[JackSpratts]

In the DVD War Over High Definition, Most Buyers Are Sitting It Out
Eric A. Taub

What if nobody wins the high-definition DVD format wars? That increasingly looks to be the situation for the next-generation DVD technology, which is available to consumers in two incompatible formats.

A little more than 18 months after their introduction, the two systems — Blu-ray, developed by Sony, and HD DVD, from Toshiba — have sold around one million stand-alone players combined. Both sides promote their technologies, their movie studio allies and the growing list of movies available in the new formats.

Yet neither has a clear advantage, either in terms of technology, number of movies or, increasingly, the price of the equipment. According to data from Adams Media Research, 578,000 HD DVD and 370,000 Blu-ray machines will be sold by the end of this year.

The winner of the format wars could be determined by which company has the most content, in the same way the VHS-Betamax VCR war was decided. But both formats offer about 400 movies. Studios allied with the Blu-ray camp include Columbia, Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, Miramax, New Line and Sony.

In the HD DVD camp are DreamWorks, Paramount, Universal, the Weinstein Company, and several smaller TV and motion picture companies. Warner Brothers releases movies for both systems.

In November, Howard Stringer, the Sony chairman, publicly acknowledged that the formats were in a stalemate, and predicted that neither side would fold.

High-definition DVDs of both formats provide superior picture and sound quality compared with standard DVDs.

They also offer advanced interactive features like multiple camera angles, games, picture-in-picture commentaries and, in the case of HD DVD, a connection to the Internet to download more content.

But the visual and audio differences depend on the size of the TV screen used to display them.

“You start to enjoy the benefits of high-definition DVD at 40 inches and above,” said Chris Fawcett, vice president for product marketing at Sony Electronics’ home video group.

Only high-definition sets can display high-definition DVD images. And only the highest-resolution displays, the so-called 1080p HDTVs, for progressive scan, can show the images at their best. As a result, the potential customer base is limited. With a lower-resolution 720p set, “you are not as likely to see a dramatic a difference” between standard and high-definition DVDs, according to Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association.

The two camps are victims of their own earlier success with DVD. The standard DVDs offered a quantum leap in quality from the picture and sound of VHS videotape, and for many that was more than adequate.

In addition, DVD players that can convert images to near high-definition quality can be found for under $100, hundreds less than a true high-definition DVD player, further reducing the urgency to upgrade to one of the new formats.

“Today, an HDTV owner hooks up a standard DVD and it looks good,” said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of HD Strategic Marketing at Universal, and co-president of the HD DVD Promotional Group. “Unless they experience the new format, they won’t understand it.”

Not many consumers are interested in even taking a look. According to research by NPD Group, only 11 percent of HDTV set owners strongly intend to buy a Blu-ray or HD DVD player by next spring. Almost three-quarters of those HDTV owners surveyed said that standard DVD was good enough for them.

“This may emerge as a premium, luxury item, not a successor to DVD,” said Ross Rubin, director for industry analysis at NPD.

Blu-ray and HD DVD proponents are doing what they can to change that attitude. And the best technique to pique interest is dropping the price. As with most things electronic, prices for both players have fallen drastically since their introduction.

HD DVD players, the vast majority of which are made by Toshiba, still have the price advantage. The company’s least-expensive model — which displays images in the lower-quality 1080i format — can be found for $200 or less in electronics store promotions or from online discounters.

Its least-expensive 1080p model is selling at Amazon for $250. But it is a tit-for-tat war. A Blu-ray 1080p unit from Samsung is just $30 more at Costco. Blu-ray units are also made by Panasonic, Philips, Sony and others.

Several holiday promotions had players in either version selling for as low as $200.

In an effort to finesse the format war, LG sells a combination unit that plays both formats; however, its $1,000 price has prompted only a few thousand consumers to buy.

As prices drop, high-definition DVD drives will find their way into other devices. Mr. Graffeo predicts that by the end of next year, 5 million notebook computers will be sold with HD DVD drives.

Sony says that 3.4 million Blu-ray disc drives are also in PlayStation 3 machines, giving it a numerical advantage. But the rival camp points out that gamers are not buying the PS3 to watch movies, and in any case, 300,000 HD DVD add-on drives will have been purchased to use with the Xbox 360 game console from Microsoft.

The 400 movies available in each format are a fraction of the 90,000 movies and TV programs that the video rental company Netflix offers. Increasingly, high-definition DVDs are being issued simultaneously with the standard definition DVD release.

Consumers are usually advised to wait until a clear winner emerges. But if there is a deciding factor, it might be which format has the more compelling movies. Good animation looks three-dimensional in high definition, so Sony is hoping to gain an advantage by providing Blu-ray formats of “Ratatouille,” the Disney/Pixar film about a cute French rat who cooks, and blockbusters like “Spider-Man 3.”

As an indication of their owners’ enthusiasm, Blu-ray users are buying twice as many discs as their HD DVD counterparts, according to Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research.

Discs can be rented at the Blockbuster and Netflix online stores. Of Blockbuster’s 5,000 physical stores, 250 offer both high-definition DVD formats, while 1,450 rent only Blu-ray; the rest offer none. The company emphasizes Blu-ray because 70 percent of its rentals are for that format, said Karen Raskopf, a Blockbuster spokeswoman.

The HD DVD camp is playing up its new interactive features, believing that the next generation of viewers wants to combine TV viewing with video games.

In Universal’s just-released HD DVD of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” viewers can play a game that tests their memories, and then upload their results using a broadband connection to a Web site and compare their scores with others.

Viewers can also find character dossiers, watch “Webisodes” with the Volkswagen Touareg sport utility vehicle featured in the film, and create playlists of their favorite scenes and share them with friends.

Those features will do little to increase sales, said Richard Doherty, an analyst with the Envisioneering Group. The market consultants’ surveys show that just 3 percent of consumers want interactivity, he said.

As more consumers buy HDTVs, and the price of dual format players drop, an uneasy truce may descend. With the studios in the United States collectively making $16.5 billion in worldwide video sales, according to Mr. Adams, companies will be loath to miss an opportunity to make money by allying themselves with one high-definition DVD format over the other. And then, the once-unthinkable could happen.

“When high-definition DVD reaches its tipping point, studios will have to release their movies in both HD DVD and Blu-ray,” Mr. Adams said. “No studio will be able to afford not to.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/business/31dvd.html





Did Warner Brothers Just Kill HD DVD?
Saul Hansell

In addition to Apple, Warner Brothers is now going to throw its weight behind the Blu-ray format for high-definition disks. Warner has been the only major studio to publish its movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Today, the studio announced that from now on, it would only issue movies in Blu-ray.

Until now, the war between the formats has seemed like a standoff. Of the big studios, Disney, Fox and Sony have backed Blu-ray. NBC Universal and Viacom back HD DVD.

Richard Greenfield, the media analyst with Pali Research, wrote that this marks the end of the format wars: “We expect HD DVD to ‘die’ a quick death.” He noted that NBC Universal has not committed to backing HD DVD exclusively. Viacom’s studios — Paramount and Dreamworks — have an exclusive deal with the backers of HD DVD, but Mr. Greenfield wonders if there is an escape clause.

Mr. Greenfield further wonders if consumers, on hearing this news, will return their Christmas HD DVD players and exchange them for Blu-ray devices. I’m not so sure that many people pay that close attention to Hollywood. But I certainly wouldn’t spend money on an HD DVD player until this all sorts out.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0.../index.html?hp





With Wii and DS, Nintendo Has 2 Hit Game Devices
Eric A. Taub

Nintendo, the maker of the Wii video game machine, does not have just one hit product on its hands. Rather, it has two.

While shoppers are still lining up before stores open to buy Nintendo’s Wii, its older portable sibling, the Nintendo DS, is the best-selling game machine in the United States. The hand-held DS outsold the Wii in November 1.53 million units to 981,000, according to sales figures compiled by NPD Group.

The DS, a three-year-old $130 unit, has been handily outselling its chief rival, Sony’s $170 PSP hand-held game device, as well as the newer and more expensive consoles, like Microsoft’s Xbox 360, selling for $350, and Sony’s PlayStation 3, which starts at $400.

Nintendo expects to finish the year having sold more than 6 million DS consoles, with a total of 15.2 million sold since they were introduced in November 2004. The best-selling game console this year, the Wii, has sold more than 5 million units this year, David Riley of NPD said.

Sony has sold 9.5 million PSP units in the United States since its introduction in March 2005.

Nintendo attributes the success of the DS to the same market positioning it used for the $250 Wii — create devices for young gamers that also appeal to their parents and even grand parents. The DS has proven more popular with younger children than Sony’s PSP; 80 percent of DS owners are 8 to 16 years of age, while PSP players tend to be 16 to 24 years old, according to analysts at Wedbush Morgan.

But Nintendo, based in Kyoto, Japan, has also developed several titles for middle-aged adults, like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, two memory-training games, and Flash Focus, a game designed to improve visual acuity. By making the device appealing to baby boomers, the company also makes parents feel better about buying it for their kids.

“On YouTube, you can see videos of retirees playing both the Wii and the DS,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s president and chief operating officer.

The DS is also compatible with Nintendo’s earlier device, the Game Boy Advance, making it an appealing platform for the older gamers, who may have kept libraries of Nintendo games.

Video game creators, already familiar with Game Boy, easily made the transition to Nintendo’s new portable unit.

Like the Wii, the DS was considered an unlikely candidate for success when it first arrived on store shelves. The DS features two screens, one of which can be operated by touching a finger to the screen. It also has wireless connectivity that allows it to communicate with the Wii as well as other users to send them messages and play games.

Sony’s PSP uses a single screen, offers Internet access, allows users in close proximity to play against each other, and can play movies using the company’s proprietary UMD disc format. “The DS was handicapped as ‘what, two screens? Are you kidding me?,’” said Richard Doherty, a partner in the Envisioneering Group. “But the DS ran enough exciting Game Boy applications that it got immediate attention.”

Mr. Fils-Aime said that future DS device will be more tightly integrated with its Wii console. Complete games as well as game samplers will be able to be downloaded into the Wii using its broadband connection, and then transferred wirelessly to the DS.

A puzzle-solving game, Professor Layton, to be introduced next year, will be upgraded with new puzzles transmitted to the DS through a wireless download.

In Japan, the DS’s functionality extends beyond its game-playing ability. There the device is used to give information during museum tours, and to download content from the Wii. A new feature allowing DS users to view movies on the device has also been introduced.

Some of those features will eventually be introduced into the North American market as well. “To aggressively drive DS business we need to provide other forms of entertainment to excite the consumer,” said Mr. Fils-Aime.

As a test this past season, fans watching a baseball game in Seattle’s Safeco Field could also see the game on the DS, and order food and view statistics using the device.

While Sony may be playing catch-up, its PSP has a number of strong-selling titles among the 359 available for the device. Its hits include Grand Theft Auto, which has sold 1.5 million units, as well as SOCOM Fire Team Bravo, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

“The DS is still a kid’s device,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan. “There is a lot of mature content available for the PSP that is not available for the DS.” .

“Our direction is first party and third-party games from such developers as Electronic Arts. This will pay dividends down the road,” said John Koller, senior marketing manager for the PSP.

But the DS’s movie capabilities have not been a hit with consumers, mostly because the price of the movies — $25 and higher — is limiting sales. “Content and price were two big issues,” Mr. Koller said. “Sixteen year olds were not interested in 1970s romantic dramas.” New lower prices starting at $5, and titles like SuperBad will change that equation, according to Mr. Koller. Additional titles from Sony geared toward teenagers and those in their 20s will be launched in the first half of 2008.

“Sony’s PSP is doing great,” said Mr. Pachter. “The DS is just doing better.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/te...1nintendo.html





Web Playgrounds of the Very Young
Brooks Barnes

Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set.

Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. Media conglomerates in particular think these sites — part online role-playing game and part social scene — can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers.

Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations. The children’s versions are proving much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups. Now the likes of the Walt Disney Company, which owns Club Penguin, are working at warp speed to pump out sister sites.

“Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today.

Worlds like Webkinz, where children care for stuffed animals that come to life, have become some of the Web’s fastest-growing businesses. More than six million unique visitors logged on to Webkinz in November, up 342 percent from November 2006, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a research firm.

Club Penguin, where members pay $5.95 a month to dress and groom penguin characters and play games with them, attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life. In one sign of the times, Electric Sheep, a software developer that helps companies market their brands in virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, last week laid off 22 people, about a third of its staff.

By contrast, Disney last month introduced a “Pirates of the Caribbean” world aimed at children 10 and older, and it has worlds on the way for “Cars” and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties.

Add to the mix similar offerings from toy manufacturers like Lego and Mattel. Upstart technology companies, particularly from overseas, are also elbowing for market share. Mind Candy, a British company that last month introduced a world called Moshi Monsters, and Stardoll, a site from Sweden, sign up thousands of members in the United States each day.

“There is a massive opportunity here,” said Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group, in an interview last week.

Behind the virtual world gravy train are fraying traditional business models. As growth engines like television syndication and movie DVD sales sputter or plateau — and the Internet disrupts entertainment distribution in general — Disney, Warner Brothers and Viacom see online games and social networking as a way to keep profits growing.

But more is at stake than cultivating new revenue streams. For nearly 50 years, since the start of Saturday morning cartoons, the television set has served as the front door to the children’s entertainment business. A child encounters Mickey Mouse on the Disney Channel or Buzz Lightyear on a DVD and before long seeks out related merchandise and yearns to visit Walt Disney World.

Now the proliferation of broadband Internet access is forcing players to rethink the ways they reach young people. “Kids are starting to go to the Internet first,” Mr. Wadsworth said.

Disney’s biggest online world is Club Penguin, which it bought in August from three Canadians in a deal worth $700 million. At the time, more than 700,000 members paid fees of $5.95 a month, delivering annual revenue of almost $50 million.

Still, one world, even a very successful one, does not alter the financial landscape at a $35.5 billion company like Disney. So Disney is pursuing a portfolio approach, investing $5 million to $10 million per world to develop a string of as many as 10 virtual properties, people familiar with Disney’s plans said.

Tinker Bell’s world, called Pixie Hollow, illustrates the company’s game plan. Disney is developing the site internally — creative executives who help design new theme park attractions are working on it — and will introduce it this summer to help build buzz for “Tinker Bell,” a big-budget feature film set for a fall 2008 release.

Visitors to a rudimentary version of Pixie Hollow, reachable through Disney.com, have already created four million fairy avatars, or online alter egos, according to Disney. The site will ultimately allow users to play games (“help create the seasons”) and interact with other “fairies.” When avatars move across the screen, they leave a sparkling trail of pixie dust, a carefully designed part of the experience.

“We wanted to come up with a way to make flying around the site feel really good,” said Paul Yanover, executive vice president and managing director of Disney Online.

Disney’s goal is to develop a network of worlds that appeal to various age groups, much like the company’s model. Preschool children might start with Pixie Hollow or Toon Town, another of Disney’s worlds, grow into Club Penguin and the one for “Cars” and graduate to “Pirates of the Caribbean” and beyond, perhaps to fantasy football at ESPN.com.

“All the stars are aligning for virtual worlds to become a mass-market form of entertainment, especially for kids and families,” Mr. Yanover said.

If virtual worlds for adults are about escaping from run-of-the-mill lives, sites for children tap into the desire to escape from the confines of reality as run by mom and dad. “I get to decide everything on Club Penguin,” said Nathaniel Wartzman, age 9, of Los Angeles, who also has a membership to a world called RuneScape.

But shopping is a powerful draw, too; most sites let children accumulate virtual points or spend their allowance money to buy digital loot. “It’s really fun to buy whatever you want inside the game,” Nathaniel said in a telephone interview. For his penguin, “like for Christmas I bought a fireplace, a flat-screen TV and a Christmas tree,” he said.

Online worlds, which typically have low overhead and fat profit margins once they are up and running, charge a monthly fee of $5 to $15 and require the adoption of an avatar. Some sites are free and rely on advertising to make money; others are advertising and subscription hybrids. Webkinz relies on the sale of stuffed animals, which come with tags that unlock digital content.

The power of the virtual worlds business was shown recently when Vivendi announced a plan to buy Activision, a publisher of video games for consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3. Vivendi owns World of Warcraft, a virtual world for adults with more than nine million members and revenue of more than $1 billion.

Still, the long-term appetite for the youth-oriented sites is unclear. Fads have always whipsawed the children’s toy market, and Web sites are no different, analysts warn. Parents could tire of paying the fees, while intense competition threatens to undercut the novelty. There are now at least 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets.

Privacy and safety are a growing concern, particularly as companies aim at younger children. Some virtual worlds are now meant to appeal to preschoolers, using pictures to control actions so that reading is not required.

And critics are sharpening their knives. “We cannot allow the media and marketing industries to construct a childhood that is all screens, all the time,” said Susan Linn, a Boston psychologist and the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a nonprofit group that has complained of ads for movies on Webkinz.com.

Operators shrug off worries about fads and competition. “Are features like creating an avatar a long-term advantage for anyone? Probably not,” Mr. Yanover said. “The viability and sustainability of this business comes from the shifting behavior of kids and how they spend their leisure time.”

As for privacy and safety, companies point to a grid of controls. For instance, Neopets restricts children under 13 from certain areas unless their parents give permission in a fax. Several Neopets employees patrol the site around the clock, and messaging features are limited to approved words and phrases.

“Parents know they can trust our brand to protect kids,” said Steve Youngwood, executive vice president for digital media at Nickelodeon. “We see that as a competitive advantage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/bu...31virtual.html





JK Rowling Drops Hints of Possible Eighth Harry Potter Book
Rhodri Phillips

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has strongly hinted for the first time that she could write an eighth book in the series.

Rowling, 42, admits she has 'weak moments' when she feels she will pen another novel about the boy wizard.

One of her biggest fans – her 14-year-old daughter Jessica – has already put pressure on her to revisit the character.

And her younger children – David, four, and Mackenzie, two – are likely to join the clamour for another novel as they discover the Potter books.

However, if an eighth novel were to be written, Rowling concedes it is unlikely that Harry would be the central character.

She finished the seventh book in the series – Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – last January.

At the time she thought she was ending a 17-year association with the boy wizard.

But in an interview with Time magazine, which put Rowling at No 3 in its Person Of The Year list, she said: "There have been times since finishing, weak moments, when I've said 'Yeah, all right' to the eighth novel.

"If - and it's a big if - I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I've already told his story.

"But these are big ifs. Let's give it ten years."

In the meantime, Rowling is working on two writing projects – an adult novel and a "political fairy tale" – and is involved in charity work.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1773





New Years Action: Giving Away My Book
Charles

I've never been one for New Years resolutions. Quit smoking? Yeah, right. However, a New Years action I can deal with. Here's the plan: starting today, I'm going to be giving away the ebook version of Republic for free.

No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it. Hope you enjoy the book and tell others.
http://www.sheehanmiles.com/blogid/2970





Congestion Causes Text Message Slowdown

Geeta Citygirl just figured something was wrong with her phone when she realized the greetings she was sending as the ball dropped New Year's Eve weren't getting through.

In Los Angeles, a half-dozen New Year's text messages bounced back to Reggie Cameron on Wednesday, more than 24 hours after he thought he sent them out.

In fact, so many people tried to send text messages on New Year's Eve that networks got jam-packed and many of the missives arrived hours later -- or not at all.

''Think of any traffic artery during rush hour: You have a large number of people who are trying to access it at the same time,'' said Joe Farren, assistant vice president of public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, a wireless industry group. ''It's really no different with regard to wireless networks.''

Millions and millions of messages did get through New Year's Eve, and a minor delay in a holiday wish is hardly the end of the world. But there have been multiple occasions in recent years when getting in touch with loved ones was more vital -- the Sept. 11 attacks, the 2003 blackout, Hurricane Katrina.

''What happens where there is an emergency?'' asked Scott Midkiff, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. ''This has been a big problem with the voice cellular system. It will probably become more of a problem with text messaging.''

The cell phone carriers say they are working to expand their systems' capacity. Jeffrey Nelson, spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the company invests almost $6 billion annually in the wireless network.

But the number of cell phone subscribers in the U.S. nearly doubled between the end of 2001 and the end of 2006, growing from 128 million to 233 million users, Farren said.

Analysts said last month that Americans may have spent more in 2007 for the first time on their cell phones than on land lines and pay phones. And people are using their cell phones in growing ways -- for text messages, video messages, e-mail and Web access.

In an emergency, it could be a concern, Cameron said.

''I didn't have a connection using cell phones for several days, and that was really frightening,'' he said of living in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks. ''I didn't talk to my parents for a week and a half.''

''It's definitely a really big question mark,'' said Rajan Shah, who sent his New Year's text messages before the clock struck midnight to beat the rush. ''It really makes you rethink technology and whether we are able to be connected through a global catastrophe.''

Text messages already use a different transmission system from cell phone calls. There may be a way to differentiate among types of information or to create a separate system for people to use in emergencies.

Farren said emergency networks in place and now being expanded allow emergency service personnel to maintain voice cell phone service in times of need.

But that doesn't help average Joe trying to find Mrs. Joe.

The next step may be some consumer education, Farren said.

''In an emergency situation, you really should stay off your phone'' if possible, he said.

Emergencies by definition are so unusual that building a full backup network could be cost-prohibitive, Farren said.

''If you're asking everyone to spends billions to billions to build a secondary network, someone's got to pay for it,'' Farren said.

But the wireless field is constantly changing, he noted. ''As innovation continues, I'm sure some of these questions will be addressed.''

It's not a strict technology issue, Midkiff said.

''It's people having to think a little bit differently about how you communicate,'' he said. ''Maybe there's a need for some different models.''
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine..._networks.html





Internet Access Is Only Prerequisite For More and More College Classes
Susan Kinzie

Berkeley's on YouTube. American University's hoping to get on iTunes. George Mason professors have created an online research tool, a virtual filing cabinet for scholars. And with a few clicks on Yale's Web site, anyone can watch one of the school's most popular philosophy professors sitting cross-legged on his desk, talking about death.

Studying on YouTube won't get you a college degree, but many universities are using technology to offer online classes and open up archives. Sure, some schools have been charging for distance-learning classes for a long time, but this is different: These classes are free. At a time when many top schools are expensive and difficult to get into, some say it's a return to the broader mission of higher education: to offer knowledge to everyone.

And tens of millions are reaching for it.

For schools, the courses can bring benefits, luring applicants, spreading the university's name, impressing donors, keeping alumni engaged. Virginia Tech, for example, offers some online classes free to its graduates.

As the technology evolves, the classes are becoming far more engaging to a broader public. (Think a class on "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Solutions Using R and Bioconductor" sounds a little dry? Try reading the lecture notes, alone, on a computer screen.) With better, faster technology such as video, what once was bare-bones and hard-core -- lecture notes aimed at grad students and colleagues -- is now more ambitious and far more accessible.

With video, you can watch Shelly Kagan, the well-known Yale philosopher, asking students about existence and what makes someone's life worthwhile.

"If death is the end, is death bad?"

The focus is sharp enough to see the sticks of chalk at the blackboard, the laces on his Converse All-Stars. You can watch his black eyebrows fly up and down as he makes points. You can see which books are on the syllabus and get the assignments online.

Just don't ask him to grade the papers.

* * *

Some professors try this on their own, on a small scale. Schools are feeling their way, experimenting with different technologies; some use Utah State University's eduCommons on the Web; some post to free sites such as YouTube and the Apple university site iTunes U. Other schools have plunged right in: MIT has 1,800 classes online, virtually the entire curriculum free and open to all.

"The idea was to have a broad impact on education worldwide and make a statement at a time when many schools were launching for-profit distance-learning ventures," Steve Carson of MIT OpenCourseWare said, "trying to redefine the role of the institution in the digital age."

MIT is working with more than 150 other colleges and universities interested in open classes, Carson said, and more than 5,000 classes are online at an international site.

Less than a week into Yale's video launch of seven introductory courses, Kagan had gotten enthusiastic, inquisitive e-mail messages from people who had watched his classes. He had started to wonder whether it was just the first sign of a deluge of armchair philosophers trying to reach him.

It is, after all, out there. For anyone.

About 35 million people have tried MIT's online courses, Carson said. The biggest surprise has been that almost half who use the site aren't students or teachers but people just curious to learn.

"Wow now I can go to an Ivy League college . . . for free," someone wrote in the comments section of one of Berkeley's YouTube videos.

"UC Berkeley isn't Ivy League," someone else wrote, but whatever. There it is on YouTube, the third lecture of Chemistry 3B, Electronic Spectroscopy, just as it was taught at Berkeley.

The first lecture of Berkeley's Physics 10, on atoms and heat, was watched almost 115,000 times in its first four months online.

The second lecture has been reached only about 8,100 times.

And people have watched Beaker from the Muppets singing (or beeping?) "Feelings" more than 2 million times over the past year and a half.

Still.

MIT gets e-mail messages all the time from such people as Kunle Adejumo, a student in Nigeria. He would print out pages from a metallurgical engineering class online and bring them to his classmates to supplement what they were learning. They kept asking for more. Finally he downloaded the entire course, printed it and brought it in. The class burst into applause.

* * *

Johns Hopkins professors have posted lecture notes from public health courses on their Web site, available to anyone. George Mason's open online research tool and archive Zotero aims to get scholars around the world to share their research. At American, "the university is still trying to figure out, like any university, its way in a technologically and legally changed environment," said Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, director of general education.

"There are intellectual property issues to be worked out here," Jackson said. "There are, frankly, revenue things to be worked out here. There are cultural considerations: What kinds of things are appropriate to what audiences?"

Many school officials have concerns about intellectual property issues -- what's okay to talk about or show in a classroom with a small group might not be appropriate for mass broadcast -- and about ongoing costs. MIT spends $4 million a year and keeps updating, adding video and, recently, a portal for high school students and teachers.

Professors have another set of worries. At Yale, psychology professor Paul Bloom's first thought after agreeing to let his class be filmed was, "Oh, God, this is a terrible mistake."

He wondered whether he would teach differently, inhibited by the camera. He imagined careless comments being immortalized forever or random snippets winding up who knows where.

Some professors worried that students would just sleep in and catch the lecture on a laptop another time. (Jackson makes classroom discussions a big chunk of the final grade to head that off.)

It couldn't replace the real thing, many professors said -- especially not for seminars, in which the discussion and the papers are so important. Students can't earn credit. And yet, Bloom said, he didn't want to say no when he was asked to do it. "I'm very much behind it for moral reasons. . . . There are a lot of people who won't have a chance to go to Yale and won't have a chance to go to university. . . . [But] anyone with access to a computer can hear these brilliant lectures on physics or ethics or the Old Testament."

It's not a solution, he said, to the inequities in education.

But it's a step.

"It's part of this movement in higher education to open up," George Mason professor Dan Cohen said, "to share the products of our research, to be here for the public good."

Besides, Jackson said: "The thing any academic most wants is for people to read their stuff, listen to what they're saying."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...123002796.html





We're All Thieves to the RIAA
Alyce Lomax

You buy a CD. You rip a digital copy so you can put it on your Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune. You're not worried; you paid premium price for the CD. You're not some lawless pirate. You wouldn't dream of sharing your music on a P2P network.

Well, you may be walking a fine line toward thiefdom in the eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the industry trade association that includes heavyweights like Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), Vivendi Universal, and EMI.

Current litigation against Jeffrey Howell of Arizona shows that while the industry's gone after him for file-sharing, not ripping MP3s, it's also taking exception to recordings on his computer that he copied from CDs he purchased, with the outlook that Howell is also liable for the "unauthorized copies" he made and placed on his PC. Although there's a lot of clarification going on over the Internet now -- pointing out that the RIAA can't specifically target ripping CDs for personal use, since that falls within "fair use" -- the RIAA hasn't lent much reason to give it the benefit of the doubt as a reasonable entity here lately.

After all, a lawyer for Sony BMG said during a recent high-profile file-sharing trial that making one measly copy was, "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'." I joked at the time that maybe they'll come after us for singing tunes in the shower, but at this point, maybe that thought isn't funny so much as scary.

I'd think companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) might start to get uncomfortable, since their participation in the varying channels of the digital music business rely on content that can be used with electronic devices in a way consumers can accept. If the RIAA does start targeting personal use, it certainly could spur a newfound revolution away from legit services (or even to new, more innovative solutions). As it stands, the industry already seems almost hell-bent on creating plenty of disgruntled customers who don't particularly want to do business with it anymore ... and then suing them for it.

As I've said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers -- which doesn't seem that outlandish at this point -- then I guess we'll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.
http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...-the-riaa.aspx





U.S. Album Sales Down, Digital Sales Up
Alex Veiga

U.S. album sales plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, continuing a downward trend for the recording industry, despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.

A total of 500.5 million albums sold as CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from 2006's unit total, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.

The shortfall in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums. About 844.2 million digital tracks sold in 2007, compared to 588.2 million in 2006, and digital album sales accounting for 10 percent of total album purchases.

Last year, Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store became the third-largest music retailer in the U.S.

Nielsen does not provide revenue figures.

Overall music purchases, including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos, rose to 1.35 billion units, up 14 percent from 2006.

The recording industry has seen CD album sales decline for years, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers have spent more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.

Warner Music Group Corp. artist Josh Groban had the best-selling album with "Noel." The album, a collection of Christmas songs, sold around 3.7 million copies.

A soundtrack for The Walt Disney Co.'s popular "High School Musical" franchise was second with around 2.9 million units sold.

The Eagles' comeback album, "Long Road Out of Eden," scored the third spot, selling around 2.6 million copies, despite being independently released and available for purchase only at Wal-Mart stores.

Three out of the five top-selling albums for the year were released late in the fourth quarter.

Among last year's other top selling albums were a "Hannah Montana" soundtrack and offerings from Alicia Keys, Fergie and "American Idol" alum Doughtry.

The major recording companies' album market share remained ostensibly the same from 2006, with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group holding a 31.9 percent share, up slightly from the previous year.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, continued to rank second with 24.97 percent, though it dropped 2.4 percent from 2006.

Warner Music remained third-largest, with a 20.2 percent share, an increase of 2.1 percent.

Britain's EMI Group PLC ranked fourth among the majors, with a 9.3 percent share, down nearly 1 percent.

The decision by some major recording artists to push back album releases initially anticipated for the fourth quarter last year may have contributed to the decline in album sales.

One trend that should prove encouraging to record labels: 50 million albums were downloaded last year, a 53 percent uptick.

"That says consumers are embracing both the track format and the digital album format," said Rob Sisco, president of Nielsen Music.

In all, 23 percent of music sales were derived from digital purchases, Sisco said.

A report released in November by Jupiter Research LLC forecast digital music sales will continue to grow to $2.8 billion, comprising 34 percent of U.S. consumer spending on music in 2012.

The recording industry continued to benefit from mobile music, with mobile phone owners buying 220 million ringtones, the firm said.

The holiday season brought an upswell of music purchases, with music sales in the last week of the year totaling 58.4 million units, the biggest sales week ever recorded by Nielsen SoundScan.

David Pakman, chief executive of eMusic.com Inc., attributed strong holiday sales at the online music retailer in part to an apparent pick up in sales of low-cost digital music players.

"That's showing us that digital music adoption is reaching into some price-sensitive areas," Pakman said.

EMusic subscribers downloaded nearly 500,000 tracks and audio books on Christmas Day alone. The company's paid subscriber base exceeded 400,000 at the close of the year.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...iLhWAD8TUP10O0





David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars
David Byrne

Full disclosure: I used to own a record label. That label, Luaka Bop, still exists, though I'm no longer involved in running it. My last record came out through Nonesuch, a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group empire. I have also released music through indie labels like Thrill Jockey, and I have pressed up CDs and sold them on tour. I tour every few years, and I don't see it as simply a loss leader for CD sales. So I have seen this business from both sides. I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I'm not the only one who can say that.

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

Some see this picture as a dire trend. The fact that Radiohead debuted its latest album online and Madonna defected from Warner Bros. to Live Nation, a concert promoter, is held to signal the end of the music business as we know it. Actually, these are just two examples of how musicians are increasingly able to work outside of the traditional label relationship. There is no one single way of doing business these days. There are, in fact, six viable models by my count. That variety is good for artists; it gives them more ways to get paid and make a living. And it's good for audiences, too, who will have more — and more interesting — music to listen to. Let's step back and get some perspective.

What is music?

First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.

All of it.

• What do record companies do?
• Or, more precisely, what did they do?
• Fund recording sessions
• Manufacture product
• Distribute product
• Market product
• Loan and advance money for expenses (tours, videos, hair and makeup)
• Advise and guide artists on their careers and recordings
• Handle the accounting

This was the system that evolved over the past century to market the product, which is to say the container — vinyl, tape, or disc — that carried the music. (Calling the product music is like selling a shopping cart and calling it groceries.) But many things have changed in the past decade that reduce the value of these services to artists.

For example:

Recording costs have declined to almost zero. Artists used to need the labels to bankroll their recordings. Most simply didn't have the $15,000 (minimum) necessary to rent a professional studio and pay an engineer and a producer. For many artists — maybe even most — this is no longer the case. Now an album can be made on the same laptop you use to check email.

Manufacturing and distribution costs are approaching zero. There used to be a break-even point below which it was impractical to distribute a recording. With LPs and CDs, there were base manufacturing costs, printing costs, shipping, and so on. It paid — in fact, it was essential — to sell in volume, because that's how many of those costs got amortized. No more: Digital distribution is pretty much free. It's no cheaper per unit to distribute a million copies than a hundred.

Touring is not just promotion. Live performances used to be seen as essentially a way to publicize a new release — a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bands would go into debt in order to tour, anticipating that they'd recover their losses later through increased record sales. This, to be blunt, is all wrong. It's backward. Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

So with all these changes, what happens to the labels? Some will survive. Nonesuch, where I've done several albums, has thrived under Warner Music Group ownership by operating with a lean staff of 12 and staying focused on talent. "Artists like Wilco, Philip Glass, k.d. lang, and others have sold more here than when they were at so-called major labels," Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch, told me, "even during a time of decline."

But some labels will disappear, as the roles they used to play get chopped up and delivered by more thrifty services. In a recent conversation I had with Brian Eno (who is producing the next Coldplay album and writing with U2), he was enthusiastic about I Think Music — an online network of indie bands, fans, and stores — and pessimistic about the future of traditional labels. "Structurally, they're much too large," Eno said. "And they're entirely on the defensive now. The only idea they have is that they can give you a big advance — which is still attractive to a lot of young bands just starting out. But that's all they represent now: capital."

So where do artists fit into this changing landscape? We find new options, new models.

The six possibilities

Where there was one, now there are six: Six possible music distribution models, ranging from one in which the artist is pretty much hands-off to one where the artist does nearly everything. Not surprisingly, the more involved the artist is, the more he or she can often make per unit sold. The totally DIY model is certainly not for everyone — but that's the point. Now there's choice.

1. At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity, deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. The idea is that you can achieve wide saturation and sales, boosted by a hardworking machine that stands to benefit from everything you do. The artist becomes a brand, owned and operated by the label, and in theory this gives the company a long-term perspective and interest in nurturing that artist's career.

Pussycat Dolls, Korn, and Robbie Williams have made arrangements like this, selling equity in everything they touch. The T-shirts, the records, the concerts, the videos, the BBQ sauce. The artist often gets a lot of money up front. But I doubt that creative decisions will be left in the artist's hands. As a general rule, as the cash comes in, creative control goes out. The equity partner simply has too much at stake.

This is the kind of deal Madonna just made with Live Nation. For a reported $120 million, the company — which until now has mainly produced and promoted concerts — will get a piece of both her concert revenue and her music sales. I, for one, would not want to be beholden to Live Nation — a spinoff of Clear Channel, the radio conglomerate that turned the US airwaves into pabulum. But Madge is a smart cookie; she's always been adept at controlling her own stuff, so we'll see.

2. Next is what I'll call the standard distribution deal. This is more or less what I lived with for many years as a member of the Talking Heads. The record company bankrolls the recording and handles the manufacturing, distribution, press, and promotion. The artist gets a royalty percentage after all those other costs are repaid. The label, in this scenario, owns the copyright to the recording. Forever.

There's another catch with this kind of arrangement: The typical pop star often lives in debt to their record company and a host of other entities, and if they hit a dry spell they can go broke. Michael Jackson, MC Hammer, TLC — the danger of debt and overextension is an old story.

Obviously, the cost of these services, along with the record company's overhead, accounts for a big part of CD prices. You, the buyer, are paying for all those trucks, those CD plants, those warehouses, and all that plastic. Theoretically, as many of these costs go away, they should no longer be charged to the consumer — or the artist.

Sure, many of the services traditionally provided by record labels under the standard deal are now being farmed out. Press and publicity, digital marketing, graphic design — all are often handled by smaller, independent firms. But he who pays the piper calls the tune. If the record company pays the subcontractors, then the record company ultimately decides who or what has priority. If they "don't hear a single," they can tell you your record isn't coming out.

So what happens when online sales eliminate many of these expenses? Look at iTunes: $10 for a "CD" download reflects the cost savings of digital distribution, which seems fair — at first. It's certainly better for consumers. But after Apple takes its 30 percent, the royalty percentage is applied and the artist — surprise! — is no better off.

Not coincidentally, the issues here are similar to those in the recent Hollywood writers' strike. Will recording artists band together and go on strike?

3. The license deal is similar to the standard deal, except in this case the artist retains the copyrights and ownership of the master recording. The right to exploit that property is granted to a label for a limited period of time — usually seven years. After that, the rights to license to TV shows, commercials, and the like revert to the artist. If the members of the Talking Heads held the master rights to our catalog today, we'd earn twice as much in licensing as we do now — and that's where artists like me derive much of our income. If a band has made a record itself and doesn't need creative or financial help, this model is worth looking at. It allows for a little more creative freedom, since you get less interference from the guys in the big suits. The flip side is that because the label doesn't own the master, it may invest less in making the release a success.

But with the right label, the license deal can be a great way to go. This is the relationship Arcade Fire has with Merge Records, an indie label that's done great for its band by avoiding the big-spending, big-label approach. "Part of it is just being realistic and not putting yourself in the hole," Merge cofounder Mac McCaughan says. "The bands we work with, we never recommend that they make videos. I like videos, but they don't sell a lot of records. What really sells records is touring — and artists can actually make money on the tour itself if they keep their budgets down."

4. Then there's the profit-sharing deal. I did something like this with my album Lead Us Not Into Temptation in 2003. I got a minimal advance from the label, Thrill Jockey, since the recording costs were covered by a movie soundtrack budget, and we shared the profits from day one. I retained ownership of the master. Thrill Jockey does some marketing and press. I may or may not have sold as many records as I would have with a larger company, but in the end I took home a greater share of each unit sold.

5. In the manufacturing and distribution deal, the artist does everything except, well, manufacture and distribute the product. Often the companies that do these kinds of deals also offer other services, like marketing. But given the numbers, they don't stand to make as much, so their incentive here is limited. Big record labels traditionally don't make M&D deals.

In this scenario, the artist gets absolute creative control, but it's a bigger gamble. Aimee Mann does this, and it works really well for her. "A lot of artists don't realize how much more money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly," Mann's manager, Michael Hausman, told me. "If it's done properly, you get paid quickly, and you get paid again and again. That's a great source of income."

6. Finally, at the far end of the scale, is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed. CDs are sold at gigs and through a Web site. Promotion is a MySpace page. The band buys or leases a server to handle download sales. Within the limits of what they can afford, the artists have complete creative control. In practice, especially for emerging artists, that can mean freedom without resources — a pretty abstract sort of independence. For those who plan to take their material on the road and play it live, the financial constraints cut even deeper. Backup orchestras, massive video screens and sets, and weird high tech lights don't come cheap.

Radiohead adopted this DIY model to sell In Rainbows online — and then went a step further by letting fans name their own price for the download. They weren't the first to do this — Issa (formerly known as Jane Siberry) pioneered the pay-what-you-will model a few years ago — but Radiohead's move was much higher profile. It may be less risky for them, but it's a clear sign of real changes afoot. As one of Radiohead's managers, Bryce Edge, told me, "The industry reacted like the end was nigh. They've devalued music, giving it away for nothing.' Which wasn't true: We asked people to value it, which is very different semantics to me."

At this end of the spectrum, the artist stands to receive the largest percentage of income from sales per unit — sales of anything. A larger percentage of fewer sales, most likely, but not always. Artists doing it for themselves can actually make more money than the massive pop star, even though the sales numbers may seem minuscule by comparison. Of course, not everyone is as smart as those nerdy Radiohead boys. Pete Doherty probably should not be handed the steering wheel.

Freedom versus pragmatism

These models are not absolute. They can morph and evolve. Hausman and Mann took the total DIY route at first, getting money orders and sending out CDs in Express Mail envelopes; later on they licensed the records to distributors. And things change over time. In the future, we will see more artists take up these various models or mix and match versions of them. For existing and emerging artists — who read about the music business going down the drain — this is actually a great time, full of options and possibilities. The future of music as a career is wide open.

Many who take the cash up front will never know that long-range thinking might have been wiser. Mega pop artists will still need that mighty push and marketing effort for a new release that only traditional record companies can provide. For others, what we now call a record label could be replaced by a small company that funnels income and invoices from the various entities and keeps the accounts in order. A consortium of midlevel artists could make this model work. United Musicians, the company that Hausman founded, is one such example.

I would personally advise artists to hold on to their publishing rights (well, as much of them as they can). Publishing royalties are how you get paid if someone covers, samples, or licenses your song for a movie or commercial. This, for a songwriter, is your pension plan.

Increasingly, it's possible for artists to hold on to the copyrights for their recordings as well. This guarantees them another lucrative piece of the licensing pie and also gives them the right to exploit their work in mediums to be invented in the future — musical brain implants and the like.

No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

Really, isn't that what we want to buy, sell, trade, or download?
http://www.wired.com/print/entertain...16-01/ff_byrne





Uncertain Prospects for Radiohead CD
Jeff Leeds

“In Rainbows,” the latest album from the British rock band Radiohead, has been readily available to music fans for almost three months, first as a digital download in an unconventional tip-jar offering in which fans decided for themselves what to pay for it, and then, like most pop music today, as digital files circulating on free, unlicensed file-swapping networks. One matter remains: Will anyone buy the CD?

Starting on Tuesday, the album, in plastic disc form, is on sale in record shops (this time with a list price, $13.98, that is not subject to consumer whims). Though hard-core fans almost surely have acquired the album, one way or another, Radiohead had plans to promote the CD release with a “prerecording” of the band performing songs from “In Rainbows” on the www.radiohead.tv Web site starting on Monday, according to the band’s Web site, radiohead.com. It is also to be shown on satellite and cable systems that carry the Current TV channel.

Though hailed by critics, the album is seen as an uncertain prospect commercially. That is because the band has declined to say how many copies have been distributed since October, when it diverged from industry custom and offered a digital download of “In Rainbows” for however much fans chose to pay — even nothing. Since then the band’s representatives have described the offering as, among other things, a way of testing whether digital downloads eat into sales of CDs.

Radiohead chose to release the CD through the independent label ATO Records and its imprint TBD. (The band’s 2003 album “Hail to the Thief” was the last one under its recording contract with the music giant EMI.) ATO is shipping an estimated 400,000 copies of the album to record shops, said executives briefed on the label’s plans. It is not uncommon for shops to sell half of the shipment of a big album in its first week on sale. But Radiohead’s performance may differ; not only has the album been widely available online, but it is also hitting record shops in the traditionally slow post-holiday sales period.

As a result, it is seen as a long shot that the band could match the performance of “Hail to the Thief,” which sold 300,000 copies in its first week after going on sale in June 2003, and went on to sell a total of roughly 1 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

Will Botwin, the president of ATO, said that in spite of the availability of Radiohead’s music online, many fans might still have reason to pay for the CD version. “You’ve still got hard-core Radiohead fans that are very inclined to own anything they can from the band,” he said.

He added that the critical praise and international headlines generated by the band’s release plan may have drawn new fans. “I think you’re going to find a new buyer that might be more curious, that might’ve gotten turned on by all the attention,” he said. Still, he acknowledged, “it’s faith on our part.”

He continued: “There’s nothing normal here. There are not normal business principles.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/ar...c/01radio.html





Digital Album Packaging Should Improve in 2008
Antony Bruno

There is a reason people still buy CDs more than they do digital albums. Actually there are several, but viruses that come along with music via peer-to-peer sites (P2P) and a concern over digital rights management (DRM) aren't the only culprits.

Digital music files just don't provide the same amount of content that a CD package does. That includes liner notes, extended album art and lyrics. Buy a digital album today and all you get are a list of tracks and (maybe) a thumbnail image of the album cover that you can't even read.

It's one of the reasons music fans still turn to P2P networks for their music. In addition to providing music free of charge and free of DRM, P2P sites in many cases also include digital copies of such extras typically found in the CD. According to label sources and pirate network tracking firms, fans downloading full albums from BitTorrent sites almost universally choose files that include scans of the CD booklet over those that don't.

Of course, there is little that can be done with those scans other than view them on a computer. Imagine if the music industry and the digital music services got together and offered an official way to access the same content, but make it available on portable devices as well as make it interactive.

There are two ways to accomplish this. One is working directly with a digital music service and hardware developer to ensure all this new content has an outlet. The other is to go it alone.

For the former, iTunes is the most likely candidate.

Although hardly life-threatening, iTunes is facing new competition from Amazon and a variety of social networking sites. While it has made great advancements with the iPod, iTunes' innovation has been slow. The service looks and operates much like it always has. The only new features are in video.

In 2008, look for Apple to make nice with its label partners by offering a bit more with each download, such as lyrics and more interactive album art.

iTunes is the only music service that has a built-in video download feature. The others offer only streaming video. It's also one of the few services that feature a tightly integrated device -- the iPod. Apple is in a great position to roll out new features across its online store and its devices at the same time.

Microsoft's Zune is another place to watch for this, for the same reasons. It also has the integrated service and device, as well as ownership of the technical building blocks needed (such as Windows Media Player). And since it's still lagging far behind Apple in the digital music game, Microsoft could easily tap digital extras as a battleground for new market share.

The problem is that the four major music companies rarely work together on anything. So another angle would be for each to go it alone. If digital music services can't or won't incorporate better metadata into their downloaded files, look for third-party applications to emerge that will do so after the fact.

Early examples of this are two games developed for the iPod -- "Musicka," created by the developers of the original music rhythm game "PaRappa the Rapper," and "Phase," created by "Rock Band" and original "Guitar Hero" developer Harmonix. Both are rhythm-based games that let users "play" along to the songs on their device by pressing buttons at the right time.

The point is that if these game companies can do it, there is no reason why labels can't offer (or commission) their own iPod plug-in that will import better album art, liner notes and lyrics directly from the label or artist and ported into iTunes and the iPod.

In the year ahead, look for several efforts from both camps as digital music distribution becomes more important to the music industry as well as a point of increasing competition among service providers.

Here are a few areas to watch:

Album Art

As music formats have changed through the years, album artwork has suffered. It has gone from sprawling center spreads adorning vinyl LPs to stamp-sized thumbnails accompanying MP3 files. But as digital becomes the predominant format, look for album art to evolve.

The early groundwork for this already has been laid. Last spring, Warner Music Group (WMG) added interactive booklets based on Apple's Quicktime software to about 75 albums sold on iTunes, providing photos and links to more multimedia content. The problem was it was also based on Flash technology, which the latest version of Quicktime disabled due to a security flaw.

There is additional activity on the mobile front. All labels are working with phone manufacturers on the "mobile album" concept -- a bundled digital package that includes the full song, ringtone, wallpaper image and other assets for one price.

Lyrics

While a lyrics page is quite commonplace in the pages of a CD booklet, they are nonexistent with digital music files. In fact, most digital music services only let users search for songs by artist, track or album name. None have an integrated lyrics search tool, and you certainly can't download lyrics to your iPod or other device.

Slowly, things are changing. Yahoo Music last year launched the first publisher-authorized online lyrics search page thanks to Gracenote, which has taken on the task of untangling the Gordian knot of music lyrics publishing rights for service providers.

That search page isn't integrated with the Yahoo Music Unlimited service, though. What's lacking is an affordable way to attach those lyrics to the digital file of the song they belong to. Digital music services would have to pay an extra fee per download to offer that capability, and devices would have to add a new "lyrics" tab or some other functionality for users to subsequently access the words while the song plays.

Look for Gracenote and its service provider partners to develop exactly that in the year ahead.

Liner Notes

Perhaps the most fundamental changes coming to album extras are in the liner notes. In a CD booklet, it's all well and good to list a bunch of people to thank and leave it at that. In the digital age, liner notes become far more interesting.

Rather than thanking so-and-so producer for doing such a great mixing job or their family for support, digital albums can provide behind-the-scenes footage of the producer and band at work, or perhaps a "making of" featurette, interview Q&A, family photos/video, etc.

One area to look for such innovation is with the CDVU+ and MVI formats created by Walt Disney and WMG, respectively. Technically these are multimedia CD formats, not digital music formats. But both represent a step toward expanding the way all involved view a music product.

Both add what can best be called "digital magazines" to a CD that, when inserted into a computer, allow fans to access videos, link to online features, lyrics and more. These physical products represent the bridge between old-school CDs and the digital future. As labels focus on selling more digital albums instead of individual tracks in the new year, expect them to learn from these experiments and begin creating similar all-digital packages as well.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/techno...49009520071231





Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM

The last major label will throw in the towel on digital rights management and prepare to fight Apple for valuable download revenues
Catherine Holahan

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group, which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com's digital music store. EMI and Vivendi's Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

Getting Hip to the Internet

The impetus to lift copyright protection represents a sea change for the recording industry, which for the better part of a decade has used DRM to guard against what it considers illegal distribution and duplication of songs purchased online. In abandoning DRM on à la carte song purchases, the labels could create a raft of new, less restrictive ways of selling music over the Internet, such as through social networks like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace. Partnerships with retailers such as Amazon could also help the music industry take a swipe at Apple, which has come to dominate the legal download market through a one-size-fits-all pricing scheme record labels find restrictive.

Details of Sony BMG's plans are expected to emerge in the coming weeks. Justin Timberlake, the popular recording artist signed to the Sony-owned Jive label, is participating in a Super Bowl promotion with Pepsi that will kick off Feb. 3 and offer free distribution of 1 billion songs from major labels, including Sony BMG, through Amazon's DRM-free download service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Sony has been experimenting with DRM-free songs for about six months. The company began giving away DRM-free promotional downloads for recording artists that sell less than 100,000 units, and at least one artist gained mainstream exposure through the effort. "A lot of these tests have led people to believe that maybe this works," says a Sony BMG executive who asked not to be identified. A Sony BMG spokesman declined to comment. Amazon also declined to comment on its DRM-free deals, beyond what it has disclosed in press releases.

The move by Sony BMG is especially noteworthy, given the company's checkered DRM past. In 2005, Sony BMG incited a consumer boycott and was the target of lawsuits after it embedded CDs with a form of DRM that was surreptitiously copied to and buried in users' PCs (BusinessWeek.com, 11/29/05), leaving the machines vulnerable to viruses.

Abandoning an Outmoded Idea

Many, including music executives, consider the industry's about-face long overdue. "This agreement is the first of many of these types we'll be announcing in the coming weeks and months," Warner Music Group Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. wrote in a Dec. 27 memo to employees explaining Warner's breakthrough deal with Amazon. "Many have argued that we could and should have done this long ago."

Labels used DRM software in an effort to prevent illegal sharing of songs on peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella. Instead, the restrictions served mainly to frustrate paying customers, forcing them to degrade the quality of music by first burning it to a CD before uploading it for play on the device of their choosing. Last year, consumers filed several class actions against the major record labels (BusinessWeek.com, 1/5/07) and, in a couple cases, against Apple, for restricting the devices and thereby controlling prices.

"DRM tends to punish the innocent more than the guilty," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, a technology research company. "It was hurting folks who were trying to follow the rules more than the folks who were pirating the music."

Dancing to Apple's Tune

Worse for the labels, the restrictions ultimately resulted in less control over the paid download industry. Because DRM tended to tie consumers to the store most compatible with their music device, the record labels unwittingly gave much of the power over music distribution to Apple, the manufacturer of the most popular digital music player, the iPod. Music industry executives say Apple has not wielded that power lightly. With control of an estimated 80% of the market for legally downloaded music, Apple pushed its preferred price of 99¢ per song over the opposition of several labels (BusinessWeek.com, 9/25/05), which preferred variable pricing that would allow some artists to sell at a premium.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also refused repeated requests from the recording industry and iPod competitors to license its DRM technology so that iTunes customers could easily put their music on other devices, without first burning it to a CD or otherwise altering the files. In a Feb. 6, 2007, letter titled "Thoughts on Music," Jobs maintained that licensing its DRM technology to many providers would make it too difficult to keep its antipiracy code under wraps: "Licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak."

Jobs used the letter to pressure the music labels (BusinessWeek.com, 2/6/07) to abandon their own use of copyright protection technology. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players," Jobs wrote. "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat." The public shaming helped Apple take the moral high ground at a time when it was under pressure from European regulators to open its DRM to let iTunes customers download their music to non-Apple devices. With his letter, Jobs pointed the finger at the labels for supporting DRM, silently suggesting the wrath of consumers and antitrust authorities should lie with them. Within two months, EMI, one of the smaller of the big four labels, offered to sell higher-quality, DRM-free tracks through iTunes for a 30¢ premium. By Oct. 17 the tracks were selling for 99¢.

A Play for an iTunes Competitor

DRM is by no means dead. Music subscription services such as RealNetwork's Rhapsody and ad-supported services like Ruckus (BusinessWeek.com, 1/22/07) will continue to use DRM to ensure music stops playing when a subscription ends. But these services represent only a small segment of the market. "There won't be any DRM of significance by the end of 2008," says David Pakman, president and CEO of DRM-free music download service eMusic, the second-largest service after iTunes. "The only time you will see it used is for rental services."

Rather than following EMI's lead, other labels are hoping to create another Apple competitor in Amazon, which is willing to give the recording industry greater pricing flexibility. "That was a big part of it—countering Apple's control in a positive way by creating more able competitors," says Mike McGuire, a vice-president for research at Gartner.

Narrowing Apple's lead won't be easy. Just ask Microsoft, which has made meager headway with its Zune music player and online music store. Still, no service has yet been able to offer DRM-free music downloads from all four major labels. Amazon could yet become a contender.

With Tom Lowry and Spencer Ante in New York.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...013_398775.htm





EU: One License, DRM Scheme to Rule Them All
Nate Anderson

Companies that want to sell online content in the European Union know that the common market doesn't apply to everything; selling digital music or offering movie downloads in Europe means negotiating separate licensing agreements in different countries and launching multiple storefronts. Today, the European Commission announced a plan to create a single, European-wide market for online music, films, and video games. It's even pushing for content owners to get their collective act together and produce a truly interoperable, consumer-friendly DRM system.

EU Commissioner Viviane Reding announced the plan today with a statement saying that "Europe's content sector is suffering under its regulatory fragmentation, under its lack of clear, consumer-friendly rules for accessing copyright-protected online content, and serious disagreements between stakeholders about fundamental issues such as levies and private copying." The way forward, she said, is clear. "Do we want to have a strong music, film, and games industry?"

The answer, of course, is a resounding "Yes! Oui! Ja!" The Commission plans to adopt a "Recommendation" by the middle of 2008 that it will use to encourage content owners, ISPs, and consumer groups to make progress in these areas. The Commission already knows that it wants to see more content made available online, and today said that it is "strongly encouraging stakeholders" to streamline negotiations over rights.

The Commission also wants to see rights licensed on a multi-territory basis, rather than country-by-country. Without such multistate licenses, it can be "difficult for online services to be deployed across Europe and to benefit from economies of scale." Negotiating rights to sell digital music, for instance, can be thorny enough in just one country, but when you multiply the problem by five, ten, or twenty countries, the history, laws, and language issues make it truly daunting. Being able to purchase EU-wide licenses for songs would make opening such stores far simpler, and it would be more likely that smaller markets would have access to such stores.

DRM, where it is used, also needs to remain transparent to consumers, a goal which includes interoperability. The Commission notes that "lengthy discussions amongst stakeholders have yet to lead to the deployment of interoperable and user-friendly DRM solutions." This is an early candidate for understatement of the year, and European countries have long shown themselves more interested, at a national level, in the issue of DRM and its problems than the US government ever has. Still, it's hard to see much coming from this; the private sector has had incentives to get this done for years and has so far failed.

Finally, the Commission plans to lay out "cooperation procedures" between ISPs, content owners, and consumers. The goal is to create "codes of conduct" for each party that will curtail piracy but also make available more "attractive content online."

The language of the announcement talks repeatedly about "encouragement" and "recommendations," but the Commission seems to be making an implicit promise to regulate in these areas if more is not done over the next few years by the private sector. Serious money is at stake as online content sales blossom in Europe; according to the Commission's own projections, revenues from online content sales will surge from €1.8 billion in 2005 to €8.3 billion in 2010.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-them-all.html





Lone Holdout in DRMed Music Recommends DRM Circumvention
Ken Fisher

With three of the big four music labels abandoning DRM, that leaves Sony as the big holdout. That's right, the same company that brought you the Sony rootkit scandal is also the last of the major labels to repent and abandon their DRMed ways.

Hence you can imagine our delight when a reader alerted us to the fact that Sony tacitly recognizes the inconvenience caused by its DRM usage and even recommends that iPod users circumvent some of its own DRM. On the Sony Rewards site, we learn that we can cash in Sony Rewards points for music from artists like Avril Lavigne, The Fray, Clint Black, Kelly Clarkson, Elvis Presley and more. Then there's this curious bit, which I quote in full:

Attention iPod users:

Our download service provides files in the WMA music format or the WMV video format, which is not supported by Apple Macintosh computers. To use your music with an iPod, simply follow the steps below:

1. Save each downloaded song to your PC

2. Burn a music CD (in CDA file format)

3. Import the music from the CD into iTunes

4. Update your iPod

The instructions are what one might call the caveman's circumvention technique: burning CD-audio compliant CDs from DRMed source material and re-ripping them to get rid of DRM works, but it does cause a generational loss in audio quality.

The best way to get rid of DRM is to strip it, of course, but Sony won't recommend that because it is illegal in the United States, and it might just make Microsoft (the DRM vendor in this instance) a little bit unhappy.

Will Sony wake up and realize that it is creating difficulties for itself by continuing to use DRM? We think it's inevitable. Barring Universal finding something unsavory in its watermarking test, it's a total numbers game: Sony won't want to be the odd man out. That doesn't mean we should expect an announcement soon. Sony is about as stubborn as they come.

Consider Sony Connect. The offering was nothing other than Sony's attempt to ape Apple's iTunes-iPod play, complete with lock-in and proprietary formats that don't play on other devices. The service failed miserably, and the company shuttered Sony Connect this past summer. Sony is still reportedly hoping to pull of this kind of play in the video scene, however, with the PS3 and PSP.

Update

BusinessWeek.com is reporting that Sony is close to throwing in the DRM towel. Sources close to the company tell BusinessWeek that part of its catalog will be made available without DRM during the first quarter of 2008. First up will be a promotion in partnership with Pepsi that will involve the distribution of 1 billion tracks via the Amazon Music Store, which sells non-DRMed music. This may indicate a long-awaited change of heart towards DRM on Sony's part—and make it trivially simple for music fans to get Sony music on to any digital media player.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...umvention.html





In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
John Tierney

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”

“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html





2007: The Miserable Year in Review
John C. Dvorak

I was not a fan of 2007. It was another crappy tech year—just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000. Let's see some of the highlights and lowlights in no particular order.

Facebook. First of all, if anything was hot, it was the social-networking scene. Facebook got all the attention. The boy genius running the place got a reputation as a hotshot when he refused to consider walking away from the whole thing with a billion dollars in pocket. This was a complete eye-roller, but apparently, he thinks that he could become the next Bill Gates if he plays his cards right. By the end of the year, the company was said to be worth $15 billion. In fact, Facebook is essentially a giant interactive mailing list and is scheduled to deteriorate into a spammer's paradise for self-promoters. Huzzah.

w00t. The top news story of the year is Merriam-Webster choosing w00t as the word of the year. Officially, it is spelled with two zeroes instead of o's, although it is commonly thrown into a conversation as woot! There is a debate over its derivation. Some say it comes from gamers finding dropped items and is a contraction of the words wow and loot. Others say it stems from hacker speak and is a contraction of wow and root, referring to hacking into the root level of a computer. My thinking? Who really gives a crap? It's dumb.

Windows Vista. One of the year's top news stories, which came out of the gate running and took it to the wire, was the ho-hum and often derisive reception of Microsoft Vista by the computing public. It was, eventually, named a dog of the year by various publications. More interesting is that for the first time in history, people demanded an old product (Windows XP) and even reinstalled it. The word of the year should have been revert. Capping off the Vista fiasco was my own column ("The Vista Death Watch)," which became the most-read online column on PCMag.com.

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage. Put bluntly, this was a ridiculous fiasco. Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage was nothing more than a spy program that was supposed to detect whether your software was legit (it aimed to prevent software copying and pirating). One day—and out of the blue—Genuine Advantage hiccupped and a slew of users were misdiagnosed, causing a user furor.

Wii. The dominance of the Nintendo Wii was a whopping big story, even as the Xbox 360 made gains. The pricey and advanced PS3 fizzled, hurting Sony, which seems to have stumbled through the year on all fronts.—next: Blu-ray >

Blu-ray. Sony's never-ending bumbling was commented upon by more than a few people and may have been highlighted by the PS3's poor performance, but it was also reflected in the HD-DVD versus Blu-ray battle royale. This fight never should have taken place, since Blu-ray was in the works for what seems like a decade or more and HD-DVD was a Johnny-come-lately. The battle between these two formats continued unabated throughout the year.

802.11n. A muddy situation evolved when Wi-Fi folks found that the infighting over 802.11n allowed the phone companies to get their various EV-DO, EDGE, and other overpriced mobile Internet computing solutions into laptops all over the country. A lot of this had to do with Intel and its attempt to dominate all things wireless.

Intel's Viiv. The whopper for Intel, though, was its Viiv initiative, which was a dog from the get-go and was dropped—finally. Somewhere along the way, Intel bought into the Silicon Valley crock that CPUs were not important any more. What a laugh. Luckily for the company, it refocused on processor chips and found itself in the driver's seat once again. Of course, Intel will fall off the path again, of that you can be sure.

A series of tubes. Politics got into the tech act, with all sorts of attempts at crummy legislation to benefit the phone companies. The rant from Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaskan Republican, about the Internet and it being "a series of tubes" provided some much-needed levity to the scene.

Apple. And I suppose I cannot lament the year without mentioning the hyper-success of Apple, which was based, for the most part, on new iPods and the iPhone. In a "tail wagging the dog" manner, these devices boosted the fortunes of the Macintosh computer. Of course, this was all helped along by the stumbling of Microsoft Vista.

Google. And finally, I cannot bid adieu to 2007 without mentioning Google. The company began making money hand over fist and seemed unable to slow its own growth no matter what it did. The situation got so bad, rumors persisted throughout the year that Microsoft and Yahoo! would merge in a feeble attempt to compete with Google. Instead, Microsoft threw money at everything it could find, including Facebook.

And that brings us full circle—sadly.

Check back next week when I look at what's in store—or not in store—for 2008.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2240652,00.asp





Ten Things That Will Change Your Future
Nick Galvin

Think back to the days before the network we call the internet existed. Think back to a world before "google" became a verb, before a user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia replaced Britannica and before eBay turned the planet into one big garage sale.

It's easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations that are part of daily life had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness.

"The internet and the web have changed the way we keep in touch with family and friends, do business, form new relationships, leaving little of our lives untouched in some way or other," says John Allsopp, a software engineer, author and founder of the influential Web Directions conference series.

"A decade from now, I've no doubt we'll be similarly astounded with the way these technologies will have reached even further into our lives."

But predicting exactly what will be the next thing or which ideas will bomb and which will fly is fraught with difficulty. (Besides, if I knew for certain, do you really think I'd still be writing for a living?)

What follows is a smorgasbord of websites, services, concepts and gadgets that at first glance seem to have little to do with each other but which taken together give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading.

THE CHUMBY The creators of this bizarre little device have generated a huge buzz over the past few months - and it's not even due to be launched until early in the year. The Chumby is a wireless internet device about the size of a rugby ball. It has no keyboard or mouse but instead uses software called widgets to display pretty much anything you want it to - all the time. For instance, it will act as an alarm clock, play your music, show you constantly updated news or track an eBay auction.

And the really interesting thing is that it is designed to be hacked - everything from the software code to the specifications for the case are freely available. No one, including the manufacturers, knows what owners will make Chumbys do once they are released. http://www.chumby.com

MICROBLOGGING This involves sharing short messages among a group. Messages are typically posted from mobile phones via SMS or instant messaging. True microblogging obsessives will dispatch messages to the group dozens of times daily, updating their peers on even the most inconsequential details of their lives.

The best-known microblogging service is called Twitter and its best-known user is US presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Twitter has also spawned a host of imitators such as Pownce and Jaiku. Microblogging fans claim that, at their best, the mini-messages are almost haiku-like, while detractors question the usefulness of being bombarded with messages such as "Just made cup of tea". http://www.pownce.com; http://www.jaiku.com.

EVERYBLOCK This is still in development but EveryBlock is definitely worth keeping an eye on, if only because it is the work of young Chicago journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty. He was the brains behind a celebrated project called chicagocrime.org, which overlays crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department on maps, thus providing a powerful graphic overview of crime in the city.

EveryBlock will use some of the same techniques to create "hyperlocal" news. The kinds of information Holovaty wants to provide include the results of house sales, scores from youngsters' sports events, local crime figures and stories written by local people. http://www.chicagocrime.org; http://www.everyblock.com.

23ANDME With the tagline "genetics just got personal", 23AndMe allows anyone to unlock their own genetic history - and likely future. For $US1000 ($1145) the service (named after the 23 pairs of human chromosomes) will reveal whether you have a predisposition to arthritis or Alzheimer's or, more frivolously, why you can't stand tomatoes.

23AndMe customers provide a sample of saliva from which technicians extract the DNA for analysis. When the results are in, customers are given a secure login that allows them to explore their own genome at their leisure, revealing their genetic "family" around the world as well as their likely future health. http://www.23andme.com.

PEER-TO-PEER LENDING Whether you're distributing music or books, auctioning off unwanted household items, wanting to bet on a horse race or looking for a soulmate, the internet can put you in touch with someone who is interested in what you have or are.

Kiva takes that idea and applies it to the established concept of microfinance - making small loans to the working poor to help them establish or expand businesses.

So, instead of giving a donation to an organisation such as Oxfam to distribute, peer-to-peer lending lets you invest small amounts directly in a particular entrepreneur - such as Mohamad Marah in Kabala, Sierra Leone. With his $US200 loan, Marah has been able to expand his garment business, buying three extra sewing machines. So far he has repaid half the loan. More than $US15 million has already been lent through Kiva - and the default rate is claimed to be just .23 per cent. http://www.kiva.org

MOB RULES The concept of a "mob" of networked citizens forming an irresistible force has been proposed and developed by, among others, futurist Harold Rheingold and Sydney web theorist and author Mark Pesce. Pesce has pointed out that in about the middle of this year every second person on Earth will have a mobile phone.

"In just a decade, we'll have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone," he said recently. In effect, he reckons, the people are the network and when that mob of people get together and decide to go in a particular direction they are virtually unstoppable. Just ask the record companies that have battled in vain for years to stop people sharing music or former Philippines president Joseph Estrada, who was forced from office in 2001 by mass protests co-ordinated by waves of SMS messages.

According to Pesce, the mob is "faster, smarter and stronger than you are". Just as importantly, the mob is quite unpredictable - so expect a wild ride in coming years. blog.futurestreetconsulting.com; http://www.rheingold.com.

GUERILLA WI-FI Having a wireless internet system set up at home is becoming increasingly common. However, tapping into the internet while out and about is still very hit and miss - and where it is available is often nose-bleedingly expensive (Telstra "hot spots" cost $14 an hour while Optus slugs users about $12 an hour).

Meraki is an internet start-up that aims to change all that by providing cheap - or free - wireless networks. Meraki sells a remarkable device call the Meraki Mini for $US49. Plug it in to your internet connection and it will instantly provide shared access to other users up to 50 metres away.

Put several Merakis together in a neighbourhood (and perhaps include a few of the more powerful versions that cover up to 350 metres) and they will instantly form a "mesh" network, giving internet access to anyone in the area. These "guerilla" networks are beginning to spring up in cities around the world, driven by people for whom internet access is a social-equity issue. Do internet service providers like this Robin Hood-style behaviour? Not at all. Can they do much about it? Er, no. http://www.meraki.com.

WORLD COMMUNITY GRID The World Community Grid project is one of the latest examples of a concept called distributed computing. The idea, though not new, involves harnessing the computing power of many thousands of idle PCs around the world to try to crack complex scientific challenges.

Distributed computing first came to prominence with the Seti@home project, which uses participants' computers to analyse radio telescope data in the search for extra-terrestrial life. World Community Grid takes the concept one stage further and aims to establish "the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity".

So far 343,000 members have donated a total of 128,000 years of computing time. Projects include one aimed at giving scientists a better understanding of cancer and another that is modelling the effects of climate change in Africa. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

LOOPT One of many social networking services that capitalise on the global positioning software now standard on many mobile phones.

Loopt members register with the site and then, when one of their friends is nearby, their location is shown on a map plus a note about what they are doing at that time.

You might not want your location to be always visible - so, thankfully, users can turn off the service. http://www.loopt.com.

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD When marvelling at the potential of the networked world it's easy to forget the 2 billion youngsters in the developing world who don't have the tools to connect.

The One Laptop per Child program is a bid to help bridge this digital divide with a machine called the XO Laptop that sells for just $US200. OLPC is a non-profit group established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte and supported by companies including News Corp, Intel and Google.

Under a "Give One Get One" scheme, donors give $US399 and they receive a child-sized XO machine and another will be sent on their behalf to a youngster in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. http://www.laptop.org.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/...949747758.html





Top Ten Reasons Why the WGA's Deal With Letterman Is Great

The deal included the entire MBA. Everything the the WGA had on the table--where the AMPTP left it when they walked out 25 days ago.
Jesse Wendel

Go Letterman Go!

The WGA made a full deal with World Wide Pants, Dave Letterman's company.

The deal INCLUDED the entire MBA. Everything the the WGA had on the table -- where the AMPTP left it when they walked out 25 days ago -- has now been negotiated fully, closed and signed with 'Pants.

Done. Game over. (For WWP. Their writers -- and only their writers -- are returning to work.)

What great, amazing news.

United Hollywood (Howard A. Rodman, member of the WGA Board and founder of the Guild's independent film writers committee)

Top 10 Reasons Why The Worldwide Pants Deal is a Good Idea

10. The AMPTP says that we're too crazy, too ideological, too amateurish to make a deal, and this lets us say, oh yeah?

9. The Networks That Are Not CBS will be hard put to justify to their advertisers and stockholders why they're letting the competition have a real late-night show while they go forth with writerless efforts. (As The Canadian Press put it yesterday, "Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart all plan returns to late-night television over the next two weeks, but aside from their familiar faces, viewers may not recognize much.")

8. And despite what some will say, that's genuine pressure. Yes, the conglomerates have deep pockets. But they do have to answer to the folks who pay the bills.

7. Because it's not just a plain vanilla interim deal: this is a deal we can use as a model, with cherries on top.

6. Cherries, in this case, meaning that the Letterman deal is the full MBA, complete with the New Media proposals we couldn't get the other side to move on at the Big Table. This shows our proposals are affordable. And, perhaps best of all, Worldwide Pants is taking on the liability of our contract provisions, including not only the payment terms, but also the backstop of the fair market valuation test under the MBA.

5. Although this will be very hard on Leno, Conan, Kimmel and other late-night Guild writers, the wedge that it drives between the networks is deeper and sharper than the wedge it drives between writers. While the companies understand ROI, only we understand solidarity.

4. Go re-read number 10.

3. Like the waiver for the SAG awards, it lets people know that, when we are able to, we honor those who honor us.

2. Because in 1988, Letterman called management "money-grubbing scum." Out loud. In public.

1. Worldwide Pants has a better logo than the AMPTP.

On a more serious note, though: we should all remember what writers gave up in 1960 so that all writers who came after them -- meaning us -- could have residuals. In order to make that deal, they gave up the rights to residuals for everything they had written prior to 1960. The sacrifice they made for the future is inspiring, and humbling in the best possible sense.

Today is the first day of 2008.

Today it has been twenty-five days since the AMPTP walked out of negotiations.

Welcome to the most important labor action of the new century.

This fight is dog-shit simple.

Will the bullies (studios) get away with stealing lunch money from the geeks (writers, actors, and directors) forever and ever, amen... or not?

At stake is control of the internet.

Whom do you want in charge?

Six big studios run by bullies?

Or middle-class folks with kids in schools and bills to pay?

Folks like you and I who genuinely give a damn about families, the war, and taking care of people. Not to mention the occasional fart joke, musical, or a musical with a fart joke. (Blazing Saddles, anyone?)

How long is our own Lower Manhattanite -- a Guild Writer -- really willing to wait? (see video to your right)

Let's ask writers on the picket line...

• What are you striking for?

• What's the hardest part of striking?

• How long are you willing to wait?

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/72178/





Leno Dominates Late-Night, and Strikers Complain
Bill Carter and Brian Stelter

Jay Leno made a triumphant return to late-night television Wednesday night, easily dominating the ratings competition over his chief rival, David Letterman, and delivering a traditional full-length monologue — even though he was performing without his team of 19 writers.

But how Mr. Leno was able to accomplish that feat has become the subject of an increasingly fractious dispute between the NBC star and the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike against the movie studios and television networks for the past two months.

The Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East moved Thursday to prevent Mr. Leno from performing any more monologues, while NBC executives said Mr. Leno would ignore the strike rules set up by the writers and would tell his scripted jokes as planned on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Tonight Show.”

The dispute could affect the other late-night shows that are without writers because of the strike. Both “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” on NBC and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC returned to the air this week, and their hosts did not perform scripted monologues. Comedy Central’s two shows, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” with Stephen Colbert, are scheduled to return Monday. If Mr. Leno is able to continue to perform material he writes for himself, it might open the door for the other hosts to do the same thing.

The clash over Mr. Leno’s monologue comes at a critical time in the two-month strike for the networks and the guilds. Ratings for the highly lucrative late-night talk shows rose sharply on Wednesday, bringing smiles to the faces of network and advertising executives whose shows had steep viewership drops when the guild began to strike in early November, halting production on shows starring Mr. Leno, Mr. Letterman, Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Kimmel and Craig Ferguson.

“Everybody’s happy that the late-night shows are back,” said Steve Lanzano, the chief operating officer of MPG, the American division of Havas. “It’s going to mean more ratings points in the marketplace, which has taken a real hit in the past year.”

Late-night talk shows are also an important beachhead for the striking writers, who see the hosts, particularly Mr. Letterman, as sympathetic to their cause. In a telephone interview Thursday night, Patric M. Verrone, the president of the Writers Guild of America West, said that with the strike talks at a standstill, there had been some hope that the deal that allowed Mr. Letterman to return with writers would help move the situation toward a settlement. But, he said, “instead the companies are choosing to pit these guys against us.”

The conflict seems about to play out on late-night television’s biggest show, “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Leno said on the air Wednesday night that he was following the rules set down by the writers before the strike and writing his own jokes for the monologue. In their outline of what could and could not be permitted during the strike, the writers expressly excluded guild members from writing any material for use by any of the companies affected by the strike, even material written for their own use.

NBC executives said Thursday that Mr. Leno and his writers held a meeting on Monday with Mr. Verrone and that Mr. Leno told Mr. Verrone he was going to write his monologue material himself. According to the NBC executives, Mr. Verrone gave Mr. Leno his approval to write the monologue.

But Thursday the guild challenged that interpretation of what happened in the meeting. Mr. Verrone said, “The sense of it was, Jay was going to play by the book.” He said that Mr. Leno brought up his work as a guest host in a previous strike in 1988, and “I can understand that there may have been some confusion for Jay about that.”

He said that he had a telephone conversation with Mr. Leno on Thursday and “I made it absolutely clear that he cannot write for the show.”

One of Mr. Leno’s writers who attended the meeting with Mr. Verrone supported Mr. Leno’s version that he had been given some assurance that he could write his monologue.

“Jay said, ‘Let me get this clear: I’m allowed to write my monologue,’” said the writer, who asked not to be identified because he was a strike supporter and did not want publicly to challenge the guild’s version of the events. “Verrone said, ‘Well, since you are taking one for the team, we won’t hassle you about that.’”

The writer added, “There was no way Jay could have misinterpreted what was being said.”

Neal Sacharow, a spokesman for the Writers Guild of America West, said that after Mr. Verrone clarified the strike rules, it would be “a clear violation” if Mr. Leno wrote and performed a monologue on Thursday night’s show.

Asked what the guild would do if Mr. Leno performed a monologue anyway, Mr. Verrone said any violation of the strike rules would be brought before a Strike Rules Compliance Committee for some kind of action.

NBC executives said Thursday evening that Mr. Leno, who was scheduled to tape his show at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, would continue to write and perform his monologue based on the contractual agreement between the guild and all production companies that was in effect when the strike began. That contract cannot be superseded by the strike rules imposed by the guild, said Andrea Hartman, the executive vice president and deputy legal counsel for NBC.

“The strike rules cannot contradict the scope and express terms of the overall agreement,” Ms. Hartman said.

According to an appendix in the contract between the guild and production entities, the terms of which NBC said remain in effect during the strike, the definition of “literary material” covered by the agreement specifically excludes “material written by the person who delivers it on the air.”

Mr. Verrone said the guild interpreted that rule differently, saying that it covered only performers who were not also hired as writers for a production and that Mr. Leno is listed as a writer on his own show. He also said that because of the strike, the contract is not in effect anyway.

Media buyers and network representatives said movie studios and other advertising clients are enthusiastic about the resumption of original programming. Among the studios, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lions Gate Entertainment and The Weinstein Company all advertised new movies Wednesday on “The Late Show.”

The late-night shows enjoyed significant viewership increases on Wednesday, presumably thanks to viewers who were curious about how Mr. Leno would perform without writers and what Mr. Letterman would say about the strike. “The Tonight Show” averaged 7.2 million viewers, almost three million more than its season-to-date average, and “The Late Show” averaged 5.5 million viewers, nearly two million more than its average.

The strong ratings for the hosts’ returns belie the sagging advertising market for late-night television. Before the strike began the late-night shows had shed approximately 10 percent of

their viewers. Two months of forced repeats — at one point NBC showed an episode of “The Tonight Show” from 1992 — exacerbated the declines. The ratings had placed both NBC and CBS in several make-good situations, when the networks did not meet their guarantees to advertisers for certain ratings levels.

The income from late-night TV is significant. A 30-second commercial on Mr. Leno’s show costs roughly $50,000, according to media buyers. Both “The Tonight Show” and “The Late Show” were expected to earn more than $200 million in advertising revenue in 2007, according to estimates by TNS Media Intelligence.

Mr. Leno has led Mr. Letterman in the competitive 11:35 p.m. time slot since 1995. Some observers expect Mr. Letterman’s access to writers and ability to book A-list entertainers to increase his viewership. Mediabuyers said the greater test for both hosts would come later this month.

“In the coming weeks, if Leno is unable to secure guests, I think there could be a narrowing of the gap between the two shows,” said Shari Anne Brill, senior vice president at the media agency Carat USA.

Other late-night shows also showed ratings gains on Wednesday. “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” averaged 2.8 million viewers, up 55 percent from season-to-date averages. “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” averaged 2.2 million viewers, up 31 percent. The ABC show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” with 1.8 million viewers, was down slightly fromits season average.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/bu...enight.html?hp





Awkward Encounters in the Hollywood Trenches
Brooks Barnes

A dozen striking screenwriters gathered in the bar at the Hotel Bel Air not long ago to decompress after another day on the picket line. Less than 10 feet away sat another strike-weary pair: Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, and Barry Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers.

Neither group acknowledged the other, although a couple of writers quipped under their breath that the moguls should pick up everyone’s bar tab. Others fretted about being seen hanging out at a five-star hotel, an awfully gilded setting for a bunch of guild members complaining about unfair compensation.

“My stomach did a flip-flop,” said one writer who was in the room. “Part of me wanted to go yell at these guys for treating us so poorly, and part of me wanted to go hide.” (The moguls did not notice the gathering of writers, according to their respective spokeswomen).

Similar scenes play out daily in the giant high school cafeteria that is Hollywood, contributing awkwardness to a labor strike unlike any other. The captains of most industries do not mix socially with the rank and file, but the people on opposite sides of this bargaining table often send their children to the same elite schools, dine at the same fashionable restaurants and attend the same holiday parties.

Only a rarefied circle of writers, of course, has the ability to truly mingle with Hollywood’s corporate royalty. The vast majority of writers are average folks who manage a middle-class existence or are unemployed in their chosen profession at any given moment. The union says the average income for a member is $60,000.

But the union also counts as members dozens of creators of hit television shows, who can take home upwards of $5 million a year, and writers who command fees of $1 million for a screenplay or more.

As the strike enters its ninth week, some of the people from both sides are sunbathing elbow to elbow at the Four Seasons Hualalai pool in Hawaii, one of several luxury resorts where Hollywood’s upper echelons jet for winter vacations.

Even attending synagogue is tricky, said Rabbi John L. Rosove of Temple Israel of Hollywood.

“We have writers and studio people in the congregation who are friends,” he said. “It puts everyone in an awkward position, including me.”

Hot tempers dominate the picket lines, and tension among friends is rising as more people in ancillary businesses lose their jobs and weeks without work stretch into months. The 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America walked off the job on Nov. 5 over payments for the use of programs and movies on the Internet.

But once the strike captains call it a day at the end of the picketing shifts and both sides dispatch their last press releases, the conflict settles into a quiet discomfort.

“When I see writer friends at the supermarket or at the movies, we know that those places are not forums to get into a debate on the strike,” said Nina Tassler, president of entertainment at CBS. “I’ve been friends with some of these people for 20 years.”
Not everyone is forcing a smile.

In November, John August, the writer of movies like “Charlie’s Angeles” and “Corpse Bride,” spied Peter Roth, president of Warner Brothers Television, at Osteria Mozza, a Los Angeles restaurant. “When you see someone you kind of know at a restaurant, it’s always a process to figure out whether or not to say hi,” Mr. August wrote on his blog. “But the strike makes that decision process much more complicated.”

Instead of confronting the studio executive, Mr. August returned home and wrote a vulgar blog entry about what he would have liked to say. One part of it that is printable here said: “Everyone knows the C.E.O.’s are talking out of two sides of their mouths.”

Some on each side of the fence conceded they avoid one another, ducking out of the school concert early or looking the other way at the Grove, a popular shopping mall next door to the soundstages for “American Idol.” Even some restaurant managers are trying to help, taking care to seat rival camps a safe distance from each other.

“Of course we pay attention to that kind of thing,” said Jay Perrin, manager of Campanile. “I don’t think a fistfight would break out,” he added. “It is more like people cracking jokes about each other with more bite than normal.”

But steering clear of the enemy in Hollywood is not easy. In a one-degree-of-separation town, a lot of Hatfields and McCoys are married, dating or related.

The executive who helped create the so-called doomsday clock, a producers’ alliance Web site that adds up the wages striking writers are losing, is married to a striking writer. The lead writer for “The Office” is married to the president of entertainment at Lifetime.

And then there is J. Nicholas Counter III, the president of the producers’ alliance and lead negotiator. His son-in-law is Alex Kurtzman, one of the most successful writers in Hollywood, whose credits include “Mission: Impossible III,” “Transformers” and the coming “Star Trek.” Mr. Counter’s daughter is a Writers Guild of America member, too.

Holiday parties and other festivities have been sparse in Hollywood, with studios and networks wondering about what kind of message such celebrations would send to the thousands of people out of work because of the strike.

Still, some have soldiered on, leading to awkward interruptions in cocktail chatter. Tom Kaipinos, the writer behind the television drama “Californication,” was one of the few guild members who attended Showtime’s holiday party.

“This doesn’t count as crossing the picket line, does it?” Mr. Kaipinos asked with a nervous laugh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/bu.../31strike.html





The Viewer's Strike of 2008

As the Writer's Strike of 2007 enters the new year, Americans could be subjected to a wide assortment of alternatives from the network broadcasters. TIME magazine recommended BBC America replacements such as the British version of the Office, along with an alternate reality version of Desperate Housewives. Whatever the country is ultimately faced with, the television we once knew is bound to be affected as it was during the previous Writer's Strike of 1988.

Regardless of the fact that underdog shows such as Seinfeld received national attention, the reigns of "Entertainment Power" remained largely unaffected. Even with new formats of governmental criticism from the likes of the Daily Show, the same studios received even more money from the same "two party" system, resulting in the same Presidential Candidates from the previous elections. And the same people got rich while the same people got ignored, leading the same country down the same path it has been on for over half a century.

But the writers have realized something important in the Capitalistic experiments of Radiohead and the Talking Heads: that profits from Internet sales managed to rival those of the traditional system of selling their rights to the networks. Should the writer's decide to take their entertainment directly to the people through "Internet Channels," "webcasts" such as I am Ninja could become the norm (given that the latest season has managed to earn advertising dollars from Dorritos). The only missing component is the hardware.

This is where you and I come into play.

Consider for a moment that the Writer's Guild of America represents a 'mere' 12,000 writers. This means that 12,000 people could potentially affect the way you and I view our entertainment. Most of us realize that mainstream media (or 'MSM' for short) controls more than our entertainment; they control which products we choose from, and which candidates we elect to vote for at the poll booths. In simple terms, MSM limits our options to those who give them the most money. 12,000 people could turn our heads towards an entirely Democratic system of news and entertainment.

The problem is that a majority of Americans receive their edutainment through controlled set-top boxes that elect to broadcast a limited range of channels. Receiving the "new" Internet "channels" is only available to a limited number of broadband subscribers who actually take the time to watch their favorite shows online. Popular alternatives such as Apple TV elect to control the entertainment through their own privately held revenue system, while Open Source alternatives such as Democracy TV (now called Miro) lack a popular television component to satisfy the average viewer.

The next 12,000 of us need to find the simple solution which enables our grandparents setup and use a "set top device" that allows them to access shows of their own choosing. Once the hardware is in place, the ultimate increase in Writer's pay -- along with the inevitable affects to broadcast television -- will become irrelevant. Those who employ the new hardware will be able to receive their standard network broadcasts through websites such as Hulu (as well as from the dedicated YouTube rippers). In practical terms, the owners of the new devices will be able to explore a whole new world of news and entertainment.

But we must dedicate ourselves to this task, and spread this message so that the next 12,000 hardware and software developers might unite in a follow-up to the Writer's Strike of 2007. Let us call it the Viewer's Strike of 2008. Let us unify our skills to produce an Open Source product which will give the viewer's the final decision, and may the rest of us commit ourselves to their efforts by recommending or outright buying these devices and setting them up in the homes of our loved ones. Let them know that the Viewer's Strike is not about revenues, but the conscious act to restore Democracy to the United States of America.

(One final note to the underdogs of the upcoming elections: Consider the Viewer's Strike of 2008 to be a valuable part in your bid for the presidency. Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel have tasted the bitter rejection of mainstream media, and their supporters have given them millions of dollars to spread their message through traditional formats. Consider the alternative, and give those dollars back to the people by supporting the Viewer's Strike of 2008. Help us ensure that every American will have access to a "Fair and Balanced" news source that they can truly trust.)
http://critterology.blogspot.com/200...e-of-2008.html





More Americans Rolling Their Own Wired Content: Survey
Gail Schiller

About 38% of U.S. consumers are watching TV shows online, 36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices and 45% are creating online content like Web sites, music, videos and blogs for others, according to a new-media survey from Deloitte & Touche.

The findings of the online survey of 2,081 Americans, conducted October 25 to October 31, were provided to The Hollywood Reporter before their official release next month.

The "State of the Media Democracy" notes that in Deloitte's first edition of the survey just eight months earlier, 24% of consumers used their cell phones as entertainment devices, meaning that usage has soared 50%.

About 62% of "millennials" (consumers 13 to 24 years-old) are using their cell phones as entertainment devices, up from 46% in the previous study conducted February 23 to March 6, 2007. And among Generation X consumers (25- to 41-year-olds), the number grew to 47% from 29% in the earlier survey.

About 20% of consumers said they are viewing video content on their cell phones daily or almost daily.

The percentage of consumers watching TV online jumped from the 23% figure reported in the previous study. Roughly 54% of those surveyed said they are making their own entertainment content through editing photos, videos or music, 45% said they are producing that content for others to see, and 32% said they consider themselves to be "broadcasters" of their own media.

"I think for advertisers one of the conclusions is you don't make decisions to advertise either on television or the Internet when you want to hit all the demographics, but rather you need to have a multiplatform strategy," said Ken August, vice chairman and national sector leader for Deloitte & Touche's media and entertainment practice, which commissioned the study. "It shouldn't be an either or proposition."

Among the study's other findings:

-- 54% of consumers said they socialize via social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards, and 45% said they maintain a profile on a social networking site.

-- 85% of consumers still find TV advertising to have the most impact on their buying habits, but online ads are second best, with 65% of consumers saying they have the most impact, beating out magazines at 63%.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ntsrc=hm_topic





Mapmaking For The Masses: User-Generated Content Can Profoundly Impact Geographic Information Systems
ScienceDaily

Websites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to create a global patchwork of geographic information while Google Earth is encouraging individuals to develop appplications using their own data.

According to Michael Goodchild from the University of California in Santa Barbara, ‘volunteered geographic information’ has the potential to be a significant source of geographers’ understanding of the surface of the Earth. Its most interesting, lasting and compelling value to geographers lies in what it can tell them about local activities in various geographic locations that go unnoticed by the world’s media, he says. His review has just been published online in Springer’s GeoJournal.

Goodchild’s paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information.

Goodchild identifies Web 2.0, georeferencing, geotags, Global Positioning System and broadband communication as the enabling technologies. In his opinion, self-promotion and personal satisfaction from seeing their contributions appear online are the primary motivators for individuals to take part in volunteered geographic information. However, Goodchild also identifies the potential for individuals to attempt to undermine its accuracy.

He concludes that “collectively volunteered geographic information represents a dramatic innovation that will certainly have profound impacts on geographic information systems and more generally on the discipline of geography and its relationship to the general public.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1203111251.htm





Got a Manuscript? Publishing Now a Snap
Candice Choi

Getting a book published isn't the rarefied literary feat it once was.

New printing technologies are making published authors of legions of aspiring writers, a population that once toiled for years on tomes that might not see the light of day.

The vast majority of today's instant authors may sell only a few dozen copies of their books, but on-demand publishing is letting thousands realize the ambitions of generations of would-be writers.

On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace, which was already letting filmmakers and musicians burn DVDs and CDs.

The programs are easy for just about anyone to use: Authors select basic options, including the book's size, binding style and paperback or hardcover. After the manuscript is uploaded, users go to a page where they select a font and design the book's cover. Even after a book has been printed they can fix typos for later printings.

Unlike vanity publishing, in which aspiring authors pay to have their books run on traditional presses, on-demand publishing doesn't have to cost writers a cent.

Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools.

Some authors publish on-demand books in hopes of catching the eye of a major publisher. But not all writers who use on-demand publishers aspire to write the great American novel.

The system also allows small businesses to print high-end brochures, screenwriters to shop their scripts around and others to assemble wedding and other special-event books for friends and family.

"I'm just amazed I have the book in my hand," said Catherine Dyer, a 49-year-old Atlanta resident who co-authored a cookbook with her four sisters through Lulu.com. "I knew trying to get a traditional publisher would take ages. With this, I knew at the onset I could have a book in my hand."

"You Want Me To Bring a Dish?" -- the sisters' 104-page cookbook -- sells for $22.76. They've ordered about 100 copies to stock stores around Atlanta and are promoting the book through local signings and radio appearances.

Dyer's already brainstorming ideas for a spinoff.

"Cause I know I can get it published," she said.

The challenge for authors now is getting the word out about their work.

"It's all about the marketing and distribution. We realized early on that that was the bigger challenge," said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO of Blurb.com, an on-demand publisher with 11,000 available self-published titles.

To help authors, Blurb automatically creates widgets that can be dragged and dropped onto other Web sites.

What makes self-publishing viable is the Internet, which gives writers instant access to audiences that share their same interests, no matter how obscure. Authors also use online communities such as blogs, MySpace.com and others to market their works.

"It used to be, if you created a book about an obscure topic, your audience was limited. Now maybe you're part of an online gardening community, and you already have an audience of 5,000 who care deeply about roses," Gittins said.

For most aspiring authors, a book deal with a major publishing house remains the ultimate dream, however.

Big companies like Random House Inc. or HarperCollins Publishers can promote authors on a national scale and get titles in major bookstores. Professional editors also polish copy in the traditional publishing world, a step that can transform a manuscript into a best-seller or perhaps a masterpiece.

"The value and cachet of being with a larger house is still something authors value," said Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.

Users of Amazon.com's CreateSpace are listed the same way as literary giants online. Keyword searches will pull up self-published books along with those of Grisham, Shakespeare, Hemingway or Rowling.

The writers are willing to live with drawbacks that would drive a purist crazy. Printing quality can vary, with images possibly emerging denser or brighter in some copies. Some in the industry say the quality of on-demand publishing has improved greatly and few would be able to distinguish the difference from those printed on traditional presses. And on-demand books are priced according to their length, making them pricier than books printed en masse.

But Gittins said shoppers are willing to pay a little more for a book tailored to a specific audience.

"It's really an opportunity for people to get their creative content out there to millions of people," said Stacey Hurwitz, spokeswoman for CreateSpace.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8TT8CFG0.htm





Generation Y Biggest User of U.S. Libraries, Survey Finds

Sixty-two percent of Gen Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year
Julie Vorman

More than half of Americans visited a library in the past year, with many of them drawn in by the computers rather than the books, according to a survey released on Sunday.

Of the 53% of U.S. adults who said they visited libraries in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger, and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said.

Internet users were more than twice as likely to patronize libraries as non-Internet users, according to the survey.

More than two-thirds of library visitors in all age groups said they used computers while at the library.

Sixty-five percent of them looked up information on the Internet, while 62% used computers to check into the library's resources.

Public libraries now offer virtual homework help and special gaming software programs, and some librarians even have created characters in the Second Life virtual world, Estabrook said. Libraries also remain a community hub or gathering place in many neighborhoods, she said.

The survey showed 62% of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57% of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46% of adults aged 53 to 61, 42% of adults aged 62 to 71, and just 32% of adults over 72.

"We were surprised by these findings, particularly in relation to Generation Y," said Lee Rainie, co-author of the study and director of the Pew project. In 1996 a survey by the Benton Foundation found that young adults saw libraries becoming less relevant in the future.

"Scroll forward 10 years, and their younger brothers and sisters are now the most avid library users," Rainie said.

The survey of 2,796 Americans was conducted by telephone from late June through early September and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. It was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that offers support for U.S. libraries.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top





Top of the Swaps: P2P's Most-Traded Movies, TV and Songs of 2007
Michael Calore

If you want a true snapshot of what people are watching and whom they're listening to online, look no further than the file-sharing underground.

With Hollywood sweating over piracy and record labels crying over losses, activity on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has emerged as the most reliable barometer for determining what's hot and what's not among the most tech-savvy media consumers.

To find the most-traded files in the world of P2P, Wired News turned to BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, a Los Angeles-based firm which tracks media-consumption trends across all digital channels -- legal and otherwise.

For this study, we asked BigChampagne to concentrate solely on P2P traffic. The firm then compiled a set of top 10 lists using data from all the major file-trading protocols and networks -- BitTorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey included. Private BitTorrent trackers and invite-only trading communities were excluded from the study, as were private LAN-based sharing networks. But what remains, we feel, is an accurate picture of what the file-trading world at large got excited about over the past 12 months.

Each list shows data from the beginning of the year up to Dec. 10, 2007.

Here are 2007's superstars of P2P:

Top Songs of 2007
1. Shop Boyz, "Party Like A Rock Star"
2. Akon, "I Wanna Luv U"
3. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls"
4. Mims, "This Is Why I'm Hot"
5. Akon, "Don't Matter"
6. T-Pain, "Bartender"
7. Soulja Boy, "Crank Dat Soulja Boy"
8. Justin Timberlake, "My Love"
9. DJ Unk, "Walk It Out"
10. Jim Jones, "We Fly High"

All of 2007's biggest names in cross-over pop and hip-hop are represented on the list of most-traded songs. But there's almost no correlation to sales of full-length CDs.

The Shop Boyz and Mims both had hugely successful breakout singles in 2007, seven of which were widely pirated. But sales of their respective albums disappointed by failing to go gold. Sean Kingston, whose song "Beautiful Girls" ranked No. 3, hasn't even released an album yet. The only top-fiver with a successful long-player is Akon, whose Konvicted CD is certified triple-platinum.

BigChampagne co-founder and CEO Eric Garland sees this as a reflection of the sea of change currently afoot in the music business. In days past, an artist's success was determined largely by album sales. The world of digital downloads, however, is centered solely on singles.

"If Soulja Boy and Shop Boyz would have sold as many CDs as they did singles, they'd be household names," says Garland. "They'd be superstars on par with 50 Cent and Kanye West."

Further evidence is the fact that the biggest ring tones of 2007 dominate our most-traded list. According to recent data from AT&T, Shop Boyz' "Party Like a Rockstar," Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot," Akon's "Don't Matter" and Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat Soulja Boy" were some of the best-selling ring tones among Telco's wireless customers.

Top Movies of 2007
1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

It's no surprise that a film based on a videogame franchise and starring fetching actress Milla Jovovich did well among the P2P crowd, which is made up largely of younger males. What is surprising is that 2007's top-two box-office draws in the United States -- Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third, respectively -- didn't even crack the top 10. Also, 2007's No. 3 movie in the United States, Transformers, only placed in the No. 7 slot.

BigChampagne's Garland points to the fact that while Hollywood films and content produced in the West dominate the lists, the file-sharing community is truly global.

The myth that higher-quality DVD rips of movies are in higher demand than "cams" -- copies captured by camcorder-toting pirates in theaters -- is also dispelled by the list of top trades.

Beowulf, for example, is No. 6 on the list despite having been released in theaters only in November. The No. 5 movie, Superbad, had only been available on DVD for a week when this list was compiled, meaning most of the traded copies were likely cams.

"You get two release windows intermingling at once," says Garland, "the most popular movies in theaters and the most popular new releases on DVD. They're all competing equally online."

Garland also points out that the art of taping a movie from the audience has come a long way of late.

"Cams can be remarkably good and perfectly watchable," he says. "It's nothing like the days of buying VHS copies off the sidewalk in Manhattan."

Top TV Shows of 2007
1. "Heroes"
2. "Prison Break"
3. "Top Gear"
4. "Smallville"
5. "Desperate Housewives"
6. "House, M.D."
7. "Lost"
8. "Grey's Anatomy"
9. "24"
10. "Dexter"

NBC's sci-fi drama "Heroes" was a runaway hit on prime-time television in 2007, and the story was the same online. The show was a smash on P2P networks -- almost twice as popular as runner-up "Prison Break."

"Top Gear," the BBC's weekly show about cars, is a surprise hit -- but the average P2P trader likely drools over cars online and off, and responds positively to the show's irreverent, danger-loving hosts.

Most of the shows on the list are produced by major networks and broadcast over the air. But filling the No. 10 slot is "Dexter," a moody drama about a serial killer produced for Showtime. The show is only available on pay TV, giving it the added allure of scarcity and feeding its popularity among P2P traders.

The possibility that some of these highly traded shows were originally purchased at an online store as DRM-locked files has little effect on their popularity, says Garland.

"Copy protection doesn't make any difference," he says. "Once one copy is unlocked and made available in the public domain, it's a short order."

Top Music Artists of 2007
1. T.I.
2. T-Pain
3. Akon
4. 50 Cent
5. R. Kelly
6. Lil Wayne
7. Justin Timberlake
8. Fergie
9. Ludacris
10. Snoop Dogg

For the list of top artists, BigChampagne tracked P2P downloads of both singles and full albums. The names here are better known -- 50 Cent, R. Kelly and Snoop Dogg, for instance -- but the list is still primarily made up of singles artists.

Garland says his firm tracks downloads of full CDs, but you'll never see them at the top of the charts.

"Songs are the new currency online," he says. "The volume of downloads for individual songs dwarfs the downloading of albums."

Indeed, anyone following the online music business this year would expect to see Radiohead on the list of most-traded artists. The British rock band generated a huge amount of buzz with the early October release of its album In Rainbows, which it sold as a pay-what-you-like digital download. Even though around one third of the album's downloaders grabbed it for free off of BitTorrent rather than pay a cent, the activity wasn't enough to make a much of a dent in the world of P2P.

"The only area where the Radiohead was possibly the story of the year was complete album downloads," Garland says. "They aren't a singles band. Consequently, Radiohead has never done the kind of volume that these big video-driven stars du jour command."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/h...YE_best_of_p2p





OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen Quits Nonprofit Effort

She's off to commercialize tech she invented in the OLPC development process
Agam Shah

The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow this week, with Chief Technology Officer Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC.

Jepsen, who joined OLPC as its first employee in 2005 after Nicholas Negroponte started the effort, will pursue an opportunity to chase after "her next miracle in display technology," OLPC said in an e-mail sent on Sunday.

Jepsen was responsible for hardware and display development for the rugged and power-saving XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its innovative hardware features and environmentally friendly design.

Her last day with the organization is Dec. 31, though she will continue consulting with OLPC, according to the e-mail. Dec. 31 is also the end of OLPC's Give One Get One program, in which two XO laptops can be purchased for about US$400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.

Satisfied that XO laptops were shipping in volume, Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.

"I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit," Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.

"I believe that the work I led in the design of the XO laptop is just the first step in changing computing," she wrote.

Powered by solar power, foot pedal or pull-string, the laptop doesn't rely on an electrical outlet to run, making it useful for situations where power is unreliable or unavailable. The laptop's specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, compared to 40 watts on commercial laptops depending on usage.

The laptop's battery lasts up to 21 hours because of custom-designed, efficient power-saving features implemented at the hardware and software level. Batteries in commercial laptops may explode at high temperatures, while XO's batteries can run and recharge in temperatures around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said in earlier interview.

OLPC is also designing a cow-powered generator that works by hooking cattle up to a system of belts and pulleys.

For connectivity, the laptop has mesh-networking features for Internet access.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...tsrc =hm_list





Intel Leaves Group Backing Education PCs
John Markoff

Intel said Thursday that it had chosen to withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child educational computer organization, which it joined in July after years of public squabbling between Intel’s chairman, Craig R. Barrett, and the group’s founder, Nicholas P. Negroponte.

The low-cost laptop, originally priced at $100, has captured the public imagination but also created intense controversy because it was viewed as a potential competitor for both Intel and Microsoft in the developing world.

The machine, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system and comes with educational software, is now built with a microprocessor made by Intel’s archrival, Advanced Micro Devices. The PC, called the XO, is being sold for about $200 apiece to governments and institutions.

On Thursday an Intel spokesman said the company shared with O.L.P.C. the vision of putting computers into the hands of children, but the two were not able to work out what he described as “philosophical” differences.

Intel did not attend a recent board meeting of the group in Florida, according to a person familiar with the events, who asked not to be named because he had not been given authority to describe the events. That set off a bitter private dispute, which led to the Thursday announcement.

“We’ve reached a philosophical impasse,” said Chuck Mulloy, the Intel spokesman. “Negroponte had asked us to exclusively support O.L.P.C.-based platforms.”

For emerging markets, Intel has been backing its own, more expensive Classmate PC, which sells for about $300. Mr. Mulloy said Intel was unwilling to walk away from support agreements that the company had made for that machine and other systems.

Intel also said it was able to develop a prototype of an XO computer with an Intel chip.

An O.L.P.C. executive, Walter Bender, accused Intel of failing to deliver on its promises of cooperation with the group and said that Intel had continued to try to undermine the group’s initiatives.

“I think that as an organization, Intel is about competition; they are not about learning,” said Mr. Bender, the group’s president for software and content.

There were reports in recent months that though an Intel executive joined the group’s board and the company contributed an undisclosed amount to the organization, Intel has continued to compete actively with O.L.P.C. in trying to make educational computing sales to governments.

In November, after the promised high-volume sales to governments failed to materialize, the organization began a $399 “Give 1, Get 1” promotion, in which people could buy XO machines and subsidize gifts to educational programs. O.L.P.C. said it distributed about 50,000 computers in the United States during the promotion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/te.../04laptop.html





News about LANCOR v. OLPC
Groklaw

I know. You thought I was goofing off partying and drinking in the new year. Not really. I was reading some cynical documents just filed in the LANCOR v. OLPC litigation. Yes, it's begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it. Heaven only knows it makes me want to drink. Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place?

$20 million dollars.

I kid you not. $20 million dollars in "damages". And an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria. They have the latter at the moment from an interim injunction, as they call it there, from an ex parte motion LANCOR filed, meaning OLPC wasn't there, didn't get a chance to tell its story in court, and based entirely on an attorney affidavit and some papers filed. The interim can last many, many months, and I think that may be the plan. OLPC, as I understand it, hasn't even been served yet. But I've learned that OLPC will aggressively respond shortly. Others listed as co-defendants, like the Growing Business Foundation, have been served and their offices searched for "evidence", which is the process there. No contraband patented materials were found, however, I'm told. I know. It's ridiculous. But any violation of the order can result in jail time. Nigeria is a hoot. Is this another email scam, I hear you ask? No. It's playing out in real life.

I've already explained why I think LANCOR's case is hopeless. So why do it? Maybe this doomed litigation effort will last just long enough for a Nigerian knockoff of the OLPC, or the OLPC on Intel, to become ready for release. Maybe it's just about money a couple of guys want. Who knows why people do things like this? I have the filings for you, so you can draw your own conclusions. So, here we go. Your first binary moment of 2008. It's laugh or cry.

Now, in SCOland we already have learned that frivolous litigation can last quite a while even in the US -- especially in the US, some of you will sing out -- and we've discerned that sometimes litigation has no legal purpose, but the courts are misused for competitive purposes, to slow down uptake of something better, or just to shake down the opponent in hopes of a settlement. It's sad that there are situations like this that lawyers have to slog through and set right. Which OLPC lawyers will. But there you are.

I'm not versed in Nigerian law, so who knows what can happen there. Here is a hint of what conditions are reported to be like, from the International Herald Tribune:

Nigeria's anti-corruption chief, whose investigations have ensnared some of the country's wealthiest politicians and officials, will be sent to a year-long training course in a remote police academy, according to senior law enforcement officials in Nigeria, in what many analysts and anti-corruption activists say is an attempt to sideline him....

Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigeria has been struggling to remake its image, which has been seriously dented by corruption. That reputation was cemented for many outsiders by the notorious, fraudulent advance-fee e-mail messages that flood in-boxes across the globe, asking for bank account details in exchange for a cut of loot filched from government coffers.

But to most Nigerians, the most serious form of corruption is the kind that has left Africa's most populous nation one of the poorest countries on earth, even though it exports billions of dollars worth of oil each year: malfeasance by government officials.

Um... you mean... like judges? Government officials? Does that mean they can be bribed? Well. Shiver me timbers. I'm not saying that is what is happening. I don't know. But I do see one can't rule it out as a possibility out of hand.

Anyway, let me show you the documents. Then we can laugh or cry together. Basically, to bring you up to date, what has happened is this, and I must preface my explanation by saying again that I'm not up on Nigerian law, so it's very possible I might not capture every detail, but at least I can give you an overview:

1. August 6, 2007: LANCOR's lawyer, Ade Adedeji, sent a letter [page 1 and page 2] to OLPC's "CEO" (with ccs to the Growing Business Foundation, LeapSoft Ltd. Nigeria, and Alteq) asking for $20 million dollars. The letter reads in part like this:
Our Clients, for a period of 9 years conducted series of research work, engaged in extensive software design work, compiled data and consequently applied for and obtained patented rights for the protection and marketing of their novel Multilingual Keyboard and keyboard Layouts which was commissioned and marketed both in Nigeria and the U.S.

Our Clients have in the circumstances suffered huge economic and financial loss.

We are informed by our Clients and we believe same to be true that following your purchase of their products on or about August 06, 2006, you took information, albeit surreptitiously, and applied their work product for your use and benefit without permission thereby violating the end user license agreement and infringing on their intellectual property rights.

OUR CLIENTS' DEMAND:

In consequence of your breach/continuous infringement of our Clients' rights we have our Clients instruction to demand and WE HEREBY DEMAND payment in damages in the sum of $20 million (Twenty Million USD).

In addition, we demand an immediate restrain from further infringement and/or breach of said rights.

2. August 31, 2007: OLPC's lawyer politely declined the offer to hand over $20 million ("Twenty Million USD") and instead asked for more information as to exactly how LANCOR's rights were infringed. It's both a serious and a very funny letter [page 1 and page 2]. Here's part of it:
In your letter you allege that OLPC has infringed certain intellectual property rights of your client lagos Analysis Corporation ("LANCOR"). Your letter lacks any detail as to the purported intellectual property rights that have allegedly been infringed and therefore we have no means of evaluating your claims.

You state that LANCOR has obtained certain "patented rights." Please identify by registration number the patents that you allege to have been infringed.

You state that OLPC has violated an end user license agreement that it entered into with LANCOR. Please provide a copy of such end user license and proof that such end user agreement was in fact executed by OLPC.

I assume that you are not claiming that LANCOR has a monopoly on the creation of multilingual keyboards. Please specify what aspects of LANCOR's multilingual keyboard design you believe to have been infringed.

Finally, although it is premature to engage in discussion of your client's alleged damages, I feel obliged to note that, given the fact that OLPC has to date sold no multilingual keyboards and that, according to LANCOR's website, its multilingual keyboard sells for $19.95, your demand of $20 million is not well founded.

In short, they apparently jumped the gun, sending the dunning letter before OLPC had even shipped anything, not to mention that OLPC is a charity, not a business, and asking for money in a sum that doesn't match reality.

There was no further communication. LANCOR did not send a letter with any further specifics to OLPC or any of the others. Notice that the original letter was also sent to three other entities, Growing Business Foundation, LeapSoft, and Alteq. Who are they and how did they get dragged into this? Because they certainly have been dragged into it. I gather LANCOR had it in mind that they were manufacturing or distributing the laptops. Alteq has since been dropped.

3. Instead of sending proof of infringement to OLPC as had been requested, instead LANCOR went to court and filed a Motion on Notice on November 22, and it has an affidavit attached from the plaintiffs' attorney on behalf of the plaintiffs, Ade Oyegbola and Walter Oluwole, in support of the motion which describes how they invented a keyboard with extra keys: page 1, page 2, page 3. On November 22nd, there was also a Motion for an Ex Parte Order: page 1, page 2, and page 3.

Significantly, the affidavit attached to the Motion on Notice, I note, does *not* say that OLPC at any time signed any EULA and there is no EULA attached as proof. Instead it just says that this is the "usual practice" for LANCOR. That's what lawyers in the US say when they haven't got a EULA to attach.

Here's the "evidence" that reverse engineering occurred: They saw a website about OLPC's keyboard and development tickets "clearly established" that it happened. The website is dev.laptop.org/query if you are curious. Speaking of curious, reverse engineering is something that normally comes up in copyright cases, not patents. So this must be related to the EULA that they have no evidence was ever signed.

Also, on page 3, note that LANCOR's attorney tells the court that LANCOR will pay damages, should the court ultimately find for the defendants instead. So this is an *interim* solution, one that I gather Nigerian law makes it very easy to obtain, to stop any further "damage" until the court can investigate.

The motion asked for an order of interlocutory injunction, essentially blocking any manufacture, selling, distribution or offering for sale in Nigeria any keyboard like LANCOR's KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard (or US version) pending a hearing, but if you notice the motion sets no such hearing date. The lines are left blank.

4. On December 3, 2007, LANCOR got the ex parte order, what they call there an Anton Piller Order and Interim Injunction against OLPC, Alteq, and Nicholas Negroponte -- who, if he ever has another brilliant idea to make the world a better place will surely keep it entirely to himself after this repulsive experience. The court order is for an injunction against any sales or distribution on pain of jail time. The Order gives LANCOR authority to serve the Motion on Notice on everybody.

5. On December 14, 2007, LANCOR went to search the premises of Growing Business Foundation and LeapSoft, looking for whatever one searches for on such missions, evidence of someone illegally using their keyboards, I suppose.

6. To date, so far as I know, OLPC has not been served, so they are under no legal obligation to obey a court order they never got served with, but my understanding is that they will not wait to be served but will be taking action to get the matter turned around. If the lower court is not amenable to dismissing the matter, it will be appealed, naturally. I find it significant that OLPC was not served. Why?

The Writ, which is like what we in the US call a summons, can be served any time within 12 months, unless it's been renewed within six months of issuance. I think that means that LANCOR, should it be desirous of stretching out the process, will be able to do so. As we have learned from SCO, sometimes just getting the process to drag out long enough can reap certain results, even if you know you can't win in the end. That might explain why OLPC has not yet been served but others were. It's conceivable also that it is just because OLPC is in the US, not Nigeria.

7. On December 17, LANCOR returned to court to report the results of the searches -- the December 3 Order had set the 17th as the date for further proceedings -- and they withdrew their case against Alteq. Alteq, by the way, is Intel's partner in Nigeria through a sister company, I have been told, and they market the Classmate, according to all I can find out. Here are the proceedings from the December 3rd hearing: page 1, page 2, page 3, and page 4.

Remember I pointed out that the "patent" had expired because there was no extension? Lo and behold, there was one presented to the court, allegedly applied for on August 15, 2007 and dated November 21, 2007. But it certainly was not in the file when I wrote about it. And that doesn't even matter, since at the time of the alleged violation of the plaintiffs' holy IP, there was no such issued extension, from all I can determine. I don't know Nigeria, but in the US, that would matter. Here's the document purporting to extend the patent: Certificate of Extension. I note that it says copyright, not patent:
... the copyright is hereby extended for a second period of five years until the 15th day of August, 2012

But did you notice something? It doesn't seem to be the paper that one would have thought the plaintiffs would have earlier received. It's a "Certificate of Extension of Copyright in Design for the Second Period of Five Years" certifying, on November 21, 2007, that on August 15th, 2007, the two plaintiffs paid for an extension of Design No. 8489. Pardon my cynicism. We showed you the original registration in our first article on this mess of pottage, but here it is again: Registration of Design.

Not to be too cynical or anything, but if by any chance the roadblock of this case miraculously clears up in a few months, around the time the OLPC's with Intel chips are ready to roll into Nigeria, or some Nigerian ripoff of the OLPC is suddenly available for purchase, let's just say my FUD/bogo-litigation meter is going to start to ring off the hook.

Now, Groklaw tries to be fair, and so I will show you now some bits from an article that appeared in The Guardian on December 18th, an article that one of the plaintiffs, Ade Oyegbola, sent me. The article is no longer at the url he sent [http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/sunda...ine/article05], but it gives his side of the story. The article was titled, "Why We Are Suing One Laptop Per Child Group, By Nigerian Keyboard Inventor":
Oyegbola told The Guardian in an email that in spite of a C and D (Cease and Desist) letter earlier sent to the OLPC to stop distributing its laptop along with a keyboard configured with LANCOR "function technique knowledge", the OLPC ignored the warning.

Reacting to criticisms of his action to the effect that LANCOR's lawsuit was unnecessary since the OLPC had changed its keyboard layout following the C and D letter, Oyegbola said: "The answer is that they changed their keyboard layout but continued to use the keyboard layout and function technique knowledge (our intellectual property and trade secret) illegally obtained by reverse-engineering our driver."

According to him, it has become necessary to make this clarification because of the several hate emails sent to executive officers of the company; and the accusation of deliberately wanting to circumvent the noble objective of the OLPC initiative, which is aimed at putting a laptop in the hands of every poor child in the nation's public schools.

LANCOR's Chief Technology Officer, Walter Oluwole said in an interview: "We're not looking to handicap One Laptop; we're not looking to tarnish them in any way. We don't want to do anything to harm his (Negroponte's) dream, but he went out of his way to kill our dream."

Well, I don't condone hate mail, of course, or worse, but let me ask you something. Does what was said to the Guardian match what you just read in the court filings? Or how about this part?
Asked about the feasibility [of] exploring an out-of-court settlement, Adedeji said: "Usually, before we sue we give the other party opportunity to approach us and try to reach some kind of settlement; it's the best way to go. And we did that. The response we got was such that left us with no other option than to go to court."

In the suit, number FHC/L/CS/ 1102/07, filed on November 22 at the Federal High Court, Ikoyi Lagos, before Justice I. N. Auta, LANCOR is seeking certain unspecified - but substantial, according to the company - damages, but mainly to stop OLPC from further infringement on LANCOR's patent by "continuing to unlawfully manufacture, sell, distribute or offer for sale, the XO Laptop, and other products infringing in the RD8489 and using the illegally acquired keyboard driver source codes."

No other option? Unspecified damages? Which is true? What they told the newspaper or what they told the court? And why is there the divergence? What might that tell you? The OLPC letter in response asked for further information, so as to provide some specificity, which was never provided. Specificity always seems to be the problem, doesn't it? The demand for $20 million was specific enough.

So, there you have it. LANCOR doesn't want OLPC in Nigeria. Or only if they get paid. Of course, OLPC will respond. Even if they are not served, I've learned they will be going to court to turn this around. But isn't it sad that they have to? I have my doubts about this design patent, by the way, as I explained, but even if it were totally valid, think about what patents can do, will you? Here we have an entire nation's children being kept from a laptop that they could be benefiting from, and yet it's out of reach for them, because of one company (and maybe some others too) who would like to make some money, honey. Patents have gotten out of hand, I think, when a result like that is even possible.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...71226210020415





Storage Projects Rise in Importance
Jennifer McAdams

In 2008, almost every sector will continue the battle with data overload. Entertainment powerhouses - from television stations to big-name amusement parks - will struggle to house huge media files or to manage the data necessary to track customer spending trends. Universities will need extra capacity to spur e-learning and to hold more detailed data on students. Hospitals will cling to enhanced storage projects to avoid buckling under onerous regulations and the prospect of storing massive image files.

These are just a smattering of scenarios that point to a now-staggering need for space. In fact, respondents to Computerworld's most recent Vital Signs survey ranked storage-related initiatives as their No. 2 project priority this year, up from No. 4 last year.

According to Milford, Mass.-based analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., private-sector archive capacity will hit an eye-popping 27,000 petabytes by 2010. Skyrocketing rates of e-mail growth account for much of this figure.

For instance, the University of Pittsburgh now pegs monthly e-mail traffic at more than 30 million messages, vs. 17 million just one year ago.

Other new factors driving the need for capacity include the pervasiveness of large files, be they media-rich elements or specialized program data such as the computer-aided design drawings now used in building everything from cars to furniture. Cloned copies of the same information are also bogging down many corporate networks.

Ironically, the adoption of virtualization technology - billed as a way to centralize and simplify storage strategies - can also trigger an initial spike in data capacity demands.

Trim the Fat

To combat spiraling data overload, corporate IT leaders will scour the market for ways to centralize storage and they will pursue options such as clustered architectures and unified storage-area networks (SAN). Data-pruning techniques, including the use of thin provisioning and data de-duplication tools, will also be high on 2008 corporate storage wish lists, according to Forrester Research Inc. analyst Andrew Reichman.

Mounting interest in these approaches highlights a pronounced shift away from "big-iron storage" - traditional storage arrays typically composed of custom application-specific integrated circuits, RAID controllers, and fixed-disk and cache-scalability ceilings.

"The alternative is software-focused solutions that make more use of general-purpose hardware and advanced software," Reichman says.

In terms of specifics, he points to redoubled interest in software from vendors such as Network Appliance Inc., which threads a common operating system across product lines to facilitate storage at the software level. He also predicts that vendors offering building-block clustered software - such as Compellent Technologies Inc., LeftHand Networks Inc., Isilon Systems Inc. and EqualLogic Inc. - will enjoy more success in 2008 as they rush to accommodate the shift in storage challenges facing many companies.

"What is interesting now is the fact that there are so many different types of data files and that they vary so much in size," Reichman says. "Many of these files are associated with less mission-critical applications and are therefore not structured in the way that database files are. They are also scattered across departments. Many companies are now using tools to begin saving files centrally rather than having them floating around."

Get It Together

Indeed, IT executives from a variety of sectors agree that there's a need for storage centralization. Before pushing in that direction, the University of Pittsburgh had little control over capacity gobbled up by course management applications and scattered data warehouses.

"A decision was made to implement a new, centralized storage management solution and to move away from discrete storage for specific initiatives," says Jinx Walton, the school's director of computing services and systems development.

The university settled on an IBM storage infrastructure that will afford the institution 350TB of capacity and more flexibility through life-cycle management. "The centralized storage solution provides the ability to effectively allocate and remove storage to meet the needs of specific projects," Walton says.

Amusement park giant Six Flags Inc. also had no interest in maintaining a decentralized storage infrastructure. "We have re-engineered our environment over the past year and a half and have moved to a central storage farm at each facility, as opposed to having DAS [direct-attached storage] in each server," says Michael Israel, Six Flags' senior vice president of information services.

Israel also highlights his organization's rollout of a centralized e-mail platform, which doubles as a way to improve data replication and disaster recovery capabilities.

Six Flags had to examine storage issues surrounding a major new business intelligence push as well. "Providing internal users with marketing data related to sales trends, season pass holder information and inventory analysis are just three areas where we have required an increase in online storage," Israel says.

Each of the company's 26 theme parks now maintains independent systems composed of HP ProLiant DL360 servers outfitted with NetApp FAS3030 storage systems. Data protection is centralized, since Six Flags' corporate data center houses NetApp SnapMirror software.

Centralization also makes sense on a security level, according to Robert Gray, founder of market research and consulting firm RobertGrayDirect LLC in Newton, Mass. "2008 will see an expanding market as fear and security concerns converge, solution-level products abound and wire-speed performance come together," he notes.

In the health care industry, security concerns are naturally paramount.

"Information must have high availability and remain safe from evil-doers," says Mark Boggs, IT director at Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston, W.Va. To address these concerns, the facility is continuing to build out its SAN and will soon add a peer storage architecture, which packs thin-provisioning capabilities to help accommodate huge imaging files. For its storage architecture, Thomas Memorial tapped EqualLogic, which is being acquired by Dell Inc.

Other industries are also swimming in storage-hungry data. Capitol Broadcasting Co. (CBC), a Raleigh, N.C.-based operator of five TV stations and several radio assets, is grappling with a 120% growth in e-mail volume and a wealth of media-rich graphics, audio and video files that reside on its networks.

"While e-mail archiving was the catalyst to move beyond DAS, other looming IT challenges were also driving the need for more robust storage," explains Chris Welty, a CBC systems engineer. The company is moving to IBM's BladeCenter architecture and has purchased an IP SAN from StoneFly Inc. in Hayward, Calif., in a further effort to provide single-instance storage on file servers, Welty says.

Virtual Storage Realities

Because virtualization vendors, including VMware Inc., position virtualization as a way to jump-start centralization, in 2008 the technology will become more affordable and more pervasive. Virtualization often involves moving physical data to a central site and providing pointers or maps to the application in which the data is used. "We expect virtualization technologies - including but not limited to VMware - to be hot in 2008," said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Heidi Biggar.

However, virtualization does have its issues, especially in the early stages of adoption, says Brian Matthews, computer user service specialist at the University of Texas. "Our storage demands initially increased because of virtualization," he says. "It becomes a matter of rethinking storage when virtualization is involved. Unified storage has always been the goal, and virtualization helps dramatically in this goal, but it does so at a very fast pace."

Naturally, virtualization offers short-term benefits as well. One of those relates to the technology's role in the new push for "green," or environmentally friendly, computing strategies. "Technologies such as server virtualization reduce the power and cooling footprint of the server infrastructure," says Nik Simpson, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah.

Overall, it will be practical, incremental moves, such as cutting power consumption and emphasizing centralization, that will emerge as the biggest storage trends in 2008. More than anything, in the new year IT executives will show fortitude in the face of storage challenges and a willingness to try out the products that vendors have been hawking for a while.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...intsrc=kc_feat





Groups: Record Data Breaches in 2007
Mark Jewell

The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.

And while companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late.

"More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they're responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company's security and seeing where the holes might be," said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim herself.

Foley's group lists more than 79 million records reported compromised in the United States through Dec. 18. That's a nearly fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all of 2006.

Another group, Attrition.org, estimates more than 162 million records compromised through Dec. 21 - both in the U.S. and overseas, unlike the other group's U.S.-only list. Attrition reported 49 million last year.

"It's just the nature of business, that moving forward, more companies are going to have more records, so there will be more records compromised each year," said Attrition's Brian Martin. "I imagine the total records compromised will steadily climb."

But the biggest difference between the groups' record-loss counts is Attrition.org's estimate that 94 million records were exposed in a theft of credit card data at TJX Cos., the owner of discount stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. The TJX breach accounts for more than half the total records reported lost this year on both groups' lists.

The Identity Theft Resource Center counts about 46 million - the number of records TJX acknowledged in March were potentially compromised. Attrition's figure is based on estimates from Visa and MasterCard officials who were deposed in a lawsuit banks filed against TJX.

The breach is believed to have started when hackers intercepted wireless transfers of customer information at two Marshalls stores in Miami - an entry point that led the hackers to eventually break into TJX's central databases.

TJX has said that before the breach, which was revealed in January, it invested "millions of dollars on computer security, and believes our security was comparable to many major retailers."

With wireless data transmission more common, hackers increasingly are expected to target what many experts see as a major vulnerability. Eavesdroppers appear to be learning how to bypass security safeguards faster than ever, said Jay Tumas, the head of Harvard University's network operations, at a recent conference for information security professionals.

"Within a year or two, these folks are catching up," Tumas said.

The two nonprofit groups' 2007 data also show rising numbers of incidents in which employees lose sensitive data, as opposed to cases of hacking.

Besides TJX's problem, major 2007 breaches include lost data disks with bank account numbers in Britain, a hacker attack of a U.S.-based online broker's database and a con that spilled resume contact information from a U.S. online jobs site.

"A lot of breaches are due to inadequate information handling, such as laptop computers with Social Security numbers on them that are lost," Foley said. "This is human error, and something that's completely avoidable, as opposed to a hacker breaking into your computer system."

Attrition.org and the Identity Theft Resource Center are the only groups, government included, maintaining databases on breaches and trends each year. They've been keeping track for only a handful of years, with varied and still-evolving methods of learning about breaches and estimating how many people were affected.

Despite those challenges, the two nonprofits say it's clear 2007 will end up a record year for the amount of information compromised, because of greater data loss and increased reporting of breaches.

Both groups acknowledge many breaches may be missing from their lists, because they largely count incidents reported in news media that they consider credible. Media coverage has risen in part because of the growing number of states requiring businesses and institutions to publicly disclose data losses. Thirty-seven states, plus Washington D.C., now have such requirements.

Because of proliferation of such laws, "it may take a year or two before things stabilize and we can see what's really happening," Foley said. "If that's the case, then we'll know whether businesses are practicing better information-handling techniques."
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/toph.../DATA_BREACHES





Sears.com: Join the Community – Get Spyware

While Christmas shopping online this season, be careful what you are signing up for.

Visiting Sears.com (and Kmart.com) a few weeks ago, I was offered a chance to join My SHC Community, for free, but what I received was, from a privacy perspective, very costly. Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of "community participation." Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software ("the proxy") on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted. This extreme level of user tracking is done with little and inconspicuous notice about the true nature of the software. In fact, while registering to join the "community," very little mention is made of software or tracking. Furthermore, after the software is installed, there is no indication on the desktop that the proxy exists on the system, so users are tracked silently. An interesting note, the spyware Sears distributes is "genetically" related to software CA Anti-Spyware has detected for a few years by the name of MarketScore (and other aliases) and distributed by other websites.

A Significant Threat to Privacy

Here is a summary of what the software does and how it is used. The proxy:

1. Monitors and transmits a copy of all Internet traffic going from and coming to the compromised system.
2. Monitors secure sessions (websites beginning with ‘https'), which may include shopping or banking sites.
3. Records and transmits "the pace and style with which you enter information online..."
4. Parses the header section of personal emails.
5. May combine any data intercepted with additional information like "select credit bureau information" and other sources like "consumer preference reporting companies or credit reporting agencies".

In addition, My SHC Community requires a variety of personal information during registration - like name, email, address, city, state, and age. All of this information can be correlated with intercepted data to create a comprehensive profile.

A Look at Network Traffic

When I analyzed my network traffic, knowing my machine was compromised, I expected to see data being sent to a domain registered by Sears. Not the case. All of my data was actually transmitted to the domain oss-content.securestudies.com (IP address: 209.247.230.166). If you look at the figure below of data captured using Wireshark, you will see a simple web transaction I made via Google. After the Google page was requested and loaded, a duplicate copy was sent to oss-content.securestudies.com.

The current registrant of the domain securestudies.com, is not Sears, but comScore. comScore is a market research company, and my data is being sent to comScore without any mention of this in the Sears privacy policy. Both companies are yet to respond to an email I wrote asking how they use the data they receive from the Sears proxy. I had sent a previous email to Sears asking some general questions about the “Community” and they responded promptly, but I am still waiting for either to respond to my inquiry on how comScore uses my data. I am concerned.

A Blatant Lie or Misinformed?Sears makes the following statement: “The personal information that you give myshccommunity.com when you register as well as any personal information that you give during the completion of a communication is stored in a confidential database owned by myshccommunity.com and is never delivered to a client. myshccommunity.com never sells your personal information to any company for any reason.” When I registered I looked over my network traffic, and all form data (name, address, etc), is sent to 66.119.41.87. This IP address is registered to comScore. This is almost laughable (in a scary privacy violation sort of way). I enter data on a page branded Sears, saying my data is stored on a secure database owned by Sears, but when I submit the data it is sent to comScore, a third party market research company.

Lack of Prominent Notice and Informed ConsentThe problem with the installation process is that it does not prominently emphasize that by completing the registration process, the user’s computer will be intensely tracked. Here are the basic steps of the registration (installation):

1) I visited Sears.com (a repeat test of Kmart test produced a similar popup) and was presented with a sliding toast popup (see image, below). The popup covered the Sears.com homepage and required that I find the hidden (in this case, the micro X in the upper right) exit button. The popup asked me to join the Sears community and enter my email address. On this page, there is no mention of tracking software, only the “community”.

2) I received an email and clicked ‘join today’. In the 7 or 8 paragraphs describing the “community” on this page, Sears buries its mention of ‘tracking’ in the third sentence of the fourth paragraph.

3) I was taken to a Sears landing page. I clicked ‘join today’. There was absolutely no mention of “software” or “tracking” on this page, but plenty of bullet points telling me about the joys of being a member and how my ‘voice counts’.

4) A page opened asking me to fill in personal information. There is no prominent mention that I am agreeing to install tracking software on my computer. One sentence mentions that the information entered on the page will be used to “assist SHC in providing you the most relevant information, communication, and content customized to your needs.” Also, at the bottom of the page is a small scroll box with the privacy policy.

5) After filling out the forms, the software download started. After the proxy software installed, there was nothing to indicate that it was actually installed. Since installation, I have not received any follow-up emails from the “community” or any other form of communication reminding me of my “membership.” All data continues to be logged – luckily the research is being conducted on a test machine. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Today I went to Sears.com and did not receive the sliding popup mentioned above, but clicked a link titled ‘join My SHC Community’. Following this link, I was never presented with the minimal notice listed in step 3 above. Furthermore, because the proxy tracks silently, anyone else who uses a compromised system will have their web usage tracked. There are no technological controls in place to control inadvertent tracking.

The Privacy Policy

When I originally did the research for this post a few weeks ago, Sears had put together a privacy policy that did a reasonable job of explaining clearly how the proxy operates. Suspiciously, when I looked at the privacy policy today, all of the direct, clear language has been removed and replaced with vague legal terms. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, the original privacy policy mentioned the word “software” 11 times – in the policy published today, it is not mentioned even once. In the old policy, “tracking” was mentioned 3 times – in today’s version it is not mentioned even once. The word “application” – from 32 mentions to none. Why did they pull out all the descriptive language and replace it with vague legal language? Some sections that have been totally removed from the Privacy Policy:

• ‘Once you install our application, it monitors all of the Internet behavior that occurs on the computer’
• ‘software application also tracks the pace and style with which you enter information online’
• ‘Our application may collect certain basic hardware, software, computer configuration and application usage information about the computer’

The direct language above has been replaced with a Privacy Policy with mushy language like:

• ‘myshccommunity.com gathers information about its members to provide superior service, communicate offers on merchandise and services’
• ‘We use this information to customize your experience on our website and to provide you with the most relevant products and services.
• ‘we make commercially viable efforts to automatically filter confidential personally identifiable information such as UserID, password, credit card numbers, and account numbers’

Unresolved Questions

• Why didn’t Sears disclose that my data, that related to registration and data sent by the proxy, is actually sent to comScore?
• Why won’t comScore answer my questions about how they use my data?
• Why has Sears removed all the clear language from the Privacy Policy and replaced it with vague legal language?
• Why isn’t the registration process clear that the user is actually signing up to install tracking software?

Conclusions

Sears.com is pushing software with extensive user tracking capabilities and doing a very poor job of obtaining informed consent – if at all. After the proxy software is installed on the user’s system there is nothing on the user’s desktop to indicate their every move on the Internet is being collected and sent to a third party market research company, comScore.
http://community.ca.com/blogs/securi...t-spyware.aspx





Australian Government Equates Freedom Of Speech To Liking Kiddie Porn
Duncan Riley

A follow up to our story December 30 on the Australian Government joining China is broadly censoring the internet. Now apparently if you believe in Free Speech you believe in Kiddie Porn, via the SMH:

“Labor makes no apologies to those who argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” [Telecommunications Minister Stephen] Conroy said yesterday. “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”

No one equates freedom of speech with watching kiddie porn, only the Australian Government does.

Whilst no one would disagree with the notion that kidde porn is abhorrent, it should be noted that the Australian Government’s censorship regime is going to be much broader than sites that show activities that are already illegal to distribute and watch across the world. Further still, as local civil libertarians have pointed out, it will not only take all of two minutes to bypass the great firewall of Australia, and worse still it will actually provide a false sense of security to parents who will wrongly believe that the internet is now a safe place for their children, when it still isn’t.

At least they’ve now admitted to taking lessons from China, not that this is something to be proud of, although the Australian Government seems to think that it is.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/01...g-kiddie-porn/





Anarchy Rules: The Dishes Stay Dirty
Penelope Green

THERE are certain things you can count on in a punk house. A killer name: Anarchtica, Scribble Squat, Collective A Go-Go, Firebreathing Kangaroo. Lots of bikes and skateboards. Homemade tattoos. A tattered photocopy of “Soy, Not ‘Oi!’,” the vegan anarchist’s “Joy of Cooking.” Guests are always welcome in a punk house, if they follow the rules: “Don’t be a jerk!” reads a guest policy sign in one.

The punk house might be a trailer, a van, a warehouse or a bus. There are lots of treehouses, and more than a few squats. The old anarchist’s dictum — all property is theft — is part and parcel of the punk-house mindset, which is lovingly chronicled in a new book of photographs by Abby Banks, a 29-year-old artist. Ms. Banks found all 42 of the houses collected in “Punk House: Interiors in Anarchy,” out last month from Abrams Image, the art and pop culture imprint of Harry N. Abrams, in the same way: by phoning a few friends.

The punk house is a curious and sometimes beautiful habitat, the expression of a music scene and do-it-yourself culture that went underground decades ago, in an attempt to opt out of just about everything that smacked of the mainstream: cities, clubs, bars, alcohol, processed foods, agribusiness and the record companies, for example, not to mention all media larger than a photocopied zine. With its roots in old-fashioned counterculture communes (like Findhorn in Scotland, but really messy, and with a thrash-hardcore beat), the punk house is a multifunctional dwelling: typically a place for like-minded males in their 20’s to live and to make and hear music. This is not to say that there aren’t all-female punk houses (there are) or ones with girls living among the boys. As with punk itself, the punk house eludes a tidy definition. “Punk Is (Whatever We Made It To Be)” is the title of a song from the Minutemen, a punk band in the early ’80s.

As Thurston Moore, a member of the art-house alt-punk bank Sonic Youth, who helped Ms. Banks find a publisher for her work and contributed an essay to the book, said recently: “It’s just a completely liberated aesthetic.”

You won’t find many punk houses in major urban areas because, as Mr. Moore explained, “you don’t go to the media eye of New York or Los Angeles to achieve success.” Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to live a punk life in areas with costly real estate.

Bands on tour don’t play gigs at the Meadowlands or even the Knitting Factory; they’re more likely to appear in basements and living rooms. There’s a preponderance of acoustic guitars: big amps might spook the neighbors.

Mr. Moore’s own successes are more commercial. In his essay for Ms. Banks’s book, he writes of his experience walking into a legendary punk house in Minneapolis wearing a nice winter parka and sneakers, whereupon he was promptly sneered at. “I didn’t know they let subversives in here,” sniped one resident wearing a leather jacket stamped with the Dead Kennedys logo.

Though she was once in a thrash-punk band called Vomit Dichotomy Ms. Banks has never lived in a punk house, but she has an enormous appetite for the aesthetic. “It’s self-expression in the living space, not just on their bodies,” she said, noting that punk-house interiors are logo-centric. As with T-shirts or tattoos, they contain lots of writing — hortatory, descriptive, diaristic — on walls, door jambs, stoves and toilets.

“I’m so goth I’m dead,” is inscribed on a wall of a punk house in Minneapolis. “Dead witnesses tell no tales,” is on the back of a toilet in another.

Ms. Banks grew up in a tidy 1920s bungalow in Claremont, Calif. Her mother is a city planner; her father a psychology professor and an aerobics instructor who was seriously into all kinds of music, including punk. “It was more than acceptable in our house to blast the Ramones,” she said. Ms. Banks’s own room was embellished with layers of stickers, fliers for shows, and blue paint. When she sent her mother a copy of the book, Ms. Banks reported, “she said, ‘Every room looks like your room!’”

She’d always made art but never a photograph, until one day after art school, when she had an epiphany. She’d been drifting, she said, working as a maid and dog walker for David Foster Wallace, who lived two blocks away from her mother’s house in California. She had friends at The Fourth Street House, a punk house in San Pedro. There was a show there one day; dueling bands were playing the kitchen and the living room and passing the mike back and forth.

The house was about to be sold, and its distinctive flourishes — the casket outside, the skate ramp out back — dismantled.

“I wanted to document it before it went away,” said Ms. Banks, explaining that despite their hoary history, many punk houses are ephemeral. “I just think they’re really important and beautiful. For some people it will be their lifestyle forever, but for others it’s just a phase.”

She called upon an old band mate, Timothy Findlen, and they embarked in Ms. Banks’s maroon Ford Ranger on a three-and-a-half month road trip.

The Ranger is an art project in itself, layered with stenciled images of figures impish, historical and arcane, like Herman Munster, Anne Frank, and one Mr. Findlen made of Harry Smith, the music ethnographer, mystic and Bohemian who died of natural causes at the Chelsea Hotel. As they toured cross-country, Mr. Findlen would play shows, and Ms. Banks would take pictures. They brought house presents — a case of wine, Two-Buck Chuck, from Trader Joe’s, and a box of silk-screen T-shirts with the slogan “I’d Rather Be Dumpster-Diving,” made by a friend of Ms. Banks.

When those offerings ran out, Ms. Banks said, “all we had was to be nice” — and the offer of Mr. Findlen’s dish-washing services.

The ephemeral quality of punk houses became clear a year after the photographs were taken, when Ms. Banks returned to her subjects with photographic release permission forms from her publisher. Many of the houses were gone, she said, resulting in a scramble to find the former residents.

Last week, Andee Grrr, a 28-year-old zine writer now living in Brattleboro, Vt., described her three years at one of the oldest punk houses in Ms. Banks’s book, the 309 House in Pensacola, Fla. (It was so old, Ms. Banks said, “there were fliers on the wall for shows the year I was born,” 1978.) The house was a clapboard five-bedroom bungalow with a fluctuating number of residents and one “filthy, filthy bathroom.” The rent for each member was $25.

Ms. Grrr, like most of 309ers, volunteered at the End of the Line vegan-punk cafe across the street, living on her tips. Food was mostly free: bread from a bakery Dumpster and vegetables from the supermarket’s Dumpster. “The good part was there was always someone to talk to if you were feeling bad,” she said. “I developed some really strong friendships. And the rent was so low we didn’t have to work much. I could write a lot. The bad part was no clear boundaries.” And the aged scurf of the house, which she said was dirty to the core. “It was kind of a hopeless situation.” Generations of punks, she said, had lived in that house.

“I thought of calling the book, ‘No Lease,’” said Ms. Banks, who herself lives without a lease in Brattleboro, part of an art collective called the Tinderbox that’s nestled into a cavernous old dance studio. The difference between an art collective and a punk house, she explained, is that in the former you’re pretending you don’t live there, and in the latter you’re pretending you don’t make music there. The rent is $1,000, which Ms. Banks collects from her studio mates (there are about 20, living and working in rooms called Shantytown and Vegetable Street). When the rent collection comes up short, they have a show, Ms. Banks said, or sell T-shirts.

“When rent is cheap or free,” she said, “it leaves time to make art or travel.” Ms. Banks, who has a wide-open face and a keen eye for the life-force inherent in the making of art, takes inspiration from the photographs of a train-hopping friend, Mike Brodie, who goes by the name the Polaroid Kidd and is a kind of Nan Goldin to his train-hopping, punk house set. Ms. Banks’s eye is intimate, to be sure, but her pictures are sly and funny. And despite the profound grunge of the punk-house milieu, her photos are never tragic: they reveal a focused, almost manic energy, like a straight-edge song.

That the idea of the punk house endured for so many years is heart-warming to one 40-year-old former punk house resident. Joel Olson is now an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. Back in the day, as he put it recently — which is to say from the late 1980s to the mid-90s — he was a zine editor and the author, with Jack Kahn, of the “Soy, Not ‘Oi!’” cookbook, copies of which Ms. Banks spotted in every house she visited. His Hippycore Krew House in Tempe, Ariz., had Green Day perform in its living room, as well as a “lot of malnourished vegan punks,” he said.

Being a vegan, as he pointed out, was nearly a punk given, a political act against industrialized agriculture and pro-animal rights, “but it was hard work.” In those pre-Internet days, he collected recipes from punk pen pals. They printed 2,000 copies, and sold them all. (A few years ago, AK Press, a radical publishing house, approached Mr. Olson for the rights to reprint his book, and it is now available at Amazon.) “I’m glad the punk house is still thriving,” he said. “It makes perfect sense for young people who don’t have much money and want to make music. The downside is that it seems to me punk culture hasn’t really evolved or developed.”

Certain icons, however, have endured, like the punk bathroom. Perhaps the greatest, said Mr. Moore, was the be-stickered, be-fliered and graffiti-emblazoned black hole in the basement of CBGB, the legendary (and now defunct) punk rock club in the Bowery.
“That’s the one thing that sears itself into your memory,” said Mr. Moore, breaking his reverie. “It’s that toilet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/garden/03punk.html





For Celebrity Magazine, Pregnancy Is a Bonus
Brian Stelter

OK!, the celebrity magazine, could not possibly have purchased all the attention it enjoyed in late December after it got the scoop that Jamie Lynn Spears, the younger and until then less sensational sister of the troubled pop queen Britney Spears, was three months pregnant.

Or could it? It is widely assumed within the publishing industry that OK! paid the Spears family for the exclusive rights to the pregnancy news. US Weekly, another celebrity magazine, cited sources who said that Jamie Lynn’s mother, Lynne Spears, had sold the pregnancy story for $1 million, printing the assertion on the cover of last week’s issue.

Checkbook journalism is hardly a secret within the star-struck world of glossy magazines. The publications often pay for photos of weddings and babies, perhaps most famously in June 2006 when People won a fierce bidding war for the first photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s daughter, Shiloh.

Although People said that the widely reported $4.1 million price tag was not accurate, it did not offer an alternative figure; editors say that disclosing prices would work against efforts to keep costs down.

Purchasing news of a pregnancy, however, is unusual. The two-year-old American edition of OK!, like its 14-year-old British counterpart, has freely acknowledged paying for “relationships” with some celebrities, but Sarah Ivens, editor of the American edition, declined to discuss specific deals or dollar figures.

“If there’s something out there, there will be a bidding war,” Ms. Ivens said. “We’re not bidding against ourselves.”

When asked why she was less hesitant than some competitors to acknowledge the purchase of photos, Ms. Ivens said: “I’m not very good at lying.”

The interview with Jamie Lynn, 16, and her mother certainly drew copious attention to OK!, which sells far fewer copies than competitors like People and US Weekly, and provoked speculation about the relationship between OK! and the Spears family, which had been strained by a disastrous photo shoot with Britney six months ago.

But Ms. Ivens kept in touch with the Spears family — she said that she spoke regularly to its members — and said that when the family decided to announce Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy, it contacted OK! first. The six-page interview barely mentioned Britney.

Word of the 16-year-old star’s pregnancy — and of OK!’s exclusive on the story — seeped out on the Internet on Dec. 18. By the next day, when the magazine reached newsstands, the news was splashed across the cover of The New York Post, treated as the lead story on NBC’s “Today” show and publicized on the home page of People.com. In each case OK! was cited as breaking the story.

Tom Morrissy, publisher of the American version of OK!, promptly sent an e-mail message to prospective advertisers extolling all the coverage the story had received. The Jamie Lynn issue of OK! sold a record number of copies — nearly two million, roughly twice the usual number.

“What advertisers care about are buzz-worthy stories and volume,” Mr. Morrissy said. He said that OK!’s financial arrangements with celebrities had not factored into its conversations with advertisers.

Securing such scoops, whatever their cost, seems to be part of OK!’s growth strategy, as each exclusive article raises awareness of the brand. In 2007 the OK! publications, which are owned by Northern & Shell, a British media company, secured the first photos of Eva Longoria’s wedding and of Larry Birkhead and Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter, Dannielynn.

The magazine’s latest photo exclusive of the wedding of Katherine Heigl, a star of “Grey’s Anatomy,” was published this week.

Some celebrity-watchers have speculated that the Spears family would be paid not for the pregnancy news, but for the first photos of the mother and baby sometime next year. The spokeswoman for Jamie Lynn Spears and representatives for the Spears family did not return phone calls or e-mail messages, and Ms. Ivens would not clarify the matter.

To the outside world, OK! did not look like the logical choice for the Spears family to take the story. Back in July Britney Spears had agreed to sit for an OK! interview and cover shoot — pitched as a friendly “comeback” profile of the increasingly ridiculed entertainer — but had acted erratically, destroyed expensive dresses and abruptly walked out.

After news of the photo shoot leaked to gossip Web sites, the magazine decided to publish a three-page depiction of the day. The issue, headlined “Britney’s Meltdown,” sold 1.2 million copies, the magazine’s best performance at the time.

The text was still relatively delicate, concluding: “At OK! we’d love to have our old Britney back. But what we experienced was a young girl who is desperately in need of help.” Still, the article suggested that Ms. Ivens would start taking a harder line toward the celebrities it typically fawned over.

“We got tougher,” Ms. Ivens said. “But the truth is, everyone in the family came back to OK! We have a really good, trusting relationship with the Spears family, and the story didn’t change that.”

Jamie Lynn Spears, the star of the Nickelodeon series “Zoey 101,” had been largely off the radar of paparazzi and entertainment journalists. Celebrity watchers characterized the arrangement with OK! as the confluence of a magazine willing to pay and a family that needed the money.

“This is a family whose trajectory appears to be moving in the wrong direction, and they might actually not know where their next paycheck is coming from,” said Janice Min, the editor of US Weekly. “Money is money.”

The Spears family could also face a loss of income from a book that Lynne Spears was going to write about motherhood, which was postponed by its publisher after the pregnancy news came out.

Ms. Min called the Jamie Lynn Spears story the “ultimate example of one of these celebrities deciding ‘I’m tired of somebody else making money off of me, I’m going to make money off my own news.’”

Competitors say that OK! has shoveled tens of millions of dollars into its American debut and has been selling advertising at deeply discounted rates. But the company says that advertising revenue has more than doubled in the last year, to $51 million in fiscal 2007 from $21 million in fiscal 2006. Mr. Morrissy said he expected the magazine to turn a profit in 2008.

Furthermore, he said, the costs of relationships with celebrities can be spread across international editions of the magazine.

“It’s not just America where these exclusives matter for our brand,” Mr. Morrissy said. “We’re going to be in 22 countries by the end of 2008.”

Thirty pages of the American version of OK! are now reprinted in the magazine’s editions in Britain and Australia. Although Jamie Lynn Spears is not well known in many countries, her pregnancy news was placed on the cover of the end-of-year Australian OK!

Early last year OK! raised its cover price from $1.99 to $2.99, but still managed to increase newsstand sales, said John Harrington, the publisher of an magazine industry newsletter.

“It’s certainly not People or US Weekly, but I think the Bauer people” — the publishers of Life & Style and In Touch — “are pretty concerned about it. And it’s probably serious competition for Star at this point,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/bu...edia/02ok.html



















Until next week,

- js.



















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