[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own. All we can do is buy their stuff and like it. All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s. 'Make' is about taking that back off and making it yours." – Shannon O’Hare


"Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations." – Robert Rauschenberg


"NAB salutes Sens. Lincoln and Wicker and their Senate colleagues for formally recognizing radio airplay's enormous value to both record labels and recording artists. The undeniable fact is that radio airplay is a musician's greatest promotional tool and generates millions of dollars in revenue annually for RIAA-member companies and performers." – Dennis Wharton


"The industry has finally been able to get some hard data about how removing DRM restrictions from legitimately purchased tracks affects piracy. The statistics show that there's no effect on piracy." – Bill Rosenplatt



































May 17th, 2008




Tanya Andersen Wins $108,000 Against Recording Industry
Ashbel S. Green

An Oregon federal magistrate has awarded nearly $108,000 to a Beaverton single mother who said the recording industry falsely accused her of illegally downloading music.

The money represents Tanya Andersen's attorney fees and costs in successfully fighting a lawsuit filed by the recording industry against her.

The attorney fee award is separate from a national class action lawsuit Andersen filed against the recording industry last year.

Andersen's legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America has gained national attention as a case of David vs. Goliath. Her suit accuses the industry of a waging a "campaign of threat and intimidation" against her and others who have never illegally downloaded music.

"While we respectfully disagree with the magistrate judge's decision to award extraneous fees -- including on counterclaims that the defendant herself brought and dropped -- it is important to note this decision is only a recommendation and falls significantly short of defendant's requests. We will likely file an objection in short order," said Cara Duckworth director of communications for the Recording Industry Association of America.

The recording industry has taken legal steps against thousands of people suspected of illegally downloading music since 2003.

The industry sued Andersen in 2005, but dropped the case last year after failing to turn up evidence that she illegally downloaded music.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingn...108000_ag.html





The Pirate Bay File Police Bribery Complaints
enigmax

The chief investigating officer in the Pirate Bay case who was revealed as recently working for Warner Bros, has been reported to the police. Yesterday the Pirate Bay crew filed “at least” three complaints, and further people have been reported for bribing the police.

The Pirate Bay case hasn’t even got to trial yet and already the controversy surrounding it is building up like some Hollywood plot.

Not only was the police star witness against the Pirate Bay previously employed by one of the plaintiffs, Warner Bros., but it was revealed that after this work he would return to his job as a police officer. Highly suspect to say the least, but not unusual in this case - the IFPI’s expert witness used to work for them too.

Various media and anti-piracy agencies all want a large piece of the Pirate Bay crew and between them are demanding millions of dollars in compensation, a point that is contested by Brokep: “In fact, they owe us a shitload of money. All the time we’ve spent on being called criminals and hunted down by private investigators and getting our stuff stolen by them - it’s gonna be expensive for them.”

Brokep says their initial target is police officer and IT forensics expert Jim Keyzer, who they clearly see as corrupt:

“We reported the police officer yesterday. For a lot of different reasons, at least three criminal complaints were filed. But you know what? It’s illegal to bribe the police as well. So more people have been reported to the police.”

The Pirate Bay crew say that when the case is over, they will demand compensation for all the time and money they have invested in this “media circus”.

Brokep is clearly in defiant mood: “So who’s the fucking criminals really? Hey Hollywood assholes - Be afraid. Very afraid. The law is coming to serve justice.”
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...plaint-080516/





Michael Jackson to Take on The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Micheal Jackson and several other artists plan to take on The Pirate Bay. The king of pop hired the infamous ‘Web Sheriff’ to protect his rights. “Hey Michael - do you want us to pay you in small kids maybe?” was the first response of Pirate Bay admin Brokep.

The Web Sheriff announced today that Michael Jackson joined the Village People, UB40 and the rights holders of Bob Marley’s music, in an attempt to get compensation for the losses they allegedly suffered at the hands of the popular BitTorrent website.

Pirate Bay’s Brokep commented on the announcement by saying: “The common thing for all of these artists of course is that no one listens to them anymore.”

This is not the first time the Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, has clashed with the Pirate Bay folks. Last November he announced that he planned to sue them in the U.S., France and Sweden for infringing the rights of Prince.

Web Sheriff will demand $100 million dollars in compensation, slightly less than the MPAA asked for last week. Adding them both together amounts to a record breaking claim. “The good thing about this is that we just broke TorrentSpy’s lawsuit. Maybe time to call Guinness, we like to break world records and we just broke one I think,” Brokep writes.

In the meantime, The Web Sheriff is still trying to get ABBA on board. “It would also be good/appropriate if the members of ABBA could take up the fight against these pirates, as they personify the Swedish music industry’s successes and are renowned ambassadors for Sweden, contrary to The Pirate Bay.” he said previously.

Again, Brokep disagrees, he sees The Pirate Bay as Sweden’s true ambassadors. “All over digg.com and other cool social networks there is always the comment “last place on earth with true freedom is Sweden” or ‘I really want to move to Sweden’,” he wrote a few months ago.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, for now, all the Web Sheriff has ever done is making threats. You would think that he must know by now that this has no effect on The Pirate Bay team.
http://torrentfreak.com/michael-jack...te-bay-080516/





Judge in Internet Music Sharing Case May Grant New Trial
Larry Oakes

The judge in a landmark music copyright infringement award against a Brainerd woman notified attorneys today that he's considering granting a new trial on the grounds that he improperly instructed the jury about what constitutes illegal file-sharing on the internet.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said in an order filed this morning in Minneapolis that he may have made a "manifest error of law" last October when he instructed a Duluth jury that simply uploading songs to a music file-sharing network could be considered illegal distribution, even in the absence of proof that anyone received them.

In a verdict hailed by the music recording industry, the jury found Jammie Thomas, 30, willfully violated the copyrights of six recording companies and should pay them $222,000. Jurors found that Thomas, operating on her home computer under the user name "tereastarr" on the Kazaa file-sharing network, copied or distributed 24 songs, and it set damages at $9,250 for each.

Thomas' attorney said the award was excessive and filed a motion asking Davis to reduce it. But Davis, in today's order, wrote that he'll consider granting a new trial on different grounds.

"The Court is concerned that Jury Instruction 15 may have been contrary to binding Eighth Circuit [U.S. Court of Appeals] precedent," Davis wrote. He then cited a case in which the appeals court "stated that `infringement of [the distribution right] requires an actual dissemination''' or, in other words, proof that someone received the songs.

Davis wrote that no party to the case made him aware of that precedent. His order did not say how it was brought to his attention.

He ordered that attorneys for Thomas and the record companies submit briefs by May 29 on whether he erred. He wrote that he'll hear oral arguments on those briefs on July 1 in U.S. District Court in Duluth.

In apparent recognition of the case's importance to the music industry and to the millions of people who download and share music, the judge also suggested that "interested parties" submit friend-of-the-court briefs by the same deadline.

The civil trial drew national attention because it was the first Internet piracy suit by the recording industry against a customer to go to trial. The Recording Industry Association of America said the verdict and its aggressive letter-writing campaign to colleges were spreading the word that people can pay a price for illegally downloading or sharing music.
http://www.startribune.com/entertain...refer=Homepage





Jury Rejects Dish Network's $1 Billion Piracy Claim
AP

A jury found Thursday that a company that makes encryption technology for DirecTV violated federal and state piracy provisions, but awarded rival Dish Network Corp. just $1,500 of the $1 billion it sought.

Dish Network, formerly EchoStar, requested $1 billion in damages against News Corp.'s NDS Group over allegations NDS hacked its satellite signals. The $1,500 award, the statutory minimum, stemmed from one incident of testing on the satellite broadcaster's encryption cards.

The case, originally filed in 2003, was heard in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana.

"This verdict is a complete vindication of NDS' position at trial, and it puts an end to the lie that NDS is any way responsible for ... piracy," said Darin Snyder, an attorney for NDS Group. "This is also a vindication of NDS' long-term anti-piracy strategy."

Dish Network spokeswoman Kathie Gonzalez said in a statement that the company was disappointed with the jury's damage award, but noted the panel did find NDS violated provisions of the Federal Communications Act and California law.

"We will continue to vigorously prosecute those individuals and companies that engage in stealing our satellite signals," she said in the statement.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9272766





Double Standard? UMG Fights "Excessive" Infringement Damages
Nate Anderson

When Jammie Thomas was found guilty of infringing the copyrights of 24 songs during a trial in Minnesota last year, a jury fined her $222,000 in statutory damages. Given that the record labels arguably lost about 70¢ per song from her (the amount paid by digital download stores like iTunes), this means that Thomas' fine was 13,214 times the actual loss. So when Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People recently unearthed a case from last year in which Universal complained about having to pay a mere 10 times the actual damages in a court case of its own, critics smelled the salty tang of hypocrisy.

The case in question involves now-deceased rapper The Notorious B.I.G., whose album Ready to Die incorporated an unlicensed sample of "Singing in the Morning" from the Ohio Players after a Hendrix sample was denied clearance. The sample made its way onto the final album and even onto reissued albums. Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, which control the rights to the song, sued. A district court ruled in their favor; Bridgeport took the $150,000 maximum in statutory damages, while Westbound sought compensatory and punitive damages. Westbound scored big, earning $366,939 from the jury along with punitive damages of a whopping $3.5 million.

Clear those samples!

In appealing the ruling, Universal argued that the punitive damages award was "grossly excessive and should be vacated or at least reduced." The reason? It's excessive. The brief quotes a Supreme Court ruling that said, "In practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process." Universal pointed out that the award in question was "approximately 10 to 1, far above the line of unconstitutional impropriety."

They convinced the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals with the claim. The judges on the appeals court found that "the jury's $3.5 million punitive damage award was unconstitutionally excessive."

The Universal case isn't quite the same as the Jammie Thomas case, since Thomas was hit with statutory damages and neither actual nor punitive damages were at issue (the RIAA simply says it can't possibly calculate actual damages and doesn't try to do so). But there's an overlap in principle, since in P2P lawsuits the goal seems to be "sending a message" to file-swappers. That's fine, of course, but are the damages in these cases "unconstitutionally excessive"?

Thomas raised that issue herself. The RIAA argued that Thomas should pay up, in part because the award was actually far lower than it could have been (at $150,000 per infringement, Thomas could have owed substantially more). "Where, as here, the amount awarded by the jury was less than 10 percent of what the jury could have awarded," wrote the RIAA at the time, "there is no basis for a remittur or a new trial."

The US government, which felt the need to weigh in, agreed. The Department of Justice concluded that "the damages awarded under the Copyright Act's statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable.'"

Fortunately, statutory damages are discretionary, but they're already so high in these sorts of cases that any attempt to raise them (as Congress considered doing in the PRO-IP Act) is bound to be seen as "gluttonous." When RIAA members like Universal object (and win) cases on the grounds that they shouldn't have to pay a penalty 10 times higher than actual damages, surely noncommercial file-swappers, operating from homes, coffee shops, and dorm rooms, shouldn't be hit with these massive fines, either, when Universal's on the other side of the courtroom. Let the penalty be commensurate with the infringement.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-damages.html





Big Content Fighting Campus P2P by Lobbying for State Laws
Nate Anderson

Neither DMCA takedown notices nor RIAA prelitigation letters have any necessary correlation with on-campus P2P usage rates, as the recent upsurge in RIAA letters this last month shows (the RIAA says that the higher volume is a result of changes to the way MediaSentry detects P2P use). Making such letters a metric for judging school enforcement against P2P would thus seem to be problematic, but that was one provision of a bill introduced earlier this year in Tennessee. As federal efforts creak slowly forward, copyright owners are increasingly taking their war on higher ed P2P to the states, and the higher ed community needs to stay vigilant to keep such laws from gaining traction.

At an EDUCAUSE higher ed IT conference last week in Washington, campus IT specialists detailed their fight to stave off technological mandates imposed by local legislatures. Their basic complaint is that P2P is a social phenomenon with deep roots, not a merely collegiate practice. They say that singling out campuses is unfair, especially since only 20 percent of students nationally live on campus. But the entertainment industries are apparently convinced that a collegiate crackdown is necessary, and they're willing to go local to make it happen.

The RIAA goes to Nashville

Tom Danford, the CIO for the Tennessee Board of Regents, detailed his university system's fight against the Tennessee law. The idea for the bill began with a 2006 senate joint resolution that asked schools in the state to educate students about P2P and develop policies to deal with it. But when the University of Tennessee continued to top RIAA piracy lists, the music lobby pushed for a legislative remedy with more teeth than a mere resolution.

That bill landed in January of this year after the RIAA hired a local lobbyist to shepherd it through the state legislature. The bill would have forced universities to enforce a P2P policy, analyze their networks for P2P use, certify that no P2P transmissions were taking place, and use affirmative, technology-based deterrents to filter P2P. The Board of Regents estimated that such measures would cost them $14 million to implement.

In addition to the cost, the bill did not distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate P2P transmissions. It also might have allowed the RIAA to sue institutions for breaching their duty under the law, something not normally allowed against state schools. The bill was eventually expanded to include private schools in the state.

Danford and others caught wind of the bill early due to a new initiative in which they examined every new bill for potential impacts on higher education. Catching the bill early allowed them to educate legislators about the severe limitations of most technological solutions, and by doing so, Danforth helped to make the bill "more palatable."

In its current form, the legislation basically codifies the earlier senate resolution into law. The technological mandates are gone, as are RIAA policing powers; instead, universities have to issue a one-time report to the legislature on their progress. Should any institution receive more than 50 new infringement notices, however, it will come under increased scrutiny.

Beyond the sunny South

Tennessee isn't the only state dealing with the issue. Illinois has seen a similar law introduced recently, and while higher-ed groups have tried to negotiate on its language, progress has been slow. California's State Assembly held a March 4 "informational hearing" on the issue and the RIAA's Mitch Glazier was on hand to prod the state to action. The rumor mill suggests that the state of Washington might see a bill of its own soon, as well.

The frustration here on the part of higher ed is understandable, as they hate being singled out for rules that don't apply to commercial ISPs—where more infringement actually takes place. But with colleges essentially playing defense as the entertainment industry continues to set the terms of the debate, the fear is that at some point these laws may start to gain traction somewhere in the US and spread from there.

But the issue isn't just technological, and it's not just about colleges. "By the time students reach us, they've already been downloading since the age of 3," Danford says, and he can't see why colleges should be specially burdened with handling a society-wide issue. It doesn't help that legislators are generally being told that "piracy" is running rampant at colleges and that a simple technological fix could shut it down. Given that premise, why aren't schools doing so? Do they hate copyrights?

Legislators don't often know how to evaluate these claims; as one national higher-ed lobbyist said, "most members of Congress would not know how to download a file, legally or illegally," so when the entertainment industry talks about piracy, lost tax revenue, and out-of-work musicians and filmmakers, they listen.

Beating back technological mandates requires a consistent educational effort, often beginning with legislative staffers. Fortunately, many of these people are young, fresh from college, and understand the issues far better than the legislators.

Colleges and universities, already having long experience of offering "continuing education," have found themselves caught up in educating legislators at all levels of government about the limits of technology, the costs of these mandates, and the limits of copyright owners' data collection methods. While it can be frustrating to spend resources on this sort of lobbying, Danford argued that it's absolutely essential to prevent bad tech policy being made by legislators in the Nashville, Springfield, or a state capitol near you.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tate-laws.html





How It Does It: The RIAA Explains How It Catches Alleged Music Pirates
Catherine Rampell

To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the Recording Industry Association of America uses the same file-sharing software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization's offices during a private demonstration of how it catches alleged music pirates. He also said the group does not single out specific colleges in its investigations.

The demonstration was given by an RIAA employee who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of concern that he would receive hate e-mail.

The official explained that one way the RIAA identifies pirates is by using LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program that is free online and used by many college students (there is also a more-robust version of the program sold for a small fee).

Here's how the process works: The RIAA maintains a list of songs whose distribution rights are owned by the RIAA's member organizations. It has given that list to Media Sentry, a company it hired to search for online pirates. That company runs copies of the LimeWire program and performs searches for those copyrighted song titles, one by one, to see if any are being offered by people whose computers are connected to the LimeWire network. For popular songs, the search can turn up dozens, if not hundreds, of hits. A search on Madonna's latest release, "4 Minutes," turned up more than a hundred users trading various copies of the song.

The LimeWire software allows users who right-click on any song entry and choose "browse host" to see all of the songs that a given file sharer is offering to others for download. The software also lists the IP address of active file sharers. (An IP address is a unique number, assigned by Internet-service providers, that identifies every connection to the Internet.) While the names of the people associated with particular IP addresses are not public, it is easy to find out which IP addresses are registered to each Internet-service provider. Using public, online databases (such as those at arin.net or samspade.org), Media Sentry locates the name of the Internet-service provider and determines which traders are located at colleges or universities.

Swift Detection

The process mimics how pirates themselves locate files but with a significant difference: speed. Media Sentry has automated the process by using scripting software that types in the songs, grabs the IP addresses, checks them, and forwards the information to the RIAA.

The RIAA's first step against campus pirates is usually to send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which asks the college to remove infringing content from its network.

In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the "hash," a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA's database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don't match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn't turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song.

If there is a match, Media Sentry investigators will then engage in a so-called TCP connection, or an electronic "handshake," with the computer that is offering the file to verify that the computer is online and is ready to share the song.

Based on that information, the RIAA will send a letter to the college asking for the song to be removed. The letter lists the name of the file and the date and time when Media Sentry investigators saw it available online.

On listservs and in interviews, some university administrators have recently questioned the validity of some of these takedown notices because they say they do not have any record of a download at the named IP address at the specified time. RIAA officials said this is because investigators performed only a "handshake."

Seeking Settlements

In more serious cases of piracy, the RIAA sometimes decides to send out "prelitigation settlement letters," which asks alleged infringers to cough up several thousand dollars in lieu of going to court and potentially facing a much more expensive punishment.

Before sending out the prelitigation settlement letters, Media Sentry investigators always download music files believed to be infringing on licensed songs. Live human beings then listen to those songs to verify that the files are infringing. A letter goes out to the college with the date and time when investigators saw that the song was available for sharing.

While the process for generating both takedown notices and settlement letters is largely automated, the RIAA said that before each warning is sent out, a full-time RIAA employee reviews each case to make sure the claim is legitimate and that the alleged pirate is in the United States. Thanks to the speed and ease of the automated process, though, the RIAA is "able to identify hundreds of instances of infringement on a daily basis," according to RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth. She also acknowledged that the RIAA can tell only when a song is being offered for users to illegally download; investigators have no way of knowing when someone else is actually downloading the song.

The organization does not perform similar automated investigations for file traders on commercial ISP's (that is, Internet- service providers not operated by universities, such as Comcast). All notices received by commercial Internet-service providers are processed manually.

"The automated takedown notice program we have right now is solely university-focused," said the anonymous RIAA representative. "We're trying to make universities aware that they have an issue with peer-to-peer file sharing on their network, and so we don't send automated notices to commercial ISP's, I think because they are generally aware that there's a problem."

The RIAA said it does not single out particular academic institutions to be "made examples of."

"We have no capability of targeting any school at all," said the RIAA representative, who argued that there is a large "misperception" among university administrators that individual colleges are being picked on. "Technically we can't do it. We find what we find with this process, and that's what we send to schools."
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/05/2821n.htm





Want to Download? Take the Quiz
Andy Guess

For all the high-tech tactics colleges have employed to slow or block students’ illegal file sharing activity, few have actually turned to methods used in the classroom to get the message across. A university in Missouri thinks it’s found the right solution, combining an age-old teacher’s tool with a dash of discipline.

Last academic year, Missouri University of Science and Technology, in Rolla, received some 200 Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” notices from the recording industry, notifying the institution that users of its network had made copyrighted works available for download. This academic year — at a time when colleges across the country have been experiencing sudden spikes in copyright complaints — the university received eight. Karl F. Lutzen, a systems security analyst at the university, chalks it up to Missouri S&T’s unusual method of regulating students’ network usage: In order to download (or upload) files on any peer-to-peer network whatsoever, all on-campus users have to pass an online quiz on copyright infringement.

But not just once. Passing the test — with a perfect score — enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user’s on-campus registered machines, presumably enough time to download that (legal) song, TV show or e-book. The next time, the student, staff or faculty member has to go to the intranet Web page and take the randomized test again, for a maximum of eight uses per month (which, kind of like vacation days, can accrue to at most 20).

“The idea is that we had a policy where we permitted peer-to-peer protocols for educational and research use,” Lutzen said, and as long as it was for legitimate reasons, “we didn’t have a problem with people using it.... This solution, more or less, through educational and technical controls, enforces that policy.”

The system works by taking advantage of “traffic shaping” technology used by most campus networks to prioritize certain types of data over others. For example, without traffic shaping that limits outgoing peer-to-peer traffic (regardless of a university’s policy on file sharing), a campus network could easily and quickly become a hub for downloaders around the world. By quickly isolating specific users and turning their ability to send and receive peer-to-peer data off or on, Missouri S&T is harnessing the traffic shaping technology to tie access to the online quiz.

“Based on the amount of grumbling it’s actually working pretty well,” Lutzen said.

When students pass the quiz, P2P access is granted within 10 seconds for use by any program, whether it’s a game or software program that needs to download an update, LimeWire, BitTorrent or another program. From that point on, there’s no way for the university to monitor whether users’ file-sharing activity is legal — but, on the other hand, there’s also no way for them to claim ignorance. If a student fails to make a perfect score, though, he or she has a minute or two to try again. But the questions change, and so does the order. Theoretically, students can memorize the questions, Lutzen said, but they’d still have to pay attention to how the answers are arranged (which also changes) and end up learning the material anyway.

Questions include asking students what kinds of works are protected by copyright and the difference between copying a CD and downloading music. The university’s sanctions for violations of copyright policy are strict: 14 days of revoked network access for the first offense and 28 days, plus community service, for the second, and so on.

Colleges have taken widely divergent approaches to the problem of illegal file sharing, from a “look the other way” philosophy to complete bans. Most inform their students of the legal aspects of peer-to-peer networks and (sometimes reluctantly) hand over “pre-litigation” letters sent by the recording industry that offer certain students discounted settlements in order to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. Some have gone so far as to block peer-to-peer access altogether, and others — like Missouri S&T — offer legal alternatives, such as Ruckus.

But the combination of strict enforcement on the campus network and educational requirements is novel. Last year, the University of Michigan used similar traffic-shaping tools to begin informing students when they were uploading data over peer-to-peer networks, but that hasn’t been matched with any blocking mechanisms. Michigan’s goal was to prevent students from inadvertently offering copyrighted content for others to download — which is sometimes the default option on file-sharing programs — and becoming susceptible to litigation. (Missouri S&T, formerly the University of Missouri at Rolla, essentially accomplishes the same goal, because uploading on peer-to-peer networks is also limited to the six-hour blocks enabled by the quiz.)

“I think that this is an interesting and new area, I think it’s great to have a thousand flowers bloom and try different things,” said Tracy Mitrano, the director of Cornell University’s IT policy as well as its Computer Policy and Law Program. At Cornell, she said, students who receive DMCA notices take an intensive educational program that they must pass. Missouri S&T’s program, meanwhile, was “another layer deeper” than Michigan’s system, dubbed BAYU (for Be Aware You’re Uploading), she said.

Mitrano added that she and others at Cornell were discussing how to move some of its post-infringement educational resources to the “front end,” when students enroll, since many come into college with downloading habits ingrained since middle school. It’s better “trying to front-load it rather than have it be ‘discipline’ even though it’s just education,” she said.

Lutzen agrees: “I think the model of putting education up front and limiting the usage is what needs to be looked at. How that’s done is up to the institution.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/15/p2p





Anti-Performance Royalty Bill Hits Senate
FMQB

A bipartisan resolution that opposes the idea of imposing a royalty rate on radio stations for the music they play was introduced in the U.S. Senate this week. The resolution, introduced by Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), has gained the support of Sens. Wayne Allard (R-CO), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Ben Nelson (D-NE) and James Webb (D-VA). Similar legislation was introduced last year in the U.S. House of Representatives by Reps. Gene Green (D-TX) and Mike Conaway (R-TX), which is called the Local Radio Freedom Act. That resolution currently has support from more than 200 House members.

"Congress should not impose any new performance fee, tax, royalty, or other charge relating to the public performance of sound recordings on a local radio station for broadcasting sound recordings over the air, or on any business for such public performance of sound recordings," reads the Senate resolution.

Commenting on the resolution's introduction, NAB EVP Dennis Wharton stated, "NAB salutes Sens. Lincoln and Wicker and their Senate colleagues for formally recognizing radio airplay's enormous value to both record labels and recording artists. The undeniable fact is that radio airplay is a musician's greatest promotional tool and generates millions of dollars in revenue annually for RIAA-member companies and performers."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=699543





Company Hopes To Challenge CRB's Existence
Susan Butler

Royalty Logic hopes to challenge the very existence of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, which sets rates for compulsory licenses under federal copyright law.

The company filed a motion on Tuesday with the federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C., which will be hearing the webcasters' appeal of the CRB's rate decision from last year, asking for permission to file additional legal arguments. The arguments challenge the constitutionality of the law that created the CRB.

Royalty Logic was a party in the webcaster rate trial. The company wanted the authority to compete with SoundExchange, which the CRB denied. SoundExchange is the only organization currently authorized to license and collect royalties for sound recording owners, musicians and vocalists under section 114 of the Copyright Act.

That section authorizes the public performance (e.g., streaming) of sound recordings over non-interactive digital services as long as certain royalties are paid and other conditions are met. The CRB is authorized by law to set those rates through a two-year rate-setting process.

The deadline for filing legal briefs with the Appeals Court has passed. Therefore, Royalty Logic is asking the court to permit the filing of additional arguments for consideration.

If permitted to file the brief, Royalty Logic will argue that the law creating the CRB violates the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, Congress improperly permitted the Librarian of Congress, which controls the Copyright Office, to appoint the three Copyright Royalty Judges.

If a court held that the law is unconstitutional, it is conceivable that decisions made by the CRB would be null and void.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...26152efdf2d303





House Approves New Property Seizure Law

The criminals in the federal government are now trying to legalize the seizure of computers and other property under the guise of strengthening intellectual property laws. HR 4279 or the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 which was recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, will give the government draconian powers to do just this. This legislation gives the government the power to seize property that facilitates the violation of intellectual property laws. The legislation also mandates the formation of a formal Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General to enforce this madness. In addition, a new office called the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative is created within the Executive Office of the President. If you boil it down to brass tax, this legislation allows the U.S. government to lawfully seize your computer if it has one unauthorized mp3 file on its hard drive. It also provides the authorization for the creation of offices within the executive branch to enforce a law that is impossible to enforce.

Below is taken from section 202 of HR 4279 that gives the federal government the authorization to seize property that may have been used to facilitate an intellectual property violation. The language in this section indicates that a violation would include downloading a single unauthorized mp3 file on to a computer.

d) Unauthorized Recording of Motion Pictures- Section 2319B(b) of title 18, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

`(b) Forfeiture and Destruction; Restitution-

`(1) CIVIL FORFEITURE PROCEEDINGS- (A) The following property is subject to forfeiture to the United States:

`(i) Any copies of a motion picture or other audiovisual work protected under title 17 that are made without the authorization of the copyright owner.

`(ii) Any property constituting or derived from any proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of a violation of subsection (a).

`(iii) Any property used, or intended to be used, to commit or facilitate the commission of a violation of subsection (a) that is owned or predominantly controlled by the violator or by a person conspiring with or aiding and abetting the violator in committing the violation, except that property is subject to forfeiture under this clause only if the Government establishes that there was a substantial connection between the property and the violation of subsection (a).

This is the 1980s equivalent of the government being given the legal authority to seize cassette recorders if they were used in recording a song off of the radio. Under this legislation, downloading even a single mp3 file unauthorized by the copyright owner will give the federal government the power to take your computer. There is no way that the federal government can enforce this. In fact, it is insane that the U.S. House of Representatives is more concerned about keeping the record and movie industry happy by passing this legislation than they are with real issues. Incredibly, this bill was passed by a vote of 410-11. Two of the dissenting voters included Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

John Conyers a fascist and anti-Constitutionalist member of the U.S. House of Representatives who originally introduced this bill made the following statements describing the purpose of the legislation. His statements were republished in a Billboard Magazine report.

(1) prioritize intellectual property protection to the highest level of our government;

(2) make changes to IP law to enhance the ability of IP owners to effectively enforce their rights;

(3) make it easier to criminally prosecute repeat offenders;

(4) increase penalties for IP violations that endanger public health and safety.

Basically speaking, Conyers believes that downloading illegal mp3 and movie files endanger public health and safety. Conyers is either an insane individual that belongs in a mental institution for making such a ridiculous statement or he and everybody else who voted for this bill is in the back pockets of the RIAA, the MPAA and the rest of the music and movie industry. Common sense would dictate that such a law is unenforceable and should have not been seriously entertained. This is just another sign that this country is run by a bunch of fascists who are trying to find as many ways to undermine civil liberties under the guise of enforcing the law. What is really ridiculous about this, is the fact that the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land is violated by these fascist tyrants in Congress every single day of the week. If they were actually serious about enforcing the law, why are they not following the Constitution? Why do they reject it?

Maybe if the movie and music industry stopped putting out horrible content, their sales would be a little better. It seems as if they are trying to blame people who download unauthorized mp3 and movie files for their shortcomings in business. Perhaps they should do what smaller independent music and film production companies have done and embrace the technological revolution instead of stifling it by trying to push this anti-American legislation down our throats.

It is understandable to go after people who are illegally profiting off of selling material that isn’t their own but there really isn’t a need for government involvement. The record industry should sue those people if they believe that there are groups or individuals who are unfairly profiting off of their work. A court can decide if the claims they present are valid. However, to give powers to an already corrupt government to seize private property from people who are violating copyright laws by merely having downloaded mp3 files or movie files on their computer is unenforceable and beyond the scope of government. Section 301 of the bill establishes the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative and section 501 of the bill establishes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice under the office of the Deputy Attorney General. These particular offices will be established to serve as the enforcement arm for this legislation.

How many more powers is this corrupt legislature going to give to a renegade executive branch that is already engaging in perpetual war, setting up a police state, authorizing torture, destroying national sovereignty and other horrors? The federal government is full of petty bureaucrats and tyrants that can’t do anything right to begin with, and the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to expand government again through this legislation. With 410 of these tyrants voting for this legislation, it is doubtful that we will be successful in defeating this bill in the U.S Senate or if it goes to the dictator in chief.
http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=8997





IFPI Advises Kids to Use LimeWire and Kazaa
Ernesto

Together with the charity Childnet, IFPI recently launched a campaign to educate kids, teachers and parents about the dangers of filesharing. Ironically, the legal alternatives they suggest direct the kids to LimeWire, Kazaa and sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

The campaign’s leaflet (pdf) is distributed through schools and colleges, libraries, record stores, teaching portals and websites in 21 countries. It advises kids and parents about the dangers of filesharing, and advises them to use the legal music online stores, which are listed on pro-music.org, with the aim of keeping kids safe online.

IFPI proudly announced their new campaign a few weeks ago, writing: “The campaign comes as millions of people take advantage of the explosion of new ways of accessing music digitally, but still lack clarity on safety and legal issues, on finding legitimate sites, on the basics of copyright and on how to unpick the jargon of digital music.”

IFPI has always been concerned with the safety of children, and on pro-music.org they maintain a list of download stores that are ’safe’ to use. I was of course curious about these legal stores, and since i’m from the Netherlands, I decided to give the Dutch legal stores a try. This turned out to be an interesting experiment.

To my surprise, the first 4 sites on the list were all gone, some had quit, and others redirected to websites that didn’t sell any music. Even worse, commodore.nl -the first site on the list- served ads for a scam site that sells filesharing software.

I finally got something that looked like a music store when I got to the fifth link, dance-tunes. However, when I searched for the latest Radiohead album, nothing came up. The site only has a few mp3s, and nothing of my choice.

The journey continued, and with sixth site, download.nl, I finally found some good music. Interestingly however, the songs I found were not for sale. Instead, I was advised to download LimeWire, Shareaza and Kazaa Lite. This may indeed sound a little confusing, but the IFPI apparently wants kids to use filesharing software after all.

So, to sum up my legal music experiment. I tried the first 6 sites advised by IFPI, 4 didn’t sell any music, the fifth only listed a few songs, and the sixth website I tried advised me to install LimeWire or Kazaa. It gets even worse further down the list where the kids end up at sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media said about the new campaign: “The new guide is a very good example of an initiative that offers simple, practical advice to parents and teachers to keep young people safe and legal while enjoying music on the Internet.

I guess she didn’t try it herself.
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-advises...ire-and-kazaa/





France Says Canada Considering "Three Strikes and You're Out" ISP Policy
Michael Geist

Last month I wrote about the pressure to adopt "graduated response," a policy that is better described as "three strikes and you're out" for ISP subscribers. While Canada has yet to take a public position on the issue, a new French document cites Canada as an example of a country that is negotiating an ISP three strikes policy. In particular, the latest Olivennes bill draft submitted by the Conseil d'Etat, states:

La méthode et le dispositif des Accords de l’Élysée soulèvent d’ailleurs un vif intérêt à l’étranger. De nombreux pays d’Europe (comme la Grande_Bretagne) ou d’autre continents (comme le Canada ou le Japon) ont d’ores et déjà initié un processus de négociation comparable, encadré par les pouvoirs publics, que ceux_ci viendront relayer en tant que de besoin.

Given that there has been no Canadian public statement consistent with the French claim, either the French are simply wrong (and should be corrected) or Canadian officials may have privately indicated a willingness to move in this direction. The latter possibility is very troubling given the likelihood that new Canadian copyright legislation is likely to be introduced within the next few weeks.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2915/125/





Bell Accused of Privacy Invasion

University of Ottawa legal clinic urges investigation of internet traffic shaping
Peter Nowak

Bell Canada is facing a growing list of critics for its internet traffic-shaping practices. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, a University of Ottawa legal clinic specializing in internet- and other technology-related law, has joined the assault on Bell Canada Inc. and its traffic-shaping practices, urging an investigation by the country's privacy commissioner.

The group says Bell has failed to obtain the consent of its retail and wholesale internet customers in applying its deep-packet inspection technology, which tells the company what subscribers are using their connections for. Bell is using DPI to find and limit the use of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, which it says are congesting its network.

The CIPPIC, which is made up mainly of lawyers and law students from the University of Ottawa, says Bell has not only failed to show that its network is congested and that its actions are necessary, but it has also run afoul of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in doing so.

"Practices [such as] those involving the collection and use of personal information are not necessary to ensure network integrity and quality of service," wrote CIPPIC director Philippa Lawson in a letter to the commissioner dated May 9.

"Moreover, subscribers whose traffic is being inspected have not consented to the inspection and use of their data for this purpose."

Bell says it is using DPI only to read the "header" on the type of traffic, which determines what kind of usage it is. But CIPPIC contends that DPI must be used to "open the envelope” on the traffic for it to be of any use to an internet service provider, thus violating the user's privacy.

"The evidence is clear that DPI technologies permit the collection and use of personal data about internet subscribers. The extent to which Bell is actually taking advantage of this capability is less clear," wrote Lawson, who was previously a counsel with the consumer group Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

"However, the literature on DPI suggests that DPI necessarily involves some collection and/or use of personal data in order for it to be a useful tool for ISPs."

Pierre Leclerc, a spokesman for Bell, said the company does not look at the content its customers access.

"Bell respects the privacy of our customers," he said. "We are in compliance with our privacy obligations."

CIPPIC said Bell has not disclosed its packet-inspection methods in its terms of service, privacy statement, code of fair information practices or frequently asked questions.

"Consent is only meaningful when affected individuals understand what they are consenting to," Lawson wrote. "If Bell is relying on its published policies as set out above to inform its customers and obtain their implied consent to its use of DPI for traffic management purposes, we submit that it has not met the standard of informed consent required by [PIPEDA]."

Investigation of other ISPs urged

The group has called on Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart to investigate Bell as well as other ISPs that have either admitted to or are reportedly engaging in traffic shaping — notably Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc., Cogeco Inc. and Eastlink — and ensure compliance with PIPEDA.

CIPPIC is the second group to accuse Bell of privacy invasion in the past month. In April, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, which represents 55 smaller ISPs that rent portions of Bell's network, also said the company was invading users' privacy in a complaint to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

Additionally, the association said Bell's traffic shaping was causing its members to lose customers and incur unneeded costs. It requested an urgent interim cease-and-desist order until the practice could be fully investigated. Its complaint was supported by Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc. and Wireless Nomad, a co-operative ISP in Toronto.

The CRTC said it would issue its decision on the interim request some time in May. Tom Copeland, chairman of the internet providers' association, says he expects an answer this week.

Internet experts have said the traffic-shaping showdown is the tip of the iceberg in the battle over net neutrality. A growing list of organizations — including the NDP, the National Union of Public and General Employees and the government's Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage — are calling on the CRTC and the government to institute legislation that will prevent ISPs from controlling what goes over the internet.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-bell.html





Deep Packet Inspection Under Assault Over Privacy Concerns
Nate Anderson

Add the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) to the list of groups concerned about the privacy implications of widespread deep packet inspection (DPI) by ISPs. CIPPIC has filed an official complaint with Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, asking her office to investigate Bell Canada's use of DPI (and we're flattered to be quoted as an expert source in the complaint). In addition, the group would welcome a wider investigation into possible DPI use at cable operators Rogers and Shaw, as well.

In writing up this morning's announcement of a massive new 80Gbps DPI appliance from Procera Networks, I noted that privacy concerns were one of the storm clouds in DPI's bright blue skies. Because DPI can drill down into packet headers and then further into the actual content being pumped through the tubes, it raises all sorts of questions from privacy advocates concerned about the easy collection of private personal information. Current gear is so sophisticated that it can reconstitute e-mails and IM conversations out of asymmetric traffic flows and it can essentially peek "under the hood" of any non-encrypted packet to take a look at what it contains.

Bell Canada's use of DPI gear has now ensnared the company in a pair of government actions over net neutrality concerns and privacy. Bell, apparently sensitive to such concerns, has made clear in its own responses to the network neutrality proceeding that its DPI gear looks at packet headers and traffic flows as a means of identifying various applications and protocols. Bell does not use DPI to actually peer at packet contents, however. "The content itself is not actually reviewed, analyzed or stored," Bell says.

But that's not good enough for CIPPIC, a group based at the University of Ottawa. Canada, like many European countries, has fairly strict rules about collecting and using personal data, and CIPPIC points out that "data packets gathered by ISPs through the use of DPI are (or can be) associated with identifiable subscribers via the IP addresses attached to those data packets."

CIPPIC seems to be making the case that IP addresses can be personal information (especially when linked a list of visited websites or to particular searches that can be gleaned from search engines with a subpoena). This fits with a recent recommendation from the top data privacy working group in the EU, which said that IP addresses should be considered personal information for precisely these reasons.

But even if what Bell is doing now passes muster, CIPPIC is worried about the widespread installation of gear that can so easily be used for other things. "The evidence is clear that DPI technologies permit the collection and use of personal data about internet subscribers," says the complaint. "If Bell is somehow able to limit the data it inspects via DPI to non-personal data, we remain concerned about the longer term viability of any such limitation, and the pressure on Bell (and other ISPs) to use DPI to distinguish among traffic in ways that necessarily involve the collection and use of personal data."

How else could Bell control traffic on its network? CIPPIC has some ideas, first among them "invest in more infrastructure to accommodate the additional demand generated by P2P traffic." But if that's not feasible, the group suggests other ways to control traffic that don't rely on widespread collection of personal information or on discriminatory throttling:

• Set limits on the amount of data per second that any user can transmit on the network
• Set dynamic data limits that relax when congestion is low and increase when congestion is high
• Cache popular files (in a non-discriminatory fashion)
• Work with protocol/application developers to develop application and network level congestion mechanisms
• Institute per-user bandwidth caps and/or metered pricing (which it is now doing)
• Develop business models to encourage heavy bandwidth usage during off-peak hours

Stoddart has previously shown a willingness to stand up for consumers on technical issues when she went public with her concerns about intrusive DRM. CIPPIC's complaint gives her office another chance to delve into the privacy issues surrounding new technology.

Here in the US, the same privacy concerns have been raised about DPI. Texas disaster recovery and managed services company Data Foundry objects to network operators doing this deep level of inspection, and in an FCC filing last year, the company charged that "broadband providers' AUP/TOS/Privacy Policies, in combination with Deep Packet Inspection, allow intrusive monitoring of the content and information customers transmit or receive. This contractual and technical capability interferes with and may well eliminate all sorts of privileges presently recognized under law... Broadband service providers have no justifiable reason to capture this information."

The issues go beyond just IP addresses, encompassing attorney/client privilege, trade secrets, and other protected communications, but DPI vendors have assured Ars that they have little interest in examining content; most traffic information can be gleaned from packet headers, destination IP addresses, flow patterns, handshakes, and the like. Given the sheer capabilities of these devices, though, it seems at least worthwhile to have a detailed discussion about the potential privacy implications.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...n-critics.html





Charter To Begin Tracking Users' Searches And Inserting Targeted Ads

Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an "enhanced online experience" that involves Charter monitoring its users' searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser.

Reader Matt copied us on a letter he sent to Charter's VP of Customer Operations and CEO:

Dear Mr. Stackhouse,

I am a high speed internet subscriber in the Fort Worth, TX area. For the last year or so I have had Charter’s 10 Megabit service and I am a satisfied customer. I am writing, however, because I am concerned by your recent letter discussing the “enhancement” that will be coming soon to my Charter web browsing experience (targeted, in-line advertisement manipulation). I appreciate Charter’s respect for my privacy, but the method that Charter has provided to opt-out of this tracking scheme is insecure and woefully inadequate.

The method that you provide to opt-out is as follows. First, a customer must visit www.charter.com/onlineprivacy. Once at the site, the customer must enter his or her complete name and address. Upon submission of this personal information, the customer must accept a cookie from Charter that indicates his or her opt-out status. While this process sounds simple on face, further consideration reveals that this opt-out method is fraught with privacy concerns and places the burden on your paying customer, rather than Charter.

The most pressing privacy issue with this opt-out method is that the opt-out form presented at the aforementioned URL is not encrypted. As I’m sure you realize, this means that a user submitting his or her address to Charter is doing so in the clear, leaving this personal information open to eavesdropping. It is not difficult to create an SSL-encrypted web form. It is troubling that Charter has not done so in this case.

The fact that this opt-out system relies on a cookie to keep users opted out is also a privacy issue. By telling customers who visit the opt-out page that, “if you delete your cookies or cache files… you will have to opt-out again,” you are encouraging users to keep those files that good privacy practices dictate should be frequently purged. Ironically, the best reason to purge one’s cookies often is to prevent internet marketers from tracking one’s behavior online.

In addition to the critical privacy concerns, the steps required to avoid being tracked by this new advertising system place the burden on your customers, rather than on Charter where it belongs. A customer should be able to opt-out of this advertising tracking system in a manner that will rarely, if ever, require the customer to opt-out again. Instead, because the system uses cookies, a customer must insecurely opt-out of being tracked on each PC in his or her home. Further compounding the work that the customer has to do, if the he or she deletes cookies in accordance with safe browsing techniques, it will be necessary to insecurely opt-out on each and every PC again.

I suggest that rather than force your customers through unending iterations of opting out of this advertising system, you should allow customers like me to opt-out at the cable modem level via a secure, encrypted form on your website. I’m glad to hear that Charter has an appreciation for my privacy, but please change your opt-out process to demonstrate that you also have an appreciation for my time and security online.

Matt's letter focuses on the flawed opt-out clause, but the program itself, an implementation of "deep packet inspection," is more worrying to us. Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to monitor not only its users searches and visited websites, but also the type of activity (e.g., email or peer-to-peer), which could be used for traffic shaping and threatens net neutrality.
http://consumerist.com/5008801/chart...g-targeted-ads





Charter Will Monitor Customers’ Web Surfing to Target Ads
Saul Hansell

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.

The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)

Charter started sending letters out to several hundred thousand customers in four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first reported by DSLreports.com.)

Charter said it will start testing the system within 30 days and will make a decision whether to roll it out to its 2.8 million Internet customers a few months after that.

Using data from Internet service providers for what the advertising people call behavioral targeting raises all kinds of questions about privacy, disclosure and who owns the information about where Internet users surf.

I called Charter to ask about this Tuesday, and the company quickly put Ted Schremp, its senior vice president for product management and strategy, on the phone. That immediately set Charter apart from the other Internet companies in the United States that have been identified as working with NebuAd: Embarq and Wide Open West. Neither of them would discuss the matter when I last asked.

Charter is taking “for the most part, a high road approach,” according to Mr. Schremp. “We have told customers exactly what we are doing,” he said. The letter to customers, he added, was “very forthcoming” and “not buried in mouse type and legal disclosures.”

The five-paragraph letter positioned the monitoring program as an “an enhanced online experience that is more customized to your interests and activities.”

“As a result,'’ the letter said, “the advertising you typically see online will better reflect the interests you express through your web-surfing activity. You will not see more ads — just ads that are more relevant to you.”

The letter contained a link to a Web page with answers to some common questions. A second link in the letter goes to a page that allows users to opt out of the system.

I suggested to Mr. Schremp that there are likely to be a fair number of customers who don’t consider having their Internet activities tracked to be an enhancement.

He responded several ways. He said that Charter convened focus groups of customers in two cities and found that most didn’t object when the program was explained to them. (A key aspect of the NebuAd system is that it claims not to record any personally identifiable information about users. Rather, it associates each user’s behavior with 1,000 categories of interest to advertisers.)

He offered his personal view that the system is harmless and well within the norms of the Internet these days. “The mainstream Internet user is hugely aware of the fact that the fundamental economic model on the Internet is advertising,” he said. While some people object to targeted advertising systems like Google’s Gmail, which displays ads related to the text of e-mail users are reading, many others don’t.

“All we are doing is, in an anonymous format, providing additional context to serve those ads. To the extent those ads are more meaningful to me as Ted Schremp, I will have a better Internet experience than the generic ads that are part of Yahoo and everything online.”

For those customers who disagree, Mr. Schremp said that Charter is offering the ability for them to choose not to be part of the system. I suggested that most privacy experts prefer opt-in systems where information isn’t collected until the user explicitly grants permission. He said that opt-out has become the norm for all targeting on the Internet.

How much money is NebuAd paying Charter for access to information about its customers’ surfing behavior? Mr. Schremp wouldn’t say. (Robert Dykes, NebuAd’s chief executive, said last month that the company was willing to pay Internet providers several dollars per subscriber per month.)

Mr. Schremp did acknowledge that raising revenue was a main goal for Charter in this: “We want to leverage technology in a way that makes sense for our economic model.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ref=technology





Money for Jams

BT's top internet architect proposes congesting charging for the internet. Before you protest, consider that it could mean faster browsing and an end to data caps.
Clive Akass

Bob Briscoe talks about the internet with the world-weary air of a man who has spent years banging his head against a brick wall.

The web is clogging up with the increasing use of bandwidth-hungry applications and there are calls for content providers such as the BBC to contribute to the cost of boosting capacity. Internet service providers (ISPs) try to answer the problem by imposing download caps and throttling heavy users. Briscoe believes that much of this is unnecessary and barely effective.

A couple of tweaks to internet protocols would make access ‘blisteringly fast’ for light users while heavy users downloading as much as they do now would be hardly affected. But it would also involve a congestion charge reminiscent of that imposed on motorists who enter central London at peak times, though Briscoe objects strongly to the use of the term.

Briscoe has to be taken seriously: he heads the team charged by BT to redesign the internet, along with others across the world. Somehow they all have to agree. And Briscoe is trying to get them to jettison one of the internet’s basic principles: equal flow rates for each data stream. The story goes back to late 1986 when the internet underwent a series of ‘congestion collapses’.

In mid-1987 Van Jacobson, of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, introduced a solution that has served the internet ever since. It conformed to the internet’s founding principle that traffic control is done by the ‘edge’ computers (your PC and a web server, say) using the Transport Control Protocol (TCP), while equipment on the intervening network does the routing using the Internet Protocol (IP).

If data arrives too fast for a router to handle, it starts to drop packets, causing the destination machine to request retransmission. Jacobson’s idea was that a source machine should halve its data rate when this happens, and then build up speed until packets start dropping off again.

This algorithm, applied as a TCP patch to the mere 30,000 machines then on the Net, was phenomenally successful, speeding everything up as well as relieving congestion, and its effect initially was to give each user of a channel a roughly equal share of capacity.

That it is still functioning at all, 20 years later, is testament to its strength a billion machines share internet resources by making between 10 and 100 rate adjustments a second. It was fair enough for the kind of bursty traffic generated by older web activity, such as email and browsing. But recent applications, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, transfer data more or less continuously, perhaps 24 hours a day.

Yet each P2P stream, under the ‘equality’ principle, has exactly the same right to a channel at any instant as a light user who is using a channel in very short snatches at a time (see image here). Applications such as P2P make things far worse by sending data in multiple TCP streams, each with the same claim on capacity as one person using a single stream.

Throwing bandwidth at the problem is similar to throwing water uphill because TCP allocates the same measly share of the new capacity, says Briscoe. A costly quadrupling of the capacity of the 10Mbits/sec link would boost the transfer rate of light users from 20Kbits/sec to just 80Kbits/sec.

Data rates are not so bad in practice because some service providers themselves prioritise some traffic and throttle heavy users.

But this is patching over the cracks of a flawed architecture, in Briscoe’s view, and throttling only marginally improves speeds for light users while punishing heavy users. Briscoe has nothing against these. “We want them to use the internet. That is what it is there for,” he says. Briscoe’s proposals shift the focus from data volume to congestion volume, measured by the number of dropped packets you cause.

They involve two protocol tweaks. One is ‘weighted TCP’, a refinement of the protocol to allow application programmers to give internet traffic different priority weights. Typical bursty traffic would be heavily weighted to get a greater share of capacity if it hits a bottleneck, yet heavy, near-continuous traffic would be barely affected.

To see why, imagine you are approaching a ticket barrier with two school parties in front of you. If the teachers in charge tell the kids to step aside for you, you would get straight through yet the children have hardly been slowed down at all. So what is to stop programmers giving all their traffic high weight? This is where the congestion charging comes in, and so does some tricky reasoning.

Service providers would still offer flat-rate access, but instead of download caps they would have a congestion allowance. If your congestion volume exceeds your limit you could still transfer all you wish along uncongested routes or you can pay for a greater allowance.

Your software would give light, bursty traffic high weight because it will have little effect on your congestion volume; but big downloads would be set low to minimise your congestion hit. Big users, including businesses, could buy higher congestion limits. But if you played your weightings right you could download as much as you liked with little or no congestion charge.

Similarly, network operators could be charged more for sending traffic through congested routes of other networks. They compete to sell capacity, so it would still pay them to keep their own infrastructure clear, but they would have an incentive to seek out clear routes. Oddly, because traffic is controlled from the edge, operators cannot see congestion outside their own network.

Briscoe’s answer is a second protocol tweak, this time to the Internet Protocol standard, to enable a mechanism called re-feedback, which flags how much congestion your packets will be allowed to cause.
“There’s one spare bit in IP and that’s all we need,” he said. A bonus is that the system could scupper Denial of Service attacks.

It would require no hardware changes at the user level, and no infrastructure changes except at the access gateways. But getting changes approved is perhaps the biggest problem of all. Jacobson’s algorithm and TCP equality, however illusory, have achieved the status of Holy Writ.

Briscoe, by his own admission, blew his top in frustration at a 2006 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) after trying for a year to explain his ideas. There are signs that people are taking his ideas more seriously, but don’t expect changes to come in very soon. “From past experience at the IETF I reckon it could take me five years to get it through,” Briscoe said.
http://www.pcw.co.uk/2216389





CRTC Launching Probe Into Internet Traffic Shaping
Peter Nowak

The CRTC is launching a public consultation on internet traffic shaping after rejecting a request by smaller Canadian internet service providers to end Bell Canada's throttling practices, saying the companies had failed to demonstrate that their businesses will be irreparably harmed by the action.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, which represents 55 smaller ISPs that rent portions of Bell's network in order to provide internet services to their own customers, had asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last month for an urgent cease-and-desist order.

Bell has been slowing the speeds of its own subscribers who use peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent since November, and extended the practice to its wholesale customers in March, prompting the complaint by CAIP. Bell has said it was doing so in order to prevent a small portion of users from slowing down internet speeds for the majority.

CAIP had asked for temporary relief from the throttling while the CRTC fully probed the issue.

"The commission finds that CAIP has not demonstrated that its members will suffer irreparable harm if the interim relief was not granted," the CRTC said on Wednesday, citing two previous Supreme Court of Canada decisions that spelled out criteria for such action.

The CRTC also said it would address the larger issue of a full probe in a letter to Bell and CAIP to be sent on Thursday. Peggy Nebout, a spokesperson for the regulator, said the letter would start a process that will allow the public to comment on the issue of traffic shaping. The CRTC expects to make a decision in the fall, she said.

The CAIP rejection represents a victory for Bell, which has come under fire from a number of organizations, including the NDP, the National Union of Public and General Employees, and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). Although other major Canadian ISPs, including Rogers Communications Inc., also throttle speeds, Bell has been targeted by critics because it is the only phone company in Canada to engage in the practice. Phone companies are required by CRTC regulations to rent out their networks to smaller providers.

Bell in April asked the Federal Court of Canada to scrap that requirement.

Mirko Bibic, head of regulatory affairs for Bell, said the CRTC's decision to reject CAIP's request was the correct one.

"It was certainly the right decision based on the facts that were before the commission," Bibic said. "We look forward to dealing with the final disposition of the CAIP application in accordance with whatever process the commission sets out tomorrow. We look forward to that because we'll be able to get more facts on the table."

Tom Copeland, chair of CAIP, said he was immensely disappointed with the decision. More than 1,100 individuals wrote letters to the CRTC in support of the group's request, Copeland said, which indicated that the larger public good was at stake.

Public good not considered, CAIP says

"They didn't consider the public good simply because they felt we didn't meet the test for irreparable harm," he said. "The public good in this case is stronger than most regulatory issues they take up."

Copeland said the group is reviewing its options, which could include an appeal.

University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist said he was not surprised the CRTC rejected CAIP's request for immediate action.

"That was a tough standard to meet, so it's not particularly surprising... but the substantial questions that CAIP has raised remain unanswered," he said.

The CRTC will also on Thursday open up its framework on the regulation of new media in broadcasting for public consultation. Geist, who has seen a draft of the framework, said it contains provisions for limiting how much control ISPs have over how people use the internet.

"The issue of net neutrality will be put on the table from a broadcast perspective. This decision puts it on the table from a telecom perspective as well," he said. "It's clear that many groups were seeking to jump in on this issue, and many more will come to the fore."

Bell must also now deal with a complaint filed by CIPPIC to the Privacy Commissioner earlier this week. The Ottawa-based legal clinic said traffic shaping and use of "deep packet inspection" technology by Bell and other large ISPs is a violation of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Bibic said CIPPIC's complaint is based on an incomplete understanding of DPI technology, and Bell looks forward to setting the record straight.

"It's based purely on conjecture," Bibic said. "It would have been far more constructive to have a dialogue with CIPPIC than for it to send out an application like this to the Privacy Commissioner."
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-caip.html





Elude Your ISP's BitTorrent Blockade

More and more Internet service providers are blocking or throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Find out whether you've been targeted, and learn how get around the restrictions.
Tom Spring

I'm a fan of live music and a patron of online communities such as eTree.org, where music junkies swap copyright-free music. So I was stung when I recently tried to download a live recording of a Dave Matthews concert only to discover that my BitTorrent client was dead in the water.

My system and Net connection checked out fine, so paranoia immediately set in: Was my Internet service provider, RCN, blocking BitTorrent? I called RCN and the tech I spoke to confirmed my suspicions, telling me that the ISP had added BitTorrent to its list of prohibited programs because many people use the software to download copyrighted material. The fact that the concert I was trying to download was copyright-free didn't sway him.

Later I called RCN's press department as a reporter, and the story changed. The ISP's spokesperson told me that the customer support rep I had talked to earlier misspoke. RCN has never intentionally blocked peer-to-peer traffic, the spokesperson said, and it supports the principles behind Net neutrality. Within 24 hours, my bandwidth-related problems with BitTorrent vanished.

Of course, most people can't call their ISP and (honestly) identify themselves as professional journalists. But that doesn't mean you have no recourse if your ISP starts blocking your file-sharing activities. A number of tips and tools can help you determine whether you're facing a BitTorrent blockade and, if so, help you get around it.

Torrent to a Trickle

If you suspect that your ISP is blocking or throttling your BitTorrent traffic, call your ISP and ask whether you're being blocked. But don't trust that you'll get a straight answer.

If your ISP's support reps won't tell you what's going on, look at the company's terms-of-service agreement (most are available online). Here again, though, you may find the answer unsatisfactory. Some ISPs couch their bandwidth management practices in vague policy statements that are difficult to decipher.

If your ISP won't come clean about its BitTorrent bandwidth policy, you can try any of a handful of ways to test whether your BitTorrent traffic is being throttled.

One method is to test your own connection speed. BitTorrent download speeds for popular files with many sources should be in the same ballpark as your bandwidth speeds in benchmark test results.

A popular Web-based tool, Glasnost, claims to be able to check whether your ISP is meddling with your BitTorrent traffic. The tool, created by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, requires no download; performing the test takes about 4 to 7 minutes.

For diehard techies who are willing to tinker, the Electronic Frontier Foundation developed a tool called Pcapdiff that tests whether your ISP is disrupting BitTorrent traffic.

Last, the makers of the BitTorrent client Vuze have created a plug-in for their peer-to-peer file swapping client. Downloading and running it on your PC won't help you determine whether your ISP is meddling with BitTorrent traffic — but it will help Vuze, which uses the data to lobby the FCC to prohibit limitations on BitTorrent.

---PB---

Evasion of the Bit Snatchers

If you discover or strongly suspect that your ISP is slowing your BitTorrent traffic, you can try several countermeasures, none of them a sure bet. One of these techniques may work for one ISP but not for another.

First, try using encryption to cloak your peer-to-peer traffic. Most clients such as BitComet, BitTorrent, uTorrent, and Vuze, support in-client encryption. Turning this feature on makes it much harder, though not impossible, for your ISP to detect that you're using peer-to-peer software. Here's how to proceed.

BitComet: Go to the Options menu, choose Preferences-Advanced-Connection, and select Protocol encryption.

BitTorrent and uTorrent: Go to the Preferences panel and select the BitTorrent tab. Choose Protocol encryption and select enabled.

Vuze: First you must change your user profile from the default beginner mode to advanced. Go to the Tools drop-down menu, open the Configuration Wizard, and select advanced. Next return to the Tools drop-down menu and select Options-Connection-Transport Encryption. Check Require encrypted transport, go to the Minimum encryption drop-down menu, and select RC4 encryption.

A second method of evading an ISP's throttling practices is to change the way the BitTorrent protocol acts. This method may work against ISPs that try to throttle speeds based on a standard set of BitTorrent configurations.

Troubleshooting your BitTorrent client's protocol settings can be tricky. To reconfigure your software, refer to the instructions provided by the publisher of the BitTorrent client you're using. One simple yet effective way to experiment with alternate BitTorrent protocol configurations is to simply try a different BitTorrent client. Different clients use different default protocols, and one may perform better on your ISP's network.

The default communications port used by BitTorrent traffic is 6881. ISPs know this and watch that port like a hawk. If an ISP throttles or blocks BitTorrent traffic traveling through this port, your file-sharing speeds will plummet.

To elude ISP throttling, BitTorrent clients enable you to switch the port or port range that your computer uses for BitTorrent traffic. Some BitTorrent clients will automatically attempt to configure your firewall or router to allow traffic to pass through the new port; with others you may have to open ports on your router manually. The excellent Port Forward site will step you through the process of tweaking your router to permit incoming connections.

One more-advanced method of obfuscating your BitTorrent traffic involves using an encrypted tunnel that, as the name suggests, shields from your ISP the type of data you are sending and receiving.

Free services such as The Onion Router (TOR) and I2P are designed for sending anonymous and encrypted messages, but some people have adapted them to use BitTorrent connections. The Vuze client has built-in support for routing your traffic through TOR and I2P.

For about $US5 a month, commercial virtual private network providers such as Relakks and SecureIX can help you prevent your ISP from identifying BitTorrent traffic. In marketing its service, SecureIX promises that it will "disable P2P throttling." The company offers a free tier of service with a bandwidth limit set to 256 kbps.

But ISPs are catching on to these advanced encryption techniques, reportedly clamping down and throttling encrypted tunnels despite being unsure that the encrypted data is BitTorrent traffic. The most extreme method an ISP may use to manage peer-to-peer traffic is to block anything that appears to be BitTorrent traffic, encrypted or not. If that happens to you, you must either switch ISPs or stop using BitTorrent software.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....1;fp;16;fpid;1





Comcast Lied to FCC, Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24/7
Ernesto

New data on Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic shows that the company misinformed the FCC this February. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie.

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. Up until today however, there has been no reliable data that revealed the scope of it.

Last week we reported on a new and reliable tool that tests whether or not your BitTorrent traffic is being limited. The tool is developed by the Max Planck Institute, who have released new data today. The findings reveal that the BitTorrent connections of half of Comcast and Cox’s customers are being cut. In addition, the data shows that these practices take place 24/7, disproving Comcast’s earlier statement to the FCC

“Comcast’s network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic,” Comcast wrote in a filing to the FCC last February.

This is far from the truth. There is little difference in the percentage of blocked customers throughout day. Furthermore, the data shows that there is also no difference between weekends and weekdays. BitTorrent is simply blocked all day long, no matter how busy their network is.

The Max Planck Institute tested the connections of 788 Comcast customers, 494 (62%) experienced a slowdown of BitTorrent traffic. Comcast is not alone though, well over 50% of the Cox subscribers that participated in the study were also throttled. The good news is, other ISPs don’t seem to restrict BitTorrent traffic on a wide scale.

Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, said in a response: “Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its customers from using popular applications — despite the FCC’s investigation and widespread public outrage. And worse, the harmful practice appears to be spreading through the marketplace.”

After being pressured by the press and thousands of upset customers, Comcast has announced that it will stop targeting BitTorrent transfers, (somewhere in the future) and promised to invest in its network capacity. For the time being the company will continue to throttle BitTorrent users.

We have asked the FCC for a response, but they had not yet responded at time of going to press.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-lied...ic-247-080515/





Cablevision Offer Baffles Wall Street (Again)
Tim Arango and Richard Pérez-Peña

Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Wall Street is wondering just what the Dolans are thinking.

Like many actions taken by the Dolans, the family that controls Cablevision Systems, based on Long Island, and a host of New York properties like Madison Square Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers, their recent bid to buy Newsday from the Tribune Company for $650 million has resulted in a collective head scratch.

That offer, once considered a long shot, was thrust to the front of the line over the weekend when the News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, pulled its bid, saying it would not raise its offer to compete with Cablevision.

That left Cablevision with the prevailing bid. An announcement of a deal could come as early as Monday morning, barring a last-minute complication, said a person involved with the talks who would not be named because they were confidential.

The Newsday bid had the backing of both Dolans — James L. Dolan, the chief executive, and his father, Charles F., the company founder — even if the two still have an uneasy relationship. Three years ago, father and son fought publicly over the fate of an expensive satellite project called Voom, a favored venture of the elder Mr. Dolan’s; when it lost millions, his son shut it down.

About two weeks ago, both Dolans flew to Chicago to meet with Sam Zell, the chief executive of Tribune, and on Sunday, Cablevision’s bankers and lawyers were in Chicago finishing the final deal points.

Both Dolans have attended meetings about Newsday, but the tension between the two has been obvious, said one person present who was granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the discussions. The family has been a lightning rod for public criticism — not least of all because of the soap opera that has been the Knicks — and the father is known to laugh off the words of critics, while the younger Mr. Dolan is more thin-skinned.

The Newsday bid has come amid a flurry of deal activity from Cablevision after an unsuccessful bid by the Dolan family last fall to take the company private in a $10.6 billion deal. Most analysts question the rationale for buying Newsday and had hoped Cablevision’s quest failed.

But when it comes to the Dolans, the only thing that is predictable about them is that they are unpredictable.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Craig E. Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Jimmy made the comment the other day that their shareholders pay him to grow the company. Maybe he believes that, I don’t know. Shareholders pay him to increase shareholder value. Even if you squint hard enough to justify these deals, it isn’t what shareholders signed up for.”

Last week, the company spent $496 million in stock and cash to acquire the Sundance Channel, a deal that was tepidly accepted by most investors and analysts.

The price, Mr. Moffett said, “was less bad than we expected.” Previously, the company flirted with taking a large stake in AEG Live, the concert promoter owned by the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz. That deal fell through, to the relief of many investors, who just wish the company would use its cash to buy back shares.

“It’s always a fun parlor game to figure out the Dolan family’s motivations,” said David C. Joyce, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Company.

Cablevision’s Newsday bid had a touch of audacity to it, coming as it did after offers from two dyed-in-the-ink newspapermen: Mr. Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns The New York Post, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News. Both Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Zuckerman bid $580 million, or $70 million less than Cablevision.

“If you look at The Post and Zuckerman’s bid, there are real synergies there,” Jill A. Greenthal, a senior adviser at the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, said last week at a forum on the media in New York City. “If you look at Cablevision’s bid, he really wants to own a Long Island newspaper, which I’m not sure I understand.”

The Dolans, as is their custom, refused to comment for this article. In the company’s quarterly earnings conference call last week, James Dolan shrugged off questions about Newsday. “We haven’t spoken about it before,” he said, “and we really aren’t going to speculate about rumors.”

This contrasted with the bravado of Mr. Murdoch in his own earnings call on Wednesday: “No, I don’t think Cablevision will prevail; just be patient for a couple days.”

An executive of another business who has worked closely with the Dolans said their interest in Newsday could not be entirely economic “because there’s not a business rationale to spend what they’re willing to spend.” This person spoke anonymously to avoid alienating the Dolans for future business.

But even if the prospective deal has an element of vanity to it, Cablevision could make the following argument. It has roughly three million cable subscribers in Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, while Newsday has about 300,000 subscribers. Cablevision’s customer relationships could help it sell more subscriptions, while overlapping ad sales forces at the two companies could result in cost savings. And Cablevision owns a 24-hour local news channel in Long Island, which could use the news gathering capacity of Newsday — and in theory cut costs.

“To be fair, those synergies probably do exist,” Mr. Moffett said. “But it ends there, and it’s far from sufficient that it would support owning Newsday at that price.”

The Cablevision empire is a strange dichotomy: one side is a cable company that is regarded as one of the best run in the country, while the other side includes Madison Square Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers — and all the publicity and drama that go with owning pro sports franchises in New York City.

Mr. Moffett, talking about the cable portion of Cablevision’s recent quarterly earnings — which make up about 75 percent of the company’s revenue — said, “It was another in the line of an amazing string of quarters.”

As a sign of the strength of the cable side, Mr. Moffett noted that Cablevision recently passed Verizon Communications as the largest provider of fixed-line phone service on Long Island.

“In four years, they went from not having phone service to being bigger than the phone company,” he said.

A cynical theory for the Dolans’ recent deal-making is making the rounds of Wall Street. Under this line of thinking, the family is so angered that shareholders killed the buyout that the Dolans now consider the company their own private fief.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Moffett said. “No one’s going to say, ‘I’m going to light up some of my billions just to spite shareholders.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/bu...blevision.html





Deutsche Telekom May Gain Control of Greek Company
Anthee Carassava

With its sales slipping and fixed-line customers defecting, Deutsche Telekom looked set this week to complete plans to buy a stake worth nearly 3 billion euros ($4.6 billion) in Greece’s former phone monopoly.

The deal would give Deutsche Telekom control of the Greek company’s management and access to Europe’s fastest-growing telecommunications market: the Balkans.

Details of the deal, including the final purchase price and scope of management control Deutsche Telekom will have over the company, OTE, remained unclear, but financial advisers worked over the weekend trying to complete the agreement ahead of its expected announcement sometime this week.

“We have had very constructive discussions,” said George Alogoskoufis, Greece’s finance minister. But he acknowledged that some issues he declined to describe were unsettled.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe’s biggest telephone company, has already agreed to buy a 19.9 percent stake from a private equity group, Marfin Investment Group Holdings, for 2.6 billion euros. It wants to buy an additional 3 percent from the Greek state and eventually increase its stake to control management and become OTE’s biggest shareholder.

The deal envisions that each company will initially control half the seats on the 10-member board of directors, with Deutsche Telekom appointing OTE’s chief executive and the Greek state appointing the chairman.

The company, according to Mr. Alogoskoufis, will retain its current name, and the government will have to be consulted on labor issues and future disposals for as long as it retains control of at least 5 percent of the company.

Deutsche Telekom has been seeking growth potential in new markets on the Continent. OTE, which operates fixed-line and mobile operations in the fast-growing Balkans, fits neatly into Deutsche Telekom’s designs.

“The two companies will complement each other in a big region,” said Anna Bischof, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom. “That’s what makes the deal so lucrative for us.”

The Greek state currently controls a 28.03 percent stake in OTE, part of which it wants to sell as the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar privatization program.

The government announced plans to seek a strategic investor in OTE two years ago. A deal with another European telecommunications operator fell through. A new agreement would have to be ratified by Parliament.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/bu...12telecom.html





EarthLink to Pull the Plug on Wi-Fi in Philadelphia
Deborah Yao

EarthLink Inc. is pulling the plug on its troubled wireless high-speed Internet network in Philadelphia, once touted as a national model.

EarthLink, which pinned its future on municipal Wi-Fi networks following rapid declines in its dial-up Internet access business, said Tuesday that it could not find a buyer for the $17 million network.

It also said talks to give the network to the city or a nonprofit organization had failed, even after offering to pay $1 million in cash and donate the Wi-Fi equipment.

City officials have said it would cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year to operate the network, which will shut down after June 12.

Also Tuesday, the company sued the city in U.S. District Court seeking to remove its Wi-Fi equipment from streetlights and cap its liability at $1 million.

''It's been an unfortunate situation,'' Earthlink Chief Executive Officer Rolla Huff told The Associated Press. ''It was a great idea a few years ago, ... but it's an idea that simply didn't make it.''

Huff said EarthLink will stay focused on serving people using dial-up Internet service and casual Internet surfers who want an economical plan.

Atlanta-based Earthlink plans to shutter a similar network in New Orleans on Saturday. The company has reached agreements with the cities of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Milpitas, Calif., which are taking over ownership of their networks. And it is in talks with Anaheim, Calif., over its network there, Huff said.

Huff said EarthLink's Wi-Fi assets are now part of the company's discontinued operations. He doesn't expect to take a charge against earnings for closing Philadelphia's network.

Four years ago, Philadelphia officials announced they would try to create one big citywide Wi-Fi hot spot to make high-speed Internet access the norm in poor neighborhoods.

The plan, announced with great fanfare, attracted attention from cities around the world and built Philadelphia's cachet among technophiles.

Under a contract finalized in early 2006 and approved by City Council two years ago, Earthlink agreed to charge $21.95 a month -- and half that to low-income households.

EarthLink paid the full cost of building the network and pledged to pay the city rent for use of light posts where Wi-Fi equipment would hang.

EarthLink's goal was to create a direct Internet pipeline into homes so it would not have to buy capacity from phone companies. But the technology proved unreliable and difficult to deploy.

EarthLink later said that its Wi-Fi business model had not panned out.

It also wasn't a big seller. The company has 5,942 subscribers in Philadelphia out of a projected minimum of 100,000, according to its lawsuit. EarthLink said it is losing up to $200,000 a month operating the network because subscriber fees covered less than half of costs.

Doug Oliver, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter, said EarthLink flip-flopped on whether it wanted Wi-Fi.

''Now they say, 'We don't want to do it. We're walking away and we're taking our marbles,''' he said. ''We are left to respond the best way we can, in the best interest of the city.''

Craig Settles, a technology business strategy consultant in Oakland, Calif., faulted EarthLink for rushing the recent negotiations with the city.

''EarthLink was putting a lot of pressure to be done and be gone, while the city has its things it has to deal with,'' he said. The talks were ''not as lengthy as they make it seem to be.''

Philadelphia officials recently said they want EarthLink to abide by the contract, but would rather not go to court to enforce it.

Councilman Frank Rizzo, an early opponent of the Wi-Fi network, said the network remains incomplete and EarthLink is vulnerable to litigation.

He also hasn't heard of anyone interested in buying EarthLink's network.

''Comcast and Verizon, they haven't even sniffed around,'' he said of the companies that provide cable and phone-based Internet access in Philadelphia.

The stock fell 14 cents to $9.10 in afternoon trading Tuesday.

------

AP Business Writer Rachel Metz in New York contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





Super-Fast Broadband Via the Sewer System
Pem Charnley

Bournemouth, UK, is often mocked by many of the British for the average age of its citizens. In short, a seaside resort where many go to die. Jack Dee once quipped that the shop windows are all fitted with bi-focals to allow passers-by to ascertain what lies within.

But the citizens, it seems, are having the last laugh as it has been reported this week that the town is to be the first in the UK to make use of the sewer system in a whole new way.

Rather than rely on the rather un-environmentally friendly process of digging up swathes of countryside and road to lay cables, H2O Networks Ltd have been called in for the gig.

As is so often the case, simple ideas seem to have manifest benefits and using sewer systems to lay fibre optic cables is a case in point.

As already stated, there is no need to dig up roads.

Conventional cables are normally laid a mere 45 cm below ground. Utilising the sewer systems means that the cables lie a full 10 metres below ground, decreasing the likelihood of damage and increasing security in potentially dangerous situations.

And of course, with no digging needed, with the sewers already in place, getting the fibre optics laid can be achieved far more quickly.

So, as many Britons languish behind with slow internet access, Bournemouth is casually reinventing itself as a rather fast, happening town, and in the not-too-distant future, will enjoy internet speeds approaching 100Mbps.

The UK has 360,000 miles worth of sewers. As Elfed Thomas, CEO of H2O Networks says:

“This is just the start of bringing next generation connectivity to the UK.”
http://ecoworldly.com/2008/05/11/sup...-sewer-system/





Hollywood Private Eye Convicted In Wiretap Trial

Self-proclaimed "private eye to the stars" Anthony Pellicano was found guilty on Thursday of racketeering and conspiracy for wiretapping foes of his high-powered Hollywood clients.

A Los Angeles federal jury convicted Pellicano on 76 of the 77 charges against him after deliberating two weeks. He was expected to spend the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced later this year.

The jury also delivered guilty verdicts on a former Los Angeles police officer. Verdicts against three other co-defendants were still being read.

Pellicano, 64, was charged with running a vast criminal scheme involving wiretapping telephones and bribing police and telephone company officials to run illegal checks on those causing trouble for his clients.

The trial exposed the seamy side of the movie industry with stars and studio executives testifying they hired Pellicano, or were spied on by him, during disputes ranging from cheating spouses and paternity lawsuits to show business contracts.

All of the celebrities testified they were unaware of any illegal activities by Pellicano, and none was charged.

Pellicano, who once worked for lawyers representing Tom Cruise, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, pleaded not guilty and acted as his own lawyer in the case.

The jury heard testimony from comics Garry Shandling and Chris Rock, Paramount Pictures chief executive Brad Grey and former Walt Disney Co president Michael Ovitz.

Ovitz, once one of the most powerful players in Hollywood, told the court he hired Pellicano to investigate journalists writing negative stories about him but said he never told the private detective to threaten anyone or use wiretapping.

Prosecutors allege it was Pellicano who in June 2002 left a dead fish with a rose in its mouth and a note saying "Stop" on the shattered car windshield of Los Angeles Times investigative journalist Anita Busch.

Busch's complaint to police triggered a raid on Pellicano's Hollywood office that eventually led to his trial.

(Editing by Xavier Briand)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...31394420080515





"Iron Man" Pounds Rivals At Movie Box Offices

Superhero movie "Iron Man" pounded the competition at North American box offices for the second straight weekend, landing at No. 1 with just over $50 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates on Sunday.

The movie about a comic book superhero in a high-tech suit of armor blasted past two new entries, family adventure "Speed Racer" and romantic comedy "What Happens in Vegas," which both posted about $20 million in ticket sales.

(Editing by Bill Trott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...55421420080511





Uncertain Futures for Bounty at Cannes

The French festival opens at a time when fewer companies are shopping for films, and few critics are reviewing new releases.
Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott

When the 61st Cannes Film Festival opens here on Wednesday, all the customary glamour, spectacle and high Gallic seriousness will be in place: the red carpet, the hatchet-faced guards, the shouting paparazzi, the promenading stars and bleary-eyed journalists. If the Americans look a little more anxious than usual, it’s not just the enfeebled dollar. Everyone may be expecting the bounty of good and even great films from around the world over the next 12 days, but the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.

For one thing, there are suddenly fewer companies shopping for movies. Last week Warner Brothers shut down two of its specialty divisions, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse, a move that followed the downsizing earlier this year of another of its subsidiaries, New Line Cinema. Warner Independent recently released Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” and David Gordon Green’s “Snow Angels,” neither of which found much of an audience. Its biggest successes had been Luc Jacquet’s “March of the Penguins” (2005) and George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005). Picturehouse’s recent releases include Olivier Dahan’s “Vie en Rose,” which won an Oscar for its star, Marion Cotillard, and Guillermo del Toro’s critically revered “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), which had its premiere at Cannes.

Studio specialty divisions are not the only ones affected. The number of film critics writing for traditional print outlets has thinned dramatically in the last year as media companies face shrinking revenues and uncertain futures. Whereas big-budget commercial releases can almost always buy a solid opening weekend at the box office with wall-to-wall publicity and advertising, smaller films depend greatly on the support of critics to find their audiences. That’s especially true these days, with so many films opening theatrically — more than 600 titles in 2007 — and competing for a seemingly shrinking audience.

“The current situation is a nightmare,” Gary Palmucci wrote in an e-mail message over the weekend. Mr. Palmucci is a top executive at Kino International, a small New York company whose titles include “Old Joy” (2006) and Mr. Haneke’s original German-language version of “Funny Games” (1997). “The Cuisinarting of accelerated production, release schedules, critics buckling under the strain of reviewing them all, the commensurate effect on attention spans and priorities of various generations of filmgoers — it all adds up to a major migraine for the small, specialized distributor.”

Even bigger companies seem to be approaching this year’s festival with a measure of caution. Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight Pictures (distributor of the box office hits “Juno” and “Little Miss Sunshine”), wrote that economic uncertainty “increases the pressure to make smart acquisition choices because the marketplace is very unforgiving at present.”

The challenges are particularly great for foreign-language films, though not only because American audiences resist subtitles. Howard Cohen, co-president of Roadside Attractions, a Los Angeles independent distribution company, observed that the entire independent film business is facing difficulties, using last year’s crop at Cannes as an example. Writing in an e-mail message, he said: “The English-language fare that is available for U.S. rights at Cannes with any box office hope, like ‘We Own the Night’ last year, is a) rare, and b) usually goes to the studios or their dependents. The very arty remainder in the actual festival (i.e., ‘Paranoid Park,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Factotum,’ ‘Japanese Story,’ ‘Jindabyne’ — the list is long) are of less interest since they don’t tend to perform.”

On a less gloomy note, Mr. Cohen also pointed out that several foreign-language films from last year’s festival, including “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “The Band’s Visit,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “Caramel,” which his company released in February, have all grossed (or are approaching) $1 million at the United States box office. (“The Diving Bell” has made more than $6 million domestically.)

This year some of the foreign-language films likely to attract interest, if not frenzied bidding, include new work from several Cannes mainstays. Among them are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian brothers who have twice won the Palme d’Or (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “L’Enfant” in 2005). Their new film, “Le Silence de Lorna,” is about an Albanian woman living in Belgium who gets mixed up with a mobster. Also returning to the main competition is the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose earlier Cannes favorites include “Distant” (2003) and “Climates” (2006). “Three Monkeys,” his new entry, involves the struggle of a family to stay together, a generic description for a film bound to be characteristically elusive and elegant. The Argentine writer and director Lucrecia Martel, one of the few women represented in competition, follows “The Holy Girl,” her 2004 tale of spiritual and sexual confusion, with “The Headless Woman,” about the aftermath of a car accident.

For many, these directors are the real stars of Cannes. In America their names may be met with blank stares, but here they walk up the same red carpet as some of the most prominent Hollywood filmmakers and celebrities. And this may be the ultimate measure of the festival’s integrity as well as a reminder of its noble traditions.

France is the country, after all, that helped establish Clint Eastwood as a major international artist decades ago. Mr. Eastwood, last here in 2003 with “Mystic River,” returns with “Changeling,” a period film about a missing child that stars Angelina Jolie. It is Cannes that made Steven Soderbergh into an instant auteur when his 1989 feature debut, “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” won the Palme d’Or. Mr. Soderbergh, who was here last year with “Ocean’s Thirteen,” a high-priced bagatelle and red-carpet bonanza, is back in competition with “Che,” a two-part biography of Che Guevara that runs more than four hours.

Just as anticipated is the rather shorter “Synecdoche, New York,” the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, best known for narratively kinked, intellectually venturesome screenplays like “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

“Synecdoche, New York,” which stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams in a Kaufmanesque tale about a theater director facing physical and metaphysical crises, does not have an American distributor. We can only wait and see what the anxious Americans will do.
http://nytimes.com/2008/05/14/movies/14cann.html?8dpc





Book Lifts Lid on Star of Eerie First Dracula Film
Dave Graham

The first screen portrayal of Dracula was so eerie, some critics asked whether the actor himself could be a vampire. But since his death, little has been done to resurrect Max Schreck's reputation -- until now.

Schreck is best remembered for playing the cadaverous vampire Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," the first, unauthorized cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula."

The rest of his career has been largely forgotten -- unjustly, in the view of German author Stefan Eickhoff, who has written what he says is the first biography of Schreck.

"Whoever hopes to discover a vampire will be disappointed, but they will find an actor of real skill and versatility," said Eickhoff. "Yet he himself remains somewhat shrouded in mystery."

"Nosferatu" failed to make its lead a star, but achieved such cult status that some film scholars speculated his name -- Schreck means "fear" or "fright" in German -- was a pseudonym.

In 1953, Greek-born critic Adonis Kyrou mischievously asked in his book "Le Surrealisme au Cinema" whether the actor was a vampire. The idea caught hold and later inspired a film.

Despite years of research, Eickhoff found there were virtually no anecdotes featuring Schreck, nor any references to him in the memoirs of the many people he had worked with.

Instead, Eickhoff's biography provides a detailed chronicle of the career of Schreck, a civil servant's son who appeared in around 800 stage and screen roles. Glimpses into the man behind the actor's mask remain few and far between.

Only in death does Schreck's character begin to come alive. The most revealing descriptions of the Berliner come from tributes paid to Schreck after he died suddenly in 1936.

Eickhoff's biography, "Max Schreck -- Gespenstertheater" (Ghost theatre) is due to be published later this year.

Loner

Contemporaries remembered Schreck, who was married but had no children, as a loyal, conscientious loner with an offbeat sense of humor and a talent for playing the grotesque.

One recalled how he lived in "a remote and strange world" and would spend hours walking through dense, dark forests.

"Nosferatu" helped propel Murnau to a brief but successful Hollywood career, but Schreck faded from the limelight.

The haunting film, which critics later saw as a metaphor for the collective trauma Germany suffered after defeat in World War One, changed the names of Bram Stoker's characters because the filmmakers failed to get permission to adapt his novel.

After the release, Stoker's widow sued the production company for breach of copyright, and won a court order to have all prints of the film destroyed. Since it had already been distributed worldwide, this ultimately proved impossible.

Over time, "Nosferatu" became seen internationally as a landmark of early German film and the horror genre -- while Schreck's other work has languished in relative obscurity.

Schreck died of heart failure aged 56, and was buried in an unmarked grave near Berlin, where he was born in 1879.

In the years that followed, his name has lived on in filmlore, thanks to the undying appeal of his most famous role.

In the 1992 sequel "Batman Returns," Christopher Walken plays a villain called Max Shreck, while in 2000, E. Elias Merhige's movie "Shadow of the Vampire" cast Willem Dafoe as Schreck the real-life bloodsucker hired to star in "Nosferatu."

Unlike Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, stars of later Dracula adaptations, Schreck never reprised the role and spent most of his subsequent film career in small, non-horror parts.

But as an actor, he was the equal of both, said Eickhoff.

"Their Draculas were refined creatures, whereas Schreck's was a more ancient, nightmarish vision," he said. "In a way, he resembled Lee a bit in that he tested himself in the most varied of roles. And funnily enough, both of them sang too."
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...83779720080509





Preserving Old Movies, At 40 Degrees
AP

While Scarlett O'Hara stayed cool at home, Dorothy Gale took a year out to go skipping down a digital yellow brick road in a Hollywood film lab.

The recently-reunited Technicolor duo could well be spending much of the rest of the millennium killing time with Lassie, Annie Oakley, Tarzan and a canned colony of heroes and villains from the silent-film era.

Thousands of pre-1951 movies captured on volatile nitrate film are kept in frigid, low-humidity vaults in a modest cinderblock building owned by the George Eastman House Museum on the piney outskirts of Rochester. Cold storage saves them from rotting away within a lifetime or, worse yet, burning up.

In most cases, these are original camera negatives from the first half-century of motion pictures, classics such as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind," the silent era's top-grossing "Big Parade," Lon Chaney in "The Phantom of the Opera" and Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 version of "The Ten Commandments."

While even the best-kept vintage reels are starting to buckle with age, a beloved movie's master negative is a sacred object that would cost untold millions to replace.

Much of that value lies in its power to produce the finest-quality copies, be it on 35mm film, Blu-ray DVD or some dazzling format that pops up in, say, the early 26th century.

"I really hope that 500 years from now people can still look at this because it's wonderful stuff," Deborah Stoiber, vault manager at Eastman's Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, said during an inspection of one of 12 dark vaults kept refrigerated year-round at 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent humidity.

On the shelves of this climate-controlled celluloid nursing home are prized Technicolor films such as "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Little Women"; silent gems starring Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo; a Lumiere brothers' chronicle of President McKinley's inauguration parade in 1897; and "Olympia," a Nazi propaganda feature on the 1936 Berlin Olympics shot by Adolf Hitler's filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.

The magical way in which a chilly, dry setting retards shrinking, fading or "nitric melt" inevitably raises concern about the long-term survival of other vulnerable pieces of the world's film heritage, from safety-based acetate stock adopted in the 1950s to television recordings to flimsy digital-video cassettes.

"Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored properly, rivals paper - and well-made paper - as a storage medium for image and sound," said Patrick Loughney, motion-picture curator at Eastman, the world's oldest museum of photography and film.

Its out-of-the-way bunker is one of just a handful of nitrate repositories run by major film archives around the country. It isn't listed in phone books or open to the public. Nor does the plain, single-story building draw the eye on a road where the occasional home is backed by woods or farmland.

On the shelves are 6,600 titles, or 22,836 reels - the oldest surviving negatives or prints dating to the dawn of moving pictures in 1893. The Rochester Institute of Technology's Image Permanence Institute estimates that climate control can preserve films still in pristine shape for another 800 to 900 years.

Considering how a nitrate fire blinded Alfredo, the projectionist in "Cinema Paradiso," each vault is rigged with sprinklers and blowout doors.

"Nitrate burns at 16,000-to-17,000 feet per second, dynamite at 24,000-to-25,000 feet," Loughney said. "It has that disturbing quality of producing its own oxygen, so you can't put it out with water. If properly stored and handled, then it's no more dangerous that any other kind of hazardous substance, like gasoline."

That knowledge came the hard way. Made primarily from sulfuric acid and cotton, nitrocellulose was blamed for disastrous warehouse and theater fires, chiefly in the two decades after Rochester-based Eastman Kodak Co. adapted it from flexible roll film it pioneered in 1889.

Nitrate film was heavily recycled for its high silver content. But the main reason some 90 percent of U.S. holdings has vanished is neglect. In severe cases of exposure to heat, damp and temperature swings, scenes become obscured by a psychedelic collage of bubbles, swirls and flashes of light.

Library of Congress vaults contain half of the estimated 300 million feet of nitrate film in U.S. storage. The Film & Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, is next with about 80 million feet.

Among Eastman's 28 million feet are DeMille's silent-film collection, an early Lumiere film featuring monks walking up a hill in Indochina in 1894 and Garbo in "Flesh and the Devil," made in 1926. Stoiber's personal favorite is "When Flowerland Awakens in Japan," a stenciled short film from 1912.

"It doesn't matter if it's 'Wizard of Oz' or an obscure newsreel that's incomplete and unidentified, they're all treated the same way - as a historic artifact," she said.

A California native who keeps a winter coat at the office, Stoiber gets through examining the entire collection every few years. One telltale sign a film is starting to decompose: "It smells like wet dog."

Gently unwinding the cyan negative of "Gone With the Wind" through her fingers - the Technicolor system required scenes to be recorded simultaneously in yellow, cyan and magenta - she pointed out an original splice in which Rhett - on his knees - proposes to Scarlett, whose second husband has just died.

"See this warping, how it curls a little?" Loughney interjected. "That's an early, early stage of deterioration" in a celebrated 69-year-old movie "not very well stored in the first 50 years of its life."

The chilled-vault solution began gaining traction among film custodians in the 1970s and storage centers have sprouted in the last 20 years, most recently at UCLA and the Library of Congress.

One unavoidable trade-off that shortens a popular film's life expectancy is when its corporate owner, encountering the latest technology, borrows it back for reformatting. "The Wizard of Oz" returned in March after undergoing a special-edition DVD makeover, just as "Gone With the Wind" did from 2002 to 2004.

Interest in nitrate films has ballooned of late "because in the age of video, the DVD and the Internet, a corporate liability that was expensive to store got converted back into a corporate asset," Loughney said.

Similarly, film preservation has entered a golden age, bolstered by private foundation funds that also flow toward repairing far less familiar or "orphan" movies. Enter Eastman's vaunted team of specialists, fueled since 1996 by newcomers trained at its pioneering film-preservation school.

One of Daniel Wagner's yearlong projects as a preservation officer at Eastman is using digital technology to remove dust and scratches and restore missing chunks of "Attack of the Indians," an 8-minute film shot in 1911 by Native American filmmaker James Youngdeer.

Only four of Youngdeer's 120 movies are known to survive, and this one - scanned back onto 35mm film - will someday show up in screenings around the world, starting at Eastman's Dryden Theater.

"When I started my career 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that films like this would never be recovered," Loughney said.

Finding old movies sometimes involves global detective work, with long-lost negatives turning up in places such as Russia and China where they didn't get thrown away so often. Old or new, however, many titles await expert intervention.

"We have a lot of films that won't be got to in my lifetime, but that's OK," Loughney said. "We keep them alive for another 50 years before somebody else raises the money. The most effective preservation strategy is cold storage because it buys you time."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/...n4085779.shtml





Hollywood Actors And Studios Clash Over Internet Clips

Getting Hollywood actors paid for their smallest performances -- video clips on the Internet -- is shaping up as one their biggest sticking points in stalemated contract negotiations with major studios.

Whether actors must give consent for snippets of their film and TV work to be displayed online, and how much they should earn for them, was the No. 1 disputed issue cited by the Screen Actors Guild after labor talks broke down last Tuesday.

Studios want to freely distribute YouTube-style clips of old TV shows and movies without seeking actors' permission and pay them a flat fee rather than bargain on a price with each performer individually.

The actors' union staunchly opposes that move.

"What they're asking us to do is erase 50 years of our customs and practice," SAG President Alan Rosenberg said in a recent interview.

The debate is the latest example of how the economics of traditional media are being upended by the growing popularity of video-sharing Web sites like YouTube, and how audiences' tastes and habits are being transformed in the process.

According to Internet marketing research firm comScore, 134 million Americans view online videos each month, with YouTube alone attracting 80 million unique visitors monthly.

The bulk of what they see consists of homemade footage and unauthorized clips of TV shows and movies, some of it blended into video "mash-ups" like the popular "Brokeback to the Future" parody trailer poking fun at the "Back to the Future" movies and the gay cowboy romance "Brokeback Mountain."

Old Rules, New Media

Studios and broadcast networks have long been free to use clips for promotional purposes -- as in traditional movie trailers and TV "promo" ads -- without paying the actors who appear in them anything extra.

But when reusing clips as entertainment, such as inserting outtakes or excerpts from one TV show into another, producers must get consent from every performer appearing in that clip and bargain with each separately on a rate of pay.

Under SAG contract rules originating 50 years ago, each performer in a clip must receive at least the "day-player" minimum of $759, even if the clip is just a few seconds long.

Those rules stood the test of time in the pre-digital era, but as companies seek to develop a "legitimate" market for clips to compete with the explosion of pirated footage on the Internet, studios say the old rules have become too onerous.

Instead, they are seeking a fixed payment to actors for re-use on the Internet in lieu of the bargaining process.

SAG says actors fear losing control over their images, especially when it comes to advertising and video "mash-ups."

"We're willing to help them build this new business, but they don't take our concerns seriously," Rosenberg said.

The studios argue that actors' work already is widely exploited -- without their consent or compensation -- through Internet piracy, and that they only stand to gain from clips licensed or distributed by the industry.

"The enormous administrative burden created by (existing) rules ... allows a clips black market to flourish on its own -- with or without us," the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the studios' negotiator, said last week.

The clips conflict is an issue unique to actors, one not addressed in the contracts settled this year with directors and striking screenwriters.

Labor talks between the studios and SAG are expected to resume at the end of this month. The existing contract covering 120,000 film and TV actors expires June 30.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Doina Chiacu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...33346620080512





HBO Film About 2000 Recount Draws Protests From Democrats
Edward Wyatt

Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore. They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election unfairly blames them for the Democrats’ failure to secure the White House.

Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, “Recount,” was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser.

William M. Daley, Mr. Gore’s campaign chairman, who helped to lead the Democratic recount team in Florida, said the film created misperceptions about the Gore team’s decision-making process. Mr. Gore, who oversaw the team from Washington, is largely absent from the film.

Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said.

The film, which has its premiere on May 25 on HBO, stars John Hurt as Mr. Christopher, Tom Wilkinson as Mr. Baker, Mitch Pileggi as Mr. Daley and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state. Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, the Gore lawyer who led the on-the-ground recount effort and through whose eyes much of the action is seen.

As many dramatizations do, “Recount” includes invented scenes and dialogue. Danny Strong, who wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that while those inventions condensed events, they reflect what actually happened. “The film tries to give the essence of the truth,” he said, and is based on his own research and interviews, as well as on books and newspaper and magazine articles documenting the recount effort.

Dramatizations of historical events, particularly political ones, have frequently given trouble to writers and producers trying to create compelling entertainment. In 2006 ABC made changes to “The Path to 9/11” after complaints from former Clinton administration officials that it portrayed them as less than vigilant in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden. CBS dropped plans to show “The Reagans,” a 2003 mini-series, after Republican and conservative groups protested its portrayal of President Reagan as forgetful and unsympathetic to AIDS victims. (The series was broadcast on Showtime.)

“Recount,” which has been screened for invited audiences in Washington and New York and will be shown in Florida this week, is inspiring similar protests.

“I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”

Neither Mr. Christopher nor Mr. Daley has seen the completed film, which has been sent to television reporters and critics for review. Mr. Daley said he requested and was given a draft of the script last year by HBO after filming had begun. Mr. Baker, who has seen the film, said he reviewed a draft of the script before production began and requested changes that were incorporated into the film.

Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears.

“I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”

The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war.

The portrait stands in stark contrast to Mr. Baker’s. This is largely because the film is edited to jump directly from scenes in which Mr. Baker prepares the Bush team for “a street fight,” giving directions about where to stage protests, to scenes where Mr. Christopher counsels caution and calls for an “orderly process” without protesters.

That characterization of Mr. Christopher has some support. Accounts published in The New York Times in 2000 characterized Mr. Christopher as urging caution and a disciplined approach to the recount.

Early reviews of “Recount” have been positive. Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.”

Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a nonviolent manner,” he said.

The film is Mr. Strong’s first produced screenplay. Also an actor who appeared for four seasons on “Gilmore Girls,” Mr. Strong said he focused his book research on four works by reporters who covered the 36 days between the election and the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount.

Mr. Strong gave several people depicted in the film the opportunity to review the script before filming began. Among them, he said, was Mr. Klain, who oversaw much of the day-to-day activity in Florida after Mr. Christopher returned to California for a family matter.

Mr. Klain said the film “gets the big things right,” but faults its portrait of Mr. Christopher. “He was as intense and vigorous an advocate for Vice President Gore as anyone there,” Mr. Klain said.

Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley were interviewed by the film’s creators only after filming began. Mr. Christopher said he was told that scenes involving his character had already been filmed; Mr. Strong denied that, saying the scenes were to be filmed that day.

Mr. Strong confirmed that Mr. Christopher offered to review the script but, he said, he decided not to send one. “I didn’t feel comfortable sending it to him because I didn’t feel that he was being totally candid in our interview,” Mr. Strong said. “He wasn’t as forthright with me as other people I’ve interviewed.”

Mr. Strong also said that the film did not intend to pin the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on anyone. In a later interview, though, he said Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley “wanted to concede from Day One.” He said that conclusion was supported by one of his primary sources, “Too Close to Call,” a book by Jeffrey Toobin, who served as a consultant on the film. In it Mr. Toobin argues that by the end of the first week, both Mr. Daley and Mr. Christopher were “making the case for surrender.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/ar...on/14reco.html





HBO Seen Selling Shows on Apple's iTunes: Sources
Kenneth Li

Time Warner Inc's HBO cable network is expected to start selling shows on Apple Inc's iTunes digital entertainment service, with flexible pricing, sources familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

Episodes of some HBO shows are likely to be sold at the standard price of $1.99 per episode or higher, these sources said, marking the first time Apple has agreed to selling television shows at different prices in the United States.

Although some global iTunes stores, including Japan, already sell songs at different prices, Apple has resisted offering music or television shows at different prices for the sake of simplicity for consumers.

The deal could be announced as early as tomorrow, one of the sources said.

But studio and music company executives have pushed for variable pricing, such as the ability to sell some content at lower prices and new releases at higher prices, which they believe would improve sales from its older catalogs.

Apple's pricing structure also was part of the reason why General Electric's NBC Universal decided last year to pull its shows from iTunes.

Since then, NBC has made some shows available for streaming on Apple's iPhone as well made some available for sale on iTunes's U.K. store.

For HBO -- home to hit series like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" -- the move marks the first time it has made its shows available for sale in electronic form. It is currently testing a broadband service for subscribers in Wisconsin, which streams episodes of shows shortly after their first airing.

HBO plans to make some of the shows available on iTunes when its sells them on DVD, after the initial airing of the entire season, one source said, preserving its relationship with subscribers and cable operators who pay HBO a fee for every new subscriber.

Other broadcast and cable networks make their shows available as early as the next day after broadcast.

At launch, HBO will likely offer mostly shows from its archives, one source said.

HBO declined comment. An Apple representative was not immediately reachable.

The news was first reported by Portfolio.com.

(Reporting by Kenneth Li; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...EN568620080512





In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time?
Brian Stelter

This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — will open with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers?

That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings. Each of the major broadcast networks, save for Fox, has seen its audience decline this season. The ratings for hit shows like “American Idol” and “CSI” have approached record lows.

Where some of last May’s 44 million viewers went is not a mystery, according to the networks. The writers’ strike this winter deflated the ratings and accelerated the flight of viewers to cable channels.

But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favored by advertisers are in decline.

The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now.

Brad Adgate, research director of the advertising agency Horizon Media, said that advertisers were paying attention to the changes.

“Part of the reason why advertisers buy television is because of its immediacy,” Mr. Adgate said. As more consumers time-shift their viewing, “there becomes less of a difference between ads in magazines and ads on television.”

Broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion upfront market attests, but its prime-time audience is gradually shrinking. Time-shifting has cushioned the declines, but in ways that are trickier to measure and pitch to marketers. With on-demand options available in more households than ever, networks have no choice but to adapt.

For starters, the prime-time schedules crafted by television programmers might become less important with each passing year. David Wolf, a senior executive with the consulting firm Accenture’s media and entertainment practice, said that “must-see TV” — the longtime slogan for of NBC’s Thursday night lineup — might become a television relic.

“The days of the ‘lineup’ are numbered,” Mr. Wolf said. In other words, with fewer viewers watching linear over-the-air television, networks can’t assume that a heavyweight lead-in like “Dancing With the Stars” will keep viewers watching all the way to the late local news, a pattern that has helped networks introduce new shows.

It may also mean that matching up programs becomes less important, or at least less potentially damaging. Last fall’s powerhouse Thursday at 9 p.m. match-up — ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” versus CBS’s “CSI” versus NBC’s “The Office” — was a scheduling move influenced by time-shifting. All three shows are popular among the young, upscale viewers who record and stream shows most often.

“I think that scheduling decision would have been a lot harder to make in a non-DVR world,” said a senior network executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about the issue. “It would have been more of a zero-sum game then.”

Many of the top-rated broadcast shows now have 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated. In urban areas, the gains are even greater. In Los Angeles, fully half the 18- to 49-year-old viewership for some shows, including “The Office” and another NBC sitcom, “30 Rock,” happens on a time-shifted basis.

Some viewers shift their viewing only slightly, overlapping shows scheduled later in the evening.

Of 20 shows time-shifted most often, only one (“Medium”) is on at 10 p.m. As appointment viewing wanes, hit franchises — ones that viewers will record or watch online each week — become even more important.

“As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said.

At a series of upfront presentations this week, the networks are likely to discuss the dizzying number of new ways to watch television. Last week, for example, the General Electric unit NBC started streaming some episodes to the Apple iPhone, and Microsoft added show downloads to its online store.

The availability of television shows online has become widespread surprisingly quickly. Some series are viewed millions of times a week via free, advertising-supported streaming Web sites like Hulu, Veoh and Fancast (and the network sites themselves). DVRs and online streams offer “a fairly large library of content available on an on-demand basis,” said Amy Banse of Comcast Interactive Media.

“The Hills,” the most popular show on Viacom’s MTV, is a leading example of the shift. Comparing television ratings with online streams is imprecise, but the audience for the series soars when on-demand options are factored in. Since the show returned on March 24, premiere episodes have averaged 3.7 million “live” viewers on Monday nights. Almost a million more viewers have watched each episode using DVRs. On the Internet, episodes and excerpts have been streamed another 32 million times. Some overlap undoubtedly exists, as some fans watch the episode both on TV and online. But every viewing is another advertising opportunity for MTV.

Streaming is particularly popular among younger viewers, who are able to sample shows they would otherwise miss. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the CW decided last month to stop streaming the teen drama “Gossip Girl” on its Web site and steer viewers to the television broadcast in an effort to bolster its over-the-air ratings. Stephanie Savage, an executive producer, said she worried that the move would alienate viewers. After all, each episode put online had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times.

“There were a lot of question marks,” she said.

But executives at the CW, a joint venture between a Time Warner unit and the CBS Corporation, were pleased with the results when the ratings rose slightly in late April, Ms. Savage noted, and the episodes are still for sale for $1.99 each at Apple’s iTunes store, where they regularly rank No. 1.

Cable operators offer yet another on-demand option. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the country’s two largest cable providers, are increasingly promoting their video-on-demand platforms, which are mostly associated with movies and premium programming. One-third of United States households now have on-demand capabilities, and Comcast said its platform recorded more than 300 million video views in March, up 50 percent over the previous year.

But of all the time-shifting technologies, digital video recorders are the most popular. One in four American households now uses a digital video recorder to time-shift shows and skip commercials, up from about 15 percent last May. The broadcast networks experienced a 60 percent rise in recorded viewing this season. Last year, in recognition of the growth of DVRs, many television networks converted to a new ratings metric for buying and selling ad time that includes shows watched within three days of the broadcast.

For networks, the DVR is a friend and an enemy: “the classic frenemy,” said Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC.

While they enable viewers to watch more hours of television, they hurt the rate of commercial recognition, as about half of all commercials are skipped in time-shifting modes.

“Honestly, if I could wish away the DVR, I would,” Mr. Wurtzel added. “But I can’t. It’s growing.”

Time Warner is trying a half-measure: letting viewers start an episode anytime during the hour of its broadcast. “I’d like to see this get to the point where we have so much content that consumers can actually plan their lives around knowing that they don’t have to plan their lives,” said Peter C. Stern, the executive vice president for product management at Time Warner Cable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/bu...12ratings.html





What is Blocking Vista Users from Recording NBC Shows?
Greg Sandoval

Some users of Windows Vista Media Center say they were blocked from recording the NBC Universal TV shows American Gladiator and Medium on Monday night.

"Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator prohibit recording of this program," the error message read.

At Thegreenbutton.com a message board popular with DVR enthusiasts, those affected tried to figure out what was causing the block. When this kind of thing happens, people immediately question whether TV and cable networks are trying to thwart time-shifting technologies and force people to watch commercials again. Even though it's rarely done, content providers do have the ability to communicate with some time-shifting hardware to block the recording of shows or broadcasts.

"This is indicative of why the current DRM schemes are flawed," said Marcel Good, an IT director in Northern California and one of the people prevented from recording the NBC shows. "It affects people who intend to legally consume content. They have no intention of stealing the content. The people who want to steal already have ways around DRM."

On Tuesday, the cause for the block of the NBC Universal shows was still unclear. Representatives from both the network and Microsoft said they would need time to look into the matter.

Until they do, here are the few available clues. Most of those who posted at Thegreenbutton were Vista users recording digital cable with ATI cablecard tuners.

A TiVo spokeswoman said the DVR company received no customer complaints about being blocked from recording.

This isn't the first time a Vista Media Center user has complained about being barred from recording. A person identified as Alex from Canada wrote 14 months ago at Thegreenbutton: "Often a small number of my shows fail to record, and in the Windows event log I see errors about 'copy protection set by the broadcaster.'"

The shows Alex tried to record came from the Toronto-based W Network. Alex was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit and when attempting to record the show Friends: Trial by Jury received this message in Media Center's event logs: "Friends was not recorded. Recording of this content is prohibited by the content provider."

Jessica Zahn, a program manager in Microsoft's Media Center TV group, who according to Thegreenbutton has volunteered to answer questions at the site, apparently responded to Alex (a Microsoft spokeswoman said she could not confirm the message came from Zahn). The person who responded under the username JessZahn said the problem had either one of two causes.

"The broadcaster is setting the 'Copy Never' flag and Media Center's behavior is expected or Media Center is misinterpreting data it receives," and someone at Microsoft would need to study the stream of the show to know for sure.

What remains unclear, however, is whether those who posted complaints at Thegreenbutton shared the same cable provider.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-994...l?tag=nefd.top





Older DVR Owners Are More Likely to Skip All Ads
Mike Vorhaus

Since upfront season is upon us, let's take a look at people's attitudes toward ad skipping.

Approximately 30% of online Americans, ages 12 to 64, own or subscribe to a TiVo or a DVR service from their cable or satellite company. And of course, we assume that everyone with one of those devices is skipping all their TV ads all the time. But that isn't true.

When asked about their ad-skipping tendencies, people report quite a bit of diversity in the percentage of ads they skip. One surprising finding? Older Americans are more likely to skip ads all of the time. When asked whether they skip ads 100% of the time, 52% of men ages 55 to 64 said they do. By comparison, only 21% of males ages 12 to 17 report skipping ads 100% of the time.

Many people might assume that young men and women are the heaviest ad skippers, given that this behavior requires the use of a newer technology. Perhaps one explanation of the results is that the older men are very focused on their TV viewing, while the younger people may well be multitasking while watching TV: texting, instant messaging, surfing the web and playing a game (or two). In that case, who needs ad skipping? They just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just "background music" for the younger demos.
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=126951





Disney to Create Lab to Test Ads for ABC, ESPN
Ryan Nakashima

Will people remember three-second video ads on their mobile phones? Do high-definition commercials on big screens get people's hearts racing more than other pitches? Is the sports ticker crawl distracting or does it add value to the 30-second TV spot?

A laboratory in Austin, Texas, to be founded by The Walt Disney Co. by the end of the year aims to answer these questions and more by testing the biometric reactions of a pool of up to 4,000 people to advertising that takes advantage of the latest technology.

In a controlled living room setting, scientists will measure heart rate and skin conductivity and track the gaze of participants who are exposed to new ad models over the Internet, mobile devices and TV screens.

The first results are expected by early 2009.

The media giant, which owns ABC and ESPN, is seeking to learn whether consumers are more engaged by new and interactive ads and ultimately if the company can charge more for them.

Disney planned to announce the formation of the lab to advertisers attending its upfront sales pitch for the coming TV season in New York on Tuesday.

''One of the reasons for engaging in an initiative like this is to determine, once and for all, if there is additional value,'' Artie Bulgrin, senior vice president of research and sales development for ESPN, told The Associated Press.

The sports media juggernaut says subscribers to its premium high-definition channels were economically better off and considers them more attractive to advertisers. Now, it will clinically test whether HD ads have more impact, Bulgrin said.

The lab will be headed by Duane Varan, executive director of the Interactive Television Research Institute at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

Varan said biometric testing helps cut to the heart of audience reactions to visual ads, which can sometimes be missed by focus group surveys.

''TV is not a rational medium, it's an emotional medium,'' Varan said. ''We can get to a deeper layer of what's motivating people by seeing how they behave, observing them in experimental settings and seeing how their body reacts.''

The initiative comes as media companies are struggling to recover from the 100-day Hollywood writers strike that depleted scripted shows and hurt network ratings.

It also affirmed the rapid growth of Internet advertising.

Disney chief executive Robert Iger said in March that the company expected to reap $1 billion in annual online revenue by September, including content downloads, online game subscriptions and other e-commerce.

Video advertisements on the ABC.com full episode player already have clickable portions and some come with games attached.

''We want to drive developments in technology, advertising and serving the consumer, not react to them,'' said George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports.
http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_9236497





Bloomberg L.P. Fills Post, Suggesting Shift to News
Tim Arango

The news business may be in the doldrums, but the competition over business news could be heating up.

Bloomberg L.P., the financial data and news giant founded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, said Monday that it had hired Norman Pearlstine, the former top editor of Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, to the new position of chief content officer.

The move suggests that Bloomberg, whose fortunes have been buoyed by the selling of its hugely profitable data terminals to brokerage firms and investment banks, plans to expand the journalism side of its business.

Bloomberg’s sprawling operation, which includes 2,300 editorial employees, a television outfit and a radio station, has largely been used as a tool for the Bloomberg terminals. But the growth in terminal sales has slowed with the economy and as Wall Street suffers from the fallout of the mortgage crisis.

Adding Mr. Pearlstine to its masthead will polish Bloomberg News’ journalistic credentials at a time when the company is gearing up for new competition on almost all fronts. Last May, the Thomson Corporation bought Reuters for $17 billion to form the world’s largest financial data company. And last fall, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation completed its $5 billion takeover of Dow Jones & Company, owner of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Dow Jones Newswires.

Also last fall, News Corporation introduced Fox Business News, a cable channel in direct competition with Bloomberg TV and CNBC, which is owned by NBC Universal.

In an interview, Mr. Pearlstine stressed that his immediate concern would be developing existing Bloomberg properties rather than looking to acquire new ones.

“I would say the specifics of the job are very much a work in progress,” he said. “The initial focus is going to be on some of the multimedia products.”

Mr. Pearlstine just had his own stint as a deal maker for the private equity firm Carlyle Group, working for the past 20 months as adviser on media and telecommunications acquisitions. But the company did not complete any deals in those areas during his time there.

Recently, Newsweek and The New York Post reported that Mayor Bloomberg might be considering an acquisition of The New York Times Company, but the mayor denied the rumor and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company’s chairman, said it was not for sale.

Monday morning, Mr. Pearlstine; Matthew A. Winkler, Bloomberg’s editor in chief; and Daniel L. Doctoroff, the president of Bloomberg, assembled in an auditorium at the company’s New York City headquarters to address employees. The takeaway from the gathering, according to an employee who was present but was granted anonymity to speak about a closed-door company meeting, was that the news organization would have a brighter spotlight on it.

“People are really excited about this,” this person said. “It means a bigger presence for us.”

On the surface, a union of Mr. Pearlstine and Bloomberg L.P. may seem a mismatch in personality and culture. Bloomberg is known as being systematic and bureaucratic with a relentless focus on efficiency; Mr. Pearlstine, a highly visible member of the New York media scene, comes from the clubby world of Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, where personal relationships count for more.

While Time Inc. still retains vestiges of a heritage of collegiality and informality, at Bloomberg, Mr. Pearlstine will find another level of egalitarianism: there are no offices, only open desks. He will have a desk in the newsroom as well as on the executive floor.

Until Monday, Bloomberg required its editors and reporters to conduct a daily “autopsy” in which they would scour newspapers and analyze why a particular paper chose, say, to run a Reuters dispatch over a Bloomberg article.

A video message set to the Beatles song “Revolution” that Mr. Winkler sent to the staff Monday shows the editor tearing a copy of The New York Times’ business section to symbolize the elimination of the daily autopsy.

The vast majority of Bloomberg’s revenue comes from selling data terminals, which includes its news service. Its revenue in 2007 was $5.4 billion, of which an estimated $4.7 billion came from selling financial data, according to Inside Market Data, a trade publication.

“They’re not fundamentally a journalistic organization,” said Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Journal and former colleague of Mr. Pearlstine. “It’s about the machine. The journalism promotes the machine.”

But that journalism is becoming a fast-growing machine itself. It has 2,300 editorial employees around the world, compared with 1,500 in 2005 and 1,200 in 2001.

Mr. Steiger predicted Mr. Pearlstine would be able to “harness” some of the journalistic talent at Bloomberg. Mr. Winkler, he said, “has an enormous amount of talent that he’s stockpiled. Norm can direct that, he can energize that.”

Mr. Pearlstine and Mr. Winkler have known each other for more than 25 years; in the early 1980s, Mr. Pearlstine hired Mr. Winkler to work for him at The Journal’s European edition.

Mr. Winkler said growth in terminal sales was slowing this year, mainly because of layoffs at investment banks and other financial institutions. The company had 273,000 subscribers last year, up from 243,000 in 2006. Each subscriber pays a fee of about $1,500 a month. Mr. Winkler also said advertising at Bloomberg Markets, the company’s magazine, and at Bloomberg TV was up on the year.

“The credo around here is, if you stop growing, you die,” Mr. Winkler said.

Bloomberg’s media properties have cautiously stepped out from under the terminal’s shadow recently. For the first time, Bloomberg Markets was honored this year as a finalist for a National Magazine Award, for a series on the subprime mortgage crisis.

Bloomberg TV, which has quietly toiled in the shadow of CNBC for about 14 years, recently revamped its look to appeal to a wider audience. While its viewership is assumed to be low, it does not participate in Nielsen ratings. Bloomberg executives view television as an essential platform.

“You cannot be in the news business today without being in television,” Mr. Winkler said.

The issue of how the company might continue to grow was raised at the gathering Monday when one of the employees in the audience asked whether a potential deal was in the works.

Mr. Doctoroff, denying that any deal was in the works, told the gathering, “We do have greater aspirations, and in what form those aspirations will be fulfilled, we’re going to all have to sit and figure that out,” according to another employee who also agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was meant to be confidential.

Yet Mr. Winkler and Mr. Pearlstine seemed to distance themselves from the long-held company mantra that they are “builders not buyers” — meaning the company would seek growth organically rather than through acquisitions. Mr. Pearlstine noted Mr. Doctoroff’s résumé — he worked at Lehman Brothers and Oak Hill Capital, a private equity firm — and suggested that his expertise in deal making might be put to use.

As Mayor Bloomberg’s term in office approaches its end in 2009, there is no shortage of speculation as to what his future holds. He retains a 68 percent stake in Bloomberg — a portion that Fortune valued last year at close to $13 billion. Merrill Lynch is the other major shareholder, with a 20 percent stake.

The mayor is made aware of most major decisions at the company, but a spokesman for the mayor declined Monday to comment. Mr. Pearlstine said his “substantive conversations” were with Mr. Winkler and Mr. Doctoroff, and that he did not feel comfortable identifying who else he spoke with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/bu...bloomberg.html





CBS to Pay $1.8 Billion for CNET Networks
A.R. Sorkin

CBS said Thursday it would buy CNET Networks for $1.8 billion in cash, marking its biggest online acquisition since hiring Quincy Smith, a former media and technology investment banker, to lead its interactive unit in late 2006. The deal came as CNET, whose assets include a popular technology-news Web site, was trying to fend off a group of activist investors seeking to take control of its board of directors.

A year and a half ago, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, sought to reassure Wall Street that his efforts to expand CBS’s Web footprint would not include expensive acquisitions.

“We are not going to spend $1.6 billion on YouTube,” he told The New York Times, referring to the video-sharing site that Google had recently bought. “We are looking for the next YouTube and Quincy knows all the players.”

Mr. Moonves now appears to have decided that CBS needs to spend at least that much to build out its Internet presence and make it attractive to advertisers.

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks,” he said in a press release Thursday. “Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest-growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives.”

CBS said Thursday it would pay $11.50 for each CNET share, a substantial 45 percent premium to where the stock closed on Wednesday.

During the dot-com boom, shares of CNET reached nearly $80, but the company’s fortunes have fallen since then, and it recently announced layoffs.

A group of investors including the hedge-fund firm Jana Partners, unhappy with the company’s recent performance and management, have been hoping to take control by getting their allies elected to the CNET board.

CBS has picked up smaller Web properties in the last year or so, including Last.fm, a music Web site for which it paid $280 million, according to regulatory filings. It also acquired Wallstrip, an irreverent financial Web program, and DotSpotter, a celebrity gossip site.

But at $1.8 billion, Thursday’s deal for CNET is the biggest by far in its recent Internet expansion.

Mr. Smith, who worked at investment-banking boutique Allen & Company before joining CBS in November 2006, said in a press release that CNET had a “near-perfect category symmetry” with the content at CBS Interactive, which includes CBSNews.com and CBSSports.com.

“Together we will have a terrific opportunity to not only grow our established businesses, but to build new attractive verticals of content as well,” Mr. Smith said.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rks/index.html





Report: Ars Technica Bought by Wired Digital

The Malden-based company that produces the Ars Technica blog has been acquired by Condé Nast Inc. for a reported $25 million, according to an online report.

Ars Technica, which is a blog for personal computer enthusiasts, was co-founded in 1998 by Ken "Caesar" Fisher, who is now a doctoral candidate in religion at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, according to his online biography.

Fisher did not immediately return requests for comment.

The company's co-founder is Chicago-based Jon Stokes. The eight-employee company is expected to be integrated into San Francisco-based Wired Digital, a division of CondéNet and the online arm of Condé Nast, according to the TechCrunch website.

No financial details were reported by the website.

Condé Nast also bought in late 2006 Somerville-based Reddit.com, an online news aggregator that was started in June 2005 by two University of Virginia graduates with a $12,000 investment from micro venture capital firm Y Combinator.
http://www.bizjournals.com/masshight...2/daily36.html





Historic Senate Vote Rejects FCC's Rules

In a near-unanimous voice vote tonight, the Senate passed a "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the Federal Communications Commission's latest attempt to dismantle longstanding media ownership limits.

Last December, the FCC voted to remove the "newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership" ban that prohibits one company from owning a broadcast station and the major daily newspaper in the same market. The resolution of disapproval (Senate Joint Resolution 28), introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), would nullify the FCC's new rules if passed by Congress and signed by the president. The House version of the resolution was introduced by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in March.

Today, the Bush administration issued a statement opposing the resolution and threatening to veto it. The statement called the FCC's new rules the product of "extensive public comment and consultation" but failed to mention that only 1 percent of public comments supported the administration's position.

Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, which coordinates the StopBigMedia.com Coalition, made the following statement:

"Today's historic Senate vote is a resounding victory for the vast majority of Americans who oppose media consolidation. We applaud the bipartisan leadership of Senators Dorgan and Snowe for acting in the public interest. But to stop Big Media from polluting our local airwaves with more junk journalism and propaganda, we need the House to move this legislation forward quickly.

"At this watershed moment, public outrage against Big Media has reached a breaking point. The Bush administration's threats to undercut this bipartisan effort in Congress show how out of touch this president is with the will of the American people. But we’re not going to stand idly by and let the White House green light Big Media's expansion. The great pendulum of political change is swinging away from corrosive consolidation and toward better media."
http://www.freepress.net/node/39877





In Their TV Tastes, the Rich Are Different

Many of their favorite shows earn modest ratings
Kevin Downey

The very rich are quite different from the rest of us in many ways, and one of them is what they watch on television. They like shows that most others don’t.

Programs enjoyed by the very rich include ABC’s “Saturday Night Football” and “What About Brian” as well as NBC’s “Friday Night” and “30 Rock.”

All four rank in the top 15 among affluent viewers measured on median income, but none ranks higher than 80th among the general household population.

That’s according to a report from Magna Global, using analysis of Nielsen Media Research ratings to rank programs according to their median household income among adults 25-54.

While a couple of the shows matched with the general viewing public’s favorites, like No. 1 “Desperate Housewives,” most were quite different.

That skew in preferences is also seen in the networks favored by rich viewers. Though NBC has slid from first to fourth place in 18-49s over the past few years, it ranks No. 2 in median household income behind only ABC, and it has seven of the top 20 shows in median income.

“Affluent programs are important to advertisers because [their viewers] have more money to spend,” says Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis at Magna. “But obviously, they are more important to some advertisers than others.”

ABC’s audience has a median income of $64,000, based on adults 25-54 in fourth quarter, compared to NBC’s $60,000, CBS’s $59,000, Fox’s $53,000 and the CW’s $45,000.

Among middling performers with affluent viewers propping up NBC is “The Office,” a comedy that so far this season ranks only No. 28 among all shows in the 18-49 demographic. But it is tied with ABC’s “Housewives” at No. 1 in affluence, with its viewers having a median income of $70,000.

More telling, “Scrubs” ranks only No. 51 among 18-49s but No. 6 in affluence with a median of $68,000, tied with ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Lost” and NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which is partly why it is remarkably in its sixth season despite never having been more than a modest performer for NBC.

It has consistently had a high median income in the regular reports issued by Magna over the years.

Shows like “Scrubs” probably give the creators of a few first-season shows on NBC and other networks some hope of survival.

NBC Thursday sitcom “Rock,” for instance, is far from a sure bet for renewal. For the season it’s tied at No. 85 in the 18-49 demographic, but its viewers have a median income of $65,000, enough to be tied at No. 11 in affluence with several other shows.

Also doing well in affluence but not necessarily overall ratings is ABC’s “Brian,” a weak drama stuck at No. 82 in the ratings so far this season but, like “30 Rock,” tied at No. 11 in affluence.

Of course, many factors go into whether or not a show makes it another season, notably its overall rating and its ability to retain viewers from lead-in programs. Recent shows with affluent viewers like Fox’s “The O.C.,” ABC’s “Six Degrees” and CBS’s “The Class” are either already gone or in their final throes.

Sternberg says programs like “Studio 60” aren’t likely to see a second season despite their viewers’ affluence.

“If [‘Studio 60’] had held onto its initial audience, I would say yes,” he says. “But since it has been declining I have to say it’s borderline at best.”
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/art...icle_10573.asp





Five Social Networking Sites Of The Wealthy
Nicola Ruiz

In the real world, the average Joe watches the Red Sox-Yankees game from the bleachers while the affluent mingle in the corporate boxes. Everyday Eddie deals with parking and public restrooms during his day at the beach, yet the mega-rich drop their keys with the valet and settle into a reserved lounge chair at a private club.

Online, the waters are parting too.

Though it once seemed that the Web was the last place where status didn't matter, the elite are now looking for a comfortable place to mingle with like-minded people. They're leaving Facebook and LinkedIn to the riffraff.

"It's taken a while for wealthy consumers to start using networking sites, mostly due to privacy issues and concerns," says Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, a New York-based research company that focuses on high-net-worth individuals.

"But now they want to leverage all those social-networking advantages. Before, they had the opportunity to network at annual international meetings, but now they can connect to like-minded people in Dubai or anywhere in the world in an instant."

According to a January survey by the Luxury Institute, wealthy-consumer participation in online social networks is on the rise. Of the 805 people surveyed (each with a minimum gross annual income of $150,000) in 2008, 60% of respondents said they participate in a social network, up from 27% in 2007.

Participation levels for the wealthy in leading social networks were 16% for MySpace, 13% for LinkedIn and 11% for Facebook. On average, a wealthy person has membership in 2.8 social networks with an average of 110 connections. Unfortunately, according to Pedraza, too many invites, "pokes" and unrequited connections, coupled with the leaks in privacy, make exclusive sites more alluring.

A new breed of social site
The wealthy are instead heading to a new crop of ultra-exclusive social networks that have blossomed over the past few years, such as aSmallWorld, which launched in 2004. This year also saw the launch of Diamond Lounge and Squa.re.

Some networks come with strict invite-only policies and a rigorous application process based on education, job title, connections and lots of virtual velvet rope. Others, such as Squa.re and Quintessentially, are more lenient, requiring simply an invite from any existing member.

ASmallWorld, by far the most well-known and well-attended site for digital A-listers, was launched in March 2004 by former Lehman Brothers banker Erik Wachtmeister. Born into a diplomat family (his father was the Swedish ambassador to the U.S.), Wachtmeister started networking at an early age.

"I realized there was an existing community of people who are connected by three degrees of separation: They stay at the same resorts when they travel, frequent the same restaurants and have similar lifestyles. They needed a platform to share and receive information--it was a huge untapped opportunity," Wachtmeister says.

ASmallWorld has grown to include 320,000 members globally (Facebook boasts 40 million, by contrast) with 65% of the members in the U.K., Italy, Germany and France and 20% in the U.S. The rest are sprinkled throughout the Middle East and Asia. Wachtmeister's site has been even called "MySpace for millionaires" by the Wall Street Journal. But Wachtmeister maintains that aSmallWorld is a niche community that doesn't allow self-promotion or aggressive networking.

Once invited to join the network (only selected members with a sturdy Rolodex are given invite powers), a member can browse the market guide (a high-end Craigslist where there are currently 500 member-listed yachts for sale), surf the luxury-travel guide and global-event guide, or participate in forum discussions--one of the site's most active and popular functions.

"Anyone with good lawyers in Phuket, Thailand?" a member recently asked on aSmallWorld's forum. He continues: "I'm building a sustainable-apartment development and need some U.K.-Thai contracts written up for an investor."

Another writes that she's "looking for recommendations for the U.K.'s and/or Europe's top cosmetic doctors to perform liposuction or the fat-dissolving laser treatment."

Participating in the forums and access to the site is free, supported by advertisers such as Cartier, Moet & Chandon and Patek Philippe--all lured on board by the guarantee of targeting a luxury-obsessed audience.

Striking a balance
Others are jumping on the bandwagon too, but finding the balance between staying exclusive and making a profit is a big challenge.

Case in point: The newly launched DiamondLounge.com. Significantly smaller, with only 150 members, the company has flip-flopped between fee-based and free, and has shifted its focus from business networking and social site to dating and fun, "like an online club," says owner Arya Marafie. He says a slow and controlled growth in these early days is critical to the site's long-term success.

"We spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that we selected the right club members, because these are the people who will invite the next group," says Marafie, adding that most of those hand-selected people are CEOs, lawyers, directors or doctors. But Marafie admits that this mix will most likely change as the site switches to a party-like environment.

"Being wealthy won't automatically get you in the door," says Marafie, "You have to be interesting and bring something to the table." He says the average age of his members is 35 to 40, significantly older than the MySpace or Facebook demographic. However, according to a study by comScore Media Metrix, 68% of the 55 million MySpace users and 50% of Facebook's 15 million users are now 25 and older.

Next month, the Luxury Institute is also launching a network catering to the affluent. For an annual fee of $250, LuxuryRatings.com will offer access to member ratings of several different types of service providers, from wealth advisers to art dealers to yacht brokers. The fee eliminates the need for online advertising, which, Pedraza says, would be a conflict of interest.

Will it work?
"People are unhappy with the free-for-all at LinkedIn and Facebook and MySpace. They are looking for a specialized group to mingle with, and paying a fee weeds out the ones who don't belong," says Chris Curtis, director of Web Business Ownership LLC, a Delaware-based Internet consulting company.

"Exclusive sites are becoming more prevalent because not everyone is willing to network with people they don't know," she adds. "It provides a more formal type of introduction within a closed circle. [The networks] have staying power, but only if they listen to the needs of the society that they are creating."

But do the rich and successful have time to be searching the Web and schmoozing? "If it's worth their time, yes," says Pedraza. "I know people who are building a yacht, and peer-to-peer insight about where to go and who to work with is the sweet spot."

Getting to that spot, however, is the challenge. If you want to be inside these clubs, aim for one of the more lenient ones that require an easy-to-find invite where all members have invite powers. Choose carefully, though, because just like in high school, once everyone can join the cool club, it's no longer cool. The alternative is to pay the yearly $250 dues to join a site such as LuxuryRatings.com.

But if you're looking for an invite from the more exclusive groups, you simply have to know someone who matters.

"If you don't know anyone in the group, maybe it's not quite right for you," says Wachtmeister.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/02/soc...0502style.html





OLEDs, e-Paper Encroach on LCDs
Yoichiro Hata

LCDs and plasma screens may be the dominant choice for TVs today, and LCDs the displays of choice for almost every other application, but a pair of upstart technologies is vying to replace them. Organic LEDs, which have already made inroads in the portable display market, are threatening to move into the living room as a new TV display. Electronic paper, meanwhile, is carving out a share in portable devices, consumer electronics and electronic signs that demand particularly low power consumption and long battery life.

At the recent Display 2008 show here, E Ink, Fujitsu and Bridgestone independently exhibited advances of their e-paper displays, which are characteristically thin, light in weight and power stingy. For its part, Sony exhibited a prototype of a 0.3-mm-thick OLED display—more commonly known as an OEL (organic electroluminescent) display in Asia— which is a reduced-profile version of the 1.4-mm OLED the company designed into its OLED TV monitor, the XEL-1, launched in December. The company also demonstrated a 0.2-mm prototype, the thinnest OLED yet.

In addition, Sony showed a prototype 27-inch OLED TV monitor capable of displaying high-definition video images in a 1,920 x 1,080-pixel format.

Handheld devices, not TV sets, are the target for e-paper, most versions of which are bistable; that is, even if power is turned off, they retain the contents of a screen without the need for electrical refresh. A reflective display that requires neither the backlight of a transmissive LCD nor the light emission mechanisms of an OLED, e-paper is suitable for applications that demand a display with especially low power consumption.

Thinness is not the only strength of an OLED display, whose screen size can be as large as 30 inches on the diagonal. OLEDs offer many other features that suit them for TV receivers, including color reproduction that exceeds the NTSC specification and a quick response time, of several microseconds. Peak brightness is more than 1,000 candelas/meter2, and the contrast ratio is more than 10,000:1.

Samsung is already jumping on the OLED bandwagon. "We will produce 40- or 42-inch TVs with organic-electroluminescence displays by 2010," said Lee Woo Jong, a vice president who heads up marketing for Samsung SDI's mobile-display division. Samsung will start volume production of 14-inch OLED panels for notebook computers by the end of this year.

Chi Mei EL, a manufacturer of display panels based in Taiwan, has its eye on OLEDs too. The company will begin commercial production of 12.1-inch organic-EL displays for notebooks in the first half of 2009, with a plan to get into volume production for 32-inch panels for TV receivers in the latter half of next year, said vice president Park Sung Soo.

Despite the advances, problems remain in applying organic-EL technology to larger panels. OLED panels are produced by compiling thin-film transistors (TFTs) on a glass substrate, followed by a series of organic layers for injecting, transmitting and/or recombining electrons and holes. In producing large panels, it has proved impossible to reuse the same manufacturing techniques originally developed for making TFTs or emission layers for small OLED panels.

For instance, for its first OLED TV, the 11-inch XEL-1, Sony used low-temperature polysilicon technology as the TFT base and small-molecule material for its organic film. But for the company's 27-inch OLED prototype, Sony engineers used an advanced "microcrystal" silicon TFT technology, tapping into a technique the company calls laser-induced pattern-wise sublimation.

Yoshi Ishibashi, chief of Sony's processing technology department, explained that there are three production process methods for TFTs: laser annealing, direct deposition and solid-phase growth. "We think that there are no better choices than using laser annealing in the silicon crystallization process for large-size panels," said Ishibashi.

Although the electron mobility of microcrystal silicon is somewhat inferior to that of polycrystalline silicon, it has another important benefit, Ishibashi said: When it comes to manufacturing large substrates, microcrystal silicon's high in-plane uniformity is a major advantage.

The industry has yet to find the optimal solution for manufacturing organic films. In Sony's XEL-1, a metal mask is placed immediately beneath the substrate, while organic materials vaporized from the melting pot are vapor-deposited onto it at RGB pixel location. But for substrates beyond a certain size, the metal mask will become distorted by its own weight or will emit heat from the melting pot, thus losing positional accuracy and decreasing aperture ratio and definition.

So Sony's engineering team sought out another technique for its 27-inch prototype. "The [laser-annealing] technique is also attractive for combining white organic EL with color filters," Ishibashi said. Using a color filter can achieve ultrahigh density, because there is no mask required to pattern discrete red, green and blue subpixels. That lowers the cost of production, although the color purity decreases and power consumption rises.

The number of bad pixels won't change, regardless of panel size. "So we need to get rid of the causes of the bad pixel as best we can," said Takatoshi Tsujimura, senior director of the OLED product division at Kodak. "To realize this, the combined use of white organic EL and a color filter is the best approach."

According to Tsujimura, the luminescence efficiency improves twofold by installing white pixels to the conventional triad of RGB subpixels. "It's because no color filters are used for white pixels," he said. "Thus, nothing prevents white light from coming through 100 percent. This is how high efficiency is achieved."

Organic-EL panels are finding their way into applications other than displays, including solid-state lighting and solar cells. Kaneka, a diversified chemical manufacturer, last month said it would begin joint research with Osaka University on an OLED lighting device and an organic thin-film solar cell.

OLED's thinness, lightness and surface-emitting properties make it useful for illumination purposes. Thinness and light weight are particular advantages in automotive and aircraft applications.

"Organic ELs can already exhibit 50 lumens per watt; 100 lumens/W is expected to be realized in 2010," said Gidas Sorin, CEO of German company Novaled. In contrast, the highest efficiency of a light bulb is approximately 20 lumens/W.

If OLED technology was one cornerstone of the Display 2008 expo here, then e-paper was the other. Several companies demonstrated advances in this technology, which is already being used in cell phones, e-book readers, signage, labels and cell phones.

To manufacture its electrophoretic-display (EPD) e-paper, pioneer E Ink produces a "sheet" that comprises microencapsulated particles in a transparent liquid; a common electrode; and a release layer, which display makers or OEMs remove to laminate the sheet to a backplane. Inside the capsules are positively charged white and negatively charged black particles.

E Ink's "sheet" technology has already been adopted in more than 10 million Motorola cell phones. The same technology is also used in Kindle, the portable book reader Amazon.com launched last year in the U.S. market, as well as seven other e-book readers now in production.

E Ink also exhibited an e-paper device that accommodates a stylus pen input. It is built around a control IC—the S1D13521B, jointly developed by Seiko Epson and E Ink—along with E Ink's AM300 development kit and a built-in electromagnetic induction-type tablet made by Wacom.

Wacom specifically developed a very thin, light panel: At 0.35 mm and 40 grams, it's half as thick as and half the weight of its predecessor. To trim the weight, Wacom engineers used PET film in place of a glass substrate.

"We expect five to six companies to launch products based on the AM300 development kit this summer," said Ryosuke Kuwata, vice president of E Ink.

Fujitsu, meanwhile, showed off e-paper technology with a multicolor cholesteric LCD. The panel, which does not use color filters, is constructed by combining three stacked display layers—one each for red, green and blue. The company exhibited an 8-inch, full-color PDA display panel capable of showing 1,024 x 768 pixels.

For its part, Bridgestone is working on a proprietary EPD technology called Quick Response Liquid Powder Display. QR-LPD is based on "electro-liquid powder," which straddles liquids and conventional powdered solids. The electro-liquid powder, which flows like a particulate suspension, is extremely sensitive to electricity, thus ensuring fast responsiveness: Response time is as fast as 0.2 ms. The powder comprises positively charged black particles and negatively charged white ones.

Bridgestone exhibited an A3-size full-color panel (4,096 colors) using a color filter. The company said it has also developed a foldable display.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=207601457





Academic Says Gadgets Threaten Internet's Future
Peter Griffiths

The rise of gadgets like the iPhone, Blackberry and Xbox threatens to unravel the decades of innovation that helped to build the Internet, a leading academic has warned in a new book.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, "sterile" boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology.

Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don't lend themselves to the sort of tinkering and collaboration that leads to technological advances, he says.

The mix of gadgets, over-regulation and Internet security fears could destroy the old system where mainstream technology could be "influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field".

"I don't want to see a two-tier world where only the experts can survive ... and the non-experts are stuck between something they don't understand and something that limits them," Zittrain told Reuters in an interview.

Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, says the Internet's simple, open architecture is key to its enormous success and also its flaws.

Amateur enthusiasts have come up with scores of new ideas by tinkering with the Internet on home computers. However, hackers have caused huge disruption by exploiting its loose structure.

Zittrain contrasts one of the first mass-produced home computers, the Apple II from the 1970s, with Apple's latest gadget, the iPhone. He says the iPhone is typical of what he calls "tethered appliances".

"They are appliances in that they are easy to use, while not easy to tinker with," he writes. "They are tethered because it is easy to for their vendors to change them from afar, long after the devices have left warehouses and showrooms."

They are a world away from the "generative Internet", a term Zittrain uses to describe the open, creative, innovative approach that helped build the Internet.

The rise of viruses and fraud has also led to tighter controls on PCs, particularly those in schools, universities, offices and public places, Zittrain says.

People are often blocked from experimenting with shared computers and their input is severely limited.

There is still time to save the Internet, he believes, although the answer lies in social rather than technological changes.

Society should resist more regulation and place its trust in the Internet's users. The success of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written and edited by its readers, shows how self-governance can work.

Internet users should see themselves as "netizens", active participants in the online world rather than passive consumers.

"The community itself exercises a form of self-restraint and policing," he said. "You see it in Britain when you try to jump a queue, you see it on Wikipedia when a page is vandalised.

"The challenge to the technologists is to build technologies to let people of good faith help without having to devote their lives to it."

* The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, futureoftheinternet.org , is published by Penguin.

(Editing by Steve Addison)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...75110620080508





FMS: Spam-Proof Anonymous Message Boards on Freenet
Ian Clarke

A few weeks ago I started hearing quite a bit of buzz about a new tool called the Freenet Messaging System or FMS. I went to its website within Freenet (we call them “freesites”), and downloaded it. Normally downloading and running code from an anonymous system isn’t a good idea, but Freenet makes it easy to digitally sign content, and the author, while anonymous, seems pretty honorable.

If you are familiar with Usenet, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph. Usenet is a discussion system that was very popular in the early days of the Internet. To use Usenet you need a NNTP client, which are a bit like email clients, and then you can post to newsgroups, forums on particular topics. NNTP is the protocol used to access Usenet, just as HTTP is the protocol used to access the web, and SMTP is the protocol used to send emails. Newsgroups have names like alt.humor.puns. These days the easiest way to use Usenet is probably through Google Groups, which, among other things, provides a web-based interface to Usenet. A number of dedicated NNTP clients still exist, one of the better ones is Thunderbird, which is primarily an email client created by the Mozilla Foundation, the creators of the Firefox web browser.

FMS evokes some nostalgia because it basically makes Freenet look like Usenet, allowing users to read messages posted to online forums, and also to post their own messages. The major difference is that because it is Freenet, everyone can remain anonymous. Currently FMS has about 30 boards on topics ranging from science, to religion, to discussion of Freenet and FMS itself. Here is what it looks like in Thunderbird:

FMS is not the first such messaging system in Freenet, another popular one is called Frost. Unfortunately, over the past few months Frost has been plagued by a familiar problem on the Internet, spamming. Unlike the Internet, Frost’s spammers are not motivated by financial gain, rather their goal seems to be pure mischief. Whatever their motivation, they’ve rendered Frost next to useless. Freenet’s anonymity makes it next to impossible to prevent spam using the same techniques that are conventionally employed on the Internet.

So how does FMS address this problem? It’s pretty cool, but first I need to give a quick crash course in how Freenet works.

Freenet is basically a globally distributed “Map” or “Dictionary”. You can insert data under “keys”, and then someone else, given the appropriate key, can retrieve that data. Freenet keys are somewhat analogous to URLs on the world wide web, except unlike URLs, they don’t point to the physical location of the data.

Freenet has a few different types of keys, which impose various constraints on the data that can be inserted under them. The type of key used by FMS is called a “Subspace-Signed Key” or SSK. The SSK itself contains a cryptographic public key, and any data inserted under a SSK must be signed by the corresponding private key. An SSK is used much like a file-system directory from which anyone can read, but only the “owner” of the SSK can write. Websites in Freenet are typically inserted under an SSK so only the author can update them.

Typically, email is “push” - senders push email to your email inbox. FMS takes the opposite approach, to receive messages from people you must “pull” it from their outbox. Because user’s outboxes are SSKs, all of a user’s messages are automatically signed and their integrity is checked by Freenet. With FMS, receiving messages from a particular is a voluntary act - and the only result of spamming is to flood your own outbox.

So how do users decide whom they should pull from? FMS creates a “web of trust” between users, where each user indicates how much they trust other users they’ve communicated with. If person A trusts person B, and person B trusts person C, then person A can trust person C - and so on. Here is a representation of the current web of trust in FMS:

If a user proves to be untrustworthy, by spamming for example, then users can change their trust rating for that user, and this will propagate through the trust web, so that others quickly stop pulling messages from the spammer’s outbox.

Ok, so how do you join the web of trust in the first place? FMS employs a clever mechanism based on the concept of “thinkcash” or CAPTCHAs. Every FMS user inserts these CAPTCHA tests, which can then be solved by a new user in order of that person to become minimally trusted by the existing user. Basically, you need to prove you are human. This is what this looks like in FMS:

FMS is not without its shortcomings. It is likely that the necessity to pull from the outbox of every user will only scale to a limited point, however FMS is being actively developed, and it is likely that these problems can be overcome in due course.

If you would like to try FMS, go and install Freenet, then click on the link to the Freenet Message System that will appear on the front page, you can download it from there. Pre-built versions of FMS are provided for Windows and Linux, however if you use a Mac you’ll need to compile it yourself (although this was pretty painless once I discovered I needed to add a -D USE_BUNDLED_SQLITE=ON to the cmake command).
http://locut.us/blog/2008/05/11/fms-...ds-on-freenet/





MySpace Wins $230 Million Anti-Spam Judgment
Anick Jesdanun

A notorious "Spam King" and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever.

The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp. (NWS) (NWS)-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.

"Anybody who's been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say, 'Wow, I better not go there,'" MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "Spammers don't want to be prosecuted. They are there to make money. It's our job to send a message to stop them."

U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins in Los Angeles ruled in MySpace's favor Monday after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines failed to show up for a court hearing.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc. (TWX) (TWX)'s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.

"MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site," Nigam said in a statement. "We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members."

Nigam told the AP that Wallace and Rines created their own MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords through "phishing" scams.

They then e-mailed other MySpace members, he said, "asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. When you (got) there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones."

MySpace said the pair sent more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members, many made to look like they were coming from trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy. Under the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted "willfully and knowingly."

In court papers, MySpace said the activities resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs, along with complaints from hundreds of users. The company also said some of the outside Web sites contained adult material, potentially harming teens who use MySpace.

The Los Angeles-based company described the amount of the award as a "landmark."

John Levine, a board member for the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, said that past spam judgments he knows of have been in the tens of millions of dollars.

There was no telephone listing for Wallace in the Las Vegas area, to which he moved in 2004 to pursue night club promotion work. Service was disconnected for two listed numbers for Rines in Stratham, N.H., his last known address; a third number in Stratham was unlisted.

Collins awarded the amounts sought by MySpace: $157.4 million jointly against Rines and Wallace and an additional $63.4 million against Rines under CAN-SPAM - plus $1.5 million more against the pair under California's anti-phishing law and $4.7 million in attorneys fees. MySpace said it was entitled to another $3 million from Rines and Wallace under a different section of CAN-SPAM.

Collins also issued injunctions barring similar activities in the future.

MySpace has another anti-spam case pending against a high-profile defendant, Scott Richter, who it claims gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.

MySpace said the junk messages from Wallace and Rines came after Richter's.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/200...D90L6QC00.html





Data Centers, Power Consumption, and Global Warming - Will the Web Crash?
Tyler Shears

So you’ve heard the hype on going green, wouldn’t you like to know how the internet fits into the big picture of saving energy? Every time you search Google you could power an 11-watt light bulb for an hour… Think that’s bad? Wait until you put that into perspective including sites like YouTube and every other bandwidth hog on the web…

So you now know one single Google search query consumes 2 to 8 watt-hours of energy. To put this on a scale, Google processes petabytes of information on a daily basis while indexing the web and doing other various things. If we average this out to 4.5 watt hours per query, and consider Google is easily handling 400 million queries a day based on comScore metrics, then we can see 1,800,000,000 (1.8 billion) watt-hours of energy being used daily just for basic search queries. The Google Complex itself uses the amount of power as 3,333 California homes.

If you’d dare to look at the bandwidth from a site like YouTube (making up over 10% of total internet bandwidth usage) and put into perspective how much power is required to simply run a search query versus serving up video content, the issue should become a bit more clear. Myspace, Facebook and the other networks sites of the like are also bandwidth hogs sharing robust amounts of digital media at high speeds.

And I digress…

How are we going to reduce the overall power consumption of the internet?

How are we going to reduce the overall heat consumption?

And do we really need to…

When a big company like Intel or Google refers to “greening” or “going green” with their server technologies the first step is finding a renewable or more efficient power source. Generally wind-power and biomass come to mind, but we’re going to need more than that to power the web as you can already see.

Right now there’s strong efforts by Intel and Google to start going green with their data center technology. Is this enough? I’m convinced that if the overall public keeps the pressure on going green and saving our environment that our technology will match pace and hopefully save the day… but in a less ideal world we’ve got bigger problems.

The amount of heat produced by these data centers is another intimidating issue we have to face… With the currently technology available we’re forced to use AC units and massive cooling centers to keep all of the servers at around 70 degrees or less. The hot air gets pumped out of the centers and usually outside, although some companies are finally using this excess heat to power office buildings and heat up pools in surrounding areas. Again, this is a good step and recycling is always ideal… but what about all this heat?

Shouldn’t the focus be on creating less heat rather than reusing the heat more effectively? A great deal of power used at these data centers is used in the cooling process alone, sometimes even more in cooling than actually running the servers. There’s a debate as to whether to use forced air cooling or liquid cooling, but either way you’re using a ton of power to cool off your servers. While it seems the big chip manufacturers are focusing on this, it becomes less pressing of an issue when you just find better ways to use the heat… but this is also a problem.

What About Global Warming?

How is that going to effect the cooling of these servers? Imagine how much harder it is to cool your house in the middle of the summer as it is, what if everything was a few degrees warmer? Well multiply that feeling time 10,000 and that’s the kind of issues data centers face. If we don’t set the pace now and start making our top priority in reducing overall heat production in data centers, we may end up with data centers that can’t cool themselves. No data centers, no internet.

What do you think will happen?
http://www.gimmiethescoop.com/data-c...-the-web-crash





This, From That
John Schwartz

The muffins are rolling.

The muffin cars, electric-powered vehicles built to resemble cupcakes, scoot around the open spaces of the San Mateo Event Center & Expo, a sprawling fairground about 20 miles south of San Francisco and, on this day, a million miles from normal.

Just inside the gates of the third annual Maker Faire, a converted fire engine belches an occasional explosive flare that sends a chest-pounding Pfoomp! throughout the fairground, startling bystanders over and over again. That contraption was made by folks from the Crucible, an industrial arts studio based in Oakland where people can take lessons in welding, blacksmithing and many, many other ways to play with heat and flame.

Nearby is the Swarm, a set of 30-inch cut-aluminum orbs that roll around on the grass, self-powered but guided by remote control. Children are playing keep-away with them.

But they are definitely not playing tag with Justin Gray’s fire sculptures around the corner. It could have something to do with the fact that they look like menacing tanks on clanking treads. Or it could be the way Robot Libby, the one that emits a horrifying turbine whine from a metallic ball bobbing on a heavy iron chain, spits gouts of multicolored flame. (As Mr. Gray manipulates the remote control, the machine mixes powders into the flame to change its color: strontium for red, copper for bluish green, steel powder for a fireworks effect.) Each burst sends a heat wave that rocks the onlookers back a step or two.

At first blush, then, this festival, sponsored by Make magazine, is a gathering place of pyromaniacs and noise junkies, the multiply pierced and the extensively tattooed. But wander awhile, and the showy surface gives way to a wondrous thing: the gathering of folks from all walks of life who blend science, technology, craft and art to make things both goofy and grand.

“We are grabbing technology, ripping the back off of it and reaching our hands in where we are not supposed to be,” says Shannon O’Hare, who has brought his three-story Victorian mansion on wheels, one of the most prominent examples of the anachronistic style known as steampunk, to the Faire. He is holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale.

“We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” says Mr. O’Hare, who goes by Major Catastrophe and works as a fabricator for the stage and businesses. “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.” Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s,” Mr. O’Hare says. “ Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”

The makers, as they call themselves, are a varied bunch. Cris Benton, the former chairman of the architecture department at the University of California, Berkeley, stood at the Faire, patiently explaining how he and his like-minded friends take aerial photographs by hoisting cameras on kites, a cunning combination of high tech and old crafts.

In the darkened building next door, Terry Schalk, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, fires up an enormous, arc-throwing Tesla coil in hopes of getting youngsters more interested in science.

“This is a real geek fest,” says Professor Schalk, a high-energy physicist in both senses of the phrase.

“If I was a kid, I’d wet my pants here,” he joked.

Some 65,000 people came to see the sprawling display of inventiveness and potentially hazardous fun. Many of them read Make magazine and its sister publication, Craft, and go to Web sites like Instructables.com that encourage people to take on projects and share what they learn. (Recent online projects have shown people how to convert a novelty French-fry telephone into a carrying case for an iPod; how to make a computer-powered coffee warmer from an old Intel Pentium chip plugged into a P.C.’s U.S.B. port; and how parents and children can build a small vibrating robot together.)

Armchair MacGyvers visit Web sites like BoingBoing.net that lovingly chronicle the more audacious projects here and at events like the anarchic Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. These overlapping, even incestuous, communities form the “maker movement” of do-it-yourself enlightenment. In an age where just about every human activity, from shopping to sex, can be performed in the virtual world, they choose to get their hands dirty.

This is part of the Bay Area’s high-tech, adamantly nonconformist culture, steeped in engineering and art and innovation in garages that incubate billionaires and crowded with guys who make late-night runs to the pharmacy for bandages and burn cream. But it is not just a California thing. Make has fans around the world, with a paid circulation of 100,000; its Web site gets 2.5 million visitors each month. The publisher has started a second Faire in Austin, Tex., with hopes of further expansion.

The founders of the magazine and the Faire are tugging on a thread that makes its way across America’s gearhead culture, zigzagging back through the Homebrew Computer Club, which helped produce the first personal computers, and Roy Doty’s how-to cartoons in Popular Mechanics magazine. But it goes farther still, back to those two bicycle mechanics, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and even back to those tinkerers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, whose hand-designed folding chairs are an elegant marvel.

What the makers are doing, then — mixing and matching technologies and hacking and tinkering — is encoded within the nation’s DNA.

“It’s deeply American,” said Xeni Jardin, an editor of BoingBoing. As for the family-friendly setting, she said, “It’s like Burning Man without all the icky hippie elements, without the pants-free guy on a bike.”

Edward Tenner, an author of works on the ways that technology affects society, said tinkering had waxed and waned but never disappeared in American culture. A great deal of mechanical know-how, he said, came from people raised on farms, where they had to fix their own equipment. But these days, he said, “this improvisation is starting to flourish in a mainly suburban and perhaps urban milieu.”

As important as tinkering has been to the nation’s past, it could become a much bigger deal before long, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. A new report from the institute argues that the makers could force enormous changes in the ways that goods and services are designed and manufactured. The renewed urge to tinker, along with flexible manufacturing technologies, could shift production from big companies and stores to communities of makers and consumers, Mr. Pescovitz said.

“It’s about having a deeper connection with the stuff around you, and through that with the people around you,” he said. That is why his research group took the slogan from the pins given out at the Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair — “I have seen the future” — and edited it for the report to “I am making the future.”

“If you want something done right, do it yourself. That’s really what it’s about,” Mr. Pescovitz said.

It is, then, a new realm of hacking, in the fine original meaning of the term among techies. That now-debased term, as the author Steven Levy put it in his book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club in the 1960s in the context of solutions to problems that showed “innovation, style and technical virtuosity.”

Hacking moved from model trains to software. But now it is returning to its roots in the physical world, as hobbyists hack their computers, their cars and just about anything else they can pry open, even if it voids the warranty.

Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, the company that publishes Make and Craft, said he felt echoes of the urge to transform tools and toys that he saw with the original personal-computer hobbyists in the 1970s and with the open-source software movement more recently. “We’ve ridden this wave before,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “We see hackers first, and then we see entrepreneurs and then we see it become part of the mainstream. And we’re still in that early hacker-enthusiast phase, but I’m really convinced that there is a manufacturing revolution on its way as part of what we’re seeing here.”

Which brings us back to the muffin cars. Keith Johnson and his daughter Karydis zip around the fairground in his cupcake-shaped runabout, which conceals a tiny electric all-terrain vehicle and the handlebars from a Hello Kitty bicycle. The “frosting” is sprinkled with oversize Prozac capsules. His head, and his baby’s, poke up out of a hole in the frosting.

His is one of more than a dozen cupcakes at the Faire. A founder of the cupcake makers group, Greg Solberg, is an engineer with Tesla Motors, a company that makes high-performance electric cars. Mr. Johnson is a specialist in preserving digital materials at Stanford University. The community of cupcake-car makers once rigged each car with speakers tied into an FM radio transmission system so they could all play the same music, whether the soundtrack from Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

When you see the members of the Acme Muffineering team rolling through their formations, however, it is difficult to suppress a single word trying to bubble up through the mists of consciousness: Shriners.

The Bay Area, Mr. Johnson notes, has a community of people whose left brains and right brains are on speaking terms, and who like to make things — as he put it, “to combine the skills that they use in their professions with their creativity to create whimsical and wonderful and sometimes useful things.”

The transport may be silly, Mr. Johnson acknowledges, but the theme is green. “We like to encourage people to use their imaginations and build energy-efficient and fun cars,” he said.

Those who came to the show did not necessarily take such a philosophical approach. Matt Miller, a postdoctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was back for his second Faire because “I like fire.” He said he subscribed to Make because he didn’t have a lot of time but lived “vicariously through others’ hobbies.”

Roxanne Stafford, a designer who visited the Faire without knowing much about it, said she was “a little overwhelmed” by the size, the variety and the noise.

She added, however, that she found an underlying message in it all. With the ghastly images from the Iraq war and the uses of technology that usually make the news, it is easy to conclude that people simply make things and use technology “to destroy one another,” she said.

“Things like Maker Faire give people hope,” she said. “Creativity is the best expression of humanity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/sc...make.html?8dpc





Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web
Noam Cohen

Imagine what it might have been like to be Dr. Kleenex. You invent a modern miracle, the cheap paper handkerchief, and suddenly you become the person blamed for America’s disposable culture, praised for a more convenient life, or both.

There never was a Dr. Kleenex, though — the product was created by a team of researchers at Kimberly-Clark laboratories in the 1920s. But there is a real Craig in Craigslist, and lately he is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh-most-popular Web site in the United States.

It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.

An ardently no-frills, ad-free, user-sensitive site, Craigslist has, by the estimate of its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, generated more than 600 million free classified listings. (Though nearly all listings remain free, Craigslist has added modest fees for job listings and real estate brokers in certain big cities, and from those fees the company generates $80 million to $100 million in annual revenue. It has a staff of 25, including Mr. Newmark.)

In the United States and beyond, Craigslist is digging even deeper into the classified-ad markets. Once, an announcement that Craigslist was expanding meant adding cities like Miami, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. These days, it means smaller places like Janesville, Wis., (population: about 60,000) and Farmington, N.M., (roughly 38,000) as well as Cebu in the Philippines and, by Mr. Newmark’s request, a site for Ramallah on the West Bank.

In the face of this expansion, Mr. Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism — not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth.”

Sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco a month ago, explaining his plans in neat mathematical style, Mr. Newmark presented an unassuming public presence. He was perched on an ordinary seat, a six-year-old Prius parked nearby, a Kangol beret on his balding head.

He used to spend two-thirds of his time working on customer service issues (including notifying an Internet service provider about a scammer on the site), he said, and the remaining third on “founder issues,” a catchall term he uses for his public-spirited work. That division, he said, would now be half and half.

But before he can extricate himself from customer issues, Mr. Newmark will have to resolve some of the growing business and legal complexities that surround Craigslist, a laid-back operation that is bumping into tough-minded competitors.

A Delaware lawsuit accuses him and Mr. Buckmaster of boardroom chicanery, an assertion they emphatically deny. Their accuser is the online giant eBay, which became a minority shareholder in 2004, with a stake of roughly 28 percent.

And while officials at Craigslist, including Mr. Newmark, maintain that for many years he has not had a significant leadership role there, the eBay lawsuit describes Mr. Newmark, in addition to being a large shareholder, as chairman (the board has two members; it had been three).

The suit was set in motion by eBay’s decision to introduce a rival online-classified site, Kijiji, in the United States last year. Kijiji is already the market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Taiwan.

EBay’s complaint contends that after the Kijiji move, Mr. Newmark and Mr. Buckmaster plotted in secret to dilute eBay’s influence in the company, including an effort to deprive it of its board seat. The lawsuit asks the court to reverse those provisions.
Craigslist is expected to respond to the complaint this month, but on its blog it offered an assessment: “Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflicted shareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating online classifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.”

The phrase “maximizing its own profits” broadly outlines the fight between the two companies.

Despite its success, Craigslist prides itself on its grass-roots instincts and user-based content — including harnessing its users to identify and block bad actors on the site. Even broad strategic decisions, such as which areas to expand into, are described as reflecting user requests made at online forums at the site.

As the complaint indicated, last year Mr. Buckmaster wrote to Meg Whitman, then the chief executive of eBay, saying, “We are no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder, and wish to explore options for our repurchase, or for otherwise finding a new home for these shares.”

In an e-mail message of its own, eBay stressed that the two companies would remain joined. “We would obviously prefer to see this resolved without litigation,” eBay wrote. “With that said, we will only accept a resolution that preserves our rights and the full value of our investment in Craigslist. We will continue to act openly and in good faith as a minority shareholder.”

The competition between the companies is also heating up outside court. EBay has recently sent e-mail messages to its users promoting Kijiji, and Craigslist in the last few weeks has added 120 cities, half of them overseas, where Kijiji has been dominant.
The Web sites’ expansion comes as newspapers are experiencing a steep downturn in classified advertising, magnified by the badly depressed housing market and weaker overall economy. Print classified advertising declined 16 percent last year, to $14.2 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America, below the 1996 level, even without adjusting for inflation.

In this straitened market, Craigslist becomes shorthand for the threat that online advertising outlets are seen as posing to newspapers.

Mr. Buckmaster responds, saying that Craigslist has no sales force and has not sought to win over newspaper advertisers, in contrast to companies like the job-listing site Monster. “That to me is a direct attack on newspapers,” he said. “We put a service out there.”

“There are bigger things that have been more problematic for newspapers,” he added, including circulation losses and basic mismanagement. “Newspapers have an enormous amount of debt. That is not something that can be laid at our doorstep.”

Clayton Frink is the publisher of The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., where Craigslist arrived in 2005. The newspaper late last month stopped printing daily, adopting a Web strategy and printing weekly.

“They have ads we would have had once upon a time,” he said, but added that his staff did not consider it “No. 1 or No. 2 or 3 of Web sites that hurt our business.” The bigger enemy, he said, is the changing marketplace, noting that large employers used to buy a page and a half for job listings and “now they put in a small ad saying to see their Web site.”

“What Craigslist does well is build a community and a feel of a community,” he said. “Building communities is going to be critical for any online product, whether a newspaper or not.”

Also, Craigslist no longer sneaks up on local newspapers. Sammy Lopez, publisher of The Daily Times in Farmington, said: “We’ve been kind of watching them. You can get on Craigslist and see if people have been requesting a site. I asked someone to look at that four or five months ago, and saw that they had.”

He said the knowledge that Craigslist would be arriving someday led the paper to improve its online presentation of classified ads, creating more categories and clear entry points. He noted that a vibrant classified-ad section was both a revenue source and a reason that people buy the paper and visit the Web site.

Mr. Newmark is a believer in the power of technology to improve life — whether in the blogging he does for Mr. Obama, a visit he recently made to Israel where he argued in favor of microloans and technological innovation to build up the Palestinian economy, or the use of online tools to make government more transparent.

He promotes these projects on his personal blog. As of the last couple of weeks, he has been writing posts on Twitter.com, too.

The list of good-government and good-journalism Web sites Mr. Newmark is involved with — sometimes financially, but more often as adviser and advocate in the Silicon Valley world — speak for themselves: factcheck.org, sunlightfoundation.com, PRWatch.org, NewsTrust.net, publicintegrity.org.

An article in The Observer of London two years ago described him as “readying his armory of cash to invest in citizen journalism projects.” Mr. Newmark says he never donated more than $20,000 to any organization.

But he has not followed the common path to Silicon Valley philanthropy — create a successful Web site, sell the Web site either to a larger company or through an initial public offering, acquire a pile of cash, then give away part of that.

While unwilling to discuss his wealth, he said he could be a lot richer if he wanted to. “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys,“ he said, “and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/te...y/12craig.html





Craigslist’s Countersuit Criticizes eBay’s Tactics
Laurie J. Flynn

Craigslist, the online classified ad company, filed a countersuit Tuesday against its minority owner eBay, accusing it of unfair competition, false advertising, trademark infringement and diluting the value of the Craigslist trademark.

Craigslist’s lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco, is the company’s first substantive response to a lawsuit eBay filed against Craigslist last month in the Delaware Court of Chancery accusing the smaller company of unfairly and secretly trying to dilute the value of eBay’s investment in the company by more than 10 percent and deprive it of a board seat.

The countersuit exposes how the tension between the companies has been growing since shortly after eBay’s 2004 purchase of a 28.4 percent interest in Craigslist. Craigslist’s suit says eBay has continually tried to exert control over Craigslist, a privately held company in San Francisco that is widely known for its anticorporate philosophy.

It revealed that eBay acquired the shares by buying an option to acquire the shares of a minority shareholder of Craigslist, whom the company did not identify. The suit said that because eBay’s option prevented Craigslist from finding another buyer, Craigslist then repurchased the shares and issued new shares to eBay.

The suit does not state the purchase price or give a value for the shares owned by Craig Newmark, Craigslist’s founder, or Jim Buckmaster, its chief executive.

In its suit, Craigslist asks the court to restore eBay’s holdings to Craigslist.

The company has also accused eBay of “business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding” and other misdeeds.

Kimberly Rubey, an eBay spokeswoman, called Craigslist’s claims "unfounded and unsubstantiated" and described them as ploy to distract attention from eBay’s claims in its suit. “EBay has, and will continue to be, a minority shareholder who believes in Craigslist, shares its values and acts with openness, honesty and integrity in its dealings with Craigslist’s board and the online community,” Ms. Rubey said. “We strongly refute any suggestion to the contrary.”

Craigslist said that while the two companies agreed that eBay’s interest in Craigslist would not preclude the two companies from competing, eBay misused its role as minority owner of Craigslist to gain access to company information and then use it to compete unfairly.

Craigslist contends that eBay used its shareholder status to plant on Craigslist’s board company officials who had responsibility for a competing site, Kijiji.com.

Craigslist added, “Under the guise of shareholder requests for information, eBay has hounded Craigslist with improper demands for confidential Craigslist information, which could be used for anticompetitive purposes."

Craigslist also accused eBay of diluting the value of the Craigslist trademark by diverting customers looking for Craigslist to the Kijiji site. Craigslist’s suit says that eBay placed misleading advertising on Google.com intended to direct users to Kijiji. Inside eBay, the suit contends, Kijiji is known as the “Craigslist killer.”

On several occasions, Meg Whitman, eBay’s former chief executive and a member of the board, has expressed an interest in acquiring the remainder of Craigslist, the suit contended. The suit also says that after buying a Dutch classified ad site for $290 million, an eBay official asked Craigslist executives, “What do you think we would pay for the largest classified ad site in the United States?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/te...gy/14ebay.html





XM Satellite Loss Widens

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc reported a wider first-quarter loss on Monday as costs to lure and retain subscribers rose.

XM, which is awaiting regulatory approval of its proposed merger with Sirius Satellite Radio Inc, said its first-quarter net loss was $129 million, or 42 cents per share. That compared with $122 million, or 40 cents per share, a year earlier.

Its loss excluding merger-related expenses appeared to be in line with the average analyst forecast of 41 cents, according to Reuters Estimates, but it was not immediately clear if the numbers were directly comparable.

Revenue rose 17 percent to $308 million, which was lower than the average analyst forecast of $313 million, according to Reuters Estimates.

Washington-based XM, whose program lineup includes Major League Baseball and Oprah Winfrey, added about 303,000 net new subscribers and ended the quarter on March 31 with 9.33 million subscribers compared with 7.91 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2007.

XM said the average cost of adding each subscriber, a measure known as subscriber acquisition cost (SAC), rose to $73 in the first quarter from $65 a year earlier. Cost per gross addition, which includes SAC as well as marketing costs, declined to $99 from $103.

Its churn rate, a measure of subscribers that quit the service, held at 1.8 percent.

Sirius is expected to report its quarterly results later on Monday.

The results come as the two companies await the opinion of the U.S. Federal Communication Commission, after the U.S. Department of Justice approved the deal in March. XM and Sirius hope to convince regulators that the deal would provide consumers with more choice in radio programming and could lead to lower prices in some cases.

Critics of the deal, which includes the main lobby group for the terrestrial radio industry, say it would create a monopoly of satellite providers.

(Reporting by Franklin Paul and Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Derek Caney)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/mediaN...AS355120080512





Sirius Revenue Up 33% In First Quarter
FMQB

Sirius Satellite Radio announced first quarter fiscal results for 2008, with a 33 percent increase in revenue and a narrowing of the satcaster's losses. Total revenue was up to $270.4 million from $204 million in the first quarter of '07. Average monthly revenue per subscriber was $10.42 in Q1, down slightly from $10.46 per subscriber last year. Sirius ended the quarter with 8,644,319 subscribers, a 31 percent increase from the end of Q1 2007. Sirius saw its net loss shrink by 28 percent, from $144.7 million in '07 to $104.1 million in this year's first quarter.

"Sirius continues to demonstrate robust subscriber and revenue growth, along with strong cost discipline and significant improvement in our bottom line," said CEO Mel Karmazin. "Compared with a year ago, first quarter 2008 subscribers grew 31%, revenue grew 33%, while cash operating costs only grew 8%, leading to a 55% decline in our adjusted loss from operations. We await the FCC decision on our pending merger with XM, and we are eager to deliver the strong benefits of the combined company to our subscribers and stockholders."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=699334





Clear Channel, Lenders Resolve Dispute Over Buyout
Joseph Altman

Clear Channel Communications Inc. has settled a legal dispute with the lenders funding its private equity buyout, clearing the way for the radio and outdoor advertising company to finally seal the deal nearly two years after it was first announced.

Under the agreement announced late Tuesday, Clear Channel shareholders would receive $36 a share, down from the earlier price of $39.20 a share and less than initial offers rejected by some shareholders as too low. That reduces the deal's value to $17.9 billion from $19.5 billion.

San Antonio, Texas-based Clear Channel and its private equity buyers, Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, had sued a consortium of six banks, accusing them of trying to undermine the deal by changing the terms.

Proceedings in that lawsuit in a Texas court, and in a separate suit filed by the equity firms in New York, were delayed Monday as the parties continued to haggle over whether the banks must fund promised loans for the takeover.

Tuesday night's agreement settles those lawsuits, but the amended buyout offer still requires shareholder approval.

"This revised agreement is a win for our shareholders because it provides them with substantial value and certainty while avoiding the delay and inherent risks associated with complex litigation," Clear Channel Chief Executive Mark Mays said in a written statement.

The buyout of the nation's largest radio station operator and a global powerhouse in outdoor advertising has been tumultuous from the beginning.

First, some shareholders insisted on a higher per-share price and a chance to keep owning a part of the privatized company. Then the credit markets seized up and banks, once eager to fund ever bigger leveraged buyouts, got skittish, and Clear Channel's share price declined on fears the deal wouldn't close.

After Clear Channel announced the original deal in November 2006, the equity partners were twice forced to raise their offer when some large shareholders signaled they would oppose earlier bids of $37.60 and $39 per share. The offer of $39.20 was finally approved in September 2007.

Some shareholders also wanted to continue owning a minority stake, and the buyers agreed to allowed them to retain as much as 30 percent of the new entity, a concession maintained in the settlement Tuesday.

Clear Channel said it now expects the deal to close by the end of the third quarter, but the parties have agreed to extend the deadline for completion of the takeover to Dec. 31.

The private equity investors and the banks will deposit their funds into an escrow account within 10 business days to help ensure the deal will go through, Clear Channel said.

A busted deal would have subjected the private equity firms to roughly $500 million in fees. But funding the loan at the original terms would have cost the banks $3 billion to $4 billion in write-downs with fewer institutions looking to buy up the debt.

As deadlines approached for the deal to get completed, the equity firms and Clear Channel accused the banks of trying to sink the buyout by changing the loan terms, a charge the banks have denied.

The lawsuits accusing Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse Group, Wachovia Corp., Deutsche Bank AG and The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC of tortious interference were filed in March.

"The banks are very pleased to have reached a constructive resolution of the matter," said Chad Leat, chairman of Citigroup's alternative asset group and a representative of the lenders.

Clear Channel shares gained $1.43, or 4.4 percent, to close at $34.30 Tuesday. The shares had jumped nearly 10 percent the previous day, when reports surfaced that the parties were working on a settlement that would re-price the deal at $36 per share.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





NPR Station WBUR Boston Adds Support for Free Audio Standard

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has marked a milestone in their PlayOgg.org campaign with the announcement that National Public Radio (NPR) news station WBUR Boston has begun worldwide webcasting in the free audio format Ogg Vorbis.

Robin Lubbock, WBUR's director of new media said, "WBUR has a great schedule of news and information programming 24 hours a day, which we are very happy to make available to Ogg Vorbis listeners. It's exciting to work with the Free Software Foundation to give a new audience the chance to listen to WBUR's award winning programing as well as the wonderful programs from NPR and the BBC Worldservice that you can find daily on WBUR."

Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, responded to the news stating, "I would like to thank WBUR general manager Paul La Camera, for so graciously listening to the case we made for free audio standards. The leadership displayed by WBUR in providing a free audio format will help to bring this issue the national attention and recognition it deserves, and will serve as a vital step in educating the public and other publicly funded radio stations. We urge NPR listeners to stream WBUR's Ogg Vorbis stream, and to acknowledge and thank WBUR for this work when making your contributions."

Unlike MP3, Windows Media, Real Audio or Quicktime, Ogg Vorbis is not restricted by software patents. The threat of these patent lawsuits chills independent development of multimedia software tools. The use of unencumbered formats like Ogg Vorbis is necessary for providing access to publicly funded news and other programming without dependence on the patent-holding corporations and proprietary software vendors.

Patent-encumbered formats owned by companies like Microsoft and Apple require listeners to use non-free software; controlled by them, not by the users. They design their software to restrict the users and spy on their activities. If users choose Ogg Vorbis for audio and Ogg Theora for video, they can use many different media players, including free software designed to respect their freedom and privacy.

Joshua Gay, FSF campaigns manager explained the campaign, "[i]t is time for our publicly funded broadcasters to take seriously the impact their decisions to webcast only in proprietary formats have on the future of free unencumbered audio standards. Today, WBUR has made an important commitment to free standards, and we are now working with other publicly funded broadcasters to follow their example".

The WBUR stream is available at http://www.wbur.org/listen/, or you can go directly to http://www.wbur.org/listen/feed/ogg.m3u.

Resources and a mailing list to track related events can be found at http://PlayOgg.org. Technical details about the Ogg Vorbis format are at http://xiph.org/vorbis/

About The Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
http://www.fsf.org/news/wbur-streams-ogg-vorbis





Milestones

Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
Michael Kimmelman

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his gallery, PaceWildenstein in Manhattan.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, Fla., these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on a project that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he believed, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for these Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from the torn scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers as flotsam in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 50’s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles, into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric, akin to bandages, from which paint dripped, like blood. “Interview,” which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photographs of toreros, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected places; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.
“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who immigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a full-blooded Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

He studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas in Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Gallery in California while stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, and it occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the GI Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.

Albers, a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg, was on the other hand recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new media, which Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950, he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery. “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, he began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. The artist thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,’’ he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages like ‘“Monogram.’’ Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.’’ Living together in a succession of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960’s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines, Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s ‘Inferno’,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secretive. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him combine images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing. His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963, he choreographed “Pelican,’’ in which he performed on roller skates wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination both with collaboration and with mixing art with technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster collaborations between artists and scientists.

In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.’’ He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.
Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was in Captiva, a slender island off Florida’s Gulf coast, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became Captiva’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village back in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/ar...enberg.html?hp