Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 22nd, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us." – Newzbin


"Are you going to stop piracy? No you're not. To try and set that as an objective is just not going to succeed." – Francis Keeling, Universal Music Group International


"We are now the Pirate Bay's ISP." – Rick Falk Vinge, The Pirate Party


"If you believe that the only way to get a good smartphone is to bet on one man, one device, one carrier, and one choice, that is a different model than we believe in. We believe innovation doesn’t come from one man, it comes from all of us." – Vic Gundotra, Google



































May 22nd, 2010




Newzbin Goes Titsup

Freetards' favourite bids adieu
John Oates

Usenet indexer Newzbin has gone titsup thanks to legal action from the Motion Picture Association.

A message on the homepage says: "Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us."

The page also links to a blog post, although its author makes clear he has no relationship to the site beyond IRC chats with its founders.

The site was turning over £1m in 2009 but was found liable for copyright infringement in the High Court at the end of March.

The blog post reports the company owes the MPA £230,000 in interim costs - a full costs and damages hearing is still to be heard. Newzbin also allegedly owes a software development house £500,000.

Users have been pushing the site's owners to open-source the code behind the site but so far they've refused. But a clone site is still a very likely outcome to the long-running legal battle.

Revoltingfilesharers blog is here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/newzbin_shuts/





U.S. Court: Isohunt has to Shut Down
Janko Roettgers

Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District issued a permanent injunction against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies.

The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all U.S. visitors. Fung could be held in contempt of court if he doesn’t comply with the injunction, and he could possibly be thrown into jail.

The MPAA’s member studios had sued Isohunt in 2006. Judge Wilson sided with the studios in December, issuing a summary verdict that found Isohunt guilty of inducing copyright infringement. Isohunt responded to the verdict by redirecting U.S.-based users to a slimmed-down site that’s meant to resemble the layout and features of a search engine like Google. Wilson now found that this is not enough. From the verdict:

“Defendants’ proposed ‘primal’ or ‘lite’ website contains all of the same indexing and searching functions as the original websites, only with a different interface for the users to operate.”

The verdict also mentions that Isohunt clocks about 2.5 million unique monthly visitors from the U.S. alone.

So what can Isohunt and Fung do to comply with the injunction? The verdict states that they have to cease “hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files” that can be used to download the studios’ movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours.

However, we’re not just talking about a simple DMCA-like takedown procedure. Isohunt has to actively prevent those titles from being traded in the future, and even filter out any metadata that could suggest or encourage infringement. The decision helpfully supplied a list of terms that are a no-no, including DVD Rips, Cam, Telesync, and Screener.

The injunction also bars Fung and his company from “soliciting or targeting a user base generally understood, in substantial part, to be engaging in infringement of, or seeking to infringe, Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works.” In other words: Isohunt would have to stop catering to file sharers, which is essentially the same as saying it has to cease operations.

Isohunt hasn’t said yet how it intends to respond to the injunction.
http://newteevee.com/2010/05/21/u-s-...-to-shut-down/





US Court: RapidShare Not Guilty of Copyright Infringement
Ernesto

The popular file-hosting service RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement, the United States District Court of California has ruled. The ruling is an important victory for RapidShare, which has been increasingly targeted by the entertainment industries.

Last year, adult media company Perfect 10 filed a lawsuit against the leading file-hosting service, RapidShare. Among other claims, Perfect 10’s lawsuit stated that RapidShare was guilty of infringing the copyrights of many of its images.

The California-based company called for a jury trial in the United States to settle the issue. RapidShare responded by requesting that the case be postponed and transferred to Europe and heard under German law. This request was denied last month and the case went ahead in the United States.

This week the District Court of California rejected Perfect 10’s request for a temporary injunction. The Court stated in its ruling that as a file-hosting company, RapidShare cannot be accused of any copyright infringements. The ruling is a significant victory for RapidShare and the case sets an important precedent in the United States.

“The view that RapidShare does not promote any infringements of copyright, unlike other file-hosts, appears to be gradually catching on,” Christian Schmid, founder of RapidShare said.

“It is a milestone for us that this is also happening in the US. We are happy that the court in California has not bought into the odd line of argument put forward by Perfect 10 and we look forward to increasingly emphasize the major difference between RapidShare and illegal share-hosts,” Schmid added.

For Rapidshare this is the second high profile legal victory this month. Earlier, a German Court of Appeal overturned an earlier verdict in the case against the movie rental company Capelight Pictures. In the verdict it stated that RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

It is not entirely clear what Schmid means by “illegal share-hosts” in his comment, but we assume that he refers to sites that encourage copyright infringement. The company previously said it would distance itself from other file-hosters that try to win the favor of those users that upload and distribute copyrighted content.

RapidShare itself does all it can to avoid such claims and is hoping to convert pirates into paying customers. Instead of simply removing pages where copyrighted material can be downloaded, RapidShare would like to redirect users to an online store where the same content can be bought legally.
http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-n...-rules-100520/





Pirate Party Steps In as The Pirate Bay's ISP
Mark Hachman

In retrospect, the marriage sounds obvious: Sweden's Pirate Party, a political organization which wants to reform the copyright law, is providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the massive pirate site which refuses to be taken down.

After a German ISP, CyberBunker, was ordered to cut off The Pirate Bay's servers from the Internet, Sweden's PiratPartiet stepped in.

"We got tired of Hollywood's cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay and ordered us to offer the bandwidth side, says Rick Falk Vinge, leader of the Pirate Party, in a statement on the group's Web site, translated via Google Translate. "It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity."

As the most notorious haven for copyright infringement on the Internet, the site has become the focal point for the ongoing war against privacy. Many of the site's partners, or competitors, such as Mininova, have either been shut down or forced to distribute only approved, legitimate software via the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.

"When other politicians to continue investigations and avoid to be held accountable, Pirate Party will take place in the responsibility and act with their own resources for the nation's information security and fundamental freedom of expression," Vinge added. "We are now the Pirate Bay's ISP."

The Pirate Party will supply hosting to the site's home page and search engine, but the official BitTorrent tracker and files are now hosted "elsewhere".

The Pirate Party said that they considered the efforts to shut down the The Pirate Bay to be "an attempt to silence one of today's most important opinion makers in matters of civil liberties and rights on the web," and effectively political censorship.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363923,00.asp





Wikileaks Founder Told His Passport Will Be Cancelled
Emma Woollacott

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has had his passport confiscated by the Australian authorities.

According to The Age, Assange had his passport taken away on his arrival at Melbourne airport last week. While it was returned 15 minutes later, Assange said he was told it would be cancelled.

While Assange has made himself particularly unpopular with the US military by publishing video of attacks on civilians in Iraq, he's been something of a thorn in the side for the Australian government too.

Last year, Wikileaks published a list of websites which were to be banned under the government's proposed internet filter. While the aim of the filter is to block extreme pornography and the like, the blacklist included a number of more prosaic sites such as those of a travel company and a dentist.

Assange said that shortly after his passport was returned he was questioned about a hacking offence committed when he was a teenager.

Assange told the television program Dateline that Australia is one of several countries where he feels unsafe.

"There are places… Dubai, who is trying to have us arrested, Switzerland under the bank secrecy laws, Cayman Islands," he said. "Australia had the federal police in relation to its censorship list so there are some jurisdictions that from time to time it wouldn’t be sensible to go there."
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-...l-be-cancelled





Travellers to be Searched for Porn
Asher Moses

Australian customs officers have been given new powers to search incoming travellers' laptops and mobile phones for pornography, a spokeswoman for the Australian sex industry says.

Fiona Patten, president of the Australian Sex Party, is demanding an inquiry into why a new question appears on Incoming Passenger Cards asking people if they are carrying "pornography".

Patten said officials now had an unfettered right to examine travellers' electronic devices, marking the beginning of a new era of official investigation into people's private lives. She questioned whether it was appropriate to search people for legal R18+ and X18+ material.

“Is it fair that customs officers rummage through someone's luggage and pull out a legal men's magazine or a lesbian journal in front of their children or their mother-in-law?” she said.

"If you and your partner have filmed or photographed yourselves making love in an exotic destination or even taking a bath, you will have to answer 'Yes' to the question or you will be breaking the law."

Customs confirmed the new reference to "pornography" on the Incoming Passenger Cards and the search powers, acknowledging that searches conducted by officers may involve the discovery of "personal or sensitive possessions".

A spokesman said officers were trained to apply "tact and discretion" in their dealings with passengers.

"Including an express reference to pornography is intended to enhance the interception of prohibited pornography at the border, by making passengers aware that some forms of pornography may be a prohibited import," the spokesman said.

The "pornography" question has appeared on the cards since September last year. The change was only spotted by Patten earlier this month and it had received little to no coverage in the media.

Colin Jacobs, chairman of the lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the change appeared to have sneaked under the radar "without any public consultation about the massive privacy issues".

"It's hard to fathom what the pressing concern could be that requires Australia to quiz every entrant to the country on their pornography habits, as if visitors would be aware of the nuances of the Australian classification scheme," he said.

"If this results in Customs trawling through more private information on laptops searching for contraband, I would say the solution is way worse than the problem."

Patten said if the question was designed to stop child pornography being smuggled into the country then the question should have been asked about "child pornography", without encompassing regular porn.

Hetty Johnson, chief executive of child protection group Bravehearts, agreed with Patten that the question was too broad. She said it should only apply to illegal pornography.

"If it said child porn I'd be 100 per cent behind it - if you're carrying child pornography then you deserve everything you get," she said in a phone interview.

The issue has echoes of the 1956 detention of famed British conductor and composer Sir Eugene Goossens who had his bag searched upon his return from Europe.

He was carrying material that was considered, at the time, pornographic and his reputation was subsequently ruined, forcing him to flee the country.

"The term pornography is not referred to at all in the federal Classification Act, which customs relies on to classify their material," Patten said.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...0520-vh09.html





China's Web "Firewall" Should be WTO Issue: EU's Kroes
Farah Master

China's Internet "firewall" is a trade barrier and needs to be tackled within the framework of the World Trade Organization, Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, told reporters in Shanghai on Monday.

Dutch-born Kroes, who is also in charge of Europe's digital agenda, said the firewall was a trade barrier as long as it blocked communication for Internet users, preventing the free flow of information.

"It is one of those issues that needs to be tackled within the WTO," said Kroes, who served as European Commissioner for competition until 2009.

Kroes spoke at the China headquarters of video-sharing company Tudou, a rival of Google's internationally popular video-sharing platform YouTube that is blocked in China.

Chinese law requires Internet companies to block or remove objectionable content, including pornography and any information deemed sensitive by the ruling Communist Party.

Social media platforms popular overseas, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, are all blocked in China for fear they will provide a platform to organize or share illicit information.

"I am pushing wherever I can just to get European enterprises a level playing field in China and the other way around. It should be reciprocal," she said, adding that the amount of disruption from the firewall varied for each business.

The U.S. has also explored taking China's Internet restrictions to the WTO. In the past, the WTO has upheld China's right to censor printed and audiovisual content.

China's more than 400 million Internet users, many of them young and educated, increasingly spend time online for entertainment. Despite censorship, the Internet can be a potent public forum in China, with bloggers and amorphous online groups hectoring the government over pollution and corruption.

Kroes said it was significant that companies such as Tudou, which uploads user videos, show that the younger generation is taking an active role in tackling censorship.

Tudou, which adheres to government censorship regulations, said it deletes 100,000 videos every month for content that involves pornography or politics.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64G10020100517





U.S. Claims on Copyright Piracy "Groundless": China

The Foreign Ministry has dismissed as "groundless" U.S. accusations that China is failing to crack down on copyright piracy, ahead of talks with top U.S. officials next week, Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.

It quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu as saying China had implemented policies to combat piracy in copyrighted films, music, videogames and other entertainment products.

"The involved U.S. Congress members should respect the fact and stop making groundless accusations against China," he said.

Chinese leaders will hold talks on Monday and Tuesday in Beijing with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

While a range of issues will be addressed, including Chinese trade policies and the yuan exchange rate, intellectual property rights will be of major importance.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said earlier this week that Washington would use the economic talks to press China on copyright piracy and innovation.

The United States placed China and Russia at the top of a piracy list earlier in May.

However, Ma said protecting intellectual property rights was of great importance to the Chinese government and that combating piracy had become part of its national strategy.

(Reporting by Farah Master; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64L1CB20100522





UK ISPs With Under 400k Users Escape Illegal File Sharing Crackdown
MarkJ

ISP music pirateMarket regulator Ofcom has informed the UK Internet Service Providers Association ( ISPA ) that broadband ISPs with less than 400,000 subscribers are likely to escape the initial Digital Economy Act (DEA) crackdown on unlawful copyright file sharing (P2P). Mobile Broadband operators will also escape, at least for now.

The code itself will cover several crucial areas; how Copyright Infringement Reports (CIR) are handled; management of the illegal file sharing warning/notification letters process; appeals against false or unfair accusations by copyright holders; and costs. There are other things too but those are the primary points for consumers to be aware of.

Most ISPs agree that both they and Ofcom have not been given enough time to develop a code for something so complex. Indeed the regulator is currently of the view that ISPs will not be able to produce an effective solution of their own in time and is therefore likely to present something with flexibility.

Trefor Davies, Chief Technology Officer at ISP Timico UK, blogged:

"Due to the short timescales Ofcom has been working to, the Code will be instructional rather than setting out line-by-line what is required. For example, instead of dictating a standard approach for a CIR, those affected will have to tell Ofcom how they will go about it and Ofcom will then approve it or recommend changes."

There are currently between 6 and 8 ISPs with more than 400,000 broadband customers in the UK market, depending on whether or not you break the figures down between parent firms. Ofcom has previously agreed that smaller providers should be excluded from the code, though the window may be left open for that to change in the future.

The long-term goal is to target ISPs with a lot of copyright infringing customers, with Ofcom seeking to follow the traffic between providers. In other words being small may not be an effective defence, although the criteria here has yet to be clarified. It's hard to see how the smallest of niche ISPs could handle this.

Ofcom currently has until the end of this month to present a draft Code of Practice (CoP) on the matter (two weeks). The issue of technical measures, such as disconnection and bandwidth limits, will follow after the warning letters process has been given time to work first.

The former Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, informed the c&binet conference in November last year that if the amount of illegal downloading had not dropped by 70% come April 2011 then measures to cut-off file sharers would be imposed from July 2011 onwards.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...crackdown.html





Pressure Grows on Spain to Curb Digital Piracy
Raphael Minder

In the last decade, a surge of music and movie sharing online in Spain has thrilled fans, but it has also increased pressure from as far away as Hollywood to clamp down. Spanish lawmakers are expected to vote this year on a measure that would allow the swift closing of sites suspected of facilitating file-sharing.

“The triumph of downloading in Spain is partly because people can watch the latest episode of their favorite American series with Spanish subtitles weeks before it gets dubbed and released on television here,” said Javier de la Rosa, a former radio presenter who is now a journalism professor at Francisco de Vitoria University here. “The quality and speed is also excellent nowadays, and some Web sites like Series Yonkis even help people by ranking downloads according to quality, so that’s very user friendly.”

The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.

For the third year running, the American trade representative has included Spain on its watch list of countries that breach intellectual property rights because of its “particularly significant Internet piracy.”

Critics say it will be extremely difficult to stop illegal downloading in Spain because of the popularity of these Web sites and a perceived indifference to piracy as a crime. As many as three billion illegal downloads were made last year in Spain, far exceeding the 21 million legal downloads, according to a study by Cimec, a Spanish market research company.

Judges have also shown ambivalence toward the issue. In 2006, the attorney general advised that peer-to-peer downloading should be considered criminal only if done for profit.

“We have a tremendous shortage of cultural education and administrative efficiency so that nobody in Spain, not even the judges, seems to believe that you can go to jail for an intellectual property crime,” said Fernando Fernández Aransay, a partner at VTF Abogados, a Spanish law firm specializing in media issues. “The problem is not that Spain doesn’t have laws but that there are in fact too many, which means more confusion.”

Some other European countries have taken more forceful action to try to tackle piracy. Last year, French lawmakers approved a law under which illegal file sharers who ignore two written warnings to stop could face the loss of their Internet connection, though the law is not yet being applied.

Britain recently passed a similar law, though it also has yet to go into effect. Last month, an Irish judge upheld an agreement between Ireland’s largest Internet service provider, Eircom, and the music industry that authorizes cutoffs.

But Victor Domingo, president of the Spanish Internet Users Association, said the group would go as high as Spain’s constitutional court to fight any legislation that curtailed access.

“The government is putting authors’ rights, which are of course important, on the same level as much more fundamental rights of privacy and freedom of expression,” Mr. Domingo said. “It has cost us a lot in this country after 40 years of dictatorship to acquire such rights for our citizens, but now we risk losing them.”

The proposed law would, in effect, reverse the burden of proof, empowering a new commission to shut down suspect Web sites pending the outcome of any court appeal.

The proposal has generated debate because some critics see it as infringing on the rights of individuals. In a country where access to information and entertainment had been severely limited during the Franco dictatorship, Spaniards’ growing enthusiasm for the Internet and all that it offers reflects a profound cultural and generational change.

Mr. Domingo sees the fight against downloading as “just an excuse for companies to try to stick to a business model that no longer makes sense and is way behind the technology.”

Indeed, Spain once was one of the most thriving music and film markets in Europe, and executives in these industries fault file-sharing for the decline. The Spanish music market, which ranks 10th worldwide in revenue, has shrunk to a third of what it was in 2001, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recording industry.

“Spain is a very young democracy, a country where rock songs got censored until 1978, so we’re still going through adolescence in relation to intellectual property,” said the Spanish rock singer known as Loquillo. “But we cannot get stuck in a fight between authors and Internet users while, much more importantly, our music industry is allowed to disappear or gets absorbed by outsiders.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/bu.../17piracy.html





National Post: "Heavy Handed" Canadian Copyright Law Coming Next Week
Michael Geist

The National Post's Don Martin reports that the copyright bill could be introduced next week with confirmation of the broad outlines of the bill I reported on earlier this month. Martin, who, describes the forthcoming bill as heavy-handed, reports:

All signals suggest Heritage Minister James Moore has triumphed over the objections of Industry Minister Tony Clement, setting up Canada to march in excessively protected lockstep with a United States that boasts the toughest laws against pirated music or movies on the planet.

It may well be a legal constraint that's impossible to enforce, but the rumble out of the PMO suggests the new law will ignore the extensive public consultations that advocated a go-easy take on copying of CDs and DVDs in favour of robust anti-consumer limits on transferring or sharing content. If this comes to pass, the federal government will be headed for a very bad week when the House of Commons reconvenes on Tuesday.

While that is not how I would describe the outcome of the consultation - fair copyright is not the same as "go-easy" - Martin's report is wholly consistent with my earlier reporting that the PMO has sided with Moore, who has emerged as a staunch advocate for a Canadian DMCA. While the bill will undoubtedly include some elements designed to garner support from consumer and education groups, the U.S.-style approach to digital locks will effectively undermine the current fair dealing provision and any additional user-oriented reforms that find their way into the bill.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5049/125/





MPAA Worries About Pirating U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
Ernesto

While U.S. men and women put their lives at risk in Iraq, the MPAA has queried the military about the pirating habits of the soldiers stationed there. A declassified document from United States Central Command confirms that the MPAA is fighting a war of its own in the Middle East, one against copyright infringing soldiers.

It is no secret that the MPAA is involved in an ongoing battle against copyright infringers in the United States. Tens of thousands of copyright notices are sent out each year informing illegal file-sharers that they are breaking the law.

Less known are the movie industry’s efforts to clamp down on copyright infringers who are defending their country’s interests on foreign soil. Because the availability of legal movies and TV-shows is limited in countries such as Iraq, soldiers sometimes use BitTorrent to get their fix, or buy pirated DVDs from local sellers.

The MPAA is not happy with these defiant soldiers. A declassified document from the United States Central Command shows that, a few years ago, the MPAA asked the military what they do to prevent soldiers from accessing pirated DVDs in Iraq.

One of the questions posed by the MPAA is whether they have banned U.S. troops from going to stores that sell pirated DVDs. The Central Command answered this question negatively, as it would hurt the business of Iraqi salesmen.

“No….banning our troops from visiting these shops would have the unwelcome secondary effect of harming Iraqi entrepreneurs selling legitimate goods.” They add that there is nothing they can do about DVDs that are being sold on Iraqi property because these stores fall under Iraqi law.

The declassified CENTCOM document (PDF)

The document does state, however, that selling pirated DVDs on US bases is not permitted. It further says that piracy could be reduced by giving soldiers access to legal forms of entertainment.

“U.S. forces have had a long-standing, positive relationship with the entertainment industry. Working to continue this relationship, including the provision of popular entertainment like first-run movies, concerts and other events will help to curtail the demand for pirated media,” it states.

Pirated DVDs are not the only worry for the MPAA as more recently military personnel have also been using BitTorrent to access U.S. entertainment on foreign bases. A military insider told TorrentFreak that they see no other option than to ‘pirate’, as the entertainment industry gives them little opportunity to enjoy digital media legally.

“We have sent letters to the RIAA and the MPAA repeatedly letting them know that our downloads are a direct representation of their failure to allow us to be good consumers as others in the US can be,” our military insider explained.

Instead of holding out a helping hand to deployed soldiers, the entertainment industries continue to treat them as criminals. On a daily basis, the MPAA and RIAA send copyright notices to military personnel via their base ISPs. In turn, the personnel are threatened with account suspension and in serious cases, disconnection.

At the same time Hollywood continues to exploit military conflicts with hit shows like The Pacific and Oscar-winning movies such as The Hurt Locker. Ironically, The Hurt Locker centers around a friendship between a heroic soldier and a young Iraqi boy who sells pirated DVDs at a U.S. base.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-worries...n-iraq-100515/





Authors Guild Worried About iPad Ebook File Sharing... But Focused On The Wrong Thing
from the people-are-reading! dept

A little over a year ago, we discussed the idea that the ebook world needed more "piracy," noting that the locked down nature of the Kindle actually limited a large part of what might help kick off the real ebook world. History has shown time and time again that so-called "piracy" is often a leading indicator of innovation in areas that people are interested in. But, unauthorized sharing in ebooks was still somewhat limited. Of course, some things have changed over the past year. There was the lawsuit against Scribd (which, last I heard, failed to get class action status) and then sudden totally unsubstantiated articles warning about unauthorized ebook file sharing.

Now, the latest, is the fear that with the success of the iPad in the market that it will become a popular platform for unauthorized sharing of ebooks. Apparently, author Scott Turow has recently taken over the Authors Guild, and has decided that ebook "piracy" is a "big problem" that has to be the focus. Perhaps next time the Authors Guild wants to show itself to be forward-looking and able to change with the times, it shouldn't put a 60+ year old lawyer in charge. Just a suggestion... Rather than saying that unauthorized file sharing is such a big problem, perhaps Turow should take a look at the music industry more closely. He seems to only be superficially aware of what's happening in that industry. Instead of recognizing that the industry wasted over a decade fighting what fans wanted, he seems to think that he can magically fight what every other industry has failed to fight. That doesn't seem like a strategy that has a high likelihood of success.

Perhaps, instead of automatically blaming those involved in file sharing, Turow should take some time to understand why it's happening, and look at those who have figured out interesting and unique models to provide more value for consumers who want it, rather than just focusing on the impossible task of trying to punish those whose actions the Authors Guild doesn't like.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...43319434.shtml





Police Say Anti-Piracy Law Makes Catching Criminals Harder
enigmax

The head of Sweden’s National IT Crime Unit says that following the introduction of IPRED anti-piracy legislation it has become more difficult to track down serious criminals. This unfortunate eventuality is a side-effect of ISPs throwing away logging data to protect the privacy of their customers. While this protects casual file-sharers, it unfortunately protects serious criminals too.

On April 1st 2009, Sweden introduced the controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED). The law, which gives rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers, was met with stiff resistance from ISPs.

Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof and one of the most outspoken opponents of IPRED, quickly announced that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers.

Although IPRED should’ve made it easier to track down file-sharers, there is nothing in Sweden’s Electronic Communications Law that dictates that ISPs have to store information about the IP addresses they allocate to their customers. To that end, Bahnhof stopped storing user data. No matter how many requests they received from copyright holders, there would be no data to hand over.

Later Bahnhof was joined by Tele2, with CEO Niclas Palmstierna announcing that his company would also stop storing IP address information. Through an increasing number of ISPs, IPRED had effectively been neutralized.

While Swedish ISPs clearly felt they had little choice but to protect the privacy of their customers against civil action related to petty file-sharing, it seems that their response to IPRED has generated an unwanted side-effect.

Anders Ahlqvist, chief of the National IT crime unit says that due to a lack of customer logging data at ISPs, it is becoming harder for the police to track down criminals carrying out serious crimes.

“It is a major concern, for example, when minors are exploited for sexual purposes via the Internet but we can not trace the perpetrators because logging information is missing,” says Ahlqvist.

Taking IPRED out of the equation is not an option, though. It appears there will be a new push to introduce a data-retention directive which will close the loophole and force ISPs to store customer IP address data in future, an eventuality predicted by IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky back in April 2009.
http://torrentfreak.com/police-say-a...harder-100517/





Did EFF Lawyer Cross Line in LimeWire Case?
Greg Sandoval

The lawyers who do most of the jousting over Internet copyright issues were abuzz last week after learning that a federal court judge suggested one of the more prominent among them had advised clients to destroy evidence.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood issued a 59-page decision in Manhattan granting summary judgment in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America in its long-running copyright fight against file-sharing service LimeWire. The order opened the door for the top four record companies to force a closure of the service.

In addressing an issue of whether statements made by a former LimeWire executive should be considered by the court, Wood called out Fred von Lohmann, the much-quoted senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that fights for the rights of Internet users and technology companies. According to Wood, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton testified that he and former company Chief Technology Officer Greg Bildson received questionable advice from von Lohmann.

"Gorton states that another attorney, [von Lohmann], gave [LimeWire], including Bildson, confidential legal advice regarding the need to establish a document retention program to purge incriminating information about LimeWire users' activities," Wood wrote in her decision.

Wood's suggestion that von Lohmann acted improperly has raised eyebrows. It is hard to imagine that Wood, a federal court judge for 23 years, would have risked calling out an attorney for potential wrongdoing unless she saw something she didn't like, said legal experts. Wood doesn't offer any further explanation or mention von Lohmann elsewhere in her decision. It's hard to say what she meant exactly. But to critics of EFF and von Lohmann, who come mostly from the pro-copyright camp, Wood's description of his advice confirms what they've suspected for years. They say von Lohmann has long provided tutorials to file-sharing services on how to break the law and get away with it.

In an interview with CNET, von Lohmann denied any wrongdoing.

"Providing advice to clients about document retention is something lawyers do all the time," von Lohmann said. "In discovery, there are a lot of documents, and clients need to understand what obligations they have about keeping documents and not keeping them based on what the law requires. That's a conversation lawyers have with clients who fear litigation is a possibility. I don't see anything particularly nefarious about this kind of a conversation with a potential client."

On Tuesday, Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director, sent a request to Judge Wood asking her to modify her written decision in regards to von Lohmann. "We believe the materials in the record do not support the inclusion of the phrase 'to purge incriminating information,'" Cohn wrote. "As you may imagine, Mr. von Lohmann and EFF are concerned that his professional reputation has been put at risk."

'Plausible deniability'
A champion of the movement to relax copyright law to prevent it from thwarting technological innovation, von Lohmann has clashed with entertainment conglomerates in some of the Internet's biggest copyright battles, including the landmark decision, MGM Studios vs. Grokster. In most of these big cases, including Grokster, the file-sharing services were defeated.

In his zeal to keep some of these services from being sued out of existence, von Lohmann has gone too far, say critics. During the Grokster trial, MGM's lawyers noted that von Lohmann in 2001 wrote a primer called "Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law After Napster." In the piece, von Lohmann advised that to "avoid liability," operators should create "plausible deniability" by "choosing an architecture that will convince a judge...monitoring and control is impossible."

In a paper titled "What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law," von Lohmann wrote, "The court also found that Napster had a duty to monitor the activities of its users "to the fullest extent" possible. Accordingly, in order to avoid vicarious liability, a P2P developer would be wise to choose an architecture that makes control over end-user activities impossible."

Is von Lohmann instructing file-sharing services on how to avoid violating the law here, or is he teaching them how to violate the law and avoid responsibility?

"There's an important difference between not creating documents in the first place and destroying documents after there is a reasonable apprehension of litigation," von Lohmann said. "I am discussing in those papers questions about how you design a product and how you can withstand litigation without violating the law. I stand behind those statements."

John Steele, who teaches legal ethics at Indiana University and the University of California at Berkeley, says there's a thin line between advising companies on how to retain documents properly and appearing to help them destroy evidence. "It's tricky," Steele said. "An attorney can never help a client improperly discard evidence."

After reviewing Wood's comments on von Lohmann, Steele said the judge's choice of such words as: "purge" and "incriminating evidence" serves to "grab your attention powerfully...I can certainly understand why everybody is paying attention to them."

Good advice?
Steele cautioned, however, that it's impossible for anyone to know whether von Lohmann crossed the line without knowing what advice the attorney gave LimeWire executives. Citing attorney-client privilege, von Lohmann declined to provide details of his discussion with LimeWire.

Michael Page, the attorney representing Greg Bildson, LimeWire's former CTO, said Monday that von Lohmann gave his advice to the company before the RIAA filed its case. "They could have destroyed anything they wanted to at that point," Page said. But the law requires parties in lawsuits to preserve documentation when there is a reasonable expectation of litigation.

For their part, copyright owners may be a bit sensitive to the issue of data retention. The destruction of evidence has been a particular sticking point in some high-profile Internet copyright cases.

•In May 2008, a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent index accused in a film industry lawsuit of copyright violations, to pay $110 million to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) after finding that site operators had hid and destroyed evidence. TorrentSpy, which later went bankrupt, claimed that it didn't intentionally lose any information.

•In the MPAA's copyright face-off against RealNetworks over its DVD-copying software, RealDVD, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel sanctioned Real for losing three notebooks belonging to one of the company's former engineers. Patel ordered Real to pay some of the studios' legal fees and also said she would assume when deciding which way to rule that the MPAA's assertions about what was in the notebooks were correct. Earlier this year, Real settled with the studios and agreed to scrap RealDVD.

•In the music industry's lawsuit against the Usenet network last year, the top four labels accused Usenet of destroying evidence and failing to produce witnesses on multiple occasions. The federal judge found numerous instances of misconduct by Usenet.

Attorneys who represent technology companies in copyright issues have rallied around von Lohmann. Said Jack Lerner, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former attorney at Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati: "Fred is one of the smartest and most ethical attorneys I know."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20005331-261.html





Google Fights the Hollywood Tech Veto
Dana Blankenhorn

Ever since the Web was spun there has been tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Generally, Hollywood has won.

The passage of laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and their strict enforcement not just by American cops but by foreign trade representatives, is well-known.

The content industries have also turned peer-to-peer technology into the “porn” of tech. While it’s a more efficient way to distribute files, Hollywood has branded it a natural copyright thief, associated it with all the world’s evils, and caused most corporate and school networks to shut it off.

When Hollywood felt threatened by new technology Washington has even, in the past, sought to criminalize “attempted” violations of the DMCA. The whole “net neutrality” debate is really about perceived peer-to-peer threats to copyright.

Over the years Apple and Microsoft made themselves allies of the content industries, enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM) and accepting the Hollywood Veto over their technology in order to take over distribution channels. The alliance has sometimes been uneasy.

Google’s WebM, launched at Google I/O yesterday, is the first direct challenge to the Veto launched by a tech company in a decade. The open source, royalty free codec formerly known as VP8 has been met by a full-on FUD attack, but rather than back down Google has pushed forward.

For Internet advocates this is a matter of principle. W3C standards have always been royalty free, patent rights waived, in order to assure maximum penetration of the global market.

The H.264 codec does not meet this test, but Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and the rest of the industry was prepared to make it part of the HTML5 standard, a proprietary technology controlled by MPEG LA, in the name of maintaining peace with the content industries.

Google has played its cards carefully within the industry. Could WebM lose out to Flash? Adobe supports it. Hasn’t Microsoft rejected VP8 in favor of H.264 support in IE9? Microsoft says it’s not opposed to WebM.

The problem is this is a political issue, not a corporate issue. Google may be able to maneuver most tech corporations behind it (Apple has been silent so far), but Hollywood’s tech veto is based in Washington, and I believe they have not yet begun to fight.

What is at stake, in the end, is control of content. Must that control be embedded in base Web technology? Will the Hollywood Veto be maintained?

Stay tuned.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-sourc...tech-veto/6533





TeliaSonera Appeals Anti-Piracy Ruling

Swedish telecom firm TeliaSonera has announced its intention to appeal to the Supreme Court (Högsta Domstolen) an anti-piracy law ruling ordering the firm to hand over the names and addresses of people behind a file sharing website.

"What we have done today is to announce to the public that we will appeal," Patrik Hiselius, the senior adviser of public affairs of the Swedish-Finnish firm told AFP, adding the company had until June 7th to submit its appeal.

The Appeals Court (Hovrätten) on Monday upheld a lower court's ruling forcing TeliaSonera to hand over to Svensk Filmindustri, a Swedish film production and distribution company, among others, the names and addresses of people behind the swetorrents.org website.

The appeals court said its ruling against TeliaSonera was based on Sweden's controversial Ipred law, which came into effect on April 1st last year and gives copyright holders the right to require service providers to reveal details of users who share files, paving the way for legal action.

TeliaSonera said it was taking the case to the supreme court in the name of customer privacy.

"For us it is very important to have the highest court look into the principle of balancing the new (Ipred) legislation vis-a-vis our basic industry provisions regarding confidentiality of communication," Hiselius said.

"The legislation protecting confidentiality of communication and thus the privacy of our customers has been around for years and years and is fundamental within our industry," he added.

Until the law was introduced, Sweden - home to one of the world's most popular file sharing sites, The Pirate Bay - had widely been considered a haven for illegal file sharing.

While Swedish Internet use significantly dropped in the days after the introduction of the law - attributed to a decline in illegal downloading - the fall was only temporary, according to internet exchange point operator Netnod.

According to a Sifo survey published by broadcaster Viasat on April 1st the number of illegal file sharers is in fact increasing, with 16 percent of Swedes responding that they engaged in the practice.

While Netnod figures for April 2010 show that the short dip was part of a longer term steady upward trend, Ipred has been lauded by the music, film and video games industries.

Ipred has been lauded by the music, film and video games industries but staunchly criticised by Sweden's Pirate Party and civil liberties groups, which want to legalise Internet file sharing and beef up web privacy.

The new file sharing law is based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED).
http://www.thelocal.se/26768/20100521/





Time Warner Cable Tries to Put Brakes on Massive Piracy Case
Nate Anderson

Time Warner Cable has no intention of complying with thousands of requests asking it to identify copyright infringers.

Remember the US Copyright Group? They're the DC legal outfit that is turning P2P copyright infringement into cash, partnering with independent movie studios (the big players are not involved) to sue individual file-swappers in federal court—and ISPs are not pleased with the plan.

Too busy busting terrorists

Yesterday, Time Warner Cable told a federal court overseeing a massive 2,094-person lawsuit targeting the poor folks who downloaded (and, what's worse, apparently watched) Uwe Boll's Far Cry that the US Copyright Group's subpoenas were out of control.

"Copyright cases involving third-party discovery of Internet service providers have typically related to a plaintiff's efforts to identify anonymous defendants whose numbers rank in the single or low double digits," wrote the cable company. "By contrast, plaintiff in this case alone seeks identifying information about 2,049 anonymous defendants, and seeks identifying information about 809 Internet Protocol addresses from TWC."

Time Warner Cable does not have enough employees to respond to these requests. In a typical month, the company receives an average of 567 IP lookup requests, nearly all of them coming from law enforcement. These lookup requests involve everything from suicide threats to child abduction to terrorist activity, and the company says that such cases take "immediate priority."

Once law enforcement is served, the four full-time workers (and one temp) who make up the ISP's Subpoena Compliance team can turn to other matters, such as subpoenas in civil cases.

The company says that it has the capacity to handle 28 subpoenas from the US Copyright Group per month. Instead, TWC was hit with a request for 809 names within 30 days. In addition, the company has received two other subpoenas, both from the same law firm, asking for another 398 and 224 IP address lookups.
Each lookup costs TWC $45.

"If the Court compels TWC to answer all of these lookup requests given its current staffing, it would take TWC nearly three months of full-time work by TWC's Subpoena Compliance group, and TWC would not be able to respond to any other request, emergency or otherwise, from law enforcement during this period," said the filing. "TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered."

Quash, baby, quash!

The ISP has now asked the court to quash the subpoena for three reasons.

First, because US Copyright Group lawyer Tom Dunlap "has now simply reneged" on an agreement that he worked out with TWC to manage the flow of subpoenas.

Second, the entire approach to these lawsuits may be invalid. Filing lawsuits can be expensive; Most federal courts charge a $350 filing fee per case, along with a new set of paperwork. Each case also creates another docket to keep track of, making thousands of cases an administrative nightmare.

Instead of going this route, plaintiffs have gone the RIAA route, simply filing mass lawsuits against groups of "John Does," in some cases by the thousands. But, says TWC, channeling its inner Ray Beckerman, "It is not evident from the complaint in this case that there is anything common to the 2,094 defendants that would justify joining them in a single litigation... Courts facing these identical circumstances have repeatedly held that a plaintiff may not join in a single action multiple defendants who have allegedly downloaded or facilitated the download of copyrighted material at different times and locations.

"Thus, if the plaintiff wants to sue these 2,094 defendants, it owes this court 2,094 separate filing fees, and it must file individual actions. Plaintiff then would be unable to combine together a single, massive discovery request with which to burden non-party ISPs such as TWC."

Third, plaintiff lawyers keep expanding the scope of their subpoenas. The first complaint filed alleged 426 infringing IP addresses belonging to TWC subscribers. But when the company finally received a subpoena, it found requests for 809 IP addresses.

Taken together, said TWC, these "discovery abuses" mean that the judge should quash the subpoena. Alternately, the judge should limit the plaintiff to 28 TWC subpoenas each month.

According to the court docket, Comcast and Cablevision are trying to work out their own deal with the lawyers to keep the work to a minimum, though they could also ask the judge to quash the subpoenas if no agreement can be reached.

The power of self-interest

Time Warner Cable has not always had the reputation of a white knight when it comes to helping its subscribers—the company famously tried to squeeze more cash from broadband users by applying ridiculous data caps, an issue so sensitive to it eventually drew the wrath of senators and congressmen.

But in this case, with its own self-interest also on the line, TWC has made an argument that strikes not just at a single subpoena but also at the overarching legal strategy behind the US Copyright Group's work.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...iracy-case.ars





U.S. Court Won't Hear Cablevision/FCC Must-Carry Case
John Poirier and James Vicini

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it would not hear an appeal by Cablevision Systems Corp to the Federal Communications Commission's must-carry requirement that forces cable systems to carry programing of broadcast television stations.

The high court in 1997 upheld the 1992 law that obligates cable television companies to carry local broadcast stations. But Cablevision said circumstances have since changed and the monopolistic nature of the cable industry has been replaced by vigorous competition.

The justices rejected Cablevision's appeal without any comment, siding with the FCC.

A U.S. appeals court in New York last year upheld the FCC's decision to require Cablevision's cable systems on Long Island to carry WRNN, a station from upstate New York that broadcasts mostly home-shopping programing.

Cablevision then appealed to the Supreme Court. It was supported by a number of cable television companies including Time Warner Cable Inc and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, an industry trade group.

Jim Maiella, a spokesman at Cablevision, based in Bethpage, New York, said WRNN moved its transmitter so that it could be located within Cablevision's services area and it has no local viewers.

"In doing so, WRNN has exposed just how obsolete these regulations have become, especially in light of the vigorous competition and other market conditions that have developed over the last decade," Maiella said.

The National Association of Broadcasters said the Supreme Court move validates its long-standing assertion that must-carry rules protect the public's access to niche broadcast programing, including foreign language, religious and independent TV stations.

"Today is a great day for the millions of Americans who rely on the diverse line-up of programing supplied by free and local broadcasters," NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton said in a statement.

The high court's action comes amid standoffs between programmers and distributors over retransmission fees, or the amount broadcasters charge to distributors who deliver the free-to-air signals to their subscribers.

Broadcasters have in the past allowed cable companies to carry those signals for free but as advertising rates fall they have been pushing for this alternative revenue.

The 1992 "must-carry" law required cable operators to devote as much as one-third of their channels to local private and public broadcast stations.

An FCC spokeswoman declined to comment on the Supreme Court's order rejecting the company's appeal.

Cablevision shares moved higher in morning trading, but were down 18 cents at $24.21 by afternoon, and Time Warner Cable shares fell 5 cents to $51.55 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares of Comcast Corp, the No. 1 U.S. cable operator, were up 5 cents at $17.66.

(Reporting by James Vicini and John Poirier; editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Maureen Bavdek)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64G4XF20100517





'Class and Gender Impact Youth Internet Use'

Socioeconomic factors and gender play a significant role in how young Swedes use the internet, many of whom are as young as four, a new report on internet use among young Swedes shows.

"Young Swedes and the Internet" is an annual survey published by research group the World Internet Institute and shows that internet use continues to creep down the age groups.

"The starting age, measured as 50 percent internet users in an age group, declined by one year for every passing year. For the nine years from 2000 to 2009, the debut age has fallen from 13 to four years old," wrote Olle Findahl, lead researcher at the World Internet Institute, in the report.

The 2009 report, published on Thursday, shows that socioeconomic backgrounds and gender remain key factors in how early and in what manner children learn to use the internet.

Among children of educated parents 67 percent use the internet at least once a week, while only 25 percent of children whose parents are less educated used the internet daily. Children of educated parents therefore typically come to school well prepared to use the internet, while many children of less educated parents enter school with little internet experience.

"It is important that schools note the significant differences in internet experience among children," said Findahl.

Although 92 to 99 percent of all schoolchildren say they have access to computers and the internet at school they do not become a part of daily school life until the students are in their late teens and many thus learn to use the web at home.

Swedish children generally start using the internet at an early age with every other four-year-old having some form of access to the web and internet tools - mainly games and movies, the report shows.

School-age children are rarely assigned tasks that involve internet use because some teachers do not consider it important for schoolwork although many young people use the internet in their free time at home and as a tool to gather information for for schoolwork.

The report also shows that there are significant variations in internet use between the sexes, with girls using the internet in more varied ways than boys and starting earlier.

Girls were typically found to use the internet to chat, blog, follow and comment on each other's blogs, communicate with instant messaging (IM), join social networking sites and upload videos and photos, all at an earlier stage and to a greater extent than boys do.

Despite the broader internet experience that girls have and their more advanced use of the web, boys consider themselves more tech-savvy than girls.

"It is remarkable that the girls, despite the fact that they are less interested in technology and new technological gadgets (sic), have conquered the internet and in many respects are more active and years ahead of boys in their use of the internet," said Findahl.

"One reason seems to be that they produce content that interests them."

By age 12 to 13, every fifth girl writes a blog and by 20, more than half blog on a daily basis, while seven out of 10 read other blogs. Among children aged 12 to 15-years-old, girls are also more active in social networks and make up two-thirds of the members.

Internet games are for many children their first contact with the internet and are a dominant activity for both boys and girls up to school age. When they start school, girls play games less and replace the time with other communicative activities.

In contrast, boys generally continue to play games daily and the activity dominates their time throughout their teenage years, with two out of three boys playing at least one to three times a week into their 20s.

The "Young Swedes and the Internet" report is an annual survey conducted by the World Internet Institute and published in cooperation with the Internet Infrastructure Foundation (Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur) and the Media Council (Medierådet).
http://www.thelocal.se/26750/20100520/





Broadband Makes Women Happy
Nate Anderson

Though men are stereotyped as gadget hounds, information technology actually brings more happiness to women worldwide.

A new study (PDF) from UK-based BCS—The Chartered Institute for IT analyzes 35,000 responses from the World Values Survey to make the case that IT actually makes people happier.

Even when controlling for income (which is correlated with happiness), the study found that access to IT made people around the world happier. The authors suggest that computers, cell phones, and the like do tremendous things for one's "sense of freedom" and control over life, which in turn promotes feelings of life satisfaction.

This fits with the finding that IT most helps those who have the least of it. "Those on lower incomes or with fewer educational qualifications appear to benefit more from access to IT than those on higher incomes or with higher educational backgrounds." It can "empower the disempowered."

The effect can be seen most strongly with women, who benefit more than men from IT.

"One possible reason is the role played by IT in modern day communications," says the study. "Therefore, we wonder whether the finding reflects the social networking role of women around the world. This result is particularly true for women in developing nations. Why this is so is not clear. But one reason might be that in many parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East women have socially controlled roles which may lead to a lower sense of freedom and autonomy and hence well-being."

According to BCS, this shows the importance of universal broadband rollouts that can help overcome the digital divide. The world doesn't need an iPad to be happy—but a cell phone and basic broadband really might make a difference.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...omen-happy.ars





U.S. Fails to Describe Wireless Industry as Competitive
John Poirier

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission for the first time since 2002 did not describe the wireless industry as having "effective competition," a situation one senior regulator blamed on consolidation.

The key omission was in an annual report on the state of competition in the wireless industry. The FCC on Thursday released the report, which covers 2008 and a portion of 2009.

The last time the FCC did not describe the industry as having "effective competition" was in a report released in 2002.

The lack of the key phrase could set the stage for U.S. regulators to impose policies and regulations to increase competition for consumers who are demanding more data plans on their mobile handsets to surf the Internet and watch videos.

It also could help shape the terms of the next set of major auctions on spectrum for a wireless industry largely dominated by AT&T Inc, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp and Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile unit. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc.

Sprint and T-Mobile are seeking more airwaves, also called spectrum, to better compete against AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Robert Quinn, AT&T senior vice president of federal regulatory policy, said the FCC's decision was a dramatic break from years of solid precedent.

"We can't help but worry that this seems intended to justify more regulation in a market where it is clear beyond doubt that regulation is simply unwarranted," Quinn said.

After the open meeting, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told reporters that the facts and data in the report will help the agency make "the right decisions" on upcoming issues.

"In some cases that will be to do absolutely nothing," he said. "In some cases it will be to take smart actions to spur competition."

Consolidation Effect

His colleague, Michael Copps, one of three Democrats on the five-member panel, however, was more critical of some of the findings, calling them sobering and worrying.

"Specifically, the report confirms something I have been warning about for years -- that competition has been dramatically eroded and is seriously endangered by continuing consolidation and concentration in our wireless markets," Copps said.

"We are going to need an extra dose of vigilance going forward and use whatever policy levers we have available to ensure good outcomes for American consumers," he said.

All five FCC commissioners voted in support of the report, but the two Republicans expressed disagreement with some of the findings.

"I believe we actually should have made an affirmative finding of a competitive market," Republican FCC member Meredith Attwell Baker said.

The industry has seen an explosive demand from consumers who increasingly surf the Web on mobile devices, especially smartphones. Demand is increasing faster for data than for voice services.

In August, the FCC began an inquiry into competition in the wireless industry. Under recommendations made in the National Broadband Plan, the agency is considering ways to provide more airwaves to wireless companies to meet a growing demand for mobile devices.

Chris Riley, a policy counsel at public interest group Free Press, praised the FCC for omitting the key phrase, but said the agency should have gone further.

"The market is largely controlled by two companies (AT&T and Verizon), and it will not dig itself out of this mess and magically produce competition," Riley said. "Oversight and reform are badly needed."

Verizon executive Kathleen Grillo said in a statement, "The U.S. has the most intensely competitive wireless market on the planet...Prices keep falling and usage keeps rising."

(Reporting by John Poirier; editing by John Wallace, Lisa Von Ahn and Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64J4P820100520





Top U.S. Carriers Plot Faster Gadgets, Services
Sinead Carew

The next generation of high-speed Internet services, tablets, smartphones and other mobile gadgets could arrive faster than you'd expect.

The two biggest U.S. phone companies, AT&T Inc (T.N) and Verizon Wireless, are stepping up plans to speed up their networks and deliver advanced devices to consumers as early as this holiday season with partners such as Motorola Inc (MOT.N), Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and LG Electronics (066570.KS).

AT&T said it is planning to triple speeds for home Internet services, and double speeds on its wireless network, while Verizon Wireless said it will be ready with a slew of high-speed phones earlier than it had previously suggested.

"We still have a tremendous amount of opportunity in wireless," said John Stankey, AT&T's operations chief, dismissing suggestions from some telecoms analysts that the industry's exponential growth days were over.

"We're at the front of that 10-year (growth) cycle in the mobile space today," he said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York on Friday.

While wireless carriers have to depend on data services for growth, because most people already have cellphones, Stankey sees opportunities in business applications. As industries add wireless connections to their equipment, such as medical devices and security systems, each business vertical could eventually generate a $1 billion a year in revenue, he said.

Stankey announced at the summit that AT&T would be able to double the speeds of its wireless data services in markets covering more than 250 million people in the fourth quarter, using technology known as HSPA Plus.

The upgrade would require an incremental investment of a few million dollars, a "rounding error" compared AT&T's total capital spend of up to $19 billion for 2010, he said.

AT&T also plans a residential broadband trial in June to allow Web surfing at speeds of 80 megabits per second (mbps), well above its current limit of 24 mbps and surpassing the 50 mbps service offered by Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N).

If the tests are successful, commercial services could launch early next year, Stankey said.

Lte Phones, Android Tablets

Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is building its high-speed network based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology.

The company, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L), is on track to offer LTE to a potential customer base of 100 million people in 25 to 30 markets including New York City, by year-end, according to Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam.

McAdam also outlined plans for multiple new devices starting with a selection of tablets to compete with Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPad. He plans to sell most of these gadgets, which run on Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Android software, in the fourth quarter ID:N14210192.

"There's no reason we couldn't have an iPad," said McAdam, but he added that the first tablets will be Android devices from contenders including Motorola, Samsung and LG.

Verizon Wireless is also planning to sell up to five LTE handsets by next May, which is faster than some analysts had expected. McAdam said Motorola, HTC Corp (2498.TW), LG and Research In Motion (RIM.TO) could be front-runners.

Verizon already sells HTC's Droid Incredible smartphone, which is seeing stronger-than-expected sales. McAdam said a shortage of advanced screens made by Samsung is hurting the company's ability to keep up with that strong demand.

In addition to phones, U.S. wireless carriers are also pushing new technologies for computing on the go.

AT&T's HSPA Plus upgrade will first be aimed at laptop users, giving them double the download speed for watching videos and other bandwidth-heavy applications.

Stankey said it was not clear when HSPA Plus-compatible phones would arrive or whether vendors would instead focus on the rival LTE technology.

He said AT&T was spending as fast as it could to beef up its network, which has been strained by a high number of users of the bandwidth-hogging iPhone.

Stankey said markets like New York and San Francisco, where the network came under most pressure, should perform as well as the rest of the country by summer's end.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle, Paul Thomasch, Yinka Adegoke, Ritsuko Ando, Bill Rigby and Franklin Paul; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64E01P20100515





Smartphones Get Cheaper for Mass Appeal
Doug Young and Tarmo Virki

A new wave of cheap smartphones could soon do for the mobile industry what years of hype and investing in pricey 3G systems failed to accomplish -- combining must-have chic with affordable prices for data-hungry masses.

Prices of smartphones are falling sharply as handset vendors use free software such as Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Android and chip prices are also tumbling as semiconductor makers put baseband and application processors into one chipset.

Free software is significant since Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) charges up to $15 per phone for cellphone vendors to use its mobile operating system.

China's ZTE (0763.HK), which cut its teeth making cheap phones for emerging markets, aims to repeat that success in smartphones with a new model it is putting on trial for about $150 per handset, said He Shiyou, head of the company's cellphone division.

The model, using Google's Android operating system, is expected to start shipping next month and could be sold globally, he said at the Reuters Technology Summit on Monday.

ZTE's phones will join a growing crop of cheaper but still intelligent phones designed to take on the likes of pricier traditional models such as Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPhone, which costs more than $600, and Research in Motion Ltd's RIMM.TO BlackBerry, which typically costs $250 or more.

"It will have tremendous importance when smartphones come down to maybe $100 to $150, then you can reach all (consumer) segments," Johan Wibergh, who heads the mobile networking equipment division at Ericsson (ERICb.ST), the world's largest cellular equipment maker, said at the Summit, which was taking place at various Reuters offices worldwide.

ZTE's cheap smartphone, which it is developing for domestic carrier China Unicom (0762.HK), follows similar moves by a number of companies and could mark the beginning of a new wave of phones to enter the market priced at around $100 to $150.

Global cellphone leader Nokia Oyj (NOK1V.HE) already sells a model whose price starts at 125 euros, while Chinese vendors are expected to take prices into largely uncharted territory.

"We are going to have an Android device for 85 euros ($105) by the end of the year," Oren Nissim, chief executive of satnav software maker Telmap, told the Reuters Summit in Paris, but he declined to name the manufacturer.

Telmap and many other major mobile software vendors have access to upcoming phone models well before they are introduced to the general public.

ZTE, Nokia, Huawei, Google to Win

The expected boom should benefit companies such as ZTE, Nokia and China's Huawei HWT.UL that have expertise developing models for cost-sensitive emerging markets and have the manufacturing clout to develop new models cheaply.

"The market is seeing an abundance of affordable smartphones, but that raises a new challenge for operators in how to make data tariffs attractive and accessible on prepay," said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber.

It could also benefit carriers with 3G networks who stand to reap more money from the data-rich services, such as online gaming, music streaming and Web surfing, that such smartphones are good at.

Ericsson and other network equipment providers could benefit too as carriers boost capacity on their networks to accommodate rising demand.

Another possible beneficiary is Google, as its Android system is fast becoming the preferred choice of many low-end smartphone makers.

"Cheaper smartphone prices are only going to benefit two groups of people: telecoms operators and Google," said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities in Taipei.

"Falling smartphone prices aren't going to be good for handset brands and they'll need to get used to these cheaper prices and lower margins soon," he said.

(Additional reporting by Melanie Lee in Shanghai, Tova Cohen in Paris and Kelvin Soh in Hong Kong; Editing by Chris Lewis and David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64G43T20100517





Google Beats Microsoft in Smartphones, Catching Apple
Tarmo Virki and Poornima Gupta

Google's Android mobile phone system is building momentum, beating Microsoft in the last quarter and challenging Apple as the number of new models with software and compatible applications grow.

Google's Android was the fourth most popular operating system on smartphones sold in the first quarter, research firm Gartner said on Wednesday, putting the company in a good position as handsets look set to surpass computers for browsing the Web.

Android, which was in 10 percent of smartphones sold in the quarter, lags Nokia's Symbian, Research in Motion and Apple.

Gartner said Android was due to beat Apple soon as there were more handset makers using its operating system, and Android phones were already outselling the iPhone in North America.

Earlier this month, research group NPD said smartphones running on Android accounted for 28 percent of U.S. unit sales in the first quarter, ahead of the iPhone -- data Apple publicly questioned, saying it was based on a limited sample of consumers.

Gartner's data is considered an industry standard.

Developer Boom For Android

More and more start-ups are developing applications for Google's Android software, boosting interest among consumers and posing increasing risk to Apple, venture capitalists told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco.

While Apple's app store offers more than 200,000 games, tools and other software to jazz up the iPhone, against just 38,000 for Android, the openness of Google's mobile operating system is helping it gain popularity with developers.

"I am quite impressed by the traction the Android ecosystem is getting," said Chris Moore, a partner with Redpoint Ventures, which has invested in online video store Netflix and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com.

Moore told the Reuters Global Technology Summit it felt as if as many start-ups were walking into his office to pitch Android applications as those for the iPhone.

"I want to say that on the current trajectory, they (Android) will pass the iPhone platform, or at least reach parity by the end of this year or middle of next year."

Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are watching these trendlines very closely as they place bets on start-ups developing interesting mobile apps.

App developers usually choose a limited number of mobile platforms to write software for as every additional platform raises sharply their costs.

Microsoft Challenged

Microsoft, which has been making mobile software for around 10 years, hopes to claw back market share it has lost to rivals with new Windows Phone 7 models, due to reach markets in time for holiday-sales at the end of the year.

"We continue to see pressure for Microsoft. We expect to see difficulties also with Windows Phone 7 with limitations they are putting on hardware vendors," Gartner's Milanesi said.

Aiming to better battle against iPhone Microsoft has set high technical demands for handset models due to use its software.

Handset makers such as HTC, Samsung and Motorola all make Windows phones but are increasingly turning to Android, which is not only free but attracting a fast-growing developer community.

Microsoft is the only major phone software maker to charge a license fee to handset makers.

(Additional reporting Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; editing by Karen Foster)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64I35620100519





The Coming Wave of Mobile Attacks
Dennis Fisher

The pace of innovation on mobile phones and other smart wireless devices has accelerated greatly in the last few years, adding features, speed and computing power. But now the attackers are beginning to outstrip the good guys on mobile platforms, developing innovative new attacks and methods for stealing data that rival anything seen on the desktop, experts say.

For years there have been dire predictions from industry pundits about the coming wave of mobile malware, viruses and Trojans that would specifically target smartphones and PDAs, wreaking havoc on mobile devices. But that giant tide of mobile malware never materialized. There have been a few mobile viruses here and there, but for the most part attackers have decided to forego those kinds of attacks and instead have focused on stealthy techniques that give them unlimited--and unnoticed--control of the device.

Banker Trojans targeting platforms such as the iPhone and Windows Mobile have appeared in recent months, and fake mobile banking applications have shown up in the app stores of some mobile platorms, as well. Those malicious applications look exactly like the legitimate banking apps produced by major international banks and are designed to capture users' online banking credentials.

This particular attack vector--introducing malicious or Trojaned applications into mobile app stores--has the potential to become a very serious problem, researchers say. Tyler Shields, a security researcher at Veracode who developed a proof-of-concept spyware application for the BlackBerry earlier this year, said that the way app stores are set up and their relative lack of safeguards makes them soft targets for attackers looking to maximize the effectiveness and reach of their malicious applications.

"App stores have good and bad things about them. Everything is in one place, which is nice. But the negative is that you have one point of distribution for potential threats," Shields said. "If I can get past a single wall, I can potentially get lots of downloads very rapidly. How do users know the dangerous apps from the safe ones in the app store?"

As part of his research, Shields used the official controlled APIs provided by RIM, the BlackBerry's maker, to develop his application, called txsBBSPY. He also signed the app using the keys provided by RIM. He didn't try to get the appp into the BlackBerry App World store, simply because BlackBerry users can load apps from anywhere, so it wasn't necessary.

But it likely wouldn't have been much trouble for Shields to do so, given the security models employed by these app stores. The companies, such as RIM, Apple and Google, that maintain app stores make no guarantees about the safety or quality of the apps, so users download and install them at their own risk.

"Without fail, no one thinks for a moment about what goes on behind the scenes of these app stores," Shields said. "The owners of the app stores have a great choke point for enforcing security, but they don't want to slow down the number of apps being sold. If you read the fine print, it's download at your own risk."

Shields and other security researchers and industry executives say that developing malicious mobile apps is likely to be the most popular and lucrative attack vector for cybercriminals in the coming years. The convergence of powerful mobile computing platforms such as the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry with the growing popularity of app stores and phones as mobile payment systems makes these attacks a layup for skilled attackers.

There's no percentage in devoting valuable resources for several weeks or months to put together a sophisticated phishing scheme or other scam in the hopes or bagging a few hundred victims when you can use that time to develop a malicious mobile banking or shopping app that could attract tens of thousands of downloads in a matter of days?

"There are extremely technical approaches like the OS attacks, but that stuff is much harder to do," Shields said. "From the attacker's standpoint, it's too much effort when you can just drop something into the app store. It comes down to effort versus reward. The spyware Trojan approach will be the future of crime. Why spend time popping boxes when you can get the users to own the boxes themselves? If you couple that with custom Trojans and the research I've done, it's super scary.

"And generally the same personal data that's on a PC is on a mobile phone. People are dropping 32 GB cards in there and using their phones as media servers. They're serious computing devices. Non-technical people's jaws drop when they hear about this stuff. They realize it's possible on PCs, but they still haven't come to grips with their phones being attacked," Shields said.

It's a new day for mobile threats, and the attackers have a big head start.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/co...attacks-051710





Remote Wiping Thwarts Secret Service
Ben Grubb

Smartphones that offer the ability to "remote wipe" are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can't look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service (USSS).

The ability to "remote wipe" some smartphones such as BlackBerry and iPhone was causing havoc for law enforcement agencies, according to USSS special agent Andy Kearns, speaking yesterday on mobile phone forensics at the AusCERT 2010 security conference.

The problem is that accomplices can remotely wipe the phones if the agencies don't remember to remove the battery or turn off smartphones before sending them off to the forensics laboratory, he said.

"So if you've got a suspect and you take the cell phone away from him, and he's got somebody on the outside that can help get on the [remote wipe] website to get his phone wiped, all your evidence is gone before you get a chance to examine," he said.

Kearns said he'd never personally faced the situation, but he knew other examiners who had.

"Sometimes you'll get a cellphone that comes in that is wiped, [but] it's not all that common," he said. Agents were trained to incapacitate devices, but Kearns cautioned that not all enforcement agencies had the same knowledge.

"Hopefully our officers are putting the cell phones in a Faraday bag that is shielded, pulling the battery [out] and turning them off [before] getting them into the shielded laboratory."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/remote-wipin...-339303239.htm





Commercial Quantum Cryptography System Hacked

Physicists have mounted the first successful attack of its kind on a commercial quantum cryptography system.

When it comes to secure messaging, nothing beats quantum cryptography, a method that offers perfect security. Messages sent in this way can never be cracked by an eavesdropper, no matter how powerful.

At least, that's the theory. Today, Feihu Xu, Bing Qi and Hoi-Kwong Lo at the University of Toronto in Canada say they have broken a commercial quantum cryptography system made by the Geneva-based quantum technology startup ID Quantique, the first successful attack of its kind on a commercially-available system.

Here's how they did it. Any proof that quantum cryptography is perfect relies on assumptions that don't always hold true in the real world. Identify one of these weaknesses and you've found a loophole that can be exploited to hack in to such a system.

The new attack is based on assumptions made about the types of errors that creep in to quantum messages. Alice and Bob always keep a careful eye on the level of errors in their messages because they know that Eve will introduce errors if she intercepts and reads any of the quantum bits. So a high error rate is a sign that the message is being overheard.

However, it is impossible to get rid of errors entirely. There will always be noise in any real world system so Alice and Bob have to tolerate a small level of error. This level is well known. Various proofs show that if the quantum bit error rate is less than 20 per cent, then the message is secure.

However, these proofs assume that the errors are the result of noise from the environment. Feihu and co say that one key assumption is that the sender, Alice, can prepare the the required quantum states without errors. She then sends these states to Bob and together they use them to generate a secret key that can be used as a one-time pad to send a secure message.

But in the real world, Alice always introduces some errors into the quantum states she prepares and it is this that Feihu have exploited to break the system.

They say this extra noise allows Eve to intercept some of the quantum bits, read them and then send them on, in a way that raises the error rate to only 19.7 per cent. In this kind of "intercept and resend attack", the error rate stays below the 20 per cent threshold and Alice and Bob are none the wiser, happily exchanging keys while Eve listens in unchallenged.

Feihi and co say they've even tested the idea successfully on a system from ID Quantique.

That's a significant blow to commercial quantum cryptography but not because ID Quantique's system is now breakable. It is not. Now that the weakness is known, it's relatively easy for the company to institute more careful checks on the way Alice prepares her states so that unknown errors are less likely.

However, there is now a significant body of work showing how to break conventional quantum cryptography systems based on various practical weaknesses in the way they are set up; things like unwanted internal reflections in the gear that generates quantum bits, efficiency mismatches between photon detectors and lasers that produce extra, hidden photons that Eve can latch on to. All these have been used to find cracks in the system.

But while the known loopholes can be papered over, it's the unknown ones that represent threats in the future. The problem that Feihu and co have opened up is in showing how easy it is with a little malicious intent to bend the assumptions behind perfect quantum cryptography. That will have a few quantum cryptographers losing sleep in the months and years to come.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1005.2376: Experimental Demonstration Of Phase-Remapping Attack In A Practical Quantum Key Distribution System
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25189/





Pentagon Hacker Demands Government Payback

Pentagon hacker, Gary McKinnon has called on the newly-elected British government to put its money where its mouth is and tear up his extradition order.

US prosecutors have been trying to get McKinnon before a New Jersey court for seven years after they caught him hacking into US military and NASA computers for evidence of UFOs.

David Cameron, the newly elected Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, had both voiced their support for McKinnon's campaign against extradition. Other ministers in the coalition government had branded the extradition unjust. Clegg had even joined McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp on a protest march.

McKinnon's solicitor, Karen Todner, wrote to the Home Secretary yesterday, asking whether "the new Liberal Conservative government will act upon their previous public statements that it would be unjust to extradite Mr McKinnon".

"We sent her copies of all the Liberal and Conservative press releases over the last seven years, reminding them of what they said," McKinnon's solicitor, Karen Todner, told THINQ.

The Home Office said the new Theresa May, the new Home Secretary, had received the letter and would consider it.

Promises, promises

Many politicians in the new government rallied behind McKinnon, whose hobby hacking from his girlfriend's flat in Wood Green, North London, attracted the attention of US military cyber intelligence agents in 2002. McKinnon was diagnosed with autism while fighting the extradition order in court.

The last British Government had supported the US court order, controversially placing its treaty obligations with the US before its duty to protect a vulnerable man from what McKinnon's lawyers said was disproportionate injustice.

The US extradition relied on its insistence that McKinnon had intentionally caused $700,000 of damage to their computers. McKinnon denied causing the damage. Any prosecution would have had to demonstrate how much of the bill for damages was the cost of scanning and securing systems that hacking had revealed to be vulnerable, and to what extent McKinnon was liable for the cost merely because he was the one who exposed the security flaws.

Politicians who have expressed their support for McKinnon have been careful not to promise they will stop his extradition. They have simply said it would be unjust. They have promised to review the extradition act. They have not promised to try McKinnon in the UK.

Dominic Grieve, who was this week appointed Attorney General, had called before the election for a change in the law, to prevent someone like McKinnon getting extradited by the authority of a treaty that had intended to deal with terrorists. But he sympathised with ministers who said they could not interrupt a legal process that already had McKinnon in its grip.

Chris Huhne, who was this week appointed minister for energy, had called the case against McKinnon a "fiasco". He called for the hacker to be tried for his hacking crimes in the UK, where he was when he committed them.

Rough justice

McKinnon's lawyers argued before the high court last year that since his autistic condition made him vulnerable, he should not be flown to face prosecutors thousands of miles away from home and family. If he were convicted and given a prison sentence for hacking, he should serve it in the UK, they said.

The High Court denied McKinnon's plea because human rights law was not strong enough to accommodate a request of such subtlety. It could only legally stop McKinnon's extradition if he was being handed over to a state that intended to do him harm.

The US prison system was deemed by the court to be somewhere where an autistic man might be sent without infringing his human rights, even though medical experts said it would be a disproportionately terrifying ordeal for an autistic man.

The Crown Prosecution Service could have subverted the US extradition by bringing a trial against McKinnon in the UK but decided against it on the basis of cost.

McKinnon was due to return to the Royal Courts of Justice in ten days to plead for the extradition to be stopped. He was to argue that his mental health had deteriorated to such a degree over the course of his seven year battle against the US order that he should be tried in the UK.

His solicitor asked the Home Secretary to agree to postpone the court hearings while she reconsidered his case in light of the vague promises ministers made on his behalf when they were courting public approval before being elected to government. McKinnon awaits her answer.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/1...nment-payback/





EFF: Forget Cookies, Your Browser has Fingerprints

Browser plugin and font data may give away your identity
Robert McMillan

Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give Web sites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Also read: EFF dubs Apple a "jealous feudal lord" over iPhone dev contract

The research puts a quantitative assessment on something that security gurus have known about for years, said Peter Eckersley, the EFF senior staff technologist who did the research. He found that configuration information -- data on the type of browser, operating system, plugins, and even fonts installed can be compiled by Web sites to create a unique portrait of most visitors.

This means that most Internet users are a lot less anonymous than they believe, Eckersley said. "Even if you turn off cookies and you use a proxy to hide your IP address, you could still be tracked," he said.

The data doesn't actually identify the Web user, but it creates a unique browser "fingerprint," that can be used to identify the user when he visits other Web sites.

Using JavaScript, Web sites are able to probe PCs and learn a lot. No single piece of data is enough to identify the visitor on its own, but when it's all strung together -- browser version, language, operating system, time zone details -- a clearer picture emerges. Some things -- what combination of plugins and fonts are installed, for example -- can be a dead giveaway.

And using the private mode offered by some browser-makers does nothing to stop this analysis. "They provide you with some protection against other people who may be in your house or who have access to your computer, but they haven't got to the point where they've provided protection against the companies that are profiling Web users," Eckersley said.

In fact, there are already a handful of companies have already started offering this kind of cookie-less Web tracking to help e-commerce sites identify fraudsters. Companies such as 41st Parameter, ThreatMetrix, and Iovation are widely used in the banking, e-commerce and social Web sites.

And the products work. Last August, when Serbian criminals started testing stolen credit cards by posting hundreds of US$1.99 transactions to the iReel.com online movie site each day, iReel turned to ThreatMetrix to get a fix on the fraudsters.

Using similar techniques to those described by the EFF, ThreatMetrix generated digital fingerprints of site visitors, which helped iReel know when a single user was trying to use hundreds of different credit cards, even when the fraudster was using proxy IP addresses, said Adam Altman, iReel's chief operations officer. "We were able to cut out a lot of the unnecessary transactions," he said.

These products may see more widespread use as browser-makers give users more control over managing the Web-tracking cookie files on their browsers, said Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner. Many e-commerce sites already use so-called Flash cookies to track visitors, but Adobe is starting to give users more control over these files, so browser fingerprinting maybe the next widely used visitor tracking technology on the Web, she said.

For people who think they're anonymously surfing the Web, this is bad news, Eckersley said. "If someone can see what pages we're going to, they know what we're reading and what we're thinking," he said.

The EFF has set up a Web site that tests visitors for uniquely identifiable information. Most people are surprised to discover just how trackable they are online, Eckersley said.

There are some effective countermeasures, however. A uniquely identifiable IDG News Service Windows XP computer running Firefox could not be identified with the NoScript safe browsing extension turned on. Adding the Tor Internet anonymization software also works, Eckersley said.

Mobile browsers on the iPhone on Android platforms are often not identifiable. That's because they typically don't have the variety of browser plugins and font add-ons that are common on desktop PCs.

So could browser makers make their products more private? Eckersley believes so. "There are some situations where having some of this information is useful, but you don't need all of it by any means," he said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...r-browser.html





Chrome Incognito Tracks Visited Sites

While using Google Chrome's Incognito Mode I've noticed that some information about visited sites is stored. Certainly it doesn't store cookies or the URL history (as it appears in the URL bar). However, follow these simple steps to confirm for yourself that some history is preserved:

1. Start an incognito window
2. Visit a URL you have never visited before, maybe http://www.elephants.com/
3. Increase the zoom by pressing the Control key and + at the same time
4. Close the incognito window
5. Start a new incognito window
6. Re-visit your URL (notice that it doesn't appear in the URL history)

As the site loads at step 6 you should now notice that the zoom level you previously chose has been remembered and reapplied.

I'm currently using Chrome 6.0.401.1 dev and reported this issue to Google a month or so ago and no fix has yet appeared. It does also work with 5.0.396.0 dev.
http://www.lewiz.org/2010/05/chrome-...ted-sites.html





Search More Securely with Encrypted Google Web Search
Evan Roseman

As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.

Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.

When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/...encrypted.html





Apps Emerge to Reset Facebook Privacy Settings
Caroline McCarthy

New third-party applications are trying to make it easier to reset Facebook privacy settings, following recent changes from the company that make a sizable chunk of profile content public by default when it was once under lock and key.

A firewall and spam filter company called Untangle launched a tool on Monday called SaveFace, which takes the form of a browser bookmark utility and sets as many Facebook profile elements as it can--contact information, friend lists and connections, wall posts--to "friends only."

"We wanted to help our customers get back to [the] Facebook of 2005," Untangle CEO Bob Walters said in a statement, in which he referred to Facebook's current privacy controls as "insane" and difficult to handle.

Additionally, an independent developer released on Monday a similar tool called ReclaimPrivacy.org, which scans a Facebook member's privacy settings, flags profile elements that may be unexpectedly public, and, like SaveFace, can reset them. Both applications are open source.

It's unclear what Facebook thinks of these apps. But considering the social network very vocally banned an app that "unfriended" people, citing privacy violation, it may also take issue with services that modify privacy settings. Granted, ReclaimPrivacy and SaveFace are not built on the Facebook developer platform, so the rules that govern them may be different.

Still, Facebook may want to leave these services alone because, in a sense, they could put members at ease and could let Facebook off the hook in the process--regardless of whether it deserves to be or not.

CNET has contacted Facebook for comment and will update this post when the company responds.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20005243-36.html





Report: Facebook Caught Sharing Secret Data with Advertisers
Eric Bangeman

The privacy issues that have been hounding Facebook may be coming to a head. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg, and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users' personal data with advertisers without users' knowledge or consent.

The data shared includes names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Some of the sites in question, including MySpace and Facebook, stopped sharing the data after the Journal asked them about it. The surreptitious data sharing was first noticed (PDF) by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in August 2009, who brought it up with the sites in question. It wasn't until WSJ contacted them that changes were made.

Not surprisingly, Facebook appears to have gone farther than the other sites when it comes to sharing data. When Facebook's users clicked on ads appearing on a profile page, the site would at times provide data such as the username behind the click, as well as the user whose profile page from which the click came. "If you are looking at your profile page and you click on an ad, you are telling that advertiser who you are," Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman told the Journal. Advertisers contacted by the paper said that they were unaware of the additional data and did not make use of it.

Facebook has tweaked its privacy policy throughout its history, with the most recent moves to open up more user information to the public drawing heavy criticism and FTC complaints. Users have also had a tough time navigating the site's often-Byzantine privacy controls, which has led to a trickle of user defections. With these latest revelations about Facebook ignoring industry standards, not to mention its own privacy policies, that trickle may turn into a torrent.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...dvertisers.ars





P2P Networks a Treasure Trove of Leaked Health Care Data, Study Finds

Eight months after passage of HITECH Act, data leaks still a problem in health care industry
Jaikumar Vijayan

Nearly eight months after new rules were enacted requiring stronger protection of health care information, organizations are still leaking such data on file-sharing networks, a study by Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business has found.

In a research paper to be presented at an IEEE security symposium Tuesday, a Dartmouth College professor Eric Johnson will describe how university researchers discovered thousands of documents containing sensitive patient information on popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

One of the more than 3,000 files discovered by the researchers was a spreadsheet containing insurance details, personally identifying information, physician names and diagnosis codes on more than 28,000 individuals. Another document contained similar data on more than 7,000 individuals. Many of the documents contained sensitive patient communications, treatment data, medical diagnoses and psychiatric evaluations. At least five files contained enough information to be classified as a major breach under current health-care breach notification rules.

While some of the documents appear to have been leaked before the Obama administration's Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was enacted, many appear to be fairly recent. A previous study by Dartmouth in 2008 also unearthed files containing health-care data floating on P2P networks, such as Limewire, eDonkey and BearShare. Among the documents found in that study was one containing 350MB of patient data for a group of anesthesiologists and another on patients at an AIDS clinic in Chicago.

The fact that many organizations are still leaking such information on file-sharing networks is surprising, said Johnson, professor of operations management at Dartmouth and one of the paper's authors.

The HITECH Act, which went into effect last September, requires any organization handling health-care data to implement stronger controls for protecting it. The law also requires such organizations to publicly disclose data breaches involving patient health information within 60 days of the discovery of a breach. The law also significantly expands the number and kinds of organizations that are required to comply with the federal law on patient privacy known as HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). The law also provides for stiff penalties for noncompliance with these requirements.

The fact that sensitive patient health information is freely available on P2P networks suggests that many organizations are still not paying enough attention to security, Johnson said.

How the data gets leaked

Data leaks on P2P networks typically occur when file-sharing software from P2P sites such as Limeware and eMonkey is improperly installed on a computer that contains sensitive data. Usually, the file-sharing software is installed on a computer to share music and video files. In many cases, however, users configure the software improperly, and all the data on the computer becomes visible and available to all other users on the P2P network.

Such lapses have led to major data leaks on P2P networks over the past few years. Some of the more high-profile examples include the leaking of sensitive details on the President Obama's Marine One helicopter last year and another incident where documents detailing Secret Service safe houses for the first family were found on a P2P network.

Businesses also have been burned by such leaks, including one breach involving personal information on 17,000 employees at pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc.. Such leaks have prompted lawmakers to consider new rules limiting the use of P2P software on government networks. Another bill is aimed at getting software developers to make their P2P software safer.

In the Dartmouth study, researchers wanted to study the impact that passage of the HITECH Act would have on the amount of health-care information available on P2P networks, Johnson said. To find out, researchers looked for documents containing specific health-care related keywords on several P2P networks. Each of the files returned in the search was then inspected for the presence of health-care data and rated on a three-point scale based on the sensitivity of the data.

The research showed that health data was as easily accessible on P2P networks as it was before the bill was enacted. More than 20% of the documents contained information that would be considered protected under HITECH rules. Even more disturbingly, the data often was found in unprotected spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents, suggesting that many organizations are not adequately protecting the data, Johnson said. In many cases, the entities leaking the data were not even aware of the fact, he said.

"Most of the time there is a lot of disbelief and stalling that goes on," when an organization is first informed about a P2P data leak, Johnson said.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...?taxonomyId=16





Adobe Flash To Eliminate Bandwidth Costs With P2P
Ernesto

Adobe is getting serious about their implementation of peer-to-peer technology to assist Flash-based video streaming and applications. The upcoming release of Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 will enable publishers to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs by outsourcing media distribution to users.

The Flash team from Adobe has been working on their P2P Flash implementation for a while, but with the release of the 10.1 player it can really make a difference for online media distribution.

Kevin Towes, Product Manager of Adobe Flash Media Server told Beet.TV that the upcoming release of the Flash player will include new P2P technology that will “significantly change the way we think of media delivery.” According to Towes, this technology could in some cases completely eliminate bandwidth costs.

The system Adobe is offering to support P2P Flash is called Stratus. It is offered to developers free of charge and can support both live and on-demand video streaming. Besides video, Stratus can also be used for Flash based multi-player games and other forms of real time communication.

For broadcasters and video services, Stratus has the capacity to eliminate a significant amount of bandwidth costs. Instead of serving the media from a central server, users will provide the necessary bandwidth. Adobe’s Stratus system serves as an intermediary in this process, managing the communications between Flash players much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers.

Towes explained that Stratus users will first have to agree to participate in a P2P-enabled Flash swarm, similar to how they are now asked to indicate whether Flash can use their webcam. If users do not want to share bandwidth, the broadcaster has the option to offer a regular stream, a degraded stream or no stream at all.

Adobe’s Stratus project is not the first to combine P2P technology with Flash. Last year, during the inauguration of President Obama, CNN used P2P-assisted technology to send out the live stream to a million viewers worldwide. This required users to install a browser plugin called Octoshape, which then made the Flash video P2P compliant.

Other initiatives to serve on-demand and live streaming have been showcased by the Triber research team, who use a BitTorrent-based solution that does not require any central servers. Tribler is currently working with several European TV-broadcasters to test this technology in the real world.

The impact of Adobe getting seriously involved in P2P streaming could be a real game changer though. One of the main advantages Adobe’s Flash has is that nearly every computer has it installed, which should facilitate the adoption rate among content providers. One less hurdle to take, and a significant one.
http://torrentfreak.com/adobe-flash-...th-p2p-100519/





At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5
Brad Stone

Early this year, the most popular YouTube video of all time — a 2007 clip of a British toddler gleefully biting the finger of his older brother — was supplanted by a brash newcomer.

The upstart was Lady Gaga’s slithering, sci-fi-themed music video for her hit single “Bad Romance.”

The shift was symbolic: YouTube, a subsidiary of the search giant Google, is growing up. Once known primarily for skateboard-riding cats, dancing geeks and a variety of cute-baby high jinks, YouTube now features a smorgasbord of more professional video that is drawing ever larger and more engaged audiences.

“Our biggest challenge is making sure we don’t taste too many things,” Chad Hurley, YouTube’s low-profile and low-key co-founder and chief executive, said in a wide-ranging interview last week.

That cornucopia of content appears to be turning YouTube — considered by many to be a risky investment when it was bought for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006 — into one of Google’s smartest acquisitions. On Monday, YouTube will celebrate its fifth birthday by announcing it has passed two billion video views a day; YouTube said it reached the one billion mark in October.

Bolstering YouTube’s growing audience is the popularity of live broadcasts, like the recent Indian Premier League cricket matches, and the integration of instructional videos directly into Google search results.

YouTube also holds a large catalog of music videos that contain advertisements, thanks to Google’s partnership with three of the four major American music labels in an effort called Vevo.

Mr. Hurley, 33, said YouTube was increasingly focused on showing users what their friends had watched, as a way of helping people navigate the tens of thousands of hours of video uploaded to the site every day. He also contended that more rights-holders were quietly allowing fans to appropriate short snippets of their content for mash-ups and parodies, “though a lot of them might not come out and say it for business reasons.”

Mr. Hurley declined to discuss YouTube’s financial performance, though he cited overall improvement.

Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.

YouTube has faced a fight in another regard as well: it has so far failed to persuade major American film studios and television networks to view it as an outlet for anything other than promotional snippets of long-form programming.

In January, YouTube introduced a movie rental store, though its only offerings are from independent film companies and Bollywood studios.

James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said YouTube’s Vevo partnership with music labels “shows what YouTube can accomplish when it works with the media industry. It’s really one of the first legitimizations of YouTube as a commercial platform.”

Mr. Hurley indicated that convincing media companies to embrace YouTube was no longer an important goal, adding that chasing Hulu.com, the joint venture of Fox, NBC and ABC, “may have been a distraction for us.”

Hulu is “starting to have some troubles in terms of their long-term model and relationship with their owners,” Mr. Hurley said, referring to the increasing unease among broadcasters with the practice of streaming programming free on the Web, where ad rates are significantly lower than they are on television.

One possibility is that YouTube would start scouring the rest of the Internet for video, Mr. Hurley said, “indexing more video wherever it may live” and then pointing users to it, even if the video did not reside on YouTube’s servers. YouTube already has the second most popular search engine in the world, according to comScore. (Second, naturally, to Google.)

One factor driving YouTube’s growth is the ever-easier availability of the Internet on the living room television through devices like TiVo and Roku set-top boxes.

Google is planning to back that trend in a big way at its annual I/O developers’ conference this week in San Francisco. The company plans to introduce Google TV, a software platform for the television that it is developing with Sony, Intel and Logitech, according to people briefed on its plans who were not authorized to talk about them publicly.

YouTube is expected to play a prominent role in bringing a variety of video to the Google TV platform, and Mr. Hurley contended that the rise of Web video on the television was inevitable.

“I don’t think there’s going to be much of a difference between a phone, a computer and a television. It’s going to be size and presentation,” he said. Although he might not have gotten the memo about the Google TV efforts, since he added, “Maybe we just have to wait until Apple releases a bigger iPhone that you can strap onto the wall,” he said.

Finally, Mr. Hurley tipped his entrepreneurial hat to a chaotic, controversial and suddenly popular site that resembles the YouTube of five years ago: ChatRoulette. The site, created by an 18-year-old from Moscow, Andrey Ternovskiy, allows people around the world to engage in random, instantaneous one-on-one conversations.

ChatRoulette “demonstrates that there is still so much more that can be unleashed with video online,” Mr. Hurley said, adding that Mr. Ternovskiy, whom he said he would like to meet, “has the spotlight and the opportunity to do great things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/te...17youtube.html





Using Online Games to Get Movie Audiences Involved
Brooks Barnes

Sony Pictures has been hard at work on a project with a complex script about spies and terrorists, filming on location and using props that include a rented airplane.

Is it the studio’s latest blockbuster in the making? Not even close. The undertaking is a nine-week “episodic online game” created by Sony marketers to stir audience interest in “Salt,” a forthcoming Angelina Jolie thriller.

The game, titled Day X Exists, is a series of Web episodes and companion challenges that reveal an important plot line. Sony will unveil a new installment each week starting Monday on dayxexists.com. “It’s a supersophisticated game, but done in a way that a casual player can understand,” said Marc Weinstock, Sony’s marketing president.

Pity the hoary television ad, billboard and trailer. As studio marketers try harder to use technology to advertise movies, ambitious Web games that interlock with social networking sites are an increasing focus. With Day X Exists, Sony hopes to mimic the viral success of Facebook games like Mafia Wars, which is played by tens of millions of people.

The goal is to reverse the consumer-advertiser relationship. Traditional marketing pushes a message over and over. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership.

“That makes them talk about it, share it, evangelize it,” said Elan Lee, a co-founder of Fourth Wall Studios, a pioneer in the games-as-marketing field that has worked with Paramount Pictures.

Studios have been using simple Web games to sell their wares for a decade — press the space bar and a character kicks something. More ambitious alternate-reality games, a genre that blends online and offline clues and relies on players collaborating to solve puzzles, have also been successful in reaching what studios call “alpha fans” (the boys in the basement). Walt Disney Studios deployed one for its forthcoming “Tron: Legacy.”

Don’t confuse these efforts with retail games based on movies (Iron Man 2 for the Nintendo). Marketing-driven games are free and expected to fade away after a movie’s release.

On the way now, as evidenced by Day X Exists, are games that feature complex narratives and depth, but do not require a master’s degree to figure out. Women in particular are a focus.

“Salt,” which stars Ms. Jolie as a sexy secret agent named Evelyn Salt, probably does not have to work hard to attract men, but women are another story. By Sony’s estimation, some 65 million women in the United States play casual games.

“It’s really misunderstood that women don’t play,” said Amy Powell, Paramount’s executive vice president for interactive marketing strategy and film production. “You cannot underestimate that audience segment.”

The ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones has also presented an opportunity for games to raise ticket sales. Marketers call the tactic location-based gaming. Say an iPhone game designed to promote a movie comes with an added element — an exclusive level that you can use only inside a theater on opening weekend.

“That really closes the loop from a digital marketing perspective because we’re actually driving people into seats,” said Jason Yim, the founder of Trigger, a digital marketing agency that counts Lucasfilm and Cartoon Network as clients.

All of this activity wins studios points for forward thinking, but to what degree is it actually increasing ticket sales? Hard to say, Mr. Yim said, but the usage is far higher than most people realize. Successful movie games get over a million plays, with some soaring to 10 million, he said, adding that movie-related iPhone apps can be downloaded in “the high hundreds of thousands of times.”

The downside of devotees is just that — they are sophisticated and can spot games that exist only to sell something, said Oren Aviv, Disney’s former president for production and marketing.

“The challenge is to make these kinds of efforts feel organic,” Mr. Aviv said. “It has to be an experience in and of itself that is powerful enough that people will forget that they are being marketed to.”

Ms. Powell pointed to another trap: designing digital campaigns that are too advanced for the general population to grasp. “As excited as we are about new technology, you have to remember that general moviegoers, general consumers just want something fun and entertaining,” she said.

To get it right, companies like Trigger begin work years before a movie’s release. When Sony hired Trigger to create an alternate-reality game for “District 9,” the science-fiction thriller released last August, the studio brought Mr. Yim’s team into the process while the script was still being written.

The objective of Day X Exists involves stopping an unspecified terrorist threat called Day X. Evelyn Salt appears to be partly responsible, but she secretly contacts players and asks for their help in proving her innocence. As the game unfolds, it becomes clear that the agent is not quite who she claims to be.

“Who is Salt?” is the tagline that forms the center of the broader marketing campaign for the film, which arrives in theaters on July 23 though Sony’s Columbia Pictures unit. The trailer has been edited to leave her identity a mystery, and billboards asking the question are already popping up. The last installment of the game gives the answer.

Day X Exists — the “missions” ask players to bug suspects, track enemy operatives and decrypt messages — will be translated into 12 languages and introduced in 18 countries. Sony created the game with Hoodlum, an Australian developer of multiplatform content; Yahoo Movies is a sponsor.

“We’re excited about it because the layers of the movie fit with the layers of the game,” said Mr. Weinstock of Sony. “Hopefully, it will bring people into the story line in a complementary way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/bu...ia/17salt.html





Filmmakers Tread Softly on Early Release to Cable
Michael Cieply

A little over a week ago, the movie business got its eagerly sought permission to activate technology to protect new releases from being copied if they were sold through video-on-demand systems before being issued on DVD.

Now comes the hard part: finding a studio brave enough to risk war with theater owners by trying it.

Hollywood cleared a legal hurdle when the Federal Communications Commission gave its approval on May 7 of “selectable output control,” which can reach into a customer’s home video player and turn off its video outputs while a pay-per-view program is being watched, to prevent the program from being copied.

The F.C.C. limited use of the remote power to those movies released to video-on-demand during their first three or four months in theaters, before the films go to DVD or other release formats. By the end of last week, however, no major film studio had yet disclosed a plan to take advance of this new capability.

When asked about the studios’ plans late last week, Bob Pisano, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said, “I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know.” To comply with antitrust law, he added, “we stay out of business-model decisions.”

What might at first seem an arcane matter — precisely when to put a movie for sale on cable systems and at what price — has been the subject of ferocious debate in a film industry that so far has stopped just short of embracing the digital revolution.

Cable operators, whose customers have become increasingly comfortable with systems that let them pay as they go for programming, stand ready to offer first-run films like “Sex in the City 2” or the forthcoming “Wall Street” sequel almost as quickly as studios are ready to offer them.

The toughest challenge, Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, told an audience at a cable industry event here last week, will be that of “navigation in a 100,000-choice world.”

Comcast is poised to take control of NBC Universal, if regulators approve a pending deal. It might then be in a position to break the ice by adding future Universal Pictures releases like “Battleship” or “Stretch Armstrong” to its on-demand universe — but only if it is ready to face down, or accommodate, theater owners who have been fiercely protective of the exclusive period during which they have customarily served up the major studio pictures.

John Fithian, the president of the National Association of Theater Owners, did not respond to recent queries about the likely response of his member companies to any move by film studios to exploit the F.C.C. approval, which his organization strongly opposed.

But one senior theater executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for his chain, said theater owners had made clear to film distributors that they simply would not book films that were simultaneously available in another medium.

Well aware of the tension, spokesmen for 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Studios and Universal — all members of the M.P.A.A. — declined last week to discuss their companies’ plans.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with peers, however, several executives said they expected to see one or more studios soon try to sell at least some films to an on-demand audience in advance of the DVD release. And one executive suggested it would happen as early as this year.

Warner Brothers and Fox were described by these executives as being especially eager to find a new revenue stream via on-demand, though it was not clear that either company was prepared to go first.

According to one executive, it appeared likely that any early experiment with on-demand film would be devised as a high-priced “premium” event, akin to an expensive pay-per-view fight night, possibly in a collaboration of some kind with theater owners, who might somehow share in revenue or get improved financial terms to make up for lost viewers.

The deeper concern, as seen by theater executives, is that even a slight nudge toward additional home viewing might help to break frequent movie-goers of their habit — and jeopardize the $10 billion-a-year box office — just as they are being enticed by big 3-D events like “Avatar.”

To date, on-demand screenings of new movies have been confined to the independent film world, where services like those operated by Rainbow Media have routinely sold access to festival-style films that would not otherwise have a large theatrical audience.
The added technological protection offered by the output control authorized by the F.C.C. makes it easier for studios to capitalize on the enormous marketing expenditure behind a first-run film like the forthcoming “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie, or “Knight and Day,” with Tom Cruise, by easing it into homes alongside theaters.

But that can happen only if theater owners allow it — and if home viewers overcome the suspicion, voiced by some, that antipiracy technology might impede their televisions and recorders once they have allowed a studio film in the door.

On this last score, Mr. Pisano said the concerns reminded him of an old television series. “This is not going to come from ‘The Outer Limits,’ to take control of your television set,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/bu.../18movies.html





Studio Loses Key Ruling in Battle with Soul Icon
Eriq Gardner

A federal judge in Tennessee has rejected a bid by the Weinstein Company to dismiss a lawsuit from soul legend Sam Moore that contends the studio's 2008 film "Soul Men" violated his trademarks and rights of publicity.

The judge let company principals Harvey and Bob Weinstein off the hook personally due to jurisdictional issues, but the surviving lawsuit against the studio could be important. The case could determine whether studios have a free speech right to make biographical movies about public figures without getting permission.

Sam Moore was part of the popular singing duo Sam & Dave, which helped invent "Memphis Soul" through chart-topping singles like "Soul Man," released in 1967.

Moore alleges that in 2003, the Weinstein brothers became familiar with him while producing the soul music documentary "Only the Strong Survive." A few years later, the Weinsteins began work on a new film, "Soul Men," starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac. The picture portrays "fictional" soul singers with similar background and experiences as Sam & Dave. The main characters even sing Moore's songs.

Moore complained to the Weinsteins after reading the script because he was concerned about his reputation, considering that the main character uses racial slurs, swears, refers to woman as "bitches" and brandishes weapons. He was told he had no case but was offered a cameo role, which Moore found to be insulting.

So he sued. In February 2009 he filed a lawsuit claiming his publicity rights were violated and that he held the trademark on "Soul Men."

Weinstein claimed that the movie was a fictional comedy and, even if it was about the duo, it was a biographical work about public figures, protected by the First Amendment governing free speech. Weinstein also said the movie was an "expressive work" and even if Moore held trademark on "Soul Men," it had a First Amendment fair-use right to use the title as long as it didn't mislead consumers.

In his decision last Wednesday, Judge Aleta Trauger rejected those arguments. The judge said the use of the "Soul Men" mark in a competing title may be shown to be confusing, claims of trademark dilution extend beyond pure commercial speech, and the defendants can't assume that a life story about a public figure is protected under the First Amendment.

Weinstein attorney Bert Fields said a trial would prove the movie wasn't Moore's story. He also believed an appeals court would rule in his client's favor on the legal issues. "I think it's quite clear you can't protect the life story of a public figure this way," he said. "That's going too far."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H08H20100518





A Fresh Look Back at Right Now
A. O. Scott

A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand outside a movie theater with a camera and microphone and poll the audience members for their reactions. What did you think of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively.

This little scene of impromptu amateur film criticism — or market research, if you prefer — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose friendship was a driving force and a central fact (as well as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those people outside that Parisian cinema in 1960 have just seen “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s debut feature, starring Jean Seberg as an American exchange student who teases, loves, protects and betrays a French hoodlum played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who smokes and runs his thumb pensively over his lips. Some of the patrons are baffled, some enthusiastic, some noncommittal, a mixed bag of responses that seems a bit deflating. Aren’t they aware of the historical significance of what they have just witnessed?

Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools.

Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.

At the same time, though, such legendary status can also be a burden, weighing down what was once fresh and shocking with a heavy freight of expectation and received opinion. There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form. The partisans of the new — Truffaut and Mr. Godard, along with comrades like Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — were steeped in film history. Before taking up their cameras they had been critics, polemicists and self-taught scholars, and yet, like other aesthetic insurgents before them, they attacked a reigning style they believed was characterized by unthinking and sclerotic traditionalism. And their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies.

Mr. Godard, who had made a handful of shorts before turning to a true-crime scenario that Mr. Truffaut had been working on, was perhaps the most extreme and paradoxical figure in this movement, and would go on to become a prolific and polarizing filmmaker. He would pass through a period of intense, if not always intelligible, political militancy in the late ’60s and early ’70s before settling into his current status somewhere between grand old man and crazy uncle of world cinema. His most recent feature, “Film Socialism,” showed up at the Cannes Film Festival last week, though the director himself did not, offering as explanation for his absence a cryptic reference to the Greek financial crisis. He has, for as long as some of us can remember, walked the fine line between prophet and crank, turning out films that are essayistic, abstract, enraging and intermittently beautiful and issuing variously grandiose and gnomic statements about his own work, the state of the world and the future of cinema.

But that is now. Back then it was surely different. An immaculate and glowing new print of “Breathless” will be shown, starting Friday, at Film Forum in Manhattan, and while no restoration can scrub away the accumulated layers of history, its anniversary can be taken as an invitation to take a fresh look. What if, instead of seeking out an artifact of the past, you could experience the film in its own present tense? Not, in other words, as a flashback to 1960, enticing as that may be, but as 90 minutes of right now.

That kind of time travel is part of the special allure of movies, and “Breathless,” precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then. And yet even as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, record the sights and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are infused with an unmistakable nostalgia. This is not something a latter-day viewer — perhaps besotted by secondhand memories of vintage cars circling the Place de la Concorde or pretty young women selling The New York Herald Tribune in front of cafes — brings to “Breathless.” Rather, the film’s evident and self-conscious desire to tap into a reservoir of existing references and associations is a sign of its director’s obsession with other movies.

You don’t have to recognize this film’s overt cinematic allusions to be aware of its indebtedness. When Michel (Mr. Belmondo) pauses in front of a movie theater to admire an image of Humphrey Bogart, he is confirming what we already know about him, which is that he is a cinematic construct, a man who has perhaps seen too many movies invented by another man who has spent his adult life doing almost nothing else. As a satellite orbiting the twin suns of the Paris Cinémathèque and the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Mr. Godard was an ardent champion of the Hollywood directors whose reputation as artists is one of France’s great gifts to America and the world. Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang — and perhaps above all Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchock: these were not just influences on “Breathless,” but axioms in its universe of meaning.

The phenomenon of movie-mad moviemakers is a familiar one by now. The young American directors of the 1970s — including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich and George Lucas — used to be identified as members of “the film generation” because they had grown up compulsively watching movies, assimilating genre conventions and shot selections that would become the raw material of their own work. Twenty years later, Quentin Tarantino, whose production company is named after Mr. Godard’s 1964 film “Bande à Part,” would refresh and extend this tradition of film-geek filmmaking. Mr. Tarantino’s career consists of a series of genre pastiches and homages that manage to feel startlingly novel, esoteric formal exercises that are nonetheless accessible pieces of popular entertainment.

“Breathless” was there first. Which is to say that it was already late. Seen from its most unflattering angle, it is a thin and derivative film noir. A generic tough guy steals a car, shoots a policeman, sweet-talks a series of women, hobnobs with his underworld pals and tries to stay a step ahead of the dogged detectives on his trail. His poses and attitudes seem borrowed, arising less from any social or psychological condition or biographical facts than from a desire to be as cool as the guys in the movies.

The wonder is that he surpasses them, and that “Breathless,” quoting from so many other movies (and shuffling together cultural references that include Faulkner, Jean Renoir, Mozart and Bach as well as Hollywood movies), still feels entirely original. It still, that is, has the power to defy conventional expectations about what a movie should be while providing an utterly captivating moviegoing experience. A coherent plot, strong and credible emotions and motivations, convincing performances, visual continuity — all of these things are missing from “Breathless,” disregarded with a cavalier insouciance that feels like liberation. It turns out that a movie — this movie, anyway — doesn’t need any of those things, and that they might get in the way of other, more immediate pleasures. You are free, in other words, to revel in the beauty of Paris and Jean Seberg, the exquisite sangfroid of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the restless velocity of Mr. Godard’s shooting style. And style, for those 90 minutes, is — to phrase it in the absolute, hyperbolic terms Mr. Godard has always favored — everything.

In a way, that skeptical young man was right: “Breathless” is not serious. It is a lark, a joke, a travesty of everything earnest and responsible that the cinema can (and perhaps should) provide. Is it a love story? A crime story? A cautionary tale or an act of brazen seduction? All of these things and none of them. It proceeds entirely by its own rules and on the momentum of its director’s audacity. That music! Those tracking shots that seem to snake through the streets of Paris in a single sprint! That long scene — almost a third of the movie’s running time — in which the two main characters laze around in a long postcoital seminar, talking about love, death, literature and music while the camera floats around them.

“Breathless” is a pop artifact and a daring work of art, made at a time when the two possibilities existed in a state of almost perfect convergence. That is the source of its uniqueness. Much as it may have influenced what was to come later, there is still nothing else quite like it. Its sexual candor is still surprising, and even now, at 50, it is still cool, still new, still — after all this time! — a bulletin from the future of movies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html





New Inks Could Mean Cheaper OLED Screens

DuPont has developed a printing process to bring down the cost of high-performance displays.
Katherine Bourzac

Organic light emitting diode, or OLED, displays seem to have it all: energy efficiency and a beautiful, crisp picture that refreshes rapidly. But it's difficult to make them on a large scale, so OLED televisions remain very expensive. Last week, DuPont Displays announced the development of a manufacturing process that the company says can be used to print large, high-performance OLED televisions at volumes that should bring down costs. Using a custom-made printer from Japanese manufacturer Dainippon Screen, DuPont says it can print a 50 inch-television in under two minutes, and testing of the displays shows their performance is reliable--the displays should last 15 years.

Display makers have struggled to scale up the manufacturing of OLEDs while maintaining high performance and low costs. "The key question is, when you scale up, does the cost per square inch drop or go up?" says William Feehery, president of DuPont Displays.

OLEDs on the market today rely on an expensive, small-scale technique called shadow-mask evaporation to pattern the light-emitting organic molecules that make up the pixels in these displays. LG's 15-inch OLED television, the biggest on the market, is set to come out in the United States this year at a cost of $2,725. At these prices, OLEDs can't compete with liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), which are relatively inexpensive because manufacturers can make them at large volumes.

One of the most promising alternatives to shadow-mask deposition is printing, which is compatible with manufacturing large screens. But printing is difficult to do reliably, and the resulting devices have lagged behind the performance and durability of those made using conventional techniques. It's been a major materials challenge to develop inks that won't bleed during the printing process, that have the desired electrical and optical properties, and that don't deteriorate over time.

OLED displays are made up of 12 to 15 layers of materials. In each pixel the red, green, and blue light-emitting materials are positioned side by side and sandwiched between materials that bring electrical current in and out of the device and that allow light to leave it. When these layers blend together during printing, device performance suffers.

DuPont has addressed this problem by using active molecules in the inks used to print each layer that are insoluble in the inks used to print the adjacent layers. This is more complex than it may sound, says Feehery. "Each of these materials is a major development effort on its own, and having to tie it to the ones above and below it imposes a lot of constraints," he says.

The company worked with Dainippon Screen to develop a multi-nozzle printer for the new inks. "The Dainippon printer works like a garden hose," says Feehery. It generates a continuous stream of ink, rather than droplets, and moves over a surface at rates of four to five meters per second while patterning a display. DuPont says that its red, green, and blue OLED materials can make displays that will last 15 years. (Reliability over time has been a concern for printed OLEDs.)

Feehery says DuPont's process is simple enough to compete on cost with LCDs. "Now we can say it works, and is worth scaling up," says Feehery. DuPont will license the manufacturing process and sell the materials to display manufacturers.

The company will face competition, though. Many other companies are working on OLED inks, including Universal Display Corporation in the United States, Merck in Germany, and Sumitomo Chemical in Japan. And Kateeva, a startup in Menlo Park, CA, is developing OLED-printing equipment that combines the volume of ink-jet printing with the performance of devices made through shadow-mask fabrication.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25337/?a=f





Indian Company Trains Small Army to Meet 3D Surge
Mike Collett-White

India's Reliance MediaWorks, part of the Reliance ADA group, is training a small army of artists to meet the rise in demand for 3D films following the huge success of James Cameron's "Avatar" and other films.

Films like "Avatar," with its record-shattering $2.7 billion global box office, "Alice in Wonderland" and "Clash of the Titans, have convinced studios to spend extra cash and add a third dimension to movies to boost box office earnings.

While film directors like Cameron debate whether converting 2D films to 3D, or filming directly in 3D, is the best way forward in the future, studios are using conversions as the most cost-effective way to meet audience demand.

Reliance, part of the conglomerate owned by Indian billionaire Anil Ambani, has begun training more than 2,700 artists to make 2D pictures into 3D in the next year or so.

Based in India, they aim to process between 10-15 films a year, each worth between $8-15 million to the company, targeting "blue chip" projects from major Hollywood studios.

"We are looking at focusing on A-list clients," Anil Arjun, CEO of Reliance MediaWorks, told Reuters. "And while scale is important, volume is not necessarily the key driver," he said.

Experts in the field warn that the laborious task of high-quality conversion is complex, but Reliance hopes to prove doubters wrong with its first film, likely this year.

When asked if he thought the 3D project a risky one at time of economic uncertainty, Arjun replied: "In 2009, probably the worst year for the world economy, the film industry grew substantially. And we also focus on next-generation applications like 2D to 3D and high definition."

Exploding Growth

In fact, the industry installing digital projection systems in theatres, anticipating huge future demand for 3D films.

The number of digital movie screens in European Union countries, for example, went from about 1,500 in 2008 to nearly 4,700 in 2009, according to industry group MEDIA Salles. And consumer electronic makers such as Sony Corp are just now starting to ramp up 3D TV set production for homes.

To insure quality, Reliance has linked with In-Three, an established 3D player in Hollywood which shared its technology and will oversee its progress via information sent down Reliance's high capacity fiber-optic cable.

"They reckon that a film like 'Clash of the Titans', even though the 3D was very poorly received (by critics), probably added $20 million to the opening weekend box office in the United States," said Patrick von Sychowski, head of strategy at Film and Media Services, Reliance MediaWorks.

"That means (the conversion) probably paid for itself...in the opening weekend, so...it's something that studios are willing to spend on because they see the immediate paybacks.

"Right now, on the back of 'Avatar' and 'Alice in Wonderland', everybody wants every one of their (major) titles to be in 3D. The world has only just woken up to 3D and you can't magically create a facility able to handle 10-15 titles overnight. We're ramping up really quickly."

As well as 2D to 3D conversion, another 1,200 artists will restore old films so they can be watched in high definition.

Damian Wader, vice president of business development at In-Three, said the Reliance tie-in was not about acquiring cheap labor in India, but did concede that it would represent significant savings.

"It's not this cheap labor that everybody keeps quoting," he told Reuters. "It is skilled labor. There's no doubt about it. But it certainly is done in a less expensive way than it would be if you ran something similar in America."

He added that providing another company with the company's technology should only help boost the nascent business.

"We already have turned people away," he said. "There's so much work to be done out there, we need to work together."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64G3ZW20100517





Google Moves to TVs With Help From Intel and Sony
Brad Stone

Google wants to bring the Internet to a part of the home that for the most part it has not yet reached: the television set.

At Google’s annual I/O conference here on Thursday, the search giant announced that it is leading a group of companies, including Sony and Intel, in an effort called Google TV.

Google’s Android software, originally developed for smartphones, will power the new service, set to run on a range of high-definition TVs and devices that connect to TVs, which will go on sale later this year.

Google said its Google TV service would combine traditional television programming with Internet video, and would allow people to easily search for programs without scrolling through unwieldy onscreen TV directories.

The effort is likely to face formidable challenges. Google must convince TV manufacturers other than Sony to use its software. And consumers have demonstrated little interest, so far, in connecting to the Web via their TVs.

What they have shown, though, is price sensitivity, and the high-powered Intel chips running these new TV services are likely to add perhaps as much as $100 to televisions optimized for the Internet, according to analysts, although the companies did not discuss prices.

Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, the ailing Japanese electronics giant and the third-largest maker of flat panel televisions in the United States market, appeared on Google’s stage to say Sony would build Google’s software into a line of its high-definition televisions that connect to the Internet, as well as one of its Blu-ray players. He was joined by the chief executives of Best Buy, Adobe, Intel, Dish Networks and Logitech in supporting the new software.

Intel will provide its Atom processors for the devices. It has spent billions developing those chips over the last few years in a high-stakes push to crack the market for consumer electronics.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, noted that people had been talking about bringing the Web to the TV for two decades. “It’s much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology and a brand-new technology than those of us from the brand-new technology thought,” he said.

Devices running Google TV will also be able to run applications written for Android phones, and will feature Google’s Chrome Web browser, which would allow consumers to surf the Web from their television sets.

Logitech, a maker of peripheral devices for computers like keyboards, mice and webcams, will manufacture a set-top box running Google TV, called the Buddy Box, which will allow people to get Google TV without having to buy a new television. It will also work on new kinds of remote controls and peripherals to allow people to surf the Web from their couches.

Many companies, of course, have already tried to bridge the gap between the television and the Web. TiVo, Boxee, Roku and Vudu, now a division of Wal-Mart, all make devices that offer a variety of Internet video on the TV. All have struggled to get mainstream consumers on board.

Roku has sold more than 500,000 set-top boxes, but its sales took off only when the price of those devices sank below $100, said Anthony Wood, the company’s chief executive. Noting the premium prices that devices running Google TV would probably charge, Mr. Wood said, “I don’t think it’s a threat as it is today, but certainly over time Google is going to get market share.”

TV manufacturers already sell so-called connected televisions with limited Internet content. Such televisions are likely to make up a quarter of all TVs sold this year, according to analysts. But many consumers do not even know they are buying that feature, and they usually make their shopping decisions based on the size and appearance of the set.

One advantage Google believes it has in courting TV manufacturers is the success of its Android platform for mobile phones — and the fact that TV makers like LG and Samsung already sell phones running Android. On Thursday, Google said that 100,000 new Android phones are activated every day, up from 60,000 in April — second in the industry only to phones from Research In Motion.

Google executives trumpeted the notion that Google seems to have already surpassed its rival Apple in this respect, although Apple still has a far larger base of devices running the iPhone operating system. It recently reported that it had shipped 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches, and more than a million iPad tablets.

Apple could double down on the TV business soon as well. It currently sells an Apple TV set-top box, which it deems an experiment, and most analysts view as a lackluster product. But analysts have long said that it now makes sense for Apple to begin selling its own flat-panel televisions that link to its iTunes content offerings.

“Google TV is more than anything finally going to create some energy over at Apple to make a television, or at least a version of the iPad that docks with a TV,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

In an interview, Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, used the momentum of Android, a free open-source platform with few rules governing its use, to draw a sharp distinction with the control exerted by Apple over the iPhone.

“If you believe that the only way to get a good smartphone is to bet on one man, one device, one carrier, and one choice, that is a different model than we believe in,” Mr. Gundotra said. “We believe innovation doesn’t come from one man, it comes from all of us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/te.../21google.html





An Ad Engine to Put ‘Mad Men’ Out of Business
Anne Eisenberg

NO costly copy writers or heirs of “Mad Men” are needed to write a new kind of ad for small businesses that want to advertise on the Web: computers create the ads instead.

New software called PlaceLocal builds display ads automatically, scouring the Internet for references to a neighborhood restaurant, a grocery store or another local business. Then it combines the photographs it finds with reviews, customer comments and other text into a customized online ad for the business.

The program, developed by PaperG, an advertising technology company in New Haven, Conn., is aimed in part at small businesses just beginning to advertise on the Web sites of local newspapers or television stations, said Victor Wong, its chief executive. Such advertisers will have a growing number of choices as national companies like ESPN create local Web franchises like ESPN New York, said Randall Rothenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of more than 400 companies selling online advertising.

PaperG’s PlaceLocal is simple to use, said April Koral, co-publisher of The Tribeca Trib, a community newspaper in lower Manhattan. She tried the program to see how well it could create a display ad for a local Tribeca restaurant — a job usually done by hand at the paper. “All you have to put in is the company name and address,” she said.

Then PlaceLocal takes over, gathering basics like telephone number, hours of business, maps and directions, and adding positive comments extracted from local blogs. Samples of ads may be seen at www.paperg.com, the PaperG Web site.

PaperG’s program is up and running on 32 local media Web sites, including Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago, and on 29 network TV affiliates owned or managed by Hearst Television, said PaperG’s chief operating officer, Roger Lee. The company has also signed up the McClatchy newspaper chain and will soon be on some of its Web sites, he said.

Sales representatives at the media companies who have signed up with PaperG often use PlaceLocal to build sample ads they show to small businesses, said Mr. Wong. Pricing, typically a flat monthly fee, is set by the media company and varies from about $150 a month to $500 or more, based primarily on how many times the ad is shown. PaperG takes a percentage of this fee, he said. In the future, small businesses will also be able to create their ads by going directly to the PaperG Web site, Mr. Lee said.

Shaina Park, a sales representative at Time Out New York who handles Web and print advertising by local bars and restaurants, is using PlaceLocal to sell ads. “Instead of sending customers a rate card, I send them an ad that the program has built,” she said. “It’s easier to sell ads if customers have an example in front of them.”

Because the program creates an ad in moments, it saves the time of people on the Web site who might normally need to build the ad themselves, or work with the customer to build one. That can translate into lower charges, Ms. Park said.

Normally Time Out New York requires companies to submit their own ads that adhere to the specifications of the site. “Images have to be a certain size and a certain format,” she said. “But often local clients don’t have those at their disposal.” She hopes that the instant ads and lower prices will bring in new small businesses that have been put off by the difficulties of advertising. “The program makes the ads much more accessible to local clients with smaller budgets,” she said.

The program can pan over photographs in the ad, zooming in to show off images of a restaurant or real estate listing, Mr. Wong said. Even if the business has no Web site, the program can usually turn up a wealth of information on it to include in the ad. “For a lawyer, we might find information in the yellow pages or on a Web site that rates and reviews lawyers,” he said. For a local company that bakes dog biscuits, the program might find comments from pleased shoppers that have appeared online, rotating different quotes in the ads as they run.

Gaby Benalil, who lives in Albuquerque, recently signed up at the Web site of a local TV station, KOAT, to advertise her new business offering cello and vocal performance lessons. “I’m just starting out,” she said, “and I don’t have much of a budget to invest in advertising.” PlaceLocal created the ad for Vocello Music Lessons that will run on the KOAT’s Web site. It will cost $200 for its six-week run, she said.

PaperG has raised over a million dollars from, among others, Brian O’Kelley, chief executive of AppNexus, an advertising technology company.

COMPUTERS are not only creating ads; they are also adding new information to them automatically. The Web site TheDigitel Charleston is offering advertisers a free updating service, said Ken Hawkins, editor. “People typically put in an ad and then don’t change it. But messages can get stale very quickly,” he said. If a customer, like a pizza shop, decides to run a special, the customer can send the revision from a blog or Facebook page, or from Twitter.

Ads that are easily updated this way will have an advantage, Mr. Rothenberg said. “It’s really important on the local ad level to make the whole process simple,” he added. “The dry cleaners, the grocery — they want the process to be easy and visible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/business/23novel.html





Sarah McLachlan Says Lilith Sales "Pretty Soft"
Gary Graff

As Sarah McLachlan prepares to resurrect the Lilith Fair after an 11-year break, she acknowledges that ticket sales for the female-centered package are "pretty soft" right now.

The trek kicks off June 27 in Calgary, with 36 dates before wrapping August 16 in Dallas. McLachlan, one of Lilith's co-founders, will be joined on the bill by the likes of Sheryl Crow, Mary J. Blige, Carly Simon, Rihanna and Selena Gomez.

There has been some grumbling about ticket prices, which are more than $250 (before fees) in some markets.

"There's about 300 seats out of 16,000 or whatever that are $250," she says. "Then there's 9,000 that are 25 dollars, so come on. We're working our hardest to have reasonably priced tickets so it can be accessible for everyone and that people will want to come. We might get slaughtered, I don't know, but I kind of have blind faith in the fact we're putting on a really great show and we always have, and that will bring people in the end."

McLachlan herself says she's particularly excited about having the Go-Go's and Bangles take part in some of this year's dates. "That's my high school days," she notes.

She's also pleased to be able to mix new Lilith participants such as Blige, Loretta Lynn, Cat Power and Metric with returnees and "friends" like Crow, Emmylou Harris and the Indigo Girls.

The tour will coincide with the June 15 release of McLachlan's first album in seven years, "Laws of Illusion." The first single, "Loving You is Easy," is currently available at digital retailers.

"I can't wait to play these new ('Laws of Illusion') songs live, but the trouble is, doing Lilith, everybody wants the hits, so I have to be careful," McLachlan said. "I'll rehearse four or five of the (new) songs and just rotate 'em and do two each night or something like that."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H0XY20100518





This Week's CD Sales Worst Since 1991
Andrew Martin

It's frustrating to know that when an album like the National's High Violet does well on the Billboard charts, it happens at a time when record sales plummeting to figures from 1991. That was the year Nielsen Soundscan began tracking album sales. And, apparently, those numbers hadn't been that low in nearly 20 years. That was, of course, until this past week, when just about 5.3 million records were sold.

It's not much of a surprise when you look at how Justin Bieber's multi-chart-topping My World 2.0 only sold a bit more than 60,000 copies and still came in at number 1. It also just missed breaking the record for a number 1 album with least copies sold. But that title is still held by the Dreamgirls soundtrack, which just broke 60,000 sold back in 2007, according to Billboard.

Also, as Joseph Plambeck of the New York Times' Arts Beat section points out, there were no "major" albums released this week. And I can only guess that these numbers will be ridiculously bloated in June with albums coming from the likes of Diddy, Drake, Eminem, and many other big names. Ah well, I'll take this in stride if this translates into more meaningful records like High Violet sitting in the Top 5. Also, props to the Dead Weather for sitting pretty high, too.

The Billboard Top 10 for the last week with copies sold rounded off:

1. Justin Bieber - My World 2.0 - 60,000

2. Lady Antebellum - Need You Now - 54,000

3. The National - High Violet - 51,000

4. AC/DC - Iron Man 2 - 48,000

5. The Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards - 45,000

6. Carole King and James Taylor - Live at the Troubadour - 44,000

7. Usher - Raymond v. Raymond - 43,000

8. Charice - Charice - 43,000

9. Godsmack - The Oracle - 43,000

10. As I Lay Dying - Powerless Rise - 38,000
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/this-w...ce-1991/40633/





UMG Exec Says Piracy Is Not Stoppable
FMQB

Francis Keeling, head of digital at Universal Music Group International, said at the Great Escape music convention in the U.K. that music piracy is unstoppable, though labels can strive to change its social acceptance. "Are you going to stop piracy? No you're not," Keeling stated, according to BBC News. "To try and set that as an objective is just not going to succeed. Can we make piracy socially unacceptable? Absolutely, and that has to be our ambition around the world."

For example, Keeling said that markets such as Spain and Italy, where file sharing is part of the norm, are particularly problematic. "We've got markets like Spain and Italy, where [people say] 'You buy music? What are you doing buying music when you can get it for free?' Clearly those markets are in the situation where, unless we can turn those markets around, we're going to have a major problem having a music business there," he said.

Universal has thrown its weight behind the U.K.'s Digital Economy Act, which will impose sanctions against serial music pirates, including the possibility of suspending their Internet service. Keeling stressed that the law is the "right solution." The details of the sanctions and how they will be imposed are still being worked out, but "the solution needs to be fair, proportionate and implemented well," Keeling told delegates.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1805883


















Until next week,

- js.



















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