Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 6th, '07

[JackSpratts]

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"Black isn't the new green." – Larry Greenemeier


"Are you sure no one's ever gonna see this?" – Eva Longoria


"It’s a once-in-a-century transformation." – Kazuhiko Ogawa


"Although we can't make any reasonable estimate, we can nevertheless say it's unlikely that Thomas would be required to pay $222,000 plus attorneys fees if copyright law were reasonable, fair, and just. But it is now none of those, so she is." – Declan McCullagh



































October 6th, 2007






Duluth Jury Decides Brainerd Woman Must Pay $222,000 for Downloaded Music Files

A 12-person jury in Duluth ruled Jammie Thomas, 30, of Brainerd, did pirate 24 copyrighted sound recordings, and ordered her to pay $222,000.

The ruling could set precedent, determining what proof is needed to find someone liable for copyright infringement.

The verdict ended three days of testimony and questioning in U.S. District Court in Duluth against Thomas, a single mother of two who was accused of downloading and sharing certain music files. Six recording companies sought damages that could have reached millions of dollars.

The case attracted national and global interest for the first-ever jury trial of someone accused of pirating music files.

Thomas testified Wednesday that she had never even heard of KaZaA and never used the peer-to-peer file sharing service on her computer.

But a computer security expert for the recording industry said all computer forensic evidence points to Thomas being guilty of copyright infringement.

Investigators for the plaintiffs provided jurors evidence that the IP address (a number assigned to a subscriber connected to an Internet Service Provider), a modem Media Access Control address and Thomas' username all link her to the pirating.

Minneapolis defense attorney Brian Toder said he and Thomas can't explain what happened, but that it wasn't be proven that his client shared copyrighted files. Toder offered theories that there could have been a computer party at Thomas's home or someone could have been outside her window with a laptop.

Thomas testified that despite the plaintiffs producing exhibits with her computer identifiers printed next to the computer screenshots, she was not the one who uploaded the music to the file-sharing service. She had no explanation for why she was identified as the pirate.

Toder has also suggested that computer hacking or IP spoofing could as explanations. Spoofing is someone pretending to be somebody else by taking over their IP address.

But an expert witness disagreed.

"My opinion is that it did not happen," Doug Jacobson, an Iowa State University professor and computer security expert, testified. "Making IP spoofing work is extremely complicated. Pretending to be somebody else at the same time they're on the Internet is almost impossible to carry out.''

The lawsuit, brought by the Recording Industry Association of America for Virgin Records, Capitol Records, Sony BMG, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings, claimed that Thomas distributed 1,702 digital audio files - many of them the plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings - from the KaZaA shared folder on her computer to potentially millions of other KaZaA users for free.

Richard Gabriel, lead trial counsel for the record industry, called witnesses this week to show that Thomas replaced the hard drive in her computer two weeks after an investigation by the music industry caught the alleged copyright infringement.

Gabriel said there is no question that someone using the name "Terastar@Kazaa" distributed copyrighted material, the question is was the user Thomas, 30.

The weight of the evidence shows it was, Gabriel said.

"All fingers point at Jammie Thomas in this case," he said, noting her user name, IP address, Modem MAC address, pass-word-protected computer, and the songs in the shared folder matched her musical tastes.

"We connected the dots for you," he told the jurors.

Thomas, 30, works for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in its natural resources and environment department. She is a grant coordinator to redevelop contaminated property. She testified that she has a bachelor's degree in business administration from St. Cloud State University. Gabriel used his questioning to point out how proficient Thomas is on a computer. The defendant has taken several computer classes and uses a computer to keep track of budgets and write grants.

Thomas, a single mother of two children, ages 8 and 11, said the lawsuit has changed her life.

"It's been very stressful," she said. "I have multi-billion dollar corporations with their own economies of scale suing me so it's been very stressful.''

She said the lawsuit has also affected her children. "I no longer have any disposable income whatsoever," she said. "My disposable income used to go for CDs, but obviously not anymore. I've had to make some changes regarding extras for my children. All the disposable income went toward this case. I didn't do this and I refuse to be bullied."

Thomas testified that she has 240 CDs, but at one time had more than 400.

At times, Toder, an International Falls native who is recognized as a Super Lawyer by Minnesota Law and Politics Magazine, seemed to be tell jurors that this is a "big guy vs. little gal'' case.

There were six members of the plaintiffs' briefcase brigade with assistants passing notes to the two lawyers and one music industry official at the plaintiff's counsel table. Meanwhile, Toder sometimes needs the help of his client in searching for papers he's looking for.

Before the verdict, Thomas and her attorney spoke briefly. Thomas said listening to the plaintiffs' closing argument left a bad taste in her mouth.

"They were taking the evidence that was presented and twisting it," she said.

Toder spent much of his 20-minute closing argument going over and disputing evidence presented by the plaintiffs. He referred to the recording industry's star witness, Iowa State University professor and computer security expert Doug Jacobson, as a "hired gun," with a financial incentive in this case.

"He was making up things as he went along," Toder said. "I respectfully ask you to reject all the testimony of Dr. Jacobson."
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/51559.htm





Brazil's Minister of Culture Calls for Free Digital Society
Posted by Martin LaMonica

Free culture advocate and Brazilian Minister Gilberto Gil said that digital technology offers a rare opportunity to bring knowledge to under-privileged people around the world and to include them in the political process.

Gil, a renowned musician and social activist who became Minister of Culture in 2003, laid out a vision of a global, collaborative digital culture founded in freely available technology during a speech on Thursday at the Emerging Technology conference, or EmTech, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He called for loosening intellectual property regulations to give more people the freedom to use and republish digital forms of content as a way of encouraging personal expression, culture and political participation.

"Today's digital technologies represent a fantastic opportunity for democratizing access to knowledge," Gil said. "We have found that the appropriation of digital technology can be an incredible upgrade in skills of political self-management and the local political process."

As Minister of Culture, Gil helped spearhead the creation of 650 "cultural hot spots" where people have access to free software and computers, typically for the first time.

At these centers, digital content and technology rapidly becomes assimilated into Brazilian culture, he said. For example, Brazilian Indians have recorded their songs on video, participants have been inspired to pursue an "open-source hardware" initiative, and a well known Afro Brazilian spiritual leader found the means to make her tradition a "first class culture" within Brazil, he explained.

Brazil is also using test versions of $100 laptops from the One Laptop Per Child project, which Gil admitted is not working as fast as he or Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would like.

He said part of the problem is the lack of a network backbone to connect PCs to the Internet. Also, he said there are two proposals to supply low-cost PCs, one from the One Laptop Per Child program that came out of MIT and one from Intel, which has caused the government to slow down.

Free culture wants free software
During his speech, Gil called on other countries to adopt more liberal policies in regard to intellectual property, patents and copyright.

Within Brazil, his ministry is trying to reform copyright laws that contain several "holes" that don't address issues such as personal use.

At an international level, Brazil has, through a United Nations forum, called for international regulations that tilt the balance of control over content away from publishers and toward consumers, particularly in developing countries. The public domain should be a "necessary dimension of the intellectual property system," he said.

This same philosophy applies to realm of software. He noted special effects producers in Hollywood have used open-source software because of the flexibility it gives them.

"Open source as an instrument is more flexible and contributing to knowledge, ideas and possibilities," he said. "Of course we are going to face problems of guaranteeing property and renumeration of property on one side and the public interest on the other side."

What's needed, he said, is more discussion of the proper balance in the political realm.

Since being Minister of Culture, he has worked with the Creative Commons group to allow musicians to permit others to take their creations and use them in various forms.

As a musician, he has taken the same route. He has chosen to republish some of his works under a liberal license to encourage republishing and remixing of his music. He said he intends to rerecord and republish his "hits" so that they can be shared and reused by others.

"I would be pleased to see my other colleagues doing the same because I'm sympathetic. Also, it's a historical trend and it's going that way," he said.

Gil said that Brazil is a fertile ground to experiment with remixing digital content because it is a culture that has often assimilated influences from the outside.

"We (Brazilians) have kind of a thirst, a hunger for new things, for different things from the outside world that we can quickly swallow, digest and process. This is a characteristic of our culture and it is showing," Gil said.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9786370-7.html





Researcher: Optimal Copyright Term is 14 Years
Nate Anderson

It's easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn't stop Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the "optimal level for copyright" at only 14 years.

Pollock's work is based on the promise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.

According to Pollock's calculations (and his paper [PDF] is full of calculations), this is exactly the opposite result that one would expect from a rational copyright system. Of course, there's no guarantee that copyright law has anything to do with rationality; as Pollock puts it, "the level of protection is not usually determined by a benevolent and rational policy-maker but rather by lobbying." The predictable result has been a steady increase in the period of copyright protection during the twentieth century.

Because Pollock's "optimal level for copyright" falls over time (as production and reproduction costs fall), policy makers need to be especially careful when contemplating increased copyright terms. It's difficult to scale back rights that have once been granted, so "it is prudent for policy-makers to err on the low side rather than the high side when setting the strength of copyright."

Neither the US nor the UK are in any danger of rethinking copyright law from scratch, but if they were looking for guidance in how to set up their systems, Pollock has it. He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).

Pollock has been an advocate for restricted copyright terms and stronger public domain for years; we earlier spotlighted a brief essay of his on the "Value of the Public Domain" that is well worth a read. His new work is getting some publicity too: it has already been highlighted by Boing Boing and will be presented at a conference in Berlin this week.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-14-years.html





Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Then Watermark It
Nate Anderson

Major League Baseball likes its copyrights served up strong, with just a hint of hyperbole to keep things interesting. The league has previously asserted that player names and statistics are subject to copyright (and must therefore be licensed for use in things like fantasy baseball leagues), and for months now it has emitted ominous rumblings about the Slingbox and its ability to place-shift content. Now, in an effort to know exactly how game footage is being used by television stations around the world, Major League Baseball has signed a deal with watermarking and monitoring firm Teletrax to keep an eye on the 2007 postseason.

Teletrax will provide the technology to watermark game broadcasts, and it will use a proprietary international system of detectors to determine when and where that footage is then used around the globe. The company claims that its technology is robust enough to protect against "all common video-processing operations normally found in studios and in transmission paths," including MPEG compression, cropping, scaling, and 50/60Hz conversion for use outside the US. The company claims that the watermark will even survive the transition to DivX.

The company's detectors can monitor all 210 television markets in the US along with cable and satellite broadcasts. They sniff out the watermark and log information about video clips that show up in sports shows, local news broadcasts, and the like. This lets Major League Baseball crack down on broadcasters using its footage without paying, but it also allows the league to cash in by more accurately billing for things like "sponsorship valuations."

The move does not appear targeted at the Internet use of MLB footage, though the league already keeps an eye out for this and has been involved in numerous takedown requests to sites like YouTube. If the watermark is truly as robust as Teletrax claims, there's no reason in principle why the system could not be extended to the Internet. Digimarc, which provides some of the underlying technology to Teletrax, has already filed for just such a patent.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ermark-it.html





Supreme Court Could Review Indecency Policy
FMQB

The Bush administration will ask the Supreme Court to reinstate a strict broadcast indecency policy that was invalidated by a lower court. In June, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had voted 2-1 to strike down the FCC's nearly zero-tolerance policy on the broadcast of certain expletives, even if they were fleeting and unscripted. Now, U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement will seek a Supreme Court review of the decision, reports the Los Angeles Times.

"I am pleased that the Solicitor General will be seeking Supreme Court review of the 2nd Circuit's decision," said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, according to the Times. "I continue to support the Commission's efforts to protect families from indecent language on television and radio when children are likely to be in the audience."

Under Martin's tenure, the FCC ruled in 2006 that almost any use of some expletives was indecent, even in live, impromptu situations. The case stemmed from two expletives uttered by Cher and Nicole Richie on Fox's airings of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards. The 2nd Circuit majority decided the FCC's policy was "arbitrary and capricious." But in July, a Senate committee voted to give the FCC explicit authority to make "a single word or image" indecent under any circumstances.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=484158





Report Says the FCC Favors Lobbyists Over the Public
Teresa von Fuchs

The FCC keeps lobbyists better informed about pending business than it does the public, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

"Situations where some, but not all, stakeholders know what FCC is considering for an upcoming vote undermine the fairness and transparency of the process and constitute a violation of FCC's rules," the GAO said in a statement.

The report says that some people at the commission warn lobbyists when a particular issue is about to come up for a vote. Typically, the commission chairman circulates an item for vote three weeks before a meeting. Under the rules of the FCC, meeting agendas are published one week before a vote is scheduled. Once the agenda is published lobbying is banned. The report says that the two-week window allows lobbyist plenty of time to "maximize their impact."

Though the report concludes the FCC generally follows its rulemaking processes, it also found that advocates who represent consumer and public interests said they were not always informed about issues up for vote, or when the right time would be to meet with FCC staff.

The report calls this discrepancy an "imbalance of information" and says that it "runs contrary to the principles of transparency and equal opportunity." The report also found some issues with how the commission handles confidential information.

The FCC responded to the report saying that it feels its processes are always open and transparent and that Chairman Kevin Martin is looking for ways to make the commissions workings even more transparent and open.

Investigators for the report focused on four proceedings in particular, reviewing a period from 2002 to 2006. The report was requested by Representative Edward Markey, a democrat from Massachusetts, over a year ago, and was made available today.
http://www.wirelessweek.com/article.aspx?id=153874





Lack of Media Diversity Ownership Slammed on the Eve of More Consolidation
Nate Anderson

Media watchdog Free Press has just slammed the FCC for gaps in the Commission's data on female and minority ownership of US media outlets. That data has become increasingly contentious as several high-profile media buyouts and mergers have appeared on the FCC docket, and critics contend that approving them would only make it more difficult for a broad variety of American experience to be accurately represented in the media.

According to research done by Free Press, 51 percent of all Americans are women, yet only 6 percent of all full-power radio and TV stations are owned by women. "People of color," as the group calls them, likewise make up 33 percent of the population but only have ownership of 7.2 percent of TV and radio stations. To put those figures in context, think of them this way: for every female-owned radio station in the country, the average market has 16 stations owned by white men. For each minority-owned station, the average market has eight stations owned by white men.

These numbers are substantially lower than ownership numbers for women and minorities in other sectors of the economy. Women own 28 percent of all non-farm businesses in the US, while minorities own 18 percent of such businesses. When it comes to TV and radio, though, Free Press found that these percentages plummet. The graph below shows a similar state of affairs when it comes to TV station ownership.

Source: Free Press

A federal court several years ago told the FCC to pay more attention to issues of minority and female ownership, but the agency has done little in those areas since. The Free Press study, in fact, bills itself as the first accurate reporting of those numbers. Past FCC documents have included figures, but Free Press calls them inaccurate.

The group also found that media consolidation makes the problem worse, as increasing numbers of stations are concentrated in the hands of white men. Consolidation is "one of the key structural factors keeping women and minorities from accessing the public airwaves," says one of the new reports. S. Derek Turner, the Free Press research director, also claims that "any policy changes that increase media concentration will unambiguously cause a further decline in female and minority ownership."

Consolidation coming?

More media concentration is possible. The FCC is already examining three significant media moves: News Corp.'s proposed Wall Street Journal buyout, the merger of satellite radio rivals XM and Sirius, and Sam Zell's proposed acquisition of Tribune Co. The deals all need to meet FCC rules about media ownership in specific markets, with several of the companies in question already holding waivers for several of the rules (the FCC prevents companies from owning certain configurations of multiple media outlets in a single market). The FCC must decide whether to renew such waivers when a company is purchased or merges with another firm.

This has given FCC Commissioners who are wary of increased consolidation a chance to address the issue. Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps expressed concern about the Wall Street Journal deal when he was in Chicago earlier this year for the YearlyKos convention, and he recently told the WSJ that he has serious reservations about all three deals. If the issues break down along party lines, as they often do, Copps will be in no position to stop the buyouts, though he might be able to wring concessions from the purchasers. He and Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein used the same strategy in the AT&T/BellSouth merger to demand (and get) real concessions from the company, such as a voluntary guarantee of network neutrality for several years and low-priced (and low-speed) DSL service.

Those concessions were largely possible because one of the commissioners recused himself from the voting; exactly how much influence Copps could have this time around is unclear.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...a-outlets.html





Senator Calls for Investigation of Buried FCC Study
Ryan Paul

Former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lawyer Adam Candeub claims that the government agency destroyed a 2004 study on the implications of local media ownership. The study, which revealed that locally owned television stations provide more local news coverage, blatantly contradicts the FCC's assertion that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news," an argument used by the agency to justify a position in favor of a hands-off approach to media ownership restrictions.

A surviving copy of the report ended up in the hands of California Senator Barbara Boxer, who supposedly received it "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitzto. Boxer revealed the report to the public during a re-nomination confirmation hearing for FCC chief Kevin Martin. Both Martin and former FCC chairman Michael Powell have denied knowledge of the report, prompting Boxer to demand a full investigation.

Allegations of malfeasance and misconduct are nothing new for the FCC. Like many other federal regulatory agencies, the FCC has a long history of dubious conduct. Disparagingly referred to as the Fascist Censorship Commission by critics, the FCC is responsible for enforcing increasingly draconian "decency" rules that threaten to purge the airwaves of free speech. The FCC is also responsible for the steady expansion of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and has attempted to mandate VoIP back-doors despite the fact that doing so contradicts the language and intent of CALEA as well as the agency's own standing policies regarding the classification of Internet services. The FCC is also guilty of frequent attempts to exceed its authority, most notably by attempting to mandate the anti-consumer broadcast flag without congressional authorization. A former employee of a prominent Washington DC telecommunications lobbying firm, current FCC chairman Kevin Martin is himself a controversial figure, whom critics regularly accuse of shilling for the big bells.

In an article about the controversial report, UCSC professor and radio history expert Matthew Lasar points out that, although the study shows that locally owned stations air an average of 5.5 additional minutes of local knows per half hour, it also reveals that the local news coverage provided by such stations can be politically motivated. According to Lasar, the study cites the following example:

"For example," the study suggests on page two, "if the local [television station] owner also develops real estate locally, they may cover the local zoning board in a way that favors the owner's real estate interests."

The paper makes it clear that localism is advantageous in some ways, but not others. Taken in full, it seems like the report merely increases the complexity of the media ownership debate rather than resolving it. As a result, Lasar feels that "[i]f Michael Powell's FCC did indeed suppress this document, the action suggests a highly politicized, even paranoid internal culture that feared even a nuanced challenge to its agenda."

Senator Boxer is reportedly waiting for answers, and is threatening a full investigation of the issue if answers don't turn up soon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060917-7758.html





Google Attacks Verizon's Attempt to Water Down 700MHz "Open Access" Rules
Nate Anderson

What is going on at the FCC? The agency established the rules for the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction back in August, but it turns out that these were not so much "rules" as "suggestions for discussion."

Verizon, AT&T, and Frontline Wireless have all since petitioned the FCC to change the rules in different ways. AT&T wants more clarity around the "public/private partnership" part of the auction, while Frontline wants a lower reserve price. Verizon, however, is directly targeting the most innovative part of the auction, the "open access" requirements on some of the new spectrum. It has filed a federal lawsuit asking that this part of the rules be struck down by a judge, and it also appears to be lobbying the FCC directly to water them down.

Google, which fought hard for those rules (and actually wanted more "open" conditions applied), is now attacking Verizon both in public and at the FCC.

While Verizon's court case proceeds through the legal system, the company's competitors have grown unhappy with the way that Verizon has handled its FCC lobbying. Frontline Wireless has gone so far as to ask the FCC to bar Verizon from the auction because Verizon has allegedly not disclosed some of its lobbying contacts with the agency quickly enough or in enough detail.

Despite Verizon's reticence to spell out exactly what it has been talking about with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in private meetings, Google believes that it has pieced the conversation together. Google's understanding is that Verizon wants the FCC to impose the open access requirements only on the network, not on the devices. That is, Verizon could still sell handsets that are locked and controlled by the company, but its network would have to be open to unlocked handsets from any operator.

According to Google's new public statement on the issue, "From our perspective, this view ignores the realities of the U.S. wireless market, where some 95 percent of handsets are sold in retail stores run by the large carriers. More to the point, it is simply contrary to what the FCC's new rules actually say." Those rules focus on customer freedom to access content and applications from any device.

In a filing with the FCC, Google asks the agency to stick to its original plan. The company points out that while the open access rules might make the spectrum less attractive to Verizon (and thus might bring in less money at auction), the rules actually make it "more attractive, not less" to Google.

Such arguments, both in FCC filings and in public, are coming thick and fast. The FCC has set a January date for the 700MHz auction, so we should know quite soon if any changes will be made to the auction rules. Google continues to shield itself in a strategic cloud of uncertainty, but the vigor with which it addresses these issues certainly suggests, at the least, that the company hasn't ruled out a bid.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ess-rules.html





Unlike U.S., Japanese Push Fiber Over Profit
Ken Belson

The United States may be the world’s largest economy, but when it comes to Internet connections at home, many Americans still live in the slow lane. By contrast, Japan is a broadband paradise with the fastest and cheapest Internet connections in the world.

Nearly eight million Japanese have a fiber optic line at home that is as much as 30 times speedier than a typical DSL line.

But while that speed is a boon for Japanese users, industry analysts and some companies question whether the push to install fiber is worth the effort, given the high cost of installation, affordable alternatives and lack of services that take advantage of the fast connections.

Indeed, the stock price of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, which has two-thirds of the fiber-to-the-home market, has sunk because of concerns about heavy investments and the deep discounts it has showered on customers. Other carriers have gotten out of the business entirely, even though it is supported by government tax breaks and other incentives.

The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow.

Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. “They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear.”

“The Japanese think long-term,” Mr. Bortesi added. “If they think they will benefit in 100 years, they will invest for their grandkids. There’s a bit of national pride we don’t see in the West.”

Such a strategy may seem anathema in the United States, where companies like AT&T and Verizon Communications, the market leader with 1.1 million fiber subscribers, are under intense pressure from investors to justify their capital spending plans. And analysts note that the Bush administration has largely stood on the sidelines rather than provide financial incentives to promote fiber services.

“While you might not want to replicate the same pathway as other countries, we are falling seriously behind,” said Charles H. Ferguson, author of “The Broadband Problem.”

Mr. Ferguson said the substandard American broadband infrastructure shaved as much as 1 percent off the nation’s potential productivity growth. Faster broadband services would allow telecommuters to use better videoconferencing equipment and more easily share multimedia documents, he said.

But even without Japan’s tax incentives, N.T.T. and some other Japanese companies say that selling fiber lines makes sense because their older copper networks need to be replaced anyway, and because they have to develop services to offset the decline in revenue from traditional phone lines.

And while acknowledging that initial investments are expensive, N.T.T. and KDDI, the second-largest phone company, expect to recoup some of their money by selling additional products, like Internet phone and television services, that are delivered over fiber lines. They also expect electronics companies to produce an array of products that rely on fiber networks, including high-definition videoconferencing equipment and medical devices that can instantly relay X-rays between hospitals.



“The cost of installing the service will continue to go down by leaps and bounds,” said Kazuhiko Ogawa, general manager of the network strategy section at N.T.T. “In the future, we will establish a lot of alliances and applications that will combine stability and reliability.”

But while millions of users have signed up for fiber connections, far fewer have bought additional services.

For Yukari Haruzono, an online game enthusiast, a high-speed fiber line is the difference between surviving and thriving in the game EverQuest.

“I play every night and on weekends, and it’s much faster and more stable than other broadband,” said Ms. Haruzono, who pays about $55 a month for service that lets her download data at speeds up to 100 megabits a second, roughly what Verizon offers in the United States. “All my friends have fiber connections, too, because they are gamers.”

But Ms. Haruzono, who has a fiber line from KDDI, buys her phone service from another company. She and other users were alarmed by technical glitches that shut down N.T.T.’s Internet phone service for several hours this year. She buys her television from the satellite provider SkyPerfect.

Over all, only about half of N.T.T.’s fiber customers sign up for Internet phone service in addition to their broadband, and just over 43,000 also subscribe to a video plan. In the United States, nearly half of Verizon’s fiber customers also get a television package, and nearly all of them use its phone service.

Japanese carriers have been slow to sell bundles of services because they face some competition from cable providers, their natural rivals.

Just 20 percent of Japanese households subscribe to a pay television service from a cable or satellite provider.

By contrast, Cablevision, Comcast and other American cable providers have been selling phone services that have helped them take millions of customers from Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies. Verizon and AT&T have retaliated by selling their own television services.

Japanese phone companies have been unable to follow suit because of a law that limits their role in the broadcasting business. As a result, N.T.T. resells programming from SkyPerfect. This gives N.T.T. less flexibility to create new services. Customers also receive no discount from N.T.T. and two different bills.

Analysts question whether users are being sold broadband lines with more speed than they need, particularly people who just check e-mail and an occasional Web site.

“Consumers buy what they think is neat and cool,” said Jim Weisser, a telecommunications consultant in Tokyo, “and 100 megabits per second is a nice round number and sure sounds fast.” But “it’s probably more speed that typical users will need for some time,” he said.

Some companies are betting that users are more interested in mobility than speed. EMobile, for instance, sells data cards for laptops and handsets that can send and receive data about as fast as a home DSL line. The unlimited data plan sells for about 5,000 yen ($43) a month, and an additional 1,500 yen buys a DSL line for a home computer.

Eric Gan, the company’s president, said this was a superior business model because the wireless network was cheaper to set up than fiber. “We aren’t losing money with fiber to the home,” he said. “We give you a big pipe for voice and everything else that is all-you-can-eat.”

Still, N.T.T. and KDDI show no sign of backing away from their fiber plans. Their priority is seeking out the apartment buildings that fill Japan’s crowded cities, offering many potential customers in one place.

Like Verizon, they have had to sign right-of-way agreements with landlords, a time-consuming process. Then they face the task of persuading individual homeowners to sign up.

“In general, people are positive about the fiber service,” said Osamu Kobayashi, a telecommunications analyst at Standard & Poor’s. “But the growth rate should slow because they’ve already gone after the condominiums and early adopters. Now, they have to go after the single homes.”

N.T.T. is also developing a dedicated fiber optic network that will provide the backbone for an array of commercial services. At its showroom in central Tokyo, it has a system that helps small-town doctors by relaying images of cell slides, X-rays and other medical data to pathologists in well-staffed city hospitals. Doctors can control the lens on the microscope to focus, zoom in and so on.

Nearby is a rubber mat developed by Hitachi that, when placed on a mattress, monitors a person’s pulse, blood pressure and other data, then relays it to a nurse or family member. Panasonic has developed radio-frequency tags that schoolchildren can carry. As they pass antennas placed outside schools and other locations, signals are sent back to parents who can be assured of their children’s safety.

N.T.T. hopes that these services, which rely on fast, dependable connections, will attract customers to its network and help solve some of the country’s larger social challenges, like the aging population, even if the payoff is not so soon in coming.

“It’s a once-in-a-century transformation,” Mr. Ogawa of N.T.T. said. “There will be more people using services who weren’t on the network before.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/bu...broadband.html





Italian Police Charge 11 Over File Sharing

Italian police have charged 11 people in connection with an alleged illegal music file-sharing network, anti-piracy officials said on Monday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recording industry, said police had dismantled a peer-to-peer network known as "Discotequezone."

The federation said 11 computers and more than 110,000 illegal MP3 music files were seized in the operation carried out by police in Rome, Milan, and Brescia.

In two cases, police found pedophile content being distributed on the network, the IFPI said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...47724220071001





Kim Jong Il Calls Self 'Internet Expert'
AP

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il called himself an "Internet expert" during summit talks with South Korea's president this week, a news report said Friday.

The reclusive leader made the remark after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun asked that South Korean companies operating at an industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong be allowed to use the Internet, Yonhap news agency reported, without citing any source.

"I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired," Kim told Roh, according to Yonhap.

"If that problem is addressed, there is no reason not to open" the Internet, Kim said.

This week's summit — the second-ever such meeting between the two Koreas — produced a wide-ranging reconciliation pact that calls for establishing a new special economic zone in North Korea and expanding the Kaesong factory park.

North Korea is one of the world's most closed nations, with the totalitarian regime tightly controlling outside information and tolerating no dissent. Radios and TV sets in North Korea can only receive state broadcasts and ordinary people are banned from using mobile phones, let alone the Internet.

However, the country's ruling elite appear to have regular access to outside information.

Kim reportedly asked former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address when she visited Pyongyang in 2000. A North Korean general cracked a joke about President Bush during high-level military talks with the South earlier this year, saying he read it on the Internet.

The North's leader is also a big fan of South Korean movies and TV dramas, and Roh gave him a bookcase of South Korean DVDs as a gift this week.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...XPrHwD8S32U000





UK Can Now Demand Data Decryption on Penalty of Jail Time
Ken Fisher

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

The law can only be applied to data residing in the UK, hosted on UK servers, or stored on devices located within the UK. The law does not authorize the UK government to intercept encrypted materials in transit on the Internet via the UK and to attempt to have them decrypted under the auspices of the jail time penalty.
The keys to the (United) Kingdom

The law has been criticized for the power its gives investigators, which is seen as dangerously broad. Authorities tracking the movement of terrorist funds could demand the encryption keys used by a financial institution, for instance, thereby laying bare that bank's files on everything from financial transactions to user data.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton said in May of 2006 that such laws would only encourage businesses to house their cryptography operations out of the reach of UK investigators, potentially harming the country's economy. "The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business," Clayton said.

"The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction," he added. "With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you're an international banker you'll plonk your headquarters in Zurich."

The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data. Though this will be handled on a case-by-case basis, it's another worrisome facet of a law that has been widely criticized for years. While RIPA was originally passed in 2000, the provisions detailing the handover of cryptographic keys and/or the force decryption of protected content has not been tapped by the UK Home Office—the division of the British government which oversees national security, the justice system, immigration, and the police forces of England and Wales. As we reported last year, the Home Office was slowly building its case to activate Part 3, Section 49.

The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals—all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an "out," in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he's been up to.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...jail-time.html





Infrared Scans May Regulate HOT Lanes
Michael Laris

Are drivers ready to be scanned like groceries at the supermarket?

The answer will help determine whether Washington area commuters use a planned network of high-occupancy and toll lanes, which will start to take shape next year when an expansion of the Capital Beltway is to begin.

The lanes are billed as the salvation of the suffering commuter. Solo drivers will be able to buy their way around congestion, while carpoolers will ride free. But the lanes' success hinges on finding a way to differentiate between paying and nonpaying customers without stopping every vehicle to count heads.

The private companies that will build and operate the Beltway lanes have proposed using technology that would scan drivers and passengers with bursts of infrared light that detect human skin. The technology is so sophisticated that it can distinguish human faces from decoy dummies and shotgun-riding dogs, according to Ken Daley, a senior vice president at toll road operator Transurban, one of two private companies behind the Beltway project.

"It does it by simply measuring the reflectivity of human skin," said Daley, whose proposal requires the approval of state and federal officials. "I'm very confident it will be there" on the Capital Beltway.

But already, the idea is raising privacy concerns that could make it difficult to get government approval.

Aside from a driver's general unease with being scanned, such equipment raises concerns about possible misuse of images in, say, divorce court or by insurance companies seeking to increase rates for long-haul commuters, said Ginger Goodin, an engineer at the Texas Transportation Institute who oversaw a July study on head-counting for the Federal Highway Administration.

Motorists "feel a sense of privacy in their vehicle, even though they may not really have it if you look at the legal cases," she said.

Still, she noted that drivers can decide whether to subject themselves to the systems. "If they just can't stomach that, then they have their choice, right next to it, to use the general-purpose lane," Goodin said.

Privately run toll roads, the latest trend for transportation officials, are planned for congested cities across the country. Local officials see them as an important way to get drivers out of jams, and they see private money as the key financing method.

In Virginia, HOT lanes are planned for the Beltway between Springfield and Georgetown Pike, Interstates 95 and 395 between Fredericksburg and the District line and, eventually, other major roads. Maryland plans a similar network of express toll lanes that would charge all drivers, including carpoolers.

Yet despite the growing popularity of HOT lanes, enforcement remains a critical challenge. In some cities, including San Diego, enforcement is done manually: California Highway Patrol officers on motorcycles watch drivers from behind concrete barriers, looking for cheaters. Other areas, including Denver, require carpoolers to peel off mid-trip to a designated lane to avoid being charged.

In Virginia, even straightforward, carpool-only enforcement has been a challenge. More than a third of the drivers using the carpool lanes on I-95 were cheaters before an aggressive state police campaign, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation. Now, state officials estimate, one in five drivers are using the lanes illegally. Fines range from $125 for the first offense to $1,000 for the fourth.

As more private firms and state officials partner for HOT lanes, there will be stronger incentives to use more automated -- and potentially more invasive -- enforcement, researchers said.

"What you typically think of as privacy threats are going to be magnified," Goodin said.

Engineering such systems has not been easy.

Some burgeoning technologies that use video, microwaves and radar to count passengers can be thwarted or confused by low light, tinted windows, a waving hand or a heat-emitting cup of coffee, according to the FHA study. Other proposals have involved using in-car cameras or seat sensors to verify passenger counts. Researchers said the infrared technology proposed in Virginia is promising but expensive. No such system is in use in the United States, Goodin said.

In Virginia, where lawmakers have fought over red-light cameras for years, it's unclear how far state officials will go.

"Questions of new technologies in law enforcement are not just about technology. They involve safety of law enforcement, they involve community acceptance and they involve considerations of personal privacy," said Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer, who emphasized that state and federal authorities have not approved the infrared technology. Homer also said the issue is not spelled out in agreements with Transurban and its partner, Fluor.

There is general agreement in Virginia on some aspects of enforcement.

Under the current plan, all drivers using HOT lanes, including those accustomed to cruising carefree on existing I-95 and I-395 carpool lanes, would need a transponder, like an E-ZPass, for tracking and proper billing of travel. Carpoolers would flip a switch to avoid being charged.

Although carpoolers would get new lanes, opponents are wary of the changes.

Transportation officials "are gambling with the only form of mass transit on the 95 corridor," said Corey A. Stewart (R), chairman of the Board of County Supervisors in Prince William County, who carpools between Woodbridge and Rosslyn. "It sounds like voodoo science."

In addition to the infrared system, Transurban cites the 407 Express Toll Route in Toronto and HOT lanes in the Minneapolis area as models of the sort of advanced system the company plans for Virginia. Both use tracking technology developed for military uses by Raytheon, a defense contractor.

In Minneapolis, state authorities say they have sharply cut cheating rates by outfitting police cruisers with receivers that can tell whether a passing car has paid. Officers hear a sound when the system determines that a driver hasn't paid and an officer can see whether it's someone riding alone.

In Virginia, similar receivers could scour the recent transactions of passing motorists for odd patterns, such as someone who drives miles in carpool mode and then suddenly flips the switch to become a paying customer after seeing an officer, said Transurban's Daley.

Some legal issues are being hashed out. In Denver, a carpool driver was fined last year for driving past an electronic toll sensor without a transponder. He challenged the fine and won.

The infrared head-counting device being considered in Virginia, originally dubbed Cyclops and now called dtect, is being developed by an optics researcher at Loughborough University in England and a British start-up company.

Work started five years ago when operators of a carpool lane in Leeds sought help, said Tim Ballantyne, an executive with Vehicle Occupancy Ltd. Designers had to find a way to deal with different windshields, ethnicities, occupant heights, light, weather and even facial hair. Their basic insight: Human skin reacts like nothing else when hit with two frequencies of infrared light.

"All blood is red, and all living humans have water in them, and we're reliant on those attributes," he said.

To address privacy concerns, before the image is made available for enforcement, the software obscures people's faces with a green dot. The company encrypted some software to make it difficult for users to unlock the originals. Daley said his goal is a system that would connect a license plate to the number of passengers in the car without ever releasing an image of the occupants.

"The images we're capturing are not ideal for identifying the occupant anyway. It looks gray, and the facial features aren't particularly well defined," Ballantyne said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...093001654.html





Technology Could Enable Computers To 'Read The Minds' Of Users

Tufts University researchers are developing techniques that could allow computers to respond to users' thoughts of frustration -- too much work -- or boredom--too little work. Applying non-invasive and easily portable imaging technology in new ways, they hope to gain real-time insight into the brain's more subtle emotional cues and help provide a more efficient way to get work done.

"New evaluation techniques that monitor user experiences while working with computers are increasingly necessary," said Robert Jacob, computer science professor and researcher. "One moment a user may be bored, and the next moment, the same user may be overwhelmed. Measuring mental workload, frustration and distraction is typically limited to qualitatively observing computer users or to administering surveys after completion of a task, potentially missing valuable insight into the users' changing experiences."

Sergio Fantini, biomedical engineering professor, in conjunction with Jacob's human-computer interaction (HCI) group, is studying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology that uses light to monitor brain blood flow as a proxy for workload stress a user may experience when performing an increasingly difficult task. A $445,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will allow the interdisciplinary team to incorporate real-time biomedical data with machine learning to produce a more in-tune computer user experience.

Lighting up the brain

"fNIRS is an emerging non-invasive, lightweight imaging tool which can measure blood oxygenation levels in the brain," said Fantini, also an associate dean for graduate education at Tufts' School of Engineering.

The fNIRS device, which looks like a futuristic headband, uses laser diodes to send near-infrared light through the forehead at a relatively shallow depth--only two to three centimeters--to interact with the brain's frontal lobe. Light usually passes through the body's tissues, except when it encounters oxygenated or deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood. Light waves are absorbed by the active, blood-filled areas of the brain and any remaining light is diffusely reflected to the fNIRS detectors.

"fNIRS, like MRI, uses the idea that blood flow changes to compensate for the increased metabolic demands of the area of the brain that's being used," said Erin Solovey, a graduate researcher at the School of Engineering.

"We don't know how specific we can be about identifying users' different emotional states," said Fantini. "However, the particular area of the brain where the blood flow change occurs should provide indications of the brain metabolic changes and by extension workload, which could be a proxy for emotions like frustration."

In the initial experiments, Jacob and Fantini's groups determined how accurately fNIRS could register users' workload. While wearing the fNIRS device, test subjects viewed a multicolored cube consisting of eight smaller cubes with two, three or four different colors. As the cube rotated onscreen, subjects counted the number of colored squares in a series of 30 tasks. The fNIRS device and subsequent user surveys reflected greater difficulty as users kept track of increasing numbers of colors. The fNIRS data agreed with user surveys up to 83 percent of the time.

The Tufts group will present its initial results on using fNIRS to detect the user workload experience at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium on user interface software and technology, to be held Oct. 7 through 10 in Newport, R.I.

"It seems that we can predict, with relatively high confidence, whether the subject was experiencing no workload, low workload, or high workload," said Leanne Hirshfield, a graduate researcher and lead author on the poster paper to be presented at the ACM symposium.

Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Tufts University.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1001125649.htm





Local Court in Berlin Prohibits Retention of Personal Data
Stefan Krempl

In a ruling, dated March 27, 2007, which has only now been published and is likely to have legal ramifications, the local court of the Berlin district of Mitte has barred the Federal Ministry of Justice from retaining personal data acquired via its website beyond the periods associated with the specific instances of use of the site. Thus IP addresses in particular may no longer be filed away. Given these Web markers "it is even today possible in most cases, without any elaborate effort being required, to identify Internet users by merging personal data with the help of third parties," the judges declared. The local court also opposed the view espoused by operators and some data privacy watchdogs that security reasons justify a recording regime that over short periods of time maps the behavior of all Net users and allows individual users to be picked out.

As the recording of behavior – in the form of logfiles or clickstreams, say – that allows individual users to be identified has meanwhile become common practice, the court's decision, which is now no longer subject to appeal, is, according to Patrick Breyer, a lawyer associated with the German Working Group on Data Retention, who was the plaintiff in the above case, something of a signal for the Internet industry as a whole. Large commercial net portals such as Google, Amazon and eBay were not prepared to dispense with recording regimes of this kind, he observed. "Even the Deutsche Bundestag [the lower chamber of Germany's Federal Parliament] is at present -- in violation of its own legislation -- logging the behavior of the users of its Internet portal on a just-in-case basis," Mr. Breyer pointed out. He called on all public authorities, departments and agencies of the German Federal State and of the federal states comprising the Federal Republic to abandoned their "illegal data retention policies" by the end of this year at the very latest. "Otherwise additional lawsuits will have to be filed," he added. The lawyer has made a model complaint available on his website.

In the opinion of the court the storing of communication traces such as IP addresses makes it possible for the surf and search behavior of individual Internet users to be charted in detail. During a parliamentary hearing on the planned six-month retention period for connection and location data experts had raised doubts about this being possible. For the local court however the case involved a clear "violation of the right to informational self-determination." What makes this case particularly awkward for the government is that of all its agencies it is the one that under the aegis of Brigitte Zypries (Social Democratic Party; SPD), the Federal Minister of Justice, and in the face of massive protests by experts, associations and concerned citizens alike wants to introduce a general obligation to retain data regardless of suspicious circumstances, that the judges have found to have committed this particular breach of data privacy law. According to Mr. Breyer the ruling shows that "the Federal Ministry of Justice is unable to abide by the legal conditions imposed to protect our privacy."

The local court had originally granted the defendant leave to appeal. From the next highest court, the District Court in Berlin, the Federal Ministry of Justice had however mainly wanted to know whether the recording of user behavior without IP addresses and without the option of identifying individual users would remain legal.
http://www.heise.de/english/newstick...61/from/atom10





Senate Panel Takes Up Press Shield Bill
Laurie Kellman

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy on Thursday urged his panel to wrap up debate on a bill to shield reporters from being forced to reveal their sources in federal court.

"The time for needless delay of this legislation has passed," the Vermont Democrat said in prepared remarks. "We simply have no idea how many newsworthy stories have gone unwritten and unreported out of fear that a reporter would be forced to reveal a source, or face jail time."

Even if the Judiciary Committee gets through a growing list of amendments and approves the bill, it faces significant opposition in the full Senate and the White House.

The Bush administration opposes the measure on grounds it would make it harder to trace the source of leaks that could harm national security.

So does U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who subpoenaed reporters to testify against White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in a case that grew out of Fitzgerald's CIA leak probe. Libby was convicted of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI; his sentence was commuted by President Bush.

"The proposed shield law poses real hazards to national security and law enforcement," Fitzgerald writes in an opinion piece Thursday in The Washington Post.

Leaks of classified information harm national security, Fitzgerald said, and a federal shield law "would have the unintended but profound effect of handcuffing investigations of such leaks."

In a companion piece in the Post, former Bush administration solicitor general Theodore B. Olson argued for the proposed federal law, saying state shield laws have worked well.

"Reporters do not expect to be above the law," writes Olson, who represented some reporters in the CIA leak case. "But they should receive some protection so they can perform their public service in ensuring the free flow of information and exposing improper conduct without risking jail sentences."

The measure creating the first federal shield law for reporters is a bipartisan compromise. The panel could not finish considering all amendments a week earlier.

In an objection echoed by some Republican senators, the Justice Department and Bush's intelligence officials say that leaked reports of intelligence activities have been a valuable source of information to the nation's adversaries. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., touted Justice Department statistics that show that 19 subpoenas have been issued for reporters' source-related material since 1992, and only four have been approved since 2001.

But supporters point out that the bill includes exemptions for cases in which investigators are tracking acts of terrorism in the U.S. and other countries. An amendment by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., would keep accused spies, agents of foreign countries and terrorists from claiming the same protections extended to journalists.

The bill is supported by 50 news organizations, including The Associated Press.

The House Judiciary Committee passed its own bill in August.

___

The bill number is S. 2035.

___

On the Net:

A text of the bill may be found at http://thomas.loc.gov
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071004/...s_media_shield





Pirates Say ‘Narrgh’ to EU Terrorism Censorship
Ben Jones

Pirate Parties around the world are protesting against a recent Net censorship proposal by EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini. Frattini has recently been urging ministers at the European Union to consider censoring certain search keywords in a bid to curb terrorism.

Commissioner Frattini’s plans are based upon the ‘hidden knowledge’ method. In a nutshell, he hopes that by banning certain words from being searched on the internet, within the EU, it will reduce the ability of would-be terrorists to carry out attacks. Suggested keywords to be filtered include “bomb”, “kill”, “genocide”, and “terrorism” whilst any attempt to get around these restrictions, by using a proxy, for instance, will be met by criminal action.

This proposal has come under fire however, by Pirate Parties all around the world. The Chairman of the Austrian Pirate Party, Florian Hufsky, stated “it’s a tyrannical attempt to curtail useful knowledge from the general public on par with policies of China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Thus, whilst ineffective as a measure, it is a strong deviation from the principles of the open society.”

With the various Pirate Parties aiming for the European Parliament in 2009, there is not a voice that can easily be discounted, and with the incumbents making these gargantuan faux-pas, it may seem that they are in with a shot of success
http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-say-...orship-071003/





The Pirate Bay is Developing a New BitTorrent Tracker
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay is without a doubt the most popular BitTorrent tracker. Unfortunately their current tracker system is not performing as it used to and has reached its effective limit. The TPB team is currently working on a more efficient Open Source tracker system that, among other things, will guarantee better protection against anti-piracy outfits.

Some of you might have noticed that the Pirate Bay trackers were down for a couple of hours today. The reason for the downtime is not related to an anti-piracy organization this time, on the contrary. TPB has moved its servers to a new datacenter and added some extra servers to their already pretty impressive server lineup. The tracker currently runs on 12 servers, and 4 brand new ones will be added later today.

Adding new servers is not the only reason for the move of course. The new datacenter has better routers which handle their requirements better. It allows TPB to install better protection against DDoS attacks and nullrouting the spam-nets from anti-piracy organizations.

However, a complete overhaul of the current tracker system is needed to ensure the future effectiveness of the tracker and to ensure protection against spammers and fake torrents. According to the tracker design page, this new tracker will be capable of blocking and/or logging known p2p vandals such as MediaDefender, BayTSP, MediaSentry and EZ2net. The new tracker will ensure the privacy of its users and is designed to be as efficient as possible, meaning more peers with less bandwidth.

TiAMO, one of the developers of the new tracker system told TorrentFreak that they are still looking for skilled coders who want to join the Open Source project and help the BitTorrent community. If you think you are the guy, let him know. The current source code can be downloaded over here.
http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-is-devel...racker-071001/





BitTorrent Addiction: The Thrill of the Chase
enigmax

It’s great to have access to a huge library of media via your torrent client, no one can deny that, but for many users BitTorrent is more than just a functional tool. It’s become an addictive hobby, with puzzles to solve and treasures to find.

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, loves puzzles - although he insists he’s not an addict. However, many users of the BitTorrent system he created can’t say they feel the same way about their new hobby.

After a brief introduction, many BitTorrent users find themselves really interested by this great system and how it all fits together. Sure, the free media BitTorrent provides is a great attraction and a positive reinforcement for continuing, but for many, the real attraction lies elsewhere.

For some hardcore torrenters, the media acquired is secondary. Enjoyable, yes - but in a post-coital cigarette-type way - the icing on the cake if you like. Sure, many torrenters just grab a torrent and come back to the PC when it’s finished but they’re blissfully unaware of where the real action is to be found. For the serious torrenters, it’s all about the thrill of the chase.

At first, the BitTorrent novice doesn’t know there are forces of evil lurking around every corner, dedicated to ensuring that his downloading experience is as difficult as possible. He (or she) is unaware that super-powerful corporations with friends in government are intent on sabotage.

He has no idea that this new hobby has such high stakes. It could potentially land him in prison or cause him to end up with a massive 6-digit fine. When the novice starts to build his knowledge of such things, it can be little bit scary - but the adrenaline flows a little and the excitement builds. The hobby becomes more intense.

With this new found energy and a little research, things become clearer for the BitTorrent student. Moving away from simply downloading, a strategy forms as he learns that for most attacks on his sharing experience, there is an effective counter-measure. So for example, any attempt to say, set up fake torrents, can be dealt with effectively by employing various counter techniques. Torrent sites start to be chosen through intelligence, not just at random.

As more experience is gathered, the BitTorrent fan will probably start to understand that organizations such as the MPAA like to deal in propaganda, and that the big headlines of being fined huge amounts or being sent to jail are not the norm. In reality, he’ll learn that the chances of coming to grief in these ways are tiny and over time, will probably come to disregard these risks.

For the more nervous torrenter, the file-sharing world can be an unforgiving place. As he learns of the many threats and people looking to profit from things like malware, he may start to put up more defenses. Terrified of getting into trouble, he may turn to services such as those offered by Peer Guardian or an anonymous VPN solution such as that offered by Relakks.

Most hobbies involve getting into the minutia and in this respect, BitTorrent is an absolute dream. On many forums, there is talk of squeezing every last little bit of performance from a BitTorrent setup - many fans are, well - fanatical about the details. Most users agree, the best way, is as fast as possible!

There are lots of things that aim to interfere with the torrent experience but thankfully, the informed BitTorrent user will pick up lots of tips and tricks along the way to help restore torrent harmony, ensuring that this hobby stays fun.

Whatever the strategy, many BitTorrent hobbyists have as much fun during the chase as they do when experiencing the media they’ve successfully snared. Although nice to have, the media isn’t always the number one importance. For some it’s just great to hoard but it’s the road to finding and obtaining the stuff that increasingly provides the pull for the torrent hardcore. The whole BitTorrent experience can be quite captivating with its technical elements, all wrapped up in a stealthy cloak-and-dagger social layer, plenty of intrigue, many new friends and lots of fun.

For some of the 21st century’s digital treasure hunters, it’s great to ‘get’ - but the journey getting there (making friends and sharing the fun with others along the way) can be better still.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-a...-chase-071005/





Long Island Man Accused of Dealing $90,000 in Fake Guitars
Frank Eltman

It's a familiar tune, a sad lament actually, about a product falling victim to counterfeiters. Lately, they've been picking on guitars.

Last month, a Long Island music dealer was accused of selling $90,000 worth of knockoffs of classic Gibsons, a guitar known for its deep, melodic sound and used by virtually every country, rock and blues artist from Elvis Presley to Eric Clapton.

"Unfortunately, consumers are ending up on the short end of the stick," said Henry Juszkiewicz, chief executive of Nashville-based Gibson Guitars Corp.

Gibson guitars — inexpensive models start at about $2,000 — have a rich, distinctive sound that leads musicians to speak about them in reverent tones.

B.B. King is perhaps the best-known devotee; his black Gibson, nicknamed Lucille, shares nearly equal billing with the blues master on stage.

"Signing guitars that are not Gibson is like being married and kissing a woman who is not your wife," King once huffed when asked to autograph a Fender guitar.

Some of Gibson's Les Paul models — named for the creator of the solid body electric guitar — can sell for as much as $10,000 new.

Knocking them off is a lucrative and easy business, according to Hank Risan, a founder of the online Museum of Musical Instruments who owns an extensive collection of guitars and other instruments, including a $15 million guitar once owned by Mark Twain.
"To put together a replica might cost me a thousand dollars, more or less, depending on the instruments and parts," Risan said.

Add a fake logo and insert serial numbers that appear genuine, he said, and "the average person, and most experts, won't know if it's a really good forgery."

China — as it has with other consumer goods, such as electronics, designer clothing and cigarettes — has become the source of an influx of mass-produced counterfeit guitars, Juszkiewicz said. Gibson has a factory in China, and Juszkiewicz said that in addition to the legitimate factory, there is another one producing bogus guitars.

He estimated the knockoffs cost the industry millions, but he had no specific figures.

"Most of our leads come from consumers," he said. "There are a lot of really bad instruments being passed off as Gibsons out there. The paint rubs off on your clothes when you take it out of the box, and they sound awful."

A surge in recent years in the value of vintage guitars — some of which sell for millions at auction — is also helping fuel the market in fake Gibsons, Fenders and other six-strings.

Forged musical instruments are nothing new. There have been knockoffs of valuable instruments like the Stradivarius violin since Antonio Stradivari began making them in the late 1600s.

"Just like in the art world, an expert can tell if something is fake, but you need to be an expert," Juszkiewicz said.

If done properly, and sold to the right unsuspecting customer, a vintage knockoff could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.

The owner of the Long Island music store, Bernard Musemeci, has pleaded not guilty to trademark counterfeiting.

Musemeci, 44, insists he thought he was buying legitimate Gibson guitars from a dealer who advertised a going-out-of-business sale on the Internet.

"I've been playing guitar for years and I couldn't tell the difference," Musemeci said after his arrest. "They looked right, they sounded right, they felt right."

His attorney, John Fath, said Musemeci discovered they were fakes about two months after receiving them, but had no luck in contacting the seller to get his money back. After that, Fath said, Musemeci only used them for parts to repair other guitars.

Juszkiewicz said his company maintains a 24-hour hot line for consumer complaints about counterfeiting and other issues, but ultimately he offers a familiar version of caveat emptor: "If it's too good a deal, it's too good a deal."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...?id=1186572096





Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience
David Pogue

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200.

The computer, if you hadn’t already guessed, is the fabled “$100 laptop” that’s been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.

The concept: if a machine is designed smartly enough, without the bloat of standard laptops, and sold in large enough quantities, the price can be brought way, way down. Maybe not down to $100, as O.L.P.C. originally hoped, but low enough for developing countries to afford millions of them — one per child.

The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.

O.L.P.C. slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Get 1, Give 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

The group does worry that people might compare the XO with $1,000 Windows or Mac laptops. They might blog about their disappointment, thereby imperiling O.L.P.C.’s continuing talks with third world governments.

It’s easy to see how that might happen. There’s no CD/DVD drive at all, no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. The Linux operating system doesn’t run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs. The membrane-sealed, spillproof keyboard is too small for touch-typing by an adult.

And then there’s the look of this thing. It’s made of shiny green and white plastic, like a Fisher-Price toy, complete with a handle. With its two earlike antennas raised, it could be Shrek’s little robot friend.

And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. “Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop,” they say.

Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747.

The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges — versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.

The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That’s one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.

Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO’s color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it’s almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.

The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup — even when there’s no Internet connection.

With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos — color-coded to differentiate them — represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO’s visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)

This feature has some astonishing utility. If only one laptop has an Internet connection, for example, the others can get online, too, thanks to the mesh network. And when O.L.P.C. releases software upgrades, one laptop can broadcast them to other nearby laptops.

Power users will snort at the specs of this machine. It has only one gigabyte of storage — all flash memory — with 20 percent of that occupied by the XO’s system software. And the processor is feeble by conventional standards. Starting up takes two minutes, and switching between programs is poky.

Once in a program, though, the speed is fine; it turns out that a light processor is plenty if the software is written compactly and smartly. (O.L.P.C. points out that despite gigantic leaps in processing power, today’s business laptops don’t feel any faster than they did a few years ago. The operating systems and programs have added so much bloat that they absorb the speed gains.)

The built-in programs are equally clever. There’s a word processor, Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games (clones of Tetris and Connect 4), three music programs, a painting application, a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents.

There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)

There’s real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the computer itself. Many nations in XO’s market have few natural resources, and the global need for information workers grows with every passing day.

Most of the XO’s programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you’re word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you’re doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You’ve never seen anything like it.

The pair of laptops I reviewed had incomplete power-management software, beta-stage software and occasional cosmetic glitches. But O.L.P.C. and its worldwide army of open-source (volunteer) programmers expect to polish things by the time the assembly line starts to roll in November.

No, the biggest obstacle to the XO’s success is not technology — it’s already a wonder — but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers.

(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte’s, response: “Nobody I know would say, ‘By the way, let’s hold off on education.’ Education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.”)

But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the obstacles and doubters, O.L.P.C. has come up with a laptop that’s tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles.

It’s a technological breakthrough, for sure. Now let’s just hope it breaks through the human barriers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/te...ogue.html?8dpc





High-Tech Culture of Silicon Valley Originally Formed Around Radio
Tom Abate

They weren't out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley's ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor.

The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor.

Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at 32 the oldest of the bunch; the rest of the renegade group were younger than 30.

So when the Traitorous Eight, as they're sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery - but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the "Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley."

But wait. The National Register of Historic Places recognizes the garage in Palo Alto where David Packard and William Hewlett started their company. Isn't that the birthplace of Silicon Valley?

And here's a hitch. Not until 1971 was "Silicon Valley" used to describe the concentration of chip-making firms in the South Bay.

So what is Silicon Valley? How and when did it arise? And most important, perhaps, what is the future of this region that has become a synonym for innovation?

"There is this myth that Silicon Valley was all orchards when the chip companies arrived, but it's not true. It had been building, building for a long time," said Christophe Lécuyer, a Stanford-trained historian who turned his dissertation into a book, "Making Silicon Valley."

Lécuyer, now an economic analyst with the University of California system, said the region's technological awakening began almost a century ago when, not long after the great quake of 1906, the Bay Area - and particularly the Peninsula - began innovating with the then-hot technology of radio.

"The San Francisco Bay Area was a natural place for interest in radio because it was a seagoing region," said Timothy Sturgeon, an industrial researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who described this radio period in a paper, "How Silicon Valley Came to Be."

Lécuyer and Sturgeon argue that, roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better.

As Sturgeon notes, as early as 1909, Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell was acquiring patents for new radio technologies and persuading university officials, including then-President David Starr Jordan, "to finance a new company" in Palo Alto that would be called Federal Telegraph Co.

That same year in San Jose, Charles Herrold started a school for radio engineers and began broadcasting to radio hobbyists and later to a small local audience to become what a 1994 PBS documentary called "Broadcasting's Forgotten Father." Back then, the region had none of its present cachet relative to other clusters of radio activity like New York, New Jersey and Boston.

But in this rivalry with the industrial powers of the East, the future Silicon Valley would find a powerful customer with deep pockets - the U.S. military.

Sturgeon said U.S. naval officials, impressed by Federal Telegraph's technology, gave the Palo Alto firm huge contracts during World War I - the first but not the last time war would fuel the region's tech firms.

In another hint of the future, Sturgeon writes that around 1910, Peter Jensen and Edwin Pridham quit Federal Telegraph "to start a research and development firm in a garage in Napa" to improve loudspeakers. In 1917, they formed Magnavox, which built public address systems for destroyers and battleships in World War I.

The war's end took the wind out of Silicon Valley's sails. The Eastern radio powers, notably RCA, dominated the field during the 1920s and 1930s. The region's entrepreneurial fire cooled but, as history would show, didn't die.
Creation story

The next chapter in the Silicon Valley story involves the familiar tale of how Hewlett and Packard hatched the region's first technology giant in a Palo Alto garage.

Sophisticated versions of this creation epic also credit their mentor, Stanford engineering Professor Frederick Terman.

Terman, who began teaching at Stanford in the late 1920s, would spend the rest of his career formalizing the university-industry collaboration that would come to typify Silicon Valley.

But in the hardscrabble '30s, it was all Terman could do to hold together the ecosystem of tinkerers and researchers who were trying to survive the Depression.

He had help from tech pioneers such as Charles Litton Sr., who in 1932 established a machine shop that made better vacuum tube manufacturing tools. Tubes were the workhorse of electronics before transistors and - according to Lécuyer - Litton's tools allowed San Bruno vacuum-tube-maker Eitel-McCullough to build superior components - and a reputation.

Another seminal event was the 1939 invention of the klystron tube by Stanford research associates and brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, who would later start Varian Associates. The klystron tube led to more powerful radars, helping the United States and its allies gain an advantage in World War II.

In his 1995 memoir, "The HP Way," Packard himself provides a glimpse of this ecosystem in action, telling how Terman arranged for him to work evenings at Litton's shop.

"Charlie Litton had started with the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto," Packard wrote, adding, "My relationship with Charlie developed into a long and enduring friendship."

Garage-era Silicon Valley also adopted the business model of the radio age - supplying the U.S. armed forces.

"Military funding was critical for the rise of Silicon Valley from the very late 1930s to the early 1960s," Lécuyer said. For instance, he said, Eitel-McCullough had about 15 people making vacuum tubes before the war. That swelled to 4,000 employees in 1943, then contracted to 200 in 1945, when peace crippled demand for tubes.

So, by the time the Traitorous Eight started Fairchild, the recipe for Silicon Valley largely had been written. Still, the notion that they founded the valley is justified by what financier Rock brought to the party - the money to bankroll bold engineers.
"The venture capital sector really arises along with the semiconductor industry," Lécuyer said. "Once the venture capital is in place, it makes all the other things possible."

From Fairchild forward

Investment that rewards risk became the final catalyst for the Silicon Valley we know, where ideas, nourished by money, spawn startups, products, even whole industries, like biotechnology.

The first big wave of startups created by venture investment were the dozens of Fairchildren - chip companies like National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel - started by engineers who traced their ancestry to the Traitorous Eight.

Intel became the largest of these Fairchildren, and Moore the best known of the eight. But the gang leader was his charismatic colleague Robert Noyce. A technical innovator - in this meritocracy he had to be - in 1961, Noyce designed the first chip that enabled two transistors to work together on a single slice of silicon. Called the "integrated circuit," it is the ancestor of today's billion-transistor chips.

In 1971, when trade press reporter Don Hoefler used "Silicon Valley" to describe the concentration of chip-making firms on the Peninsula, the name stuck. But almost from the start, it stood for more than chip-making.

"Silicon Valley created an environment that allowed ideas and money and people to combine more easily," said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley and an expert on the region.

The early chip industry, like the two waves of innovation before, initially depended on military expenditures, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, writes in his book "A History of Modern Computing."

Only this time, it was the Cold War that opened the government's checkbook.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, prodded the United States to modernize its missile and space program. The newfangled silicon chips were considered vital - albeit costly - components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the Defense Department bought so many "that the price dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30."

Falling chip prices fueled development of new electronics for corporate customers and eventually individual consumers. Reliance on military purchases lessened, though defense dollars remained important in spurring research. Thus, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later dreamed up Google, a defense research grant helped support their work. And when Stanford computer scientists won a robotic car race in 2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.

By the 1970s, therefore, Silicon Valley was poised to capitalize on new civilian technologies like PCs, as exemplified by Apple Computer.

In the 1980s, excitement shifted to scientific workstations and networking devices from firms like Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems, and to software like the version of UNIX perfected at UC Berkeley.

In the 1990s, the point-and-click browser popularized by Netscape ignited the dot-com boom and, after a painful bust and slow recovery, the recent rise of Google and social networking sites such as Facebook signal another wave of entrepreneurship.
Back to the future

Today, Silicon Valley is showing signs of age. Traffic is bad. Housing is worse. And it's competing with every metropolitan region in the nation - indeed, the world.

Saxenian, the Berkeley dean, is optimistic. Her most recent book, "The New Argonauts," posits that Silicon Valley will remain a design and innovation center by partnering with lower-cost manufacturing centers overseas.

"Viewed from outside the United States, Silicon Valley is an amazing place," she said. "I'd put my bets on innovation coming out of the valley for the next 20 years."

But jobs are a concern. Tech employment hasn't yet recovered from the dot-com bust. The American Electronics Association says California had 1.2 million tech jobs in 2000. Its most recent snapshot found 280,000 fewer Californians collecting high-tech paychecks.

Is it outsourcing? Is it globalism? Is it a problem? Maybe the answer depends on whether you're looking for work or looking to hire.

And more to the point, after all this time, do we know what Silicon Valley is, or better yet, how to keep it vital?

"My biggest hope for the valley is that we continue to have the focus, creativity and capital to reinvent our future and the future of technology," said Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp., the most prosperous of the Fairchildren.

"My biggest fear is that we will get complacent and allow it to happen elsewhere."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...L&tsp=business





Electronic Artists Find Inspiration in Vintage Gear



Kerri Mason

Before preset sound banks overflowed with prefab beats, electronic musicians made them from scratch with freestanding synthesizers.

Before drag and drop, remixers physically cut and spliced tape to move sonic parts. When the digital production revolution finally did come, dance producers led the charge, emboldened by the standardization of sounds and methods they had pioneered. Since then, nothing has sped the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some) more than the advent of increasingly cheap, easily manipulated software.

But now, less than a decade after the debut of such computer synthesizers as Propellerhead's Reason and Ableton's Live, the same early adopters who embraced digital are turning their gazes back to the future.

"People are realizing what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time. The magic of analog is it's never the same, depending on the weather, where you are in the world, the electricity supply."

Moffa is one of a crew of young dance producers who have dumped their neat little laptops for rooms full of hulking black boxes, scouring eBay and garage sales for vintage, amp-driven, analog synthesizers. Their mission: to shake off the homogeny of boilerplate beats and use synthesizers as the nuanced instruments they once were.

"We get more inspiration out of the old machines," says James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, whose addictive "Attack Decay Sustain Release" (Interscope) has fired up the dancing shoes of indie and club kids.

"You try to do something, and they'll give you something back you didn't expect," Ford says of the old-school technology. "Also, because they're physical things, it's less cerebral; there's a humanism to it. We're not big fans of pushing blocks around screens."

Acts from the Chemical Brothers to Nine Inch Nails have garnished their records with different analog tools for years. But the new school of enthusiasts sees its preference as a sort of reactionary revolution.

Moffa dumped all his digital sounds for good in 2005, going fully analog for Vinyl Life's "Flashlight" (Ultra) and each release since. Simian's "Attack" contains no samples, and was entirely made with hunks of such audio antiquity as the Korg MS-20 (1978), ARP Instruments ARP 2600 (1971) and Roland Juno-60 (1982). Such acts as Uberzone and U.N.K.L.E. have also expressed their displeasure with the constraints of digital.

"I hate really nostalgic records that are trying to sound like old records," Ford says. "But there's something familiar about (analog), the way it shapes the sound and rounds out the edges and warms it up. It reminds you of the records you grew up with."
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...45873720070930





In Facebook, Investing in a Theory
Brad Stone

The Facebook frenzy is spreading.

Thousands of software developers are creating features for Facebook, the rapidly growing social network, many hoping to strike it rich alongside Facebook’s own employees.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., opened its service to outside developers this spring, inviting them to create tools for the site and to try to profit from them. Since then, more than 4,000 “applications” have flooded onto the site, spicing it up with games or whimsical programs called widgets that let you turn your friends into virtual zombies and more practical tools that let users display images of their favorite books, music, movies and wine on their profile pages.

The wave of attention from users and developers has sent estimates of Facebook’s value soaring into the dot-com stratosphere. Last month, there were reports that Microsoft was considering a $500 million investment that would value the three-year-old company at up to $15 billion.

Now it appears that such exuberance has infused the expanding Facebook universe, even though no one has yet proved it is possible to build a profitable business with sustainable revenues on the site. Some developers report earning tens of thousands of dollars in advertising with the applications they have created. Yet their applications are mostly running ads promoting other Facebook applications — a situation that recalls the earliest Gold Rush miners, who earned a living selling shovels to other miners. And developers must cover the cost of hosting the applications on their own Web servers.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley venture capitalists are creating funds devoted entirely to investing in Facebook tools. Internet entrepreneurs are shifting their businesses to focus on the social networking site. Some of the most popular applications are being sold, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars — but only when buyers’ and sellers’ ideas about the potential of Facebook are similar.

Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, based in San Mateo, Calif., said the price would be high for anyone who wanted to buy his 20-person company’s most popular Facebook widget, Super Wall. “If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I’d say, ‘Forget it,’” said Mr. Tokuda, 41.

Super Wall, which lets Facebook members leave messages, photos or videos on one another’s profile pages, is an expanded version of a Facebook function built in on profile pages, called the Wall. Though 10 million Facebook users have added Super Wall to their pages, it could be quickly eclipsed if Facebook decided to improve its own Wall feature.

Nevertheless, Mr. Tokuda says, life as a barnacle on Facebook’s hull can be profitable. “This is a completely new channel of delivering content to users and letting them communicate,” he said. “Owning that over the long stretch can be worth a lot.”

Facebook itself has nurtured the enthusiasm among developers. The platform was originally pitched as a way to build a business on Facebook’s back. And last month, the company’s founder, Mark E. Zuckerberg, announced a new investment fund, the FB Fund, to give grants of up to $250,000 to developers creating new tools for the site.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the vice president for product marketing and operations at Facebook, argues that the high values placed on Facebook tools are reasonable considering what the company is giving its entrepreneurs. “People look at our platform as a way to dramatically de-risk an investment. For little amounts of money in a short period of time, you can understand whether consumers will adopt your application,” he said.

That understanding can indeed come quickly. Facebook gives its members updates on what new features their friends are trying out, which allows applications to spread more quickly and cheaply than if they were available on a stand-alone Web site.

ILike, an Internet music company based in Seattle, was among the first to introduce a Facebook application when the site was opened up in May. The iLike tool, which lets users post clips of their favorite songs, has since been added to the pages of 8.6 million of the service’s 43 million users, and it gets twice as much traffic as iLike’s year-old Web site.

ILike makes money on advertising and commissions when users buy concert tickets or download songs from iTunes, but its goals are considerably more ambitious. “We have the potential opportunity to create the new MTV,” said Ali Partovi, its 34-year-old chief executive, who has spent the last two weeks traveling to Nashville, Los Angeles and New York, trying to persuade musicians and their managers to participate on Facebook as they do on its larger rival, MySpace.

Other Facebook entrepreneurs, and their would-be financiers, are indulging in the kind of exuberant thinking that recalls the first dot-com bubble. This summer, Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist in Monterey, Calif., who describes himself as “the first Facebook-only V.C.,” started a $25 million Facebook investment fund and introduced a Web tool, at Adanomics.com, that assigns a monetary value to Facebook applications.

Considering variables like the number of users, frequency of use and advertising revenue, Mr. Lorenzen values popular Facebook applications like Where I’ve Been (lets users show which countries and states they have visited), Texas Hold ’Em Poker and What’s Your Stripper Name (suggests what you and your friends would call yourselves on stage) at around $2 million each.

“It has become very clear this is a huge opportunity,” Mr. Lorenzen said. “It is very simple in my opinion for small development teams to very quickly build businesses on top of Facebook.”

Yet there are questions about the ability of these Facebook-inspired businesses to create sustainable revenues. Developers are restricted to placing advertising on their “canvas page” — the portion of the site through which users install and interact with an application. Facebook does not allow developers to advertise on users’ profile pages, where the applications themselves are imbedded.

Several companies have created networks to funnel advertisements to canvas pages, and Facebook itself has indicated it will soon introduce its own ad system for developers. So far, most of the ads on canvas pages promote other applications whose creators are seeking exposure.

Michael Lazerow, the co-founder of Buddy Media, based in New York, thinks the pattern of Facebook applications relying on advertising from other Facebook applications is unsustainable. Buddy Media, his five-employee start-up, is developing a virtual currency for the service, called AceBucks, which can be won by playing games and exchanged for virtual goods and services on the site. The company is betting that traditional advertisers will ultimately flock to Facebook, attracted by the personal information members reveal to applications. Such data will allow advertisers to narrowly direct their messages.

“That is where it turns from a pyramid scheme to a major business,” Mr. Lazerow said. “Would you rather market to people who you have no idea who they are, or reach the exact people you want to reach?”

Not everyone is sold on this as inevitable. Andrew Chen, an advertising executive and adviser to the Silicon Valley investment firm Mohr Davidow Ventures, suggests that the Facebook enthusiasm is overblown. Precisely because Facebook is such an appealing and engaging environment, he says, Facebook users click on ads significantly less frequently than elsewhere on the Web. And Facebook members who add applications to their pages can just as easily remove or ignore them.

“It’s really hard to value these things right now except on a very arbitrary basis,” he said. “The ecosystem has to mature significantly before any sort of real revenue or value can be created.”

Some Facebook developers seem to agree and are keeping their expectations in check.

Rajat Agarwalla, 26, and his brother Jayant, 21, developers based in Calcutta, created Scrabulous, a popular Facebook adaptation of the word game Scrabble that has been added to more than 840,000 pages. Rajat Agarwalla said he had tried all the Facebook advertising networks and found that none earned much money. Now he is using Google AdSense to put text advertising links on the Scrabulous canvas page, and he said he is barely recouping his swelling bandwidth costs.

But that is fine with him, because developing for Facebook is only a hobby for the Agarwalla brothers.

“We see it as a project and as a community, where people are actually having fun with each other, rather than paying to have fun or thinking someone is running this as a professional enterprise,” Mr. Agarwalla said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/te...4facebook.html





The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward
G. Pascal Zachary

AT first blush, the iPhone from Apple, the new microprocessor family from Intel and the ubiquitous Google search engine have nothing in common. One is a gadget, one is an electronic part and one is a service.

Yet all of these products — much acclaimed for their creativity — depend on obscure process innovations that, while highly complex and lacking glamour, are an essential part of establishing a winning edge in commercial electronics. Indeed, the success of Apple, Intel, Google and scores of other technology companies has as much or more to do with their process innovations as the products that inspire loyalty among fans and admiration from foes.

First, a definitional detour. Processes are the stuff in the proverbial “black box,” the alchemy unseen by consumers or the inelegantly termed “end users” who buy computers, cellphones, cameras and all manner of digital devices and services.

Snazzy products are the stuff of legends, romanticized by “early adopters” and skewered by neo-Luddites. Yet while these products bring glory to companies, novel processes are often more important in keeping the cash registers ringing.

The proof of this proposition is that while companies often spend millions to advertise and market new product designs and innovations, they guard intensely the details of their process innovations.

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”

Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components. Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of their future arc.

Intel treats its process innovations as a competitive weapon, striving to create a “new generation” every two years. That enables the company’s chips, even if there were no changes in their design, to perform better and cost less to make.

Consumers are usually blind to the importance of novel processes. Even when they learn about these innovations, they tend to think only of the product itself.

“The average consumer doesn’t care what processes are used,” says Mark T. Bohr, an Intel physicist who oversaw what is arguably the most important advance in decades in the technology for making microprocessors, the brains inside computers and other digital devices.

Faced with ever-faster chips that threatened to explode into flames, Intel searched desperately for new processes to make microprocessors. Enter hafnium, a rare metal. Designers led by Mr. Bohr in Hillsboro, Ore., chose hafnium to replace silicon oxide, the venerable insulator in chips and a material used in making glass. Mr. Bohr also helped to identify new materials, whose identity Intel is keeping secret, for the crucial transistor “gates” that sit atop a chip’s insulators.

On Nov. 12, Intel will begin shipping its first chips using the new processes. Gordon E. Moore, Intel’s co-founder, recently declared that the hafnium-and-gate process innovations should allow his so-called Moore’s Law, whereby chips grow ever faster and less expensive, to hold true for some time.

Despite the enormity of the achievement, Mr. Bohr is relatively anonymous, even within Intel. “The work of process development comes second to creating new designs for chips,” he says. Not surprisingly, when Intel starts shipping the new chips, neither the hafnium nor the gates innovations will be trumpeted as selling points. Rather, Intel will emphasize how customers can benefit from using the chips.

If process innovations are unheralded, consumers may misunderstand the nature of technological change.

“Process innovation tends to receive less attention from the informed public for the same reason that incremental innovation tends to receive too little attention: it is more difficult to encapsulate in a press release or photo opportunity,” says David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of technological change.

“Process innovation, even more than most product innovations, also tends to realize its economic potential through a lengthy process of incremental improvement based on learning by doing and other types of learning,” he added. “So ‘breakthroughs’ in process engineering are, if anything, even rarer than in product innovation.”

As a result, process gurus are resigned to playing in the shadows, leaving fame, if not fortune, to others. John Feland, human interface architect at Synaptics Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., knows this enduring truth of invention. He helps design arrays of sensors that drive the touch screens in the newest cellphones like the Prada from LG. Such touch screens are earning raves from consumers, yet Mr. Feland is essentially an invisible man.

“My job is to make our customers look like heroes,” he says philosophically. Then he sums up the special role played by fellow members of the process tribe: “We are like Q to James Bond.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/te...gy/30ping.html





Fact or Fiction?: Black Is Better than White for Energy-Efficient Screens

Black isn't the new green
Larry Greenemeier

The green computing movement demands that all computer users shed the energy-wasting practices to which they've grown accustomed—so you decide that you're going to power down your PC at night, invest in an Energy Star–approved laptop, and only visit Web pages that eschew white space in favor of ostensibly more energy-efficient black backgrounds.

Before you tune out and turn off, you should know that black isn't necessarily the new green. Because computer monitors come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and not all monitors create black and white the same way, there's no proof that, on the whole, increased usage of black images would save more energy than the continued use of white ones. In fact in newer liquid-crystal display, or LCD, monitors white is actually slightly more energy efficient than black.

The notion that black screens save electricity certainly makes sense when you're talking about cathode-ray tube, or CRT, technology that works by moving an electron beam back and forth across the back of the screen. "The front screen is covered with red, blue and green phosphors," says Bill Schindler, vice president of electrical engineering for Panasonic Plasma Display Laboratory of America. To produce white, the electron beam is directed at the phosphors. However, "when the screen is black, you don't have to fire the beam," he adds.

CRT monitors, which until a few years ago were the predominant models among PC users, consume more power when a computer screen is white. To confirm this, Schindler measured the energy output of an 18-inch (45.7-centimeter) CRT monitor and found it used 102 watts when the screen was white but only 79 watts when the display was black.

This is not the case, however, with LCD monitors, which have no phosphors and represent the lion's share of every new monitored purchased in the developed world, including those used by laptops. Instead, LCD displays rely on an array of thin-tube fluorescent bulbs that provide a constant source of light to create a white screen. To make it black, LCDs rely on a diffuser to block this light. As a result, LCDs use more energy than CRTs to display a black screen. Measuring a 17-inch (43-centimeter) LCD monitor, Schindler found that white required 22.6 watts, while black came in a tad higher at 23.2 watts. With a 20-inch (50.8-centimeter) LCD, black required 6 percent more energy than white.

One of the most visible manifestations of the belief that black screens save energy is Blackle, an online search engine whose Web site is cast almost entirely in black. Created by Heap Media, Blackle exists "to remind people of the need to take small steps every day to save energy," says Blackle founder Toby Heap, who launched the site in January. "I do not expect the energy savings from Blackle to change the world on their own, but the point of Blackle is that every little bit counts."

One of the key arguments in favor of black screens is a 2002 research study produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory entitled "Energy Use and Power Levels in New Monitors and Personal Computers." The report indicates that "a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Indeed, that study reports that black screens consistently require less energy than white screens, regardless of whether the monitor is a CRT or LCD.

"It depends on the resting state of the LCD as to whether they require energy to stop light or to allow light to pass through," Heap explains. "This is why screen tests show that some CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) LCD screens save energy and some use a bit more. All of the scientific test data we have come across shows a slight saving on black LCD screens, which suggests that the rest state on many LCD screens does not allow light through." Heap also points out that a large number of Blackle users come from India and South America, where CRTs are still commonly sold.

Even though Google isn't tied to Blackle other than powering its search engine, Google green energy czar Bill Weihl in August posted a blog disputing the notion of black as the new green. "We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption," he wrote. "To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75 percent of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage."

New advances in LCD technologies could eventually validate the belief that black is better. Newer types of LCD include a dynamic dimming capability that changes the strength of the backlight based on the image being displayed. Heap also points out that many of the new monitor technologies such as LCDs backlit with light-emitting diodes (LED), plasma screens and organic LED screens do not have a constant backlight "so we will see larger savings with Blackle as these new monitors replace the CCFL LCDs," he says.

In the meantime, the world is evenly split between CRT and LCD monitors, totaling roughly 405 million and 401 million respectively in 2007, according to iSuppli data. So if you're still toiling away in front of a hefty CRT monitor that takes up three-quarters of your desk, then black screens will save you some energy. For those who've graduated to thinner LCD models, black screens are actually sucking up more energy then their white counterparts.
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=...8158F1CCD20C80





New Sony XEL-1 OLED TV
Luigi Lugmayr

Sony introduces their first commercial OLED TV named XEL-1.

The stunning XEL-1 is what Sony teased on Friday on their site in Japan. The XEL-1 is an 11 inch display that is only 3mm thin. Other stunning performance indicators include a dramatic 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a low 45W power consumption.

Sony has put the ultra-thin display on a pedestal with a flexible arm. At 11 inch the Sony XEL-1 is a nice stylish desk accessory.

The first Sony OLED TV has a resolution of 960x ×540px, but takes input resolution up to 1080p.

The Sony XEL-1 has an integrated digital TV tuner for Japan. Other features of the Sony OLED TV include USB, LAN interface, 1x HDMI port, headphone plug and S-Force sound.

Overall measurements of the XEL-1 are 287×253×140mm.

Sony plans to start shipping the XEL-1 OLED TV on December 1st for 200,000 Yen (~$1,740). This is a very high price for an 11 inch TV, but it is the first OLED TV to buy. Early adoption always had its price.
Via this Sony press-release (Japanese). See also the Sony OLED TV product page (Japanese).
http://www.i4u.com/article11857.html





A Cult Classic Restored, Again



Fred Kaplan

IT’S been 25 years since the release of “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s science fiction cult film turned classic, but only now has his original vision reached the screen.

“Blade Runner: The Final Cut” — as the definitive director’s cut is titled — was scheduled to play at the New York Film Festival Saturday night, opens at the Ziegfeld in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles on Friday, and comes out in December in a five-disc set with scads of extra features.

An earlier director’s cut played in theaters 15 years ago to great fanfare and is still available on DVD. But the new one is something different: darker, bleaker, more beautifully immersive.

The film, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” takes place in Los Angeles in 2019. It follows a cop named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) who hunts down androids — or, in the film’s jargon, replicants— that have escaped from their slave cells on outer-space colonies and are trying to blend in back on Earth.

What’s hypnotic about the film is its seamless portrait of the future, a sleek retro Deco glossed on neon-laced decay: overcrowded cities roamed by hustlers, strugglers and street gangs mumbling a multicultural argot, the sky lit by giant corporate logos and video billboards hyping exotic getaways on other planets, where most English-speaking white people seem to have fled.

Mr. Scott designed this world in minute detail and shot it at night, from oblique angles, mainly on Warner Brothers’ back lot in Burbank, Calif., pumping in smoke and drizzling in rain.

“I’ve never paid quite so much attention to a movie, ever,” Mr. Scott said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he’s shooting a spy thriller. “But we had to create a world that supported the story’s premise, made it believable. Why do you watch a film seven times? Because somebody’s done it right and transported you to its world.”

He created this world from what he saw around him. “I was spending a lot of time in New York,” he said. “The city back then seemed to be dismantling itself. It was marginally out of control. I’d also shot some commercials in Hong Kong. This was before the skyscrapers. The streets seemed medieval. There were 4,000 junks in the harbor, and the harbor was filthy. You wouldn’t want to fall in; you’d never get out alive. I wanted to film ‘Blade Runner’ in Hong Kong, but couldn’t afford to.

When “Blade Runner” came out in June 1982 it received mixed reviews and lost money. The summer’s big hit was “E. T.,” Steven Spielberg’s tale of a cute alien phoning home from the tidy suburbs. Few wanted to watch a movie that implied the world was about to go drastically downhill.

“Here we are 25 years on,” Mr. Scott said, “and we’re seriously discussing the possibility of the end of this world by the end of the century. This is no longer science fiction.”

The special effects that produced this vision were amazing for their day. Created with miniature models, optics and double exposures, they seemed less artificial than many computer effects of a decade later. But like film stock, they faded with time.



For the new director’s cut, the special-effects footage was digitally scanned at 8,000 lines per frame, four times the resolution of most restorations, and then meticulously retouched. The results look almost 3-D.

The film’s theme of dehumanization has also been sharpened. What has been a matter of speculation and debate is now a certainty: Deckard, the replicant-hunting cop, is himself a replicant. Mr. Scott confirmed this: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

This may disappoint some viewers. Deckard is the film’s one person with a conscience. If he’s a replicant, it means that there are no more decent human beings.

“It’s a pretty dark world,” Mr. Scott acknowledged. “How many decent human beings do you meet these days?”

The clue to Deckard’s true nature comes in a scene that was cut from the original release and only recently unearthed by Charles de Lauzirika, Mr. Scott’s assistant and the restoration’s producer, In the film, Deckard falls in love with Rachael (played by Sean Young), a secretary at the Tyrell Corporation, the conglomerate that makes replicants. She discovers that she’s a replicant too. Her memories of childhood were implanted by Tyrell to make her think she’s human.

In the last scene of Mr. Scott’s version, Deckard leads Rachael out of his apartment. He notices an origami figure of a unicorn on the floor. A fellow cop has often left such figures outside replicants’ rooms. In an earlier scene, Deckard was thinking about a unicorn. Looking at the cutout now, he realizes that the authorities know what’s in his mind, that the unicorn is a planted memory, that he’s a replicant and that he and Rachael are both now on the run. They get into the elevator. The door slams. The end.

Neither this scene nor any unicorn appeared in the 1982 release. That version ended with Deckard and Rachael escaping, driving through green countryside, Deckard telling us in his Philip Marlowe voice-over — which ran throughout the movie — that he had learned Rachael is a new type of replicant, built to live as long as humans. They smile. The end.

How to explain such a drastic change? The veteran television producers Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio put up one third of the film’s $22 million budget and the completion bond, which stipulated that if the film went over budget they had to pay the overrun but would also take ownership of the movie. The film went $7 million over budget.

Preview screenings were disastrous. Crowds went to see the new Harrison Ford movie, thinking it would be like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and they were befuddled. Mr. Yorkin and Mr. Perenchio, whose relations with Mr. Scott were always tense, took over.

In some accounts, Mr. Scott was kicked off the picture and had nothing to do with the voice-over or the happy ending. This isn’t quite accurate.

“I was in a minor argument over it for about six hours,” Mr. Scott recalled. “Then I was fully on board.” He had contemplated a voice-over early on, inspired by Martin Sheen’s in “Apocalypse Now.” When the previews bombed, he revived the idea and had his screenwriters, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, work on it. The new owners discarded that draft and hired Roland Kibbee, a frequent writer for the detective show “Colombo,” to do a rewrite.

Mr. Scott didn’t like the revision, but he edited it into the movie anyway. He also asked Stanley Kubrick for outtakes of rolling countryside that were shot for “The Shining,” and used them as backdrop for the desired happy ending.

“I went along with the idea that we had to do certain things to get audiences interested,” Mr. Scott recalled. “I later realized that once I adopted that line, I was selling my soul to the devil, inch by inch drifting from my original conception.”

“My original concept,” he said, “was almost operatic: the cadences, the deliberate pacing. I mean that in the sense of the best comic strips, the ones that adults read, which are very operatic. ‘Batman’ — you can’t get more operatic than that.”

Afterward, Mr. Scott moved on to other films. In 1989 a Warner Brothers executive, going through the vaults, came across a 70-millimeter print of Mr. Scott’s original cut. In May 1990 the print was lent to a Los Angeles theater showing a festival of 70-millimeter films. Fans lined up around the block. The same thing happened when two art houses screened it in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Sensing a windfall, Warner Brothers announced the release of a director’s cut and brought in Mr. Scott. It was a rush job — much of the deleted footage couldn’t be found — but it was closer to what he had intended.

In 2000 Mr. Scott announced that he was working on a multidisc set that would include a polished director’s cut. But the project collapsed when the Mr. Yorkin and Mr. Perenchio wouldn’t transfer the rights.

This refusal was widely attributed to lingering bitterness. Mr. Yorkin, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles, denied that. “It’s just there was no reason for another release,” he said. “We needed an idea that would make it an event.”

Last year they realized the film’s 25th anniversary was coming up. “That was an idea we could hook it on,” Mr. Yorkin said. A deal was struck with Warner Brothers. The project was revived.

Mr. de Lauzirika plowed through 977 boxes and cans of film, stored mainly in a Burbank warehouse, and found the missing pieces — including the complete unicorn scene — along with several discs’ worth of material for DVD special features. And the technical experts restored the picture to a level of detail that would have been impossible a few years earlier.

“In many ways,” Mr. de Lauzirika said, “the delay actually helped. So all headaches aside, it’s hard to be bitter. I’m actually quite grateful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/movies/30kapl.html





Using CCTV for Low-Budget Filmmaking
Regine

One of the highlights of the Goodbye Privacy symposium at ars electronica was a talk given by Graham Harwood. The Mongrel artist demonstrated several strategies developed by Mediashed in reaction to surveillance.

MediaShed is a "free-media" space open to the public in the east of England. Free media - "as in free speech not free beer"- is a means of doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using the public domain, free software and recycled equipment. It is also about saying what you want "freely", using accessible media that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls.

It's not just a matter of allowing artists, hackers, activists, etc. to use these free tools but also those you would not expect to find in this art context.

For example, Mediashed involved a group of kids who usually hang around in the streets to engage in Video sniffin' activities and turn CCTV into a free broadcasting system for their own use. "Why would you want to buy some video equipment when there are already so many cameras around for you to use?" They bought in a high street store some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out the street for signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own movie.

Next their video sniffing adventures were invited to Futuresonic, as part of the festival's Art for Shopping Centers selection. This time the film, called The Duellists, combined free-media with free-running. Inspired by the parkour sport, free-running involves fluid uninterrupted movement adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, free-running makes use of and re-energises the infrastructure of the city.

Futuresonic 2007 presents The Duellists by MediaShed ft Methods

The performers were professional parkour breakin' crew Methods of Movement and their acrobatic choreography was filmed in the shopping centre over three nights. The film was shot using only the existing in-house CCTV network of 160 cameras operated from the central control room, with a soundtrack created entirely from the found sounds and noises recorded during the performance. Sometimes the quality of the camera is incredibly good, elsewhere it is just b&w and grainy.

The movie was projected on a big plasma screen inside the Manchester Arndale Shopping Centre where an average of 6000 people shop every day. On the second day, they had to take the movie off, some people were not too happy at the idea that performers were messing up with a space meant for shopping activities.

The project was the first official UK implementation of GEARBOX the free-media video toolkit developed by MediaShed with the Eyebeam Studios in New York. Comprised of “how to” step by step examples, Gearbox shows people how to record footage using combinations of found resources (such as CCTV Video Sniffin’ or Spy Kiting which allows you to get images that -sort of- look like they were taken from helicoptor but using cheap wireless cctv technology and a kite instead) and low-budget methods of reproducing professional film making techniques (for example, achieving a crane shot using a fishing pole).
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com...ves/009757.php





The Online Movie Community Saves Steven Spielberg’s Ass
Neil Miller

Under-appreciated. Underestimated. Ignored. These are common phrases that we in the online movie community have often used to describe our value in the eyes of most (but certainly not all) movie studios. Sordid is the relationship between the online community and Fox, who likes to pick and choose who gets to see their movies first. Hell, even the studios we love dearly, such as Paramount, have had run-ins with our brethren (See Paramount shutting down IESB earlier this year). But despite the rocky road upon which we travel when it comes to proving our worth and gaining access to top notch information that can be delivered to our faithful readers, when push comes to shove, the online community really does have the best interests of Hollywood in mind - no matter what they think of us.

The most recent incident, one that could have gone terribly wrong for the folks at Paramount Studios, involved a break in at the office of one Mr. Steven Spielberg. You may know him as the director of small, artsy films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Spielberg’s production office on the Paramount lot was robbed of multiple computers and over 2000 production stills from Spielberg’s current project, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom fo the Crystal Skull.

The thieves then began to contact online outlets, basically auctioning off the goods for the low, low price of $2000, which is wholesale if you really think about. Can you imagine the immense amount of information that could be pulled off of a few laptops from Spielberg’s office? It blows my mind.

One particular outlet that was contacted, TMZ.com was even on the verge of posting some of the information. But before they could move forward, the lawyers over at Paramount stepped in.

The FBI also began their investigation, which would ultimately be aided by a member of the online movie community. This member of the community cooperated with both the FBI and Paramount reps, and less than 24 hours later a sting operation, complete with a body double for our blogger hero, was underway. The thieves were apprehended today at the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles, CA around 4:00pm PST.

To say the least, it was a victory for everyone. For Spielberg and the folks at Paramount, they get their stuff back and avoid a huge publicity nightmare. For the online community, we get to celebrate one of our own who chose to do the right thing and ended up a hero. We all love to report a spoiler here and there, or leak a video once in a while. Hell, we here at FSR have received our share of “Cease and Desist” notices from legal teams at various studios. But this was just going too far. One thing that studios often forget is that above all, we love movies. We are here to help them (the studios) get their great films to you (our beloved readers), we aren’t here to steal computers and damage careers. We’ll leave that to the tradition format media.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is still set for a May 22, 2008 release. And no, I don’t have any of the photos. So lay off, ya scavengers.
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/new...lbergs-ass.php





It Isn’t a Real Sex Scene? I Still Need a Cigarette
Mireya Navarro

A FEW years ago, Michelle Borth went topless for a movie, and she thought: “That’s it. That’s my last topless scene.”

Then she read the script for the new HBO show “Tell Me You Love Me.” The show required frontal nudity and such explicit sex scenes that the first question asked at a press conference with television critics last July was:

“Did anybody actually do it?”

The answer was no, but Ms. Borth, who plays Jamie in “Tell Me,” is not faulting anyone for wondering.

“It’s not supposed to be like any show,” Ms. Borth, 29, said. “To keep it tame doesn’t do justice to what we’re doing, which is an unfiltered, candid look at relationships, and that includes sex.”

Certainly, real sex in acting is rare, but recent offerings in television and film are pushing the boundaries. Some critics have called “Tell Me” nothing more than soft porn, and even people in the entertainment industry question just how much explicitness is necessary. Just how graphic, they ask, must sex scenes be to make a dramatic point?

In the last few years, two American filmmakers, Vincent Gallo and John Cameron Mitchell, have depicted actual sex in their films — and have not been shy about admitting it. Recently, the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee earned an NC-17 rating for his “Lust, Caution.”

These films and “Tell Me” fall under “hard-core art,” said Linda Williams, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of books on both pornography and cinema. They escalate the explicitness, trying to step beyond the conventional but not veer into pornography.

“We’re stuck in this dichotomy of pornography’s un-nuanced pleasure and simulated sex, which does not allow certain kinds of representations,” she said. The new productions, she added, are redefining “just what might be an American adult film or television show.”

Cynthia Mort, the creator of “Tell Me,” said the point was not to make the depiction indistinguishable from real sex. “The goal is to make it moving and emotional and intimate and, yes, uncomfortable at times, because not everyone is comfortable with sex,” she said. “You’re trying to capture that.”

IN the fourth episode of “Tell Me,” Ms. Borth’s character has a fling after breaking up with her fiancé. Rodrigo García, the director, said the scene needed explicitness, including nudity and frantic motion, to contrast with the aftermath — her disappointment and loneliness.

Otherwise, he said: “I’d have couples huffing and puffing under bedsheets. I don’t think a wife covers her breasts with bedsheets after sex. That’s an insufferable cliché in movies.”

Adam Scott, who plays the architect Palek on “Tell Me,” said he and his wife initially had reservations about the intimacy involved, but were won over by the script, which follows three couples as they work out relationship issues.

On the show, Mr. Scott is shown nude and engages in laborious sexual play as his character tries to get his wife, played by Sonya Walger, pregnant. He said the scenes needed to match the emotions portrayed in other aspects of the characters’ relationship, which frays under the strain of not being able to conceive.

“I feel the audience would be cheated if we say we’re doing a show about intimacy, and it’s not intimate,” Mr. Scott said.

But judging from comments on the show’s Web site, viewers are split. While some appreciate the scenes (“The scenes really get you to a true place,” one viewer wrote), others find them distracting and unnecessary.

Another viewer wrote: “I can understand having examples of problems for people to deal with, but you don’t need to show a full sex scene between two people. It’s like a second generation Playboy channel.”

Some film historians question whether audiences really lose out if there is more modesty.

“I’m not sure the general audience cares as much as filmmakers do in terms of how graphically it’s shot,” said Patricia King Hanson, editor of the American Film Institute’s catalog of feature films. “If you have kissing and partial nudity, is that less effective than if you showed them copulating on screen?”

Some actors agree that some territory shouldn’t be explored for the sake of a film or a show.

Ashley Jones, 30, an actress on the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful,” often acts in scenes requiring vigorous pretending, but she said she balked at anything racier in her acting career. “To me, you can get the same message across and leave something to the imagination,” she said. “When you get out there suddenly you feel too exposed, and you think, ‘This doesn’t feel like I’m an actor. This feels like I’m doing it.’”

What then, of the actors who are willing to go all the way? While real sex in film dates back to the 1970s and is a mainstay of European directors like Catherine Breillat of France, Lisa Ades, a director of “Indie Sex,” a documentary series on sex in cinema shown last month on IFC, said American directors have only recently ventured into it, with Mr. Gallo’s 2003 movie “The Brown Bunny” and last year’s “Shortbus,” written and directed by Mr. Mitchell.

Mr. Gallo declined a request for an interview and Mr. Mitchell was in Europe and unavailable. But one of the leads in “Shortbus,” Paul Dawson, 37, compared his experience with the sex scenes to shedding tears.

“A crying scene and a sex scene are very intimate and require an actor to find something inside that makes him cry or makes him aroused,” he said. Mr. Dawson said he did “Shortbus” because he saw value in creating something that viewers might not have seen on screen but that many would identify with.

Even so, a lot of people in the industry don’t buy the idea that some films require actors to engage in the real thing. Scott Winant, a director of the Showtime series “Californication,” which also uses sex as a narrative device, said that what makes the scene is the emotions conveyed in the acting, not the act. Real sex, he said, “doesn’t necessarily communicate the emotion of the sexual moment. It’s more effective to work with great actors who can identify with a sexual moment through the acting.”

To viewers, these distinctions may be hard to grasp. Even Marci Hirsch, a vice president at Vivid Entertainment, an adult film company, said “Tell Me” often looked like the soft version of her films. “I said, ‘Did I just see that?’” she said. “I didn’t think the sex scenes were bad at all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fashion/30sex.html





Eva Longoria Has A 'Sex' Tape!

It's true! Desperate Housewives starlet Eva Longoria has a Desperate secret! The 32-year-old actress' sex tape has been leaked to Will Ferrell's Web site Funnyordie.com — but it's not what you think.

Poking fun at herself — and Paris Hilton — Longoria spoofed the heiresses' infamous porno with Rick Salomon. The curvy brunette's co-star in the funny short is Eric Christian Olsen (aka "Perry Hilton").

"Are you sure we should be doing this?" asks Longoria at the beginning of the tape while posing for the camera. "What if it gets out? It could be really embarrassing."

"Don't worry baby," responds Olsen. "I'm going to put it someplace safe, like the glove box of my car."

In the next few scenes the "newlyweds" pillow fight, Longoria jumps on the bed in lingerie and Olsen does push-ups while she sits on his back sifting through a magazine.

"Are you sure no one's ever going to see this?" Longoria nags, while primping. "Because one day I might want to marry a really cute basketball player or something."
http://www.starmagazine.com/eva_long...tainment/13015





Canada's Lois Maxwell, Who Played Moneypenny, Dies
CBC News

Canadian actress Lois Maxwell, who played the definitive Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond films, has died. She was 80.

Maxwell died in hospital in Fremantle, Australia on Saturday.

Winner of a Golden Globe for the Shirley Temple movie, That Hagen Girl, Maxwell also starred in the CBC-TV series Adventures in Rainbow Country and wrote a column in the Toronto Sun newspaper under the name Miss Moneypenny.

Maxwell was born Lois Hooker in Kitchener, Ont., in 1927.

She started her acting career on radio, but left home at 15 to join the army. She travelled throughout Europe in the Second World War, performing music and dance numbers in the Army Entertainment Corps.

During a tour of London, the troupe discovered she was under age and she enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London to avoid being shipped home.

At age 20, Maxwell headed to Hollywood. In 1946, she landed a minor role in A Matter of Life and Death.

Only a year later, she was hailed as best newcomer at the Golden Globe Awards, for her part in That Hagen Girl, which also starred Temple and Ronald Reagan.

Shortly afterward, she appeared in a photo layout in Life Magazine with another up-and-coming actress — Marilyn Monroe.

She moved to Rome from 1950 to 1955, appearing in a series of Italian films, before meeting her husband, television executive Peter Marriott.

They settled in London and had two children, Melinda and Christian.

Shortly after the birth of her second child, Maxwell was asked to take the role of M's secretary in Dr. No, the first of the Bond movies to star Sean Connery.

Her character Miss Moneypenny's flirtatious interactions with Agent 007 were popular with moviegoers and she outlasted another Bond, Roger Moore.

"She was always fun and she was wonderful to be with," said Moore in an interview with BBC. "She was absolutely perfect casting."

Moore had known Maxwell since they were drama students together in London.

"I think it was a great disappointment to her that she had not been promoted to play M. She would have been a wonderful M," he said.

She starred in 14 movies as Moneypenny, including The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only and A View to a Kill.

During this period she also appeared in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and worked on TV shows including The Saint, The Baron, UFO and The Persuaders! She also was a voice on the children's marionette series Stingray.

After the death of her husband in 1973, she moved back to Canada and bought a cottage in northern Ontario.

At that time, she took a role as the mother in the CBC series Adventures in Rainbow Country, which focused on the adventures of teenage Billy, his sister Hannah and their Ojibway friend Pete.

In the 1980s, she became a regular columnist for the Toronto Sun newspaper, sharing stories about her experiences on the movie set, her co-stars, her life in Italy and her present life.

Her last movie, made in 2001, was a thriller, The Fourth Angel. She retired to the U.K., but moved to Western Australia to be close to her son's family.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/20...well-obit.html





More Hollywood Studios Say ‘No Smoking’
Michael Cieply

In the movie musical “Dreamgirls” last year, James “Thunder” Early, Eddie Murphy’s soul-singing, chain-smoking character, was so infuriated by a fumbled food order that he mashed his cigarette into a chicken sandwich that was supposed to have no mayonnaise.

That portrayal and scene could still fly these days at DreamWorks, which made the movie. But if Universal Pictures were to produce the movie today, Mr. Murphy might consider having his character switch to chewing gum.

The biggest studios are usually like-minded when it comes to what is fit to portray on screen. But they have become divided lately in confronting one of the entertainment industry’s touchiest issues: smoking in movies that reach the young.

Under pressure from an antismoking lobby unsatisfied by a promise that the industry’s trade group made in May to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.

Smoking opponents view the result as surprising progress toward a virtual ban on tobacco images in all but films with R or NC-17 ratings.

Yet Hollywood is also waking to the realization that a committed band of advocates is rapidly changing what is permissible in the movies. And that precedent could embolden other groups campaigning to rid movies of portrayals of gun use, transfat consumption or other behavior that can be proved harmful to the public.

“It’s a chilling idea,” said Bill Condon, who wrote and directed “Dreamgirls” for the DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures units of Viacom.

General Electric, the corporate parent of Universal Pictures, decided last April that, with few exceptions, “no smoking incidents should appear in any youth-rated film” produced by the studio or its sister units, Focus, Rogue and Working Title Films.

“Movies are supposed to reflect reality,” Mr. Condon said. “You’re taking away a detail that is one of the more defining aspects of a lifestyle.”

The extent to which depictions of smoking actually spur the young to smoke remains a subject of debate. Widely cited research by Dr. James A. Sargent of the Dartmouth Medical School showed a connection between adolescent exposure to smoking in movies and addiction to tobacco. But Dr. Deborah Glik, director of the Health and Media Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the connection appeared strongest among those who were already predisposed by other factors to smoke.

In any case, corporate Hollywood is in a hurry to find the right side of the issue. The companies are being prodded by a network of antismoking campaigners, some of them flush from Big Tobacco’s settlement with various state attorneys general, and already successful in much of the country in banning smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places.

The Rev. Michael Crosby, who coordinates antismoking efforts for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, compared the state of play to a horse-race game in a carnival, with each company leaping past the other in recent months. “G.E. is now ahead,” said Mr. Crosby, who has been pressing the studios on the issue via shareholder resolutions and executive meetings for the last decade.

Before G.E. moved with what is widely regarded as the toughest antismoking policy to date, Time Warner had said it “strongly discourages” smoking in youth films produced by its Warner Brothers and New Line units, and seeks to limit smoking depictions in films marketed to what it called mixed audiences.

In July, the Walt Disney Company said it would ban smoking in its Disney-branded movies, like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, while trying to discourage tobacco use in youth-rated movies from its Miramax and Touchstone units. A spokesman for the Sony Corporation’s Sony Pictures Entertainment said the studio — which showed tobacco use in all three of its PG-13 rated “Spider-Man” films — has a policy under which it tries to discourage the depiction of tobacco products in youth-oriented films.

Viacom is meanwhile scrambling to devise a smoking policy of its own, having been assured two weeks ago by Mr. Crosby and his allies that it was increasingly out of step with its studio brethren. That warning came about because antismoking groups had recently discovered that the News Corporation and its 20th Century Fox Film division were already on the bandwagon, thanks to a strict though intentionally unpublicized policy of rooting tobacco out of youth-friendly films for the last three years.

Since 2004, the studio’s production manual has mandated that no principal character can be seen to smoke in a film set in contemporary times and to be rated G, PG or PG-13 unless the studio’s president of production signs off on the scene. Tobacco ads and promotions are not supposed to be visible in Fox movies. Even antismoking messages on screen are not to have been provided by tobacco companies.

The reduction of on-screen smoking is a pet project of the studio’s co-chairman, Tom Rothman, according to both Mr. Crosby and industry executives who requested anonymity because they did not want to offend a competitor or were not authorized to discuss the policy.

Yet Mr. Rothman has been reluctant to make a public issue of the studio’s policy, for fear that it might open the door to demands from groups with other causes, or put the studio at a competitive disadvantage with filmmakers who see blanket restrictions on smoking as threatening the credibility of their work.

Indeed, James L. Brooks, one of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood, was not stopped by that policy last year. His Gracie Films delivered the animated PG-13 rated “Simpsons Movie,” featuring enough tobacco (even in the trailer) to earn a “black lung” rating from the scenesmoking.org Web site, which monitors smoking impressions in movies.

Mr. Brooks and Fox executives did not respond to queries about why the smoking portrayals were allowed despite the policy.

Even the most aggressive studios have built wiggle room into their policies. To date, no company has said that it would bar smoking in the many films that are produced independently and later acquired for distribution by a studio. Thus, the hard-bitten, soft-hearted table server played by Cheryl Hines in the PG-13 rated “Waitress,” picked up by Mr. Rothman’s Fox Searchlight at the last Sundance Film Festival, can still wield a cigarette near the pregnant character played by Keri Russell.

Neither has any studio figured out how to deal with directors who may rely on their contractual right of “final cut” to include such scenes. Sony’s guidelines allow for exceptions if the scenes are needed for historical authenticity or to deliver an antismoking message. And even at G.E. and Universal, the policy says the presumption against a smoking scene can be “rebutted” based on its importance to the film, the difficulty of removing it, and whether or not the picture will be marketed to adolescents.

Advocates are naturally suspicious that such loopholes will only delay what they see as progress. “In about five years, they’ll live up to promises they’re making now,” said Michael Passoff, associate director of As You Sow, a socially responsible investment group based in San Francisco that has pressed studio owners on the smoking issue.

Eventually, the approach of the industry’s trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America — which relies on the ratings system to reduce tobacco impressions reaching the young — may diminish the need for individual solutions.

“This is still a new policy, and it’s going to take time to develop,” said Seth Oster, the association’s executive vice president and chief communications officer. Mr. Oster said 22 films have had warnings about smoking attached to their ratings since the system went into effect. And at least one film, “Saving Sarah Cain,” released by the News Corporation’s FoxFaith unit, has had its rating bumped to PG from G because it depicted tobacco use.

Some opponents of smoking on film see a chaos of individual policies as the prelude to an inevitable broad agreement to banish tobacco from all but adult-rated films.

“I think success is going to come very suddenly,” said Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, and whose proposal would led to an R rating for virtually all tobacco use in movies. “It will take the monkey off the individual companies’ backs.”

Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts who is chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, said he would prefer to see an industrywide antismoking initiative, perhaps like the agreement in 2000 to limit the marketing of violent films, though he did not expect that to happen without further hearings.

Should an industrywide policy happen, of course, some young viewers might turn to entertainment they find less pinched, and more authentic. Not incidentally, the pilot episode of “quarterlife,” a new series about recent college graduates planned for direct distribution on the Web, concludes with a soulful discussion between two friends on a cigarette break.

Or, as Mr. Condon pointed out, the push for tobacco prohibition in film for the young might simply add new cachet to what is forbidden. “If they succeed, they may well glamorize smoking again,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/bu...a/01smoke.html





Hollywood Fretting Over Digital Movie Downloads and Declining DVD Prices
Jacqui Cheng

Several brick-and-mortar retailers are redefining the term "bargain basement" when it comes to DVD sales, although some question whether it's the wisest move. Both Target and Circuit City have begun advertising certain DVDs, which come from a variety of movie studios, at a new low price of $3.99 apiece—practically the equivalent to renting a movie. The move is meant to boost sales, but not everyone is happy about it, least of all Hollywood.
Sony admits, fixes problem with DVD DRM

The move is unprecedented not only in price, but also timing: DVD sales like that are almost nonexistent outside of the fourth quarter of the year, Warner senior VP Jeff Baker told VideoBusiness. For the low, low price of $3.99, Target customers can pick up such hits as The Nutty Professor and Along Came Polly, while Circuit City customers can grab The Bourne Identity and S.W.A.T. The prices are not reflected on the stores' web sites but can be found at the respective retail stores and sometimes announced in fliers.

The trend is growing, too. VideoBusiness points out that mass retailers are increasingly pricing DVD titles in the $3 to $4 range (0.8 percent of catalog sales were in this range as of 2007, as compared to 0.4 percent in 2005) as well as the even-more-popular $4 to $5 range (a whopping 4.6 percent of catalog sales in 2007, compared to 0.7 in 2005).

But while Matt Damon fans in the audience might be swooning at the chance to spy such a perfectly-crafted butt over and over for only $3.99, the pricing is not necessarily a good thing for the studios or retailers. "It's a negative precedent in the business to do that type of lower budget pricing outside of the fourth quarter," Baker said. "You would need to see some uplift in unit volume velocity to compensate for that lower pricing to maintain profit margins, and I have not uniformly seen at retailers the necessary uplift in volume."

The new low in DVD prices stem from a combination of decisions made by the retailers and the studios. Physical sales of movies continue to drop, with both retailers and studios rushing to come up with solutions that will compete with other forms of distribution, including digital sales. Retailers—particularly those with a brick-and-mortar presence—are willing to do almost anything to try to reverse that trend. Higher physical sales (at any price) means more people in the store, and more people in the store means more sales of other merchandise too (when was the last time you walked into a Target to buy a DVD and walked out only with a DVD?).

The movie studios, on the other hand, are just plain scared to jump headfirst into digital distribution and would rather milk physical sales as long as possible. Only Disney appears to have gone into digital distribution with open arms, which has been a successful venture thus far. But that hasn't stopped others from insisting on strict DRM in an attempt to control the user experience and sell more copies of movies. This strategy has so far failed.

But milking physical sales at any cost isn't exactly helping anyone out either, and may actually hurt everyone in the long term. Virgin Megastores senior product manager Chris Anstey agrees, stating that customers have come to expect heavy discounts and have adjusted their purchasing plans accordingly. "As a result, the new release doesn't blow out and, out of panic, the prices drop. It's a vicious cycle," he told VideoBusiness.

From a bird's-eye view, of course, all of this makes sense. The DVD was born at a time when there was comparatively far fewer entertainment options as there are today (the Internet in general is more widely embraced now than in the mid 90s, then there's YouTube, BitTorrent, forums, video on demand, DVRs, etc.). With more competition for consumers' money and attention, the "traditional" model is suffering, and this puts the squeeze on both Hollywood and the major retailers
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-industry.html





Playback Problems Reported on 'Silver Surfer,' 'Day After Tomorrow' Blu-Ray Discs

Two of the most eagerly anticipated next-gen releases in recent memory have hit a series of playback snags on select Blu-ray players, but a fix is said to be on the way.

As we've previously reported, 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'Day After Tomorrow' (both released this past Tuesday) mark the first Blu-ray releases from Fox Home Entertainment following a six month sabbatical.

But while the discs have generally been well-received (our own Peter Bracke raved about the audio/video quality in his review of 'Silver Surfer'), what was initially a cause for celebration has become an exercise in frustration for some Blu-ray fans as incompatibility issues with some players have hindered playback of the discs.

The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung's BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players (including the PlayStation 3), although users have reported lengthy load times of up to two minutes.

It has been widely speculated that these issues stem from the use of BD+ copy protection on the two discs. We contacted Fox for comment, but so far there's no official word from the studio.

Calls placed to both Samsung and LG customer support revealed that both manufacturers are aware of the issue, and that both are working on firmware updates to correct it. Samsung promised a firmware update within "a couple" weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.

We'll keep you posted when/if any official statements are released by Fox or any of the manufacturers involved. In the meantime, we've set up a dedicated thread in our Forums area to discuss playback problems with both the 'Silver Surfer' and 'Day After Tomorrow' discs.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/1035





So simple it hurts

Borrow your friends' movies
SiteBlurb

Welcome to Movie Moocher! If you have already signed up, log in with your college email and password on the right. If you don't have an account, you can register, or take the tour. Registration is free and easy.

What is Movie Moocher?

Movie Moocher was built on a few simple premises. Many students bring DVDs with them to college. Most people enjoy watching DVDs, especially DVDs they don't already own. While there is probably a Blockbuster close by, that costs both time and money. Wouldn't it be easier if you could borrow the DVD from someone nearby who already has it?

So that's what Movie Moocher is. You sign up, and add DVDs you're willing to share with classmates. You search through the collective DVD library of your school. And you can request DVDs with a single click.

There are also some nice social networking features. You can rate your favorite movies, and write a brief review. If someone doesn't return your DVD on time, you can say so on their profile. And there are tons of sweet statistics.

If your college is on the College List, then you will have no problems, and can register instantly. If it is not on the list, you can still register, but it may take longer as you'll have to register your college first.

So what are you waiting for? Register!
http://www.moviemoocher.com/





Online Videos May be Conduits for Viruses
Greg Bluestein

Online videos aren't just for bloopers and rants — some might also be conduits for malicious code that can infect your computer.

As anti-spam technology improves, hackers are finding new vehicles to deliver their malicious code. And some could be embedded in online video players, according to a report on Internet threats released Tuesday by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center as it holds its annual summit.

The summit is gathering more than 300 scholars and security experts to discuss emerging threats for 2008 — and their countermeasures.

Among their biggest foes are the ever-changing vehicles that hackers use to deliver "malware," which can silently install viruses, probe for confidential info or even hijack a computer.

"Just as we see an evolution in messaging, we also see an evolution in threats," said Chris Rouland, the chief technology officer for IBM Corp.'s Internet Security Systems unit and a member of the group that helped draft the report. "As companies have gotten better blocking e-mails, we see people move to more creative techniques."

With computer users getting wiser to e-mail scams, malicious hackers are looking for sneakier ways to spread the codes. Over the past few years, hackers have moved from sending their spam in text-based messages to more devious means, embedding them in images or disguised as Portable Document Format, or PDF, files.

"The next logical step seems to be the media players," Rouland said.

There have only been a few cases of video-related hacking so far.

One worm discovered in November 2006 launches a corrupt Web site without prompting after a user opens a media file in a player. Another program silently installs spyware when a video file is opened. Attackers have also tried to spread fake video links via postings on YouTube.

That reflects the lowered guard many computer users would have on such popular forums.

"People are accustomed to not clicking on messages from banks, but they all want to see videos from YouTube," Rouland said.

Another soft spot involves social networking sites, blogs and wikis. These community-focused sites, which are driving the next generation of Web applications, are also becoming one of the juiciest targets for malicious hackers.

Computers surfing the sites silently communicate with a Web application in the background, but hackers sometimes secretly embed malicious code when they edit the open sites, and a Web browser will unknowingly execute the code. These chinks in the armor could let hackers steal private data, hijack Web transactions or spy on users.

Tuesday's forum gathers experts from around the globe to "try to get ahead of emerging threats rather than having to chase them," said Mustaque Ahamad, director of the Georgia Tech center.

They are expected to discuss new countermeasures, including tighter validation standards and programs that analyze malicious code. Ahamad also hopes the summit will be a launching pad of sorts for an informal network of security-minded programmers.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071002/.../cybersecurity





At Starbucks, Songs of Instant Gratification
Matt Richtel

Like that song you hear playing at Starbucks, but just cannot wait until you get to a computer to download the song?

Starting tomorrow at certain Starbucks stores, a person with an iPhone or iTunes software loaded onto a laptop can download the songs they hear over the speakers directly onto those devices. The price will be 99 cents a song, a small price, Starbucks says, to satisfy an immediate urge.

“For the customer it’s an instant gratification,” said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment. “You’ll hear the song, be able to identify what it is and download to the device.”

And it’s just the tip of the iced latte. Businesses are using new technologies to enhance the impulse buy so consumers can purchase their temptations whenever they want, wherever they are, before the urge passes.

Amazon.com pioneered one-click shopping to speed purchases, whether made at home or on an employer’s time. But the development of more capable gadgets, coupled with mobile payment mechanisms, is allowing people to buy not just media, like music, videos and ring tones, but also hard goods, on the go.

This evolution follows the popularity of debit, gift and refill cards, which allow buyers to fill accounts and make cashless payments. Payments made with those cards exceed the payments made by cash and check, according to the Nilson Report, a credit industry newsletter, which used Commerce Department data.

Credit card companies in particular are experimenting with ways to turn the phone into a conduit for card purchases and to offer incentives, like coupons, for mobile purchases. Visa, for instance, is developing technology that will allow people to wave their cellphones in front of a reader to pay for items under $25 without a signature. (Swiping the card through a reader, an innovation several years old, is apparently too much of an impediment.)

The idea is no waiting, cashier or other buying barrier — aside from the charges that show up on a credit card or cellphone bill. And there, along with challenges revolving around security and business models, lies a chief rub.

The mobile-payment technology can create a desensitizing and seductive purchase experience, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University.

“The more people think about a purchase decision, the more likely uncertainty creeps in,” he said. “One frame of mind is you’re helping create in consumers’ mind a source of pleasure, and enabling them to fulfill that pleasure,” Mr. Katz said of the mobile impulse temptation. Another is that “they’re preying on our materialistic souls.”

For now, the new Starbucks service’s preying capabilities will be limited. The concept is being introduced in around 600 cafes in New York and Seattle only, though Starbucks, based in Seattle, and Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., plan to offer the service in other major cities late this year and in 2008.

Impulsive music lovers will have to sign onto the cafe’s Wi-Fi network to discover what song is playing over the Starbucks speakers. With a few taps, users can download the song onto their iPhones (which double as an iPod), or the new Apple iPod Touch with its wireless connection. The 99-cent charge will appear on their phone bills.

Other coffee drinkers who have iTunes software loaded on their notebook computers can do somewhat similar things. When they open their laptops while sitting in a participating store, a Starbucks icon will pop up, giving them a chance to click and buy.

Starbucks said it was the first retail outlet to offer such capability. It is certainly not on the cutting edge of the downloadable music experience. For more than a year, Verizon Wireless has offered technology that lets consumers buy songs over the air. Other carriers, including Sprint and AT&T, allow over-the-air downloads.

Roger Entner, a communications industry consultant with IAG Research, which advises mobile carriers, said Sprint and Verizon were each offering around 60 million songs a month for downloading.

Verizon and others also allow users to buy video, pictures, wallpaper, ring tones and games — none of that revelatory anymore. Verizon also experimented with music fans’ buying concert tickets over the phone, then turning that phone into a bar code for concert entry.

John Harrobin, senior vice president for digital media at Verizon, said, “The fact that when you want something, you can get it instantly through the phone is something we believe in.”

Mr. Entner said the sticking point on the growth of the phone as a full-service payment device had less to do with technology, which is adequate, and more to do with business questions. He said that all the potential participants — phone carriers, retailers, credit card companies, music labels — wanted a cut of the action, and it was not clear how the money for over-the-air payments would be divided.

For example, he said, the mobile-carrier profits for downloadable songs were about 3 cents a song, which he deemed “razor thin.”

Visa, which takes a piece of the action of credit purchases and would love to see buying opportunities blossom, introduced a new microcard last week. It works like a credit card, but it is small enough to fit onto a key chain. At merchants equipped with wireless payment systems, consumers wave the card to pay; purchases under $25 do not require a signature.

Visa is also rolling out a “mobile payment platform.” That’s marketing-speak for software that not only lets consumers pay by waving their phones, but also lets merchants beam coupons to their customers on the go. For instance, Visa has experimented at its headquarters in Foster City, Calif., with sending employees coupons for discounts in the company cafeteria.

The plan got a strong reception by consumers, said Pam Zuercher, Visa’s vice president for innovation.

“Think about this as an extension of direct mail, but you have a much lower chance of leaving your coupon at home,” she said, adding that the technology “provides the ability to influence experiences within a retail location.”

Ms. Zuercher said Visa planned a test of its mobile payment system with its partner, Wells Fargo. It is already testing the system in South Korea and Taiwan. (Some of the mobile payment systems are more advanced overseas, where wireless networks are faster, allowing more complex services. But, Mr. Entner said, the United States may wind up in the forefront because credit payments are so tied up with consumer culture).

The prospect of coupons by phone, or location-based advertising, might give shivers to people already distressed by seeing every nook and cranny of public space crammed with commercial messages.

They are getting trade-offs. Services including the Internet and e-mail, like television before it, are subsidized by advertising and those who respond to it.

“One of the great steps forward for denizens of the online world was the development of one-click buying,” Mr. Katz from Rutgers said. Before that technology, “there was a vast amount of evidence that a small percentage of people who started the checkout process actually completed it.”

In the mobile world, the barriers fall further. No checkout aisle, cashier or money changing hands. Just an impulse — click and a buy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/te...mpulse.html?hp





Unbricked iPhones Now Fully Working, Calls Included

Yesterday we reported how to unbrick an unlocked iPhone. Today we have discovered that you can send and receive calls, SMS and mails too, as well as surf the Web with it. You just have to use a TurboSIM card (like I did) and, according to the iPhone Sim Free people, any restored iPhone with their paid software installed (we have been unable to test this. )

I was too tired to think about trying this yesterday, but today I put my TurboSIM card with the Vodafone SIM and, as you can see in the video, it works great. The iPhone is now exactly in the same state as it was for me before the software update: it can send and receive calls, SMS and mails, as well as surf the Web.

The iPhone Sim Free people, who previously said their paid software unlock will work despite firmware updates, is claiming now that if you downgrade to firmware 1.0.2 your non-AT&T SIM will work just fine. I've tried this but couldn't get it to work. We are talking to them to see what may be happening.

Meanwhile, iPhone Dev Team is working full speed ahead on two things:

• Downgrading the baseband so they can unlock again the iPhones restored to version 1.0.2 from 1.1.1.

• Crating another free unlock that will work for version 1.1.1 of the software. According to them, both may be very near--now testing-- and they have put it forward to people with bricked phones to "be patient and hold on until we come with a full solution for 1.1.1 firmware."
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/un...ded-305253.php





Technology Has Teenagers and Parents Talking

The family meal may be threatened with extinction but "High-Tech" parents are now communicating much better with their teenagers and giving them more freedom, says child psychologist Richard Woolfson.

Long gone are the days when parents were much more dictatorial and children were to be seen, not heard.

"The consultation, negotiation and mutual respect that goes on between parents and teenagers in families today would probably shock the mums and dads of 50 years ago," Woolfson said in a study of how family communication has evolved.

Sitting round the table together for a meal was once the bedrock of family life. It is now becoming a thing of the past but Woolfson stressed that was not the end of the world.

"Now we have today's high-tech family where family communication takes place by email, internet, webcam and mobile phone as well as face-to-face of course," he said.

That has another beneficial side-effect, Woolfson said in his survey for the T-Mobile phone company.

Parents are now able to contact their kids much more easily and children have become more confident and communicative.

"This means that parents are less worried about their children's safety because they feel reassured," Woolfson said.

And the generation gap is not suffering.

"Even grandma and grandpa have entered the world of cyber space to keep close contact with their children and grandchildren, all of which can only be good news for everyone," Woolfson concluded.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...83732020070929





Google Eyes Canada Rollout of Discreet Street View
David Ljunggren

Google Inc is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers, but would blur people's faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws, the Web search firm said on Monday.

Canada's privacy commissioner told Google in August that the feature -- which offers a series of panoramic, 360-degree images of nine U.S. cities -- could violate Canadian laws if it were introduced without alterations.

Some of the pictures feature people who can clearly be identified, which contravenes Canadian legislation on privacy.

"We are thinking about launching it outside the United States, including Canada, and we're looking at how it would have to be different in Canada compared to its U.S. version," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel.

"We would launch Street View in Canada in keeping with the principles and requirements of Canadian law ... that means we know we'll have to focus on finding ways to make sure that individual's faces are not identifiable in pictures taken in Canada and that license plate numbers are not identifiable in Canada," he told Reuters in an interview.

Google had been approached by a number of Canadian cities seeking to be featured, he said.

"(They) have said 'Please come and start taking this imagery of our city. It's good for our tourist industry and we'll even pay you or reimburse your expenses to do so'," he said.

Canada's privacy commissioner has yet to hear from Google, a spokesman said.

"If that's how they're planning to roll out their service by putting in place technological means ... to block out faces and license plates and other essential personal information, then that's a great first step," said Colin McKay.

The images of U.S. cities were produced in partnership with Canadian firm Immersive Media Corp (IMC.V: Quote, Profile, Research), which says it has taken similar street level pictures of major Canadian cities.

Fleischer said he did not know if the firm would be involved in any Canadian launch.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/techno...30696920070925





Bleakonomics
Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Shock Doctrine

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Naomi Klein.

558 pp. Metropolitan Books. $28.

There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city’s public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina’s military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic “shock therapy” on a resistant population. And then there is “Washington’s game plan for Iraq”: “Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food,” not to mention a strong stock market and private sector.

“The Shock Doctrine” is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. “Disaster capitalism,” as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. Like Pol Pot proclaiming that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was in Year Zero, extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or “shocks.” For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programs in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W. Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq.

In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once “complete depatterning” had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed. But after breaking down his “patients,” Cameron was never able to build them back up again. The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: “Countries are shocked — by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters.” Then “they are shocked again — by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy.” People who “dare to resist” are shocked for a third time, “by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.”

In another introductory chapter, Klein offers an account of Milton Friedman — she calls him “the other doctor shock” — and his battle for the hearts and minds of Latin American economists and economies. In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was developing the ideas that would eclipse the theories of Raul Prebisch, an advocate of what today would be called the third way, and of other economists fashionable in Latin America at the time. She quotes the Chilean economist Orlando Letelier on the “inner harmony” between the terror of the Pinochet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman shared responsibility for the regime’s crimes, rejecting his argument that he was only offering “technical” advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington by Pinochet’s secret police. For Klein, he was another victim of the “Chicago Boys” who wanted to impose free-market capitalism on the region. “In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the ‘war on terror’ was a war against all obstacles to the new order,” she writes.

One of the world’s most famous antiglobalization activists and the author of the best seller “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies,” Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives. It is striking to be reminded how many of the people involved in the Iraq war were involved earlier in other shameful episodes in United States foreign policy history. She draws a clear line from the torture in Latin America in the 1970s to that at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk markets. Indeed, the case against these policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes. They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.

Klein isn’t an economist but a journalist, and she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue the redistributionist policies enshrined in the Freedom Charter, its statement of core principles. These chapters are the least exciting parts of the book, but they are also the most convincing. In the case of South Africa, she interviews activists and others, only to find there is no one answer. Busy trying to stave off civil war in the early years after the end of apartheid, the A.N.C. didn’t fully understand how important economic policy was. Afraid of scaring off foreign investors, it took the advice of the I.M.F. and the World Bank and instituted a policy of privatization, spending cutbacks, labor flexibility and so on. This didn’t stop two of South Africa’s own major companies, South African Breweries and Anglo-American, from relocating their global headquarters to London. The average growth rate has been a disappointing 5 percent (much lower than in countries in East Asia, which followed a different route); unemployment for the black majority is 48 percent; and the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled to four million from two million since 1994, the year the A.N.C. took over.

Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of “The Shock Doctrine,” it’s clear they have their work cut out for them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/bo...tiglitz-t.html





Why Big Newspapers Applaud Some Declines in Circulation
Richard Pérez-Peña

As the newspaper industry bemoans falling circulation, major papers around the country have a surprising attitude toward a lot of potential readers: Don’t bother.

The big American newspapers sell about 10 percent fewer copies than they did in 2000, and while the migration of readers to the Web is usually blamed for that decline, much of it has been intentional. Driven by marketing and delivery costs and pressure from advertisers, many papers have decided certain readers are not worth the expense involved in finding, serving and keeping them.

“It’s a rational business decision of newspapers focusing on quality circulation rather than quantity, shedding the subscribers who cost more and generate less revenue,” said Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm.

That rational business decision is being driven in part by advertisers, who have changed their own attitudes toward circulation.

In the boom years, “there was more willingness by advertisers to assign some value to the occasional reader, the student, the reader who doesn’t match a certain profile,” said Jason E. Klein, chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing alliance.

But advertisers have become more cost-conscious and have learned how to reach narrowly tailored audiences on the Internet. Sponsors of preprinted ads that are inserted into a newspaper have been especially aggressive in telling papers that some circulation just is not worthwhile.

“The insert advertisers look to flood the area within five miles of their stores or flood certain ZIP codes,” Mr. Klein said. “They’re not interested in hitting a scattering of readers, and they don’t want to pay for it.”

As a result, newspapers have sharply curtailed their traditional methods of winning customers — advertising, cold-calling people and offering promotional discounts. That strategy was always expensive, and it has become more so with do-not-call laws and the rising number of people who have only cellphones. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the average cost of getting a new subscription order, including discounts, was $68 in 2006, more than twice as much as in 2002.

Most of the customers recruited with promotions and cold calls drop their subscriptions when the discount expires, so the cost of pursuing them and putting the news on their doorsteps can exceed what they pay for the paper. And despite falling ad sales, most American papers still make more money from ads than from circulation.

So the industry is accepting that circulation will fall and hoping to find a level that can be sustained with little effort. As a result, the subscription churn rate — the number of people who drop their newspaper each year divided by the total number of subscribers — fell to 36 percent last year from 54 percent in 2000, the newspaper association says.

There are exceptions to the trend; New York City’s tabloids, The Daily News and The New York Post, continue to scrap for as many readers as they can, even if many of them drift away. And some executives and analysts think newspapers have gone too far in cutting investments meant to cultivate new readers, like advertising on radio or distributing papers in schools.

“Newspapers have not spent a lot of money on that kind of self-promotion, and I think that has hindered our long-term growth,” said John Kimball, chief marketing officer at the Newspaper Association of America.

A prime example of the new approach is at The Los Angeles Times, which has lost more circulation in this decade than any other paper, falling to about 800,000 on weekdays in its most recent reports to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, from almost 1.1 million in 2000.

“There is a school of thought these days that you stop actively selling altogether and let the readership seek its natural level,” said Jack Klunder, senior vice president for circulation at The Los Angeles Times. “We’re not at that point, but we’re running far fewer promotions, accepting that some number of people are never going to buy the paper, long run, at full price.”

Like many other papers, The Times has also cut back sharply on advertising itself. “When the profitability stream of the paper is interrupted, you start to look at places to save on the expense side,” including advertising, Mr. Klunder said. “You need to advertise in the long run, but we make a lot of short-term decisions in this business.”

The New York Times’s circulation has held relatively steady in this decade, but that masks two opposing trends. In its home market, circulation is down, as The Times, like others, has cut back on promotions and discounting. But sales are up in other markets where The Times continues to pursue new, mostly affluent readers.

Some large papers have made conscious decisions to limit their geographic range. The most striking recent example is The Dallas Morning News. Last year, it stopped distribution outside a 200-mile radius, and weekday circulation tumbled 15 percent to a little over 400,000. This year, the paper imposed a 100-mile limit. It expects to show another drop in sales when new figures are reported this month.

“We were distributing in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, way down in south Texas,” said Jim Moroney, the publisher and chief executive. “It cost too much money getting the papers to those places, and this clearly wasn’t anything our advertisers were giving us value for.”

Many of the readers who were cut loose complained, “but I have no regrets,” he said. “The people who really want to read The Dallas Morning News can still get it online.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/bu...a/01paper.html





Balancing Bottom Lines and Headlines
Clifford Krauss

DURING the next year or so, The St. Petersburg Times plans to continue pursuing deeply reported, long-term features about such topics as Florida’s property insurance crisis, complex tax issues, public education at all levels, and wildlife and endangered species. It will balance this slate of stories against all the other bread-and-butter issues it covers everyday for its readers: politics, business, sports, community affairs, culture and more.

“We’re going to invest the time and energy and the resources in these stories because the question we’re always asking ourselves is what matters to our audience,” said Stephen Buckley, the managing editor of the newspaper. “And that’s the question that really drives our organization: Are we doing work that matters?”

Such ambitions were rare enough in the good old days of gumshoe journalism, when newspapers were cash machines. Now, as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet, this kind of enterprise reporting has become harder to find at many papers. And in that context, The St. Petersburg Times is itself an endangered species — an independent, privately owned daily that continues to serve up quality journalism. Many owners of other daily city papers sold them off years ago to try to avoid inheritance taxes. But The St. Petersburg Times was not sold; to guarantee local ownership and independence, its owner, Nelson Poynter, gave it away upon his death in 1978 to a nonprofit educational organization now called the Poynter Institute.

For newspaper publishing — an industry awash in uncertainty as it tries to adapt to the Internet — The St. Petersburg Times offers one possible model for salvaging enterprises that must, as all businesses do, respond to financial reality. In contrast to some other businesses, newspapers also have to address technological change and economic shifts while carrying out their traditional mission of trying to provide independent, high-quality information and analysis to readers.

Interest in the St. Petersburg model has grown in the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s recent agreement to acquire Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. That was just the latest in a wave of seismic changes that include plummeting stock prices for publicly owned newspaper companies (including The New York Times Company), the divestiture of the Knight Ridder chain and the cost-cutting that has ravaged newspapers like The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., and The Los Angeles Times.

“I think the St. Petersburg Times model is wonderful, and I think it would be great if there would be more of them,” said John S. Carroll, a former top editor at The Los Angeles Times, who resigned after resisting staff cuts ordered by its owner, the Tribune Company. “The value of newspapers is dropping so the financial sacrifice necessary to do this is becoming easier, and I think there is a lot of charitable money around, and there are some money people who are concerned about the future of journalism.”

FOR their part, editors at The St. Petersburg Times say Mr. Poynter was a visionary whose act of singular munificence allows their reporters to do painstaking reporting because the paper doesn’t answer to outside investors who constantly watch the bottom line. “We don’t put out a newspaper to make money,” says Paul C. Tash, the chief executive of the Times Publishing Company, which oversees the paper. “We make money so we can put out a great newspaper.”

Mr. Poynter didn’t make all his family members happy by giving away a fortune, but as he said, “I haven’t met my great-grandchildren, and I may not like them.” While his legacy allows for patient, long-term investment, The St. Petersburg Times isn’t free from the industry’s challenges.

The paper doesn’t get any money from the Poynter Institute. Just like other private businesses, it pays for its operating expenses, $90 million this year for payroll alone, from its own revenue, and it pays taxes on its profits. It must also pay the Poynter Institute a yearly dividend, currently about $6 million, for which it receives no tax benefit. “The Times Publishing Company has no tax advantages related to our ownership,” said Jana Jones, the company’s chief financial officer.

What makes the company different from most private companies is that the owner, the Poynter Institute, does not take money out of the company beyond the dividend. Every decision that is made at the newspaper with regard to the use of profits, executives say, is based on the reinvestment needs of the company. No owner or chain is removing that money to invest in another newspaper or another business.

As a result, the paper does not need to push for lush profit margins that exceed 20 percent, a benchmark at some publicly owned newspaper chains. (In fact, its margin is now below its minimum target of 10 percent, according to the company.) Instead, it can spend money on big investigations and on innovative products that may hurt the bottom line in the short term but may pay off handsomely in the future. In short, the freedom from Wall Street’s tyranny gives the paper more room to experiment.

Still, editors at The Times, Florida’s most widely circulated paper, say the business environment here is as tough as they have ever seen, especially with the local housing market crashing. And, like other papers, The Times is having to make sacrifices.

But while most other papers are cutting back on their investigative reporting, The Times is increasing it. It has recently published exhaustive investigations of vanishing wetlands and overcrowding at the county jail. It still sends correspondents and photographers on expensive trips abroad to cover the Iraq war and political crises elsewhere, while also expanding coverage of local football games through Webcasts of highlights and reporter commentaries. A winner of six Pulitzer Prizes in its history, the paper has won three Ernie Pyle awards for human interest writing over the last four years and won the Raymond Clapper award for Washington reporting last year.

For other papers to follow The Times’s route, they will have to enlist the aid of deep-pocketed financiers with an affinity for information gathering — a very small group. One of those financiers is Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist who made a recent, unsuccessful bid for the Tribune Company. “You could create a nonprofit newspaper and have a number of foundations be contributors to the nonprofit,” he said, describing a model that is somewhat similar but not identical to that of The St. Petersburg Times.

Current owners of newspapers, however, seem less than enthusiastic about giving away their family jewels. “As altruistic as some families are, to say that you are going to take a very valuable enterprise and give up that value is something that just isn’t going to happen,” said Frank A. Blethen, whose family controls The Seattle Times.

Others are equally skeptical. “You have to have a private owner somewhere who has been in the business for a long time who decided they didn’t have heirs or their heirs are going to get enough anyway,” said Brian P. Tierney, who led a group that bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News last year.

But already, a handful of small newspapers have followed The Times’s example, including The Anniston Star in Alabama and The New Hampshire Union Leader. Other newspaper owners have come calling to St. Petersburg, but Mr. Tash says that when he gets to the part about how Mr. Poynter gave the newspaper away, “there is a long pause, and they usually say — sometimes to the great relief of their children — that’s not going to work for us.”

For all of the insulation The St. Petersburg Times enjoys, it, too, faces financial challenges. As a private company, the Times Publishing Company does not release profit numbers, but Mr. Tash said profits have been falling since 2001.

The daily newspaper’s average circulation dropped to 308,256 in 2006 from 334,336 in 2003; Sunday circulation decreased to 406,920 from 420,251 over the same period. But that is a softer decline than those at The Miami Herald and many other big-city dailies. Times managers say they expect single-digit increases this year for both the daily and Sunday editions, primarily because circulation in neighboring Tampa is booming after an intensive marketing effort. There, it faces tough competition from The Tampa Tribune.

Advertising in The St. Petersburg Times is also suffering, with double-digit declines in auto, real estate and employment classifieds over the last year alone. Increased advertising in a new, free tabloid it publishes and on the Web have not made up the difference.

The declines in revenue have brought sacrifices here as everywhere else in the business. The newsroom staff has been cut to about 360 from about 390, mainly by attrition, since January. The size of the paper was narrowed recently to save newsprint. Two pages were taken out of the Saturday business section by eliminating some stock tables. In Citrus County, north of the St. Petersburg area, the paper’s bureau has been closed and the local edition has been eliminated. Obituaries beyond seven lines are no longer free. Selling obituaries made the obit pages advertising pages, preserving some space for news that otherwise would have been lost.

“I don’t see a eureka moment yet,” Mr. Tash conceded. “You have to keep the ball in play long enough until you see how you might win the game.”

STAYING in the game also means generating new products that may seem alien to traditional Times readers. The company introduced a tabloid as a sassy, free weekly publication called tbt* in 2004 and converted it into a daily last year to attract young readers. Management says tbt* is about to eke out a profit. Now the company is preparing to start a new glossy lifestyle magazine called Bay, aimed at its wealthiest readers.

The Times has also been aggressive online, reintroducing its Web site, tampabay.com, last year to attract a regional audience beyond St. Petersburg, and it has started many blogs covering issues as diverse as alternative energy and personal finance. The company reports that the average number of monthly visitors on the Web site has increased from 964,000 in 2005 to 1.3 million last year to 1.4 million in July.

In early August, editors teamed up with Congressional Quarterly to start PolitiFact.com, a sometimes cheeky look at the presidential candidates’ claims, promises and attacks; the site has already touched off a buzz far outside of St. Petersburg’s pristine marinas.

Staff members were added to the Web and tbt* operations, even as the paper’s staff was cut — a classic effort to take costs out of a declining product line and reinvest a portion of the savings in innovative products that might raise revenue. The investment last year in tbt* totaled $6.3 million, an amount the company believes that it will match this year. (The company declined to detail other financial commitments.)

Managers at The Times say most newspapers are cutting costs but not using enough of their savings to innovate because of a short-term strategic horizon that Wall Street enforces. “I think it is going to be very difficult, even harder, for newspapers that can’t look past the quarter or this year to create something that may not help their bottom line in the short term,” Mr. Tash said.

But will the efforts to pump up the Web and tabloid journalism really help guarantee quality journalism over the long haul?

For all of the emphasis on new media and amusement, editors here say the heart of the issue is how to deliver the most news to the most people as efficiently as possible in formats that correspond to their needs and tastes. In the end, the combination of sacrifice and new products is supposed to save the newspaper.

The other day, Neil Brown, the executive editor of The St. Petersburg Times, met with Christine Montgomery, managing editor of tampabay.com, and Richard Reeves, vice president for advertising and marketing at The Times, to consider how they might save the $250,000 it costs annually to deliver copies of The St. Petersburg Times to Tallahassee every day, a service that The Miami Herald and other Florida competitors have already given up. The operation requires two trucks and sells only 350 copies, for a mere $150 in daily circulation revenue. It looks like a ripe candidate for elimination in these tough times, but the editors do not want to disappoint their loyal Tallahassee readers.

As the three brainstormed, they kicked around various ideas about an electronic state edition with top political and business articles that would be aimed at a Brooks Brothers and Gucci audience in Tallahassee and other Florida cities. The edition could be e-mailed or set up on a separate Web site, possibly replacing the costly delivery operation. Or it could be such a moneymaker that no cost-cutting would be necessary. “There’s a 50 percent chance we can do this and keep delivering the papers,” Mr. Reeves concluded, to the smiles of the others.

THAT would make reporters like Thomas French happy. He has spent years examining endangered species, alongside other tasks he juggles for The Times. He recently visited a local zoo to witness a 1,000-pound manatee being hauled into a truck so it could be released into the wild — part of a lengthy series on the behavior of animals in zoos and the wild that he plans to get into the paper by the end of the year.

“I don’t know of any business plan where this kind of in-depth reporting makes sense, except for one that is built on a long-term goal of excellence,” he said. “I don’t know how long they’ll let me do this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/bu...ia/30pete.html





Bad Reporting About the Northwest Passage Issue

There is nothing that that spreads faster than a global warming scare story even when it is false. I’ve investigated several of the bogus claims here over the last year or so. Those can be found here, here, here, here and here. Now for the newest story. The famed Northwest Passage is now open, supposedly for the first time, so that a ship can actually make the journey.

The BBC dramatically reported on September 14 that: “The most direct shipping route from Europe to Asia is fully clear of ice for the first time since records began.” They are a bit dicey about when those records began or what records they are referring to. In fact it is satellite records of the passage that were started in 1978. So they mean for the first time since 1978. They leave out the date for the start of the records. Note: The report now mentions 1978, if it was there when I read it two days ago I didn't see it. However, many, many other reports have left the date out.

The first time!!!! Really? How can they say that? They actually reported on September 10, 2000 that: “A Canadian police patrol boat has completed a voyage through the fabled Northwest Passage without encountering any pack ice.”

How many “first times” are there at the BBC? Is this the environmental equivalent being a virgin, again?

National Geographic reports the Passage “is ice free for the first time since satellite records began in 1978”. Alas, the 2000 report from the BBC reports a previous first time. But at least National Geographic mentioned that the records in question only began in 1978, unlike the BBC which carefully excluded that key fact.

Slashdot announced “Impassable Northwest Passage Opens For First Time in History”. Canada.com referred to the Passage as the “historically impassable maritime shortcut”. Associated Press reported that the ice melt is “raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.” Saying it eluded them is pretty clear. No one has ever been through the Northwest Passage because of heavy ice.

The Melbourne Herald-Sun called the Passage “the dreamed of yet historically impassable maritime shortcut...” The environmental site Environmental Graffiti reports that “Explorers have searched for it for centuries and failed.” The it being the Northwest Passage. But they report that now it has been discovered thanks to “our malignant little friend: global warming.” The New York Post has also told the world that until now, the Northwest Passage has “eluded explorers”. And Scientific American has called this a “historically impassable route”.

You get the drift. The world’s media is saying variations on the same theme. Google news shows almost 1,300 outlets reporting this story. The basic claim is that the Passage is passable today and this is the first time in recorded history. Some mention that the recorded history is since 1978, while others make it sound like this is the first since human history began, a much longer period and a far more dramatic claim. Either claim is false. As noted the BBC reported the exact same story in 2000.

We should also look at the claim that the ice has always been so thick that the Northwest Passage has been “historically impassable”. Most attempts by explorers to find this passage happened during the Little Ice Age. I would think they would have had great difficulty making it through the Passage under ice age conditions. But are they saying that after the Little Ice Age ended that no one has made it through the Passage? They seem to be.

The problem is that ships have sailed through the Northwest Passage before today and long before a police patrol did it in 2000. It has happened several times. The historically impassable route has been passed through numerous times for over a century now.

Here is a photo of the St. Roch. It’s a wooden ship, not some massive, metallic icebreaker. According to the Vancouver Maritime Museum web site, this 104 foot wooden ship sailed through the Northwest Passage from 1940 to 1942, that was from west to east. In 1944 it did it again from from east to west. King George VI awarded Captain Henry Larsen, and the crew, the Polar Medal for making the 1944 voyage.

The Maritime Museum also includes a little information about the Northwest Passage as well. And they specifically mention that the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen “became the first person to sail the entire Passage from east to west” and that was in 1906.

Remember that police patrol boat that went through the Passage on the other “first” time in 2000? It was actually named the St. Roch II. It sailed the same route as the first St. Roch as a fund raiser to help preserve the original ship. They were re-enacting the previous voyage from 60 years earlier.

The USS Storis made the journey in 1957 as this US Coast Guard history of the ship mentions. They do claim, falsely, that this trip “ended a 450-year search for the Northwest Passage” neglecting to mention the St. Roch did it twice before them and Amundsen did so as well. Here is a photo of the Storis during its 1957 trip through the Northwest Passage.

A Dutch businessman, Willy de Roos, 56, made a solo voyage through the Northwest Passage in 1977 and you can see a Canadian Broadcasting Network clip on the journey here. They have another report on the S.S. Manhattan making the trip through the Passage in 1969

I shouldn’t neglect to mention that a couple of Canadians, Mike Beedell and Jeffrey MacInnis, sailed through the Northwest Passage using a catamaran with wind power only. That was in 1988. And in 1985 there was a diplomatic row between the US and Canada because the ship, the Polar Sea, was setting sail through the Northwest Passage and hadn’t asked Canadian permission. The US argued it was international waters and Canada said it wasn’t.

Even tourists on the M.V. Lindblad, a Swedish ship, have traveled through the Northwest Passage. They did it with luxurious food and in comfort. The trip was a 40 day trip from Newfoundland to Japan via the Passage and cost the tourists $16,000 to $22,000 in 1984! You can even hear the captain being interviewed by Canadian radio saying that the ice is in retreat and the water is open. That was back during the time when the panic mongers were pushing the global cooling theory. The Lindblad made a second trip through the Passage in 1988.

In 1977 another Canadian ship, with four Canadians, made the trip through the Passage as well. At one point of their trip they sailed together with the Dutch businessman who was making the solo trip. So you had two different ships traveling through the “historically impassable” Passage at the same time. I guess that is the Passage’s equivalent of a rush hour.

With just a few minutes of research I have been able to compile twelve cases of vessels traveling through the Northwest Passage. Yet major media outlets from around the world are pretending that such trips have never been possible until this year. The BBC didn’t even check their own web site.

Once “global warming” is mentioned all critical faculties are shut down in the media. They don’t verify facts. They just repeat the claims that are made.

We simply don’t know if the Northwest Passage has been relatively ice free before the 1978 satellite data started being collected. But we do have two different BBC reports, in two different years, each claiming the Passage was ice free “for the first time”. Before 1978 we don’t know. It is pure guesswork. But given that the planet has been much warmer than today, in the past, it is likely the Passage has been ice free on many occasions.

Regardless of that, the history of ships traveling through the Northwest Passage has been well documented. This is not conjecture or guessing. It is a historical fact. We’ve had small wooden ships do it, luxury tourist boats, a solo voyage, and numerous other incidents, all of which I have documented here.

The only reason I can think of that explains why journalists, who repeated the false claims of this story, didn’t bother to do any research is because these claims have been linked to global warming. They don’t want to be called “deniers” by the warming alarmists. Global warming to the Left is what “terrorism” is to the Right. It is an issue that is meant to be so scary that one is supposed to close down their mind, repeat the slogans, and obey.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/200...t-passage.html





ABC News Sends Digital Reporters Abroad
Brian Stelter

ABC News announced today that it would dispatch digital reporters to seven foreign cities, a move meant to give the network a broader global presence without incurring the cost of opening full-fledged bureaus.

The reporters will serve as their own producers, bookers and assistants, filing reports for all ABC News platforms. Two people will be posted in India, and one each in South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates and Kenya.

“We don’t need old-style bureaus with a bricks and mortar office, editing suites, and full-time camera crews,” said Marcus Wilford, the London bureau chief for ABC News. “We can shoot video, edit it and feed it over the Internet now.”

The reporters will be supported by ABC’s five fully-staffed bureaus (in London, Moscow, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Beijing) and by the network’s partnerships with other news organizations.

ABC and other networks have been cutting back on their overseas infrastructures for decades, as have newspapers and other news outlets. Their budgets have benefited, even if viewers and readers probably haven’t.

For the latest generation of journalists, conducting interviews, operating a camera, editing video clips and filing stories have turned into common skills. The old norm — of four-person network news crews — is rapidly growing extinct.

One of the new ABC digital reporters, Dana Hughes, formerly an investigative producer, was in Nairobi, Kenya on Wednesday looking for an apartment, which will also serve as her office.

“I’ve been given the assignment to, more or less, cover the entire continent of Africa,” she said by phone from Nairobi.

Ms. Hughes started gathering news before she even arrived in Kenya. The musician John Legend was on her flight, en route to support a United Nations project and record a music video, and he consented to an interview once the plane landed in Nairobi.

Mr. Wilford of ABC News said he saw this round of foreign posts as the first phase of a broader deployment, adding that he would especially like to add a reporter in Tehran.

Mr. Wilford recalled that when he was hired by ABC News 20 years ago, the news division’s Paris bureau had three camera crews, three producers, two correspondents, drivers, and a chef in a house with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Today the ABC News presence in Paris consists of a lone staff producer.

“It was a palatial establishment,” Mr. Wilford said, “and it wasn’t sustainable.”
http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp





College Daily’s Vulgarity Is Now Free-Speech Issue
Brian Stelter

On the campus of Colorado State University, opinion is divided over whether a terse editorial that ran in the student newspaper on Sept. 21 was an exercise of free speech or immature judgment.

The four-word message began with “Taser this” and added a four-letter expletive directed at President Bush, in a type size larger than most newspaper headlines. The message was “the view of The Collegian editorial board," the daily newspaper stated.

Editors at The Rocky Mountain Collegian were reacting to a Sept. 18 incident at the University of Florida, where a student had been hauled off by the police and shocked with a Taser gun after repeatedly asking questions at a forum featuring Senator John Kerry. The campus paper ran a news article on its front page that discussed free speech regulations on college campuses, as well as the disputed attack.

This week, a school supervisory board will decide whether to fire the editor in chief, J. David McSwane, over the decision to publish the four-word message.

The question of free speech quickly became political, with a campus group, the College Republicans, circulating a petition calling for Mr. McSwane’s resignation. Three days after the message ran, Mr. McSwane vowed that he would not resign. “We feel this statement, albeit unpopular, was necessary in communicating our opinion that it’s time college students challenge the current political climate and speak out,” he wrote in a letter to the public.

By then, the controversy was becoming national news. The president of Colorado State, with 22,000 students in Fort Collins, released a statement expressing disappointment about the editorial and referring the matter to the Board of Student Communications, an independent body that oversees the newspaper.

The board, composed of six students and three professors, held a well-attended public forum on Sept. 25 and subsequently decided that the community’s complaints had enough merit to call Mr. McSwane to a formal hearing, scheduled for Thursday. The board plans at the hearing to consider whether the language violated the newspaper’s code of ethics, specifically the provision that “profane and vulgar words are not acceptable for opinion writing.”

Until then, the participants are keeping quiet; neither Mr. McSwane nor any of the nine board members responded to interview requests.

Greg Luft, chairman of Colorado State’s journalism department, said every college newspaper in the country exhibits “occasional exuberance” on its pages. The editors are students who are learning journalism skills, he said, and “some editors do a fantastic, very mature job, and some need advice or professional guidance.”

Mr. McSwane has retained David Lane, a lawyer based in Denver, for advice about his First Amendment rights. Mr. Lane represented Mr. McSwane once before, when, at age 17, Mr. McSwane posed as a drug-addicted high school dropout to try to expose Army recruiting tactics in his high school paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/bu...a/01taser.html





Indian Reporter Arrested for Suicide Story
UPI

An Indian television journalist has been arrested for allegedly trying to get a depressed businessman to kill himself and his family on camera.

Identified only as Vipin, the journalist was charged with abetting suicide, the Times of London said Tuesday.

The television presenter is accused of telling a businessman a suicide attempt was the best way to highlight his troubles after he lost a land dispute in court.

Fortunately, police in Punjab arrived in time to stop Tilak Raj and his three daughters from drinking poison Sunday.

This is the latest is a series of stories about the outrageous lengths to which competitive Indian journalists will go to get a salacious story on the air.

A TV reporter in Delhi was charged last week with inciting riots with his report of a prostitution racket supposedly run by a mathematics teacher.

The expose was revealed to be fake.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...de_story/7203/





UC Berkeley First to Post Full Lectures to YouTube
Greg Sandoval

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9790452-7.html





Afghan Models Reveal the Beauty Under the Burqa



Jon Hemming

A model strutting the catwalk is hardly revolutionary in most countries, but Afghan television's answer to "America's Next Top Model" is breaking boundaries and revealing the beauty under the burqa.

Nearly six years after the overthrow of the strict Islamist Taliban government, almost all women in deeply conservative Afghanistan still only appear in public wafting past in the burqa's pale blue, their dark eyes only occasionally visible behind the bars of its grille.

But in the relatively liberal northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a local television station has started to show a different image of Afghan women with an extremely low-budget take on the hit "America's Next Top Model", a reality TV show in which judges choose prospective models from a group of contestants over several weeks.

"I was really enthusiastic to make this program because I wanted the girls to present the clothes and themselves," said Sosan Soltani, the 18-year-old director of the program.

"Afghanistan is free and these girls are the future of this country," she said.

Four girls in brightly colored traditional costumes with baggy pants and long loose-fitting shawls and headscarves strode down the impromptu catwalk decked out in traditional Afghan rugs. Seemingly less confident than their Western counterparts, they avoided the gaze of the all-male film crew and press.

A quick change later, the same four appeared in camouflage combat trousers, sneakers and embroidered smocks. Then came denim jeans, open-toed sandals and colorful lightweight jackets.

None of this would be at all risque in the West, but in Afghanistan, such attire can spark outrage, especially when broadcast on television.

"According to Sharia law, Islam is absolutely against this," said Afghan Muslim cleric Abdul Raouf. "Not only is it banned by Islamic Sharia law, but if we apply Sharia law and to take this issue to justice, these girls should be punished."

"A Step Forward"

More than 10 other models due to take part in the program failed to turn up after hearing that members of the international press would be present, fearing the wider broadcast of the show could lead to trouble for them, their friends said.

Those who did brave the possible backlash were determined.

"It is a great idea I think for Afghan girls, to encourage them to go a step forward," said 19-year-old model Katayoun Timour.

"We know that in Afghan society 90 percent of people think it is not good, that it's absolutely wrong," she said of the program. "We had objections from people, but I tell them it is not something bad, they should see it in a positive way."

But on the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif, it was hard to find anyone who objected to the program, especially among the young.

"It is a good program," said 28-year-old shopkeeper Ahmad Sear. "People watch and like it, especially women are interested in this program -- through this program and the clothes they wear, they might be able to develop their country."

"Young people are interested in fashion and the program introduces new clothes to them," said businessman Ahmad Nasir. "It also complies with Afghan culture, so it's fine."

But asked if he looked more at the clothes or the girls, he replied with a smile: "The girls of course." Then added, "the clothes are important though."

Model Timour said she wanted the outside world to see a different image of Afghan women.

"I have seen outside Afghanistan they have a different kind of idea about women in Afghanistan -- they think they are always wearing the burqa and sitting at home but it is not like that," she said. "Girls in Afghanistan are beautiful."
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...27726920071001





All-Stars of the Clever Riposte
Allen Salkin

DASHIV is in town and the celebration has not ceased.

Strange women are opening their apartments to him. Three parties have been given in his honor. His beer mug has been constantly refilled.

All hail DaShiv.

Who in the world is DaShiv?

Well, in one sense he is Bob Hsiao, a 28-year-old part-time wedding photographer from Berkeley, Calif., who does not have a girlfriend and lives with a roommate.

But thanks to a particular wrinkle of Internet culture, DaShiv is a star, an internationally famous portrait photographer, feted and fawned over during his 10-day visit to New York. This fame is not thanks to his own blog. He doesn’t have one. Nor has he scored big by creating a clever YouTube video or a flashy MySpace page.

DaShiv’s notoriety stems from the popularity of the comments and photos he posts on blogs run by other people.

There are those who have blogs. Then there are those who leave comments on other people’s blogs, sometimes lots and lots of comments, sometimes nasty, clever, brilliant, monumentally stupid or filthy comments.

DaShiv posts mostly to MetaFilter, a Web site that allows anyone to submit items of interest or questions inviting comment by other people. Another user there, Chad Okere, a 27-year-old computer programmer in Ames, Iowa, who uses the screen name Delmoi, has posted more than 13,000 comments. On the conservative politics blog Little Green Footballs, nearly 4.3 million comments have been left by tens of thousands of users since its creation in 2001.

“People are doing it for the same reason another generation of people called in on talk radio,” said Shel Israel, a social media consultant and a columnist for Blogger & Podcaster magazine. “They are passionate, they live in a world where nobody listens to them, and they suddenly have a way to speak.”

Since many blogs have a readership of one — or, at best, the writer, his mother and some guy he sat next to in seventh grade who found him on Google — piggybacking on a more popular site offers a wider audience for a keyboard jockey’s gripes and quips. Not everyone is up to the task of creating a blog with the kind of consistent tone and provocative topics that attract visitors.

“There are people who react rather than act,” Mr. Israel said. “As much as we talk about joining the conversation on the Internet, the most popular bloggers start a conversation.”

And some folks react a lot.

Seth Chadwick has posted his reviews of 207 restaurants in Phoenix on Chowhound, the online bulletin board where all things food are discussed with fathomless detail. Far more readers see his reviews on Chowhound than on Mr. Chadwick’s own Web site, Feasting in Phoenix. In two years, the Google ads on his site have yielded him a grand total of $110, he said.

That’s more than the zilch his Chowhound posts have earned him, but Mr. Chadwick, a project coordinator at a retirement investment fund, spends about six hours a week writing about food because he has adopted the mission of using Chowhound’s bulletin boards to lift his desert city’s culinary reputation.

“There are some small, wonderful places here that people don’t know about because they are hidden behind huge neon signs for Applebee’s, Cheesecake Factory and the like,” he said by telephone.

Like the narrator of the Elton John song “Rocket Man,” frequent commenters can spend a little time every day inhabiting the identity of their wished-for selves — Mr. Hsiao becomes DaShiv, or Georgia Logothetis, a second-year lawyer in Chicago, metamorphoses into the respected liberal commenter georgia10 on Daily Kos. Online they indulge the sweet fantasy that “I’m not the man they think I am at home.”

“You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day,” said Marshall Poe, a professor of history and new media at the University of Iowa, who has studied Internet communities. “Every hour you have 10 minutes where you’re not doing anything productive at work, and you can’t look at porn. So you make a comment and fulfill this desire to show yourself off as a smarty-pants.”

What point there might be to someone putting all his creative sweat into a 1,700-word exegesis on the cultural status of Bonobo apes, which a few hundred strangers might read, can be partially explained by a writer’s desire to be recognized within an online community, Mr. Poe said. On MetaFilter, readers can mark other users’ comments as a favorite, and commenters derive pride from how many times they have been “favorited,” he said.

On Gawker, the media gossip Web site, editors select the best comments of the week and conduct commenter executions, in which users judged to be unclever are stripped of their commenting privileges.

Sometimes, would-be Rocket Men pop up in strange places. The real-life identity of one of Gawker’s most frequent contributors, and a best of the week honoree, LolCait, was a mystery to the editorial staff until a few weeks ago. That’s when Richard Lawson, a 24-year-old sales coordinator in the Gawker Media ad department, who was worried his insider status could be discovered and ethically embarrass the company, confessed that he was LolCait.

His success shows how good commenting has become social currency online. Mr. Lawson, who studied playwriting in college, said he started leaving comments after he was hired five months ago, just to see if he could survive the audition as a Gawker-approved commenter. He made it, and was later singled out for a comment that was in the form of a fake entry from the socialite Tinsley Mortimer’s diary.

“That was when some of the other commenters started saying, ‘Hey, I like your stuff,’” Mr. Lawson said in a telephone interview.

His basic style is “easy jokes, puns, random celebrity jabs,” he explained. In response to a news item about the rapper Foxy Brown slapping a neighbor with her Blackberry, LolCait commented, “This is like the time Spinderella stabbed me with her Treo.”

Since he confessed, Mr. Lawson’s job responsibilities have grown, although he has not received a raise. He was put in charge of choosing the best comments of the week.

Not every commenter is a frustrated office worker yearning for pinprick shafts of fame. Some already have the real thing. The restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow commented on an item that Eater, the restaurant business blog, wrote about an advertisement Mr. Chodorow had placed in The New York Times criticizing a restaurant review by Frank Bruni. (Is this meta enough for you?)

After explaining why he’d focused on the topic of salmon in the ad, Mr. Chodorow referred to the title of the Eater item, “Chodorow Edging Closer to Insanity, Places ‘Dear Frank’ Ad,” and wrote, “If you worked in this business, you’d be crazy too.”

David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, the site that tracks 107.4 million blogs, said that when he learned of a blog post in which he or Technorati was mentioned, he went to that site to leave a comment, a practice that let people know they were being heard. “If you can do this,” he said. “People who are often your harshest critics become your evangelists.”

Commenting has become such a widely played sport that new tools are being deployed to separate the “trolls” — unwelcome commenters — from the favorites. Eater plans to offer readers the option of custom-filtering comments to exclude certain writers. Little Green Footballs started a rating system that lets users vote a comment up or down on a page, “to help the better ones be noticed,” the site creator, Charles Johnson, wrote in an e-mail message.

DaShiv’s posts on MetaFilter, which has about 30,000 active users, have been “favorited” 297 times. In addition to dispensing dating advice online (“Mathematically speaking, being good friends after a breakup makes it 258.1 percent harder to move on than a no-contact breakup”), DaShiv began snapping photos at San Francisco Bay Area real-world get-togethers, or meetups as they are called, of MetaFilter users. He posted them on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, which shares content with MetaFilter.

“He’s a MetaFilter star,” said ThePinkSuperhero, the screen name of a woman who helped organize a meetup in Astoria, Queens, on Wednesday in DaShiv’s honor. “He came to be known as a great portrait photographer. Wherever he goes, people flock to him to have their picture taken.” (The woman, a 24-year-old director of operations at a financial operations firm, asked that her real name not be printed because “I don’t want my MetaFilter comment history tied to my Google index forever and evermore.”)

Soon, those organizing meetups in other cities started asking DaShiv if he would show up to take photos. This summer, Matthew Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter, flew DaShiv to Portland, Ore., for the site’s eighth-anniversary party.

When Mr. Hsiao announced he was coming to New York for 10 days, at least five people he’d never met in person offered couch space, and three meetups were organized.

He said he chose the mean-sounding online moniker DaShiv when he was younger and posting to dial-up computer bulletin boards in Los Angeles. “I chose it mostly because I was a sarcastic little brat growing up,” he said.

Despite his growing fame, he doesn’t see himself creating his own blog soon. “It’s easier to join in on a conversation than to start one,” he said matter of factly.

Some have parlayed commenting into a profession, even if only part time. Matt Diggs was a college student so obsessed with high school football in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that he began filing reports for the message boards at the Web site that is now called Texas Prep Insider in exchange for free entry to high school games.

He has since graduated and is now paid $20,000 annually to make 30 to 50 entries a week on the site, a nice addition to what he earns teaching psychology at a community college. Recognized as the area’s foremost expert on his subject, Mr. Diggs, 29, also leaves comments, gratis, on The Dallas Morning News high school sports blogs.

His obsession with high school football started when he was a freshman at Plano East Senior High School. “I played tight end,” he said. “But I never made it to varsity.”

Robin Epstein contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fa...ommenters.html





Service Helps Friends Share Their Online Discoveries
John Markoff

Four software designers who were instrumental in the creation of Google’s popular e-mail and mapping services have founded a new company with the intent of making it easy for people to find out what Web material their friends are enjoying.

The company, FriendFeed, is the brainchild of Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, two of the programmers who built Google Maps. Several months ago the two men, both Stanford-trained computer scientists, teamed with Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who were members of the original Gmail software design team.

Mr. Taylor said he and Mr. Norris left Google this year to create a company focused on data storage technologies, but they shifted direction several months ago.

FriendFeed users can see what their friends are reading, listening to or viewing on the Web as a continuous stream of notifications. This stream can appear on a personal Web page or in a module on the user’s customized page on Facebook or Google. The system does not require the installation of software, but it does require the friends to participate.

The system can track people’s activities on a variety of Web sites, ranging from collaborative news filtering sites like Digg and Slashdot to music services like Last.fm and video and photo services like YouTube and Flickr.

FriendFeed now supports 23 Web services, and it also permits users to comment on postings and carry on online discussions.

“This gives you a snapshot of what people you know think is interesting,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s kind of a blog that writes itself.”

FriendFeed will be made available to several thousand users on Monday, and new users will gradually be permitted to join after that.

The designers said they were aware that theirs is not a unique effort to find simple ways to share online content. Other sharing services include Kaboodle, which Hearst acquired last month, and Clipmarks, which Forbes has bought. Plum is an independent start-up that has designed a free Web service for collecting and sharing online information.

Google itself recently created a feature for capturing and sharing Web pages called Shared Stuff that it has not yet publicly announced.

The creators of FriendFeed say their system is intended to be as simple as possible. “I like this because it doesn’t require me to do anything new,” Mr. Taylor said.

Before teaming up with the other former Google programmers, Mr. Buchheit, who was an early Google employee and left the company after it went public, had been working as a private investor. But he said he enjoyed the “purity” of designing a product from scratch and getting feedback from thousands of users.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/te...gy/01feed.html





Storing Files on the Internet, Microsoft Style
Steve Lohr

Microsoft is moving to deliver more software technology over the Internet as a service, forced to follow an industry trend led by Google, its newest archrival.

But its strategy is a careful balancing act, adding Internet services without offering online versions of its most lucrative desktop products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Microsoft is making announcements today that it plans to offer a free service, called Office Live Workspace, that will allow people to store, access and share documents online. A user will be able store up to 1,000 documents on a workspace on the Web.

But a Word or Excel document in the online workspace can be edited only if the user has bought Microsoft’s Word or Excel software. “The ideal case is where a person has Office,” said Rajesh Jha, a vice president for Microsoft Office Live products.

In an offering for larger companies, Microsoft will host the data center software for e-mail, workgroup collaboration and instant messaging and provide those as online services to corporate customers with 5,000 or more users of Microsoft Office desktop software, a product second only to Windows as a profit maker for the software giant.

Microsoft has long had online services for consumers, including its Web-based e-mail, Hotmail, and instant messaging service known as Windows Live Messenger. Last year, the company introduced an online service for small businesses, providing them with their own Web sites and e-mail accounts. It also has a customer relationship management service, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which competes with Salesforce.com, another leader in the software-as-services trend.

The moves by Microsoft, analysts say, represent an effort to quicken the company’s pace in Internet services. “Microsoft is recognizing that it needs to be seen as a fast follower in this space, and now it is seen as a slow follower,” said David M. Smith, an analyst at Gartner, a market research firm.

Microsoft describes its strategy as “software plus services.” Increasingly, industry analysts say, software will be a blend of online and offline abilities. Google, for example, introduced programming tools called Google Gears in May to help people use its Web-based applications like e-mail and word processing when a user is, say, on an airplane.

Yet Microsoft champions a vision of Web-based services that is firmly moored in the company’s mainstay products. Office Live Workspace, for example, can be used by anyone with a browser for tasks, ranging from a business team jointly drafting a sales proposal to a family sharing and updating a household calendar. (Individuals can sign up for a workspace at www.officelive.com, though the service will not begin until later this year.)

Microsoft has so far resisted the advice of some industry analysts and company insiders who say Microsoft should offer simple, online versions of its most popular desktop applications like Word and Excel. It would be better for Microsoft, they say, to offer those alternatives itself than to allow rivals to seize this emerging market.

Indeed, Google began offering its Google Apps to business customers this year. Today, hundreds of thousands of small businesses use the Google bundle of online applications that include a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar and instant messaging, and dozens of large global corporations are evaluating Google Apps, said Dave Girouard, general manager of its corporate business.

“The world is changing to this new paradigm of Internet services, and it’s going faster than people expected,” he said.

Google won an endorsement last month when Capgemini, a large technology services company, began a service to help large companies use Google Apps. The corporate demand is fueled in part by the desire of companies to add Web-based collaboration tools quickly and without the expense and headaches of having to buy more server computers. The Google Apps run on Google’s computers in its data centers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/te...gy/01soft.html





Microsoft Offers Licenses For Fake Windows XP Copies

To qualify, users of illegitimate versions of Windows XP Pro must pledge to use only genuine Microsoft software going forward and agree to have their software infrastructure audited.
Paul McDougall

In the latest sign that Microsoft expects to support its Windows XP operating system for the foreseeable future, the company on Tuesday introduced a new licensing program designed to let users of fake or pirated copies of the business version of the OS upgrade to fully licensed copies.

Under the plan, called Get Genuine Windows Agreement, software resellers can offer to their business customers a volume licensing contract that will allow them to replace fake or "mislicensed" copies of Windows XP Professional with legitimate versions.

To qualify, users of illegitimate versions of Windows XP Pro must pledge to use only genuine Microsoft software going forward and agree to have their software infrastructure audited. Once they bring undocumented copies of Windows XP Pro into compliance, program participants will have the option of enrolling the software into Microsoft's Software Assurance program -- which offers upgrades and support for an additional fee.

Resellers who push the Get Genuine Windows Agreement to customers will get a cut of any new license fees they generate, Microsoft said. The company did not disclose the cost of licenses to be sold under the program, but indicated that such licenses would be sold separately from existing volume licensing offers.

Microsoft estimates that 35% of all software in use around the world is stolen our counterfeited.

The program may be Microsoft's latest response to the fact that many businesses are sticking with Windows XP, despite the widely hyped launch of Windows Vista in January. Last week, Microsoft said it would allow personal computer manufacturers to continue selling Windows XP through June 2008. The company originally planned to stop shipping the software to computer makers on Jan. 30.

Many commercial software buyers have railed against Windows Vista's price, lack of compatibility with existing software, and system requirements that exceed the capabilities of PCs more than a couple of years old.

PC makers have responded to such concerns by continuing to push Windows XP, despite the millions of dollars that their partner in Redmond spent promoting Vista. Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard have in recent weeks gone as far as offering customers discs that effectively let them "downgrade" their Windows Vista systems to Windows XP.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...SSfeed_IWK_All





Why My Mom Can Use Ubuntu (read: Why linux is Better than Windows)

Yes, that’s right; my mom is an Ubuntu user. She has been for about a year now (since Edgy). This is the story of how it all got started.

About 4 years ago, my father discovered eBay. Really discovered eBay. Selling, mostly, at first, but then, later, he started moving his purchases from brick and mortor to anywhere that accepted Paypal. One of these bargain purchases was a venerable Thinkpad T30. His excitement was fueled by the plethora of parts and accessories available at bargain basement prices. New battery? Docking station? DVDRW? No problem. So, when my mom started to make comments about needing a notebook, herself, he knew his choice.

Dad’s T30 came with no restore media, but, no need, there was a working install of Windows XP Pro already on the hard drive. This is how the T30 he purchased for mom was listed, but, instead, no media, no install. Wait… it did have a Windows key sticker on the bottom. So, naturally, dad called me to ask if I had any XP install CDs handy. I did (yes, I dual boot one computer), and I brought it over for a “quick” install. 39 minutes of copying files (well, that’s how many minutes the fancy Windows installer said were remaining, as always) and I enter the key. Oops, this key will only work with the missing restore discs. What was I thinking?

We were left with three options:

1. Find and replace the missing restore cds ($40 or so)

2. Purchase a new, oem, or student copy of Windows XP (way too much, too much, and my brother was no longer a student)

3. Why don’t I have her try out Ubuntu? (free, as in beer)

My father was always a skeptic of any of my suggestions, but my mother, she was willing to give it a shot. She had been using Windows for years, at home and work, but was in no way married to it. There were, of course, a few applications that she used regularly for work, but if she was willing to try, I was willing to help. I took the T30 home for a few hours to make it as simple as possible for my dear mother. With Ubuntu, this doesn’t take much, but I needed to find a replacement for Publisher. I set up the few codecs, a proprietary video driver, a quick EasyUbuntu, and off it went.

There was but one snag, in the beginning, and it’s understandable. Scribus is what I had found to replace publisher, and I’d never used it before. Mother was pretty upset that she couldn’t open any of those .pub files she’d been working on for her class reunion. That was the first discussion I’d had with her since her “migration” to linux. I found an online service that quickly, and free-of-charge, converted them to PDF. Simple enough to handle for any modern operation system, except windows. Oh, there’s the Adobe reader, of course, but that’s not Windows. The rest of the work she had to do, she finished with Scribus, and she was impressed. Truthfully, I was impressed (at her adaptation).

Time went on, and there were calls, here and there. “Are these updates OK to install?” “Why does this message pop up?” “I go to the hotel, I go to work, I come home, it just works. I don’t know what your dad’s problem is.” “Could you be there while I dist-upgrade, you know, just in case?” Wow. My mom actually said “dist-upgrade.” Ha, priceless.

Now, she is by no means a full on linux geek but a full blown linux user (and maybe just a bit of a geek). This became abundantly clear when we met for lunch, one day. She told me the story of her IT guy friend in Michigan and his virus problem. Apparently, a massive infection, across several locations, covering 400 Windows computers in there organization caused a bit of work for this IT friend. A few weeks of antivirus duties, actually. Then, my mother delivered the punchline.

Mom: “then I said, ‘Antivirus??? What’s that!?! Hahaha!’“

Yeah, she went there. More on my mom to come.
http://troubledramblings.com/2007/10...an-use-ubuntu/





Verizon, Copper, Fiber, and the Truth
Alexander Graham Cracker

Starting last spring, reports began surfacing of Verizon routinely disabling copper as it installed its fiber-based FiOS service. We discussed the issue here a couple of times. In my experience, every time Verizon has installed FiOS at a friend's house, they have insisted they have to cut off the copper and move the POTS to the fiber. By doing so, they block anyone else such as COVAD or Cavalier from renting the copper for competitive access. Sources report that today, at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Verizon executive VP Thomas Tauke denied ever doing that. (The transcript should be up in a day or so. The AP coverage does not mention this detail.) I wonder if Rep. Markey's staff is interested in hearing from people who experienced Verizon disabling copper, and without notice?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/2050230





Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies
Bobby White

In 1969, at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, Larry Roberts oversaw a program of connected research computers called ARPAnet that became the foundation for the Internet. Four decades later, he has spent nearly $340 million trying to redo that same technology, which he now believes is far behind the times.

"We can no longer rely on last-generation technology, which has essentially remained unchanged for 40 years, to power Internet performance," says Mr. Roberts, who is 69 years old. Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission.1 BIZTECH BLOG2

Mr. Roberts isn't the only networking pioneer dissatisfied with earlier achievements. Len Bosack, the 55-year-old co-founder and former chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc., helped commercialize routers, the core piece of networking equipment that allows computers to communicate with one another. Yet he now terms such gear "less and less adequate" for today's Internet needs. Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes.

The actions of Messrs. Bosack and Roberts fuel the growing debate over whether the Internet's current infrastructure is sufficient to handle the explosion of bandwidth-hungry services such as Internet telephony and video. In a recent report, Cisco calculated that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 million terabytes, or the equivalent of 40 trillion email messages. If such Internet traffic continues increasing, many believe networks could crash or at least slow to a crawl.

"The increasing bandwidth demands on cable operators will soon reach crisis stage," wrote Stan Schatt, research director at ABI Research, in a recent report. Others disagree. Cisco, even with its forecast of great traffic growth, concludes Internet-service providers will be able to cope.

Today, information travels the Web by being broken into tiny bits called packets, which are routed through the least congested pipes to their destination. Once the packets arrive, they are reassembled into their original form. The problem is that the increasing size of files, such as video, has begun overwhelming some equipment handling the traffic, resulting in errant or lost packets.

To tackle the problem, a slew of start-ups are producing gear and software to accelerate Internet traffic or to increase the network's capacity. These include companies run by Messrs. Roberts and Bosack, as well as Riverbed Technology Inc. and Big Band Networks Inc. Other companies, such as BitGravity Inc. and Limelight Networks Inc., are creating "parallel networks" -- essentially scaled-down versions of the Internet -- to escape the glut of traffic on current networks.

The target buyers for these start-up services are Internet-service providers and big companies with large networks of satellite offices. A business, for instance, can affect how quickly emails and other files flow to their branch offices depending on the equipment they use in their network.

But many of the new start-ups aiming to cater to these needs aren't likely to survive. In the late 1990s, start-ups such as Celox Networks Inc., Chiaro Networks Inc. and Centerpoint Broadband Technologies Inc. also emerged to grapple with the growth in Internet traffic. All of those companies have since filed for bankruptcy or shut down, casualties of the telecom bust.

Today's Web-traffic-control start-ups "really have their work cut out for them," says Michael Kennedy, a networking consultant with Network Strategy Partners LLC. "Technology doesn't always win the race."

Mr. Roberts's concern over the Internet's infrastructure stretches back years. Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it."

In 1998, Mr. Roberts, who worked at several networking start-ups in the 1970s and 1980s after leaving the Defense Department in 1971, founded a start-up called Caspian Networks Inc. He raised $317 million from venture capitalists for Caspian to manufacture the flow-based routers that could analyze Internet traffic and improve how that traffic moved. But the equipment -- priced at about $500,000 per router -- was too expensive for many customers.

Mr. Roberts resigned in 2004 from Caspian; the company closed its doors last year. But the scientist's desire to improve the Web's infrastructure didn't abate. Two months after leaving Caspian, Mr. Roberts founded Anagran in Redwood City, Calif., and raised $22 million in venture funding to continue his work. This time around, he says, Anagran's product is cheaper -- costing just $70,000 -- and there is a more urgent need for such equipment.

"Larry wants to get it right," says Dan Brown, a venture capitalist at ArrowPath Venture Partners in Redwood Shores, Calif., which has invested in Anagran.

Anagran has already picked up customers such as Merit Networks Inc., of Ann Arbor, Mich., a nonprofit organization that builds networks for universities, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University. "Larry's equipment is built for the more complex traffic like Internet television," says Jim Chen, assistant director of networking at Northwestern. "It's a perfect fit for us."

The XKL story began in Seattle in 1991, a year after Mr. Bosack and his former wife, Cisco co-founder Sandy Lersner, were ousted from Cisco. At the time, Cisco had just gone public and the company's venture capitalists figured the duo could no longer run the growing enterprise. Mr. Bosack soon sold most of his Cisco stock and concentrated on XKL. There, he focused on increasing the Internet's capacity through fiber optics, which are strands of glass capable of carrying 100 times more data than traditional wires.

For more than a decade, Mr. Bosack worked in stealth mode on his technology. At the same time, he began noticing how businesses and consumers were finding unintended uses for the Internet, such as videoconferencing. "Some of this stuff was putting a heavy burden on the network," he says.

That led to XKL's introduction of the DMX optical transport system last month. The $100,000 system allows businesses and service providers, rather than telecommunication companies, to manage and connect to fiber lines. XKL has only just begun to sign up customers, says Mr. Bosack.

Messrs. Roberts and Bosack haven't met but know of each other through industry circles and say they have been following one another's progress.

"We're pushing for the same thing," says Mr. Bosack. "The public needs something better than what's currently available."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article....html?mod=blog





For Troubled Stars, a Fickle Memorabilia Market
Steve Friess

As the public refocused on the off-field life of O. J. Simpson, Kathleen McCarthy of Maple Springs, N.Y., thought it might be time to make some money off an autographed book about Mr. Simpson that her father had found years ago.

Yet more than a week has passed since Mrs. McCarthy posted the 33-year-old paperback biography on eBay with a minimum price of $150, and nobody has bid on it.

She believed the timing was right to sell the book because Mr. Simpson, the former football star, stands accused of bursting into a Las Vegas hotel room to reclaim what he said was memorabilia stolen from him. “I figured there must be a market for his stuff if they say he’s stealing it,” Mrs. McCarthy said. “But maybe not.”

One of the most intriguing twists in Mr. Simpson’s most recent brush with the law is that the items the police say he went to retrieve are actually of little interest to most legitimate sports memorabilia collectors. The $5 billion business is prone to devalue collectibles from athletes, including Michael Vick, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, whose public images have been scarred by scandal.

About 200 items related to Mr. Simpson were available on eBay before his most recent arrest; more than 400 were available as of late last week. But the vast majority had attracted no bids.

Mr. Simpson, 60, has been charged with 10 felonies, including armed robbery, and one gross misdemeanor. He is free on bail and due back in court in late October.

The police report states that Mr. Simpson’s group left with boxes and pillowcases stuffed with $100,000 in merchandise, but much of that value came from items unrelated to Mr. Simpson, including signed lithographs of Joe Montana, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, and baseballs signed by Pete Rose.

Items related to Mr. Simpson that were reported taken included eight autographed footballs, two plaques, a photo of him with J. Edgar Hoover and three ties he said he wore during his 1995 criminal trial for the slayings of his former wife and her friend. Mr. Simpson was acquitted but found liable for the deaths in civil court in 1997.

“One of the things that experts like me have been baffled by,” said Thomas S. O’Connell, editor of Sports Collectors Digest, “is that, at least from what was reported to have been in that hotel room, I still haven’t heard which items would have justified all the trouble O. J. is in now.”

Mr. O’Connell said the most impressive item listed was a ball from Mr. Simpson’s appearance in an All-American game that might be worth $700. “At least from a memorabilia standpoint, there’s nothing that makes my heart spin,” he said.

Mr. Simpson was quoted in the police report as complaining that the two memorabilia dealers who accuse him of armed robbery had stolen his belongings in the first place. “If these guys were legit,” Mr. Simpson is reported to have told the police after the Sept. 13 episode, “they would have got big bucks on the Internet.”

But Mr. Simpson’s star value has fallen considerably since his arrest on the charges he killed his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman, collectors say.

“Prior to O. J.’s criminal issue, he was a player like Joe Montana, a fan favorite, well liked,” said Ross Tannenbaum, owner of Dreams Inc., the parent company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., of a chain of about 30 Field of Dreams sports memorabilia shops. “In general, we don’t sell O. J. Simpson stuff. There really isn’t much demand for it. People do recognize him for his football-playing abilities, but at the same time people are turned off by him.”

Other athletes whose items Mr. Tannenbaum does not trade anymore include Mr. Vick, the National Football League quarterback who admitted this summer to financing a dog-fighting operation, and Mr. Bonds, who in August broke baseball’s all-time home run record but under a cloud of suspicion that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. That record-setting ball recently sold at auction for $752,457, far below the $2.7 million paid for Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball hit in 1998 to set the single-season home run record.

Mr. McGwire’s fate is also reflective of changes in the market. His memorabilia’s value plummeted in 2005 after he appeared before a Congressional subcommittee investigating steroid use in baseball but refused to answer questions about whether he had taken performance-enhancing drugs. Mr. O’Connell said the value of Mr. McGwire’s record-setting home run ball had plummeted along with his popularity.

“That ball is worth well below that under the circumstances now,” said Mr. O’Connell, who estimated it was worth $1 million. “At the time, it was an extraordinary baseball.”

Some scandal-tarnished stars have retained their value. The baseball great Pete Rose, despite being banned from Hall of Fame consideration for having bet on baseball while a manager, draws lines of fans who pay at least $40 for his autograph when he appears three days a week at the Field of Dreams shop on the Las Vegas Strip. And Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, has remained popular despite steroid accusations.

“Lance Armstrong got a pass because of the cancer thing,” said Joey Sutton, owner of the New Orleans celebrity memorabilia store Vintage 429, referring to Mr. Armstrong’s much-publicized battle with testicular cancer. “He comes across as sort of a good guy. He’s also very charitable.”

While most of what the police say was taken from the Las Vegas hotel room was related to the sports careers of Mr. Simpson or other athletes, the three neckties that he is said to have worn during the 1995 trial fall into a category known as murderabilia, items made collectible by their association with a well-publicized crime.

Five states — California, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Utah — have passed laws intended to limit sales of such items, and a bill is pending in the Senate to bar the use of the United States Post Office in the trade. Ebay has stopped trading in items related to Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and other murderers, but private dealers have moved in online. None of this would affect Mr. Simpson because he was not convicted in the slayings.

“Awesome,” said Tod Bohannon, 30, a Commerce, Ga., math teacher and purveyor of the Web site murderauction.com, when told of the ties. “If he really wore it in the trial, I’d give $500 for one.”

Even if Mr. Simpson’s items do not necessarily sell, they can still be used to attract attention. When the Las Vegas controversy erupted, Mr. Sutton moved his sole Simpson item into his front display window at Vintage 429: a 1994 Sports Illustrated cover, signed by Mr. Simpson, from shortly after his arrest with the headline, “Charge: Murder.”

Mr. Sutton has priced it at $3,475 but it has not sold. Interestingly, he says, items related to organized crime figures like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel remain popular despite the often-gruesome crimes associated with them.

“The gangsters, they are not perceived as losers,” Mr. Sutton said. “People glorify them. If you take somebody like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or O. J. Simpson, their perceived value is very low because they’re perceived to be losers. Nobody wants to be associated with that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/us/01oj.html





EBay Announces Skype Shake-Up and Charge
Brad Stone

EBay is finally accounting for its expensive acquisition of the Internet telephone provider Skype two years ago.

The auction giant, based in San Jose, Calif., announced today that it was taking a $1.43 billion charge related to the 2005 acquisition and that Niklas Zennstrom, a co-founder of Skype, was stepping down as chief executive of the division.

In 2005, eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion, offering an additional $1.7 billion in incentives if the company, a rapidly growing Internet phenomenon, met certain revenue targets.

Though Skype’s membership rolls have since swelled to more than 220 million and the division began turning small profits this year, Skype has fallen far short of eBay’s revenue targets, and of Wall Street’s general expectations for the largely free calling service.

As part of the payout, eBay will pay a onetime $530 million fee to Skype shareholders to settle the revenue incentives, which increases Skype’s total acquisition price to $3.1 billion. But by taking the $1.43 billion charge against earnings, eBay is resetting the value it is assigning to the Skype division to $1.7 billion.

“It has seemed relatively clear that Skype has underperformed even modest expectations for the last two years,” said Derek Brown, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald.

As part of the changes, Mr. Zennstrom will become non-executive chairman of Skype. An entrepreneur who helped create not only Skype but also the file sharing program Kazaa and the Internet TV network Joost, Mr. Zennstrom has continued to focus on start-up efforts while running Skype, in part through his own investment group, Atomico. An eBay spokesman, Hani Durzi, said the parting of ways was mutual.

“This was Niklas’s choice,” Mr. Durzi said. “He is choosing to leave. He could have continued to run the company but he wanted to focus on new opportunities.”

Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, will act as chief executive of Skype until eBay hires a replacement.

EBay’s stock was trading at $39.34 early this afternoon, up 32 cents on the day, or 0.8 percent. On the day the Skype deal was announced in September 2005, it closed at $38.94.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/te...1cnd-ebay.html





Five Reasons Nokia Should Buy Skype From eBay

According to Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider (Henry Blodget and Silicon Alley, two great Web 1.0 tastes that go great together?), eBay's acquisition of Skype can now be officially tagged a bomb. How long will it be until Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft buys Skype?

Blodget analyzes the collapse of Skype:

The Skype acquisition never made sense strategically, and one reason Skype has struggled, we think, is that it is just a distraction to eBay (which needs desperately to focus on its core commerce business). eBay should immediately sell what's left of Skype to Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google, all companies that offer portfolios of communications services that Skype might actually benefit from being a part of.

Skype is rapidly surrendering its early dominance of soft-phone VOIP to other more focused competitors, and if it stays within the eBay fold, we think further write-downs will be in the offing. Skype was a $2-$4 billion eBay hail-Mary pass, and it just officially fell incomplete. eBay should just acknowledge that and move on.

Of course, Blodget argues that eBay should sell Skype to Google or Yahoo or MSN. While I think that's interesting, I think the company that should buy Skype is Nokia. And here are five reasons:

1. Skype's Real Potential Is On Mobile Devices
Skype's real promise has always been with mobility. I use Skype for all of my long distance when I travel abroad on business trips. While Skype on a laptop is great, I'd much rather have Skype on a dual-mode smartphone with Wi-Fi access. That way I could Skype over 3G or Skype over Wi-Fi in my hotel room or at the trade show conference floor.

Imagine the Skype client built in to Nokia's S60 platform and the Symbian OS. This could give Nokia's mobile devices a new differentiator and competitive advantage.

2. Nokia Is Getting Serious About VoIP
Nokia is making a major push into the VoIP market, especially for business users. Skype has amazing brand recognition with consumers and business travelers (many of whom use Skype the way I do to cut down on telecom costs while on the road). Nokia could easily upgrade Skype's business offering and make a more robust version of the platform for both the enterprise and the SMB markets.

3. Skype Would Make Nokia More Of A Web Services Company
Look, Nokia just kicked down $8.1 billion for Navteq in large part because the company wants to evolve from being just a handset maker. Why not combine location technology from Navteq with Skype's VoIP, IM, and other IP communications technologies? Imagine what this could do for mobile communications.

Surely, with its global share of the handset market, Nokia more than any other company could figure out a way to make money off Skype.

4. Embrace The Agent Of Your Own Disruption
By buying Skype, Nokia would move from being a handset maker that caters to carriers to being the company that helps revolutionize the mobile industry. Let's face it, peer-to-peer VoIP technologies like Skype will eventually cut into the carrier business model. Nokia knows this and the carriers know this. Why not buy the company that helped kick-start this trend and then use it to rebuild this industry?

5. Do It Before Google Uses Google Talk To Win The Handset Market
It looks like the gPhone is coming, and you can bet Google is going to push its own VoIP service, Google Talk, on it. Google has the cash and the brand name to push peer-to-peer VoIP into the mainstream. By buying Skype now, Nokia can use Skype's technology and brand name to fight Google and the gPhone.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...kia_shoul.html

[JackSpratts]

Joost Free Video-Sharing Service Opens to Public
CBC News

Internet-based television service Joost on Monday launched its software for Mac and Windows, making the peer-to-peer technology widely available to the public for the first time.

With Joost version 1.0, users can now download the free software without being "invited" by a friend. They can transmit video using peer-to-peer technology (P2P), the same approach used to launch the Skype internet calling service and Kazaa, the music-sharing website.

P2P is a method of distributing data in which multiple computers each transmit and receive information.

Sharing the computing power and band width of its users instead of filtering everything through a central data server can lead to better transmission quality, particularly as the number of users goes up.

Founded by Skype's Janus Friis and Kazaa's Niklas Zennström, the service got a shot in the arm earlier this summer when it raised $45 million US from five investors, including CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. The company has also signed deals with other big media players such as Turner Broadcasting System, Sony Pictures Television, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.

Overall, Joost says it has 150 channels of video.

The mainstream approach is different from that of Kazaa, which has run into trouble with the music industry over users sharing music downloads for free.

While Joost focuses on bringing television programming to the internet, much of the move among technology firms has been to find a way to bring the internet to television in the form of set-top boxes such as Apple Inc.'s Apple TV.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...st-public.html





So Far, Joost Lacks Must-See Content
Mathew Ingram

Joost - the streaming Internet TV service from the creators of Skype and the Kazaa file-sharing network - finally opened to the public yesterday, after almost a year of invite-only "beta" testing. So should you download it? And more importantly, is it the future of television?

The first question is pretty easy to answer: It's completely free, so why not? All you need is a high-speed Internet connection and a computer running Windows or Mac OS X (although it had better be a fairly recent model, since Joost needs more horsepower to run than some other video services).

As for whether Joost is the future of TV, that's a tougher question to answer. Obviously co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis believe it's the future. Of course, they also thought Skype was the future of Internet telephony, and eBay (which acquired the company in 2005) just took a $1.4-billion (U.S.) Skype-related writedown yesterday.

The reality is that no one really knows what TV is going to look like in the future -- and that includes the major networks. Most of them are dealing with record low levels of viewership and a splintered marketplace full of YouTube video clips, BitTorrent downloads and other unpredictable forces.

Joost is one attempt to find a middle ground. The service looks a lot like regular television (it is designed to run full-screen, unlike YouTube) and it carries similar types of content, from National Geographic documentaries to music videos.

However, since it is streaming only, content can't be downloaded or shared, which content providers like. The system also allows content providers to restrict where certain shows can be watched, based on a user's IP address. And there are ads sprinkled here and there, both TV-style and popup-style.

Will users who have grown accustomed to the freewheeling nature of the Internet want to put up with those kinds of restrictions? They might, in return for compelling content. At the moment, however, that is what many see as the most obvious issue with Joost: a lack of must-see content.

Although the service has signed deals with Viacom, CBS and others (including a recent deal with Major League Baseball), many of those deals are for older content, including episodes of the 1980s TV show Starsky & Hutch.

The content problem is magnified in Canada, since a lot of U.S. network content is restricted to U.S. users. There are still shows to watch, including some content from Canadian providers such as CHUM's MuchMusic, but it doesn't take long before the menu starts to look pretty familiar. Under the heading "cartoons," there are only eight selections, and under "drama" there are only three. "News" has one.

One of the things that drove television adoption in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the popularity of shows such as Kraft Television Theatre and game shows like Name That Tune - shows that everyone wanted to watch.

In today's fragmented media landscape, however, very few shows have that kind of effect on viewers. And just as the major TV networks have to find a way of dealing with that reality, so do newcomers like Joost.

Joost's hardware and Internet requirements could be a stumbling block as well. Not only does the service need a fairly powerful PC, since it is designed to run video full-screen, but it also demands a high-speed Internet connection.

That's because Joost is a "peer-to-peer" service, like Skype and Kazaa, an early music-downloading pioneer (which was later driven out of business by record-industry lawsuits). Simply put, this means that while a Joost user is watching a streaming TV show with the software, his or her PC is also streaming that show to others watching it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl.../Entertainment





The Marriage Is Over, but the Show Goes On
Whitney Joiner

RICHARD LINKLATER may have put this capital city on the film industry’s radar with “Slacker” in 1991. But for almost as long as Austin has been known as the Texas Hollywood, its most prominent and prolific player has been Troublemaker Studios, a filmmaking funhouse created by the director Robert Rodriguez and the producer Elizabeth Avellan.

For more than 15 years the partners — in both business and marriage — churned out entertainments like “Sin City,” the “Spy Kids” trilogy and “Desperado.” And they gladdened the hearts of studio executives by delivering their popular movies under budget, keeping postproduction in-house at Troublemaker’s downtown location and in their sound and editing studios on the 100-acre Avellan/Rodriguez compound outside Austin, next door to the castlelike home (complete with balconies and hidden staircases) where they raise their five children.

But last year, during the filming of the “Grindhouse” double bill that paired Mr. Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” with Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” came the rumors, and then the official announcement that Mr. Rodriguez and the pregnant Ms. Avellan had decided to end their marriage. The news that the two had separated and, months later, Mr. Rodriguez’s public appearances with Rose McGowan, the leading lady of “Planet Terror,” came as a shock to the close-knit Austin filmmaking community.

In a place where crew members had grown so accustomed to regularly working with Troublemaker that some had picked up and moved here from Los Angeles — Ms. Avellan lovingly refers to them as her children — the dissolution of the marriage raised the obvious question: What would become of the moviemaking miniempire they had built together?

Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Avellan say they plan to keep Troublemaker as is, and to continue working on some joint projects, like a planned family film called “Shortz.” But for Ms. Avellan, 47, personal hardship is leading to a professional evolution. Most of her career she has willingly ceded the limelight and the major creative decisions to Mr. Rodriguez, a charismatic character who famously got his start by partly financing his $7,000 debut, “El Mariachi,” by spending a month in an Austin hospital testing a cholesterol-lowering drug. Now Ms. Avellan plans to transform her own ideas into movies and television shows and take Troublemaker in new directions. For the first time, she is producing a major studio picture with a director besides Mr. Rodriguez.

“Queen of the South,” a sprawling crime thriller set in Mexico and Spain, will be directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, a 29-year-old filmmaker and Avellan protégé, and produced by Ms. Avellan and Sandra Condito for Warner Independent Pictures. Based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel of the same name, “Queen” is the story of Teresa, a murdered Mexican drug cartel pilot’s girlfriend. Fearing for her life, she escapes to the Mediterranean and begins her own trafficking operation.

In the past, she said, while she was interested in projects like “Queen,” with its $25 million budget and exotic locations, “I didn’t want Robert to feel like I wasn’t giving 150 percent, like any producer would do. So I’d not talk about this or that.”

“Now I feel free to mention some of the things that I’m doing,” she added.

Considering the strength of the previous incarnation of their partnership, this looser arrangement carries risks for both filmmakers as they make their first films without each other’s help. (Mr. Rodriguez is working on a remake of “Barbarella.”)

Both Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Avellan describe their relationship as complementary; their success, they say, came from matching her logistical side with his creative one. “In a lot of ways, we were made for each other,” Ms. Avellan said.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, before moving to Houston as a child and later attending Rice University, Ms. Avellan knew she was destined to be a producer, she said. The moment came while watching Holly Hunter playing a hyperefficient news producer in the 1987 film “Broadcast News.” “To have that much pressure and keep all those balls in the air and have the random knowledge,” she said, “I thought, ‘That’s me!’ ”

Eight years after “Broadcast News,” Ms. Avellan was a co-producer of “Desperado,” Mr. Rodriguez’s first major studio film. From then on, she has received top production billing on all his films. In a telephone interview, Mr. Rodriguez pointed out that he had helped produce Troublemaker’s projects as well. “But the stuff she’s doing now on her own, she’s doing the full-fledged producer job, which I’m sure is more exciting to her than just working on whatever project I hand along,” he said.

And perhaps now Hollywood will truly take notice. Ms. Avellan is well known in Austin as a philanthropist and a supporter of student film (last March she was the first recipient of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Ann Richards Award), and she has played an equal role in creating a moneymaking empire (Troublemaker’s 14 movies have made more than $900 million at the box office and hundreds of millions more in DVD and video sales). But that success has not completely translated to recognition in Los Angeles.

On July 26 The Hollywood Reporter released its first “Latino Power 50” list, highlighting Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes male and female Latino talent. Mr. Rodriguez was third on the list; Ms. Avellan wasn’t included, or even mentioned in Mr. Rodriguez’s entry. “This is the only woman who’s made Latin-themed movies, casting Latinos, for the American audience, in English, that have broken 100 million,” Ms. Condito said. “And she’s not on the list! It’s mind-boggling to me. But that’s not only Hollywood’s fault. That’s also her fault, in the best way possible, in the sense that she doesn’t push herself in front of people.”

Salma Hayek, who starred in Mr. Rodriguez’s “Desperado,” “From Dusk Till Dawn” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” calls Ms. Avellan a “well-kept secret.” But, she said, “now that she’s starting her career as an independent, breaking away and doing stuff on her own, people will know more about her.”

If it’s a challenge to continue on with business as usual at Troublemaker now that she is no longer married to Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Avellan isn’t showing it. While some in the Austin film world and inside Troublemaker wonder what will happen next — “There’s an enormous amount of concern,” said Louis Black, editor of The Austin Chronicle and founder of the South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Festival, “because these are two people that a lot of people care about” — Ms. Avellan said she never questioned whether or not to stay with Troublemaker. It’s a decision that might seem counterintuitive, given the collapse of the marriage. But considering the stakes as equal partner of a moneymaking company with grand plans — Ms. Avellan said she also hoped to expand the studio’s sound and digital facilities and bring in more commercial production — it’s an experiment she’s willing to try.

“Robert and I have been such good partners for 18 years,” she said. “So many things haven’t changed in general, just in how we handle our personal life with our children. The only thing we’re not is married anymore.”

“He can make his movies here,” she added, “just like I can make my movies here. It’ll be good for Austin: if I bring a movie in, and Robert does a movie too, this place will be much more used. People can say, ‘Oh, it’ll never work.’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? It’ll work.’ I’m excited at the prospect of showing them — of showing the world what I do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/movies/30join.html





Publishers Seek Talent Online
Motoko Rich

Joining the growing list of publishers that use public votes to decide what to publish, Penguin Group is teaming with Amazon.com and Hewlett Packard for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000. The full manuscripts of those semifinalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller “Eat, Pray, Love,” and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner, who will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 advance from Penguin. Separately, Borders Group, the bookstore chain, is teaming with Gather.com, the social networking site, and Court TV to solicit unpublished manuscripts from mystery or crime writers. A panel of judges that includes the writers Harlan Coben and Sandra Brown will crown the winner from a pool of finalists selected by voters on Gather.com. The winner will receive a $5,000 advance and will be published by Borders itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/bo...ERSSE_BRF.html





Stewart Tells MSNBC Host: Your Book is a 'Recipe for Sadness'
Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano

On Tuesday night's Daily Show, MSNBC host Chris Matthews got an in-person taste of Jon Stewart's penchant for mocking the mainstream media and the conventional wisdom it espouses.

Matthews, appearing to promote his new book Life's a Campaign, said he had endured the "interview from hell" after Stewart panned the new book as a Machiavellian "recipe for sadness."

"What you are saying is, people can use what politicians do in political campaigns to help their lives. ... That strikes me as fundamentally wrong," Stewart said at the opening of the interview. "It strikes me as a self-hurt book, if you will. Aren't campaigns fundamentally contrivances?"

Matthews extolled the virtues of listening and insisted that people can learn much about success from the tools employed in successful political campaigns.

"It's always a campaign," Matthews said. "It's a campaign to get the girl of your dreams; it's a campaign to do everything you want to do in life."

"But there has to be some core of soul in there," Stewart retorted. "What campaigns are, are photo opportunities that are staged, and there's nothing in this book about, 'Be good; be competent.'"

Matthews said that information was in the Bible -- "it's been written," he said.

"This book has been written too, it's called The Prince," Stewart retorted, referring to Machiavelli's treatise. "I thought that (your book) was a recipe for sadness. ... If you live this book, your life will be strategy, and ... you'll be unhappy."

As the interview became more heated, Matthews invited Stewart to a tete-a-tete on his home turf, Hardball, which Stewart declined. "I don't troll," he said.

"You are unbelievable," an exasperated Matthews said. "This is a book interview from hell; this is the worst interview I've ever had in my life. This is the worst. You are the worst."

"There's something in here that you fear," Matthews charged.

"Like fascism; I fear fascism," Stewart retorted.

Given one last opportunity to talk up his tome's "good values," Matthews gave up and tossed the book on Stewart's desk after the host couldn't contain his laughter.

At the end of the segment, Stewart offered to go on Hardball "and you can yell at me." He then extended his hand, "Friends?"

The two men shook hands before the show went to commercial.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Chris_...This_1003.html





Tweens Love Broadway, but Can’t Save It Alone
Campbell Robertson

For Broadway producers, 10-year-old Jamie Carroll looks like an ideal theatergoer: she downloads scores off of iTunes, is a fervent proselytizer when she likes something and has lots of friends, two of whom she brought along to a recent Saturday matinee of “Legally Blonde.” “A lot of my friends say it’s the best musical they’ve ever seen,” she said.

Maybe. But Jamie’s father and her 14-year-old brother would not join them, considering the show too girly. Even her mother, Tacey Carroll, was only present as a chaperone: “This is a little more for them,” she said, echoing several other mothers at the theater, one of whom even dropped off her young charges and went shopping.

And that’s the rub for Broadway producers, for whom teenage and tween girls have become the demographic of the moment, wooed by marketing campaigns and featured as central characters in a flurry of shows in development, including “13,” about a teenager from New York who is transplanted to Indiana; “Princesses,” which is basically “High School Musical” meets “Gossip Girl”; and a musical adaptation of the movie “Clueless.”

Increasingly, though, some worry that the sugar-and-spice enthusiasm may be misplaced, because while teenagers and tweens may be helpful in creating a hit, they are far from enough to ensure one. For that, you still need grown-ups — lots of paying grown-ups — to want to come to a show.

Indeed, the producers of these new shows, as well as those of the $10 million “Legally Blonde,” say they are hoping for a general audience, teenagers and tweens included. “Repeat business among that group is a big deal and does help you,” said Bob Boyett, a producer of “13.” “But you have to go for a broad audience.”

For a while now, the “Degrassi” set has been the talk of Broadway, for one big green reason: the musical “Wicked,” which was created for a general audience, but began attracting a fanatical, often face-painted following of teenagers and tweens a few months after it opened in 2003. It also began grossing well over a million dollars a week.

It quickly became a notion along Broadway that the young demographic could make a hit, and producers with new shows spoke to investors about tapping the so-called “Wicked” market.

Even marquee advertising for “The Pirate Queen,” about a 16th-century Irish chieftain, blared a quote from The Record in Bergen, N.J., referring to the show as “the greatest celebration of girl power since ‘Wicked’” (the next sentence of the review, calling it “one of the silliest musicals in years,” was somehow left out).

But as David Stone, one of the producers of “Wicked,” hastens to point out, a show cannot become a major hit solely or even mostly by appealing to a niche audience, teen or otherwise. Surveys taken of “Wicked” audiences showed that while the number of attendees under 18 was about double the average, they still made up less than one-fifth of the audiences over all (a full quarter of the audiences were over 50). The idea of Broadway as a destination primarily for big-city sophisticates, of course, has gone the way of the top hat. The proportion of Broadway audiences composed of out-of-towners, who are likely to be looking for family entertainment, has grown by half in the last 25 years. At the same time, bringing young people to Broadway has become an almost existential mission for producers.

One company that pointed the way was Disney, whose successful shows, like “Beauty and the Beast,” brought in children as never before, many of whom grew up to become the teenagers longing for the sassier “Legally Blonde.”

One theory is that zealous teenagers can kick-start a show, pushing it toward a broad audience. The recent announcement that MTV would broadcast an entire taped performance of “Legally Blonde” on Oct. 13 is evidence of this strategy. After all, “Legally Blonde” the musical was based on a popular 2001 movie aimed squarely at girls and young women. It would be foolish to disregard that groundwork, said Hal Luftig, the lead producer of the musical.

“You sort of embrace it,” he said, adding that a majority of the show’s marketing dollars are aimed at girls and young women.

But there’s a difference, which Mr. Luftig is well aware of. Movies are relatively cheap and accessible, so Hollywood can court a narrow segment of the population and still make a killing. Thus a so-called chick flick like “Legally Blonde” can gross $96 million domestically appealing almost exclusively to, well, so-called chicks.

A successful show on Broadway has to attract people who are, first, in or visiting New York and, second, willing to spend a good deal of money. That’s already a pretty small crowd. Slicing it any further is risky.

Randall Wreghitt was a producer of “Little Women” in 2005, a musical aimed primarily at mothers and daughters. The strategy worked well at first, Mr. Wreghitt said, but the number of women quickly got littler, and the show closed within six months.

“I think we tend to want to say a certain demographic is the reason for a show being popular, but it can’t be,” Mr. Wreghitt said. “It has to be a real cross section.”

There are success stories, especially when shows attract large groups who are outside the traditional Broadway audience. “The Color Purple,” for example, became a hit with groups of black women.

Teenagers and tweens are already a heavily courted audience; casting announcements for “Hairspray” read like the Teen Choice Awards. But they have yet to make a hit entirely on their own. So Mr. Luftig’s plan for “Legally Blonde” — which was in development before “Wicked” opened — is that a general appeal will take hold through a kind of indirect effect.

In other words, by appealing not directly to the ticket buyers but to the people who exert major influence on them — their daughters — “Legally Blonde” brings adults into the theater. Ideally, they then have a good time and tell their adult friends. “If we go after the tweens, we’ll get the adults,” Mr. Luftig said.

Will it work? Well, after a good summer, the show’s attendance figures took a severe drop once school started. But September is a bad month on Broadway in general. Perhaps the MTV broadcast will make a big difference.

As for Ms. Carroll, Jamie’s mom, she thought “Legally Blonde” was cute, but she wouldn’t go back, as she would to “Wicked,” which she and her husband loved. Jamie, on the other hand, was not big on “Wicked.” But, like her friends, she thought “Legally Blonde” was the best show she’d ever seen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/th...02twee.html?hp





Making a Thundering Comeback After 65 Million Years
Patricia Cohen

Dillon Hawkins watching creatures in "Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience."

So Mr. Mactaggart, an Australian entrepreneur with Spielberg-size ambitions, decided to create a theatrical experience that had “something for all ages, kids and adults, so they wouldn’t be bored.” One result is “Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience,” a show with life-size animatronic dinosaurs that walk and talk (well, roar), not simply on screen, but also in three dimensions.

Based on the popular BBC Television series, this $20 million extravaganza is arriving at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., tonight through Sunday as part of a two-year American tour. Tickets range from $27 to $87.

Having managed three arenas in Australia and New Zealand, Mr. Mactaggart, now the executive director of Immersion Edutainment, which created the dinosaur show, said he realized how underutilized stadiums are. During the show’s run at the Wachovia Spectrum in Philadelphia, he noted that arenas had such “height and width and depth, but most shows don’t use all the space.”

His does. The ornithocheirus, strung from the ceiling, has a 38-foot wingspan. The brachiosaurus is 36 feet tall. But scale alone does not account for their impact. They are also remarkably lifelike. Stretchy beanbags filled with polystyrene balls and pulled across moving points in the dinosaurs’ bodies give the appearance of muscles and fat moving under skin. Hand-painted mesh (six miles of it) and latex stencils give the skin a pebbled texture. Most important, the technology that allows the giant lizards to cock their heads, roll their eyes and react to the audience endows them with emotion.

Two lumbering torosauruses resemble sumo wrestlers more interested in eating than fighting. A serene vegetarian, the ankylosaurus has the eyes and expression of a dimwitted ram.

The parade of 15 animals lasts about 90 minutes. And though there is a human host (effective as a measuring stick), his commentary is like the onstage questions at a beauty contest; all anyone is really waiting for is the next contestant to appear.

“Some dinosaurs wouldn’t get off the stage,” my 7-year-old complained. “They’re wasting time.”

The hulking Tyrannosaurus rex didn’t wait to be invited out. At 23 feet high and 42 feet long, with 6-inch teeth and a thundering snarl, she was fearsome enough to reduce some toddlers to tears. Mama charged out to save her yelping baby T, who then gave her a playful nip. A look around the arena revealed what seemed to be whole families having fun.

Although the dinosaurs make it all around the stage — about the size of a hockey rink — spectators sitting on the sides may have difficulty in some arenas seeing the video backdrop and the opening egg-hatching sequence.

The large dinosaurs glide along, attached to low-slung go-carts run by jockey-size drivers. A second operator in a control booth uses a “voodoo rig” — a device that fits along the operator’s arm — to move a dinosaur’s body, head and tail, while a third person manipulates the eyes, jaws and sounds.

The Utahraptors and baby T rexes, 7 and 8 feet high and 14 feet long, are actually 90-pound puppets. Though they are the smallest characters, they are in some ways the most compelling. There is a performer inside, and that beating heart comes through.

Harley Durst, 26 and trained as a stunt acrobat, is one of the men inside the belly of the beast. He has been with the show for five years, he said, and has closely watched the BBC series, visited zoos and worked with the designer, Sonny Tilders, to understand “how an animal reacts to whether he sees something or smells something.”

“I watched bears fight,” he said, “posturing, then seconds of madness.”

“We had big mirrors made up,” he added, so the puppeteers could observe themselves and practice “ways you can stand still and keep it alive.”

Hopping up from a chair to demonstrate, Mr. Durst said he practiced moving like a quadruped. He took large strides with his chest forward, leading with one knee while extending the other leg back. And while you might think that a flash of sprinting human legs would ruin the illusion, it is actually less distracting than the camouflaged go-carts between the mammoth robots’ feet.

Although Mr. Durst is onstage for only 15 minutes, it is exhausting work, given the weight and bulk of the costume and the strenuous movements. “My brain is running 100 miles an hour with all the music and movement cues,” he said.

“Walking With Dinosaurs” took six years to create. There is an original score. Onstage with the dinos are inflatable vines, trees, flowers and insects that rise from the stage floor in seconds. A smoking volcano later turns the vines into a pile of scorched wet noodles. Elaborate lighting creates patterns of leaves and footprints across the floor. And the fog that rolls in at intermission could keep “The Phantom of the Opera” going for a month.

The show requires 150 people to stage, including a spectrum manager to control radio frequencies used to operate the dinosaurs. Twenty-five tractor-trailers are needed to transport the 116,000 pounds of scenery, lights and sound equipment, and the 30 tons of dinosaurs.

“This really is a remarkable collaborative effort by people who bought a dream,” Mr. Mactaggart said.

He said his company was creating a second unit to tour in Europe and Asia, possibly by the end of next year — a kind of Cirque du Dinosaure.

Barney, eat your heart out.

“Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience” runs through Sunday at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J.; (212) 307-7171, dinosaurlive.com.
http://nytimes.com/2007/10/03/theater/03dino.html?8dpc





I’ll buy that for a dollar

Radiohead Tells Fans To Name Their Own Price For Latest Album Downloads; Gives Them A Reason To Pay

The band Radiohead is apparently coming out with a new album; the first after its original record deal was completed. It appears that, like many other musicians, they're realizing that the traditional recording industry business model doesn't quite make sense for them. While there was some buzz about an apparent hoax website about the band's new album, it turns out the real thing is a bit more interesting. That's because Radiohead is doing two smart things. It's telling fans they can name their own price for digital downloads. You just pay the band however much you think the downloads are worth and they'll be happy. But that's not all (though, that's what most folks are focused on). Rather than just offering up the content, they're also trying to give people a reason to actually buy something else. In this case, it's a "discbox," which will include the new album on both CD and vinyl, as well as an additional CD of seven extra songs and photos, artwork and lyrics. The whole thing will be packaged in a nice container. In other words, the band is following in the footsteps of folks like Trent Reznor, in realizing that the music is promotional for other stuff -- and you can still sell stuff if you make it worthwhile. In this case, Radiohead isn't really selling the "music." After all, you can get that for free. They're selling the full collection of stuff that comes with the music. Funny how it's the musicians, and not the record labels, who seem to realize that adding value and getting people to pay for it is a business model that beats suing fans.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070930/214524.shtml





Sloejammin

Life’s not over once you hit the big 3-0, it’s just beginning. Settled in a career, comfortable in your own skin and, if you’re a woman, celebrating your sexual peak (or celebrating your woman’s sexual peak), you don’t need to pound shots with your buddies until 3 a.m. to prove that you’ve got “it” anymore. Whether your partner is your, gulp, spouse, or someone you just started dating, here’s what we spin when we trade that beer bong for a night in.



Asking the Question

Because you’re too old to just say, “Hey, wanna fuck?” and you want to set the mood.



If you’re asking her...

Van Morrison, “Crazy Love”

Duh. If you can’t get her into bed playing Van the Man, you need to practice on that blow-up doll buried in your closet.



If you’re asking him...

Okay, you can just say, “Hey, wanna fuck?” For more elegance try:

Sarah McLachlan, “Ice Cream”

Her sultry voice will make you feel sexy and turn him on. It’s a win-win all around.



The Bee Gees, “How Deep is Your Love?”

Before you judge, dust off the album you haven’t listened to since you were 11. Trust us.



Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On”

A no brainer: the smoothest “wanna fuck?” in Motown history.



Making Out

Because you’re never too old to neck on the couch. Or on the front steps. Or by the mail box. Or by the kitchen sink...



Sly and The Family Stone, “If You Want Me To Stay”

If the evening’s not as hot as anticipated, try quoting the liner notes, “[I define] life and existence in terms of light and substance and weight...not necessarily tangible mass, but intangible matter such as a good feeling, a good vibe, a good thought.” Your partner will either be turned on by your metaphysics or tell you to shut up and use your lips for something more productive.



The Commodores, “Easy”

His daughter’s crazy antics will never silence his sexy voice. Admit it: you had a crush on Lionel Richie when you were a kid. Play this song, and you’ll be doing it all night long.



Beastie Boys, “Ricky’s Theme”

Pure, unadulterated make out music.



Prince, “Do Me, Baby”

No more hiding Prince under your bed next to your Playboys like when you were a teenager. Play this one good and loud. And break out the massage oil.



Bumpin’ and Grindin’ or The Hour of Power

The Hour of Power: are we kidding?! Nope. Sex does get better as you age.



Morphine, “Buena”

A little bit of low rock to bring the evening down. Bari sax and all. It’s gooooood.



Funkadelic, “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”

What’s a Funkadelic? “I am Funkadelic, dedicated to the feeling of Good. And baby, I’m good at being Good.” You can be a Funkadelic too.



Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Sir Psycho Sexy”

Men take an early cue from the Peppers’ pride: “I won’t and I don’t hang up until I please her.”



Rick James, “Give It to Me Baby”

James claims to have bedded over 1000 women in his day. With a straight-up, funky approach like this, we understand how.



...and if you’re coming too soon...an interlude...



They Might Be Giants, “Particle Man”

Who needs to think about baseball when you’ve got the geek anthem of all anthems playing in the background? Take a breath, get a drink of water, reapply massage oil... Boppy enough to keep you going, but dorky enough to slow you down.



Barry White, “Your Sweetness Is My Weakness”

Break time: over. Get back in the saddle.



Parliament, “Up for the Down Stroke”

Simple lyrics and a groovin’ beat keep you hot. And to quote George Clinton: “When you’re hot, you’re hot.”



LaBelle, “Lady Marmalade”

The only woman to make the Bump & Grind list, Patti’s old school version of “Lady Marmalade” will make you rip off your grey flannels before you can say, “I’m up for the down stroke.”



B.T. Express, “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied)”

Sounds a little like Funkadelic, but hey, it’s the Hour of Power. We need the groove.



Stone Temple Pilots, “Interstate Love Song”

Slowing it down and rocking out as we reach our climax.



Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”

Who has the louder orgasm: you, your partner or Robert Plant?



Blowin’ Smoke

What songs brighten your afterglow?



If the night went well...

Barry White, “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything”

The only man sexy enough to appear twice on this list; end your night with this song and guarantee a repeat. Barry Bonus: The song’s light tempo will keep you from falling asleep right away – a sure fire way to show your partner that you care.



If the night went not so well...

Ted Nugent, “Yank Me, Crank Me”

You can yank me, you can crank me, but don’t you wake up and thank me. Adios.



If it was the best sex you’ve ever had...

Van Halen, “Runnin’ with the Devil”

There’s no way anything that feels this good isn’t a sin.
http://www.thepeeq.com/Features/Feat...r-MP3-Playlist





Can I sit in your lap…

Rolling Stone Magazine Hits a Sour Note With Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees (Like Madonna)
Roger Friedman

To anyone who’s still reading or buying Rolling Stone: It’s time to boycott Jann Wenner’s flagship magazine.

I’ve never participated in a boycott — not of lettuce or grapes or anything else. But enough is enough.

After the announcement late Friday of the nominees’ ballot for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there’s only thing to do: Hit publisher Wenner, who controls the Rock Hall, where it hurts.

If you love rock 'n' roll, stop buying Rolling Stone until the tremendous insults of the Hall of Fame are corrected.

Wenner’s nominating committee consists largely of his current and former employees from Rolling Stone (Nathan Brackett, David Fricke, Jim Henke, Joe Levy, Brian Keizer, Toure, and Anthony DeCurtis). But they have little say over who really is inducted.

Last year, in a story reported by this column exclusively, Wenner threw out a vote in which the classic British invasion group Dave Clark Five was voted in and changed it for another round that favored rappers Grandmaster Flash.

As one insider from the Hall has maintained, "Once Ahmet Ertegun died, Jann felt like he could run wild." The legendary co-founder of Atlantic Records was considered the only person who could control Wenner. He died in 2006.

The Dave Clark Five incident has repercussions, however. I’m told that Wenner was made to meet Clark after I broke that story last March. The group now is guaranteed entry, although it’s a bittersweet win. They are probably not, to paraphrase one of their hits, "Glad All Over."

But this year’s choices are a complete affront to fans of the Rock and Roll Hall. And to show how much Wenner controls what’s happening, the exclusive announcement was made on Rolling Stone’s Web site.

If you’re still reading or buying Rolling Stone, it’s time to stop.

This year’s ballot shows that the Hall has skipped over the seminal 1970s for the worthless '80s. The committee has chosen dance music over rock. They’ve all but ignored the pioneers who influenced the genre in favor of non sequiturs.

The choices: dance group Chic, hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, mediocre Bruce Springsteen-wannabe John Mellencamp (a Wenner crony who’s lost out on many tries), white rappers the Beastie Boys, disco queen Donna Summer and, of course, Madonna.

Among "older" names: the aforementioned DC5, instrumentalists the Ventures and Leonard Cohen.

Here’s the idea: that these names should enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before such historically important and influential acts as Iggy Pop and the Stooges, "fifth Beatle" Billy Preston or performer/producer Todd Rundgren.

They aren’t the only ones.

Major groups the Hall voters deem "not hip": The Moody Blues (simply for "Days of Future Passed") and Chicago (for its first two seminal albums). Hall & Oates, Yes, Genesis, J. Geils Band, Alice Cooper and KISS are also names often mentioned by critics.

Also left wanting: stars such as Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, who were mainstays of Rolling Stone in the 1970s, have been iced out. Carole King was inducted only as a writer with ex-husband Gerry Goffin. Her achievement as the creator of "Tapestry," for years the best-selling album of all time, has been ignored.

Neil Sedaka ("Calendar Girl," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do") is not in the Hall of Fame. Neither is Neil Diamond ("I’m a Believer," "Sweet Caroline"). That’s right. They only wrote half the hits that modern groups cover or sample. Go figure.

The late Laura Nyro, who also wrote a dozen or so hits, is absent, as is Leon Russell, whose songs "This Masquerade" and "A Song for You" are among the most covered by pop acts. He also was a member of Phil Spector’s legendary band, as were other nonmembers Glen Campbell and Sonny Bono.

Then there are the R&B performers who remain in the cold, such as Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Motown legends Mary Wells, the Marvelettes and the Spinners, not to mention Ben E. King ("Stand by Me" and dozens of hits on Atlantic), Stax Records legends Carla and Rufus Thomas, Spector star Darlene Love, Joe Tex, Al Green and, of course, Chubby Checker, whom the Hall denies over and over again despite his invention of rock’s greatest dance hit, "The Twist."

Neither John Fogerty, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Ringo Starr, Tom Waits, Steve Winwood, Diana Ross, Steve Miller nor Sonny Burgess — the man behind Elvis Presley — is in the Hall of Fame.

OK, just so we’re straight on why Rolling Stone must be boycotted. It wants the Beastie Boys before Randy Newman, The Hollies, Tom Jones or Mitch Ryder’s "Devil in the Blue Dress."

Controversial Cat Stevens also stays in the cold despite his dozen or so hits and his influence on singer-songwriters of his era. And I haven’t even raised the idea of Poco, Aaron Neville, the Turtles, Gram Parsons and hitmakers Three Dog Night, whose members made hits for dozens of new songwriters including Harry Nilsson, John Hiatt, Jimmy Cliff, Hoyt Axton, Paul Williams and Randy Newman.

The lists go on and on. You can see more names at www.futurerockhall.com.

The Hall has caused its own problems over the years. It no longer includes three categories that the Hall introduced, then eliminated: Non-Performers, Side Men and Early Influences. The nominating committee, with a couple of exceptions who are obviously ignored, is simply too young and uneducated in popular music history to select entries in those groupings.

It’s a pathetic, ridiculous situation and it must be stopped.

Of the new crop, I don’t have much to say that’s positive. Madonna is a steamroller because of the cult of personality. She’s not a rocker, she has a thin voice and she doesn’t write all of her own material. But she’s a force of nature.

There’s no stopping Madonna when she wants something. Chances are good she won’t bring Steve Bray, Patrick Leonard, William Orbit and all her writers and producers to the stage. They are Madonna.

Chic is a fun idea with great songs, but it was really producer-writer Nile Rodgers and his partner Bernard Summers who made it work as a dance group. Rodgers should be in as a hugely successful producer of music by David Bowie, Ross and others. Summers can be thanked. Chic, however, is not rock.

The rest are totally off base, given the above list. Summer was a disco act. For her to get in before Ronstadt is a joke. Mellencamp at least plays rock. But he’s a minor note in the genre’s history.

Afrika Bambaataa and the Beastie Boys: Are they kidding? Even the latter must be laughing. They had one big hit, "You’ve Got to Fight for Your Right to Party." The former, while I’m sure quite lovely, is a record-scratcher with a great name. Each of these belongs in a Rap Hall of Fame.

And it’s not that I am against hip-hop or rap artists in the Hall of Fame. But Run-DMC is the obvious choice for an act in that genre that crossed into rock. Apart from its own music, Run-DMC’s partnership with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way" brought hip-hop to a new level and standard. No one would argue with its inclusion.

Of the two senior acts aside from the DC5, the Ventures probably are a good idea. The Hall lacks instrumentalists. But Cohen should be in as a writer. His morose style never once crossed into rock, and he knows it.

Diamond, Sedaka and Simon have among them dozens more actual rock hits as writers and performers. Come on. And Cohen’s songs have not had nearly the same impact on rock as those by Jimmy Webb. He’s also been snubbed by Wenner’s crew.

By the way: The Hall of Fame Foundation, which Wenner runs with toadie Joel Peresman, has nothing to do with the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland.

"Jann treats the museum like a toy and has no respect for Terry Stewart," an insider says. Stewart runs the museum with no regard for Wenner’s exclusions.

Last year, the Hall claimed to have given away only $158,968 of its $12 million war chest to needy musicians. It gave $56,236 to the museum to maintain its own archives. The museum must raise its own money.

Peresman is thought to get between $300,000 — what the previous director was paid — and $500,000.

New board members include wealthy businessmen Craig Hatkoff (co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival) and Dirk Ziff (heir to a media fortune), nice guys who have no connection to the music business or rock 'n' roll at all. They’re Wenner’s friends. Famed rocker Jay-Z — ha ha — also has joined.

Former inductees to the Hall, by the way, must buy their own tickets to the annual Waldorf-Astoria dinner. Tickets cost $3,500. Few, if any, show up anymore for the big jam session at the end of the night.

These selections for 2008 are terrible, but they’re just the beginning of what’s going to be a weird ride, thanks to the new generation. To wit: Kanye West is scheduled to be honored soon by the Chicago branch of the Recording Academy.

This means that other artists will have to perform a tribute to him by performing his music. Only: He has no music. West samples existing records. So someone will have to sample a sample to praise him. It’s sad.

So: I don’t know anyone who buys or reads Rolling Stone, but someone must, since Wenner Media seems to make money. It can’t all be Us Weekly.

Until real rock is served by the Hall of Fame, please don’t buy Rolling Stone or click on any of the ads on its Web site. Then maybe Wenner will get the message that no one can take his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seriously anymore.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,298681,00.html





World's Biggest Fake Fish Tank

A 250m by 30m LED screen has been installed in the ceiling of a new mall in Beijing. That's an impressive 7,500 square meters of viewable area, and comes with an impressive $32 million price tag to match. It hangs 80 feet in the air, and is actually five screens combined

It can show films, video games or even photos uploaded by visitors, but most of the time it plays animations like swimming fish.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/led-scree...ank-297359.php





The Trial

Duluth RIAA P2P File Sharing Trial
p2pnet news

Today Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) will be forced to step up and explain in-depth and in detail how it’s been able to portray some 30,000 American men women and children, customers all, as hardcore criminals and thieves.

Because today the trial of Jamie Thomas, a First Nations mother of two accused of being a massive online distributor of copyrighted music, opens in Duluth, Minnesota.

However, this time, reporting won’t be left to the mercies of the mainstream media who so far have been distinguished by their consistent failure to present both sides of a story in which the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel claim they’re being “devastated” by losses they say have been incurred because of music lovers using the Net to pass long their favourites.

Files shared equal sales lost, claim the labels, an assertion they’ve never been able to prove but which has, on the other hand, been shot down in a number of authoritative studies, the most quoted being The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis from Koleman Strumpf, professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School and Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard University Business School.

The labels also claim file sharing contributes to massive job loss and ravages the US economy.

However, a new Fair Use study states unequivocally:

With more than $4.5 trillion in revenue generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs.

In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright.

Now lawyers representing the corporate music industry will try to justify their attack on Thomas and on other women such as:

» Rae-Jay Schwartz, confined tro a wheelchair my multiple sclerosis
» Tanya Andersen, a disabled single mother who depends on a medical pension for income
» Patti Santangelo, a New York mother of five who’s never allowed tragic family events to be used in stories of the persecution of her and two of her children by the Big 4 labels

Their stories beggar belief, as do the means used by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG continue their attacks on these mothers and thousands of other men, women and children —– their own customers.

Despite successful attempts by the Big 4 to use the mainstream media to create the impression thousands of people have been successfully sued for the non-existent crime file sharing, no one has yet appeared in court or been found guilty of anything, let alone copyright infringement.

This will be the first time since 2003 when the RIAA launched its first attack that a case has actually made it to trial. For the first time, the labels will be forced to give chapter and verse on their depredations not to an elderly judge with little or no knowledge of the Net, but to a jury of ordinary people, some of whom will be dedicated surfers.

And that’ll be very bad for the RIAA.

Jury selection and opening statements are expected to begin today with Big 4 lawyers trying to make a case largely based on ‘evidence’ supplied by online scalp Hunter SafeNet that Thomas shared 1,702 files she’d gathered with Kazaa, the seriously discredited P2P file sharing application owned by Australian company Sharman Networks and which is itself the subject of a class action lawsuit.

The labels will try to make the jury believe that Thomas was a criminal and thief, as the labels call file sharers, who illegally distributed the digital downloads online as tereastarr@KaZaA.

RIAA truth alignment specialist Cary Sherman is expected to give evidence.

Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer who’s representing several RIAA victims and whose Recording Industry vs The People carries the only detailed list of case-by-case court documents and lawyers representing corporate music victims, is dedicating space to reports of the trial provided by citizen journalists.

p2pnet, the only site to have consistently carried victims’ stories since the Big 4 attacks began in 2003, will similarly be featuring reports.

If you live in Duluth or anywhere near it, or you can arrange to get there, attend the trial and let Beckerman know what you see and hear.

This could be the one where the corporate music industry, its shills, its hired legal guns and its professional dissemblers will be shown for what they really are —– not people working in an honest and hard-pressed industry that’s struggling to stay above water in hard times, but a ruthless collection of avaricious executives who will do literally anything to maintain their companies’ dominant position in the music industry, and gain total control of how, and by whom, music is distributed online.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13513





Duluth Court to Host First Jury Trial Over Music File Sharing
Mark Stodghill

A single mother of two children takes on the Recording Industry Association of America in a Duluth courtroom today in the nation’s first copyright infringement case to reach a jury.

The RIAA — representing Virgin Records, Capitol Records, Sony BMG, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings — claims that Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn., distributed 1,702 digital audio files — many of them the plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings — from the KaZaA shared folder on her computer to “potentially millions of other KaZaA users’’ for free.

According to the plaintiffs’ proposed verdict form, the industry is seeking as much as $3.9 million in damages — up to $150,000 for each of 26 copyrighted sound recordings that were allegedly pirated. The trial is in Duluth because it is the federal court nearest to Brainerd.

Minneapolis attorney Brian Toder is representing the defendant. Toder said Thomas, 30, is the single mother of two children, ages 11 and 13. She’s employed by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in the administration of its natural resources department, he said.

Toder was asked why the case is going to trial. “Because we wouldn’t allow ourselves to be bullied,” he said. “Most people settle when they get these kind of lawsuits … They’re very good at getting people to settle.”

Toder said federal court rules precluded him from commenting on details of his case.

In a court-filed document, Thomas’ attorney said she “did not download anything from KaZaA or any other peer-to-peer network’’ and questions whether the plaintiffs own the copyrights they allege are theirs.

As the result of a Feb. 21, 2005, investigation, the plaintiffs claim Thomas, under the username tereastarr@KaZaA, distributed pirated audio files over the Internet. The plaintiffs filed a “Doe’’ lawsuit and subpoenaed Charter Communications to identify Thomas as the subscriber responsible for the pirating, according to the plaintiffs’ “statement of case.”

Denver lawyer Richard Gabriel is the lead attorney representing the plaintiffs. He couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.

“Without commenting specifically on the merits of this case, I will say that with all our cases we try to be fair and reasonable in resolving them quickly and out of court,” Cara Duckworth, director of communications for the Recording Industry Association of America, said in an e-mail Monday. “I might add that we settle for amounts far less than what the law allows.’’

The RIAA claims that the music industry is losing billions of dollars from the illegal copying of its music. The industry’s zero-tolerance copyright campaign started in 2003. It has brought more than 26,000 lawsuits against individuals who allegedly have illegally downloaded and/or distributed copyrighted music files, Duckworth said.

In separate cases, three University of Minnesota Duluth students are accused of allegedly downloading music illegally. UMD and 57 other U.S. college campuses were included in a wave of 503 pre-litigation settlement letters sent by RIAA last month.

Jury selection begins this morning in Duluth federal court. U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis will preside over the trial, which is expected to conclude Thursday.
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/art...s.cfm?id=51388





RIAA Copyright Campaign Finally Goes to Trial
David Kravets

The Recording Industry Association of America and a mother from Minnesota will face off Tuesday in the nation's first copyright jury trial. The case stems from the music industry's four-year-old legal campaign against peer-to-peer piracy.

The RIAA is seeking millions in damages. The case could set legal precedent concerning the level of proof a jury would consider sufficient to find a defendant liable for copyright infringement. It's also likely to offer a glimpse into the industry's investigative techniques.

The case, Virgin v. Thomas, pits a 30-something woman from Brainerd, Minnesota, against some of the biggest names in the industry: Virgin Records, Capitol Records, Sony BMG, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings -- all members of the RIAA.

The industry is seeking as much as $3.9 million in damages plus legal fees against Jannie Thomas in U.S. District Court in Duluth, Minnesota. The plaintiffs accuse Thomas of distributing 1,702 audio files -- many of them copyrighted by the recording industry -- on file-sharing site Kazaa in 2005.

"Plaintiffs will prove that the defendant is liable for the direct infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights because she downloaded and distributed them over the internet without plaintiffs’ authorization," several music-industry lawyers wrote in court documents Sept. 17.

Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, of the firm Chestnut & Cambronne in Minneapolis, said in an interview that Thomas is innocent.

"My client is adamant that she just didn't do it," Toder said. "She hired me to defend her and said she's not going to settle under any circumstances."

The RIAA's zero-tolerance copyright campaign commenced Sept. 8, 2003, and has launched more than 20,000 lawsuits. Anecdotal evidence suggests the bulk of the cases settled, while others were quietly dismissed

Following the pattern of most of the RIAA's lawsuits, Thomas came under legal fire when an investigator with SafeNet allegedly detected somebody at IP address 24.179.199.117 distributing audio files on Kazaa according to court documents. In response to a subpoena, internet service provider Charter Communications identified Thomas as the subscriber assigned that internet protocol address, according to court documents.

Jury selection will take place Tuesday, and the trial could begin the same day.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/ne.../10/riaa_trial





Music Download Trial Begins in Minn.
Joshua Freed

Was there a serial downloader lurking outside Jammie Thomas' window? Did someone else hook up a computer to her Internet connection?

Those are some of the questions her attorney has been raising in the nation's first trial of someone accused of illegally sharing music online.

But Richard Gabriel, lead attorney for some of the nation's largest record companies, sought to pick those ideas apart one by one by calling witnesses to document each step the record companies used to point the finger at Thomas.

Testimony in the civil case was to resume Wednesday in federal court in Duluth. The case could wrap up as early as Wednesday night or Thursday.

On the courthouse steps Tuesday, Thomas denied illegally downloading music. In court, attorney Brian Toder has said there's no proof she shared music illegally.

Toder's cross-examination has focused on raising doubt about whether the record companies can really prove it was Thomas who downloaded and shared the 1,702 songs, as the record companies allege she did in 2005.

He suggested in his questioning that someone other than Thomas _ someone outside her window, or a neighbor _ could have been responsible if she used a wireless router. That could have allowed anyone nearby to utilize her Internet connection, using the same address that led the record companies to Thomas.

The companies have backed up their claims with literally a wall of data _ enlarging printouts of logs and dates and Internet addresses on a screen in front of jurors, with Gabriel zeroing in with a laser pointer to highlight the entries he says prove Thomas did what they say she did.

Mark Weaver of SafeNet Inc. testified about how his company, at the behest of the record companies, found 1,702 songs offered by a user of the Kazaa file-sharing program under the name "tereastarr."

Then defense attorneys put on David L. Edgar of Charter Communications, Thomas' Internet provider. He testified about how he and another investigator independently matched the Internet address used by tereastarr to both Thomas' account and an electronic address for the cable modem she leased from the company.

Doug Jacobson, a computer security expert and professor at Iowa State University, testified that Toder's theory that someone else used a wireless router to download the songs linked to Thomas was far-fetched. He said records subpoenaed from Charter don't show the kind of Internet address used by such routers.

"There was no wireless router used in this case," he said.

Thomas, a 30-year-old mother of two from Brainerd, is expected to testify during the trial.

"I do know that I didn't do this, and the jury will hear that I did not do this," she said Tuesday outside the courtroom.

Thomas' computer hard drive will be a key to the case. She and her attorney say she replaced it at the suggestion of Best Buy Co. after she had some computer problems in 2005. The record companies say she was trying to cover her tracks after they sent her messages saying she was illegally distributing their files.

Music sales have slumped in recent years as more people have turned to file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America, which is not a party to the lawsuit, says record companies have brought more than 26,000 actions against people alleging they shared files in violation of copyrights.

The action against Thomas is the first to get to trial because most defendants have settled by paying a few thousand dollars.

Jennifer Pariser, head of litigation and antipiracy at Sony BMG, portrayed the trial as a fight for survival.

"It is imperative for Sony BMG to combat this problem," Pariser testified Tuesday. "If we don't, we have no business anymore."

In response to a question from Toder about whether the industry was making millions off all the settlements, Pariser said the campaign has actually lost money.

Thomas, who works for the Department of Natural Resources of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, is at risk for a judgment of more than $1.2 million if jurors found against her for all 1,702 songs. The recording association is seeking damages set under federal law of $750 to $30,000 for each copyright violation.

Besides Sony BMG, the companies that sued Thomas are Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...201029_pf.html





RIAA Anti-P2P Campaign a Real Money Pit, According to Testimony
Eric Bangeman

During an occasionally testy cross examination, a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record labels. The revelation came during the first day of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, the first file-sharing case to go to trial (it was formerly known as Virgin v. Thomas, but the sole Virgin Records track was stricken from the complaint, making Capitol Records the lead plaintiff).

After a relatively calm morning session, proceedings resumed after lunch. After RIAA lead counsel Richard Gabriel finished his direct examination, Thomas' attorney David Toder began his attempts to undermine the labels' case. He focused on apparent inconsistencies from the testimony of Jennifer Pariser, Sony BMG's the head of litigation. Toder also got Pariser to admit that IP addresses and screenshots "don't identify human beings."

Pariser also said she had no idea why Virgin Records dropped its part of the case. "The RIAA and the plaintiffs have the same lawyer and coordinate the lawsuits," Toder noted. "You don't know why they bailed on the case?" Pariser said she had enough trouble keeping track of Sony's litigation, let alone what the other companies are doing. Perhaps—and this is just a guess—it's the money.

Lawsuits are punitive, not business

One of the biggest bombshells from the cross-examination was Pariser's admission that the RIAA's legal campaign isn't making the labels any money, and that, furthermore, the industry has no idea of the actual damages it suffers due to file-sharing.

The admission came during questioning over the amount of damages the RIAA is seeking in the case. Toder asked Pariser how much Sony was suing the defendant for, and she replied that the amount was for the jury to decide and that the labels weren't suing for actual damages. As is the case with the other file-sharing lawsuits, the record industry is only seeking the punitive damages available via the Copyright Act, which can range from $750 to $150,000 per song. "What are your actual damages?" asked Toder.

"We haven't stopped to calculate the amount of damages we've suffered due to downloading, but that's not what's at issue here," replied Pariser, who was reminded by Judge Michael Davis to answer the questions actually asked by Toder, not hypotheticals.

Toder then pressed the Sony executive on the question of how many people actually downloaded music from the defendant. "We don't know," she replied. "I can't identify any other entities aside from what SafeNet reported, but I know that many others did... that's the way the system works."

Toder then raised the question of the RIAA targeting the wrong people in its lawsuits. "How many dead people have you sued?" he asked, a question that was blocked after Gabriel objected. Toder then took a different tack, asking Pariser if she recognized the names of Gertrude Walton, Sarah Ward, Cindy Chan, and Paul Wilke—all innocent victims of the RIAA's driftnet tactics.

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a "few thousand." "More like 20,000," suggested Toder. "That's probably an overstatement," Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."

The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry. On the other side of the balance sheet is the amount of money paid to SafeNet (formerly MediaSentry) to conduct its investigations, and the cash spent on the RIAA's legal team and on local counsel to help with the various cases. As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...money-pit.html





Sony BMG's Chief Anti-Piracy Lawyer: "Copying" Music You Own is "Stealing"
Eric Bangeman

Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify. Pariser said that file-sharing is extremely damaging to the music industry and that record labels are particularly affected. In doing so, she advocated a view of copyright that would turn many honest people into thieves.

Pariser noted that music labels make no money on touring, radio, or merchandise, which leaves the company particularly exposed to the negative effects of file-sharing. "It's my personal belief that Sony BMG is half the size now as it was in 2000," she said, thanks to piracy. In Pariser's view, "when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed."

Pariser has a very broad definition of "stealing." When questioned by Richard Gabriel, lead counsel for the record labels, Pariser suggested that what millions of music fans do is actually theft. The dirty deed? Ripping your own CDs or downloading songs you already own.

Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she said.

Countless studies have shown that the majority of music on portable music players like the iPod comes from sources other than download services. For most people, that music is comprised primarily of songs "ripped" from CD collections to MP3 or some other comparable format. Indeed, most portable music players comes with software (like iTunes) which is designed to facilitate the easy ripping of CDs. According to Pariser's view, this is stealing.

We've actually heard something similar to this view before. As part of the 2006 triennial review of the effectiveness of the DMCA, a number of content-related industries filed a joint reply with the government on the effectiveness of the DMCA and the challenges that lay ahead for copyright. The argument relating to CDs espoused in the joint reply could be summarized: although nothing has prevented consumers from making backups of CDs, this cannot be construed as authorization from the music labels for them to do so. Thus, there has been no authorization of said backups, and the coincidental ability to make backups currently should not be mistaken for fair use.

Pariser's views appear to be similar, insofar as she clearly suggests that consumers have no right to make backups of the music that they have purchased in CD form or even in download form.

Ken Fisher contributed to this report.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-stealing.html





Does Illegal File-Sharing Cut Into CD Sales?

Stan Liebowitz says yes, rebutting the well-known arguments of Koleman Strumpf, published in the Journal of Political Economy. I would be happy to link to a response by Strumpf. In the meantime, two notes: a) I suspect non-fair use CD burning is in any case the bigger issue, and b) significantly lower musical sales, and yes sales are falling, still can be welfare-improving. The real consumption of music seems to be up.
http://www.personalbee.com/105/19913760

Paper



Online File Sharing Does Worst Damage to Lower Ranked Albums in Billboard Top 100

File sharing is taking its worst toll on smaller albums, “devastating” lower ranked titles on the Billboard Top 100, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the monthly journal.

“The Effect of Digital Sharing Technologies on Music Markets: A Survival Analysis of Albums on Ranking Charts” is by Sudip Bhattacharjee and Ram D. Gopal, University of Connecticut; Kaveepan Lertwachara, California Polytechnic State University; James R. Marsden, University of Connecticut; and Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University.

The authors completed rigorous empirical analysis, using data on the performance of music albums on the Billboard Top 100 charts together with data on peer-to-peer file sharing. The analysis indicates that average survival time on the chart has decreased by 42%. The lower debut ranked albums bore the brunt of decreased survival times, with file sharing as a major contributing factor.

“Although there is no evidence that file sharing hurt the top debuting albums, this electronic word-of-mouth was devastating for lower debuting albums, suggesting increased risk from rapid information sharing for all but the ‘cream of the crop,’” the authors write.

The authors note that strength of chart debut rank as a success indicator emphasizes the importance of early successful marketing efforts and suggests that firms would do well to frontload their promotional campaigns.

Another important marker of success continues to be the superstar effect, with albums by these artists surviving 35% longer.

The study also provides evidence that minor labels are closing the gap with the major labels.

The authors investigated how the level of file sharing influences survival time on the charts. The first research phase compares music album survival before and after the arrival of MP3, Napster, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The second phase looks at the effect file sharing has on current top debut ranked albums and lower debut ranked albums.-Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
http://www.huliq.com/36377/online-fi...lboard-top-100





If You Keep Stealing Movies, You'll Never be a Star

The Motion Picture Association of America has, for years, attempted to stop rampant piracy through cheesy, guilt-inducing public service announcements. "You're not just stealing from the rich, you're stealing from the janitors too" -- that sort of thing. Well, the Brits have decided its film industry can only tackle its $18 billion piracy problem by targeting the young. Film Education, as the project is called, infiltrates classrooms to convince kids that piracy is evil by preying on their future hopes and dreams. The message: All those small, independent films that might launch your career in show biz won't get made because of your thieving ways.
http://valleywag.com/tech/file_shari...tar-305837.php





Riding bareback

Internet Killed the Radio Star?

The Recording Industry Association of America is targeting universities, and 58 ASU students and counting, to stop illegal music downloading.
Christina Caldwell

In kindergarten, the first thing we learn is that sharing is caring. In college, this idea could cost you thousands of dollars.

On Sept. 20, the RIAA sent 35 ASU students pre-litigation notices — a letter outlining the RIAA's intent to sue that gives the recipient an option to settle before going to court. This is in addition to 23 students who received notices in February.

In an attempt to limit illegal file sharing on college campuses, the Recording Industry Association of America is in the midst of a campaign targeting university students and faculty in an attempt to curtail illegal music downloading. Since the campaign's launch, about 3,329 pre-litigation notices have been issued to American universities, according to the RIAA.

Just last month, 503 students and faculty at 58 universities were sent pre-litigation notices in the RIAA's seventh wave of collegiate settlement letters. This month, 403 notices were sent to 22 universities, including ASU.

For the RIAA, downloading at the university level has no end in sight and therefore, neither do the lawsuits.

The threat of an RIAA lawsuit being slapped on any ASU student participating in illegal file sharing is here and very real.

'Easy targets'

Chris Ly, an ASU alumnus who settled with the RIAA when he was a journalism senior in 2005, is among the now thousands of college students who have been served with a pre-litigation notice from the Recording Industry Association of America, outlining the group's intent to sue for illegal file sharing.

"To me it seems like they are going after the easy targets," Ly says in an e-mail. "College students don't have the money and knowledge to fight these types of lawsuits."

Whether it is lack of knowledge on the student's part or just a willingness to settle file-sharing suits without a mess, the RIAA has set out to accommodate the thousands of people it is suing. Simply by using their Visa, MasterCard or Discover card, "John Doe" can settle his case online at p2plawsuits.com without going to court. On the Web site, a user can enter his or her case identification number as found on the pre-litigation notice, which will lead them to the amount they will pay to the RIAA and record companies.

But Ly settled in a more traditional way. The pre-litigation letter spelled out that the RIAA was onto Ly's downloading and gave him a phone number to call if he wanted to settle with the RIAA without going to court.

Ly, who was using popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program Kazaa Lite, says he quit downloading music illegally a couple months before he was given a pre-litigation notice.

"I got an iPod and started buying music off of iTunes for it rather than downloading it off of file-sharing programs," he says.

But Ly couldn't erase the past. The RIAA had identified him as a copyright criminal. Ly sent a cashier's check of approximately $4,000 to the lawyers representing the record companies, which thousands like him have done.

Kevin King, a history junior, received a pre-litigation letter from the RIAA in October 2005. King's father thought the notice was unbelievable — literally.

"My dad threw out the first one because he thought it was spam," King says. "We settled out of court after we did a little research and discovered that conviction would be a sure thing."

The RIAA sent King a list of songs they believe he downloaded. At the top of the list were two songs by King's own band from high school. King ended up paying $3,800.

Fighting back

Every university targeted by the RIAA is faced with a decision whether to protect its students from being sued or to comply with the RIAA's wishes in forwarding settlement letters.

Pam Gerace, North Carolina State University's director of student legal services, warned students against revealing themselves to the RIAA, even if slapped with a settlement letter.

Gerace says the RIAA could pursue other legal actions with the names, including giving the names to record companies, according to NCSU's campus newspaper The Technician.

But unlike NCSU and other universities like the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska, who have refused to forward pre-litigation letters to their students, ASU has complied with the RIAA.

Adrian Sannier, vice president of ASU's University Technology Office, says ASU wants to give the affected students a choice in deciding whether or not they want to pursue with the lawsuit on their own.

It's a "hard problem" in deciding whether to be worried about the RIAA subpoenaing the university or protecting a member of the ASU community, Sannier says. ASU officials decided that the university was not divulging student information to the RIAA by simply forwarding the letters to the accused file sharer and proceeded in distributing the letters.

David Swain, managing attorney at ASU's Student Legal Assistance Office, says 19 students from the February wave of letters have come to him seeking legal advice in dealing with the RIAA. Swain says ASU has not released any student information or identifications to the RIAA.

'Don't fear the RIAAper'

The RIAA's tactics haven't won the group a lot of support in the blogosphere.

George Ziemann, musician and blogger on AzOz.com, has been outspoken about the RIAA lawsuits.

"My disdain for the record labels came before the lawsuits," Ziemann says in an e-mail. "I'm outspoken about the lawsuits because, from a musicians' point of view, telling people not to listen to your music is simply ludicrous."

On his Web site, Ziemann encourages any person accused of illegal file sharing, student or otherwise, to take the RIAA to court and tell them to "prove it."

Ziemann is not alone in his anger. More than 60 anti-RIAA groups exist on Facebook comprising thousands of members. In March, the visit of an RIAA representative at ASU inspired a protest, with students holding signs reading "Don't fear the RIAAper" and "Download like it's 1999."

Mishka Bier was an ASU sophomore when he stopped to pursue a musical career. Bier, who has done fill-in guitar work for popular bands like A Cursive Memory, says illegal downloading doesn't hurt but actually helps struggling artists.

"There are negative effects on the industry, but not from the artist's perspective," he says. "If you look at it, more kids will be coming to the show if they end up 'stealing' the album, and you'll be getting more money from the venue, and if you don't suck as an artist and the kids really like you, they'll buy a shirt. The positive greatly outweighs the negative. The money lost on a CD sale is tiny compared to that of the money gained from ticket and merch sales."

Mainstream artists split on their views of illegal music downloads. Artists like Mary J. Blige, DMX, the Dixie Chicks, Shakira, P. Diddy and even the late Luciano Pavarotti came out against file sharing, according to the Web site MusicUnited.com. However, the Washington Post has reported that artists like Chuck D and Jason Mraz support file-sharing sites, and a 2004 poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found a majority of artists didn't think file sharing was a major threat, even though most thought it should be illegal.

Death of the music industry?

Though artists might not be too concerned, the RIAA says the music industry as a whole certainly is. More than 1.3 billion files were illegally downloaded by college students last year, which adds up, the group says.

During his visit to the ASU campus in March during security week, RIAA's senior vice president David Hughes says he thinks illegal downloading could be the death of the music industry unless something is quickly changed.

"The music industry is on the verge of a big change," Hughes says. "Whether it's the current major record companies, whether it's the independent labels … their economics are going to be very similar and piracy is going to disable them."

Hughes says illegal file sharing is not allowing them to invest time and money into new and unique artists, so consumers are left with only what sells.

"The labels don't have the money to gamble on interesting and … financially risky artists," said RIAA representative Hughes during his March visit to ASU. "So music fans get the lowest common denominator. You get the former Mickey Mouse Clubs. You get the Britneys and the Justins and the Jessica Simpsons, and anybody else the labels are confident that can sell a decent amount on the first … single."

A representative with the RIAA says the campaign is not a moneymaker for the group; all the money the association takes in from the settlements goes back into anti-piracy and education efforts, she says.

Where ASU's violations stack up

The RIAA claims that the ASU network is one of the worst collegiate violators of copyright law. ASU officials disagree.

In February, the RIAA ranked ASU 24th on its top 25 worst offenders of pirated music, but Sannier says that statement is simply inaccurate. The sheer number of students who attend ASU give the RIAA's results bias, Sannier says. With over 65,000 students on all four campuses, Sannier points out that ASU's percentage of complaints is below any other school on the worst offenders list by between 5 to 20 percent.

"That's like saying all of the murders are in California," he says. "We have sort of the same kind of numbers of complaints as [5,300-student] Seton Hall College, and we're some kind of giant offender."

During his visit during Security Week in March, Hughes of the RIAA says ASU and other schools with students being sued should not feel victimized. "We have no ability or intention to target any single school," Hughes says. He called the lawsuits a form of "education through litigation."

Maybe there is no intention to target any school, but the students who have been sued say it is surreal. "It's an odd feeling knowing that I could have just as likely gone on downloading for years and years if this [lawsuit] didn't happen," ASU alum and lawsuit target Ly says.

Fellow music sharer King says the RIAA was going to sue him for much more than the $3,800 he settled for had he taken the case to court. King says he had downloaded approximately 1,100 songs using file sharing program Kazaa Lite — the same program Ly was using.

At the time Ly was sued, he had 800 songs on his computer, half of which he says were from compact discs he purchased after downloading a single he liked.

Struggling to adapt

Sannier of the UTO says while ASU has made an effort to prevent piracy by installing anti-piracy software, people will always find a way to get their music for free.

The battle between those who are sharing music and the music industry is an "arms race," and whatever measures a school takes in order to prevent piracy, a few months later there will be a way to get around that obstacle, Sannier says.

The only way to get around the "escalating chain" of collegiate piracy is for the music marketplace to change, Sannier says.

"[The music industry] is selling records based on the idea that they need to be delivered by physical devices [such as CD's]," Sannier says, adding that the industry is slowly adapting and that peer-to-peer technologies have completely transformed the music industry.

Suspicious peer-to-peer traffic is being monitored and halted on the ASU network through software called Audible Magic, Sannier says. If a student thinks that his or her peer-to-peer traffic is legitimate and shouldn't be blocked, they can contact the University Technology Office, Sannier says.

"What's interesting is, we haven't seen any of that," Sannier says of petitions to allow legal peer-to-peer traffic. "So we think our Audible Magic filter is configured so that legitimate P2P traffic is working and illegitimate traffic isn't."

An alternative to file sharing services, Ruckus, a legal music downloading service, is free for ASU students. Ruckus offers over 2.5 million songs to college students across the country.

But a particular file cannot always be found on Ruckus, which is why Sannier says he thinks students might turn to illegal downloading, fully knowledgeable of its risks.

Former ASU student and musician Bier says illegally downloading music is "like having sex without a condom."

"Kids know that they could get STDs if they aren't practicing safe sex, but they're going to do it anyways," he says. "Who honestly thinks that they're going to be sued by the RIAA for downloading music?"
http://www.statepress.com/issues/200...6/style/701942





Problems Persist for Those Who Download

Half of students who download music or file share have experienced problems
Danielle Morris

New research shows more than half of students who download unlicensed software, illegal music and file share experience virus and spyware problems, according to a survey by Ipsos Public Affairs.

In some cases, students have suffered from hard drive crashes and the loss of their document files.

"This is significant. Over 50 percent of students are experiencing virus and software problems, another 20 percent hard drive crashes and another nearly 20 percent are experiencing file losses," said vice president of public affairs at Business Software Alliance, Diane Smiroldo.

Smiroldo also said, "Students need to realize how vulnerable they are to viruses and spyware from illegally downloading unlicensed software and copyrighted material."

A few students surveyed on campus who download unlicensed software said they have yet to experience any problems.

However, downloads that involve file sharing or peer-to-peer (P2P) applications put a computer's security at serious risk.

Peer-to-peer applications allow attackers to access personal information, and although some may be safe, they are nearly impossible to identify, according to the National Cyber Alert System (NCAS).

The NCAS also warns against file sharing, because P2P applications can include pirated software such as copyrighted material or pornography, which would make you unknowingly eligible for fines or further prosecution.

Smiroldo also said not all legal downloads are necessarily safe either. She recommends making sure all downloads are protected by copyright.

According to Smiroldo, it is not necessarily a guarantee where to go.

"It is important to stay as safe and legal as you can," she said.

Although downloads do increase the risk of experiencing a plethora of computer problems there are some things that can help prevent from experiencing a computer crash.

Anti-virus software is a must in effectively preventing a computer from a crash. It is not only important to have this software, but also to maintain it.

Anti-virus software protects computers against new viruses, but since attackers are constantly creating new viruses it is only truly effective with continuous updating.

Another way to protect personal information is to install a firewall. A firewall allows you to block potentially virus causing pop-ups before they can even enter a computer.

To learn about further risks and complications of illegal downloading, B4Ucopy has resources posted on their Web site for college students so they can better understand the vast amount of complications related to download unlicensed software.

Despite the recent growth in students experiencing computer complications do to downloading, fewer students have been downloading illegal software.

According to BSA's press release, only 55 percent of students illegally download compared to 61 percent in 2005, and 68 percent in 2003.

Overall, whether you are downloading illegal software, or downloading free software believed to be safe, a computer's personal information is being put at risk and it is important to be aware of the dangers.
http://media.www.universitychronicle...-2998579.shtml





Mirage Gives Colleges an Answer to MP3 Headaches

Austin-based Mirage Networks Inc. is working with a college in Houston to minimize threats to its computer network, including music file sharing.

Mirage, which makes security software for a variety of clients, said its network access control software can help colleges cope with a range of problems, including virus attacks, unauthorized network access and music file sharing.

Its software is being used on the three campuses of Houston's San Jacinto College to curtail music file sharing that can monopolize network resources and leave students vulnerable to malware on their PCs and lawsuits from the music industry trade group.

The college uses the software to keep unauthorized laptop computers from accessing its network.

"We can configure our security sensor to disallow rampant file sharing and avoid the negative publicity that often comes with that type of activity," said Will Sydnor, the college's information technology manager.

Mirage has sold its security software to more than 50 colleges.
http://www.statesman.com/business/co...01plugged.html





Microsoft Updates Its iPod Competitor
Jeff Leeds

Microsoft has revamped its slow-selling Zune digital music players and created a MySpace-style social-networking site in its drive to compete with Apple’s market-leading iPod player.

In large part, the Microsoft moves announced Tuesday — the introduction of a smaller, sleeker version of the Zune player and the planned Zune Social Web site — reflect an attempt to build scale for a brand that so far has achieved only niche status. Microsoft said it had sold about 1.2 million units of the original device in the last year.

“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said in an interview Tuesday. “The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side.”

Microsoft said it had re-engineered the Zune hardware and software and the associated digital music store to make them all easier to use. “I’m sure a year from now we’ll do even better,” Mr. Gates said. “But I’m blown away by what they’ve been able to do in a year.”

Many of the changes are stylistic. The company reworked the device’s navigation button and dropped one of its signature colors, brown, from the list of options. The Zune will be available in black, pink, green and red.

But one of the most striking changes had to do with Microsoft’s effort to enhance what had been perhaps the most talked-about feature on the original device: the ability to share music files and other media wirelessly with other Zune owners. Far too few people, however, purchased the player for such sharing to become commonplace, and the function held little appeal because it was crippled by usage rules negotiated with the music industry. Shared songs expired within a few days, even if the recipient did not play them. And a file acquired from one Zune user could not be shared with a third user.

Under the new rules, Microsoft said, shared songs would have no expiration date and it would be possible repeatedly to pass along songs sent from one device to another. But a shared file can be played only three times on each Zune.

Partly to warm up the initially tepid response, the company is creating a social-networking site, Zune Social, to encourage the sharing of samples of songs online, even for fans who do not own a Zune player. Members of the network will also be able to use a small application on their computers to display which songs they have been listening to, and that information can be posted on certain Web sites outside the network or sent by e-mail to friends.

Various social networking sites, like Facebook, already offer sharing of samples of songs.

“The whole idea behind Zune is much broader than the devices themselves,” said J Allard, the Microsoft vice president who oversees design and development for consumer products like the Zune and the Xbox 360 game consoles. “The conditioned thought is around a portable device being the center point of the experience, when in fact it’s not. It really is about how do we start taking Zune beyond that device.” He said the social networking would appeal to Zune owners and people who had not bought the device.

A version with 80 gigabytes of storage, available only in black, will sell for $250. A version using flash memory with 8 gigabytes of storage will sell for $200, and the 4-gigabyte flash player will cost $150, the company said.

Van Baker, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, said the Zune revisions amounted to “a much-needed line extension” for the brand. “Is it enough to get somebody to move away from Apple to Microsoft? I don’t think so,” he said, “but it should help Microsoft against some of the other alternatives.”

Microsoft also said the library of songs available on its digital music service would soon include more than one million tracks without copy-protection software, known in the music industry as digital rights management or D.R.M. But the company noted that even songs without copy protection would still be playable only three times when they have been passed from another Zune user.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/te...gy/03zune.html





Matsushita to Launch Advanced Blu-Ray Recorders

Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd said it would launch new Blu-ray optical disc recorders in November that allow more hours of full high-definition recording on a single disc than any others available.

Matsushita, along with Sony Corp, promotes the Blu-ray technology, which competes with the HD DVD format, backed by Toshiba Corp and Microsoft Corp.

Osaka-based Matsushita, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, also said it plans to offer the world's first DVD recorders that can store full high-definition programs on conventional DVD discs next month.

Full high-definition (HD) programs come with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels.

Matsushita's new Blu-ray recorders, which are able to record up to 18 hours of full HD programs on a dual-layer disc, will go on sale on November 1 in Japan.

A model equipped with a one-terabyte hard disk drive is expected to sell for 300,000 yen ($2,600), Matsushita said.

The one-terabyte hard drive can store up to 381 hours of full HD programs.

Matsushita, the world's largest maker of plasma TVs, took the wraps off the new Blu-ray and DVD recorders at the CEATEC Japan 2007 electronics industry trade show on Tuesday.

The company said it will start selling three models of new DVD recorders capable of recording full HD programs on conventional DVD discs on November 1.

The high-end model with a 500-gigabyte hard disk drive is likely to sell for 130,000 yen, Matsushita said.

Video rental chain Blockbuster Inc, the largest U.S. provider of home movie entertainment, came out in favor of the Blu-ray format in June.

But Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc signed exclusivity deals in August to distribute their next-generation discs on Toshiba's HD DVD format for the next 18 months, a move that evened a contest where the Blu-ray camp appeared to be pulling ahead.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...14015620071002





Writers Guild to Seek Authorization to Call Strike
Richard Verrier

Ratcheting up labor tensions in Hollywood, leaders of the Writers Guild of America on Monday said they would ask members for authorization to call a strike if the union is unable to negotiate a new three-year contract with major studios.

"Because the stakes are so high, it is necessary to empower your negotiators with the tools needed to make the best possible deal," the union stated in a letter posted on its website. "It is apparent that the companies do not yet feel the pressure to conduct serious negotiations."

The request was not unexpected. Unions often seek strike authorizations to gain leverage in negotiations. The Screen Actors Guild, for example, obtained a strike authorization from members last year before signing a new agreement with producers of cable TV programs.

What's more, negotiations between writers and producers, which began July 16 and are set to resume Thursday, have been unusually contentious.

If a majority of the guild's members grant the authorization, the union board members could call a strike any time after the current agreement expires Oct. 31. Ballots are due Oct. 18.

The sides are far apart on several issues, especially the thorny matter of pay for work that is distributed via the Internet and other new media. So far, neither side has gone beyond lambasting the other's proposals.

Still, Monday's move is certain to add to anxiety in Hollywood's executive suites. Studios already are bracing for the first major Hollywood strike in nearly 20 years by, among other things, rushing to complete film and TV shoots before a walkout might occur. J. Nicholas Counter III, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, accused the guild of pursuing a reckless strategy.

"The Writers Guild's strike authorization is notable only because its negotiators seem intent on striking without seriously addressing the [alliance's] proposals, and with no regard for the devastating impact on their members, fellow unions and this industry," he said in a statement. "We are committed and prepared to make a fair deal with the WGA, but at this point the WGA is not of the same mind."

Most labor analysts have predicted that writers would not reach a deal by Oct. 31 and seek to push back negotiations until early next year to align with the Screen Actors Guild, whose contract expires June 30.

Those familiar with the guild's thinking, however, say the board is keeping its options open, including the possibility of calling a strike as early as next month, when studios would be in the thick of the fall television season.

Meanwhile, the guild has set up an operations center at its headquarters to mobilize members in the event of a strike, earmarking more than $12 million to finance a possible walkout. The union downplayed that outcome Monday. "The guild's leadership will do everything in its power to avoid a work stoppage."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...business-enter





Wolf Man and Narnia 3 Pushed Back by Actors Strike

Two potential blockbusters, Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Wolf Man, starring Benicio Del Toro, have seen their respective release dates pushed back by six months in what appears to be one of the first signs of the impact of next summer's actors strike.

Dawn Treader is moving from a May 1, 2009 date to May 7, 2010, while Mark Romanek's remake of the 1941 horror classic is shifting from November 12, 2008 to spring 2009.

The actor's strike looks set to take place in June next year and will in fact manifest itself as a combined strike by the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America (West) against the Producers Guild of America. The predicted strike has already sent Hollywood into a frenzy of planning, with many studios reportedly accelerating production of films to avoid gaps in their release schedules. A list of 300 high-priority film projects is reportedly circulating around talent agencies as part of the effort. See it here.

The strike is over royalties from sales of movies over the internet and on DVD, which are not covered in the current deal between the various guilds.

Disney had planned to release one Narnia film a year from next summer, when the second film in its fantasy franchise, Prince Caspian, is scheduled to hit the big screen, so the planned strike is clearly being taken very seriously by the major studios. Other films which have so far been affected include the $100m historical epic Pompeii, which lost director Roman Polanski after doubts were raised over its ability to begin an 18-month shoot in summer next year due to the strike. Films with British links which could be affected include Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Mamma Mia!, Young Victoria and the next James Bond film.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...172455,00.html





Abortion as a Front Line in the Culture Wars
Manohla Dargis

The first thing you should know about the documentary “Lake of Fire” — an unblinking look at the violent fight over abortion in the United States, including those homegrown religious fundamentalists who kill in the name of God — is that it was made in black and white. This is critical. Because the other thing you should know about this fascinating, discomfiting, at times unpleasant, confused and confusing film is that it sets off extremely graphic images of actual abortions against a notorious photograph of a woman who died after an illegal motel room abortion, visuals that are inflammatory if, for the most part, also germane.

Not everyone will agree about the abortion visuals, including, perhaps, those who worry that such explicit imagery can speak louder than any pro-abortion-rights argument. It’s an understandable concern. Because they are filmed (the dead woman is immortalized in a still photograph), the abortions are unnerving, which is why I suggest that the faint of heart skip the rest of this paragraph. After the first operation, a second-trimester abortion, the doctor sorts through a tray of fetal parts, including a perfect-looking tiny hand and a foot, to make sure that nothing has been left inside the patient, which might lead to poisoning or even death. The doctor then holds up the severed fetal head. One eerily bulging eye looks as if it’s staring into the camera and somehow at us.

My initial and admittedly angry first thought about these images was that the director, Tony Kaye, was just resorting to shock tactics. The film doesn’t employ narration or on-screen texts that reveal his views on abortion; instead, there are 152 minutes of talking-head testimonials, on-the-street interviews and archival and new visuals. This means that you have to pay extra-special attention to his filmmaking choices, to the way he juxtaposes sights and sounds and who gets to speak and when.

His choices can be baffling. The ludicrous opening credits (anguished music, candles shaped like praying hands) could be straight out of a cheap horror flick, though the later presence of heavyweights like Noam Chomsky points to more sober ambitions.

The British-born Mr. Kaye started his life in images by directing commercials, a form that relies on bold visuals and simple messages. He went on to direct the flashy “American History X” (1998), about a charismatic neo-Nazi, though he lost control of the project to its star, Edward Norton. Mr. Kaye began shooting material for “Lake of Fire” (the title refers to hell) in the early 1990s, a process that consumed an uncommonly long 16 years. He has stated that he was interested in making a “socially conscious” dramatic film, but decided to make a documentary that would represent the issue in its complexity, despite knowing nothing about the form. His ignorance has its dividends. Shot primarily in sumptuous, often disquietingly beautiful 35-millimeter film, “Lake of Fire” doesn’t look anything like most American documentaries.

The decision to use black and white was smart because, as with “Schindler’s List,” too much red might well have sent audiences fleeing from theaters. The absence of color blunts the force of the images (the sounds of the machinery are still unsettling), which allows you to watch the movie rather than avert your gaze and your rattled mind. Mr. Kaye has an irritating, sometimes self-undermining weakness for shocking visuals (and edits), but it’s clear from all the time he spent on this project and from the different voices he’s gathered that he was genuinely interested in making a serious work, one that explores its subject with far more depth and breadth than the usual run-and-gun documentaries.

In the main, he has succeeded, notably through an array of mostly male journalists, activists, ministers, lawyers and academics, including the philosopher Peter Singer and the writer Nat Hentoff, who lay out the arguments and scan the terrain. Some sound rational, coolly dispassionate; others smile and spew. A few of the more vivid characters, specifically religious extremists who believe that America should be a Christian nation and that abortion providers should be executed alongside homosexuals, adulterers and blasphemers, are, well, something else. Intentionally or not, Mr. Kaye has made a documentary that vividly delineates how religious-fundamentalist terrorists take root in a country, slide around the law and gain legitimacy (martyrdom), and how those who profess to love God can justify murder.

Which leads me back to some of the more shocking images in “Lake of Fire.” It’s possible that Mr. Kaye opted to show several abortions because he wanted viewers, particularly those sympathetic to a woman’s right to abortion, to understand what stirs some people not just to action, but also to kill doctors. If nothing else, the first abortion in the film (of a 20-week-old fetus, though that information is not in the film) reinforces what an abstraction the term pro-choice really is. Abortion does end the life of something. The fight, of course, is over what that something is — an embryo, a baby, God’s creation, a blob of cells — and who has dominion over it and the fully formed human being carrying that something inside her body.

I wish there were more of those fully formed human beings in “Lake of Fire,” which has an awful lot of men talking about what women should and should not do with their bodies. There are women here, to be sure, though it may be instructive that one of the most memorable female voices belongs to an unreliable witness who talks about seeing “babies” stacked in an abortion-clinic freezer. Mr. Kaye follows this startling testimonial with otherworldly and unidentified images of intact late-term fetuses or babies or maybe even dolls. Because I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, I asked the film’s distributor. According to the company, these images had been given to Mr. Kaye by members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

One lesson of “Lake of Fire” is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough. Although the film doesn’t identify her, the dead woman in the photograph that Mr. Kaye shows us late in the film is Gerri Santoro. In 1964, when abortion was not yet a constitutional right, she and a male lover checked into a Connecticut motel room, where he tried to perform an abortion. She had become pregnant and feared that her estranged husband, who beat her and their children, would find out. Something went wrong, and the lover fled. Ms. Santoro died, smeared in blood, defeated, naked and alone. Before she was a symbol, she was a person.


LAKE OF FIRE

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by Tony Kaye; director of photography, Mr. Kaye; edited by Peter Goddard; music by Anne Dudley; released by ThinkFilm. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 152 minutes. This film is not rated.

With: Alan M. Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, Nat Hentoff, Dallas A. Blanchard, Norma McCorvey, Peter Singer, Randall Terry, Frederick Clarkson, Bill Baird, Frances Kissling, Michael Griffin and Paul Jennings Hill.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/movies/03fire.html





‘The Kite Runner’ Is Delayed to Protect Child Stars
David M. Halbfinger

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene.

Executives at the distributor, Paramount Vantage, are contending with issues stemming from the rising lawlessness in Kabul in the year since the boys were cast.

The boys and their relatives are now accusing the filmmakers of mistreatment, and warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities between the politically dominant Pashtun and the long-oppressed Hazara.

In an effort to prevent not only a public-relations disaster but also possible violence, studio lawyers and marketing bosses have employed a stranger-than-fiction team of consultants. In August they sent a retired Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism operative in the region to Kabul to assess the dangers facing the child actors. And on Sunday a Washington-based political adviser flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange a safe haven for the boys and their relatives.

“If we’re being overly cautious, that’s O.K.,” Karen Magid, a lawyer for Paramount, said. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

In interviews, more than a dozen people involved in the studio’s response described grappling with vexing questions: testing the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity.

“The Kite Runner,” like the best-selling 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini on which it is based, spans three decades of Afghan strife, from before the Soviet invasion through the rise of the Taliban. At its heart is a friendship between Amir, a wealthy Pashtun boy played by Zekiria Ebrahimi, and Hassan, the Hazara son of Amir’s father’s servant. In a pivotal scene Hassan is raped in an alley by a Pashtun bully. Later, Sohrab, a Hazara boy played by Ali Danish Bakhty Ari, is preyed on by a corrupt Taliban official.

Though the book is admired in Afghanistan by many in the elite, its narrative remains unfamiliar to the broader population, for whom oral storytelling and rumor communication carry far greater weight.

The Taliban destroyed nearly all movie theaters in Afghanistan, but pirated DVDs often arrive soon after a major film’s release in the West. As a result, Paramount Vantage, the art-house and specialty label of Paramount Pictures, has pushed back the release of the $18 million movie by six weeks, to Dec. 14, when the young stars’ school year will have ended.

In January in Afghanistan, DVDs of “Kabul Express” — an Indian film in which a character hurls insults at Hazara — led to protests, government denunciations and calls for the execution of the offending actor, who fled the country.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “Kite Runner” actor who plays Hassan, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, 12, told reporters at that time that he feared for his life because his fellow Hazara might feel humiliated by his rape scene. His father said he himself was misled by the film’s producers, insisting that they never told him of the scene until it was about to be shot and that they had promised to cut it.

Hangama Anwari, the child-rights commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said on Monday that she had urged Paramount’s counterterrorism consultant to get Ahmad Khan out of the country, at least until after the movie is released. “They should not play around with the lives and security of people,” she said of the filmmakers. “The Hazara people will take it as an insult.”

The film’s director, Marc Forster, whose credits include “Finding Neverland” (2004), another film starring child actors, said he saw “The Kite Runner” as “giving a voice and a face to people who’ve been voiceless and faceless for the last 30 years.” Striving for authenticity, he said, he chose to make the film in Dari, an Afghan language, and his casting agent, Kate Dowd, held open calls in cities with sizable Afghan communities, including Fremont, Calif., Toronto and The Hague. But to no avail: Mr. Forster said he “just wasn’t connecting with anybody.”

Finally, when Ms. Dowd went to Kabul in May 2006, she discovered her stars. “There was such innocence to them, despite all they’d lived through,” she said.

Mr. Forster emphasized that casting Afghan boys did not seem risky at the time; local filmmakers even encouraged him, he said: “You really felt it was safe there, a democratic process was happening, and stability, and a new beginning.”

Ms. Dowd and E. Bennett Walsh, a producer, said they met in Kabul with Ahmad Khan’s father, Ahmad Jaan Mahmoodzada, and told him that his son’s character was the victim of a “vicious sexual assault.” Mr. Mahmoodzada seemed unmoved, they said, remarking that “bad things happen” in movies as in life. The boy, they continued, did not receive a script until a Dari translation was available on the set in western China. The rape scene was rehearsed twice, they said, once with the father present.

On Tuesday the elder Mr. Mahmoodzada, reached by cellphone, rejected this account, and said he never learned the rape was a plot point until the scene was about to be shot. He also said his son never received a script.

Mr. Forster said that during rehearsals he considered including a shot of Hassan’s pants being pulled down, exposing his backside, and that neither Ahmad Khan nor his father objected. But the morning the scene was to be filmed, Mr. Forster found the boy in tears. Ahmad Khan said he did not want to be shown nude, Mr. Forster agreed to skip that shot, and the boy went ahead with the rape scene. Mr. Mahmoodzada confirmed this.

In the final version of the film, the rape is conveyed impressionistically, with the unstrapping of a belt, the victim’s cries and a drop of blood.

The filmmakers said they were surprised when Ahmad Khan and his father told The Sunday Times of London in January that they feared for their lives. Mr. Walsh and Rebecca Yeldham, another producer, flew to Kabul to learn more in February.

The producers dispelled one fear, that the filmmakers would use computer tricks to depict the boy’s genitals in the rape scene. But Ahmad Khan’s parents also pressed for more cash, the producers said.

On the advice of a Kabul television company, the boys had been paid $1,000 to $1,500 a week, far less than the Screen Actors Guild weekly scale of $2,557, but far more than what Afghan actors typically receive.

In late July, with violence worsening in Kabul, studio executives looked for experts who could help them chart a safe course. Aided by lobbyists for Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, they found John Kiriakou, the retired C.I.A. operative with experience in the region, and had him conduct interviews in Washington and Kabul.

“They wanted to do the right thing, but they wanted to understand what the right thing was,” Mr. Kiriakou said.

There was one absolute: “Nothing will be done if it puts any kid at risk,” Megan Colligan, head of marketing at Paramount Vantage, said.

Mr. Kiriakou’s briefing, which he reprised in a telephone interview, could make a pretty good movie by itself. A specialist on Islam at the State Department nearly wept envisioning a “Danish-cartoons situation,” Mr. Kiriakou said. An Afghan literature professor, he added, said Paramount was “willing to burn an already scorched nation for a fistful of dollars.” The head of an Afghan political party said the movie would energize the Taliban. Nearly everyone Mr. Kiriakou met said that the boys had to be removed from Afghanistan for their safety. And a Hazara member of Parliament warned that Pashtun and Hazara “would be killing each other every night” in response to the film’s depiction of them. None of the interviewees had seen the movie.

Another consultant, whom Paramount did not identify, gave a less bleak assessment, but Ms. Colligan said the studio was taking no chances. “The only thing you get people to agree on is that the place is getting messier every single day,” she said.

So on Sunday Rich Klein, a Middle East specialist at the consulting firm Kissinger McLarty Associates, flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange visas, housing and schooling for the young actors and jobs for their guardians. (The United States is not an option, he said, because Afghans do not qualify for refugee status.)

Those involved say that the studio doesn’t want to be taken advantage of, but that it could accept responsibility for the boys’ living expenses until they reach adulthood, a cost some estimated at up to $500,000. The families, of course, must first agree to the plan.

“I think there was a moral obligation even before any of these things were an issue,” said Mr. Hosseini, the novel’s author, who got to know the boys on the set. “How long that obligation lasts? I don’t know that anybody has the answer to that.”

Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Kabul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/movies/04kite.html?hp





Taking Liberties out on DVD on 15th October



Suchandrika Chakrabarti

Taking Liberties, a documentary which explores the possible erosion of civil liberties under Tony Blair's government, supported by the UK Film Council P&A fund, is out to rent or buy on DVD on 15th October. Director Chris Atkins has grand aims for the film:

"If there's one thing I've learnt from making this film, it is the understanding that politics is not about self important windbags in Westminster, or thundering newspaper editorials - it's about people. And all people need to do is to engage and have a voice and they can change the world."

The film looks at diverse case studies of those affected by the flurry of legislation brought in by Blair's government, with the supposed aim of countering terrorism.

These include the continuing house arrest of Mouloud Sihali, found innocent in the so-called "Ricin plot" case; 82 year-old Walter Wolfgang's 2005 arrest (under the Terrorism Act 2000) for shouting out "nonsense" during Jack Straw's speech at the Labour party conference and the extradition of the Natwest 3 to America for an alleged crime that did not involve America at all.

The film puts forward the argument that the Labour government have overreacted to the potential terrorism threats faced by post-9/11 Britain. Although some of the situations lend themselves easily to humour - such as two grannies running rings around police officers accusing them of "looking" at a classified American air base - some of the stories suggest a sinister erosion of civil liberties.

The case of Omar Deghayes, a British resident still languishing in Guantanamo Bay after five years, is chilling; the government only requested his release on 7th August this year. The case of the Natwest 3 also highlights the fact that UK citizens can easily be extradited to America on flimsy grounds, but that it doesn't work vice versa - certainly a turn of events that has flown under the radar since the signing of the Extradition Act 2003 made this situation possible.

The film uncovers the large extent to which anti-terrorism laws have curtailed everyday freedoms that we all take for granted, and indeed rarely even think about. A thought-provoking watch.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1286/261/





How's This for a Twist? Bush Insults H'wood
Brooks Boliek

President Bush took a potshot at Hollywood on Monday when he made a seemingly off-handed remark about what the industry purportedly stands for.

Bush's rhetorical broadside came as he paid tribute to the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, noting that his parents were well-regarded, behind-the-scenes players in the U.S. movie industry.

"Many people are surprised when told about the admiral's show business roots," Bush said. "After all, he is humble, well-grounded and filled with common sense. Not exactly what one thinks about when they think of Hollywood values."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...169e2f67c9f7d5





Radiohead Embraces Trust Over DRM: Will it Work for Film?

I recently heard from a music industry insider that Radiohead make some 80% of their income from touring, which opened up the question of why they put so much effort into packaging, selling and protecting albums. A question that has now been answered. Free from a record label after their six album deal with EMI had come to an end, one of the most revered bands of the last 20 years have taken the twin giant leaps into self-distribution and inviting downloaders to decide how much to pay for their new album (In Rainbows).

Trust - it's a model that has supported musicians perhaps longer than any other system, and hundreds of thousands of buskers and touring musicians today make a living from an upturned hat, which - tho no DRM system can ever force people into filling - somehow they do. Magnatunes has already been using the 'pick your own price' system for a while, and despite having a minimum cost of £5 (unlike In Rainbows where there will be no lower limit), sees an average payment of around £8 (Magnatunes also have great licenses for filmmakers wanting to only pay for music rights *after* the film starts making money).

We've seen the publishing industry shift from a paid-for model for newspapers and magazines to free ad-supported distribution in less than a decade. The New York Times was set to make millions this year from pay-per-view articles, the management eventually decided it would make more from advertising in the long run and made everything free. Rumours abound that ft.com and WSJ.com are set to follow suit.

With Amazon now opening a 2 million song DRM-free store, making it easier than ever to pirate (if you are so inclined), the tide for music too seems to be shifting towards a more open trust-based situation. Inherently - as with life - the trust approach has a lot going for it, viewing people as decent until proven otherwise, and it is sufficient to support church collections, eBay and plenty more.

But film is that much more expensive than music or writing to produce, and it'd be foolish not to consider what if trust doesn't work? If so, and unless we are to adjust to watching only microbudget productions and demand that film professionals work for free, then we are presented with the nightmare scenario Orange has been taking great pains to illustrate over the past decade with its Film Funding Board cinema ads - the advertiser as film funder and script developer. In some ways its only a small step away from current practices where Spiderman is filled with Sony technology, or films eligible for British tax breaks have to have sufficient 'British elements'. But it would spell the end of big budget art films. Supercomputer HAL in 2001 would be upgraded to Windows Vista and instantly cheer up.

So if there was an underlying business question the film industry is struggling to answer right now, and that's been at the back of my mind since I first started getting hooked on watching films online, it's how do we make the trust model work? My opposition to DRM is not simply that it's a pain in the arse, a topsy-turvy 'new' technology that offers you less than the 'old' tech it is replacing (imagine buying a DVD that you couldn't take out of your house to lend to a friend, or that vanished off your shelf if the distributor went bust), it's that it encourages technology monopolies to control media distribution. And as we've seen with Google in China, or indeed the iPod, that opens up all sorts of problems for freedom of speech.

Naturally a key part of making the trust model work is increasing and improving the relationship between creators and consumers - making that link as two-way as possible. We put our change in the buskers hat because we see them there as a human, rather than a faceless entity.

As some have seen - such as Brave New Films, who raised the $300,000 budget of their last feature by emailing people who had previously bought their DVDs - the web makes this easy and people are up for doing it.

Could the pre-sales market of finance - which has been shrinking in recent years and could vanish altogether if the web becomes the primary mode of film distribution (why would a video distributor pay an advance if that film is available simultaneously on thousands of download services in many countries?) - be replaced with a kind of micro-presales? Thousands of people paying more than they would normally for a DVD to part finance a film, snoop on its progress, be listed in the credits, and get a personal copy at the end? So rather than paying a premium for something that's offered for free (or pay-what-you-can), you pay for exclusive access, and to be part of the process, like Matt Hanson's Swarm of Angels or the MyMoviesMashup.

In fact the physical version of Radiohead's new album will sell for a premium - £40 for a box set including vinyl, disc and artwork, and all eyes will be on them to see if the loss in official sales will be offset by the higher price (Kid A famously debuted at number one in the charts despite being deliberately leaked in full on P2P networks prior to that). For if they pull this off, it could change everything.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1312/277/





Weekend Boxoffice

1. The Game Plan $22.7
2. The Kingdom 17.7
3. Resident Evil 8.0
4. Good Luck Chuck 6.3
5. 3:10 to Yuma 4.2
6. The Brave One 3.7
7. Mr. Woodcock 3.0
8. Eastern Promises 2.9
9. Sydney White 2.7
10. Across the Universe 2.1

Weekend of Sept. 28-30.Estimated figures in $ mil.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...fice/index.jsp





New Video Gives ‘SNL’ Another Hit on the Web
Jacques Steinberg

The latest hit for “Saturday Night Live” on the Internet began taking shape on Sept. 24, when Andy Samberg and a group of his colleagues on the show were sitting around their offices, scrounging for a celebrity or politician “who could really use a love song right now.” Around the same time, Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer, was imagining a skit in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, would be depicted on a wild night out on the town.

Before long the ideas fused, and by last Saturday, opening night for the 33rd season of “Saturday Night Live,” the group had produced a three-minute music video titled “I Ran So Far Away.” In it, a crooning, piano-playing Mr. Samberg and a doppelgänger for the Iranian president (his castmate Fred Armisen, bearded and in a gray suit and open-neck dress shirt) dance and appear to fall in love — giving apparent lie to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s contention at Columbia University that there were no homosexuals in Iran.

By yesterday afternoon, just four days after its network premiere, the various versions of the video posted on YouTube had been viewed nearly 300,000 times, according to tallies posted on the site. For Mr. Samberg and his main collaborators — Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — “I Ran” is something of a sequel. Last year, NBC posted an uncensored version of a boy-band video the group made — the cleaned-up title was “Special Treat in a Box” — in which Justin Timberlake and Mr. Samberg each appeared to be making a gift of their male anatomy. Thus far, that film has been seen more than 29 million times on YouTube, and last month it won an Emmy.

However popular, such films — including “Lazy Sunday,” a rapping homage to “The Chronicles of Narnia” — have not appeared to raise the ratings of the show itself. Last season, “Saturday Night Live” drew an average of about 6.4 million viewers a week, which was down from the year before. But the digital shorts have given the show, and Mr. Samberg in particular, a Web presence and cachet.

Considering that Mr. Samberg and his crew typically create their digital films in little more than 48 hours, the six days they spent on “I Ran” made it feel like a feature film. First, Mr. Samberg said, they developed the song’s R&B beat, which had elements of LL Cool J, the Wu-Tang Clan and an outright sample from Aphex Twin, an electronic performer.

The chorus, “I Ran,” is a knock-off of the 1980s Flock of Seagulls hit of the same name. But otherwise, the words were original. Among the more memorable lines Mr. Samberg sings to the Iranian president are:

You can deny the Holocaust all you want

But you can’t deny that there’s something between us

At another point, Mr. Samberg invokes “The Passion of the Christ” and its star, singing :

They call you weasel

They say your methods are medieval

You can play the Jews

I can be your Jim Caviezel

The film also features two cameos, personally arranged by Mr. Samberg. Adam Levine, the lead singer of the band Maroon 5, sings the “I Ran” chorus. Mr. Samberg, 29, said in an interview yesterday that he had sent a text message to a mutual friend, saying he had a perfect part for Mr. Levine to sing. The problem was that Mr. Levine was in Detroit. Mr. Samberg persuaded the singer to fly to New York early Friday morning. He then went straight to the makeshift recording studio in Mr. Samberg’s office and, on only a few hours sleep, traveled to Brooklyn to film his scenes. He was back on a plane to Detroit by early afternoon.

Another cameo, several seconds of Jake Gyllenhaal stroking his beard, was filmed in Los Angeles on Friday.

While the cast’s main goal was to have fun, Mr. Samberg said, the film has a political undertone. “No one around here,” he said, “is super fired-up about a guy who is denying the Holocaust and saying there are no homosexuals in his country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/ar...ion/04snl.html





Network head admits media losing piracy war

NBC Chief Urges All-Hands Assault on Piracy
Anne Broache

Copyright holders are "losing the battle" against piracy, at the expense of economic security and public health, and will never prevail unless a wide swath of governments and industries gets proactive, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said Wednesday.

The media conglomerate's chief shared a lengthy attack plan in a speech at an antipiracy summit here hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

He wants alleged intellectual property violations to take center stage at all levels of government, from the White House to U.S. embassies around the world. He wants Congress to create dedicated IP enforcement departments and to offer federal grants for state and local governments to escalate their own policing efforts.

He wants advertisers and credit card companies to stop providing "financial support" to Web sites that are "overwhelmingly devoted" to making pirated content available.

And he wants Internet service providers, university network operators, user-generated content sites, search engines, auction Web sites and even consumer electronics and home networking device manufacturers to install filtering technologies designed to detect and block unauthorized copyright content. Critics argue that technique is prone to being either over- or underinclusive--or downright ineffective--but Zucker said he's convinced it's an approach worth pursuing.

Just as cable companies have helped to combat theft of their signals through encryption, "technology has been and continues to be an incredibly powerful tool to combat theft, whether we are talking about hard goods or digital goods," Zucker said. Such tools will never be perfect, he conceded, "but committed development of technology has the potential to reduce dramatically the traffic in counterfeit and pirated products."

In an attempt to illustrate the impact of piracy on the U.S. economy, Zucker touted the "staggering" numbers in a new study released Wednesday by an economist named Stephen Siwek, which found the U.S. economy loses $58 billion and U.S. workers are deprived of nearly 375,000 jobs annually because of global and domestic-based copyright infringement.

A copy of that study was not immediately available, so it was unclear how those numbers were derived. The group that released the study, called the Institute for Policy Innovation, has a history of sponsoring pro-Hollywood events.

But despite concerns about the Internet as a piracy venue, Zucker said his company has no intention of shying away from the medium. In fact, the General Electric subset intends to continue beefing up investments its digital presence by "ripping apart old business models and pioneering radically new ways of reaching audiences."

Take the network's hit comedy sitcom 30 Rock, for example. If viewers miss its broadcast TV airing, they have a multitude of options for watching it later, including in free, streaming form at NBC.com; in free, downloadable form from NBC.com (albeit with a 7-day lifespan); through some cable and satellite on-demand services; and, in a few weeks, through Hulu.com, the new joint digital video venture between NBC and News Corp. (There wasn't a peep about the fall lineup's newfound lack of availability through Apple's iTunes store, though.)

"On screens small, medium or large," he said, "we are there wherever or however consumer wants to consume our content."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9790352-7.html





MediaDefender Leak Offers BlueTack Users a Reality Check
Drew Wilson

The Media Defender internal email leak offered plenty of information for the taking. MediaDefender-Defenders said that they hoped that the email leak will prove to be a viable tool to protect against anti-P2P efforts. This is something BlueTack has been trying to do. After the email leak, a text file that compiles the complete IP (Internet Protocol) list Media Defender used while dropping fake files onto various P2P sites and networks was posted. While judging the effectiveness of these lists had proven to be an impossible task before the major leak, the effectiveness can now be tested.

Slyck began the investigation when BlueTack's 'Paranoid' IP filter blocked one of TVUnderground's new eDonkey2000 servers. A request for comment or information on the matter to BlueTack's team went unanswered. To this day, why BlueTack has blocked only one of TVUnderground's servers is unknown. In the meantime, Slyck is currently in the possession of a copy of BlueTack's IP filter lists, and further investigation into related matters appeared warranted.

According to the BlueTack website, "B.I.S.S. is a site dedicated to improving the safety and awareness of all our members and guests, providing News, Security articles, Software Reviews, Technical Support, Guides, IP Research and Free Software needed to help us keep our connections to the net and each other safe, secure, and free from unwelcome intruders."

Among the things offered are the blocklists, which have been met with either acceptance by the file-sharing community or complete rejection. Some say that the blocklists allow users to simply block any anti-filesharing company and allow users to connect with non-industry IPs. Others say that there is no way to get the right IPs before the IPs are changed to different addresses, thereby rendering the filters ineffective. It's been the subject of debate for quite some time amongst many experts with no real way to test the lists, at least until the Media Defender email leak.

The 'Paranoid' eMule IP filter was retrieved on September 27, 2007. The Level1 IP blacklist, which is supposed to block all known anti-p2p IPs, was retrieved on September 30, 2007. The idea behind getting these lists now is to offer ample time for Media Defender's now public IPs to be added to the lists for a much more effective blocklist for PeerGuardian users.

Slyck then obtained a copy of the publicly available 14.3MB compressed text file which lists all of the Media Defender's IP addresses. At this point, it became obvious that testing such a large volume of IPs would prove to be an overly time-consuming challenge, at least by hand. In order to alleviate this problem, it was best to test one particular IP range. Conveniently enough, the first range started with 116. Slyck then decided to test all of the IPs that started with the number 116.

The total number of IPs used by Media Defender starting with 116 was 1,474. Obviously, BlueTack did block all IPs that started with 116, but how many Media Defender IPs were successfully blocked? When Slyck investigated, there was a common theme that blocklists seemingly jumped over several ranges used by Media Defender. After some extensive study using the Level1 list for anti-p2p companies and the 'Paranoid' list, BlueTack would have successfully blocked 16 IPs. Thus, this sample test offered 1.09% protection against Media Defender in that range.

The IPs that were successfully blocked were: 116.255.1.109, 116.255.1.154, 116.255.1.244, 116.255.1.27, 116.255.1.52, 116.255.1.85, 116.215.157.243, 116.212.14.223, 116.199.202.170, 116.199.202.240, 116.199.207.83, 116.199.207.84, 116.199.226.78 , 116.199.227.11, 116.199.227.27, 116.199.227.67. The remaining 1,458 IPs would still be allowed through even with these two filters being used today.

While BlueTack may still perpetuate the idea that their filters are 99% effective, these latest findings will only fuel criticisms towards BlueTack's actual effectiveness. A complete test might not be possible short of creating a simple program to test every single number or spending weeks hand-testing every single Media Defender IP address. In the mean ime, it seems very apparent that BlueTack's filters have a few holes.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1593





Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics
Hillary Chura

As the power of the Internet grows, businesses small and large find themselves confounded by disenchanted employees, suppliers and competitors who seek fertile ground to air grievances online.

Armed with little more than a Web connection and a keyboard, these detractors can do everything from irritate, via a scathing review, to causing serious business problems by using message boards to reveal company secrets or spread rumors of unethical behavior. They may also start a gripe site or register a Web address in their target’s name.

“There is all type of damage by miscreants on the Web to a business,” said Marc S. Friedman, chairman of the intellectual property practice at Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross in Manhattan. “The number of methods depends only on the creativity of the wrongdoer.”

For Katie Lambert, it was anonymous postings on AOL’s Yellow Pages about the gym she owns, Go Figure, in Westwood, Mass. The gym, the postings said, was overpriced, crowded and chaotic. Ms. Lambert didn’t learn of the comments until a member alerted her. When some loyal customers found out about the review, they went online and responded positively, but the detractor always shot back. Ms. Lambert said she tried to contact AOL but could never reach anyone who could remove the material.

“Anybody can write anything in the world, whether it’s true or not. It could be affecting my business right now,” Ms. Lambert said. She said she ultimately realized the postings came from a member who didn’t want to pay a $100 cancellation fee to get out of her contract. Ms. Lambert’s lawyer wrote the woman, asking that the false comments stop. They did, and Ms. Lambert said she learned that companies should periodically check what is being said about them online.

Business is not alone in such frustrations. Politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton, authors like Patricia Cornwell as well as other public and private individuals find themselves in the cross hairs of commentators emboldened by the anonymity of cyberspace. But such postings can do more than just irritate; financial damages can reach millions of dollars or shut down a business entirely.

Remedies vary by case and by state, but lawyers, Internet specialists and others counsel that the best course with may be to ignore irritating posts because trying to squelch a malcontent can have unintended consequences.

“Your reaction often, if you’re a small business, is to get angry and to fire off a letter,” said Barry Werbin, an intellectual property lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in New York. “Some big companies do it. More often than not, the person who posts the gripe site can’t wait to get that letter and post it.”

Sometimes, Mr. Werbin added, “it can worsen the damage because it just fuels the fire.”

Assuming that the posting activity is not illegal or defamatory and truly damages a business rather than just an ego, there may be better ways to respond. Scurrilous opinions often appear on Web sites including Yahoo message boards, AOL and MySpace. Those sites may remove objectionable material if asked but are not legally required to do so. Even if they do remove it, the damage may already have been done. Besides, even if the comments are taken down, a determined whiner can find any number of other venues. Other online review sites, like Yelp or TripAdvisor, are particularly influential.

“New consumer opinion gets posted about every five seconds,” said Rob Crumpler, chief executive of Buzz Logic, which helps businesses identify influential bloggers.

Samantha DiGennaro, who runs her own strategic communications consulting firm in New York, says many companies either run scared from electronic media or fail to realize how quickly negative comments can jet around the Internet.

“People think, ‘It’s only on the Web. It’s not that important.’ But it’s almost more important than a newspaper or something in print,” she said. “Things live in perpetuity on the Web.”

Some large marketers may blog or respond anonymously. Ms. DiGennaro said appropriate responses were not one size fits all and must be tailored to the particular case. If something merits being addressed, she said, it can better be done in the name of the company rather than hiding behind anonymous postings.

On the technical front, a search engine optimization expert can tweak a site so that it moves a positive posting higher in an Internet search, tending to bury the negative one. Shailen Lodhia, vice president for sales at Submit Express, an optimization firm in Burbank, Calif., estimated results could take three months to a year, and monthly retainers could exceed $3,000.

The best defense is a good offense. Useful practices include registering personalized e-mail addresses as well as gripe domain names — not with the intention of using them but to prevent others doing so. Registering common misspellings as well as derogatory domain names is a good precaution and so is covering extensions like .biz and .org. Costs are minimal, some lower than $50 a year.

Companies that sell products or services should trademark their name to prevent others from using it as a domain name without authorization, legal experts said. Executives may find their only recourse is to sue if someone registers their name as a U.R.L. and uses it to defame them, said Mr. Friedman of Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross. He said that few companies thought to buy potentially negative domain names. Debra Condren, a business psychologist and career adviser, said the occasional negative comment could actually lend credibility to a company rather than tarnish it. She said people expected to see a range of opinions, and if they saw only positive ones on a company blog, for example, they might suspect that negative feedback was being censored. A range of opinions seems authentic.

“Some people, for whatever reason, aren’t going to like or appreciate what you’re selling,” she said. “Accept this as normal, and you won’t stay awake at night letting a disgruntled client or a negative person who decided not to use your services bring you down with what will be transparently obvious to most people as sour grapes feedback.”

Angie Hicks, founder of Angie’s List, a member-generated ratings service where users report their positive or negative experiences with local contractors, said every company gets complaints at some time, but the way it responds can be more telling than the complaint itself.

“You can really see how that company is going to stand by their work based on how they handle problems that come up,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/bu...ss/04sbiz.html





Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.

“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”

“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”

“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.

“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.”

A single footnote — added to reassure the C.I.A. — suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency’s previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation as attorney general.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury’s biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury’s father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

“We all grew up together,” said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. “You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.”

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

“As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,” said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. “At O.L.C., you’re not writing law review articles and you’re not theorizing. You’re giving a client practical advice on a real problem.”

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.”

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was “very troubled” at the notion of a probationary period.

“If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,” Mr. Cooper said. “You’re implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.”

Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. “No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,” he said. “Every opinion I’ve signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.”

Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.

“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.

“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade campus on Law Day — a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program — Mr. Comey spoke of the “agonizing collisions” of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

“We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’” Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”

Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.’s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”

In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an “Ask the White House” feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury’s public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.

A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury’s active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press “entirely appropriate” and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury “has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency” on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury’s role in interrogation policy.

“There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,” Mr. Durbin said.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/wa...rogate.html?hp





Cellphones 'Raise Tumour Risk'

Using a cellphone for more than a decade can double the risk of some types of brain tumours, Swedish researchers said on Tuesday.

Dr Lennart Hardell and scientists at the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden said their analysis of previous studies shows "a consistent pattern of increased risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma".

Acoustic neuromas are benign growths on the nerve linking the ear to the brain, while gliomas are malignant, difficult-to-treat tumours of the brain and nervous system.

The researchers also found that the greatest risk of developing a tumour is on the side of the head where the cellphone was held.

Hardell and his team identified 18 studies of brain tumour risk among long-term cellphone users, 11 of which provided data for 10 years or longer.

When the findings were analysed collectively, the researchers found people who had used cellphones for at least a decade had a 2.4-fold greater risk of acoustic neuromas and were twice as likely to develop gliomas.

Scientists fear cellphones could boost brain tumour risk by exposing the brain to electromagnetic energy. But early studies did not have a long enough follow-up time to fully account for long-term risk, Hardell and his team reported in journal Occupational Environmental Medicine.

Enough time has now passed since cellphones were introduced to analyse risks of cellphone use for 10 years or longer, which they believe is a "reasonable minimum period" to estimate risk.

One study in the analysis found no increased tumour risk with cellphone use, but it did show that cellphone users who developed brain tumours had larger tumours than non-cellphone users.

They found the greatest risk was for tumours located in the area of the brain with the most exposure and the study periods allowed enough time for tumours to develop.

But the researchers added that longer follow-up is needed, because an increased risk for other types of brain tumours cannot be ruled out.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...194709,00.html





PFIR Proposes Automated Network Neutrality Enforcement System
Ryan Paul

People for Internet Responsibility (PFIR) co-founder Lauren Weinstein has issued a proposal for a global Internet traffic analysis system capable of automatically detecting prejudicial bandwidth manipulation. Weinstein believes that implementation of his proposal could put an end to the impasse that has stalled the network neutrality debate.

Network neutrality is a model of broadband network operation that does not distinguish between different kinds of traffic for prioritization purposes. Applied to the Internet, network neutrality generally implies that all forms of traffic—regardless of the nature, source, or recipient—are given equal treatment and transmitted without selective degradation. The aim is to prevent the construction of a so-called tiered Internet, which critics argue would lead to widespread quality of service (QoS) discrimination that would stifle freedom of expression on the Internet and allow the broadband duopoly to set up exploitative digital toll booths to cash in on content delivery. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Supporters of a tiered Internet argue that network neutrality would impede innovation and degrade network operator property rights. The debate has become increasingly hostile, and little headway has been made.
Getting the facts, and acting on them

A recent proposal issued by PFIR aims to offer a more constructive way to move the net neutrality debate forward. The proposal suggests establishing a distributed global Internet traffic monitoring system that would facilitate rapid detection of abusive network manipulation. At a minimum, this system could be used to provide insight and statistical data so that legislators can make informed decisions about what regulatory solutions are actually needed, if any.

PFIR says the system could also be used for a real-time network neutrality enforcement framework. Legislators could craft a set of uniform network handling standards and an automated system could be devised to leverage the monitoring statistics and impose corrective sanctions when deviations are detected. The standards could be adjusted as needed in order to limit any potential negative impact on innovation.

"This proposal, if implemented from both the technological measurements standpoint and on a legislative basis to whatever degree may be deemed appropriate, would offer what amounts to a 'status quo' operating environment to ISPs so long as they continued to compete in an open, fair, and nondiscriminatory manner, but would enable the promise of quick and decisive corrective actions in the face of any specific abuses as detected by, and defined in conjunction with, the proposed global Internet measurement infrastructure," says the proposal. "Triggers and remedies under the approach proposed here would be as specific and quantitatively precise as possible, and only activated in the face of defined violation conditions based on the hard data from the measurement environment. In the absence of any defined abuse conditions being triggered, ISPs and related operations would proceed on a free market basis without new constraints."

The concept described in the proposal is intriguing on several different levels, but the costs and challenges of creating such a massive monitoring system should be questioned. In some respects, a fully automated system is preferable to other kinds of regulatory proposals because it would reduce the potential for inconsistent enforcement. Most conventional Net Neutrality regulatory solutions that have been proposed thus far would empower government agencies like the FCC, which aren't necessarily more reliable or thorough than the Internet service providers themselves. An automated solution—assuming that it could be devised in a manner that prevents outright manipulation—would be far more transparent and less susceptible to the frailties of bureaucracy.

On the other hand, there are clear cost and privacy concerns that will afflict any kind of Internet traffic monitoring system of this scale. In order to make this proposal viable, PFIR will have to address such concerns and provide more specific implementation details.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...nt-system.html





Poll Finds Canadians Strongly Support Net Neutrality Legislation
Michael Geist

A new poll by Leger Marketing (commissioned by eBay) finds that Canadians are generally unware of net neutrality issues, yet strongly support the principles that provide the foundation for net neutrality legislation. In particular, the survey found that:
• three in five Canadians concur that ISPs should be required to treat all content, sites and platforms equally.
• two-thirds of Canadians disagree with the proposal that ISPs should be allowed to impose additional fees for access to specific content on the web.
• 76% of Canadians (including 70% of Conservative supporters, 79% Liberal and 86% NDP) believe the federal government should pass a law to confirm the right of Internet consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice.
• 77% of Canadians agree that net neutrality policies protect the rights of Internet consumers.

While critics will undoubtedly note that the majority of Canadians were unaware of net neutrality, that has not stopped other groups - including copyright lobby groups and the telcos - from commissioning similar surveys and reporting them as fact. Indeed, the survey's results point again to the lack of transparency within the Canadian marketplace as most consumers can hardly be faulted for being unaware of instances of traffic shaping since ISPs do not disclose such practices. Canadian politicians have long ignored the net neutrality issue on the basis that it does not resonate with the public. The Leger survey suggests that this is simply not the case and that legislative action would find broad public support.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2272/125/





AT&T Vows to Use Terms of Service for Good, Not Censorship
Ken Fisher

Yesterday we reported on AT&T's controversial Terms of Service, which in broad legal language gives AT&T the right to terminate a customer's service for activity which AT&T deems "damaging" to its reputation. As we noted yesterday, the legal language is particularly vague and appears to give AT&T broad discretion in deciding what constitutes "damage."

To recap, in section 5 of its legal ToS, AT&T stipulates the following:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

Translation: "conduct" that AT&T "believes" "tends to damage" its name, or the name of its partners, can get you booted off the service. Note the use of "tends to damage": the language of the contract does not require any proof of any actual damage.

Interpretation of this section of the ToS has been practically unanimous online: it gives AT&T the power to punish customers that dare criticize the company. However, an AT&T spokesperson tells Ars Technica that the company has no interest in engaging in censorship but stopped short of saying that AT&T could not in fact exercise its ability to do so.

"AT&T respects its subscribers' rights to voice their opinions and concerns over any matter they wish. However, we retain the right to disassociate ourselves from web sites and messages explicitly advocating violence, or any message that poses a threat to children (e.g. child pornography or exploitation)," the spokesperson told Ars Technica. "We do not terminate customer service solely because a customer speaks negatively about AT&T."

The language of the contract reflects synchronization between the AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Terms of Service with the Terms of Service for AT&T's Worldnet and BellSouth customers. AT&T says that the language is not new, nor is such language unique to AT&T's contracts. It does appear to be here to stay.

Some readers who learned of the updated Terms of Service were upset by them, but not surprised. A reader drew connections to AT&T's involvement in the recent domestic spying scandal. "Given the fact that AT&T doesn't seem to have been hurt much with the spying case, I really don't think they will be hurt much if they cut off people that criticize them," wrote one reader.

Customers will have to take AT&T's word on faith, for the language of the contract is far broader than the spirit of its intent, as described by the AT&T spokesperson. However, as I noted yesterday, AT&T is clearly aware that using the ToS for censorship could cause considerable uproar. It's a cliché, but only time will tell if AT&T sticks to its word.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ensorship.html





‘Howl’ in an Era That Fears Indecency
Patricia Cohen

Those who happened to click on Pacifica.org yesterday could hear Allen Ginsberg intoning, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” along with the rest of his classic poem “Howl.”

The occasion was the 50th anniversary of a court ruling that found the poem had “redeeming social importance” and was thus not obscene.

Yet Ginsberg, who died in 1997, was heard online and not on the New York radio station WBAI-FM, affiliated with the Pacifica network, because the station, according to an article on Wednesday, feared that by broadcasting “Howl” it could run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission’s interpretation of indecency and incur bankrupting fines.

Janet Coleman, WBAI’s arts director, said that when the idea of airing the poem to test the law was proposed, “I said, ‘Yes, let’s try it.’” The radio station has a history of championing the First Amendment, having broadcast the comedian George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine that resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling on indecency. But after several harsh F.C.C. rulings in 2004 — against CBS for a glimpse of Janet Jackson’s breast during the Super Bowl halftime show and against Fox for curse words used during the Billboard Music Awards — “our lawyer felt it was too risky,” Ms. Coleman said. The commission can impose “draconian fines,” she said, that could put WBAI out of business.

In 2005 Congress raised limits on fines for obscenity, enabling the F.C.C. to charge up to $325,000 for every violation of its standards. The commission marks the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. as a time when the airwaves should be free of offensive language.

“It seems like déjà vu all over again,” said Al Bendichs, one of the lawyers who argued the case in 1957.

WBAI, which is part of the Pacifica network, decided to run “Howl Against Censorship” yesterday on the Pacifica Web site because the Internet, satellite programming and cable TV are not regulated by the F.C.C. The show included a 24-minute recording from 1959 of Ginsberg reading his poem; an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the original publisher of “Howl” and the defendant in the 1957 case; and a panel on the First Amendment. WBAI's decision was reported yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Since 2004 there’s really been a sea change,” said Ronald Collins, a First Amendment lawyer and an author, referring to changes since the Janet Jackson incident. “Howl” has been repeatedly broadcast, but now “it’s a completely different era,” he said. “The F.C.C. made it clear it has a zero-tolerance policy for offensive language and images.”

Mr. Collins was among a group of people, including Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Bendichs, who approached WBAI about airing the poem. They could have tried to get a preliminary judgment from the F.C.C., but Mr. Collins said that the commission doesn’t respond to such requests.

When asked about the broadcasting of the poem, Mary Diamond, a spokeswoman for the commission, referred to the agency’s fact sheet: “The F.C.C. is barred by law from trying to prevent the broadcast of any point of view.” It goes on to say, “However, the Commission does have enforcement responsibilities in certain limited instances.”

In June the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled against the F.C.C. in the Fox case, but the commission has indicated that it will appeal to the Supreme Court. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has not ruled in the CBS case. Mr. Collins said that the First Amendment issues raised by these cases would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Ferlinghetti, 88, who owns the landmark City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, said that when “Howl” was labeled obscene, first by United States Customs agents and then by the San Francisco police, it “wasn’t really the four-letter words.” He added, “It was that it was a direct attack on American society and the American way of life.”

Mr. Ferlinghetti quoted the unpublished 1957 opinion by San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn, whom he noted was “a God-fearing Sunday school teacher”: “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?” Judge Horn wrote. “An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/books/04howl.html





The Verizon Warning

We have long been concerned about the potential threat to free speech and a free press as communications migrate from old-fashioned telephone lines, TV broadcasts and printing presses to digital networks controlled by unregulated private companies. The threat stopped being theoretical recently when Verizon Wireless censored political speech on one of its mobile services.

Verizon did the right thing after the problem was disclosed: it promptly dropped a misbegotten policy and said its new policy is to open its network to any legal communication. But alarm bells should be ringing on Capitol Hill, where industry lobbying, legislative goldbricking and Republican aversion to regulations have bottled up much-needed laws on digital communications.

Late last month, Verizon Wireless denied an application from Naral Pro-Choice America, a reproductive rights group, for a “short code,” a few numbers that a mobile phone user can use to subscribe to a particular source of text messages. Verizon said its policy was to refuse “issue oriented” text-messaging programs from any group that “seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.” The policy also said political candidates may be granted short codes if the content is, “in VZW’s sole discretion, not issue-oriented or controversial in nature.”

Leave aside for the moment the sorry spectacle of a major American company aiming to make campaigns even more substance-free than they already are. The Verizon policy was textbook censorship. Any government that tried it would be rightly labeled authoritarian. The First Amendment prohibits the United States government from anything approaching that sort of restriction.

If Verizon had attempted it on normal phone lines, it would have been violating common carrier laws that bar interference with voice transmissions. Unfortunately, those laws do not apply to text messaging.

Given this chilling experience, the Federal Communications Commission should quickly issue regulations that also bar interference with text messaging. Unfortunately, the F.C.C. is in the thrall of the carriers, and the Bush administration has an unblemished record of siding with corporations over the rights and safety of American citizens. That means Congress will have to take the lead, as it must on other issues affecting the mushrooming world of digital communications.

Verizon admitted its mistake and pledged not to repeat it, but that’s not enough. As admirable as Verizon’s retreat was, the company reserved the right to change the rules at any time. Verizon still says “some well-intentioned employee” got too zealous. If its top executives were not engaged on this issue, they should have been.

Our democracy is built on basic freedoms not being left to individuals, or individual companies. And there is special cause for worry in our business. American newspapers can resist government intimidation because the Constitution is on our side, but also because we control the presses. That is the real meaning behind “freedom of the press,” and authoritarian societies know it. In the 1980s in the Soviet Union, you had to have a license from the Communist Party to own a Xerox machine; the Soviets understood that it was a printing press.

If newspapers were delivered over mobile phones, a company could simply cut them off because it did not like a particular article. This is not the stuff of a futurist essay. Freedom of speech must be guaranteed, right now, in a digital world just as it has been protected in a world of paper and ink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/opinion/03wed1.html





Bush Admin: RIAA Win Shows Copyright Law is 'Effective'
Declan McCullagh

The Bush administration said on Friday that the recording industry's $222,000 courtroom victory shows that the legal system is working against peer-to-peer pirates.

"Cases such as this remind us strong enforcement is a significant part of the effort to eliminate piracy, and that we have an effective legal system in the U.S. that enables rights holders to protect their intellectual property," said Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement, to CNET News.com.


Chris Israel, U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement, in a file photograph

President Bush named Israel, formerly a senior Commerce Department official, to the key copyright post in July 2005. He has an MBA from George Washington University and, before joining the Bush administration, worked for Time Warner's public policy arm.

Israel's comments come a day after the Recording Industry Association of America won a landmark jury verdict in a Minnesota federal court against a woman accused of sharing copyrighted songs on the Kazaa file-trading network.

The Bush administration has adopted a generally expansive view of copyright law, including writing trade deals that include anti-circumvention restrictions. In 2005, the president signed into law the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which slaps some file-sharers with additional penalties.

Israel also said: "Piracy impacts many of our most innovative industries, costs American jobs and is a huge threat to our economic competitiveness."
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9792252-38.html





Why the RIAA Should Have Won (Though the Fine was Too High)
Declan McCullagh

The Recording Industry Association of America probably should have won its lawsuit against a Minnesota woman accused of sharing songs through the Kazaa file-sharing network.

There was enough evidence linking Jammie Thomas' computer to an IP address that was offering a slew of copyrighted songs to other Kazaa users. A jury in Minnesota, hardly the record labels' home turf, unanimously thought so too.

The problem isn't the verdict. It's the penalty.

After decades of special-interest lobbying by large holders of intellectual property rights, U.S. copyright law has spiraled out of control. It's been transformed from limited protections of authors' rights for 14 years to a juggernaut with criminal enforcement, sky-high penalties, and up to 120 years of legal protection.

Copyright no longer abides by the fundamental principle of law, which is that the damages awarded should be related to any harm committed. No wonder Jammie Thomas got slapped with a $222,000 bill. (And I wouldn't be surprised to see attorney's fees add another $100,000 on top of it.)

"It doesn't strike a regular person that by passing a CD around the neighborhood, they should have their house taken away," says Lew Rockwell, president of the free-market Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. "And by electronic means it shouldn't be any different."

Copyright law is, as Berkeley law professor Pam Samuelson points out, way too verbose; it's now swollen to an unbelievable 200 pages long. It's complex, incomprehensible, designed to favor large copyright holders over defendants, and thoroughly out of touch with reality.

This should be no surprise. The technical term for this is "rent-seeking," meaning special-interest coalitions who pressure the government to transfer wealth to them. The general public (reasonably) can't keep track of the minutiae of proposals to expand copyright law, but RIAA lobbyists can devote 100 percent of their time to the job. What happens is that copyright law continues to clamp down on Americans, inexorably, like a ratchet.

Consider what aggressive rent-seeking has achieved for the music and movie industries--and some certain large software companies--in the last decade alone: The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (more P2P penalties). The No Electronic Theft Act (file-swapping criminalized).

So what should Jammie Thomas have been required to pay? She's accused of sharing 24 songs, or two CDs worth. We don't know how many people downloaded those songs, but if 10 people did, that's perhaps $250 in value. If 100 people did, that's $2,500, and so on.

Walter Block, an economics professor at Loyola University, is no fan of copyright law at all. (He'd abolish it.) But his suggested penalties for physical larceny are worth taking into account. "My view is two teeth for a tooth, plus expenses, plus cost of capturing, plus a scaring penalty" that would provide additional deterrence and avoid allowing the wealthy to flout the law, he said on Friday. In other words, let the punishment fit the crime.

Under the judge's interpretation of copyright law, unfortunately, the RIAA wasn't required to prove how many songs were downloaded. Maybe nobody did; maybe thousands of people did. All the RIAA needed to do is prove Thomas made them "available" through Kazaa.

Although we can't make any reasonable estimate, we can nevertheless say it's unlikely that Thomas would be required to pay $222,000 plus attorneys fees if copyright law were reasonable, fair, and just. But it is now none of those, so she is.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9792175-38.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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