard’—where you have a much more romantic film, a much more powerful focus to the two characters—without all the political stuff going on in the background. You go for the emotions on a very basic level. What would be the upper limit on that? You know, the upper limit of anything these days is probably still ‘Titanic.’ I’m not saying we could do six hundred million dollars. But it could be two hundred million.”

It was clear that the whole conversation was beginning to make Mr. Pink uncomfortable. He didn’t like “The Bodyguard.” Even the title made him wince. He was the sort who liked “Yojimbo,” after all. The question went around the room: What would you do with “The Interpreter”? Sean Verity wanted to juice up the action-adventure elements and push it to the $150- to $160-million range. Meaney wanted to do without expensive stars: he didn’t think they were worth the money. Copaken wanted more violence, and he also favored making Keller black. But he didn’t want to go all the way to “The Bodyguard,” either. This was a man who loved “Dear Frankie” as much as any film he’d seen in recent memory, and “Dear Frankie” had a domestic box-office gross of $1.3 million. If you followed the rules of Epagogix, there wouldn’t be any movies like “Dear Frankie.” The neural network had one master, the market, and answered one question: how do you get to bigger box-office? But once a movie had made you vulnerable—once you couldn’t even retell the damn story without getting emotional—you couldn’t be content with just one master anymore.

That was the thing about the formula: it didn’t make the task of filmmaking easier. It made it harder. So long as nobody knows anything, you’ve got license to do whatever you want. You can start a movie in Africa. You can have male and female leads not go off together—all in the name of making something new. Once you came to think that you knew something, though, you had to decide just how much money you were willing to risk for your vision. Did the Epagogix team know what the answer to that question was? Of course not. That question required imagination, and they weren’t in the imagination business. They were technicians with tools: computer programs and analytical systems and proprietary software that calculated mathematical relationships among a laundry list of structural variables. At Platinum Blue, Mike McCready could tell you that the bass line was pushing your song out of the center of hit cluster 31. But he couldn’t tell you exactly how to fix the bass line, and he couldn’t guarantee that the redone version would still sound like a hit, and you didn’t see him releasing his own album of computer-validated pop music. A Kamesian had only to read Lord Kames to appreciate the distinction. The most arrogant man in the world was a terrible writer: clunky, dense, prolix. He knew the rules of art. But that didn’t make him an artist.

Mr. Brown spoke last. “I don’t think it needs to be a big-budget picture,” he said. “I think we do what we can with the original script to make it a strong story, with an ending that is memorable, and then do a slow release. A low-budget picture. One that builds through word of mouth—something like that.” He was confident that he had the means to turn a $69-million script into a $111-million movie, and then again into a $150- to $200-million blockbuster. But it had been a long afternoon, and part of him had a stubborn attachment to “The Interpreter” in something like its original form. Mr. Bootstraps might have disagreed. But Mr. Bootstraps was nowhere to be seen.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten...061016fa_fact6





Hit man

So Predictable

The NewYorker Video

Malcolm Gladwell talks about engineering hits.
http://www.newyorker.com/festival/videos/fevi_video5b





Survey Finds Declining P2P Usage in Canada
Michael Geist

The Copyright Board of Canada conducted hearings today on the private copying levy. Included as part of the evidence was a major survey (not online at the moment) on music copying conducted for the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) by Reseau Circum. The CPCC, which counts CRIA General Counsel Richard Pfohl as one of its board members, has tracked music copying habits since 2001-02.

The headliner in the latest survey is that file sharing activity is in steady decline in Canada. The survey, conducted in June 2006, finds that just 14 percent of Canadians have downloaded music in the last 12 months, down from 15 percent in 2005, 19 percent in 2004, 21 percent in 2003, and 21 percent in 2002. It goes without saying that this finding comes despite the absence of lawsuits, the absence of copyright reform, and the continual (yet questionable) claims that Canada is a world leader in file sharing.

As expected, file sharing activity is higher in the younger demographics - 39 percent of 12-17 years olds have downloaded in the past 12 months, 29 percent of 18-25 year olds, 13 percent of those in 26-45 age bracket, and only 3 percent of those over the age of 46. Contrast those numbers with CRIA-commissioned Pollara data from earlier this year which misleadingly asked whether survey respondents had ever used file sharing services. Unsurprisingly, that question resulted in a positive response from 69 percent of 12-17 year olds and 64 percent of 18-25 year olds - numbers that provided CRIA with the opportunity to claim that file sharing continues unabated when in fact the numbers are shrinking.

The survey included several additional noteworthy findings:

• When respondents were asked how many songs downloaded from the Internet reside on their computers, 35 percent said zero, 26 percent said between 1-50 songs, 17 percent said 51-250, and 17 percent said 251 or more.
• When asked about the number of songs obtained from P2P services in the previous month, 29 percent said none, 54 percent said between 1-50, and just 9 nine percent said more than 51 songs. That contrasts with 2002 data when 14 percent said zero, 71 percent said between 1-50, and 11 percent said more than 51 songs.
• When asked about the use of commercial download sites such as iTunes, 67 percent said they had no songs from such services on their computers and 19 percent said they between 1-50 songs. That contrasts with data in 2002 when 84 percent said they had no songs from such services on their computers and 12 percent said they had between 1-50 songs.
• Respondents who have purchased less music in the last 12 months were asked to explain the change. Just nine percent of respondents cited P2P as the reason for fewer purchases.

So we have yet another survey, this one indirectly backed by CRIA, that points to the fact that file sharing simply isn't the concern that CRIA claims. When combined with the Pollara study (top source of music is burned CDs, not P2P) and the Canadian Heritage music report (continued gains for Canadian music), the evidence continues to affirm that legal reforms targeting P2P are wrongheaded solutions in search of a problem.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1495/125/





Despite Legal Efforts P2P Traffic Keeps Growing
Grant Robertson

If Germany is any indication, the movie and music industry's campaign against peer to peer filesharing isn't curbing the amount of peer to peer related traffic.

A new study finds that P2P in Germany is growing and evolving, "Depending on time of day, P2P traffic uses a share of 30% (daytime) and 70% (nighttime) of the overall Internet traffic in Germany. The absolute data volume has risen by 10% between June and October 2006. BitTorrent has surpassed eDonkey as the most popular file sharing network and causes more than half of all P2P traffic in Germany. Both networks generate over 95% of the P2P traffic and have nearly displaced previously popular networks such as Kazaa's FastTrack."

The study's findings come on the heels of the IFPI's renewed efforts to take filesharers to court around the globe. The IFPI announced last week that it had initiated 8,000 new filesharing lawsuits in seventeen countries.
http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2...keeps-growing/





IFPI Set Their Sights on Parents of Peer-To-Peer Network Users

The German section of the IFPI announced today that it plans to intensify the legal action takes against users of peer- to-peer networks. In particular, the Association pointed out that people with Internet connections have a responsibility under civil law if their Internet access is used to violate copyright. "Parents have to understand that they are responsible for any violations of copyright that their children commit via these Internet connections. And that can cost a pretty penny!" threatened Michael Haentjes, chairman of the German Phonograph Associations. Recently, the first- instance district court of Hamburg confirmed that parents must monitor the way their children use the Internet via home connections and take action if need be.

But copyright experts say that the legal situation is not as clear as the IFPI sees it. Marco Gercke, attorney and lecturer for media penal law, says that "the claim that parents can always be held responsible for copyright violations that their children commit is problematic." Parents can only be held liable if they have failed to watch over their children. This can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. "If the child is 12 years old and has already been caught providing copyrighted works in peer-to-peer networks, then the parents should have been keeping an eye on the child; but if the child is a 23-year-old student who still lives at home, the liability of the parents is questionable. We therefore need to be very careful when making such blanket statements."
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/79680





Uni-Verse

Professors Weigh Benefits of Online File Sharing
Steve Rafferty

University administrators will soon finish phasing in a new online file sharing system that they say will reduce the amount of software held on university computers, but could leave faculty with less storage space.

The new network, GUShare, is a Web-based application designed to allow administrators and professors to store their work and gives them the ability to make it accessible to their co-workers, said Beth Ann Bergsmark, director of University Information Services. Although the program was launched in January, its predecessor, Novell — which stores files for most Georgetown faculty — will remain active until Dec. 6, giving faculty members less than two remaining months to move their work.

Will Anderson, UIS associate director, said that Novell servers require additional software to be installed on all Georgetown computers. Since GUShare is based on the Internet, he said that it can be accessed from any computer with a faculty or staff member’s Net ID and password and does not use up hard-drive space.

Bergsmark added that GUShare makes it easier for Georgetown faculty to collaborate on projects with staff at other universities and organizations. Under the new system, a faculty member can send a password-protected “ticket” to someone outside GU to share a file, she said.

Anderson said that this was a primary motivation for creating the new system.

“We decided to go with a system that allowed for more sharing for not only people at Georgetown, but outside the university as well,” he said.

Bergsmark added that each member of the Georgetown faculty is given 450 megabytes of storage for individual use on GUShare. Each university department receives between two and 10 gigabytes on GUShare, depending on its size and need for file-sharing, she said.

But Diana Owen, director of the American studies program, said that while the new network has its benefits over the current system, GUShare does not provide enough storage space.

“From what I’ve heard, the space that we are going to be allocated for departments might not be big enough to do the kinds of things we want to do,” she said.

Owen also questioned the functional capabilities and security of the new network, citing the tendency of Georgetown’s Web-based e-mail server to experience frequent delays and occasionally crash.

“How well is it really going to work? How secure is it?” she asked.

UIS began holding training sessions for faculty members earlier in the semester on the new program. Bergsmark said that over 2,200 faculty members have already begun to use the new system.

“While GUShare is relatively straightforward, we encourage faculty and staff to attend training sessions, to learn some shortcuts and increase their comfort level,” she said.
http://www.thehoya.com/news/102406/news7.cfm





UDit Regulations Annoying, Blame Not Given Where it is Deserved
Jordan Barth

Maybe you are one of the unfortunate students who have read the dreadful words from Jeremy Landis, the supposed representative of the Recording Industries Association of America (RIAA) who is sending censures to the university claiming illegal peer-to-peer file sharing activity. Excluding the expletives, your response was probably one of confusion. You probably weren’t sure if you downloaded the files or not. And if you didn’t, you sure don’t know how to prove your innocence.

This has become all too common at our university, very unlike the Marianist charisma and spirit we’ve grown to love. UDit has barraged yet another round of students with notices of their alleged violation of the peer-to-peer file sharing policy found in the Standards of Behavior handbook.

But if you are one of the students who haven’t been privileged to have wireless added to your dorm, you might have a wireless router. Your wireless router only gets its IP address once, so whoever logs the router into the network—now has their Cisco Clean Access account associated with everyone who is using the wireless. What this means is anyone that is using your wireless is technically using your identity.

Thanks to a well-meaning, however poorly written policy, you are held responsible for any misusage of your ‘online identity.’ That’s exactly how the policy reads (See Policy 6.2). Why is this poorly written? Suppose you are a good, responsible UD student and you keep a nice, randomly generated password on your account. Well, what happens if some unknown persons cracks your password, downloads illegal music—or worse yet, ‘kiddie porn’—and UDit gets wind of it? Technically you’re responsible. It came from your IP address. Or, at least that’s how the policy reads. What about equipment malfunction? What if your router malfunctions and the security you put on disappears? Or, your computer malfunctions and the screen saver doesn’t lock your computer? Same deal. You’re responsible.

The question becomes how do I defend myself? It’s not simple, but it can be done. Just note, if you actually did commit the policy violation, don’t use these suggestions to try to get out of it. It won’t work. If you are caught lying, plan on being in front of the Judicial Board with very serious sanctions.

Have a reliable person (a help desk support person would do great—they are an outside source that wouldn’t lie) look at the files on your computer and verify you do not have the files.

If you do have the files, have a reliable person check your “File Creation” dates. Check these dates against the date your IP address was detected by the RIAA and see if the files were created before the date of the violation, thus proving you had the files before your IP address was even recorded. Make sure the person who verifies this either comes to your hearing or writes a witness statement.

If you own the music/files that you allegedly stole, bring those CDs to a hearing.

If you want to get technical, demand that UDit provides you with the violator’s MAC address. If you can prove you didn’t log into the computer that committed the violation, you’ve got a very strong point.

Lastly, if it came from your computer and your login—yet you know you didn’t download it—you need to have an alibi. Look at the dates the file was created and try to determine where you were, how someone could have gotten access to your computer, check what Web sites were recently visited and see if this person saved their username/password anywhere.

The policy should not read that you are responsible for anything that happens under your identity. The policy should read that you are responsible for anything that happens if you do not take proper precautions against your account being compromised. Don’t make your password your first and last name. Don’t give out your private information to anyone. Don’t leave your computer unlocked. Don’t neglect to protect your router in your room.

If you need help, contact the Office of Community Standards and Civility in Gosiger Hall 224. They will find you an advocate from the Judicial Board that will help you prepare for your case (they even have techno savvy persons such as myself). Just remember, you only get a short amount of time to appeal responsibility for your case—so don’t delay.
http://www.flyernews.com/article.php...e=12&artnum=04





Stop P2P File-Sharing
Unsigned editorial from the board

In this week's issue, we explore some of the reasons for slower Internet connections on campus (see the story from the front page). One of the biggest problems ITS faces is Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing.

The problem with file-sharing is that it uses up a great deal of the College's bandwidth, decreasing the speed at which everyone else is able to access the Internet.

While many college students participate in downloading music, movies and television shows, it's clearly an illegal practice (in certain instances) that can become a nuisance for other students, faculty and staff members. However, at times, inconvenience is the least of the College's worries, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been handing out "notifications" like candy recently.

Cary H. Sherman, president of the RIAA, said Sept. 26 that "recent surveys indicate that more than half of the nation's college students frequently download music and movies illegally." She also announced that students at 132 schools have been sued since March 2004.

Inside Higher Ed recently reported that Dan Glickman, chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), released the results of a study that found the U.S. film industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005. 44 percent of those losses ($2.6 billion) can be attributed to the actions of college students, according to the MPAA. Not only is P2P file-sharing inconvenient, it's also the equivalent of stealing from the artists who are not compensated for their work.

ITS needs to come up with a system of consequences for users who repeatedly cause problems. It needs to come up with that system soon. As things stand now, users may be removed from the network for a short period of time, but there are no real repercussions for people who abuse the system.

The best idea we've heard is a graduated system of penalties. After the first instance of bandwidth abuse, the user is removed from the system for a week and must attend a session explaining what may have caused the excessive bandwidth use. The second offense would result in a month-long suspension. After the third instance, the student would be removed for a full semester.

This system would allow users who honestly don't know they're causing problems to change their ways without undue punishment. However, in order for this to work, ITS will need to communicate with students openly and clearly. Educating students about proper use of P2P software is essential to the success of any penalty system.

We're against any policy that would block all file-sharing programs, because there are legal and legitimate uses for the software. For example, open-source software (software that is free and can be edited by the user) may be available for download only over P2P platforms. Certain online games utilize P2P software to enhance the experience for players.

For those Etown College students using the software legally to play games or download open-source software, keep up the good work. Those uses don't gulp up bandwidth and are not against the law.

To students who currently engage in P2P downloading but don't share their files, we'd like to let you know that this, too, puts a strain on the system. The more connections a culprit creates on the network (with P2P sharing, it can be up to 250 for one machine), the slower the network responds for other, law-abiding users.

Look at it Our Way represents a majority opinion of at least two-thirds of the editorial board of the Etownian.
http://www.etownian.com/103/10.05/opinion/stop.p2p.asp





Why is File-Sharing So Bad?

Why is free music so bad?

Music is an art form. I believe art should belong to everyone. No matter what the music industry does there will continue to be ways technology gets around these outdated copyright laws. Often they say bands/artists need the money, because no ones ever paid over a thousand bucks to see a concert. Not to mention appearence fees etc. I detest when bands say they love their fans, they love their fans money, or else maybe they'd make their music available to everyone.

I challenge technology and the industry to come up with something that makes everyone happy. A way to get music free while not putting labels out of business. File Sharing is a rather brilliant way of peeving off the music industry. A legal (for now) way to get free music. They call owners of these sites con men or criminals, but really they are brave innovators. Bring in a new era of technological freedoms.

Please comment! I love feedback. Maybe you have an idea to fix this war for music? I'd love to hear it.
http://www.progressiveu.org/183010-w...sharing-so-bad





File-Sharing in the Post-'Grokster' World
Richard Raysman and Peter Brown

In the past decade, the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing of music files on the Internet has had a radical impact on the music industry and the way music is distributed. In response, the music industry and other copyright holders have fought to defend this valuable right.

In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its landmark decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 US, 125 SCt 2764 (2005). In a relatively short time, the Court's decision has had a number of practical implications on P2P file sharing which are shaping the future of music and video distribution, and the licensing of other copyrightable content online.

This article will briefly summarize the Grokster decision and the consequences to the parties involved in the litigation, as well as other companies involved in peer-to-peer (P2P) file- sharing; generally summarize the unsettled international P2P file-sharing landscape; and highlight the entertainment industry's continuing concern over those developing the next generation of P2P networks.

'Grokster': A Brief Summary, the Fallout

Grokster involved consolidated cases brought by a coalition of music publishers, songwriters and motion picture studios against Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks (maker of the Morpheus P2P program). The issue before the court was the legality of the use of P2P file-sharing software that enabled computer users to easily exchange digitized music, video, software and motion picture files over the Internet "on a gigantic scale," without the use of a centralized server.1

In rendering its decision, the Supreme Court in Grokster was not concerned with how the technology worked and whether it was capable of "substantial non-infringing use." In the end, the Court fashioned an "active inducement" rule for copyright, relying on common-law principles and the active inducement rule in patent law (codified at 35 USC §271(b)). Generally speaking, in the file-sharing arena, "active inducement" involves the distribution of software "with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement."2

Following the Grokster decision, Grokster Ltd. shut down its services as part of a $50 million settlement with the plaintiffs, a judgment it may not be able to pay due to insufficient resources. However, in April 2006, settlement talks with the co-defendant StreamCast broke down. Recently, the district court ruled in favor of the entertainment companies on summary judgment and against StreamCast, citing the Supreme Court's Grokster decision, in finding instances of "massive" copyright infringement on the defendant's P2P network and "overwhelming" evidence of StreamCast's unlawful intent.

Beyond the defendants in the case, the Court's decision also affected other file-sharing companies. For example, in September 2005, WinMX stopped operating in response to cease-and-desist letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and one month later, i2hub, another file-sharing network, closed its site. In July 2006, Kazza, one of the most popular worldwide file-sharing networks, reached a settlement with several major music companies, whereby it agreed to pay over $100 million dollars to U.S. and Australian recording companies and become a legal file-sharing network through the use of filtering technology to prevent P2P file-sharing.3 This past summer, the RIAA filed suit against P2P software maker and distributor LimeWire in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement under an "active inducement" theory. The plaintiff claimed, among other things, that the defendants, like prior services such as Napster, Aimster and Grokster, "have continued to promote, market, and distribute LimeWire as the successor-in-infringement to these pirate services." See Arista Records LLC et al. v. LimeWire LLC, No. 06 CV 5936 (SDNY Complaint filed Aug. 4, 2006), at ¶3. In response, LimeWire filed a countersuit, alleging that the record companies engaged in "unfair business practices" and acquired "a monopoly over digital distribution of commercially valuable copyrighted music and movie content."

Indeed, the RIAA has been relatively successful in its litigation campaign against both direct and indirect infringers in the United States since it began filing lawsuits in 2003. As of August 2006, the RIAA has filed over 18,200 actions, most of which have been against individual file-sharers.4 Still, the RIAA, despite a drop in the number of lawsuits filed during the first half of 2006, seemingly has achieved its "initial goal" of deterring illegal file-sharing of music through an aggressive litigation approach.5

Unsettled International Landscape

Given that the Internet has no real geographical boundaries, the entertainment industry's fight against P2P file-sharing extends beyond the United States. Although Grokster is one of the earliest court decisions to address the issue, other courts, including Canadian and Australian, have weighed in on the legality of the practice.

Slightly more than a month prior to the Grokster decision, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal addressed the issue of the Canadian Recording Industry Association's (CRIA) right to identify and sue individual file-sharers. The Federal Court of Appeal, in BMG, Inc. Canada v. John Doe, 2004 FC 488, aff'd. 2005 FCA 193,6 issued an opinion that denied CRIA's motion to reveal the identities of 29 alleged file-sharers, focusing on CRIA's evidentiary threshold and the privacy of the anonymous defendants. The Canadian Court set forth a test or "road map" to be used before identities of file-sharers could be revealed. 2005 FCA 193 at ¶15. In addition, the appellate court questioned the trial judge's "statements relating to what would or would not constitute infringement of copyright" in the file-sharing context, cautioning about the "danger in reaching such conclusions at the preliminary stages of an action without the availability of evidence nor consideration of all applicable legal principles . . . ." Id. at ¶¶46-48. Ultimately, the court dismissed the appeal without prejudice, permitting the plaintiff to commence a further application to identify the users. Id. at ¶55. How the issue of the legality of file-sharing in Canada plays out and the degree, if any, to which Grokster might impact it, remains to be seen.

In France, a number of French court decisions have cleared users of file-sharing or handed down light punishments.7 For example, a court decision in February 2006 suggested that P2P downloading of music for private, noncommercial gain may be fair use. The French recording industry organization has since appealed the decision.8

More in line with the Grokster decision and suggesting that it may have had some international influence, an Australian court, in September 2005, found operators of the Kazaa file-sharing system liable for infringement under Australian copyright law for the unauthorized trading of copyrighted works by users of their system. See Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v. Sharman License Holdings Ltd. (Australian Fed. Ct. Sept. 5, 2005). This legal decision prompted Kazaa's aforementioned $100 million settlement with the recording industry.

Similarly, in June 2006, a Dutch appeals court overturned an earlier favorable ruling, and upheld an injunction against the Web site www.zoekmp3.nl, which provides links to MP3 files, and ruled that it would have to pay damages. The court said that failure to adhere to the injunction would result in fines of 10,000 euros per day or 1,000 euros per infringing file. In July 2006, however, a Dutch appeals court, in another matter, blocked the Dutch antipiracy organization (BREIN) from learning the identities of alleged file-sharers from various ISPs. The court ruled that the method used by a private company hired by the plaintiff to collect IP addresses of alleged file-sharers was unlawful under European privacy laws.9

On the legislative front, the French parliamentary lower house has been debating the legalization of P2P through charging a flat, global licensing fee to Internet users. Like France, the Swedish government is considering a fee to be imposed upon broadband use, which would compensate film and music companies for downloading of their works, thereby changing current law, which makes it illegal to download copyrighted material. Despite the aforementioned BMG v. John Doe decision in Canada, lobbying continues in the Canadian legislature, as the industry seeks to declare file-sharing illegal.

Cooperation, Legalization

Some companies, perhaps concerned with being sued for copyright infringement in the post-Grokster environment, have cooperated with the entertainment industry and have "retooled" their operations. For example, in November 2005, BitTorrent, a software used for file compression and easier distribution of content over the Internet, announced that it had entered into an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to help prevent illegal downloading of movies on its Web site. Additionally, BitTorrent executed licensing deals with at least four independent movie studios, as well as Warner Bros. Entertainment Group, to distribute video titles over the Internet. Similarly, in November 2005, iMesh music service became a legal license service of music downloading.

On the consumer side, legal downloading has been on the rise.

As of February 2006, one billion songs were downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. And in June 2006, EMI Music arranged to deliver its music over a legal P2P network constructed by LTDnetwork. EMI also has begun negotiations with YouTube and other video-sharing sites to work together to help prevent copyright infringement from the unauthorized posting of music videos that appear on their sites.

"Darknets"

Although the entertainment industry has been successful in litigation in the U.S. and some foreign courts in finding the makers or distributors of P2P software contributorily liable for copyright infringement and prodding other sites into legal business models, rapid advances in technology may provide the next challenge. Certain computer programmers are developing so-called "anonymous" P2P networks known as "darknets," which make it more difficult to detect users and identify the content being shared.10 Generally speaking, darknets are "closed" networks that are used by a small group of individuals who know and trust each other and share files among themselves. Given the "closed" nature of these networks, the potential for both noninfringing and infringing use exists (e.g., free communication outside of state censorship or the exchange of copyrighted music). In essence, information that is transmitted over these networks might be encrypted and "routed-through" other users of the network to cloak the particular user and the content delivered.11

Conclusion

To date, lower courts have begun to apply Grokster's rule of law. For example, in one music file-sharing case where the defendant downloaded and retained entire, unauthorized copies of copyrighted works that were available for retail sale, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that Grokster forecloses the argument that such downloading in order to sample prior to purchase is fair use.12 However, the struggle to control the distribution of copyrighted material over the Internet continues. In the future, copyright holders will likely continue the pattern of filing lawsuits and lobbying in legislatures to protect content, while facilitating commercial online distribution. Still, some users will continue to look for easy and free online distribution of music and motion pictures that disregard the rights of copyright owners.
http://www.law.com/jsp/nylj/PubArtic...=1160471119010





Welcome to CollegeSwarm.com
Weblurb

CollegeSwarm.com is place to discuss your college computer network no matter where your college is. At CollegeSwarm you can get together with other students on campus to troubleshoot problems you might be having downloading or uploading files.
http://www.collegeswarm.com/





If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em.
Brett Thomas

Introduction
It seems like only yesterday that we were carrying walkmans to listen to our music. Unaware of little more than battery life and durability, portable music was simple: tune in to the radio, or play a cassette tape. When I got home from a day at school, I would often turn on the radio, cue my latest tape to the first blank section, and eagerly await the playing of my new favourite song. I hoped to catch and preserve it for all eternity on my Maxell 90-minute miracle mix-tape, so that the soothing beats could play through my headphones on my bus ride to school the next morning.

Little did I know, I was stepping on the road straight to H-E-double hockey sticks...At the tender age of 9, I was a pirate. Of course, at the age of 9, being a pirate is something that involves an eye patch, your mum's old ruffled blouse that hasn't seen the light of day since 1978, and some form of kitchen utensil as a substitute hook.

My, how times have changed. Now there are laws in place to send little 9-year-olds like I was to jail, and my trusty old walkman has been replaced by a sleek iPod nano. CD burners, Napster, and DeCSS came and went, and now Metallica has a contract to be on Napster's service while DVD Jon is writing protection instead of breaking it. So sit back, and let's take a musical trip through media, content protection, and your rights as the sucker with the dough.

"The style is new, but the face is the same as it was so long ago..." - A little history

In 1969, Led Zeppelin released its second album. Among other greats, it featured a song called "Heartbreaker." Though it was certainly never meant to be taken as such, it would be a great anthem for those of uswho are consumers looking at the media industry now. Record labels have always been at odds with their customer base, but it was never so popular to hate big business as it was when the cassette tape craze started.

When cassette tape recorders started being released to the general public, the recording industry worldwide went into a panic. Surely, nobody who could just record music would buy it?! The existance of tape-trading rings and organized bootleggers seemed to further the industry's point. Suddenly, it was possible to buy a tape of a concert that you didn't even go to, for a band that you didn't pay to see or hear. It was entertainment armageddon...and thus was born the first anti-piracy campaign: "Home taping is killing music."

What the record industries never bothered to mention was that these bootlegged copies of concerts were what made some of the most popular acts of the 80's and 90's. Metallica, the band that would later go on to be a thorn in the side of consumer-rights lovers everywhere, owe most of their career to the existance of bootlegs, which helped them rise up to immense popularity in spite of poor backing by their initial label. Elektra records would never have been capable of pouring enough advertising into the band as they received from word of mouth and bootlegged concert tapes.

Of course, the recording industry isn't the only group that had protection problems. The MPAA was struggling with the advent of Betamax at roughly the same time. Even the software industry had to acknowledge the threat of piracy once disk sizes shrank down to the ever-portable 3.5". The media was no longer ungainly, and computers were nowhere near as scarce. Eager to protect their own rights, the Software Publisher Association created the "Don't copy that floppy" campaign in 1992.

"Free Floating Hostility" - The advent of DRM

When George Carlin was a budding stand-up comic, he used to be able to stick to a topic and roll with it. As his skits matured, he started to take on shorter rants. By the time his 1996 album Back in Town was released, he had condensed a myriad of disjointed thoughts into one short burst entitled "Free Floating Hostility." The comic and acerbic rhetoric jumped all over the place - much like the way the media industries began to treat copy protection and methods.

Though there was little that could be done to protect analogue media, the digital age provided a whole new world of opportunities. Since CDs and DVDs were digital media, they could have the benefit of other computer files - lossless reproduction. Fortunately, they could also have another computer benefit - encryption that could be decoded on-the-fly. And thus, DRM was born.

The first big DRM effort was region encoding. If anyone has a good reason for the existance of this aside from to prevent grey-market price reduction, I'm all ears. Along with region coding came Content Scrambling, or CSS. Though DVDs have gone through a couple of other methods, these are the only two still widely used.

In music, DRM took a different direction - at first, there was little to be done about it at all. CD players had been out too long to make discs carry any sort of bona fide copy protection, or there'd be a chance older players couldn't run the disc. As the internet grew and music moved off of the disc, however, DRM began to grow into the monstrosity it is today - a horrid patchwork of discordant systems with little to no interoperability.

In order to protect that hodgepodge of systems, the individual industries each leaned on lawmakers in both the US and EU. Thus was born the DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act. In Europe, they passed the 2001 European Directive on Copyright, which covers much of the same ground. Though these laws spelled out very clearly the right to have protection for digital products, neither does a good job of spelling out how. In fact, the majority of each bill outlines what a consumer can or cannot do with protected media while imposing no guidelines on the producers.

The lack of standards in DRM methods has created problems on many fronts, but most all of them solely affect the legitimate end user. For instance, Apple's FairPlay prohibits any music that bears copy protection other than FairPlay from being able to play on iPods. On the flip-side, any music purchased that contains FairPlay cannot be played on a device that is not an iPod. Along a similar vein, Microsoft developed PlaysForSure, which for sure won't even play on the company's own upcoming Zune.

This leads to a crucial question: Who is DRM there to protect? The record industry didn't get any more money just because your Samsung Sansa won't play your legally purchased track from iTunes Music Store. But you're not going to run out and spend money on an iPod when you have a perfectly good player. If everything was standardized so that all players could play all DRM content, wouldn't that be better?

Why, sure...Unless, of course, you just give in and spend the $0.99 to buy the song twice. Don't forget the music video for just $2.99!

"Money, it's a gas. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash." - DRM Abuse

When Roger Waters wrote the lyrics to "Money" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, he probably didn't realize how well he'd outline their own industry 30 years later. Ever since the onset of copy and content protection, legitimate consumers have been the unwitting victims in what could best be described as a war between the producers and the pirates - the guy with the dough is just collateral damage. Or is he?

Probably the greatest faux-pas of any of the industries belongs to Sony as a member of the RIAA. The rootkit scandal is likely to go down in history as one of the greatest abuses to consumer rights currently known. Worse than the actual copy protection, though, was the fact that the installed software did "phone home" with information, turning your computer into a marketing infoproducer. This little boon was slid in under the guise of protecting the music that was purchased - it just happened to let them know your listening habits. How convenient...

The RIAA is far from the only group to try and benefit further off of their right to protection. Commercial DVDs (at least those sold here in the States) still come with that FBI warning I mentioned previously. By law, that track must be unskippable, so that any consumer is forced to be aware of what could happen if that DVD were to be pirated. Realising that advertising on a DVD was much easier to skip than on VHS, studios began putting the previews and adverts on that FBI Warning track - making them completely unskippable.

The software industry has had its own problems with copy protection being used to piggyback other benefits. For instance, many pieces of software generate hashes based on what hardware is in your machine - this information becomes part of the code you need for your product key, giving the manufacturer a good idea of what types of systems are in use and with what other software, without you ever providing a lick of consent. Many times in the computer world, though, this minor intrusion is ignored - there are usually bigger fish to fry, like the users of StarForce copy protection.

Most of these misguided attempts keep getting scape goated to one eternal, sworn enemy - the pirates. If pirates didn't crack and steal it, they rationalize, then the industry wouldn't have to work so hard to protect it. If you'd just turn against those pirates, then the **AA wouldn't have to violate your rights to protect their own.

Oh, wait...you had rights? Well, sort of...

What the DMCA and the 2001-EDC lacked in industry responsibility, they made up in spades for the consumer. Each article is laden with things that you as the end user can and cannot do. The majority of these rulings fall under the term "Fair Use" in the United States and "Fair Dealings" in the EU (and most other countries).

The most important thing to understand about Fair Use is that it simply cannot be revoked. No matter what an EULA or any other document says, Fair Use is not able to be taken away. However, what constitutes fair use is the second most important fact - it is an affirmative defense, or an acknowledgement that you did breach copyright law. You're just saying that nobody was hurt by it and that you had a good reason. Clearly, any attempt to profit from, further distribute, or in any way prevent the copyright holder from getting paid for that work will violate Fair Use. And in order to prevent any heated discussion on it, Fair Use does definitively allow you to make a back-up copy of your purchased media, subject to one exception.

The odd thing about Fair Use is what it doesn't specify - and what both the DMCA and 2001-EDC clearly deny, to remove any doubt. You are not allowed to remove the DRM imposed on a file. Ever. This has actually caused problems in the US, where photographers watermark a print and then a company buys rights to publish the image. Either the photographer has to send a new, unwatermarked version, or the company is in violation of the DMCA. Even if you have legal right to the image (or video, or song), only the copyright holder has the right to remove DRM.

Where this really falls afoul for media consumers is in the format of your file. Perhaps you want to put that DVD on your hard drive? Making a carbon-copy ISO is not illegal in any way. However, using DVD-shrink to cut off the FBI warning is. If you have a music file from iTunes, removing the FairPlay from it so it can play on your Sansa or Zen is also a violation. In fact, even having the tools to do so will put you on the wrong side of the legal line.

"I shot the sheriff" - Consumer Advocates

All the peace, love, and harmony of the 60s and 70s seem to be captured in the immortal words of everyone's favourite reggae artist, Bob Marley. His political activism in his homeland and in international policy left lasting impressions on generations of music listeners.

Though he's not quite Bob Marley (first of all, he lacks the dreadlocks), Norwegian Jon Lech Johansen knows a lot about being stuck fighting for rights in international policy. Having produced DeCSS at age 15, he found himself stuck in a fierce court battle with the Norwegian police, the MPAA, and the US Government. After prevailing in that court case, "DVD Jon" has gone on to be one of the greatest advocates against DRM technology.

Jon was helped out of his legal wranglings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF is an American organization that is devoted to the protection of individuals' rights online, where law simply has not caught up with technology. Though it is headquartered in California, the organization has an official presence in many places both in and out of the US, and is not at all afraid to wade into international laws.

Of course, many other forms of consumer-rights "advocacy" exist. There are tremendous grass-roots campaigns against DRM that survive solely on word-of-mouth and angry customers. These groups will often issue boycotts on brands or products that support DRM or copy protection, though tolerance of what constitutes DRM varies from group to group. Then there are those who go rogue, and choose to use piracy as a means of making a political statement.

It is important to note, however, that true consumer-rights advocates are much like true hackers - there is an attitude amongst those who genuinely rally, argue, and fight that those who just copy and steal are nothing more than thieves. This attitude falls right in line with true hackers, who believe that script-kiddies downloading programs and causing trouble have little understanding of what it means to truly hack anything.

Lovely... So where do we go from here?

With a little understanding of the history, laws, and powers behind DRM, it's not hard to see that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Anti-copy sentiment and legal action have been around since the dawn of consumer duplication equipment, and the organizations that wield these rather crude tools haven't changed their tune in over 20 years.

So, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. DVD Jon has gone to work writing DRM now, instead of breaking it. And the EFF has been lying low for a little while in the area of DRM. Why?

Standards. Johansen's company DoubleTwist Ventures has reverse engineered Apple's FairPlay and rewritten almost the exact same code. And this time, he's pretty sure he's got the legal ground to stand on if the lawsuits start to fly. Apple's iTunes Music Store, love it or hate it, is the best store out for the legal purchase of music downloads. By unlocking the FairPlay DRM, Johansen will be able to sell the protection to other media player companies, or even develop an open-source version for 'Nix.

If the patchwork and mishmash of failed DRMs get brushed away and everything falls under FairPlay, a standard will be set for all media and players to live by. Though it's not a perfect solution as it is written, FairPlay is well considered to be the most generous DRM out in the market - especially when you consider the amount of content that is protected under it. If the model then needed to be changed, the standard is already set - small tweaks would be easily able to propagate out to the consumer level with no inconvenience.

Most importantly, with standards a consumer would be able to choose the device that he or she wants to use. DRM wouldn't be one tenth the inconvenience if you could go buy any player, and be able to put any song on it that you legally purchased. Without all of the format wars, in-fighting and lawsuits, a consumer would be left with options - a solution that revolves around the convenience of the sucker with the dough.
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/10...join_em/1.html





Big Broadcasters Want to Control More Media Outlets
Nate Anderson

During its last quadrennial review of broadcast ownership rules, the FCC voted for less regulation of US media companies, only to be smacked down by a court decision in Prometheus v. FCC. That case sent the FCC back to the proverbial drawing board, and the agency has sought a new round of comments on media ownership. Many of those comments were filed on Monday (the day that public comments ended), and they make one thing perfectly clear: big media companies have not given up on the dream of major deregulation.

At issue are current FCC regulations that generally prohibit cross-ownership of a broadcast station and a newspaper in the same market and prohibit the ownership of too many radio stations and TV stations in the same market.

The public comments are strikingly similar, in some cases because different media organizations used the same DC law firm to help them draw up the papers. They all mention the growth of the Internet, arguing that the massive success of services like YouTube has made many of the FCC's rules about local ownership requirements obsolete. In fact, they claim, the FCC has it precisely backward: increased media consolidation will benefit consumers, not harm them.

Gannett (which owns USA Today, among other things) points to the "established and sizable benefits that can be achieved by more efficient combinations of resources in the media sector," while Fox says it is "beyond question that regulatory intervention is no longer necessary to ensure diversity and localism." CBS puts it most strongly what it says that failing to give broadcasters the "fundamental freedom to compete" means that "we put at risk the rich American tradition of free, over-the-air broadcasting." That's right—CBS is saying that not allowing massive conglomerates to own even more pieces of the media could kill off free television.

Not surprisingly, these assertions are controversial. Michael Copps, one of the two Democratic Commissioners at the FCC, gave a recent talk in which he called on consumers across the country to get involved in the process. Copps pointed out how important citizen comments were to the last round of rule-making. "Thankfully, citizens rose up across the land," he said. "They sent nearly 3 million protests to the Federal Communications Commission. Congress rose up, too, and then a federal court sent those rules back to the FCC saying they were badly flawed and they needed to be reworked. That was good, and anybody that doesn't believe that citizen action can have an effect should just revisit what happened there."

Journalist Juan Gonzalez was at the same event and offered a dire warning about how corporate media remains largely closed to minority viewpoints. "We are in real danger of waking up one day with a de facto apartheid system," he said, "one where a small group of giant firms, run almost exclusively by white investors and managers, control the production and distribution of news and information to a largely non-white population." This isn't scare-mongering—a study released last week by Dr. Carolyn Byerly of Howard University found that minorities held a majority interest in only 3.6 percent of all broadcast stations in the US, even though more than 100 million of the 300 million Americans come from non-European backgrounds.

Byerly's study was released under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, which several days ago issued four academic reports on media consolidation (PDF). After examining all four reports (which were submitted to the FCC as well), the SSRC said, "These studies make clear that media consolidation does not create better, more local or more diverse media content. To the contrary, they strongly suggest that media ownership rules should be tightened not relaxed."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061025-8072.html





FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and Juan Gonzalez on the Color of Media Consolidation

Copps and Gonzalez spoke at last week’s town hall meeting in New York on diversity and media ownership. The FCC is reconsidering a number of broadcast rules -including whether a single company should be able to own both a newspaper and television station in the same market. [includes rush transcript]
A town hall meeting on diversity and media ownership was held last week here in New York City. All five commissioners from the Federal Communications Commission were invited. Only two showed up – Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. More than 300 activists and citizens came out to show their opposition to further media consolidation as the FCC reconsiders a number of broadcast rules - including whether a single company should be able to own both a newspaper and television station in the same market.

Michael Copps, FCC Commissioner.

Juan Gonzalez, Daily News columnist and Democracy Now co-host.

AMY GOODMAN: This is FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.

MICHAEL COPPS: The FCC is in the midst of a hugely important proceeding right now to decide what the future of our media, our TV, our radio, our newspapers, our cable, even our internet, are going to look like for a long, long time to come.

A little history, just to set the stage for our discussion. Three years ago, under then FCC Chairman Michael Powell and over the objections of my good friend Commissioner Adelstein and myself, the FCC severely cut back -- really “eviscerated” is a better word -- the rules that were meant to check big media’s seemingly endless appetite for more consolidation. It passed new rules, which have allowed a single media giant to own in a single market up to three television stations, eight radio stations, the cable system, the cable channels, even the internet portal, and the local newspaper, which in most cities in the United States of America is already a monopoly. And the agency did all of that behind closed doors and without seeking meaningful input from the American people. Can you imagine that? Authorizing a sea change in how news and entertainment are produced and presented over the people's airwaves, without even involving the people who own those airwaves and who depend so heavily upon them. It was a near disaster for America.

Thankfully, citizens rose up across the land. They sent nearly 3 million protests to the Federal Communications Commission. Congress rose up, too, and then a federal court sent those rules back to the FCC saying they were badly flawed and they needed to be reworked. That was good, and anybody that doesn’t believe that citizen action can have an effect should just revisit what happened there. We checked those rules. You checked those rules from going into effect. It was concerned citizens at work, and it was a citizen consumer victory.

But, here’s a reality check now. We’re right back at square one, and it’s all up for grabs again. And if we're going to have a better result this time around, doing something positive for media democracy, it’s going to be because of more citizen action and more input from folks like you. So, this time we need to make it an open public process, instead of hiding in our office in Washington like the majority did in 2003. This time, let all the commissioners come to New York City -- I wish they were all here tonight -- and let all the commissioners get out across America and find out what’s happening in the real world, beyond that Beltway that they bemoan so much but seem to love staying behind so much.

So, as we begin our discussion, then begin with that simple reminder: it’s all of us who own the airwaves. There is not a broadcaster, a business, a special interest, and any industry that owns one airwave in the United States of America. They belong to you, and they belong to me. And, my friends, now is the time to assert our ownership rights.

AMY GOODMAN: FCC Commissioner Michael Copps at the town hall meeting on diversity and media ownership here in New York. A number of people spoke, among them, New York Daily News columnist and Democracy Now! co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I thank Commissioner Copps and Commissioner Adelstein for their continued willingness to hear the concerns of the public, as the FCC prepares yet again to overhaul the nation’s broadcast ownership rules, a process that has the potential to make a bad situation far worse than anyone can imagine. I am talking about the impact of media consolidation on news and information provided for and about the nation’s fast-growing population of racial and ethnic minorities.

Just this week, the United States reached a milestone: the 300 million population mark. More than a third of that population, more than 100 million people, trace their origin not to Europe, but to Africa, Asia, Latin America, or to the original indigenous people of the hemisphere. By 2050, that figure will surpass more than 50% of the total U.S. population. Yet our news media, especially our broadcast media, have failed in stunning fashion to reflect in their ownership, their employment and their news coverage, this rapidly changing reality.

Worse, if present trends of media concentration continue, and if our government loosens even further its regulation of broadcast ownership rules, media ownership by racial minorities in my opinion will virtually disappear in the United States. We are in real danger of waking up one day with a de facto apartheid system, one where a small group of giant firms, run almost exclusively by white investors and managers, control the production and distribution of news and information to a largely non-white population.

Is this overly alarmist? Not if you consider some of the facts we’ve heard this evening. The last report the Department of Commerce did tracking media ownership was in 2000. It stopped doing the reports. And at that time, it found that 3.8% of all full-power broadcast stations in the country were owned by people of color. Now, when an independent nonprofit group does the job that the federal government should be doing, we find that the actual ownership by minorities has decreased since 2000. So, while the minority population of the country is increasing, the minority ownership of radio and television is decreasing. So this is a troubling trend that we have been trying to get data on. The FCC has not been mining its own data. The Commerce Department has stopped doing the studies.

While the race or ethnic background of an owner is hardly a sure guarantee of more balanced news coverage, the FCC’s own studies several years ago, in response to the Adarand case, found a clear connection between minority ownership and more diversity in content and staffing.

For eleven years now, the NAHJ has produced its annual Network Brownout Report, as our executive director mentioned earlier. Each report examines coverage of Latinos on the evening news of the major networks. Every year, it shows the same depressing result: stories about Latinos have made up less than 1% of the more than 12,000 network news stories that air annually, even while the Latino population continues to explode. And this is going on year after year after year. When Latinos are covered, the two dominant themes are invariably undocumented immigration and crime. The harm done to our community and to the general society by this persistent marginalization of Hispanics and by the preponderance of stereotypical coverage cannot be overestimated.

As a veteran journalist, I know that ownership matters. There are few news executives in our time brave enough to buck the viewpoints of their owners on a day-to-day basis. It is not a matter of how many different channels, how many niche publications, on how many platforms or particular venues you produce your content. If it’s the same owners, the viewpoint diversity, no matter how many different niche publications and how many outlets you have, will not be substantially different.

So, if there is no diversity in ownership, it is extremely unlikely the public will receive sufficient diversity in viewpoint and coverage. Because of media ownership concentration, our democratic discourse has been cheapened and distorted. We call on the FCC to use its regulatory powers to reverse this dangerous trend, to reassert the long-established principles of our national broadcast policy of diversity, localism and competition. If we do not reassert them, then we are headed for a de facto apartheid media system. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Gonzalez, the former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which was one of those organizations that sponsored the town hall forum on media diversity in New York.
http://www.democracynow.org/article..../10/23/1425236





Creative Commons Filmmaking - A Swarm Of Angels Remixes Modern Cinema

Creative Commons filmmaking experiment A Swarm Of Angels aims to create and distribute the first collaborative internet film. The aim is to use community participation and funding to make a film that would traditionally cost $3-4 million for just $1.75 million.

"A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It's all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven't seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals. We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0."

Because the finished product will be released under the creative commons license, users will be able to freely download, view, share, burn, rip, and remix the content as they see fit. The entire filmmaking process will be collaborative, from a Wiki-based script creation to community voting on certain creative & marketing decisions. They have set clearly defined stages and targets, with an eventual goal of 50,000 participants involved in the making of this feature film.

Torrentfreak has more details on the project, as well as a short interview with founder Matt Hanson.

"The genre will be thriller based with some soft sci-fi elements. The community is currently developing two scripts, The Unfold and Glitch. Based on member input these scripts will be put into initial drafts written by Matt Hanson."

"The success of this project would undoubtedly create a landmark example of how media can be created and made available for free. It would encourage an alternative entertainment model to Hollywood, which doesn’t crack down on filesharers, but encourages and accommodates them, and their enthusiasm. I think the future of film is about bringing audiences and filmmakers closer together in entertainment communities where both can interact and get more out of the experience."

Those interested in participating should check out the Join page and discussion boards to get involved. Join The Swarm.
http://www.freshdv.com/2006/10/creat...-swarm-of.html





What’s That Sound Coming From the Doctor’s Cabinet?
Neil Genzlinger

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” made in Germany in 1919, virtually cornered the market on the concept of “disorienting.” So what David Lee Fisher has accomplished in his unusual semi-remake is rather startling: he has out-disoriented the original. Probably not in the way he intended, but still, interesting, and kind of dizzying.

Robert Wiene’s “Caligari,” of course, is a landmark of silent cinema. Filmed when Germany was suffering a severe shortage of right angles, it is chock-full of skewed windows, crooked doors and warped walkways, not to mention freakishly made-up characters.
Mr. Fisher has scanned the original backgrounds from an old print and, through some kind of green-screen magic, put living, speaking actors into them. They tell a fleshed-out version of the original story, written by Mr. Fisher but basically the same as that flickering tale from almost 90 years ago: Francis (Judson Pearce Morgan) and his friend Alan (Neil Hopkins) visit a fair where the mysterious Caligari (Daamen Krall) is exhibiting a somnambulist (Doug Jones) who accurately predicts Alan’s death.

The disorientation begins the first time an actor speaks: so ingrained are the silent Expressionist images of the original that it is jarring to hear voices. It’s doubly jarring that the resulting dialogue sounds very 21st-century (except when, occasionally, it sounds like a noir detective film), even as the makeup is recreating the 1919 look. Brain cannot reconcile! Circuit overload!

And, of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you’re trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed and edited by David Lee Fisher; written by Mr. Fisher, based on the story by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and the film “Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari” by Robert Wiene; director of photography, Christopher Duddy; music by Eban Schletter; production designer, Kim Richey; produced by Leonard McLeod and Paula Elins; released by Highlander Films. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 76 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Judson Pearce Morgan (Francis), Daamen J. Krall (Dr. Caligari), Doug Jones (Cesare), Lauren Birkell (Jane), Neil Hopkins (Alan), William Gregory Lee (Joseph), Randy Mulkey (Inspector) and Time Winters (Dr. Stern).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/10/2...es/25cali.html





Talent Agency Is Aiming to Find Web Video Stars
David M. Halbfinger

One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media.

The move by the United Talent Agency — best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase — amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. It is also a return by Hollywood’s core talent representatives to the sort of new-media business they tested, without great success, at the peak of the dot-com boom.

The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

“It starts with just helping identify people on both sides of the aisle,” said Brent Weinstein, head of the new division, UTA Online. “The barrier to entry is so low, everybody is now a potential artist. So there’s this great unwashed of talent out there, 99.999 percent of which is probably not good enough to have a traditional film and television career. But on the Internet, a lot of different types of things go. And yet for buyers, this is a wall of people, so how does a brand know which one of them can help it execute?”

John Moshay, head of business development for Whittman Hart, an interactive advertising agency based in Chicago, said it was becoming untenable for buyers like his firm and its clients to find their own writers, performers and directors.

“It’s very hit or miss at the moment, and we’re at a tipping point: the marketplace is just beginning to ramp up its demand for true talent like this,” he said. “We use it, and we buy it, but we’re not necessarily in the business of developing it.”

United Talent’s online division, whose initial staff is three 26-year-old agents promoted from assistant, will operate independently from the main agency, said Jeremy Zimmer, a founder and director of the company. Defying industry conventions, agents will welcome unsolicited submissions (preferably as Web links), show existing clients’ output on a new agency Web site and be free to sign clients without the approval of the more-established departments.

Already, the three agents have cut six-figure deals with major media portals and signed a handful of clients whose Web-based serials, recurring comedy features and short digital films have drawn one-time downloads in the millions and regular watchers, in some cases, in the tens of thousands.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Weinstein said, one of his new agents showed him a Web video that had been up for less than an hour: “Paxilback,” a parody of a Justin Timberlake music video, “Sexyback.” The agents quickly reached out to its creators, a group of Los Angeles artists called People Food. By the time they could arrange a meeting five days later, the video had been seen 600,000 times.

United Talent is hardly the only agency to recognize the shift of media and advertising money, and consumers, to the Internet. Agencies like International Creative Management and Endeavor frequently bid against United Talent. And the venerable William Morris Agency created a digital media division in May, though that is aimed at helping existing clients find new work in the digital world — like a Web-based talk show that stars the comic Tom Green, a familiar television personality of a few years ago.

Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood’s dominant talent shop, had a big Internet division at the height of the dot-com boom. But that was long before user-generated content achieved its current volume and impact; the unit has since shut down, and no one at Creative Artists is assigned solely to recruiting Web talent, an agency employee said.

United Talent, by contrast, is taking the risk that relatively small deals today will quickly grow in size and scope, and it is banking on the notion that artists surfacing on the Internet may often be quite content to have successful careers that do not make the leap to TV or film.

“In the old days, i.e., two months ago, it was about signing up those clients and immediately figuring out how to flip them into traditional media,” Mr. Weinstein said. “Now we can look at an artist and say, that might be a goal, but in the interim, or while we’re doing that, or instead of that, how can we monetize their interests online?”

Agents, producers and buyers alike say the Web has been an unpredictable medium for making deals. But Mr. Zimmer said he hoped United Talent would soon have enough clout to lay down some rules of the road. “The more market share we have in Web-specific talent, the more we’ll be able to define the rules of the marketplace and help the buyers understand the best way to do their business,” he said.

Jason U. Nadler, one of the three new online agents, said United Talent’s clients were only now waking up to the possibilities. “These are people that realize they have something. They see YouTube being bought for $1.6 billion. They say, ‘Wait a sec, I haven’t seen a penny of this. Meanwhile, my stuff has been downloaded two million times.’ They feel like they might not be getting as good a deal as they should, and they’re excited when we call.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/te...88Z6LNwEdh+Krw





The doctor is online

Net-Based Psychiatric Treatments Sometimes Beneficial
Eric Bangeman

A yet-to-be-published study is making some startling claims about psychological treatment. According to researchers at The Australian National University in Canberra, spending time on therapeutic and educational web sites can be just as effective as regular visits to the psychotherapist.

Researchers studied a group of patients who were referred to two web sites: The MoodGYM and education site BluePages. The MoodGYM is therapeutic in nature, a cognitive behavior therapy site dedicated to preventing depression by helping users to "identify and overcome problem emotions," showing them how to "develop good coping skills for the future" in order to enjoy good mental health. BluePages is a depression education site, providing information about the symptoms of and treatments for depression.

After 12 months, users of both web sites reported improvement. Interestingly enough, the educational site BluePages proved to be more effective than the behavior-therapy site. BluePages users "were less likely to use actions that did not have an evidence basis," researcher Helen Christensen said. "We don't know exactly why the Internet interventions are so effective in the longer term, but it may be that there is a reduction in use of ineffective and potentially damaging treatments."

"In some ways the results are not that surprising," psychotherapist Kerry DeVries told Ars Technica. "Cognitive behavioral strategies—sometimes in conjunction with medication—are the most effective means of treating depression." DeVries also believes willingness to use the web sites shows the kind of initiative needed to successfully treat depression. "A person who is visiting an educational site like BluePages is taking the necessary steps with her own self-care. That's a key component of successful treatment for depression."

The researchers believe that the results indicate that Internet-based strategies—educational and therapeutic—can be as effective as in-office treatment. If that is indeed the case, educational and treatment-focused sites could become useful tools in treating people in remote or rural areas for whom access to professional help is problematic. Some therapists make use of remote treatments already, mostly over the phone, but using the Internet as a means of delivering psychiatric care is a relatively new phenomenon. While it can't replace individual psychotherapy or medication in all instances, the study does show that sites dedicated to education and treatment can be a valuable tool in the therapist's arsenal.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061026-8082.html





Amazon to Curtail Its Spending
Laurie J. Flynn

Going into the critical holiday shopping season, Amazon.com said yesterday that it would slow its investment in new technology in a bid to start reaping the rewards of its continuing growth.

Amazon, the huge online retailer based in Seattle, reported that its third-quarter earnings fell by more than a third, dragged down by heavy spending to get new projects off the ground, even as its sales rose 24 percent.

Despite the profit hit, the company’s promise to ease up on future spending on new technology came as a relief to investors, who bid up Amazon’s shares by more than 14 percent, to $38.38, in the after-hours trading that followed the release of its results.

Amazon shares had risen 75 cents, to close at $33.65, during the regular session.

Executives have long insisted that lower prices, new services and expanded selection are essential to power growth in sales and are necessary in light of the highly competitive market. Amazon faces challenges not only from merchants selling physical goods like electronics and toys, but also from sellers of digital products, including the Apple Computer iTunes store for music.

But for the first time in a long while, executives moved to assure investors that expansion and new hiring would now begin to slow.

“We expect our year-over-year increase in technology spending to decline during the fourth quarter,” Tom Szkutak, Amazon’s chief finance officer, said in a conference call with analysts.

Lately, Amazon’s profit gains have slowed as it has invested heavily in teams of software engineers and computer scientists to build the technology for its new offerings.

During the third quarter, Amazon’s investment in new technology and content increased 42 percent, to $171 million. Among the new initiatives was Amazon Unbox, a video downloading service introduced in September.

Sales increased to $2.31 billion in the third quarter, compared with $1.86 billion in the period last year, slightly higher than the $2.25 billion expected by analysts.

Profit in the quarter declined 37 percent, to $19 million, or 5 cents a share, from $30 million, or 7 cents, a year earlier. That beat analysts’ forecasts of 3 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial.

Jeffrey Bezos, the chief executive, said Amazon increased the selection of products it sells directly through its sites by roughly 50 percent during the quarter.

Investors were also encouraged yesterday by Amazon’s forecast for the holiday quarter. Amazon now expects revenue of $3.63 billion to $3.95 billion during the fourth quarter, an increase of 22 percent to 33 percent over the period last year, topping Wall Street’s forecast of $3.69 billion.

For the full year, revenue is expected to be $10.35 billion to $10.68 billion, growing 22 percent to 26 percent compared with 2005.

“There’s nothing remarkable about their performance, but investors are basically saying that things look O.K.,” Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said. “The sector has rebounded. There is good growth momentum.”

One major area of investment for Amazon has been in the toy business, after its courtroom defeat this year by Toys ‘R’ Us, in a ruling that allowed the toy retailer to sell items on its own Web site. After losing that high-margin relationship, Amazon spent heavily to enhance its selection and its business partnerships with toy companies and other retailers.

Company executives also continued to defend Amazon Prime, the discount shipping program, despite longstanding concern among some analysts that the program was too costly. Amazon Prime gives subscribers unlimited two-day shipping for a fee of $79 a year.

“We continue to see increased purchases by Amazon Prime members across more categories,” Mr. Szkutak said.

Indeed, Amazon’s popularity appears to be growing. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research company, traffic on Amazon.com’s sites overall increased 14 percent during the fourth quarter over last year. And the number of purchases increased to 5.8 million in August from 4.7 million in July.

Amazon’s earnings report was released the day after I.B.M. filed two lawsuits against the company, contending it has built its business on technology developed by I.B.M.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/te.../25amazon.html





Sony Says Recall Strains Battery Production

The Sony Corporation said on Tuesday that a recall of up to 9.6 million of its personal computer batteries was overwhelming its production capacity and warned that it could lose some of that business to its rivals.

Besides Sony itself, major computer makers like Dell, Toshiba and Apple are recalling Sony-made lithium-ion batteries, which in rare cases can overheat and catch fire.

The executive deputy president at Sony, Yutaka Nakagawa, told reporters at a news conference that Sony’s capacity was inadequate to supply enough new batteries to replace its customers’ batteries while also meeting its regular demand.

Mr. Nakagawa said Sony was in talks with personal computer makers about enlisting the help of other battery makers to meet demand.

He also said that there was a good chance that some makers of personal computers could take their business elsewhere and reduce their reliance on Sony.

Such a move could be a boon for the Sanyo Electric Company, another top maker of lithium-ion batteries in 2005, according to the research firm Jstar Global.

Sony said it had no plans to quit its battery operations. “The battery operation is a very important business for us; we have no intention of quitting it or scaling it down,” Mr. Nakagawa said. “I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for causing worries over the safety of lithium-ion batteries.”

Last month Masahiro Ono, an analyst for Morgan Stanley, estimated that Sony’s battery operations would post sales of 180 billion yen ($1.5 billion) for the fiscal year, or 2 percent of the company’s overall revenue. Sony itself does not disclose the size of its battery operations.

Sony has set aside 51 billion yen ($429 million) for costs related to the recall. Hit by the mounting recall costs and a widening loss at its game division, Sony last week slashed its full-year operating profit outlook by 62 percent.

Sony also said yesterday that it would recall batteries in its Vaio notebook computers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/te...gy/25sony.html





Corning Earns $438 Million in 3Q as Sales Rise 8 Percent
Ben Dobbin

Corning Inc., lifted by higher demand for liquid-crystal-display glass, said its third-quarter profit more than doubled, but warned Tuesday that sales in the fourth quarter would be slightly short of Wall Street's view.

The glass, fiber optics and specialty materials company earned $438 million, or 27 cents a share in the July-September period, compared with a profit of $203 million, or 13 cents a share, in last year's third quarter.

Sales jumped 8 percent to $1.28 billion from $1.19 billion a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, including an asbestos-litigation charge of $13 million, or 1 cent a share, Corning earned $451 million, or 28 cents a share.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had forecast earnings of 25 cents a share on sales of $1.32 billion.

In July, Corning warned that its third-quarter results would fall short of Wall Street expectations because of inventory buildups of LCD glass. It projected sales of $1.26 billion to $1.33 billion and per-share earnings of 22 cents to 26 cents a share, before items.

For the fourth quarter, Corning expects sales of $1.28 billion to $1.33 billion, with per-share earnings of 26 cents to 29 cents a share, before special items. Analysts had expected income of 27 cents per share on sales of $1.359 billion.

One reason for the shortfall, Corning's chief financial officer Jim Flaws said, "is Wall Street doesn't adjust for the change in the yen rate when they set some of those numbers at the beginning of the quarter.

"Remember this product is all sold in yen and ... the dollar was strengthening during this period of time, and so that was a slight negative to us," said Corning's chief financial officer, Jim Flaws.

Corning shares fell 25 cents, or 1 percent, to close at $23.14 Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The earnings report was released after the market close, and its shares fell 54 cents to $22.60 in extended trading.

Corning's display technologies sales rose 3 percent to $506 million from $489 million a year ago as year-over-year LCD glass volume surged by 31 percent but this was largely offset by price declines and changes in foreign exchange rates.

Third-quarter revenue in the segment rose 10 percent from $461 million in the second quarter as volume increases of 16 percent were partially offset by lower prices and exchange-rate changes.

In May, the world's largest maker of LCD glass lowered its sales growth forecast for the flat-screen television and computer panels, predicting volume would be flat to 5 percent lower than the first quarter because of inventory buildups.

Sales in Corning's telecommunications unit fell 3 percent to $456 million mainly because of lower prices and lower volume for fiber-to-the-premises optical fiber and related products.

Based in western New York, Corning commands an estimated 55 percent of the global market for LCD glass, which accounts for about 38 percent of its revenue.

As many as 42 million LCD TVs will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 20 million in 2005, analysts say. Of those, more than 11 million units will be sold in North America.

James Houghton, the iron-willed patriarch who came out of retirement to guide Corning's recovery from the telecommunications crash of 2001, retired in May as an active employee of the pioneering glass company his great-great-grandfather founded in 1851.

For the first nine months of the year, Corning earned $1.21 billion, or 76 cents a share, versus $618 million, or 41 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue for the nine months rose to $3.81 billion from $3.38 billion a year ago.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Microsoft Earnings Rise, Beating Views
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp., which is gearing up to release new versions of its two most important products, says it started its fiscal year on the right foot with quarterly results that exceeded expectations.

For the three months ended Sept. 30, earnings rose by 11 percent, amid higher-than-expected sales of products including server software, Redmond-based Microsoft said Thursday.

But the company also warned that its results for its current fiscal second quarter would be hurt by plans to defer about $1.5 billion in revenue to the following quarter. The company's overall results for the full 2007 fiscal year, which ends in June, aren't expected to be impacted.

Microsoft expects to defer the revenue because of a plan to offer consumers who buy computers over the next few months coupons that are good for free or discounted upgrades to the new versions of its Windows operating system and Office business software.

After many delays, Windows Vista is due to reach consumers in January. Microsoft and computer makers are offering the coupons in the hopes people will buy new Windows-powered computers as holiday gifts even though they will be running a soon-to-be-outdated operating system. Office 2007 also isn't due to consumers until January.

For the fiscal first quarter, Microsoft said it earned $3.48 billion or 35 cents per share, compared with earnings of $3.14 billion, or 29 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.

The year-earlier results included a one-time legal charge of 2 cents per share.

The company said revenue for its fiscal first quarter was $10.81 billion, an 11 percent increase over $9.74 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were expecting earnings of 31 cents per share on revenue of $10.75 billion.

Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said net income was boosted by higher-than-anticipated investment income. He said Microsoft also was able to reduce spending in the just-ended quarter, but he warned that some of that money will be spent in the current quarter instead, on marketing and other efforts.

Liddell said Microsoft also had higher-than-expected revenue from server software and the unit that includes the Xbox videogame console.

For the current fiscal second quarter that ends Dec. 31, Microsoft said it expects to earn between 22 cents per share and 24 cents per share. The company said the results would be about 11 cents less than they might have been because of the $1.5 billion revenue deferral plan.

Microsoft said that after deferring the $1.5 billion, revenue for its second quarter would be between $11.8 billion and $12.4 billion.

Analyst Sid Parakh with McAdams Wright Ragen said that although analysts were warned of the revenue deferral, some may not have been expecting the impact on earnings to be quite so high.

Microsoft now expects earnings of $1.43 to $1.46 per share for its full fiscal year ending in June, a small revision to a previous forecast of $1.43 to $1.47 per share.

But revenue for the 12-month period is expected to be between $50 billion and $50.9 billion, a slight increase over a previous forecast of $49.7 billion to $50.7 billion.

Liddell said the fiscal year earnings forecast was lowered in part because the company's plan to buy back about $20 billion worth of shares wasn't as successful as anticipated. Microsoft only was able to buy back about $4 billion in stock.

Analyst Alan Davis with D.A. Davidson said he was relatively pleased with overall performance.

"It's not a bad quarter, not a bad outlook," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102601009.html





Sun Reports Higher Sales, and a Rise in Optimism
Laurie J. Flynn

Sun Microsystems, the struggling server maker that has become an emblem of the dot-com bust, has provided some evidence that its hard times may soon be over.

The company beat Wall Street’s estimates with a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss on Thursday on a 17 percent increase in sales.

Sun posted a loss of 2 cents a share during the first quarter that ended Oct. 1, in contrast to a loss of 4 cents a share in the quarter last year, as corporate customers showed greater confidence in the company’s growth prospects and helped it gain back share in the market for computer servers.

“We believe we are well on track to a more attractive future,” said Jonathan I. Schwartz, the chief executive.

Before the report was released, shares of Sun rose 6 cents to close at $5.36, just short of the 52-week high. They rose slightly in after-hours trading.

The stock has risen nearly 25 percent this year on optimism that a turnaround was finally under way.

“Things are progressing well,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. “They are even a little ahead of plan.” He said he expected Sun to break even next quarter, a sentiment that appears to be widely held on Wall Street.

Sun’s sales increased 17 percent to $3.19 billion, from $2.73 billion for the same period last year. Sun’s loss was $56 million during the first quarter, compared with a loss of $123 million in last year’s period.

As part of its broad plan for turning things around, the company promoted Mr. Schwartz, its longtime president, to chief executive in April. He succeeded Scott McNealy, a company co-founder who had led Sun for more than two decades.

That was followed in May by Sun’s announcement that it would cut as many as 5,000 jobs before the end of the year in an attempt to turn a consistent profit again. Yesterday, Michael E. Lehman, Sun’s chief financial officer, said the company had reduced its work force by 2,000 since the end of June, and planned to reduce it by another 1,000 to 2,000 before the end of the year.

Over the last few years, the company has overhauled its entire product line, upgrading its line of computer servers and reworking its software operating system strategy. Sun announced new servers based on more powerful Sparc chips, while expanding its use of mainstream processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Last year, the company acquired StorageTek, a storage and data services company, for $4 billion.

In Sun’s services business, revenue was up 20 percent, to $1.23 billion from $1.02 billion a year ago. Sales from its computer systems increased 15 percent over last year’s first quarter, for the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue increase. Software sales grew 17 percent.

“We grew all of our core businesses,” Mr. Schwartz said.

The strategy appears to be working in Sun’s crucial server business, which has lost market share in recent years. Sun’s share of the server market measured in revenue grew to 12.9 percent, from 11.2 percent during the second calendar quarter, according to IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

While declining to give a precise forecast, Mr. Lehman said he expected Sun to see a rise in revenue in “the high single digits” in the second quarter from the first quarter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/technology/27sun.html





For AMD, More Money Means More Problems
Tom Krazit

Success has its pitfalls, especially when you've awoken a sleeping giant.

For the past two years Advanced Micro Devices has made Intel, one of the world's most prominent companies, look bad. Better products and better timing have brought AMD significant market share and prominent new customers like Dell. But Intel is on the comeback with new processor designs better suited for the power-efficient multicore era, and it will beat AMD to the quad-core punch by using a design strategy that makes purists scoff but accountants happy.

The next six months will be tricky for AMD CEO Hector Ruiz. For starters, his company is taking a hit in the stock market after disclosing that its gross margin fell five points from the second quarter to the third, which ended last week. Part of that was due to the price war in the PC processor market, but AMD also is facing a challenge of overall demand is rising before new manufacturing technologies are completely ready.

"It's a good problem to have," said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research, since it means people want your products. "But AMD needs more factories." The company's design strategy for the quad-core era requires that it successfully navigate the transition to building smaller transistors at the same time it gets a new factory up and running.

AMD's current pickle is the result of its success, which makes it a little easier to swallow for company executives. Demand is high, but the company's dual-core processors still use its 90-nanometer manufacturing technology. Intel's chips, on the other hand, are built using the smaller transistors provided by its 65-nanometer manufacturing technology. Not only is AMD using larger transistors, but its dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 processors contain two processing cores integrated onto a single piece of silicon, or a die. This design has given AMD great performance during the past few years, but resulted in processors that were almost twice the size of its single-core chips.

Individual chips are cut from round silicon wafers. Manufacturers obsess over reducing the number of defects on those wafers, but there's always going to be some number of chips on a wafer that simply don't work. The problem is that when each individual chip is relatively large, there's an increased risk that a portion of that chip might contain a defect. Since it costs the same to make a wafer whether a chipmaker gets six chips or 60 chips from that batch, maximizing yields or the number of good die per wafer is essential to this business.

AMD's 90-nanometer dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 processors have a die size of 199 millimeters squared. By chip design standards, that's considered a little large, McCarron said. When AMD starts making dual-core Opterons on its 65-nanometer manufacturing technology, that die size is expected to go down to something a little more comfortable that will allow AMD to produce more chips per wafer. An AMD representative declined to comment on the die size for its first 65-nanometer products.

On a conference call following AMD's earnings results last week, Chief Financial Officer Bob Rivet noted that the company would see a cost benefit from its move to 65-nanometer processors in the fourth quarter, since the cost of building the wafer can be spread over more chips. He also pointed out that AMD still hasn't made the full transition to 300-millimeter-wide wafers from 200-millimeter wafers. Obviously, the larger the wafer, the more chips that can be cut from that wafer, and--not counting the one-time expense of purchasing 300-millimeter equipment--the extra costs of the larger wafer are negligible. "Every day will make the wafer costs go down because we will have better utilization and the die costs will go down due to the conversion to 65-nanometers," Rivet said. The company will also be able to produce more chips from the same wafers in order to satisfy demand, and performance will also likely be improved.

Intel, however, made the move to 65 nanometers in the fourth quarter of 2005, and to 300-millimeter wafers some time ago. Its Core Duo chip was its first processor built using the smaller transistors, and it announced earlier this month that it is now shipping more 65-nanometer processors than 90-nanometer chips.

This has given Intel the flexibility to leapfrog AMD to the quad-core generation of processors. Intel plans to build quad-core chips by taking two separate dual-core processors and putting them together in a single package, which it calls a multichip module (MCM).

The MCM allows Intel to get its designs out into the market faster than AMD. Intel's first quad-core processors are expected to become available next month, but AMD is waiting until the middle of next year to unveil its quad-core server processor.

It also allows Intel to maximize its yields by building smaller chips. For example, if one of the dual-core processors in the MCM gets knocked out by a defect, the whole product doesn't have to be tossed. Intel will still need to build dual-core chips for the mainstream and lower ends of the market for several years. It can build dual-core chips for those markets, and simply package two dual-core chips when it wants to ratchet up the performance.

AMD's chips are based on a different design than Intel's, and so the company believes it benefits most from an integrated core design, where all four cores on its quad-core chips will live on a single piece of silicon. Each processor core will be connected by a fast Hypertransport link that allows signals to flow between the cores at the chip's clock speed without having to leave the die. Intel's design means that if a core on one processor wants to exchange information with a core on the other processor, they have to do so at rates slower than the chip's clock speed, since the signals have to travel through the package.

Some chip enthusiasts--who occasionally resemble architectural critics--aren't too impressed with the MCM approach, since it fails to address Intel's reliance on external communications links to exchange information between processors. This was one of the factors that led to AMD's performance advantage up until the introduction of Intel's Core microarchitecture processors, which outdo AMD's chips on several benchmarks.

Intel thinks its quad-core processors will be extremely competitive on performance and power consumption, in part because the company will boost performance between now and when AMD's quad-core chips are ready, said Bill Kircos, a company spokesman. Still, Intel will use a mix of monolithic and MCM quad-core designs in the future, depending on the need for performance, low-cost chips, volumes, and speed, he said.

AMD's monolithic design also means its die sizes will likely increase when it moves from dual-core 65-nanometer processors to quad-core 65-nanometer processors, raising the cost and margins issue once again. Earlier this year, AMD showed it recognized the need to catch up to Intel's manufacturing pace with the announcement that it plans to introduce 45-nanometer processors just 18 months after rolling out its 65-nanometer chips, a transition that usually takes at least two years. But if it can continue to deliver performance that makes server customers drool with its quad-core chips, the cost questions will be overshadowed by the revenue padding its bottom line.
http://news.com.com/For+AMD%2C+more+...3-6129667.html





One year ago

Energy Crisis: It's Hard to Make a Buck When You Are Storing Everyone's Stuff for Free
Robert X. Cringely

Combining themes of several recent columns, we can see that a lot of money is being bet on a future user computing experience based on web services. Ubiquitous broadband along with hefty processing capability in your desktop, notebook, and coat pocket will bring entertainment, information, and even classic office services to us wherever we are, finally making real Sun's old motto that the network is the computer. But this future brings with it a number of expenses and vulnerabilities. For users, there's the dilemma of trusting our data to whomever. For service providers, there's the alternate dilemma of having to hold that data, because the cost of keeping that data online all the time will be huge. It's an energy crisis in the making.

The best bet in terms of who will be providing these future web services is simple: everyone. Microsoft will build hooks into Windows Vista, making it work seamlessly with a variety of services that will clearly be coming from a revitalized MSN. What Microsoft does, Yahoo will do and Google will do -- entertainment suites, search suites, communication suites, Office suites. As Dave Winer said last week on NerdTV, developers will give users whatever they want. The big boys will be competing furiously for market share, too, as you can see from the recent public wrestling over buying a piece of AOL. And remember, that's the FREE part of AOL they are fighting over.

Wherever the majors let us down, the startups will take over with yet more individual services and suites. AJAX porno, anyone?

But every one of these service providers, if they really do intend to be there when we need them with all our pictures, videos, love letters, and construction blueprints, are going to have to keep all that data available online 24/7, which is an unprecedented storage challenge, and one that the storage industry has NOT been working on.

As my Mama would say, this is a problem of having a big old back end.

Let's imagine some typical numbers. In the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen/Netratings, we have approximately 202 million Internet users, each of whom is eligible for a free Gmail account with two gigabytes of storage. Since my mother uses less than two gigs and I use more, let's do our rule-of-thumb estimate with that number, making the potential Gmail storage obligation 404 million gigabytes or about 400 petabytes. That's 400 times the current capacity of the Internet Archive, but it is also probably a tenth or less the total capacity of our PC and DVR hard drives today, so I think it is a very fair number to play with.

Of course, all that storage won't be required just for Gmail, unless Microsoft decides to create phantom users and take down its competitors through overwork. (Would that be legal? Maybe.) Rather, the 400 gigs will be shared among many competitors. But for this exercise it doesn't really matter because the issue is TOTAL cost, not who is bearing that cost.

Probably 80 percent of this capacity will be borne by the major players, with each of those taking a roughly equal share. That's MSN, Yahoo and Google, assuming that AOL will be somehow distributed between them, with each having about 100 petabytes of storage.

How much storage IS that, really? Well, the biggest enterprise hard drives available today hold 400 gigabytes each, which means each of these companies is going to need AT LEAST 250,000 drives, making Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital all very happy. Though with volume discounts that's really only about $25 million in disk drives -- far less than Microsoft's legal bills.

Now let's build a data center using those 250,000 drives. A disk array can hold about 32 drives in a 3U space. In a typical cabinet you can store about 12 arrays or a total of 384 drives. That cabinet sits on a 2' x 2' floor tile, plus some aisle space, or about 10 square feet of floor space for planning purposes. 250,000/384=651 cabinets or about 6,500 square feet. Heck, that's nothing when you read about all the hosting companies, with their 20,000 square foot data centers containing 20,000 servers each.
But just how many of those 20,000 square foot data centers are there, really? Do a little investigating and you'll find many hosting companies share the same building and claim the same 20,000 square feet.

The problem comes when you start to think about power consumption. It's not that disk drives consume so much power or that they haven't come down in consumption over the years, but each of those cabinets will require using modern drives about 3,300 watts to run while the full 100 petabytes will require 2.148 MEGAwatts. And all that heat has to go somewhere, so the building will typically use three to four times as much power for air conditioning as it does to run the drives, taking our total power consumption up to just under 10 megawatts, which at typical U.S. industrial power rates will cost about $5 million per year.

NOW we know why Google bought those 30 acres on the Columbia River in Oregon right next to a generating station from the Bonneville Power Administration. It's a source of cheap, uninterruptible power.

Of course nobody would build such a data center today because it would require 330 watts per square foot, and even the most modern facilities are provisioned only with 200 watts per square foot. Most are designed for 100 watts. So chances are any of these companies would spread their storage over two to three facilities.

This is the kind of planning and provisioning required to support FREE services. Add pictures and especially video and the total data storage requirements go up by another two orders of magnitude, much of that supposedly still supported by ads.

That's a heck of a lot of ads.

My point here is that we're entering another period of Internet exuberance. Yes, a lot has changed since 1999, but it's amazing how many of the ideas being pushed are the SAME ideas, just empowered now by dark fiber, cheap broadband, and six years of Moore's Law. And this time I think it will actually work and the Internet will change even more than it has the ways we live and work. But it isn't going to come easy and it isn't going to come cheap.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...20_000870.html





10,000 Fedora Downloads in Five Hours
Stephen Shankland

If you're curious what the appetite is for Fedora Core 6, Red Hat's newest version of Linux for hobbyists, the company has an answer: 10,000 downloads in five hours.

Doing the math, that works out to one download every 1.8 seconds. And considering that the minimum size of Fedora Core 6 is 3.4GB, it's no surprise Red Hat's servers fell to their knees after the release Tuesday.

Although not all the downloads taxed the servers. The 10,000 statistic includes downloads through BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that doesn't tax central download servers as much as direct downloads.
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6129149.html





Bug Causes Microsoft to Push Vista RTM to Nov. 8
Elizabeth Montalbano

PC manufacturers that expected to get their hands on the final version of Windows Vista today will have to wait a couple more weeks for the operating system, according to sources familiar with Microsoft Corp.'s plans.

Microsoft originally targeted today for Vista's release to manufacturing, but a last-minute bug that "took most of the Vista team by surprise" caused an unexpected delay, said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead at a Seattle high-tech company that tests its products for Vista. Allen also oversees hotfix.net.

Allen said the Vista team discovered the bug, which "would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall," in Vista Build 5824 on Oct. 13. The team fixed the bug a week later in Vista Build 5840, he said, but the delivery of the operating system to PC makers was delayed.

The team is now targeting a new date of Nov. 8 for Vista's release to manufacturing, Allen said. He also said that the business release of Vista, which Microsoft recently said is on track for release next month, "will barely make the end of November deadline."

A story in DigiTimes first reported the delay of Vista's release to manufacturing, citing Taiwanese PC makers.

"We aren't discussing a specific date in public for RTM, though we are in the final stages of development and we are on track for Vista's availability to businesses in November and general availability in January," said a Microsoft spokeswoman. She declined to comment on what timetables Microsoft has given to OEMs and other partners.

Vista's release to manufacturing isn't the only thing that Microsoft is keeping people waiting for. Consumers concerned about the change in Windows client licensing that will allow them to transfer a Vista license only once are still wondering what would happen if they switched out the motherboard and other components of a computer. Some power users who like to build computers from scratch and rebuild PCs frequently have wondered whether they will have to purchase a new Vista license every time they do this.

Microsoft is in no hurry to give them an answer. A week after users first raised the issue, Microsoft declined to comment on the issue, according to a representative from its public relations firm.

Computerworld's Eric Lai contributed to this report..
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9004437





Spoofing Bug Found in IE 7
Joris Evers

Security experts have found a weakness in Internet Explorer 7 that could help crooks mask phishing scams, the type of attack Microsoft designed the browser to thwart.

IE 7, released last week, allows a Web site to display a pop-up that can contain a spoofed Web address, security monitoring company Secunia said Wednesday. An attacker could exploit this weakness to trick people into believing they are on a trusted Web site when in fact they are viewing a malicious page, Secunia said in an alert.

"This makes it possible to only display a part of the address bar, which may trick users into performing certain unintended actions," Secunia said. The company has created a demonstration that shows a Microsoft Web address in the pop up window, but displays content from Secunia.

The problem lies in the way Web addresses are displayed in the IE 7 address bar, a Microsoft representative said in an e-mailed statement. An attacker could exploit the issue by tricking a user to click on a specially formatted link, the representative said.

The pop-up will block the left part of the Web address, Microsoft said. "Clicking in the browser window or in the address bar and scrolling within it will display the full URL, however," the company said. In case of the Secunia example, the true Secunia URL is revealed.

An attack won't work if a Web site is known to be part of a phishing scam, Microsoft said. The IE 7 phishing shield will identify such sites and warn the user, it said. Microsoft is not aware of any attacks that actually use the reported vulnerability, the company said.

IE 7 is the first major update to Microsoft's ubiquitous Web browser in five years. Security was the No. 1 investment for the update, Microsoft has said. The phishing protection has been a major focus for Microsoft, shielding against malicious Web sites designed to trick users into handing over their personal information.

The spoofing issue, rated "less critical" by Secunia, appears to be the first genuine, publicly disclosed flaw in the new Microsoft browser. An earlier problem, disclosed a day after the IE 7 release, lies in Outlook Express, not IE 7, Microsoft has said.

Microsoft will continue to look into the problem and may provide a browser patch to fix it, the company said. In addition, Microsoft chided the anonymous discloser of the flaw. The software maker prefers that security issues be disclosed privately so it can repair them before they get publicly known.
http://news.com.com/Spoofing+bug+fou...3-6129626.html





From Redmond With Love

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent us a cake for the upcoming release of Firefox 2!



A big thanks to Redmond, Washington!

P.S.: No, it was not poisoned
http://oregonstate.edu/~wenzelf/temp...dericiana.html





Secure VoIP Calling, Free Software, and the Right to Privacy
David Sugar

All free nations in the world today recognize certain basic principles, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the freedom of privacy. These values that we all share were articulated by and fought for by people such as Voltaire, Jefferson, and Bolivar. This common heritage of freedom is today under attack by those who wish to turn the clock back on human progress. We all know that a government that lives in such fear of its own citizens that it must spy on them and claims the authority to do so en-mass and unchallengeable is not a legitimate government of the people it claims to serve.

There is an interesting story about George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. At one point some of Washington's officers were plotting rebellion against him, and he accidentally received a dispatch that was meant for one of the conspirators. Having opened it, and read it, he realized what had happened, and then asked the courier to please apologize because the letter was not meant for him. He choose to act as best he could in a manner as if he had not read the letter. For Washington understood that even at a time of war, there are certain ideals that must never be sacrificed, otherwise even if victory was achieved, it is not worth the price of a nation nobody would wish to live in.

With these thoughts, we chose, on the first Monday of this October, to release a stack for secure VOIP calling, as free software developed through GNU Telephony, a loose organization of developers who specialize in free software for telecommunications. We accomplished this by creating a free software stack that implements Phil Zimmerman's ZRTP, as well as the Secure RTP spec. This is now part of the GNU RTP Stack, ccrtp. We chose to make this available for immediate use in the most compelling way, by having available at the same time, a complete secure softphone client anyone can also download and use and which implements the secure calling features in an easy to use manner. This client was the Twinkle Softphone client, developed by Michel De Boer, and modified with his help to meet this goal in time with our initial release.

Secure calling VOIP using ZRTP operates much like ssh in concept. The keys for communication are generated locally, rather than using an external certificate authority, hence preventing weak or poisoned certificates which SRTP potentially allows. Fingerprint session signatures are shown and cached much like the ssh host fingerprints, so that one can determine if there is a man in the middle decrypting at one end and encrypting to another.

What we have developed does not interfere with lawful police investigations, since the end point can still be compromised with physical access, presumably executed as part of a lawful and judicially supervised court order. But it does prevent arbitrary and mass spying on what people say, which must come to an end before all other freedoms are lost. With additional technologies including tls secured SIP and anonymizing connection proxies, it is possible to also reduce associative information signal that intelligence so desperately wishes to mine, and that is a goal of later phases of this project.

Since it is free software, anyone can download and use it. Since it is offered as a library, it can be used to produce applications, like Twinkle, that can perform secure communications by design, rather than as an afterthought. This technology is here to stay. There are enough people who have set it up now around the world, including some I personally showed. The source is available and mirrored worldwide. Binaries have been build and now distributed in Debian. Much of that was all done very rapidly and early on at the start of the month, the rest while I was in Maturin speaking at the IVth International Free Knowledge Conference, which I will write about next week, to deliberately make sure it was immediately usable and widely disseminated.

This technology we are bringing to free VOIP software was of course first proposed, in a proprietary form, and as an external proxy known as zfone, by Phil Zimmerman. Much of the work in developing secure calling in the GNU RTP Stack was done by people like Werner Dittman and Federico Pouzols, and with lots of Michel De Boer from Twinkle. Whether you are a head of state wishing to communicate in private, a union organizer within a company, or simply talking to your family and friends, you have a basic right and expectation of privacy. We intend to do everything in our power to help further that goal.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...ght_to_privacy




Phones for That Other System
Roy Furchgott

MAKING phone calls using voice-over-Internet protocol seems not only inexpensive, but so very modern. Known by the zippy acronym VoIP (rhymes with practically nothing), it lets you make voice calls over the Internet to anywhere in the world for pennies; no old-fashioned phone company required.

But as modern as the service seems, the VoIP phone gear has been as fashion-oriented as an avocado-green rotary phone — and about four times as large. Until recently, the best you could hope for was an “operators standing by” headset and microphone, which had to be tethered to a computer, which was itself tethered to a router.

Over the last year, however, VoIP providers like the industry leaders Skype and Vonage have been offering handsets that look and work more like the phones people are used to. VoIP phones are compact and wireless, and in some cases double as standard landline phones. There are systems that can convert your existing landline phones to work with VoIP, and Wi-Fi phones that do not even need a computer to work, just a wireless Internet connection.

These new, familiar-looking VoIP phones are being cranked out to make VoIP services appealing to people who are less than tech whizzes, and to give manufacturers a chance to sell yet another handset for your home. “Anything that makes these services feel more like the phone services that people have 100 years of experience using is to their advantage,” said Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

There are essentially two types of VoIP consumer services: Skype, which has a proprietary technological standard, and most everything else, using a common version of a standard called SIP. While either can make calls over the Internet, Skype-certified phones won’t necessarily work on other services, like Vonage, and vice versa. You may have to read some fine print to find out, or just buy a phone certified for the service you choose.

Figuring out which service is best for you takes a little work with a spreadsheet. Some VoIP services, like Vonage, SunRocket, BroadVoice and AT&T CallVantage, are similar to traditional phone plans, charging a flat rate, sometimes with extra fees for some calls — for instance, to certain foreign countries.

VoIP services from the computer side of the industry, like Skype, Yahoo, AOL and MSN, usually offer free calling to other members using their service. You may want to choose the service already used by the people you want to call. Those companies do charge a fee for calls to and from people not on their service.

No matter, similar phones are available for either kind of plan.

Just like regular phones, VoIP phones need to be connected to a service provider, in this case through a broadband Internet connection. The latest phones, like the Netgear SPH101 for Skype ($250 before rebates) and the UT Starcom F1000 series for Vonage ($130), connect using Wi-Fi and have all of the VoIP software built into the phone. Since these phones connect to the Internet without a computer, they can work even when your computer is off, and anywhere within range of a Wi-Fi connection.

A test of these two phones found both to have very good sound quality — better than the average cellphone. But that quality, as with all VoIP phones, is partly contingent on your Internet connection. “Congestion on your line matters,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for the market research firm NPD. “If it’s 6 or 7 at night and everyone is on the PC, you might experience some quality issues.”

Even the latest phones have their limits. Neither the Netgear nor the UT Starcom phone will work at a Wi-Fi hot spot that requires sign-in from a Web browser, so you can’t fire them up at the local Starbucks. Also, getting them on a network may require a password, but in a test the Skype Netphone would not accept the 13-character Wi-Fi network password, requiring instead a 26-character pass code, which wasn’t easy to find or to type into the phone correctly.

The UT Starcom phone couldn’t sign onto my network until the software was updated, but couldn’t be updated until it was signed onto my network. A second UT Starcom phone with the newer software connected easily.

Much simpler to connect was the VTech IP8100-2 for Vonage. This phone comes with a base station that plugs directly into your modem or router and then connects wirelessly to two portable handsets. Again because the base bypasses the computer, it will work with any system.

Once the base was connected, the phones recognized the network, and calls were easily placed. One person I called said the phone sounded a tad “tinny,” but it was clear enough for her to hear a vacuum cleaner running in the background.

The phones aren’t cheap; the VTech IP8100-2 lists for $150. But you can save money if you use cordless phones that you already own — with the help of an adapter that turns your existing phones into a VoIP set.

These adapters are generally easy to connect. Some, like the D-Link USB phone adapter ($60 from Skype), connect to your computer and then require software installation to run. The computer has to be on for your VoIP phone to connect. A more elegant method is to get an adapter like the Linksys PAP2 ($60), which attaches directly to your router and can operate when your computer is off. It can support any 2.4- or 5.8-gigahertz cordless phone, and can be used to connect to a number of different providers.

Adding a new system can also mean a proliferation of handsets around the house. But the telephonic clutter can be controlled through dual phones, which are single handsets that connect to both a landline and VoIP. In a test the RTX DualPhone ($110), a Skype cordless phone, was both easy to set up and offered good sound quality. Switching between Skype and landline was as easy as pressing the appropriate send button.

While these phones are inexpensive to use, they aren’t necessarily a replacement for the standard landline. They won’t work when power is down, while standard landlines do (the system still takes messages, however, and can forward calls to another line).

Then there is the 911 problem. While you can use any Skype to make calls from any computer anywhere, the service doesn’t know where your computer is, and can’t route an emergency team to you. Some services, like Vonage, offer Enhanced 911, which lets you register the location of your phone.

That doesn’t mean a VoIP phone is pointless. It can be a money-saving second line. If you stripped frills from your landline, like message service, caller ID, call forwarding and other features, the savings may be far greater than the cost of VoIP service. VoIP offers all of those frills and more at no additional cost. “Their pitch is to be as much as possible like your old phone service, but cheaper, with more features,” Mr. Rubin said.

For VoIP, it’s still early in the game. Companies are putting together even more blended phones, like cellphones that double as Wi-Fi phones, and a standard is being developed that would allow a handset to move seamlessly among cellular, Wi-Fi, VoIP and landline calls. Now, if you could only get one in retro-cool avocado green.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/te.../26basics.html





T-Mobile Tests Dual Wi-Fi and Cell Service
Ken Belson

Yesterday T-Mobile became the first major mobile phone carrier in the United States to begin selling service that allows a single handset to communicate over both cellular networks and Wi-Fi hot spots.

The first phones, which are available to consumers in Seattle on a trial basis, link to T-Mobile’s cellular network outdoors and to Wi-Fi routers at homes, in offices and in other locations like airports and hotels. This lets customers avoid using some of their cellular minutes and increases coverage in places where signals are typically weak, like basements and rooms without windows.

To gain access to the service, called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, customers must buy a phone that works on both networks. T-Mobile is selling a choice of two handsets that cost $49.99 for customers who sign up for a two-year rate plan for at least $39.99 a month. Subscribers are charged $19.99 a month in addition to their regular cellular plan fees.

Customers also need a wireless router, which is free with a rebate. The router is then connected to any available broadband line for home or office use. The phones connect not just to the wireless router, but also at any of 7,000 Wi-Fi hot spots that T-Mobile operates at Starbucks coffee shops, Hyatt Hotels and other public locations.

T-Mobile has set up a Web site, www.theonlyphoneyouneed.com, for customers who want to sign up for the service.

Since customers can make unlimited calls using their broadband connections, the service represents a threat to Vonage, SunRocket and other companies that offer phone plans over high-speed Internet connections. The service also gives T-Mobile a leg up in competing with Sprint and other cellular carriers that are trying to develop similar services.

The dual-use phone service may appeal most to younger consumers who do not have a traditional phone line and rely solely on cellular phones and broadband lines.

“For the below-30 age segment, it’s a no-brainer,” said Roger Entner, a wireless industry analyst at Ovum, a consulting firm. “This is also a threat for other wireless carriers because it fixes the problem of poor coverage inside homes.”

Though consumers conceivably will use fewer cellular minutes with these phones, Mr. Entner said T-Mobile still benefits because consumers have to buy some kind of rate plan. T-Mobile can also lower its costs because some phone traffic that would otherwise travel on its cellular network will move to a competitor’s broadband network.

T-Mobile may also avoid having to build as many base stations and antennas to reach inside homes and offices.

A company spokesman, Peter Dobrow, declined to say how long the trial in the Seattle area would continue, or on T-Mobile’s plans to introduce the service elsewhere.

Earlier this month, however, Robert Dotson, the chief executive of T-Mobile USA, said his company would develop services that would eliminate the need for traditional phones.

Sprint has been working with cable companies to come up with services that integrate its cellular network with the broadband and video services offered by cable companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/te.../24mobile.html




Review: Fastap Puts Twist on Cell Typing
Bruce Meyerson

There are only so many ways to lay out the keys on a cell phone for typing words, or so you'd think.

There's the traditional 10- number telephone keypad with the letters of the alphabet bunched three and four to a button. Even with cutsie abbreviations, typing is an arduous affair. If you want a full typewriter keyboard with one letter per key, then you probably have to settle for a bulkier BlackBerry-like device.

Innovative solutions to this stalemate have been rare, and only the BlackBerry 7100 series with its novel two-letters-per-key design can be judged a raging success. Another notable design, from Nokia, with a funky fold-out keyboard resembling a Star Wars wing fighter, has sold well enough to appear on three devices.

The Fastap keyboard from Digit Wireless offers a surprising new twist: The letters appear on 26 small raised buttons positioned at every corner between the standard keys found on a typical cell phone. The letters are placed in alphabetical order rather than the "QWERTY" layout found on typewriters, BlackBerries, Treos and the like.

For now, you can't get a phone with Fastap through one of the big national carriers, but Digit says that's due to change next year. That sounds plausible because the Fastap keyboard is already gaining traction with two smaller wireless providers, Alltel Corp. of Arkansas and Telus Corp. of Canada.

Telus Mobility launched the first handset with Fastap in late 2004, and the customer response has been so encouraging the company has introduced two more models with the keyboard, the third arriving last month.

According to Telus, the Fastap keyboard is fueling higher usage of text messaging and other premium services that generate extra revenue. On average, Fastap users send more than twice as many text messages as Telus customers with a standard phone. Likewise, Fastap handsets generate twice as much revenue from text messaging and mobile Internet usage as comparable handsets.

I tried out the Fastap keyboard on an otherwise ordinary LG handset from Alltel. Without a doubt, typing was swifter compared to the usual process of locating a letter on a number key and then tapping it multiple times to choose from among the three or four letters on that button.

My biggest complaint was that the letters were printed on the keys in a hard-to-read gray. The "Q" key was pretty indistinguishable from the "O" key, and so there were plenty of typos in my messages where a word like "word" was misspelled as "wqrd."

Since it's easy for a thumb to stray onto a number key from the slightly raised perch of a letter button, Fastap is programmed to decide which one the user meant to press. If it comes mid-word, for example, the error-prevention software presumes the number press was accidental, and chooses the letter.

The dedicated letter keys also make it possible to program one or more as a shortcut to an application. On the Alltel phone, for example, holding down the "W" key will launch the Web browser, cutting several key strokes from the process. A carrier can preconfigure these shortcuts or allow users to set their own, a freedom Alltel chose not to provide on its handset.

Another trick enabled by the Fastap keyboard is that you can just dial the letters of a vanity toll free phone number (let's say 1-8XX-NO-SWEAT) instead of hunting for the corresponding letters on the dial pad.

For those who'd prefer a QWERTY keyboard in a phone-sized package, the Nokia E70 may be the way to go, though it may be too pricey for American tastes. You'll need to pay the list price of $450 because the E70 isn't being sold directly by U.S. cellular providers, which unlike foreign carriers have conditioned customers to expect big device discounts in exchange for contract commitments.

The E70, compatible with the Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile USA networks, is a snazzy phone with letter keys far bigger than the buttons on most handheld computers. The hidden keyboard flips out on two hinges over the screen, extending all the way in the other direction to form wings on both ends of the display, with half the letters on either side. When the keyboard is open, a wing gripped in each hand, the display rotates 90 degrees.

Aside from price, another drawback to the E70 may be size, which is a notch bigger in weight and dimensions compared with the two previous Nokia models featuring this keyboard design.

It's rare that you come across a truly novel new approach to an old problem, and if nothing else, the Fastap keyboard is that. It will be interesting to see if this new mouse trap catches on.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-25-17-15-16





Computer Beats Fastest Text Messenger
Travis Reed

Ben Cook's fingers flurried so fast you couldn't see what he was doing until he had done it. But when the cell-phone screens cleared, the world's fastest text messenger was handed his first head-to-head defeat Tuesday: a voice-recognition computer had bested his record time on a complicated 27-word message.

"I'm a little humbled to have been beaten like that," the 18-year-old Provo, Utah, man said with a smile after the race.

The exhibition was sponsored by Nuance Communications Inc., a company that hopes to deploy its new software across several wireless carriers next year.

Nuance recruited Cook to test him against their software before he embarks on a two-year Mormon mission. He has gained celebrity for the text title and makes $1,000 a day doing public appearances for phone company Cricket.

Two Nuance employees also participated, one using a cell phone with a predictive text program that turns partial words into full ones and another with a full QWERTY keyboard on a Blackberry.

Neither came close to Cook, who used basic "3-key typing," in which several letters share the same number key on a phone pad. To get the desired character it can take three or more clicks.

Each contestant took turns completing a text message in three rounds of increasing difficulty. All spelling, grammar and capitalization had to match the sample text precisely.

The first message, "I'm on my way. I'll be there in 30 minutes," took over a minute with the predictive software, 29 seconds with a Blackberry and 16 seconds for the record holder. The voice recognition software finished it in under 8 seconds.

The final message was a duplicate of one that brought Cook a world record. It read "The razor toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygo centrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

Cook finished in 48 seconds, six seconds more than his record. But it took the Nuance program just 16 seconds before the 20-foot screens set up on either side of the contestants flashed red to signal the finish.

The software wouldn't ordinarily be programmed to handle those Latin words, said Michael Thompson, Nuance general manager and vice president of search and communications. But it does come ready to understand about 500,000 others in English.

Thompson couldn't say how much the service would cost consumers because it will likely vary by carrier. He said it'll be available in some new phones, but existing phones can download software for use as well.

Nuance envisions it as a tool for drivers and others who want to send text messages, instead of calling or leaving a voice mail, but don't have time to sit and type.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-24-17-41-53





Blind Web Surfers Sue for Accessibility
Seth Sutel

"Links list dialogue." "Links list view." "Your Account - Two of 164." This is what the Internet sounds like to Chris Danielsen. Danielsen is blind. He's using a software program called Jaws that converts the text on a Web page into a computerized voice that comes out through a speaker, allowing him to surf the Web using keyboard commands instead of a mouse - the same way lots of blind people use the Internet.

In this case, his computer is listing all the Web links on the page he's on and telling him that the highlighted link his cursor is on now will take him to the "Your Account" section on Wal-Mart's Web site.

Danielsen, who writes a blog called "The Voice of the Nation's Blind" for the National Federation of the Blind, says accessing the Internet has been a "huge boon" for blind people. It's allowed them to accomplish a great number of tasks on their own that would otherwise present difficulties or require the help of a sighted person, such as banking, buying plane tickets and shopping for things like groceries and music.

But like any evolving technology, accessing the Internet has hardly been a smooth ride for the blind. Some sites can be difficult to navigate, particularly if they contain relatively few text links and rely more on graphics and other visual elements that screen-reading software such as Jaws can't interpret.

That's why the NFB, an organization that represents blind people, is suing Target Corp., saying that its Web site is inaccessible to blind Internet users.

Last month a federal judge in California allowed the NFB's case to proceed, rejecting Target's argument that its Web site wasn't subject to the Americans With Disabilities Act, a 1990 law that requires retailers and other public places to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Target argued that the law only covered physical spaces.

The case, which is entering a pretrial phase called discovery in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, could set an important precedent for applying federal accessibility law to the Internet.

Target said in a statement that its Web site was "committed to providing an online experience that is accessible to all of our guests. Despite the lawsuit brought forward by the National Federation of the Blind, we have always and will continue to implement new technologies to our Web site."

John Pare, a spokesman for the NFB, said most Web sites are far easier to navigate than Target's. In a demonstration of screen-reading software for The Associated Press, Danielsen showed that many links on Target's side were unintelligible to the Jaws software, and that the final purchase required the use of a mouse, something even the most sophisticated blind Web surfer would have trouble with. However, he was able to navigate other sites and purchased a CD from Amazon.

Jaws, made by Freedom Scientific, is a popular kind of screen-reading software, but there are others, including Window-Eyes, made by GW Micro, and Hal, made by Dolphin Computer Access.

Many Web sites already have made major progress in becoming accessible to the blind, and some, such as those run by the government, are required to do so by law.

Yet surfing the Internet is not always worry-free for the blind. Crista Earl, the head of Web operations for the American Foundation for the Blind in New York, said graphics that don't contain textual labels - which can be read by screen-reading software - are a common obstacle for blind Internet users, as are "forms" that are unlabeled. Forms are the little boxes where you insert data, such as a book title you wanted to search for.

The decision to hold Target's Web site to the same standards of accessibility as its physical store under the Americans with Disabilities Act was considered a victory by many advocates for the blind, but at the same time others worry that the ruling could be read too narrowly.

Not every business or Web site is subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act, said John D. Kemp., a lawyer with the Washington law firm Powers, Pyles, Sutter & Verville P.C. The ADA applies mainly to public places such as restaurants, retailers, movie theaters and health care institutions, explained Kemp, who has long worked on compliance issues related to disabilities, employment and technology.

For an electronic retailer such as Amazon.com, which has no physical store, the law is unclear, Kemp said. "There is no well defined policy in this area at all."

However, Kemp noted that many businesses, such as banks, see a strong business rationale for making their sites accessible, and have moved aggressively to do so.

Meanwhile, other retailers are also moving to adapt their Web sites to screen-reading software. Kelly Groehler, a spokeswoman for Best Buy Co., says the company has made a number of changes to its site since late last year, including incorporating "alt tags" - or text that labels items like graphics - into its site.

Best Buy also moved code for drop-down menus to the bottom of the page, where it's less likely to duplicate other elements on the page. "We're trying to be proactive here," Groehler said. Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella says the site has made sure it is "reasonably accessible" to the blind.

Other retailers are making similar efforts, but it remains a challenge due to the continuing evolution in the technologies used by blind people to surf the Internet, says Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation for online retailers.

"As the retailers' Web sites continue to evolve to stay competitive in the marketplace, sometimes the technologies necessary to do that are a little bit ahead of where the screen-readers are," Silverman said. "It's a very fast-moving environment. Retailers want to serve all their customers, including blind people."

Internet search giant Google Inc. is getting into the act as well. In July it launched a project to identify and rank Web sites that offer significant accessibility to the blind.

As more information and services migrate online, keeping access open to it is of paramount importance to advocates for the blind.

"The blind have more access to information than they ever had in history - but that's only true to the extent that Web accessibility is maintained," Danielsen said. "The technology is out there, and we don't need barriers to be put in our way. Give us a way in."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-24-13-46-06





But will my PC blink "12:00 AM"?

A “Napster Moment” for TV Downloads

The “Tape it off the Internet” project is currently in the final stages of the closed Beta program. TIOTI might very well be a realistic representation of what the future of TV will look like.

The TIOTI project approach to socialize and optimize your TV Download experience. TIOTI combines great design, TV-torrent tracking, favorites, recommendations, RSS feeds, tagging, groups, wiki’s, and a lot more ‘Web 2.0′ stuff.

In an interview we did with Paul Pod, one of the founders of the project, he said that their goal is to create a “Napster moment” for TV downloads.

I don’t know if you remember downloading music before Napster came along, but it was an experience not dissimilar to the BitTorrent experience today. And remember when you tried out Napster for the first time? We’re aiming to create that Napster moment for TV downloads. Web 2.0 is neither here nor there - what matters is good architecture and fantastic design. For non-geeks, it’s all about the user experience - if it sucks they don’t come back.

Last May we were able to give you a sneak peek behind the screens. Over the past months a lot of work has been done to optimize and add features to the site. Some of the new (working) features that are worth mentioning are RSS feeds for your favorite shows, and integration with Amazon and the iTunes store.

The episode view includes links to downloads from the iTunes store.

The Show page includes links to DVD’s from the Amazon store.

TIOTI offers RSS feeds for ever show, but also feeds for your favorite shows. This makes it easy to stay up-to-date.

There is no official release date for the public Beta yet, but it won’t take long now.
http://torrentfreak.com/a-napster-mo...-tv-downloads/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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