Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 27th, '09

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June 27th, 2009




DHS to Kill Domestic Satellite Spying
Eileen Sullivan

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to kill a program begun by the Bush administration that would use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law enforcement, a government official said Monday.

Napolitano recently reached her decision after the program was discussed with law enforcement officials, and she was told it was not an urgent issue, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about it.

The program was announced in 2007 and was to have the Homeland Security Department use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes.

The program, called the National Applications Office, has been delayed because of privacy and civil liberty concerns.

The program was included in the Obama administration's 2010 budget request, according to Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat and House homeland security committee member who was briefed on the department's classified intelligence budget.

Harman said Monday she had not been given final word that the program would be killed. She said she would talk to Napolitano on Tuesday.

Harman has been outspoken about her concerns that the program is unnecessary, far reaching and open-ended.

"I thought this was just an invitation to huge mischief," Harman said. Of killing the program, she said, "It shows real leadership on the part of Janet Napolitano."

Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said Napolitano began looking at the program shortly after she became secretary. Kudwa said the department expects to announce the results of that review soon.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said he hoped the department wasn't canceling the program.

"If it is true, it's a very big mistake," said King, who is the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. "This is definitely a step back in the war on terror."

For years, domestic agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Interior Department have had access to this satellite imagery for scientific research, to assist in response to natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, and to map out vulnerabilities during a major public event like the Super Bowl.

Since 1974 the agency's requests satellite imagery have been made through the federal interagency group, the Civil Applications Committee.

The Bush administration, however, decided to funnel the requests through the Homeland Security Department and expand their use for homeland security and law enforcement purposes.

After receiving a letter from Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Napolitano decided the program should be canceled.

Bratton, in his role as head of the Major City Chiefs Association, wrote on June 21 that the program, as envisioned by the Bush administration, is not an urgent need for local law enforcement.

Instead, Bratton said, Homeland Security should focus on the fusion centers across the country and improving information-sharing with state and local officials to improve the domestic intelligence picture.

Bratton said he was unaware whether police chiefs has been consulted by Bush administration officials about the satellite program.

"To my knowledge, this is the first opportunity major law enforcement organizations have had to participate in this significant and complex initiative," he said in the letter.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090623/...spy_satellites





Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned
Noam Cohen

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

1. Twitter Is a Tool and Thus Difficult to Censor

Twitter aspires to be something different from social-networking sites like Facebook or MySpace: rather than being a vast self-contained world centered on one Web site, Twitter dreams of being a tool that people can use to communicate with each other from a multitude of locations, like e-mail. You do not have to visit the home site to send a message, or tweet. Tweets can originate from text-messaging on a cellphone or even blogging software. Likewise, tweets can be read remotely, whether as text messages or, say, “status updates” on a friend’s Facebook page.

Unlike Facebook, which operates solely as a Web site that can be, in a sense, impounded, shutting down Twitter.com does little to stop the offending Twittering. You’d have to shut down the entire service, which is done occasionally for maintenance.

2. Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out

“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is an expert on the Internet. That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.

3. Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

4. Watch Your Back

Not only is it hard to be sure that what appears on Twitter is accurate, but some Twitterers may even be trying to trick you. Like Rick’s Café, Twitter is thick with discussion of who is really an informant or agent provocateur. One longstanding pro-Moussavi Twitter account, mousavi1388, which has grown to 16,000 followers, recently tweeted, “WARNING: http://www.mirhoseyn.ir/ & http://www.mirhoseyn.com/ are fake, DONT join. ... #IranElection11:02 AM Jun 16th from web.” The implication was that government agents had created those accounts to mislead the public. ABCNews.com announced that Twitter users who said they were repeating (“retweeting”) the posts from its reporter, Jim Sciutto, had been fabricating the material to make Mr. Sciutto seem to be backing the government. “I became an unwitting victim,” he wrote.

5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge

For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter.

6. Twitter Can Be a Potent Tool for Media Criticism

Just as Twitter can rally protesters against governments, its broadcast ability can rally them quickly and efficiently against news outlets. One such spontaneous protest was given the tag #CNNfail, using Internet slang to call out CNN last weekend for failing to have comprehensive coverage of the Iranian protests. This was quickly converted to an e-mail writing campaign. CNN was forced to defend its coverage in print and online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/we...1cohenweb.html





In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences
Robin Wright

Iran's revolution has now run through a full cycle. A gruesomely captivating video of a young woman — laid out on a Tehran street after apparently being shot, blood pouring from her mouth and then across her face — swept Twitter, Facebook and other websites this weekend. The woman rapidly became a symbol of Iran's escalating crisis, from a political confrontation to far more ominous physical clashes. Some sites refer to her as "Neda," Farsi for the voice or the call. Tributes that incorporate startlingly upclose footage of her dying have started to spring up on YouTube.

Although it is not yet clear who shot "Neda" (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the shah's security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles. (See pictures of terror in the streets of Tehran.)

The first clashes in January 1978 produced two deaths that were then commemorated on the 40th day in mass gatherings, which in turn produced new confrontations with security forces — and new deaths. Those deaths then generated another 40-day period of mourning, new clashes, and further deaths. The cycle continued throughout most of the year until the shah's ouster in January 1979.

The same cycle has already become an undercurrent in Iran's current crisis. The largest demonstration, on Thursday of last week, was called by opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi to commemorate the deaths of protesters three days after they were killed.
Shiite mourning is not simply a time to react with sadness. Particularly in times of conflict, it is also an opportunity for renewal. The commemorations for "Neda" and the others killed this weekend are still to come. And the 40th day events are usually the largest and most important.

"Neda" is already being hailed as a martyr, a second important concept in Shiism. With the reported deaths of 19 people Saturday, martyrdom also provides a potent force that could further deepen public anger at Iran's regime. (See the Top Ten Players in Iran's Power Struggle.)

The belief in martyrdom is central to modern politics as well as Shiite tradition dating back centuries in Iran. It too helped propel the 1979 revolution. It sustained Iran during the eight-year war with Iraq, when over 120,000 Iranians died in the bloodiest modern Middle East conflict. Most major Iranian cities have a Martyrs' Museum or a Martyrs' cemetery.

The first Shiite martyr was Hussein, the prophet Mohammed's grandson. He believed it was better to die fighting injustice than to live with injustice under what he believed was illegitimate rule.

In the seventh century, Hussein and a band of fewer than 100 people, including women and children, took on the mighty Umayyad dynasty in Karbala, an ancient city in Mesopotamia now in modern-day Iraq. They knew they would be massacred.

Fourteen centuries later, Hussein's tomb in Karbala is one of the two holiest Shiite shrines — and millions of Iranians still make pilgrimages there every year. Just as Christians reenact Jesus' procession bearing the cross past the fourteen stops to Calvary before his crucifixion, so too do Shiites every year reenact Hussein's martyrdom in an Islamic passion play during the holy period of Ashura.

Because of Hussein, revolt against tyranny became part of Shiite tradition. Indeed, protest and martyrdom are widely considered duties to God. And nowhere is the practice more honored than in Iran, the world's largest Shiite country.

The revolutionaries exploited the deep passion about martyrdom as well as the timetable of Shiite mourning in whipping up greater opposition to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. With the deaths of "Neda" and others, they may now find the same phenomena used against them.
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...906049,00.html









As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue
Noam Cohen

TO censor the Internet painlessly, undetectably, is the dream that keeps repressive governments up late at their mainframe computers. After all, no users are so censored online as those who never see it.

The Iranian government is carrying out an Internet crackdown in hopes of subduing the protest movement that has surged since the disputed results of the presidential election on June 12. At the same time, the Iranian government has been sending out the police to restrain protesters and foreign journalists.

Thus far, however, the Iranian government has learned the difficulty of trying to control the Internet in half-steps. Because the government’s censorship efforts are so evident — transparent, even — there is a battle raging online to keep Iran connected to the world digitally, and thus connected to the world. Sympathizers around the world are guiding Iranians to safe access to the Internet and are hosting and publicizing material that is being banned within Iran.

If only Iran’s leaders had thought through the implications of what can be called the Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship, as propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His idea is deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives, and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute cats. Even the sarcastic types (who, for example, have been known to insert misspelled messages under pictures of kittens) seem to be under their thrall.

So when a government censors the Internet, it had better think twice: “Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites,” Mr. Zuckerman wrote for a recent talk. People who could not “care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos” and thereby “block a few political ones.”

As it happens, Mr. Zuckerman said, the Iranian government’s censorship task has been made harder because there is a thriving blogging community there, which he attributes to an earlier Iranian censorship campaign against traditional print media, in 2003. Writers flocked to the Internet. This fact, combined with a history of blocking access to social media tools since at least 2004, means that a large group of computer-savvy communicators “have had five years to figure out” how to get their message out.

They have learned about all manner of “proxies,” that is, improvised ways of evading censorship — often connecting to a computer outside of Iran, which then can connect to the Internet freely. In earlier cases, the important news that bloggers had to share on a social network might have related to soccer, or a certain favorite pet, but today those same tools are used to get the word out about protests and a spirit of defiance within Iran.

From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

The Russia-Georgia war, he said, offered a contrast.

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”

There are practical benefits to the mainstreaming of political protest online. It presents another barrier to censorship.

Mr. Zuckerman said there had been discussion about having a dedicated human rights site — “and we realized that it will be the most attacked site in the world,” he said.

“The response,” he said, “is to say let’s go in the other direction — encourage anyone that has a human rights site to mirror it everywhere, including sites like Blogspot.com with lots of noncontroversial sites. It is kind of hard for Iran to block Blogger.com well, not that it is hard, but it is complicated. They would have close down a lot of blogs, including blogs with cute cats.”

Beyond the practical benefits, there is something satisfying about a country being assisted by ordinary bloggers who suddenly show their skills in organizing and belief in basic political principles. It harks back to heroes like the Roman leader Cincinnatus, a farmer who had to be persuaded to lead the republic in a time of need and after succeeding quickly returned to the farm. Any functioning society needs professional politicians, just as any modern society needs political blogs, but it is good to be reminded that leadership and political voices can come from other ranks.

But, Mr. Zuckerman reminded me, “You have to have the sword at home. You don’t want to have to buy a sword at the last minute.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/te...et/22link.html





Pro-Iranian Regime Hackers Invade Oregon Computers
Joseph B. Frazier

Hackers defaced the home page of the Oregon University System, posting a caustic message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and stop talking about the disputed Iranian election.

Attempts to access the university system's Web site were automatically redirected to another page, where readers viewed a message said to be from Iran that asserted there was no cheating in the election. That message was up for 90 minutes before university system technicians intervened Wednesday morning.

The hackers apparently took advantage of third-party software that had not been properly updated, university system spokeswoman Diane Saunders said. Hackers frequently attack the system's computers, but technicians usually beat back their efforts, she said.

"They are able to stomp on most of them," Saunders said.

She said nobody's personal computers were attacked. Also, no malicious software - which could give hackers remote access to computer hard drives - was introduced.

There was no immediate indication why the hackers targeted the system, which oversees Oregon's seven public universities.

The message that was posted on the Web site, made available to The Associated Press by the university system, addressed Obama and said it was being posted from Iran. The text, in red on a black background, calls on Obama to focus on the economic crisis instead of commenting on the Iranian election.

The message also makes derogatory comments about Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has contended the June 12 vote was rigged.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062401664.html





The Devil Is In the Digits
Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.

We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2000004.html?1





Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology

European gear used in vast effort to monitor communications
Christopher Rhoads in New York and Loretta Chao in Beijing

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.

Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.

Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said.

"If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Mr. Roome.

The sale of the equipment to Iran by the joint venture, called Nokia Siemens Networks, was previously reported last year by the editor of an Austrian information-technology Web site called Futurezone.

The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren't fully displayed -- until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said.

"We didn't know they could do this much," said a network engineer in Tehran. "Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network."

Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran's case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country's system. It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.

All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function -- and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest.

Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts.

Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say," said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures. "This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China."

China's vaunted "Great Firewall," which is widely considered the most advanced and extensive Internet censoring in the world, is believed also to involve deep packet inspection. But China appears to be developing this capability in a more decentralized manner, at the level of its Internet service providers rather than through a single hub, according to experts. That suggests its implementation might not be as uniform as that in Iran, they said, as the arrangement depends on the cooperation of all the service providers.

The difference, at least in part, has to do with scale: China has about 300 million Internet users, the most of any country. Iran, which has an estimated 23 million users, can track all online communication through a single location called the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., part of the government's telecom monopoly. All of the country's international links run through the company.

Separately, officials from the U.S. embassy in Beijing on Friday met with Chinese officials to express concerns about a new requirement that all PCs sold in the China starting July 1 be installed with Web-filtering software.

If a government wants to control the flow of information across its borders it's no longer enough to block access to Web sites hosted elsewhere. Now, as sharing online images and messages through social-networking sites has become easy and popular, repressive regimes are turning to technologies that allow them to scan such content from their own citizens, message by message.

Human-rights groups have criticized the selling of such equipment to Iran and other regimes considered repressive, because it can be used to crack down on dissent, as evidenced in the Iran crisis. Asked about selling such equipment to a government like Iran's, Mr. Roome of Nokia Siemens Networks said the company "does have a choice about whether to do business in any country. We believe providing people, wherever they are, with the ability to communicate is preferable to leaving them without the choice to be heard."

Countries with repressive governments aren't the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." A White House official wouldn't comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.

The Australian government is experimenting with Web-site filtering to protect its youth from online pornography, an undertaking that has triggered criticism that it amounts to government-backed censorship.

Content inspection and filtering technology are already common among corporations, schools and other institutions, as part of efforts to block spam and viruses, as well as to ensure that employees and students comply with computer-use guidelines. Families use filtering on their home computers to protect their children from undesirable sites, such as pornography and gambling.

Internet censoring in Iran was developed with the initial justification of blocking online pornography, among other material considered offensive by the regime, according to those who have studied the country's censoring.

Iran has been grappling with controlling the Internet since its use moved beyond universities and government agencies in the late 1990s. At times, the government has tried to limit the country's vibrant blogosphere -- for instance, requiring bloggers to obtain licenses from the government, a directive that has proved difficult to enforce, according to the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of universities that study Internet filtering and surveillance. (The partners are Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.)

Beginning in 2001, the government required Internet service providers to install filtering systems, and also that all international connections link to a single gateway controlled by the country's telecom monopoly, according to an OpenNet study.

Iran has since blocked Internet users in the country from more than five million sites in recent years, according to estimates from the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

In the 2005 presidential election, the government shut down the Internet for hours, blaming it on a cyberattack from abroad, a claim that proved false, according to several Tehran engineers.

Several years ago, research by OpenNet discovered the government using filtering equipment from a U.S. company, Secure Computing Corp. Due to the U.S. trade embargo on Iran, in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed shah, that was illegal. Secure Computing, now owned by McAfee Inc., at the time denied any knowledge of the use of its products in Iran. McAfee said due diligence before the acquisition revealed no contract or support being provided in Iran.

Building online-content inspection on a national scale and coordinated at a single location requires hefty resources, including manpower, processing power and technical expertise, Internet experts said.

Nokia Siemens Networks provided equipment to Iran last year under the internationally recognized concept of "lawful intercept," said Mr. Roome. That relates to intercepting data for the purposes of combating terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminal activities carried out online, a capability that most if not all telecom companies have, he said.

The monitoring center that Nokia Siemens Networks sold to Iran was described in a company brochure as allowing "the monitoring and interception of all types of voice and data communication on all networks." The joint venture exited the business that included the monitoring equipment, what it called "intelligence solutions," at the end of March, by selling it to Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP, a Munich-based investment firm, Mr. Roome said. He said the company determined it was no longer part of its core business.

-- Ben Worthen in San Francisco, Mike Esterl in Atlanta and Siobhan Gorman in Washington contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html





China Says Web Filtering Software Launch Unchanged
AP

China is sticking to its planned launch of a controversial Internet censoring software in about one week, an official newspaper said Tuesday, despite Washington's concerns over the move's possible impact on trade and access to information.

The China Daily said the plan to require the Web-filtering Green Dam Youth Escort software on all personal computers sold in China starting July 1 remains unchanged, citing an unnamed source from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It is to be pre-installed or included on a compact disc with all PCs sold in China.

The ministry did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment. Calls to Zhang Chenmin, head of one of the software's developers, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., rang unanswered.

The report came amid efforts by Chinese Web surfers to lobby the communist government to scrap its plan and after the U.S. Embassy said American diplomats met Friday with officials of China's ministries of commerce and information technology to express concern and seek more information about the system.

"The U.S. is concerned about actions that seek to restrict access to the Internet as well as restrictions on the internationally recognized right to freedom of expression," the embassy said in a statement Monday.

"The U.S. Government is concerned about Green Dam both in terms of its potential impact on trade and the serious technical issues raised by use of the software," it said. "We have asked the Chinese to engage in a dialogue on how to address these concerns."

Chinese officials say the Internet filtering is an effort to block access to violent and pornographic material. But Internet users have ridiculed the system and some are circulating petitions appealing to the government to scrap it.

China, which has the world's largest population of Internet users at more than 298 million, also has one of the world's tightest controls over the Internet. The government bans online pornography and this year launched a nationwide crackdown that led to the closing of more than 1,900 Web sites.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062301038.html





Google Slammed as China, U.S. Quarrel Over Internet
Chris Buckley and Emma Graham-Harrison

China on Thursday stepped up accusations that Google is spreading obscene content over the Internet, a day after U.S. officials urged Beijing to abandon plans for controversial filtering software on new computers.

The growing friction over control of online content threatens to become another irritant in ties at a time the world is looking for the United States and China to cooperate in helping to pull the global economy out of its slump.

China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday accused Google's English language search engine of spreading obscene images that violated the nation's laws, less than 24 hours after disruptions to the company's search engines and other services within China.

Spokesman Qin Gang did not directly say whether official action was behind the disruptions, but he made plain the government's anger and said "punishment measures" taken against Google were lawful.

"Google's English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lascivious and pornographic, seriously violating China's relevant laws and regulations," he told a regular news conference.

A spokesman for Google in China declined to comment.

Separately, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk on Wednesday voiced concerns over the "Green Dam" software in a letter to Chinese officials.

"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Locke said in a statement.

China says the "Green Dam" filtering software is to protect children from illegal images and insists the deadline of July 1 for new computers to be sold with the software will not change.

An official at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, which handles trade rows, said the ministry had no immediate response to the U.S. criticism and referred questions to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which also had no comment.

Critics have said the program, sold by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co, is technically flawed and could be used to spy on users and block sites Beijing considers politically offensive.

The proposed new rules raised fundamental questions regarding the transparency of China's regulatory practices and concerns about compliance with WTO rules, the U.S. officials said.

Google Disrupted

The software plan coincides with criticisms of Google by China's Internet watchdog and access disruptions in China to the U.S. company's websites.

The watchdog last week ordered the world's biggest search engine to block overseas websites with "pornographic and vulgar" content from being accessed through its Chinese-language version.

Late on Wednesday evening, Internet users in China were unable to open several Google sites for around an hour, and some reported disruptions throughout Thursday.

A company spokeswoman at Google in the United States said the firm was checking reports of problems with access in China.

The disruption -- coming soon after Google was criticized by China -- "seems beyond mere coincidence," said Mark Natkin, Managing Director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based company that advises on telecommunications and IT.

Google's problems reflect the difficulties of foreign Internet firms competing in the world's biggest online market while facing controversy over censorship.

Chinese officials have said their Internet moves are driven by worries about exposing children to disturbing online images, but an official newspaper reported on Thursday that a plan to recruit volunteers to scour the Internet for banned content and report to officials also has a political element.

The Legal Daily reported that 10,000 volunteers sought by Beijing would also search for "harmful content" that includes "threats to state security," "subverting state power," and "spreading rumours and disturbing social order."

Natkin, the consultant, said the official pressure was most unlikely to deter Google and other Internet companies from continuing to operate in China.

"Google has to be looking at China as a long-term play," he said. "The allure of the Chinese market, not just for Google and not just for Internet companies, is so compelling, so alluring."

(Additional reporting by Doug Palmer and Mohammad Zargham in Washington, Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing and Lucy Hornby in Shanghai; Editing by David Fox..)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55O0EO20090625





German Court Rules Pupils Can Rate Teachers Online
Candeias

A German court ruled Tuesday that schoolchildren may rate their teachers online, rejecting the case of a woman who argued her rights had been infringed by pupils who gave her bad grades on a popular website.

The Federal Court of Justice found that the rights of the woman, a teacher of German and religion, had not been compromised by the ratings and that pupils had a right to offer an opinion as long as they did not hinder her professionally.

“The opinions expressed are neither abusive nor insulting,” the court said in a statement. “The plaintiff did not show that she had been harmed in any specific way.”

The court said collection, storage, and transmission of ratings by online portal spickmich.de was therefore permissible without the assent of the plaintiff.

The website allows students to award teachers marks on a scale from one (very good) to six (unsatisfactory), the same scale on which German pupils are graded.

Categories assessed include “cool and funny,” “popular,” “motivated,” “human,” and “good teaching.”

The lawyers of the woman, who had been given a rating of 4.3 for her German teaching, argued that the site was unfair and inaccurate because users rate subjects anonymously.

This could lead to multiple ratings by the same person, as well as ratings by people with no connection to the school or teacher in question, they argued.

But the court said in this case, the right of the individual to express an opinion outweighed these concerns.

The operators of the website hailed the court’s ruling.

“The judges clearly said that the teacher herself is not being rated, but rather her job performance. Therefore it’s allowed and students may express this criticism publicly online,” said Tino Keller, the website’s editor-in-chief.

German commentators say the case could set an important precedent for other rating portals such as those for hotels, professors, doctors, and health insurers.
http://www.candeias.me/2009/06/24/ge...achers-online/





German Court Rules Against Rapidshare
Wolfgang Spahr

The Regional Court of Hamburg has ruled in favor of German collecting society GEMA, which had requested that the court issue an order prohibiting file-hosting service rapidshare.com from making around 5,000 music tracks available on the Internet.

"The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks," it was stated in a declaration issued by GEMA.

The court also ruled that the precautions allegedly taken by rapidshare.com and other file-hosting sites were not sufficient to effectively prevent the copyright breaches caused by the service.

"The judgment of the Regional Court of Hamburg marks a milestone in GEMA's efforts to combat the illegal use of music works on the Internet," said Dr. Harald Heker, CEO of GEMA, in a statement. "GEMA will continue to do everything it can to shield its members from online piracy. We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level."

Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare AG in Cham (Switzerland), commented: "We do not consider the court's decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases.

"Our experience is that the courts of appeal tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts. For this reason, we think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...7cd744af207db9





Pirate Bay Retrial Denied; Judge Declared "Unbiased"

After The Pirate Bay defendants lost a high-profile copyright infringement trial in Sweden, they charged that the judge belonged to pro-copyright groups and was therefore biased against them. A Court of Appeals ruling today disagrees; there will be no retrial.
Nate Anderson

A Swedish court ruled today that the judge overseeing The Pirate Bay trial earlier this year was not biased by belonging to various pro-copyright organizations. The unanimous decision (Swedish) means that there will be no retrial; the defendants must hope for a successful appeal instead.

Judge Tomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, as are several of the lawyers who represented the recording and movie industries during the trial. He also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.

After receiving a verdict of a year in jail (each) and a shared 30 million kronor fine, The Pirate Bay defendants charged Norström with bias and asked a court of appeal for a completely new trial with a different judge.

That appeal was overseen by Judge Anders Eka, who doesn't normally hear copyright-related cases but did so here in order to make the ruling appear as fair as possible.

The Stockholm District Court, of which Norström is a member, defended its judge during the proceedings, telling Eka and two other judges that membership in such groups is necessary to keep up with developments in the field. Every field has its professional organizations, and the District Court argued that this was no different.

Eka didn't fully agree. In today's announcement, he made clear that the judge should have disclosed his memberships up front. His memberships also showed "a commitment to issues of intellectual property that to some extent can be said to be in the rightsholders' interests."

But Eka and the other judges concluded that simply endorsing the principles of copyright law was no grounds for disqualification in a trial; copyright was written into Swedish law, and judges can't be called "biased" simply because they support existing laws.

"The Court of Appeal has come to the conclusion that none of the circumstances set out, individually or taken together, means that there are legitimate doubts about the judge's impartiality in this case. There has not been any bias," concluded the court. The decision cannot be appealed.

The Pirate Bay defendants can still appeal the results of the first trial, but they won't receive a Jammie Thomas-Rasset style do-over.

Update: As a reader points out, defendant Peter Kolmisoppi Sunde has just tweeted: "The Pirate Bay will now file charges against Sweden for violation for Human Rights. More info later. (The bias-judge is himself biased...)"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...d-unbiased.ars






Dutch Antipiracy Organization Takes Aim at Pirate Bay

File-sharing service The Pirate Bay is the target of yet another legal case to try to shut it down, this time in Holland.
Mikael Ricknäs

The Pirate Bay is the target of yet another legal case -- the Dutch antipiracy organization BREIN wants to close the file-sharing site in the Netherlands, and wants to see its founders appear in the Amsterdam district court on July 21, it said Tuesday.

Whether Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Warg will show up remains to be seen. BREIN chose an unusual method to summon them and used Facebook and Twitter to convey the information to three men.

"You can find the defendants on Facebook and Twitter. Internet works for enforcers as well as infringers. Now they know about the court case in the Netherlands," said BREIN director Tim Kuik in a statement.

However, Neij told Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå that he uses Facebook and Twitter, but hadn't seen anything about the case.

Cases involving the file-sharing service are now ongoing in an increasing number of countries.

Movie and record companies filed documents last week in a Norwegian district court seeking a temporary injunction to force ISP Telenor to block the site. A similar case is waiting to be heard in the Danish high court, and has already led to the site being blocked by some operators.

In April, Neij, Sunde and Warg were found guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law in a Swedish district court. They were sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million Swedish kronor (US$3.8 million) in damages.

Currently, the Swedish court of appeals is looking into changes of bias directed at the judge who handled the case in the district court. The three judges who will decide the matter started deliberating Wednesday.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16727...irate_bay.html





Anti-Piracy Lawyers Lose License To Chase Pirates
enigmax

Just days after Norway’s data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it’s now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won’t be renewed.

Earlier this month we reported that since Norway’s Personal Data act prohibits the storage of unnecessary data, ISPs in the country must delete all IP address-related personal information they hold on their customers which is more than three weeks old. This makes it very hard in most cases to track down illicit file-sharers.

Now according to a Norwegian report, going after domestic file-sharers has become more difficult than ever before.

Since 2006, the Simonsen law firm - home of notorious pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel - has been in possession of a license from Norway’s data protection office which enables the outfit to monitor alleged pirates and collect their IP addresses.

But unfortunately for the firm it now has to stop this Internet surveillance, since the license was only temporary, has just expired and won’t be renewed.

The reason for the renewal rejection is that there has been little political debate on the issue since the license was granted. Norway’s data protection authorities had previously requested political clarification and legislation on what licensees can and cannot do. They haven’t been forthcoming.

Simonsen lawyer Espen Tøndel told Dagbladet that he was very unhappy with developments. “We believe that the decision is politically justified,” he said, noting that there should be no reason why the license shouldn’t be extended.

Tøndel further said that his law firm will object against the non-renewal of their license but if they fail, he fears that copyright holders will be completely powerless to stop illegal file-sharing.

“One can not deny [the copyright holders] their right to protect their interests in this way,” he said.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...irates-090622/





'Three-Strikes' Off Anti-Piracy Agenda In Spain
Howell Llewellyn

Spain's cultural industry has accepted that the proposed disconnection of Internet users who ignore warnings not to download illegally is no longer an option. The about-turn by the Coalition of Creators and Content Industries follows indications that the government will refuse to implement any kind of "three-strikes" scheme.

But the Coalition, which includes sections of the music, film and software sectors including 88-member labels body Promusicae, as well as collecting societies such as the 95,000-member authors and publishers society SGAE, still thinks a reduction in Internet access speed is feasible against offenders.

In his first public appearance as Coalition president, Aldo Olcese acknowledged that users are "our current and future clientele," and that punitive measures were out of the question. "We have no desire to criminalize Internet users who download illegally," he said.

Olcese was speaking just three days after Spanish Internet Service Provider (ISP) association Redtel announced that it would refuse to hold more talks with the Coalition, until the government comes up with a solution to piracy in Spain.

The Coalition will now concentrate its anti-piracy message against the activity of P2P BitTorrent tracker services. Olcese claimed that there were now 200 such Web sites in Spain, compared to just 70 a few months ago.

The P2P problem in Spain is so bad that "it is no exaggeration to say that Spain has become a paradise for global piracy," he said.

Olcese added that the Coalition was still compiling information on the sites' activities, but promised that "within a short space of time" the Coalition would present the names of the 200 sites.

Olcese also said he was confident the government would move forward on its anti-piracy measures. "I am convinced the government will do something and soon," he said.

"I speak with [people from] the government every day, and I tell them their problem is getting worse every week," he added. "But just as President Obama recently announced steps to deal with piracy after consultations with [culture industry] experts, I have absolutely no doubt that this government will soon take steps after being convinced by experts [from the Coalition]."

Olcese added that the Coalition was willing to support the launch of a Web site of "wide-ranging and abundant" legal cultural content "at competitive prices" for users who wanted to obtain material legally. He said "this Web site would begin operating the moment the government announces definitive steps to tackle piracy."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...5e1e0ebea8495f





Major Music Labels in Court Move to Force Internet Providers to Act on Downloads
John Collins

THE BIG four music labels have launched legal proceedings against Ireland’s second-largest telco, BT Ireland, and largest cable operator UPC Ireland, to force them to act against illegal music downloads by their subscribers.

The move follows an out-of-court settlement in January between Eircom and the labels – EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Music – under which the telco agreed to introduce a “three strikes and you’re out” rule for persistent downloaders.

As part of the agreement, the record labels agreed that they would seek a similar system to be put in place by all other internet service providers (ISPs), so that Eircom would not be at a competitive disadvantage.

A spokesman for music industry body Irma, which has co-ordinated the legal actions, confirmed that the case was over illegal file-sharing and followed from the Eircom case. He declined to comment further citing the legal proceedings.

Proceedings were issued in the High Court and Tuesday by “EMI Records (Ireland) Limited and others” against BT Communications Ireland, and in a separate case against UPC Communications Ireland. However, legal papers have not been served on either ISP.

It is understood that Irma’s investigation of file-sharing networks shows that after Eircom, they are most commonly used by UPC and BT customers.

A spokeswoman for UPC said the firm “has made its position clear from the outset – it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation”.

She added: “There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights-holders’ proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.”

UPC proposed to Irma that a “stakeholder forum” be formed between ISPs, the Data Protection Commission, the National Consumer Agency and relevant government departments to find an alternative solution but Irma rejected this.

“UPC intends to vigorously defend its position in court.”

A BT spokeswoman said: “We understand that proceedings have been issued but BT has not yet been served with papers. Therefore we are not in a position to comment on the grounds of the complaint set out in those proceedings.”

Under the agreement reached with Eircom, investigators working on behalf of the labels pass on the details of Eircom users they detect sharing copyrighted material. Eircom will then contact the customer and ask them to desist.

If the same customer is detected sharing copyrighted music a second time, they are issued with a formal warning. The third time they are detected, their account is terminated and they are cut off from the internet.

Irma and Eircom are having ongoing discussions about exactly how the scheme will be implemented on a technical level. As a result, no Eircom customers have been disconnected to date.

In January a number of European jurisdictions seemed to be moving towards a “three strikes” approach to combat illegal downloading of music which dwarfs the value of the legal market.

Earlier this year, however, the European Parliament rejected a far-reaching telecoms reform package because of concerns over provisions in it to cut off internet users who infringe copyright.

Members of the parliament felt internet access was a right of citizens.

Earlier this month, France’s constitutional court rejected a French law which implemented the “three strikes” rule.

The music industry is also known to be unhappy with the Digital Britain proposals announced by communications minister Lord Carter. It says that ISPs should engage in dialogue with customers but, if file-sharing of copyrighted material is not reduced by 70 per cent within a year, regulator Ofcom will be given powers to act.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...249188923.html





French Govt Reworks 'Three-Strikes' Law
Aymeric Pichevin

The "three-strikes" saga continues in France following the Constitutional Council's recent decision canceling the sanction side of the bill (Billboard.biz, June 10), with the government attempting to find a way around the legal ruling.

While the educational part of the bill, which allows the administrative authority Hadopi to issue warnings to infringers, had been passed into law, a short new bill on the sanction side of the anti-piracy system has now been approved by government ministers to be introduced as legislation.

The French government had wanted Hadopi to be able to cut off repeat offenders after two warnings. With the Constitutional council having stressed that only a judge can rule on such terminations of Internet access, the new bill intends to simplify procedures to avoid French courts, which would slow the sanction process.

Instead, a judge would be allowed to rule through an "ordonnance pénale" (penal order), a process that avoids a hearing involving the presence of the person accused of copyright infringement. Only in the case of an appeal would a court hearing take place.
Under the new proposals, the cutting of Internet access would also be added to the sanctions the judge would be entitled to apply in cases involving counterfeiting in relation to intellectual property. The law until now allowed fines of up to €300,000 ($418,000) and three years imprisonment.

The government is also believed to cautiously considering a system of automatic fines for users neglecting to protect their Internet connection in cases of file-sharing on that particular line. This would prevent any defence on the basis that someone else, such as a neighbor, had accessed the Internet connection.

This scheme - likely to be hugely controversial - would allow sanctions to be pronounced quickly in the case of infringement, and would not require proof that the Internet subscriber was the individual who actually illegally downloaded files.

The new draft now has to be discussed by the French Senate and National Assembly and discussions should start in July. If it is adopted by both chambers, it is likely that it would be challenged again by its opponents in front of the Constitutional council.

The bill is to be carried by the newly appointed minister of justice Michèle Alliot-Marie. French minister of culture Christine Albanel, who carried the "three-strikes" bill, left the government yesterday (June 24), as part of broader government reorganization decided by President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon.

Albanel has been replaced in her role by Frédéric Mitterrand, a writer and TV producer who was, since 2008, the director of the French arts academy in Rome, "Villa Medicis." He is the nephew of former French president François Mitterrand.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...27e7fb5c29205f





More BitTorrent Users Go Anonymous
Ernesto

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks are increasingly seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world. With pressure from anti-piracy outfits mounting on ISPs to police their networks and warn those who share copyrighted content, many file-sharers have decided to negate this by going anonymous.

The UK government has high hopes for the piracy warnings Internet providers will be required to send to copyright infringing customers. The warnings are designed to scare users away from illicit file-sharing, but when we asked our readers what action they would take upon receiving a warning letter from their ISP, many were unmovable. A massive 41% indicated that they would take steps to conceal their identity, while only 7% of our readers said they would obey the warning and stop sharing.

The results of the survey clearly showed that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

TorrentPrivacy, BitBlinder and The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator are just a few examples of services launched in the past year, targeted at concerned BitTorrent users. The goal of these and other anonymity applications is clear; hide the IP-address of the file-sharer so he can’t be tracked down while swapping files.

Currently in beta, The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator uses the same tech platform as the VPN service Relakks. For a few dollars a month it routes all your traffic through its servers, hiding your IP address. Ipredator is currently limited to 3000 users but according to the Pirate Bay team there are another 180,000 users on the waiting list, eager to join.

Running a VPN network for hundreds of thousands of hungry BitTorrent users will prove to be quite a challenge. The infrastructure and bandwidth required by a service targeted at file-sharers is significant, not to mention costly. This undoubtedly leads to problems.

The aforementioned Relakks saw its subscriptions double in just a month when the controversial Ipred law came into effect in Sweden this April. This surge in subscriptions led to to major problems with support and updates according to Relakks’s chairman Jan Erik Fiske.

Unlike more traditional VPN services, BitBlinder recently introduced a free solution. Instead of routing the traffic through a central server BitBlinder passes it on through multiple peers. Each peer in the chain only knows the IP address of the next person in the chain, not the original requester/sender.

A few days after its launch BitBlinder had signed up more than 30,000 new users. Right now registrations are temporarily closed to make sure everything runs smoothly for those already using the service, and while they iron out bugs. “We want to make sure it works, and is secure for everyone,” Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder told TorrentFreak.

Because of the increasing interest in anonymity, the Swedish ISP Alltele decided to offer a free service to conceal the IP-addresses of its customers. According to Alltele’s CEO Ola Norberg thousands of users have downloaded the application, which nearly killed the server it was running on.

These examples clearly show that the scare tactics of the entertainment industry are not going to work. There is no doubt that with every new anti-piracy initiative introduced, more and more users will find their way to one of the many anonymizing services out there.

Instead of stopping the pirates in their tracks the entertainment industry has simply inspired a new ‘industry’ worth millions of dollars.
http://torrentfreak.com/more-bittorr...nymous-090622/





How Thomas-Rasset Case Would Have Played Out, Had We Not Been in the Parallel Universe
Ray Beckerman

The normal world in which we litigators travel is that both sides are represented by lawyers, and there are a judge and jury to act as umpires, and cases are decided according to time tested principles of substantive and procedural law.

The RIAA cases, however, proceed in a parallel universe, where the plaintiffs are overlawyered, the defendants underlawyered, and the Courts misled by both. The courts have not received the benefit of the crystallization of issues that would normally result from the proper working of our judicial system, resulting in a “parallel universe” which, to an outside observer, might look like litigation, but is not.

So I thought to myself : “how would this case have played out in the real world, rather than in the parallel universe?”

Here's how:

Liability-Reproduction right

Plaintiffs failed to introduce an iota of evidence that Jammie Thomas-Rasset had made a single copy using Kazaa.
Result: directed verdict on reproduction right.

Liability-Distribution right

Plaintiffs failed to introduce an iota of evidence that
(1) any copy was disseminated to anyone other than MediaSentry
(2) any dissemination “to the public” occurred
(3) any sale, other transfer of ownership, rental, lease, or lending occurred.
All of the above are necessary components to the distribution claim.
Result: directed verdict on distribution right

Evidence-Plaintiffs' Experts

(1) Under Fed. R. Civ. P. and Fed. R. Evid., MediaSentry was an expert; therefore testimony barred for failure to provide expert witness disclosure;
(2) Alternatively, MediaSentry documents and testimony barred for failure to satisfy Daubert and Fed. R. Evid. 702;
(3) Jacobson testimony barred for failure to satisfy Daubert and Fed. R. Evid. 702

Evidence-Defendant's Expert

Since he was a rebuttal witness, Court was wrong to prejudge what defendant's expert could and could not testify about; the scope of his testimony could not be determined until after plaintiffs' case had been put in.

Assuming the Court denied or reserved decision on defendant's motion to dismiss at close of plaintiffs' case, we reach the following:

Statutory Damages-entitlement-jury instructions

The jury should have been instructed that a “work” is an album, and that multiple mp3's from one album constitutes a single “work”.
The jury should have been required to make findings as to (a) the date defendant commenced using an “online media distribution system” (Kazaa) and (b) the copyright registration effective date of each work they find was infringed.
The jury could have been instructed that no statutory damages could be awarded as to any work whose copyright registration effective date was subsequent to the date of defendant's commencement of use of Kazaa [or the Court could itself have made that determination based on the answers to the verdict form].

Statutory Damages-amount-jury instructions

There is long standing case law under the Copyright Act that statutory damages should bear a reasonable relationship to actual damages, and that even in commercial cases the usual multiple is from 2:1 to 4:1. There having been no evidence of defendant having been a distributor, and the actual damages being as a matter of law something less than the maximum wholesale price of 70 cents, the jury should have been instructed to award $750 per infringement it found to have been committed.

If the Court submits the case to the jury, and the jury awards $750 per infringed work, then the parties could litigate the constitutionality of that award in motion practice.

That's the way it would have played out in the real world.

I can dream, can't I?
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...31177282248660





RIAA Settles Suit Where Defendant Had No PC

RIAA member Universal Music Group this past weekend was forced to settle a music file sharing lawsuit it had filed against New Hampshire resident Mavis Roy. The label dropped its case after evidence provided by anti-piracy snooping firm MediaSentry was successfully challenged by the defense's expert witness Dr. Sergey Bratus. Among other key problems with the data, the defense pointed out that Roy didn't own a computer at all at the time of the supposed infringement and that it wasn't until a letter appeared that she was aware of any possible action.

Universal is likely to have settled the case to avoid creating a legal precedent that could be used to shoot down other MediaSentry-derived evidence and defeat the RIAA in similar cases.

Opponents to the RIAA's lawsuit tactics have argued that MediaSentry is not only an unauthorized investigator but that it has regularly misidentified file traders by making assumptions about the accuracy of IP addresses that have targeted the deceased, young children and those like Roy who didn't have computers. Such tracking systems can only see file sharing accounts used by certain IP addresses and doesn't account for those using others' connections, mistaken physical addresses or the person actually using the computer.

The RIAA has claimed it will stop suing individuals in favor of trying to force Internet providers to monitor and flag pirated material, but questions have been raised why new lawsuits have appeared and why other, sometimes questionable lawsuits have persisted since the formal change in policy.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...forced.settle/





EA's New Motto: Please Pirate Our Games... Er, Storefronts

EA doesn't mind piracy of Sims 3, as retail customers get the whole experience. In fact, please pirate the company's future games. Why? EA is selling a service, not a game. Consider everything that comes on the disc a demo; the real value is online.
Ben Kuchera

EA CEO John Riccitiello has a new message for people who want to pirate EA games: go ahead and do it. "By the way, if there are any pirates you're writing for, please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes..." he told IndustryGamers. "If they would just pirate lots of it I'd love them. [laughs] Because what's in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff." Welcome to the new EA, where you're not being sold a game, you're being sold a store.

Sims 3 was leaked weeks before the game was supposed to be released, along with a warning not to allow the game to connect online. The torrent file also urged people to buy the game if they liked it; a cynical person might say that it sounds like more of a marketing plan than a leak. Riccitiello even jokes that this was a "secret" marketing program for a large-scale demo, focused on Poland and China. He denies that the leak came from EA, though.

EA has some built-in protection against pirates when it comes to Sims 3. A large percentage of the content isn't even saved on the disc: you have to go online and activate the title to get the rest of the game. "A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people. So for the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community," Riccitiello explained. EA had sent me a copy of the game to check out, and while installing I noticed there was a 3GB update that needed to be installed to play.

EA thinks this is the secret to stopping—or at least curbing—piracy: games should be services, not products. Or at least products that should be selling other products. We already knew that EA would like to turn Tiger Woods into a subscription-based product, and Sims 3 is a game that wants you to constantly be creating, downloading, and buying new virtual items. The old business model was selling expansion packs, but that was too complicated: why not cut out the retailers and turn the game into its own store to sell the products?

"I'm a longtime believer that we're moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons.... So the point I'm making is, yes I think that's the answer [to piracy]." Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. "And here's the trick: it's not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it's the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know... So I think the truth is we've out-serviced the pirate."

The Sims is a great testbed for this approach: the audience trends more towards the casual, and the frequest expansion packs have historically sold very well at retail. This is an audience that's ready for microtransactions, and may actually welcome buying content at a trickle instead of spending $30 a throw for a new disc every few months. Battlefield Heroes is likewise going to be a free product with for-pay aesthetic updates, and EA recently turned its card-game-slash-strategy-title Battleforge into a free-to-play product where you can buy extra cards if you tire of the hand you're dealt in the initial download.

Some of these moves may be experiments, and Battleforge may have simply failed to sell, but EA is certainly interested in expanding the idea of how games are sold and consumed.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...torefronts.ars





Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us!

Kayak, the popular multi-airline airfare search engine, thinks Microsoft Bing’s new travel search engine looks so much like its own that it’s confusing Kayak users. The travel search company sent Microsoft a legal letter last week telling them to cut it out, Wired.com has learned.

Microsoft heralded its travel search as one of the key ways that its revamped search engine Bing bested Google by helping users make decisions, rather than just finding information.

Its search results for an itinerary presents users with sliders and check boxes on the left that let searchers change times and specify airlines. Search results reload instantly as boxes are clicked and sliders slid.

There’s no question Bing feels like Kayak. When Microsoft showed us the search engine under embargo, this reporter’s first comment upon seeing the travel page demo’d was “This looks like Kayak.” Our Bing review described its interface as “uncomfortably close to Kayak’s,” an observation that others made as well.

Kayak noticed too.

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

That’s careful language for “Microsoft copied our stuff wholesale.”

Microsoft’s Whitney Burk denies that there’s any copying going on.

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

Copyright law offers some protection for a website’s look-and-feel, but it’s not easy to prove.

Others noticed as well.

For instance, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s David Radin reviewed Bing, noting that the travel site “feels so much like Kayak that without asking, I assumed Microsoft licensed the technology from Kayak. Can you say ‘eerily similar’?”

Douglas Sims, the president of an IT consulting firm in Tennessee, noted the similarity too, inspiring him to write a short essay on his website:

Bing Travel is like Kayak in more ways than just the layout and visual design. The navigation, the automatic loading of results from different airlines (using ajax), even the results themselves are almost identical.

In an interview, Sims said he had no connection to Kayak but was moved to write about the comparison because he was a longtime admirer of Kayak’s interface. In early June, he had friends writing to tell him how cool Microsoft’s search was.

“I felt offended,” Sims said. “I thought Kayak did an awesome job, and now my friends are giving credit to someone else.”

He noted that Microsoft’s travel search engine includes the same shading on the gray sliding bars as Kayak’s site does.

“I design stuff like this sometimes,” Sims said. “I’ve always said I can’t just copy other people’s work, you can’t just rip it off, but in hindsight, is it fair game? Maybe I should do that.”

Readers at TechCrunch also had a healthy debate about whether Microsoft ripped Kayak off, or was just using the technology it bought when it purchased Farecast.

For its part, Kayak seems caught between indignation at seeing a giant company copy their hard work and flattery that their work at designing a user interface work is so good that someone would ape it.

They are also a company with fewer than 100 employees, while Microsoft employs far more lawyers than that.

Update: This post was updated Wednesday evening with comment from Microsoft.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06//kayak-bing/





Publishers Win Anti-Piracy Law Test Case

In the first case tried since the passage of Sweden’s anti-file sharing law in April, an ISP has been told by a Swedish court it must hand over information about its customers to five publishers looking into copyright violations.

If the company, broadband service provider Ephone, fails to comply with the order from the Solna District Court to hand over information about the users connected to certain IP-addresses, it will face 750,000 kronor ($95,000) in fines.

The court found that there is probable cause to believe that Ephone users were violating copyrights and that the company should pay the publishers’ court costs of 75,000 kronor.

When the new Swedish law came into force on April 1st, five publishers of audio books were the first copyright holders to file a case under the new measure.

The publishers, which include 15 authors who suspected their work has been spread illegally over the internet, demanded to know who owned a server suspected of containing some 2,000 audio book titles.

But Ephone refused to reveal who was using the IP-address in question, pointing out that a password was required in order to gain access to the works stored on the computer

As a result, the company argued, the sound files weren’t publicly accessible and thus the matter wasn’t a case of copyright infringement.

The publishers then sought a court order which would force Ephone to divulge information about the users tied to the IP-address.
http://www.thelocal.se/20274/20090625/





Greater Media Urges Listeners To Help Save Radio
FMQB

Greater Media has launched a new website, HelpSaveRadio.org, to educate listeners about the Performance Rights Act and what it means to free, local radio stations. The site offers information about the legislation and links where people can sign a petition opposing the Performance Rights Act, or write to their Congressperson in regards to the bill.

"Radio stations have always been free to listeners. We have never charged artists for airing their music," reads the website. "The effects of a performance tax would be catastrophic, potentially forcing stations out of business, causing additional job cuts in the radio industry, stifling airplay for new artists, reducing our ability to contribute to community organizations that rely on radio for support, and harming the listening public who depend on local radio."

Meanwhile, another website, CreativeDeconstruction.com, provides a forum for artists and bands who want to take the music industry into the future. An article on that site outlines "5 Reasons Why the Performance Rights Act is a Bad Idea," and one of them is that the bill would cripple local radio. It argues that royalties have killed off numerous music sites, so many radio stations will suffer the same fate.

The site also argues that the PRA will hurt independent artists because, "Adding an additional fee for every song played will only make stations even more unwilling to take risks on unproven acts. Independent acts have a hard enough time getting on major stations – they don’t need another hurtle." The site also points to payola as its third point, saying that, "The RIAA values the promotional benefits of radio airtime so much that it’s willing to break the law and pay out large amounts of cash to get it, yet it now wants the radio stations to start paying them for the privilege of providing this benefit." It doesn't make sense.

For its next point, CreativeDeconstruction points out that when other music platforms such as online streaming were required to pay performance royalties, "it had everything to do with controlling the reproduction of digital music – a problem not shared by terrestrial radio." And lastly, it says that the PRA doesn’t benefit musicians as much as the RIAA claims. "The problem here is that the royalties would be paid to performers and copyright owners, which in most cases are the major record labels. After the label takes its cut, there remains the issue of whether or not the rest of the fee will ever reach the artist," it says.

Earlier this month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers held a town hall meeting in Detroit to hear both sides of the argument about the Performance Rights Act, a bill that he sponsored. Many artists were on hand to support the legislation, such as Dionne Warwick, Sam Moore, hip-hop artist Rhymefest and Mary Wilson of The Supremes. On the opposing side were representatives from Greater Media Detroit stations WRIF-FM, WCSX-FM and WMGC-FM, Reverend Al Sharpton, VP/GM of Radio One Detroit Kathy Stinehour, CBS Radio Detroit Market Manager Debbie Kenyon, and WCHB morning host Mildred Gaddis.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1377537





Twitter Users Buy More Music: Report
Antony Bruno

A new NPD Group study finds that active Twitter users buy 77 percent more digital music downloads on average than non-users. Additionally, 12 percent of those who have bought music in the last three months also report having used Twitter, versus 8 percent of overall Web users.

"Based on their music-purchasing history, active Twitter users are simply worth more to record labels and music retailers than those who are not using Twitter," says NPD entertainment analyst Russ Crupnick.

A third of all Twitter user reported buying a CD in the prior three months, and 34 percent reported buying music digitally, compared to 23 percent and 16 percent for overall Web users. Another one-third of Twitter users listened to music on a social networking site, 41 percent via online radio and 39 percent watched music videos online. Overall, they are twice as likely than average Web users to visit MySpace Music and Pandora.

"Twitter has the potential to help foster the discovery of new music, and improve targeted marketing of music to groups of highly-involved and technologically savvy consumers, but it has to be done right," Crupnick said. "There must be a careful balance struck between entertainment and direct conversation on one hand, and marketing on the other. Used properly Twitter has the power to entertain -- and to motivate music fans to purchase more new albums, downloads, merchandise, and concert tickets."

(Editing by Dean Gooodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55N0M020090624





Variable iTunes Pricing a Moneymaker for Artists
Antony Bruno and Glenn Peoples

In April, soon after Apple gave labels the ability to set different prices for their songs on iTunes, every track on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" was raised to $1.29.

Some music fans complained about these price increases, and many technology executives and bloggers proclaimed that labels were making the wrong move. But while sales of individual tracks from "Dark Side of the Moon" dipped by 11%, album sales remained steady. And all sales combined generated about 12% more revenue in the six weeks after iTunes implemented variable pricing than they did in the six weeks before that.

These are the results labels were hoping for when Apple relented and began selling music at three price tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. They certainly put enough work into getting there: It took years of negotiation to get Apple to break its one-price-fits-all format.

Playing with pricing won't solve the music industry's biggest problem: Digital revenue is increasing too slowly to compensate for the decline of CD sales. But variable pricing will help labels bring in more money from online downloads, according to the results so far.

A Billboard analysis of Nielsen SoundScan data on February-May sales of hits and a sample of popular catalog songs shows that "Dark Side of the Moon" isn't an anomaly. While variable pricing made sales volume decline, higher prices compensate for that to create more revenue.

Not surprisingly, results vary. The demand for more popular tracks is less sensitive to higher prices, so sales don't decrease as much. Most less-popular tracks suffer a larger sales decline and see only marginal revenue gains. There are also notable, if isolated, examples of songs that sell so much worse at a higher price that they bring in less money overall.

The math is simple. So long as sales for higher-priced tracks don't fall more than 29%, labels take in more revenue from $1.29 tracks, after factoring in wholesale rates, distribution fees and mechanical royalties.

Sales of the weekly top 40 tracks -- most of which now have the higher wholesale rate -- fell about 11% in the six weeks after the launch of variable pricing. But retailer revenue from those tracks rose about 10% after the price hike. That means labels took in 20% more revenue for those songs.

"A $1.29 vs. 99 cents price point has not made a notable difference in consumers appetite for online music," Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield says. "On the album side, you've seen variable pricing for a while and it's not clear that it's had a notable negative impact, so I'm not sure why the single environment would be different."

Other factors surely influenced sales. A seasonal sales dip often takes place after the first quarter. It happened this year, too: Sales of all tracks, most of which have the same price, declined 5% during the six-week period following the introduction of variable pricing. The top 200 digital tracks dropped 8.5% during this time. Making the situation more complex, the price changes took place gradually. On April 7, 33 of the top 100 tracks on iTunes were priced at $1.29; by June 11, 72 of the top 100 had that price.

To measure the impact of price changes alone, Billboard examined more than 70 catalog tracks from popular acts with consistently strong sales -- Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Bon Jovi, Jack Johnson, Billy Joel, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sublime, Norah Jones, ABBA and others. The songs were chosen because they sell steadily but haven't seen spikes from TV exposure or media coverage. So looking at their sales should isolate the effect of price changes.

It's important to note that the size of Billboard's sample is too small to have statistical significance given the thousands of catalog songs sold on iTunes. But it offers a compelling picture of how variable pricing has helped labels so far.

In the six weeks after iTunes introduced variable pricing, the songs that Billboard looked at sold 20.9% less than they did during the previous six weeks. That's a much steeper drop than that of the most popular titles. By way of comparison, the top 40 tracks on Billboard's Hot Digital Songs chart declined only 10.8% in the same time frame. But even this deep drop in unit sales resulted in a net gain to the bottom line. Consumer spending on the catalog tracks dropped about 2% and net revenue to labels rose around 6%.

The revenue increase from those catalog tracks has only a fraction of the weight of the top 40 tracks. In a typical week, for example, the number one track in the country will sell many more copies -- sometimes twice as many copies -- as the combined total of all the catalog tracks in Billboard's sample. Billboard also looked at track sales from albums in which some or all tracks were raised to $1.29. The results varied but each example showed a decline in unit sales greater than the total market's 2% drop during the six-week period.

That's the forest. To really gauge the impact variable pricing can have on sales, one has to examine the trees. Individual results for specific artists show how careful labels have to be when they use their newfound pricing power.

Take Sugar Ray's 1999 hit "Every Morning." On the iTunes listing for the album "14:59," the song is priced at 99 cents; on "The Best of Sugar Ray" it costs $1.29. (Both are priced at 99 cents on Amazon.) During the six weeks after variable pricing started, sales of the $1.29 version dropped 41% compared with the four weeks before the price change.

Revenue from the 99 cent track increased 102%, suggesting that the price difference drove fans to the cheaper option. The decline in revenue from the more expensive version was roughly offset by the gains in the less expensive version. Overall, sales for the two tracks dropped nearly 17% and net revenue dropped by about 6%.

Expect similar fluctuations on individual tracks as the labels continue to experiment raising prices for different songs. The decision to raise the price of a song is "a mix of art and science," according to one label source, meaning that it's based on sales data and gut instinct. But label executives wouldn't say more about how those choices are made.

Some labels, including Warner Music Group and Nettwerk Music Group, as well as the digital distributor INgrooves, have used pricing analysis services like Digonex to help inform their decisions. So far, though, most variable pricing decisions have been made through a process more akin to throwing pasta against the wall to see if it sticks.

"For the first year or so the labels are looking at this to see how the market reacts," Gartner analyst Mike McGuire says. "It's real-time research, in effect. They need as much data as they can to try to understand where they go from here. I don't know that they have enough data to say whether this has worked or not at this point."

It will also take more time to determine what impact price changes might have on gift card sales. NPD Group estimates that about 40% of iTunes sales come from gift cards, which have set values. A teen with a $25 gift card is going to spend $25, whether that amount buys 25 tracks at 99 cents each or 19 at $1.29 each. So far, iTunes hasn't issued cards with new values, and it's too early to determine whether higher prices will lead parents to buy more valuable gift cards.

It's also not yet clear how variable pricing will affect publishers' revenue. While labels can make up for lower sale volume with higher wholesale rates, music publishers receive a fixed mechanical rate per download, regardless of price. Lower volume means less revenue. To them, lower sales volume means less money. And, of course, the biggest publishers are owned by the largest label groups.

So far the bulk of the analysis on iTunes' new pricing scheme has focused on the $1.29 tier. There's also the lower 69 cent price to consider. But just as pricing some tracks at $1.29 probably won't make iTunes users turn to illicit file-sharing, pricing them at 69 cents almost certainly won't convince file-sharers or fans of physical product to begin purchasing downloads. It may not even be the best way to get consumers to buy more music.

Labels have lowered prices on far more tracks than they made more expensive, according to multiple sources. But these changes are only starting to appear in iTunes.

Right now, finding those tracks is a hit-or-miss process. Labels have mostly lowered prices on slower-moving tracks and albums, some from acts that have other popular songs. But Billboard's analysis suggests, and label sources confirm, that lowering prices hasn't resulted in significant sales or revenue increases.

The 1971 Jackson 5 song "Maybe Tomorrow" now costs 69 cents, but it continues to sell between 60 and 90 copies per week, just as it did in February and March. Stevie Wonder's "If It's Magic" from "Songs in the Key of Life," also now 69 cents, sold fewer copies in May than in April or March. Nor did price cuts on all 10 tracks on Canned Heat's "One More River to Cross" result in any increase in volume.

So far, most significant sales increases have come from combining lower prices with promotions or making them part of a package. Universal Music Group Nashville lowered the price of six popular George Strait songs to 69 cents the same week CBS televised a Strait concert. That week track sales jumped 283% from the prior six-week average. The lower-priced tracks rose 334% while the tracks that stayed at 99 cents rose only 276%. Combined digital album sales for the three titles jumped 786%.

The same phenomenon can be seen on Amazon, which often drops the price of an artist's older albums on the day of a new release, then promotes the entire catalog on its home page.

"You need to set a price point where you're getting people to pay more for more music, as opposed to trying to extract an increasingly higher per-unit price," McGuire says.

Looking forward, the lowest price tier may also give labels the flexibility they need to develop digital products other than the album. For example, if a popular new single sells for $1.29, labels or retailers could identify four other songs from similar but unknown acts and sell them as a bundle.

Potentially, the combinations are endless. "The benefit of digital is that it gives you infinite ways of packaging content," Greenfield says. "The more the labels think about bundling in, the better."

This is one way that labels could increase digital sales, which in the past several years have begun to level off. Year-over-year growth in digital music sales has fallen from 147% in 2005 to 27% in 2008, according to SoundScan data. Through June 7 this year, track sales are up 14% from the same period in 2008. About 75% of iTunes consumers are repeat customers rather than new users, according to NPD Group. This won't make up for the big problem: Worldwide physical sales have fallen 52% in the last decade, according to the IFPI.

Simply increasing the price of music on iTunes won't make up for that decline. To do that, the music industry would need to increase digital revenue across the board, not just the part of it that comes from downloadable tracks.

Of the people who now buy music in any format, two out of three still buy CDs exclusively, and they are buying fewer of them, according to NPD Group. Those who do purchase digital music mostly buy it by the track -- which has left more lucrative album sales in decline as well.

"We're not going to have $14 billion in iTunes and Amazon sales no matter what we do," says NPD Group VP/senior industry analyst of entertainment Russ Crupnick. "There's still tens of millions of people who haven't tried the digital music model. Half of them have digital music players. Some of them use. We're not making the case for them to buy as many CDs as they used to and not making the case for them to buy anything from digital. Variable pricing is irrelevant."

This is where other new digital business models could come into play, such as Nokia's Comes With Music model and the kind of collective licensing being pioneered by Choruss, both of which would bundle the cost of music into other services or products. Both rely less on a revenue-per-unit model and more on revenue-per-user. Or "pricing the consumer versus pricing the content," as one label digital executive puts it. "We think the real story around price as it relates to the audience for digital music is with respect to the new business models that are user-based as opposed to wholesale price-based."

These efforts are still developing, of course. Variable pricing is here, and it's already responsible for a 10%-15% increase in revenue on average for affected tracks, according to label sources.

"With the business continuing to be so hit-driven, having the flexibility to price inventory online the way you do in the traditional world makes a lot of sense," Pali's Greenfield says. "Maximizing the profitability of digital through variable pricing is critical."

(Editing by Dean Gooodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55K0DJ20090621





Sirius XM Must Raise Prices to Pay Music Royalties
Greg Sandoval

Satellite radio provider Sirius XM is preparing to raise prices.

The Copyright Royalty Board has raised music royalty fees and Sirius will pass those costs on to customers starting next month.

In a letter to subscribers, Sirius CEO Joe Zarella said "Beginning on July 29, 2009, a 'U.S. Music Royalty Fee' of $1.98 per month for primary subscriptions and $.97 per month for multi-receiver subscriptions will be effective" the next time they renew their subscription.

Royalty rates have risen steadily since 2007 when the CRB established performance royalty rates for satellite radio. The rate jumped from 6 percent last year to 6.5 percent this year and will go up every year until 2012, when the rate will top out at 8 percent.

Sirius and XM promised the Federal Communications Commission they would not raise rates as a condition of the companies' merger, but the FCC did allow them to issue rate hikes to account for any increase in royalty costs.

In an FAQ posted on Sirius' site, the company states plainly that satellite radio providers are being charged fees that traditional radio stations aren't required to pay.

"Unlike terrestrial radio, both Sirius and XM are required to pay copyright music royalties to recording artists, musicians, and recording companies who hold copyrights in sound recordings," the company said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273078-93.html





Top 40 Faces New Digital Shake-Up
Ian Youngs

The Top 40 is facing a shake-up as chart bosses consider incorporating songs from music streaming sites.

Offering free, legal access to millions of tunes, online jukebox services like We7 and Spotify have taken off in 2009.

Users can listen to tracks without paying to own them, as they have had to with vinyl, tapes, CDs and downloads.

The Official UK Charts Company said it was "bound to" include streaming and subscription services at some point, but not for at least another year.

Because listeners do not pay per track - if at all - those plays would be likely to carry less weight than normal sales.

That would be a big departure from the way the the official singles chart has been compiled since it was launched in 1952.

WE7 ALL-TIME STREAMING CHART
1. Lady GaGa (above) - Poker Face
2. Tinchy Styder - Number 1
3. Flo Rida - Right Round
4. Taylor Swift - Love Story
5. Lady GaGa - Just Dance UK only. Up to 6 June

It has always been based purely on sales, with each individual purchase - whatever the format - treated equally.

But the streaming and subscription services may soon become too popular to ignore.

Spotify offers streamed songs for free with adverts, or without ads for a £9.99 monthly fee. It registered one million UK users in April - just two months after its public launch.

We7, which goes down the free, ad-funded route, is expected to pass the million mark in the coming days.

Services like Napster, HMV and Nokia give customers access to unlimited tracks for a monthly fee and Virgin Media has just announced a similar offering, with BSkyB expected to follow suit.

Official Charts Company managing director Martin Talbot told BBC News the charts had traditionally counted individual singles bought for permanent ownership.

"The key task that we've been getting to grips with over the past 18 months has been ensuring that post-download, and post-permanent ownership of music, we're also counting how consumers are consuming their music in other ways," he said.

"The charts have always been there as a popularity poll, as a means of identifying what are the hottest records of the moment.

UK SINGLES REVIVAL
2003 - 30,888,000 singles sold
2004 - 32,266,000
2005 - 47,882,000
2006 - 66,925,000
2007 - 86,562,000
2008 - 115,139,000 Source: Official Charts Company

"That's been relatively simple when people have bought stuff to keep forever. But that's going to become increasingly more complicated."

The charts have already come a long way since 2005, when the first downloads counted towards the Top 40. Now, 98% of all single sales are digital.

Mr Talbot said streams and subscription downloads would be integrated into the main chart when they become "a very big part of the way people consume music going forward" and fans were buying fewer tracks as a result.

"I'm sure it will come upon us quicker than we might anticipate but none of us really know when it will happen," he said. "I think ultimately it's bound to happen. But that could be five years, it could be 10 years, it could be 20 years."

There was currently no sign of a slow-down in single sales, Mr Talbot said. Some 115 million singles were sold last year - compared with a low point of 30 million in 2003. This year's total is expected to be 160 million.

Streams vs downloads

One big question if streams did count towards the charts would be how much weight they would carry.

"Knowing what a stream is worth compared to a purchase of a download, for instance, is very difficult to identify at the moment, but that's obviously going to be the next step," Mr Talbot said.

The advent of services like We7, Spotify and Imeem, on top of established sites like YouTube, MySpace and Last.fm, have led some analysts to predict that people may become less interested in owning music.

Instead, they may be happy to stream songs from huge catalogues, especially as technology makes it possible to use these services on the go.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/8109267.stm





Miley Cyrus Fights Scalpers with Paperless Tickets
Ray Waddell

As Miley Cyrus prepares to hit the road this fall, the spotlight is shining on what was once a relatively minor piece of the touring puzzle: the ticket.

Or in this case, the lack thereof. Cyrus' tour will use paperless tickets, and that's causing a commotion, mostly among the scalpers who infamously made so much money from her last tour.

The 2007-08 Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds trek grossed $55 million and sold about 1 million tickets to 70 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore. But it also provided outraged parents with a bitter introduction to secondary vendors, who scooped up tickets and sold them at huge markups. The resulting controversy made Cyrus the poster child for what many perceived as an out-of-control resale market.

Now Cyrus' fall tour will make history as the first arena-level trek to embrace paperless ticketing in an attempt to thwart resellers. As is the case with airlines, those who purchase the tickets must be on hand with their credit card to gain admission.

"The focus was, 'How do we take all the information we gathered last time out and do a better job of it?'" says Jason Morey, Cyrus' manager and president of Morey Management Group, an affiliate of Ticketmaster Entertainment's Front Line Management. "It was important to us to address the issue of demand. We thought that of every single option that was available out there, this was a really viable option, to go with the paperless ticketing."

Those associated with the tour say public feedback has been generally favorable and that tickets are selling well, with nearly 500,000 purchased already. The fact that they're not blowing out immediately as they did on the last tour is evidence that brokers aren't flooding the system, they say.

Meanwhile, secondary market players are crying foul, protesting that they're being shut out from buying Cyrus tickets, or at least hindered, and predicting entrance chaos, and a consumer backlash, at concerts.

Sean Pate, director of communications at the secondary market leader StubHub, says the number of tickets sold by resellers during the 2007-08 tour has been overstated. "There was a lot of misperception that brokers had gobbled all the available inventory and posted it on StubHub or anywhere else," he says. "The reality was that StubHub sold roughly 5%-6% (of seats) at any one of the venues she played in terms of the total seats in the arena."

Don Vaccaro, CEO of the secondary ticket aggregator Ticket Network, wonders aloud whether paperless ticketing might violate antitrust laws.

"Ticketmaster's actions are trying to restrain the secondary market from dealing in Miley Cyrus tickets and restraining consumers from being able to sell their rights to admission to that venue," Vaccaro says.

Morey disagrees. "Scalping is a really important issue to Miley," he says, "but really the focus is about giving the regular fan an opportunity to buy a really good ticket at face value."

Cyrus is not the first major touring act to turn to paperless ticketing. For AC/DC's North American tour last year, some 3,000-4,000 tickets per show were paperless. At a Metallica show in September at the O2 arena in London, all tickets were paperless. Both operations went smoothly, according to Ticketmaster chief technology officer Brian Pike.

"Most of the lines ran at roughly the same speed as a normal night," Pike says. "When people come with four tickets, it's actually sometimes faster than scanning four different pieces of paper. We think this technology has been well-tested and is ready for this challenge."

Chuck LaVallee, director of music relations for StubHub, begs to differ. "On AC/DC they were swiping cards and shoving fans through," he says. "If they didn't have time to check IDs on 3,000 tickets, they're not going to have time to check them on 18,000. I think the whole thing's a mess."

A Perfect Test Case

In many ways a Cyrus tour is the perfect test market for paperless ticketing. Not many 11-year-old girls have credit cards, but their parents do, and many of them will surely be on hand for the shows. "Not many parents would send a 10-year-old to Staples Center (in Los Angeles) and drop them off for a concert," AEG Live president Randy Phillips says.

The Cyrus tour was sold in three stages: a Miley World fan club presale Monday, an American Express presale Wednesday and the general public on-sale Saturday. Prices range from $39.50 to $79.50, with I Love All Access (a division of Front Line) premium seats in the first 25 rows with perks like merchandise and services selling for about $295.

"Nobody cares about (the add-ons), they just want their tickets in the first 25 rows," LaVallee says.

Forty-five shows put on sale have sold slightly fewer than 500,000 tickets. "This is what on-sales used to look like before brokers got into our business," says Debra Rathwell, senior VP at AEG Live, which is promoting the tour. "Now you're dealing with the public, the public has their own time that they go about doing things, and I think we're off to a fantastic start."

The fact that tickets didn't blow out is a sign that brokers aren't flooding the system, Rathwell adds. "I can tell you last time brokers went in with their machines and it was ugly," she says. "That had to be shut down and stopped this year. The good news is the best tickets in all of these venues are in the hands of the public."

But LaVallee thinks the fact that the tour didn't sell out immediately means one of two things. "Either Miley Cyrus is not as hot as they thought she was," he says, "or the fans have spoken and they don't like paperless."

StubHub isn't carrying any Cyrus tickets for "philosophical" reasons," LaVallee says.

"Our company prides itself on being able to fulfill any ticket we sell, and we guarantee our client base that they will always get what they want," he says. "We couldn't guarantee (that to) our customers and Miley Cyrus fans who chose to buy tickets on our site. I do believe, had the paperless tickets been transferable, we would have done a healthy business on it."

Resellers Still Active

Rathwell acknowledges that paperless ticketing hasn't completely shut down resellers, who can buy more than one ticket and then accompany their buyers to a venue. "I saw some of their postings," she says. "$2,600? Get a life. I don't think the big companies have postings, but you're always going to drag around the dregs."

LaVallee argues that paperless ticketing hasn't prevented brokers from buying up the same number of tickets as they normally would.

"The only thing this is going to do is shore up the local broker, take the business right back into the dark alleys, increase the amount of fraud," he says. "Joe Blow Broker in St. Louis doesn't have a 'fan protect.'"

And how would this Joe Blow Broker get his paperless tickets? "They're buying a crappy seat in the upper bowl and then some good seats below to walk people in," LaVallee says, adding that the potential for fraudulent tickets increases "exponentially" without a company like StubHub involved.

Fans who want to avoid fraud should go to Ticketmaster or the primary ticketer if it's not a Ticketmaster building, Morey says. "We've made this the most safe experience for a consumer to go to Ticketmaster, buy a face-value ticket and not deal with the chance that you go to a secondary site and either buy a fake ticket or meet somebody in a parking lot," he says.

In terms of pulling this off, it certainly can't hurt that the management company and ticketing company in question share an owner.

"There's definitely synergy," Morey says. "Ticketmaster wants to please us just like they want to please their other clients. This isn't something Ticketmaster tried to shove down my throat, this is something that I requested. They've literally moved mountains to try to make this right for this tour."

(Editing by Dean Gooodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...55K0CX20090621





Björn from ABBA: There's Probably No God

"Freedom from indoctrination ought to be a basic human right for all children," argues ABBA star Björn Ulvaeus in a passionate plea for Sweden to rethink its policy on faith-based schools.

Without thinking too much about it at the time, when I wrote the lyrics for ABBA's songs the message I wished to convey tallies well with campaigns launched recently by humanist organisations in the UK, US and Australia:

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Earlier this month the Swedish Humanist Association (Humanisterna) launched a similar campaign. And in light of the growing influence of religious schools in Sweden, the campaign could hardly be more timely.

Unfortunately the European Convention on Human Rights doesn't permit the banning of independent religious schools. Under current Swedish law, independent schools may adopt a "confessional direction" as long as they stick to the official national curriculum and adhere to the education system's "general goals and values".

A lot of independently managed schools (friskolor) negotiate this balancing act well, but there are also a lot of schools that don't.

If it wished, Sweden could choose to refrain from using tax money to fund these independent schools. There is nothing in the European Convention on Human Rights that prevents such a course of action. But Sweden has chosen to go the other way.

So do the legal guidelines outlined above ensure that pupils at religious schools are educated in an environment that does not favour any one ideology or religion above all others? No, of course they don't.

And are not curious, questioning citizens one of society's most valuable assets? "Of course they are", is the ringing response you will receive from the majority of Swedes, of this I am convinced. And these are the sort of citizens we want our children to become.

In a recent debate with principals from two religious schools I was accused of being driven by emotions masquerading as reason. But if we hypothesise for a moment that they are right, then surely the same is true of them. And if that's the case, who should we listen to?

It is precisely to avoid such conflicts that schools should provide a safe haven from all ideologies, with the obvious codicil that children should learn as much about as many of them as possible from an objective point of view.

It's hardly controversial to opine that people in favour of religious schools are themselves believers. Religion has a natural place in their homes and their children grow up with it.

And that's fine. But does this not make it all the more important for schools to be free of religious influence? Children need to be able to meet and get to know their peers on neutral ground. Religions by their nature always run the risk of creating an "us against them" scenario. However tolerant we believe ourselves to be, there is always a reason people consider their own religion superior to all others.

One of the school system's most important functions is to create a feeling of community, where all are treated on equal terms regardless of race, class or creed. Society's way of treating children with the respect they deserve is to combat by all available means any sense of an "us against them" divide.

In my debate with the school principals, they said that societies which had not encompassed different ideologies and beliefs had never been successful. And they're absolutely right, which is why we have a secular and democratic system of government.

It is important to guarantee people the right to believe whatever they wish. But people should be free to choose their own ideology or belief system when they have become old enough to think for themselves.

Nobody should have to form an opinion on matters of such weight before they are ready to size up the arguments. Above all, children should be kept away from anything that bears even the slightest whiff of indoctrination. In fact, freedom from indoctrination ought to be a basic human right for all children.

A religious education makes it more difficult for children to form their own views on the world. It puts obstacles in their way that not all are capable of overcoming.

The headmasters also put it to me that there were plenty of famous free-thinking, prominent figures who had gone to Christian schools. But really this just annihilates their own argument. These people learned to be free thinkers despite, not because of, their Christian schooling.

One of them is particularly topical this year, 150 years after the publication of 'On the Origin of Species'. Charles Darwin may have gone to a very Christian school but it didn't prevent him from coming up with the "best idea in the world". Nor did it prevent him from abandoning his faith. Because, faced with the facts at his disposal, Darwin reached the same conclusion as the Swedish Humanist Association: There's probably no God.
http://www.thelocal.se/20268/20090625/





Indie Rockers, 90210
Jennifer Bleyer

THE teenagers streamed in by the dozen past the electric gate, the 12-foot-high manicured hedges and the gleaming Lexus sedans in the driveway. They made their way to the backyard, where a makeshift performance space had been set up between the tennis court and the rose garden.

Hugging one another and milling around in skinny jeans and Converse high-tops, they took drags from their cigarettes.

It was a clear evening on a recent Friday. Behind a sprawling home in Encino, a grassy Los Angeles neighborhood on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, the gathering of nearly 300 teenagers included students from many of the area’s elite private schools — Buckley, Oakwood, Marlborough, Crossroads, Wildwood, Campbell Hall — and more than a few were Hollywood offspring.

The well-heeled children of Los Angeles are often derided as a lacquered tribe consumed with shopping and status, a stereotype sustained by the likes of the recently revived “Beverly Hills, 90210” franchise. But a different scene has been thriving here lately, composed of kids in thrift-store threads churning out homespun indie music and flocking to shows often held in one another’s backyards and living rooms.

“It certainly seems to be a phenomenon over the last three or four years,” said Linda Lichter, an entertainment lawyer whose two musician sons graduated from Crossroads. “I have a whole bunch of friends and clients whose kids are out there playing in bands. Kids aren’t responding to TV or movies anymore. Music is what’s cool.”

IN the summer, the scene coalesces at house shows like the one in Encino, a pastoral setting that made the event resemble a junior version of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Attendees chipped in $2 to watch a half-dozen acts, including a solo electric bassoonist and an experimental folk-punk band, Slaying Chickens.

Tallulah Willis, the youngest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, staked out a prime space close to the stage. Keely Dowd, the daughter of Jeff Dowd, a producer on whom the Coen brothers based the main character of “The Big Lebowski,” ambled past the pool with a friend.

Emma Tolkin and Taylor Thompson, both 18 and with an entertainment industry pedigree, stood in front of the crowd in cute gauzy dresses with a guitar and bass slung around their respective necks.

“This song is called ‘Shootin’ With Rasputin,’ and my grandfather wrote it,” Ms. Tolkin announced. They launched into a catchy tune with honey-voiced harmonies, recasting lyrics that had been written by Ms. Tolkin’s late grandfather, Mel Tolkin, the head writer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”

Indie music has a long and storied history in Southern California, dating back to the punk scene that flourished in Orange County in the late 1970s, and continuing today at popular all-age sites like the Smell in downtown Los Angeles and Pehrspace near Echo Park.

But to veterans of this scene and the latest crop of show-going kids, elements of the city’s music landscape have lately been skewing even younger and emanating from tonier enclaves, like Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Hancock Park.

And unlike other parents who may caution against pursuing rock ‘n’ roll careers, especially as the record industry crumbles, parents here can be encouraging and even aggressive about guiding and promoting their children’s bands. Ringing up their professional contacts and ferrying gear to gigs, they engage in helicopter parenting for the future rock-star set.

Hudson Franzoni, 17, started drumming five years ago. To encourage his development, his parents built him a studio at their home in the Malibu hills.

His father, David Franzoni, a screenwriter whose credits include “Amistad” and “Gladiator,” has invited agents to watch Hudson’s bands play in the family’s backyard, with its panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. He and his wife, Nancy, have also arranged for their son to continue his drumming lessons during their summers in Italy and while on location for movie shoots.

“I don’t want Hudson to wake up someday and say, ‘What happened to that thing I dreamed about when I was a kid?’ “ Mr. Franzoni said.

As involved as they are, the Franzonis complain about other parents of aspiring musicians. Mrs. Franzoni recounted an incident two years ago when some Malibu parents auditioned Hudson as the drummer for a band they were assembling for their child.

“It was full-on pedal to the metal,” Mrs. Franzoni recalled. “They hired a manager, hired another guy for recording, had band rooms, recording rooms. But they wanted us to sign contracts saying he would stay with the band after high school, no college, and he would only play their music. Hudson said ‘This isn’t what I want to do.’ ”

Hudson joined another band, but after it broke up, the group insisted on keeping songs in its repertory that Hudson had helped write. Now, the family’s personal lawyer copyrights every song Hudson writes and regulates what he puts on his MySpace page.

“It gets strange in L. A.,” Mrs. Franzoni said. “You’re a leg up to a kid in Nebraska, but it’s extremely pressurized with all the agents and managers. I’ve been heartbroken by the cutthroat competition.”

Pulled strings or not, some musicians with industry connections have attained measures of success lately.

Z Berg, the willowy 22-year-old lead singer for The Like who also attended Crossroads School, is the daughter of the music producer Tony Berg and niece of Jeff Berg, the head of International Creative Management. The band, whose two other members, Charlotte Froom and Tennessee Thomas, also have parents in the music industry, was signed to Geffen Records in 2004.

And Michael Shuman, the bassist for Queens of the Stone Age who went to Campbell Hall, is the son of Ira Shuman, a producer of “Night at the Museum” and the new “Pink Panther” films. The band is signed to Interscope Records and performs its psychedelic-tinged hard rock around the world.

But many of those flocking to house shows in Los Angeles shrug over such associations. Mostly college bound and unfettered by the worldly concerns that usually occupy musicians struggling to make it, they are free to indulge their whims, an impulse that eclipses the desire for broader recognition.

As children being raised in a town obsessed with celebrity and success, their form of rebellion, it often seems, is the feverish generation of art for its own sake in a scene that remains below the radar.

“I guess that growing up around Hollywood gave me a general sense that success in show business isn’t that far out of reach,” said Ms. Tolkin, whose father, Michael Tolkin, wrote “The Player” and other films and novels. “But I don’t want to feel like a sellout. I like the D.I.Y. aspect of this. I like that it’s just me and Taylor playing music.”

AT the Encino show, she and Ms. Thompson ran through their set of poppy, three-chord driven songs with sweet, sincere lyrics about friendship, science, bicycles, sleeping bags and the weather.

Many of their teenage fans sat on the ground with legs crossed, singing along like eager kindergartners. When the young women fumbled over a song, they giggled, pushed their hair from their faces and started over with the crowd’s encouragement.

Offstage, their talk was not about their rock-star ambitions but about their coming high school graduations, their college plans for the fall, and their latest musical obsessions (“I’ve been having a love affair with Scandinavian pop and bluegrass,” Ms. Tolkin gushed).

As night fell, lighted cigarettes and cellphone screens flickered on the lawn like fireflies. People drifted into the guesthouse, where three young artists had built an installation out of old car parts and a smoke machine. Others swung on a swing set and applauded loudly as the last act of the night, a raucous nine-person juggernaut called Limetree Warehouse, took the stage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/fa...1rockkids.html





Rainbows All Over Your Blues
Jack

Ok geezers actual and wannabee, "Woodstock69" is on the air. Re-live your spent youth as you wallow in the sound.

And dig it: it’s less than two months before the big 4-0. New York State Thruway's closed, man!





Spinal Tap Isn't Tapped Out Yet

The faux metal band that sprung forth from Rob Reiner's 1984 'mockumentary' is back with a new album (its first in 17 years) and a one-off 'world tour.'
Steve Appleford

The rock stars in the room have been at this all day. Since 11 a.m., the laughable, mostly fictional heavy-metal trio Spinal Tap has been hard at work, making the usual wig adjustments and celebrating the release of the band's first album in 17 years.

First there was a live performance and some preposterous chitchat on "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" and now more interviews and a quick nighttime photo shoot. The photographer observes the musicians' scowling, mildly bewildered faces as they pose at a Universal City hotel.

"Nice," he says approvingly.

"We don't do nice," says the tall singer with a British accent, who calls himself David St. Hubbins (more commonly known as American actor Michael McKean). "Nice is for the Jonas Brothers."

Bassist Derek Smalls (a.k.a. Harry Shearer) raises a triumphant heavy-metal fist toward the lens, and lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) watches blankly in his leather jacket and shiny red sneakers. The day isn't over.

"If I could get a rubber doughnut to sit on," says St. Hubbins, looking at his chair, "that would be great."

"You mean," Tufnel asks, "besides the one in your trousers?"

The exchange is a typical moment of ridiculous, overlapping improvisation that Guest, McKean and Shearer have periodically brought to life since the 1984 release of "This Is Spinal Tap," the Rob Reiner-directed skewering of rock 'n' roll excess and general cluelessness.

At moments like this, the three humorists remain in character as their Spinal Tap alter egos, as they do even backstage on Spinal Tap tours. The new album, "Back From the Dead," was recorded in January at the Village Studios in Los Angeles. It was released last week on the band's Label Industry Records, with 19 tracks, a DVD interview disc and an elaborate foldout diorama of the musicians as action figures.

Among the newer songs is "Warmer Than Hell," a climate change anthem written for the band's performance at the Live Earth concert in 2007, where St. Hubbins introduced the lyrics: "Satan sat in Surrey / sweating like a pig. / He said, 'Is this just a fluke / Or maybe something big?' "

Fans will recognize many songs ("Big Bottom," "Stonehenge," "(Funky) Sex Farm") from the film, recorded in a studio for the first time, sometimes with such guest players as John Mayer and Steve Vai.

"We said, 'Why don't we make these tracks sound as best they can be?' " says Tufnel, "with us controlling it, with loudness, sonic integrity."

"It's just an ability to have these songs enjoyed the way they were meant to be enjoyed," says Smalls, "with royalties flowing to us."

The band's last album was 1992's "Break Like the Wind." A reunion was unexpected this many years later.

"We went in the studio and cut 23 songs in six days," says CJ Vanston, longtime keyboardist for the band and producer of "Back From the Dead." "That's what people don't know about these guys -- what really solid musicians they are, how creative they are musically."

Guest is the acclaimed director of a series of improvisational comedy films, from 1996's "Waiting for Guffman" to 2006's "For Your Consideration." McKean is a busy stage and film actor, appearing in Woody Allen's "Whatever Works," released last week. And Shearer voices several recurring characters on "The Simpsons," hosts his long-running "Le Show" on KCRW-FM (89.9), writes books and more.

But fans keep asking about Spinal Tap, 25 years after the hit mockumentary. (Smalls calls it "docu-ganda.") They just completed a 30-city "Unwigged & Unplugged" tour, appearing onstage as themselves to perform songs from "Tap," the 2003 folk music parody "A Mighty Wind" and other film-music projects.

The trio plans a one-night-only "world tour" at London's Wembley Stadium on June 30. They promise to be loud as always.

"We wanted it to be a painful experience on some level," says St. Hubbins of the Spinal Tap mission. "Painful not emotionally but physically painful and difficult to stomach."

Adds Tufnel, "At the end of the day, people thank us for that pain. At the end of the show, there's a look on their face -- it's a glazed look, but it's a good glazed."

"It's similar to enhanced interrogation. Audio-boarding," St. Hubbins suggests. "I have heard people yell, 'I give up.' They'll tell you anything you want to know."

"That was me, actually," says Smalls.

The Tap experience now extends to players of the Rock Band video game. Four Spinal Tap songs, including the previously unavailable "Saucy Jack" (from the band's unfinished musical about Jack the Ripper) became available to download for use in the game last week.

"I think it's very important for kids these days to learn to fake it," says St. Hubbins of the game. "It's very important in business, in relationships -- "

"Sex," interjects Tufnel.

"Authenticity has been proved wanting as a strategy," says Smalls.

"So we're glad to lend our services to help them learn how to completely [B.S.] their way through anything in life," St. Hubbins goes on. "But I would rather kids play this game with a guitar than a shooting game, blowing away the zombies."

Smalls agrees. "We don't get any royalties for that."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...tory?track=rss





Paramount Bets Its Summer Largely on One Producer
Michael Cieply

On Tuesday, Lorenzo di Bonaventura was in Moscow. Before that, it was Amsterdam, then Rome. And by Friday, he was back here, to prep for a Westwood film premiere, even as management at his home base, Paramount Pictures, was in disarray again.

So it went last week for Mr. di Bonaventura, a Hollywood producer who has been circling the globe with an unusual load: Paramount’s entire summer movie schedule.

One step ahead of the disappointing grosses for his latest film — “Imagine That,” which managed just $5.5 million at the box office for Paramount on its opening last weekend — Mr. di Bonaventura spent the turmoil-filled week abroad promoting his next, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

That one is to open Wednesday, from Paramount and DreamWorks, in association with Hasbro. Six weeks later comes “G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” again from Mr. di Bonaventura and Paramount, this time with Hasbro and Spyglass Entertainment.

Apart from a small comedy in mid-August, “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard,” from the Paramount Vantage specialty unit, the three films are Paramount’s total output until Oct. 2. That is when the studio, owned by Viacom, is scheduled to release “Shutter Island,” a drama directed by Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead.

While it is certainly rare, and potentially risky, to trust so much to one producer (who partners with other producers on each film), it may also be a sign of the changing times in Hollywood. Studios have trimmed their release schedules and cut back on exclusive deals with producers, but the winnowing has bolstered the position of gatekeepers like Mr. di Bonaventura and his counterpart J. J. Abrams at Paramount, or Jerry Bruckheimer at Disney.

Meanwhile, Mr. di Bonaventura’s return last week coincided with a management shake-up, not the first, at Paramount. Late Friday, John Lesher and Brad Weston, two of the studio’s top film executives under chairman Brad Grey, were ousted and offered producing deals.

That left the vice chairman, Rob Moore, and the former DreamWorks executive, Adam Goodman, now president of the Paramount movie group, in control of a film operation that has been struggling to get its footing for the last several years.

Mr. Grey became more involved with film production recently, as he moved to whittle the executive team and step up progress on projects for 2011. In an e-mail message on Saturday, Mr. Grey pointed to successes like “Star Trek,” but said: “We knew our production team was top heavy and in need of streamlining.”

That Mr. di Bonaventura, amid the changes, should be in the middle of three successive films for one studio during Hollywood’s peak season is remarkable in a business in which release schedules have shrunk and opportunity has diminished.

“I work at it seven days a week,” said Mr. di Bonaventura, who spoke during a breather in his office on Paramount’s lot on Friday, shortly before the studio announced its realignment.

But the confluence also sheds light on the inner workings at Paramount. Mr. Grey and his executives — having trimmed producer deals and staff, while parting ways with a DreamWorks executive team led by Stacey Snider and Steven Spielberg — began tapping Mr. di Bonaventura, a consummate insider who had seemed a candidate to run the studio back in 2005, when Mr. Grey, a talent manager, instead was appointed to the top job.

Six years ago, Mr. di Bonaventura was squeezed out as executive vice president of Warner Brothers’ worldwide motion picture group in a power play gone awry. Among other things, he protested his boss’s backing for “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” which starred the same Eddie Murphy who failed to attract an audience to “Imagine That.”

Out of Warner, Mr. di Bonaventura quickly signed on to a Paramount producing deal. By 2007, he was running hot, racking up credits on three Paramount films: “Stardust,” “Shooter” and “Transformers,” the last of which took in $708 million at the worldwide box office and helped lift the studio to first position among domestic distributors.

Many in Hollywood describe Mr. di Bonaventura, 52, as a kind of shadow adviser to a Paramount staff whose studio experience was thinner than his own. He dismisses that notion, but acknowledges a bond based on his executive background. “I understand the language of a studio,” Mr. di Bonaventura said.

This summer’s hat-trick was set up in 2007, as Hollywood was scrambling to fill its future schedule in anticipation of a threatened writers strike. “Imagine That,” then titled “Nowhereland,” was shot in the fall of that year, just as the writers’ three-month walk-out was getting under way.

Originally scheduled for release last September, the film was instead held until this June, partly to set it apart from “Meet Dave,” a Murphy film that did poorly for Fox a year ago. Mr. Grey also put it under the Nickelodeon name, to help build up Viacom’s internal brands as the DreamWorks team departed.

While shooting “Imagine That” in Los Angeles, Mr. di Bonaventura and Paramount were also rushing to find scripts for movies that could be prepped during the strike, so that this summer’s schedule would not be left empty.

On the eve of the walkout, which began Nov. 5, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the first “Transformers” film, delivered an outline that was used by the director Michael Bay and others to begin laying out the current “Transformers” film.

Meanwhile, Mr. di Bonaventura had joined Paramount executives in a behind-the-scenes struggle to keep “G. I. Joe” — which, like “Transformers,” was based on a Hasbro toy line — from slipping off to a competitor.

According to Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief executive, Mr. di Bonaventura had for years been trying to develop a film based on the military-themed toys. But Paramount’s rights were expiring, and both Warner and Legendary Pictures — the team behind “The Dark Knight” — were pursuing it.

To have lost “G. I. Joe” would have been a spectacular disappointment to Paramount’s Mr. Weston: his father, Stanley, was a toy designer who had brought the original G. I. Joe idea to Hasbro, Mr. Goldner said.

To keep the project, Paramount agreed to join Mr. di Bonaventura in a deal that pushed it into production in February of last year, with Stephen Sommers directing, on a schedule that overlapped with the “Transformers” shoot.

Mr. di Bonaventura thus got his summer lineup — as did the William Morris Agency, which represented the directors and others on all three of his films.

In the immediate run-up to summer, Paramount had both a major hit, with “Star Trek,” and a miss, with “Dance Flick.”

But with the demise of “Imagine That,” Mr. di Bonaventura and his studio could use hits from the next two.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” has the advantage of a strong predecessor, but “G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is the start in what the studio hopes will be a lucrative new franchise series. Like the original “Transformers,” the recent rebooting of “Star Trek” and other films based on vintage products and television shows, it will have to overcome inevitable skepticism from hard-core fans.

Brian Savage, director of Fun Publications, which operates “G. I. Joe” collectors’ conventions, said such fans are not completely convinced yet. “There’s mixed emotion,” Mr. Savage said last week.

But Mr. di Bonaventura overcame similar doubts two years ago among fans of the “Transformers” toy line by giving them a little more than they expected.

By August, in any case, he will be deep into the next round. Only days ago, Mr. di Bonaventura finished shooting a spy thriller called “Salt” with Angelina Jolie in New York and Washington.

It is set for release next summer — by Sony Pictures, though, not Paramount.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/bu...22lorenzo.html





Sandra Bullock Tops Box Office After 10 Years

Sandra Bullock achieved her first No. 1 movie in 10 years at the weekend box office as moviegoers across the United States and Canada said yes to "The Proposal," which also marked her biggest opening.

The Walt Disney Co romantic comedy sold an estimated $34.1 million worth of tickets during the three-day period beginning June 19, the company said on Sunday.

"It definitely met and exceeded our expectations," said Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Group. "In a summer with a lot of sequels, it's always nice to have an original movie."

"The Proposal" also earned $10 million from 10 foreign markets, with No. 1 bows in Australia ($3.3 million) and Russia ($2.8 million) leading the way.

Bullock last went to No. 1 in North America with the 1999 film "Forces of Nature," which co-starred Ben Affleck. Her previous best opening was $17.6 million for her most recent film, "Premonition," in March 2007.

The 44-year-old actress stars as a book executive who fakes an engagement to her lowly assistant (Ryan Reynolds) to avoid deportation to her native Canada. The laughs ensue when she meets his parents, with "Golden Girls" veteran Betty White stealing the show. Anne Fletcher ("27 Dresses") directed. Disney declined to reveal the budget.

Critics' reviews were mixed, but exit surveys were strong, Disney said. Men accounted for 37 percent of the audience, a surprisingly large turnout for a romantic comedy.

Its reign likely will be short-lived, though, with "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" opening worldwide on Wednesday through Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures.

"Hangover" Persists

After two weekends at No. 1, "The Hangover" slipped to No. 2 with $26.9 million. The hit bachelor-party comedy now has banked $152.9 million, according to Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros. Pictures.

The only other new release in the top 10 was the Jack Black prehistoric comedy "Year One," which came in at No. 4 with $20.2 million, in line with the expectations of its distributor, Sony Corp's Columbia Pictures.

The $60 million film, from "Groundhog Day" director Harold Ramis, stars Black and Michael Cera ("Juno") as hunter-gatherers banished from their primitive village.

Just ahead of it, at No. 3, was Disney's Pixar-produced cartoon "Up" with $21.3 million. It has earned $224.1 million after four weekends, surpassing the $223.8 million lifetime total of Pixar's 2008 Oscar-winning smash "WALL-E."

Zoradi said he expected "Up" to pass 2004's "The Incredibles" ($261 million) to become the second-biggest Pixar film after 2003's "Finding Nemo" ($340 million). Comparative data are not adjusted for inflation.

Rounding out the top five was Columbia's "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" with $11.3 million. Denzel Washington and John Travolta star in the hijacking thriller, which has earned $43.3 million after 10 days.

Director Woody Allen's 40th film, "Whatever Works," starring "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, earned $281,000 from nine theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The best comparison is with his 2005 comeback, "Match Point," which opened to about $400,000 in eight theaters on its way to $23 million. "Whatever Works" was released by Sony art house unit Sony Pictures Classics.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Vicki Allen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...55I0HG20090621





Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Peter Bradshaw

Michael Bay, that prince of unsubtlety, royal rejecter of nuance and regal repudiator of light-and-shade, has returned with another of his mega-decibel action headbangers, which, in a genially inclusive spirit, was listed in this paper's summer movie guide. I found it at once loud and boring, like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan. And at two and a half hours, it really is very long.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Release: 2009
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 149 mins
Directors: Michael Bay
Cast: Hugo Weaving, John Turturro, Josh Duhamel, Julie White, Kevin Dunn, Matthew Marsden, Megan Fox, Rainn Wilson, Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson

Once again, we are in the world of the Transformers, and again the star is Shia LaBeouf: allegedly a Tom Hanks for the future. This movie franchise is based on a branded toy manufactured by Hasbro: basically, cars that can transform themselves, with much whirring and clanking, into vast, ungainly and incredibly dull robots. The good ones are the Autobots and they are on our side; the bad ones are the Decepticons, defeated in the first movie, but now intent once more on crushing Earth. For about two-thirds of this mind-frazzlingly dull film, we are led to believe that the "fallen" of the title refers to this resurgent army. But then we find out it kind of means something else, and the storyline completely transforms itself into something even more boring than it was originally.

As ever, Bay makes it clear that his true love is not really the Transformer toys, but the grown-up toys: military hardware. The Autobots are stationed on the island military airbase of Diego Garcia in the Indian ocean and there are lots of shaven-headed army guys striding around. Diego Garcia is a British territorial possession leased to the US army, and so in the spirit of the Special Relationship, some Brit soldiers are also, briefly, allowed on the screen.

Bay has a great love of flashy effects, stroboscopic editing and loud crashes; he famously calls his cinematic technique "fucking the frame". That phrase might be brutal, but it's accurate. And there's no doubt about it: he really has given the frame a right old seeing-to this time. Bay has turned up at the frame's flat with some unguent massage oils, scented candles and a hundredweight of Viagra. It isn't long before the headboard of the frame's bed is crashing repeatedly against the wall, while the frame gazes up at the ceiling ... and I think the frame is faking it.

Because this film really is quite staggeringly uninteresting. The loud explosions - so densely packed as to resemble a 150-minute drum roll - are the only things keeping you awake. While the Transformers were clanking noisily around, my mind wandered and I found myself thinking about Hazel Blears, swine flu and whether Waitrose was going to take over all the empty Woolworths buildings.

The cherry on this cake of direness is the performance of Megan Fox, playing LaBeouf's sultry girlfriend - a performer so poutingly wooden she makes Jordan look like Liv Ullmann. You'll get better acting and superior entertainment at a monster truck rally.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/...ox-michael-bay





Soldiers on a Live Wire Between Peril and Protocol
A. O. SCOTT

“The Hurt Locker,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a script by Mark Boal, is the best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq. This may sound like faint praise and also like a commercial death sentence, since movies about that war have not exactly galvanized audiences or risen to the level of art. The squad of well-meaning topical dramas that trudged across the screens in the fall of 2007 were at once hysterical and noncommittal, registering an anxious, high-minded ambivalence that was neither illuminating nor especially entertaining. And the public, perhaps sufficiently enervated and confused by reality, was not eager to see it recreated on screen.

So let me put it another way, at the risk of a certain cognitive dissonance. If “The Hurt Locker” is not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car. The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. Ms. Bigelow, whose body of work (including “Point Break,” “Blue Steel,” “Strange Days” and “K-19: The Widowmaker”) has been uneven but never uninteresting, has an almost uncanny understanding of the circuitry that connects eyes, ears, nerves and brain. She is one of the few directors for whom action-movie-making and the cinema of ideas are synonymous. You may emerge from “The Hurt Locker” shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking.

Not necessarily about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war, mind you. The filmmakers’ insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well. “The Hurt Locker,” which takes place in 2004 (it was filmed mostly in Jordan), depicts men who risk their lives every day on the streets of Baghdad and in the desert beyond, and who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there.

The filmmakers, perhaps out of loyalty to their characters, are similarly reticent. But within those limits, “The Hurt Locker” is a remarkable accomplishment. Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces.

Her focus is on Delta Company, an Army unit whose job is to detect and defuse — or carefully detonate, it all else fails — the I.E.D.’s that seem to pop up everywhere, like mushrooms in the rain. Some of the devices are brutishly simple, others fiendishly elaborate, but each one lays the groundwork for a cruel and revealing test of character.

And much as Ms. Bigelow excels at setting up and cutting together these live-wire moments of danger, they are not feats of technique-for-its-own-sake as much as highly concentrated, intimate human dramas. The engagements between Delta Company and its shadowy adversaries contain an element of theater. The bomb-makers mingle with Iraqi bystanders to observe and assess their work, standing on balconies and at windows watching impassively as the Americans shout, sweat and gesticulate, actors in a show whose script they are fighting to control.

Not that the soldiers are all on the same page. “The Hurt Locker” focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a bundle of nerves and confused impulses, eager to please, ashamed of his own fear and almost dismayingly vulnerable. Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a careful, uncomplaining professional who sticks to protocols and procedures in the hope that his prudence will get him home alive, away from an assignment he has come to loathe.

The wild card is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who joins Delta after its leader is killed and who approaches his work more like a jazz musician or an abstract expressionist painter than like a sober technician. A smoker and a heavy metal fan with an irreverent, profane sense of humor and a relaxed sense of military discipline, he approaches each new bomb or skirmish not with dread but with a kind of inspired, improvisational zeal.

As he gropes for the wires that will ignite a massive car bomb or traces a spider-weblike cluster of shells buried under a street, he looks like a man having the time of his life. Not that he is frivolous, though to Sanborn he seems insanely reckless. Rather, to quote a Robert Frost poem, James is a man whose work is play for mortal stakes.

And Mr. Renner’s performance — feverish, witty, headlong and precise — is as thrilling as anything else in the movie. In each scene a different facet of James’s personality emerges. He can be callous, even mean at times, but there is a fundamental tenderness to him as well, manifest in his affection for an Iraqi boy who sells pirated DVDs and his patient solicitude when Eldridge, under fire and surrounded by dead bodies, has an understandable bout of panic.

There is more friction between James and Sanborn: competition, incomprehension, but also a brand of masculine love similar to the passion between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in “Point Break.” In one scene Mr. Mackie and Mr. Renner trade stomach punches in a ritualistic display of affectionate aggression that looks as if it will end in either sex or murder, and Ms. Bigelow’s insight is that the tense comradeship of soldiers rests, often tenuously, on barely suppressed erotic and homicidal impulses.

“The Hurt Locker” opens with a quote from Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent for The New York Times, declaring that “war is a drug.” And it is certainly possible to see Will James as a hopeless war addict, a danger junkie sacrificing good sense and other people’s safety to his habit. But his collection of mechanisms from bombs that nearly killed him and the blend of serenity and exhilaration that plays over his blunt, boyish features when he finds a new one suggest otherwise.

Eldridge is a decent guy, dangerously out of his element but making the best of a bad situation. Sanborn is a professional, doing a job conscientiously and well. But James is something else, someone we recognize instantly even if we have never seen anyone quite like him before. He is a connoisseur, a genius, an artist. No wonder Ms. Bigelow understands him so perfectly.

“The Hurt Locker” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense, horrific violence and appropriately profane reactions to the prospect of same.

THE HURT LOCKER

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; written by Mark Boal; director of photography, Barry Ackroyd; edited by Bob Murawski and Chris Innis; music by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders; production designer, Karl Juliusson; produced by Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro; released by Summit Entertainment. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

WITH: Jeremy Renner (Staff Sgt. William James), Anthony Mackie (Sgt. J. T. Sanborn), Brian Geraghty (Specialist Owen Eldridge), Ralph Fiennes (Contractor Team Leader), David Morse (Colonel Reed) and Guy Pearce (Sgt. Matt Thompson).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/26...hurt.html?8dpc





Comcast, Time Warner Team Up To Control TV On The Internet
Om Malik

Updated: Sometime tomorrow, Comcast and Time Warner will announce a partnership to promote the concept of TV Everywhere. Jeff Bewkes, chairman and CEO of Time Warner and Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast will have a joint media conference tomorrow in New York. The deal makes it painfully obvious that everything cable companies do — including introducing the draconian metered broadband policies — is done to save their video franchises.

With the pervasiveness of broadband and easy availability of tools that allow web-video to leap onto your television, cable companies see that their video distribution pipes are becoming less relevant. So they want to control how you watch premium content online and want to impose fees via an authentication system. Time Warner and Jeff Bewkes has been championing this concept — essentially an authentication system that require viewers to have cable, telco or satellite subscriptions in order to watch certain premium content online or on other platforms. Bewkes recently said he wanted to launch the system during the second half of 2009. (NewTeeVee has just published a great FAQ on TVEverywhere.) Time Warner spun out its cable business as a separate company. Time Warner owns premium services such as HBO.

This coming together of large media companies and cable companies over Internet video should put the anti-trust officers in Washington on red alert. They should be paying attention to not only these moves but also the metered broadband efforts of cable companies. The cable industry and its large media partners form a cozy cabal, though on paper they dislike each other.

Cable operators need media company’s channels to overcharge the working stiffs like you and me. Media companies need the cable operators to share subscription revenues to pay for their highly inefficient and archaic businesses. President of Comcast Stephen Burke actually says so himself.

“The majority of profits for the big entertainment companies is from cable programming,” he tells The New York Times. “That stream is so important to every entertainment company that everybody is looking at that and saying, if we are not careful we could start to harm that model.”

Here is the irony: if Comcast thinks it is keeping the status-quo go, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes thinks he is inventing the future. “We’re talking about taking the TV industry to a new era,” he tells the Times. When I read that, I LOL-ed. That is rich coming from a guy who runs a company that is has proved to be the Internet equivalent of the village idiot. Anyway here are some minor details about this system that is going to be TV’s future.

The first test of the new system, which will authenticate cable subscribers online and make available programs on the Web for no additional charge, will be announced Wednesday, between Comcast and Time Warner. The trial will involve about 5,000 Comcast subscribers, and television shows from the Time Warner networks TNT and TBS.

Comcast and others such as Viacom have been championing their own authentication systems. There is a massive battle brewing where content owners and cable operators will soon find themselves on the opposing sides. Cable companies (and large media companies) are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that their brands don’t matter as much in this age of content atomization.

It is not clear if consumers are really willing to deal with these confusion authentication systems. When our sister site, NewTeeVee asked its readers if they would pay $10-a-month to Comcast, nearly 70 percent said No!
http://gigaom.com/2009/06/23/comcast...nternet-video/





Blu-ray Adoption Still Sluggish, HDTV Sales Up
Shawn Oliver

It's a tough time for Blu-ray to be really hitting its stride. Many consumers are still wary due to the battle with HD-DVD, and frankly, many are still content with DVD. In too many cases, upscaled DVD looks "good enough" for consumers, and only those with oodles of disposable income are willing to fork out for Blu-ray. Blu-ray player prices are still relatively high, and the actual movies are way expensive compared to the same titles on DVD. Plus, the install base of DVD is so high, it's tough for many to start building another movie library on another format.

Those reasons and more are what is keeping the interest in Blu-ray rather low according to a new study by Harris Interactive. Currently, 11% of Americans own an HD-DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right? More Americans own HD-DVD right now than the "winning" format, Blu-ray. To be totally honest, we aren't so shocked by the news. When HD-DVD was around, it was far and away the "budget" format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format.

Today, BD is still fighting that stereotype, but the prices aren't helping it win many folks over. Of course, many folks own a Blu-ray player in that their PS3 will play them, but people are still not jumping to join the BD bandwagon. The lag in adoption can't totally be blamed on the economy, though. During this same time period, HDTV ownership is up. In the survey, nearly half of respondents stated that they own an HDTV, which goes to show that HDTV ownership isn't necessarily a prerequisite for Blu-ray adoption. With HDTV stations becoming more and more the norm, many folks are spending their TV watching time on high-def programs, not Blu-ray. Compared to May of 2008, some 12% more people own HDTVs.

The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately 6 Standard Format DVD’s in the last six months compared with 1 in HD format (HD-DVD .7 vs. Blu-ray .5). Take a look at these PS3-specific findings below to put an even clearer spin on things:

When Blu-ray player or PS3 owners are asked specifically about standard versus Blu-ray format purchases, the results suggest a mixed bag of behaviors with some price sensitivity indicated:

Only one quarter plan to switch to Blu-ray completely (25%), while one third of Blu-ray or PS3 owners claim that most of their movie purchases are now on Blu-ray format (32%);
Two in five are waiting for Blu-ray format prices to come down before they buy more (43%) – and a quarter buy Blu-ray regardless of price (25%); and,
Only 1 in 5 appear to be replacing or duplicating their existing standard format DVD library with Blu-ray format (21%), and over a third say they only buy movies on Blu-ray format that they currently do not own on standard definition (37%).

All told, we still see Blu-ray adoption a long ways from taking off. The economy isn't helping matters, and Blu-ray just doesn't provide a good enough incentive to convince users to switch from DVD. We'll ask you: have you switched to Blu-ray? Are you holding off? Do you think DVD is "good enough?"
http://hothardware.com/News/Bluray-A...HDTV-Sales-Up/





MPAA Says Real's Patent Attempt Saps RealDVD Argument
Greg Sandoval Font

The film industry fired another legal broadside at RealNetworks and RealDVD.

The Motion Picture Association of America has accused Real of misleading the court about the company's attempts to circumvent ARccOS and RipGuard and about whether the technologies are true copy-protection measures.

Real wrote in patent applications filed with the Patent and Trademark Office in 2007 and 2008 that the two software were indeed copy protections, despite arguing the opposite in court, the MPAA alleged in a document filed with the court on Wednesday. The patent applications were published by the patent office two weeks ago.

The MPAA has taken Real to court to try to stop the company from selling RealDVD, a software that enables users to copy DVDs to a hard drive, as well as Facet, a DVD player that can also create digital copies of DVDs and store them as well. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel is due soon to decide whether to continue banning sales of RealDVD until a full trial decides whether the technology violates copyright law.

A Real spokesperson was not immediately available for comment Thursday morning.

An important point of contention in the case is whether RealDVD circumvents copy protections placed on DVDs. If Patel decides it does, then Real is violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which outlaws the circumvention of anti-piracy measures.

Real maintains it has a license with the DVD Copy Control Association, the group that oversees DVD security, to use the copy protections the studios place on DVDs, so there's no circumvention. As for ARccos and RipGuard, technologies that are not included under the DVD-CCA licensing, Real has argued throughout the court fight that these aren't security measures.

"Real and its witnesses have told the court that ARccOS and RipGuard are not copy protection technologies and that Real's engineers did not know how ARccOS and RipGuard worked," wrote MPAA lawyers in documents filed with U.S. District Court in San Francisco. "Yet Real simultaneously has told the PTO that RipGuard' and ArccOS are 'copy protection mechanisms' and then described specific techniques used by ARccOS and RipGuard."

The MPAA attorneys also said "Real has told the court, through witnesses and proposed findings, that ARccOS and RipGuard can only delay but cannot prevent a 'linear copy' of DVDs. But Real is insisting to the (patent office) that ARccOS and RipGuard can 'cause an archiving process to fail' or 'never complete'--exactly contrary to its representations to this court."

The studios asked Patel to consider the three patent applications before making her decision. While it's late to be entering evidence, the MPAA alleges that it has the right to do it because Real did not turn over the patent applications in discovery.

"Judicial notice is warranted here because the applications have been in Real's possession and control but unavailable to the studios," the MPAA said in its court filing, "(And) because the applications so directly contradict Real's contentions before this court."

The language in the patent applications does appear to contradict what Real's lawyers and witnesses have said in court.

Nonetheless, the motion filed by the MPAA may be overkill. Real's story about ARccos and RipGuard was already the weakest part of its case. Real has alleged that the two software types were ineffective in securing DVD content, yet the MPAA produced documents that show Real's attempt to crack them failed. The company then tried to hire an outside firm, which the MPAA alleges is a group of Ukrainian hackers, and they couldn't do it either.

The MPAA said that Real's patent applications are U.S.Patent Application Publication No. US 2009/0148125 A1 (Watson, Bielman, and Barrett); U.S. Provisional App. No. 61/095,249 (Chasen, Buzzard, et al.); and U.S. Provisional App. No. 61/012,500 (Barrett, Hamilton, et al.).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-102...html?tag=mncol





Milestones

Kodak Kills Kodachrome Film After 74 Years

Kodachrome, the film brand touted as the stuff of memories, is about to become a memory itself as Eastman Kodak stops production due to overwhelming competition from digital cameras.

Eastman Kodak Co said it will retire Kodachrome color film this year, ending its 74-year run after a dramatic decline in sales.

"The majority of today's photographers have voiced their preference to capture images with newer technology -- both film and digital," said Mary Jane Hellyar, president of Kodak`s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.

Kodachrome was once the film of choice for many baby boomers' family slide shows and gained such iconic status that it was celebrated in the mid-1970s with a song of the same name by Paul Simon, with the catch-phrase: "Mama don't take my Kodachrome away."
The film's durability and ability to capture rich, vibrant colors also made it a favorite among professional photographers like Steve McCurry, known for his portrait of an Afghan girl with green eyes for the cover of the National Geographic Magazine in 1985.

But it is a complex film to manufacture and requires a complicated process to develop, and today there is only one lab left in the country that processes the film.

It also faced competition from Japanese rival Fuji Film.

In the end, Kodachrome accounted for less than 1 percent of the company's total sales of still-picture films, the company said.

Even McCurry has now moved onto digital and other film including Kodak's Ektachrome.

"In fact, when I returned to shoot the `Afghan Girl` 17 years later, I used Kodak Professional Ektachrome Film E100VS to create that image, rather than Kodachrome film as with the original," he said in a statement.

Underscoring the decline of film, the company that popularized consumer photography more than 100 years ago said 70 percent of its revenue today is from consumer and commercial digital businesses.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando and David Lawsky, Editing by Maureen Bavdek, Dave Zimmerman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...technologyNews





Ed McMahon Dies at 86
Steve Gorman

Ed McMahon, a fixture on U.S. late-night television for 30 years as the full-throated announcer and sidekick for Johnny Carson on NBC's "The Tonight Show," died on Tuesday at 86 after battling a series of illnesses in recent months.

The veteran TV personality best known for his nightly introduction of Carson in a deep, booming voice with the drawn-out line, "Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" died at a Los Angeles-area hospital, and was immediately hailed by friends and former colleagues as an icon of American popular culture.

"He died early this morning with his wife and loved ones by his side," his spokesman Howard Bragman said. McMahon had been battling pneumonia, among many other illnesses.

Outgoing, affable and possessing a robust, baritone voice, McMahon began his career with stints as a bingo caller, carnival barker and boardwalk pitchman before becoming a broadcast announcer and TV host.

Trained as a U.S. Marine fighter pilot during World War II, he flew missions in Korea in the 1950s.

He went on to become one of the most celebrated sidekicks in TV history as Carson's right-hand man on "The Tonight Show" from 1962 to 1992, when Carson retired as host.

The gregarious McMahon, a frequent comic foil for the Carson during ad-libbed banter at the top of the show, was familiar even off camera for his "Hi-oooooh!" and frequent guffaws at Carson's monologue jokes, especially when a punch line fell flat. Carson died in 2005 at age 79.

"Ed's introduction of Johnny was a classic broadcasting ritual -- reassuring and exciting. Ed was a true broadcaster, and an integral part of Johnny Carson's 'Tonight Show.' We will miss him," talk show host David Letterman said on Tuesday.

Enduring Catchphrase

McMahon's signature introduction of Carson endured as a catch-phrase. Jack Nicholson's maniacal character in the 1980 movie thriller "The Shining" announced "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" as he burst through a door to menace his wife with an ax.

McMahon was a leading figure on several other TV shows, too, including the talent show "Star Search" in the 1980s.

He was a long-time co-host of Jerry Lewis' annual telethon benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and he became well-known as the presenter of the American Family Publishing sweepstakes, as well as a pitchman on numerous TV commercials.

Lewis said McMahon was "a dear, dear friend. We were always making jokes, cracking each other up ... It's hard to imagine doing the (telethon) without him."

California governor and former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger said America had lost "one of its greatest and most memorable television personalities."

"From 'Star Search' to the 30 years he spent in our living rooms as an integral part of the 'Tonight Show,' Ed brought joy and laughter to millions of Americans," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

McMahon made headlines a year ago when he defaulted on a $4.8 million mortgage on his six-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion, although he later found a buyer and avoided foreclosure.

The star blamed his financial woes on having broken his neck about 18 months earlier, leaving him unable to work. He also sued Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, accusing it of failing to diagnose the neck fracture and botching two operations.

(Additional reporting by Dan Trotta, Bob Tourtellotte and Jill Serjeant; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...55M2YI20090623





Farrah Fawcett Dies of Cancer at 62
Susan Stewart

Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.

Her death, at St. John’s Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.

To an extraordinary degree, Ms. Fawcett’s cancer battle was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide. Her face, often showing the ravages of cancer, became a tabloid fixture, and updates on her health became staples of television entertainment news.

In May, that battle was chronicled in a prime-time NBC documentary, “Farrah’s Story,” some of it shot with her own home video recorder. An estimated nine million people viewed it. Ms. Fawcett had initiated the project with a friend, the actress Alana Stewart, after she first learned of her cancer.

Ms. Fawcett’s doctors declared her cancer-free after they removed a tumor in 2007, but her cancer returned later that year. She had been receiving alternative treatment in Germany and was hospitalized in early April for a blood clot resulting from that treatment, according to her doctor, Lawrence Piro. He also said her cancer had spread to her liver.

Ms. Fawcett’s career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and stage as well as missed opportunities.

She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined. No poster like it has achieved anywhere near its popularity since, and, arriving before the Internet era, in which the most widely disseminated images are now digital, it may have been the last of its kind.

Ms. Fawcett won praise for her serious acting later in her career, typically as a victimized woman. But she remained best known for the hit 1970s television show “Charlie’s Angels,” in which she played Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful women employed as private detectives by an unseen male boss who (in the voice of John Forsythe) issued directives and patronizing praise over a speaker phone. Her pinup fame had led the producers to cast her.

Ms. Fawcett and her fellow angels, played by Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, brought evildoers to justice, often while posing in decoy roles that put them in skimpy outfits or provocative situations.

“Charlie’s Angels,” created and produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg for ABC, was a phenomenon, finishing the 1976-77 season as the No. 5 network show, the highest-rated television debut in history at that time.

Ms. Fawcett was its breakout star. Although she left the show after one season and returned only sporadically thereafter, the show’s influence — among other things, it inspired two much later feature films starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu — was so indelible that she was forever associated with it.

The series, whose popularity coincided with the burgeoning women’s movement, brought new attention to issues of female sexuality and the influence of television. Commentators debated whether the show’s athletic, scantily clad heroines were exemplars of female strength or merely a harem of pretty puppets doing the bidding of a patriarchal leader.

As the show’s most popular star, Ms. Fawcett became another sort of poster girl, for the “jiggle TV” of the ’70s, and a lightning rod for cultural commentators. Chadwick Roberts, writing in The Journal of Popular Culture in 2003, described her “unbound, loose and abundant hair” as marking “a new emphasis on femininity after the androgyny of the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

In 1978 Playboy magazine called Ms. Fawcett “the first mass visual symbol of post-neurotic fresh-air sexuality.” She herself put it more plainly: “When the show got to be No. 3, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be No. 1, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

Ms. Fawcett acknowledged that her sex symbol status was a mixed blessing. It made her famous, but it often obscured the acting talent that brought her three Emmy nominations, most notably for “The Burning Bed,” a critically acclaimed movie about spousal abuse.

“I don’t think an actor ever wants to establish an image,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “That certainly hurt me, and yet that is also what made me successful and eventually able to do more challenging roles. That’s life. Everything has positive and negative consequences.”

Ferrah Leni Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Tex., on Feb. 2, 1947. Her father, James, worked in the oil pipeline industry; her mother, Pauline, was a homemaker.

After dropping out of the University of Texas, Ms. Fawcett moved to Hollywood to pursue acting. She soon found work in commercials for Wella Balsam shampoo and Noxzema shaving cream, among other products. A Noxzema commercial in which she shaved the face of the football star Joe Namath was shown during the 1973 Super Bowl.

Ms. Fawcett also found acting work in television, landing guest roles on “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Flying Nun” and other sitcoms. She appeared in four episodes of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” whose star, Lee Majors, she had married in 1973. When Ms. Fawcett was cast on “Charlie’s Angels,” she had a clause written into her contract that allowed her to leave the set every day in time to prepare dinner for Mr. Majors.

She was billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors until 1979. She and Mr. Majors divorced in 1982.

The poster that ignited Ms. Fawcett’s career was shot at the Bel Air home she shared with Mr. Majors. “She was just this sweet, innocent, beautiful young girl,” said Bruce McBroom, who took the photograph. Searching for a backdrop to Ms. Fawcett in her one-piece red swimsuit (which she chose instead of a bikini because of a childhood scar on her stomach), he grabbed an old Navajo blanket from the front seat of his 1937 pickup.

After leaving “Charlie’s Angels” to pursue a film career (she came back for guest appearances for two more seasons), Ms. Fawcett made three forgettable movies in quick succession, then salvaged her reputation by returning to television. In 1981 she starred in the mini-series “Murder in Texas,” as the wife of a doctor who is subsequently accused of murdering her; in 1984 she made “The Burning Bed.”

Both movies were shown on NBC, and both performances received strong reviews. In “The Burning Bed,” Ms. Fawcett was one of the first prime-time actresses to forgo cosmetics in favor of a convincing characterization.

In 1983 she played another victimized woman who fights back — a vengeance-seeking rape victim — in the Off Broadway production of “Extremities.” She took over for Karen Allen, who had replaced Susan Sarandon. Ms. Fawcett went on to star in the film version of the play in 1986.

Other roles followed in film and television — she won praise again in the searing 1989 television movie “Small Sacrifices” — but throughout, Ms. Fawcett tended to attract more attention for her looks and personal life than for her professional accomplishments. Her long relationship with the actor Ryan O’Neal, with whom she had a son, kept her on the gossip pages long after her television work had become sporadic. In recent months she and Mr. O’Neal had been living together. Interviewed by Barbara Walters this month on the ABC program “20/20,” Mr. O’Neal said that he had asked Ms. Fawcett to marry her and she had said yes.

In 1997 Ms. Fawcett negated much of the respect she had earned as an actress when, during an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman,” she promoted a bizarre body-painting Playboy video and appeared ditsy to the point of incoherence.

But later that year she appeared in the acclaimed independent film “The Apostle” as Robert Duvall’s long-suffering wife, and her critical star rose again — only to be dimmed by publicity about a court case involving a former companion, the director James Orr. Mr. Orr was convicted of assaulting Ms. Fawcett and sentenced to three years’ probation.

In addition to Mr. O’Neal, Ms. Fawcett is survived by her father, James, and her son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal.

Though her career was volatile, Ms. Fawcett’s fame never diminished after “Charlie’s Angels.” She tried to capitalize on her celebrity with the 2005 reality series “Chasing Farrah,” but it was a critical and ratings flop. Writing in Medialife magazine, Ed Robertson described the series and its star as “a living example of a talented actress whose career has been turned into a parody by poor decisions.”

Ms. Fawcett herself described her career succinctly. “I became famous,” she said in her 1986 Times interview, “almost before I had a craft.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/ar...26fawcett.html





Michael Jackson, Pop Icon, Is Dead at 50
Brooks Barnes

Michael Jackson, the fallen King of Pop, is dead. The singer, songwriter and dancer whose career reached unprecedented peaks of sales and attention, died Thursday at 1:07 p.m. Pacific time, a Los Angeles city official said. He was 50.

Mr. Jackson, in a coma, was rushed to U.C.L.A. Medical Center, a six-minute drive from the rented mansion in which he was living, shortly after noon by Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics. A hospital spokesman would not confirm reports of cardiac arrest.

As with Elvis Presley or The Beatles, it is impossible to calculate the full impact he had on the world of music. At his height, he was indisputably the biggest star in the world and has sold more than 750 million albums. Radio stations across the country reacted to his death with marathon sessions of his songs. MTV, which was born in part as a result of Mr. Jackson’s groundbreaking videos, reprised its early days as a music channel by showing his biggest hits.

From his days as the youngest brother in the Jackson 5 to his solo career in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Jackson was responsible for a string of hits like “I Want You Back,” “I’ll Be There,” “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” “Billie Jean” and “Black and White” that exploited his high voice, infectious energy, and ear for irresistible hooks.

As a solo performer, Mr. Jackson ushered in the age of pop as a global product – not to mention an age of spectacle and pop culture celebrity. His early career with his brothers gave way to a solo act in which he became more character than singer: his sequined glove, his whitened face, his Moonwalk dance move became embedded in the cultural firmament.

But not long after his entertainment career hit high-water marks — Thriller,” from 1982, has been certified platinum 28 times by the Recording Industry Association of America – it started a bizarre disintegration. His darkest moment undoubtedly came in 2004, when he was indicted — though later acquitted — on child molesting charges. A young cancer patient who claimed the singer had befriended him and then sexually fondled him at his Neverland estate near Santa Barbara, Calif.

But Mr. Jackson was an object of fascination for the press since the Jackson 5’s first hit, “I Want You Back,” in 1969. His public image wavered between that of the musical naif, who only wanted to recapture his youth by riding on roller-coasters and having sleepovers with his friends, to the calculated mogul who carefully constructed his persona around his often baffling public behavior.

Mr. Jackson had been scheduled to perform a 50 concerts in at the O2 arena London beginning next month and continuing into 2010. The shows were positioned as a potential comeback, with the potential to earn him up to $50 million, according to some reports.

But there has also been worry and speculation that Mr. Jackson was not physically ready for such an arduous run of concerts, and Mr. Jackson’s postponement of the first of those shows from July 8 to July 12 fueled new rounds of speculation about his health.

“The primary reason for the concerts wasn’t so much that he was wanting to generate money as much as it was that he wanted to perform for his kids,” said J. Randy Taraborrelli, whose biography, ”Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness,” was first published in 1991. “They had never seen him perform before.”

Mr. Jackson is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince "Blanket" Michael Jackson II.

The performer’s eccentric lifestyle took a severe financial toll. In 1987 Mr. Jackson paid about $17 million for a 2,600-acre ranch in Los Olivos, Calif., 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Calling it Neverland, he outfitted the property with amusement-park rides, a zoo and a 50-seat theater, at a cost of $35 million, according to reports, and the ranch became his sanctum.

But Neverland, and Mr. Jackson’s lifestyle, were expensive to maintain. A forensic accountant who testified at Mr. Jackson’s molestation trial in 2005 said that Mr. Jackson’s annual budget in 1999 included $7.5 million for personal expenses and $5 million to maintain Neverland. By at least the late 1990s, he began to take out huge loans to support himself and pay debts. In 1998 he took out a loan for $140 million from Bank of America, which two years later was upped to $200 million. Further loans of hundreds of millions followed.

The collateral for the loans was Mr. Jackson’s 50 percent share in Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a portfolio of thousands of songs, including rights to 259 songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney that are considered some of the most valuable properties in music.

In 1985 Mr. Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV, which included the Beatles songs -- a move that estranged him from Paul McCartney -- and 10 years later Mr. Jackson sold 50 percent of his interest to Sony for $90 million, creating a joint venture, Sony/ATV. Estimates of the value of the catalog exceed $1 billion.

In many ways, Mr. Jackson never recovered from the child molestation trial, a lurid affair that attracted media from around the world to watch as Mr. Jackson, wearing a different costume each day, appeared in a small courtroom in Santa Maria, Calif., to listen as a parade of witnesses spun a sometimes-incredible tale.

The case ultimately turned on the credibility of Mr. Jackson’s accuser, a 15-year-old cancer survivor who said the defendant had gotten him drunk and molested him several times. The boy’s younger brother testified that he had seen Mr. Jackson fondling his brother on two other occasions.

After 14 weeks of such testimony and seven days of deliberations, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts on all 14 counts against Mr. Jackson: four charges of child molesting, one charge of attempted child molesting, one conspiracy charge and eight possible counts of providing alcohol to minors. Conviction could have brought Mr. Jackson 20 years in prison.

Instead, he walked away a free man to try to reclaim a career that at the time had already been in decline for years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/ar...26jackson.html





Hello Goodbye: Jackson's Beatles Rights at Risk
Gina Keating

Beatles For Sale?

The Fab Four's prized catalog -- specifically 267 songs mostly written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney -- is embarking on a long and winding road of ownership uncertainty following the death of Michael Jackson on Thursday.

The pop singer and Sony Corp's Sony Music arm operated a lucrative joint venture that either owns or administers the copyrights to about 750,000 compositions written by the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers.

Industry analysts estimate that Sony/ATV Music Publishing is worth at least $1 billion, making Jackson one savvy entertainer. His initial investment cost him $47.5 million in 1985. Music publishing is considered a license to print money. Not quite as exciting as the piracy-ravaged recorded-music side, it involves collecting royalties from such diverse avenues as downloads, radio airplay and videogames.

But mystery now surrounds the beneficial ownership of Jackson's stake. According to a lawsuit filed in 2002 by a creditor, he secured bank loans totaling $270 million two years earlier using both his Sony/ATV stake and the copyrights to his own songs as collateral.

Jackson lived an extravagant lifestyle, even as his commercial appeal dwindled amid damaging child-abuse allegations and changing music tastes. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2005 that his cash reserves ran so low earlier that year that he worried about paying his electric bill. The paper reported earlier this month that he had racked up about $500 million of debt.

"Very Complex" Valuations

A clearer picture of his finances will emerge during the administration period of his estate that usually lasts about 18 months, said Renee Gabbard of the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker in Costa Mesa, California.

Jackson's executors will evaluate his assets, file the estate tax return and invite creditors to submit invoices, said Gabbard, who has a number of wealthy clients with entertainment-related estates.

The process of valuing estate assets, especially intellectual property like music copyrights, is "very complex" and often takes "quite a while," said Gabbard.

"When you have entertainers and musicians they usually have quite extensive royalty contracts. It's very tough to put a value on a catalog of songs," she said.

Jackson and Sony formed their joint venture in 1995, with the singer contributing ATV Songs, whose 4,000 tunes included most of the Beatles catalog. He had bought ATV a decade earlier from Australian businessman Robert Holmes a Court, famously outbidding McCartney in the process.

Jackson was not involved in the day-to-day operations of Sony/ATV, but as a lover of the songwriting process was known to be "incredibly proud" of the company and its fast growth, according to a publishing industry source.

A spokesman for Sony/ATV declined to comment.

His stakes in both Sony/ATV and in Mijac, which holds his own copyrights, were owned by trusts. It was not clear if they were irrevocable or not. If they are revocable, then they could be dismantled to satisfy creditors, Gabbard said.

The estate would first pay federal taxes owed on Jackson's assets, most notably the publishing companies. The remaining assets then would go to satisfy creditors and the balance probably would be placed into separate trusts for his beneficiaries, most likely his children, Gabbard said.

But the publishing industry source said it was too premature to speculate about a possible change in ownership at Sony/ATV, which is run by music industry veteran Martin Bandier.

Additionally, each side is reportedly entitled to make a counter-offer if the other side lines up a buyer, or to bid for the other half it does not own.

The Beatles catalog, meanwhile, just keeps raking in money. The group's CDs will be reissued on September 9, the same day that a Fab Four version of the "Rock Band" videogame hits stores.

(Additional reporting by Dean Goodman, Editing by Anthony Boadle)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...55Q0V920090627





After Jackson, Fame May Never Be the Same
David Segal

On Thursday night, a crowd gathered in Union Square in Manhattan for a fond and spontaneous memorial to Michael Jackson. A few hundred onlookers formed a circle, leaving enough space in the middle for the grandstanders and the brave to dance like the King of Pop. Or try to.

Even the lamest moonwalk drew chants of “Mi-chael, Mi-chael!”

Watching this spectacle, you had to wonder: When will this happen again? When will another pop culture figure mean so much to so many that people are moved to assemble, hug and dance?

This is a tribute, of course, to Mr. Jackson’s singular gifts — his voice, songwriting talent, physical grace, and the list goes on and on. But there is the related matter of historical timing. Fame on the level that Mr. Jackson achieved is all but impossible for pop culture heroes today, and quite likely it will never be possible again.

On the most basic level, this is matter of business and math. Michael Jackson has sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide of the 1982 album “Thriller,” which spent more than 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts.

It’s one of those high-water marks that nobody will touch, because record stores are vanishing, and along with them, megahit albums are vanishing, too. A big week on the Billboard charts is a quarter-million units sold, which is about the number of units the Jonas Brothers moved last week with their latest release, which opened at No. 1. And it’s rare for an album to last even three weeks at the top.

People who buy music tend these days to buy — or steal it — online, a song at time.

But even if nobody achieves album sales on a Jacksonian scale, couldn’t he or she be an artist every bit as popular, every bit as loved, every bit as listened to?

Probably not. The pop-idol field — like every field that can lead to super-fame — is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keep growing. When the Beatles were on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, more than 70 million people watched, that is, more than one-third of the entire population of the United States. Yes, the Beatles were that good. But at the time, there were three networks and the radio. No Facebook, Twitter, video games, movie multiplexes, Sirius radio, malls or a dozen other potential drains on an audience.

There weren’t a lot of rock bands, either. George Harrison was the only Beatle who’d visited the United States before the group landed for that historic performance — his sister lived in Illinois — and when he returned to England he gleefully informed his mates that nobody in America could compete.

Likewise, Michael Jackson had MTV, which was the place for music videos, and as close to an Ed Sullivan platform as he needed. Of course, it’s been a long time since MTV played hour after hour of prime-time videos. Today, you watch music videos on YouTube, but because there are no programmers to curate what you see, every artist has to compete with thousands of others. And now that anyone with a computer has a miniature studio, and anyone with a Internet connection can post a song, there are more genres, subgenres and artists than ever.

That’s why even Michael Jackson would have a hard time becoming Michael Jackson these days. Come to think of it, Farrah Fawcett, who also passed away this week, would never have become Farrah Fawcett if she showed up in that red, one-piece bathing suit today. In the ’70s, she became the fantasy of choice for every post-pubescent teenage boy in the country, selling 10 million posters of her iconic, high-beam smile. Now, there are so many vixens grinning seductively from so many Web sites and lad mags that no single woman could ever commandeer the public imagination in quite the same way. There is no “this year’s model” anymore. There is this week’s model, and that’s about it.

There are plenty of upsides to the new unfiltered, multiple-choice pop culture of 2009. We get to decide what we want to listen to and watch, and we can listen and watch whenever we want. It’s far better for aficionados, too, because they can dig deeper into any topic, no matter how obscure. Obsessed with a soccer team in Germany? Twenty years ago, you’d be lucky to spot it twice a year on TV. Now, you can watch it online, and a dozen blogs are there to parse every goal, red card and trade.

But there is something sad about our infinite menu of options. It could very well mean the end of true superstardom and with it, the end the collective experience on display Thursday night in Union Square.

Everyone there knew Michael Jackson. Everyone there had watched him, sang with him, tried to dance with him and, yes, everyone was collectively aghast by much of his recent behavior. But he was ours. If nothing else, his passing reminds us of how little in pop culture we currently share.

And inadvertently, that Union Square memorial demonstrated why. In the middle of the impromptu festivities, a pedicab cycled by with a platform attached to the back. Jutting from the platform: a silver, 10-foot stripper pole, on which a woman in lingerie was spinning, legs splayed, upside down, then right side up, then upside down again.

There were flashing lights and, inevitably, the name of a Web site stenciled on the side.

Half of the people in the Michael Jackson throng spotted the rolling spectacle and started pointing. A few dozen turned on their heels and joined this woman and her cycler in a slow, jaw-dropping and highly distracting procession down the street.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/we...w/28segal.html





A New Way to Spread the Word
Eric Pfanner

Travelers at the Liverpool Street Station in London were surprised one morning last January when several hundred of their fellow commuters, instead of scurrying toward the 11:15 train to Southend-on-Sea, started dancing to the sounds of Lulu’s “Shout.”

A day and a half later the routine, captured by hidden cameras, showed up during a break in the reality television show “Celebrity Big Brother.” The seemingly spontaneous performance turned out to have been an advertising stunt for T-Mobile, a wireless telephone network that used it for a campaign built around the slogan “Life’s for Sharing.”

Sharing is exactly what happened next. While the ad, in its entirety, was shown only once on television, word of it spread via e-mail, blogs and social networks, until it was watched more than 15 million times on YouTube. The spot spawned spoofs and imitators who organized similar events, including one that shut down Liverpool Street Station a few weeks later.

“It seemed to spread a bit of joy at a time when people really needed it,” said Kate Stanners, executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi London, the agency that created the ad.

The campaign may have cheered up recession-weary Londoners, but it also showed why many people in the media business feel spurned these days. Advertising as it has long been known — television commercials, newspaper ads and the like — is a shrinking part of the marketing equation. What happens elsewhere, mostly on the Internet, is what increasingly matters.

Advertisers did not suddenly wake up to the Internet; they have been shifting growing portions of their budgets online for years. But the popularity of social networking and other Web 2.0 phenomena is helping them use consumers to spread the word for them, allowing them to cut down on paid advertising. While music companies, movie studios and publishers, among others, are trying to figure out ways to get consumers to pay for their content online, advertising is moving in the other direction.

Marcel Fenez, head of the media practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said that during the current economic downturn, a lot of paid advertising would be lost for good, separating this downturn from previous ones, when ad spending recovered relatively quickly. After a 12 percent plunge this year, global ad spending will not climb back to 2007 levels for another five years, Mr. Fenez said.

“It’s different this time,” he said. “There’s obviously some element of cyclical in it, but our belief is that it is largely structural.”

Not surprisingly, PriceWaterhouseCoopers’s forecasts are gloomiest for newspapers and television, which it expects will suffer from ad spending declines of 16 percent and 11 percent this year, respectively. But even Internet advertising will fall by 2 percent, and it will recover only slowly, the company said.

Some formerly high-flying Internet businesses like MySpace, owned by News Corp., have been brought to earth by the recession. With advertising in decline, the social networking service recently announced plans to cut 30 percent of its staff. Other Web 2.0 businesses, like YouTube, owned by Google, are still trying to figure out how to monetize the vast amounts of traffic they generate.

Amid such a broad-based downturn, the advertising industry has also been hurt, and the mood is sober as representatives from all over the world gather this week in Cannes for an annual get-together. Instead of competing to host the most lavish beach parties, as they have in previous years, agencies are trying to outdo each other with understatement.

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, the world’s largest advertising company, calls 2009 a “write-off” for the industry. While marketers are slightly less pessimistic than they were a few months ago, they remain cautious, and a recovery in ad spending is likely to lag behind improvement in the economy, he added.

“While the head and the heart may be better, I don’t think that has extended to the hand writing the checks,” he said.

Ad agency companies have been cutting jobs and costs, but they have been slightly more insulated than many media owners because they get paid regardless of whether advertisers choose to spend their money on newspapers, television, magazines, radio, billboards or the Internet. Also, companies like WPP and Publicis Groupe, which owns Saatchi & Saatchi, have been expanding their capabilities in digital marketing and other areas outside traditional advertising.

In the past, ad agencies were often paid on commission, as a percentage of advertising sales, but their compensation is increasingly being fixed at hourly rates, as it is for lawyers or accountants. Because digital marketing campaigns are more labor-intensive to develop than ads in traditional media, executives say, this means higher fees.

Advertisers — at least those that can still afford to spend — have also found some benefits in the confluence of a cyclical economic downturn with a structural shift toward free advertising on the Internet. The price of advertising in many paid-for media has fallen, for instance.

Simon Clift, chief marketing officer of Unilever, the consumer products conglomerate, said that on average, the company was paying about 5 percent less for ad space and time than it did last year.

“We’ve been getting some real bargains and, even better, some real value,” he said. “The overriding message of the Internet is that you can do more with less.”

How does free advertising look? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product.

Free advertising does not mean the end of the paid kind. As in the case of the T-Mobile campaign, paid advertising can help get the process started. For some things, like burnishing a company’s image or stimulating consumers’ desire for an expensive pair of shoes, there may be few free options. And new technology will bolster the advertising capabilities of traditional media like television, backers say.

But in the future, none of these things will exist in isolation. Advertising executives have been talking about “integrating” their campaigns for years, with mixed results, but now consumers are doing it for them.

“People have been a bit sloppy with the word advertising,” said Richard Pinder, chief operating officer of Publicis Worldwide. “It came to mean spending money on television or newspapers. Actually, I think we’re going back to the original meaning of the word, which is to say, I hope that people are aware of my brand and interested in knowing more about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/te.../22iht-ad.html





FTC Plans to Monitor Blogs for Claims, Payments
Deborah Yao

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

"If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk," said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices. "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and ... they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.

Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.

The blogosphere is quite different.

"Rules are set by the individuals who create the blog," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "Some people will accept payments and free gifts, and some people won't. There's no established norm yet."

Bloggers complain that with FTC oversight, they'd be too worried about innocent posts getting them in trouble, and they say they might simply quit or post less frequently.

Between ads on her five blogs and payments from advertisers who want her to review products, Rebecca Empey makes as much as $800 a month, paying the grocery bill for a family of six. She also has received a bird feeder, toys, books and other free goods.

Now the 41-year-old mother of four in New Hartford, N.Y., worries that even a casual mention of an all-natural cold remedy she bought herself would trigger an FTC probe.

"This helped us. This made us feel great. Will I be sued because I didn't hire a scientist to do research?" Empey said.

Empey, whose blogs include New York Traveler and Freaky Frugalite, said she discloses compensation arrangements on a page on her blogs or through a "support my sponsor" logo. She said most of her readers understand that she sometimes gets compensated.

By contrast, a mommy blogger on Double Bugs praised Skinny Cow low-fat ice cream sandwiches and thanked a Web site called Mom Central for the chance to try them. But there's no clue that Nestle SA's Skinny Cow division was giving bloggers coupons for free products.

Some bloggers believe more uniform disclosure and practices would help instill trust and make advertisers more comfortable working with bloggers. To them, the question becomes whether the FTC should be the one crafting standards.

"It would always be better for bloggers to self-police," said Robert Cox, president of Media Bloggers Association in New Rochelle, N.Y. "We have laws on the books. They apply to everybody, not just people who write blogs."

Yuli Ziv, who writes a fashion blog from New York, is working on one such effort at self-regulation, helping craft an ethics policy for about 15 Web sites as part of the Style Coalition started in January to help bloggers become more professional.

"It's been an issue, regardless of the FTC," she said. "It's about trust."

Existing FTC rules already ban deceptive and unfair business practices. The proposed guidelines aim to clarify the law and for the first time specifically include bloggers, defined loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online.

"It's sort of a recognition that word-of-mouth marketing in whatever form, whether electronic or not, is a significant part of the marketing strategy of modern companies," Cleland said. "Because it's new, I think it is imperative that we provide some kind of guidance."

If the guidelines are approved, bloggers would have to back up claims and disclose if they're being compensated — the FTC doesn't currently plan to specify how. The FTC could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers, and it could ask the Justice Department to sue for civil penalties.

Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews.

So parents keeping blogs to update family members on their child's first steps technically would fall under the FTC guidelines, though they likely would have little to worry about unless they accept payments or free products and write about them.

But they would need to think twice if, for instance, they praise parenting books they've just read and include links to buy them at a retailer like Amazon.com Inc.

That's because the guidelines also would cover the broader and common practice of affiliate marketing, in which bloggers and other sites get a commission when someone clicks on a link that leads to a purchase at a retailer. In such cases, merchants also would be responsible for actions by their sales agents — including a network of bloggers.

Amazon declined to comment.

Cleland said the FTC would likely focus on repeated offenses that continue after a warning to stop.

Still, the agency has a big job ahead as new communications channels continually emerge. Advertisers now are paying some Twitter users to post short items through the increasingly popular messaging service. The FTC says the guidelines would cover such arrangements, regardless of the medium.

Even before the FTC commissioners vote on the final guidelines this summer, some in the blogging world have taken pre-emptive measures.

In May, IZEA, an Orlando, Fla.-based firm that matches advertisers with 265,000 bloggers, began sending reports to advertisers on whether hired bloggers are disclosing compensation arrangements, as IZEA requires. Such bloggers are paid as much as $3,000 for a 200-word post.

Over the holidays, IZEA ran a campaign in which bloggers who don't normally shop at Sears Holdings Corp.'s Kmart stores were given $500 gift cards and encouraged to write about their experiences in the stores. To reduce the chance of a bad review, the retailer said it avoided bloggers who previously made negative remarks about the company.

Meanwhile, a blogger on TravelingMom was whisked away on a free Disney cruise in January. She stayed in an ocean-view stateroom, where she was greeted by Champagne on ice and a plate of cheese and fruit. Later in the trip, she and other bloggers basked in the sun on Castaway Cay, Disney's private island.

"I've been on cruises before, but never like this one. The Disney Wonder (cruise ship) is ... well ... wondrous," she gushed on her blog.

She did disclose the free trip.

Mandatory disclosures could change how reviews are perceived online because many Internet users might never imagine that bloggers get compensation.

"I don't think, for the average reader of a blog, it immediately comes to mind that they actually have a relationship with the company," said Sam Bayard, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "You think about (blogs) as personal, informal, off the cuff and coming from the heart — unfiltered, uncensored and unplanned."
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/200906...ie_disclosures





Blogger Hal Turner Charged With Threatening Chicago-Area Judges
Edmund H. Mahony

An Internet radio host and blogger charged earlier this month with encouraging people to "take up arms" against three public officials in Connecticut was arrested again Wednesday on charges that he threatened to assault and murder three federal judges in retaliation for a ruling upholding handgun bans in the Chicago area.

FBI agents charged Hal Turner, 47, of North Bergen, N.J., at his home on charges related to the appeals court judges. The federal charges in Chicago arise from Internet postings on June 2 and 3 in which Turner allegedly proclaimed his "outrage" over a June 2 decision by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer of the Chicago-based U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed," said the postings, which also included photographs, phone numbers, work addresses and room numbers of the judges, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location.

The Chicago arrest warrant affidavit suggests that the Internet postings were inspired by lawsuits in Chicago and suburban Oak Park that followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year upholding the right of citizens to keep handguns in their homes for protection. The lawsuits challenged handgun bans that remained in effect after the high court's ruling. The three judges dismissed the lawsuits in an opinion written for a unanimous court.

Federal authorities said they found another Internet posting, allegedly written by Turner, claiming that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against Matt Hale, a white supremacist convicted of soliciting the murder of a U.S. District Court judge in Chicago. The blog entry noted that the slain judge's mother and husband also were killed by a gunman in her home.

"Apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit court didn't get the hint after those killings," the posting said. "It appears another lesson is needed."

State Capitol police in Connecticut charged Turner on June 3 with inciting injury to persons or property after he allegedly posted material on the Internet criticizing legislation to shift some control over the Roman Catholic Church affairs from the church to lay members.

The Internet blog targeting the Connecticut officials — state Rep. Michael Lawlor, state Sen. Andrew McDonald and state ethics commission officer Thomas Jones — promised to make public their home addresses.

On his Turner Radio Network blog, Turner allegedly wrote, "It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die. ... If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they're going to get uppity with us about this, I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down, too."

Turner is scheduled to be presented this afternoon on the Chicago charges in federal court in Newark, N.J. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He was presented at Superior Court in Hartford on Monday. He did not enter a plea. If convicted on the Connecticut state charge, he faces from one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
http://www.courant.com/news/politics...,1750469.story





Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly
Dan Cohen

I love my Amazon Kindle. I love reading with it, I love how light it is, and I love the battery life. I also love the fact that it automatically syncs with the Amazon Kindle application on my iPhone and iPod touch. That means any book will open to the last page read regardless of the device last used. it is an amazing bit of technology that makes reading books across multiple platforms beyond simple.

It’s a perfect situation — right? Well, it’s an almost perfect situation. This afternoon I discovered a huge Achilles heel in the whole Amazon Kindle environment.

Perhaps the best way for me to explain the problem is by simply recounting the events that led to the discovery.

Two days ago I upgraded my iPod touch to iPhone OS version 3.0. Today my new iPhone came. That means two new handhelds in a three-day period. I loaded all of my primary apps onto both and began the process of entering my credentials for each app that requires them. (I decided it was best to start off with a clean slate rather than attempting to restore from a prior backup.)

When I got the Amazon Kindle app I knew there was one particular book I needed to download to both devices immediately. It’s a reference book that I wanted to make sure that I had on my device as the weekend began. But when I opened the app it only showed me a small subset of my books. “What?” I wondered. I went into that digital download portion of Amazon store and there I saw a list of all the books that I have purchased for my Kindle. “Great,” I thought “I’ll just choose the books that I want and click the ‘ download/send it to…’ Button next to the item.” I clicked and a few books gave back the message “successfully sent to”. A number of the books, however, including the one I was looking for, gave back the message that they were unable to be sent to my iPhone. I tried to download it to my iPod touch and received the same message.

Figuring that the store might not be recognizing the two new devices I removed all of my handheld devices from my account and added both my iPhone and my touch back. I went back in, clicked “download/send to” and received exactly the same message. I was starting to get frustrated.

At this point I decided that I’d spent enough time trying to hassle with this and, since I must doing something very simple wrong, my best alternative was to simply call customer service. I did and that’s when I got the surprise.

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

Quick aside — all of the books that are in my Fictionwise bookshelf having been downloaded numerous times and although I have to go through the pain of unlocking them each and every time, I’m able to download them to any iPhone or iPod touch I’m using without a problem. It’s the reason that I’ve been using Stanza, now owned by Amazon, a fair bit these days as I read through some of the books remaining in my account.

It gets worse.

I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it’s in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. “It’s not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?” I asked. “No, I don’t believe so. You can have to look for it.”

We’re not done- it gets even worse.

“How do I find out how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

Here is the major problem with this scenario.

First, it’s not clear that this is the policy.

Second, there’s no way to find out in advance how many times a book is able to be downloaded. You can buy a book and it can only be downloaded numerous times or you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.

In the meantime, Amazon wants us to upgrade our Kindles every year or two. Apple wants us to upgrade our iPhone or iPod touch every year or two. This means that although the books remain in your Kindle library online you may not be able to download them once you upgrade your hardware. And there is no way to know — at least according to what the customer service rep told me.

This doesn’t bother me tremendously with a fiction book which I will likely buy, read and be done with. (I know some people reread books or love passing them around to family. I’m not one of them.) But it doesn’t work for me at all with regard to reference books. I want to know that I can buy a reference book and legitimately access it on the Kindle and the iPhone I own today and the Kindle 3 and iPhone 3G Q I own next year.

I checked the site and could find no indication of download limits in the information on any of the numerous books I looked at. Therefore I will assume the rep gave me accurate, honest information. That being the case… this entire thing is ridiculous!!!!

No, I should not be able to send my books to anyone I feel like sending them to, but in this day and age I should be able to redownload the books I HAVE BOUGHT after I upgrade my hardware! (It’s not like I can backup my Amazon Kindle books the way I back up my iTunes library. Amazon is my library backup! Or so I thought.)

At a minimum Amazon should be absolutely upfront about this policy and Amazon should NOT be using the argument that the number of times you can download the book is up to the publisher and they have no way of controlling it or EVEN KNOWING where the ceiling is. It should say right up front, before you purchase the book,

“If you purchase this book you’ll be able to download it a total of X number of times. After that you may be required to repurchase it.”

Oh, and while I’m at it, how about adding this line to their promo material…

Own an iPhone? The iPhone is a perfect companion for your Kindle. To read Kindle books on your iPhone or iPod touch, simply download our free Kindle for iPhone application. Our new Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes your reading location across your Kindle(s) and your iPhone. That is, assuming you are able to download the book again in the first place. Now you can read a few pages on your iPhone and pick up right where you left off when you return to your Kindle.

At least that way we would know upfront what we are getting ourselves into when we buy a book.

This entire episode makes me question whether or not I will purchase any additional books from Amazon. I never wanted to get on the “DRM-Complaint Bandwagon”.

Tonight I’m not just riding the wagon, I’m driving the damn thing. http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/19/...nd-it-is-ugly/

KindleGate: Confusion Abounds Regarding Kindle Download Policy

I’ve been on top of KindleGate most of the afternoon. It took speaking with three MORE customer reps today, plus the one yesterday, to finally get accurate, or what I hope is accurate, information.

This sordid tale began last night when I was setting up my iPhone 3G S, and a book I went to download to the Amazon Kindle app would not download. I called customer service to inquire about the issue. In short order the customer representative told me that each publisher determines the number of times a book can be downloaded, and once that download number is reached the book needs to be repurchased. When I asked where this was written, he said in the fine print of the legal document you signed when you start your Kindle account. When asked how one would know how many times you can download the book he said, “you can’t we don’t even know.” I purchased a new copy of the book in question, and as soon as I got home last night, wrote the post that went up about midnight.

This afternoon I received an e-mail from Amazon confirming a refund for the book that I re-purchased yesterday. Funny thing was… I hadn’t requested a refund. In fact, I hadn’t had any interaction with Amazon since the call with a customer representative yesterday. I was perplexed…

I called Amazon to inquire about the refund I received. That’s when the fun really began. That’s when it became crystal clear that the issues surrounding DRM and Kindles is confusing to us as end-users because… it’s just as confusing to the customer representatives at Amazon. No, that’s being far too generous. The whole issue is confusing to us as end-users because the Amazon representatives who are supposed to clarify issues… don’t have a clue! It got so bad in fact, that one of the representatives along the way actually use the line, “Oh I’m sure you were told that yesterday because we were having downloading issues that they’ve been fixed.” Ah yes, and I can’t read this book because the dog ate my Kindle.

Here’s what happened –

I called up the first representative to ask about the refund, and I asked for an explanation and a clarification on the digital rights management policy with regard to Kindle books. The rep said, “Let me transfer you,” and before I could say another word, put me on hold. A bit later a new customer representative got on the phone. Here is a fairly accurate transcript of one part of that (long) conversation –

Him — You can download an unlimited number of times.

Me — If that’s the case why was I told that sometimes it’s five or six times and sometimes it’s one time?

Him — You can download an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

Me — So it’s not the number of downloads the way the rep yesterday said but the number of devices?

Him– Right.

Me– What if I get a new device?

Him — Most books give you six or seven devices that you can have it on at any one time.

Me — What about the 8th device? What if I get a new Kindle and new iPhone and they are eight and nine but are the only devices at the time that I am using.

Him — I believe we can release more licenses.

Me– You believe or you know? And does that mean that on my seventh Kindle I need to call Amazon and ask you to release each book one at a time?

Him — Well that’s up to the publisher

Me — Huh? I thought you said it could be downloaded an unlimited number of times to any device, could be on five or six devices at any one time and you could release more devices if need be. Is that the case or is it up to the publisher to determine? I’m getting more confused not less.

He said, “No, you can download a book an unlimited number of times.”

Me- Then why was I told there was a limit and for some books it is five or six but for others it might be just one.

Him- No you can download it and remove it and redownload it.

Me- That’s all well and good but yesterday I was told that there was a limit to the number of times it can be downloaded.

Him- Oh, well there is a limit to the number of devices you can download to but the majority of books let you download to five or six.

Me- So how do you know if it is one or six in advance? And what happens when I am on device number seven and the cap is six.

Him– To be honest with you that’s going to be a problem.

(Seriously, that’s what he said!)

Me- That IS a problem and it is also not an acceptable answer when real money is involved in the purchase. I would really like a better answer than that.

Him- Let me check.

I was put on hold for an extended period of time. After which he came back and said, “I checked and you can download any book to any device an unlimited number of times and you can have any given book on six devices at a time.”

I then said, “So you’re telling me that every book that I purchased through Amazon for the Kindle can be on up to six devices at any given time and you can release all of those licenses if I change devices?”

He replied, “Yes that’s what I’m saying.”

Me– “Six times?”

Him– “Right!”

At which point I read him the following e-mail. It had arrived about 30 seconds before, likely as a result of his conversation while I was on hold…

Dan,

I’ve reviewed our previous correspondence regarding your problem downloading Kindle books to your iPhone, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience and miscommunication on this matter. We have identified the issue and are working on a solution to address it. In the short term, we have corrected the problem on your account. You should now be able to download and read your Kindle books on your iPhone and iTouch devices.

We have also refunded you for the duplicate purchase of the book.

Publishers choose whether they apply DRM to their content and thus determine how many copies of each title can be downloaded to different Kindle devices at the same time. There is no limit on the number of times a title can be downloaded, only limits on the number of simultaneous devices.

I apologize again for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,

I continued, “So you told me that any book can be on six different devices, while your colleague sent me an e-mail that says that each publisher determines how many devices you can have. I’m even more confused now than I was before, and before I spend another penny on books for my Amazon Kindle I really would like to know what the actual policy is because you put me on hold and came back with a different answer than e-mail that I got.”

He put me on hold once again.

About 10 minutes later, a third customer representative (this was the fourth person I had spoken to at this point!) got on the phone and attempted to “clarify” even further. He did give me some specifics which I will get into in a few minutes. Before I get to them however, he did something that would have been impressive if it were quite so big of a concern — he apologized. Sort of.

I asked why it was that I got totally wrong information from the customer service representative yesterday and from the first two customer service representatives I talked to today. I asked him, “How is a customer supposed to know any of this? Especially when the first three customer service reps I spoke to got it completely wrong? They are the ones that customers like me turn to to get the information, and they told me something totally different than what you’re telling me now.”

He responded, “Yeah that’s a training glitch that we had, and I’m really sorry about that. Like I said I’m going to address this problem here.”

I pushed a little bit harder, perhaps a little too hard, and said, “I spoke with three customer service representatives before you, and every one of them gave me the wrong information. That’s not a training glitch, that’s people at Amazon not having any clue about the DRM policy and that’s a problem.”

He responded, “We face new situations every day and quite frankly we’ve never run into this problem before, but now that you’ve raised the issue please know that it will be addressed directly.”

Personally I find it amazing that my questions were “new situations”. It seems rather basic that when dealing with a DRM system the vendor and the customer should easily know-

1. How many downloads are possible

2. How many devices material can be on

3. What the options are when the number of downloads or machines is exceeded.

He then told me that he would be retraining all the customer reps so they have the correct information and future customers won’t run into similar situations.

I’m glad I could help

So Here Is The Bottom Line – (I think…)

According to the last customer representative spoke to…

You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.

Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it’s only one device.

At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book.

According to the customer rep, there is a project to try to get that information available to the customer but it’s not yet available.

Finally, when you have reached a limit of six devices and you swap one older device for a new one, it does not automatically reset the number of licenses so you can add the new one. Amazon can release all of the licenses which will remove any given book from all of the devices and then allow you to re-download it that same number of times.

In other words, if his information was accurate, and the runaround I got this afternoon does make me continue to wonder, once you purchase a book you will have access to it going forward….

You just may have some hoops to go through along the way.
http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/21/...wnload-policy/





Reflecting on the Digital Economy Conference
Michael Geist

Ottawa has played host to many digital economy-type conferences over the years. Many have the same feel with pretty much the same people saying pretty much the same thing. Yesterday's conference titled Canada's Digital Economy: Moving Forward was different. The primary reason was leadership (the noteworthy impact of Twitter on the proceedings and Terry Matthews' warning against mimicking the U.S. on copyright which he said "has become so extreme that it inhibits creativity and innovation" rank a close behind). Both Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage James Moore left no doubt that they get it and are determined to craft laws and policies that look ahead rather than behind.

Clement closed the conference by noting how much has changed in the year since Bill C-61 was introduced. Clement said that it was "at least a somewhat different" public policy environment and committed to a copyright consultation this summer:

Moore was even more forceful with remarks that I doubt that we have ever heard from a Canadian Heritage Minister, who provided an inspirational talk on the potential of new technologies. He closes with:

The old way of doing things is over. These things are all now one. And it's great. And it's never been better. And we need to be enthusiastic and embrace these things. I point out the average age of a member of parliament because don't assume that those who are making the decisions and who are driving the debate understand all the dynamics that are at play here. Don't assume that everybody understands the opportunities that are at play here and how great this can be for Canada. Tony is doing his job and I'm going to do my job and be a cheerleader and push this and to fight for the right balance as we go forward. The opportunities are unbelievable and unparalleled in human history.

Last year's experience with Bill C-61 left thousands of Canadians deeply disappointed with government on copyright policy. Yesterday's remarks signal an important shift with both Clement and Moore clearly committed to more open consultation and to the development of a balanced copyright bill that better reflects the real-world realities of new technologies, innovation, new creators, and the reasonable expectations of Canadian consumers.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4077/125/





Sugar Labs Announces Immediate Availability of Sugar on a Stick; Learning Platform Runs on Any PC or Netbook In The Classroom
Press release

Sugar Labs, nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform to over one-million children worldwide, announces the immediate availability of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry. Available free for download at www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto an ordinary 1GB USB flash drive and used to reboot any PC or netbook directly into the award-winning Sugar environment. It runs on recent Macs with a helper CD and in Windows using virtualization. Sugar on a Stick is designed to work with a School Server that can provide content distribution, homework collection, backup services, Moodle integration, and filtered access to the Internet. Today’s Strawberry release is meant for classroom testing; feedback will be incorporated into the next version, available towards the end of 2009.

“One year after its founding, Sugar Labs is delivering on its education promise for its second million learners,” commented Walter Bender, founder and executive director. “Sugar is preferred because it is a superior learning experience for young children: engaging while being affordable. Sugar on a Stick is a great way to try Sugar without touching your computer’s hard disk. It is also well suited to slower, older PCs and low-powered netbooks. There is a version for the OLPC XO-1 and it will ship with the newer XO-1.5 laptops in the fall.”

Sugar on a Stick provides a coherent and consistent computing experience. It reduces costs by providing flexibility in hardware choices, allowing schools to keep their existing investment in hardware. Learners can benefit from the increased household ownership of computers; by bringing Sugar on a Stick home, every student has a consistent, comparable computing environment that parents can share in as well. It also provides off-line access to applications and content as not every learner has Internet access at home.

As part of an ongoing effort to make Sugar on a Stick classroom-ready, Sugar Labs has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Gould Charitable Foundation to implement Sugar at the Gardner Pilot Academy, a public elementary school located in one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse sections of Boston, Massachusetts.

Learning Activities are at the heart of Sugar. Sugar on a Stick includes 40 Activities to interest young learners such as Read, Write, Paint, and Etoys. Hundreds more Activities are available free for download at the Sugar Activity Library. Most “Sugarized” Activities have student collaboration built-in; students and teachers work, play, and learn on the same Activities together. The Sugar Learning Platform is open, so by leveraging the work of other open source projects, existing software for children can be integrated; for example, the acclaimed GCompris suite of 100 Activities developed over the past five years by Bruno Coudoin was recently added to Sugar, including Activities such as Chess, Geography, and Sudoku. Teachers and parents interested in Sugar’s Activities and its modern interface for children can watch short videos on the recently opened Sugar Labs Dailymotion channel.
Visitors to LinuxTag are welcome to speak with Sugar Labs contributors at booth 7.2a 110a.
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?t...090624SugarLab





At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners
Alex Williams

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. “He was playing a racing game,” Mr. Hobbs said. “He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone.”

But, Mr. Hobbs added, “we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the business.”

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table — not praying — while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed.

“You’ll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting,” Mr. Reines said. “BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.”

Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests, plumbing the Web for data to illuminate an issue under discussion or simply taking notes.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy. Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, has gained such a reputation for checking his BlackBerry during public meetings that some parents joke that they might as well send him an e-mail message. Few companies have formal policies about smartphone use in meetings, according to Nancy Flynn, the executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a consulting group in Columbus, Ohio. Ms. Flynn tells clients to encourage employees to turn off all devices.

“People mistakenly think that tapping is not as distracting as talking,” she said. “In fact, it can be every bit as much if not more distracting. And it’s pretty insulting to the speaker.”

Still, business can be won or lost, executives say, depending on how responsive you are to an e-mail message. “Clients assume they can get you anytime, anywhere,” said David Brotherton, a media consultant in Seattle. “Consultants who aren’t readily available 24/7 tend to languish.”

Playful electronic bantering can stimulate creativity in meetings, in the view of Josh Rabinowitz, the director of music at Grey Group in New York, an advertising agency. In pitch meetings, Mr. Rabinowitz said, he often traded messages on his Palm Treo — jokes, ideas, questions — with colleagues, “things that you might not say out loud.”

The chatter tends to loosen the proceedings. “It just seems to add to the productive energy,” he said.

But business relationships can be jeopardized. Lori Levine, the founder of Flying Television, a talent-booking agency in Manhattan, said that in an effort to be environmentally sensitive she instructed employees to take notes on BlackBerrys instead of paper during client meetings.

“Then I got a call from a client screaming that our vice president spent an hour on his BlackBerry during a huge meeting,” Ms. Levine recalled. To soothe the client, Ms. Levine read aloud the notes the vice president had taken.

In Dallas, a college student sunk his chance to have an internship at a hedge fund last summer when he pulled out a BlackBerry to look up a fact to help him make a point during his interview, then lingered — momentarily, but perceptibly — to check a text message a friend had sent, said Trevor Hanger, the head of equity trading at the hedge fund, who was helping conduct the interview.

Very few companies have policies on smartphone use in meetings, which leaves it up to employees to feel their way across uncertain terrain.

To Jason Chan, a digital-strategy consultant in Manhattan, different rules apply for in-house meetings (where checking BlackBerrys seems an expression of informal collegiality) and those with clients, where the habit is likely to offend. There is safety in numbers, he added in an e-mail message: “The acceptability of checking devices is proportional to the number of people attending the meeting. The more people there are, the less noticeable your typing will be.”

Beyond practical considerations, there is also the issue of image. In many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace boast.

Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. “It’s a not-so-subtle way of signaling ‘I’m connected. I’m busy. I’m important. And if this meeting doesn’t hold my interest, I’ve got 10 other things I can do instead.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/us/22smartphones.html





Paper’s Report on Killing Was Seen Only Online
Tim Arango

It was a two-part story of homicide and intrigue, wrapped in salaciousness and sexual innuendo, nearly 7,000 words long — the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age.

But the article of the unsolved slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a “polyamorous family” of three men lived, was written for The Washington Post’s Web readers only, published on May 31 and June 1.

The decision to keep the article out of the print edition angered many readers who still pay for the newspaper. It also highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences.

Most editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news.

“If you’re doing long form, you should do it in print,” said Mark Potts, a newspaper consultant and blogger. “This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn’t have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.”

Some editors have taken the opposite tack, offering exclusive articles for print readers, and then posting them online several days later.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, for example, recently began publishing articles exclusive to the print edition on Sundays, and then posting them online on Wednesdays. The articles are all in-depth, investigative pieces similar to the homicide series in The Post.

The reason for the experiment, said Nancy Barnes, editor of The Star Tribune, is “so readers get something extra for buying the paper,” adding, “It’s more of a reward for our readers who subscribe.”

She said the idea was to find ways to give readers incentives to buy the paper while editors and executives at the company continue to explore methods to charge for content online.

Other articles held back from the paper’s Web site have included one on a prostitution ring, a serial narrative about police corruption and an in-depth look at student debt.

In one letter that The Post published after its article ran online, a reader wrote: “Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet. As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.”

The project, it seems, was not an experiment in Web-only journalism at one of the nation’s largest newspapers, but a result of the financial pressure afflicting the industry.

Editors at The Post have said they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs.

The reporter who wrote the two-part series, Paul Duggan, was asked in an online chat with readers why the article did not appear in the paper.

“That’s a question for senior editors here, not me,” Mr. Duggan wrote. “I’m a mere typist. But I will say, generally, that some stories, to be told right, need a lot of space, and there is a finite amount of it available in the printed paper. Fortunately in this age we have a boundless digital revenue that can accommodate narratives like this one.”

In an interview, Mr. Duggan said the limited scope of the article made it more suited for the Web: “It’s merely interesting. It’s a murder story. It doesn’t indicate any kind of trend. It doesn’t explain the world to you.”

Meanwhile, how the story was covered in the nearly three years between the crime and Mr. Duggan’s series speaks to the condition of the news industry.

Craig Brownstein, an executive at the big public relations firm Edelman, and three friends who all lived near the crime scene became amateur reporters and started a blog last year called whomurderedrobertwone.com. Along with The Legal Times newspaper, the blog chronicled the case and the incremental legal news that was largely ignored by the mainstream news media.

Mr. Brownstein began the blog late last year, shortly after three people, who lived in the townhouse where Mr. Wone had been killed, were charged with obstruction of justice. No one has been charged in the killing.

“There was something about the proximity of this case to where we lived, and that it had languished for two years,” Mr. Brownstein said. “Seven months after we started digging, it’s still clear as mud.”

“Would I like to have seen it spread across three or four pages of the paper? Yeah,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/bu...ia/22post.html





Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site
Noam Cohen

Recognizing that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is increasingly used by the public as a news source, Google News began this month to include Wikipedia among the stable of publications it trawls to create the site.

A visit to the Google News home page on Wednesday evening, for example, found that four of the 30 or so articles summarized there had prominent links to Wikipedia articles, including ones covering the global swine flu outbreak and the Iranian election protests.

The inclusion of Wikipedia articles among the thousands of publications used by Google News began as an experiment that was seen by a small percentage of users, said a company spokesman, Gabriel Stricker. Before making the addition permanent, he said, Google wanted to be sure that even people seeking news would want to read the articles created by volunteers working in collaboration over the Internet.

“We saw users were finding the Wikipedia pages to be helpful complements to so many stories they saw,” he said, adding that Wikipedia frequently offered “the broader overview on the topic.”

Google’s promotion of Wikipedia content is hardly new: its search engine routinely lists Wikipedia articles as the first result for a search. But their use on the news site — especially as newspaper publishers have been complaining that Google was building a competing news site using headlines and snippets of newspaper articles — adds a new wrinkle to the question of how publications can control and charge for their content.

In response to critics’ concerns over the accuracy of what appears on Wikipedia, the articles there, particularly about breaking news, can be meticulously sourced. The article “Iranian Presidential Election, 2009,” for example, had more than 200 footnotes by the weekend. So, in essence, many Wikipedia articles are another way that the work of news publications is quickly condensed and reused without compensation.

The move by Google News was news to Wikipedia itself. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, said he learned about it by reading an online item on the subject by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

“Google is recognizing that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information,” he said, although “it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/te...et/22wiki.html





Investors Bet on Payments via Cellphone
Claire Cain Miller and Matt Richtel

On a PC, having to fill out a form and type in a credit card number to buy something is only mildly annoying. On a cellphone, it could make you want to skip the purchase entirely.

This is why investors, start-ups and major corporations are pouring money into services that make it easier to use cellphones to buy goods and transfer money.

The aim is to turn phones into virtual credit cards or checkbooks, enabling the kind of click-and-buy commerce and online banking that people have come to expect on their PCs. But shrinking down those services to fit onto cellphones presents serious challenges.

The services must work on many different phones and through many cellphone service providers, which usually control the billing relationships with customers. That adds complexity to the already tricky business of safely and securely transferring funds among financial institutions and merchants.

Mobile payment systems have been tried before, with only modest success. Driving a new flurry of deal making, industry analysts and executives say, is the success of the iPhone, BlackBerry and other sophisticated devices. These phones make complex interactions easier, and they have shown that people on the go are willing to spend on music, games and virtual goods, like a $2 costume for a character in a video game.

Now the race is on to develop new payment systems — and to get several percentage points in fees from each transaction.

“A lot of big players with big bucks are investing a lot of money in this,” said J. Gerry Purdy, an industry analyst for Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm. “They’re seeing that returns could be so huge.”

“We know it’s going to be there,” he said of the technology. “The question is how to make it easy for people.”

Obopay, a start-up that lets people transmit money to one another via text message, raised $35 million from Nokia’s investment arm in March. That was the single largest investment in a financial services start-up this year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Last week, MasterCard introduced a service called MoneySend that uses some of Obopay’s technology.

Also last week, a mobile payments start-up called Boku announced that it had received $13 million in venture capital financing. Boku, which is the product of a merger of the start-ups Paymo and Mobillcash, says it views itself as the mobile phone’s answer to MasterCard or Visa. But instead of relying on credit card numbers, Boku asks users to type in their phone numbers.

The system then sends a text message to buyers asking them to authorize the transaction with a texted response, and the charge appears on their mobile phone bill. Carriers can take up to 50 percent of the purchase price, while Boku takes 5 percent to 10 percent.

“Everyone knows their cellphone number. Not everyone knows their credit card number,” said Mark Britto, Boku’s chief executive.

When people can use their phone numbers to make a purchase, they are 10 times as likely to follow through on a transaction as when they have to type in credit card and billing information, said David Marcus, chief executive of a start-up called Zong. Much like Boku, Zong lets people use phone numbers to buy games, virtual goods and virtual currency.

“If you want to buy a virtual penguin for two bucks, you’re not going to go to your wallet, take your credit card out and type in 16 numbers,” Mr. Marcus said. “These transactions are impulse purchases.”

Why focus on virtual penguins instead of real-world goods like books or clothes? Because the hefty transaction fees charged by wireless carriers in the United States would make those offerings uncompetitive or unprofitable, while virtual goods cost almost nothing to produce. Boku and Zong plan to handle sales of real products if fees come down after carriers see that people do want to use their phones to make purchases.

Mobile payment companies also need to get cooperation from merchants, which must add a payment option to their mobile sites or applications — in much the same way that many online stores allow PayPal payments. Boku says its strategy is to try to establish direct relationships with major retailers, and to allow smaller merchants to add Boku services with relative ease.

Another group of mobile payment companies let people use their phones to send money to one another via text message. Using these fledgling services, a person can send money to, for instance, a baby sitter, family member or a neighbor selling a couch on Craigslist. The services then transfer the money between the two accounts — bank, debit or credit card.

Obopay, one of the biggest companies in this business, has raised a total of $104 million from investors including Nokia; the investment firm of James D. Wolfensohn, a former president of the World Bank; and Citigroup, which uses Obopay to run its mobile payment service. PayPal, which is owned by eBay, is promoting its own mobile tools.

So far, mobile money-transfer services have had more success in developing countries, where fewer people have traditional bank accounts, and among people in developed countries who want to send money to relatives abroad.

In the United States, skeptics say, people will continue to use checks, credit cards and cash rather than adopting yet another system for their mobile devices.

But the potential opportunity to get fees from the growing number of mobile transactions is too juicy to pass up, despite the risks, said Aaron McPherson, an analyst with IDC Financial Insights, a market research company.

“If you’re a venture capitalist who likes to take big bets, it’s a good thing to get into, but a lot of these guys are going to lose their shirts,” Mr. McPherson said.

David Weiden, an investor at Khosla Ventures, which invested in Boku, conceded that many past ventures in this area have failed. But, he said, “it is also true that micropayments and this premium model for goods and services, mostly digital games and ring tones, has been an absolutely smashing success on mobile and way underhyped.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/technology/22pay.html





Australia Beats US for Broadband Access

SOUTH Korea, where 95 per cent of homes have broadband, has topped a world survey on access to the high-speed internet.

Among other Asia-Pacific nations, Australia ranked 11th with 72 per cent, Japan ranked 16th with 64 per cent, New Zealand ranked 25th with 57 per cent and China ranked 43rd with 21 per cent.

The United States, where just 60 per cent of households had broadband as of last year, ranked 20th in the survey of 58 countries by Boston-based Strategy Analytics, released on Thursday.

Five of the top 10 countries or territories in the survey were in Asia and the firm predicted the broadband subscriber base in the Asia-Pacific region will grow on average by a further 15 per cent a year between 2009 and 2013.

Strategy Analytics said South Korea's highly-urbanised population and its government-backed broadband policy accounted for its high rate of broadband penetration.

With South Korea ranked first the other top nine included Singapore ranked second with 88 per cent, followed by the Netherlands (85 per cent), Denmark (82 per cent), Taiwan (81 per cent), Hong Kong (81 per cent), Israel (77 per cent), Switzerland (76 per cent), Canada (76 per cent) and Norway (75 per cent).

Thailand ranked 51st with seven per cent, Vietnam ranked 52nd, also with seven per cent, the Philippines ranked 53rd with five per cent, India ranked 57th with two per cent and Indonesia ranked 58th with one per cent.

Strategy Analytics acknowledged that measuring broadband penetration has been a subject of controversy with arguments being made over whether it should be measured by household or per capita.

"Broadband rankings are often the subject of great debate and hand-wringing," said David Mercer, vice president of Strategy Analytics.

"Though our rankings may differ from those of other organisations, it is because we are looking at the appropriate metrics," he said.

"In far too many cases, people are looking at the wrong things," said Ben Piper, a Strategy Analytics analyst.

"Residential broadband is overwhelmingly consumed on a household basis -- not individually," he said.

"Reporting broadband penetration on a per capita basis misses the mark, and can provide grossly misleading results."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013040,00.html





Monticello Wins Fight Over Broadband

State Supreme Court upheld city's right to install high-speed network
Leslie Brooks Suzukamo

The way has been cleared for the city of Monticello to build its own state-of-the-art phone, video and Internet broadband service to compete with local phone and cable companies.

The Minnesota Supreme Court earlier this week rejected an appeal by Bridgewater Telephone Co., part of TDS Telecommunications of Madison, Wis., to overturn two lower court decisions favoring the city. The phone company argued the city didn't have the authority to issue $26 million in revenue bonds to finance the project, which would run fiber-optic cable to every home and business.

The news represents a victory for consumers, who complain that having phone and cable companies as their only connectivity providers has kept prices high and strangled innovation. Others argue that the Internet needs to be considered a publicly owned essential service to allow the United States to keep pace with countries like Sweden or South Korea, which have cheaper, faster Internet networks for phone, data and video.

But phone and cable companies may find the court's decision encourages other cities to invade their turf. They've argued that city-owned systems backfire and leave taxpayers holding the bag.

"The lack of judicial action on the part of the (Minnesota) Supreme Court will likely discourage other private enterprises from doing or expanding their business in Minnesota," said Drew Peterson, director of legislative affairs for TDS. The decision "endangers the appropriate relationship between municipalities and private enterprise," he added.

In February, voters in North St. Paul rejected a referendum to offer phone service backed by general obligation bonds. North St. Paul city officials had wanted to build a fiber network for a "triple-play" of voice, video and high-speed Internet services.

The citizens of Monticello approved a referendum two years ago to let the city offer phone service with a 74 percent yes vote, said Jeff O'Neill, the Monticello city administrator.

The Monticello revenue bonds are backed by investors, so taxpayers technically are not on the hook if the system fails to generate enough revenue. However, the city might face a costly downgrading of its bond rating should the city default, O'Neill said.

O'Neill counters criticism about government encroachment on private enterprise with this question: "Would you rather trust government, which can be voted out, to provide your service? Or a private corporation, which is accountable to shareholders and not to the needs of people?"

Construction is slated to start in two weeks. Monticello could be offering service as soon as this fall to its 12,000 residents and assorted businesses, O'Neill said.

A handful of cities in Minnesota and across the country have started providing competing broadband services, such as the Wi-Fi systems in Minneapolis and Chaska, but it's almost unheard of for a city to undertake an expensive fiber-optic program that requires digging up streets so it can lay cable to each home or business.

The town of Windom, Minn., built a fiber-optic system in 2005. The St. Paul suburb of Eagan has been studying the idea for residents while St. Paul itself is considering a limited fiber network for government entities like city, school district and county offices.
http://www.twincities.com/business/ci_12652086





Reporters Find Northrop Grumman Data in Ghana Market
Robert McMillan

A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.

The drive had belonged to a Fairfax, Virginia, employee who still works for the company and contained "hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts," said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led the investigation for the Public Broadcasting Service show Frontline. He would not disclose details of the documents, but he said that they were marked "competitive sensitive" and covered company contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Transportation Security Agency.

The data was unencrypted, Klein said in an interview. The cost? US$40.

Northrop Grumman is not sure how the drive ended up in a Ghana market, but apparently the company had hired an outside vendor to dispose of the PC. "Based on the documents we were shown, we believe this hard drive may have been stolen after one of our asset-disposal vendors took possession of the unit," the Northrop Grumman said in a statement. "Despite sophisticated safeguards, no company can inoculate itself completely against crime."

A Northrop Grumman spokesman would not say who was responsible for disposing of the drive, but in its statement the company noted that "the fact that this information is outside our control is disconcerting."

Some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices, Klein said. "It was a wonderful, ironic twist," Klein said. "Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe."

According to Klein, it's common for old computers and electronic devices to be improperly dumped in developing countries such as Ghana and China, where locals scavenge the material for components, often under horrific working conditions.

Last year the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a substantial amount of the country's e-waste ended up in developing countries, where it was often dangerously disposed of.

The reporters bought seven hard drives, Klein said. The other drives contained sensitive information about their previous owners, including credit-card numbers, resumes and online account information.

Off-camera, sources in Ghana told the reporters that data thieves routinely scour these hard drives for sensitive information, Klein said.

Although that may be worrying to some, security experts say that there is already a vast quantity of this type of information available online from criminals who have stolen it from hacked computers.

Compared to hacking, stealing data from old hard drives is pretty inefficient, said Scott Moulton, an Atlanta data-recovery expert who teaches classes on data recovery. "It's a tremendous amount of work, so it's only going to be the bottom-of-the-barrel guys who would do that," he said. "It's happening on a small scale."

Still, it's easy for criminals to find data on drives, even when they've been legitimately wiped clean, Moulton said. He buys used hard drives by the hundreds for his classes. These drives have been professionally wiped, but his students always find at least one drive in each class with information still on it.

That's because it's easy for a drive to get missed during the wiping process or improperly wiped. Compounding the problem, the software that some recycling companies use doesn't actually remove all data from the drive, especially data that may be hidden on corrupted parts of the hard drive known as bad blocks, he explained.

The surest way to get your data off of a hard drive is to physically destroy it, Moulton said.
http://itworld.com/security/69758/re...a-ghana-market





IBM Researcher Solves Longstanding Cryptographic Challenge

An IBM researcher has solved a thorny mathematical problem that has confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption several decades ago. The breakthrough, called "privacy homomorphism," or "fully homomorphic encryption," makes possible the deep and unlimited analysis of encrypted information - data that has been intentionally scrambled - without sacrificing confidentiality.

IBM's solution, formulated by IBM Researcher Craig Gentry, uses a mathematical object called an "ideal lattice," and allows people to fully interact with encrypted data in ways previously thought impossible. With the breakthrough, computer vendors storing the confidential, electronic data of others will be able to fully analyze data on their clients' behalf without expensive interaction with the client, and without seeing any of the private data. With Gentry's technique, the analysis of encrypted information can yield the same detailed results as if the original data was fully visible to all.

Using the solution could help strengthen the business model of "cloud computing," where a computer vendor is entrusted to host the confidential data of others in a ubiquitous Internet presence. It might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients' data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data.

Other potential applications include enabling filters to identify spam, even in encrypted email, or protecting information contained in electronic medical records. The breakthrough might also one day enable computer users to retrieve information from a search engine with more confidentiality.

"At IBM, as we aim to help businesses and governments operate in more intelligent ways, we are also pursuing the future of privacy and security," said Charles Lickel, vice president of Software Research at IBM. "Fully homomorphic encryption is a bit like enabling a layperson to perform flawless neurosurgery while blindfolded, and without later remembering the episode. We believe this breakthrough will enable businesses to make more informed decisions, based on more studied analysis, without compromising privacy. We also think that the lattice approach holds potential for helping to solve additional cryptography challenges in the future."

Two fathers of modern encryption - Ron Rivest and Leonard Adleman - together with Michael Dertouzos, introduced and struggled with the notion of fully homomorphic encryption approximately 30 years ago. Although advances through the years offered partial solutions to this problem, a full solution that achieves all the desired properties of homomorphic encryption did not exist until now.

IBM enjoys a tradition of making major cryptography breakthroughs, such as the design of the Data Encryption Standard (DES); Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC); the first lattice-based encryption with a rigorous proof-of-security; and numerous other solutions that have helped advance Internet security.

Craig Gentry conducted research on privacy homomorphism while he was a summer student at IBM Research and while working on his PhD at Stanford University.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=7690





Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom
Jim Giles

EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.

After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company's final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times.

Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron's demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails' content.

Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. They presented their findings at the International Workshop on Complex Networks, held last month in Catania, Italy.

Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, has also worked with the Enron emails. He says that if further research backs up Menezes's idea, this shift in communication patterns could be used as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organisation. "Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful," he says.

Confirming this link will be difficult, though, as privacy concerns mean that email logs are hardly ever made public. Menezes says his university will not allow him to analyse even an anonymised version of student email data.

Such restrictions are frustrating for researchers who study social networks, as they had hoped email logs might boost the field by providing unprecedented quantitative data on how people communicate.

A few other studies have been carried out, however. Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research in New York managed to obtain anonymised university email records - though he is not able to share them with others - and used them to show that instead of varying continuously, individuals' emailing behaviour falls into distinct clusters. Meanwhile, Peterson used the Enron email log to develop software that scans for potential saboteurs working within an organisation.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ding-doom.html





Survey Reveals Social Networkers' Risky Behaviors

Members of online social networks may be more vulnerable to financial loss, identity theft and malware infection than they realize, according to a new survey from Webroot.

Surveying over 1,100 members of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other popular social networks, Webroot uncovered numerous behaviors that put social networkers' identities and wallets at risk. Among the highlights:

• Two-thirds of respondents don't restrict any details of their personal profile from being visible through a public search engine like Google;
• Over half aren't sure who can see their profile;
• About one third include at least three pieces of personally identifiable information;
• Over one third use the same password across multiple sites; and
• One quarter accept "friend requests" from strangers

Social Networks Present New Opportunities for Cybercriminals

Cybercriminals employ various types of trickery and malware to capitalize on risky behaviors. One common tactic is phishing, which hackers use to entice victims into downloading an infected file, visiting a disreputable site outside the social network, or wiring money to a "friend in distress."

In recent months, Webroot has seen an increase in these types of attacks on social networks, including "Trojan-MyBlot," which targeted users of MyYearbook.com, and others targeting Facebook users including "Koobface" and several spread through the domains "mygener.im," "ponbon.im" and "hunro.im."

Sophisticated means to execute attacks on social networks: The Webroot survey respondents who reported experiencing identity theft, a hijacked account and unauthorized username or password changes may have been victimized by hackers who were able to access their profiles and guess their passwords based on the personal information they included.

Summary of Key Findings

Results of the Webroot survey indicate a general lack of awareness of the security risks on social networks and the tools available to protect personal information, as well as higher rates of risky behaviors exhibited by younger social networkers.

Social networkers make private information public:

• 80 percent allow at least part of their profiles to be searchable through Google or other public search engines; 66 percent don't restrict any profile information from being visible through public search
• Over half (59 percent) of respondents aren't sure who can see their profile
• Over one quarter (28 percent) accept friend requests from strangers; of those, one third (36 percent) do not cloak any of their profile information
• About one third (32 percent) include at least three pieces of identifiable information

Privacy concerns outweigh protective actions:

• 78 percent expressed some concern over the privacy of the information they share in their profiles
• However, 36 percent use the same password across multiple sites
• And 30 percent do not have adequate protection against viruses and spyware

Younger users take more risks - 18-29 year olds are more likely to:

• Use the same password across multiple sites (51 percent, versus 36 percent overall)
• Accept a friend request from a stranger (40 percent, versus 28 percent overall)
• Share more personal information that may compromise online privacy (67 percent share birth date, versus 52 percent overall; 62 percent share home town, versus 50 percent overall; 45 percent share employer, versus 35 percent overall)
• Experience a security attack (nearly 40 percent, versus 30 percent overall)

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=7688





New Facebook Blog: We Can Hack Into Your Profile
Caroline McCarthy

Well, here's an innovative way to get some buzz: FBHive, a new blog devoted to the discussion of all things Facebook, has debuted with the revelation that its creators have discovered a hack that can expose some crucial profile data.

No, it won't expose your personal photos or wall posts. But, FBHive says, it can bring up all the "basic information" that you have entered into your profile, even if you've elected to keep that information private. This is the section that includes location, gender, relationship status, relationships (significant other, parents, siblings), political views, religious views, birthday, and hometown. That's enough to be a problem in the identity theft department, as it could easily expose frequent password hints like dates of birth and mothers' maiden names.

Security holes are nothing new to social networks: last year, Facebook plugged a leak that exposed members' protected photos via the Facebook mobile site, and another hole was discovered about a year ago that exposed members' birth dates.

Admirably, FBHive has not shared the details of the newly discovered hack; more disconcertingly, it said Facebook has done nothing since it alerted the social network to the issue earlier this month.

"We are not malicious hackers, by any means, and our skills are far from advanced," the post read. "We here at FBHive are fans of Facebook, but when a security hole as big as this is discovered and brought to (Facebook's) attention, it shouldn't take 15 days to fix."

A Facebook representative said the company is currently "looking into" the matter and will have more information soon.

UPDATE at 11:14 a.m. PT: "We have identified this bug and closed the loophole," an e-mailed statement from Facebook read. "We don't have any evidence to suggest that it was ever exploited for malicious purposes."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10270002-36.html





MySpace to Axe Two-Thirds of International Workforce

MySpace, the social network owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, said it plans to cut about two-thirds of its international workforce and close at least four of its offices outside the United States.

The proposed move comes a week after it said it will cut 30 percent of its staff.

Roughly half of MySpace's total user base comes from outside the United States. Rival Facebook's worldwide user base is more than double that of MySpace, according to market researcher comScore.

The proposed restructuring plan would apply to all international divisions of MySpace, reducing its international staff to about 150 from 450.

Under the proposed plan, MySpace would place all existing offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and Spain under review for possible restructuring.

Upon completion, London, Berlin and Sydney would become primary regional hubs for MySpace's international operations.

MySpace China, a locally owned, operated and managed company, and MySpace's joint venture in Japan will not be affected by the proposed plan, the company said.

(Reporting by S. John Tilak in Bangalore; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55M21U20090623





Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
David Kravets

Thursday’s $1.92 million file-sharing verdict against a Minnesota mother of four could provide copyright reform advocates with a powerful human symbol of the draconian penalties written into the nearly-35 year old Copyright Act. Then again, maybe not.

A Minnesota federal jury stung Jammie Thomas-Rasset with the enormous fine after concluding she infringed copyrights on 24 music tracks by sharing them on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. It was the defendant’s second trial: The first ended in a $222,000 verdict for the same songs, but was nullified after the judge presiding over the case said he provided faulty jury instructions that favored the recording industry.

But the retrial only put the defiant Thomas-Rasset deeper in debt than before, and sparked a popular backlash on blogs and Twitter. Now would-be copyright reformers are hoping to turn the stratospheric judgment into a rallying cry for action in Washington. “The verdict will give ammunition to lawyers, academics and judges who want to impose a constitutional limit on statutory damages,” says Ben Sheffner, a copyright attorney who writes the Copyrights & Campaigns blog.

There’s no doubt that a multi-million dollar judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000. That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers; not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

The verdict comes against a backdrop of rising opposition to such outrageous fines, from the judge presiding over the Thomas-Rasset case to the blogosphere and legal scholars. In a file-sharing case pending in Massachusetts, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is arguing that the maximum $150,000 fine per infringement is unconstitutionally excessive in violation of due process and the prohibition on cruel-and-unusual punishment. The Obama administration weighed in on that case to support such huge damages, taking the same position as the Bush administration.

And legal scholars at the University of California at Berkeley are proposing a rewrite of the Copyright Act. In a forthcoming research paper, fellow Tara Wheatland and Berkeley scholar, Pamela Samuelson, argue that juries and judges need more congressional guidance when it comes to their deliberations on damages.

“We know of no other area of law in which judges and juries are given such open-ended discretion to award up to $150,000 in damages without any burden of proof on plaintiff to prove the fact or extent of the harms they suffered,” the duo write in Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform.

In an e-mail interview, Wheatland said that the award in the Thomas-Rasset case was “wildly disproportionate to the amount of actual damages conceivably inflicted by her conduct, and is far more than would be necessary to deter her and others like her from engaging in peer-to-peer file sharing.”

Even the judge who presided over Thomas-Rasset’s trials, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, wrote last year that the original penalty was too high.

Now lawyers for the woman — if they don’t broker a settlement with the Recording Industry Association of America — are likely to go before Davis to attack the award. If they take Berkman’s approach, they have a big hurdle: The U.S. Supreme Court once rejected a cruel-and-unusual challenge to a 50-year prison term received by a California man caught shoplifting golf clubs.

Copyright expert Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent blog post that under a Supreme Court precedent, the justices have concluded that punitive damages, generally, should be no higher than nine times the actual damages. The case is not squarely on-point with Thomas-Rasset’s, where the award was based on the statute, and not an arbitrary number intended purely to punish a defendant. But assuming each download in the Thomas-Rasset case is valued at $1, her judgment is at a ratio of a stunning 800,000-to-1.

It’s easy to see a congressman or congresswoman — from a state other than California — grilling a recording industry executive on CSPAN about the fundamental unfairness of the Thomas-Rasset award. But the image begins to fade when one considers the full facts of the case. She’s not quite the poster child for change.

Confronted with powerful evidence of infringement, Thomas-Rasset concocted two ludicrous defenses for both trials. At the first, she said a hacker must have hijacked her home wireless connection, even though she didn’t own a wireless router. At the second trial last week, she testified that her children may have been the culprits.

And in the discovery phase of the proceedings, she was caught turning over a different hard drive than the one used at the time of the infringements.

And both trials occurred only after she rejected settlement offers twice, one as low as $5,000.

A key element of the Free Jammie meme — that she was only caught sharing 24 songs — is misleading. That’s all the RIAA sued her for, but the industry’s investigators picked those 24 songs from her Kazaa library of 1,700 tracks.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the case, has said it is winding down its 5-year-old litigation campaign, which has snagged some 30,000 defendants. Most all have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. So far, Thomas-Rasset was the only one to go to trial.

Ronald Rosen, the author of Music and Copyright, a treatise on copyright law published last year, suggested the verdict in the Thomas-Rasset case was, indeed, too high. But in the end, he claims, it was generally consistent with Congress’ intent in passing and fortifying the Copyright Act.

“It was really to stop people from infringing,” Rosen says. “There’s always been good lobbying on behalf of Hollywood and the record industry and so forth. Congress just felt people should be discouraged from copying, and the creators shouldn’t suffer.”

Even at $80,000-a-song, Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s verdict may not be enough to change lawmakers’ minds.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/thomasfollow/





Copyfraud: Poisoning the Public Domain

How web giants are stealing the future of knowledge
Charles Eicher

Special report The public domain is the greatest resource in human history: eventually all knowledge will become part of it. Its riches serve all mankind, but it faces a new threat. Vast libraries of public domain works are being plundered by claims of "copyright". It's called copyfraud - and we'll discover how large corporations like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon have structured their businesses to assist it and profit from it.

Copyfraud first came to my attention nearly two years ago in my scholarly research. As Google Books began releasing massive numbers of newly scanned public domain books, Japanese Studies scholars excitedly announced (http://www.froginawell.net/japan/200...nload-feature/) their discoveries. I found links to books by one of the first American journalists to arrive in Japan, Lafcadio Hearn (http://www.trussel.com/f_hearn.htm). Scans of his books from the 1890s onward - with their eccentric letterpress typography and gold foil stamped leather covers - give us the details of presentation and are the minutiae that launched a thousand dissertations. This is just the sort of material that excites scholars like me; we examine his books to see how the West first came to understand Japan.

But Hearn's books also have commercial value as public domain works. Hearn's book of traditional Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan was released as a film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058279/) in 1964 and was nominated for an Academy Award; a modern film homage appeared in 2007 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844319/). Hearn profited by recording, translating, and publishing a book of traditional folk tales. When his book lapsed into the public domain, it was used again as source material for a copyrighted commercial derivative work on film. This recycling of ancient oral tradition by Hearn helped propel a generation of big-budget horror films, becoming a profit centre for movie studios in both America and Japan.

Upon hearing the news of Hearn's work appearing on Google Books, I searched for Hearn's classic Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan. Although a freely downloadable scan (http://books.google.com/books?vid=OC...d=wz7wdeMs6PYC) of Volume 2 was available, only a limited preview edition (http://books.google.com/books?id=6B_7heyFw3wC) of Volume 1 from Kessinger Publishing (http://www.kessinger.net/index.php) was available, under a 2004 "copyright". The preview edition was marked "Copyrighted material" on every page. Many pages were omitted, the book is nothing but an excerpt.

Kessinger made the document useless to scholars, to force them to purchase the full hardcopy edition for $25. Links on the Google Books page directed purchasers to the Kessinger edition on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419121871) and other online booksellers. Scholars were outraged (http://muninn.net/blog/2006/01/googl...c-domain.html). These works are clearly in the public domain, dating back to the 1890s and beyond.

When questioned, Google said (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2006/...books-and.html) it "must err on the side of caution... until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain." But with the sheer volume of ebooks being submitted by outside publishers, there are obvious delays in clearing rights. Some publishers have exploited this gap, providing copyfraud editions where no free edition was available.

Google suggested waiting patiently, as surely these missing volumes would eventually be scanned and added to its free online library. But the practice began to spread. Other publishers followed Kessinger's model and several (http://books.google.com/books?id=qdlTT8M-r1MC) more (http://books.google.com/books?id=tM5TkHIMRKwC) copyfraud editions (http://books.google.com/books?id=TCVYZvLxuMMC) of Volume 1 followed. Nearly two years later, a freely downloadable scan of Volume 1 finally appeared (http://books.google.com/books?id=N9oMAAAAIAAJ). Some publishers had used the two year gap to profit.

We can see the publishers' motivation. Their business model has been ruined. There is a long tradition of small publishers selling facsimiles of rare public domain books. They were a precursor of the print-on-demand online model, collecting and curating large libraries of obscure, disreputable, and uncommercial works on topics like occultism, homeopathy, military history, and crackpot cancer cures, and selling them to niche markets. But with the advent of Google Books, their market has evaporated: the books are no longer scarce. So they fought back the only way they knew how, by exploiting the gaps in Google's book coverage.

Copyfraud: How to do it

Committing copyfraud is astonishingly easy and costs nothing. I can borrow a public domain book from any library and scan it, or I could download the text (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8130) from Project Gutenberg. I reformat it as a PDF, mark it with a copyright date, register it as a new book with an ISBN, then submit it to Amazon.com for sale. I may not even need to print and bind any books, I can offer it through Amazon's Booksurge (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custom...odeId=13685731) print-on-demand service, or as an ebook on Kindle (https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin). Once the book is listed for sale, I can submit it to Google Books for inclusion in its index. I could easily publish thousands of books; most would never sell, but with zero up-front cost, any sale is pure profit.

But why would Google and Amazon permit this exploitation of the public domain? It could be argued it would be better to index these copyfraud editions. Perhaps it's better to have access to a fraudulently copyrighted, paid edition rather than no edition at all. I disagree. Google Books has structured its online service with no regard to preventing abuses, and so has created a financial incentive for some publishers to game the system. Google also has its own incentive, as it earns a small kickback on every sale referred to Amazon or other booksellers. Essentially, this system has become a successful inversion of the "micropayments" model, Google is profiting by administering millions of small transactions which divert vast sums of money to undeserving, unscrupulous publishers. Perhaps we should call it "microfraud".

Just as scholars were discovering their restricted access to these public domain works, Law Professor Jason Mazzone released a groundbreaking article, "Copyfraud (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#PaperDownload)", examining the problem and its impact. Mazzone asserts this type of copyfraud is targeted at universities. A recent infringement lawsuit (http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright...9_F3d_1381.htm) denied universities Fair Use access to copyrighted materials, and has made them reluctant to use materials bearing even a fraudulent copyright. Some publishers profit from muddling the status of the copyright, so universities must force students to purchase documents they could otherwise obtain for free, driving up the cost of higher education."

Corporate interests like movie studios have an incentive to enforce legal access to the public domain, it is their source material, and they have an army of lawyers to back them up. But scholars have no such resources. A penniless student may be able to afford a $25 copyfraud edition, but not an expensive lawyer to sue to protect his rights.

Professor Mazzone also discusses another interesting case where a claim of copyright can be attached as a condition of access. This is the "sole-source monopoly", where only a single copy of a public domain work exists. I have previously discussed this issue in my article 'How To Copyright Michelangelo (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/27/how_to_copyright_michelangelo/)', Astonishingly, this pseudo-copyright has also afflicted the Leader of the Free World, President Obama.

Enter Obama, bearing Web 2.0 gifts

All works of the US Government are in the public domain (http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105). It's a condition of Federal Law. Recently, Yahoo's Flickr photo service was granted exclusive access to the Official White House Flickr Photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/).

But because Flickr is ideologically committed to Creative Commons licensing, it offered no licensing tags for public domain material, claiming it had no way to check every submission was truly public domain. This forced the White House photos to be licensed under a CC license. But CC relies on copyright. It is merely a waiver of rights granted by copyright, and these public domain works could never be assigned copyright. Users objected to Flickr assigning licensing restrictions where none could legally be imposed. Flickr initially refused to change its licensing terms, defending their use of CC licenses. They have since relented, creating an exclusive new category of "United States Government Work," linking to a document describing their public domain status, rather than just assigning a public domain tag. Now Creative Commons seeks expanded authority to administer the Public Domain, by issuing a "Creative Commons Public Domain License (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/)," as if it was a sublicense of its own invention. Creative Commons is trying to expand its licensing authority over not just newly created works, but all public domain works.

Public domain licensing is still not available to any Flickr user. This forces everyone, from individuals to large public institutions (http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrc...611349183205/), to contribute their works to the "Flickr Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons/)" under a CC license, even if the works are clearly in the public domain. Flicker is enacting a blatant power grab on behalf of Creative Commons. They are establishing an extra-legal licensing monopoly, imposing an illegal copyright license structure on free works. And this is the most pernicious effect of copyfraud: it exploits the public domain to aggregate monopoly power for private interests.

Creative Commons seeks to become the arbiter of public domain licensing, yet it has no governmental authority and cannot enforce its licenses. Nor is it subject to Congressional oversight like the Copyright Office.

Google's land grab

Google is engaged in a similar power struggle. Under the Google Books settlement with publishers, the company has already negotiated expanded authority to administer copyrights on "orphan books," legitimately copyrighted books that are out of print. Google wants to become an alternate registrar for the public domain, keeping a registry (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/...available.html) of American books that publishers have failed to renew copyrights. This database was scraped from government online records, but Google says this list is not authoritative or exhaustive, even conceding that errors are likely. So Google is unofficially performing official governmental regulatory powers on copyrights. This should be prevented, handled only by the true governmental authority: The Library of Congress. Eventually Google will collect payments and distribute royalties for orphan books, giving Google truly monopolistic control of both copyright and the profits from copyrighted books.

Google's public domain book scanning project has enhanced its authority as the primary internet source for the world's written knowledge, giving Google a powerful bargaining position when it negotiated the orphan books settlement. Once Google drove out rival book scanning projects like Microsoft Live Search (http://publisher.live.com/), publishers had little ability to resist Google's monopoly, forcing them to settle for less.

Google has usurped governmental functions that protect the public interest with a failed bureaucracy that serves only private profit. And Google is well positioned to continue their power grab, there are now three ex-Google executives (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/02/obama_google/) on the White House staff. Google's chief policy executive will become the government's Deputy Chief Technology Officer (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/02/obama_google/). And now Google has announced its intention to sell ebooks (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/te...e.html?_r=1&em) through Google Books, directly competing with Amazon and other booksellers. Google has leveraged its power to become a publishing monopoly.

A plan to beat Copyfraud

What can be done to protect the public domain from such opportunism?

As Professor Mazzone says, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: the law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain." The balance must be restored. There is nobody devoted to protecting the public trust against the forces who would exploit it. Only governmental authority can protect this public resource, and governments must act to protect our common rights.

Dominant corporate interests like Google can easily create systemic abuses against the public trust. They must be restrained. Copyright law should be enhanced to protect the public interest, but existing law has enough regulatory power - if the government has the will to use it. Allowing these abuses to continue will only lead to new monopolies.

Government should act to secure its authority over copyrights, stopping the self-interested meddlers like Creative Commons and their Public Domain licensing, and Google's registry of lapsed copyrights.

Private interests should be prohibited from exerting pseudo-regulatory powers, as well as the means to profit from their own regulation. Anti-trust actions could break up the newly forming publishing cartel before it becomes entrenched. At a minimum, Google's orphan books settlement should be given further judicial review and invalidated. Google and Amazon should be prohibited from offering books with false copyrights, the public should be empowered to flag copyfraud books and issue a take-down notice.

Publishing should not be permitted to become a Google-Amazon oligarchy. Let us not forget what happened when a single portal to the entirety of the world's books was assembled: the ancient Library of Alexandria burned to the ground, taking everything with it. Nobody should be allowed to become a single portal to the world's knowledge.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/





Richard Marx (!) Attacks RIAA After $1.92M Thomas Verdict

Jammie Thomas-Rasset was held liable to sharing 24 songs, including one by pop crooner Richard Marx. But the lawsuit wasn't done in Marx's name—this week, he called out the recording industry's "greedy actions."
Nate Anderson

There was a time in my life during which I left Richard Marx's "Paid Vacation" album in my stereo system for weeks at a time. This was not because I felt a spiritual craving for the music so strong that only repeated listenings would satisfy. No, it was the single worst CD I could dredge up out of my music collection, and I thought it might be effective as alarm-clock music. Hearing it, would I not have to rise at once to shut the disc off?

Turns out that it was just too inoffensive, too polished, too saccharine to yank me from my slumbers, but Richard Marx this week has partially redeemed himself for the album's creation (and for the $11 I must have spent on it back in high school). Marx issued a strong statement against the "greedy actions of the major labels" after hearing about the $1.92 million Jammie Thomas-Rasset verdict.

As a longtime professional songwriter, I have always objected to the practice of illegal downloading of music. I have also always, however, been sympathetic to the average music fan, who has been consistently financially abused by the greedy actions of major labels. These labels, until recently, were responsible for the distribution of the majority of recorded music, and instead of nurturing the industry and doing their best to provide the highest quality of music to the fans, they predominantly chose to ream the consumer and fill their pockets.

So now we have a "judgment" in a case of illegal downloading, and it seems to me, especially in these extremely volatile economic times, that holding Ms. Thomas-Rasset accountable for the continuing daily actions of hundreds of thousands of people is, at best, misguided and at worst, farcical. Her accountability itself is not in question, but this show of force posing as judicial come-uppance is clearly abusive. Ms. Thomas-Rasset, I think you got a raw deal, and I'm ashamed to have my name associated with this issue.

Richard Marx's opinion carries no legal weight, of course, though it's notable that his song "Now and Forever" was one of the 24 tracks for which Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay. The track was actually played in court to verify that it was the same one retrieved from the tereastarr@KaZaA share folder—and one of the trial's few moments of levity came when the judge asked why the playback of such a terrific song had been cut short? (He was apparently serious, preferring Marx's smooth acoustic guitar to the No Doubt track that preceded it.)

Who needs to be liked?

In the wake of the RIAA win, the organization's legendarily poor public image somehow got even worse. Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis called the Thomas-Rasset ruling "infamous as one of the most wrong-headed in the history of the American judicial system—not to mention that it will forever stand as the best evidence of the contempt of the old-school music industry toward the music lovers who once were its customers."

Columnist Robert X. Cringely, riffing on the Journey tracks that Thomas-Rasset now owes $80,000 apiece for, headlined a recent column, "Don't stop believing in the RIAA's capacity for evil." Clever.

How has the RIAA responded to the $1.92 million verdict? "Clinical detachment" is probably not the best response in the emotional aftermath of the case, but that's exactly what we got today from the RIAA's Joshua Friedlander, who compared the Thomas-Rasset jury to a really helpful focus group.

"Last week we got a chance to listen to one of these groups outside the usual circumstances," he wrote. "It wasn't a research project, and it wasn’t by sitting behind a two-way mirror... This group of 12 Minnesotans showed us that, despite the protestations of some pundits who suggest that the digital world should resemble some kind of new wild west, the majority understands and believes that the same laws and rules we follow every day apply online. Not just in theory, but in practice. Another group of 12 people presented with similar questions said the same thing two years ago. That makes a sample size of only 24, but it's certainly enough to learn from."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...as-verdict.ars





Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
John Noble Wilford

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”

Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.

Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.”

Dr. Conard’s team said an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals had been found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct.

The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.

The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture; griffon skeletons are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.

Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch three-hole ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”

Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.

A replica has yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”

This week, Dr. Conard began a new season of exploration at Hohle Fels Cave. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said by e-mail. “I never have expectations. One never finds what one is looking for, but one normally finds something interesting.”

Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.

It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.

Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html





Irony and the Old Lady
Cathy Horyn

FIRST go the knees, then goes irony. Sometime around age 50, women start to let go of certain ideas about themselves and fashion. Up till then you can wear lots of silly or brash things, and if you are reasonably fit and attractive or consistently daring, it doesn’t really matter. You’re still with the tide. You are home free with your esoteric Pradas, your porkpie hats and coy Lolita socks, and no little voice is going, “Heh-heh-heh, you’re too old for that.”

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that you are not Helen Gurley Brown, the miniskirted octogenarian. You love your youthful ideals but draw the line at being a slave to them 50 years on. Saying goodbye to short skirts and flimsy tops is actually liberating.

Irony is harder to part with — for the simple reason that many of us who are now in our 50s grew up with that kind of cerebral fashion and were happy to have clothes that made reference to ideas, worlds, that only those in our orbit could understand. Our mothers (mine, anyway) did not see the point in adopting flannel shirts or rummaging through Goodwill bins for just the right filthy cardigan.

And why would they? Grunge and deconstruction, which provided a counterpoint to the slick, aggressive fashion of the late 1980s, were our peculiar trip. My mother always preferred her own rose-colored glasses. “Can’t you be a lady?” she would say with a sigh. She thought women should look beautiful, while I pondered the meaning of Miuccia Prada’s “ugly beauty.”

So it goes. I still think I will buy myself a pair of knee socks and wear them with high heels — didn’t Prada show a fabulous pair this season? But the truth is I won’t be buying them. While I’m still in love with the ironical gesture and its mild but wholly satisfying orneriness and freedom in the face of so much conformity and New Jersey housewife opulence, I can’t pull it off anymore. I mentioned this to a friend, Luca Stoppini, the art director of Italian Vogue. I asked him why it is that fashionable women can’t wear certain things after 50. Luca had the answer right away. “It’s like fighting with the wind,” he said.

Nothing conveys that struggle better than Madonna’s attire last month at the Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum. In addition to wearing a taffeta hair bow that poked up like rabbit ears, she had on a bright blue minidress with a romper hem and a pair of swashbuckler boots that noticeably left a crack of skin showing at the top of her thighs.

Although the outfit was plainly a riff on exuberant Paris fashion — it was designed by a host of the event, Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton — many people took the excessiveness seriously. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some members of the low-brow media on the steps of the Met didn’t get the joke. But, in any case, they thought that Madonna, who is 50, looked like a nut.

One person who didn’t was Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, who said last week, “To me, that’s the Madge I fell in love with.” He let out a laugh. “Scandal!”

Tama Janowitz, whose fiction chronicles a mixed bag of urban obsessions, often with fashion at the flaky core (her next novel, “They Is Us,” projects a future in which women wear codpieces and men high heels), sent her thoughts in an e-mail message. It began: “90 percent of the time designers create a look that is basically unflattering to the female physique unless you are a 20-year-old, six-foot-tall model, in which case it does not make any difference what you have on. Madonna looked stupid in her rabbit ears.” Then she added, “Is that because of the times or her age?”

Yet a feeling of betrayal soon nipped at Ms. Janowitz’s e-mail message, and I understood it. She mentioned the names of a half-dozen eccentric women, birdlike creatures and deities less admired for their beauty than their captivating presence. She might have also mentioned Marchesa Luisa Casati, who was pre-goth. Or Anna Piaggi of Italian Vogue, whose highly theatrical style places her above mundane questions of appropriateness. It must be said that Ms. Piaggi’s look, highlighted by bright color and a miniature hat tipped over her whitened brow, demands a commitment few women possess.

As Luca said: “Even in the middle of summer, in the countryside, she doesn’t go out unless she’s dressed like that. It’s her sense of life.”

By the end of her note, Ms. Janowitz had come to the defense of women everywhere who resent being bullied and sniggered at and wish to express themselves at the risk of looking ridiculous. “If Madonna was wearing a bustle and a hoop skirt,” she wrote, “why would it irritate?”

Still, I wonder: Madonna certainly looks in terrific shape for 50. Yet precisely for that reason did the queen of self-presentation slide toward self-persuasion with her rabbit ears? Was there a wind blowing through the Met?

Irony has been an essential ingredient in fashion for at least the last 40 years — in the kinky clothes of Jean Paul Gaultier, in the recontextualizing of drag and vintage styles by Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano, in a spree of men’s wear that deconstruct the I.B.M. suit, most recently by Thom Browne. In women’s fashion, Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Prada use irony liberally, with Mr. Jacobs roaming across a range of ideas, from Margaret Thatcher’s unlikely sexiness to small-town formality during the Depression.

Some older women who love fashion still prefer a look with an edge rather than a polish. And with the economy forcing many to shop in their closets, they’re finding wonderful things. Last week, on a visit to New York, Sandy Schreier, a well-known collector of couture from Detroit, had on a black Jil Sander jacket with a 10-year-old Sander pink tulle skirt and black leggings, finished off with Prada ballet flats.

“People stopped me on the street and said, ‘Where did you get that?’ ” Ms. Schreier, a grandmother, reported. “I think that for a while I stopped being Sandy Schreier who would mix up things from different decades. I was getting complacent.” She added, “The reason I dress this way isn’t just to have fun with fashion, but it’s attention-getting — let’s face it.”

Yet just as many women dislike attention — or, anyway, that kind of attention. “The fashion message we’re so used to in New York doesn’t translate elsewhere in the country,” said Charla Krupp, a stylist and the author of “How Not to Look Old.” “People don’t get the joke.”

For that reason, Ms. Krupp tells older women to err on the side of classic and elegant. “No irony,” she said. “You can’t wear that porkpie hat. People will think you’ve lost it.”

It may just be that we’ve had a bellyful of abstractions like irony and now hanker for something direct and concrete. This desire for clarity isn’t limited to an age group — young people seem to crave it, too — and it’s not a defense against the standard complaint that you’re not cool enough to get the joke. Who cares if the joke is available to everyone through the Internet?

Madonna’s bunny ears are just the last gasp. Fashion needs a new antidote for modernity.

“It’s impossible to think of something you can drag out from the land of naffness and make cool,” Mr. Doonan said, referring to the process by which banal or out-of-date styles are brought back and, after much analysis and decoding and finally brand approval, become fashionable. He offered up the drop-waist denim dress, a wholesome style from the ’80s, saying it was rife with ironic potential.

I laughed. That was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

He thought for a moment. “To be overweight and not care, like Beth Ditto, is the most transgressive you can be right now.” But he only said that, I think, because plus-size stories were in a couple of newspapers that day. And you know what they say about newspapers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/fashion/25IRONY.html





The Overextended Family
Peggy Orenstein

I would never have pegged my parents as early adopters. At 79 and 82, they are, like most people their age, blissfully uninterested in technology. To them, a BlackBerry is a late-summer fruit; tweeting is something a bird does. So I was unprepared when they called to tell me about their thrilling new discovery: Skype, an online service we could use to video chat. It’s free, my mom explained, eagerly. All we’d have to do is get something put on our computers (translation: download a program) and they would be able to talk to their 5-year-old granddaughter face to face! We could leave the gizmo on all the time, my dad suggested, and they could watch her go through her day. “Maybe you could bring it to her school,” he added, only half-joking. “We could see her classroom!”

Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to have them toppled by the click of a mouse. If I wanted them to have unfettered access to my life, I wouldn’t have put the “keep out” sign on my room at age 10. I would have lived at home through college. I would have bought the house next door to them in Minneapolis and made them an extra set of keys.

Even they might have found that a little extreme.

But the mere existence of video chat forces me to lay down a whole new set of rules and to rethink, yet again, the line between inclusive and intrusive, the balance between their yearning to shrink the distance between us and my need for limits — something I thought we resolved decades ago to our mutual satisfaction.

So I did what any sensible adult child would do. I stalled.

“Gee,” I said, “setting that up seems awfully complicated. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”

To Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.

I may curse e-mail for destroying my workday, for turning me into a lab rat on a drug unable to stop clicking on “send-receive.” Yet it has been a godsend in my relationship with my mom: her hearing is severely impaired, much beyond help from aids or amplification, making phone conversations frustrating. E-mail has allowed us to “talk” again more fully, to share complex thoughts and feelings. We sometimes correspond five or six times a day.

Likewise, digital cameras are a boon: the near-instant photos I send to my folks — my daughter’s school play or maiden bicycle voyage — are truly the next-best thing to being there. Each technology strengthens our bond, but each also preserves my privacy. I’m in touch more often than ever before but entirely on my schedule. I manage the flow of information. I set the terms of my self-presentation. Everyone wins.

Apple hints at something similar in one of its “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, demonstrating how, with the flick of a finger, you can turn an incriminating snapshot into “at least one photo you can show your parents.” The message is that this achieves the elusive balance between access and control in personal communication. But I wonder. Cellphones may be smart, but they’re also tricky. On one hand, you don’t have to answer them if you are, say, in a crowded cafe (and oh so very often, I wish people wouldn’t) but the assumption has become that you will. Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it. One of my brothers grabs his cellphone before heading out for his morning run in case his wife or kids want to reach him. My other brother considers that excessive. Let’s just say that it is best to draw the curtain on that dinner-table debate.

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

Every evolution in telecommunication has been greeted with ambivalence. Critics of the early telephone warned that eliminating the physical presence from conversation would increase isolation and undermine the family. Picture phones embody the future in dystopian and utopian sci-fi alike: Heywood Floyd uses one in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; ditto George of “The Jetsons.” When AT&T unveiled a test model at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors lined up for a chance to talk to a stranger at Disneyland. Even Lady Bird Johnson gave it a whirl in Washington. In 1970, the picture phone was introduced for commercial use; the product tanked. Part of it was the expense — a three-minute call between New York and Chicago on the original version cost $27. But there was another reason: Who would want callers to know you were leafing through magazines or never made your bed or were trimming your toenails in the all-together? No one, that’s who.

Video chat, while obviously cheaper, would seem to have the same skewed ratio: too much access, too little control. But that’s speaking from the standpoint of a daughter. My perspective shifts significantly — as it does on so many subjects — when I mull this one over as a mother. It’s one thing to consider how much about me my parents have a right to know; it’s another to contemplate how much about my daughter I have a right to know — or even want to know.

I have friends who scroll through their teenagers’ text messages every night. They say it’s for their children’s protection, but to me it just seems the high-tech equivalent of picking the lock on a diary (something I know my mother never did, because if she had, I’d still be grounded). Their children don’t seem to mind the breach of trust. Maybe that’s because privacy is as foreign to them as analog television. Or because they’ve grown up far more tethered than any previous generation to their parents’ watchful gaze. It’s curious that today’s parents, who in their youth were so adamant about their own independence, are so lousy at fostering it in their progeny, even after the children leave home.

When I took off for college, I called my parents once a week, which was standard. They never saw my dorm room, didn’t meet my friends, had no concept of my schedule. It was My Space — the old-fashioned kind. Has cheaper and more plentiful technology made the difference, or is it something else? According to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web site traffic, Skype users typically fall into one or more of four groups: white, male, between 18 and 34, and the “less affluent” — which in this case, probably indicates still in school. It could be such lads Skype only one another, but I doubt it. If they’re indeed checking in with Mom, I hope they at least cover up the beer-pong poster first.

Maybe by the time my daughter leaves for college, I, too, will wish for a 24-hour-a-day video feed (or, by then, perhaps, a continuous holograph). Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be relieved not to see into her room, not to have to tell her for the 832nd time to clean it up. Maybe I’ll remind myself that magic mirrors are best left back in “Romper Room,” that, at some point, she has to figure out how to be her without me. She will need to cut the invisible cord — the phone cord, that is — and I will have to let her.

Doubtless, if circumstance takes her far away from home, my sense of the distance between us will be different from hers. That measure will change yet again — for both of us — should she have children, as it has, since her birth, for my parents and me. The truth is, I consider their tie to my daughter to be as precious as they do; the technology I use, I realize, may no longer reflect that.

So, I agreed to give video chat a try. We downloaded Skype and set a time to connect. They rang. I answered. My daughter waved. And then . . . we stared at each other. Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice. In my concern over letting my parents too far in, creating a claustrophobic closeness, I hadn’t considered that video chat might do just the opposite.

“Um,” I finally admitted, “I don’t have anything to say.”

That was a few weeks ago; we haven’t tried again since. It looks as if we’ll be among the two-thirds of Skype members who, according to Quantcast estimates, are passers-by who use the service no more than once a month.

“I think I’d rather e-mail,” my mom wrote me.

“Me, too,” I shot back, attaching a few photos of kindergarten graduation before hitting “send.”

Her response, which came instantly, made me smile: “Oh, Pegs,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for the pictures. It was exactly as if we were there with you!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...ln-t.html?_r=1





The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized

How the Internet helps Iran silence activists.
Farhad Manjoo

What happened in Baharestan Square on Wednesday? According to a woman who called in to CNN, Iranian security forces unleashed unimaginable brutality upon a few hundred protesters gathered in central Tehran. "They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood, and her husband, who was watching the scene, he just fainted," the anonymous caller screamed into the phone. "This was—this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us."

Clips of the phone call ricocheted across the Web and cable TV. The message was corroborated on Twitter, where a post by @persiankiwi brought horrific news from Baharestan Square: "we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar."* News organizations around the world told of a brutal crackdown—Iran's Tiananmen. But at the same time, other reports suggested the rally was a far tamer encounter. A reader on the New York Times' Lede blog wrote in to say that the protest had been cleared by security forces with minimal violence. The blog of the National Iranian American Council, which has been closely following all the news out of Tehran, published a report from a "trusted source" who said that while the rally was "tense," it didn't match the CNN caller's account. "The moment we stood in one place, they would break us up," the source wrote. "I saw many people get blindfolded and arrested, however it wasn't a massacre."

Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative powers of technology have pointed to Iran as a test case—one of the first repressive regimes to meet its match in social media, the first revolution powered by Twitter. Even in the early days of the protest, that story line seemed more hopeful than true, as Slate's Jack Shafer, among many others, pointed out. Since last week, though, when the state began to systematically clamp down on journalists and all communications networks leading out of the country, hope has become much harder to sustain. The conflicting accounts about what happened at Baharestan Square are evidence that Iran's media crackdown is working. The big story in Iran is confusion—on a daily basis, there are more questions than answers about what's really happening, about who's winning and losing, about what comes next. The surprise isn't that technology has given protesters a new voice. It's that, despite all the tech, they've been effectively silenced.

The crackdown in Iran shows that, for regimes bent on survival, squashing electronic dissent isn't impossible. In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has one of the world's most advanced surveillance networks. Using a system installed last year (and built, in part, by Nokia and Siemens), the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point. Through "deep packet inspection," the regime achieves omniscience—it has the technical capability to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines—a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls. The Stasi's work force comprised 100,000 officers, and estimates put its network of citizen informants at half a million. In the digital age, Iran can monitor its citizens with a far smaller security apparatus. They can listen in on everything anyone says—and shut down anything inconvenient—with the flip of a switch.

We've seen the effects of this control over the past couple days. To be sure, a few harrowing pictures and videos have filtered through Iran's closed net. But they're the exceptions; much of what's happened since the start of the week went undocumented. As the Lede points out, many of the clips now being posted to YouTube were first published last week, before Iran shut down its connections with the outside world. In the absence of fresh videos coming out of the country, people have been attaching new dates to old clips in order to stoke new outrage over the security crackdown.

The dearth of new images isn't surprising. The Internet is not anonymous; in places like Iran and China, whatever you do on the Web can be traced back to your computer. Hackers and activists have come up with many clever ways to elude such monitoring, but for most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril.

There's another problem with expecting digital movements to overthrow repressive governments. Organizing online—using tools like text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter—requires social trust, a commodity in short supply in a police state. Even in America, we've seen movements that look mighty online fizzle when they hit the ground (see Howard Dean). Imagine how much more difficult this would be if you were sitting in Tehran: You come across a tweet alerting you to a rally this afternoon in Baharestan Square. You'd like to go, but all kinds of fears begin to run through your head. What if they're watching me? Is this rally for real—or is it disinformation? What if I'm the only one to show up?

Other than trying to shut down many parts of the Web, we don't know what, precisely, Iranian security forces have done in response to the online protest movement. It's unclear whether they've actually planted disinformation online or tried to trace images and videos back to their original posters. But the uncertainty itself breeds fear. Several times over the last couple weeks, rumors have flooded the Web that the government had already gotten wise to Twitter and was actively seeding the movement with fake news. It was a stark example of how the psychological repression characteristic of authoritarian regimes—the constant fear, the inability to trust anyone—finds particularly fertile ground online.

Here's another one: On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That's right—the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that's no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?
http://www.slate.com/id/2221397





Surf the Internet Anonymously
Arun Kamath

Planning to go to countries where privacy of citizens is of little or no importance to the Government? Most of us like the internet because it helps us escape the real world and also allow us to keep our anonymity while doing so. Unfortunately, many countries are keeping track of their citizens tracking behaviour. If you are surfing the internet using a public hotspot, you are in grater danger of reavealing your sensitive information to unwanted people.

Here are some free, open source software that will help you maintain your privacy:

1. UltraSurf: (for Windows) It helps protect Internet privacy with anonymous surfing,by hiding IP addresses and locations and cleaning browsing history, cookies,etc.
2. Hotspot Shield: (for Windows and Mac) It secures your web session using HTTPS encryption. Hides your IP address.Helps you bypass censorship and firewalls.Protect you from snoopers trying to get sensitive information about you at hotspots, airports, hotels, corporate offices and ISP hubs.
3. Tor: (for Windows, Mac and Linux) Tor defend you against any form of network surveillance that will threaten your personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities.Tor works with many applications such as web browsers, instant messaging (IM) clients, remote login and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Please note that Java, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Adobe’s PDF plugins, etc. can be manipulated into revealing your IP address. Please be careful while surfing anonymously in certain countries with tyrranical governments where even a small mistake can lead to your arrest on most occasions. http://techyoyo.com/2009/06/surf-int...ss-censorship/





How to Run a Protest Without Twitter

Iranians can learn from leaders of protests — from Berlin to Beijing — before modern telecommunications.
GlobalPost Editors

This year's web wunderkind, Twitter, has been credited as a force in organizing protesters in Thailand, Moldova and, now, Iran.

But in Iran, the government has clamped down on the mobile network and put up Internet firewalls, leaving us to wonder how opposition leaders are getting the word out — which they seem to be doing, as reports trickle out in spite of government restrictions on the media that demonstrations continue unabated.

So we talked to past protest leaders to find out how they toppled governments and grabbed the world's attention before there were mobile phones or an Internet.

Hungary, 1956 — Flyers and word of mouth

Gyuri Lassan, then a 20-year-old construction worker, had seen flyers around university campuses in Budapest advertising meetings for the organization of a student revolution to fight the communists prior to Oct. 23, 1956. That evening, thousands of students met at the building of the Hungarian National Radio, linked arms and began a protest against the Communist regime.

During his morning commute the next day, Lassan heard on the radio that the students had broken into the building. Given the unusual morning traffic, rumors of an uprising spread quickly through the city.

“The whole of Pest knew what was going on,” Lassan said. “People were talking to each other on the street, the executives were coming down out of the office buildings.”

Before the march on the radio station that evening, students had organized secretly for weeks. Many at the universities had illegally used old printing presses to produce flyers and old radio equipment to send messages in Morse code to other groups meeting to organize and finalize their plans to march on the radio station.

Jozsef Erdelyi was only 8 years old at the time of the revolution, but his 17-year-old brother had heard broadcasts from the Communist leaders on the radio telling people to go home or risk arrest.

"The more the radio told people to go home, the more came out onto the streets,” Erdelyi said. The streets were full of yells and chants urging citizens to march on the radio station and resist the AVO, the Communist police force.

“I went alone to the radio station,” Lassan said. “I met people on the way and we couldn’t believe this ridiculous situation. There were police and AVO men everywhere, but we thought we were really doing something … that we could overcome them.”

United States, 1960s — Face-to-face and mimeograph machines

Students for a Democratic Society built its nationwide antiwar movement in the 1960s “primarily face to face,” said Michael Ansara, who served as New England coordinator for the group while studying at Harvard. "This is not only before Twitter, this is before computers," cell phones and fax machines, he said. “This was like the Dark Ages.”

“It was all printed word, and word of mouth and sometimes phone trees,” Ansara said. With the latter method, “You could reach a couple thousand people quickly.”

Ansara also described the group’s use of hand-operated mimeograph machines, provided by campus ministries or sympathetic professors, when information needed to be disseminated at night. After printing leaflets one by one, students would fan out across dormitories, dropping them under each door.

Intercampus SDS coordination depended on personal relationships, Ansara said. He maintained contact with coordinators for every New England campus, who in turn organized the efforts of activists at their respective schools. The group’s structure was not unlike that of an urban political machine, he said.

In Iran, Ansara believes that the Internet and cell phones allow for a faster, less centralized movement, but “if Twitter’s gone, they’ll find another way to communicate, even if it’s going up to the rooftop” and shouting. While the technology of dissent may evolve, he said, “fundamentally this is all the same process, which is self-organization plus inspired leadership.”

United States, 1960s — The latest technology: pay phones and TV

Once-pioneering technologies like pay phones and television were used by the Freedom Riders in much the same way contemporary protesters use Twitter and Facebook.

Paul Breines, a former Freedom Rider who rode buses through the south to combat racial inequality in America’s public transportation system, cited pay phones and television as key components of mobilization and coordination.

Pay phones, which are a rare sight now that mobile phones proliferate, helped keep the Freedom Riders informed and connected. Breines said, “pay phones were widely in use, especially because the home phones of leading activists and probably most 'movement' offices were eventually tapped, either by the FBI or by local security or police agencies.”

Television, which was the landmark technology of the1960s, spread word of the movement to the rest of American society. “Precisely in the early 1960s, television was starting to play a big role in everything. To get things out to the larger ‘outside world’ the movements were pretty much dependent on television coverage,” Breines said.

Breines said not having the internet did not put the Freedom Riders at a disadvantage. “Those of us in all of the protest movements had no idea that we didn’t have the internet, Twitter, cell phones, and so on; no idea that we were pre-modern,” he said.

East Timor, 1970s-1980s — The 100 lbs. tweet

Another challenge for popular uprisings before ubiquitous digital communications was getting the message to the outside world. Rebels in East Timor were masters at this in the years following the 1975 Indonesian invasion.

East Timor’s cause was the longest of long shots. A small, poor and remote dot on the Indonesian archipelago, it was struggling for independence from Jakarta’s rule. It was surrounded on all sides by its foe, or by ocean. Cold War administrations in Washington opposed its cause and equipped Indonesia with fighter jets to keep the territory from turning communist.

But the Timorese knew how to use adversity to their advantage. Indonesian troops committed all manners of atrocities, strafing villages and starving the local population. In an interview several years ago, then-President Xanana Gusmao said the country owes its independence in no small part to its ability to get the news of these atrocities out.

But it was by no means as easy as sending a tweet.

Instead, the rebels lugged a 100-pound radio transmitter. For years, there was massive soldier who carried it on his back through the rugged trails, Gusmao recalled. When they reached a point high enough, they would transmit the latest developments, and then quickly flee before the Indonesians tracked them down. Their audience was a small group of Australian supporters, who set up a large antenna in the outback to receive the faint, crackly signal. (Theirs, too, was a dangerous game, as the Australian government regarded the group as communist supporters.) The message would then be encoded and sent by mail or phone to East Timor’s expat supporters in the West — gifted diplomats including Jose Ramos Horta, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his "work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor."

Iran, 1979 — Smuggled cassettes

During the Iranian revolution, there were several means of communication in Iran. According to the non-profit Iran Chamber Society, these were very important communication tools for Ayatollah Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini:

• International media (newspaper, radio, telephone, telegraph) after his arrival to Paris,
• Distribution of his articles in Iran by his supporters at night,
• Lectures by clerics throughout the country (every small village in Iran has a cleric).

In an attempt to weaken Khomeini's ability to communicate with his supporters, the Shah urged the government of Iraq, where Khomeini was living in exile, to deport him. The Iraqi government cooperated and on Oct. 3, 1978, Khomeini left Iraq for Kuwait, but was refused entry. Three days later he left for Paris and took up residence in the suburb of Neauphle-le-Chateau. Though farther from Iran, telephone connections with the home country and access to the international press were far better than in Iraq.

According to The Guardian, a lot of Khomeini’s messages to Iranian people came through smuggled cassettes: "[Khomeini’s] messages were distributed through music cassettes, which were smuggled into Iran in small numbers, and then duplicated, and spread all around the country.”

Another very important communication method at the time was pamphlets which were printed and distributed clandestinely at night time. These pamphlets asked people to join demonstrations and informed them of activities.

Foreign media also helped spread otherwise unavailable information, even though such sources were censored heavily by Shah. Media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian reported extensively on events in Iran.

China, 1989 — Posters, poetry and the goddess

The student-led movement that swept Beijing in the spring of 1989 and ended in tragedy began amid a uniquely Chinese form of political communication and dissent: written protests and poetry posted in public gathering spots. The spontaneous posting on college campuses of dazibao, or “big character posters,” which criticized government officials and policies and called for reforms, became a common form of communication during the Tiananmen movement.

Dazibao had been used for centuries in China to express dissent, and cropped up again and again amid the roiling political turbulence of China’s 20th century.

But word of the Tiananmen protests got two other important boosts.

First, central authorities did not prevent local media from reporting on the story. So news spread rapidly throughout the country. It then spread wider, and faster, thanks to foreign media who happened to be in Beijing to cover a state visit by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Students quickly capitalized on this development, writing signs in English for broadcast on CNN and the BBC and constructing the “Goddess of Democracy” — a statue that came to symbolize the event for television viewers around the world.

East Germany, 1989 — Plotting in the churches

East Germany's proximity to the West limited the government's ability to control outside communications. "East Germany had the special situation that you could listen to all the West German radio stations and in most parts, you could also receive the TV stations," said David Gill, an opposition leader who helped lead the storming of the Stasi, or secret police, buildings in January 1990.

"And then people mostly met in churches — the demonstrations in the beginning always started from churches," he said. Every Monday night, many churches would hold peace prayers, which became increasingly political. Between word of mouth and West German broadcasting, word spread of the weekly ritual.

"People knew if they wanted to be part of the movement, they should look what's going on in the church in town," Gill said. "People went to church because they knew after this, they would go out for demonstrations."

When protests began in East Germany, the crowds numbered in the hundreds, but they grew to hundreds of thousands. And as the revolution progressed, state controls grew looser. When theater workers organized a large demonstration in Berlin in November 1989, the protest was advertised even in the newspapers — "it was no longer really undercover," Gill said. Then the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

But back in the beginning, worry of a crackdown loomed: "There was a big fear that the East German authorities could turn violent, like in Tiananmen a couple of months before," he said.

Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1989 — Carbon paper?

Students and dissidents in former Soviet-bloc countries like Poland and then-Czechoslovakia didn't have the advanced communication of 20 years later — email, Internet and cell phones.

Heck, they were lucky if they even had a computer and a printer. Those allowed them to write up their underground newspaper — Samizdat — and easily print hundreds, or thousands, of copies in short order. Otherwise they were left to bang it out on typewriters, using carbon paper (if you are under 30 you probably don't even know what that is). If they were lucky, they could make six carbon copies at a time, typing it out letter by letter.

The Samizdat newspapers — like every other kind of information students and dissidents sought to distribute — required good-old-fashioned shoe leather. Nobody dared use a telephone to arrange a meeting — or anything else — for fear the secret police were listening in. So information was distributed by word of mouth, person-to-person.

In Poland the underground media reports — mostly print but also radio — were picked up by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, which then broadcast the news back into Poland, according to Konstanty Gebert, a commentator for Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's leading newspapers.

“This of course gave the authorities the time to prepare, but it was the only way to get large numbers of people out on the street,” he wrote in an email.

Monika Pajerova was a student leader of the Velvet Revolution that brought down the communist government in 1989.

“Czechoslovakia was completely cut off from the outside world,” she said. “We only had Radio Free Europe, which was difficult to receive.”

But after the huge demonstration on Nov. 17, 1989, when hundreds of thousands joined the students' protest, many of them spontaneously, organizers knew their time had come.

“It was the first time since '68 that so many people were in the streets,” Pajerova said, referring to the Prague Spring, a reform movement in 1968 that sought "Socialism with a human face." The Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks that summer, and the country labored under one of the most retrograde communist regimes in the Eastern bloc for the next 21 years.

“We knew we had to get the message out,” she said. “Our biggest fear was that the protests would start and end in Prague.”

So hundreds of students, dissidents and celebrities were dispatched by car to spread the message to the countryside.

Less than a month later, Havel – who had been jailed several times by the Communist government — was elected president by the communist parliament. And the communist government was soon out of power.

For the protesters in Iran to succeed, will require both determination and luck, according to Pajerova.

“The crucial thing is to have a group of people absolutely devoted to the cause,” she said. “But you also need historical context.”

The collapse of communist governments in East Germany and Poland that year, as well as the Soviet Union's refusal to offer military support was a boon for the dissidents. That and the fact that the Prague Spring, a generation before, as well as the country's brief experiment with democracy between the world wars, made the time ripe for the Czechoslovak revolution.

By contrast, the pro-democracy protests in China that same year were brutally crushed by the Beijing government.

“In Tiananmen,” she said, “the historical context wasn't there.”

In retrospect

Historically, new technologies have consistently shaped collective action, said Paul Buhle, former professor of American Civilization at Brown University and scholar of social movements.

In the 1920s, the radio stations WEVD and WCFL sought to exploit their new medium to bring the Socialist and Labor movements to wider audiences, he said. While these first stations, whose call letters referred respectively to Eugene V. Debs and the Chicago Federation of Labor, failed to significantly bolster their causes, pirate radio would later become invaluable to dissident movements throughout the world.

But technology can be a double-edged sword for social movements. “The way strikes used to succeed was by stopping people from going across the picket line, and often that meant getting into fistfights with them. Then came video cameras and it became impossible to throw a punch” for fear of prosecution, Buhle said.

More recently, technology has served movements by furthering accountability. “It’s much harder now for police to act horribly because of the threat that somebody will have a cell phone and record it,” Buhle said. Citing past abuses against protesters at political conventions, he said “if these had been recorded and made instantly available on YouTube it might have made a difference”

And “what’s true for Chicago or Minneapolis or New York is true for Iran too,” Buhle said. “It doesn’t mean authorities can be stopped, but it makes it much more difficult for them to deny who is doing the violence.”

David Case, Stephanie S. Garlow, Ashley Herendeen, Bruce I. Konviser, Barbara E. Martinez, Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Thomas Mucha, Alex Pearlman and Ben Schreckinger contributed to this report.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/w...otests-methods


















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


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