[JackSpratts]

I Was Disappeared by Salon

When journalists threaten to sue
Debbie Nathan

On August 24, the online magazine Salon published my opinion piece "Why I Need to See Child Porn." It argued that we need a government system to vet researchers' and journalists' qualifications, allowing them to test government claims about the prevalence, content and profitability of internet child pornography images without fear of legal sanctions.

The next morning, August 25, Salon received communication from New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, threatening to sue Salon and me for libel if my article were not immediately removed from Salon's site. Among other things, my piece had discussed Eichenwald's August 20 Times article, "With Child Sex Sites on the Run, Nearly Nude Photos Hit the Web."

Within hours after receiving Eichenwald's threat of a lawsuit, Salon pulled "Why I Need to See Child Porn," along with dozens of letters responding to it. My piece was not archived on Salon's site and neither were the letters. All the material was irretrievably removed. A correction was run stating it was "inaccurate" that journalists and other researchers have "no protection from prosecution if they viewed visual depictions of child pornography." On August 26, Salon's editor, Joan Walsh, wrote on Salon's forum for subscribers, Table Talk, that my article was taken down because its "central premise" was "impossible to just correct." She did not mention that Salon had been contacted by Eichenwald and threatened with a lawsuit.

I was not consulted about the decision to irretrievably remove my opinion piece and the letters. I had no input into the language of the correction.

After Salon pulled the article and ran its first correction, Eichenwald continued to threaten a suit unless another correction was run. On August 31 Salon ran a second correction, based primarily on language supplied by Eichenwald and his lawyer. I had no input into the decision to publish this correction, nor any input into its wording. Salon gave me no opportunity to respond to the correction.

The first correction had been published in a format allowing the public to respond by clicking a link on the same page the correction appeared on. People could read the responses sent in by clicking on the same page, just under the correction. During the next few days beginning August 25, Salon posted over 150 responses.

When Eichenwald demanded a second correction, he specified it must be "locked" so no public response could be submitted on the correction page or be readable from there. Subsequently, Salon formatted the second correction so it is impossible to send or read responses on the same page as the correction. Postings now can be made only by paid subscribers, to Salon's "Table Talk" section. No discussion topic links in "Table Talk" are marked as having anything specifically to do with "Why I Need to See Child Porn."

I am extremely disappointed with Salon's handling of this incident. Nevertheless, I trust public discussion will continue about the issues my article raised.

For more information, see:

Alia Malek, "Child Pornography: To See or Not to See?" (Columbia Journalism Review CJRDaily, September 21, 2006)
http://counterpunch.org/nathan09232006.html





Child Pornography: To See, or Not to See?
Alia Malek

Writing in Salon on August 24, Debbie Nathan wanted to start a conversation about child pornography. She raised the question: How can journalists report on child pornography when it is a crime to even look at such images? Nathan argued that journalists should be protected from prosecution for possession of child pornography if that possession is for legitimate reporting purposes, including, for example, testing government claims about the prevalence of child pornography.

Instead, the conversation came to a screeching halt.

According to Nathan's article, her inquiry was rooted in her own research this summer into child porn on the Internet. In the course of her reporting, she inadvertently stumbled onto a Web site that featured illegal images. She became consumed with a fear that she would be arrested and prosecuted, recalling the prosecution and incarceration in 2000 of freelance journalist Lawrence Matthews in Washington, D.C. on charges that he had received and transmitted pornographic images of children in the course of his research on the topic. She reached out to other journalists and researchers who had looked into the subject, and heard stories of people abandoning the enterprise because of the risk of prosecution.

Then on August 20, the New York Times published a piece by Kurt Eichenwald that exposed a group of new Web sites purporting to have legal images of children but which in fact feature images that are arguably pornographic. As Eichenwald explained, courts have decided that nudity is not required for images to be deemed child pornography. The Times article was accompanied by a disclaimer that stated: "Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download, or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities."

Eichenwald's article, beyond just reporting on the trend, included lurid descriptions of the kinds of images found on these "child modeling" sites, though he says he relied on law enforcement and chat-room descriptions of the images rather than firsthand viewing. Nathan, however, assumed that Eichenwald had seen the images himself, and kicked off her article by provocatively saying that Eichenwald had spent time recently "look[ing] at a lot of kiddie porn." Though she discussed Eichenwald's tactics and opined on their legality, she ultimately was arguing that "the government prohibits reporters and other legitimate investigators from doing front-line research into child pornography," because she believes such work requires journalists to view illegal images and risk being prosecuted.

Uncontested in Nathan's argument is the notion that journalists have to actually see these images to test "government claims as to how prevalent child pornography really is and what makes an image pornographic."

On the same day Nathan's article was posted on Salon, the magazine pulled it and any letters it generated, and issued two corrections. The first correction emphasized that the law "does offer some legal protection for journalists and other researchers" and that an "affirmative defense may exist that would protect such work under certain circumstances, and the opinion asserted by Nathan that her work ... would constitute a violation of the law was inaccurate."

(An affirmative defense is one that does not deny the truth of the allegations against the defendant but gives some other reason why the defendant cannot be held liable.)

The second correction stressed that Eichenwald's article was "not based on reviewing the content of the sites themselves" and reiterated the legal disclaimer that the Times originally ran with Eichenwald's piece, asserting that journalists who come to possess these images inadvertently and who report them to the federal authorities are protected from prosecution.

With Salon disavowing Nathan's entire article, the matter seemed settled. But the two questions at the heart of this episode are worth considering. First, the question Nathan addressed in her ill-fated article: Should journalists be protected from prosecution when they intentionally seek out child pornography for reporting purposes? And this one, which Eichenwald vigorously answers in the negative: Do journalists need to see these images -- and therefore break the law -- to adequately report on the subject?

The Times limited its interpretation of the federal statute's provision for an affirmative defense to the case of inadvertent viewing. But a journalist like Nathan, who wants to see the images for her reporting, by definition would break the law and risk prosecution. (For a detailed review of the law as it pertains to journalists, see "Reporting on Child Pornography: A First Amendment Defense for Viewing Illegal Images?" by Clay Calvert, Kentucky Law Journal, Fall 2000/2001.)

We asked Calvert, a professor of communications and law and co-director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment at the Pennsylvania State University, to fill us in on the state of the law and any affirmative defenses as they apply to journalists:

"It is still very risky for journalists today to receive and transmit, during their investigation of a story or a report, images of child pornography. The Matthews case makes this clear in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the general line of Supreme Court precedent is that journalists are not exempt from generally applicable laws that apply equally to all citizens. Clearly child pornography statutes are such laws of general applicability, so journalists take a risk today when investigating child pornography as they come across it on the Web, even with the exception spelled out in the federal statute pertaining to destruction of the images and reporting the matter to law enforcement officials. That defense under federal statute [18 U.S.C. 2252A (d)] only applies, by its terms, to the possession of 'less than three images of child pornography.' In other words, basically a journalist would be allowed under this defense to only possess two images, and that's not a lot of content to look at for a full-blown investigative article."

Nathan argues that to report on child pornography, journalists will be forced to take the government's word about, for example, what these images are, where they are, who is involved, the extent of the problem, and how much revenue is generated. And by extension, so will the public. Her argument is that the government cannot be trusted.

Indeed, in May of this year, a piece in Legal Times tried to ascertain the source of a statistic, used by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, on the prevalence of consumers of child porn on the Internet. As it turns out, both the media and the government were using a number -- that at any given time 50,000 predators are on the Internet prowling for children -- that seemed to come out of thin air. The media cited the government and the government cited the media as the source for the number.

But does contesting such a government claim require viewing the images? For Legal Times, at least, it did not.

In a heated exchange in the comments section of the blog on Open Democracy between August 25 and September 2, Eichenwald asserted that journalists don't need to see the images to adequately report on the subject. Eichenwald quotes his own e-mail to Nathan on the blog, saying that her "apparent belief that we need to study child porn images has all the earmarks of a rubbernecking obsession on the grotesque." He argued that journalists can trust descriptions of the images given by the courts and law enforcement officials. He reiterated these comments to CJR Daily in a phone interview.

This is tricky territory. We understand the importance of challenging government claims, especially when labels are used to stigmatize people and silence debate. For example, in the context of "terrorism," we have more than anecdotal evidence that the government has falsely accused individuals and misled the public. But such investigations did not require journalists to engage in terrorism themselves, or to break the law in any other way, to find out the truth.

In the context of reporting on child pornography, it seems the only reason to see the images (and thereby break the law) is to determine whether or not they are actually pornographic, and we haven't yet seen credible evidence that the press is being lied to and manipulated in this context. Some might see this as a chicken/egg problem. But the most expedient methods of accessing information are rejected by journalists all the time when those methods are illegal. Those who argue the need to see child porn to understand it too easily dismiss the fact that not only is viewing illegal, but that it also prolongs the exploitation of these children -- because society has determined that merely seeing children in these poses victimizes the child. Similarly, we recognize the tension this creates with our role as the Fourth Estate.

Whether this situation necessitates a privilege analogous to what journalists seek in a federal shield law is perhaps a discussion worth having. Of course, such a discussion would require -- as in the shield law debate -- an examination of the question, Who is a journalist? And in a profession that requires no licensing, there is the very real danger that pedophiles could hide behind our privilege to indulge their criminality.


Alia Malek writes Those who argue the need to see child porn to understand it too easily dismiss the fact that not only is viewing illegal, but that it also prolongs the exploitation of these children.

Claptrap. Not all child pornography would fall under the category of "exploitation" and one need only to reference the Michael Jackson trial and how Prosecutors sought to indict Mr. Jackson on child pornography charges over a coffee table book; A book by the way that had been in the possession of the District Attorney who earlier sought to indict Mr. Jackson on similar charges but failed.

Alia Malek does CJR a disservice by reciting the usual bumper sticker cookiee cutter echochamber phrases.

Posted by: Nelson G


Alia Malek should brush up on her logic. She quotes Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez as saying that 50,000 child-sex predators are prowling the Internet, "a number," she says, "that seemed to come out of thin air," but then writes, appropos of whether kiddie-porn images are truly pornographic, that "we haven't yet seen credible evidence that the press is being lied to and manipulated in this context." If a made-up figure is not evidence of manipulation, what is? Given the Bush administration's unparalleled record of mendacity, any journalist who is not suspicious should be drummed out of the profession. Malek also suggests that a reporter who wishes to evaluate such claims first-hand is somehow comparable to one who believes he or she must engage in an act of terrorism in order to undrestand what the phenomenon is all about. But the comparison is speciouis. Viewing a kiddie-porn web site is analagous to visiting Ground Zero in order to see the results of a criminal act. She similarly puts the car before the horse in asserting that looking at an allegedly pornographic photo somehow "prolongs the exploitation of these children." But a photo is merely a record of an act that has already taken place. In a touching display of political deference, finally, she concludes that reporters should heed the law and not conduct such research because something called "society" has has forbidden it. But this is exactly the problem: the Bush administration has launched a major crusade around this issue, yet forbids journalists to engage in the most elementary fact-checking to determine that its claims are correct. This is positively Orwellian, yet CJR backs the administration up. Clearly the lapdog press has learned nothing from missteps over WMDs and the War on Terrorism. How sad!

Posted by: Dan Lazare
http://www.cjrdaily.org/behind_the_n..._see_or_no.php





24 Years Later, Believe It or Not, the Who’s Next
Alan Light

SIX years ago, at a press conference to kick off a tour by the Who, the singer Roger Daltrey announced that he was working on songs for the band’s new album. The bass player John Entwistle chimed in that he was doing the same. This news shocked Pete Townshend, the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, though it was mostly a bluff meant to prod him into action.

After much further cajoling from Mr. Daltrey, Mr. Townshend finally sat down to try writing the music last year. But he had no idea what he wanted the new record to sound like — especially since the results would be the illustrious band’s first album since 1982.

“You come up against such enormous preconceptions about what would constitute material for a new Who album,” he said. “It had to deal with the past and the future and contain that magic ingredient, and I tried to figure out what that was.”

The result is “Endless Wire,” coming out Tuesday on Universal Republic Records. A sprawling work, it ranges from the first songs Mr. Townshend and Mr. Daltrey have ever recorded as an acoustic duo to some that hold their own next to the band’s finest stadium rockers. At its heart is “Wire & Glass,” a 10-song “mini-opera” that is Mr. Townshend’s latest foray into extended musical narrative, an approach he pioneered with the rock operas “Tommy” and “Quadrophenia.”

“The stripped-down acoustic-vocal stuff is what slays me,” Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s lead singer and a longtime champion of the older band, wrote in an e-mail message. “After 20-plus years of not recording new Who material, they didn’t pick up where they left off — it’s where they are now.”

The album announces that one of the greatest rock bands of all time is back in business as something more than a touring heritage act. The release also puts the spotlight back on the notoriously spiky partnership that helped bring it into being.

Mr. Daltrey, 62, and Mr. Townshend, 61, are the two surviving members of the founding lineup, after the deaths of their incendiary drummer, Keith Moon, in 1978 and Mr. Entwistle in 2002. And though they seem lately to have attained an uneasy peace in their relationship, it was clear in separate interviews — Mr. Daltrey in a friend’s apartment high above Central Park and Mr. Townshend over the phone from a tour stop in Vancouver — that this hasn’t stopped them from taking the occasional swipe at each other.

“After John died,” Mr. Townshend said, referring to Mr. Entwistle, “I was left with one very clear relationship and that was with Roger — which was probably the least important to me in the band. We had a lot of discussion that our friendship meant more to us than anything else.”

Mr. Daltrey puts it another way: “He’s like the brother I never had. I love him dearly; I don’t like him sometimes, but I love him dearly. And I’m sure he would say the same about me.”

Mr. Daltrey recalled the day, just before Christmas, when some demo recordings arrived. “He told the press that he’d given me 26 songs,” said Mr. Daltrey, “yet I only received 4! So I was still very skeptical as to whether this was really going to happen, because I’ve been burned so many times before.”

After handing over that first batch, Mr. Townshend set the new songs aside to concentrate on a different kind of writing, which led to the mini-opera. “I’d written a novella as a possible basis for a theatrical play or a two-man show or maybe something in Las Vegas,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was.”

“The Boy Who Heard Music” (posted at www.petetownshend.co.uk/projects/tbwhm) is a tightly knit, hallucinatory tale of the rise and fall of a band made up of three teenagers from different ethnic groups, and an aging rock star observing them from a mental institution. (Mr. Townshend says his online research for the project led to his arrest in 2003 on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children; the charge was dropped, but he remains on a sex-offender watch list.) He reworked the novella into “Wire & Glass” — some songs that “had some teeth," he said. He then “knocked off the rest a bit Jack White style, using stuff from notebooks as far back as 1971,” and after more than two decades, a new Who album was ready to roll.

Still, Mr. Townshend was apprehensive about sending these songs to Mr. Daltrey. “Roger is always difficult to present new music to,” he said. “He operates rather like an editor. When you present him with finished material, he’s a fantastically positive interpreter. But I don’t think he knows enough about being an artist and the vulnerability of the creative process.”

Mr. Daltrey — who called “Wire & Glass” a “quirky, cranky idea” — suggested that Mr. Townshend’s narrative writing had as much to do with marketing as with art. “In the early days we used to call it hype, and it still is hype,” he said. “It was a device to get noticed in the press: ‘Oh, the Who have a new album, just like the Stones and the Beatles.’ But if you said you had a mini-opera, then all of a sudden they were interested.

“Whatever Pete wants to call it as the device that makes him write the songs, I don’t care,” he continued. “There’s still some interesting words on there. So I take all of that with a pinch of salt, and I don’t fight it anymore.”

Forty-two years after their first recording and 24 years after a Who “farewell tour” — a farewell that lasted seven years before the band went back on the road — the volatile chemistry between the singer and the guitarist still yields a powerful stage presence, as a series of recent shows in the New York area proved. (The touring band also includes Mr. Townshend’s brother Simon on guitar, Pino Palladino on bass, Zak Starkey on drums and John Rabbit Bundrick on keyboards. On the album, Pete Townshend plays numerous instruments and Peter Huntington plays drums on many tracks, since Mr. Starkey — Ringo Starr’s son — was touring with the band Oasis when most of the album was recorded.)

The band was the clear highlight of the Concert for New York City after the 9/11 attacks, an intensely emotional show that Mr. Townshend described as an example of “the Who mechanism working in ideal circumstances.” As this tour was starting, however, the band mates’ differing worldviews — which Mr. Townshend attributed to the contrast between his more bohemian art-school background and Mr. Daltrey’s more working-class roots — clashed yet again.

Mr. Townshend, always interested in new technology, announced that the concerts would be Webcast, only to retract those plans a few days later at Mr. Daltrey’s insistence. Eventually, the band made a deal with Sirius Satellite Radio to broadcast the shows as part of an all-Who channel that will continue throughout the tour.

“I don’t particularly like the world technology has created,” Mr. Daltrey said. “Has anything really gotten better with the computer, or are you just doing more and more of less and less? I’m incredibly paranoid about it, especially after what happened to Pete. I think the Internet is just an advertising device of very dubious returns.

“Also, I haven’t got the luxury of throwing the kind of money at it that he can,” he continued, referring to Mr. Townshend’s songwriting revenue. “I haven’t got the publishing, I’m just the singer. So I have to look at it much more hard-nosed as a business and ask if I can put a million dollars into it, and the answer is no.”

Mr. Townshend responded: “Roger likes things that are finished, and with the Internet, everything is a work in progress. I try not to bludgeon him with this stuff, but I can’t help it; it’s my passion.”

For Mr. Daltrey, “Endless Wire” closes a door for the band that was left open after the death of the high-flying Mr. Moon (about whom he is developing a film project, with Mike Myers committed to the role). “We were ill equipped to deal with Keith’s problems at the time,” he said. “If we’d known then what we know now about rehabilitation, we wouldn’t have lost him. So it always felt that if that had really been the end, it wouldn’t have been right. With this album, now there can be an ending. I don’t want it to be, but it can be, and I’m at peace with that.”

Mr. Townshend, characteristically, disagreed with that assessment. “It doesn’t feel like closure; it feels completely new,” he said. “Closure implies that we couldn’t do it again, couldn’t do another album with the same quality and dignity.

“This album isn’t some sort of Who miracle. It’s just two guys who’ve come together to do something creative. It just happens to be under a very powerful brand name.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/ar...c/29ligh.html?





The Difficulties of Discovery: Bumping Into New Music Can Be a Circuitous Task
Marc Fisher

Time for Serendipity Showdown, in which old-fashioned radio descends into the pit of battle against satellite radio, music blogs and online music-discovery engines to determine the best way to find new sounds.

Throughout the Top 40 era, radio held sway simply by playing the hits. With the FM revolution came a flowering of new formats, which introduced music that listeners would never hear on hit radio. But the Internet era brought radio a slew of new competitors and a theoretically infinite menu of musical choices.

No matter how many songs are on their iPods, though, listeners often grow tired of the tunes they've chosen to put on their digital players. That phenomenon allows radio executives some hope about their future: For now, at least, despite the proliferation of new technologies, old-fashioned broadcast radio remains music fans' primary vehicle to discover new sounds.

Although 61 percent of people in the 35-to-54 age bracket say they go to traditional radio to find new music, only 35 percent of those ages 18 to 34 use radio for that purpose. According to a study by Bridge Ratings, a California company that conducts research for the radio industry, younger listeners are more likely to learn about new tunes from friends via online sharing, via Internet radio or on one of the new online music networks.

So I put the various media to the test: Which would prove the most alluring and efficient way to discover unknown sounds?

Radio, stuck for a couple of decades in a calcifying set of heavily researched formats, remains the cheapest and easiest way to hear the most popular tunes in the land. But a generation of listeners whose MP3 experience leads them to more eclectic tastes often finds radio formats too restrictive. Radio responded with new formats known variously as Jack, Bob or Dave, that combine well-known and second-tier hits from the 1960s through the '90s with a smattering of current rock and pop songs. By scrapping deejays and mixing up the decades, these stations hope to capture some of the spirit of an iPod shuffle.

No Washington area station has adopted the pure form of the format, but WRQX-FM (Mix 107.3) comes closest, with a blend that purports to include the best of "everything." But the station's definition of "everything" turns out to be awfully narrow. In one three-hour stint, I heard nothing more exotic than Lisa Loeb, Ashlee Simpson or the Goo Goo Dolls. There wasn't a single song played that I hadn't heard before and the closest the station came to offering a rediscovery was Kim Carnes's "Bette Davis Eyes," the 1981 hit that turned out to be just as annoying a quarter-century later.

Over on pay satellite radio, the selections are more varied. With dozens of music choices on XM or Sirius, I could stick to the hits by listening to channels designed to mimic hit radio stations of the 1960s, '70s or '80s, or venture into more narrowly defined terrain.

On XM's Fred channel, I took the nostalgia train back to Debbie Harry's "Rapture" and moved along to Iggy Pop's "Blah Blah Blah" and the Cure's "Club America." But satellite radio is highly segregated by format, and only Sirius's Shuffle channel moves randomly -- and clumsily -- from rock to country to hip-hop and beyond. XM's Fine Tuning channel offers a more intelligent eclecticism, shifting from Celtic music to U2 to Tangerine Dream to Philip Glass. But although there are new artists to discover here, the overall sound is too bland; the selections are made to create a consistent aural ambiance rather than a surprising mix of genres.

To find true serendipity, it seems, it's necessary to tap into a more daring intelligence. Online music lovers are using blogs to display their own collections, and although each individual blog can be anything from stultifying to magnificent, blog aggregators give adventuresome listeners an easy way to explore.

At http://hype.non-standard.net , the Hype Machine connects to dozens of music blogs, ranking tunes by how often listeners click on them. It doesn't take much to create a hit on the Hype Machine; a few dozen listeners can take a song such as the Delgados' 2004 version of the Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky" and put it into the top 25. But the winnowing process nonetheless leads to some interesting tunes -- within those genres where early adopters tend to hang out.

The songs that bubble to the top on the Hype Machine come primarily from within the boundaries of indie rock, dance music and hip-hop, with a bit of pop. It's possible to follow links from aggregators to individual music blogs or to listeners' MySpace pages and find rich troves of new sounds from the clubs of New York, the streets of Brazil or the vaults of classic jazz labels, but it takes time and a willingness to comb through lots of really bad stuff.

The Hype Machine hit list led me at random to Caetano Veloso's "Irene," a typical gem from the Tropicalia movement of samba-influenced rock, funk and soul from Brazil in the 1960s, and when I followed the link to the blogger who posted that tune, there were plenty more of that ilk. But that's the rare success; most links take you to typical blog fare, where messages to personal friends crowd out the occasional musical gem.

If you want your serendipity a little less random, the answer is a music recommendation system such as Pandora.com or Last.fm. Both use algorithms based on the same idea as the Amazon.com service that suggests books based on what you've already looked at. Pandora lets you create as many as 100 stations; you type in the names of artists or songs that serve as the foundation, and the software -- guided by dozens of Pandora staffers who catalogue tunes according to about 400 musicological attributes -- builds a station with sounds you're likely to favor.

For example, when I programmed a station with some old school R&B (Harold Melvin, O'Jays, Stylistics), Pandora served up "Patches" by Clarence Carter and "Heavy Love" by David Ruffin. Ask the site why it's delivering the music it is, and you get very specific reasons: It found tunes that matched my original choices in exhibiting "classic soul qualities, gospel influences, major key tonality, and mixed acoustic-electric production," the software informed me.

Sometimes, Pandora is too literal; it feeds you songs almost identical to those you plug in, acting almost like a radio station's music testing does -- giving listeners only what they are almost certain to like and not enough that's surprising.

You can, however, work the machine to be more adventuresome by creating stations with a more eclectic foundation. When I started a station with Prince, Van Morrison, Randy Newman and Steely Dan, the machine delivered Bjork, Phish, Kraftwerk, Counting Crows, Elvis Costello and Death by Chocolate. When Pandora came up with Kiss's "Nothin' to Lose" on this station, I inquired how that could happen. Answer: The songs shared "basic rock song structures, a subtle use of vocal harmony, acoustic rhythm piano, and major key tonality." Well, yes, but still, no thanks.

Listeners can fine-tune their stations by rejecting Pandora's offerings, up to a limit of six tunes each hour. It's easy on Pandora to narrow your station so tightly that you don't learn anything new, but it's also possible to work the machine to keep serving up tunes you've never heard before, songs that are not bad at all.

In the Serendipity Showdown, if you're willing to put in the time, Pandora delivers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...av=hcmoduletmv





Love ‘Springtime for Hitler’? Then Here’s the CD for You
Alex Williams

SACHA BARON COHEN, meet Irving Berlin.

Jokes that compare Jews to cockroaches have left some viewers of Mr. Cohen’s farcical new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Mr. Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat’s ill-fitting suit — in fact, long before the 1929 stock market crash — Berlin, the songwriter behind “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was reeling off satirical songs about Jews that might seem dodgy on the “Borat” soundtrack. One such Berlin number, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” from 1916, concerns a businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over his unrepaid i.o.u.’s.

This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface,” which is aimed not at the History Channel crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history — perhaps justifiably.

“It’s like Hitler’s playlist, but it’s not, because it was actually Fanny Brice’s playlist,” said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre. (Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.”) “It’s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.”

In spring 2005, Mr. Rosen, who is the author of “White Christmas: The Story of an American Song” (Scribner, 2002) and has also contributed articles to The New York Times, joined forces with Courtney Holt, a former Interscope Records executive, who now runs MTV digital operations; David Katznelson, a former Warner Records executive; and Josh Kun, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. They turned a shared obsession into “Jewface,” an album they hope will turn the MySpace generation on to a form of music that offended many even in their great-grandparents’ day.

“Jewface” is the fourth album released on Reboot Stereophonic, a nonprofit record label devoted to unearthing odd Jewish-theme pop recordings from earlier eras, which Mr. Holt, Mr. Kun and Mr. Katznelson founded a couple of years ago. The CD will soon be available at record chains like Virgin, as well as on Amazon.com and iTunes.

Coarse, yes. Consider the very title “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band,” from 1906. The four collaborators acknowledge that these playful vaudeville ditties could function as hate speech in the wrong context, and they carry particular power in a politicized climate where newspaper cartoons can cause riots, and Mel Gibson has risked his career with a drunken outburst.

But to the project’s partners — music professionals typically associated with the likes of the Beastie Boys (for whom Mr. Holt produced a music video) and the Flaming Lips (whom Mr. Katznelson signed at Warner), not Eddie Cantor — this forgotten genre serves as a window into American Jewish heritage for people just like them: young secular Jews weaned on kitschy pop culture, abrasive rock and irony, as much as on the Torah.

“We’re all kind of disaffected American Jews, who aren’t particularly religious, don’t really practice and don’t really lead very Jewish lives at all,” said Mr. Kun, 35. “Digging up these recordings was really about figuring out who we were in this world.”

Many of these lost recordings spent nearly a century buried under dust on wax cylinders, the canister-shape phonograph records that predated discs. To contemporary ears the songs are camp, much like a previous Reboot Stereophonic release, “God Is a Moog” — a 1968 rock-opera reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service, performed on Moog synthesizer by the electronic-music pioneer Gershon Kingsley.

But they also fit with a growing tendency among Jews of Generations X and Y to embrace, and even have fun with, stereotypes that might have made their parents squirm. It is the same impetus behind Heeb magazine, an irreverent publication about Jewish culture, and the proliferation of hipster Hanukkah parties in Manhattan each December, when fashionable young clubgoers bat around inflatable dreidels as house music blares.

The “Jewface” tracks may soon find their way onto the dance floor. Adam Dorn, a Manhattan musician and producer who records under the name Mocean Worker and has worked with Bono and Elvis Costello, recently cut a trancy remix of “Under the Matzos Tree,” a 1907 song performed by Ada Jones, complete with blips and beeps and a thudding drum machine laid over lyrics like “Listen to your Abie, baby, Abie, come out in the moonlight with me.”

“I just said, let’s take this woman who would probably be 116 now and give her a backbeat,” explained Mr. Dorn, 35.

But even the original versions of the old tunes rock, in their way.

“There’s an ethereal quality” to the music, said Mr. Katznelson, 37. “It teleports you to another time. It’s almost psychedelic.”

Mr. Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted country.

But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock. “My Yiddisha Mammy,” a 1922 riff on Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” written by Eddie Cantor and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with lyrics like these:

I’ve got a mammy,

But she don’t come from Alabammy.

Her heart is filled with love and real sentiment,

Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.

The “Jewface” project, however, does have historical as well as musical value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for a century,” said Dr. Magee, who explained that this music was generally ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews, who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes, not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own vaudeville self-parodies.)

“Some generations had to come and go,” Dr. Magee said, “before younger people could listen with fresh ears, say: ‘Hey, let’s listen to this. It’s not us, but it’s our predecessors.’ ”

Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Mr. Rosen writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such Hebrew comedy was “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined,” and that same year it was denounced by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that a project like this “gets very complicated.” It is on the one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its impact. Still, he said, “our experience in this kind of thing is that inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.”

Mr. Rosen discovered the genre in the mid-’90s, while working on a master’s degree in Jewish history at University College London. One day, while doing research at the British Library, he ran across the sheet music for a song called “I Want to Be an Oy, Oy, Oyviator” — a comedy song about a Jewish aviator. Digging deeper, he found sheet music for hundreds of such songs, usually decorated with insulting caricatures of Jews as Shylocks, nebbishy immigrant greenhorns or schlemiels (like Levi, the Jewish wrangler in “I’m a Yiddisher Cowboy,” from 1908, who falls for an Indian maiden, then runs afoul of her father, the Chief).

Fascinated, Mr. Rosen set off on a quest to track down actual recordings of this music. He trolled dusty junk shops, record-collector conventions and, inevitably, eBay, looking for wax cylinders, which cost $10 to more than $100, and 78s. His search, he said, “took roughly 10 years on and off.”

Mr. Kun heard Mr. Rosen speak about the genre at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle last year. Within weeks, they said, they were planning an album.

Mr. Kun recalled: “I would get e-mails at 6 in the morning: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of this guy?’ I remember one night he found the personal stationery of one of these old vaudeville performers, and it was as if he had found a brick of gold in the pyramids.”

While the collaborators hardly expect “Jewface” to become a commercial smash, their industry savvy does increase the chances that the music will be heard.

Mr. Holt, who worked on the iPod deal between U2 and Apple while at Interscope, is trying to organize a concert and eventually an album, with established rock and folk acts doing covers of the old songs. He’s making calls, he said. So far no one is getting back to him.

“It’s a hard sell,” Mr. Holt acknowledged last week over a Scotch at SoHo House, the private club in downtown Manhattan, declining to name the acts he has been in touch with about the concert. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, there’s this lost Jewish music, recorded by Jews, making fun of Jews for non-Jews to be able to enjoy, in order to assimilate!’ That’s not a great elevator pitch.”

Even family members can be skeptical. Mr. Rosen said his in-laws were taken aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some, culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture’s distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the same culture.

“To some extent, people like to see themselves represented,” Mr. Rosen said, “even if they are badly represented.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/fa...audeville.html





Hollywood’s Knocking but Mom Guards the Door
Kimberly Brown

WHEN the 30-year-old singer Jeff Buckley, best known for his haunting 1994 album “Grace,” walked into a Memphis river fully clothed in 1997, he wrote a Hollywood-ready end to a brief but compelling life story.

Soon the movie people came calling, wooing his mother, Mary Guibert, for the rights to tell his story and to use his music in the telling. But Ms. Guibert, wary of letting her son’s memory be exploited, was a tough customer.

Brad Pitt, who at one point had called himself obsessed with Mr. Buckley’s music, struggled for two years to make a film inspired by his life. But Ms. Guibert rejected the scripts he developed as straying too far from reality. She shot down another effort, in part because the screenwriter imagined a scene with Mr. Buckley on LSD, hallucinating a meeting with his father, Tim Buckley, the 1960’s folk and jazz troubadour, who died in 1975 (and whom Jeff barely knew). She turned down a third project because it was too truthful: she did not want to make a purely biographical film.

“The great curiosity the world has about him should be fed somehow,” Ms. Guibert, 58, said recently over lunch near her home in Los Angeles. “But in the right ways.”

Now, almost 10 years after Mr. Buckley’s death, Ms. Guibert, whose life and career revolve around tending to his estate, has taken matters into her own hands. She is working with a young producer, Michelle Sy, and an even younger screenwriter and director, Brian Jun, to develop a film she plans to call “Mystery White Boy.” But whether she will have any more success getting a movie made is anything but certain.

“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” she said, voicing her ambivalence about the entire undertaking. Ms. Guibert said her son was uncomfortable with his celebrity and would not have wanted any movie made about him. But her fear that someone might make a film without her cooperation, somehow sullying Mr. Buckley’s memory in the process, has motivated her to take the wheel, however reluctantly.

The tale of the on-again, off-again Buckley movie shows how even a project with a charismatic main character, a true story and a built-in audience — not to mention the makings of a popular soundtrack — can get stuck in the peculiar hell known as development.

It also shows how films involving dead musicians and artists can be among the trickiest to make: if the subject’s survivors control the rights to their music or art, they can exercise a veto merely by withholding those rights. “When a parent or a spouse has a certain memory of someone, that’s the movie they want to see,” said Dale Pollock, a former president of A&M Films. “And what’s the use of the movie if you can’t have any of the songs?”

Mr. Pollock said that he spent seven years trying to make a biographical movie about Otis Redding, but that Mr. Redding’s widow, Zelma, refused to approve any script that depicted her husband as a womanizer. “Her presence made it impossible to make a realistic film about Otis Redding,” he said. “You took this big part of what he was out of his life, and the story didn’t work.”

(Reached by phone at her shoe boutique in Macon, Ga., Ms. Redding, 64, said she was not opposed to airing a certain amount of dirty laundry in a biopic, but denied he was a womanizer, adding, “I’m not going to let anybody scandalize Otis Redding’s name.”)

The broad outlines of Mr. Buckley’s family story are what captured Hollywood’s attention. Like Tim Buckley, Jeff was a talented, handsome singer who flirted with stardom, wrestled with the temptations of the music industry and died young. He looked startlingly like his father and had the same unusually wide vocal range. Both made music that defied convention, as the music critic David Browne wrote in “Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley” (HarperEntertainment, 2001).

And yet the father was only a fleeting presence in his son’s life. Ms. Guibert, who was Tim Buckley’s high school sweetheart, was abandoned by him as a pregnant teenager and raised their son without him. Jeff met Tim only a few times before Tim’s death from a drug overdose. Still, Tim’s abbreviated but impressive career cast a long shadow over his son.

When “Grace” was released by Columbia Records, a division of Sony, critics swooned over Jeff Buckley’s beguiling falsetto and celestial sound. In a concert review at the time, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that “with his voice, a world of tumult and obsession becomes almost seductive.”

Critics praised “Grace” and Mr. Buckley’s admirers included Paul McCartney, Bono and Jimmy Page, but the album’s sales were underwhelming. By 1997, Mr. Buckley was under pressure from Sony, which had signed him to an impressive three-album deal, to come up with a more commercial follow-up to “Grace.” He headed to Memphis in search of a creative refuge. His band members were on their way to join him the night he drowned.

His death left Ms. Guibert in the awkward position of managing his posthumous career. It is difficult not least because she has been a polarizing figure among her son’s friends and fans, critiqued and second-guessed for everything from her handling of his memorial service to the release of his music. Some of his friends even asserted that he would not have wanted her to run his estate.

And yet she spends her days policing the Internet for sales of bootlegs, maintaining a fan Web site, promoting tribute concerts and working with record companies to release more of his music. She also fields requests to use Mr. Buckley’s music on television and in films.

“This is my life’s work,” said Ms. Guibert, who shelved dreams of becoming an actress when her son was born but nonetheless retains an air of drama. “I think about this 24/7.”

She said she had not become rich as the custodian of Mr. Buckley’s legacy. Though “Grace” continues to sell as many as 1,000 albums a week domestically, Ms. Guibert said the record company was just now breaking even on it. This summer, she said, she went without hot water for several weeks, waiting to repair her water heater until the next royalty check arrived. A film, she acknowledged, would no doubt help, not least by improving sales of Mr. Buckley’s music.

At first, Ms. Guibert said, she turned away the writers and producers who asked for the right to tell her son’s story. But Mr. Pitt tempted her by helping her set up an archive of Mr. Buckley’s music and writings, including diaries and audio journals that he had recorded on cassette.

Once Mr. Pitt had Ms. Guibert’s blessing to develop a film, he hired Emma Forrest, a British novelist and journalist, to write a screenplay in the vein of the 1979 Bette Midler film “The Rose.” After all, there had been speculation that Mr. Buckley’s death was not an accident, that drugs, alcohol, or perhaps some form of mental illness had played a role.

But Ms. Guibert rejected Ms. Forrest’s two drafts.

“Her immediate response to the first draft was, ‘No, my son didn’t take drugs, he never suffered from depression,’ ” Ms. Forrest said. It was a question of competing truths, she added. Ms. Guibert’s recollections of her son differed from those of Mr. Buckley’s friends, interviewed by Ms. Forrest. Ms. Forrest said she wanted to explore the nature of genius and mine the links between music and emotional disintegration, but Ms. Guibert wanted none of it.

“We were trying to tell a story about creativity” and how it can affect people who are “exceptionally talented,” Ms. Forrest said, adding that she had struggled with mental illness herself, which she wrote about in her 2001 novel, “Thin Skin.”

Ms. Guibert said she dismissed Ms. Forrest’s screenplay in part because it was too fantastic: Ms. Forrest had her Jeff character meet the ghost of Judy Garland. She also depicted him mutilating himself, a form of mental illness that Ms. Guibert said was based too much on the screenwriter’s life and not enough on Jeff Buckley’s.

Ms. Guibert, who insists her son had no drug or alcohol problems, said he didn’t suffer from mental illness though he had the occasional panic attack and bouts of depression.

Mr. Pitt, who did not return calls for comment, eventually gave up on the project.

Mr. Buckley’s story continued to interest other filmmakers, however; no fewer than four documentaries have been made about him. And after Mr. Browne’s double biography was published, he said he was approached several times by writers and producers interested in adapting it. The book was optioned last year by Train Houston, a writer in Los Angeles who briefly interested the actor Tobey Maguire’s production company in the project.

But Ms. Guibert stood in the way. She said the script Mr. Houston wrote had a “verisimilitude” problem, and that she did not trust his approach. Mr. Houston said he had planned to learn more about Mr. Buckley once his script was sold and pushed Ms. Guibert to reconsider, but she would not budge.

“Obviously, I was not going to have any control over it,” Ms. Guibert said.

Now she is very much in charge. Through her lawyer, Ms. Guibert met her co-producer, Ms. Sy, a former director of development at Miramax Films who received an executive producer credit on “Finding Neverland.” Ms. Sy in turn linked up with Mr. Jun, 26, after his film “Steel City,” about a complicated father-son relationship, was favorably reviewed at Sundance.

On the Jeff Buckley Web site, Ms. Guibert assures his fans that Mr. Jun will not “sugarcoat or manipulate” the facts: “I’ve looked into his eyes and I know that he’s a straight shooter. There’s a depth of character to Brian, surprising in someone so young, and I have seen from his filmmaking that he has the courage and the skill to do this the way it should be done.”

Whether some sugarcoating can be avoided in a project that remains under Ms. Guibert’s watchful eye is an open question: she is, after all, his mother.

“I try to be impersonal and realistic,” Ms. Guibert said. “You know, to be a good business person about all of it. In the final analysis, I’m his mother. And when the chips are down and when our backs are to the wall, that’s it, that’s the one reason that remains. Because I’m his mother, that’s why. Because I’m still alive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/movies/29brow.html





Mission: Rescue Operation
Laura M. Holson

The film star, who took a beating when Paramount ended his longstanding production deal last summer, has found not just a home, but a new career direction that could point the way for expensive actors who are struggling in cost-conscious Hollywood.

Mr. Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, will take charge of United Artists, the famous production company started by Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, the company said Thursday.

For Mr. Cruise, gaining control of United Artists undoubtedly provides a sense of vindication that he is still a force in Hollywood after he was unceremoniously cut loose this summer from a 14-year deal with Paramount Pictures. Sumner M. Redstone, chairman of Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, said at the time that Mr. Cruise’s “recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

He was referring to Mr. Cruise’s couch-jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s show, and his frequent mentions of his belief in Scientology. Mr. Redstone claimed that his behavior had cost the studio as much as $150 million in movie ticket sales for “Mission: Impossible III.”

“He was embarrassing the studio,’’ Mr. Redstone recently told Vanity Fair. “And he was costing us a lot of money.”

Ms. Wagner will be named chief executive of United Artists and Mr. Cruise will be an executive and producer associated with the studio under an unusual arrangement that gives them a minority share of the company. Ultimately Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., which owns United Artists, hopes that investors take a direct stake in both the unit and Mr. Cruise’s career. “The studios and talent don’t trust each other,” Harry E. Sloan, MGM’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview Thursday. “We need to start a dialogue.”

For MGM, which is owned by private equity firms in partnership with the Comcast Corporation and the Sony Corporation, the deal offers an alliance with a major star on terms more manageable than the huge fees he commanded from Viacom’s Paramount Pictures for expensive films like last May’s “Mission: Impossible III.” It also offers a way to unlock the value of the United Artists name, which carries enormous cachet, but has been attached to only a few films lately.

The deal also offers a fresh twist on recent trends that have seen investors become directly involved with film producers, even as stars seek more creative and financial control over their careers. Established producers like Joel Silver and Ivan Reitman are among those who have made partnerships with outside investors, allowing them to finance films intended for distribution by studios.

Initially, Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner will have authority to produce about four movies a year, for distribution by MGM. Neither Mr. Cruise nor Ms. Wagner put up any capital, Ms. Wagner said. Mr. Cruise may or may not star in the pictures, and will remain free to work as an actor for other studios.

Mr. Sloan and his team have been working to revive MGM as a full-blown movie and television distribution company. Last year, several producers in Hollywood had sought to buy United Artists but were unsuccessful. So far MGM’s recent track record as a distributor of other producers’ movies is unimpressive.

“School for Scoundrels,” which starred Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Heder, brought in only $17.2 million at the domestic box office when it was released in September. The World War I epic “Flyboys” flopped, bringing in only $12.8 million.

Mr. Sloan said MGM was trying to create a new studio model in its dealings with Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner. The company will finance United Artists’ first few movies, with budgets of $40 million to $50 million — relatively modest amounts, by current Hollywood standards — and will pay for the unit’s overhead.

After that, Mr. Sloan expects to approach outside investors to finance United Artists’ movies in partnership with Mr. Cruise, who will share an ownership stake in the operation with Ms. Wagner. If investors are not interested in financing the films, MGM said it would pay for them all.

Those outside investors could be hedge funds, wealthy individuals or investment banks. According to Mr. Sloan, the proposed United Artists financial model will spread risk more equally between the studio, talent and the outside investors than a conventional Hollywood deal.

Mr. Sloan said he expected to announce United Artists’ first movie soon. When asked if outside investors would still be interested if United Artists’ initial movies flopped, he laughed and joked, “We’ll take the model out to investors before the first picture opens.”

Recently, some financial funds have seen disappointing results from their investments in studio films. Legendary Pictures, which has a five-year, $600 million deal with Warner Brothers Entertainment to co-finance and co-produce deals, for instance, was an investor in some of that studio’s more noticeable summer duds, including “Lady in the Water” and the animated “The Ant Bully.”

“The actors are not going to have a cakewalk,” said Harold Vogel, the author of “Entertainment Industry Economics.” “These investors don’t say, ‘Oh, it’s so glamorous to go to a party.’ They aren’t that dumb. Instead they say, ‘You will get your money, but we get ours first.’ ”

Mr. Cruise seems to be hedging his own bets by staying on the market as an actor for hire. Also, films already in development under their Cruise/Wagner Productions moniker can be produced by other studios, although Ms. Wagner said she and Mr. Cruise were in negotiations with Paramount to buy back some of the projects they developed there.

When asked to comment on Mr. Cruise’s new deal, Mr. Redstone said, “I wish Tom and his associates the greatest good fortune in their venture.”

Ms. Wagner said she hoped United Artists would become a home for talent, in keeping with the company’s roots. The studio was originally founded in 1919 by Mr. Chaplin, Ms. Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and D. W. Griffith. In later years, it became associated with MGM, and for decades was controlled by the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who ultimately engineered the sale to its current owners.

Unlike Mr. Silver and Mr. Reitman, who expect to focus on low-budget thrillers and comedies, United Artists expects to make mainstream films of considerable range, Ms. Wagner said. She added that United Artists’ financial backers would have no creative input; their role would be limited to how money was spent. “We are not looking to make a film that makes people unhappy,” she said.

Of course, that is harder than it seems. Other well-known Hollywood personalities have tried to start talent-friendly studios over the years with limited success. Revolution Studios, to choose one relatively recent example, was started in 2000 by the veteran producer and executive Joe Roth, who said he too wanted to bring actors deeper into the process of creating artful films at a reasonable cost, like the old United Artists. But the deal he cut with Sony to create Revolution was not renewed after a string of disappointments, and he is now going to be a Sony producer.

“I’m still reeling,” said Ms. Wagner of the day’s news. “The ink is not dry on this. If you have a movie, send it our way. We are still figuring this all out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/bu.../03studio.html





'Why I Sacked Tom Cruise'

THE man who ended Tom Cruise's 14-year-relationship with Paramount Pictures says he was influenced in the shock decision by his wife, because she and "women everywhere" had started to hate the star.

Viacom boss Sumner Redstone stunned Hollywood earlier this year when he revealed that the studio would sever its ties with the actor's production company, accusing him of "creative suicide" with his outlandish behaviour.

Now the outspoken 83-year-old has told Vanity Fair it was his wife Paula who turned on Cruise first.

"Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him," Redstone said. "The truth of the matter is, I did listen to her, but I make business decisions myself."

The split between Paramount and Cruise/Wagner Productions came after months of negative publicity for Cruise, much of it focused on incidents such as his famous couch-jumping appearance on Oprah Winfrey's show.

He also used NBC's Today show to attack Brooke Shields over her use of anti-depressants for postnatal depression after the birth of her first child.

Redstone defended his decision not to renew Paramount's deal with Cruise, saying again that he had embarrassed the studio and cost it millions of dollars.

"When did I decide?" he asked Vanity Fair. "I don't know. When he was on the Today show? When he was jumping on a couch at Oprah? He changed his handler, you know, to his sister - not a good idea.

"His behaviour was entirely unacceptable to Paula, and to the rest of the world. He didn't just turn one (woman) off.

"He turned off all women, and a lot of men ... He was embarrassing the studio.

"And he was costing us a lot of money. We felt he cost us $US100 million ($130 million), $US150 million ($195 million) on Mission: Impossible III.

"It was the best picture of the three, and it did the worst." Cruise's business partner, Paula Wagner, disputed Redstone's version of events at the time, saying negotiations on a new contract had simply fizzled out.
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment...-10388,00.html





Negative Publicity Is the New Hot Hype
David M. Halbfinger

The TV networks don’t want you to see ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary “Shut Up and Sing.” The movie theater chains don’t want you to see the fictionalized polemic “Death of a President.” The president of Kazakhstan doesn’t want you to see “Borat.”

Just ask the people promoting the movies.

Hollywood appears to have hit upon a fail-safe strategy for getting attention for just about any kind of film: get someone, anyone, to try to suppress it, and then rush to the news media with breathless warnings about the First Amendment coming under attack.

“Profoundly un-American,” Harvey Weinstein, the distributor of Barbara Kopple’s Dixie Chicks film, declared in a statement shopped around by his publicists late on Thursday, in which they asserted that NBC and the CW network had refused to run ads in which the singer Natalie Maines refers to President Bush with an expletive and as “dumb.”

(NBC acknowledged that it had rejected the ads for fairness reasons, since Mr. Bush couldn’t be expected to buy response ads, as he would in a political campaign. CW said the Weinstein Company had not bought any time on the network. The Weinstein Company, for its part, said that if it had concocted the dispute for publicity’s sake, it would have done so a week ago to avoid stepping on the film’s mostly positive reviews.)

Newmarket, the distributor of “Death of a President” — the poorly reviewed British pseudo-documentary that caused a furor for depicting the assassination of President Bush — has been fielding a platoon of public relations consultants to hype the fact that networks like Fox, CNN and National Public Radio refused to carry advertisements for it.

None of this is new, of course, with the possible exception of Sacha Baron Cohen’s surprisingly successful baiting of the Kazakh government for his raunchy Fox comedy, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” In fact, veteran movie marketers say that while entertainment journalists keep falling for the ploy, audiences have long since wised up to it.

“These are all time-tested canards that get people to write about your film,” said Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, who as an executive for Mr. Weinstein oversaw the distribution of the NC-17-rated “Kids” when Miramax was barred from releasing it by its parent, the Walt Disney Company. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the public really cares. It can get word out, but it can’t get people to want to see your film. People just yawn. And sometimes it reeks of desperation, too.”

Take a low-budget movie few have heard of, and not many more are likely to see, that depicts Jesus as a black man: “Controversy continues to swirl around ‘Color of the Cross,’ ” the film’s publicist cried a few weeks ago, before reporting that some black ministers had refused to screen it for their congregations.

The major studios, of course, are known for ducking controversy, denuding their films of political leanings to avoid alienating large portions of the audience. They have other reasons, too: one marketer who worked on Fox’s climate-change blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow,” released in 2004, said the studio wanted to avoid having the movie seen as an issue-oriented film, lest audiences decide it sounded boring.

But even studio films are turning up in the news columns more and more: “Blood Diamond,” a new Warner Brothers movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, made headlines in The Los Angeles Times, for example, when it got caught in a public relations battle between De Beers, the diamond conglomerate, and a group of Kalahari bushmen who were evicted from their land in Botswana, where De Beers is mining.

Still, it’s the independents like Magnolia and ThinkFilm that have made a specialty out of marketing controversy, as Mr. Weinstein did perhaps better than anyone before or since with Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Mark Urman of ThinkFilm owned up to capitalizing “a bit cynically” on the NC-17 rating last year for Atom Egoyan’s “Where the Truth Lies,” for one. But he said the outrage he expected over “The Aristocrats” last year never materialized, scotching his plans to use it to sell tickets.

“I’m finding that a lot less of this is working,” he said. “The last film that was successfully sold with controversy at the root of its campaign was ‘Passion of the Christ,’ a film accused of anti-Semitism and then sold to a very large Christian population as ‘this film Jews don’t want you to see.’ It worked in a stunning way, by making it appear to be a beleaguered film.”

Mr. Urman and Mr. Bowles said that conservative and religious audiences — who once could be relied on to protest, picket and draw the rest of America’s attention to movies like “Priest” or this summer’s “Jesus Camp” — have learned to resist the bait.

Magnolia hoped to market “Jesus Camp” both to liberals who would be appalled by its seeming brainwashing of the Christian young, and to conservatives who would be proud. But an important Christian leader turned against the film, Mr. Bowles said, and the result was neither the support nor the vocal opposition the distributor was hoping for.

Mr. Urman is now distributing “Shortbus,” an unrated movie with hard-core sex, and he says he has been shocked by the lack of resistance to it from the religious right.

“They see you coming,” he said. “Conservatives don’t want to be used. And liberals are no more motivated to see something because conservatives are against it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/28/movies/28stud.html





Bill O'Reilly Wants to Ban Horror Movies (and is a Moron)
Scott Weinberg

You know Bill O'Reilly? That stuffed shirt knee-jerk reactionist / sexual harrassment expert? Yeah, that guy. Well, Bill has finally discovered that there's a thing out there called A Horror Movie, and get this: He wants to ban them. Yep, O'Reilley threatens to "look into it" at the tail-end of this moronic video clip in which some wifty psychologist and some puritan author spend about six minutes boo-hoo-hooing over the shameless gruesome nastiness of movies like Saw, Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Look out, Lionsgate! Bill O'Reilly plans to "look into" horror movies and, I guess, put a stop to the durn things, consarnit! Stockholders beware!

Words like "sickening" are tossed around the studio as the three overwhelmingly ill-informed hand-wringers ramble on, poorly covering a subject that they know nothing about. O'Reilly even states that this type of horror "could never have happened in America ten years ago," blissfully ignorant to the fact that gore flicks have been around since (at least) the days of Herschell Gordon Lewis. (Like, the 1960s!)

Billy's guests are Dr. Virginia Klein, "a psychotherapist," and James Hirsen, the smug author of a book called Hollywood Nation -- a book that has a piece of effusive front-cover blurbage from none other than Michael Medved. (As if that's a person you want praise from.) So obviously Bill is really interested in covering both sides of the Horror Movie argument. Sheesh. Klein seems to claim that the only people who like Saw 3 are those who "are on tranquilizers" or "like toys." (Don't feel bad; I don't have any idea what she's talking about either.) Dr. Klein ends up a total wiffle-ball washout, and here's why: The "psychology" of horror flicks is so simple that I don't even feel the need to explain it here -- but she STILL gets it completely wrong! She blathers and blithers for a few minutes before Billy Boy shoots it on over to Mr. Hirsen, the "Hollywood Insider." Ahem.

Hirsen's insights into the realm of "extreme horror" are as such: Horror fans refer to the goods at "ultra-violence." We do? Hey Hirsen: Ever heard of A Clockwork Orange? Came out in 1971? Ever heard of Kubrick? Give it a rent one day. It delivers some actual insight into the nature of violence, and no, there's no Cliff's Notes, sorry. Hirsen also bemoans the fact that the hardcore horror movies take place in "an amoral universe in which you can't tell who the good guys are and the bad guys are." THIS is a guy who actually writes about film? Did he actually just imply that movies have no business dealing in that grey moral area between white-hatted heroes and mustache-twirling villains? Whaaat? And he has the stones to go on FOX NEWS and use the phrase "amoral universe"?? Holy freakin' macaroni, who allowed this clip to air on national television? It's so inept I'm almost embarrassed for the participants; they even have the balls to say that our young horror filmmakers are celebrated "because of money." As if there's any other gauge of value in Hollywood besides money. Nope, just in the horror gerne, I suppose. Very insightful, fellas. Eli Roth should apologize for his success, but Adam Shankman is the next Billy Wilder because his flicks make money? Whatever.

And then there's O'Reilly himself. Y'know, I've always been more than content to simply ignore O'Reilly, but he's so ill-prepared and obtuse in this clip... He yearns for the old horror movies like Dracula and Frankenstein -- not because they're beautifully made and grimly effective pieces of cinema, but because they "cut away" from the violent material. Brilliant. He then goes on to describe a few generic atrocities that may or may not appear in the Saw series ("Eyeballs gouged out! Hands being lopped off! women being defiled!") before casually reminding his viewers that Fox also makes horror movies. (Way to cover your ass there, Bill.) The raving dolt even implies that Warner Brothers has to come out and "explain" and apologize for why they made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And yet Sony doesn't have to "explain" why they made White Chicks? Fox doesn't deserve a nationally-televised rap on the knuckles from O'Reilly the Holy for that last Lindsay Lohan flick? Please.

Argh, I gotta wrap this rant up; I'm just too aggravated to continue. Horror has always been seen as the black sheep of the movie world, and frankly I'm sick to freakin' death of this B.S. This moronic video is yet another piece of low-minded and shamelessly elitist nonsense that exists only to prove, what, -- That Bill O'Reilly is Too Good for horror movies? Fine, more for the rest of us, you aimlessly nattering blowhard. And, with all humility, I'll close this geeky diatribe with an offer-slash-challenge to Mr. O'Reilly: Bill, seriously: Next time you want to hang the horror genre in effigy without even bothering to find ONE person who'll come to its defense, I challenge you to drop me an email and let me represent the pro to your clueless con. And good luck with your crusade against horror films; I'm sure all the people you just labeled sick, twisted deviants who have the GALL to enjoy this stuff will take your opinions as if they came from someone with half a brain. Grr.

[Thanks to Bloody-Disgusting.com for pointing me towards the video clip, because it enabled me to rant endlessly and have fun doing it. Also, it looks like Saw 3 director Darren Lynn Bousman was penning his own response to O'Reilly at the same time I was -- and we even make some of the exact same (and very valid) points. Heh.]
http://www.cinematical.com/2006/11/0...nd-is-a-moron/





Sadistic ‘Saw III’ Rips Away at Ratings Board Standards
Tenley Woodman

Saw III

Movie Rating: (R) | Critic: F


Reading tales of medieval punishments is haunting. Watching people being tortured is not. It’s just sick.

The first 20 minutes of ‘‘Saw III” is a bloodbath. Like trapped animals, the unfortunate people in serial torture-killer Jigsaw’s (Tobin Bell) grasp try to free themselves by breaking their limbs and ripping the flesh from their bodies.

Pass the popcorn - I think not.

Surpassing the gore and psychological trauma of ‘‘Se7en,” ‘‘Silence of the Lambs” and ‘‘Hannibal,” ‘‘Saw III” is an exercise in bad taste.

Jigsaw is dying from a brain tumor, but continues his warped games through Amanda (Shawnee Smith, ‘‘Summer School”), a former torture victim who survived one of his horrific challenges.

Beneath the torture and gore is a story; whether it’s one you care to follow is another matter.

Per Jigsaw’s request, Amanda captures an unhappy doctor named Lynn (Bahar Soomekh) to perform a back-alley lobotomy on him. Meanwhile, Amanda lays the trap for Jigsaw’s next victim, Jeff (Angus Macfadyen, ‘‘Braveheart”), a grieving father unable to control his rage over his son’s death.

Jigsaw assumes moral high ground by convincing his victims that whether they live or die is by their choice. But let’s get real, if you have hooks and other nasty contraptions piercing, twisting and maiming your body, is there a choice?

If the film is not disturbing enough, the antics of those behind the scenes also bring decency into question.

Bell donated his own blood so it could be mixed with the red paint for the film’s promotional posters.

Filmmakers approached the MPAA rating board seven times before receiving an R rating.

One graphic scene shows a woman’s rib cage being ripped out while she is still alive. If this is what the rating board believed was reasonable R material, I’d hate to see what was left out.

Director Darren Lynn Bousman made his directorial debut with ‘‘Saw II” and stayed on to direct this third installment. Keep in mind he was once a production assistant for Tara Reid, so clearly, he has no taste.

(‘‘Saw III” contains grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and profanity.)
http://theedge.bostonherald.com/movi...ticleid=164482





Washed Up in a World of Urban Vermin Intrigue
A. O. Scott

Don’t get me wrong: I’m looking forward to the next James Bond movie as much as anyone else. But it strikes me as unlikely that any British action picture released this year will surpass “Flushed Away.”

Yes, the 007 franchise has the gadgetry, the babes and the dry martinis, but does it have google-eyed, rubber-mouthed leeches (unless they were slugs, or maybe some kind of aquatic worm) singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in splendid choral harmony? (I know, I never wanted to hear it again either, but trust me, you haven’t really experienced the song until you’ve heard it performed by leeches.) Does Mr. Bond have Kate Winslet as his love interest? (Playing a sewer rat, yes. But still. Kate Winslet.) Is his nemesis a giant toad with a fondness for royal family paraphernalia and an obsessive hatred of rodents?

I could go on, but I’ve made my point. “Flushed Away,” directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell, is the first computer-animated feature to come from the very English whimsy factory that is Aardman Animations, progenitors of Wallace and Gromit, Rex the Runt and “Chicken Run.” (DreamWorks, a co-producer of “Chicken Run,” was also involved with “Flushed Away.”) The technological shift from the traditional Aardman stop-motion animation, using plasticine models, has given the filmmakers new freedom and flexibility — for instance, in confecting sequences that take place in and under water — but the eccentric, handmade “Wallace and Gromit” aesthetic remains happily intact. And at a time when all-ages three-dimensional animation seems to be in a serious rut (how many more movie-star-voiced pleas for interspecies understanding must we be subjected to?), it is a relief to encounter such exuberant and infectious silliness.

At first, “Flushed Away” does not seem so different from its lesser competitors, even as it dares to aim a few mocking jabs at Pixar, the top dog in the computer-animation world. At one point the sentimentality of “Finding Nemo” is grazed by a satirical harpoon, and the story begins in an expansive London house whose clean spaces and tidy right angles recall “Toy Story.” So, at first, does the situation in which the hero, a pet mouse named Roddy (Hugh Jackman), finds himself when his young owner and her family have gone on vacation. He cavorts with the Barbies and the Kens, but this is a lonely, empty pastime — they’re just toys, after all — and it seems to promise a boring movie.

As it happens, a less boring movie would be hard to imagine. Roddy’s life, as they say, is changed forever when an uncouth rat named Sid (Shane Richie) pops up through the plumbing. Roddy, trying to rid himself of the interloper, finds himself sent down the pipes, where he is accidentally introduced into a world of subterranean urban vermin delights.

In spite of the title and the necessity of using a toilet as a portal to the London sewer, the humor in “Flushed Away” is mostly clean. The narrative, on the other hand, is gratifyingly messy, as Roddy, washed up in a miniature London built out of trash and flotsam beneath the actual city, becomes embroiled in some fairly complicated intrigue. He falls in with Rita (Ms. Winslet), who pilots an old boat, and who is harassed by the grandiose toad (Ian McKellen) and his minions, a veritable charcuterie platter of voice-over excess featuring Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis, and Jean Reno as the toad’s French cousin, who is (naturellement!) a frog.

As is the custom with Aardman productions, there is a sweet and modest decency — a wry celebration of Traditional British Values, if you will — peeking out amid the clamor and craziness. (The pop-cultural references and canny music selections, meanwhile, mark “Flushed Away” as an all-American DreamWorks animation product.)

The filmmakers also take evident pleasure in topping themselves, and in conceiving a structure that is less like a roller coaster ride than a ski jump. The picture relentlessly picks up speed, zooming from drollery to anarchy to complete — albeit brilliantly controlled — comic chaos, and before you know it, you’re airborne (even if, strictly speaking, you’re still in the sewer), carried aloft on the wings of leeches.

“Flushed Away” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has a few mildly naughty jokes.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/11/0...tml?ref=movies





From Kazakhstan, Without a Clue
Manohla Dargis

Sometime in early 2005, a mustachioed Kazakh journalist known as Borat Sagdiyev slipped into America with the intention of making a documentary for the alleged good of his Central Asian nation. Many months later, the funny bruised fruits of his labor, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” are poised to hit the collective American conscience with a juicy splat. The Minutemen, those self-anointed guardians of American sovereignty, were watching the wrong border.

Borat, who just recently invited the “mighty warlord” George W. Bush to the premiere of his film before a gaggle of excited news crews, is the dim brainchild of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comic best known until now for another of his pseudonymous identities, Ali G. Described by his creator as a “wannabe gangsta,” Ali G was the host of a British television show, starting in 2000 (HBO had the American edition), where, as the voice of “the yoof,” he interviewed serious and self-serious movers and shakers, including “Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” Sam Donaldson and Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who found himself explaining why terrorists could not drive a train into the White House. (No tracks.)

Mr. Baron Cohen succeeded in seducing politicians and pornography stars alike, mostly because Ali G’s phenomenal stupidity made the character seem harmless. He also seemed to represent the ultimate in media big game: young people. Dressed like a Backstreet Boy, complete with Day-Glo romper suits, designer initials and a goatee that looked as if it had been painted on with liquid eyeliner, he was met with bewilderment, exasperation and patience that at times bordered on the saintly. Like Borat and Bruno, another of the comic’s similarly obtuse television alter egos who made regular appearances on the shows, the joke was equally on Ali G and on the targets of his calculated ignorance.

With Borat, Mr. Baron Cohen took the same basic idea that had worked with Ali G and pushed it hard, then harder. The joke begins with an apparently never-washed gray suit badly offset by brown shoes, which the performer accents with a small Afro and the kind of mustache usually now seen only in 1970s pornography, leather bars and trend articles. Think Harry Reems, circa 1972, but by way of the Urals. Married or widowed, and he appears to be both, Borat loves women, including his sister, the “No. 4 prostitute” in Kazakhstan, with whom he shares lusty face time in the film’s opener. He’s a misogynist (a woman’s place is in the cage), which tends to go unnoticed because he’s also casually anti-Semitic.

That Mr. Baron Cohen plays the character’s anti-Semitism for laughs is his most radical gambit. The Anti-Defamation League, for one, has chided him, warning that some people may not be in on the joke. And a sampling of comments on blogs where you can watch some of the older Borat routines, including a singalong in an Arizona bar with the refrain “Throw the Jew down the well,” indicates that the Anti-Defamation League is at least partly right: some people are definitely not in on the joke, though only because some people are too stupid and too racist to understand that the joke is on them. As the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel observed, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, a truism Mr. Baron Cohen has embraced with a vengeance.

Given this, it seems instructive to note how discussions of Borat, including the sympathetic and the suspicious, often circle over to the issue of Mr. Baron Cohen’s own identity. Commentators often imply that Borat wouldn’t be funny if Mr. Baron Cohen were not Jewish, which is kind of like saying that Dave Chappelle wouldn’t be funny if he were not black. For these performers, the existential and material givens of growing up as a Jew in Britain and as a black man in America provide not only an apparently limitless source of fertile comic material, but they are also inseparable from their humor. But no worries: Borat makes poop jokes and carries a squawking chicken around in a suitcase.

Like General Sherman, he also lays waste to a sizable swath of the South, a line of attack that begins in New York and ends somewhere between the Hollywood Hills and Pamela Anderson’s bosom. The story opens in Kazakhstan (apparently it was shot in a real Romanian village that looks remarkably like the set for a 1930s Universal horror flick), where Borat sketches out his grand if hazy plans before heading off in a horse-drawn auto. Once in New York, in between planting kisses on startled strangers and taking instruction from a humor coach, he defecates in front of a Trump tower (Donald Trump was one of Ali G’s more uncooperative guests) and masturbates in front of a Victoria’s Secret store. The jackass has landed.

It gets better or worse, sometimes at the same time. Whether you rush for the exits or laugh until your lungs ache will depend both on your appreciation for sight gags, eyebrow gymnastics, sustained slapstick and vulgar malapropisms, and on whether you can stomach the shock of smashed frat boys, apparently sober rodeo attendees and one exceedingly creepy gun-store clerk, all taking the toxic bait offered to them by their grinning interlocutor. There is nothing here as singularly frightening as when, during his run on HBO, Borat encountered a Texan who enthused about the Final Solution. That said, the gun clerk’s suggestion of what kind of gun to use to hunt Jews will freeze your blood, especially when you realize that he hasn’t misheard Borat’s mangled English.

That scene may inspire accusations that Mr. Baron Cohen is simply trading on cultural and regional stereotypes, and he is, just not simply. The brilliance of “Borat” is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy. Mr. Baron Cohen isn’t yet a total filmmaker like Jerry Lewis (the film was directed by Larry Charles, who has given it a suitably cheap video look), but the comic’s energy and timing inform every scene of “Borat,” which he wrote with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and his longtime writing and production partner, Dan Mazer. These guys push political buttons, but they also clear room for two hairy men to wrestle nude in a gaspingly raw interlude of physical slapstick that nearly blasts a hole in the film.

Clenched in unspeakably crude formation, those hairy bodies inspire enormous laughs, but they also serve an elegant formal function. The sheer outrageousness of the setup temporarily pulls you out of the story, which essentially works along the lines of one of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movies, though with loads of smut and acres of body hair, relieving you of the burden of having to juggle your laughter with your increasingly abused conscience. Just when you’re ready to cry, you howl.

“If the comic can berate and finally blow the bully out of the water,” Mr. Lewis once wrote, “he has hitched himself to an identifiable human purpose.” Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t blow bullies out of the water; he obliterates them.

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes raw language, naked men and nude wrestling.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/11/0...tml?ref=movies





Don’t Touch That Dial
Bill Carter

IN every television season some new lesson about the American audience is imparted. This season’s lesson was clear within the first weeks of the fall: you can ask people to commit only so many hours to intense, dark, intricately constructed serialized dramas, to sign huge chunks of their lives away to follow every minuscule plot development and character tic both on the air and on Internet sites crowded with similarly addicted fanatics.

Ask for more and you will get what happened to every network this fall. “The Nine” got low numbers. “Vanished” was banished. “Kidnapped” went unransomed. “Smith” was swift-kicked. “Runaway” sounded like a command.

“The message we received was that people have strains on their lives,” said Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment. “People are saying, ‘I’ve got my handful of shows like this, and I don’t want more.’ ”

Or as Kevin Lubarsky, a recent Villanova University graduate who has relocated to Los Angeles, put it one recent afternoon: “Sundays you’ve got football. Then you’ve got a couple of these serialized shows. You can’t spend your life watching television.”

Inspired by the tremendous popularity of “Lost,” a program that is as hard to follow as it is to produce, the networks this fall introduced no fewer than 10 similarly demanding serialized dramas (and even a couple of comedies). Mr. Reilly was genuinely excited about the prospects for “Kidnapped,” NBC’s series about the abduction of a wealthy New York family’s scion. The show had high production values and an exceptional cast, including Jeremy Sisto, Delroy Lindo, Dana Delany and Timothy Hutton.

It had three chances on Wednesday nights before being exiled to the wastes of Saturday night, where it is expected to die a quiet, premature death. Writers will try to wrap up the story in 13 episodes instead of the 22 that were planned.

“Smith” won’t even get that minimally dignified exit. The CBS series, about a ruthless gang of master thieves, also had an impressive cast, headed by Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen. But it was expunged from existence after just three episodes. If you want to know what happened to those characters, you’ll just have to use your imagination. They will forever be suspended in midstory.

Similarly, will we ever know what “The Nine,” ABC’s drama about characters held hostage in a bank robbery, was supposed to add up to? It has the built-in advantage of following directly after “Lost,” but in its first four outings, it has frittered away an enormous number of viewers. That’s even more than “Invasion,” the serialized drama that last year tried to march into viewers’ homes on the heels of “Lost.”

The prospect of devoting time and passion to a show only to see it cut off, like a movie snapping in half in midprojection, has made a lot of viewers feel commitment-phobic this season.

Mary Beth Fay, a high school teacher from Round Hill, Va., has been a faithful fan of serialized shows like “Lost” and “Prison Break” from the beginning of their runs. And she was willing to try a few more entries this season.

But she said the demands on her time and concerns about cancellation sent her fleeing from some of the shows, like “Six Degrees,” ABC’s serial about intersecting events involving six New York strangers. “I decided not to stick with that one because it wasn’t being very successful in the ratings. It’s not worth watching a show if you’re not going to get the story completed on the air.”

Other viewers learned that lesson the hard way — by committing themselves to a show, only to be left at the altar a few episodes later. They tend to be bitter. Writing on the Web site misguidedthoughts.com, someone using the name Runaway Fan” lamented the injustice of it all: “They could have at least let us see the rest of the season instead of getting us hooked and then dropping it.”

It may be the network itself that pays the greatest price. On the same site, a fan named Jasmine wrote, “I’m not watching the CW at all anymore.”

Dana Walden, president of the 20th Century Fox Television studio, said: “What the audience seems to be saying is: ‘Enough. We can’t get involved with more of these.’ ”

Logically this result should have been expected. But logic often runs aground in the offices of television executives who endlessly try to anticipate the future by repeating the past. Or, as Preston Beckman, executive vice president for entertainment for the Fox network, put it, “In this business we always overcompensate.”

It all started six years ago with “24,” the first of the you’ve-got-to-see-it-every-week dramas built around a single, suspense-laden, seasonlong storyline. The show, which appeared on Fox, became a hit in the United States and abroad, and even validated the emerging business of sales of DVD’s of entire seasons of series.

ABC raised the stakes two years ago with “Lost,” which became a bigger sensation than “24.” And viewers of “Lost” don’t even get a resolution at the end of the season. They commit themselves to the show knowing that it will tease and confuse them for the entire length of its run.

Fox expanded the genre last year by adding “Prison Break,” a less spectacular but still solid hit that also told a continuing story.

Viewers were watching three of these densely plotted novelized series, and they were watching them with the kind passion network executives and program creators craved.

Soon Hollywood talent agencies, where writers first kick around concepts for shows, and studio and network development offices, where programs are pitched every year, were filled with what Ms. Walden called “big, hooky ideas” for more shows that would stir the same passions.

“It did sort of filter into the ether,” she said. “We were all having conversations about event drama, and all an event drama is is a serialized drama.”

Part of the appeal was the chance to take on a new kind of challenge. “It’s difficult to get creative people not to want to do this kind of show,” Mr. Beckman said. “After you do 15 cop dramas, you get resistance to do more of them.”

HANK STEINBERG already had the best kind of creative credentials when he walked into network offices ready to pitch his idea for “The Nine.” He had created a hit series in the CBS procedural drama “Without a Trace,” one of the many successful hourlong shows that tell a complete story each week. He was looking to branch out creatively.

“I wanted to do a serialized show after doing a closed-ended, episodic series,” Mr. Steinberg said. He was aware of “24” and “Lost,” he said, and how addicted viewers were to them, though he himself was not hooked.

But he and his co-creator, his sister K. J. Steinberg, wanted a more realistic series, without any supernatural plot twists. “We wanted the event to have a mundane quality to it,” Mr. Steinberg said. “A sense of randomness.”

The plan was to tell the story of a hostage crisis and the trauma it caused, but to tell it in flashbacks as the characters’ lives moved forward. How exactly this was going to translate into many years of episodes had not been completely worked out, Mr. Steinberg said. Maybe, he said, “we would propel Season 2 by a new series of events; we might not even be mentioning the bank.”

In essence, the idea for “The Nine” was a big premise to a single story, something you might see unfolding in two hours in a theater.

“It was more like a movie about a bank robbery, and by the end of the season you would see how that worked out,” Mr. Steinberg said.

For some critics of this year’s serial dramas, that was part of the problem. Many of the season’s new serial dramas seemed much more like ideas for movies than for extended television series.

A poster named GregB on the Metacritic Web site (metacritic.com) said he was reluctant to commit to “The Nine” after seeing the pilot. “Watching the pilot made me feel like I was reading a book and missing chapter 2-10, and then had all the characters talk about all those chapters,” he wrote. “I feel like I’m being teased.”

One senior network entertainment executive, who spoke anonymously because his own network had put on several of the shows in question, said: “You have this problem with these shows. If you don’t give people enough information about the main plot every week, they get antsy and want to quit. And if you give them too much information, you start to ruin the suspense. So you wind up with a lot of deliberate confusion. And confusion is death for shows like this.”

Another problem is that with such intricate plots, these shows are much more difficult to join in progress. Three episodes in, the audience for “Kidnapped” was dropping. Even if the network could attract more viewers, how could they follow the action if they had already missed the first three hours?

After the first season of “24,” the decision-makers at Fox were torn over whether the show’s gimmick — one story told over 24 hours in real time — should be maintained. Some said its second season should have a new format, where each episode would cover a self-contained 24-hour period. That would have made the series far less risky, more repeatable and utterly ordinary.

But it might have ended up that way save for one thing: DVD sales. The first season was in stores, and it was selling well. That gave Fox hope, and the original model was retained.

Now, Ms. Walden said, those elements are crucial parts of the formula for how to get a new serialized drama made. “At the studio we first check with our international sales and home entertainment departments before we go ahead.”

None of that really matters, of course, if the show doesn’t last. If a show can’t get by 3 or 6 or even 13 episodes, no DVD will get made, and the international broadcasters will be left as much in the lurch as the viewers.

That would seem to argue for networks to be as patient as possible with serialized shows. But, as Mr. Reilly noted, network executives get assailed for “having itchy trigger fingers” while also facing almost instant declarations in the news media that a new show is a flop and needs to be yanked from the schedule.

Patience is just one lesson the networks have been struggling to learn. Bob Wright, the chairman of NBC, said he learned another from his own wife: don’t schedule a show about a child’s kidnapping at 10 p.m., right before every mother in America goes to bed.

That pitfall extends to the whole premise of a series with dark and scary overtones. Some sense of uplift is needed in most of the episodes, several executives said, or viewers will feel a chill and walk away.

Another lesson is to find some way to increase the audience for a show if it demonstrates promise — and find it as quickly as possible. That’s why some shows — like “24” and “Prison Break” — have run “marathons” of multiple episodes in a single night to hook viewers who might be curious but reluctant to dive in midstream. In addition, replays available on network Web sites the next day are intended to ensure that early fans aren’t left adrift just because they had to attend a wedding or birthday party.

EVEN when serialized shows do become hits, they face challenges that conventional shows do not. They never repeat successfully, for one thing, making it crucial to attract big first-run audiences and strong DVD sales.

And holding onto huge ratings year after year is difficult. That seems increasingly to be the case with the genre’s biggest hit so far, “Lost.” Now in just its third season, the show has seen its ratings fall more than 25 percent. While those numbers are still exceptionally good, ratings tend to increase for almost every conventional hit drama in the third season. It appears that new viewers are unwilling to join “Lost” at this point because the story is so far along and so convoluted that it would take weeks of DVD viewing to catch up.Given all the risks, and all the failure early this season, serialized dramas might be expected to be at a saturation point, or worse — at the point when a creator walks into a network office to pitch a serialized drama and quickly gets ushered out of the building.

Some of that may already be happening. Ms. Walden described a new wave of ideas landing at the feet of drama developers this year. “We’re hearing an awful lot of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ in the corporate world, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ in a lawyer world.”

Even so, the door to serialized drama has not been completely closed. No one in the television business has overlooked the outstanding new hit of the fall season: “Heroes” on NBC. The convoluted, dense story of a group of people suddenly imbued with supernatural powers is straight out of the “Lost” playbook. And it is grabbing viewers and getting them to sign on for the long ride.

“Regardless of how saturated the landscape might be,” Ms. Walden said, “there’s always room for another great show.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/ar...on/29cart.html





Cos. Have Broad Aims for TV on the Web
Brian Bergstein

Eyebrows went up when Google Inc. recently agreed to spend $1.65 billion for YouTube, the most popular Web site for free video clips. But that figure could be blown away one day if some emerging companies achieve their much broader visions for the future of online TV.

These companies are building flexible online networks that can host content, serve up ads and dish out interactive features. While "viral" video-sharing sites like YouTube focus on individual clips - many pirated - these new Internet TV platforms are designed to host full-fledged channels that content creators can control.

One of the best positioned is Brightcove Inc., which on Monday is taking the wraps off an Internet video network that handles virtually everything for content creators.

Aiming to serve everyone from garage auteurs to major media companies, Brightcove offers free publishing tools and runs video wherever publishers want it.
That could be on the central Brightcove site, which is accessible through the video search functions at Google, Yahoo and AOL. Or content publishers can use Brightcove to run video on their own separate, branded sites. Or they can syndicate it to third-party Web sites, such as blogs or MySpace pages, where the content might run alongside user-generated material.

All those videos can be sold as paid downloads or streamed for free, with ads. Brightcove will sell ads and pool them among its customers, or it will plug in commercials that content creators sell themselves.

"They can launch a business in our system in a week," said Brightcove's founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, who formerly was chief technical officer at "Flash" graphics creator Macromedia Inc. before it was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.

It's not a new idea that the abundant bandwidth of the Internet could become the delivery mechanism for thousands of TV channels - including new special-interest stations that would struggle to crack the cable or satellite lineup. We heard that pitch in the dot-com heyday.
But after a slow ramp-up, more than half of U.S. Internet subscribers now have broadband rather than dial-up. And the explosive growth of video-sharing sites, YouTube included, has helped convince advertisers that the medium has legs (though the term most commonly used is eyeballs).

These trends have helped Brightcove draw $28 million in funding from such companies as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL LLC, Hearst Corp., General Electric Co. and IAC/Interactive Corp. And Brightcove's flexibility has attracted diverse publishers trying to expand their broadband video presence. National Geographic, the Travel Channel, Warner Music, The New York Times and The Washington Post are all Brightcove customers.

So is Barrio 305, a Miami-based Internet-only channel devoted to the tropical hip-hop music flavor known as reggaeton. Brightcove pumps Barrio 305's videos to free sites in addition to Barrio 305's own pages. That gives the upstart network such wide dispersal that it hasn't mattered that Barrio 305 has yet to persuade any cable TV programming buyers to offer its package.

"We can bypass these traditional media agencies, and we can get out directly to our audience," said Antonio Otalvaro, one of the three brothers who founded Barrio 305. "Our primary audience is online. They're not watching TV."

Brightcove wins big praise from Forrester Research video analyst Josh Bernoff, who says Allaire "has really got it all figured out."

Even so, Brightcove is not alone in holding video publishers' hands as they step into the Internet.

NBC Universal recently launched an Internet video distribution system called NBBC (short for National Broadband Co.) that is working with NBC affiliates and even traditional NBC rivals such as CBS Corp. and News Corp. NBBC is a marketplace where content owners and third-party sites can agree to share content and ad revenue.

"You can syndicate over millions of sites, each one of which will drive somewhere between one stream and a million," said Mike Steib, NBC Universal's general manager for strategic ventures. "Web site partners can say, `I'd love to have Vibe.com (clips) and NBC News and product reviews from CNet, and `Saturday Night Live' - the Web site owner tells you what fits best for their audience. Being able to create that, we think, is the next big thing."

Another key player, Maven Networks Inc., is headquartered in the same Cambridge office complex as Brightcove. (The ties aren't just geographic: Allaire briefly served as an adviser to Maven before founding Brightcove in 2004; Maven licensed a video publishing tool to him and owns a minuscule stake in Brightcove.)

Like Brightcove, Maven is hosting video for customers and giving them quick, mouse-click methods of positioning content and setting up ad campaigns. Unlike Brightcove, Maven doesn't want to double as a video portal or dip into the ad business. Maven gets paid when viewers check out one of its customers' videos.

Maven's CEO, Hilmi Ozguc, is a tech veteran who sold an online ad company to ExciteAtHome - which flamed out when its big dreams got way ahead of the early state of U.S. broadband penetration. Retrenching, Ozguc started Maven in 2002 "with an eye to this broadband future" and has raised about $30 million, mainly from venture capitalists.

Maven's customers include CBS-owned College Sports Television and The Weather Channel. Maven also powers aspects of NBBC's system, while 20th Century Fox uses Maven to show movie trailers.

"The whole industry is being transformed," Ozguc said.

So deeply is it being changed, in fact, that Web video companies will have to smartly evolve as content coming over the Internet is routinely funneled not only to computers but directly to living room TVs. This will require navigating around or working with cable companies, for example, that make a good deal of their money controlling what you see on TV.

Consumers would also benefit from better methods of finding all this stuff, since traditional Web search engines were built to read text.

None of these obstacles are insurmountable, but whoever can solve them would likely create an enormously valuable enterprise. Sure, YouTube sold for $1.65 billion, but Bernoff predicts "there will be multiple multibillion-dollar companies" before all is said and done.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-30-00-55-07





Swiss TV-Over-Broadband Service Launched
AP

Switzerland's dominant telecommunications company has launched a TV-over-broadband service that offers more than 100 television channels and more than 70 radio stations.

Swisscom said its existing high-speed Internet customers will be able to watch and record those stations through its $24-a-month Bluewin TV service. Video on demand will cost extra.

The launch of the service was delayed a year because of technical difficulties, including problems with the development of software designed by Microsoft Corp. for the set-top box.

"We wanted to offer a mature service, so we worked on it for another year," Swisscom spokesman Christian Neuhaus said.

TV-over-broadband services, also known as IPTV, have so far been launched in France, Spain, Italy and Britain.

The technology is not yet compatible with high-definition television, which would require a tenfold increase in bandwidth.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-01-17-50-36





The Death of TV: Google to Smack Down UK's Top Channels
CS

The deformed children of the first dotcom boom roam the streets like dogs, but it looks like background radiation must be reaching safe levels again because new heroes are rising. Google's purchase of YouTube for $1.65bn and Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace for $580m are just two of the more flamboyant transactions sprung from this new-found confidence.

But this is just the beginning. It's now reported that Google's advertising revenue will surpass that of the UK's main commercial TV channels. Could it be that the days of traditional broadcast advertising are numbered, or can the two co-exist like Ritalin stepkids in some horribly dysfunctional family?

Channel 4 is predicted to collect £800m in returns from advertisers this year, but Google is expected to surpass this figure in the UK. It is then likely that the Internet search giant will overtake ITV1 within 18 months. What's not clear is how parasitic the relationship between online and offline advertising is. It's too early to tell whether advertisers are turning away from television onto the Web, or if they're supplementing TV ads with online versions.

What does this mean for the glorious creative output that UK television advertising is globally applauded for? The US has been forced to contend with heinously patronising and crude TV advertising for decades, but the UK's advertising industry has managed to create art out of the dirty act of selling. Some of the best short films of the last century have been television advertisements.

Who can forget the Guinness man as he waits, Buddha-like, for that perfect wave? Or the Hovis kid, cycling his rickety old bicycle up cobblestone streets delivering bread -- his face prematurely lined because, you imagine, his father died in a recent mining accident and his mother is a drunk?

And what is to become of masterpieces like the new Sony Bravia advert, where thousands of litres of paint are exploded across a Glasgow housing estate? Even if some of these make the transition to online (the Bravia ad has), they'll lack the spectacle of their TV equivalent.

Of course, it may be that this argument is moot. As the Internet becomes more pervasive, we might abandon our televisions all together, and stream 'television' solely over the Internet. Rather than there being any great paradigm shift as advertisers switch from TV to the Web, perhaps the Web will simply turn into TV. If you have anything to say on the matter (preferably outrageous, fuelled by anger and uncorroborated by fact), let us know by posting a comment below. -CS
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/televisions/...9284883,00.htm





Diller’s Web: Think Cable of the Past
Richard Siklos

When Barry Diller hired longtime television and film executive Michael Jackson as programming president at the IAC/InterActiveCorp, he had to reassure investors that he was not going back into the entertainment business.

IAC is an Internet company, after all, and Internet companies promise higher growth than media businesses typically deliver. But could Mr. Diller resist his past? Hollywood dominates his résumé, and Mr. Jackson had worked for him previously, overseeing the USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel, among other TV and film ventures.

So far, Mr. Diller has allayed their concerns. He has not gone out to buy a studio, nor has he leaped onto the latest wave of Internet content megadeals by laying down big dollars for the likes of a Facebook or YouTube.

Instead, a glimpse at Mr. Jackson’s early efforts in online programming are now coming into view: he is thinking big by going small, investing in and starting targeted content sites built around humor, news and popular culture that remind him of the early efforts in cable television programming.

In an interview, Mr. Diller said he expected Mr. Jackson to carry out perhaps dozens of such ventures during the next few years. “The amount of capital we’ll put in this over time will be hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “This is a wonderful area right now to invest in.”

The company recently unveiled a test version of a new daily newsletter and Web site, Very Short List, which carries recommendations of unheralded cultural and entertainment products, including books, CDs and DVDs. And in August, IAC acquired control of the Web site www.collegehumor.com — whose name is fairly self-explanatory, though its appeal depends on which college you attended.

Mr. Jackson’s next project, scheduled for a debut next year, continues in a mirthful vein: a continuously updated satirical Web site that IAC is beginning as a joint venture with The Huffington Post, the assemblage of left-of-center blogs that was founded last year and is edited by the author and pundit Arianna Huffington.

The concept behind the to-be-named site is to deliver throughout the day the kind of humor that has been the preserve of late-night talk-show hosts like Conan O’Brien and the Comedy Central stalwarts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Kenneth Lerer, a former Time Warner executive who is a founder of The Huffington Post, calls the idea “real-time satire — real news, not fake news,” and said it would be edited by Ben Wikler, a comedy writer who has worked closely with Al Franken.

Mr. Jackson’s career suggests that more is in store for him. Before he ran the television business of USA Networks and the Universal Television Group, which were acquired by NBC in 2003, he was the chief executive of Channel 4 in his native Britain.

He took some time off after the businesses he led were acquired, then worked on several film and TV projects. But he decided not to return to television because of his view that even the cable networks had become too bland.

A clincher for Mr. Jackson was that at the beginning of this year, Trio, a small cable channel for nonfiction programming that he and Mr. Diller had taken a particular interest in, was recast as Sleuth. It shows reruns of the investigative police shows that dominate prime time. “The cable world has become conservative,” Mr. Jackson lamented.

During his interregnum, Mr. Jackson was thinking Webby thoughts. He collaborated with the author and journalist Kurt Andersen and the designers Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman to develop a collection of eclectic and carefully “curated” items (books, CDs and so on) boxed together and periodically shipped to subscribers.

That was the origin of Very Short List, which has evolved into a daily newsletter and Web site because Mr. Jackson and Mr. Diller — who financed the venture through IAC and rehired his old colleague in January — deemed the box concept too expensive to succeed at first.

In its preintroduction form, one of the site’s recent picks included Michel Gondry’s video for a new single by Beck. Another was the book “The Laws of Simplicity” by John Maeda, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose tenets, if his unusually stark office is any indication, Mr. Jackson already lives by.

In the case of the planned satire site, Mr. Jackson said he had sought out The Huffington Post as a partner because it appeared to know how to start up a Web business quickly. The Huffington Post ranked 24th in the blogs category of Web sites during the month of September, with 635,000 unique visitors, according to comScore Networks.

Sean Mills, president of The Onion, a satirical Web site and publication, said that the Web had proved to be particularly suited to humor. But “to maintain it over a long period of time is a very difficult thing,” he added, “and something that we are constantly challenged with.”

In addition to competing with the likes of The Onion, IAC’s new venture may have another rival: Time Warner is developing an online comedy site involving its Home Box Office and AOL divisions, which also proposes to include a satirical take on breaking news, an executive briefed on the plan said.

Where CollegeHumor was concerned, Mr. Jackson conceded that the site might not be for everybody. (Last week, the site featured what it called the “greatest picture ever to grace CollegeHumor”: two half-naked women kissing atop kegs of beer.) It ranks sixth among humor Web sites, according to comScore, with 1.3 million unique visitors in September.

“What attracted us to CollegeHumor is it’s a brand,” Mr. Jackson said. “I think those things that have a point of view can be successful on the Web. That’s a model that goes back forever.”

Mr. Diller said that although IAC could afford a big acquisition like the $1 billion said to be sought for Facebook, a social networking site, he was reluctant to do so. “Making very large bets on businesses that don’t yet have a business model is just not our history,” he said. “I’ll leave that to the media imperialists.”

Instead, he and Mr. Jackson said they favored the economics of starting their own ventures and investing in nascent ones. “This is a medium where how much you spend has much less effect on the outcome than ever before,” Mr. Jackson said. “Some of the best content online has been created by amateurs for nothing.”

Mr. Jackson appears to be something of an island unto himself at IAC, whose better known operations, including the Home Shopping Network, Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Match.com, LendingTree and the search engine Ask.com, generate more than $6 billion a year in revenue.

He said his next area of focus might be news — a site that aggregates and edits news and helps point people to the best information available — but he was not ready to talk about specifics.

Whatever he does, his friends expect it to make a splash.

“If there’s something to do online that makes sense,” Mr. Andersen, the author, said, “he’s as well positioned as any 48-year-old guy to figure out what that is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/bu...31jackson.html





Students Produce Movies With Cell Phones
Melissa Trujillo

The cameras capture the young man walking down the stairs, reciting a monologue about the three things people should know about him: His favorite movie is "Gone with the Wind," he loves roller coasters and he hates when people don't take him seriously.

The shot is complicated and takes several attempts to perfect. But there's no big camera equipment, no expert sound system and no reels of film to capture the moment.

Instead, everyone involved, from the three cameramen and the sound guy to the extras, is producing the miniature movie with - and for - cell phones.

The exercise is part of a new Boston University class created through a unique partnership with cellular company Amp'd Mobile and taught by director Jan Egleson. During the semester, the students will produce a series of short episodes that eventually will be distributed by the company for its cellular customers. The students have challenged each other to shoot it using only the phones, despite obstacles surrounding sound and video quality.

The class, which the university believes is the only one of its kind in the country, offers students credit and a chance to be part of the new media culture - where anyone, anywhere, can create, distribute and view entertainment using a variety of emerging technologies. Amp'd benefits by getting mobile content created by one of its targeted audiences: young, tech-savvy adults.

Amp'd, whose backers include Qualcomm Inc. and Viacom Inc., is trying to compete with mainstream cellular players like Cingular Wireless by branding itself as a youth-oriented company offering more than just phone service. It sells comedy clips, cartoons and music videos for subscribers to watch on cell phones for prices that start at 45 cents for a single download to $20 for unlimited access.

Most content is geared toward people ages 18 to 35.

"They're all about anywhere, anytime," said Seth Cummings, Amp'd Mobile's senior vice president for content, who helped start the program at his alma mater. "They want to be able to take their media with them."

Amp'd has hired established writers to create original content, but Cummings said the company decided to work with BU to target budding artists.

"I know that when I was there, there was this stuff that we'd create that there was no outlet (for)," Cummings said. "There's a real outlet here."

The medium is so new, the students and Egleson spent some time in a recent class debating what to call their work. Options included mobisodes (mobile episodes), mobilettes or cellenovelas (cellular telenovelas).

"We're on the cutting edge of a new era of film medium," said Mark DiCristofaro, a 21-year-old BU film student. "Why not get on board early?"

And because anyone with a cell phone can make a video and upload it to the Internet to watch on computers or phones, the students said they felt a greater opportunity to get people to see their work. Television production graduate student Chris Miller said cell phones give young filmmakers a new way to distribute their work.

"It's so hard to get the studios to really pay attention, especially the beginning filmmakers," Miller said. "So if they don't want to go that route, you don't have to."

In some respects, Egleson's film class is like any other. In the first hour, he guides the students through a discussion of editing, graphics, music and tone. They work on their series, centered on a group of diverse students who each harbor a secret.

"The bottom line is always that if it's a good story and you get involved, it doesn't matter what format it is," said Egleson, who has directed films and television shows.

Other times, though, the students and teacher run into challenges unique to working with their black, shiny cell phones provided by Amp'd:

- The phones film for just 15 seconds at a time. For longer scenes, such as the monologue in the stairwell, multiple phones are used.

- The phones don't pick up sound well. During this class, the students try putting a phone in an actor's pocket or using a makeshift boom created with a tiny microphone and a bendable, green stick.

- In some scenes, cameramen can be seen in the shots. So when they finish filming, they quickly put their cameras to their ears and become extras casually chatting on the phone.

The picture quality isn't as good as film, either, because the phone's camera records 15 frames per second, compared with the typical 24 to 30 frames per second in movies or on television.

"I wish I could tell you I've done this a million times," Egleson tells the class as they watch him upload their footage stored on the phone's memory cards onto his laptop, done by connecting the phone to the computer with a USB cable.

Miller said the students also have had to adapt their film-making style for the small - very small - screen. Scenes are shorter, cuts are quicker and visuals are larger. Nobody is trying to make a "Saving Private Ryan" epic, and the students refuse to edit out the quirks, saying they want to create videos the average phone user could make themselves.

"It's not quite as clean as what you'd expect from television. It's a little more raw," Miller said. "It's not your `Everybody Loves Raymond' sitcom."

On the other hand, Egleson said, the phones give the cameramen more flexibility because they aren't lugging around large equipment and can easily whip a phone out of their pocket for spontaneous scenes. And Egleson expects the phone technology to improve quickly.

Paris recently held its second film festival devoted exclusively to movies shot with cell phones. But it's too early to say how popular mobile programming will become in the United States, said Linda Barrabee, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a Boston-based technology research firm.

Although cell phones are ubiquitous, a much smaller percentage of people own phones with the technology to watch videos or subscribe to services to do so.

Current trends, she said, lean toward people being most interested short programming, such as sketches or sports highlights, that they can watch in line at the store or on the subway.

"For the most part, what we're talking about is snacking," she said.

But Barrabee wouldn't rule out feature films watched in segments - or even attracting older people, who have more buying power than young adults.

Despite the challenges and uncertain future, a wave of enthusiasm traveled through a recent three-hour BU class, from the experimental filming to the writing session.

"I feel like I should pay $7 for this," one student said as the class crowded around cell phones and computers to watch their edited footage.

Which is exactly what Amp'd Mobile wants to hear.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-29-14-55-42





Google Shares Ad Wealth With Videographers
Greg Sandoval

Google has begun sharing advertising revenue with the makers of a popular video clip in a groundbreaking deal that could drive up the costs of competing in the fledgling video-sharing sector.

The search company has agreed to turn over most advertising revenue generated by the latest video from Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, creators of "The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment," according to Peter Chane, a senior product manager for Google Video.

In exchange, Grobe and Voltz, who saw their original offering--which shows a version of Vegas' Bellagio Fountains made of 101 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos--catch fire with video-sharing fans last summer, have agreed to let Google host their latest video, "The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment II."

Until now, most amateur-made material that appears on video-sharing sites was made for fun. But inviting talented videographers to share in the ad revenue generated by their clips is the way of the video-sharing future, analysts say. Metacafe, one of the top 10 video-sharing sites, also announced on Monday that it will pay $5 to video creators for every 1,000 times their video is watched.

Critics argue that most video-sharing companies are profitless, and their costs, such as the high price of bandwidth, make sharing ad revenue difficult. Yet, video-sharing site Revver.com has shown that rewarding video makers helps attract the best talent. The Los Angeles-based company, which pays 50 percent of ad revenue to videographers, has drawn some of the Web's top auteurs, including the producers of Lonelygirl15, a much-watched fictional video series about a home-schooled teenage girl.

Revver is betting that audiences will follow the best video makers. Apparently, the deep-pocketed Google is making the same bet.

"This is the first case where we matched up video content with advertising," Chane said. "We've taken user-submitted material that is not considered professional content and monetized it."

How long will it be before YouTube, which sees more than 50,000 videos uploaded to its site daily, begins writing checks to its content creators? Google acquired YouTube, the sector's largest company, earlier this month for $1.65 billion.

"Until the deal closes, we're continuing to operate as two separate companies," a Google representative said in an e-mail.

YouTube could not be reached for comment.

One thing is sure: Stupid pet tricks and people acting goofy on camera have never been as lucrative a business.

Grobe and Voltz, for instance, pocketed $35,000, their share of the ad revenue paid to them by Revver, for their first Coke-and-Mentos video back in July. Now, the pair could earn big bucks from Google if the latest video is a hit. The two are also hosting a video-making contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, which paid them an undisclosed amount.
http://news.com.com/Google+shares+ad...3-6130881.html





Asset Sales Boost Time Warner 3Q Earns
AP

Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media conglomerate, posted sharply higher third-quarter earnings on Wednesday due largely to several asset sales and adjustments related to its deal to acquire cable systems from Adelphia, but earnings excluding items fell shy of analysts' expectations.

The company's AOL unit, which is revamping its business model, posted higher profits as it slashed marketing expenses for its dial-up access service. But AOL's revenues fell as lower revenues from dial-up subscribers outpaced gains in Internet advertising.

The New York-based company, which owns Time Inc., Warner Bros. and HBO, had earnings of $2.3 billion, or 57 cents a share, versus $853 million, or 18 cents a share, in the year quarter last year.

Revenues rose 7 percent to $10.9 billion from $10.2 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting revenues of $11.1 billion.

The earnings included 23 cents per share for discontinued operations related to cable systems that Time Warner has since transferred to Comcast Corp. as part of a three-way deal with Comcast to acquire the systems of Adelphia Communications Corp.

The figures also included 14 cents per share in gains from the sale of Warner Bros.' Australian theme park business, other asset sales and one-time effects.

Without the discontinued operations or one-time gains, the earnings were equivalent to 19 cents per share, up from 17 cents per share on a comparable basis in the year-ago period.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting earnings of 20 cents per share.

On an operating basis -- before interest expenses, taxes, depreciation and amortization -- Time Warner's income grew 16 percent to $2.9 billion, led by gains at its cable TV business and at AOL. The company's cable networks and magazine publishing divisions also posted gains, while TV and movie programming declined.

The company's shares fell 31 cents or 1.6 percent in pre-market trading to $19.70. The shares have been rising steadily since their $15.84 close on August 9, shortly after the company announced its new strategy for AOL. Longer term, the shares have been trading below $20 since May of 2002.

AOL posted a 21 percent gain in profits despite a 3 percent decline in revenues as the division cut back on marketing expenses for its dial-up Internet access business, which continued to dwindle rapidly.

AOL is in the midst of turning its business model away from charging for Internet access in favor of selling advertising online, a formula being followed successfully by Internet rivals Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.

AOL lost another 2.5 million dial-up subscribers in the quarter, bringing its total to 15.2 million. Subscription revenues fell 13 percent to $210 million while advertising revenues jumped 46 percent, to $151 million.

This summer AOL said it would offer many of its services for free, including e-mail, as part of its business overhaul.

For the first nine months of the year, Time Warner earned $4.8 billion, or $1.13 per share, versus $1.4 billion, or 29 cents per share, in the comparable period last year. Nine-month revenues rose 2.8 percent to $31.8 billion.

The company also backed its previously announced full-year outlook of posting growth in operating income in the low double-digit percentage range, excluding the impact of the Adelphia transaction and other one-time effects.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...me-Warner.html





Execs: AOL Free Strategy Still on Track
Anick Jesdanun

AOL saw its largest quarterly drop in paying subscribers, while traffic to the company's free, ad-supported Web sites held steady, prompting Time Warner executives to declare Wednesday that their online unit's new strategy is on track.

The accelerated decline had been expected following AOL's announcement in August that it would give away AOL.com e-mail accounts, software and other services once reserved for those paying as much as $26 a month for Internet access. In the process, AOL stopped actively marketing subscriptions and halted the trial discs that often came unsolicited in mailboxes and magazines.

The company lost 2.5 million U.S. subscribers in the July-September period, compared with drops of fewer than 1 million subscribers a quarter since AOL hit its peak of 26.7 million four years ago. That leaves 15.2 million paying subscribers in the United States, nearly two-thirds for dial-up access.

As a result, subscription revenues declined 13 percent, though that was partly offset by a 46 percent boost in advertising over the same period last year, Time Warner Inc. reported Wednesday. Online ads now account for 24 percent of AOL's total revenues, compared with 16 percent a year ago.

Over the past two years, AOL has been increasingly making its features and services available for free in hopes of driving traffic to ad-supported Web sites. In August, it decided to give away most of what's left to prevent further defections to rivals like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Data from comScore Media Metrix show that AOL has managed so far to keep people visiting its sites even after they cancel subscriptions.

AOL sites had about 16.0 billion U.S. page views in September, down only slightly from 16.5 billion in June, before the strategy shift. AOL had 111 million unique visitors in September, a 1 percent drop from a year ago, even as paid subscriptions dropped 24 percent over the past year.

"The early results of the strategy we announced ... are encouraging," Time Warner Chief Executive Dick Parsons said during a conference call. "These members are maintaining their level of usage after they switch. In addition, we are also signing up more new users than we initially expected."

Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's chief operating officer, said only two-thirds of AOL's 3 million free e-mail users were people who had dropped paid accounts, meaning the company has about 1 million new users who weren't even subscribers right before the strategy shift.

E-mail is particularly important because people use it frequently and regularly. While checking e-mail on an ad-supported Web page, users may even stumble upon a video clip or other content, boosting AOL's ad opportunities.

The 46 percent third-quarter boost in advertising is more than Yahoo's 18 percent though less than Google's 70 percent.

AOL has been able to grow fast partly because it started with relatively low ad revenues. It had $479 million in the third quarter, compared with $1.37 billion at Yahoo. Yahoo's growth was about $210 million, greater than the $150 million for AOL.

Time Warner executives acknowledged that AOL might not sustain its recent growth rates, but said the company should be able to keep pace with industry growth trends.

Parsons added that Europe presents additional ad opportunities. Time Warner is selling its access businesses there - a deal for AOL's French subscribers closed Tuesday - and the arrangements call for AOL to provide content and ads for the new owners' existing customers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-01-17-42-42





Is Vista a Dead End?
John C. Dvorak

As we get ever closer to the official release of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, we have to ask ourselves what comes next—or is this the end? I think it is the end, for a lot of reasons.

First, it's possible that Microsoft is out of ideas, and Apple is out of ideas from which Microsoft can borrow. If Microsoft wants to keep improving its OS, there is only one hope: somehow to develop an OS to coordinate and control the multiple cores within the CPU. In other words, make a universal parallel-processing OS—a feat nobody has yet managed.

The multiple cores in a CPU are generally like those multi-CPU computers that process a lot of data in parallel. Applications are specifically written to use all these chips. The apps do the work, and the OS tries not to get in the way. Even if the OS does nothing more than use multiple cores to multitask programs, coordinating that among the CPU, the OS, and subsystems such as memory, hard drive, and peripherals is nightmarish.

Demos showing the power of multicore chips are usually games in which a specific function—AI, ray tracing, or something that can't make too big a mess—is shoved to the extra core. If Microsoft ever makes its OS take advantage of multiple cores, you can be sure it will be for something mundane.

Somewhere down the road, these multiple cores may be functional at the OS level. But does Microsoft have the talent for this challenge? And how many decades will it take to develop?

The situation looks even bleaker when we see what's already happened to Vista. Microsoft couldn't get the promised database-centric file system to work, so it was left out of the new OS. This sort of file system goes back to the 1970s and was used in the Pick OS and other systems. Yet Microsoft, with all its resources, can't make it work.

To make matters worse, when Microsoft tries to add features to its OS, it gets attacked by companies who provide these functions as third-party vendors. This includes the antivirus and firewall companies, a few of which are threatening to sue Microsoft on the same grounds as the old antitrust case.

Microsoft's unfortunate history, combined with its incredibly deep pockets, makes it a wide-open target for legal harassment as well as legitimate attacks. It's still unclear how Microsoft will be treated in Europe and China over the long term.

I don't get how Microsoft's supposed visionaries couldn't see this coming when the company was riding roughshod over its competition in the 1980s and 1990s, especially when you consider that Bill Gates's dad is a leading partner at a huge law firm.

While Microsoft, because of its sheer size, is no more doomed than IBM ever was, it's never going to be a leader again, if the Vista saga is any indication. What we are witnessing now is nothing more than upgrades and maintenance.

The company still makes its money from two product lines (OS licenses and Microsoft Office) and seems less than sincere when it ventures into other markets. When it does have a winner, such as the Xbox 360, it can't bring itself to stomp on the gas pedal. Despite having billions in the bank, the company is still risk-averse.

Once Vista emerges and the OS scene is reset for another two or three years, there will be an opportunity for something new to become the rage. It may finally give the slowly growing Linux a chance to capture the desktop and change the way we spend our money. Everyone would love to get off Microsoft's expensive treadmill. Opportunity is knocking. Will anyone answer?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759...079TX1K0000584





2 Giants in a Deal Over Linux
Laurie J. Flynn and Steve Lohr

Microsoft acknowledged the influence of the Linux operating system on Thursday by striking a deal with Novell, a longtime rival, to ensure that Novell’s version of Linux could operate together with Windows in corporate data centers.

In an industry known for strange bedfellows, the two companies said they were collaborating on technical development and marketing programs. They also took steps to ensure that Microsoft’s intellectual property was protected as it modifies its software to work with the operating system Novell acquired in January 2004, known as SuSE Linux.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, said that the companies began discussing the collaboration in April, but that Microsoft had been getting pressure from its largest corporate customers far longer.

“I certainly recognize that Linux plays an important role in the mix of technologies our customers use,” Mr. Ballmer said at a news conference here announcing the partnership. But he added that Microsoft would continue to push Windows over Linux to customers, endorsing SuSE Linux only if customers insisted on using it.

The partnership, according to industry analysts, is driven by both competitive and customer considerations. Linux and Windows are increasingly used on corporate server computers powered by the lower-cost microprocessors from the personal computer industry.

“This is a customer-driven information technology world now, and this move by Microsoft is partly an accommodation to its corporate customers,” said Gary Beach, publisher of CIO magazine, whose audience is mainly the chief information officers of companies.

Analysts said Microsoft’s move might well help its fast-growing server software business by reassuring corporate technology managers that they could make continued investments in Windows and Linux. Both proprietary Windows and open-source Linux have made strong gains in corporate data centers, not so much against each other, but by supplanting costly machines that run commercial versions of the Unix operating system and sometimes, mainframe computers.

Microsoft’s server software sales are now running at $10 billion a year, rising 17 percent in the most recent quarter.

Richard Sherlund of Goldman Sachs said, “Microsoft doesn’t have to like Linux, but C.I.O.’s want Windows to play well with Linux.”

As part of the agreement, Microsoft said it would not file patent infringement suits against customers who purchase Novell’s SuSE Linux.

Stuart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs, said that aspect of the deal could further increase acceptance of Linux among corporations. The risk of lawsuits by Microsoft had been a lingering fear among Linux developers because Microsoft executives have been highly critical of what they said was the Linux world’s careless disregard for intellectual property rights.

“Microsoft customers are going to run a lot of Windows and a lot of Linux, and today Microsoft is saying that’s O.K. and there will not be resistance from Microsoft,” said Mr. Cohen, who leads a consortium that promotes the adoption of Linux.

In trading Thursday, Novell’s stock rose 92 cents, or 15.7 percent, to $6.79 as word of the deal leaked out. The formal announcement was made after the close of regular trading. Financial terms of the deal, effective until at least 2012, were not disclosed. Microsoft declined 4 cents, to $28.77.

Microsoft’s and Novell’s move comes a week after Oracle, the big database company, announced that it would provide technical support for Linux software distributed by Red Hat, a leading Linux company. But Oracle also said its support would be at about half the price of Red Hat’s service.

Red Hat makes its money on technical support, so the Oracle move was seen as a hostile act, noted Charles di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Red Hat shares fell on the Oracle announcement last week. They slipped 2.7 percent on Thursday, after the Microsoft partnership with Novell, Red Hat’s main competitor as a Linux company, was announced.

Matthew J. Szulik, chief executive of Red Hat, said the announcement was recognition by Microsoft that Linux is now a “core component of information technology infrastructure” and an effort by Novell, a “weakened and vulnerable” Linux company, to gain ground.

Mr. Ballmer, though, disputed the notion that Microsoft’s announcement was in response to Oracle’s arrangement with Red Hat.

“We’ve been working on this deal for a long time,” he said, calling Oracle’s deal “just a service agreement” with Red Hat. “You get no covenant not to sue if you chose Oracle.”

Microsoft and Oracle are the two largest software companies in the world, competing in databases, programming tools and some business applications. Yet Oracle’s fundamental business is corporate database software, while operating systems are Microsoft’s core franchise.

“As of last week, Oracle essentially got in the operating system business,” Mr. Beach of CIO magazine said. “This is Microsoft’s response.”

Microsoft plans within weeks to introduce the first major upgrade to Windows in many years. In the meantime, some customers have defected to Linux to reduce their dependence on Microsoft’s development schedule and to cut their costs.

Open-source software, which developers are free to modify and redistribute, is seen as the antithesis of proprietary software like Windows. Linux companies like Novell make the bulk of their revenue from support and service for Linux, not the initial sale.

Laurie J. Flynn reported from San Francisco and Steve Lohr from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/business/03soft.html





In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year

Social Sites Find Fickle Audience
Yuki Noguchi

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they're over MySpace.

"I think it's definitely going down -- a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now," said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.

From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she's gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day -- decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends' pages -- to deleting the whole thing.

"I've grown out of it," Kim said. "I thought it was kind of pointless."

Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months' time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever's hot now.

MySpace is one of the most wildly successful sites in recent years, amassing 124 million profiles and transforming teen life online during its 2 1/2 years of existence. The site functions like a cross between a diary, e-mail program and photo album where content can be shared with friends, whose pictures appear on a member's profile.

One key measure of a site's popularity is the amount of time a user stays on the site. Tracked over time, such usage data for older networking sites frequented by young people show how popularity gradually rises then falls, like an inchworm's back.

Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month, according to Nielsen-NetRatings. Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month .

It's hard to make an online audience stick. Most Internet services are free and compete for a viewer's time, which most sites then try to parlay into advertising dollars. The more time someone spends on a site, the more ads they see. The successful sites engender habits among their users, but users can -- and historically have -- defected to other services for any number of reasons.

The high school English class cites several reasons for backing off of MySpace: Creepy people proposition them. Teachers and parents monitor them. New, more alluring free services comes along, so they collectively jump ship.

The relatively short lifecycle of a popular site is a terrifying prospect for companies like Google Inc., which this month spent $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the Internet's latest grass-roots favorite, year-old YouTube, whose popularity Google hopes to harness as a loyal video audience.

To a youth market composed of teens like Kim and Birnbaum, MySpace is just the latest online fad. Before MySpace, the place to be was Xanga, and before that, Friendster, MiGente and Black Planet.

"They're not loyal," Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic. Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They're constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.

Consider the most popular teen sites tracked by Nielsen-NetRatings. Topping the list last month were Snapvine.com, PLyrics.com, Picgames.com -- none of which appeared among the top 10 for April, or the list a year ago.

Madeline Dell'Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. "No one was using Xanga anymore," she said.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend's photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said.

MySpace said it hopes to earn a permanent place in its users' lives, becoming as essential as e-mail and cellphones.

"There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don't," a spokeswoman for the site said, but the site is adding an average of 320,000 new profiles every day and continuing to go mainstream. In the past year it launched new services such as mobile and video channels, and expanded internationally.

Some teens, however, say security and privacy -- already a common concern among parents and teachers -- are dampening their enthusiasm for MySpace.

Over the summer, Birnbaum's friend Chrissy Quantrille discovered an impostor had taken her photos off her MySpace profile, set up a fake page and even used it to establish a romantic virtual relationship with a boy in California.

"It was creepy," said Quantrille, who tried to contact the offender -- "What are you doing?" -- and sent a message to the duped boyfriend. She and her friends filed a form asking MySpace to take down the fake page, which it did within two days.

New fake sites of Quantrille and her friends reappeared three weeks ago, prompting some to move to Facebook, where users have to register using a school or business e-mail, making it feel safer.

MySpace going mainstream also attracts unwanted attention.

Dell'Aria said teachers at her previous high school started logging onto MySpace and reading students' profiles, apparently monitoring the pages for signs of alcohol or drug abuse.

"I was shocked and kind of annoyed, and it was kind of an invasion of privacy," she said. Although no one got in trouble, word spread like wildfire, and many of her classmates reset their privacy settings to block unapproved users from accessing their pages, she said.

Liana Castro, a junior in the literary media department of Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, said having an online social life intesified the drama in her real life.

She routinely heard from people who complained they weren't designated as one of her top eight friends. "People would be like, 'why am I not in your top eight?' " With 279 online friends, Castro caught so much grief she changed the site so it only listed four family members.

Her profile also landed her in hot water when a boy she didn't like kept asking to be her online friend. "I kept deleting the message," she said. "He got mad."

Watching as their peers deal with such fallout, some vow not to engage in the phenomenon at all.

Evan Hansen, a sophomore at Falls Church High School, said he didn't buy into the MySpace hype and is waiting for the craze to die.

"Over time, people are going to get sick of talking to people on the computer," he said. "I just think people will want to spend more time with each other -- without the wall of technology."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102800803.html





GooTube's Porn Opportunists: The Expanding World of Upload-It-Yourself Smut
Violet Blue

People have been making amateur porn and uploading it to YouTube since its inception; after all, it's human nature to sexualize any new technology. Smart online sites like Second Life, while not a sex site, take this need to sexualize as a grown-up given. In their architecture and business model, they just sort of budget in that adult users will use a certain percentage of their world for sex, and set up all the necessary precautions to make this a safe and sane (and even fun) experience for everyone, and easily avoided if you prefer real estate to RealDolls. According to Linden Labs/Second Life's Catherine Smith, "All 'adult content' is confined to Mature sims in Second Life and takes place behind closed doors."

But in the aftermath of Google's acquisition of YouTube, YouTube's methods of trying to control questionable content and Terms of Use (TOU) enforcement are emerging as clumsy at best, and highly exploitable at worst. Even so, YouTube's policies on porn and adult content have opened up a whole new market for an ever-growing roster of upload-it-yourself smut sites, while raising some interesting questions about businesses whose TOU and operational models turn a blind eye to the inevitable intersection of sex and technology.

Lawyer and executive director at The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Jennifer Granick adds: "Internet regulations tend to be ill-defined and confusing, and as a result, they are discriminatorily enforced. Companies have to guess whether they are going to be targets for regulators or law enforcement. As a result, general-interest content companies like YouTube or Google Images will choose to ignore regulations that special-interest content companies like a pornography video or photo site believes it must comply with."

As content delivery evolves, porn, as an extension of human sexual expression, follows. The Flickr spin-off sites are a great example: Flickrchicks, Adult Flickr, FlickrBooty (all defunct) and several others made up for what Flicker's TOU couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver (yet appeared on the site, regardless). These sites essentially skimmed Flickr for hotties to repost in babelog-style form and pull in affiliate click-through revenue, many knowing full well that the pictures they link to have a limited life span.

Many businesses have flourished where others decidedly feared to tread, rather than creating a healthy, inclusive and lucrative business structure. Where Google's AdSense wouldn't go, AdBrite mopped up the revenue. And when PayPal decided that grown-up money was filthy lucre, a whole host of adult transaction services were eager to Dumpster-dive for PayPal's sizable leavings.

Similarly, early this year sites like (NSFW) HotTube.wordpress. com and (NSFW) DudeTube.blogspot. com sprang up in the tradition of the Flickr spin-off babe sites, making the most of YouTube's easily accessed user-submitted content and its inconceivably exponential growth rate. Simply sifting through YouTube for porn and coming up with the goods over and over again and then reposting the juicy finds was enough to make these sites merit repeat visits for viewers. And knowing the content was against YouTube's TOU, sites like DudeTube often posted video embeds with the title "not around for long," acknowledging the temporary nature of the amateur offerings, whether the videos were explicit or not, with the understanding that YouTube's policies and policing were often bizarrely erratic and only a YouTube employee's judgment call away from removal.

By summer, YouTube had proved itself simply unreliable for a number of users -- not just for porn, but for being a content-delivery system for anyone whose content might get flagged by concerned or malevolent users and yanked by a YouTube customer service department that seemed to be in over their heads.

Similarly, Internet video site Veoh, which had been a smart, rational, useful place to upload and watch hard- and soft-core video, abruptly changed its TOU in June and no longer allowed adult content to be uploaded to its network -- all video deemed "pornographic (which shall include any depictions of nudity)." Veoh then did what many people have been wondering aloud about YouTube, and they scrubbed their site clean of anything that smelled like copyright infringement -- at least at the time.

Enter sites like (NSFW) Xtube.com, and the new era of porn-loving video sharing, user-submitted communities. Like YouTube (in fact, a lot like YouTube), Xtube has a similar user interface for viewers and uploaders alike, as do the more recently hatched competition (NSFW) YuVuTu.com (Caution: some users are experiencing malware installs) and (NSFW) PornoTube.com.

These sites have quickly filled with thousands of amateur and professional porn (and soft-core) clips featuring dozens of straight, gay and "everything" categories. Same flash upload/encode systems, same tagging systems, same pseudo-social network connecting users and favorites, and nearly identical options for easy URL grabbing and video player embeds for porn-happy bloggers.

For the founders of these sites, it was a no-brainer to build a smart, sex-positive YouTube clone. Steve Jacobs from YuVuTube said, "YouTube clearly missed a trick when they decided not to include adult material, as that is more likely to be monetizable. We started YuVuTu simply because we saw that YouTube and its competitors were staying out of adult. We felt that amateur productions can compete with professional productions far better than in any other genre (sport, comedy, action movies, music videos, etc.), so it's obvious to us that the YouTube model of user-generated content will be most successfully applied to adult content." Jacobs added, "The jury is still out as to whether YouTube has a viable business model."

Lance Cassidy, marketing director of Xtube, explained how YouTube's market practically demanded the delivery system ASAP: "YouTube was rockin' it and no one had an answer to them for the adult industry. We were actually not sure we would be first on the scene and hesitated, but once we looked, we were shocked and hurried to it." Though it may seem like YouTube's sex clones rushed to fill a gap in the market in typical dot-boom style, their business models have been built from the start to openly deal with adult content, making direct eye contact with many issues that could streamline TOU enforcement on nonporn sites like YouTube -- and not just in terms of avoiding dreaded uploads of underage or otherwise illegal content.

For example, from the outset Xtube has actively partnered with adult companies and porn auteurs to offer free DVD previews, circumventing the lure of copyright-infringing uploads from users. They also offer options for filmmakers to sell streaming clips to users, providing a nice one-two of both free and monetized content options outside ad-revenue models. Xtube also has the most stringent user interface for actively managing and explaining copyright permissions and age-of-consent 2257 documentation as requirements within the user interface for upload, explicitly making users responsible for legality of content.

Having a reliable content-delivery system for porn makes all of our hard drives smile -- but being realistic about your users and what they'll want to do with your content-delivery system makes everyone happy, from censorship to legalities to contributing to a more-needed-than-ever healthy attitude toward human sexual expression. Building your tech in keeping with the way people will use it will always make more sense than trying to change human behavior. Just don't actually call it GooTube, OK?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...violetblue.DTL





Milestones

100,000,000 Websites

November 2006 Web server survey

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. Domain industry juggernauts Go Daddy (U.S.) and 1&1 Internet (Germany) have also seen strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts, with the NCSA web server dominating with 57 percent market share, leading CERN (19%) and a newcomer named Apache (3.5%). Microsoft's Internet Information Server launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache and IIS. This month Apache leads with 60.3% market share, with Microsoft at 31.0% and Sun at 1.7%.

Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million). April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/20...er_survey.html





Must-Have Browser Upgrades
Rob Pegoraro

Your view of the Web is in for a change -- in some cases, whether you like it or not.

This can happen with either of two new browsers. One's the second major update to Mozilla Firefox in a year. The other is more of a surprise: It comes from the company that sat out the last half decade of browser innovation, Microsoft. And it will be automatically installed on Windows XP machines starting next week.

Don't be alarmed. If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, much less any older version, you need this upgrade. You've been stuck with a browser that lends you too little help in staying on top of the Web, and out of trouble on it.

Competing browsers, such as Firefox, Opera and Safari, have provided solutions for those problems for years. As a result, Firefox in particular has carved a chunk out of IE's once-overwhelming market share.

But some users can't or won't make the effort to download and install new software. So now Microsoft will do it for them. Starting Wednesday, its new, Windows XP-only Internet Explorer 7 ( http://www.microsoft.com/ie ) will be automatically installed on their computers through XP's Windows Update mechanism. (The one exception: An illegitimate copy of XP that fails Microsoft's "validation" test can't get this version of IE.)

Microsoft's mandatory upgrade is a gutsy, perhaps pushy move. Unlike almost every other patch or bug-fix sent through Windows Update, IE 7 brings major new features and a new front end. This update forcefully yanks an obsolete browser into the 21st century -- which may confuse some IE vets.

Users of other browsers, however, may feel right at home. Like them, IE 7 offers tabbed browsing, which cures screen gridlock by letting you view multiple Web pages in one window, and a search shortcut at the top right that sends a query to your choice of search engines. It also can subscribe to free Web feeds, which spare your keyboard's refresh key by letting Web sites tell you when they've posted new items.

Microsoft has made its own tweaks to these borrowed features. For example, if you've opened so many pages in tabs that you're getting lost, clicking a "Quick Tabs" button fills the window with miniature views of each open page. And when you preview a Web feed by clicking on an orange icon in IE 7's toolbar, a little search form lets you peek into its archives to see how often a topic of interest has been covered.

Internet Explorer 7 can also look out for "phishing" sites, the phony pages that impersonate banks and credit card issuers: If desired, it will check every new page against a blacklist of known phishing offenders, then block your access to any site on it. Meanwhile, IE 7 highlights legitimate financial sites that use encryption to keep out online snoops by putting a big lock icon in the address bar.

(It's a sad comment on the state of the Web these days that a browser's selling point can be how well it bars you from parts of the Web.)

IE 7 adds further defenses against browser hijacking -- attempts by sites to force-feed your computer hostile software by exploiting flaws in the browser. But since it continues to support one of the most popular hijacking targets, Microsoft's ActiveX technology, it still presents a bigger target than other browsers.

The Web may look a little sharper overall in this browser, thanks to its improved support for Web standards. And when you print pages, IE automatically resizes them so they don't get cropped at the sides. You can also resize a page on the screen by clicking on a magnifying glass icon.

But none of those features will be as immediately noticed as IE 7's new interface. This browser, like many recent Microsoft releases, ditches traditional text menus in favor of toolbar buttons that sometimes double as drop-down menus. This sleek design takes up much less space, but it also lacks consistency and bumps some often-used functions, like the home-page button, to odd locations.

In any case, if you've been using IE 6 for years, you may not know where to click when IE 7 lands on your computer.

But rebelling against this forced upgrade by turning off automatic updates in XP is not a good idea. You need Microsoft's security fixes far more than you need to avoid disruption from a new browser. Besides, you can better express any disapproval by switching to the new Firefox 2 (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X 10.2 or newer and Linux at http://www.mozilla.com/ ).

This free, open-source browser, used by a growing minority of users, may once have had the reputation of being a cult favorite among geeks, but compared with IE 7, it's a much easier upgrade. Its interface features a lineup of menus and toolbars that any IE user would recognize, but it also offers all the power-browsing features that IE 7 has added -- and then some.

For instance, if you close a tab by mistake, Firefox lets you undo it to bring that page back up. Its Web-search form allows some search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to complete search terms for you, based on what other users have looked for. Firefox allows a choice of RSS-feed readers, both other programs and such sites as Google Reader or Bloglines. Like Microsoft's new browser, Firefox includes a phishing filter -- although it missed a couple of phishing sites that IE 7 flagged.

Firefox 2.0 can also spell-check what you type into Web forms. And if the browser shuts down accidentally (as it did when my laptop crashed with a "blue screen of death" Thursday night), it will restart where you left off, with the same set of pages you had open before.

That capability alone makes Firefox 2 worth the upgrade.

Firefox also fits better for an often-overlooked group of users -- everybody still running pre-XP versions of Windows. By releasing IE 7 only for XP, Microsoft has given them the clearest signal possible: Goodbye and good luck.

This can be a lot of change to deal with for people who haven't had to adjust to a new browser in this decade. But it should be welcomed. It's called competition, and it's about time it returned to the browser market.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102800029.html





Do You Want More Frickin' Pirates?

How frustrating is it, particularly if you're tech savvy, to be willing to shell out good money for digital content, only to be stymied by the fact that this online service isn't available yet in your country?

I'm sure many users across Asia are experiencing this, just as I'm sure that many Internet users are using BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer apps to download files, many of them illegally.

By denying users a legal alternative for downloading content, are companies just encouraging more people to become pirates?

I'm really torn over this, because while years ago I made a public stand against piracy and stopped buying bootleg discs of any form -- whether games, apps, music or movies -- I also think DRM as it exists today is mostly stupid. And what's an even more bitter pill to swallow is that even when you're willing to play by the rules, it so happens they don't want you to be part of the game.

Case in point: the iTunes store still isn't available in the Philippines. Sure, if I use a credit card with a billing address in the US or the other countries where the iTunes store is available, I can purchase content even if I'm in the Philippines. But we're trying to do things legally, right?

PayPal recently became available in the Philippines, though in limited form -- you can send money, but can't receive funds. PayPal, however, still isn't a solution for buying content from iTunes, because your PayPal account must originate from a country where the iTunes store is available. D'oh!

Which is why I feel like yelling at these companies: What do you want us consumers to do? It's a chicken-and-egg problem. As a gaming journalist, I've heard the same reason being given for why, say, the Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube were never officially launched in the Philippines. And yup, as of this writing, the Xbox 360 still hasn't been officially launched in the Philippines. Of course, they'll cite the problem of piracy and the supposed lack of demand for original products.

But you know what? A sizeable number of people in the countries you're dismissing do want and can afford to buy original content. Yet you're making it harder for us by not even investing in an official presence in our countries and facilitating legal means of acquiring your products and services.

Forget the pirates. You wouldn't get money from them anyway. There will always be people who will prefer pirated goods -- and they're not just the people who are actually poor. If poverty were the only reason for piracy, then it would be non-existent in a country like Singapore, or heck, the US itself.

Think about it: we're choosing to patronize original goods, in spite of the ready availability of bootlegs. I think vendors are underestimating the purchasing power of this segment of the population. Of course, it would help if they lower the prices of originals, and this has actually been happening in Asia. Compare the prices of the Asian versions of Xbox 360 titles with the US editions, for example.

Once upon a time, during the days of the original Napster, nobody thought people would pay to download digital music when you could get the files for free via P2P. Then iTunes came along with a pricing that hit the sweet spot and a user-friendly way to download these tunes.

Which is why it's sad that, until now, Apple is still denying users in many countries the right to easily purchase content from the iTunes store. If I sound frustrated, well, I happen to be really excited over the hot new NBC series Heroes, and was more than willing to pay US$1.99 per episode to download them from iTunes.

Again, what do you want consumers to do?

More and more people are exchanging files on P2P. We know there's a huge demand for the content, and that the technology is readily available.

Heck, we don't even have to go as far as P2P -- like many people, I spend more time viewing clips on YouTube than I do watching TV. We know a lot of the content that's online on YouTube violates copyrights, though of course now YouTube is forming partnerships with different content providers and Google has 1.65 billion dollars worth of reasons to make sure it goes the legal route.

I know there aren't easy answers. We can expect more battles over copyrights and consumer rights. But the burden is now on companies to provide legal alternatives that satisfy this seemingly insatiable desire for digital content.

After all, it doesn't matter how many of us are willing to buy, if you have nothing to sell.
http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/blog/ba...1964239,00.htm





RIAA Targets University

The University of Maryland is confronted with a wave of copyright infringement claims by the RIAA. In one month they received 130 letters, almost a tenfold of what they receive on average.

The biggest spike was in September, probably to scare newcomers, and students who returned form their summer break, but in October they still received a considerably higher number of complaints than the monthly average.

Students are an easy target for the RIAA because they do not have the money to fight back. The often offer the students to settle for $3000 or $4000, leaving the students broke, but avoiding a real case. This trick seems to work well for the RIAA, they easily collect money without having to proof (they have no clue) that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization

Sometimes it looks like the RIAA willingly selects their targets based on their bank account. They try to avoid the mistake the MPAA made earlier this year by suing millionaire Shawn Hogan who allegedly downloaded a Film on BitTorrent. Hogan, however, was not easily scared by the MPAA and said “$100,000 in legal fees is a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. They’re completely abusing the system, I would spend well into the millions on this.”
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-targets-university/





ACLU Withdraws Lawsuit Challenging Patriot Act
AP

The American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a three-year-old lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act, months after Congress rewrote parts of the law.

The ACLU said Friday it is withdrawing the lawsuit because of "improvements to the law."

Beeson, the New York-based associate legal director of the ACLU, said in a written statement.

The Justice Department said it is pleased with the ACLU's action.

"The Patriot Act is a legitimate and important tool that has better helped law enforcement fight terrorism while simultaneously protecting our valued civil liberties," Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said in Washington.

The Justice Department argued last month that amendments approved by Congress in March had corrected any constitutional flaws in the Patriot Act.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2003 on behalf of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Mich., and five other nonprofit groups, was the first legal challenge to Section 215. That part of the Patriot Act lets federal agents obtain such things as library records and medical information.

The ACLU said the revisions allow people receiving demands for records to consult with a lawyer and challenge the demands in court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102801001.html





No Internet at United Nations 'Internet' Summit
Declan McCullagh

You'd think that of all places that should have speedy and reliable Internet access, a United Nations summit on the Internet would be high on the list.

Not quite. The organizers of the summit, held at a luxury resort hotel on the Athenian Riveria not far from the city center, couldn't even provide a working Internet connection.

The wireless connection in the main conference hall appeared briefly before dying and leaving attendees bereft of the Net on Monday. Trying to connect to the base station yielded only a "could not connect to the network" error.

It was no better on Tuesday -- by that time, the conference organizers apparently gave up and took the connection offline completely.
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-613...0991&subj=news





Free Software and World Peace
Terry Hancock

Somebody recently noted that, what with all the bombing and killing and tyrannical madness going on in the world, how can we waste all this time talking about free software? Surely there's more important stuff to worry about?

Well, they’re absolutely right that there are bigger problems in the world. When I get a chance to do something more direct about it, I plan to. So far, it looks like voting is about it, though.

On the other hand, you can’t trivialize peacetime matters. Peace is more important than stopping war. It’s the thing we need to protect when we deal with the evils in the world.

Regrettably, peace usually works the soft and slow way, while war is swift and always seems like the simpler solution. Hence our constant error in trying to make wars to stop wars. It is always a mistake to try to stop the processes of peace just because war seems more urgent. Because peace is what actually stops wars.

Free software does, in my opinion, make significant strides forward in creating long-term peace for humanity. A web, constructed of free software now connects us all, enemies and friends alike—and people who used to be enemies are becoming friends. Or perhaps only their children are.

This is the real thing that those “evil internet chat rooms” are doing to our children: they are connecting them. They’re allowing people who wouldn’t talk to each other before the chance to do so in relative safety, unencumbered by distance. They’re allowing them to come to terms with each other on a personal, down-to-Earth level like nothing else can. It makes a difference when you know that the “foreigner” with the odd skin color and the funny-looking clothes has a name and a pet hamster named “Rodrigo”.

The thing breeding in those internet chat rooms is surely the power-mongerers of the world’s worst nightmare: it’s a new generation of people who are beginning to think of their race as “Human” and their nation as “Earth”. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but there is something happening. Something that happens through shared experiences and exchanged knowledge. Something personal that treaties and laws and propaganda ministers can’t get to. People are talking to each other.

There’s a forum on the internet that I have visited where Hindi and Muslim Kashmiris hurl insults at each other, pretty much incessantly. But they are talking to each other. I regularly converse with people from all over the English-speaking world, and also with a few people from Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Sweden, India, Italy, and Brazil (a Brazillian made some important contributions to a project I’m still working on, while my main collaborator is Swedish—so some of these relationships have been significant, productive experiences), not to mention Guam and Iceland.

It’s also largely on the internet that the knowledge of treachery and deceit in governments has been disseminated, because it’s a nearly unsuppressable press with few chokepoints that would-be tyrants can throttle. And when they do try, as they are trying, it is largely through free software that work-arounds are made.

Free software is also hard at work, leveling the economic playing field for developing economies trying to modernize, without finding themselves under the thrall of developed nations’ software corporations. It’s free software that’s showing that sophisticated technology needn’t be equated with powerful, centralized control, and that sharing doesn't have to forced by a command economy in order to work.

GNU/Linux is making affordable embedded devices (whether they are the OLPC laptops or just mobile phones) that can be deployed to more people in more remote locations, in order to empower those people with the ability to speak back and to solve their own problems in their own way on their own terms, using their own resources, instead of falling deeper and deeper into World Bank debt or some other form of debt-slavery imposed by developed-world power holders.

Happy, well-fed, well-educated, hopeful people do not become suicide bombers and neither do they elect fear-mongerers. So if you really want to stop the violence and bring back sanity, then the best way to do it is to do whatever it takes to make people in even the most far-away lands happy, well-fed, well-educated, and hopeful. It’s not just humanitarian and altruistic, it’s also enlightened self-interest. And you could make worse choices than free software as a means of furthering that goal.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1832





EU Exec Praises ICANN Work on Internet
Derek Gatopoulos

A top EU official praised the United States' commitment to pull back from its historic oversight of the Internet as a worldwide conference on the network's future opened Monday.

EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said she hoped last month's deal would lead to eventual independence for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit agency in charge of the Internet's key traffic-management technologies.

"We are very satisfied with the work of ICANN. What Europe was objecting was the government oversight of ICANN," Reding told The Associated Press. "I think ICANN is doing a perfectly good job as it is. Just leave it alone."

Ahead of a U.N. summit on information technology last year, Europe insisted that the U.S. government cede responsibility of policing the Internet to some sort of new combination of governments and the private sector. The United States ultimately kept sole control - through ICANN - and agreed to this week's forum instead.
Last month, the Commerce Department said it would retain oversight of ICANN for another three years, although it agreed to be less actively engaged. Reding called that "the first step in the right direction."

"We do not need governments to have hands on ICANN. That's why we have discussed this for years with the Americans in order to leave ICANN free, to leave ICANN independent, without government oversight," she said. "We will monitor very closely what will happen in the next months and years and hope that ICANN can be independent."

The United States and other governments, she added, should focus instead on threats like spam and cybercrime.

Some 1,200 academics, policy makers, technology experts, user representatives and other delegates are attending the Internet Governance Forum, which runs through Thursday in this resort near Athens. Discussion topics are expected to include ways to ease current U.S. control of the Internet and improve international cooperation to fight Internet crimes like banking fraud and child pornography.

"This is an opportunity for a dialogue of a very large scale," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in opening the forum. "Everyone's input is needed to keep the Internet free and safe."

Event organizers said the forum would not make recommendations but was aimed purely at starting a long-term dialogue and making such discussions more inclusive.

In an interview Friday, the U.N.'s top Internet official, Nitin Desai, predicted that Asia will drive a massive online expansion by the end of the decade, propelled by improved cell phone technology and expansion of computer-sharing schemes within communities.

"The big expansion in the Internet in the next five years is going to take place in developing countries," Desai said. "A lot of it in countries which are not English speaking ... where people don't even know the Latin alphabet, for instance, China."

Desai, a special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general, called on better cooperation between government and law-enforcement agencies to prevent overly restrictive Web policing, adding that the billion Internet users who are decent citizens should not be punished for the transgressions by the few.

"Criminals travel on the road. Therefore let's have a rule which says no one should get on the road without first checking at the police station. Would you do that? Of course you wouldn't. ... The important thing is not to overreact."

Desai described the Athens forum, which organizers plan to turn into an annual event, as a global "town hall meeting" that would bring together professionals who rarely talk to one another, at a time when the profile of the average Internet user is changing.

"This is a medium which in five years' time will have users who are not your classical Internet users. These are not research professionals in developed countries. ... It's going to be a lay user. It's going to be a user in China, in Arabic speaking countries, in India," he said.

Desai said Web-enabled cell phones would have a massive impact in the developing world.

"Once you get that, the cost of access won't be more than the cost of using a mobile phone," he said. "India is talking in terms of half a billion people having mobile phones, in a matter of barely five years."

Greek organizers said the next IGF meetings would be held in Brazil next year, in India in 2008 and Egypt in 2009.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-30-13-03-16





IBM Still Profits From Giant Mainframes
Brian Bergstein

Cheap little servers handle so much of the Internet's dirty work that giant computers known as mainframes, which debuted 50 years ago and often cost more than $1 million, are supposed to be passe.

When Hoplon Infotainment, a startup video game company in Brazil, let it be known that it uses a mainframe to operate its signature online game, "People would actually take a step back and say, `What? Did I hear correctly?'" said Tarquinio Teles, Hoplon's CEO.

Yet mainframes are inspiring new ways of doing things at organizations like Hoplon. The trend is driven by and anxiously watched at IBM Corp., which makes the vast majority of the world's remaining mainframes and continues to be hugely reliant on them.

After dropping nearly 8 percent in 2005, IBM's mainframe revenue is up 10 percent this year. That includes a 25 percent gain in the most recent quarter. Mainframes were IBM's fastest-growing hardware segment after the microchip division, which is enjoying a nice ride making microprocessors for the top three video game consoles.

IBM does not release precise figures, but analysts estimate mainframe revenue at roughly $2.3 billion in the first nine months of 2006. While that is a small chunk of IBM's overall sales of $65 billion so far this year, mainframe revenue is especially precious because the machines drive huge software and maintenance deals, making them IBM's most profitable line of hardware.

Of course, the huge third-quarter boost is unlikely to be sustained. IBM is benefiting from having released two new mainframes in the past year, and sales eventually should taper until an upgrade comes, at least a year from now. Such ups and downs are typical: Unisys Corp., a much smaller vendor, has seen mainframe sales drop this year, but spokesman Brian Daly said the numbers strengthened in the third quarter with the release of a new model.

Still, for IBM to be having success with mainframes at all is somewhat surprising. Because if you were to break modern computing history into its simplest terms, it would go something like this: There was the centralized-mainframe era, and then there was the distributed-computing era. And the former ended a while ago.

Mainframes emerged in the 1950s as room-sized hubs that did it all. They crunched numbers, administered transactions, ran simulations and stored data.

By the 1980s and '90s, however, information technology was flourishing with flexible and smaller pieces of hardware that took on traditional mainframe duties. Cheaper server computers could calculate stuff and serve up Web pages. New communications gear ferried information around networks. Separate storage machines made more efficient use of memory. Millions of desktop computers flowered.

Sun Microsystems Inc., a leading maker of servers, denigrated mainframes as "dinosaurs," prompting IBM to call its next mainframe line the "T-Rex."

As mainframes ceased to be the center of gravity, they mainly lived on in government agencies, banks or complex networks like airline travel systems. Many such places needed mainframes' heavy-duty security and processing ability, but others were locked into the specialized programs they had written in mainframes' unique language.

"Where the mainframe still has a long-term home is running long-term code," said John Parker, chief information officer for A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc., a financial services firm that recently dropped its French-made mainframe but still runs key functions on a mainframe operated by a third-party hosting service. "Every industry has it, in my experience."

Since inertia is not growth, the market for mainframes and servers costing more than $500,000 dropped from $19 billion in 2000 to less than $12 billion last year, according to analysts at IDC.

One huge challenge has been the machines' old-school reputation. Programming mainframes still involves typing code on a green screen, much like early versions of DOS, the operating system that dominated PCs before the visual "windows" approach.

To try to encourage younger software developers to write programs for the machines, IBM recently announced a $100 million effort to simplify and modernize mainframe programming. Earlier it began encouraging customers to run Linux, Java and other low-intensity software on mainframes, in hopes of keeping the machines from falling deeper into specialized niches.

IBM also is trying to get creative in luring customers. In April it launched a "business-class" mainframe that costs $100,000 and up, targeted at smaller companies that want mainframes' high level of security and reliability.

One key pitch is that mainframes can do so many tasks at once that they are more energy efficient and take up less space than a comparable cluster of smaller servers.

"For every application, many times it takes five servers in a distributed environment," said Jim Stallings, who runs IBM's mainframe division. "Many customers are saying, `I can't deal with the complexity.'"

The University of Toronto recently bought a business-class mainframe to manage enrollment and other administrative functions. Eugene Siciunas, director of computing services, said the main attraction was flexible pricing.

The university saved money upfront by selecting a mainframe that runs at less than top capacity. Then on days when computing loads are heavier, the school can buy a short-term boost of extra processing power. Network managers call IBM, which remotely tunes the mainframe to deliver better performance.

Hoplon, the Brazilian company, is using a mainframe's processing might to build a complex "massively multiplayer" online game. But rather than shelling out precious startup capital to own a mainframe, Hoplon is remotely accessing one stashed in an IBM data center in Brazil. The same machine manages a retirement fund for IBM's Brazilian employees and handles operations for a building-tools manufacturer.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Inc., said IBM has had to adopt such sales methods to "maintain the platform's viability."

"The company has done a good job of continuing to gain leverage out of the mainframe," King said. "For a platform that a lot of folks have claimed is essentially moribund or headed into a very dark, bad future, it's got remarkable legs."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-29-15-04-02





Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?
Steve Lohr

Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.

The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.

Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.

Richard M. Karp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk whose title seemed esoteric: “The Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories.”

Yet he presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science.

“Algorithms are small but beautiful,” Dr. Karp observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena. Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms.

Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is computing,” he said.

Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”

But with the rise of the Internet, social networks and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.

“We’re really witnessing a revolution in measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.

The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?

Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators.

“This is the introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way,” Dr. Kleinberg said, “and we’re just at the beginning.”

But having a powerful new tool of tracking the online behavior of groups and individuals also raises serious privacy issues. That became apparent this summer when AOL inadvertently released Web search logs of 650,000 users.

Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking. Rick Rashid, a computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”

But clearly, the technology could also enable a surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will determine that, not scientists.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html





U.S. Justice Dept. Probing Sony Unit
Hans Greimel

Sony Says U.S. Justice Department Is Probing SRAM Sales at Its Electronics Unit

Sony said Tuesday the U.S. Department of Justice is probing its electronics unit as part of an industrywide investigation into sales of a particular type of memory chip. The news could spell more trouble for a company already stung by sinking profits, a global battery recall and product delays.

The Japanese company received a subpoena from the Justice Department's antitrust division seeking information about Sony's static random access memory, or SRAM, business, company spokesman Atsuo Omagari said.

"Sony intends to cooperate fully with the DOJ in what appears to be an industrywide inquiry," the company said in a short statement.

Separately, EU antitrust regulators said Tuesday they had raided several chip makers in Germany in October as part of a price-fixing investigation regarding SRAM chips.

Earlier in October, U.S.-based chipmaker Cypress Semiconductor Corp. said its SRAM operations were also under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

SRAM is a kind of computer memory that is faster and more reliable than the more extensively used DRAM, or dynamic random access memory. Unlike DRAM, SRAM can keep its data without power, but it is also more expensive.

SRAM is found in relatively small quantities in personal computers. It's also used in disk drives, communications equipment and networking gear.

In 2005, Sony sold 3.3 billion yen ($27.7 million) worth of SRAM. The product is made by outside manufacturers for Sony, which in turn sells the memory chips to other electronics makers, Omagari said. He declined to provide other details about the investigation.

A separate DOJ investigation into price-fixing among DRAM companies has so far resulted in more than a dozen charges against individuals and more than $731 million in fines against Samsung Electronics Co., Elpida Memory Inc., Infineon Technologies AG and Hynix Semiconductor Inc.

The new probe could add to a growing list of headaches for Sony, which has been battered by a worldwide recall of lithium-ion laptop batteries on fears they could overheat and burst into flames. The recall affected almost every major laptop maker in the world, including Dell Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd.

Just last week, Sony Corp. said profit plunged 94 percent in the July-Sept. quarter.

Sony shares, which have fallen about 15 percent since May, fell 57 cents, or 1.37 percent, to close at $40.98 Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061031/japan...obe.html?.v=11





Are You an Average YouTube User?
Kelvin Beecroft

We’ve been doing some heavy number crunching at Mashable Labs lately, so just for kicks we wanted to know what an average YouTube user looks like. We started by seeding a list with usernames of 100 active users on YouTube, like lonelygirl15. Then we grabbed the usernames of all their subscribers and added those to the list. Once we had a list of generally active users together we went out and grabbed their profile info. So bear in mind this is an active subset of the total users, not a random sample.

From a sample of 41,000 active user profiles we collected some rather unsurprising statistics. Based on the profile info supplied, the age of an average YouTuber is 27, with 20% being 35 or older - a bit more mature, perhaps, than the kids over at MySpace. Be aware, however, that finding the age of social networking users is a challenge - this method involves simply grabbing the reported age from the profile, which is only 100% accurate if everyone tells the truth. Other methods are problematic, too - this weekend Nielsen NetRatings suggested that one-third of YouTube’s audience is over 45. They’re measuring audience, not registered members - they use some downloadable software to do that. Do the kids log out of their parent’s profiles before going to YouTube? It’s hard to tell.

They’re pretty busy watching videos, though. If the average video is 2 minutes then these guys are spending some quality time in front of YouTube: one hour and 18 minutes every day.

What about extreme YouTubers? We found those too. It’s not really possible to watch 20,105 videos a day, but we found users who are doing just that - we think something funny’s going on there. But channel views, nearly 5 million – yep, lonelygirl15. Really, how many people are lonely on YouTube? A username says a lot about a person but we only found 13 that wanted to put lonely somewhere in their username. 178 think of themselves as happy while 1030 like to include the word angel. Finally, who you associate with says much about your character and less than 4% of YouTubers have a website link back to MySpace.

We should add the disclaimer that this data is a bit of fun, and really just some preliminary musings before we start looking deeper at the YouTube data we’re collecting.
http://mashable.com/2006/10/30/are-y...-youtube-user/





Digital Mudslinging

As the 2006 elections near, smear tactics are going high-tech in a bid to sway Net-surfing voters

Negative campaigning is nothing new during election season. But it has taken on a whole new digital dimension this year. In heated races around the country, candidates are finding new ways to bash opponents through social networks such as MySpace (owned by News Corp. (NWS)) and with new tools such as the online video site YouTube, which wasn't even around in the 2004 election.

And the more the sites grow in popularity, the more efficiently and cheaply a candidate can get a message across. "The nature of the Internet allows for some amount of anonymity, your message spreads around a lot quicker than a debate speech or a TV ad, and there are no regulations by the [Federal Election Commission]," says Julie Barko Germany, deputy director for George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.

Witness the YouTube effect on the Senate race in Virginia between George Allen, the Republican incumbent, and Democratic challenger Jim Webb. Allen held a comfortable lead over Webb until one of Webb's camera-toting aides captured footage of Allen making a racial slur during a campaign stop in Breaks, Va. The incident was quickly posted on YouTube, where it temporarily held the site's No. 1 ranking and swiftly gained national notoriety. Allen has since taken a steep drop in popularity among voters. A seat Republicans previously counted as a sure thing has now become the focus of a hotly contested race.

Microsites and Belly Laughs Online aspersions can be particularly effective when they're draped in humor. A lot of Net surfers are more likely to forward a video clip or flock to a site if there's a guffaw in the payoff. "Negative campaigns work and that's why people always do them," says Rebecca Donatelli, chairwoman of Campaign Solutions, a consulting firm that coordinates online campaigns for Republican candidates. "But if you're going to say something negative, you should try to do it with a sense of humor."

Campaign Solutions is working on behalf of Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, creating a series of microsites aimed at needling Santorum's opponent, Bob Casey Jr., a Democrat. "The point was to poke fun at Bob Casey and to raise some ire," she says. Campaign Solution's Detective Site and Western Site, both of which can be accessed from WheresCasey.com, use playfully themed graphics to drive home what Santorum believes to be Casey's Achilles' heel: a history of conspicuous absence from public dialogue.

Virginia Davis, spokeswoman for the Santorum campaign, says the microsites have worked particularly well with a younger demographic. Along with profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and videos on YouTube, she says interactive components of Santorum's 2006 campaign targeted constituents age 18 to 35 by "appealing to people who think politics are boring." Not to be left out of the online political scene, Casey has a sleekly designed Web site with a focus on different ways to take action, such as recruiting friends and writing to news editors.

From a Distance In California, polls show that State Treasurer Phil Angelides lags well behind Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in voter support—but that's not stopping Angelides from tapping a variety of experimental online resources. The challenger set up BSBuddies.com, a site where users play an animated game of building their own personalized Schwarzenegger action figure. The game is designed to focus on what Angelides considers a poor Schwarzenegger record on issues such as education. "Too Cool for School" Arnold, for example, promises to "raise tuition and fees" and "cut financial aid by two billion dollars." The Angelides campaign initially linked to the game from its main page, but it recently removed the link and there's no indication on the microsite that the challenger and his team are the creators. The anonymity of the Web, as permitted by the Federal Election Commission's lax policies regarding the Internet, allows candidates like Angelides to portray their opponent in a negative light without coming off as mudslingers themselves.

Negative campaigns can backfire through any medium—but they do so all the more quickly and virally on the Web. Just ask Bob Corker, who's challenging Harold Ford for the Tennessee U.S. Senate seat. Corker pulled a TV ad attacking Ford amid criticism that it played on racial stereotypes. Corker tried to distance himself from the ad, which features a white woman bragging that she met Ford "at a Playboy party." But the ad has lived on with a vengeance on YouTube (recently purchased by Google (GOOG)).

Let Them Sling Mud Constituent-generated media, as exemplified by political blogs of recent years, has proved that smear campaigning isn't limited to the politicians themselves. Now, online social networks put the mud in the hands of voters.

That may come as especially good news for Democrats. New data from Nielsen//NetRatings show that Republican candidates have a larger constituency on the Internet—36.6% of users 18 and older, compared with 30.8% of users who support Democrats. But the most popular social-networking sites strongly tend toward Democrat and liberal-leaning users. On MySpace, 31.5% of members identify themselves as Democrats, whereas 23.9% say they're Republican. On Facebook, 49.9% of members are Democrats, while just over a quarter, 26%, are Republican.

Embracing social networks may be especially effective for Democrats in parts of the country where young voters are regarded as a key swing demographic, such as in Iowa's third congressional district. There, Democratic incumbent Leonard Boswell and Republican challenger Jeff Lamberti both have Facebook profiles. But among the site's users, Boswell has 76% of the support, compared with 24% for Lamberti.

The Nedheads In the Connecticut U.S. Senate race between Democrat Ned Lamont and incumbent Joseph Lieberman, Lamont supporters calling themselves "Nedheads" created a group on YouTube that has attracted more than 2,000 members and created nearly 500 videos in support of their favored candidate, which in many cases attack Lieberman's policies. One Nedhead post is a music video of "The Find Joe Song," which calls Senator Lieberman a "bottom feeder" who has "bought the race."

A potential pitfall of letting supporters get involved is losing control of the candidate's image or message, be it positive or negative (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/31/06, "A Vote for MySpace"). That wasn't a concern for Lamont's campaign, says Tim Tagaris, the campaign's Internet communications director. "The Nedheads came about organically, and we support meaningful opportunities for people to give their feedback like that," he says.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...102_080536.htm





Bob Barker Retiring After 50 Years on TV
Sandy Cohen

Bob Barker is heading toward his last showcase, his final "Come on down." The silver-haired daytime-TV icon is retiring in June, he told The Associated Press Tuesday.

"I will be 83 years old on December 12," he said, "and I've decided to retire while I'm still young."

He'll hang up his microphone after 35 years as the host of "The Price Is Right" and 50 years overall in television.

Though he has been considering retirement for "at least 10 years," Barker said he has so much fun doing the show that he hasn't been able to leave.

"I've gone on and on and on to this ancient age because I've enjoyed it," he said. "I've thoroughly enjoyed it and I'm going to miss it."

Reaching dual milestones, 50 years on television and 35 with "Price," made this an "appropriate" time to retire, Barker said. Besides, hosting the daily CBS program — in which contestants chosen from the crowd "come on down" to compete for "showcases" that include trips, appliances and new cars — is "demanding physically and mentally," he said.

"I'm just reaching the age where the constant effort to be there and do the show physically is a lot for me," he said. "I might be able to do the show another year, but better (to leave) a year too soon than a year too late."

Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation, said Barker has left an enduring mark on the network, calling his contribution and loyalty "immeasurable."

"We knew this day would come, but that doesn't make it any easier," Moonves said in a statement. "Bob Barker is a daytime legend, an entertainment icon and one of the most beloved television personalities of our time."

Barker began his national television career in 1956 as the host of "Truth or Consequences." He first appeared on "Price" on Sept. 4, 1972 and has been the face of the show ever since.

A CBS prime-time special celebrating the show's longevity and Barker's five decades on TV was already under way, a network spokesman said.

To kick off his retirement, Barker said he will "sit down for maybe a couple of weeks and find out what it feels like to be bored." Then he plans to spend time working with animal-rights causes, including his own DJ&T Foundation, founded in memory of his late wife, Dorothy Jo, and mother, Matilda.

He said he'd take on a movie role if the right one came along, but filmmakers, take note: "I refuse to do nude scenes. These Hollywood producers want to capitalize on my obvious sexuality, but I don't want to be just another beautiful body."

Freemantle Media, which owns "Price," has been looking for Barker's replacement for "two or three years," Barker said. And he has some advice for whoever takes the job: learn the show's 80 games backwards and forward.

"The games have to be just like riding a bicycle," Barker said. "Then he will be relaxed enough to have fun with the audience, to get the laughs with his contestants and make the show more than just straight games, to make it a lot of fun."

As for his fans, Barker said he "doesn't have the words" to express his gratitude.

"From the bottom of my heart, I thank the television viewers, because they have made it possible for me to earn a living for 50 years doing something that I thoroughly enjoy. They have invited me into their homes daily for a half a century."

But when it comes to saying his final TV goodbye, Barker said he'll do it the same way he does each day on "Price": "Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/...barker_retires





Ex-Leader of Computer Associates Gets 12-Year Sentence and Fine
Michael J. de la Merced

The former chief executive of Computer Associates International, Sanjay Kumar, was sentenced yesterday to 12 years in prison for orchestrating a $2.2 billion accounting fraud at the software company. He was also fined $8 million.

Because he pleaded guilty in April to securities fraud and obstruction of justice charges, Mr. Kumar, 44, had faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The judge, I. Leo Glasser, of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, described such a punishment as excessive. But he repeatedly rebuked Mr. Kumar for helping inflate the company’s sales figures in 1999 and 2000, as well as lying to federal investigators and authorizing a bribe to a potential witness.

“This shocked the conscience of this court, and I dare believe it shocked the conscience of any reasonable person,” Judge Glasser said.

The sentence came down after a nearly two-hour hearing in which Mr. Kumar again apologized to the court.

“I stand before the court today to accept full responsibility for my actions,” said Mr. Kumar, wearing a tie and charcoal gray suit. “I deeply regret the actions I took.”

Joining Mr. Kumar in the courtroom were his wife, father and two sisters, as well as a phalanx of lawyers. His two daughters stayed home. Upon hearing the verdict, neither Mr. Kumar nor his family betrayed any emotion.

Kirby D. Behre, a partner at the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker and a former federal prosecutor, said he considered Mr. Kumar’s sentence stiff but just. “It’s a far cry from a life sentence, but it’s still a decade behind bars,” Mr. Behre said.

Mr. Kumar is the latest convicted chief executive to receive a lengthy prison sentence in recent years.

Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron, was sentenced last week to 24 years and four months in prison, while Bernard J. Ebbers last year received 25 years in prison.

Mr. Kumar’s fine, the judge said, has been deferred until restitution is determined next year. Mr. Kumar is scheduled to report to prison on Feb. 27.

At the hearing, his main lawyer, John P. Cooney Jr., requested that Mr. Kumar serve his prison term at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, N.J., a medium- and minimum-security prison 40 miles west of Atlantic City. After the hearing, Mr. Cooney said his client had not yet decided whether to appeal the sentence.

The four-year investigation of Computer Associates, now CA, centered on backdated contracts that artificially inflated profits. Computer Associates, based in Islandia, N.Y., entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to avoid indictment in 2004; in it, the company agreed to pay $225 million to a shareholder restitution fund and agreed to government monitoring for two years.

Seven other Computer Associates executives have pleaded guilty to fraud charges. Stephen Richards, the company’s former top salesman, pleaded guilty in April alongside Mr. Kumar; he is to be sentenced on Nov. 14.

The second-largest provider of software for mainframe computers, Computer Associates had tremendous success during the 1990s, largely under the leadership of Mr. Kumar and the company’s founder, Charles B. Wang.

Mr. Kumar was compensated handsomely in return: in 1998, he netted a $330 million bonus, one of the largest paydays of any American executive.

Once hailed as a Horatio Alger success story, Mr. Kumar arrived in the United States at the age of 14 after his family fled Sri Lanka. Joining Computer Associates in 1987 at the age of 25, Mr. Kumar earned promotions quickly: he became president and chief operating officer in 1994, and in 2000 he assumed the role of chief executive. Two years later, he added the title of chairman after Mr. Wang resigned.

But as the government’s investigation stepped up, Mr. Kumar came under scrutiny. He stepped down as chairman in April 2004, taking the title of chief software architect, until he finally severed all ties to the company two months later.

Details have since emerged of the dubious accounting practices that helped fuel Computer Associates’ once-soaring stock price. For instance, the company rolled sales figures from new quarters into previous earnings figures, a practice employees called the 35-day month. Prosecutors also said that Mr. Kumar repeatedly lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and his own lawyers, and that he approved a $3.7 million payment to silence a potential witness.

“This was the most brazen and comprehensive obstruction in the modern era of corporate crime,” said Eric Komitee, the assistant United States attorney in charge of the case.

At the sentencing, Mr. Cooney detailed Mr. Kumar’s philanthropic efforts as he sought to win leniency for his client: donations to tsunami relief in Sri Lanka; girls’ education programs in Kenya; emergency medical support to victims of the 1998 embassy bombings, also in Kenya; and programs to help scientists track elephant herds in Africa.

But Judge Glasser said that federal sentencing guidelines did not permit him to consider charity work in determining punishment.

The judge also questioned several statements by Mr. Kumar and his lawyer that suggested the former executive had fully accepted responsibility for his actions. The judge cited the timing of Mr. Kumar’s guilty plea — two weeks before his trial was to have begun — as well as Mr. Kumar’s continued denial that he erased potentially incriminating data from a laptop computer.

Jennifer Hallahan, a spokeswoman for Computer Associates, said the company sought to move beyond the Kumar era.

“We are a dramatically different organization than we were more than two years ago, when Mr. Kumar left the company,” she said.

She added that the company was still seeking to obtain any “ill-gotten gains” from former executives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/te...3computer.html





Compulinx CEO Arrested For Identity Theft
Chris Gonsalves

Federal law enforcement officials Tuesday arrested the well-known CEO of White Plains, N.Y.-based MSP provider Compulinx on charges of stealing the identities of his employees in order to secure fraudulent loans, lines of credit and credit cards, according to an eight-count indictment unsealed by the U.S. Attorney's office in White Plains.

Terrence D. Chalk, 44, of White Plains was arraigned in federal court in White Plains, along with his nephew, Damon T. Chalk, 35, after an FBI investigation turned up the curious lending and spending habits. The pair are charged with submitting some $1 million worth of credit applications using the names and personal information -- names, addresses and social security numbers -- of some of Compulinx's 50 employees. According to federal prosecutors, the employees' information was used without their knowledge; the Chalks falsely represented to the lending institutions, in writing and in face-to-face meetings, that the employees were actually officers of the company.

Terrence Chalk is also charged with racking up more than $100,000 in unauthorized credit card charges. If convicted, he faces 165 years in prison and $5.5 million in fines, prosecutors say. Damon faces a maximum sentence of 35 years imprisonment and

No one was answering the phones at Compulinx Wednesday morning, and the company's Web site was not responding. Terrence Chalk, a member of Westchester County Business Council's Hall of Fame, is well known in the channel as an early adopter of the managed services model and innovator of the "coopetition" model, which helped bring other service providers into the MSP space.

"We've seen a lot of different companies in the channel try to get into managed services, and a lot of them want to partner with us to reach some of those opportunities," Chalk told VARBusiness last year. "Having a network of partners expands your prospects."

Compulinx was known as Computek until 2004, when it acquired Linx Logic, formerly part of Ernst & Young Technologies. The company developed its own proprietary software platform for hosting customers' networks, dubbed Manage:Now, and moved on to launch its own partner program that allows other resellers to team on managed-services projects.

Compulinx also manages a massive IT infrastructure, which includes four data centers, more than 300 servers and a whopping 40 TB of storage. Any disruption to Compulinx's operations would seemingly be troubling for the company's partners and customers, but as of Wednesday morning, few were commenting.

Compulinx was among the seminal members of Ingram Micro's VentureTech Network (VTN) organization, which bolsters the profile of some 300 SMB solution providers nationwide. A spokesperson for Ingram Micro Wednesday said Compulinx was "moved out of VTN well over a year ago" and was also no longer listed with the Ingram Micro Services Network as of January 2005.

Ingram wasn't alone in giving Compulinx a seal of approval over the years. CMP Technology's own Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED), in conjunction with Babson College, named Compulinx a Channel Elite member last year.

Chalk's attorney, Mayo Bartlett of White Plains, said Wednesday afternoon that he hadn't spoken to his client about the potential technology fallout for Compulinx' clients. Bartlett added that he hoped the Compulinx business could continue uninterrupted despite the CEO's legal woes.
http://www.varbusiness.com/sections/...leId=193500991





3 Americans Arrested by F.B.I. in Identity Thefts
Tom Zeller Jr.

At least three Americans and 11 Polish nationals have been arrested in the last month in a crackdown on an online black market in which users buy and sell credit card numbers, bank account log-ins and other personal information, federal investigators say.

The three Americans have been identified as Dana Carlotta Warren, 29, of Atlanta and Zanadu Lyons, 24, and Frederick T. Hale, both of Columbus, Ohio. The charges included conspiracy to commit bank fraud, identification fraud, identity theft and other violations in what the F.B.I. described as a plot linking those arrested in the United States and those in Poland.

The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors are expected to announce the arrests of two more Americans today.

The arrests follow a two-year operation in which the F.B.I. worked with Polish investigators to identify suspects trading in or enabling the use of stolen consumer information.

Warrants were also being served in Romania as part of a continuing investigation, an F.B.I. spokesman, Paul Bresson, said.

The proliferation and sale of stolen consumer data on the international black market, particularly through online forums, has been a nagging problem for law enforcement, given the restrictions in national legal systems.

But the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Cyber Division, James Finch, suggested that this was slowly changing.

“We are sharing evidence and using sophisticated techniques like never before,” Mr. Finch said in a statement. “Cybercriminals will no longer be able to hide behind borders to conduct their illicit business. There will be no safe haven for cybercrime.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/business/03cyber.html





LimeWire Linked to Identity Theft

The Denver District Attorney issued a security warning to users of LimeWire after discovering the file-swapping software was linked to dozens of cases of identity theft.

The DA's office revealed it was investigating a case where LimeWire, a peer-to-peer file transfer service similar to Kazaa or Gnutella, was allegedly used to gain access to personal and financial information from individuals and businesses from around the country from about 75 different targets. It's unclear if the software opened a security hole in users' computers or if information was scooped out of directories mistakenly left open to LimeWire's file-trading function.

"It appears that the file-sharing program was exploited to enable someone sitting at a computer in Denver to illegally access everything - every file, every document - on computers across the country," a spokesman for the DA said in a statement. "The investigation is continuing, and we are urging people who use LimeWire or other file-sharing software to ensure that their computer security is up to date including adequate firewall security, antivirus software, and other measures."

Officers located the files when executing a search warrant on a run-of-the-mill identity theft case in a Denver apartment. It is unclear if this is the first use of the software to gain access to private information, or if it's simply the first time authorities discovered LimeWire being used to find personal information.
http://www.aversion.com/news/news_ar...m?news_id=7533





Starbucks Loses Laptops With Worker Data
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Starbucks Corp. said Friday it had lost track of four laptop computers, two of which had private information on about 60,000 current and former U.S. employees and fewer than 80 Canadian workers and contractors.

The data, which includes names, addresses and Social Security numbers, is about three years old, dating prior to December 2003, said Valerie O'Neil, a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based coffee retailer.

The company has not received any reports that anyone's personal information has been compromised.

"We have no reason to believe these laptops are in the hands of someone who wants to misuse them," O'Neil said. "We just want to make every effort to protect our partners."

O'Neil said Starbucks was in the process of notifying those affected, including an estimated 8 percent of its current work force, which numbers about 135,000 worldwide.

Starbucks has been looking for the laptops since early September after discovering they were missing from a closet in the corporate support center at its south Seattle headquarters, O'Neil said.

The company waited several weeks to disclose it had lost the laptops, O'Neil said, because "we wanted to make sure we were thorough before we notified people."

In a letter to those potentially affected, Starbucks urged people to monitor their financial accounts for suspicious activity and said it was offering free credit protection services to help them do that.

"Please know that we are exploring all avenues to locate these laptops, including reaching out to law enforcement agencies," the letter stated.

O'Neil said Starbucks was reinforcing its corporate policies and updating procedures on protecting the personal information of its employees to prevent such data loss from happening again.

Asked if there were any secret recipes on the missing computers, O'Neil chuckled and said, "I don't know of any."

---

Starbucks information security help line: 1-800-453-1048.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-04-02-58-47





How to Hack a Window XP Admins Password
Quinn Zerfas

This is a cool little trick I’ve picked up in my travels and decided to share it with you fine and ethical individuals =). Log in and go to your DOS command prompt and enter these commands exactly:

cd\
cd\windows\system32
mkdir temphack
copy logon.scr temphack\logon.scr
copy cmd.exe temphack\cmd.exe
del logon.scr
rename cmd.exe logon.scr
exit

So what you just told windows to backup is the command program and the screen saver file. Then you edited the settings so when windows loads the screen saver, you will get an unprotected dos prompt without logging in. When this appears enter this command that’s in parenthesis (net user password). So if the admin user name is Doug and you want the password 1234 then you would enter “net user Doug 1234″ and now you’ve changed the admin password to 1234. Log in, do what you want to do, copy the contents of temphack back into system32 to cover your tracks.
http://internetbusinessdaily.net/how...mins-password/





Seagate to Encrypt Data on Hard Drives
May Wong

Seagate Technology LLC hopes its new security system for the hard drive will become the most formidable barrier between computer data and thieves.

The world's largest hard drive maker says its DriveTrust Technology, to be announced Monday, automatically encrypts every bit of data stored on the hard drive and requires users to have a key, or password, before being able to access the disk drive.

Technology that protects the hard drive — the computer's storehouse of data — differs from most security products launched in the past several years. Such products typically put firewalls around computer networks, encrypt data files or defend the operating system from invasions.

Protecting the hard drive itself offers another layer of protection and might stop thieves from purloining confidential information from lost or stolen laptops. Errant notebook computers have cost government agencies and corporations millions of dollars and put sensitive data — including customer credit cards or social security numbers — on the street, possibly in criminal hands.

“I believe other companies will be following suit and it will become an industry standard,” said John Monroe, a research vice-president at Gartner Inc.

Laptop computers with DriveTrust-based hard drives would prompt users to type in a password before booting up the machine. Without the password, the hard drive would be useless, Seagate officials said.

Even data-recovery specialists would not be able to help if the assigned password somehow gets lost, said Scott Shimomura, a senior product marketing manager at Seagate.

“That's the trade-off: Anytime you introduce backdoors or holes to circumvent the security, then you've created vulnerability,” Mr. Shimomura said.

Seagate said it has already implemented the technology into one of its drives for laptops and another for digital video recorders.

Though DriveTrust is proprietary, Seagate may eventually allow other storage companies to integrate it into their own products. Seagate will offer development tool sets for other companies to create additional security layers to work with DriveTrust.

“We believe the entire industry will benefit from it,” Mr. Shimomura said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...wharddrive1029





Canada #2 in Maintaining Personal Privacy
Katie Fretland

Germany and Canada are the best defenders of privacy, and Malaysia and China the worst, an international rights group said in a report released Wednesday.

Britain was rated as an endemic surveillance society, at No. 33, just above Russia and Singapore on a ranking of 37 countries' privacy protections by London-based Privacy International.

The United States did only slightly better, at No. 30, ranked between Israel and Thailand, with few safeguards and widespread surveillance, the group said.

The study ranks countries on various privacy-related issues. These include whether they have a written constitution with specific mention of privacy, the use of identity cards and biometrics, electronic surveillance including closed-circuit TV cameras, interception of communication, access of law-enforcement agencies to private data, surveillance of travel and financial transactions, and global leadership in promoting privacy.

On a scale of one to five, Canada scored three or higher in all categories.

Canada received the highest ranking of five for its legal limits on the keeping of private data. It scored four in constitutional and statutory protection, privacy enforcement, ID cards and biometrics, leadership in promoting privacy and democratic safeguards.

The watchdog organization tracks surveillance and privacy violations by governments and corporations, said director of Privacy International Simon Davies. It studied the reach of governments in their use of video surveillance in private locations, workplace monitoring and identity protection, among other areas.

“The aim is not to humiliate the worst-ranking nations, but to demonstrate that it is possible to maintain a healthy respect for privacy within a secure and fully functional democracy,” said Mr. Davies.

Efforts to quash terrorism have eroded individual privacy protections since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, human rights activists say. Governments around the world have imposed security and immigration legislation that invades people's private lives, they say.

In the United States, President George W. Bush's administration has come under fire for its warrantless domestic wiretapping program, which monitors international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people suspected by the government of having terrorist links.

The New York Civil Liberties Union says there has been a staggering increase in surveillance of lawful activities with little concern for the civil liberties implications, said executive director Donna Lieberman.

In 1998, the union conducted a survey of video surveillance in Manhattan and found more than 2,300 cameras in use. Last year, a similar study found more than four times that number in just 20 per cent of Manhattan, Ms. Lieberman said.

S. Arutchelvan, a Malaysian activist based in Kuala Lumpur, said privacy has not been sufficiently protected since the government stepped up efforts over the past five years to track down suspected Islamic militants, dozens of whom have been detained without trial.

“We believe there has been encroachment on privacy, such as the tapping of phones and other methods through telecommunications, in the name of fighting terrorism,” Mr. Arutchelvan said.

Chinese legal activist Xu Zhiyong said strict Internet controls have resulted in fewer protections for Internet users in China.

The Communist government has set up an extensive surveillance and filtering system to prevent Chinese people from accessing material considered obscene or politically subversive.

Lawyers and academics raised awareness of privacy violations in China after a 2003 incident in which a couple was detained in the northwestern Shaanxi province for possession of pornographic videos.

“In the past few years, authorities have been making some positive changes to respect the privacy of individuals,” Mr. Xu said. “But when it comes to the Internet, the government feels it must supervise users and that results in less privacy protection.”

Privacy International's rankings of 37 countries, with the best at No. 1. Some countries are tied.

1. Germany

2. Canada

3. Belgium

3. Austria

5. Greece

6. Argentina

6. Hungary

8. France

8. Poland

8. Portugal

8. Cyprus

12. Finland

13. Italy

13. Luxembourg

13. Latvia

13. Estonia

13. Malta

18. Denmark

18. Czech Republic

18. Ireland

18. Lithuania

18. New Zealand

18. Slovakia

24. Australia

24. Spain

26. Slovenia

26. Netherlands

28. Israel

28. Sweden

30. United States

31. Thailand

31. Philippines

33. Britain

34. Singapore

34. Russia

36. Malaysia

36. China

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...101.wpriv1101#





Britain is 'Surveillance Society'

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said.

Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored.

Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV.

Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says.

It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network, the report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner's Office.

The office is an independent body established to promote access to official data and to protect personal details.

HOW WE CAN BE WATCHED

4.2m CCTV cameras
300 CCTV appearances a day
Reg plate recognition cameras
Shop RFID tags
Mobile phone triangulation
Store loyalty cards
Credit card transactions
London Oyster cards
Satellites
Electoral roll
NHS patient records
Personal video recorders
Phone-tapping
Hidden cameras/bugs
Worker call monitoring
Worker clocking-in
Mobile phone cameras
Internet cookies
Keystroke programmes

The report's co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was "the most surveilled country".

"We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection," he said.

"We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy.

The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with "endemic surveillance".

Mr Thomas called for a debate about the risks if information gathered is wrong or falls into the wrong hands.

"We've got to say where do we want the lines to be drawn? How much do we want to have surveillance changing the nature of society in a democratic nation?" he told the BBC.

"We're not luddites, we're not technophobes, but we are saying not least don't forget the fundamental importance of data protection, which I'm responsible for.

"Sometimes it gets dismissed as something which is rather bureaucratic, it stops you sorting out your granny's electricity bills. People grumble about data protection, but boy is it important in this new age.

"When data protection puts those fundamental safeguards in place, we must make sure that some of these lines are not crossed."

'Balance needed'

The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights.

A spokesman said: "Massive social and technological advances have occurred in the last few decades and will continue in the years to come.

"We must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities it provides for individual citizens and society as a whole."

Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers.

"The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC.

"Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/6108496.stm





Music Downloading's New Deal
Catherine Holahan

Free file-sharing services are considering ad-supported business models—but first, they need to win over music label foes

The threat of recording industry lawsuits has certainly given pause to peer-to-peer music file-sharing services. Few have dared show their servers on U.S. soil since the Supreme Court in 2005 ruled Grokster and Morpheus could be sued, declaring open season on companies that enable users to swap copyrighted files. On Oct. 30, even News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace—a social-networking site known for allowing all manner of freedoms—cracked down on the use of copyrighted music, licensing technology from Gracenote that allows the site to review and block songs uploaded to the site.

But the practice of what the recording industry considers illegal music downloading is alive and thriving, thanks to lax copyright protections abroad and the experience of a generation that grew up swapping songs over superfast Internet connections. And lately it's finding a new lifeline: a business model."

This year, 300 million to 500 million files were pirated each day, according to Artistdirect, a New York company that tracks illegal downloads through its MediaDefender service, and in some cases, attempts to block them. "The user base has been chased around the Internet because the companies keep getting shut down…but this is a really stubborn, persistent phenomenon," says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, an online media measurement firm.

International Lawbreakers

Many of the new sites have cropped up in countries such as Russia and in parts of Asia, where digital copyright laws are not as clear or strictly enforced as in the U.S. The recording industry is trying to fight the overseas sites by adopting the same legal tactics that worked in the U.S. The Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a lobby group representing Eaton Vance Michigan Municipal Income Trust (EMI) and Warner Music Group (WMG), has threatened to sue the operators of Russian site Allofmp3.com, for allegedly violating copyright laws.

The site owners, however, are undeterred by the specter of litigation. Even an October announcement by U.S. officials that Allofmp3's actions could cost Russia entry into the World Trade Organization hasn't shut down the service, which charges 15 cents to 30 cents per song, compared with 99 cents a song from Apple Computer's (AAPL) iTunes Music Store.

So why can't the recording industry stop the illegal music downloading? Part of the problem has to do with culture. For a generation of music downloaders, file swapping isn't the same as stealing a CD from a store. It is seen as a legitimate social-networking phenomenon and, in some cases, a way to get even with an industry viewed as having gotten fat off of consumers.

Going Legit

However, some so-called pirate sites are voluntarily moving to the side of the Recording Industry Association of America and others in the industry. They are doing this not because of the threat of lawsuits, but because of the promise of money—namely, a share in the billions of advertising dollars moving online. To do that, they need to strike licensing agreements. Erstwhile pirate sites such as Qtrax, owned by Brilliant Technologies, are working with the recording industry to become advertiser-supported networks. The goal is to make money off of the millions who have become accustomed to free music by making users pay for songs with their time (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/9/06, "Free Downloads—After This Message").

Qtrax isn't alone in pursuing ways to let users get free songs in exchange for sitting through advertising and music news. MediaServices, the parent company of Allofmp3, is exploring such a model, according to spokesman Ilya Levitov. "We're still at the phase of alpha testing," says Levitov. "When the product is ready there'll be special software which a person will download, and naturally there will be advertising on the player which will be played on the computer." eDonkey, one of the biggest so-called pirate sites, is also looking into an ad-supported model (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/05, "A Hard Ride for eDonkey"). But going legit isn't easy for sites that once fostered illegal downloading. The music industry doesn't exactly want to embrace former foes, especially when there are sites such as SpiralFrog, which also plans an ad-supported business model—but doesn't have a history of sparring with the recording industry (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/5/06 "Meet the iTunes Wannabes"). Pirate sites that have experimented with other models after being sued by the RIAA have largely failed to be profitable. Napster (NAPS), which became a subscription service, is still losing money (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/3/06, "Napster on the Block?").

Industry Advantages

Brilliant Technologies CEO Allan Klepfisz says he voluntarily shut down the original Qtrax after four months, without any threat of suit, because he didn't want to sour a relationship with the industry he would eventually need as a partner. "We wanted to close it down and build a more legitimate model," he says. Qtrax is set to relaunch as an ad-supported model in January and now has licensing deals with most major labels, says Klepfisz.

Licensing is only half the battle. The next step is to convince users accustomed to free peer-to-peer networks to bother to come to sites that work in the same manner but want to deliver advertising or pitches to buy the song for 99 cents. SpiralFrog CEO Robin Kent believes users will gladly pay with their time and sift through some advertising for a guarantee that the file they are downloading is the real McCoy. "They don't mind advertising. They have grown up with advertising all their lives," says Kent.

Besides, users on peer-to-peer networks are already wasting a lot of time weeding out corrupt files on their favorite sites. Firms such as Artistdirect are hired by labels and movie studios to post dummy files and advertising on peer-to-peer networks in the guise of illegal downloads. When a user searches for an Artistdirect client's material, they are swamped with fake files that, after waiting to download, either don't do anything or deliver an advertiser-supported message with the artists or song involved. For example, in June, Artistdirect released a Jay-Z video supported by Coca-Cola (KO). The company is currently using decoying and redirecting measures with 20,000 popular music and movie titles.

Future Advertising

Qtrax's Klepfisz is not only confident users will come to free sites—he believes ad-supported models will become the dominant method of delivering music. After all, most online content, including news and video, is available for free, thanks to advertiser support. Much TV programming has been advertiser-supported for its entire existence. "It seems to us that it might be difficult for the music industry to carve itself out as the one area that isn't advertiser-supported," says Klepfisz. "We see ourselves as a very essential bridge between paying for music and a future when music is advertiser-supported."

Klepfisz's future may not be that implausible considering that pay-per-download sites have largely failed to be profitable (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/05, "Online Music's Elusive Bottom Line"). Even Apple only sells about 15 songs a year per iPod, on average. Meanwhile, American consumers are listening to more music than ever before, according to Jupiter Research's Mark Mulligan. "They have access to more music than any generation before, but they are spending less," says Mulligan.

The peer-to-peer sites are clearly part of the reason. If the record companies can't beat them out of existence, it makes sense to try joining them and collect whatever compensation they can get from advertisers. BigChampagne's Garland says the peer-to-peer model may even become profitable through a subscription service, providing the legitimate versions have the same enormity of selection available on the LimeWires of the world. "I think it is very clear that the draw for tens of millions of people is the social-networking aspect of this and, beyond that, the exhaustive, unlimited title availability. If you can dream of it, it is somewhere out there in somebody's collection."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...gn_id=rss_tech





Big Labels Are F*Cked, and DRM is Dead - Peter Jenner
Andrew Orlowski

Interview Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager, who subsequently managed Syd Barrett's solo career, Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum.

And he doesn't pull his punches.

The major four music labels today are "fucked", he says. Digital music pricing has been a scam where the consumer pays for manufacturing, distribution, and does all the work - and still has to pay more. Labels should outsource everything except finance and licensing.

But he's also optimistic that for almost everyone else - indie labels, musicians, songwriters and budding entrepreneurs - as well as network providers - the future's going to be pretty bright. The Big Four know that the DRM era is nearly over - and within two or three years, he predicts, "most countries" in the world will have a blanket licensing regime where we exchange music freely, for a couple of quid a month.

In the future, he also suggests, artists, co-ops and managers will raise their own investment on behalf of artists - and pick and choose their marketing teams.

Jenner is organising a conference (http://www.musictank.co.uk/bts_conference.htm) in London on November 15 to discuss these issues. Billed as an "Urgent Blue Sky Debate", for once a music event may live up to its billing. Earlier this year, France almost voted to legalise P2P and bring in a blanket license - the necessary stepping stone to the future.

While Jenner elaborated on these in a report for MusicTank recently - it's only available to the public for a fee. So we were delighted when he dropped by Vulture Central yesterday to lift the lid on the business. Strong language follows.

You said that at In The City, the big label executives have lost their faith in DRM - they don't believe in it any more.

They don't. Not anymore.

And that was done by Sony BMG - what the fuck was that [rootkit DRM] about? The other was iTunes - and they've seen how kids don't like it. The unitary payment doesn't suit the technology, it doesn't suit how they're actually using downloads - which is to explore and move around. You don't want to pay a dollar for each track when you want to explore music.
And they're pretty crappy services, too. eMusic works, but when the others time-bomb the songs it's more annoying than the per-machine restriction. Because it's suddenly robbing you of something you had.

Oh yes.

And three years later you go, "Oh, shit!" - You basically have to pay twice for it.

Yes, that's outrageous. You've got to provide stuff that people can keep, and they don't mind paying you $3 a month for.

So how long can the big labels keep up this charade?

Earlier I was talking about the ground moving underneath the industry. At In The City people are beginning to realise they have to do something. So I think in two or three years blanket licenses will be with us in most countries.

And France nearly voted for it this year.

Yes, it got shot down - but the people who shot it down really shot themselves in the foot. They tried to get away from being too unpopular by saying "it's like a parking fine" - and the court said no - if it's an infringement of copyright, it's an infringement of copyright, and there's a huge fine.

So of course they can't enforce the law - it's completely unenforceable.

With the DRM, I think they've realised it just isn't working. People don't like the CDs, they find their way around it; they don't like the DRM, they don't use the DRM services; they resent - as you say - having subscriptions wiped.

So do you think a blanket license will be introduced bottom-up through industry agreement, or top-down as in France - where there was some political leadership? It just isn't on the mainstream media, or think tanks' radar just yet. And I don't see much political leadership.

No, the political people have to be just well informed enough so they don't fuck it up, and they have to be encouraged to help it. I think it would be wonderful if the government could lock everyone in a room - the music industry, the unions, the performers, the record companies, the publishers, the ISPs - and tell them you can't be let out until you sort it all out.

They won't do that, but I think some way will be found to get that result.
So it's a fear of losing the distribution channels?

They won't have any control over distribution. A blanket license is a blanket non-license, really - it's simply saying "we won't sue you". But if you have commercial services exploiting music, we will want to pay you more. You're licensing the anarchy.

It's interesting where we'll end up drawing the line between commercial and non-commercial, but in the end the numbers will be so huge it'll iron itself out. Someone from England might pull in a lot of hits from Spain - but again, it doesn't matter. I don't then worry how they'll pass the money to each other, but it'll all come out in the wash.

Like it does today with collection societies?

Yes
I saw some reaction to the first step - "Value Recognition Right" here in the UK, and very few people seemed to understand it - especially not from the value-for-money point of view.

It was a very important first move but it was also a bit clunky. "Value Recognition Right - what's that? You're inventing a new right to make people pay - but you're also suing people - huh?"

But if you say that if mobile phones and ISPs want to distribute music in a non-commercial fashion, then they should pay for that right.

And if you swear that you're not going to listen to any music, you're not going to pay. It's going to be very hard for you not to pay, and the network is keeping an eye on you to see you don't download any music. And if you do without a license, we'll sue the hell out of you - because you've been offered a cheap deal like the TV license.

That's a lot cheaper than a TV license.

And fairer. If you don't have a computer, you don't have the internet, you don't have a 3G phone - and you don't listen to music - you're not going to pay!
They had to do it I think, and it was necessary to flush out critics who have no realistic alternative - other than that artists should go begging...

The "freedom" people are telling us I have to go out and sell more T-shirts - it's an argument I find tremendously insulting.
To me if someone gets some earning from their creativity it's one less person who's going to spend their life on a production line, or in a cubicle

Well, all the people who are writing this have salaries
Or they're rich tenured American professors.

They're getting paid very nicely, thank you. No, I certainly agree.

I don't think the positivehello side of Recognition Rights came in. Here's some place you won't be sued - you can do what you like with it - explore the world's music, share it, download it.

So the Big Four can't give up control?

Well, they know that they've built their power around their monopoly, and their manipulation of the market, and that's how they cover up their incompetence - by being "the only people who know how to buy stuff in", and so on. They've spent a lot of money establishing it.

And it's only through distribution, through black boxes, and their control of the existing copyright regime.

But it's not just that. You've also got this incredibly complicated rights structure. They've got to sweep it away online - they don't need to fuck with it offline - but they need to say there will be payment for music, and it's for the [artists] to claim under some kind of regulation.

We can have an 'OfRoy' - an office of royalties, or whatever you want to call it. Someone just to keep an eye on things to see people aren't be shafted, and that there's arbitration in the long run.

Doing it through the courts is just too complicated - it just becomes nit-picking. What we are doing today with radio, PRS, is actually riddled with holes. Money gets lost, misattributed, deductions are taken for this or that - but we can all live with it. It's not some malicious plot. It's just compounded human error.
For readers who've never heard of the black boxes, what are they?

Any money that comes in through collective payment and you don't know who it belongs to for any reason - or you can't pay it to them because you don't know where they are - goes into what's called the black box.

Which everyone in the collection societies insists doesn't exist. You ask Fran [Richard, ASCAP] about the black box and he will give you the most fantastic bullshit. He'll say "We don't have a black box".

Of course he has a black box. With the best will in the world you cannot distribute all the money accurately.

In a blanket license system, there'll be huge black boxes, and we'll have to learn to hold the money for a long time. People will learn to register, then we can work out how to deal with the black box fairly - rather than giving it to people who know it's there. That's what's happened in the past, really.

We don't talk much about it - so no one know who's got it. And the people who get it don't say much about it - it's not top of their conversation at music conferences. They don't come in and say "we cleaned up on the black box". What they will say, is "our market share was fantastic." That's because it's divided up by market share. It's non-attributable income and it doesn't have go to the artist - it goes straight to the bottom line.

The industry dreams of black boxes! (laughs)
But now it's going to be in the collection agencies' hands - or some intermediary.

If it's the publishing side, you get 50/50 at least, or 70/30 if you have a modern or newish record deal. And that 50 per cent is not recuperable against any advance. It's the same with PPL - you get some substantial proportion of the income. [The PPL is a members' society that collects royalties from public performances and and divides them between the recording rights holder and musicians] It's not quite as much as they try and tell you get, but it's quite a lot. So it's another income.

But it's quarterly and they can't wait to get rid of the money. The agencies know the regulators are watching them closely and can come in and ask "what are these pools of money you have here?" The EU watches them very closely.

So in collection agencies, while money can get systematically stolen, it's like petty theft. It's like retail losses from shoplifting. The agencies are really just shoplifters, but the major labels are burglars, and the worst of them are like armed robbers!
You mention Clive Rich [Sony BMG] in your report who modernised the recording contract - but that cut the rate for songwriters, didn't it?

No, I don't think it cut the rate for songwriters. I think it kept the rates online very low - but it was much clearer, much simplified and absolutely a move in the right direction. But you see, because of the stock market, they're obsessed with "margin".
If you're talking about your margin you should be doing things completely differently. They should be talking about their bottom line. But they talk about "unit margin" because that's what analysts look at.

That's true. It's a house joke at The Register when we cover earnings calls that the analysts have this Pavlovian response. I've been on calls where a company's sales have fallen 50 per cent and all the analysts ask about is "margin" Er, guys, what about your sales drop!

What's important is what's your bottom line, for Christ's sake.

The blanket licensing thing is obviously going to slash your unit margin. The record companies have increased their margin on downloads, because the costs have been ripped out. So they've cut the artists royalties and raised their margin.

But because they've replaced an album with a single they've helped destroy the retail industry, they're now in a position where they're completely fucked.

No one's got any sympathy or love for them, because they've systematically been shoring up their figures in the short run - squeezing money into Universal to make up for their catastrophies; Warner Brothers have been coping with huge debt; EMI have been desperately trying to hold their stock price up so somebody would buy them; BMG has been wondering how the fuck they're going to pay somebody back money for whatever it was, so they don't go public - and Sony are in a terminal mess.

So all of them have been draining profit. It's "get the money in, boys, get the money in. "

So they've raped them. They've raped their whole business model, and no one's got the time or energy to think about their business.

Then you've got people like Barney [Wragg] at Universal, their new technology man, and they've got these High Priests of DRM in there.
One thing you strongly hint at is that the distinction between royalties for a physical thing, and performances, is out of date and needs to be rethought.

The difference between a download and a stream now is now purely just a question of what you want to call it. Both are streams, both can be downloaded and it's whether you want to call it a download and charge for a download.

The record companies have managed to establish, and I think incorrectly and it should be challenged, that a download is a replacement for a sale. Here's what they're saying - it's a mechanical, so it's the same as selling a record. Then the logic goes on: a download is a certain technical process that puts it onto your machine. So anything which does that is a download. Therefore, anything delivered in that way is a sale: so we'll pay you as a sale.

Which then means you've got to track everything. It's not discriminating - it's not looking at what people are using the music for. It's creating an artificial distinction so they can distinguish the payment of royalties. So you get paid 15 per cent of the dealer price net of some things - whether they call it "packaging deductions", or "new technology", or "Mid-Price", or some combination of those.

They have all sorts of ways of slicing down the royalty rate. And the net result is that if you're getting only five per cent of the dealer price actually paid to you - as the person who made the record - you're doing well. The writers, because they've got the publishers fighting for them, get more. They went to tribunal recently and got eight per cent of the dealer price. So if you wrote your own song you might get 11 per cent of the dealer price, and that's top money. If you allow for the Paul McCartneys, maybe 15 per cent. But that's tops for a big label.

Now, if you're an independent, you get in the region of 35 per cent of the dealer price, because they go 50/50. And that's what gives the game away.

And all your net is a payment to an aggregator - maybe 15 per cent, and paying the distributor, and paying the publisher. So instead of five per cent of dealer price you're going to get maybe 20 per cent of dealer price. It's a huge difference!

If you say it's a performance, however, it's a neighbouring right, it might be argued that it goes through PPL, in which case you get 50 per cent with many less deductions. So a performance split between members of the band, sessions musicians - a complicated formula but it goes to the musicians.
In your report you suggest that a blanket license for digital will really begin to change relations fundamentally. You mention managers, and artists co-ops. Can you elaborate?

The key things that the record companies do are probably finance and distribution. Well, distribution is much easier because of the net. There's also marketing - and that's really finance. Then you have an issue of these complex rights - so who do you back? Do you put your money into the record or into the whole game? And I think everyone's moving into putting money into the whole game.

You can envisage a different investment model - imagine estate agents for IP. Someone wants to come in and invest £100,000 in Billy Bragg. And he goes to someone and someone says "Sure, Billy Bragg, it's safe to give him £100,000"...
I can't see it working. We might live in four or five houses in a lifetime and there's only one Billy Bragg career for Billy.

There's one career - but the logic is sound. If you turned over 50,000 and made a 50,000 profit, he'd be safe

You can look up the recording part of it, and chop that up. Or you can just promote the brand. I think you call them consultants rather than estate agents. That way you're asking what is the key element of the equation - and the key is to "own the fans" - and the person who owns the fans is the artists. So it may be the best person to invest in is the management - you'll get the best return on your investment - and you can see what the manager did last year. Or they can say, Peter Jenner - I know what he does. Let's let him go out and find the promotion people and the marketing people.

I like the idea of doing co-ops to raise the money, too. If I give money to you to write a book, that's fairly high risk. If I lend it to 100 people that's much lower risk - someone's going to come through and I'll get my money back. The industry understands these issues. And you're less likely to rip each other off.

Small businesses working together strengthens the market.
There are intangible things about physical music we're only just discovering we value. I'll tell you something. Have you noticed that digital people are pretty twitchy people. Recently I was reunited with all my old vinyl and it's much more sociable than running it off a computer or an iPod. People appreciate each other's company more, and appreciate the music more - we grow more patience and it's lovely. The tyranny of the playlist, of interactivity is horrible - it's a curse.

Well, without sounding like a clever clogs, I always said this was going to be a streaming media, which has even less interactivity.

Like what we're listening to now it washes over me. That's fine. I see music as a commodity as being the driver. There's far more casual access to music and for those people, you need all of the music. It's no good just having Sony's catalog. While for the fans, they want more from one artist. They want to get close to the artist, they want better packages. Real fans might want many versions of a song from a demo, to the final version, to the mash-up version, as many as 20 - it's a continuum. And you can give them it now. You've got that sort of market for the fanatics - they want the live recoridng, the backstage photos, the singer's blog when he's on the road.

That's a complicated bundle of rights - it's about bundles. You can't sell that individually, but it's a bundle. And people will want to give your their money.
And mobile?

The real game in town is not online. It's a skirmish. The real game is mobile phones. If your mobile phone is a portable computer, which has got all the facilities of an iPod and a radio, and a TV, with some limits on their memory but as time goes it'll have huge memory. But you need access to everything.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/03/peter_jenner/





If You're Going To Sue For Copyright Infringement, First Make Sure You Own The Copyright
Contributed by Mike

Shawn Hogan has received plenty of attention in the last year for his decision to fight the MPAA over the lawsuit they filed against him, claiming he had shared the movie Meet the Fockers via a file sharing program. The problem? Hogan didn't actually share the movie, has never downloaded it, and actually owns the DVD of the movie in question.

The MPAA made it clear that if he just paid them $2,500, they would forget the whole thing -- which certainly has the feel of extortion. So, Hogan decided to fight the case in court to prove they were wrong, and said he wouldn't let them back out and run like they've done in other cases. All this, despite the fact that it would probably cost him over $100,000 in legal fees. Hogan decided it was worth it on principle. However, in preparing for the case, it looks like Hogan and his lawyer discovered that the studio might not actually have the rights to the movie.

The explanation is a little confusing, but it appears that there are two separate organizations involved: Universal City Studios Productions LLLP and Universal City Studios LLLP (you can see why this gets confusing). The first (we'll call them "Productions") is the one who sued Hogan. However, it was the other ("plain old Studios") who filed the copyright registration.

So, in preparing for the case, Hogan and his lawyers went looking for proof that plain old Studios had transferred the copyright to Productions -- which they got. The problem, however, is that the notice transferring the rights happens to occur two months before plain old Studios actually registered the copyright. In other words, they handed over the rights before they even got them -- making the whole thing a bit of a mess.

Apparently, it's messy enough that Hogan and his lawyer hope to have the whole case dismissed. Unfortunately, having such a case dismissed on what appears to be a (stupid and careless) technicality won't help much in dealing with other cases where people are falsely accused (assuming this thing isn't that common) -- but it should save Hogan a lot in legal fees.

Either way, it's yet another example of the somewhat reckless abandon with which the industry seems to file these lawsuits. Why bother making sure (a) the person did it or (b) you own the copyright before suing? That takes all the challenge out of suing your customers.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061031/192204.shtml














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