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Old 16-05-07, 09:56 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 19th, '07

Established 2002


































"The study shows that when it comes to software, open-source varieties face fewer patent threats than proprietary ones." – Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols


"Of all countries studied, the US had the lowest rate of piracy, yet the highest total losses." – Ed Oswald


"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device." – Jeff Bezos


"The publisher complained that at the end of the first 'Sock Monkey' book, Drinky Crow burned the house down with everyone in it. I told them, 'It's a cartoon!' Next time they’ll all be fine." – Tony Millionaire


"[Rupert Murdoch’s] business is privatized, government propaganda; that’s all the company essentially does." – Bruce Page


"I think in the future, the broadcast stations will all turn off. There is a very limited amount of content on them." – Steve Perlman


"I have never seen insanity like this one in the music industry. This is true insanity." – Mark Lam


"Troll-whisperer." – Cory Doctorow





































May 19th, 2007









Is he still here?

Gonzales Proposes New Crime: "Attempted" Copyright Infringement
Declan McCullagh

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.

"To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with pre-release piracy.

Here's our podcast on the topic.

The IPPA would, for instance:

* Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department's summary of the legislation says: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.")

* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are "attempting" to infringe copyrights.

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC "intended to be used in any manner" to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and is problematic and controversial.

* Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention regulations. Currently criminal violations are currently punished by jail times of up to 10 years and fines of up to $1 million. The IPPA would add forfeiture penalties too.

* Add penalties for "intended" copyright crimes. Currently certain copyright crimes require someone to commit the "distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies" valued at over $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were "intended to consist of" distribution.

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when compact discs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds or sounds and images of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder such as photographers, playwrights, or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment.

A representative of the Motion Picture Association of America told us: "We appreciate the department's commitment to intellectual property protection and look forward to working with both the department and Congress as the process moves ahead."

What's still unclear is the kind of reception this legislation might encounter on Capitol Hill. Gonzales may not be terribly popular, but Democrats do tend to be more closely aligned with Hollywood and the recording industry than the GOP. (A few years ago, Republicans even savaged fellow conservatives for allying themselves too closely with copyright holders.)

A spokeswoman for Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who heads the House Judiciary subcommittee that focuses on intellectual property, said the congressman is reviewing proposals from the attorney general and from others. The aide said the Hollywood politician plans to introduce his own intellectual property enforcement bill later this year but said his office is not prepared to discuss any details yet.

One key Republican was less guarded. "We are reviewing (the attorney general's) proposal. Any plan to stop IP theft will benefit the economy and the American worker," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who's the top Republican on the House Judiciary committee. "I applaud the attorney general for recognizing the need to protect intellectual property."

Still, it's too early to tell what might happen. A similar copyright bill that Smith, the RIAA, and the Software and Information Industry Association announced with fanfare last April never went anywhere.

News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html






Amazon to Offer DRM-Free Music Downloads
Dawn Kawamoto

Amazon.com plans to launch a digital music store later this year, featuring music downloads without copyright restrictions.

The e-commerce giant announced Wednesday that it would offer songs from more than 12,000 record labels in the MP3 format, without the controversial digital rights management (DRM) software. Record labels are beginning to warming up to the concept of offering music downloads without DRM, after waging war with peer-to-peer companies over distributing their copyrighted music and over piracy issues.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, said in a statement.

Users will be able to play their music on virtually any device, including PCs, iPods, Zunes and Zens, as well as burn the songs on CDs for personal use.

In making the announcement, Amazon also noted it has teamed up with EMI Music to offer songs from its digital catalog. As part of its digital music store, Amazon will offer EMI's new, premium DRM-free downloads.

That's the second deal EMI has struck since announcing it would begin offering DRM-free music downloads at a premium price. Last month, EMI and Apple struck a similar deal with the computer maker's iTunes store. Apple is expected to offer the label's DRM-free music beginning this month at $1.29 per song, versus DRM-protected music for 99 cents a song.

Last year, Yahoo Music began to test the concept of DRM-free music. Yahoo offered a single song without DRM from singer Jessica Simpson.
http://news.com.com/Amazon+to+offer+...3-6184178.html





DRM With a Vengeance
Jack

Media companies are beginning to hear the anti-DRM message and are responding to the growing consumer backlash by reassessing plans for locking down content, or like EMI by dropping DRM entirely from most product offerings. Not so Adobe Systems. The giant software vendor is attempting to create nothing short of a content control penal colony wherein documents are prepared, consumed and persistently restricted.

That success requires fundamental changes in PC platform architecture right down to the chip level makes the sheer scope of their ambition nothing short of alarming.

For a detailed overview of where they are and perhaps more ominously, where they’re heading, listen to this in-depth webcast with Adobe’s senior technical "evangelist" Duane Nickull.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...130#post256130





The Law Arrives in Wild West of Webcasts
Doreen Carvajal

PARIS: Since Pandora.com closed its box of digital musical delights this month to users outside the United States, the eulogies for the popular American radio Webcaster have been pouring in from Dubai to Patagonia.

It is "a step back to the dark ages in the music world!" fumed Mario from Mexico City. "No por favor!" declared a user from Spain. "Why can't they leave us in peace?"

With 6.5 million registered users, Pandora stands at the vanguard of the sprawling, global Internet radio market. But Webcasters are suffering severe growing pains in the form of a looming increase in U.S. royalty rates and the free-wheeling atmosphere of the Wild West with competing collection agencies all over the world in search of royalties.

On May 3, that chaos prompted Tim Westergen, a former musician who founded Pandora in a San Francisco apartment, to pull the plug on the international market, blocking foreign visitors through computer IP addresses, which identify the country of the user.
"This is a watershed period that we're going through," said Westergen, who had intended to start a British site this week, but scrapped the project temporarily with royalty struggles overwhelming the company. "We're a nascent industry that is transforming the landscape of the business, offering a massive diversity of music and I think that's challenging the powers that be."

The fundamental issue is that Internet radio sites are global by nature - streaming musical programs digitally to users all over the world. But there is no one-stop global shopping for royalty collections, which means that Pandora has to negotiate agreements with institutions from each territory or directly with independent and major music labels.

Global demand, though, respects no boundaries. The U.S. Internet radio audience climbed to 34.5 million in March, with the share of listeners higher in Europe at 49.5 million, according to ComScore Media Mextrix, a marketing research company that tracks Internet traffic.

"The number I like is average daily visits," Bob Ivins, marketing director for ComScore, said. "Across the European Union we have 5.8 million people hitting a radio site daily versus 4.2 million in the U.S. on an average day."

Those listeners are logging on to sites with a vast depth of music that can tailor programming to eclectic tastes. Live365.com, for instance, is a ten-year-old network of thousands of members who create their own online stations offering everything from Konkani music from the west coast of India to a Webcaster playing hundreds of versions of the same music: "Ave Maria."

The expanding market, which at this point lacks leaders, has overwhelmed the existing royalty structure. But the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, in London has just hammered out an international agreement to develop a more manageable way to stream across competing territories and collect royalties.

"In actual practice, companies had to two options if they wanted to remain legal," said Lauri Rechardt, a legal consultant who helped negotiate the agreement for IFPI, which represents 1,400 record companies in 70 countries. Either they limited their service to certain territories for which they had cleared the rights, Rechardt said, or they attempted the physically impossible task of striking deals with hundreds of record labels.

Within the next three months, Rechardt said, he expected 40 national royalty collection agencies in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America to sign the agreement to allow these institutions to license rights for musical streaming across several markets. On Friday, Gramex, the Finnish collection agency, was the first to sign.

"This agreement would make it a lot easier for us," said Mark Lam, chief executive of Live365.com, whose company is expanding into Taiwan and Japan. "Every time we go into new markets, we're called by the various societies who say, 'you owe us money.' So if there's a cross-border agreement that is reasonably priced it would lessen friction."

But the agreement leaves rate-setting to each individual country, and for the moment the United States is poised to set what is, in effect, a global benchmark. Those royalty rates are the subject of a furious political struggle over proposed increases that could raise the cost of sound recordings for Internet stations ranging between 300 percent to 1,200 percent.

Westergen, of Pandora, said that his negotiations to obtain a licensing agreement with the British collection agency, Phonographic Performance, ground to a halt because the U.S. increases "cast a shadow over all ongoing negotiations" as collection societies watched to see what happened in the United States.

Currently, Webcasters pay a percentage of revenues in performance royalties for music streamed to the United States to an industry-backed association called Sound Exchange, which collects and distributes the money. But the Copyright Royalty Board has set new rates effective July 15 that change the structure so Webcasters are charged each time a user listens to a song.

With the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, U.S. law exacts a higher value for digital content than for traditional radio, a system that allows the recording industry to charge performance royalties to digital music streamers and distributors like iTunes.

The new rate increases have sparked an intense lobbying campaign in Congress by small and large Webcasters like AOL radio and Clear Channel.

On Thursday those efforts prompted U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, to introduce legislation reverse a Copyright Royalty Board decision setting the new rates.

John Simson, executive director of SoundExchange in Washington, D.C., said that the Webcasters have managed to portray themselves as a grassroots collection of gritty, small independent Webcasters, but the ones who would benefit most are large companies with deep pockets like AOL Radio and Clear Channel.

"Do you say that if this service plays this music I get paid very handsomely, but if this service pays my music I don't?" Simson said of the divide in resources between big Internet radio companies and smaller independents. "I think it's a very delicate issue. And I think in any new area like the Internet there will be some businesses that survive and some that don't."

Along with a lobbying campaign in Congress, Webcasters are also pursuing an active public relations offensive online through the Savenet Radio Coalition, which is urging listeners to contact their legislators to support the "Internet Radio Equality Act."

Last.fm, a popular London-based Webcaster that is also a social networking site, will be affected by the rate increases, but is not terribly worried because of direct deals that it has negotiated with major labels, according to Christian Ward, a spokesman for Last.fm. "The industry trusts us," Ward said, "which means that there are always ways around the issues. It will be difficult, but we'll find our way around the problem."

Mark Lam, of Live365.com, is not so sanguine. "Obviously independent players will not be able to survive and that's because they want them to go away and make room for others with rich corporate parents," he said, adding, "I have never seen insanity like this one in the music industry. This is true insanity."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...ss/radio14.php





XM Pretends To Let Customers Cancel
Ben Popken

Some XM Radio subscribers protesting the Opie and Anthony suspension hang up the phone thinking they've canceled, but after calling back to verify, it turns out they've only been given a 1-6 month credit, writes reader Justin:

On Wednesday I called and canceled my XM subscription after finding out Opie and Anthony were suspended. This afternoon (Thursday) I read on a message board that subscribers who also called to cancel were finding out their accounts were not canceled. Instead some were given the 1-6 month credit they turned down and others found out their accounts were not flagged for cancellation until May 26 (XM's shareholder meeting is May 25th, coincidence?).

Sure enough, when I called XM customer support to verify my cancellation I was told my account was granted a 3 month credit on Wednesday instead of the cancellation I demanded. After being transferred to the cancellation department I was hung up while on hold waiting for them to pick up. It took one more call to find out my account had been canceled around the time I was on hold (hung up on) waiting for the cancellation department.

So if any readers canceled their XM service they need to call XM again and verify. Otherwise they may be in for a surprise in a few months when XM monthly charges start back up.

Others writing on an Opie & Anthony fan forum, Wackbag, say the same happened to them.

It's almost as if XM hired AOL's old retention specialists.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/stat...cel-261566.php





Beware P2P Networks with a Tunnel to Confidential Data
Larry Greenemeier

Many of the biggest breaches in recent years were inadvertent disclosures, Dartmouth business school researchers found.

Peer-to-peer networks could be more than a nuisance in the workplace, they might also be providing cyberthieves with a tunnel into your most confidential data. So says a new study of corporate data leaks released Tuesday by Dartmouth business school researchers.

"Many of the biggest breaches in recent years were inadvertent disclosures," says Eric Johnson, professor of operations management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and director of the school's Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies. Johnson co-authored the study along with Scott Dynes, a senior research fellow at Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies.

One of the major problems, they found, was that users were insufficiently protecting their files and data from peer-to-peer networks.

"Like most people I talked to, I underestimated the scope of the problem," Johnson told InformationWeek.

"The kinds of leaks coming out of these organizations would make their hair stand on end, in terms of both the amount and type of information leaked."

The Dartmouth study notes that there are an estimated 10 million users sharing music, video, software, and photos over peer-to-peer networks, up from about 4 million in 2003. This doesn't even include BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer application for video files that's difficult to monitor.

Meanwhile, efforts by ISPs, corporations, and copyright holders to limit peer-to-peer through technology (such as site blocking, traffic filtering, and content poisoning) or through the courts (the most notable being the Recording Industry Association of America prosecution of individual users and file sharing firms) have prompted peer-to-peer developers to create decentralized, encrypted, anonymous networks that can find their way through corporate and residential firewalls.

"These networks are almost impossible to track, are designed to accommodate large numbers of clients, and are capable of transferring vast amounts of data," the study says. And now the bad news. Criminals are actively searching peer-to-peer networks for any personal information they can use to commit identity theft.

There are several ways for confidential data to find its way to a peer network, including instances where users accidentally share folders containing such data, users store music and other data in the same folder that is shared, or users download malware that exposes their file directories to the network.

A lot of identity theft victims "don't realise that their son was on LimeWire last night sharing their financial information," Johnson says.

"Much of this software has interface designs that are confusing and even deceptive in a way that gets people to share, without knowing it, their whole hard drive."

Identity theft has become a bleak fact of life for many people. Many would-be identity thieves simply troll the Internet looking for sensitive information mistakenly posted to Web sites. Johnson and his colleagues have tracked this behavior by ordering credit cards and phone cards and then publicly disclosing account information via the Web.

"We leaked a live Visa card so we could watch what the thieves were doing with the information," he says, adding that he found that cyberthieves were using the stolen accounts in conjunction with PayPal and other online payment services to try to cover their tracks.

Johnson and his colleagues found lots of supposedly confidential information floating freely out on the Web, including job performance reviews and a bank's spreadsheet containing 23,000 business accounts including their contact names and addresses, account numbers, company positions, and relationship managers at the bank. He even found the results of a "confidential" security audit that a company had commissioned. Whoops.

One of the most effective ways to prevent business information from being leaked through peer-to-peer networks is to understand how these services are used.

"Security people say they've blocked ports inside their firewalls so that users can't connect into peer-to-peer networks," Johnson says.

"That's fine until those employees take their laptops home at night or go to a Starbucks and connect to a peer-to-peer network." There are ways of tracking whether corporate data has been leaked onto peer-to-peer networks. Security pros can set up their own accounts on the most popular peer-to-peer networks, which include Gnutella, FastTrack, and eDonkey, and search to see if any information being offered resembles their proprietary data or intellectual property.

"Create a digital footprint for your company," Johnson says. Keep track of all searchable keywords that would lead a Web surfer to your company, including firm names, abbreviations, ticker symbols, brand names, subsidiaries, etc., and use those terms to search the peer-to-peer networks.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...&src=site-marq





Illegal File-Sharing Almost Wiped Out on OU Network, Officials Say

An effort to crack down on illegal file-sharing over Ohio University's computer network is apparently working, according to a news release from OU Tuesday.

Brice Bible, the university's chief information officer, reports in the release that illegal file-sharing on the university's network has "virtually stopped."

The OU information technology (IT) group that Bible heads has been denying network access to users who engage in high volume peer-to-peer file swapping with parties both inside and outside the university network.

Since April 27, the release states, IT officials have shut off 240 network users for unauthorized file-sharing. That number includes users of a file-sharing setup that was operating within the university network.

Based on the release, it would appear that OU is relying on a recording industry group for the information that illegal file-sharing has ground almost to a halt at the university.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been monitoring such usage, and has filed a federal copyright-infringement lawsuit against 10 "John Doe" OU students for allegedly sharing copyrighted music files over OU's network.

Before filing the suit, it sent out some 50 warning letters to offending students, and has since sent more such letters with the threat of litigation unless the recipients make a cash settlement.

"After just two weeks, Recording Industry Association of America notices of illegal file-sharing detection have dropped to nearly zero as compared with 10 to 50 per day before," Bible said in the OU release. "I am pleased that we had such good results in a short time. And we did it without having to restrict legal uses of P2P technology."

OU claims that it has now refined its computer system to the point where it can distinguish between legal and illegal file-sharing, quashing the latter while allowing the former to continue. It uses filters that look for and block both encrypted file-sharing and unencrypted P2P programs sharing copyright information, while letting other types of file-sharing go on.

This means, the release states, that "users can grab a new Unix patch, turn in a film assignment to a professor, download a movie trailer, or send a friend the latest uncopyrighted indie cut without having to ask for special permission."

Bible noted in the release that on a campus that has suffered a huge and embarrassing data-theft incident, cracking down on illegal file-sharing is among other things a useful computer security measure.

"P2P protocols can make the system prone to security vulnerabilities, making it easier for hackers to find ways into a computer system," he said. "Some P2P protocols also can act like spyware. The fewer of these malicious tools on our system, the better."
The reduction in file-sharing has also freed up more bandwidth for legitimate uses, according to OU. The release notes that students who violate rules against file-sharing face loss of Internet access for a first offense, and disciplinary actions through Judiciaries for subsequent violations.

President Roderick J. McDavis is quoted in the release as saying he is pleased with the progress being made on this issue.

"Those individuals who have been doing this illegal activity have gotten the message that it is time to stop," McDavis said.
http://www.athensnews.com/issue/arti...story_id=28274





Stanford To Charge Reconnect Fee For DMCA Notices
theantipop

Stanford didn't like appearing on the MPAA's list of 25 worst offenders. Last week the university issued notice of a new policy in which students are charged a reconnection fee, ranging from $100 to $1000, if they fail to respond quickly enough to a DMCA complaint. The policy is to take effect September 1 this year. As a show of "good faith" they are graciously allowing all students to start at the $100 fee level for subsequent notices.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/17/1529238





BitTorrent User Loses Appeal in Movie Piracy Case

A Hong Kong man, believed to be the first person convicted of downloading pirated movies using BitTorrent file-sharing technology, lost his appeal on Friday in the territory's highest court.

Chan Nai-ming, who used the alias "Big Crook" on the peer-to-peer BitTorrent network, was found guilty in October 2005 of copyright infringement and attempting to distribute three Hollywood movies using the popular file-sharing software.

While people have used BitTorrent technology for years to download movies undetected, Chan was caught red-handed by a Hong Kong Customs officer in January 2005.

The three movies Chan was convicted of pirating were Daredevil, Miss Congeniality and Red Planet in what the Hong Kong government has called the first conviction of its kind in the world.

"He plainly succeeded in distributing copies of the films in question," the five-member Court of Final Appeal said on Friday in its judgment. "The appeal must accordingly be dismissed."

Chan had been sentenced to three months imprisonment, and had served several weeks in prison before the appeal of his conviction.

The defense argued that Chan merely enabled BitTorrent users "to make copies of their own" of movies stored on his hard disk, rather than trying to "transfer" any copy in his possession, according to the judgment.

But the court rejected that argument, saying Chan "did create and have possession of such a copy (transiently or otherwise) for distribution to the downloading swarm."

Chan had posted a message inviting BitTorrent users to download a movie on an Internet movie forum called "bt.movie.hk" using his "Big Crook" alias.

The Hong Kong government welcomed the judgment, saying it clarified the law regarding Internet piracy.

"This judgment has confirmed that it commits a crime and violates copyright laws for the act of using (BitTorrent) software to upload and distribute," said customs official Tam Yiu-keung in a written statement.

He added the judgment would have a deterrent effect, a view endorsed by industry watchdogs such as the Hong Kong branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

"Those uploaders and downloaders who wish to rely on the gray areas of the law will have no more excuses," said Ricky Fung, the body's chief executive officer.

The BitTorrent system is designed to distribute large amounts of data such as movies by allowing individual computers to share the material they have downloaded from a source.

Hong Kong's Commerce Secretary earlier said the posting of copyrighted materials in Hong Kong using BitTorrent had dropped 80 percent within a year of Chan's arrest in 2005.
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmN...16876120070518





The Death of Piracy
Wysiwyg Films

"What's really amazing is that TV had the perfect test case, seeing the music business practically destroying itself and totally alienating their core fans for the past six or so years — and they look at that and say, 'Yeah, that's the way to go.' "
John Rogers

Piracy - no, not the eye-patch type, but the copyright infringement variety. Product piracy has been with us since the industrial revolution, but today it is most common in the distribution of music, films and television shows. Compared to the film and TV industries, those music bods have been there, done that, bought the t-shirt (or illegal download) and, nowadays, seen the video.


But is piracy really the conquering invader we are warned about by industry propaganda or will it one day concede a dramatic surrender? How about, rather than a fight to the death, we work together for a cease-fire and a harmonious future? Piracy only thrives because there is a gap in the market, with consumers feeling their needs are not being met. They want it now, they want it cheap, they want it easy and they want as much as they can get - and finally some people are listening.

Pirates would have no plan of attack if we could all get the same content free. Tedious release schedules give the pirates opportunity to sell us illegal copies 'before the official release date'. But street pirates could shift the same number of units selling legitimate copies instead of contraband if the distributors worked with them instead of against them.

The late 1990s witnessed a boom in illegal music file sharing through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as the infamous Napster and Kazaa, which took its toll on traditional revenue streams for record companies. Peer to peer file exchange arose from the ashes of the dot com era alongside open-sourced programming and other decentralising practices, which questioned the status quo. Services like Napster, Grokster, Hotline and Kazaa allow people to share large files with each other quickly and easily. On a P2P network, if a computer requests a file, instead of slowly copying it from a single server to a computer, it copies pieces of it from a thousand computers which speeds up the process exponentially.

When music moved to digital files small enough to transfer across the internet a problem arose: people started swapping music files, piracy rose and the music industry howled. The war on new technology had begun.

Taking the fight to the courts, the media bayed for blood. Inevitably Napster, the first great music-based P2P service fell. Others followed, but new ones constantly took up the call to arms. P2P became a dirty word, synonymous with crooks, thieves and pirates.

But tough US Court rulings are not enough to keep a good idea down and the music industry finally learnt that old adage - if you can't beat them, join them. It was pointless to make new technologies illegal, far better to use them to the industry's advantage. Today online music distribution has been embraced, with the once rebellious Napster now a legitimate online music store - only one of the estimated 300 services available, compared to a handful a few years back. And with this legitimacy, P2P has now been awarded the shiny badge of respectability.

Surely with the relevant case of music so recent a memory, film executives would have the opportunity to win the war without having to unsheathe their weapons? Apparently not. US TV writer/ producer John Rogers is incredulous. "What's really amazing is that TV had the perfect test case, seeing the music business practically destroying itself and totally alienating their core fans for the past six or so years — and they look at that and say, 'Yeah, that's the way to go.'"

Online movie piracy was once considered by the Hollywood studios as seemingly impossible, and so it was: movie files were so large as to be unwieldy and with most internet users in the early/ mid 1990s using dial-up, it could take over 2 days to download a complete feature film. And no one needed a film that badly. Yet learning from Tom Cruise's Maverick in 'Top Gun', the "need for speed" was soon upon us and broadband arrived with such promises a plenty. As "large-sized file transfer" problems became less severe with compression technologies such as DivX, sharing became more widespread and began to affect large software files like animations and movies. And with that, movies could be trafficked through the Internet providing consumers with exciting, new territories to explore. The vast majority of which were illegal and so DivX joined the lawyer's hit list.

In the past, files were distributed by point-to-point technology with a central uploader distributing files to downloaders. With these systems, a large number of downloaders for a popular file used an increasingly larger amount of bandwidth. If there were too many downloads, the server became unavailable. The opposite is true for peer-to-peer networking, the more downloaders the faster the file distribution. With 'swarming technology', as implemented in file sharing systems like eDonkey2000 or BitTorrent, downloaders help the uploader by picking up some of its uploading responsibilities.

P2P technology was employed by the brains behind Kazaa, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, to create Skype. This in turn revolutionised the communications industry and helped move P2P networks to legitimacy. Revelling in this newfound acceptance, we can now look forward to the introduction of Joost, the first grand worldwide P2PTV conduit. Joost's vast library of quality content will help establish its name, but it will be the absence of any fees that make it stand alone amongst it's competitors. With an advertising-backed model, customers plugging in anywhere in the world can enjoy content without paying a penny.

Sounds like the pirates lost that one.

But the advancements in technology don't end there. DivX, like Napster was initially feared, but progressed to secure industry acceptance. DivX sealed deals with electronics companies to include their codec in home DVD players, enabling people to download a film, burn it to DVD and watch it at home on their TV. This effectively picked the pocket of the pirates, as the costs involved are so scant as to under-cut any illegal street seller.

Strike two!

Making matters worse for the pirates is the added value that many download services supply. The technology-literate can enjoy more than the just the film itself with many sites providing a plethora of added extras to excite film lovers. With anything from downloadable scripts or posters to special features, fans can immerse themselves more fully in the world of films keeping even the fussiest of fan boys happy. The online communities promise interactivity with other enthusiasts, and recommendations specifically monitored to reflect your personal tastes. All this and at the best quality.

So with the films available online legally and complete with all the trimmings, what is plan B for today's pirate?

For many, it's the immediate gratification they provide. If you are in England why wait for the film that's screening to American audiences? Why delay getting your hands on a DVD if you don't have to?

The high cost of producing numerous film prints for exhibition in cinemas meant that it used to take a film at least a year to open in cinemas around the globe. Money men need to feel that one window of opportunity is closed before they open the next one, in this case the end of a long cinematic run delays the arrival of the film on DVD. Because of this, DVDs did not come out for at least 12 months (and with zone restrictions), and then comes the television broadcasting window, then the cable window and so on.

But some of Hollywood's most influential figures are looking to create a more simultaneous experience. George Lucas opened ‘Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith’ on the same day internationally, an idea supported by John Fithian, from the National Association of Theatre Owners "we have consistently advocated reduced or eliminated windows between the US and international theatrical release."

The advent of digital cinema projectors will allow more films to open all over the world at the same time, as it cunningly sidesteps the time lags and costs incurred of it's cousin the 35mm. Curt Marvis, from download giant CinemaNow, is looking forward to this change, "it is about time. I think we will see the Hollywood studios adapt their traditional release 'windows' more and more." Some distributors are already making their DVDs available only 1 to 2 months after a cinematic release and it seems to be an idea that is catching on. In Norway they are testing selling DVDs in cinema lobbies and Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh has put his considerable weight behind the matter. The director happily experimented with no window at all, allowing his murder mystery ‘Bubble’ to be watched at a cinema, on a DVD or on cable TV, all on the same day.

Some argue that such examples are merely the indulgences of big names that can afford the luxury of a low budget flop, and Soderbergh shouldn't bite the hand that feeds. His resolution has not been swayed by such criticisms: "The studio model has to be rethought," he told Hollywood Reporter. "Everything changes and evolves. We've got to get with it, embrace it and find a way to make it work...The movies are not the way they used to be when I grew up." The movie business, in his own words is "out of whack."

Simultaneous release may have the traditional money men shaking their heads, but as the windows close it will remove one more of the motivations that people have to go to pirates: seeing the films before they come out.

But lastly what about the pirates themselves - where do they stand in this war?

How about side-by-side with the film distributors? It's really not too far-fetched. Supplying pirates with legitimate DVDs at cheap prices legitimises the pirate networks, turning pirates into conventional points of purchase (POP). This benefits all parties and provides a new, yet established, outlet. Time Warner and Twentieth Century Fox have both met with success having implemented this scheme in China, though the inability to find legitimate Western DVDs and the low wages in China have also been influential factors. However with a tried and tested example out there, it cannot be too long until other distributors like Wysiwyg, look to the pirate as friend, not foe. Indeed Wysiwyg invites pirates to send an email to legitimatepirate@wysiwygfilms.com with a view to making more money by selling more, better quality DVDs.

As Hollywood attempts to pass some further legislation or publicly whinge about the money it is losing from piracy, it fails to see the bigger picture. In the war between technology and piracy, technology can win and, like the reformation of street pirates, can now help establish a new world order. The technologies that once formed the greatest threat to the media industries have now removed that very threat. Oh, sweet irony.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/#





Music Companies Heartened by Report on Internet Piracy
Nic Fildes

Music companies have been heartened by a parliamentary report backing calls for internet service providers (ISPs) and search engines such as Google to crack down on users that share music illegally as well as extending copyright terms for recording artists.

The report, compiled by the Culture, Media and Sports Committee, argued that ISPs and search-based businesses should do more to discourage piracy amongst customers. Music companies have been blighted by illegal file-sharing amongst internet users and have been frustrated by ISPs that refuse to take action against customers that are breaking the law.

Internet companies such as BT and Tiscali argue that they are "mere conduits of information" and that the onus is on music companies to prove their customers are engaged in illegal activity in the courts before action should be taken. However music companies argue that ISPs are in the best position to clamp down on illegal file-sharing and have profited from the rapid increase in broadband take-up in the UK, partially driven by demand for digital music on the back of rampant growth in iPod sales.

The report also recommended that the law related to damages should be reviewed to ensure that penalties constituted a real deterrent to copyright theft.

John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music trade body the IFPI, said the report provided hope for music companies that ISPs have to start working with content owners to crack down on piracy. He said that, according to the Treasury-backed report on intellectual property rights by Andrew Gowers last year, UK ISPs have to show that progress is being made to tackle illegal file sharing this year. If ISPs remain intransigent, the Gowers Report has recommended the Government consider some form of regulation.

Mr Kennedy said there had been some "meaningful discussions" with ISPs that buy capacity from network owners prepared to take action as illegal file-sharers tend to use large amounts of bandwidth, costing those operators money.

The parliamentary report also urges the Government to press the European Commission to extend the copyright term for sound recordings to at least 70 years. Under current UK laws, copyright on sound recordings expires after 50 years.

Mr Kennedy said it was "very embarrassing" that the Government refused to support the UK music industry. "Even though we can't win the Eurovision song contest, the UK music industry is arguably the most important in the world, given its history. Its influence has been immeasurable," he said.

The Parliamentary report criticised the Gowers Report for focusing only on economic analysis and not on the moral rights of the recording artists.
http://news.independent.co.uk/busine...cle2553985.ece





Poland: Nine People Held by Police for Translating Movies
michuk

Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org have been held for questioning by Polish police forces. The possible accusation is publishing illegal translations of foreign movies.

Napisy.org was the most popular Polish portal where users (over 600 thousands active ones) were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies (mostly from English to Polish, but not only). Popular video players could be then used to display the subtitles when playing a movie (usually a DVD-rip).

The website (already shut down) was located on German servers. Zbigniew Urbański from the Polish National Police informed that the police action was supported by German colleagues and the Polish Foundation for protecting Audio-Video content (connected with The Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry, a Polish RIAA/MPAA-like organization):

The people held for questioning are mostly the people who were involved in translating the movies. They were stopped in different places all over the country: in Śląsk (Silesia), Podlasie (Podlachia), Kraków (Cracow) and Szczecin (Stettin). Among the arrested was the service administrator from Zabrze. The case is evolving. Further actions are coming.

During the proceedings, 10 PCs and 7 laptops have been secured by the Police, together with about 2000 CDs containing (probably) illegally copied movies and PC software.

According to Polish copyright law any “processing” of others’ content including translating is prohibited without permission. The people held (aged 20 - 30) were questioned on Wednesday and Thursday and then allowed to leave. In case of being accused of illegal publishing of copyrighted material, they can spend in jail up to 2 years (in the worst case).
http://polishlinux.org/gnu/poland-9-...lating-movies/





Meet the Copyright Alliance
p2pnet.net news

Anyone who believes things are as bad as they can get with self-interest corporate groups undermining freedom of choice, freedom of expression and freedom of speech should prepare themselves.

There's a new anti-consumer gang in town, and it'll be more actively poisonous than anything you've ever seen before.

Collectively and individually, the huge music, movie and software industry groups claim the men, women and children upon whom they all depend so absolutely are nothing but potential criminals just waiting for an opportunity to rob them blind by "massively distributing" corporate product on- and offline.

Enter the Copyright Alliance meant to, "convince increasingly skeptical members of the general public and policymakers that copyrights are something special that deserve protection," says the Hollywood Reporter.

"Patrick Ross, executive director of the organization, said that the group helps fill a gap that was left when former MPAA chief Jack Valenti died," states the story. Valenti, "ran a similar group known as the Copyright Alliance that went into eclipse after his death last month" but, "That was a creature of Jack Valenti. With this, we hope to preserve that broad group."

Congress, "heralded the launch of the Copyright Alliance, which consists of 29 organizations in the U.S. ranging from entertainment and arts groups to technology and sports coalitions," says Variety. "The alliance estimates that the number individuals it represents totals 11 million.

Praising the new multi-level enforcement outfit are such infamous entertainment industry supporters as Hollywood Howard Berman, Howard Coble and John Conyers.

Observes InfoWorld, "Several copyright bills are likely to come before Congress this year, said Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property," going on:

Among the bills Berman expects in Congress is reform of the payment system for music royalties, particularly higher payments for artists whose music is sold online, he said.

Berman praised the Copyright Alliance for its focus. Congress and advocates need to 'protect against the constant assault on copyright law,' he said.

Copyright issues are likely to produce major debate in Congress this year. Two bills would nullify a March ruling from U.S. copyright royalty judges increasing the royalty fees Internet radio broadcasters must pay. In February, Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, introduced a bill that would carve out customer rights for the so-called fair use of copyright works.

The Copyright Alliance also will work on efforts to educate consumers about copyright. Many young people today don't understand the value of copyright, said James Gibson, an intellectual property professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. "The problem is, in the popular culture, copyright gets a bad rap," he said.

At the launch, "the alliance sought to draw attention to the importance of copyright-dependent industries by showing a short video depicting photographers, animators and other artists deemed 'the face of copyright'," says ZDNet, continuing, "Grammy-winning Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier, guitarist and Booker T and the MGs member Steve Cropper, famed folk singer Tom Paxton and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Tim O'Brien also showed up to tout the importance of copyright to their livelihoods."

However, the story points out, pro-consumer group the Digital Freedom Campaign, whose members include the Consumer Electronics Association, advocacy group Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was launched recently.

"That group argues that big labels and studios are threatening to squelch new gadgets and consumer freedom by chipping away at the fair use rights written into copyright law," says ZDNet.

"They support proposals like the Fair Use Act, sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and three of his House colleagues, which would amend the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow consumers the legal right to pick digital locks on copyrighted works for certain home or educational purposes.

"RIAA President Cary Sherman, for his part, has denounced the group's stance as an 'extremist' interpretation of the law designed to frighten consumers and policymakers."

Cultural Enlightenment

The Copyright Alliance describes itself as a, "non-profit, non-partisan educational organization dedicated to the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs and growth" whose members will lobby for heavier civil and criminal penalties for copyright infringements, which they call "violations".

And schools at all levels should expect a flood of industry created and supplied materials and 'instructors' because the music, movie and software cartels also promise to 'educate' and motivate your children, saying:

It's never too early to learn the value of copyright. In fact, every time a child takes crayon to paper, he or she has created a copyrighted work, but how many know the rights they've just earned?

Educators across the country recognize the value of incorporating an understanding of copyright into lesson plans, but the resources haven't always been readily available. The Copyright Alliance, as part of its educational mission, aims to identify valuable curriculum guides and other educational resources and make those resources available to educators.

Unbelievably, the group also claims it'll support freedom of expression, issuing a set of fulsome "policy principles" to "guide their educational outreach efforts".

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT
To enrich our culture through incentives to create and disseminate new and innovative creative works to citizens.

PROGRESS
To promote the progress of science and creativity, as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, by upholding and strengthening copyright law and preventing its diminishment.

EDUCATION
To advance educational programs that teach the value of strong copyright and its vital role in fostering creative expression, driving economic growth, and enriching the lives of our citizens.

ENFORCEMENT
To protect the incentive to create by supporting effective civil and criminal enforcement of copyright laws domestically and internationally.

DISSEMINATION
To defend the rights of creators to control their property, understanding the necessary balance of those rights with the public good.

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
To encourage the inclusion of copyright protections in bilateral, regional, and multilateral agreements to protect creators and foster global development.

FREE EXPRESSION
To protect the rights of creators to express themselves freely under the principles established in the First Amendment, with copyright as an "engine of free expression."

It's hard to imagine a more unsavoury, unscrupulous and unethical collection of parasites, and all in one place.

Members include: American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; American Society of Media Photographers; Association of American Publishers; Broadcast Music, Inc; Business Software Alliance; CBS Corporation; Directors Guild of America; Entertainment Software Association; Magazine Publishers of America; Major League Baseball; Microsoft; Motion Picture Association of America; National Association of Broadcasters; National Collegiate Athletic Association; National Music Publishers' Association; NBA Properties, Inc; NBC Universal; News Corporation; Newspaper Association of America; Professional Photographers of America; Recording Artists' Coalition; Recording Industry Association of America; Software & Information Industry Association; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Time Warner; Viacom; Vin Di Bona Productions; and The Walt Disney Company.

The alliance's academic board boasts James Gibson, University of Richmond; Michael Ryan, George Washington University; Micheal Einhorn, Rutgers University; Stan Liebowitz, University of Texas at Dallas; Ronald Mann, University of Texas; R Polk Wagner, University of Pennsylvania; and, Lee Hollaar, University of Utah.

Its financial, legal, political and media resources and limitless and anyone who thinks things are bad now should very definitely stay tuned.

Because in the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12261





Copyright Extension Urged for U.K. Sound Recordings

British copyright laws on sound recordings must be extended beyond 50 years to prevent veteran musicians like Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney from losing royalties in later life, a report from a parliamentary committee said Wednesday.

The issue of copyright protection has become a hot topic in Britain as early hits from aging musicians approach the cut-off point.

The increasing public discussion has arrived at a time when the online digital music revolution has renewed interest in the back catalogues of many performers.

Under current rules, performers can earn royalties for 50 years from the end of the year when a sound recording was made.

In comparison, novelists, playwrights and composers enjoy copyright protection for their life and 70 years afterwards.
Today in Business

If the rules do not change, Richard's first hit "Move It!" from 1958 would lose protection in 2009, while early tracks from The Beatles like "Love Me Do" would also soon be out of date.

"We have not heard a convincing reason why a composer and his or her heirs should benefit from a term of copyright which extends for lifetime and beyond, but a performer should not," the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the Parliament said in its report.

"Given the strength and importance of the creative industries in the U.K.," the report concluded, "it seems extraordinary that the protection of intellectual property rights should be weaker here than in many other countries whose creative industries are less successful."

The copyright protection for performers in the United States is 95 years from release. In Australia it is 70 years.

The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, commissioned by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and released in December, rejected calls to extend the protection.

Andrew Gowers, who headed the review, said that longer copyright terms would increase the costs for consumers and companies that play music.

But the parliamentary report released Wednesday argued that the Gowers review examined the situation from a purely economic point of view and had not considered the moral rights of artists to own and control their intellectual property.

The committee called on the government to lobby the European Commission to extend the term of copyright to at least 70 years.

John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI body that represents the international recording industry, welcomed the report.

"The Select Committee has given a ringing endorsement for fair treatment of the U.K. music industry," he said.

"It has backed two simple principles - that U.K. performers must get a term of copyright protection comparable to composers and that Britain must not be left with weaker copyright protection than its international partners."

The committee, which looked at a range of issues facing the creative industries, also sided with the IFPI in its effort to require Internet service providers to do more to discourage piracy of music.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...iness/copy.php





Madonna Releases New Song, "Hey You" for Charity, to Perform it at July's 'Live Earth' Concert
AP

Madonna, one of the headliners at this summer's "Live Earth" concerts, has released a new digital song for the musical event.

The global concert series, taking place July 7, is designed to raise awareness about climate issues. "Hey You," which Madonna produced with Pharrell Williams, doesn't specifically talk about Earth issues, but the ballad's lyrics refer to loving and saving each other.

Madonna is scheduled to perform the song during the show at Wembley Stadium in London. Other shows will take place in Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.; Tokyo; Shanghai, China; Johannesburg, South Africa; Sydney, Australia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Hamburg, Germany; and Istanbul, Turkey.

"Hey You" is available on MSN.com. The first million downloads are free, and Microsoft is pledging to donate 25 cents per download to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Besides Madonna, other headliners slated for the London concert include the Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis and the Beastie Boys.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...ment-headlines





Madonna Steals Song "Hey You" For Live Earth

Madonna steals copyrighted works again.

Date Released: 05/19/2007
Miami, Florida, May 19, 2007 - on May 3, 2007, Aisha released a free song titled “Thieves” via her web site www.aishamusic.com, about Madonna and the copyright infringement legal case Aisha v. Madonna, which was filed with the Supreme Court in April 2007 (case no. 06-1389). Press releases were issued that were carried on several press sites two weeks ago.

Two weeks later, on May 16, 2007, Madonna has mimicking released a free song titled “Hey You,” where she further unlawfully stole items from Aisha’s private, unreleased, Copyrighted Catalog, valued at billions due to its sheer voluminous content, which contains 9,000 songs, 300 movie scripts and short stories, 15 book manuscripts, 200 music video treatments, 500 photographs, 150 photo treatments, a perfume line and clothing line, valued at billions.

Additional litigation will be brought over the song “Hey You” by Madonna, which was illegally released through MSN.

Aisha stated, “I know my words when I see them and these items were copyrighted long ago before she infringed them this week. Once again, she has stolen copyrighted material that does not belong to her. She is unequivocally the most unoriginal artist in the history of music. How can one claim to be doing charity work, for which one has stolen that which is being contributed. Only a fraud would do that. Not to mention, the song sounds bad due to her singing. The hot air that is her thin, squeaky, wobbly voice will not help climate change.”

A formal complaint was filed with George W. Bush appointees Alberto Gonzales at the DOJ and FBI Director Robert Mueller in September of 2005, as copyright infringement is a crime the FBI investigates.

However, Mueller has shirked his duties once again, as he was publicly noted to have done in the Mark Foley congressional page scandal, where another famous figure was involved. The Inspector General excoriated the FBI for this conduct, under Robert Mueller.

Aisha stated, “Mueller’s criminal negligence in this case in allowing Madonna to continue to illegally use years old copyrights on a regular basis, speaks terribly of him and his abilities as chief law enforcement officer of the country. It stands to reason, if he can’t stop Madonna, how’s he going to stop Osama. They need to listen to Congress and the American people and step down for the sake of the country.”

Aisha was the first to break the story in her December 2006 internet based Sound Off Column about the FBI abusing the Patriot Act via improperly obtaining emails, bank statements and phone records of American and international citizens. Three months later, Aisha’s claims in her Column were confirmed when in March 2007 IOG Glenn Fine wrote of FBI abuses of the Patriot Act regarding emails, banks statements and phone records, resulting in a recent Senate inquiry.

The local Miami FBI, run by Jonathan Solomon, stated they are investigating the criminal copyright infringement and invasion of privacy case Aisha v. Madonna. However, this has not stopped Madonna and her associates from unlawfully continuing to pilfer the contents of Aisha’s preexisting, private, Copyrighted Catalog that was proven to have been procured by them via illegal means, in making an unauthorized copy of the master file, with additional items stolen from Aisha’s publicly viewed web site.

Aisha further stated, “An illegal copy of my Copyrighted Catalog was made and she continues to unlawfully use items from it, attributing them to herself and her associates in violation of U.S., British and United Nations laws. She has illegally passed around and sold items from my Copyrighted Catalog to other parties in the industry, who have been tied to her via business records and tax records, as well as stealing items for herself and her companies in violation of SEC laws, that govern each respective corporation.”

UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINT

A United Nations human rights abuse complaint has been prepared and will be filed with the U.N. via an assigned international representative. Aisha’s human rights have been violated in respect to her copyrights, property ownership and privacy, which has been invaded in the same manner that other victims experienced in the Anthony Pellicano case.

Anthony Pellicano is Madonna’s lawyer’s now incarcerated private investigator. The contents of the human rights abuse report will be posted to the Internet shortly via Aisha’s web site.

COMPARATIVE LYRICAL CONTENT OF THE INFRINGEMENTS CONTAINED IN THE SONG “HEY YOU” BY MADONNA TO AISHA’S PREEXISTING COPYRIGHTS THAT ARE YEARS OLD:

Aisha: don’t give up Madonna: don’t you give up

Aisha: Life isn’t so bad Madonna: It’s not so bad

Aisha: A chance for you - give us a second chance Madonna: There’s still the chance for us

Aisha: the courage to be yourself Madonna: just be yourself

Aisha: poet and peacemaker Madonna: poets and prophets

Aisha: Tell me why you act so shy Madonna: Don’t be so shy

Aisha: There's a reason people have so much difficulty Madonna: There’s reasons why it’s hard

Aisha: Make it together Madonna: Keep it together

Aisha: we'll make it anyway Madonna: we’ll make it alright

Aisha: But will you change, you’ve got to beat this thing Madonna: You’ve got to change this time

Aisha: Remember this Madonna: Remember this

Aisha: Is real, It’s more than something you feel None of it’s real including the way you feel

Aisha: Save your soul Madonna: Save your soul

Aisha: little sister Madonna: little sister

Aisha: Save your soul Madonna: Save your soul

Aisha: Little Brother Madonna: little brother

Aisha: Save yourself the pain save yourself

Aisha: learn to love yourself Madonna: first love yourself

Aisha: courage to love someone else Madonna: then you can love someone else

Aisha: I can’t change everyone Madonna: If you can change someone else

Aisha: save everyone else Madonna: saved someone else

Aisha: it’s a choice you make Madonna: You’ve got a choice

Aisha: everything makes sense Madonna: it will make sense

Aisha: learn to love yourself Madonna: first love yourself

Aisha stated, “Madonna is famous for taking other people’s songs, changing a line or two, then taking full writer’s credit and financial compensation for something she did not write. That’s called stealing and fraud. Thanks to her, we now have the unenviable task of monitoring all new releases, checking for people she illegally sold items from my Catalog to, in order to bring future lawsuits to get my work back.” Madonna’s many copyright infringement, civil rights violations and breach of contract cases illustrate a pattern of misconduct that has spanned five countries: 1. Aisha v. Madonna (civil rights and copyright infringement) 2. Sorrentino v. Madonna (assault and battery on a 10 year old child) 3. Myers v. Madonna (civil rights violations) 4. Ronald J Myers v. Madonna (civil rights violations) 5. Barrier v. Madonna (civil rights violations) 6. Bourdin v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 7. Easy Street Records v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 8. Acquaviva v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 9. D’Onofrio v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 10. Iving L Williams v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 11. Eon Net LP v. Madonna (copyright /patent/trademark infringement) 12. Rich Kidd Music Publishing, Inc. v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 13. Winterland v. Madonna (copyright infringement) 14. Hobe Cie. LTD v. Madonna (trademark infringement) 15. Coppola v. Madonna (personal injury) 16. Rice v. Madonna (breach of contract) 17. Mclay v. Madonna (breach of contract) 18. Nike, Inc. v. Madonna (breach of contract) 19. Millennium Films v. Madonna (breach of contract) 20. Done and Dusted v. Madonna (breach of contract)

FULL LIST OF ALLEGED INFRINGEMENTS:

The following is a list of works from Aisha’s aforementioned Copyrighted Catalog that she formally alleged Madonna and her affiliates such as Warner Bros Pictures, Warner Bros Records, Warner Bros’ artists like Paris Hilton and Madonna's cousin, Gwen Stefani, among others Madonna does business with, have unlawfully used, in the ongoing infringements of her copyrights.

Defendants in the case who have already been sued in the 2005 Aisha v. Madonna lawsuit that was recently filed with the Supreme Court, continue to infringe more of Aisha’s works, such as Sony for Beyonce and Interscope for Gwen Stefani, who has stolen from Aisha’s Copyrighted Catalog two albums in a row now, reaping millions in illegal profit.

1. Princess Diaries 2 (2005) 2. Prince And Me 1 & 2 (2005) 3. Sam’s Lake (2005) 4. Gravedancers (2005) 5. Material Girls (2006) 6. Valentine’s Day (2006) 7. American Dreamz (2006) 8. Goal (2006) 9. My Sister’s Keeper (2006) 10. Blond Ambition (2007) 11. Rude Buay (2007) being used by Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie (his fourth infringement lawsuit since he has been with her). 12. Tonight He Comes (2007) 13. “American Life” song by Madonna (2003) 14. “Orange County Girl” by Madonna’s cousin Gwen Stefani (2006) 15. “Confessions On A Dance Floor” CD by Madonna (2005) 16. A backdrop from Madonna's Re-invention world tour (2004) 17. A backdrop from Madonna's Confessions world tour (2006) 18. "Sorry" Music video by Madonna (2005) 19. “Stars Are Blind” music video by Madonna's fellow Kaballah Centre member and Warner Bros artist Paris Hilton (2006) 20. Madonna's fellow Kaballah Centre member Britney Spears’ “Streams Of Consciousness” column, ripped off my “Sound Off Column” - both bearing the same initials and written content that Spears plagiarized years after my Column was copyrighted, indexed and established online. 21. Items from my clothing line have been illegally used for Madonna's English Roses clothing line (2005) 22. Items from my clothing line are illegally being used for Madonna's H&M line (2007) 23. December 2006's "Beauty Buyble" by Judith Regan's Regan Books, who was behind Madonna's 1990's "Sex" book. 24. E’s 2007 “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” 25. “Dandelions” by Madonna’s fellow Kabbalah Center member Nicole Richie 26. “Where Is Your Dignity” “Burned” and “Happy” by Hillary Duff, who starred in Madonna’s infringing film she stole from my Catalog, “Material Girls” 27. “Hollaback Girl” by Madonna’s cousin Gwen Stefani (2005) 28. “Worldwide Woman,” “Amor Gitmo” and “Welcome To Hollywood” by Beyonce Knowles (2007) 29. “Beautiful Liar,” “Suga Mama,” “Greenlight,” “Flaws and All” and “Still In Love” low budget music videos by Beyonce (2007) 30. “Umbrella” by Rihanna 31. “Can I Live” by Nick Cannon (2005) 32. My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) 33. “Never Again” by Kelly Clarkson (2007) 34. “Hey You” by Madonna (2007) 35. A verbatim theft of a specific cultural joke in “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” (2005), stolen from Aisha’s 1998 copyrighted script “Presidential Dreams.” “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” was produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. Brad Pitt starred in Guy Ritchie’s box office bomb “Snatch” which was also the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit. Since he has been with Madonna, different litigants have sued Guy Ritchie 4 separate times for copyright infringement, over the projects “Snatch” “Swag” “Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels” and in the legal case Aisha v. Madonna for pilfering items from Aisha’s catalog.
http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/p...cfm?PRID=10293





Can CBS Put the Net Into Network?

Broadcaster launches plan syndicating shows on web, admits old strategy failed
Brooks Barnes

A year ago, CBS Corp. announced the creation of Innertube, an entertainment channel on CBS.com designed to make the company a player in online video. It streams video of sporting events, news reports and reruns of shows such as the hit comedy "How I Met Your Mother."

CBS's new chief Internet strategist now jokes that the Web address for Innertube should be "CBS.com/nobodycomeshere."
A version of what the hit CBS show 'CSI' would look like on a variety of Internet video players. Clockwise from top: Joost, AOL, TV.com and Bebo.

CBS, after a year of experimenting with various Web initiatives, says that forcing consumers to come to one site -- its own -- to view video hasn't worked. Instead, the company plans to pursue a drastically revised strategy that involves syndicating its entertainment, news and sports video to as much of the Web as possible. It represents a stark departure for the TV industry. Most of CBS's major competitors, including Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Fox, are to some degree all betting that they can build their own Internet video portals.

Starting this week, an expanded menu of CBS's video content will be available for free to consumers on as many as 10 different Web sites ranging from Time Warner Inc.'s AOL to Joost Inc., a buzzy online video service that is just rolling out. The company calls its new venture the CBS Interactive Audience Network.

Because CBS plans to sell the advertising that will appear on the digital network, the launch is timed to coincide with the industry's high-stakes "upfront" ad-selling season, which kicks off today. It is the time of the year when the big networks unveil their fall schedules to advertisers and start negotiations to place some $9 billion in ads for the 2007-2008 television season, which starts in September.

CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves plans in coming days to announce a flurry of other deals aimed at giving consumers new ways to use CBS content online. For instance, CBS is working on agreements with social-networking sites such as Facebook Inc. and Last.fm Ltd. to allow users to post CBS video clips to their profiles, according to people familiar with the matter. A deal is also imminent with Slide Inc., which allows users of social networks such as MySpace to personalize photos and video for their pages.

All the big networks will aggressively shop advertising space on their sites to media buyers this week, but most of the networks are pursuing a homegrown approach to Internet video. ABC, for instance, has focused on streaming all of its prime-time programming through its own ABC.com player. NBC Universal and Fox in March said they are creating a new Internet video portal to compete with Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube. In addition to launching the new portal -- which the two companies plan to support with a $100 million marketing campaign -- the venture will syndicate the content to big Web sites. Those sites include AOL, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, TV.com, News Corp.'s MySpace and Yahoo Inc.

In contrast, CBS has abandoned attempts to build its own blockbuster portal and is instead signing pacts with a raft of smaller -- and often-untested -- Web companies, from Joost to Veoh Networks Inc., a video-sharing service. Unlike other big media companies, CBS's holdings in cable networks are limited, which gives it more freedom to distribute its content widely over the Internet without hurting a cable revenue stream. CBS is essentially placing bets on which video sites will matter in the coming months and years, both in the U.S. and around the world. With any luck, the smaller sites will grow in popularity, boosting the exposure of CBS shows -- and lifting the network's haul of online ad dollars. CBS will give advertisers the freedom to tweak their ads to fit the different sites. The internal code name for CBS's new strategy: "Rolling Thunder."

"We can't expect consumers to come to us," says Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive. "It's arrogant for any media company to assume that."

CBS faces a particularly difficult challenge luring its viewers to the Web. The network, home to franchises such as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "60 Minutes," attracts an older average viewer than ABC, NBC or Fox. As a result, media buyers and analysts say, CBS's audience is less Web-savvy and the company has a harder time funneling viewers to its Web site with on-air promos.

The likes of Yahoo and MSN see the networks as trying to leverage their relationships with TV ad buyers to siphon off online ad dollars. So while the Web companies want to offer their users access to portions of studio movies and TV hits -- which explains why they are signing deals with all the networks -- they argue that they should be selling the advertising that accompanies it. The company that sells the ads gets to keep the lion's share of the revenue; in CBS's case, it gets 90%, while the Web partners get a 10% cut.

Joanne Bradford, chief media officer of MSN, says advertisers would be served better by buying online ads directly from Web sites rather than buying Internet packages offered alongside their upfront TV deals with the networks. "I'm a little irritated that the networks have put together a digital package that lets a marketer check a box and isn't as robust or deep," she said at a conference last week for advertisers in Seattle.

Advertisers will ultimately decide if CBS's new strategy is the right one. So far, media buyers are positive about the move, although they note that CBS has had troubles implementing some heavily promoted digital efforts in the past. CBS has already signed up major advertisers for its digital network such as Procter & Gamble Co., General Motors Co. and AT&T Corp.'s Cingular Wireless.

"I'm really impressed, especially regarding the ability for us to make one buy but tailor the ad message differently to each of the sites," says Tracey Scheppach, corporate vice president and video-innovations director at Publicis Groupe's Starcom USA.

-- Kevin J. Delaney contributed to this article
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...main_tff_t op





CBS Fires Consultant Gen. Batiste Over VoteVets Ad; 'We Went to War With a Fatally Flawed Strategy'
Mike Sheehan

Retired Army Major Gen. John Batiste has been asked to leave his position as a consultant to CBS News over a new advertisement criticizing the Iraq war. The ad was produced by the group VoteVets.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown, Batiste, former First Infantry Division commander, tells host Keith Olbermann in the video clip below, "I'm no longer wearing the uniform of our country; I have no ties to the defense industry; I can speak honestly, I have a duty to do so. And I know there [are] other generals both active duty and retired that are doing all they can within their means. In my case, I'll continue to speak out."

After Olbermann asks Batiste about the war itself, the retired general says, "We went to war with a fatally flawed strategy ... This is all about a president who's relying almost solely on the military component of strategy to accomplish the mission in Iraq."

"Sadly," he continues, "we're missing the diplomatic, the political, and the economic components that are fundamental and required to be successful."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CBS_fi...iste_0511.html





Is It the Woman Thing, or Is It Katie Couric?
Bill Carter

The numbers are stark. Eight months into Katie Couric’s job as the first woman to anchor a network newscast on her own, her “CBS Evening News” has not only settled back into its long-held position of last among the evening news broadcasts, but also regularly falls short of the newscast that Ms. Couric replaced.

In the latest week’s ratings, “CBS Evening News” had its worst performance since the Nielsen company installed its “people meter” ratings system 20 years ago.

Ms. Couric professed to be unfazed. “Honestly, I think we’re going to see ebbs and flows,” she said in a telephone interview the day after receiving the ratings news. “I don’t think it’s a doom-and-gloom scenario.”

But it certainly is not a buoyant scenario either, as Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, acknowledged. “We are a distant third,” he said. “There is no way to sugarcoat that fact.”

CBS executives say their research had predicted that the newscast would continue to struggle in the ratings, even after the network’s enormous investment in Ms. Couric — an estimated $15 million in annual salary — as well as millions more to build a new set and promote her and her newscast.

But the network seemed not fully prepared for a host of other developments that followed its expensive decision.

There has been a cascade of hostile comments in the press. Members of the news staff were quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer as suggesting that Ms. Couric might stay only through the 2008 election. And a recent Gallup poll reinforced the notion that Ms. Couric had become a polarizing figure: 29 percent of respondents said that they did not like her, as opposed to 51 percent who said that they liked her. (Her competitors at ABC and NBC both had negative scores under 20 percent and positives around 60.)

Turning around the newscast will be a serious challenge, one former longtime network news executive said. “I think it will be very difficult, honestly,” said the executive, who asked not to be identified because he expects to work again with one of the networks. “Usually it takes a cataclysmic event to change news loyalties.”

“CBS Evening News” continues to bring in revenue for the network — the smallest share of a total of about $540 million for the three network newscasts combined — and CBS executives said that it remains profitable. But network sales executives have estimated that for each 0.1 rating point a newscast drops among viewers from age 25 to 54, the program could lose $5 million to $6 million in revenue. (A point represents about 100,000 viewers.) CBS executives concede that as the ratings decline, so do the profits.

“We’re not making as much as we would if the ratings were up,” said Mr. McManus.

Despite the low ratings and the reports of sniping from colleagues, the mood inside CBS News remains unshakably upbeat. In an interview in her office overlooking the set, Ms. Couric sought to convey the message, backed up by CBS management, that she was not going anywhere. Not now, not after the 2008 election, not anytime encompassed by her initial five-year contract.

Nor does she want to go anywhere, she insists. “I have no regrets,” she said.

The network’s executives, including Leslie Moonves, the CBS chairman, say they knew that they were acquiring probably the most avidly followed personality in television news, and so they did expect a media spotlight. But some of the other reactions caught them off guard.

“Am I surprised by the attention?” said Mr. Moonves. “No. Am I surprised by the vitriol? Yes.”

He and Mr. McManus took pains to deny vigorously that there has been any plan to unseat Ms. Couric. “It’s a flat-out lie that there has been any consideration, any meeting or any discussion about replacing Katie,” Mr. McManus said.

“This is a long-term commitment,” Mr. Moonves said.

Ms. Couric, 50, made her debut on CBS in September, after 15 years at “Today,” accompanied by great fanfare. She was expected to appeal to younger viewers. And to a degree she has — her ratings, while still usually third, are most competitive among younger women. But the newscast CBS created to try to take advantage of Ms. Couric’s morning-show skills has already been discarded, discredited as a colossal misfire.

One senior CBS producer who supports Ms. Couric but requested anonymity because of a working relationship with some people on the program, summed up that initial newscast, saying, “it was inane.”

Ms. Couric said, “I don’t think there was ever a vision to blow up the evening news, but to maybe make some changes that would recharacterize it.”

The biggest target of criticism was the segment called Free Speech, in which people like the film director Morgan Spurlock and the author Mitch Albom (as well as many unfamiliar voices) sounded off on issues for 90 seconds. But some CBS News staff members said they had been disappointed with the ill-focused approach of the entire newscast.

Part of the problem may have been timing, the former network executive said.

“They decided to go away from hard news just when there was a shift in interest to real news, with continuing issues about Iraq and the early buildup to the presidential election.”

Mr. McManus defends the choices CBS made. After years of hearing how the evening news was a dying institution, if the network had not tried to shake things up, he said, “the industry would have said: why did you hire Katie Couric and put on the exact same newscast?”

CBS’s evening news broadcast has now been entrusted to the network news veteran Rick Kaplan, who was brought in seven weeks ago to improve the newscast and impose some hard-news discipline. He has increased the number of stories covered by the newscast, quickened the pace and instituted more focus on the lead story, adding sidebar reports to try to add context.

Many of the changes return the program to a more traditional format, but another longtime CBS news producer said that might not be the best use of Ms. Couric’s skills. “That show doesn’t fit her personality,” said the producer, who asked not to be identified because he works on another program.

And while the newscast’s structure has been pummeled, Ms. Couric has also endured exceptional personal scrutiny. She was criticized for wearing too much makeup or too little. Ms. Couric was caught up in an odd plagiarism incident, when an essay she had presented as her own — even though written by a producer — turned out to have been lifted from The Wall Street Journal.

She was criticized for being too soft in her initial newscasts, and too hard in an interview with the presidential candidate John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, after they revealed that Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had returned. The issue was complicated by the public knowledge that Ms. Couric’s husband, Jay Monahan, died from colon cancer in 1998.

“Some people asked me if I was going to bring up Jay. I would never,” Ms. Couric said. “I want to educate people about colon cancer. But I never, ever want to exploit my husband’s death.”

Ms. Couric’s defenders ask whether a man taking the CBS job would have had his looks, hair, and clothes commented on in the same way as Ms. Couric’s. Or if a single male anchor’s social life would be almost daily fodder for the tabloids.

“Maybe we underestimate the huge shift this represented,” Mr. McManus said. “It was almost a watershed event to have a woman in that chair.” He added, “There is a percentage of people out there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman.”

Even some doubters inside the network say the newscast has improved under Mr. Kaplan. Ms. Couric has tried to break through on stories the network thinks play to her strengths.

For example, she quickly made her way to the campus of Virginia Tech after the killings there and did many interviews in a special hourlong newscast. (Her numbers increased that night, but ABC, with Charles Gibson still in the New York studio, won the ratings, as it has consistently over the last several months. Brian Williams of NBC was second.)

Even with some improvements, many staff members remain less than confident that the situation can be reversed, said one CBS producer who asked not to be identified because of concern that management did not want employees to criticize Ms. Couric. But Ms. Couric was not necessarily the problem, the producer said. “People may be critical of her, but if they work with her, they like her,” the producer said.

However, CBS still labors under some entrenched handicaps, like the weak performance of many of its stations, which leaves its evening news with the weakest lead-in audiences of the three networks. The program has typically finished more than 1.5 million viewers behind both of its network competitors. Ms. Couric’s newscast audience is now off about 4 percent from the newscast anchored a year ago by Bob Schieffer, who had succeeded Dan Rather for an interim period that lasted 17 months.

Despite those numbers, some advertisers continue to be supportive. Andy Donchin, the director of national broadcast for the advertising agency Carat USA, said, “ It’s still a good place for my clients to sell their products.” Among the advertisers his firm represents are Pfizer, Hyundai and Alberto Culver.

Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a report that monitors the network evening newscasts, said Ms. Couric’s newscast was “a work in progress” and that it was too soon to declare whether it would succeed or not. But, he said, “she has misplayed the expectations game.”

With those early expectations gone and signaling perhaps that CBS has no Plan B in the works, Mr. McManus said that the network is looking for long-term gains.

“Our ratings will improve because of the quality of our newscast and the quality of our anchor,” he said. “That’s the only plan that makes sense right now.”

As to when that might happen, Mr. McManus said, “Three years, four years, five years; that is the time frame that I think, realistically, you need to use to evaluate where the broadcast is and where CBS News is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/bu...couric.html?hp





Charles Gibson Enjoys a Second Wind on ABC
Jacques Steinberg

The retirement date had already been set: Charles Gibson was scheduled to leave ABC News on June 22, 2007, after a 32-year career.

Whatever hope Mr. Gibson, or his employer, may have had of extending that date had ended in December 2005, when ABC effectively passed over Mr. Gibson as a replacement after the death of Peter Jennings, the anchor of what was then called “World News Tonight.” Mr. Gibson, it was decided, would end his career on “Good Morning America.”

“And that was fine,” Mr. Gibson said yesterday from behind his desk at ABC News headquarters in Manhattan, resplendent in a pinstripe dress shirt more evocative of the New York Yankees than his beloved Baltimore Orioles. “Good Morning America,” he added, “is not a bad way to end your television thing.”

It didn’t turn out that way of course. Not only did Mr. Gibson wind up getting the job after all — his first anniversary is May 29 — but as he spoke yesterday, he did so as the anchor presiding over the most-watched of the three network newscasts, at least since Jan. 1.

“I’m a huge John Irving fan,” he said. “John Irving writes a lot about how events you don’t expect come in and turn your life. I think that’s very true.”

He added: “I sort of shake my head sometimes and think, ‘Son of a gun.’ What’s the old thing they say? ‘Luck is basically preparation plus opportunity.’ ” Still, as Mr. Gibson, 64, was quick to point out about his broadcast, “We haven’t won anything.”

With just a few weeks left in the prime-time season that began in September, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” remains the most-watched of the so-called Big Three broadcasts during that period, in terms of overall viewership and, more narrowly, among viewers ages 25 to 54, the demographic category to which advertisers are most closely tuned.

But those seasonwide figures mask a swing in momentum, and thus perception, that has occurred during the last four months.

So far in 2007 “World News With Charles Gibson” has been drawing on average about 8.88 million viewers each night, according to Nielsen Media Research estimates. That is about 56,000 more viewers than Mr. Williams’s broadcast each night. More significant, though, is that the ABC broadcast is attracting, on average, about 450,000 more viewers a night than it was last year at this time; over the same period, the viewership of the NBC broadcast has dropped by about 530,000, according to Nielsen.

Asked if he knew why ABC was up and NBC was down, Mr. Gibson said: “I don’t have any answer.”

Pressed to offer some theories, he ticked off several possible reasons. The most important, he said, was “stability.” Specifically he was referring to how he had sought to calm the program’s employees after a turbulent year. Mr. Jennings’s death was followed by the departures of his designated successors (Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas) last year after Mr. Woodruff suffered injuries in Iraq, and Ms. Vargas then decided to step down because of her pregnancy.

He also suggested that the program had “caught some breaks” in recent months, including Brian Ross’s early reporting on the Congressional page scandal that would claim the career of Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican. ABC News also received an extra half-hour in prime time on the night of the midterm elections in November. And finally there was the return of Mr. Woodruff, who reported not only on his recovery but on the treatment of wounded veterans.

Mr. Gibson, when asked if he had changed as a journalist over the last year, said he had grown more comfortable with the notion that, when warranted, he was able to all but decide on his own how a particular report might be played.

As an example he cited how he was adamant all day Tuesday that his broadcast not open with the obituary of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had died earlier in the day.

“You don’t normally lead with obituaries for someone with a legacy that is very positive in some ways, very negative in other ways,” he said. “It was a sense I had that it didn’t rise to the point of the lead.”

Ultimately Mr. Gibson’s broadcast opened with word of an apparent deal in Washington on immigration policy; Mr. Williams and Katie Couric of CBS News would go with the Falwell story, which Mr. Gibson played second.

“A year ago, when I first came in, I began to realize that the anchor’s inclinations, I guess, or feelings, were listened to and taken to heart a lot,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘You better not express this unless you’re damn sure you’re right.’ Just be very careful picking not your spots, because they’re going to listen to you, by golly.”

So has Mr. Gibson gotten around to rescheduling that retirement date? As of now, he says, his contract goes until several months after the 2008 presidential election. But neither he nor his boss, David Westin, the president of ABC News, expressed any interest yesterday in setting an end date on what has turned out to be an unexpected and extraordinary run.

“I would not be looking to make any changes there,” Mr. Westin said in a separate interview, “and I would hope he would not either, for some time to come.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/ar...ion/17abc.html





Trying to Keep the Viewers When the Ads Come On
Stuart Elliott

As the big agencies get ready for the biggest week of the year for the biggest advertising medium, changes are coming that can only be called, well, big.

The medium is of course broadcast television, which remains a powerful way to peddle products despite the recent inroads made by alternative ways to watch programs, which include the Internet, digital video recorders, cellphones, DVD players and video on demand.

Beginning today, the, er, um, big broadcasters will reveal their prime-time lineups for the new season in a week of lavish, star-filled presentations at Manhattan landmarks like Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden.

For years, the presentations during what is known as upfront week — so named because the agencies decide to buy billions of dollars of commercial time before the fall season starts — have remained essentially the same. Season after season, the spiels were mostly confined to rote reiterations of the value of buying spots on broadcast television.

But the growing popularity of the alternatives to watching TV on TV sets is forcing the networks to change decades of habits.

For instance, ABC is scheduled to describe at its upfront presentation tomorrow an extensive promotional initiative called “ABC start here” in which TV is just one medium among many. The campaign is intended to help guide consumers through the maze of devices on which they can watch ABC entertainment and news shows.

“It doesn’t matter — TV, online, iTunes, whatever,” said Michael Benson, executive vice president for marketing at the ABC Entertainment unit of ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company.

“They have control,” Mr. Benson said of viewers, “and we’re not going to fight that. We want to make it easy for them to get what they want, where they want, when they want.”

At the same time, ABC and the four other big broadcast networks are working on methods to hold the attention of TV viewers throughout the commercial breaks that interrupt the shows they want to see.

That is becoming increasingly important for two reasons. One is that more viewers are watching shows delayed rather than live, using TiVo and other DVRs. Research indicates those viewers are more likely to fast-forward through spots than those who watch live TV.

The other reason the networks need viewers to keep watching ads is that Nielsen Media Research, the ratings arbiter, intends soon to begin measuring viewership of commercials as well as programs.

One way that many networks hope to engage viewers during commercial breaks is by wedging original content into the blocks of advertising time, so that viewers will anticipate seeing something fun if they sit through a few ads.

Fox Broadcasting, for instance, tried out a series of clips for two weeks last month about an animated character named Oleg, a New York cab driver, who popped up in eight-second vignettes during commercial breaks in series like “24.” CW has been running “content wraps,” which mix sponsor products into program snippets.

Some experiments involve the cast of the shows in which the commercials appear, serving as hosts for the breaks. That is a throwback to an era when “cast commercials” proliferated with the stars of series like “I Love Lucy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and even “The Flintstones.”

The changes are fraught with risk because the broadcasters have long been following tradition in the way they schedule shows, promote them and sell commercial time in them. But with risk comes potential reward, analysts say.

“We do focus groups with consumers 18 to 34, the most desired demographic, the most tech-savvy, and their media consumption habits are changing,” said Michael Kelley, a partner in the entertainment media and communications practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “With that comes receptivity to new forms of advertising, provided the networks get closer to viewers’ interests.”

To do that, Mr. Kelley said, the broadcasters must change their focus to “engagement,” or involving viewers in ads, from “impressions,” the total audience exposed to commercials. He likened the challenge to how Google persuaded computer users that ads could be useful rather than annoying, by promising that only relevant ads would be displayed alongside search results.



Several network executives responsible for sales acknowledge the challenges ahead.

“We need to become a lot more innovative in the way we present commercials,” said Ed Swindler, executive vice president and chief operating officer at NBC Universal advertising sales, part of the NBC Universal division of the General Electric Company.

NBC has been testing what Mr. Swindler called “various forms of pod innovation,” referring to the collection of commercials that compose a break, “and even when ratings did not go up, some measures of engagement did.”

For example, Mr. Swindler said, in one experiment, the awareness of a brand rose 15 percent compared with a spot in a regular commercial break.

“This puts the onus on networks to creatively program the commercial pods,” he added, “and on agencies to create commercials more fun and interesting to watch.”

Mr. Swindler declined to provide additional details of the tests for competitive reasons, but at least one was previously reported: a trivia quiz during a commercial break on the sitcom “Scrubs.”

Fox, part of the News Corporation, is more open about its experiments with Oleg the cab driver. In one clip, Oleg sang about himself to the Barry Manilow tune “Copacabana.” In others, he drove around celebrities like Tom Cruise and Rosie O’Donnell.

“From minute-by-minute ratings, we couldn’t tell much,” Jon Nesvig, president for sales at Fox, said, but “an on-screen blurb, ‘Go to fox.com,’ generated quite a bit of Web traffic; on some nights, Oleg got more than 100,000 hits.”

It is unclear whether Oleg, created by Ideocracy, a New York agency, will be back. Some viewers complained that the character, who spoke with Greek inflections, was an ethnic stereotype, and “people found the accent a little hard to understand,” Mr. Nesvig said.

Even so, “some form of content in the commercial breaks is on our radar,” he added. “Under the right circumstances, we’d do more.”

The network that has been the most innovative in this realm is CW, owned by the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, which has been offering its so-called content wraps to advertisers since September. Each one blends entertainment and advertising in a break that runs two or two and a half minutes.

Brands sponsoring content wraps include Activision, Caress, Herbal Essences, Listerine and Toyota. The most recent, for the Cover Girl line of cosmetics sold by Procter & Gamble, appeared last Tuesday during “Gilmore Girls.”

For the 2006-7 season, “we thought in our wildest dreams we’d do 10, and we’ve ended up doing closer to 20,” said Bill Morningstar, executive vice president for sales at CW.

“We’re all looking for ways to engage consumers differently and get them to put down the remote control and pay attention during commercial breaks,” Mr. Morningstar said, adding: “We did a focus group last week in which we watched the participants watch the content wraps. They physically leaned forward during the commercial breaks.”



After the upfront week presentations conclude, the negotiations between the networks and agencies begin in earnest. In recent years, the amount of commercial time the broadcasters have sold in each upfront market has ranged from $8.5 billion to $9.5 billion. (There are also upfront markets for cable, syndicated and Hispanic TV; all told, upfront sales can total around $20 billion a year.)

The broadcast upfront talks can last anywhere from a week, if demand is strong, to three months, if it is weak. Trade publications have speculated that the haggling may take longer than usual this time as the networks and agencies grapple with issues like commercial ratings and how to measure DVR viewership.

So far the need for those changes has been given a lot of lip service, but now network executives seem to be translating words into action.

“If there’s any year to do it, this is the year,” Jo Ann Ross, president for sales at CBS. “All of what we’re all talking about is good for the business.”

Changing the paradigm could make the networks more accountable to advertisers and more appealing to viewers, Ms. Ross said. “But we want to make sure that when we do do it, we do it in the right way,” she added. “It’s very tricky.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...ness/tvads.php





Sitcoms Are Dead! Long Live Sitcoms!
David Blum

NETWORK television isn’t dead.

I don’t care what you hear this week when the executives of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and the CW all come to town for “upfronts,” the presentations where they hawk their fall lineups to dubious advertisers. I don’t care what you read in articles about huge hit counts on YouTube or hot-selling “Sopranos” DVDs or the runaway success of cable shows like “The Closer” on TNT. I don’t care what you think when you watch ABC’s “According to Jim” — yes, that’s still on the air, and yes, millions of Americans recently tuned in for its very special 135th episode, “In Case of Jimergency.”

Network television simply cannot be allowed to die, and not just because that would bring a premature end to the career of Charlie Sheen. Its death would also force Hollywood producers to sell their golfing castles in Scotland, fly business class and order the 2002 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou instead of the 1995. So let’s not even go there.

Fortunately, network television has a fail-safe option: the situation comedy.

Admittedly, it’s not an obvious solution. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the five networks together have plans to buy as few as five new half-hour comedies to help fill almost 100 hours of prime time each week. That makes the sitcom seem like a long-shot method for a troubled industry to save itself.

But unlike serial dramas like “Lost” and “24,” sitcoms can be repeated again and again, with lots of high-priced commercials, and in no particular order. When producers’ prayers get properly answered, these half-hour shows are then sold for millions of dollars into “off-network syndication,” the magic term to describe television’s 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots. It’s the backbone of local programming, a means for affiliates in, say, Cleveland and Miami to sell advertising and guarantee viewers without breaking a sweat.

At its peak in the mid-‘90s, “Seinfeld” earned NBC $200 million in profit each year, and went on to make more than $1 billion in syndication revenues. Which pays the bills for every network television flop you’ve ever seen, not to mention the cost of maintaining Jerry Seinfeld’s parking garage.

With such huge potential revenue streams, sitcoms remain a viable business plan — as long as the factories keep new high-quality models coming off the assembly line. And so the networks create dozens of sitcom pilots each year, and from them emerge the occasional mega-hit half-hours like “The Cosby Show,” “Seinfeld” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” — those successes that help justify and finance the networks’ continued existence.

Forget all the endless talk about the death of sitcoms: a recent study showed that the average American television-watching household increased its comedy-watching to four and a half hours a week this season, up from less than four hours in the 1993-4 television season.

The only trouble is that viewers are still mostly watching reruns of “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” Instead of producing much-needed new hits, the networks have littered the landscape with money-losing duds like “Courting Alex” and “Emily’s Reasons Why Not.” Anyone hear of “Help Me Help You”? It made its debut last fall on ABC, and will next appear as a write-off on the network’s balance sheet.

But despite the long years since “Friends” and “Raymond” and “Will & Grace,” the networks still do this one thing better than anyone else; for some reason, the cable channels haven’t figured out how to consistently duplicate the formula. Or maybe they don’t want to waste the many millions it costs the networks to develop all the shows that don’t dent the Nielsen Top 10 — or 50 — and die before producing a return on the investment.

HBO may have stumbled onto a syndication hit with “Sex and the City” and will soon have another in “Entourage,” but its occasional other efforts haven’t worked at all; don’t wait up for reruns of “Lucky Louie” or “The Comeback” at 11 p.m. Remember FX’s “Starved”? I didn’t think so.

Going forward, the real problem for the networks will be finding fresh ideas for comedies from the junk heap of pitches and pilots. Even a good “Friends” episode starts to wear thin after the 50th viewing, I happen to know. It speaks to the scarcity of next-big-things that ABC actually produced a pilot based on a handful of 30-second Geico “Cavemen” commercials, despite the lack of a coherent narrative, recognizable stars or even a logical concept.

That “Cavemen” has a good chance to get picked up reflects just how little inspiration drives the network development process. This year’s pilots also include CBS’s “Up All Night,” set in a 24-hour diner (think “Cheers”), NBC’s “I’m With Stupid,” set in a mismatched apartment share (think “The Odd Couple”), and ABC’s “Carpoolers,” set in the world of carpooling (think of changing the channel). Television comedy ruthlessly feeds on its own rich past, finding stale ways to repeat clever premises, fantasizing about the possibility of a windfall.

But even if the ideas aren’t innovative or original, the rewards will register if it works. “The King of Queens” has sold into syndication, and so has “Two and a Half Men.” It’s remarkable that after a half-century, the network sitcom has yet to progress very far beyond the basic lovable-losers blueprint of “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy,” but maybe that’s part of the reason network sitcoms remain necessary. They fulfill our need for group experience — all of us laughing along with a studio audience at the comforting cadence of sitcom humor.

That’s why this fall’s network schedules will try again to capitalize on the half-hour format, and will for years, maybe decades to come. They may be endangered species, but networks and sitcoms still feed off each other; as long as comedy writers can squeeze a chuckle out of a rim shot, the networks will survive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/opinion/14blum.html





Hi-Definition Telecasts at Center of Met Opera's New Strategy Under Peter Gelb
Ronald Blum

David Gockley, general director of the San Francisco Opera, sat in a movie theater and watched a live broadcast of Puccini's "Il Trittico" from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

"I sent an e-mail to Peter Gelb," he said a few weeks later. "I said, `I respond to this better than actually being in a live theater because the sound is so good, the camera work is so good and it focuses you on the essence of what makes performances great."'

More than anything else, Gelb's first season as general manager of the Met will be remembered for his video innovation, transmitting six operas live around the world in high-definition as part of a series that will expand to eight productions next season.

Gelb took over last August when Joseph Volpe retired after 16 years as head of the country's biggest musical institution and focused on sight as well as sound _ for some putting too much emphasis on the visual. Gelb's first season opened with a stunningly beautiful new production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" directed by Oscar winner Anthony Minghella, and another highlight of the season was Bartlett Sher's sassy staging of Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," also arranged by Gelb.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the percentage of potential ticket revenue sold at the Met had slid steadily, from 90.8 percent in the 2000-1 season to 76.8 percent in 2005-6. It bounced back to 83.9 percent in the season that ended last weekend, and the number of sellouts increased to 88 _ exactly quadruple the total in Volpe's final season.

Gelb said there were increased expenses but that it was too early to assess the bottom line.

"It was essential that in order to fuel the longer-term recovery of the Met, that the kinds of significant changes that we put into place had to begin with this season rather than sitting back and allowing the box office to continue to flounder," he said Tuesday.

Full subscribers for next season are 185 ahead of last season's 12,942, and that includes about 2,000 new subscribers, double last season's 900. He's scheduled seven new productions for next season, the most at the Met since the nine in 1966-67, the company's first season at Lincoln Center.

Gelb is transforming the Met to a company whose live performances are only a part of a larger equation. Its radio telecasts had been a staple since 1931, and Gelb instituted satellite radio and audio streaming on the Internet. He envisions productions being rolled out in the same manner as movies: the opening, the theater telecast and a pay-per-view television availability followed by free broadcast on PBS. In the end, the best are released on DVDs.

"I hope it works. Something needs to be done," said tenor Ben Heppner, slated to be featured in next season's broadcast of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."

The Met isn't the only opera company racing ahead in the video age. The San Francisco Opera is installing its own television production facility at a cost of about $3 million and hopes to negotiate deals with its unions allowing greater rights. At The Royal Opera in London, Sony put in equipment capable of transmitting 12 cameras simultaneously from 32 possible access points.

"This is the area we're all moving into a very, very big way," said Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden's director of opera. "It's a big challenge for us all in the performing arts."

Through May 14, the Met sold 323,751 tickets to its theater broadcasts, where admission is generally $18 in the United States. "Barbiere" was the top seller at 74,937 on March 24.

Gelb projects that next season's total will reach 800,000.

"We will potentially be in a situation where as many people will attend the movie theater showing live as actually go to the Met during the season," he said.

Singers, taking note of the robotic cameras on the sides of the stage that look like "Star Wars" droids, use special makeup for high definition and, according to soprano Renee Fleming, pay more attention to appearances. Many of them say they've noticed that more people are seeing their performances because of the telecasts.

"Everything is experimental and it remains to be seen. It certainly can't hurt," said soprano Deborah Voigt. "I've had several people here who have seen simulcasts and gone to a theater. I notice that audiences seem to be getting younger."

While in the auditorium focusing on the live performance, each spectator chooses what to focus on, but in the theaters that decision is taken over by the television director. While wide shots sometimes are used for the theater telecasts, closeups sometimes are substituted for the television versions.

Some operas benefit. Tan Dan's "The First Emperor," which seemed inert at times on stage, was faster paced in director Brian Large's TV version. For a riveting revival of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" with Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, a touching moment was left in, when tenor Ramon Vargas sang passionately to Elena Zaremba without noticing that a leaf had fallen onto his head.

Gockley said technology advances have been the key.

"With old-time television _ small screen, not adequate audio __ the majesty of opera didn't really come through," he said. "In high definition and in good quality sound in somebody's home, a big screen is a very, very powerful conveyance and gives a depth and dimension that we could only dream about before."

In other news, Gelb said Mary Zimmerman will direct the Met's new production of Bellini's "La Sonnambula" in 2008-9 and that "Das Rheingold" will open the 2010-11 season, starting the Met's new staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

He also said money was the reason the Met's proposed 2008 tour of China with "The First Emperor" fell through.

"We were always relying upon the Chinese to be able to provide us with financial guarantees that would cover all the costs of the tour," he said. "I guess in the end it became it became more than they had bargained for."
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...rst-Season.php





Internet Meets Large Screen
Peter Wayner

ROBERT SOREL, a trombonist from Woonsocket, R.I., keeps his PC in his basement media room, where, hooked up to his other components, it acts as a jukebox for his music and video collection.

In Woodbury, N.J., Dave Wasman, a computer consultant, keeps a Mac Mini connected to his high-definition television so he can browse the Web for news and short films.

And Chris Lanier, a student at the University of Houston, uses his network-enabled Xbox to link his living room TV to his office computer, which he taps for Web offerings and for archived video.

Each is exploring the couch-potato frontier, using a PC to bring the bounty of the Internet to the TV. They struggle with arcane formats, noisy fans and Web sites designed for the desktop to escape the old television broadcast networks and their collection of channels numbered in the mere hundreds.

The long-predicted convergence of the Internet and the broadcast world is accelerating. Unlike the established television networks, which serve up 30-minute meals of programming, video-sharing Web sites are nurturing a world of snacklike shorts. But finding the right hardware for this convergence still requires some thought.

Some hook up an office PC to a large screen, a process that is straightforward for most modern screens and computers but is often complicated by tiny idiosyncrasies often caused by the very openness that attracts the users. Both Apple and Microsoft have been slowly moving toward the living room by enhancing desktops with software packages like Front Row or Media Center, which display videos and play music with a simplified interface.

Another choice is a product designed for the living room, often by the same computer companies. The new Apple TV or the Xbox can bring videos, photos or music from the computer over to the TV, but they do not offer full Web browsers or all of the content that may be available online.

Steve Perlman was a founder of WebTV, the start-up company that built a set-top box for browsing the Web in 1996 — a box that is now sold by Microsoft as MSN TV. He points out that PCs are poor guests in the living room because they can take a long time to start, spew white noise from a fan and are susceptible to viruses.

The standard graphical desktop interface is hard for couch dwellers to use because of the small fonts and many tiny buttons. Web browsers and other tools ask for input from a keyboard that usually requires two hands, or from a mouse that needs a hard flat surface.

The people on the couch will be leaning back, not sitting forward, and “they’ll be holding a beverage in one hand and possibly their girlfriend or boyfriend in the other,” Mr. Perlman said. “You really only have one hand available.”

One common solution is a wireless keyboard like the Adesso SlimTouch (about $85 from www.adesso.com) or the Logitech diNovo Edge (about $165 from www.logitech.com). Both come with trackpads for moving the cursor. A more sophisticated solution is a programmable remote control like the SnapStream Firefly (about $50 from www.snapstream.com). This will link the push of a single button on the remote to a long list of commands for the computer to execute. For instance, one button can call up a Web page with a weather report or the latest news.

If the computer comes with a remote, as the iMac does, products like Remote Buddy (from iospirit.com for about $13.50) or Mira (from twistedmelon.com for about $16) let the user push one button to activate programs.

Many users take advantage of features that were originally included to help people with poor eyesight. The Firefox Web browser, for instance, can increase the size of the fonts in most Web pages, and a number of programs will zoom in on any part of the screen, making it easier to watch Web videos on the big screen.

Juggling computer settings to make fonts readable is a constant challenge for most users. Many report, for instance, that they avoid the higher-resolution screen settings to make the fonts and the controls larger.

Mr. Lanier in Houston, for instance, uses a 37-inch Panasonic TV that displays signals in the 720p format, which is short of the highest definition. A higher-resolution set is “not worth it for that screen size,” he said.

“As soon as you get up to the larger screen size, then it becomes a benefit depending on how close you are to the TV,” he said. “Based on how far I sit from the TV, the benefits aren’t going to be seen by my eyes.”

One big advantage of the open-ended PC platform is its adaptability to third-party products. Hauppauge, for example, makes a $99 HDTV tuner that converts broadcast HDTV signals into PC files that will play on Windows Media Center, where they can be watched later.

While many welcome this flexibility, it can also complicate matters. Mr. Lanier, for instance, began with a full PC in his living room, but moved it back to his office and replaced it with the simplified interface provided by his Xbox.

Some companies are introducing products to simplify the links between PC and TV. The MediaSmart flat-panel TVs from Hewlett-Packard include a small, limited processor that adds about $300 to the price. It uses the home network to download videos, photos and music from a PC with Media Center.

“The neat thing about this, it does it without bringing the pain of the PC into the living room,” said Alex Thatcher, senior product marketing manager at the digital TV solutions group of Hewlett-Packard. “By that, I mean the pain of doing a virus scan.”
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, says that while he can understand why some might want to add a Mac Mini (about $600) to a living room TV, he thinks a better choice for many is the new Apple TV offering (about $300), which will display music, photo and videos from a Macintosh or a PC.

“You need to focus on making things easier to use,” he said. “You start with making the simplest things work well from the beginning.” He said Apple was concentrating on adding simple features to the living room, not shoehorning a PC into the living room.
Apple TV does not include a Web browser, but it will search the Web for some things. Movie trailers are downloaded directly from Apple’s Web site; this may be how Apple will choose to open up its interface to YouTube videos in the future.

Smoothing the connections is a big topic for the companies as they jockey to find the best way to satisfy both content creators and the couple on the couch.

“Just as Web sites are adapted to detect whether it’s a mobile device, I expect that you’ll begin to see Web sites that are adapted for viewing on a television screen,” said Mr. Perlman, the WebTV founder, who is now nurturing media tools and content through his business incubator, the Rearden Companies. “When that happens, you’ll see an utter transformation of the business.

“I think in the future, the broadcast stations will all turn off. There is a very limited amount of content on them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/te.../17basics.html





Lost in the Transition: Movies in Home Theater

Back in the mid 90s, it appeared that both the studios’ panicked fears of home theater users and the brutal format wars were nearly under control. However, one other critical problem still had to be solved:

The studios had worked so hard to differentiate movies from television and create an experience that could not be duplicated at home, that now--somewhat ironically--solutions needed to be engineered for the technical problems of presenting those movies designed exclusively for theaters on home theater equipment.

As the industry inched toward DVD, Laserdisc and VHS users often ended up with poor transfers from the original theatrical movies sitting in studio’s warehouses.

Lost in the Transfer.
Since television had a fixed screen ratio, studios took their existing wide aspect films and commonly just cut the sides off using ‘pan and scan’ techniques to get as much of the action as possible inside a full screen version of the original widescreen movie.

However, many movies had been designed specifically to show off the dramatic wide aspect ratios of widescreen movie formats, and subsequently lost a lot of their original character from the brutal editing required for pan and scan transfers to home theater formats.

Using letterboxing, the entire movie could be shown at the expense of blank areas at the top and bottom of the screen, but studios feared that consumers were more concerned about using the whole TV tube rather than seeing the whole movie.

This shot from Lady and the Tramp shows why pan and scan is used: putting the full glory of a CinemaScope film on TV requires blacking out a significant chunk of the screen with letterboxing, or cutting out half the picture to present a “full frame” version. On a widescreen TV, much less letterboxing is necessary.

The letterbox version feels like watching a movie, while the full screen version cuts the film into a cartoon.

In addition to the extra-wide picture problem, there was also no way to deliver the fancy six track audio designed for theatrical movies on home theater equipment.

Those extra channels of sound did not really make sense to deliver at home anyway, because most multichannel theater audio systems--including 70 mm Todd-AO--delivered five front channels and one rear surround channel.

Dolby Stereo Fixes Movie Sound.
As movies fell from their glorious golden age in the early 70s, new technologies helped to solve problems in the movie theater, and those solutions eventually impacted home theater as well.

The various multichannel magnetic soundtracks put on 70 mm prints for use in the fanciest theaters weren't practical, durable, or economical. In 1975, Dolby Labs introduced Dolby Stereo, a new high quality system that offered good sound that was easier and cheaper to deliver.

Dolby's new system was backwardly compatible with existing equipment that optically read the basic soundtrack that had always been on movies; it used the same two channel optical recordings printed directly on standard 35 mm movie film.

However, Dolby Stereo was more than just left and right stereo; it also added two new channels:

•a center channel that directs attention toward the stage
•a surround channel that provides immersive, ambient sound toward the rear

Using methods similar to the right and left stereo matrix on records and FM radio, Dolby Stereo adds a center channel to both channels, and then adds a surround channel, phase shifted 90 degrees.

When played through two speakers, the center channel is imaged by the brain of the listener between the two speakers, and the surround channel, being out of phase, creates an ambient, surrounding effect.

The Real Deal on Surround
Dolby Stereo surround effects don't actually require more than two speakers to hear because sound is perceived in the brain; stereo imaging only requires two ears on the listener, not a certain number of speakers.

While some insist that “real” surround effects require the maximum number of speakers currently being sold on the most expensive surround sound systems, that's principally because they're just excited about buying the most gold plated speaker wire connectors possible.

There is nothing “real” about vibrating a speaker coil to create sound, nor is there anything “real” about engineering a soundtrack that greatly exaggerates audio positioning. Many portable stereos similarly have a wide mode that creates eerily surrounding effects from regular sound inputs using just two speakers.

Taking Dolby Stereo Apart
While the psychoacoustics behind Dolby Stereo can be delivered by standard two channel stereo equipment, the stereo imaging effect is even greater when using special decoding and multiple speakers.

In Dolby Stereo, the surround channel is separated by doing a differential of the two channels, applying a low pass band filter to remove highly frequency distractions, and is output to speakers along the rear of the theater with a slight delay.

During the surround extraction, the center channel is turned 180 degrees out of phase and cancels itself out, following the same principle behind noise cancelation headphones. Similarly, the surround channel is also out of phase with the left and right channels, and therefore cancels out that duplication as well.

In addition to the out of phase noise cancelation effect, Dolby Stereo also performs a delay on the surround, exploiting the Haas Effect, a phenomenon where the brain ignores duplicate sounds from two sources heard within 30-40 milliseconds.

With a longer delay between two sounds, we hear a reverberating echo; using the Hass Effect, the brain can better localize sounds by ignoring unnecessary noise and only tuning into positioning cues that matter.

Dolby Stereo’s slight delay wipes the duplicate surround wave from perception, so the audience only hears center channel sound that appear to come from the stage, and surround sound that appears to envelop from behind.

The simplicity and flexibility of Dolby Stereo resolved several issues: it helped to ensure that all movies had a durable, high quality soundtrack that could scale from simple systems to more complex ones, and created an incentive for theater owners to upgrade their sound to take advantage of an audio feature that would now be ubiquitous, not just used on one or two big movies or as part of a fad.

Dolby Surround Comes Home
In 1982, Dolby introduced a version of the Dolby Stereo system for home equipment under the name Dolby Surround, followed by the greatly improved Dolby Surround Pro Logic in 1987, Pro Logic II in 2000, and IIx in 2004.

Each version introduced greater sophistication in delivering immersive surround sound.

Since all modern movies have a Dolby Stereo soundtrack, when Laserdisc and Stereo VHS arrived the full theatrical sound from the movie ‘just worked’ on home stereo equipment. While Pro Logic was prohibitively expensive when it first came out, it has since been included on nearly all home stereo equipment.

Dolby's Pro Logic was also intended to present music with surround effects. However, because Pro Logic was created for movies it created an unnatural ‘center stage feel’ that a lot of people didn't like.

That’s why Pro Logic II offers two modes, one for movies with a strong center that directs attention toward the screen, and one for music that presents a more diffusely ambient sound.

Other attempts at recording and distributing multichannel sound for music, including a rash of “quadraphonic” attempts in the early and mid 70s, failed due the similar problems that had plagued theater sound in the early 70s: a chicken and egg situation of limited content and limited equipment.

Pushing the State of The Art.
Dolby's solution was not only elegant and inexpensive to deliver, but was also regarded as high quality. Its combination of elegant simplicity and economical distribution prepared a way for theatrical sound to be delivered cost effectively in home theater.

In the late 70s, a reemergence of theatrical technology pushed by movie makers helped raise the bar once again, creating another wave in the state of the art that would also eventually lap up on the shores of home theater.

A future article takes a look.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...CAC14A246.html





What's the Matter with HDMI?
Kurt Demke

How the designers of the HDMI standard screwed up, and what's to be done about it.

HDMI, as we've pointed out elsewhere, is a format which was designed primarily to serve the interests of the content-provider industries, not to serve the interests of the consumer. The result is a mess, and in particular, the signal is quite hard to route and switch, cable assemblies are unnecessarily complicated, and distance runs are chancy. Why is this, and what did the designers of the standard do wrong? And what can we do about it?

The story begins with another badly-developed standard, DVI. A few years ago, there was a movement within the computer industry to develop a new digital video display standard to replace the traditional analog VGA/RGBHV arrangement still found on most computer video cards and monitors. Interested parties grouped together to form the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG), which developed the DVI standard.

DVI had all the earmarks of a standard designed by committee, and it remains one of the most confusing video interfaces ever. DVI could run analog signals, digital signals, or both, and it could run digital signals either in a single-link configuration (in a cable using four twisted pairs for the signal), or in a dual-link configuration (using seven). Identifying which DVI standard or standards any particular device supported was not always easy, and the DVI connector came in various flavors and was never really manufactured in any form that wasn't well-nigh impossible to terminate.

But the worst thing about DVI was something that the computer-display professionals involved in its development really didn't give much thought to: distance runs. Most computer displays are mounted at most a few feet away from the CPU, so it didn't seem imperative that DVI work well over distance. This lack of concern for function at a distance, coupled with common use of twisted-pair cable (e.g., CAT 5) in computer interconnection, led to a decision that DVI would be run in twisted-pair cable.

Had the DVI standard been designed by broadcast engineers rather than computer engineers, things probably would have turned out very differently. In the broadcast world, everything from lowly composite video to High-Definition Serial Digital Video is run in coaxial cables, and for good reasons, which we'll get to in a bit. Long-distance runs of VGA, in fact, are always handled in coaxial cable (though there may be a number of miniature coaxes in a small bundle, rather than something which obviously appears to be coax).

DVI lacked a couple of things which the consumer audio/video industry wanted. It was implemented on a variety of HD displays and source devices, but it was confusing for the consumer because of the many variants on the standard and different connector configurations, and it didn't carry audio signals. A consortium to develop and promote a new interface, HDMI, was formed; the idea was to come up with a standard which could be implemented more uniformly, was less confusing, and offered the option of routing audio signals along with video.

Here, again, was an opportunity to avoid problems. The difficulties of running DVI-D signals over long distances were well known, and the mistakes of the past could have been avoided by developing HDMI as a wholly new standard, independent of DVI. Instead, the HDMI group elected to modify the DVI standard, using the same encoding scheme and the same basic interface design, but adding embedded audio and designing a new plug. Instead of many DVI options, analog, digital, single and dual link, there was one "flavor" of HDMI (actually, there is also a dual-link version in the HDMI spec--but you won't find it implemented on any currently available device). This provided the advantage of making HDMI backward-compatible with some existing DVI hardware, but it locked the interface into the electrical requirements of the DVI interface. Specifically, that means that the signals have to be run balanced, on 100 ohm impedance twisted pairs.

We're often asked why that's so bad. After all, CAT 5 cable can run high-speed data from point to point very reliably--why can't one count on twisted-pair cable to do a good job with digital video signals as well? And what makes coax so great for that type of application?

First, it's important to understand that a lot of other protocols which run over twisted-pair wire are two-way communications with error correction. A packet that doesn't arrive on a computer network connection can be re-sent; an HDMI or DVI signal is a real-time, one-way stream of pixels that doesn't stop, doesn't error-check, and doesn't repair its mistakes--it just runs and runs, regardless of what's happening at the other end of the signal chain.

Second, HDMI runs fast--at 1080p, the rate is around 150 Megapixels/second. CAT5, by contrast, is rated at 100 megabits per second--and that's bits, not pixels.

Third, HDMI runs parallel, not serially. There are three color signals riding on three pairs, with a clock circuit running on the fourth. These signals can't fall out of time with one another, or with the clock, without trouble--and the faster the bitrate, the shorter the bits are, and consequently the tighter the time window becomes for each bit to be registered.

Consider, by contrast, what the broadcast world did when it needed to route digital video from point to point. The result was HD-SDI, high-definition serial digital interface. One coaxial cable can route an HD SDI signal hundreds of feet without errors, with no repeater hardware or EQs in the line. Had the consumer industry opted for a coaxial-based standard, we'd be able to do the same in our homes. Admittedly, few of us need to make 300-foot runs; but the ability to run 300 feet without problems would be accompanied by rock-solid certainty of being able to do 50, or 75, without any worry at all.

But why is there such a big difference between twisted pairs and coax? It all has to do with the electrical properties of the two methods of routing signal from one place to another: balanced, through twisted pair, and unbalanced, through coax.

We tend to assume, when thinking about wire, that when we apply a signal to one end of a wire, it arrives instantaneously at the other end of that wire, unaltered. If you've ever spent any time studying basic DC circuit theory, that's exactly the assumption you're accustomed to making. That assumption works pretty well if we're talking about low-frequency signals and modest distances, but wire and electricity behave in strange and counterintuitive ways over distance, and at high frequencies. Nothing in this universe--not even light--travels instantaneously from point to point, and when we apply a voltage to a wire, we start a wave of energy propagating down that wire which takes time to get where it's going, and which arrives in a different condition from that in which it left. This isn't important if you're turning on a reading lamp, but it's very important in high-speed digital signaling. There are a few considerations that start to cause real trouble:

Time: electricity doesn't travel instantaneously. It travels at something approaching the speed of light, and exactly how fast it travels depends upon the insulating material surrounding the wire. As the composition and density of that insulation changes from point to point along the wire, the speed of travel changes.

Resistance: electricity burns up in wire and turns into heat.

Skin effect: higher frequencies travel primarily on the outside of a wire, while lower frequencies use more of the wire's depth; this means that higher frequencies face more resistance, and are burned up more rapidly, than lower frequencies.

Capacitance: some of the energy of the signal gets stored in the wire by a principle known as "capacitance," rather than being delivered immediately to the destination. This smears out the signal relative to time, making changes in voltage appear less sudden at the far end of the wire than they were at the source. This phenomenon is frequency-dependent, with higher frequencies being more strongly affected.

Impedance: if the characteristic impedance of the cable doesn't match the impedance of the source and load circuits, the impedance mismatch will cause portions of the signal to be reflected back and forth in the cable. The same is true for variations in impedance from point to point within the cable.

Crosstalk: when signals are run in parallel over a distance, the signal in one wire will induce a similar signal in another, causing interference.

Inductance: just as capacitance smears out changes in voltage, inductance--the relationship between a current flow and an induced electromagnetic field around that flow--smears out changes in the rate of current flow over time.

Impedance, in particular, becomes a really important concern any time the cable length is more than about a quarter of the signal wavelength, and becomes increasingly important as the cable length becomes a greater and greater multiple of that wavelength. The signal wavelength, for one of the color channels of a 1080p HDMI signal, is about 16 inches (1), making the quarter-wave a mere four inches--so impedance is an enormous consideration in getting HDMI signals to propagate along a cable without serious degradation.

Impedance is a function of the physical dimensions and arrangement of the cable's parts, and the type and consistency of the dielectric materials in the cable. There are two principal sorts of cable "architecture" used in data cabling (and HDMI, being a digital standard, is really a data cable), and each has its advantages. First, there's twisted-pair cable, used in a diverse range of computer-related applications. Twisted-pair cables are generally economical to make and can be quite small in overall profile. Second, there's coaxial cable, where one conductor runs down the center and the other is a cylindrical "shield" running over the outside, with a layer of insulation between. Coaxial cable is costlier to produce, but has technical advantages over twisted pair, particularly in the area of impedance.

It's impossible to control the impedance of any cable perfectly. We can, of course, if we know the types of materials to be used in building the cable, create a sort of mathematical model of the perfect cable; this cable has perfect symmetry, perfect materials, and manufacturing tolerances of zero in every dimension, and its impedance is fixed and dead-on-spec. But the real world won't allow us to build and use this perfect cable. The dimensions involved are very small and hard to control, and the materials in use aren't perfect; consequently, all we can do is control manufacturing within certain technical limits. Further, when a cable is in use, it can't be like our perfect model; it has to bend, and it has to be affixed to connectors.

So, what do we get instead of perfect cable, with perfect impedance? We get real cable, with impedance controlled within some tolerance; and we hope that we can make the cable conform to tolerances tight enough for the application to which we put it. As it happens, some types of impedance variation are easier to control than others, so depending on the type of cable architecture we choose, the task of controlling impedance becomes harder or easier. Coaxial cable, in this area, is clearly the superior design; the best precision video coaxes have superb bandwidth and excellent impedance control. Belden 1694A, for example, has a specified impedance tolerance of +/- 1.5 ohms, which is just two percent of the 75 ohm spec; and that tolerance is a conservative figure, with the actual impedance of the cable seldom off by more than half an ohm (2/3 of one percent off-spec). Twisted pair does not remotely compare; getting within 10 or 15 percent impedance tolerance is excellent, and the best bonded-pair Belden cables stay dependably within about 8 ohms of the 100 ohm spec.

If we were running a low bit-rate through this cable, it wouldn't really matter. Plus or minus 10 or 15 ohms would be "good enough" and the interface would work just great. But the bitrate demands placed on HDMI cable are severe. At 1080i, the pixel clock runs at 74.25 MHz, and each of the three color channels sends a ten-bit signal on each pulse of the clock, for a bitrate of 742.5 Mbps. What's worse, some devices are now able to send or receive 1080p/60, which requires double that bitrate.

Impedance mismatch, at these bitrates, causes all manner of havoc. Variations in impedance within the cable cause the signal to degrade substantially, and in a non-linear way that can't easily be EQ'd or amplified away. The result is that the HDMI standard will always be faced with serious limitations on distance. We have found that, at 720p and 1080i, well-made cables up to around 50 feet will work properly with most, but not all, source/display combinations. If 1080p becomes a standard, plenty of cables which have been good enough to date will fail. And it gets worse...

In June 2005, the HDMI organization announced the new HDMI 1.3 spec. Among other things, the 1.3 spec offers new color depths which require more bits per pixel. The HDMI press release states:

"HDMI 1.3 increases its single-link bandwidth from 165MHz (4.95 gigabits per second) to 340 MHz (10.2 Gbps) to support the demands of future high definition display devices, such as higher resolutions, Deep Color and high frame rates."

So, what did they do to enable the HDMI cable to convey this massive increase in bitrate? If your guess is "nothing whatsoever," you're right. The HDMI cable is still the same four shielded 100-ohm twisted pairs, still subject to the same technical and manufacturing limitations. And don't draw any consolation from those modest "bandwidth" requirements, stated in Megahertz; those numbers are the frequencies of the clock pulses, which run at 1/10 the rate of the data pairs, and why the HDMI people chose to call those the "bandwidth" requirements of the cable is anyone's guess. The only good news here is that the bitrates quoted are the summed bitrates of the three color channels -- so a twisted pair's potential bandwidth requirement has gone up "only" to 3.4 Gbps rather than 10.2.

What's to be Done?

It's unlikely, given the wholehearted way in which the consumer electronics industry has embraced HDMI, that this interface will disappear anytime soon. We're stuck with it. Given that that's so, what can a person do to avoid problems with video dropouts and outright signal failure?

First, limiting run lengths is a good idea whenever it can be done. If you don't need to put your sources at one end of the room and the display at the other, by all means avoid doing so.

Second, if run lengths can't be limited, consider relying on analog component or RGBHV signals for your distance runs; these formats are much more robust (in large part because they run in coax rather than in twisted pairs) and can be run hundreds of feet.

Third, eliminating unnecessary switches, couplers, and adapters may help; as bad as the impedance mismatch problems are in the cable itself, those problems are even worse when the cable's conductors must be split out to join to a connector, or when the signal must travel through connections that can't be kept at 100 ohms.

Fourth, there are some things that can be done in cable design, and we're on the task. In particular, though the impedance of pairs can be controlled only to a limited degree, there are some things which the Chinese (who, as of this writing, manufacture all of the HDMI cable sold by anyone, anywhere, under any brand name) do not have the technical capacity to do but which American manufacturers do, and which help address the problem. Belden has a patented "bonded pair" technology which involves molding twisted pairs together rather than simply twisting them, and which was developed specifically to address the problem of running high bitrates through twisted pairs. Beginning in 2005, we consulted with Belden on construction of such a cable for use in HDMI applications and in 2006, Belden built a series of sample reels of cable for us in its engineering lab. Our in-use testing has shown the cable working at 150 feet at ordinary high-definition resolutions (720p, 1080i) and up to 180 feet at 480p. Electrical tests of the cable indicate that it should be good for 1080p at a greater distance than any cable currently on the market. The cable has been ordered for full-scale production and should be available on our site around the very end of June or the first half of July 2007.

Many thanks to Bluejeans Cable for providing this article for our site.

Footnotes:

1. This is the wavelength "in air," i.e., as though the signal were propagating at the speed of light. Since cable will always have some type of dielectric material around the wires, the wavelength is actually shorter still; for solid polyethylene, the wavelength would be about 2/3 of this measure.
http://www.audioholics.com/education...tter-with-hdmi





Pioneer Unveils Revamped Plasma Technology
Caroline McCarthy

For Pioneer, black is the new black.

At a press event Wednesday morning, the electronics company unveiled its new line of high-definition plasma televisions, a selection of new home theater equipment, and a new technology and business strategy that it calls "Project Kuro," after the Japanese word for "black." And black was the focus of the event: after all, Pioneer claims that its new eighth-generation flat panels provide the most advanced levels of deep black of any television on the market.

According to presentations by Pioneer executives, the company has completely restructured both its technology and business strategies as part of Project Kuro. New color filter technology and cell structure have allowed for "significantly deeper black levels," said Russ Johnston, senior vice president of marketing for Pioneer USA, who called it "game-changing technology." This revamped plasma technology will be available in all Pioneer flat-panels.

Some analysts have expressed doubt about plasma television technology's success in the HDTV market, but Pioneer's executives painted a sunny outlook on the grounds that the color quality is better overall. "Plasma is self-emissive in red, in green and in blue," Johnston explained. "It can also reproduce the entire color spectrum from white to black."

At the same time, as many electronics manufacturers are trying to make their HDTVs become more common and more affordable, Pioneer wants to emphasize the opposite. Tom Haga, CEO of Pioneer North America, said that the company is aiming to "break away from the commoditization models that so many companies are chasing," and instead demand the highest quality possible in audio and video.

Pioneer executives said at the press conference that Project Kuro reinforces the company's dedication to a customer base of "discerning entertainment junkies"--consumers who all share a passion for high-quality audio and video and are willing to shell out the cash for it. "We want consumers to walk into the store and see that our panels are the best," said Ken Shioda, general manager of display products for Pioneer. "These consumers expect a very unique experience when they make any purchase."

In June, Pioneer will be shipping the first models of its eighth-generation plasma TV line, which had been previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January: the 42-inch Pioneer PDP-4280HD, which will sell for $2,700; and the Pioneer PDP-5080HD for $3,500. A month later, the first models from the Pioneer Elite line will be available: the 42-inch Pioneer Elite PRO-950HD for $3,200; and the 50-inch Pioneer Elite PRO-1150HD for $4,500.

More flat-panel plasma TVs, these with higher-end 1080p resolution, will ship this fall. The 50- and 60-inch models range in price from $5,000 to $7,500.

Additionally, Pioneer's new Elite line includes new home theater equipment offerings: a Blu-ray Disc player for $1,000, a Blu-ray Disc computer drive for $299, and four new audio-video receivers that retail between $650 and $1,600.
http://news.com.com/Pioneer+unveils+...3-6182482.html





Putting the 'Wow' Into Home Movies
David Pogue

'Wow" is typical. "Jeez" is another favorite. "Man, look at that!" is a runner-up. These are the noises your friends and neighbors will make the first time they see high-definition movies - of your life.

And no wonder. The picture and sound are many times sharper and clearer than standard TV. The picture is wide, like a movie. And here's the kicker: This is not some high-definition nature channel playing in a demo loop at Best Buy. These are home movies: your children, your family outings, your vacations.

Most high-definition camcorders record on plain old MiniDV tapes, the same one-hour cassettes sold by stores everywhere for about $4 each. But next month, Sony and JVC will offer new high-definition camcorders that record on built-in hard drives instead.

The beauty of hard-drive camcorders like the Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 and the JVC Everio GZ-HD7 is that you never have to rewind or fast forward. You can use an on-screen table of thumbnails to jump to any scene for immediate playback. You never have to worry about recording over something by accident. And you never have to wonder if there is a blank tape in the machine.

Both of these new machines are clad in shiny, futuristic black. Each can store five hours of high-definition recordings at top quality - which is a very, very high quality indeed. The picture is so sharp, it could cut your corneas.

Both cameras connect to high-definition TVs using either HDMI, a single cable that carries both picture and sound, or component cables - three for picture, two for sound. Both include goodies usually missing on cheaper camcorders, like a microphone jack and, on the Sony, a headphone jack. Both have built-in lens covers - a great feature - and a minutes-remaining battery display. And both come with batteries that last only 90 minutes or so, but accept optional five-hour batteries.

These are expensive machines. The suggested list prices are $1,300 for the Sony and $1,700 for the JVC. Once these camcorders hit store shelves, their street prices will probably be a couple of hundred dollars lower.

On paper, the JVC is particularly drool-worthy. It is a three-chip camera, meaning it contains separate sensors for red, green and blue light. In principle, this setup should offer much better color than one-chip cameras like the Sony. Surely that feature alone justifies the price difference and the much bulkier design.

Unfortunately, the three chips do not seem to make much difference. I ran both camcorders through parallel video torture tests, filming everything from sunny softball games to spooky unlit basements and bike rides on overcast days. In no case could any of my guinea-pig observers detect a difference in color or clarity.

The JVC's image stabilizer is nowhere near as good as the one on the Sony, or on Canon's terrific new HV20, a high-definition tape camcorder that I tested for comparison. This is a serious problem. Because of the wide screen, high-definition video emphasizes the horizontal elements of the picture. If the camcorder is not well stabilized, it is very easy to make your audience seasick.

Now, the trouble with hard drives is that they get full and you have to empty its contents onto a computer or a DVD burner. The Sony SR7 stores video in a new compression format, unhelpfully called Avchd, that was especially developed for tapeless camcorders. This storage format requires less space than, say, the HDV format used by high-definition tape camcorders. The Sony SR7's lower-capacity sibling, the SR5, also uses this format. So does the compact CX7, which records onto memory cards instead of hard drives.

Unfortunately, few popular video-editing programs recognize Avchd. Sony says that its own program, the Windows-only Vegas software, can edit Avchd, and that Nero, Ulead, Pinnacle and Sonic Solutions have Avchd editing programs in the works. In the meantime, you will have to be content with editing your videos right on the camcorder.

Then there is another problem. How will you show the finished videos on your TV? You will have to connect the camcorder to your TV with a wire, just as in the bad old days. There are high-definition DVD burner, but you would be foolish to buy one until the format war of high-def DVD formats, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, is over.

JVC, on the other hand, has really thought these problems through. The camcorder can impersonate a tape camcorder, so you can play its recordings right into iMovie, Pinnacle or any other Mac or Windows editing software.

It is not altogether clear, however, that these hard-drive camcorders are an improvement over tape. Tape camcorders cost less and offer infinite capacity in the form of blank tapes sold in stores, do not require a computer as an offloading station and produce video that is easy to edit.

Nonetheless, it is nice to have hard-drive camcorders as an option.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...soutsource.php





A Diet, Oddly Bland, of Continuous Images and Chat
Louise Story

IN the short history of the Internet, most online videos have been funny, fleeting clips lasting only a few minutes — sometimes just seconds. Web sites like YouTube and MySpace are populated with bite-size videos that the youngster down the street whipped up in his spare time. And media companies like Viacom and NBC have posted abridged versions of popular shows on their Web sites.

But the future of online television may lie with longer programs, the kind that merit curling up on your couch rather watching from your office chair. Most video viewing, after all, is still on television sets, and many people turn them on for hours at a time. In contrast, Nielsen Net/Ratings finds that consumers visit YouTube on average for only 11.5 minutes at a time.

With this in mind, my husband and I logged on to two new Web sites last week that portray themselves as the future of television — they stream long-form content mimicking television, but they also let viewers use their computers while watching.

We wanted to see how long we could stay interested in TV online — how long it could keep us from turning on our BlackBerrys, our other laptop or regular television. To give the sites a fighting chance, we plugged our computer into the overhead projector that normally connects to our cable box, dimmed our lights and poured some drinks.

We visited Joost, founded by the team that first created Kazaa, a peer-to-peer music network. Kazaa ran into copyright woes in 2001, and the team then introduced Skype, an Internet phone service now owned by eBay.

Joost has been available in trial form to a small group of Web users for a few months, as has Babelgum, a site backed by the Italian telecommunications magnate Silvio Scaglia. It will open its doors in a broader test run for consumers on May 31.

Both sites require a quick download to get started and a continuous Internet connection. Babelgum runs on the QuickTime program, which can also be downloaded free. Babelgum will be available only for PCs at first, but by the end of the summer a product is planned for Macs.

The main difference between these sites and YouTube is the nature of the content: it is full-length and professionally edited. Like YouTube, the content is free. Yet, as we all know, nothing is ever really free. Joost required me to register my age, gender and other details, and both Web sites say they will monitor your viewing patterns. Joost says it does this so it can produce “personalized television supported by advertisements that are most likely to interest you.”

In the advertising industry, sites that ask for user data upfront are a treasure trove for companies that want their brands pitched to just the right people at just the right time. Joost has already signed up more than 30 major advertisers, including Microsoft, Unilever and United Airlines.

Within a few minutes of logging on to Joost, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Kraft all zapped ads at us. Babelgum will not have ads until later in the year and is planning to make its ads skippable during the trial period — an option that consumers will appreciate but advertisers will begrudge.

Joost’s interface is flashy — colorful globs float by, converting the screen into the equivalent of a giant lava lamp. Babelgum has a more streamlined look, with black screens framing programs as they load. Babelgum viewers will be able to rate shows they watch, and sign up for “smart channels” that recommend programs based on past viewing. Joost has more gadgets to play with for now, including TiVo-like controls to pause and fast-forward while you watching, but finding them can be confusing until you are accustomed to the system.

Joost features programs from television brands like Comedy Central, National Geographic, Adult Swim and Sports Illustrated (yes, there is a swimsuit channel). Babelgum is staking out its turf with television programming that is popular overseas — BBC documentaries and sports events sponsored by Red Bull, are two examples — and niche content made by independent producers in the United States.

As we watch the Guinness World Records TV channel on Joost, boredom creeps in. How long can you watch television these days without doing something else? My husband pulls up his favorite technology site alongside Joost because he has become annoyed with the sometimes choppy images. Soon, he pulls out his laptop, too, and turns on the regular television.

Time passes — and I cannot sit still. I reach for my BlackBerry to check e-mail. But wait. Joost and Babelgum have solutions for the multitasker generation. Even as they mimic television, these sites incorporate the social networking and communication tools of cyberspace. Television programs on Joost are played in windows overlaid with screens that allow the communication addict in us to IM our friends within Joost.

Salvation. I send my friend Aaron an e-mail invitation to join Joost.

We meet in the Live@Much channel. There are 19 programs here — all interviews with musicians. First we watch Beyoncé, then Nelly Furtado, then John Mayer. Aaron (otherwise known by his screen name fLocker) tells me what he is switching to as he clicks through (we spend about an hour doing this but I’m sparing you from a full transcription).

fLocker: Now I’m watching Jay-Z.

LouiseStory: I can’t keep up with you!

fLocker: Nah, I think I just have ADD. I can’t just watch one thing for too long.

An ad for Garnier Fructis hair conditioner appears on my screen. I wonder if Aaron sees the same ad.

LouiseStory: What ad are you seeing?

fLocker: I think it was a car commercial. Didn’t pay attention to it though. Haha.

LouiseStory: Are you watching real TV while using Joost?

fLocker: Haha, yea kind of.

LouiseStory: Braxton and I got bored, so we have four screens going.

fLocker: Well, I’m sitting on the couch in front of the TV, and it’s on. But I’m mostly watching this.

AARON tells me that chatting while watching TV is nothing new for him. He did it when AOL introduced Instant Messenger; he and his friends sent instant messages while their television sets were tuned to the same channel. Joost simply enables chatting and viewing on the same screen. (Babelgum plans to introduce a chat tool this summer).

After using Joost for 60 minutes we decide to say farewell.

LouiseStory: It’s awkward saying goodbye on Joost.

fLocker: Why is that?

LouiseStory: Cause we both know we might both keep watching. There’s an expectation in instant messaging to keep talking. If you’re online you have to be talking.

And, if you are below a certain age, your eyes can’t resist shifting from screen to screen on multiple devices. By the time we turned off Joost and Babelgum last week, we also had turned on our regular television, two laptops and BlackBerrys.

Traditional television is competing with newer technologies for our attention, even while we watch, because TV is a one-way medium. Our experience with Joost and Babelgum made us think that the services should add more televisionlike content to expand the range of people who might watch.

They also should probably stick to their strengths as television sites where consumers can multitask while watching. At least for me, they have the potential to refocus my attention in the living room on fewer screens — maybe even (perish the thought) just one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/bu...y/13novel.html





At a French Studio, Great Ghosts and Big Plans
Dana Kennedy

NICE, France

FOR more than 30 years the olive- and palm-tree-laden grounds of the Victorine studios here, just steps from the sea, have tempted a steady stream of producers and businessmen hoping to revive the place where classics like Truffaut’s “Day for Night” and Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” were filmed.

But a very Mediterranean mix of local bureaucracy and political corruption has helped defeat them all, including Michael Douglas and his brother Joel, who took charge of the Victorine in the mid-1980s, only to leave a few years later with little to show for it.

“We’ve been disappointed so many times,” said Emile Martin, 64, who began as the Victorine’s film projectionist in 1965 in the studio’s heyday and is the archivist and unofficial historian. “We had a lot of hope when the Douglas brothers came, but Michael hardly ever showed up, and Joel just played pinball all day.”

Yet the entrepreneurs keep coming, and the Victorine, whose Paramount Pictures-style white arched gate was recently refurbished, has flickered back to life, most recently to capture the antics of Rowan Atkinson on film. Mr. Atkinson, the British comic best known to American audiences for his hammy cameos in movies like “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Love Actually,” is no Cary Grant. Nor is his new movie, “Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” reminiscent of Hitchcock, though it is set in the south of France. But for Jean-Pierre Barry, the owner of Euro Media Television, the Paris-based television and film powerhouse, which took over the studio in 1999, the Bean movie demonstrates that his plan to renew the studio by vigorously promoting it as a film- and TV-friendly place is working.

“Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” which recreated part of the Cannes Film Festival on the Victorine’s soundstages, has been a huge hit internationally and arrives in the United States in August. The Victorine “must survive, and we’re going to see to it that it does,” Mr. Barry, who began Euro Media on a shoestring in 1983, said as he sped down a Nice highway in his Mini-Cooper, bound for the airport to pilot his own jet back to Paris.

“I am Belgian, don’t forget,” he said. “We are different from French. We have a fighting business mentality. We are making sure Hollywood knows we’re here and open for business.”

But even Mr. Barry concedes he faces an uphill battle and a deadline. The Victorine must compete with other established studios in Europe, while newer facilities dangle cheaper labor and tax breaks to lure productions. And he and Euro Media face a homegrown political obstacle: the city, which owns the property, can turn the studio into a housing development in 2018.

The Victorine’s history is a tangled one, but one that is a quintessentially south-of-France story, replete with jet-set-era glamour, tragedy and shady subplots. Created in 1919, about the time the first studios in Hollywood were built, the Victorine has played host to the likes of Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall and David Niven. David Lean died during preproduction at the Victorine of his last, never-completed movie, “Nostromo.” The studio has survived one world war and weathered three major fires. Yet those blows didn’t compare with what Mr. Martin calls the studio’s “catastrophic years,” 1975 to 1983, during the long reign of Nice’s most notorious mayor, Jacques Médecin.

Mr. Médecin presided over such blatant corruption on the Côte d’Azur that Graham Greene, then a resident of nearby Antibes, helped force a criminal investigation that ultimately resulted in Mr. Médecin’s arrest and imprisonment. But not before Mr. Médecin, a regular at the studio commissary, was able to install cronies as studio bosses, some of whom pocketed profits they made from visiting production companies and left without ever reinvesting any money in the studio.

Some, Mr. Martin said, sabotaged the place on their way out, cutting cables and breaking equipment. “It was what we call a southern way of doing things,” said Antoine Sabarros, a film and television producer who has worked at the Victorine for 30 years. “But it got to the point where you had to fight to get anything accomplished here, and I’ve gotten sick of fighting.”

Conditions at the studio were so bad during the filming in 1982 of Sean Connery’s final appearance as James Bond, in “Never Say Never Again,” that the director, Irvin Kershner, threatened to stop production if the filthy screens in the projection room, yellowed from decades of smoking, were not cleaned.

“The grass was so high it was like a savanna out here,” Mr. Martin remembered. “The crew for the Bond film had trouble moving the equipment around. It was embarrassing.”

The stirrings of a comeback began in 1996, when the action star Jean-Claude Van Damme arrived to film “Maximum Risk” and “Double Team.” And Euro Media’s takeover — with its strategy of pursuing a mix of prestige and lowbrow films, along with television shows and commercial production for brands like Toyota and McDonald’s — has accelerated the rejuvenation of the Victorine, officially called Studios Riviera. John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin,” with Robert De Niro; “Swordfish,” starring John Travolta; and the director Neil Jordan’s “Good Thief” have been filmed at the studio. And the lowbrow French surfer film “Brice de Nice,” one of the biggest box office successes in French history, was shot partly at the Victorine in 2004, along with other French films starring national legends like Catherine Deneuve and Miou-Miou.

Since Euro Media took over in 1999, 24 feature films have made use of the Victorine, and the number of television shows shot there has doubled. In 2000, 18 television commercials were made there; by 2005 the number had risen to more than 50.

Though the Victorine is faring better, the competition among European studios to lure filmmakers has never been more fierce. The studio has always been dwarfed by Rome’s larger Cinecittà Studios (“La Dolce Vita” and “The Gangs of New York,” to name a few), and today studios in Eastern Europe can offer cheaper shoots. Even Pinewood Studios near London recently lost its stranglehold on the James Bond franchise when the producers of “Casino Royale” decided to film at the Barrandov Studios in Prague.

And there’s a more ominous threat in Spain, where in 2005 an $88 million studio, Ciudad de la Luz, opened in the coastal city of Alicante. French filmmakers are signing on; the new Gérard Depardieu movie, “Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques,” was shot there last year. Unlike the Victorine, which receives no government money, the Spanish government hands out hefty subsidies, including a reported six million euros — more than $8 million — for “Astérix.”

To compete better, Euro Media and Mr. Barry have upgraded the Victorine and the marketing efforts for it. The company recently opened a modern recording complex, run by a French-born Los Angeles music producer. And last year the Victorine hired its first international marketing agent, Dana Davidson Thevenau, an American who was the director of a French film commission. She recently went to Los Angeles to raise the studio’s profile in the film industry and is overseeing an elaborate marketing display at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins Wednesday.

“It’s a huge job to turn this studio around,” Ms. Thevenau said, “especially when filmmakers can go anywhere in the world. But we have this incredible location, and we have this amazing history. When Rowan Atkinson was here, he wanted to hear all the stories about Truffaut and Hitchcock and Grace Kelly.”

Standing on the upper patio of the Victorine’s villa, built for a prince in the late 1800s and the headquarters for a succession of studio bosses, Mr. Martin reminisced about those glory days. He recalled sharing some of Katharine Hepburn’s chocolates during “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” drinking whiskey with Richard Burton on “The Comedians,” playing himself in a bit part in “Day for Night” and watching workers construct a swimming pool that Elizabeth Taylor requested but never used.

If that history isn’t enough, some veterans of the Victorine trust in another savior: the ghost of Rex Ingram, an Irish-born Hollywood director who took over the Victorine in 1925 and shot several films there. “I heard about the ghost the first day I started here,” said Patricia Douglas, a French film production coordinator and the former wife of Joel Douglas, who met him when the Douglas brothers filmed “The Jewel of the Nile” at the Victorine in 1985. “Everyone said it was a positive ghost.

“And,” she added, “it doesn’t want the Victorine to die.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/movies/13kenn.html





Girth and Nudity, a Pictorial Mission
Abby Ellin

BEFORE we begin, let’s get one thing out of the way: Yes, Leonard Nimoy is more than happy to do it — the Vulcan salute, the gesture that launched a thousand spaceships. He does so easily, effortlessly: palm outward, fingers extended, the index and middle finger smashed together, the ring finger and pinky touching, the thumb sticking out on its own.

“People ask me all the time,” Mr. Nimoy said, carrying saucers of coffee and tea into his art-filled living room off Central Park West. He placed them next to galleys of his forthcoming photography book, which sat near a copy of “Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West,” by Margaret R. Miles, and a folder of news clippings on obesity.

“You see what I have here, about the health guidelines for models?” he asked, pointing a long, tapered finger toward the file.

The basso profundo voice was unmistakable, his words occasionally clipped with his native Boston accent. “They now have to have at least a certain weight to qualify,” Mr. Nimoy added. He looked pleased. This is a subject that speaks to him.

He knows that he is an unlikely champion for the size-acceptance movement; body image is a topic he never really thought about before. But for the last eight years, Mr. Nimoy, who is 76 and an established photographer, has been snapping pictures of plus-size women in all their naked glory.

He has a show of photographs of obese women on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June; a larger show at the gallery is scheduled to coincide with the November publication of his book on the subject, “The Full Body Project,” from Five Ties Publishing. The Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have acquired a few images from the project. A few hang at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York. (Their explicitness prevents the images from being reprinted here.)

These women are not hiding beneath muumuus or waving from the bottom of the Grand Canyon à la Carnie Wilson in early Wilson Phillips videos. They are fleshy and proud, celebrating their girth, reveling in it. It is, Mr. Nimoy says, a direct response to the pressure women face to conform to a Size 2.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

Mr. Nimoy, who divides his time among homes in New York and Los Angeles and on Lake Tahoe, in California, admits that before he began this project, it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven, that a fat body in Africa is treated quite differently from one in the United States. “In some cultures their weight is a sign of affluence: their husbands can afford to feed them well,” he noted.

His enlightenment came about eight years ago, when he had been showing pictures from his Shekhina series — sensual, provocative images of naked women in religious Jewish wear — at a lecture in Nevada. Afterward, a 250-pound woman approached him and asked if he wanted to take pictures of her, a different body type. He agreed, and she came to the studio at his Tahoe house. She arrived with all sorts of clothes and props, “as if she were playing a farmer’s wife in a butter commercial,” he said.

His wife, Susan, who was assisting him, said, “No, we want to shoot nude.” So the model removed her clothing and lay down on the table. At first Mr. Nimoy was very nervous, he said.

“The nudity wasn’t the problem,” he said, “but I’d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn’t quite know how to treat her. I didn’t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.”

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman’s comfort with her body. He placed some of the shots in various exhibitions, and they invariably garnered the most attention. “People always wanted to know: ‘Who is she? How did you come to shoot her? Why? Where? What was it all about?’ ”

He decided to pursue the subject further and was led to Heather MacAllister, the founder and artistic director of Big Burlesque and the Fat Bottom Revue, a troupe of plus-size female performers in San Francisco. Ms. MacAllister died in February of ovarian cancer, but something she said to Mr. Nimoy in one of their first meetings struck a chord. “ ‘Any time a fat person gets on a stage to perform and is not the butt of a joke — that’s a political statement,’ ” he recalled. “I thought that was profound.”

Initially, he was interested in replicating Herb Ritts’s popular image of a group of nude supermodels clustered together on the floor, and a Helmut Newton diptych of women clothed and then unclothed in the identical pose. Ms. MacAllister and some of her friends agreed to be his subjects. He then posed the women to simulate Matisse’s “Dance” and Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”

The responses have ranged from joy to horror. One formerly obese woman said the photos terrified her; she said they recalled a picture she kept in her wallet as a reminder of her former self. Other women have thanked Richard Michelson, the Northampton gallery owner, for displaying the images, and even asked if Mr. Nimoy wanted to photograph them.

“I am actually amazed at how little negative reaction there has been,” said Mr. Michelson. “I attribute this in part to the gallery setting, and the fact that Northampton, Massachusetts, is perhaps the most liberal city in the most liberal state in the nation.”

“We do overhear some reductive ‘Is Nimoy into fat chicks’ comments when the gallery room is first entered,” he continued, “but in fact the fun nature of the work and the quality seem to shut people up by the time they leave. I’ve had a few crank e-mails with snide remarks, but not a one from gallery visitors.”

The Big Fat Blog, a Web site devoted to fat acceptance, wrote about Mr. Nimoy’s photographs in 2005. A woman calling herself Nellicat wrote in response: “I’m 5’5" and weigh between 130 and 135. But I don’t feel as comfortable in my own skin as I should. I look at those women strutting, posing, laughing, and I feel real envy towards them. There they are, posing for a man (!) knowing that the whole world will be able to see them naked (!!) and they are LOVING it. Oh, to be that free! To be that comfortable and beautiful in your body — I truly envy them.”

Though most people think of performers as naturally more unabashed than the rest of us, Ms. MacAllister said it is sometimes difficult for them, too. “We get scared and struggle w/self-acceptance and self-love just like you,” she posted on the blog at the time. “Just want you to know that ‘freedom is not free’; the freedom you see us enjoying is the result of constant hard work and eternal vigilance against the ‘tyranny of slenderness.’ ”

Mr. Nimoy was born in Boston to Russian Jews; he speaks and reads Yiddish. He began acting at 8, but his big break came at 17, when he was cast as Ralphie in a Boston production of Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing.” In 1966, he landed a gig on a little television show called “Star Trek,” which ran for only three seasons but would resonate for decades. He spent two seasons on “Mission Impossible” and in 1971 went to U.C.L.A. to study photography. He didn’t graduate, but he has a master’s in education and an honorary doctorate from Antioch College. He hasn’t acted since 1990, choosing to devote himself to art collecting, voiceover work and various philanthropic endeavors, including an artists’ foundation he and his wife run.

Most people know him as Mr. Spock, the terminally rational Vulcan with the famous hand signal. (The signal, which he said was his design, is actually rooted in Judaism. It represents the Hebrew letter “shin,” the first letter in the word Shaddai, which means God.)

In 2002, he published a book of photographs entitled “The Shekhina Project.” Shekhina is the feminine aspect of God; the photographs are sensual, erotic images of women draped in phylacteries, religious garments typically worn by Jewish males. The pictures were very controversial within the Jewish community: some people objected to the nudity, while others were offended by women in traditionally male garb. On the latter point, Mr. Nimoy said that he was not the first to put forth the idea. “There are historical writings of famous Jewish women, daughters of rabbis, who have done that,” he said.

He expects his second book to provoke an equally strong reaction, though he hopes the audience will gain a new perspective on the issue and learn something.

As for whether people will think he has a fetish, he said he can’t help that. “I just have no way of dealing with that,” he said with a laugh. “People will think what they’re going to think. I understand that.”

And what of his own attitude toward fat women?

“I do think they’re beautiful,” he said. “They’re full-bodied, full-blooded human beings.”

He doesn’t necessarily find them sexually attractive. “But I do think they’re beautiful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/fashion/13nimoy.html





Google Wins Part of Nude-Photo Suit
Alex Pham

A federal appeals court Wednesday cleared Google Inc. to resume posting tiny versions of nude photos by a Beverly Hills-based adult publisher.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals undid a preliminary injunction, issued last year by a Los Angeles District Court, that had kept the Web search giant from displaying thumbnail-size photographs of images owned by Perfect 10 Inc. that other sites had improperly posted.

Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. The doctrine allows use of copyrighted work under some conditions, such as for parody or education.

But the three-judge panel handed Google a mixed victory. It sent the case back to the District Court to determine whether Google was indirectly liable for damages because it linked to websites that displayed Perfect 10's copyrighted images without permission.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., is fighting legal battles on a number of fronts over how it indexes and displays copyrighted material, including photos, books and TV shows.

"We are delighted that the court affirmed long-standing principles of fair use, holding that Google's image search is highly transformative by creating new value for consumers," Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement.

Amazon.com Inc. also was named a defendant by Perfect 10 because its A9 search engine points to Google's search results. The Seattle-based online retailer declined to comment on the ruling.

Dan Cooper, Perfect 10's general counsel, said the company would ultimately prove that Google was indirectly liable for copyright infringement. He cited the court's finding that, "There is no dispute that Google substantially assists websites to distribute their infringing copies to a worldwide market and assists a worldwide audience of users to access infringing materials."

Cooper said that finding "confirms what we've believed all along: that a search engine cannot knowingly facilitate access to infringing material without consequence."

Legal experts differed over what the ruling might signal for Google's legal battle with Viacom Inc. over clips of TV shows posted on Google's YouTube video service.

Evan Cox, a partner at law firm Covington & Burling in San Francisco, said the court's decision left open the possibility that courts could someday require Google and Internet service providers to actively try to stop users from using their technology to traffic copyrighted content. So far, the 9th Circuit has held that a company has to take action only if it knows of a specific instance of copyright infringement — and it can easily stop the infringement.

"This is a win for Google but with some worrisome loose ends in the opinion," Cox said.

But Neil J. Rosini, a lawyer with Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo in New York, said the case merely reaffirmed Google's defense in most copyright cases: that it complies with copyright law because it takes down copyrighted material when its owners ask.

The ruling came on the same day that Google announced a revamp of its popular search engine. Through an effort called Universal Search, Google began displaying full-length playable videos, images and news stories directly in its general search results. For example, a query about Steve Jobs will pull up pictures of Apple Inc.'s chief executive, as well as blogs about Jobs and a video of his 2005 speech at Stanford University.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=1&cset=true





Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
Clive Thompson

Jonathan Coulton sat in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, his Apple PowerBook open before him, and began slogging through the day’s e-mail. Coulton is 36 and shaggily handsome. In September 2005, he quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife’s guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song each week, posting each one to his blog. “It was a sort of forced-march approach to creativity,” he admitted to me over the sound of the cafe’s cappuccino frothers. He’d always wanted to be a full-time musician, and he figured the only way to prove to himself he could do it was with a drastic challenge. “I learned that it is possible to squeeze a song out of just about anything,” he said. “But it’s not always an easy or pleasant process.” Given the self-imposed time constraints, the “Thing a Week” songs are remarkably good. Coulton tends toward geeky, witty pop tunes: one song, “Tom Cruise Crazy,” is a sympathetic ode to the fame-addled star, while “Code Monkey” is a rocking anthem about dead-end programming jobs. By the middle of last year, his project had attracted a sizable audience. More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans’ avid attention; indeed, he relies on his fans in an almost symbiotic way. When he couldn’t perform a guitar solo for “Shop Vac,” a glittery pop tune he had written about suburban angst — on his blog, he cursed his “useless sausage fingers” — Coulton asked listeners to record their own attempts, then held an online vote and pasted the winning riff into his tune. Other followers have volunteered hours of their time to help further his career: a professional graphic artist in Cleveland has drawn an illustration for each of the weekly songs, free. Another fan recently reformatted Coulton’s tunes so they’d be usable on karaoke machines. On his online discussion board last June, when Coulton asked for advice on how to make more money with his music, dozens of people chimed in with tips on touring and managing the media and even opinions about what kind of songs he ought to write.

Coulton’s fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent gig, half of the audience members I spoke to had originally come across his music via one of these fan-made videos. When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd. The day I met him, he was examining a music video that a woman who identified herself as a “blithering fan” had made for his song “Someone Is Crazy.” It was a collection of scenes from anime cartoons, expertly spliced together and offered on YouTube.

“She spent hours working on this,” Coulton marveled. “And now her friends are watching that video, and fans of that anime cartoon are watching this video. And that’s how people are finding me. It’s a crucial part of the picture. And so I have to watch this video; I have to respond to her.” He bashed out a hasty thank-you note and then forwarded the link to another supporter — this one in Britain — who runs “The Jonathan Coulton Project,” a Web site that exists specifically to archive his fan-made music videos.

He sipped his coffee. “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” — he clicked his keyboard theatrically — “this is my job.”

In the past — way back in the mid-’90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans. If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their blogs, reading their fans’ comments and carefully replying. They check their personal pages on MySpace, that virtual metropolis where unknown bands and comedians and writers can achieve global renown in a matter of days, if not hours, carried along by rolling cascades of popularity. Band members often post a daily MySpace “bulletin” — a memo to their audience explaining what they’re doing right at that moment — and then spend hours more approving “friend requests” from teenagers who want to be put on the artist’s sprawling list of online colleagues. (Indeed, the arms race for “friends” is so intense that some artists illicitly employ software robots that generate hundreds of fake online comrades, artificially boosting their numbers.) The pop group Barenaked Ladies held a video contest, asking fans to play air guitar along to the song “Wind It Up”; the best ones were spliced together as the song’s official music video. Even artists who haven’t got a clue about the Internet are swept along: Arctic Monkeys, a British band, didn’t know what MySpace was, but when fans created a page for them in 2005 — which currently boasts over 65,000 “friends” — it propelled their first single, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” to No. 1 on the British charts.

This trend isn’t limited to musicians; virtually every genre of artistic endeavor is slowly becoming affected, too. Filmmakers like Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) and Rian Johnson (“Brick”) post dispatches about the movies they’re shooting and politely listen to fans’ suggestions; the comedian Dane Cook cultivated such a huge fan base through his Web site that his 2005 CD “Retaliation” became the first comedy album to reach the Billboard Top 5 since 1978. But musicians are at the vanguard of the change. Their product, the three-minute song, was the first piece of pop culture to be fully revolutionized by the Internet. And their second revenue source — touring — makes them highly motivated to connect with far-flung fans.

This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful. When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation theory, talking at one point about “rhizomatic networks.” (You can Google it.) Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band members dancing on treadmills to their song “Here It Goes Again.” The video quickly became one of the site’s all-time biggest hits. It led to the band’s live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video.

This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their success fan by fan. Across the country, the CD business is in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone. People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not they’re paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what the new economics of the music business will be.

The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while using the Internet primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go has done. Two-thirds of OK Go’s album sales are still in the physical world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online. Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all. Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album’s price, a much smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal Web sites, where there’s no middleman at all.

In total, 41 percent of Coulton’s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online.

Indeed, running a Web store has allowed Coulton and other artists to experiment with intriguing innovations in flexible pricing. Remarkably, Coulton offers most of his music free on his site; when fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Yet this phenomenon isn’t merely about money and business models. In many ways, the Internet’s biggest impact on artists is emotional. When you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can feel as if you’re on stage 24 hours a day.

“I vacillate so much on this,” Tad Kubler told me one evening in March. “I’m like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery. But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I’m not sure you can have both.” Kubler is the guitarist for the Brooklyn-based rock band the Hold Steady, and I met up with him at a Japanese bar in Pittsburgh, where the band was performing on its latest national tour. An exuberant but thoughtful blond-surfer type, Kubler drank a Sapporo beer and explained how radically the Internet had changed his life on the road. His previous band existed before the Web became ubiquitous, and each town it visited was a mystery: Would 20 people come out? Would two? When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, Kubler immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. Now the band’s board teems with fans asking technical questions about Kubler’s guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 recordings of live gigs with each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band. Some send e-mail messages to Kubler from cities where the band will be performing in a couple of weeks, offering to design, print and distribute concert posters free. As the band’s appointed geek, Kubler handles the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs chant his online screen-name, “Koob.”

“It’s like night and day, man,” Kubler said, comparing his current situation with his pre-Internet musical career. “It’s awesome now.”

Kubler regards fan interaction as an obligation that is cultural, almost ethical. He remembers what it was like to be a young fan himself, enraptured by the members of Led Zeppelin. “That’s all I wanted when I was a fan, right?” he said. “To have some small contact with these guys you really dug. I think I’m still that way. I’ll be, like, devastated if I never meet Jimmy Page before I die.” Indeed, for a guitarist whose arms are bedecked in tattoos and who maintains an aggressive schedule of drinking, Kubler seems genuinely touched by the shy queries he gets from teenagers.

“If some kid is going to take 10 minutes out of his day to figure out what he wants to say in an e-mail, and then write it and send it, for me to not take the 5 minutes to say, dude, thanks so much — for me to ignore that?” He shrugged. “I can’t.”

Yet Kubler sometimes has second thoughts about the intimacy. Part of the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that surrounded his favorite stars. He’d parse their lyrics to try to figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today’s online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this morning? “It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock ’n’ roll,” he said.

So Kubler has cultivated a skill that is unique to the age of Internet fandom, and perhaps increasingly necessary to it, as well: a nuanced ability to seem authentic and confessional without spilling over into a Britney Spears level of information overload. He doesn’t post about his home life, doesn’t mention anything about his daughter or girlfriend — and he certainly doesn’t describe any of the ill-fated come-ons he deflects from addled female fans who don’t realize he’s in a long-term relationship. (Another useful rule he imparts to me: Post in the morning, when you’re no longer drunk.)

There’s something particularly weird, the band members have also found, about living with fans who can now trade information — and misinformation — about them. All celebrities are accustomed to dealing with reporters; but fans represent a new, wild-card form of journalism. Franz Nicolay, the Hold Steady’s nattily-dressed keyboardist, told me that he now becomes slightly paranoid while drinking with fans after a show, because he’s never sure if what he says will wind up on someone’s blog. After a recent gig in Britain, Nicolay idly mentioned to a fan that he had heard that Bruce Springsteen liked the Hold Steady. Whoops: the next day, that factoid was published on a fan blog, “and it had, like, 25 comments!” Nicolay said. So now he carefully polices what he says in casual conversation, which he thinks is a weird thing for a rock star to do. “You can’t be the drunken guy who just got offstage anymore,” he said with a sigh. “You start acting like a pro athlete, saying all these banal things after you get off the field.” For Nicolay, the intimacy of the Internet has made postshow interactions less intimate and more guarded.

The Hold Steady’s online audience has grown so huge that Kubler, like Jonathan Coulton, is struggling to bear the load. It is the central paradox of online networking: if you’re really good at it, your audience quickly grows so big that you can no longer network with them. The Internet makes fame more quickly achievable — and more quickly unmanageable. In the early days of the Hold Steady, Kubler fielded only a few e-mail messages a day, and a couple of “friend” requests on MySpace. But by this spring, he was receiving more than 100 communications from fans each day, and he was losing as much as two or three hours a day dealing with them. “People will say to me, ‘Hey, dude, how come you haven’t posted a bulletin lately?’ ” Kubler told me. “And I’m like, ‘I haven’t done one because every time I do we get 300 messages and I spend a day going through them!’ ”

To cope with the flood, the Hold Steady has programmed a software robot to automatically approve the 100-plus “friend” requests it receives on MySpace every day. Other artists I spoke to were testing out similar tricks, including automatic e-mail macros that generate instant “thank you very much” replies to fan messages. Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid.

Even the most upbeat artist eventually crashes and burns. Indeed, fan interactions seem to surf along a sine curve, as an artist’s energy for managing the emotional demands waxes and wanes. As I roamed through online discussion boards and blogs, the tone was nearly always pleasant, even exuberant — fans politely chatting with their favorite artists or gushing praise. But inevitably, out of the blue, the artist would be overburdened, or a fan would feel slighted, and some minor grievance would flare up. At the end of March, a few weeks after I talked with Kubler in Pittsburgh, I logged on to the Hold Steady’s discussion board to discover that he had posted an angry notice about fans who sent him nasty e-mail messages complaining that the band wasn’t visiting their cities. “I honestly cannot believe some of the e-mails, hate mail and otherwise total [expletive] I’ve been hearing,” he wrote. “We’re coming to rock. Please be ready.”

Another evening I visited the message board for the New York post-punk band Nada Surf, where a fan posted a diatribe attacking the bass player for refusing to sign an autograph at a recent show, prompting an extended fan discussion of whether the bass player was a jerk or not. A friend of mine pointed me to the remarkable plight of Poppy Z. Brite, a novelist who in 2005 accused fans on a discussion board of being small-minded about children — at which point her fans banned her from the board.

When Jonathan Coulton first began writing his weekly songs, he carefully tracked how many people listened to each one on his Web site. His listenership rose steadily, from around 1,000 a week at first to 50,000 by the end of his yearlong song-a-week experiment. But there were exceptions to this gradual rise: five songs that became breakout “hits,” receiving almost 10 times as many listeners as the songs that preceded and followed them. The first hit was an improbable cover song: Coulton’s deadpan version of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot rap song “Baby Got Back,” performed like a hippie folk ballad. Another was “Code Monkey,” his pop song about a disaffected cubicle worker.

Obviously, Coulton was thrilled when his numbers popped, not least because the surge of traffic produced thousands more dollars in sales. But the successes also tortured him: he would rack his brains trying to figure out why people loved those particular songs so much. What had he done right? Could he repeat the same trick?

“Every time I had a hit, it would sort of ruin me for a few weeks,” he told me. “I would feel myself being a little bit repressed in my creativity, and ideas would not come to me as easily. Or else I would censor myself a little bit more.” His fans, he realized, were most smitten by his geekier songs, the ones that referenced science fiction, mathematics or video games. Whenever he branches out and records more traditional pop fare, he worries it will alienate his audience.

For many of these ultraconnected artists, it seems the nature of creativity itself is changing. It is no longer a solitary act: their audiences are peering over their shoulders as they work, offering pointed comments and suggestions. When OK Go released its treadmill-dancing video on YouTube, it quickly amassed 15 million views, a number so big that it is, as Kulash, the singer, told me, slightly surreal. “Fifteen million people is more than you can see,” he said. “It’s like this big mass of ants, and you’re sitting at home in your underpants to see how many times you’ve been downloaded, and you can sort of feel the ebb and flow of mass attention.” Fans pestered him to know what the band’s next video would be; some even suggested the band try dancing on escalators. Kulash was conflicted. He didn’t want to be known just for making goofy videos; he also wanted people to pay attention to OK Go’s music. In the end, the band decided not to do another dance video, because, as Kulash concluded, “How do you follow up 15 million hits?” All the artists I spoke to made a point of saying they would never simply pander to their fans’ desires. But many of them also said that staying artistically “pure” now requires the mental discipline of a ninja.

These days, Coulton is wondering whether an Internet-built fan base inevitably hits a plateau. Many potential Coulton fans are fanatical users of MySpace and YouTube, of course; but many more aren’t, and the only way for him to reach them is via traditional advertising, which he can’t afford, or courting media attention, a wearying and decidedly old-school task. Coulton’s single biggest spike in traffic to his Web site took place last December, when he appeared on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” a fact that, he notes, proves how powerful old-fashioned media still are. (And “Weekend Edition” is orders of magnitude smaller than major entertainment shows like MTV’s “Total Request Live,” which can make a new artist in an afternoon.) Perhaps there’s no way to use the Internet to vault from the B-list to the A-list and the only bands that sell millions of copies will always do it via a well-financed major-label promotion campaign. “Maybe this is what my career will be,” Coulton said: slowly building new fans online, playing live occasionally, making a solid living but never a crazy-rich one. He’s considered signing on with a label or a cable network to try to chase a higher circle of fame, but that would mean giving up control. And, he says, “I think I’m addicted to running my own show now.”

Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn’t last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?

It is also possible, though, that this is simply a natural transition point and that the next generation of musicians and artists — even the avowedly “sensitive” ones — will find the constant presence of their fans unremarkable. The psychological landscape has arguably already tilted that way for anyone under 20. There are plenty of teenagers today who regard themselves as “private” individuals, yet who post openly about their everyday activities on Facebook or LiveJournal, complete with camera-phone pictures. For that generation, the line between public and private is so blurry as to become almost nonexistent. Any teenager with a MySpace page is already fluent in managing a constant stream of dozens of semianonymous people clamoring to befriend them; if those numbers rise to hundreds or even thousands, maybe, for them, it won’t be a big deal. It’s also true that many recluses in real life flower on the Internet, which can famously be a place of self-expression and self-reinvention.

While researching this article, I occasionally scanned the list of top-rated bands on MySpace — the ones with the most “friends.” One of the biggest was a duo called the Scene Aesthetic, whose MySpace presence had sat atop several charts (folk, pop, rock) for a few months. I called Andrew de Torres, a 21-year-old Seattle resident and a co-founder of the group, to find out his story. De Torres, who played in a few emo bands as a teenager, had the idea for the Scene Aesthetic in January 2005, when he wrote a song that required two dueling male voices. He called his friend Eric Bowley, and they recorded the song — an aching ballad called “Beauty in the Breakdown” — in a single afternoon in Bowley’s basement. They posted it to MySpace, figuring it might get a couple of listens. But the song clearly struck a chord with the teen-heavy MySpace audience, and within days it had racked up thousands of plays. Requests to be the duo’s “friend” came surging in, along with messages demanding more songs. De Torres and Bowley quickly banged out three more; when those went online, their growing fan base urged them to produce a full album and to go on tour.

“It just sort of accidentally turned into this huge thing,” de Torres told me when I called him up. “We thought this was a little side project. We thought we wouldn’t do much with it. We just threw it up online.” Now their album is due out this summer, and they have roughly 22,000 people a day listening to their songs on MySpace, plus more than 180,000 “friends.” A cross-country tour that ended last December netted them “a pretty good amount of money,” de Torres added.

This sort of career arc was never previously possible. If you were a singer with only one good song, there was no way to release it independently on a global scale — and thus no way of knowing if there was a market for your talent. But the online fan world has different gravitational physics: on the basis of a single tune, the Scene Aesthetic kick-started an entire musical career.

Which is perhaps the end result of the new online fan world: it allows a fresh route to creative success, assuming the artist has the correct emotional tools. De Torres, a decade or more younger than Coulton and the Hold Steady, is a natural Artist 2.0: he happily spends two hours a day or more parsing notes from teenagers who tell him “your work totally got me through some rough times.” He knows that to lure in listeners, he needs to post some of his work on MySpace, but since he wants people to eventually buy his album, he doesn’t want to give away all his goods. He has thus developed an ear for what he calls “the perfect MySpace song” — a tune that is immediately catchy, yet not necessarily the strongest from his forthcoming album. For him, being a musician is rather like being a business manager, memoirist and group therapist rolled into one, with a politician’s thick hide to boot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/ma...udience-t.html





Guy Drinks. Bird Drinks. Guy Thrives. Bird Drinks.
Charles McGrath

IN certain New York artistic circles the cartoonist Tony Millionaire is famous for once, at the end of a very long night, having sex with a slice of pizza. This was in the mid-’90s, a period when Mr. Millionaire, who is large and striking-looking to begin with, used to favor lime-green leisure suits or a tuxedo with a bottle of vodka in the pocket. He would frequently end an evening by climbing on a table, removing his false teeth and declaring, “I am Tony Millionaire!”

The name is a pseudonym of course, though a former girlfriend used to claim it came from an Old French term meaning “owner of 1,000 serfs.” Mr. Millionaire — or Scott Richardson, as he used to be known — actually lifted it from an “I Dream of Jeannie” episode and printed it on a label for a party he attended in 1981. The tag stuck, and he now says, “If I ever hear anybody using my other name, it’s either my mother or my lawyer.”

These days Tony Millionaire is practically a brand name, attached to a syndicated weekly comic strip, “Maakies”; a series of comic books called “Sock Monkey”; the graphic novels “Uncle Gabby” and “Billy Hazelnuts”; and an animated cartoon, “The Drinky Crow Show,” which will make its first appearance on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim on Sunday night at 11:45. (Since Friday the episode has also been available on adultswim.com; whether there will be more depends on how this one goes over.)

Spun off from by the “Maakies” comic strip, “The Drinky Crow Show” is about an alcoholic, suicidal crow and his sidekick, a dim-witted libidinous monkey named Uncle Gabby, shipmates on a 19th-century whaling ship captained by a crusty Ahab type who happens to have a sexpot daughter. Like the strip, the cartoon is graphically elegant, done in a style reminiscent of early comics masters like Winsor McKay and Johnny Gruelle (who drew “Raggedy Ann”); the content, on the other hand, comes bubbling up from a part of the imagination that polite cartoonists lock away.

This first episode begins with a whoosh of crow vomit and ends with a squirt of bug excrement. In between there are floggings, decapitations and dismemberments, cannonballs that go right through characters, leaving perfect round holes, and one instance each of copulation between whales and between a fly and a cockroach. The hero, Drinky Crow, rescues the ship and Uncle Gabby, or half of him, anyway, with quick thinking and artistic enterprise — when he’s not blotto, that is, a condition indicated by a giant X where his eye should be and little bubbles circling his head.

This troubled, bibulous little bird is in many ways Mr. Millionaire’s alter ego and also his savior. He came up with the character in the winter of 1993, during an extremely low period in his life. He was living in New York then, and barely scraping by, as he had been since getting out of art school, by making architectural drawings of houses. But that winter his business had dwindled, and as he recalled recently: “My girlfriend said, ‘You’re not going to be able to pay the rent, are you?’ She said it would be better if I moved out, and so I was broke, sleeping on couches, begging food from friends. One night I went to this bar in Brooklyn, Six Twelve in Williamsburg, and on a napkin I started drawing a cartoon about a crow who got drunk and blew his brains out. The bartender said, ‘Every time you draw one of those, I’ll give you a beer,’ so I just kept drawing. He photocopied them, and pretty soon they became a kind of trademark for the bar. The bartender even made a Styrofoam model of Drinky Crow.”

Drinky’s fame eventually spread to The New York Press, the alternative paper, which commissioned Mr. Millionaire to do a weekly strip for $25 an installment. That in turn led to syndication and to freelance work for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and other mainstream publications. “That was the first time in my life I ever paid taxes, and I was a little worried that I was going to get in trouble,” he said. “But I got a good accountant, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell them you were homeless.’ ”

Though Mr. Millionaire has since branched out into books and television, the strip — two strips, really, one very slender one underneath the other — remains a cornerstone. “No matter what, I’ve got to get my weekly ‘Maakies’ out,” he explained. (The name is a nonsense word, chosen because Mr. Millionaire liked the way it looked; it rhymes with “car keys” pronounced with a Massachusetts accent: MAH-kees.) “That’s my soul. Without it I’d still be a bum, I’d still be drawing houses. I needed a deadline. That’s the code of the cartoonist: make the deadline.”

Among the fans of “Maakies” is Art Spiegelman, the author of “Maus.” “I really like the fact that there’s this disparity between the delicacy of the drawing and the coarseness and stupidity of the humor,” he said recently. “That goes back to a great moment in cartoon history.”

The strip also provides a window onto Mr. Millionaire’s background and influences. The shipboard setting, for example, owes something to his boyhood in Gloucester, Mass., where his maternal grandparents were both artists who frequently painted nautical themes. His grandfather also introduced him to the world of the classic Sunday comics, which often manifest themselves explicitly in Mr. Millionaire’s work, in strips, for example, that adopt the style of Mr. Gruelle, Rube Goldberg, V. T. Hamlin’s “Alley Oop.” The idea of a second strip running beneath the main one, and usually with no relation to what’s going on above, is something he borrowed from George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat.”

Mr. Millionaire’s parents were both artistic too. His father was a designer, and his mother a junior high school art teacher. She forbade coloring books in the house, and when he was younger also talked him out of aspiring merely to be a commercial artist. “She said, ‘What, you want to paint pork chops on the side of cardboard boxes?’ ” he recalled, and then added, “In my mind there was never any doubt that I was going to do something artistic, and for all the hassles my parents gave me, they were always very encouraging: ‘You stupid idiot — it’s because of you it’s raining! You’re a great artist.’ ”

Mr. Millionaire, now 51, has been married for six years to the actress Becky Thyre, and they live with their two young daughters in a stucco bungalow in Pasadena, Calif. Thanks to health insurance Mr. Millionaire now has dental implants to replace the falsies. (The originals were knocked out in a car crash when he was a teenager.) And though he professes still to be a wild man of sorts, most of his boozing these days is notional, except for a few beers late at night while he works in his studio, drawing in ink with store-bought fountain pens he tweaks with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The studio is a converted one-car garage that looks more like a consignment shop than an artist’s workroom. Some of his grandparents’ paintings hang on the wall, along with yellowing newspaper pages from the Golden Age of comics. There is a stuffed raccoon cat in the rafters, and antlers and a mangy head high on the north wall. A computer printer is hidden in an old radio cabinet, and tucked away in a corner is a scanner Mr. Millionaire uses to send his Drinky Crow drawings to the animators, who work in Transylvania.

The notion of turning “Maakies” into a cartoon occurred first to Eric Kaplan, who wrote for “Futurama” and “Malcolm in the Middle” and has lately been working on a series of full-length “Futurama” features. He said recently that because of his work in animation and production he had become interested in developing more projects that brought together striking design and unusual stories, and he heard about Mr. Millionaire from the cartoonist Peter Bagge.

Like a lot of TV people he was also aware of some Drinky Crow shorts on “Saturday Night Live” in the late ’90s. Six were made, and though only two were shown, they became legendary for their weird bleak humor. “What appealed to me about ‘Maakies’ was that it’s a distinct comedic world,” Mr. Kaplan said. “It makes you feel that you’ve gone to the well of Tony Millionaire’s imagination and let down a bucket. With the cartoon we’re going down into the same lava.”

Mr. Millionaire credits Mr. Kaplan, who wrote the script for the first “Drinky Crow” on Adult Swim for figuring out how to turn a series of four-panel cartoons into an extended narrative, and for teaching him that cartoon dialogue doesn’t always work when spoken. Mr. Kaplan says the process wasn’t as complicated as Mr. Millionaire makes it sound. “I went for a long walk with Tony, and I asked him why he was so depressed when he started drawing Drinky,” he recalled. “And I thought: ‘I can fill in a little of the psychology. He’s a frustrated romantic who’s had his heart broken. And Uncle Gabby is just a guy who wants to eat, have sex, get drunk. Drinky’s the more sensitive one.’ ”

He added: “As much as possible, we tried to take a certain way of looking things from Tony’s brain and put it on the screen. It’s a very pregnant premise — kind of in the past, kind of in the present. It’s about this world — it speaks to the horror of life.”

Getting the voices right, Mr. Millionaire said, proved to be more of a challenge than he imagined. A single actress nailed all the female parts, but they went through a couple of actors for Drinky before finally discovering one who sounded sufficiently sodden.

Even harder was getting the right look. The animation is computer generated, and originally it was too three-dimensional. “It looked like ‘Jimmy Neutron,’ ” Mr. Millionaire explained, adding that early versions of Drinky had him jumping up and down, strutting, clapping his hands. “I said: ‘No, no, no — he doesn’t do that! He has much less affect.’ ”

Eventually he and the animators devised a system whereby he took the computer-generated models and added by hand all the etchinglike details so characteristic of his work: the planks, the portholes, the texture of Gabby’s fur. “That’s why it looks like 3-D Sunday comics,” Mr. Millionaire said. “ I don’t know anything about animation, but I invented a whole new technique, Maakimation!”

Adult Swim, which has given us, among other innovations, “Saul of the Mole Men” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” with its talking milk shake, French fries and meat wad, does not observe the same rules as the rest of television. For one thing there are no seasons; shows come and go seemingly at random. As Nick Weidenfeld, Adult Swim’s manager of program development and a champion of “Drinky Crow,” explained recently, there are no focus groups, no pre-testing of a show. “We don’t go by the usual TV model,” he said. “For a new show, it’s more a question of: Does this feel right in terms of what we’re doing and where we’re going?”

What this means in practice is that for the time being there are no further episodes of “Drinky Crow.” The pilot will be shown Sunday night, and then by some process that seems in part mystical and in part based on viewer response, the network bigwigs will decide whether or not to order more. If the show is approved, Mr. Millionaire and Mr. Kaplan already have hundreds of new plots stored in their heads. “The ship can travel,” Mr. Millionaire explained. “It can go to Japan, it can go to the North Pole. It can sprout wings and fly to the edge of the universe if it has powerful enough rockets and the right fuel: alco-fuel.”

But what about poor Uncle Gabby, who at the end of Episode 1 is cut in half at the waist, with his spinal column dangling down like an extension cord and insects feasting on his blood? “The publisher complained that at the end of the first ‘Sock Monkey’ book, Drinky Crow burned the house down with everyone in it,” Mr. Millionaire said. “I told them, ‘It’s a cartoon!’ Next time they’ll all be fine.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/ar...on/13mcgr.html





Hit rigging

SuperMoviesDownload: The YouTube Virus
Pete Cashmore

YouTube users can’t have failed to notice that the Most Viewed list is consistently dominated by videos branded by a site called SuperMoviesDownload. How did they get so many views? Cheating, of course.

We pointed out in October 2006 that it was easy to enter the Most Viewed list on YouTube just by opening some tabs in Firefox and setting them to auto-refresh - no real skill required. (For those who try refreshing the page once and see no increase in views, note that YouTube only updates its viewing stats every few hours). Based on the ease with which these sites are dominating the popularity rankings, it seems that nothing has been done to fix the issue. In other words: these unwanted self-promoters are doing nothing more than refreshing the page on one PC - when we tried this for our original post, there wasn’t even any sign that IPs were being logged. For SMD, which seems to sell movie downloads, the process goes something like this:

1. Find an interesting YouTube video
2. Add your own site branding and URL
3. Upload to an account and disable comments so no one complains about you taking their clips
4. Auto-refresh the page 50,000 times
5. Get in Top Viewed List
6. Profit

Below is a screenshot showing that 7 of the Most Viewed YouTube clips right now are from SMD, and many others come from sites using the same trick. Eric Schmidt was asked about the problem at a recent interview (pointed out to us by The CoMotion Group), but downplayed the problem. It seems that a fix would be easy and straightforward: why not go ahead and fix it up?
http://mashable.com/2007/05/12/super...youtube-virus/






Tilting at a Digital Future
Richard Siklos

IN Rupert Murdoch’s world, two things are certain: the sun never sets on the kingdom, and a TV is always on in the background.

On the evening of April 26, several large television monitors adorned the terrace of Mr. Murdoch’s Beverly Hills mansion for a dinner celebrating a special edition of “American Idol” that raised more than $70 million to fight poverty. An Asian noodle station was set out by the pool; nearby, sushi chefs busily sliced tuna for “Idol” co-hosts Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, and seven, hyperactive “Idol” finalists who, when they weren’t clamoring around megastar Tom Cruise, dreamily watched themselves on the big screens. Wendi Deng, Mr. Murdoch’s wife, wore a billowy, green dress and introduced their 5-year-old daughter, Grace, to guests before sending her to bed.

Mr. Murdoch casually sipped wine and chatted with his daughter, Elisabeth, and other guests. He had planned for the event to be an early dinner party, but he finally headed to bed at 1 a.m., leaving music impresario Quincy Jones and others chatting on a sofa. After all, he had work to do.

What partygoers didn’t know was that during the previous week, on April 17, Mr. Murdoch had offered to buy Dow Jones & Company, the venerable publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion. So far, he had not heard back directly from the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. Signals sent by the Bancrofts’ intermediaries were not encouraging, but he was prepared to fly cross-country and meet with the family on a moment’s notice.

As is so often the case with Mr. Murdoch, the Dow Jones bid is counterintuitive and seemingly quixotic. While investors and media giants have cooled on the newspaper industry, the News Corporation’s czar has patiently waited for the right moment to bid on a prize he has long coveted but felt was beyond his reach. Mr. Murdoch’s bid has also caused hand-wringing about his intentions for The Journal, a publication that has long led the pack in authoritative business coverage.

Perhaps the chief worry among those concerned about the journalistic future of Dow Jones is how much editorial independence the company would have under Mr. Murdoch’s rule. It also raised questions about how well the strait-laced Journal would fit within a conglomerate whose offerings include the online hangout MySpace, racy British tabloids, and table-thumpers like Bill O’Reilly.

WHATEVER the media mogul says he may do with such a powerful enterprise, a close look at what he’s actually done in the past — particularly how he has deployed his far larger Hollywood and television properties — is a telling indicator of what life may be like for Dow Jones in a Murdoch regime.

When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Yet Mr. Murdoch restored the studio, let his staff there produce the films they wanted (for the most part), and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.

“Rupert Murdoch is utterly consistent,” says Barry Diller, who once ran Fox and now oversees the IAC/Interactive Corporation. “It’s not like he’s adding toys. This is oxygen to him.”

In almost every case, Mr. Murdoch endured years of losses to put new offerings like Sky Television in England the Fox News Channel in America on the map. There is scant evidence of Mr. Murdoch’s envelope-pushing imprimatur at the studio that is the center of it all, just as it is less in evidence at the large quality newspapers he owns, including The Times of London and The Australian.

Mr. Murdoch’s long-held desire to own The Journal fits into a similar grand plan: to revitalize if not save the original business — newspapers — on which he built his empire. Mr. Murdoch’s vision is to fold together the far-flung news businesses he owns into a seamless digital platform anchored by the Web-oriented Journal and, in the process, reinvent the newspaper industry that his company was built on. “We are a relatively old company deeply rooted in print journalism,” Mr. Murdoch told his top news executives in his Aussie drawl a few days after the “Idol” party. “Now, we have to make huge leap into a completely different world.”

The digital future he envisions has information zipping across an expanding, ubiquitous array of screens — TVs, laptops and cellphones. In a world of proliferating broadband, Mr. Murdoch sees video as a bigger component of the news blur and he wants to meld his disparate video assets into his sprawling digital infrastructure: from Fox News in the United States, Sky News outlets around the world, and the business TV channel he is launching this fall in America and plans to take international (which, if his cards play out, he hopes to tie closely to The Journal).

As Mr. Murdoch tries to make the digital future a reality, skeptics wonder whether he will use his newfangled media platform to merely transmit news and analysis or whether he will package information according to his own needs — and even use it as a cudgel.

A couple of days embedded in the Murdoch camp yields a few clues about what makes Rupert run and why. At age 76, he appears to be in his strongest position in years — with his company’s share price up nearly 50 percent in the past two years and his grip over his company finally secure. He remains unblinkingly fixated on the advancement of the News Corporation as though it were a nation state and his relentless corporate march has imbued his company with a maverick culture less apparent at other media giants scrambling to adapt to the hurly-burly of the digital age.

Mr. Murdoch has also shown little hesitation to reverse course when his plans go awry. He says that China, for instance, is no longer the corporate imperative that it once was for him. Until recently, he was determined to build a global satellite-TV empire to delivery his programming, but the rapid emergence of the Internet cooled his ardor. DirecTV, was a company he pursued for years with as much fervor as he now shows for Dow Jones, but he recently agreed to sell it only three years after it was acquired. While the News Corporation’s involvement in the newspaper business could seem like nostalgic attachment to an industry that has seen better days, Mr. Murdoch is hardly known for being sentimental. Indeed, Mr. Murdoch is pretty much the same in public as he is in private, with little evidence of an inner Rupert — even to some who work closely with him.

“This is a man who’s been single-minded since he was 22 years old and he’s woken up every morning with the same agenda: which is to extend the reach and power and influence of his company,” said one person close to Mr. Murdoch who was given anonymity to speak openly about him. “I think tomorrow is the same as today in that respect.”

Mr. Murdoch has had an eventful personal life — including six children from three marriages — and his raw ambition dovetails with an endless curiosity about world affairs, a mischievous streak, and a self-image as the ultimate outsider. In fact, Mr. Murdoch says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites” — words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices. (The Journal, of course, represents one of the quintessential elite media trophies).

Asked if even now he doesn’t consider himself an elite, Mr. Murdoch shakes his head. “No, I’m going to keep myself as much of an outsider as possible,” he says. “We just don’t join clubs.”

MR. MURDOCH’S many critics over the years have viewed him in a far less noble light, accusing him of a cynical worldview that appeals to the lowest common denominator. In sum, they say, he is willing to sacrifice principle for profit.

“His business is privatized, government propaganda; that’s all the company essentially does,” says Bruce Page, a journalist who worked at The Sunday Times of London before Mr. Murdoch owned it and is among his toughest critics. Mr. Page’s 2003 book, “The Murdoch Archipelago,” portrayed Mr. Murdoch as nothing less than a threat to democracy. “It isn’t that Murdoch’s particularly wicked. He’s not a fearsome, warriorlike figure. He’s Falstaff. He has absolutely no concept of honor.”

James H. Ottaway Jr., whose family owns 6 percent of Dow Jones, sounded a similar, if more measured, alarm in a statement on May 6 opposing the offer. “When Rupert Murdoch’s news interests conflict, his business interests usually prevail,” Mr. Ottaway wrote.

This is far from how Mr. Murdoch sees himself, although he has acknowledged that “it has been a long career, and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes.” He also argues that he has evolved as a newspaper owner and does not interfere in coverage or dictate editorial positions at his quality titles.

There are certainly well-worn stories about how he dropped BBC from his Chinese satellite service to appease the government, published the so-called Hitler Diaries in his Sunday Times, and pummeled foes in the pages of The New York Post. But his proponents say that there are the less-told stories about how he once owned The Village Voice and New York magazine and left their editorial operations largely alone.

Asked what he would tell the Bancrofts if they granted him a meeting, Mr. Murdoch says, “I want to tell them how much I appreciate them as a family and to impress on them that my family would be a worthy successor.”

Mr. Murdoch half-jokingly says that he is too busy to roll up his shirtsleeves and write headlines; after all, he has 47,000 employees. He has also offered to install an independent board at The Journal to ensure independence, something he did at The Times. But he has also made it clear that he is not offering a 67 percent premium over Dow Jones’ share price to stay away from the place — and that he vows to invest in the business. In the British market, for example, he has spent nearly $1 billion on new presses, converted the venerable Times to a tabloid format while expanding its foreign bureaus, and started a free daily — all in the past few years.

Although Mr. Murdoch is a huge fan of The Journal’s conservative editorial pages, which are routinely aligned with the political tenor of the Fox News Channel, he insists that most of his editors pick for themselves which candidates they support in elections. In England, it is not unusual for The Sunday Times and The Times of London to support different candidates; same for his big tabloids The Sun and News of the World. (In this political season, Mr. Murdoch says that personally, he is keeping his options open; among the American presidential candidates, “I’m not madly enthusiastic for anyone,” he says.)

Without his cherished newspapers, Mr. Murdoch would be just another billionaire spouting about politics and world affairs and occasionally chairing fund-raisers — not playing as defining a role in shaping public opinion and packaging information. But print isn’t, at first blush, where the action is in the Murdoch kingdom.

From the sprawling Fox studio lot in Century City and the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles splayed out beneath his terrace, newspapers seem like a quaint and distant quadrant of the empire, contributing just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007, and 14 percent of its $3.2 billion in operating income. Like most newspaper companies, the newspaper group is facing slow revenue growth, and its operating margins are running at a solid, if unspectacular, 14 percent.

Over his usual lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary three days before CNBC first reported his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch boasted that the “underlying readership of newspapers is going through the roof.” Yet he had notably sat on the sidelines as two of America’s largest newspaper groups, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company, went up for sale and failed to attract more than a single bidder. Had the industry become so impaired that he would never buy another newspaper again?

“It’s all possible,” he said, with an earnest smile. “Never say never.”

In the days after he submitted his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch says that he had started to think his offer was going to be quietly rejected. But the Bancrofts authorized the family’s trustee to hire bankers and lawyers to represent them — an encouraging sign. Then, word leaked out through CNBC, to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch and his advisers, who worried that if it became public the family may close ranks.

Mr. Murdoch was back in New York when the news broke and went on the Fox News Channel to talk about his offer. While he was in the studio, the Bancrofts issued a statement that family members representing 52 percent of the votes in Dow Jones opposed the offer. Mr. Murdoch said that he held out hope — which he says he still maintains — for a meeting with the family.

Three days after his Fox News appearance on May 3, Mr. Murdoch still had not received any direct word from the Bancrofts. He sat on a sofa in his office on the eighth floor of the News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters, behind him a wall of TV screens showing his channels, set next to a luminescent blue and yellow map of the world. (There is also a rack for his newspapers, flown in daily).

He said that he believed some of the 35 Bancroft family members may be swayed to take his offer, and then did something he rarely does: talk about the past. He spoke of his father’s beginnings in Australian newspapers, and how he rescued papers that, he said, would have otherwise disappeared. “There’s a pattern that goes right up to today, of providing choice.”

Later that same day, he boarded the company jet for a flight to Monterey, Calif. For the third year in a row, he was gathering his top publishing and digital executives from here and abroad to brainstorm about how to go about conquering the Internet. By the time the jet was over Michigan, several News Corporation executives were playing poker in the back of the plane. Col Allan, the editor of The New York Post, watched the Republican debate on a big television screen and Robert Thomson, editor of The Times of London, phoned his newsroom to get the results of the French election.

Mr. Murdoch had planned to view some TV pilots, but never got around to it as he, Mr. Thomson and his executive vice president of corporate affairs, Gary Ginsberg, sat in his study and talked into the night about politics and world affairs. At one point, Mr. Murdoch, wearing a beige cardigan, glanced at a screen tuned to his news channel.

“Fair and balanced,” he declared, repeating the Fox News motto, which he meant as a playful jab at Mr. Ginsberg, who worked in the Clinton administration.

THE next morning, Mr. Murdoch was joined by Peter A. Chernin, the News Corporation president, to kick off the “Digital News Initiative” conference at the Monterey Plaza Hotel. The 60 or so attendees ran the gamut of his company’s news operations, including teams from not only his British and Australian papers and The Post, but also from Sky Television in London, the Fox television group and MySpace.

There was urgency in the room, because the company’s online media outlets do not have the same kind of dominance they enjoy in TV and in print. For instance, both FoxNews.com and NYPost.com saw the number of unique users to their sites rise around 30 percent in April versus a year earlier, but they still ranked only 9th and 26th among the most visited general news sites, according to ComScore Networks.

Guest speakers included Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, and Kjell Aamot, the chief executive of Schibsted, the Norwegian publisher that generates a majority of its earnings from its online operations. Mr. Murdoch was staying at his ranch in nearby Carmel, where he had a dinner for the group.

Critical to reinventing the newspaper business, Mr. Murdoch told the audience, is getting the 175 newspapers the company owns to share resources and move quickly in unison. “We need to take advantage of our global scale everywhere,” he said.

Although Mr. Murdoch had not expected to discuss his offer for Dow Jones at the meeting, he offered a brief explanation. “We had hoped to keep it private and secret for a lot longer while they were having proper time to consider it,” he said. “I think it’s an incredible franchise with outstanding people.”

The challenges facing Dow Jones are somewhat different then those facing Mr. Murdoch’s papers because financial news is one of the few forms of information that consumers will pay for online. Still, The Journal, like other newspapers, has struggled to find ways to grow as print advertising and readership has come under pressure.

Jeremy Philips, a 34-year-old former Internet executive who joined the company last year to oversee strategy and acquisitions, followed Mr. Murdoch with a presentation that brought the challenges and opportunities facing the newspaper industry into sharp focus.

Online news is typically free, and advertising rates for it are comparatively low. Mr. Philips calculated that for every print reader a newspaper loses, it currently needs 100 online readers to generate the same amount of revenue. The more encouraging news is the costs of reaching those readers are less expensive through the Internet than through print — indeed, The Times of London, which recently revamped its Web site, is regularly visited by more users outside of England than within.

Another slide posited that of the millions of readers who come to various newspaper sites in a given month, a huge majority come only once, a consequence of all those referrals from search engines and aggregators. Mr. Philips said he sees that traffic, despite how fleeting it may be, as an incredible opportunity if all those one-time visitors can be compelled to come back a few times more.

Mr. Murdoch perked up when discussing the online potential of The New York Post, which has consistently lost money since he acquired it for a second time in 1993. At a break in the conference, Mr. Murdoch sought out Rebecca Wade, the editor of The Sun, to discuss the results of that day’s Scottish election. For a while, he sat at the back of the ballroom chatting with Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook, who sat next to him again at dinner. Mr. Murdoch listened closely.

If one thing was clear over the weekend, it was that Mr. Murdoch’s determination to revitalize the news will depend as much on mastering geeky technology as storytelling and layout. Winning The Journal will require other masterful feats like convincing the Bancrofts that the sometimes fractious Murdoch clan will be worthy stewards.

Mr. Murdoch says that if the Bancrofts grant him a meeting, he would like to introduce them to his grown children so they can see the passion they all share for the news business.

Of course, Mr. Murdoch does not exactly see himself as a wizened septuagenarian preparing to hand off his media assets. His wife, Wendi, is 38 years his junior, and they have socialized with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his fiancée, Anne Wojcicki. The Murdochs are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller; it is another prize that Mr. Murdoch has said he has long coveted.

By every measure, he appears to believe he has plenty of time to get exactly what he wants. As he wrapped up the conference in Monterey last Sunday, he looked out at his employees and said: “You all think I’m too old.” Pausing for a beat, he added: “I think you’re too old.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/bu...13murdoch.html





At Wall Street Journal, Slim Margins Open Door to Murdoch
Richard Pérez-Peña

Does The Wall Street Journal make money? The question might seem silly. The chronicler of capitalism, the bible of business: of course The Journal turns a profit, right?

Dow Jones & Company, which owns the newspaper, does not break out separate figures for The Journal. But the probable answer, according to analysts and current and former company officials, is yes, The Journal operates in the black, but barely, and maybe not for long.

"I would say The Journal is probably marginally profitable," said John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst based in Silver Spring, Md. "No question they've made some things better in the last couple of years, but there are trouble signs."

Dow Jones is profitable overall, although like many media companies it has been squeezed as readers and advertisers migrate to the Web. But The Journal itself, despite weekday circulation of more than two million, second only to USA Today in the United States, has lagged far behind most major papers in profit margin.

That performance has helped depress the stock price, making Dow Jones an attractive takeover target for Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, whose bid for the company sent the stock price soaring. (Executives at Dow Jones declined to comment for this article.)

And already, 2007 is looking worse than 2006. Early this year, Dow Jones projected that for the year, The Journal would see an increase in ad revenue in the midsingle digits. Instead, through the first four months of the year, it is down more than 4 percent from the year-earlier period, despite the resources being poured into the Saturday issue and the decision to open up the paper's front page to advertising last fall.

Last week, Lehman Brothers projected a slight decline for the year in ad revenue at Dow Jones's consumer media group, which includes The Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch, with declines at the print Journal wiping out the online gains, and then some.

Murdoch argues that the News Corporation can capitalize on The Journal's strength as a brand, leveraging it for a new Fox business cable channel and pouring more money into its European and Asian editions. The Bancroft family, which owns a controlling share of Dow Jones, opposes Murdoch's bid of $60 a share, although the opposition is based more on philosophical reasons than financial ones.

In part, The Journal's recent struggles can be attributed to its longstanding commitment to high-quality journalism that translates into high costs, and to the particular pressures felt by a business-oriented newspaper.

But they are also the result of some management decisions to expand during the late 1990s boom, high turnover in the paper's ad sales department and recent attempts to broaden the paper's advertising base with the Saturday issue.

The Journal and its Web site account for most of the consumer media group, which makes up about 55 percent of Dow Jones's revenues. As a whole, the group posted a slight operating loss in 2005 and a positive margin of 3 percent last year, despite unusually strong ad sales — and analysts say the margins for the Journal were probably worse.

Yet even in unsettled times, with newspapers unsure of their futures, many still rack up healthy profits. The corporate divisions that include newspapers posted 2006 operating margins of 23.7 percent at the Gannett Company, the nation's largest chain and publisher of USA Today; 18.3 percent at the Tribune Company, which publishes The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, where editors and publishers have been under pressure to cut costs; and 9.6 percent at The New York Times Company.

In a way, the Journal's troubles are nothing new; Wall Street analysts, big investors and, at times, members of the Bancroft family have complained for more than a generation that it was a brilliant product poorly managed, but boom times made it profitable, anyway. In 1998, the paper added Weekend Journal, a Friday section with softer news and features, and the two years after that, operations were flush as the stock market rose and the technology industry went wild.

But this decade has amplified the industry's troubles, with ad dollars contracting, newsprint and other costs rising, and the decades-long decline in circulation accelerating. And while Sept. 11 marked a turning point at all papers, it hit particularly hard at The Journal, whose headquarters is near the World Trade Center site.

Like many other papers, the Journal has cut costs by shrinking the physical size of the paper, losing about 10 percent of the space devoted to news in early 2007. But it has not been willing to engage in the kind of wholesale staff cuts seen across the industry.

Dow Jones Newswires and The Journal often produce separate coverage of the same events, and Dow Jones executives have argued for reducing that duplication, allowing some reduction in the news staff. The Journal's editors and reporters have strongly resisted such consolidation, often successfully arguing that heavier use of the wires' work would dilute the distinctiveness and quality of The Journal. But many people in The Journal newsroom also say that some consolidation is inevitable.

The Journal has additional challenges, including its heavy dependence on business-to-business advertising, which dropped sharply in the 2001 recession, and never rebounded the way consumer advertising has. In the first four months of this year, technology advertising — a business mainstay — dropped 23 percent, while total advertising volume was down 5.5 percent.

The paper, traditionally published only on weekdays, introduced a Saturday issue in September 2005, hoping to tap deeper into consumer ads and make itself competitive on coverage of news that breaks on Fridays. The company says the Saturday issue is meeting expectations — 60 percent of its advertisers last year were new to The Journal, and 70 percent of the revenue was from consumer ads.

But it is an expensive project because it means filling and printing more papers and requires new delivery arrangements to reach the homes of readers who get The Journal weekdays at work. The Weekend Edition of the Journal may turn out to be a smart long-term strategy — analysts are divided on that question — but for now, it loses money, and will continue to do so for some time. Dow Jones has said that the weekend Journal lowered earnings by about 15 cents a share last year, which translates to a loss of about $12 million.

The Journal's attempts to sell ads have not been helped by the fact that the top advertising position will soon have changed hands five times in eight years, sometimes going to people with little or no newspaper experience.

Ad revenue at the Journal began to improve in late 2005, and in 2006, it rose 8.8 percent, the first full-year increase since 2000. Some of that was because of the Saturday issue, but even the weekday numbers rose.

But in February, the executive in charge of ad sales, Judy Barry, who was well-regarded in the company, resigned. People at Dow Jones who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal matters said that she clashed with Richard F. Zannino, who had become Dow Jones's chief executive in February, 2006. Ad revenue has dropped sharply since she left.

Last Thursday, the company put Michael F. Rooney, a career magazine executive, in charge of ad sales, with the new title of chief revenue officer. By the time he takes over next week, the position will have been vacant for three months.

Increasingly, Dow Jones is positioning itself as a digital information supplier whose parts — including newswires and the Factiva archive service — nourish one another and should not be judged singly.

But the domestic edition of the Journal remains by far the largest piece of that puzzle. The Journal is also the only large paper in the country to charge for access to its Web site. With more than 900,000 subscribers, WSJ.com has become an important source of income, but the demand for payment limits the audience it can offer to online advertisers, and the ad rates it can charge.

A former Dow Jones executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of damaging career prospects, said: "I don't think there's much hope of averting a revenue decline this year at The Journal, maybe even the company as a whole, and I wouldn't be surprised if The Journal was operating in the red by year's end."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...soutsource.php





Reuters Agrees to $17.2B Thomson Takeover
Robert Barr

Reuters agreed on Tuesday to a $17.2 billion takeover by Thomson that would vault the combined entity ahead of Bloomberg to become the world's largest financial data and news provider.

The combined company will be headed by Tom Glocer, 47, who is now chief executive of Reuters, and he will be responsible for finding the $500 million in savings the companies are promising to deliver by the third year.

Reuters trustees, who could have vetoed any takeover, endorsed the deal, which is still subject to approval by shareholders and regulators.

"We believe that the formation of Thomson-Reuters marks a watershed in the global information business, and will underpin the strength, integrity and sustainability of Reuters as a global leader in news and financial information for many years to come," said Pehr Gyllenhammar, chairman of the trustees.

Holders of each Reuters Group PLC share traded in London will be paid the equivalent of about $7 in cash and 0.16 shares of Thomson Corp.'s Toronto-listed stock.

The value of the deal is calculated based on Thomson's closing share price of 48.46 Canadian dollars on the Toronto Stock Exchange on May 3, the day before the companies announced they were exploring a combination.

Shareholders of Thomson, formally based in Toronto but with its operational head office in Stamford, Conn., would control more than three quarters of the shares in the new company, Thomson-Reuters PLC.

Woodbridge, the Thomson family holding company which controls roughly 70 percent of Thomson, will own approximately 53 percent of the combined business. Other Thomson shareholders will have 23 percent and Reuters shareholders 24 percent, the companies said.

Reuters and Thomson compete with Bloomberg LP, founded by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, in providing data terminals to the world's major banks and brokerages. Reuters was the market leader for years before steadily losing ground to Bloomberg.

An April report from Inside Market Data Reference said Bloomberg has a 33 percent share of the market, with Reuters holding 23 percent and Thomson 11 percent.

"For Thomson, it is a defining moment in our journey to become the information provider of choice for the world's business and professional markets," said Richard J. Harrington, Thomson's president and chief executive. Harrington, 60, will step down when the merger is completed.

London-based Reuters was born in 1851 when Paul Julius Reuter started sending stock market quotations between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable.

Reuters shares rose 3.1 percent to 624.5 pence ($12.38) on the London Stock Exchange at midday.

The merged companies will have a dual-listed structure.

The renamed Thomson-Reuters will retain current listings on the Toronto Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange. It also will apply for its ordinary shares to be listed on the London Stock Exchange and intends to apply for its American Depositary Shares to be listed on Nasdaq.

"The companies will be separate legal entities but will be managed and operated as if they were a single economic enterprise," the announcement said. "The boards of the two companies will be identical and the combined business will be managed by a single senior executive management team."

The combined Thomson Financial unit and Reuters financial and media businesses will be called Reuters.

Thomson's professional businesses — legal, tax and accounting, scientific and healthcare — will be branded as Thomson-Reuters Professional.
http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1184649.html





Clear Channel says Private-Equity Firms Raise Bid by 0.5 Percent
AP

Channel Communications Inc. said Friday the Boston-based private-equity firms trying to buy the radio and advertising company raised their bid by half a percent, in an attempt to defeat strong opposition to the value of their previous offer.

Thomas H. Lee Partners LP and Bain Capital Partners LLC amended their offer to $39.20 per share, up from the $39 per-share bid that Clear Channel’s board rejected as inadequate. The new price values the company at about $19.45 billion.

The firms included a condition that they will pay an undisclosed premium if the deal does not close before Dec. 31. They also granted existing shareholders the option of taking the payment either in cash or as shares in the private company. The agreement limits the number of shares that can be exchanged at a one-to-one ratio to 30.6 million, or about $1.2 billion worth.

Clear Channel’s board approved the amended merger agreement and recommended shareholders vote in favor of the deal. The company canceled a shareholder meeting scheduled for May 22 and will reschedule it once it makes the requisite regulatory and securities filings.

The company delayed an earlier shareholder vote after it became clear the deal did not have enough support to win approval.

Clear Channel is the nation’s largest radio-station operator. It also has a large outdoor advertising unit.
http://business.bostonherald.com/bus...icleid=1001911





Outporting

Local News Web Site Postpones Coverage by Reporters in India
Justin Pritchard

A local news Web site's editor who hired two reporters in India to cover suburban Pasadena said he's been so overwhelmed by reaction to his plan that he had to postpone publication of their first stories.

James Macpherson said he hasn't found the time he hoped to train one of his new staffers to cover Monday night's City Council meeting, which is shown live on the Web.

"We've been prevented from doing that due to the attention that we've received," Macpherson said Monday.

He hired the reporters last week and wanted to have posted their stories on pasadenanow.com by now. One based in the Indian financial center of Mumbai will watch the meetings, which often go past midnight, and use the time difference (early morning here is early afternoon in India) to write summaries so readers in the city near Los Angeles can log on Tuesday mornings and find out what happened.

Macpherson said he's working with the reporters on stories he intends to post before next Monday's meeting. As a Pasadena native, he said, he knows the city and its players and will ensure stories written from afar are fair and accurate.

Many newsrooms already are facing job and coverage cuts and Macpherson's plan struck a nerve when The Associated Press first reported its details Thursday.

Since then, Macpherson has spoken with more newspapers, TV and radio stations than he can name and hasn't had time to do interview requests from as far away as Australia and France. Hundreds of responses nearly shut down his e-mail account and vaulted pasadenanow.com from obscurity to a destination for those wondering what was going on.

Reaction has fallen into two camps.

Many within journalism have pilloried the idea of covering local news from half a world away -- or suggested it must be a publicity stunt. As Larry Wilson, editor of the local Pasadena Star-News paper wrote in a column, how could an Indian reporter know whether a council member was joking when he made his remarks?

Others agree with Macpherson, who pointed out that desk-bound reporting is commonplace in an increasingly lean news industry.

One of the skeptics quoted in AP's original story was Bryce Nelson, a University of Southern California journalism professor and Pasadena resident. He said reaction to the story was striking, and not just among reporters.

A reader wrote Nelson remarking that a story about an anti-war march in a Northern California newspaper bore little resemblance to the actual event -- perhaps because the reporter had written the story without being there.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051401263.html





Delivered on Electronic Paper, the Seattle P-I Won't be Your Father's Web Site

The flat, flexible display screen you can roll up and put in your pocket or purse might finally be here. Hearst Corp., owner of the Post-Intelligencer and an investor in the technology, plans to test it in Seattle and elsewhere.
Bill Richards

Sometime in the next two years, if Hearst Corp.'s plans work out, a handful of Seattle Post-Intelligencer readers will begin getting their morning news not from the paper on the front stoop or by dropping change in a corner newsbox — or even on their laptop — but from a new electronic newspaper that's displayed on a screen as light and flexible as paper. The screen will be about the size of a small tabloid newspaper, and it will be in color.

The electronic P-I will carry real-time news, same as the Internet, not yesterday's news like traditional papers. Readers will turn the e-paper's pages by touching the flexible screen. And when those readers head off to work, they will roll up the electronic P-I and stuff it in their pocket, purse, or briefcase.

"If you could tell someone, 'We'll deliver your news in a customized way, so that when you wake up at 6 a.m., you'll have 6 a.m. news on the front page, every day,' we think consumers will say, 'Hey, that's pretty darn good,'" said Ken Bronfin, who heads Hearst's interactive division.

With the ink barely dry on a new joint operating agreement (JOA) between Hearst and the Seattle Times Co., which under the agreement prints and distributes both papers, Hearst is planning to field test a version of the long-promised e-paper here in Seattle. Some industry experts think the e-paper will upend the entire newspaper industry. It will most certainly rattle Seattle's media market.

Hearst officials say they hope to begin testing their device with the P-I here and at some other sites where the company has media operations within two years. While the display technology originally was developed to deliver print news, Hearst officials told Crosscut it could also become a flexible, low-cost platform for delivering video or standard Web content. Hearst owns a dozen newspapers, including the P-I, but also 29 television stations, 19 magazines, and numerous Web sites.

"No one has really done what we are planning to do with this," said Bronfin. "This is all clearly new. No consumers have had contact with this."

Tech and media companies have been predicting for years that they are on the verge of unveiling some form of a flexible e-paper that is practical for consumers. But the technology has been slow to evolve and expensive to develop.

Newspapers in Belgium and Germany, and U.S. media companies like The New York Times Co., are working on their own versions of an e-paper. But Hearst's device would be the first to offer a tabloid-sized newspaper on a large, flexible, color screen.

Hearst is not generally known for newspaper innovation, and Bronfin's interactive division has attracted little notice. It operates as both a venture capital and incubator arm for the company's tech investments. Hearst bought a piece of E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that was spun off from MIT's Media Lab about 10 years ago. E Ink's other owners include Intel, Motorola, and McClatchy Co., the minority owner of The Seattle Times and owner of the Tacoma News Tribune, Tri-City Herald, The Olympian, Bellingham Herald, and Idaho Statesman in Boise.

In addition to heading Hearst Interactive, Bronfin currently chairs E Ink's board. Seattle, he said, "is a great market for trying this out." The city has a large computer-literate population, a built-in test bed for Hearst in the P-I, and competition from The Seattle Times, which would provide a daily comparison for reader acceptance of an electronic P-I.

The e-paper screen uses ordinary reflected light, like regular printed paper, instead of being backlit like a laptop screen. It requires so little power that it can operate for a month or more on flashlight batteries before needing a recharge.

Sony's digital Reader, which it introduced last year and claims to be able to display up to 25 300-page books, already uses the E Ink technology on a hardback platform. Hearst's flexible electronic newspaper would have a similar capacity, Bronfin said.

James McQuivey, television and media analyst for Forrester Research, says the e-paper could be for news readers what the iPod is for music fans. Its extended power life, he says, is "probably the single largest display innovation of this decade." Hearst, McQuivey said, is furthest along in this area of display technology.

But if Hearst tries to give the e-paper full wireless capability — that is, updates the news second by second instead of downloading a page and storing it as an iPod stores downloaded music — the device's power reserve would be cut by as much as 80 percent, McQuivey said.

According to E Ink's Web site, its electronic ink contains millions of microcapsules, each the diameter of a human hair. Each microcapsule contains either positively charged white particles or negatively charged black particles, suspended in a clear fluid. Bronfin calls the chemical mix the device's "secret sauce." A tiny electric charge draws one microcapsule to the surface of the screen and pushes the oppositely charged capsule to the bottom, creating white or black dots that form a printed page. Transistors embedded in the screen alter the charges, changing the page.

The microcapsules can be displayed on a variety of flexible surfaces, including foil, plastic, cloth, or real paper. The whole thing is managed by an embedded microprocessor.

While electronic ink has been around for years, newspapers have been slow to move toward the technology. Traditional newspaper formats are tough to adapt to computer screens, which are small and must be read head-on to avoid distortion. Laptops are heavier and bulkier than ink on paper, and advertisers examining prototypes complain that flexible, colored screens distort or wash out when they are rolled or folded.

Last Sunday, May 13, however, LG.Philips LCD, a Korean display manufacturer, announced that it has solved many of those screen problems. Philips said it has developed a 14.1-inch color screen using E Ink's technology that is thinner than a postcard, has the clarity of a traditional newspaper, and can be bent with no distortion or fade. Philips' Web site shows a worker bending the screen with a color display the width of a small tabloid newspaper.

Hearst said it plans to use Philips display technology for its e-paper experiment. Philips' announcement cited projections by Displaybank, a Korean research firm, that the worldwide market for flexible displays will be $12 billion by 2015.

Hearst's plans to begin testing its e-paper here in the relatively near future could help explain why it elected last month to suddenly settle a four-year legal fight over the JOA with the Seattle Times Co. The two companies announced the settlement April 16, just before they were to enter binding arbitration.

Under the settlement, the Times Co. dropped efforts to end the JOA and shut down the P-I for at least nine years. The Times also agreed to pay Hearst $24 million in exchange for Hearst's promise to drop a claim that the Times managed the JOA in favor of the Times and give up its right under the previous version of the JOA to 32 percent of the Seattle Times Co. profit until 2083 if it is forced to close the P-I.

Both Hearst and Times Co. officials have offered only vague explanations for suddenly settling the dispute after years of costly and often bitter fighting. The agreement's wording, however, permits both companies to engage in "other business ventures and activities" outside the JOA without sharing their revenues. If Hearst is able to deliver an electronic P-I, the Times, which prints, delivers, and markets both papers under the JOA, would be left with an expensive overhead of trucks and printing presses while the P-I would be relatively unencumbered.

"If in the long run Hearst can avoid buying presses, trucks, and gas to deliver the P-I [and can instead do so] in a fashion that is convenient and meets my wants and needs, I'd say it offers a pretty fascinating opportunity," said Randy Beam, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington. The e-paper technology, said Beam, who specializes in newspaper management and operations, "dramatically cuts the cost of distributing the news."

"It would certainly enhance competition between newspapers and television as distributors of real-time information about things like weather and sports scores," he said.

However, Beam and other industry experts say e-papers won't necessarily fix dwindling newspaper readership, especially among younger readers.

The problem with attracting younger readers, Beam said, lies with newspaper content, not the delivery system. "My big worry," he said, "is that paper companies would look at this technology as just an opportunity to do in the future what they do now, just more cheaply."

Others, like San Francisco-based media investor and consultant Alan Mutter, say media companies like Hearst are focusing on the wrong target. A former newspaper editor who writes the blog Newsosaur, Mutter said readers are already overloaded with electronic gadgets, and newspapers should aim to provide better content on existing devices.

"A specialized device like this that you need to carry along with your cell phone, laptop, pager, and Blackberry is just a non-starter," Mutter said.

But Bronfin said a big attraction of Hearst's e-paper would be its cost — less than an annual subscription to the P-I, which is about $185. That cost could be less if the company chose to incorporate it into a long-term e-paper subscription, the way cell-phone companies do with their hardware.

With a JOA settlement in place, Bronfin said, Hearst might seek Times participation in its e-paper test here. "If relations are good," he said, "the more the merrier."

Bill Yearous, a Seattle Times Co. vice president for information technology, said the company has been closely following the development of E Ink's technology and has experimented with formatting The Seattle Times for Sony's Reader. Philips' flexible-screen technology, Yearous said, is "absolutely amazing." But he said Hearst has not yet approached the Times about testing a flexible-screen delivery system.

"We would consider anything," Yearous said of an e-paper partnership with Hearst.
http://www.crosscut.com/seattle-newspapers/3231/





Magazine Suspends Its Run in History
Charles McGrath

After more than 50 years American Heritage, the magazine that furnished not just the minds but, in its original hardcover format, the dens of generations of American history buffs, is suspending publication, its editor, Richard F. Snow, said last week.

The bimonthly magazine, which is owned by Forbes Inc., has been for sale since January, and in the absence of a buyer, Mr. Snow said, the publishers have decided to put the next issue, June-July, on indefinite hold. For at least the time being, however, American Heritage will continue to maintain a Web site.

That leaves Mr. Snow and his staff, which has dwindled to four from a dozen, in limbo, where they have been since just before Christmas, when they were informed that the magazine was going on the block. “It’s a little like sailing the Flying Dutchman through the fog,” Mr. Snow said. “On the other hand, I’ve been here for 40 years, so I can’t really bitch about job instability.”

The magazine has always been a bit of an anomaly among American publications.

The circulation is currently 350,000, or as high as it has ever been, and hundreds of those readers can still be reliably counted on to write in arguing about the true causes of the Civil War or, as happened recently, to point out that the author of a World War II article doesn’t know the difference between the M-1 rifle and the M-16, which didn’t come in until Vietnam.

American Heritage was founded in 1954 by James Parton, Oliver Jensen and Joseph J. Thorndike Jr., refugees from Life, who from the beginning broke most of the rules of magazine publishing. They determined not to accept ads, for example — on the ground that there was a “basic incompatibility between the tones of the voice of history and of advertising” — and instead charged a yearly subscription of $10, a figure so steep at the time that readers were allowed to pay it in installments. They also published in clothbound, hardback volumes with full-color paintings mounted on the front.

The format was an instant hit with readers, who instead of tossing back issues often shelved them in their bookcases, but it initially confounded the United States Post Office, which decreed that American Heritage could use neither the book rate nor the periodical one. That ruling was eventually overturned, but not until the magazine had almost bankrupted itself by paying for parcel post.

The first editor of American Heritage was Bruce Catton, a Civil War historian who wrote in the inaugural issue in December 1954 that “the faith that moves us is, quite simply, the belief that our heritage is best understood by a study of the things that the ordinary folk of America have done and thought and dreamed since first they began to live here.” In the beginning, at least, that meant a fair amount of WASPy nostalgia and a steady ration of stories about the Civil War. That inaugural issue, for example, includes a piece about a Union general who was falsely accused of treason in 1862, as well as articles about the country store, the Fall River steamship line and a lament by Cleveland Amory about the decline of New York men’s clubs.

Mr. Snow, 59, went to work in the American Heritage mailroom in 1965, when Columbia University insisted he take a little time off, and joined the staff full time when he finally graduated, in 1970. He has been there ever since, and in 1990 he became the magazine’s sixth editor, succeeding Byron Dobell.

Either he was a perfect fit to begin with, or over the years he has taken on many of the characteristics of his workplace, for he now closely resembles his own magazine. He is quite youthful looking, on one hand (probably because he is one of those people who mature early and then never change), and a little old-fashioned on the other. He speaks in perfectly turned paragraphs and may be the last person left in New York to unself-consciously use “indeed” as an exclamation.

He favors gray suits and sweater vests, his telephone manners are impeccable, and he has a bubbling, high-pitched voice that turns a simple “hello” into something that resembles the opening bar of a Broadway show tune. Like his magazine he has an almost insatiable curiosity and is particularly expert on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, not to mention Coney Island amusement rides at the turn of the last century.

Mr. Snow has been at American Heritage long enough that he can remember when it was an empire in the mid-’60s, employing 400 people, with the magazine as a flagship for what was in effect a publishing company selling books, many of them by some of America’s best-known popular historians, by direct mail. He was managing editor in 1980, when the magazine ceased publishing in hardback (except for subscribers who wanted to shell out extra for what Mr. Snow now calls a “padded, leatheroid edition”), and in 1982 when, bowing to economic necessity, it began soliciting ads.

“We all felt very bad about taking advertising,” Mr. Snow recalled. “But it had the odd effect of making us feel we were in touch with the world. There was a sense of a living connection to a process that was actually sort of fun — or at least it was fun while we were getting ads.”

American Heritage remained more driven by circulation than by ads, however. According to Scott Masterson, a senior vice president at Forbes and president of American Heritage, the magazine was losing money when Forbes bought it in 1986 and then bounced back for a while. But in the late ’90s, Mr. Masterson said, it failed to reap the kind of profits that many magazines did, and after 2001 it experienced the same downturn that afflicted the magazine business in general and had trouble recovering.

Part of the problem was the Internet, Mr. Snow said. “We’re really a general interest magazine,” he said. “We don’t play to a history buff in any narrow sense — like the Civil War re-enactors, for example. They can go on the Web and get thousands and thousands of hits.”

Three years ago Mr. Snow and Mr. Masterson decided to embrace the magazine’s aging readership and rejiggered American Heritage to appeal more specifically to baby boomers, mostly publishing articles about things that had happened in their lifetime. The formula was an editorial success, Mr. Snow said, yielding articles like one that appeared in the February-March issue about the Wrecking Crew, an unheralded studio band that played on many hit records in the ’60s and ’70s. But it failed to provide the hoped-for bump on the business end. “Forbes has been very, very patient,” he said. “but basically they’ve been carrying us for a while.”

Over lunch recently at Keens — another venerable New York institution, decorated with old clay pipes and playbills and where he pointed out, for the sake of accuracy, that the famed mutton chop is really lamb — Mr. Snow lamented that the next issue of American Heritage might never get into print.

“We’re just about finished with the issue, and we have a particularly fine piece by Teller, the nontalking half of the Penn and Teller team,” he said. “It’s a superb piece of writing, an essay about a fellow named David Abbott, who was a great American magician.”

Mr. Snow added, “You know, some issues are better than others, but I don’t think there’s been a single one where anything really bored me.”

He said he was still unsure about his own fate, but if need be he could go back to writing historical novels. “I’ve written four,” he said. “Two were loathed by everyone who read them, but two actually got published.” And no matter what happens, he has worked out a crucial point of his severance: He gets to keep his Royal manual typewriter.

“That was the typewriter I was assigned in 1970, and it will follow me to the grave,” he said, and he added: “I wish this were more a sign of granitic stability, but in fact it’s a sign of my computer incompetence. I use it just to type labels, but it works beautifully. Every year someone comes in and cleans it. I don’t think he’s paid by Forbes. He’s some spectral presence who just turns up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/arts/17heri.html





Internet Giants Vie to Snap Up Web Ad Firms
Miguel Helft

It’s a good time to be an Internet advertising company.

In the struggle for advantage in the digital advertising boom, companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are rapidly acquiring once-obscure firms, sometimes for eye-popping prices. The payoff, they hope, will be in the relationships and technology that can deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time across myriad online sites.

The struggle reached new heights yesterday when Microsoft agreed to buy the online advertising company aQuantive for about $6 billion. It is Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever and a sign of its struggle to build an Internet ad business on its own.

The purchase caps a month of intense deal making, ignited when Google agreed to buy DoubleClick, a competitor of aQuantive, for $3.1 billion, outbidding Microsoft. Since then, all of Google’s main competitors have snapped up online advertising specialists.

Underlying the deals, which total more than $10.5 billion, is a transformation of the advertising world away from traditional media like television, radio and print.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” said Bryan Wiener, chief executive of 360i, a search marketing company based in New York. “It’s not just talk anymore. The flood of dollars online is starting to accelerate to match the amount of time we spend online.”

Online ads accounted for 5.8 percent of the $285 billion spent on advertising in the United States in 2006, according to eMarketer, a research firm. It estimates that the online share will rise to 10.2 percent by 2010.

In the first quarter of this year, AT&T spent $79 million on online image-based advertising, compared with $55.6 million in the quarter a year ago, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Ad Relevance. The Ford Motor Company increased its purchases to $29 million in the period, from $7 million a year earlier.

As those dollars move online, the big Internet companies see a chance to capture an ever-larger portion of the ad business, and they are seeking to expand.

Until recently, for instance, Google was largely focused on selling small text ads that appear alongside its search results and on other Web sites. Microsoft and Yahoo have sought a piece of that business and have sold ads on their own Web portals, which attract hundreds of millions of users each month.

Now, the large Internet companies all want to become intermediaries between advertisers and the millions of Web sites that have fragmented the online audience. And they are hoping to help deliver ads to online video games, cellphones and Internet television services.

“This is about the opportunity,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division. “We believe that there are tens of billions of dollars in economic value that can be generated in this industry, and we are committed to getting a bigger share of it.”

Analysts say that strengthening its online advertising business is particularly critical for Microsoft, not only because the company has lagged behind competitors like Google and Yahoo, but also because a major technological shift risks eroding the company’s core software business.

Google, which leads the online advertising world, is among those trying to make inroads into Microsoft’s traditional software business by offering word processing, spreadsheets and other software free.

Microsoft has “a strategic need to get into advertising in a big way and to protect the castle against the Google onslaught,” said Todd Dagres, founder and general partner of Spark Capital, a venture capital firm in Boston.

So far, Microsoft’s online advertising efforts have been a mixed bag. Seeking to compete more effectively with Google and Yahoo, Microsoft made a major investment in building a search engine and a technology system to deliver ads on it. Despite that effort, Microsoft’s share of the online search audience has declined steadily, making it harder to persuade advertisers to use the system.

“To effectively compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo, Microsoft needs to have a large base of advertisers,” said Anthony Noto, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. Mr. Noto said that Google had more than 500,000 advertisers and Yahoo about 300,000, while Microsoft has only a small fraction of that. “As long as that gap exists, they will have an inferior ability to monetize their own product,” Mr. Noto said.

Now aQuantive, which is based in Seattle, will bring many advertisers to Microsoft — and more.

The company has three business units, including Atlas, which like DoubleClick sells tools to advertisers and Web publishers that select and deliver the ads that appear on any given Web page when a user clicks on it. The so-called ad-serving technology, for which aQuantive charges a fee, uses data collected across the Web to figure out which ads are likely to be relevant to a particular user.

For example, when a user visits a news Web site, an ad server might deliver an ad from a marketer that is trying to reach the typical reader of the site. Even more valuable, it might make a match between the marketer’s target audience and typical readers of a news article on a particular subject.

The technology also uses the data to help Web publishers earn the most for the ad space available on their sites. That could also help Microsoft get more from the ads that appear on its own Internet portal.

Additionally, the DRIVEpm unit of aQuantive brings to Microsoft an advertising network that buys ad space from online publishers and sells it to advertisers. Both units would give Microsoft a greater role in brokering and selling ads outside of its own Web portal, MSN.

It is that same ambition that explains the recent wave of deals by other Internet companies. In addition to Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, Yahoo recently bought the 80 percent of Right Media that it did not already own for $680 million. The company operates an auction marketplace in which advertisers and publishers buy and sell online advertising space in real time.

This week, AOL bought Third Screen Media, which operates an ad network for mobile phones, and Adtech, an online advertising firm in Germany. AOL was the first Internet portal to buy a major advertising network, Advertising.com, in 2004.

“We early on saw the value of a big owned and operated portal, plus a large third-party network,” said Michael J. Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks.

The recent deals are also blurring the lines between the big Internet companies and traditional advertising companies like the Omnicom Group, WPP Group and Publicis Groupe, potentially bringing them into conflict.

On Thursday, the WPP Group bought 24/7 Real Media, another DoubleClick competitor, for $649 million, to compete better with Internet companies.

And in aQuantive, Microsoft is also getting the Avenue A/Razorfish unit, a leading interactive agency that helps marketers plan advertising campaigns, design ads and place those ads on Web sites either directly or by taking part in ad networks and exchanges.

This is “a watershed week for advertising in general,” said Rich LeFurgy, a former Madison Avenue executive who is an online advertising consultant and investor. “The boundary between ad agencies and ad media has been breached at the highest level. That’s never happened before.”

To understand how hot the market for online advertising technology has become, consider aQuantive’s stock price, which opened the year at about $25 a share. The company’s shares jumped when Google said it would buy DoubleClick for what many analysts thought was a steep price. Microsoft ultimately offered $66.50 a share in cash for aQuantive, an 85 percent premium over its closing price Thursday. Shares of aQuantive soared 78 percent yesterday, to $63.79.

Microsoft said the bidding for aQuantive was competitive, but would not say which other companies were interested in acquiring it. But having been outbid by Google for DoubleClick, Microsoft may have believed it could not afford to let this deal get away.
“They weren’t going to lose this process,” said a person close to the transaction. “That’s why they paid the price they did.” The conversations between Microsoft and aQuantive “got serious after the Google-DoubleClick deal was announced,” this person said.

Microsoft said the acquisition would require antitrust review.

The software giant has asked regulators to scrutinize the Google-DoubleClick deal, which it said would reduce competition. But Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said during a conference call with analysts that Microsoft and aQuantive were complementary businesses and that their union would promote competition.

The pursuit of online advertising businesses has not gone unnoticed by venture capitalists, who are financing a new generation of ad-focused start-up companies.

In 2006, these investors put $372 million into companies involved in Internet marketing services, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group. That was the highest annual figure since 2000.

Carl Eibl, a managing director at Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, a San Diego firm, said there was a sense of urgency among entrepreneurs and investors to start companies based on Internet advertising and marketing and to develop them quickly. “There’s a race to critical mass and a race to position,” he said.

In that respect, he said investors view the recent spate of acquisitions as “heartening but also sobering.”

“The key acquisitions are happening right now,” he said.

Matt Richtel, Steve Lohr and Eric Pfanner contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/te...hp&oref=slogin





Online Invitation to ‘Help Yourself’ Surprises the Stuff’s Owner
William Yardley

The offer had sure seemed strange. Then again, it appeared on Craigslist, the online marketplace that has made its name by upending conventional classified advertising.

“House being demolished,” read the posting on March 24. “Come and take whatever you want, nothing is off limits. Items outside and garage will be open for access into house. Please help yourself to anything on property at 1202 East 64th Street. Tacoma.”

Within a week, the unoccupied house at that address in Tacoma, Wash., had been picked clean. Living room window? Gone. Water heater? Gone. Kitchen sink? Naturally.

And the homeowner? Laurie Raye was stunned.

Now the matter has moved from Craigslist to Superior Court, where Ms. Ray’s niece, Nichole Marie Blackwell, 28, is to appear next week to face charges of burglary, malicious mischief and criminal impersonation. Investigators said they had traced the fraudulent advertisement to a computer Ms. Blackwell had previously used to post other times on Craigslist.

“Blackwell said that she had disliked the victim for years and was upset because the victim had evicted her mother from the house in question without letting her mother get her possessions,” said a document filed last week by the Pierce County prosecutor.

“On March 24, 2007, she drove by the house and noticed the garage was open,” the document continued. “Blackwell and her mother entered the garage and took items that belonged to her mother. Blackwell then returned home and was angry at the victim for how she was treating family members and posted the ad.”

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive for Craigslist, said users had flagged the ad as inappropriate within hours of its posting. “Apparently it’s a family feud,” Mr. Buckmaster said.
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/articl...85/1001/NEWS06





The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller
Shira Boss

WHEN Shana Kelly, a literary agent at the William Morris Agency, submitted Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel, “Cipher,” to book publishers in 2003, she had high expectations. She contacted nearly two dozen high-ranking editors at major publishers, expecting every one to make offers for her client’s coming-of-age story set at a boarding school.

Within weeks, though, most editors had passed. “They loved it but weren’t sure they could sell a lot of copies, because they couldn’t figure out how to market it,” Ms. Kelly said. In the end, Random House was the only publisher to make an offer, giving Ms. Sittenfeld a $40,000 advance.

Random House published “Cipher” in January 2005, renaming it “Prep” and backing it with a clever marketing and publicity campaign. But the initial print run was just 13,000 copies — not enough to generate added royalties on the $40,000 advance.

“Prep” proceeded to confound all expectations by making the New York Times best-seller list a month after publication. The hardcover, with a cover price of $21.95, eventually sold more than 133,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which captures about 70 percent of sales. The paperback also became a best seller, selling 329,000 copies to date. Foreign rights have been sold for publication in 25 languages, and Paramount has optioned the movie rights.

The book was buoyed by favorable press and word of mouth. But other books receive similar attention and go nowhere, so why was “Prep” so successful? Conversely, what causes a book that was all the rage at auction time to fall flat at bookstores?

Brian DeFiore, a literary agent, asks: “Is it the cover? The title? The buzz wasn’t there? Timing? It wasn’t that good?”

The answer is that no one really knows. “It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”

The hunt for the key has been much more extensive in other industries, which have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.

Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling. Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance. “The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,” Mr. Strachan said.

Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, said that whenever he discusses the book industry with people in other industries, “they’re stunned because it’s so unpredictable, because the profit margins are so small, the cycles are so incredibly long, and because of the almost total lack of market research.”

Publishers do engage in limited numbers crunching. In estimating value, editors rely heavily on an author’s previous sales or on sales of similar titles. Based on those figures and some analysis — about the popularity of the genre, the likely audience, the possible newsworthiness of the topic of the economy — they work up profit and loss projections.

The advance payment to the author is often an estimate of the first year’s royalties, usually 10 percent to 15 percent of expected sales. The advance is a liability for the publisher because it is a fixed cost. It doesn’t have to be repaid by the author if it turns out to be an overestimate, which it usually is. But when earned royalties exceed the advance amount, the author is paid more.

Calculating the advance accurately would be a prized skill, but no editors claim to have a scientific handle on how a book will sell. Instead, they emphasize the role of intuition and say that while big unexpected losses and gains do happen, somehow it all works out.

But results are not spectacular, for an industry that had $34.6 billion in net revenue in 2005. Net profit margins hover in the mid-single digits for the $14 billion trade segment, which covers adult, juvenile and mass market titles, with an estimated 70 percent of titles in the red.

Sales in the trade segment (which includes both fiction and nonfiction) grew 5 percent in 2005 from the previous year, but year-over-year sales growth is expected to decline to less than 2 percent by 2010, according to book industry trade group data. The industry does follow trends to pursue growth, but when it comes to acquisitions, methods have not changed much in hundreds of years, says Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University.

IT’S the way this business has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot,” Professor Greco said.

There is a “business model” that supports this risk-taking. As Mr. Strachan puts it, “Lightning does strike.”

And so it must. To make money, the industry depends on perennial sellers and on best sellers. It’s not so much the almost sure-fire best sellers by the well-known authors, because those cost so much to acquire and market, but the surprise best sellers. Those include books like “Prep,” “The Nanny Diaries” (bought for $25,000, it sold more than four million copies), “Marley and Me” (bought for $200,000, sold 2.5 million copies) and “The Secret” (bought for less than $250,000, sold 5.25 million copies in less than six months).

“They’re the ones we all hope and pray happen to us one day,” says Judith Curr, the publisher of Atria Books, which printed “The Secret,” a self-help book that explains “the law of attraction.”

After seeing the movie version of “The Secret,” which existed before the book, Ms. Curr estimated that the planned book could sell a million copies. Based on what? “Just a feeling,” she said. She described it as a tingling that went up her spine.

All of the major houses have also lost on big bets. One of the highest advances ever paid was more than $8 million for a proposal that became “Thirteen Moons,” the second novel by Charles Frazier. He is the author of “Cold Mountain,” which sold 1.6 million copies in hardcover.

Random House printed 750,000 copies of “Thirteen Moons” for the hardcover release in October. The book became a best seller, but it has sold only 240,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan. That would account for less than $1 million of earned royalties, under standard contract terms. The paperback will be out next month, further diminishing hopes of selling out even the initial hardcover print run.

“It’s guesswork,” says Bill Thomas, editor in chief of Doubleday Broadway. “The whole thing is educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. You just try to make sure your upside mistakes make up for your downside mistakes.”

Downside mistakes are more risky when they come with higher advances. These result from bidding wars or when a house decides that a project is so special it is worth acquiring at nearly any cost.

“On rare occasions, you love it, bypass the numbers crunching, do back of the envelope in your head, call the agent and get in early and offer half a million,” Mr. Thomas says. That can lead to auction fever.

“That’s often when the business model of this industry falls to pieces,” Mr. DeFiore, the agent, says. “Because publishing houses are paying high six and even seven figures in hopes those books will turn into the megahits they need, but some will and some won’t, so those big bets are dangerous.”

In the case of hardcovers, a few books that the publishers think have best-seller potential are promoted with generous marketing and publicity campaigns. Others are considered long shots, with anticipated sales of maybe a few thousand copies. Most are considered midlist, with respectable sales of 15,000 to 20,000 copies, Mr. Greco says, but not breakout sales.

Titles can shift categories unexpectedly. “Nobody in publishing is smart enough to know which of the big books will be fiascos, which of the little books will be successes and which in the middle might go up or down,” Mr. Thomas says.

There are two ways for a book to become a best seller. One is to make it on to a best-seller list by selling many copies in a week. Other books sell steadily over months and years, eventually outselling many official best sellers. “Unanswered Cries,” a true-crime book by Tom French, was acquired in 1989 by St. Martin’s for $30,000. It now has 400,000 copies in print in paperback and sold at least 31,000 copies last year alone.

These older titles are crucial to profits because marketing and acquisition costs have usually already been recouped. Yet publishers focus much more attention on the hardcover release. As they prepare to introduce a book, any combination of timing, packaging, marketing and other factors could help ignite the mysterious spark that leads to best-sellerdom.

Contributing to the success of “The Secret,” for example, could be any or all of the following: the subject, the title, the initial DVD release, the marketing campaign, the power of the Internet, “Oprah” and the latest trend.

But “The Secret” is only the most recent book of its type. “Many people have spent lots of money trying to publish the book ‘The Secret’ has become,” says Susan Petersen Kennedy, president of the Penguin Group. “A lot of books are just like that that haven’t worked.”

The same uncertainty surrounded “Prep.” When Ms. Sittenfeld was writing the novel, she recalled, colleagues said, “The boarding school book has already been written. Why are you doing it again?”

But after it became a best seller, Ms. Sittenfeld said, she heard the opposite: “Of course it did well! It’s a boarding school book!”

The publisher of “Prep” attributes the success, in addition to the story, to a catchy title and book cover and creative marketing and publicity. A team of four publicists made belts that matched the cover for giveaways, and sent splashy gift bags (holding pink and green flip-flops, the belt, notebooks, lip gloss) with the galleys to magazines. The pitch letter included photocopies of the publicists’ own high school yearbook photos.

“It got attention, and we started getting calls wanting more and more galleys,” says Jynne Martin, one of the publicists.

An impressive lineup of press coverage followed. The book ended up with coveted crossover market appeal: in addition to young women, the book was read by adolescents, more mature readers and males, according to anecdotal evidence. Information about readers is often anecdotal because publishers argue that market research would be too expensive, or too difficult to pull off because one book is so different from the next.

“Some of the best and most interesting books have something contrarian that does surprise and delight. says Susan Weinberg, publisher of PublicAffairs.

TAKE the surprise of “Skinny Bitch,” a diet book by Rory Freedman, a former modeling agent, and Kim Barnouin, a former model. “The voice is funny, tough love, no nonsense,” the authors’ agent, Talia Rosenblatt Cohen, said. But the authors were largely unknown and advocate a vegan lifestyle. “Everyone kept saying, ‘No platform!’ and ‘Vegan!’ ” Ms. Rosenblatt Cohen said.

The book sold to Running Press in Philadelphia for barely over five figures and has not received much mainstream press since its publication 16 months ago. Word traveled among vegans and college students, however, and it became a Los Angeles Times best seller. More than 100,000 copies are now in print, and the authors have signed a deal for two more books with Running Press for “well into the six figures.”

Some experts wonder if book publishers might uncover more books like this if they tried harder to find out more about their buyers and what they want.

“The Newspaper Association of America has a staggering amount of data on people who read newspapers. The book business has, basically, nothing,” said Professor Greco. “They’re not going into the marketplace and doing mall intercepts and asking people, as they leave the bookstore, ‘What did you buy? Did you find what you’re looking for? What motivated you to choose that book?’ ”

An exception is the consumer research gathered by the Romance Writers of America, a writers’ association that publishes a regular market study of romance readers. It reports survey information on, for example, demographics, what respondents are reading, where they are getting the books and how often, and what kind of covers attract them. Romance authors and publicists use the information to create promotional campaigns.

Most publishers, though, continue to gather data on sales and not much else, though past performance is certainly no guarantee of future results, even from the same author.

After “Prep” became a best seller, Random House signed a two-book deal with Ms. Sittenfeld for a multiple of her $40,000 “Prep” advance that she would not reveal.

Her second coming-of-age novel, “The Man of My Dreams,” was published last May, and again the advance payment and sales haven’t matched up. According to Nielsen BookScan, “The Man of My Dreams” has sold 36,000 copies in hardcover and 6,000 in paperback.

Ms. Sittenfeld says she is reminded of something she heard from an editor: “People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”

Editors’ note: The editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...ss/books14.php





An Author’s Nightmare
Dick Cavett

“You should sue your publisher.”

Those attention-getting words were uttered by a man who was invariably referred to as “the grand old man of Chicago book dealers.” That, rather than “hello,” was his greeting when my co-author and I once entered his shop.

His place had the familiar scent of a real old-fashioned bookstore for book lovers, enhanced by carpeting and the traditional brass bell that tinkled as you opened the door.

“I ordered 50 copies of ‘Cavett,’ H.B.J. sent me nine copies, and I sold them all that morning,” he said. He was referring to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, our publisher. “It’s three weeks now that I can’t get any more copies out of your publisher. People come in for it every day. Do you have a good lawyer?”

How could this be? How could they not send the books?

It was Christmas buying time, the book had made The New York Times best-seller list, and Chris Porterfield and I were in Chicago doing a media blitz. We did the Donahue show (then in Chicago), and Irv Kupcinet’s show and Studs Terkel’s and made numerous other Chicago radio and TV appearances. How could the book not be in a popular bookstore? Any comfort from thinking maybe this was an isolated case quickly dissolved. “And the Kroch-Brentano chain of stores,” he said, emphasizing the word “chain,” “can’t get it either.”

He told us where to find one of those stores, and we went there. “Nice to see you,” said the department clerk. “It’d be even nicer to see your book. People are driving us crazy.”

(If this were a ’40s movie, the picture would start to undulate, and the music would tell us we’re going back in time.)

Authors telling me similar stories began to play back in my head, but not having been an author when I’d heard them, I’d paid scant attention. Some had been famous people, but some not so famous. The typical author might have been a guy who spent three years writing a book in his humble apartment while his wife taught night school to make ends, if not meet, come into closer proximity. Then suddenly, delight: The book got good reviews. But the publisher did the typical poor job of distributing it, and still another potential best-seller was strangled in its cradle by the incompetence of the publishing house. People with such stories often said, “Nobody knew my name, of course. This wouldn’t happen to you.” (Ha!)

(Screen becomes wavy again and we are back at the “Cavett”-free book counter.)

I felt the vein at the left of my forehead begin to pulsate — a sign my staff would watch for during taping of a show. It was an infallible indication that I was getting irritated by a guest.

“May I use your phone?” I asked the nice clerk. I called H.B.J. and asked to speak to Mr. Jovanich, the tall, erudite, handsome head of the company who had urged and encouraged and wined and dined me, ultimately seducing me into doing a book. The seduction included long, pleasant, chatty lunches with him at Lutece, an elegant (et très cher) French eating joint. Lunch included fine wines selected knowledgeably by my host. Mostly we dined alone, but once we were favored by the presence of the elegant, witty and still knock-out-beautiful Paulette Goddard. (We aren’t in Nebraska anymore, Toto, I thought.) All boded well for the book.

“Hello, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.”

“Bill Jovanovich please.”

“Mr. Jovanovich isn’t in.”

(Temple throb increases.) “Where is he?”

“He’s in Europe, I’m afraid”

“Don’t be afraid. Where in Europe?”

“I’m afr… I believe he’s traveling right now.”

“Who’s running the store while he’s gone?”

“The president of H.B.J.”

“Let me have him.”

“He’s at the Yale Club right now.”

“Are you equipped to reach him there and put him on the line with me?”

“Is this an emergency?”

“I’ll say.”

(Our camera cuts to the Yale Club locker room. Men in and out of towels parading about.)

Attendant: “Locker room.”

“Mr. [I cannot recall his name] please.”

“He’s in the steam room.”

“Get him out.”

“Yes sir!”

(A suspenseful pause.)

(The President of H.B.J., presumably holding his towel in place with his free hand): “Hello, who’s this?”

“Dick Cavett. In Chicago. I’m in a Kroch-Brentano store. They’ve all been out of ‘Cavett’ for weeks. What the hell is the excuse for this? Are you not allegedly a professional enterprise?”

At that moment, a nice lady came to the book counter and asked for … you guessed it … “Cavett” and registered disappointment. I put her on the phone, saying, “Tell this man your problem.”

She: “I haven’t been able to find Mr. Cavett’s book anywhere in Chicago. I’m going to have to buy Lawrence Welk’s book instead.”

Me (taking the phone): “How fast can you get the books here?”

(I forget what he said, but it was unsatisfactory.)

“What about overnight air express?”

“Yes, Dick [the pointed way of saying one’s name by the annoyed]. That would be expensive.”

“As expensive as not selling the book for three weeks?

“Before you return to the comforts of the steam room, I’ll make this easy for you. If the books aren’t here by tomorrow morning, I’ll cancel the Dinah Shore Show, the Carson Show, the Today Show and all the rest of this so-called selling tour and come home. Your hapless company has one book on the best-seller list and you can’t manage to distribute the goddamn thing. You must be very proud.”

(I hung up, as loudly as possible this side of breakage.)

The books winged their way to the Windy City the next morning, worth their weight in air express fees. I did the other shows, the book sold pretty well despite H.B.J.’s best efforts, and life resumed.

It was in telling this tale to Calvin Trillin that I learned of his ongoing project, “An Anthology of Authors’ Atrocity Stories About Publishers.” Even if he got a publisher and the book came in at under 60 pounds, they’d fail to get it to the stores. That practice, I’ve been told ever since my battle of Chicago, continues, like Bush’s war, to this day.

My friend and prolific writer of books Roger Welsch, who made overalls chic on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the years with his “Postcard from Nebraska” (which Johnny Carson told me was the only “must see” on his personal televiewing list), recently was asked to do a book signing — a semi-pleasant aspect of book promoting. The author sits in a bookstore framed by stacks of his work and signs them for chatty purchasers. Roger said he got slicked up and drove a good distance to Grand Island, Neb. He entered the bookstore and became a bit uneasy, because nothing resembling a crowd was in evidence. In fact, nothing resembling even a person was there, except for the lady who ran the place. “How nice of you to come!” she effused and went and got the store’s copy of his book from the window for him to sign. He drove home.

When asked to sign now, he asks politely if “book” is plural.
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2007...ors-nightmare/





Apple Snags 10 Percent of U.S. Retail Notebook Sales in March
AppleInsider Staff

Apple Inc.'s line of MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks combined for nearly 10 percent of all notebook sales at U.S.-based retail stores during the month of March, while sales of iMacs also helped the Mac maker rank amongst the top five desktop manufacturers for the first time this year, according to just-released data from NPD Group.

US retail notebook sales

For the month of March, Apple placed fourth on NPD's list of top selling retail notebook vendors with a 9.9 percent share, ahead of of Compaq's 8.5 percent share but behind Gateway's 13.0 percent share. Toshiba topped the list -- which omits manufacturers like Dell who only sell direct. -- by grabbing 26.2 percent of the market, followed by HP at 23.9 percent.

The 9.9 percent notebook share garnered by Apple is up from February, when it did not place in the top five, but down from January, when it registered a 10.1 percent share of U.S. retail notebook sales.

US retail desktop sales

Meanwhile, the Mac maker broke into NPD's list of top five U.S.-based retail desktop vendors for the first time this year, seizing a 7.7 percent unit share. The list, which does not include Dell, was topped by HP with an even 35 percent slice of the market. HP was followed by Compaq (16.7 percent), Gateway (16.6 percent), and Emachines (16.4 percent).

SanDisk chips away at iPod retail share

Over in the digital media player space, Apple in March saw continued erosion of its share of the retail segment at the hands of rival SanDisk. For the month, Apple held onto a 68.9 percent share, down from 72.3 percent in February and 72.7 percent in January. SanDisk appears to be the primary beneficiary of the iPod maker's lost share, with its slice of the retail media player market rising from 8.9 percent in January, to 9.7 percent in February, and 11.2 percent in March.

Rounding out the top five digital media player retail vendors for the month of March was Creative with a 3.6 percent share (up from 2.7 percent in February), Microsoft with a 2.5 percent share (no change), and Samsung with a 2.2 percent share (down from 2.5 percent in February).
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._march .html#




Microsoft Says Vista Sales at Nearly 40 Million
Sue Zeidler

Microsoft Corp. has sold nearly 40 million Windows Vista licenses in the first 100 days that the latest version of the operating system has been available, Chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday.

Gates said an accelerating consumer shift to digital lifestyles had helped make the operating system the fastest-selling in history, and that premium editions have accounted for 78 percent of Vista sales.

"I'm really thrilled at how this has come together," said Gates during a speech at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2007 in Los Angeles.

Windows operating systems run on more than 95 percent of the world's computers and represent the Redmond, Washington-based company's biggest profit driver.

Vista, which Microsoft introduced on January 30, also marks the first major operating system upgrade in more than five years from the world's biggest software maker.

Gates said Windows Vista allows many niche-oriented PC functions to move into the mainstream, from Web cameras to various home remote-controlled items.

Gates also said that the company named its next-generation Windows Server software -- formerly known as "Longhorn" -- Windows Server 2008.

Windows Server is the server operating system equivalent to the Vista PC operating system, with an emphasis on many of the same features, such as better security.

Microsoft, which controlled an estimated two-thirds of the global server software market in 2006, has said the product is on track to debut in the second half of 2007.

Gates said Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 will provide a platform for hardware innovations and drive increased demand for a wide range of new PCs and devices.

He cited a study by research group IDC that projects there will be a $120 billion economic impact from product and services revolving around Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

The company also said three new hardware manufacturers -- Gateway Inc. (GTW.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Lacie and Medion -- plan to build products for Windows Home Server.

That software is aimed at helping families with multiple PCs easily centralize, share and protect digital content, such as pictures, music, documents and videos.

Microsoft shares were up 7 cents at $30.94 in afternoon Nasdaq trading.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...AS157420070515




Microsoft to Sell $1b in Software to Lenovo

China's largest PC maker says the purchase advances goal of protecting intellectual property worldwide.
Judy Hua

Lenovo Group Ltd. has signed a deal with Microsoft Corp. to buy Windows, Office and other software suites for its personal computers in a deal worth as much as $1.3 billion.

The agreement emulates one inked in 2006, worth $1.2 billion over one year, to pre-install Microsoft's Windows operating system software on Lenovo's computers, deemed a major step in China's efforts to combat piracy.

A Beijing-based spokesman for China's largest PC maker said on Thursday that the framework agreement, encompassing this fiscal year, had been signed on Wednesday in the United States.

"Our projection is the price tag could be as much as $1.3 billion for this fiscal year," the spokesman said. "Last year's agreement was executed very well."

Both firms hoped to advance "one of the most important goals of international business: the protection of intellectual property," Lenovo senior vice president Chen Shaopeng, who attended the signing ceremony, said in a statement on Thursday.

In November 2005, Lenovo became the first personal computer manufacturer to pre-install Windows on all of its product lines for the Chinese market.

The move followed a Chinese government decree that required all PCs made in China to have licensed operating software installed before leaving the factory, as part of Beijing's efforts to crack down on piracy.

Details of the 2007 purchasing agreement would be finalised later, the Beijing-based spokesman said.

Lenovo now sells pre-installed Microsoft software on computers sold in more than 65 countries around the world.

Microsoft and Lenovo last month announced they would build a joint research and development innovation centre in China, marking Microsoft's first such endeavor with an OEM partner, it said.

The centre will focus on technologies for the China market and concentrate on mobile devices and ways to build products on top of Microsoft's software, it said.

Lenovo -- one of several Chinese companies trying to craft an international brand -- commands a dominant market share in Asia excluding Japan but faces fierce competition from Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard elsewhere.

The Chinese firm is now vying with Taiwan's Acer Inc. for the mantle of world's third-largest PC manufacturer, tracking behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Lenovo has also been grappling with expenses arising from layoffs and corporate streamlining after its $1.25 billion purchase of IBM's PC arm in 2005.

Lenovo's shares fell 0.7 percent to HK$2.91 on Thursday, broadly in line with the main market's 0.5 percent dip. The stock has gained more than 5 percent over the last year.
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...27653820070510





Microsoft Takes on the Free World

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe. Fortune's Roger Parloff reports.

Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant.

A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers.

But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.

The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the "free world" - people who believe software is pure knowledge. The leader of that faction is Richard Matthew Stallman, a computer visionary with the look and the intransigence of an Old Testament prophet.

Caught in the middle are big corporate Linux users like Wal-Mart, AIG, and Goldman Sachs. Free-worlders say that if Microsoft prevails, the whole quirky ecosystem that produced Linux and other free and open-source software (FOSS) will be undermined.

Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," he insists. "What's fair is fair."

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents.

It's a breathtaking number. (By comparison, for instance, Verizon's (Charts, Fortune 500) patent suit against Vonage (Charts), which now threatens to bankrupt the latter, was based on just seven patents, of which only three were found to be infringing.) "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," Gutierrez asserts. "There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression. (He's also a professor on leave from Columbia Law School, where he teaches cyberlaw and the history of political economy.)

Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.) In any case, the fact that Microsoft might possess many relevant patents doesn't impress him. "Numbers aren't where the action is," he says. "The action is in very tight qualitative analysis of individual situations." Patents can be invalidated in court on numerous grounds, he observes. Others can easily be "invented around." Still others might be valid, yet not infringed under the particular circumstances.

Moglen's hand got stronger just last month when the Supreme Court stated in a unanimous opinion that patents have been issued too readily for the past two decades, and lots are probably invalid. For a variety of technical reasons, many dispassionate observers suspect that software patents are especially vulnerable to court challenge.

Furthermore, FOSS has powerful corporate patrons and allies. In 2005, six of them - IBM (Charts, Fortune 500), Sony, Philips, Novell, Red Hat (Charts) and NEC - set up the Open Invention Network to acquire a portfolio of patents that might pose problems for companies like Microsoft, which are known to pose a patent threat to Linux.

So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon - an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers.

"It's a tinderbox," Moglen says. "As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere."
Party crasher

Brad Smith, 48, became Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel in 2002, the year the company settled most of its U.S. antitrust litigation. A strawberry-blond Princeton graduate with a law degree from Columbia, Smith is a polished, thoughtful and credible advocate whom some have described as the face of the kinder, gentler, post-monopoly Microsoft. But that's not really an apt description of Smith; he projects intensity, determination, a hint of Ivy League hauteur, and ambition.

We're sitting at a circular table in Smith's office in Building 34 on the Redmond campus, with a view of rolling green lawns splashed with pink-blossomed plum trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, Smith recounts, software companies relied mainly on "trade secrets" doctrine and copyright law to protect their products. Patents weren't a big factor, since most lawyers assumed that software wasn't patentable.

But in the 1990s, all that changed. Courts were interpreting copyright law to provide less protection to software than companies had hoped, while trade-secrets doctrine was becoming unworkable because the demands of a networked world required that "the secret" - the program's source code - be revealed to ever more sets of eyes.

At the same time courts began signaling that software could be patented after all. (A copyright is typically obtained on an entire computer program. It prohibits exact duplication of the code but may not bar less literal copying. Patents are obtained on innovative ways of doing things, and thus a single program might implicate hundreds of them.)

In response, companies began stocking up on software patents, with traditional hardware outfits like IBM leading the way, since they already had staffs of patent attorneys working at their engineers' elbows. Microsoft lagged far behind.

As with the Internet, though, Microsoft came late to the party, then crashed it with a vengeance. In 2002, the year Smith became general counsel, the company applied for 1,411 patents. By 2004 it had more than doubled that number, submitting 3,780.

In 2003, Microsoft executives sat down to assess what the company should do with all those patents. There were three choices. First, it could do nothing, effectively donating them to the development community. Obviously that "wasn't very attractive in terms of our shareholders," Smith says.

Alternatively, it could start suing other companies to stop them from using its patents. That was a nonstarter too, Smith says: "It was going to get in the way of everything we were trying to accomplish in terms of [improving] our connections with other companies, the promotion of interoperability, the desires of customers."

So Microsoft took the third choice, which was to begin licensing its patents to other companies in exchange for either royalties or access to their patents (a "cross-licensing" deal). In December 2003, Microsoft's new licensing unit opened for business, and soon the company had signed cross-licensing pacts with such tech firms as Sun, Toshiba, SAP and Siemens.

At the same time, Smith was having Microsoft's lawyers figure out how many of its patents were being infringed by free and open-source software. Gutierrez refuses to identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed, lest FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them.

But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

Now that Microsoft had identified the infringements, it could try to seek royalties. But from whom? FOSS isn't made by a company but by a loose-knit community of hundreds of individuals and companies. One possibility was to approach the big commercial Linux distributors like Red Hat and Novell that give away the software but sell subscription support services. However, distributors were prohibited from paying patent royalties by something whose very existence may surprise many readers: FOSS's own licensing terms.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...n=money_latest





Author of Linux Patent Study Says Ballmer Got It Wrong
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wasn't really saying that Linux violates more than 200 software patents, Microsoft followed up by saying Ballmer was only citing findings from a controversial study done this summer by OSRM (Open Source Risk Management), a risk-mitigation consultancy.

The study claimed that Linux has been found to potentially violate 283 software patents. The author of that report, however, doesn't see things the way Ballmer does at all.

"Microsoft is up to its usual FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt]," said Dan Ravicher, author of the study Microsoft cites, who is an attorney and executive director of PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation).

"Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does."

"There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality," Ravicher said.

"Patents don't care how the infringing article is distributed, be it under an open-source license, a proprietary license or not at all. Therefore, if a patent infringes on Linux, it probably also infringes on Unix, Windows, etc.," he said.

It makes no difference whether and how software is distributed, Ravicher said. "The bottom line is there's no reason to believe that Windows, Solaris, AIX or any other functionally similar operating system has any less risk of infringing patents than Linux does."

"Ballmer makes a very bold statement by saying Linux infringes hundreds of patents," Ravicher said. "That is extremely different than saying 'Linux potentially infringes X patent,' because the requirement to prove infringement is much more difficult than the requirement to simply file a case claiming infringement. As the SCO saga shows, filing a case based on an allegation is one thing; proving the merits of the allegation in court is something completely different."

Speaking Thursday at the Microsoft-sponsored Asian Government Leaders summit in Singapore, Ballmer said, "There was a report out this summer by an open-source group that highlighted that Linux violates over 228 patents. Someday, for all countries that are entering WTO [the World Trade Organization], somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights for that intellectual property. So, the licensing costs are less clear than people think today."

In fact, the study said Linux potentially violates 283 software patents, not "over 228" as Ballmer said in his speech.

But Ravicher said Ballmer misinterpreted his study's findings. "He misconstrues the point of the OSRM study, which found that Linux potentially, not definitely, infringes 283 untested patents, while not infringing a single court-validated patent."

"The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD about Linux's alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation," he said. "And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so

The study shows that when it comes to software, open-source varieties face fewer patent threats than proprietary ones, Ravicher said. "If one believes the proof is in the pudding, open-source software has much less to worry about from patents than proprietary software."

"Consider this—not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less been found to infringe. On the contrary, proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently."
These include the patent battle over Eolas Technologies' browser technology and the recent settlement between Eastman Kodak Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. over Kodak's patent being infringed by Java.

Ravicher wasn't the only open-source leader to take offense at Ballmer's comments.

"At OSDL, we have a lot of confidence in the robustness of Linux around IP, patents and copyright," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL (Open Source Development Laboratory), the home organization of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

"Some of the world's largest vendors share our view and are willing to stand behind Linux to protect their customers, as are we," Cohen said. "HP offers its Linux customers indemnification. So do Red Hat and Novell. Both Novell and IBM have publicly promised to use their extensive patent portfolios to protect Linux customers."

Cohen said OSDL has set up a $10 million legal defense fund for Linux customers. "With Linux adoption growing three times faster on the server than any other operating system, customers are clearly not intimidated by FUD and are continuing to embrace Linux," he said.

Cohen said none of the challengers to Linux has specified where the platform may be overstepping its bounds.

"Over the past 18 months, a handful of companies and individuals who are threatened by Linux's success have tried to argue that Linux may infringe others' software patents. We find it interesting that none of those companies or individuals have said which patents Linux may offend.

"Yet patents are, by their nature, public; inventions must be disclosed in exchange for the rights granted by the PTO [the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office]. Detractors of Linux on patent grounds should be asked to point to the specific patents that they claim infringe."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1729908,00.asp





Torvalds and Moglen Agree: MS Patent Claims are 'FUD'
Joe Barr

After reading portions of the Fortune Magazine story which contains the latest sabre rattling by Microsoft in its battle against free software, we asked Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux kernel, if he had any comment on Microsoft's claims that the kernel knowingly infringes on 42 Microsoft patents.

Torvalds replied:

Can you get a list of which ones? Before that, it's just FUD, and there's not a whole lot I can say or do. Is there prior art? Are they trivial and obvious to one skilled in the art? Would we need to work around them? We don't know, because all I've heard so far is just FUD.

If MS actually _wanted_ us to not infringe their patents, they'd tell us. Since they don't, that must mean that they actually prefer the FUD.

While Torvalds and Free Software Foundation legal counsel Eben Moglen don't always see eye to eye, they seem to be in harmony on this issue. Moglen said last week at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego that the threat of lawsuits is often more effective than actually suing, because if you sue you have to stipulate which patents are being infringed and show that the patents are good.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/1455258





Students May Get Recycled Computers
Brian Knox

Some students in the Northwest school district don’t have computers at home, but administrators hope that will change soon.

The district has decided to do something different this year with the surplus computers that are “retiring” from service on their regular five-year replacement cycle: give them to students who need them at home.

Jerry Ashton, director of technology for the district, said the idea came from Superintendent Karen Rue. Ashton said he did some research to find out if the Texas Education Code even allowed giving students computers, which it does.

“The idea was to get computers in the houses of the kiddos who otherwise couldn’t get them,” Ashton said.

Rue said the five-year-old computers have become obsolete for the district’s purposes but will be valuable for students who don’t have a computer at home now.

“These computers may not have market value, but they have kid value,” she said.

Knowing that there are more homes without computers than computers available, each campus principals selected students they knew did not have computers at home or potentially did not have computers. Each campus submitted names of students they felt could best benefit from having a computer at home.

A total of 375 flyers were sent home with the selected students to explain the program to parents and ask if they were interested in receiving the free computers.

Administrators are hoping for a successful turnout to the computer pick up Saturday, May 12, and again on June 2. Next year, Ashton estimates that more than 1,000 computers will be available according to the replacement cycle.

All of the hard drives have been reformatted so it contains no district information. Each computer will also include a free set of software which will include a word processing application, a photo manipulation application and a few games along with a Linux operating system. The district does not provide Internet access, at least not yet.

“That is in the long-range technology plan,” Ashton said. “The goal is to offer a discounted rate for NISD students. We’ve just started putting together those details.”

In the past, the surplus computers were put up for bid. Ashton said the district usually received little if any money for the computers, sometimes “pennies on the dollar for scrap.” Some companies charged to haul off the computers.

Response to the program has been positive, Ashton said.

“We’ve had a couple of parents call us and thank us,” he said. “Some see it as something the child has won. Those who have called have been very grateful.”

Some surplus computers will also be used for a new type of summer technology camp for students, Ashton said.

“In the past we’ve taught certain software titles, but this year, we are teaching how to assemble and disassemble a computer and load software. The goal is to include this as an after-school program. We hope to get kids excited about technology,” he said.
http://www.wcmessenger.com/news/news...EpEFmkSpXI.php





DRM

TiVo Awarded Patent For Password That Is So Hard To Guess It Will Outlive Your Hard Drive

TiVo’s dust up with Dish may get all of the ink love, but in reality, it represents a very small part of their patent portfolio. Between their trademark filings, their patent applications and their aggressive open market acquisitions, TiVo has managed to build a very impressive intellectual property portfolio around their technology. They haven’t always had the cash to defend this moat, but with damages from TiVo’s potential patent award against Dish, now up to $130 million it could free up a lot of cash to go after other infringers, if Dish loses their appeal.

Some of TiVo’s patents have obvious applications and some of them are really held more for defensive purposes, but it’s the bizarre ones that I find most interesting and on Tuesday, TiVo was issued a patent for a method of locking down hard drives, that involves creating a password, that is so hard to guess, it would take longer than the expected life of your hard drive for someone to crack. According to the patent document, the method is described as the following.

“An authentication system for securing information within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer such that it is difficult or impossible to access the drive by any system other than a designated host is disclosed. While the invention is similar in intent to a password scheme, it significantly more secure. The invention thus provides a secure environment for important information stored within a disk drive. The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host’s responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself.”

At first the whole thing seems pretty silly to me, but when I think about it, I see two ways that TiVo could take this technology.

The Glass Half Empty - It’s pretty clear that the studios don’t like consumers having control over their our content. When TiVo first introduced TiVo to Go, there were rumblings that Hollywood would sue them over it. Since than, this rhetoric has turned out to be nothing but empty threats. Nonetheless, TiVo was forced to make compromises. When it comes to HDTV, the studios have drawn a line in the sand and consider it sacred. They will not allow consumers to take HDTV content to go (even though we have fair use rights to what we’ve paid for ) Is it that TiVo is in a shakedown with the studios and has implemented these protections to make sure you can’t just unplug your external drive and give it to your friends or is this the secret sauce behind the DRM that prevents you from taking Amazon movies and watching it on an iPod? When it comes to these issues, TiVo has been forced to walk a fine line between pleasing their customers and keeping the studios off their backs and while there are certaininly a wide variety of ways that you could use this technology, it could also be abused in the wrong hands.

The Glass Half Full - From the very start, security has been a big focus for TiVo. They want their customers to be safe. From the get go, they knew that they had to build a network where people didn’t have to worry about pop up viruses. You hear a lot about different hacks on TiVo, but you never hear about anyone actually being able to hack into TiVo’s internal systems, so that they can take control of other people’s DMRs. A secure connection between a consumer and TiVo is not just essential for their customer’s privacy, but it’s a requirement for allowing TiVo to utilize transaction related advertising. There will always be mischief makers who want to wreck havoc on a system, but if you can lockdown the content, it will go a long way towards preventing people from doing damage.

I think that this is a very creative patent, but in all honesty, I don’t know enough about the Technology behind this patent, to have any idea of what this could really be used for. The real answer probably lies in a grey area that exists outside either explanation. Given TiVo’s history of standing up for consumer rights, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Security on a DMR is just as important as security on a computer and my non-technical guesstimate is, that this patent represents technology that was implemented a long time ago. It’s kind of a quirky idea, but I’ve come to expect nothing less from the people who reinvented television.

TiVo, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, VOD, TV, Technology.

Jesse replied:

This really has nothing to do with security, at least the kind of security that benefits TiVo owners. The only conceivable attack it might prevent is someone breaking into your home, opening up your DVR, and stealing the hard drive while leaving the rest of the $600 machine behind.

If you prevent me from accessing the hard drive I paid for, inside a box I own, that doesn’t benefit me. It might benefit TiVo, who wants me to buy new features from them instead of installing them myself. Or it might benefit Big Content, who wants me to buy shows on DVD instead of archiving my own recordings. But it sure doesn’t do anything for me.
http://davisfreeberg.com/2007/05/10/...ur-hard-drive/





Hard drive/Blu-Ray combo

1000GB Blu-ray Recorder Announced By Hitachi
David Richards

Hitachi has revealed a 1 Terrabyte Blu-ray recorder at the Harvey Norman retail conference being held at the Melbourne Convention Centre.

Hitachi is set to launch a 1000GB Blu-ray recorder. The product that was shown at the Harvey Norman Conference being held at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. According to Hitachi Australia the device will go on sale in 2008 for around $2,000.
http://www.smarthousenews.com.au/Com...orage/A3X2P7W8




'Racetrack' Memory Could Gallop Past the Hard Disk
Amarendra Swarup

An experimental breakthrough that could dramatically increase the capacity, speed and reliability of computer hard drives has been announced by an international team of physicists.

Guido Meier at the University of Hamburg in Germany and colleagues used nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire at 110 metres per second - a hundred times faster than was previously possible.

By contrast, today's hard drives rely on the much slower spinning motion of a disk to move magnetic regions - and the data encoded by these regions - past a component that can change or "read" this magnetic information.

"If you want to make a hard drive, operating speed is an important factor," says Meier. "The idea is also to get rid of the mechanical parts, so there's much less wear and tear, and devices can become more robust."

The idea of moving magnetically-stored data electronically has been touted before. Stuart Parkin at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, patented a similar concept called a magnetic "racetrack" in 2004.

Round the bend

In his device, a U-shaped magnetic nanowire is embedded into a silicon chip. Magnetic domains are then moved along the wire by pulses of polarised current, and are read by fixed sensors arranged in the silicon itself.

According to IBM, this type of magnetic memory could vastly simplify computers, and eventually replace all hard-disk drives. However, previous experiments have disappointed, producing speeds up to a thousand times slower than predicted.

"Our results showed the movement of domains cannot be predicted with certainty as they get stuck on imperfections in the crystal," says Meier. "We believe this is why previous attempts were relatively slow as they used longer electric current pulses – up to microseconds long – increasing their chances of getting stuck."
Aligned atoms

By switching powerful magnetic fields on and off, the researchers were able to rapidly create magnetic domains in a wire less than a micron wide made of permalloy - a magnetic material made of iron and nickel that is often found in disk drives.

These regions contains many magnetic atoms all aligned in the same direction and are separated by domain walls – thin regions where the atoms change their magnetic orientation from one alignment to the other. These can then be moved using much shorter nanoscale pulses.

A powerful x-ray microscope, capable of resolving features as small as 15 nanometres, was then used to read this information by snapping images of domain walls before and after the nanosecond current pulses. Future hard drives could store data by designating a domain wall to be a binary one, while its absence could be interpreted as a binary zero, the researchers say.

However, there are still problems that need to be overcome before the technique could be used more widely. In particular, small crystal imperfections in the wire impede progress, slowing down some domain walls and stopping others altogether.

"The question is can we fabricate media that are perfect or control the imperfections," says Peter Fischer, a team member at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California. Meier believes that using different materials and changing the shape of the wire could help avoid these issues.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...dId=tech_rss20





Holographics Set to Feed a Market Hungry for Data Backup

It has taken 40 years, but our insatiable appetite for data has finally led to holograms for storage - if you've got the cash
George Cole

Could magnetic tapes, hard drives and optical disc formats like Blu-ray be replaced by a data storage format that uses holograms? The world's first commercial holographic storage system is launched this autumn, with the product able to store the equivalent of 64 DVD movies on a disc about the size of a CD.

Holographic storage has been talked about since the 1960s, but it's taken more than 40 years for technology to catch up.

Article continues

InPhase Technologies, based in Longmont, Colorado, is the latest company to get behind holographic storage. InPhase has spent 13 years developing materials, systems and processes. Its first products - marketed under the Tapestry brand - will be a 600GB write-once disc and a drive.

Biggest challenge

Wolfgang Schlichting, a research director at IDC, the analysis group, says: "The biggest challenge was developing the media. There was a lot of work on complex crystalline rewritable media, but the success of CD-R showed that write-once media could succeed, so then there was a switch to photopolymer materials. The cost and complexity of the optics has also decreased - you're now talking of technology that's similar to a digital camera."

The increasing demand for data storage makes it necessary to look beyond conventional forms of storage technology, such as optical discs or magnetic tape. The storage capacity of optical discs has increased over successive generations, from CD-Roms, which store around 700MB of data, to DVDs (18GB), and now next-gen formats such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, which each hold upwards of 25GB. And there are plans for even larger capacity discs.

But despite this, optical disc technology has struggled to keep up with our insatiable appetite for data. That's why many archival systems still use magnetic tape, which offers large storage capacities at a cost-effective price. However, tape has its problems. Wlondek Mischke, director of research at technology company DaTARIUS, says: "Magnetic tape is very difficult to handle and very expensive [and] is waiting for something to replace it. Holographic storage could be the one."

But how successful will holographics be? Jim Porter, president of market research company Disk/Trend, says: "Any holographic storage system will have to be reliable, easy to use and be sold at a price that is considered by prospective buyers to be appropriate for the application."

The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market - a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.

Kevin Curtis, InPhase's chief technology officer, says: "Very large companies are showing the most interest, which is interesting, because large companies tend to be technology laggards. The amount of data they're getting through is becoming unmanageable." However, Bill Foster of consultancy Understanding & Solutions, says: "Tape technology is well established. It will be difficult to sweep aside."

What's more, tape technology is still evolving. Last year, IBM and Fuji Photo Film showed that it was possible to pack data on to magnetic tape with a density of 6.67bn bits per square inch - or 15 times the data density of standard tape. And magnetic hard disk capacity is also increasing thanks to perpendicular recording.

Nor does holographic storage look like replacing optical disc formats any time soon. "Any storage system with the capability to supersede today's optical discs will have to have rewritable versions and be offered at more attractive prices. Holographic products will not reach these objectives in the foreseeable future," says Porter. Jean-Paul Eekhout, TDK's corporate strategy director, adds: "Holographic storage will be complementary to formats like Blu-ray. It's more a B2B [business-to-business] technology and will find a place in the archival market. But I don't expect holographics in its current shape or form to cross over to the commercial market."

Even InPhase acknowledges that we are unlikely to see pre-recorded videos on holographic discs for a long time - if ever. "We're not looking at [packaged] content," admits Curtis. Conventional optical discs and drives are cheaper to produce and there is a huge hardware and software infrastructure based around them.

But Walden says: "We believe the technology lends itself to both business and consumer applications. Almost every company involved in optical storage is also looking at holographics as a potential candidate for the next generation of optical disc." IDC thinks that by 2011, the holographics drive market will worth around $200m globally, a small portion of the multibillion-dollar data storage market.

David Mercer, principal analyst at research group StrategyAnalytics, says: "The challenges will revolve around production economics and industry standards, and these alone are likely to delay the emergence of significant consumer volume opportunities."

Consumer applications

Mercer believes holographic technology will play some role in storage devices aimed at consumer applications, such as content archiving and creation, but adds that: "It will be more challenging to develop a video distribution and publishing standard around holography, as this will involve the coordination of interests in content ownership and protection, device manufacturers and others. By the time these pieces fall into place, video distribution will have migrated to some degree towards online models so the need for a physical media platform may be in doubt."

Indeed, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates thinks that formats such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD represent the last generation of physical video formats, with future generations downloading videos on demand.

But Foster says that holographic storage might stand a better chance at challenging another storage medium - flash memory. "Holographic storage doesn't have to be on a disc - it can also be on solid state medium," he says. So perhaps holographic storage's day has finally come.

• How holograms work

The source material (such as a photographic image or video footage) is encoded with error correction and channel data, but instead of the encoding being carried out on a bit-by-bit basis (as with say, CD or DVD), around 1m bits are generated at one time, which are recorded as a single page. The process uses light from a single laser split into two - a signal beam, which carries the data, and a reference beam. Where the two beams intersect, the interference pattern (hologram) is recorded within a photosensitive storage medium. Note "within" - because holographic storage is a 3D process that uses the entire recording layer and not just the surface of the medium.

The data is recorded throughout the depth of the media uniformly, and multiple pages of information can be recorded in the same volume by changing the angle of one of the two beams. To read the data, a reference beam with the same characteristics used during the recording process is shone on to the holographic disc and the deflected beam is read by a digital camera detector.

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this.

An alternative system uses micro-holograms to record discrete recording layers, like a multi-layer DVD.

Liz Murphy, of InPhase, says: "You only have one opportunity to introduce a product and there's so much anticipation about this. We want holographic storage to be successful."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...080840,00.html





House Dems: Broadband Isn't Broadband Unless it's 2Mbps
Nate Anderson

Saying that the FCC "has not kept pace with the times or the technology," Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) opened a hearing today into the FCC's methods for measuring broadband availability in the US. The US lags in speed, availability, and value, said Markey, compared to a country like Japan, where most residents can pay $30 a month for 50Mbps fiber connections to the Internet (which some senators would like to see migrate across the Pacific). But without accurate data on US broadband, neither the government nor private industry will be able to put forward a comprehensive national broadband plan.

Problems with the FCC's broadband data collection methodology have been well-known for years, and Congress is finally poised to step in and tell the agency how to fix the problem. The Broadband Census of America Act, currently in draft form, asks the FCC to increase its broadband threshold speed from 200Kbps to 2Mbps and to stop claiming that a ZIP code has broadband access if even a single resident in that ZIP code does. It also asks the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to prepare a map for the web that will show all this data in a searchable, consumer-friendly format.

The mood among the members of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet was jovial; Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) even opened by asking (in reference to the proposed map), "Why do maps never win at poker?" The answer: "Because they always fold." Groan.
Is 2Mbps the answer?

"More broadband" is one of those issues that every politician supports, and everyone agrees that the current system has problems, but there was still wrangling over important details. The most contentious of these was whether the government should mandate a definition for "high-speed Internet." Right now, that definition includes any connection over 200Kbps, which Markey wants to boost more than 10 times. 2Mbps is faster than many current DSL links, so part of the reasoning behind this change appears to have a public relations focus—telecommunications companies will want to boost their offerings to over 2Mbps in order to avoid the stigma of not providing "true" broadband.

The plan went over well with the consumer advocates who appeared before the subcommittee. Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America, said that the US is "stuck with a twentieth century Internet" and that he would support increasing the "broadband" definition to 2Mbps. Ben Scott of Free Press echoed that sentiment, suggesting that the definition needs to be an evolving standard that increases over time, which is in contrast to the current FCC definition; it has not changed in nine years. "We have always been limited by the FCC's inadequate and flawed data," he said.

Those from the industries that provide Internet connectivity were less thrilled about the approach, arguing that 768Kbps DSL lines in rural areas might not be speedy today but still remained a massive improvement over dial-up speeds and should still be counted. One proposal, made by several speakers, was summed up well by Steve Largent of the CTIA, which represents wireless telephone companies. He suggested that the FCC keep the current threshold at 200Kbps but provide more granularity so that users can see exactly which speed tiers are available in their neighborhoods. Many new broadband subscriptions are currently coming from wireless connections, which would nearly all be excluded under any definition that set a baseline of 2Mbps. Largent also stressed the need, acute in his industry, for more spectrum to deliver services, and he asked that the FCC's upcoming 700 MHz auction occur on schedule.

Kyle McSlarrow, who heads the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (and who was yesterday calling for a vastly reduced FCC), said that his group supported the goals of the subcommittee, but that the government must act cautiously in attempting to translate broadband data into a grand national strategy. "It's not like the marketplace isn't addressing consumer demand," pointing out that Comcast recently demoed 100Mbps cable technology.

Public/private partnership

The representatives appeared most interested in the testimony of Brian Mefford, CEO of ConnectKentucky. ConnectKentucky is a public/private partnership that has boosted broadband availability from 60 percent to more than 90 percent in just two and a half years and used mapping techniques to identify current gaps in service. Once those were discovered, the group helped to create a regulatory environment that encouraged private investment, then partnered with companies on a market-driven approach to rolling out new lines, even in rural areas. 80 percent of the funding came from state and federal government agencies, while 20 percent was put up by the companies involved. By the end of this year, 100 percent of Kentucky homes should be able to access broadband of at least 768Kbps.

No such public/private partnership exists on the national level, but Markey and others appeared greatly interested in Mefford's testimony, suggesting that a similar scheme could be introduced to Congress in the future. Such a plan had the support of several industry leaders, including Walter McCormick, head of the US Telecom Association, who would no doubt love to see federal money and support for extending services into low-profit regions.

The FCC, the whipping boy at the hearing, has heard enough of the criticism that it has started to take a hard look at its data collection policy, but major changes have yet to be introduced.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ts-2-mbps.html





Cisco Routers Caused Major Outage in Japan: Report
Jim Duffy

Cisco routers were the source of a major outage May 15 in an NTT network in Japan, according to an investment firm bulletin.

Between 2,000 and 4,000 Cisco routers went down for about 7 hours in the NTT East network after a switchover to backup routes triggered the routers to rewrite routing tables, according to a bulletin from CIBC World Markets. The outage disconnected millions of broadband Internet users across most of eastern Japan.

Cisco says it could not say which specific router models were involved.

"Cisco is working closely with NTT East to identify the specific cause of the outage and help prevent future occurrences,” a Cisco spokesman said in an e-mailed reply. “At this time, Cisco and NTT have not determined the specific cause of the problem."

NTT East and NTT West, both group companies of Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), are in the process of finalizing their decisions on a core router upgrade, according to the report.

The routing table rewrite overflowed the routing tables and caused the routers’ forwarding process to fail, the CIBC report states.

“Clearly, this failure doesn't reflect well on (Cisco) and at the very least highlights the need for two vendors,” states CIBC analyst Ittai Kidron in the report. Kidron states that NTT West is evaluating Juniper core routers while East evaluates the Cisco platforms.

“That said, we don't expect the failure at NTT East to influence its decision with respect to its choice of core router vendor,” Kidron states in the bulletin. “In fact, as router capacity was partly responsible for the failure, it is possible the outage could accelerate NTT's transition to Cisco's newer core router, the CRS-1.”

NTT was one of the initial testers of the CRS-1 when the product was launched three years ago.

“We don't believe the decisions would change based on this event,” Kidron concluded. “Juniper still remains a leading contender at NTT West and Cisco at NTT East.”
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...age-japan.html





Symantec False Positive Cripples Thousands of Chinese PCs
Gregg Keizer

A signature update to Symantec's anti-virus software crippled thousands of Chinese PCs Friday when the security software took two critical Windows .dll files for malware.

According to numerous blog entries from Chinese computer users, a virus signature database seeded yesterday mistook two system files of a Chinese edition of Windows XP SP2 as a Trojan horse which Symantec dubs "Backdoor.Haxdoor." The anti-virus software -- Norton AntiVirus, for example, or the anti-virus component of the Norton 360 or Norton Internet Security suites -- then quarantined the netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll files.

"With these files removed, Windows XP will no longer start up, and even the system Safe Mode no longer functions," said one user writing to the alt.comp.anti-virus newsgroup this morning.

Late Friday, China time, the Chinese Internet Security Response Team (CISRT) posted an alert on its English-language blog. "It's a terrible day for lots of Chinese users (especially Enterprise Users) who use Norton products today," CISRT said. "This issue has made a huge effection to Chinese people." Other reports claimed that more than 7,000 users had already contacted Rising Antivirus, a Chinese security company, asked for help on how they could recover their PCs. On Rising's home page, its threat gauge was rated at red late Friday, the highest ranking this year.

In an e-mailed statement, Symantec acknowledged the signature update bug and said it re-released a new update late Thursday, U.S. time. The Cupertino, Calif.-based security vendor also said that only Simplified Chinese versions of Windows XP SP2 that have been patched with a Microsoft fix from November 2006 were impacted.

If the PC hasn't been rebooted, users can grab the revised signature update to fix the problem, said Symantec. But if Windows was restarted after the flawed update, the user has a much harder row to hoe. Because the bad signature update removed the two .dll files, Windows won't boot -- it ends in a Blue Screen of Death, said CISRT -- and so there's no way to retrieve the new signature or to restore from a backup.

"Customers impacted by this issue following reboot of an affected system can return their system(s) to the previous state through use of the Windows recovery console," Symantec said. XP's recovery console is a command line-driven tool that gives limited access to the PC and its hard drive. Users writing on online forums recommended users copy the two .dll files from their Windows restore CD to the hard drive.

A likely snafu in that scenario, however, is that many Chinese users don't have a restore CD because they're running pirated copies of Windows.

"Norton this time has made a very serious mistake," the Chinese-language Sogou news site said [translation by Babelfish -- eds.].

"All the main news channel in China has reported this since 6 in the morning ECT +8, but symantec keeps silence," someone identified as "Ink" said on the Wilders Security Forum.

Other anti-virus companies have gone through similar fiascos. In March, users blamed Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live OneCare for deleting Outlook e-mail files, although the company denied that the security service was at fault. More than two years ago, Trend Micro Inc. distributed a flawed virus definition file that slowed thousands of PCs to a crawl. Three months later, the anti-virus vendor said that the incident had run up $8.2 million in direct costs to the company.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...icleId=9019958





Hackers Hijack Windows Update's Downloader
Gregg Keizer

Hackers are using the file transfer component used by Windows Update to sneak malware past firewalls, Symantec researchers said today.

The Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is used by Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems to deliver patches via Windows Update. BITS, which debuted in Windows XP and is baked into Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, is an asynchronous file transfer service with automatic throttling -- so downloads don't impact other network chores. It automatically resumes if the connection is broken.

"It's a very nice component, and if you consider that it supports HTTP and can be programmed via COM API, it's the perfect tool to make Windows download anything you want," said Elia Florio, a researcher with Symantec's security response team, on the group's blog. "Unfortunately, this can also include malicious files."

Florio outlined why some Trojan makers have started to call on BITS to download add-on code to an already compromised computer. "For one simple reason: BITS is part of the operating system, so it's trusted and bypasses the local firewall while downloading files."

Malware, particularly Trojans, which typically first open a back door to the system for follow-on code, needs to sidestep firewalls to bring additional malicious software -- a keylogger, for instance -- to the PC. "[But] the most common methods are intrusive [and] require process injection or may raise suspicious alarms," said Florio.

"It is novel," said Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec's security response group. "Attackers are leveraging a component of the operating system itself to update their content. But the idea of bypassing firewalls isn't new."

Symantec first caught chatter about BITS on Russian hacker message boards late last year, Friedrichs added, and has been on the lookout for it since. A Trojan spammed in March was one of the first to put the technique into practice.

"The big benefit BITS gives them is that it lets them evade firewalls," said Friedrichs. "And it's also a more reliable download mechanism. It's free and reliable, and they don't have to write their own download code."

Although BITS powers the downloads delivered by Microsoft's Windows Update service, Friedrichs reassured users that there was no risk to the service itself. "There's no evidence to suspect that Windows Update can be compromised. If it has a weakness, someone would have found it by now.

"But this does show how attackers are leveraging components and becoming more and more modular in how they create software. They're simply following the trend of traditional software development," said Friedrichs.

Florio noted that there's no way to block hackers from using BITS. "It's not easy to check what BITS should download and not download," he said, and then offered some advice for Microsoft. "Probably the BITS interface should be designed to be accessible only with a higher level of privilege, or the download jobs created with BITS should be restricted to only trusted URLs."

Microsoft was unable to immediately respond to questions about unauthorized BITS use.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9019118





Internet Captures Half of Spare Time

Broadband users make online time a priority.

Broadband users spend almost half their spare time in a typical weekday online, according to Media-Screen's "Netpop|Play" report.

A copy of the study provided to eMarketer stated that the average broadband user spent an hour and 40 minutes of her typical weekday spare time online. Over half of that time online was devoted to entertainment and communication.

The study also noted a range of users' spare time activities, and found that e-mail and personal Web surfing trumped TV viewing.

Josh Crandall of Media-Screen said that the point of the results was not that broadband users spend more time online, but that online marketing is still underused in proportion to that time.

"Currently, the proportion of advertising resources devoted to the Internet (about 7%, according to ZenithOptimedia) is nominal relative to the value it generates in interest and engagement among fans," said Mr. Crandall. "As more of the population goes online and there are more marketing channels, it will be imperative for the entertainment industry to know how to effectively allocate marketing and advertising dollars."

eMarketer's own estimates for US online ad spending as a percentage of the overall market are based on Internet Advertising Bureau/PricewaterhouseCoopers data, and are similar to the Zenith numbers. One in 10 ad dollars will go online in 2010, up from 6.6% this year.

Broadband users have been spending more time online for years. The "broadband effect" has been credited with increasing time spent online and the range of online activities conducted.

As the 2005 Forrester Research/HeadlightVision "It's a Broadband Life" report noted, "The essence of the Broadband Effect is that when what consumers can do changes, what they will do changes dramatically."

"A variety of data shows that the Web is an equally important entertainment platform for broadband users as it is a communication platform," says eMarketer Senior Analyst Ben Macklin. "This is a broadband phenomenon, and not only are broadband users watching, listening and interacting with online entertainment content, they are actively creating it."
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004916





How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

Angry people looking for fights will inevitably try to poison successful Internet communities. Columnist Cory Doctorow looks at ways to remove the poison without killing the discussion too.

The Internet Tough Guy is a feature in all Internet social forums. These are people who poison discussions with anger, hatred, and threats. Some are malicious. Some are crazy. Some are just afflicted with a rotten sense of humor. Whatever their motives, they're a scourge. It takes precious little trolling to sour a message-board. A "troll" -- someone who comes onto an online community looking to pick fights -- has two victory conditions: Either everyone ends up talking about him, or no one talks at all. And where two or more trolls gather, they'll egg each other on, seeing who can anger and disrupt the regular message-board posters the most.

It can be distressing. If you're part of a nice little community of hamster-fanciers, Trekkers, or Volkswagen enthusiasts, it's easy to slip into a kind of camaraderie, a social setting in which everyone talks about life, aspirations, family problems, personal triumphs. In some ways, it doesn't matter what brought you together -- the fact that you're together is what matters.

Then, almost without warning, your community goes toxic. Someone in your group undergoes a radical personality shift and begins picking fights, or someone new comes to the party with an agenda. Or, worst of all: Your little clubhouse achieves some small measure of fame and is overrun by newcomers who don't know that Liza is a little bit touchy on the subject of hamster balls, or that old Fred gets into a froth anytime someone asks about retrofitting a bud vase into a vintage Beetle, or that everyone here actually kind of knows Wil Wheaton from reading his blog and he's a total mensch, so jokes about shoving Wesley out the airlock are frowned upon.

Sometimes, you rebound. More often, you tumble. Things get worse. The crowds get bigger, the fights get hotter. Pathologically angry (but often funny) people show up and challenge each other to new levels of vitriol.

In extreme cases, you end up with the kind of notorious mess that Kathy Sierra found herself in, in which trolls directed such bilious, threatening noise towards a harmless advocate for "passionate users" in web-applications that she withdrew from speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference.

You can deal with trolls in many ways. Many trolls are perfectly nice in real life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up. But it doesn't always work: I remember one time I challenged someone who'd been sending me hate mail to call me up and say the words aloud: the phone rang a moment later and the first words out of my troll's mouth were, "You f*cking hypocrite!" The conversation declined from there.

Trolls can infect a small group, but they really shine in big forums. Discussion groups are like uranium: a little pile gives off a nice, warm glow, but if the pile gets bigger, it hits critical mass and starts a deadly meltdown. There are only three ways to prevent this: Make the pile smaller again, spread the rods apart, or twiddle them to keep the heat convecting through them.

Making the group smaller is easy in theory, hard in practice: just choose a bunch of people who aren't allowed in the discussion anymore and section them off from the group. Split. Or just don't let the groups get too big in the first place by limiting who can talk to whom. This was Friendster's strategy, where your ability to chat with anyone else was limited by whether that person was your friend or your friend's friend. Users revolted, creating "fakesters" like "New York City," whom they could befriend, forming ad-hoc affinity groups. Friendster retaliated by killing the fakesters, and a full scale revolt ensued.

Spreading the group apart is a little easier, with the right technology. Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, tells me that he once cured a mailing-list of its flame-wars by inserting a ten-minute delay between messages being sent to the list and their delivery. The delay was enough to allow tempers to cool between messages. A similar strategy is to require you to preview your post before publishing it. Digg allows you to retract your messages for a minute or two after you post them.

But neither of these strategies solves the underlying problem: getting big groups of people to converse civilly and productively among themselves. Spreading out the pile reduces the heat -- but it also reduces the light. Splitting the groups up requires the consent of the users, a willingness to be segregated from their peers.

The holy grail is to figure out how to twiddle the rods in just the right fashion so as to create a festive, rollicking, passionate discussion that keeps its discourse respectful, if not always friendly or amiable.

Some have tried to solve this with software. Slashdot (and similar group-moderated sites like Kuro5hin and Plastic) use an elaborate scheme of blind moderation in which users are randomly assigned the ability to rank each others' messages so that other users can filter what they read, excluding low-ranked posts. These strategies are effective for weeding out the pathetic attention-seekers, but they don't have a great track record for creating rollicking discussion. Instead the tone of the discussions, even read at the highest level of moderation, is an angry, macho one-upmanship. The top posts are often scathing rebuttals of someone else's ill-considered remarks.

I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that it's because there's something fundamentally unfriendly about a roundtable where the participants are explicitly asked to participate in active, public, quantitative rating of one's peers. Like one of those experimental 1970s communes where everyone has to tell everyone else the absolute truth all the time ("Your laugh irritates me," "You have a fat rear end that I find unappealing"), this does a good job of getting all the cards on the table, but is less successful at inspiring an atmosphere of chumminess.

Then there's the psychological effect of trolling: For a certain kind of person (guilty as charged), flames are nearly impossible to let go of. I get tons of lovely fan mail from people who want me to know how much they liked my books. I love these notes and write short, polite, thank-you letters back to each person. But the memories of these valentines fades quickly. Not so the ill-considered, pseudonymous rant from someone who's convinced that I'm on the take, or who has some half-baked theory about copyright, or who wants to say insulting things about my family, friends, interests or habits.

Those people command my full attention. Many's the time I've found myself neglecting a warm bed, a hot meal, or a chance to go out for a cup of coffee with a friend in order to answer some mean-spirited note from some 16-year-old mouth-breather who achieves transcendence only through pointless debate with strangers. For many of us, our psyche demands that these insults be met and overcome.

I am, by my nature, a scrapper. I come from a family of debaters, and my job for several years has been to win debates over copyright and digital freedom. I think that many technology designers are of a similar bent: Argumentative and boisterous, hard-pressed to back away from even a pointless fight. And it is these people who often end up designing our tool-suites for online communities. We view ourselves as locked in an arms-race with trolls who seek to overcome our defenses.

However -- and thankfully -- many community conveners are of a more amicable bent. Although they're not technically capable of writing their own message-board tools, they are socially qualified to wield them.

Take my friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who moderates the sprawling, delightful message-boards on Making Light, a group-blog where the message boards run the gamut from the war in Iraq to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction, and where they discussion is almost always civil.

Teresa is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll's message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole.

Teresa calls it "having an ear for text" and she is full of maddeningly unquantifiable tips for spotting the right rod to twiddle to keep the reactor firing happily without sparking a meltdown.

In the wake of the Kathy Sierra mess, Tim O'Reilly proposed a Blogger's Code of Conduct as a way of preventing a recurrence of the vile, misogynist attacks that Sierra suffered. The idea was that bloggers could choose to follow the Code and post a little badge to their sites affirming their adherence to it, putting message-board posters on notice of the house rules. Although it sounds like a reasonable idea on the face of it, bloggers were incredibly skeptical of the proposal, if not actively hostile. The objections seemed to boil down to this: "We're not uncivil, and neither are those message-board posters we regularly see on the boards. It's the trolls that we have trouble with, and they're pathological psychos, already ignoring our implicit code of conduct. They're going to ignore your explicit code of conduct, too." (There was more, of course -- like the fact that a set of articulated rules only invite people to hold you to them when they violate the spirit but not the letter of the law).

O'Reilly built his empire by doing something incredibly smart: Watching what geeks did that worked and writing it down so that other people could do it too. He is a distiller of Internet wisdom, and it's that approach that is called for here.

If you want to fight trolling, don't make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won't discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

But there aren't enough Teresas to go around: how do we keep all the other message-boards troll-free? Again, the secret is in observing the troll whisperer in the field, looking for techniques that can be encapsulated in tutorials and code. There is a wealth of troll whisperer lore that isn't pure intuition and good sense, techniques that can be turned into tools for the rest of us to use.

A friend who's active on the Wikipedia community once summed up her approach to life: "Don't let assholes rent space in your head." That is, don't let the jerks who crash your community turn it into a cesspool. It's easier said than done, though.

Assisting the troll whisperers and learning from them recognizes that most of us want a civil discussion, and give us the tools to repel trolls. Instead of implying that we all lack civility, these techniques recognize our good will and help us solve the hard social problems of keeping the pathological personalities renting space in our heads.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=199600005
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