Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 22nd, ’05 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 20-10-05, 08:03 PM

"Supermodels not wanted. We want your brain." – Early KaZaa recruitment ad

"I have no idea what I'll be doing, but I know it will be reverse engineering, and I'm sure it will be interesting." – DVD Jon

"It's not clear that anyone could even make 'Eyes on the Prize' today because of rights clearances." – Peter Jaszi

"There's so much information out there that a lot of you are spending too much time keeping up with things and not doing important things - like your job." – Mike Masnick

"I'm here because I hope you will agree that an uncoerced, uncoercable press, though at times irritating, is vital to the perpetuation of the freedom and democracy we so often take for granted." – Judith Miller

"This legislation will make the unregulated gun industry the most pampered industry in America." – Kristen Rand

"A global information system needs a culture of sharing." – Arthur Carty

October 22nd, ’05

The Hidden Cost of Documentaries
Nancy Ramsey

THE moment seemed innocuous enough.

Michael Vaccaro, a fourth grader, had just left P.S. 112 in Brooklyn and was headed home with his mother. Two filmmakers were in front of him, their camera capturing his every movement on video, when his mother's cellphone rang.

"It was such an indicator of today's culture," said Amy Sewell, a producer of "Mad Hot Ballroom," the documentary that follows New York City children as they learn ballroom dancing and prepare for a citywide contest. "Michael's mom had just asked him how school was, her cellphone rings, she answers it, and the look on his face says, 'I don't get to tell my mom about my day.' "

In addition, the ringtone was "Gonna Fly Now," the theme from "Rocky," and the neighborhood was Bensonhurst. "How perfect was that?" Ms. Sewell said.

Perfect, but a problem. Had the ringtone been a common telephone ring, the scene could have dropped into the final edit without a hitch, the moment providing a quick bit of emotional texture to the film. But EMI Music Publishing, which owns the rights to "Gonna Fly Now," was asking the first-time producer for $10,000 to use those six seconds.

Ms. Sewell considered relying on fair use, the aspect of copyright law that allows the unlicensed use of material when the public benefit significantly outweighs the costs or losses to the copyright owner. But her lawyer advised against it. "I'm a real Norma Rae-type personality," Ms. Sewell said, "but the lawyer said, 'Honestly, for your first film, you don't have enough money to fight the music industry.' " After four months of negotiating - "I begged and begged," Ms. Sewell said - she ended up paying EMI $2,500. (Total music clearance costs for "Mad Hot Ballroom," which featured songs of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, came to $170,000; total costs over all were about $500,000.)

Today, anyone armed with a video camera and movie-editing software can make a documentary. But can everyone afford to make it legally?

Clearance costs - licensing fees paid to copyright holders for permission to use material like music, archival photographs and film and news clips - can send expenses for filmmakers soaring into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation," for instance - a portrait of a young man's relationship with his mentally ill mother that Mr. Caouette edited at home, on a laptop computer - was widely reported to have cost $218. In fact, after a distributor picked up "Tarnation," improved the quality with post-production editing and cleared music rights, the real cost came to more than $460,000. Clearance expenses were about half the total.

Securing rights to music has long been a serious challenge. Ten years ago, for instance, the filmmaker Steve James paid $5,000 to include the song "Happy Birthday" in "Hoop Dreams," the 1994 documentary that followed two Chicago basketball players through high school. One memorable scene portrayed a young man's 18th birthday, as the family sang "and his mom baked him a cake," Mr. James said. "It was an important scene, there was some amazement that Arthur had made it to 18. Of course, we wanted that in."

Scrutiny by rights holders has increased, Mr. James said, as the profit potential in documentaries has risen. "When I was starting out, documentaries were under the umbrella of journalism," he said. "Now, the more commercially successful documentaries have become and the more they're in the public eye, the more they're perceived as entertainment."

In another change, said Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University, "rights holders are slicing their bundle of rights in finer and finer ways and selling them off in smaller and smaller pieces." He asked: "Would music copyright owners 10 years ago have predicted they'd be making a substantial part of their money over ringtones on cellphones?" (It's now a reported $3 billion industry.) As a result, he said, there's been "a tremendous upsurge in intellectual property consciousness and anxiety on the part of all kinds of users."

Mr. Jaszi is an author, with Patricia Aufderheide, the director of American University's Center for Social Media, of a report titled "Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers," for which 45 filmmakers were interviewed. Among the more striking examples he cites is "Eyes on the Prize," the series on the civil rights movement. Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard, has called "Eyes" "the most sophisticated and most poignant documentary of African-American history ever made." But it was last broadcast in 1993, and while schools or libraries may have a copy, it is not legally available for sale or rent on DVD or video.

"There's a whole generation out there who have not seen the program," said Sandy Forman, an entertainment lawyer heading a project to reclear the rights so that "Eyes" can be rebroadcast and distributed to the educational market. "When the rights were originally cleared, they were acquired for different terms. Some were in perpetuity, some were for 3 years, some for 7, some for 10." Once just one group of rights expired - and there are 272 still photographs and 492 minutes of scenes from more than 80 archives, plus the music - "we had to pull the film from distribution."

In August, the project received $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and $250,000 from the New York philanthropist Richard Gilder. PBS's "American Experience" is considering a 2006 broadcast of "Eyes."

"It's not clear that anyone could even make 'Eyes on the Prize' today because of rights clearances," Mr. Jaszi said. "What's really important here is that documentary commitment to telling the truth is being compromised by the need to accommodate perceived intellectual and copyright constraints."

On occasion, storytelling takes a back seat to legal and financial considerations. When Jon Else was completing his film "Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle," a backstage look at an opera company that won a Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, he wanted to use a scene in which the stagehands watched "The Simpsons" as Wagner roared overhead.

"I felt it was a wonderful cultural moment to see two stagehands playing checkers while the gods are singing about destiny and free will and Marge and Homer are arguing on the television set," Mr. Else said. "We got permission from Matt Groening's company," which produces "The Simpsons," and then went to Fox.

"The first response was $10,000 for four seconds," Mr. Else said. "When I explained this was for public television, they replied that was their public television minimum. We eventually worked our way down to $7,000, but it was at the end of production, we were exhausted and out of money." It became more complicated. "Fox said, Wait a minute, any chance you're going to sell this? It wasn't the case of Fox being intractable jerks; it's just this odd gray area.

"At the last second, I replaced it with a shot of a film that I own," he said, adding, "I'll burn in journalistic hell for that."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html

Congress OKs Gun Industry Lawsuit Shield
Laurie Kellman

Congress gave the gun lobby its top legislative priority Thursday, passing a bill protecting the firearms industry from massive crime-victim lawsuits. President Bush said he will sign it.

"Our laws should punish criminals who use guns to commit crimes, not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products," Bush said in a statement.

The House voted 283-144 to send the bill to the president after supporters, led by the National Rifle Association, proclaimed it vital to protect the industry from being bankrupted by huge jury awards. Opponents, waging a tough battle against growing public support for the legislation, called it proof of the gun lobby's power over the Republican-controlled Congress.

"This legislation will make the unregulated gun industry the most pampered industry in America," said Kristen Rand, director of the Violence Policy Center.

Under the measure, a half-dozen pending lawsuits by local governments against the industry would be dismissed. Anti-gun groups say some lawsuits filed by individuals could be thrown out, too.

The Senate passed the bill in July.

The bill's passage was the NRA's top legislative priority and would give Bush and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill a rare victory at a time when some top GOP leaders are under indictment or investigation.

"Lawsuits seeking to hold the firearms industry responsible for the criminal and unlawful use of its products are brazen attempts to accomplish through litigation what has not been achieved by legislation and the democratic process," House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., told his colleagues.

Reese reports opponents see the measure's strong support as testament to the gun lobby's influence.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, did not vote. He is in Texas in connection with his indictment in an alleged scheme to violate state election law.

Propelled by GOP election gains and the incidents of lawlessness associated with the passing of Hurricane Katrina, support for the bill has grown since a similar measure passed the House last year and was killed in the Senate.

Horrific images of people without the protection of public safety in New Orleans made a particular impression on viewers who had never before felt unsafe, according to the gun lobby.

"Americans saw a complete collapse of the government's ability to protect them," said Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president.

"That burnt in, those pictures of people standing there defending their lives and defending their property and their family," he added, "where the one source of comfort was a firearm."

With support from four new Republicans this session of Congress, the bill passed the Senate for the first time in July. House passage never was in doubt because it had 257 co-sponsors, far more than the 218 needed to pass.

The bill's authors say it still would allow civil suits against individual parties who have been found guilty of criminal wrongdoing by the courts.

Opponents say the strength of the bill's support is testament to the influence of the gun lobby. If the bill had been law when the relatives of six victims of convicted Washington-area snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo sued the gun dealer from which they obtained their rifle, the dealer would not have agreed to pay the families and victims $2.5 million.

"It is shameful that Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that guarantees their gun-dealing cronies receive special treatment and are above the law," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla.

Bush has said he supports the bill, which would prohibit lawsuits against the firearms industry for damages resulting from the unlawful use of a firearm or ammunition. Gun makers and dealers still would be subject to product liability, negligence or breach of contract suits, the bill's authors say.

Democrats and Republicans alike court the NRA at election time, and the bill has garnered bipartisan support. But the firearms industry still gave 88 percent of its campaign contributions, or $1.2 million, to Republicans in the 2004 election cycle.

Gun control advocates, meanwhile, gave 98 percent of their contributions, or $93,700, to Democrats that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

---

The bill is S. 397.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME

Microsoft Recants Disputed Music Contracts
AP

Microsoft Corp., already under government scrutiny over its behavior toward competitors, told manufacturers of iPod-like portable audio devices that they were not allowed to distribute rivals' music player software, but then pulled back after one company protested.

The Justice Department said the incident was ''unfortunate,'' but that government lawyers decided to drop the issue because Microsoft agreed 10 days later to change the contracts. The government disclosed details of the dispute in a federal court document made available Thursday.

The disputed contracts would have affected portable music players that compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s wildly popular iPod.

Legal and industry experts said Microsoft's demands probably would have violated the landmark 2002 antitrust settlement between the company and the Bush administration. They expressed astonishment that Microsoft was not more careful, given its mandatory legal training for employees about antitrust rules and continued monitoring by the Justice Department and a federal judge over its business deals through late 2007.

''One has to be skeptical that either the internal training is not working, in which case heads ought to be rolling, or that the lessons of the case are being ignored,'' said Albert A. Foer, head of the Washington-based American Antitrust Institute, which supports more aggressive U.S. antitrust policies.

Howard University law professor Andrew Gavil said he wonders whether Microsoft's early demands -- which would have compelled manufacturers to distribute to consumers only Microsoft's Windows Media Player software -- were a genuine mistake or a signal the company intends to revert to its hardball tactics.

''It's somewhat amazing it even happened,'' said Gavil, who has closely followed the Microsoft case. ''It's troubling that anyone inside Microsoft was still thinking this was a legitimate business strategy.''

Microsoft said it recanted its demands after lawyers reviewed the contracts and after an unspecified industry rival complained. ''We have a legal process in place that prevents these incidents from occurring,'' spokeswoman Stacy Drake McCredy said.

The disputed contracts were drafts sent to manufacturers before Microsoft's lawyers reviewed them, said one lawyer familiar with details of the incident. This lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to make public statements about the antitrust case.

The contracts, part of a campaign Microsoft called ''easy start,'' affected one of the rare technology sectors where Microsoft is not already dominant: handheld music players and online music services. The software giant and others have struggled to match the runaway success of Apple iPod player and iTunes music service.

Microsoft wants consumers to use its media software to download songs and transfer them onto their portable music players from Internet subscription services, such as those from Napster Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Each company currently offers its own media software.

Before the disclosure of the document involving portable music players, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had set a hearing for this coming Wednesday to review the adequacy of the antitrust settlement. It was unclear whether she will challenge lawyers from Microsoft or the government over the contacts.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...Antitrust.html

Accused Spyware Installer Settles Lawsuit
AP

The former chief executive of a company accused of secretly installing adware and spyware on millions of home computers agreed to pay $750,000 in penalties after an investigation, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Thursday.

In April, Spitzer sued Los Angeles-based Intermix Media Inc., saying the company was responsible for sending software tens of millions of times on computers across the country and three million times in New York.

Adware and spyware deliver nuisance pop-up advertisements and can slow and crash personal computers. Spitzer said such programs are fraudulent and threaten to discourage e-commerce.

Shortly after filing the suit, Spitzer's office began investigating Intermix's founder and former CEO Brad Greenspan, Spitzer spokesman Brad Maione said.

Greenspan, 32, served as CEO of Intermix from July 2002 to October 2003. Investigators said he directed employees to bundle adware with other free programs and to make the software difficult to remove.

''This agreement sends a message that intrusive and deceptive practices will not be tolerated,'' Spitzer said.

Greenspan did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement. In a statement, he blamed the company's current management for increasing the amount of adware attached to Intermix's offerings and with deceiving investigators.

''My departure from Intermix in 2003 preceded the focus of the New York attorney general's investigation on Intermix' practices beginning in late 2004,'' he said. ''During my tenure at the company, the adware division was a small part of the business ... I continue to stand by my statements that it was the current Intermix Management team that ramped up the company's adware-download program aggressively during the investigation by the New York attorney general and misrepresented the status of the adware pop-up product.''

Intermix runs a collection of Web sites featuring quizzes, games and jokes that it packages for advertisers. It also owns MySpace.com, the popular social-networking site.

Spitzer said that Intermix's agreement to pay $7.5 million in penalties over three years and stop distributing adware programs was approved by state Supreme Court Judge Judith Gische.

Intermix ''is pleased to put this historical matter behind us,'' said Linda Goldstein, an attorney representing the company. ''This was activity in the company's past and to a large extent had been largely ended by the time the investigation began.''

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Dreifach disputed those assertions, saying Intermix continued to attach spyware to its programs well into 2005.

''Our investigation began in September 2004 and we found numerous examples of programs'' bundled with spyware, he said. ''We contacted them in December and we were fairly surprised they went ahead with these egregious practices. It continued essentially to the eve of our suit.''

Software also agreed to pay $35,000 to end an investigation by the attorney general's office of its bundling of adware with free screensavers without providing notice to consumers, Spitzer's office said.

News Corp., the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, last month completed its purchase of Intermix for $580 million in cash.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomwire. htm

Sony BMG Sued in Bribery Case
Jeff Leeds

TSR Records, an independent music label, filed suit yesterday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment, accusing it of unfairly dominating radio play lists through the use of bribes to programmers and other illicit tactics.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, comes three months after Sony BMG agreed to pay $10 million to settle allegations by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, that it had used improper radio promotion practices, including payola, or undisclosed payments to broadcasters.

TSR, of Tarzana, Calif., said independent labels were "systematically excluded" from radio play lists as a result of record company tactics. It contended that Sony BMG violated federal and California antitrust laws and improperly interfered with its business prospects. The case seeks unspecified monetary damages and attorneys' fees.

Tom Hayden, the label's chief executive, said in an interview that he often found that deserving acts, including a TSR rock band, Get Set Go, had been shut out of stations because of improper conduct by bigger labels.

Sony BMG said the company would not comment on pending litigation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/bu.../19payola.html

Publishers Sue Google Over Scanning Plans
Hillel Italie

Just weeks after a leading authors' organization sued Google Inc. for copyright infringement, the Association of American Publishers has also filed suit against the search engine giant's plans to scan and index books for the Internet.

Under the Google Print Library Project, millions of copyrighted books from three major university libraries - Harvard, Stanford and Michigan - will be indexed on the Internet unless the copyright holder notifies the company by Nov. 1 about which volumes should be excluded. Two other libraries, Oxford University and the New York Public Library, will contribute only out-of-copyright materials.

Google has called the project an invaluable chance for books to receive increased exposure. The library project is an offshoot of the Google Print program, for which publishers voluntarily submit copyrighted material.

But in papers filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the publishers association sought a ruling that would support an injunction against illegal scanning and cited the "continuing, irreparable and imminent harm publishers are suffering ... due to Google's willful (copyright) infringement to further its own commercial purposes."

The suit named five publishers as plaintiffs: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. The suit seeks recovery of legal costs, but no additional damages.

Google, in a statement issued Wednesday, called the legal action "short-sighted" and said the project was a "historic effort to make millions of books easier for people to find and buy."

"Creating an easy to use index of books is fair use under copyright law and supports the purpose of copyright: to increase the awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders," David Drummond, Google's general counsel and vice president, corporate development, said in the statement.

The Authors Guild, which represents about 8,000 writers, filed a class action suit for copyright infringement last month. Besides an injunction, the guild is seeking monetary damages.

Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said Wednesday that the publishers' lawsuit followed months of negotiations with Google.

"We spent so much time on this I think half of our board ended up having trouble with their families because of canceling vacations," she said.

Publishers worry that Google is scanning entire books, even though just a limited amount of material will be displayed online. The library project's Nov. 1 deadline, Google's so-called "opt out" provision, was established over the summer in response to such concerns.

But Schroeder said Wednesday that the company still wrongly placed the burden on copyright holders. By contrast, publishers don't object to the larger Google Print program because nothing would be used without explicit permission.

Google has countered that it does not need permission for the library project and calls the "opt out" clause a courtesy. Google's Drummond said through spokesman Nathan Tyler that even after Nov. 1, copyright holders can request that material be removed.

The Google controversy reflects a general debate over the Internet and copyright law. Even the publishers association acknowledges that the project could benefit the book industry, if rights are respected. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow made his most recent book, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," available for free last summer on the Internet, believing that the promotional value greatly outweighed any lost sales.

Schroeder noted that viewpoint, but cited two reasons for still objecting to Google's program.

"First of all, it sets a dangerous precedent. If you allow Google to do it, you allow anybody to do it. It's going to be an impossible task for copyright owners to defend themselves," she said.

"Secondly, the whole principal of copyright law is that you get to decide if it's good for you. Why should Google get to decide? Earlier this week, Google announced a version of its print program was now available in eight European countries, including France, Germany and Spain.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories... ustomwire.htm

Barney: I Sue You, You Sue Me
Declan McCullagh

For a plush purple dinosaur who extols the virtues of affection and amity, Barney can be surprisingly aggressive in his legal demands.

Barney's lawyers at the New York firm of Gibney, Anthony and Flaherty sent stiff warning letters last week to Web sites displaying less-than-flattering images of the plump saurian.

"Your Web site depicts a plush Barney toy in a violent manner or position," Matthew Carlin wrote Tuesday on behalf of Lyons Partnership, which owns the Barney trademark. "We are writing to request that you remove this violent content toward Barney on your Web site."

One of the ostensibly violent sites, a site maintained by Baltimore-area programmer Rob Carlson, depicts a Barney toy suspended from the ceiling. Carlson, who has not removed the photograph, says it has been online for at least five years and nobody has complained before.

Carlin said he could not discuss his law firm's next steps in attempting to remove offensive images of Barney from the Internet. "I really can't comment," he said Monday in a brief telephone conversation.

Another letter from Carlin was directed to Stuart Frankel, who maintains the "Source of All Evil" site with a rendering of a vaguely Satanic cartoon tyrannosaur. "It is unlawful...to use this property without the permission of Lyons Partnership," Carlin wrote. "These materials must be immediately removed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco civil liberties group providing legal representation to Frankel, dismisses the legal threats as nonsense. "I think that Barney is unfortunately looking like he's becoming a recidivist in phony copyright claims," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director.

In 2001, EFF took on Barney's lawyers after they sent out similar cease-and-desist letters. At the time, Cohn wrote back saying that anti-Barney screeds were protected by the First Amendment rights to publish parodies, and Barney's owners never pursued the matter further.

Since then, the EFF managed to break new legal ground by forcing voting machine maker Diebold to write a check to settle allegations of copyright misuse. "We were very happy to cash that check for $125,000 from Diebold when they made phony copyright claims," Cohn said. "I'd be happy to cash one from Barney."

Barney's lawyers have been aggressive in pursing trademark lawsuits before. They once sued the creator of a sports mascot that, as part of its performance, assaulted and generally did violence to a Barney look-alike.

But the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1999 that the performance was a parody and not forbidden by trademark law. "Even if young children--like the 2-year-old who had such a traumatic reaction to the downtrodden Barney--are in attendance, we would expect them to be supervised by parents who could explain the nature of the parody," the court decided.
http://news.com.com/Barney+I+sue+you...3-5898240.html

Japanese City Sued For Copyright Infringement

The Yomiuri Shimbun

A suit was filed Wednesday against the Yokohama municipal government for allegedly infringing the copyright of a painting by posting images of it on the Internet for a public auction.

The suit was filed with the Tokyo District Court by the Art Copyright Center, Ltd., based in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, which as the painting's copyright agent said the city had failed to obtain consent from the painter or the company. It is unusual for a municipal government to be sued over copyright violations. The court's decision could lead to a flurry of cases involving copyright infringement of paintings whose images are posted on the Internet.

According to the bill of complaint, the painting was obtained by the city from a resident in lieu of unpaid city taxes. In February, the city began auctioning goods seized from debtors via the Internet, including the painting. Three images of the painting were posted-- two of the complete picture and one showing a magnified image of the artist's signature. In the suit, the Art Copyright Center says the city did not ask its consent to post said images and was guilty of copyright infringement. The firm asked the court to order the city to take the images off the Internet and pay royalties of 170,000 yen.

According to the Yokohama municipal government, the images were slightly blurred before being posted on the Internet, and in the words of an official, were "not copies, which need a copyright license. Even if they are seen as copies, they were for reference and still don't require a license."

But Atsushi Yamato, an associate professor at the graduate school of Yokohama National University and an expert on copyright law, disagrees. "One needs to get a copyright license for public auctions as well as in other cases," he said. "Changing the image [by blurring], is seen as another violation of copyright." Yamato's opinion is shared by the Copyright Research and Information Center, an incorporated association.

In contrast, the Tokyo metropolitan government, which was the first local authority to hold public auctions of reposessed goods, sided with Yokohama, while the copyright department of the Cultural Affairs Agency took a neutral position, saying, "We would like to wait for the court's decision [before commenting]."

According to the law, copyright is valid for 50 years after the death of the artist, and is not transferred when one buys the work, as in the case of a painting. To reproduce or exhibit a work, it is necessary to obtain a copyright license.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national...14TDY02004.htm

California Sued Over Violent Video Game Ban

Two industry trade groups sued the state of California after the state passed a law barring the sale of violent video games to minors.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former screen "Terminator" who is himself portrayed in several video games based on his Hollywood roles, vowed to fight the suit, which was filed on Monday in federal court in San Jose.

"I will do everything in my power to preserve this new law, and I urge the attorney general to mount a vigorous defense of California's ability to prevent the sale of these games to children," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

"California's new law will ensure parental involvement in determining which video games are appropriate for their children," he said. "I believe strongly that we must give parents the tools to help them protect their children."

The trade group Entertainment Software Association announced its intentions to fight in court immediately after Schwarzenegger signed the ban 10 days ago. Video Software Dealers Association joined in the suit.

"It is not up to any industry or the government to set standards for what kids can see or do; that is the role of parents," said Douglas Lowenstein, the group's president.

"Everyone involved with this misguided law has known from the start that it is an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment freedoms of those who create and sell video games."

Federal courts have ruled against violent video game legislation in Washington state, the city of Indianapolis and St. Louis County in Missouri, saying the moves violated constitutional free speech guarantees.

The California ban came in the wake of lively debate after game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software pulled its best-selling game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" from retailers this summer because of hidden sex scenes.

The state's measure bars the sale and rental to minors of games that show serious injury deemed especially heinous, atrocious or cruel. Violators are subject to a $1,000 fine.
http://news.com.com/Calif.+sued+over...3-5899595.html

U.S. Video Game Sales Down 20 Pct in Sept.-Analyst

U.S. retail sales of console video games fell 20 percent in September, but are seen rebounding at year-end -- the traditionally strong holiday season when

Microsoft Corp. also will launch its new game player, an analyst said on Monday.

Sales of video games for consoles are expected to have fallen to $365 million in the United States in September from $458 million a year earlier, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter forecast in a client note.

Pachter said he expects double-digit declines for September and October.

"We expect modest growth in November and dramatic growth in December," with full-year console video game software sales ending 9 percent higher year-on-year, Pachter said.

U.S. console video game software sales are up 9 percent through August, he added.

September sales figures from market researchers NPD Group are due later this week, Pachter said.

Video game sales have slowed as consumers wait and save for next-generation consoles from Microsoft, Nintendo Co. Ltd <7974.OS> and market leader Sony Corp. <6758.T>. Microsoft's Xbox 360 will be first to hit the market and is slated to arrive on store shelves on Nov. 22.

Pachter forecast a 2 percent rise in September sales at Electronic Arts Inc., the world's biggest video game publisher, and a 4 percent increase at Activision Inc., the industry's No. 2 player.

Sales at Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., which recently pulled and re-released its blockbuster "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" title without disabled sexual content that let to a restrictive rating change, is expected to have September sales that were down 24 percent from the year earlier.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ch=video+games

Dutch Say Suspects Hacked 1.5M Computers
Toby Sterling

Three suspects in a Dutch crime ring hacked 1.5 million computers worldwide, setting up a "zombie network" that secretly stole credit card and other personal data, prosecutors said Thursday.

The three, who were arrested Oct. 6 and originally were estimated to have hacked 100,000 computers, have yet to enter a plea.

A court in the town of Breda extended the custody of the 19-year-old main suspect and a 22-year-old accomplice for a month Thursday, and ordered the release of the third, aged 27, pending trial, prosecution spokesman Wim de Bruin said. The suspects' names have not been released.

Prosecutors said, however, more arrests were likely as the investigation continues.

The two still being held are accused of blackmailing a U.S. company by threatening it with a "denial of service" attack, in which thousands of computers that have been infected are used to bombard a target with e-mail. De Bruin said the company did not want its identity known.

The software the hackers used, a variation of the worm known as "W32.Toxbot," was first detected this year. Antivirus software can remove it, but the hackers adjusted the program constantly to defeat protections.

The existence of the "zombie network" of infected computers was first detected by Dutch Internet provider XS4ALL. The company noticed unusual activity coming from a handful of its users' infected computers, said the company's chief technical officer, Simon Hania.

The company traced the network as far as it could, and then turned the matter over to prosecutors.

De Bruin said prosecutors worked with computer crime experts to trace the network to its source and then installed taps on the suspects' computers. The taps showed the suspects manipulating the zombie network to steal passwords and credit card data, De Bruin said.

They also are accused of stealing PayPal and EBay Inc. account information to order goods without paying for them, he said. Authorities have seized computers, a bank account, an undisclosed amount of cash and a sports car in the investigation.

About 30,000 of the infected computers were in the Netherlands. When investigators dismantled the global network, they found more than 15 times the number of infected computers they originally estimated.

XS4ALL's Hania said that although the zombie network may be the largest of its kind whose controllers were busted, it was only a "drop in the ocean."

"It destroys the Internet," he lamented.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

Can’t even do that here

Green Light To Chase File-Sharers

Film and music companies can once again start to collect information about people who spread copyrighted material over the internet.

The Swedish Data Inspection Board (DI) has ruled that industry organisations such as the Swedish Anti-Pirate Bureau (APB) and record industry group IFPI can collect the IP addresses of people who spread films, computer games and music against copyright laws.

DI had earlier ruled that APB and IFPI’s methods broke privacy laws, as they were collecting personal information without permission. It had also decided that collecting information about illegal spreading of material was forbidden because only government authorities are allowed to keep registers of criminal offences.

Now, DI says that both organisations can have an exception from the law, and will therefore be allowed to re-start collecting information about file-sharers IP addresses.

“The organisations’ collection of IP numbers does not constitute an undue infringement of personal integrity,” DI argued in a press release.

The organisations representing copyright owners have the duty to protect their members’ financial and legal interests, it said. It added that they were only collecting information that users of file-sharing programmes had made public by signing on to the network.

If APB and IFPI were not systematically making a register of personal information, but were simply passing on information to internet service providers or to the police.

Björn Gregfeldt, chairman of APB, told The Local that the ruling meant that the fight against illegal copying could start straight away.

“We have never kept a register of personal details,” he said.

“We can restart our operations pretty much immediately, and maybe now we’ll be able to persuade internet service providers that they have to take this problem seriously.”
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20051013

Swedish Music Industry Joins File Sharing Battle

Sweden's high profile battle between illegal file sharers and representatives of the film and games industries rumbles on. But now the country's music industry, which has so far kept quiet on the subject, is planning to get involved.

"We see no signs that illegal file sharing is declining," said Helene Rönnmark, at the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), to Computer Sweden.

"Therefore we are planning a number of measures during the autumn and it is important that the public is aware of that," she said.

The organisation will carry out a quarterly assessment of the scale of the problem and says it will not begin clamping down until the public has been informed of the plans.

Last week the IFPI, along with the games and film industry body, Antipiratbyrån (APB), was given the right to register the IP addresses of individuals found to be sharing copyright-protected material.

This gave the organisations an exemption from the Personal Data Act and was seen as a significant victory for APB and an indication that the hunt for illegal file sharers could proceed.

But any satisfaction that the organisation derived from it will have vanished this week, with the news that APB must inform people that their IP address is being registered.

The order comes from the Swedish Board of Data Inspection, but APB says it is impossible without the cooperation of the country's internet service providers. And the ISPs are not playing ball.

Only the file sharer's ISP can link the IP address to the person. If the ISP receives a request for such information from the police, they cannot refuse it, but a few calls from TT revealed that requests from APB would be ignored.

"We don't send out warning letters to our customers on anyone else's behalf," said Jan Sjöberg, the press officer at Telia Sonera Sweden.

The public face of APB, lawyer Henrik Pontén, thinks that the ISPs are taking a short-term view of the problem.

"It is also in their interests that there is a functioning games and film industry for legal distribution," he said.

"In the long run a working copyright law is also a condition for their business - we are in the same boat since we have the content and they have the means of distribution," said Pontén.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20051020

EU Pushes for Online Music Copyright
Aoife White

The European Union called on Europe's music industry Wednesday to create EU-wide copyright licenses for online music, saying this would boost demand for legal downloads.

"These licenses will make it easier for new European-based online services to take off," EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said.

Music copyrights are currently collected by national agencies, but the emergence of online music services such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes means there is growing demand for a license that covers all 25 EU nations.

The European Commission said the absence of bloc-wide copyright licenses has been one factor that has made it difficult for new Internet-based music services to develop their full potential.

Apple has to obtain separate licenses for each song in every EU country to offer it to all Europeans, which could cost it up to 475,000 euros ($569,000) per song, the commission said. In practice, this means that users in some countries have a much smaller catalogue to choose from.

However, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said the music business is already working hard to license online music by tackling problems negotiating rights with copyright holders.

"There are over 300 legal music sites in Europe now, some of them with over 2 million tracks," it said.

Germany is Europe's biggest online user of both legal and pirated music with 9.5 million people downloading, according to a Forrester Research report from August 2004. Some 89 percent of people questioned said they never paid to download music or video.

Last year, online music sales in the EU reached 27 million euros ($32 million), far below the booming U.S. market which reported $248 million in sales.

Research group Enders Analysis predicts European sales to surge to 900 million euros ($1.1 billion) by 2010, but foresees a continued lag behind the United States, where sales should reach 1.4 billion euros ($1.7 billion) that year.

McCreevy warned the music industry that, at this stage, he is merely asking them to develop licenses.

"I will be monitoring the situation closely and, if I am not satisfied that sufficient progress is being made, I will take tougher action," he said.

The commission said it wants to give rights holders and commercial users of copyright material the choice between two options.

It said commercial users and rights managers backed the first option allowing the national agencies that collect copyright payments to grant an EU-wide license.

Music publishers, independent record labels and some collective rights managers wanted to give copyright holders the choice to appoint a rights manager for online use in the EU.

McCreevy said last week he saw music copyrights as a test case which could lead to single licenses for books and films.
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...stomwire. htm

Study: Europeans Pay Double Tax On Net Music
Andy McCue

European consumers are being forced to pay usage rights on legal copy-protected music downloads multiple times because of outdated private copy levies, according to a study.

The Business Software Alliance issued a report Thursday urging that the extra taxation that most European countries have added to music downloads be scrapped.

The BSA said the rise in online content protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology makes the need for private copy levies obsolete. These levies were originally designed as a tax on people making private copies of tapes and CDs they had bought.

But online content is increasingly DRM-protected. Under DRM, things such as music downloads carry a royalty at the point of purchase, so a percentage of the payment goes directly to artists and labels.

"With DRM technology's expanding role in the market, levies have become a superfluous double tax on consumers," Francisco Mingorance, director of public policy in Europe for the BSA, said in a statement. "Levies were designed to compensate for unpoliceable private copying. But with DRM, the rationale for levies disappears."

These levies don't apply to the United Kingdom, but most of Europe is forced to pay for usage rights through taxes imposed on their PC and music-playing equipment.

"Lawmakers cannot ignore that private copy levies are increasingly obsolete in the digital age," Mingorance said.

"Governments have an opportunity to bring real consumer benefits by applying the European Copyright Directive rules and phasing out the outdated levies system," he added.
http://news.com.com/Study+Europeans+...3-5894685.html

Three Indicted In Massive Bust Of Pirated CDs

A federal grand jury indicted three men on Wednesday in what prosecutors are calling the largest bust of pirated CDs in U.S. history.

The indictment follows the arrest last week of Ye Teng Wen, 29, Hao He, 30, and Yaobin Zhai, 33, on charges of illegally reproducing 325,000 music and software CDs.

Two of the men are American citizens and one has a U.S. work permit, said a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney for Northern California.

"The allegations of massive piracy of music and software reflect the potential loss of millions of dollars to the artists and businesses who legitimately own the copyrights on these works," U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan said in a statement.

"These individuals are charged with affixing counterfeit labels on CDs to create the appearance of legitimacy, including the FBI Anti-Piracy Warning that stated 'Unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law."'

Prosecutors said the pirated CDs, which included Latin music and Symantec computer security software, circulated widely and one of the disks was found at a store in Chicago.

The three men, who live near San Francisco, have been released on bail and will appear in court on October 27.

Music industry officials say piracy has lead to a steady decline in CD sales over the past five years. Industry officials estimate that piracy costs software and music firms tens of billions of dollars worldwide.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ch=Yaobin+Zhai

Australian ISP Settles With Music Industry
Steven Deare

The case between the Australian music industry's antipiracy unit and Internet service provider Swiftel Communications has been settled out of court.

Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) had alleged that Swiftel's employees and customers created a BitTorrent file-sharing hub to host thousands of pirated sound and video recordings.

Michael Kerin, MIPI general manager, would not reveal if a financial arrangement was involved, saying: "Let me put it this way--the music industry would never have settled the case unless it was on terms that suited it."

As part of the settlement terms, announced Friday, Perth-based Swiftel will implement a new process to deal with copyright-infringement notices issued by copyright holders.

"Swiftel regrets that it has not taken enough action to date to stop Internet piracy. We are committed to implementing a new set of industry-leading compliance programs to protect the music industry," Ryan O'Hare, chief executive officer of Swiftel, said in a statement.

The case has been ongoing in Australia's Federal Court since March after MIPI ordered a search on Swiftel's premises. The music industry claimed it had evidence that the ISP's employees and customers had infringed on copyright content by using BitTorrent.

The settlement follows the music industry's recent court victory over Sharman Networks, owners of Kazaa, a similar application to BitTorrent.
http://news.com.com/Australian+ISP+s...3-5895499.html

Yahoo to Bar Minor-Adult Sex Chat Rooms
Samuel Maull

Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older.

The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

"This is about protecting kids," Bruning said.

Spitzer said authorities did not have to resort to litigation. He said Yahoo, "acting as a good corporate citizen, ... did the right thing. We asked them to create a filter to stop this kind of thing and they have done so."

In June, while still in discussions with the attorneys general, Yahoo voluntarily closed its user-created chat rooms following complaints that some had names suggesting they facilitated illegal conduct, including sex between adults and minors.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Wednesday that Yahoo was still determining if and when user- created chats would be restored as it makes improvements "to enhance the user experience and compliance with our terms of service."

If they do get restored, the agreement calls for Yahoo to review the names of such rooms ahead of time and reject any deemed inappropriate. Even if a room's name is innocuous, Yahoo also will bar any whose postings encourage sex acts between adults and minors, purging such chat rooms within 24 hours from when it becomes aware of them.

"These efforts are consistent with and build upon our long-standing commitment to providing a safer and more secure online experience for consumers," Osako said.

The company also is eliminating the teen chat category and limiting usage of all chat rooms to adults, although it was not clear how the company would prevent children from signing up as adults because credit cards aren't required.

Spitzer, a Democrat running for governor next year, said he started the investigation at Bruning's urging.

"The agreement we have today is the first of its kind," Spitzer said. "We think this is an agreement that can be a template for others to use."

Bruning said the agreement means "our children are safer online and predators have fewer opportunities to prey on them."

Among the illicit chat rooms removed were those with labels such as "girls 13 & up for much older men," "8-12 yo girls for older men," and "teen girls for older fat men." Many of these were located within the "Schools and Education" and "Teen" chat categories.

An undercover investigator, posing as a 14-year-old while visiting one of those chat rooms, received 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period, the attorneys general said.

Spitzer and Bruning said they launched their investigations earlier this year after receiving tips that children had unfettered access to adult chat rooms.

Other measure announced under the agreement:

-Yahoo will make it easier to report any threats to child safety, give priority to such complaints and designate specific employees to do so.

-Yahoo will develop educational materials and feature them on the Yahoo network, promoting the safe use of chat rooms.

-Yahoo will donate $175,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's New York affiliates, and provide banner advertising to that organization targeted to teens.
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...stomwire .htm

China Arrests Over Net Obscenity
Correspondents in Beijing

CHINA has arrested 101 suspects since police started to crack down on internet obscenity in August.

The suspects included people who used the internet to set up illegal chat rooms that recruit others to participate in pornographic movies, the Xinhua news agency said, citing the public security ministry.

"This behaviour has severely polluted the internet environment, done harm to juvenile's physical and mental health and caused strong public anger," the ministry said.

The special crackdown was jointly initiated by the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Information Industry and the Information Office of China's cabinet, the State Council, in August.

To date, 1,568 pieces of evidence have been obtained, from which 76 criminal cases have been put on file, resulting in the arrests of the 101 suspects, the ministry said.

Police are intensifying their crackdown on internet "obscenity", the Xinhua report said.

China's online population has grown rapidly in recent years from just 620,000 in 1997. With more than 100 million users now, it is the world's second largest internet market after the United States.

The Chinese government recognises the internet's potential for spreading education and technical skills but also fears its capacity for carrying content considered subversive or unhealthy for the population.

This month, the government shut down three popular websites as part of a new drive to keep out content seen as anti-government and potentially inciting unrest.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html

Surveillance

Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You

Tiny Dots Show Where and When You Made Your Print
Press Release

San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers (for a list of the printers we investigated so far, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/ printers/list.php). The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope (for instructions on how to see the dots, see: http:// www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/).

EFF and its partners began its project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers Schoen, EFF intern Robert Lee, and volunteers Patrick Murphy and Joel Alwen compared dots from test pages sent in by EFF supporters, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern.

"So far, we've only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers," said Schoen. "But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots."

You can decode your own Xerox DocuColor prints using EFF's automated program at http:// http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/...ex.php#program.

Xerox previously admitted that it provided these tracking dots to the government, but indicated that only the Secret Service had the ability to read the code. The Secret Service maintains that it only uses the information for criminal counterfeit investigations. However, there are no laws to prevent the government from abusing this information.

"Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?"

EFF is still working on cracking the codes from other printers and we need the public's help. Find out how you can make your own test pages to be included in our research at http:// www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/wp.php#testsheets.
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_10.php#004063

Study Ranks Homeland Security Dept. Lowest in Morale
David E. Rosenbaum

At the Department of Homeland Security, the main government agency responsible for protecting the country against terrorism and responding to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, only 12 percent of the more than 10,000 employees who returned a government questionnaire said they felt strongly that they were "encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things."

Only 3 percent said they were confident that in their department, personnel decisions were "based on merit." Fewer than 18 percent said they felt strongly that they were "held accountable for achieving results." And just 4 percent said they were sure that "creativity and innovation are rewarded."

In each of these instances and many others, the responses of the Homeland Security employees were less favorable than those of all the other departments and large agencies surveyed by the federal Office of Personnel Management, according to a new study by an outside research organization.

Experts in human resources said the morale problems indicated in the survey should be of serious concern to the top officials at the department.

"It shows there is something fundamentally wrong at the organization," said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

"If you were on the board of directors of a company and you got results like this," Professor Cappelli said, "you would lean on the managers to fix the problem or get rid of them."

The department was created by law in 2002 and was not fully in operation until late 2003. It brought together workers from established agencies with widely varying histories, missions and cultures, including the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service, the Customs Service and the Transportation Security Administration.

Asked about the survey, Russ Knocke, the press secretary for the department, said the morale problems occurred because "the Department of Homeland Security was a merger of 22 agencies, a start-up all at once, and a number of the agencies experienced some growing pains the first couple of years."

"This is a unique circumstance," Mr. Knocke said. "This is not like a business in the private sector or even other departments in the federal government. It's a unique department with a great sense of urgency for fulfilling its responsibility."

The survey was taken by the Office of Personnel Management between August and December 2004. Forms with 88 multiple-choice questions about workers' attitudes toward their jobs were sent to 276,424 federal employees selected at random, and 147,914, including 10,473 from the Department of Homeland Security, returned completed questionnaires. The department employs 180,000 workers.

The purpose of the survey, the personnel office said, was to allow managers to measure "employees' perceptions of whether, and to what extent, conditions characterizing successful organizations are present in their agencies."

In June, the personnel office posted agency-by-agency answers to 78 of the questions, at www.fhcs2004.opm.gov/published.htm.

This month, Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research institute, published the first comparison of how employee attitudes in various agencies compared with one another on all those questions.

Of 30 cabinet departments and large independent agencies, the employees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation had the highest morale, Mr. Lilly found.

The morale at the Department of Homeland Security was far worse than that at the agency where the survey showed morale to be next lowest, the Small Business Administration.

In terms of positive answers, by Mr. Lilly's calculations, the department ranked dead last on half the questions.

The department finished in the top half of the 30 departments and agencies on only one question. More than 56 percent strongly agreed with the statement "The work I do is important." That placed Homeland Security employees second only to those at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

On the other hand, in answer to the question "How would you rate the overall quality of work done by your workgroup?" only 22 percent of Homeland Security employees answered "very good."

Only 20 percent strongly agreed that "My work gives me a sense of personal accomplishment."

Only 27 percent strongly agreed that "people I work with cooperate to get their job done," and 13 percent strongly agreed that "my job makes good use of my skills and abilities."

In each of these instances, the department's employees were less positive about their jobs than were workers at any other department or agency in the study.

Mr. Knoke, the Homeland Security spokesman, pointed to the long hours and weekends put in and the dangerous situations faced by many workers in his department, and said, "I really don't think our employees come to work every day and make the sacrifices they make in their personal lives because they're looking for the kind of workplace environment that is necessarily going to be the easiest or the simplest."

But Professor Cappelli of the Wharton School said a poor work environment "rarely drives morale into the floor like this." What usually causes bad morale, he said, are "questions about the overall mission of the organization."

Indeed, fewer than one-quarter of the Homeland Security employees said they knew for sure "how my work relates to the agency's goals and priorities."

Samuel B. Bacharach, a professor at Cornell and the director of the Institute of Workplace Studies there, said that what should be most worrisome to top officials about the employees' attitudes at the Department of Homeland Security was the sense that creativity and initiative were not rewarded.

If these questions were asked of employees at a private company, said Carl E. Van Horn, a professor at Rutgers and director of the university's John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, the executives "would be happy with 85 percent" positive responses.

"If it was only 75 percent," Professor Van Horn said, "they would want improvements."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/po...tml?oref=login

Bank Regulators Want Stronger Alternative To Password-Based Web Log-Ons
AP

Federal regulators will require banks to strengthen security for Internet customers through authentication that goes beyond mere user names and passwords,
which have become too easy for criminals to exploit.

Bank Web sites are expected to adopt some form of ``two-factor'' authentication by the end of 2006, regulators with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said in a letter to banks last week.

In two-factor authentication, customers must confirm their identities not only through something they know, like a PIN or password, but also with something they physically have, like a hardware token with numeric access codes that change every minute.

Other types of two-factor authentication include costlier hardware involving biometrics or ``smart'' cards that would be inserted into designated readers on a user's computer.

Banks might also issue one-time passwords on scratch-off cards or require ``secret questions'' about a customer's account, such as the amount of the last deposit or mortgage payment.

The council also suggested that banks explore technology that can estimate a Web user's physical location and compare it to the address on file.

The most common way of stealing consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials online, known as phishing, typically involves sending e-mails that direct unwitting users to phony Web sites. Data harvested at such sites is then used fraudulently.

The Anti-Phishing Working group, an industry association, reported 13,776 unique types of phishing attacks in August.

While some financial institutions have given their customers electronic password tokens, those have tended to be optional. Other banks have instituted password entry through mouse clicks instead of typing, a protection against keystroke-snooping programs.

But in general, the industry can do more to stop account fraud and identity theft, according to the financial institutions council -- which includes the Federal Reserve; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.; the U.S. Comptroller; the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration.

``The agencies consider single-factor authentication, as the only control mechanism, to be inadequate for high-risk transactions involving access to customer information or the movement of information to other parties,'' the council wrote. ``Account fraud and identity theft are frequently the result of single-factor ... authentication exploitation.''

FDIC spokesman David Barr said the rules will serve as standards that will be checked when banks' practices are audited.

Although the requirements apply just to financial services companies, the policy could stimulate wider use of two-factor authentication by other merchants that are willing to ``federate'' their Web sites with banks, said Michael Aisenberg, director of government relations for Internet services provider VeriSign Inc.

VeriSign is a member of the Liberty Alliance, a group that is working to develop standards for federated authentication.

In a federated system, a two-factor login at one site would be recognized by another, so a travel agency associated with your bank would automatically grant you access if you came straight from the financial institution's Web site.

At the very least, Aisenberg said, ``The securities industry is going to have to go along and other regulated sectors will no doubt follow along as well.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp

Microsoft Exec: ID Cards Pose Security Risk
Andy McCue

Microsoft has warned that the U.K.'s national identity card plans pose a security risk that could increase the likelihood of confidential data falling into the hands of criminals.

Jerry Fishenden, a top security and identity management expert at Microsoft, said that the British government's current technology proposals are flawed. He also criticized other technology suppliers for failing to speak out publicly about their concerns for fear of damaging any future bids for part of the lucrative contract for ID cards.

Fishenden, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, said that the plans for a central national identity register could lead to "huge potential breaches" and a leakage of personal information.

"I have concerns with the current architecture and the way it looks at aggregating so much personal information and biometrics in a single place," he said. "There are better ways of doing this. Even the biometrics industry says it is better to have biometrics stored locally."

Fishenden said no systems are ever completely secure and warned that putting vast amounts of personal data and biometric information such as iris, fingerprint and facial scans in one central database could prove too tempting a target for hackers and other criminals.

The U.K. government is backing a bill to make ID cards compulsory for all British residents. The cards, which are intended to help combat terrorism, illegal immigration and organized crime, will be based on biometric data. They have run into opposition both for the potential cost to holders and over worries about privacy and reliability.

Microsoft has expressed its concerns directly to the ID cards team at the U.K. government's Home Office, Fishenden said. Other suppliers are keeping quiet about their fears over the viability of the proposals because they want a piece of what would be a multibillion-pound project.

"Every supplier I talk to privately expresses their concerns," he said. "They seem happy to express their reservations to each other. But I don't think we have been as vocal as we should have been on this debate."

The Microsoft executive's comments come as British members of parliament are due to vote on a third reading for the Identity Cards Bill and just a day after Home Office minister Tony McNulty admitted that the proposed biometric technology has problems recognizing some people, such as those with brown eyes.

McNulty's statement followed a report in the U.K. newspaper the Independent on Sunday warning that one in 1,000 people could be incorrectly identified by the biometric systems because of difficulties in identifying those such as manual laborers who wear down their fingerprints.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+exec+I...3-5900411.html

Throw another right on your barbie

Terror Laws Spark Data Fears
Paul Osborne

CIVIL libertarians say new anti-terror laws could ease police access to business customer records without adequate checks and balances.

Under the draft laws, banks, airlines, phone and power companies could be forced to provide information about customers suspected of terrorist offences to federal police and ASIO agents.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) and ASIO would be given an easier process for obtaining records from businesses that would otherwise require a search warrant.

They would only need "reasonable grounds" to issue special notices to businesses such as ship and aircraft operators for details on their cargo, crew, passengers, stores and voyage.

The AFP also would be able to apply to a magistrate for notices requiring banks, travel and transport companies, power, gas and water companies and telecommunications carriers to provide information on a suspect's accounts, transactions and activities.

Firms could face fines of up to $6,600 and be protected from court suits on the grounds of breaching privacy rules, contracts or legal privilege.

The government argued the "notice to produce" would make it easier to investigate terrorism and not negatively brand a business as having been served with a warrant.

But NSW Council for Civil Liberties spokesman Cameron Murphy said the laws went further than what police needed to investigate terrorism.

"This might just be a back door for police to get highly personal information about people's finances and it's likely to just be done using the guise of terrorist investigations, Mr Murphy said.

"The problem is that these laws provide police extraordinary new power while at the same time reducing accountability - they are a recipe for misuse and corruption."

Australian Privacy Foundation spokesperson Anna Johnston said the government needed to show why the current search warrant system did not work.

"What's wrong with the search warrant system?" Ms Johnston said.

"If getting a search warrant quickly is hard why don't (they) spend more resources to improve the availability of judges, rather than lessen judicial oversight?

"The role of judicial approval in allowing search warrants is not only about protecting innocent victims and, if you like, a second pair of eyes to pick up mistakes, but an important anti-corruption measure to stop rogue police officers."

She said the AFP had sought the new powers, which the government had yet to formally respond to, in the recent review of privacy laws

Ms Johnson also said businesses had to be responsible and should still hand over information useful to police.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html

Police Agree On National Database
Selina Mitchell

AUSTRALIA'S police ministers have agreed to a national rollout of a massive database of "persons of interest", which will eventually include information on missing persons.

The Commonwealth has committed $5.6 million to the rollout and the states and territories have agreed to share the costs of running the system.

The CrimTrac Minimum Nationwide Person Profile (MNPP) will give police access data on persons of interest provided by any jurisdiction.

The database will include images and text.

It will replace the National Names Index, a text-based police mainframe system.

The online MNPP system was tested for three months by NSW and Victoria earlier this year at a cost of $11 million and the two states will continue to update their information.

Other state's police can access it, but are yet to provide data to the system. That should occur next year.

The MNPP is designed to give operational police online access to comprehensive information on people of interest, including those that may be wanted in another state, reported as missing in another state, or known to be a threat to themselves or others.

The decision to introduce the system nationally was made at the Australasian Police Minister's Council, held in Brisbane last week.

It did not immediately approve the inclusion of a national missing persons database as part of the system.

The Council considered a draft national missing persons policy, but a spokesman for Justice Minister Chris Ellison said more work was required before a national database of missing persons could be finalised.

The Council also discussed the Australian National Child Offender Register (ANCOR).

Launched by Senator Ellison in September last year, the register tracks the movements of offenders against children, including sex offenders.

A spokesman the justice minister said the register could not be fully effective until all states had passed legislation based on a common model.

The South Australian and Tasmanian parliaments were "dragging their heels", he said.

Under ANCOR, people convicted of sexual or other serious offences against children will be required to register with police and provide details such as club memberships and travel plans.

The information can only be accessed by police.

It is being used by most states and territories.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html

Cop To Be Punished Over File Breach

A Victorian police chief inspector will face disciplinary action over the leaking of 291 files from the police database.

The unnamed officer, who works in the unit that manages the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP), was responsible for wrongly authorising the release of thousands of files, a report by the police Ethical Standards Department has found.

Victoria's Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon said the same officer then failed to brief her properly on the seriousness of the security breach.

Ms Nixon said yesterday the report recommended formal disciplinary action be taken against the senior officer, who gave approval on July 14 for the files to be emailed to a corrections officer and to a senior officer within the Justice Department.

"There were 291 names ... it made 7000 pages of documentation and so it was a fairly extensive file," Ms Nixon said.

The people whose files had been released would not be told of their involvement in the incident for fear of jeopardising the identity of a whistleblower.

Asked if the 291 people involved shared the same surname, Ms Nixon said: "Part of the search method that was used was not a very defined search method, and so it gave data for 291 individuals."

Ms Nixon said the officer's punishment would be a matter for the disciplinary advisory unit.

The state Government last month announced the appointment of a commissioner to oversee police data security and a $50 million plan to replace the LEAP system.

Ms Nixon apologised to the community for the latest breach of trust, of which there have been several incidents in recent years.

"We've charged members with inappropriately using the database (previously) - it's an issue around the way people see information they use on a daily basis and how they protect it," she said.

"The vast majority of members of Victoria Police do the right thing."

The report will be forwarded to the Office of Police Integrity for review.

Police have provided a summary of the report, but the full document will not be released.

State Opposition Leader Robert Doyle called for the full report to be released.

"Six weeks after we were supposed to get some report on the leaking of sensitive police information what we get is a police press release," he said.

"It still doesn't answer the central questions. We still don't know how it happened."

The latest ESD report follows a series of breaches of the troubled LEAP system.

Earlier this year, the Office of Police Integrity recommended the system be scrapped.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html

Missouri May Track Cell Phones for Traffic Data
David A. Lieb

Driving to work, you notice the traffic beginning to slow. And because you have your cell phone on, the government senses the delay, too. A congestion alert is issued, automatically updating electronic road signs and Web sites and dispatching text messages to mobile phones and auto dashboards.

In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is finalizing a contract to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to map real-time traffic conditions statewide on all 5,500 miles of major roads.

It's just one of a number of initiatives to more intelligently manage traffic flow through wireless data collection.

Officials say there's no Big Brother agenda in the Missouri project - the data will remain anonymous, leaving no possibility to track specific people from their driveway to their destination.

But privacy advocates are uneasy nonetheless.

"Even though its anonymous, it's still ominous," said Daniel Solove, a privacy law professor at George Washington University and author of "The Digital Person." "It troubles me, because it does show this movement toward using a technology to track people."

Cell phone monitoring already is being used by transportation officials in Baltimore, though not yet to relay traffic conditions to the public. Similar projects are getting underway in Norfolk, Va., and a stretch of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Macon, Ga.

But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive - tracking wireless phones across the whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic counts, and for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to other travelers.

In fact, it would be the biggest system of its kind in the world, said Richard Mudge, a vice president at Delcan Corp., the Canadian company that won the Missouri bid.

The contract is expected to be completed within several weeks, and a cell phone monitoring system tested and implemented within six months after that. The cell phone provider for Missouri hasn't been disclosed, but Delcan uses data from Cingular Wireless LLC phones in the Baltimore project.

Governments have had the ability to measure traffic volumes and speeds for years. They can embed sensors in pavement, or mount scanners and cameras along the road. But those monitoring methods require the installation of equipment, which must be maintained, and can take only a snapshot of traffic at a particular spot.

In contrast, "almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system," said Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Although most new cell phones come equipped with Global Positioning System capabilities that can pinpoint their exact locations, the tracking technology used for transportation agencies does not depend on that.

Instead, it takes the frequent signals that wireless phones send to towers and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to another. Then it overlays that data with highway maps to determine where the phones are and how fast they are moving. Lumping thousands of those signals together can indicate traffic flow.

A Delcan demonstration Web site developed for Baltimore uses various shades of green, yellow and red to show block-by-block whether vehicles are moving at or below the speed limits. As rush hour started on a recent work day, observers could watch as green turned to yellow and then red on roads heading out of downtown.

The Baltimore project began this spring as a pilot program that monitors Cingular users over about 1,000 miles of road, but Maryland officials hope to eventually create a statewide version. (A Delcan competitor, Atlanta-based AirSage Inc., has an agreement with Sprint Nextel Corp. to monitor phones for its projects in Georgia and Virginia.)

Pete Rahn, director of the Missouri Department of Transportation, would like to make a similar Web site available to Missouri motorists, and to post estimated travel times on electronic road signs.

The Missouri and Maryland plans also assume that the contractor will market more detailed information to the private sector - automakers that offer onboard navigation systems, cell phone companies, shipping businesses or media that broadcast rush-hour traffic reports.

The private sector marketing helps drive down the states' cost. Missouri expects to spend less than $3 million a year on the service, Rahn said, although the exact price won't be known until the contract is finalized. Maryland is spending $1.9 million, although the entire Baltimore project costs nearly $5.6 million, said Mike Zezeski, director of real-time traffic operations for the Maryland Department of Transportation.

By contrast, the San Francisco Bay area spent about $35 million over several years to install roadside scanners and develop computer programs, Web sites and call centers for a real-time traffic service based on electronic toll passes, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the region's Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Officials considered using cell phone monitoring but opted against it, partly because of privacy concerns.

"We felt very strongly we had a bullet-proof privacy policy" with toll-pass monitoring, Rentschler said. "On cell phones, we could never do that."

As with cell-phone monitoring, the information received from the Bay area's toll scanners is anonymous. It's also encrypted and destroyed daily. But the local transportation commission went a step further, mailing 250,000 metal bags into which motorists could place their toll devices to prevent them from being monitored along the roads.

Cell phone users could accomplish the same thing by turning off their phones.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggests that someone should notify cell phone owners that their phones are being monitored for traffic data.

Privacy experts also worry that the traffic monitoring could later evolve into other uses - perhaps to catch speeders or fugitives.

That's because each cell phone has a unique serial number, in addition to its call number and a code that indicates its service provider. A cell phone company must always be able to track the location of its phones in order to know where to route a call.

"It's a mission creep issue that would be of most concern to consumers," said Lillie Coney, associate director of Washington, D.C.-based EPIC. "They may start out saying we want to know if there's a traffic problem and then take that information and start using it for different purposes."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

Furor Grows Over Internet Bugging
Ryan Singel

A recent government order mandating that voice over internet protocol services must include the same government-approved wiretapping capabilities as traditional phone companies threatens to cripple peer-to-peer telephone innovation, according to new warnings from civil liberties groups and an internet telephony pioneer.

The new rules from the FCC were published last month and take effect Nov. 14 , though companies have 18 months to comply. The order expands a controversial 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which required phone companies to buy or retrofit switching equipment to meet stringent, government-approved wiretap standards that permit law enforcement to more easily wiretap digital phone calls, and to capture information such as voicemail PINs typed on a phone after a call is completed.

Under the new order, VOIP services that can both dial into, and be called from, the traditional phone network also have to comply with the costly requirements, pulling services like AT&T CallVantage and Vonage into the wiretap regime.

Critics say the rules make it harder for new U.S. internet telephony companies to get off the ground.

"What the FBI has asked for, and what the FCC has to date given them, would require any new developer of a voice-based technology to submit their application for the FBI's approval before even one single person on the internet can try it," said John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "If the FCC continues to give the FBI every power it asks for, we will see a tremendous diminution of innovation in the United States and innovation will move overseas to places that are more supportive of small innovators."

The ruling could be particularly troublesome for companies using a peer-to-peer architecture that doesn't route calls through a central server, and which may not technically be able to comply. The FCC order says that all calls on such a system -- not just the ones to and from the traditional network -- have to be wiretappable using CALEA standards.

The end result, according to Jeff Pulver, who co-founded Vonage and runs a free P2P internet telephony service called FWD, is that the rules "take away our freedom to innovate and take away inspiration for people to be entrepreneurial in this space."

"This comes at a time when it's most susceptible to being screwed up," Pulver said. "The technology is still in its adolescence. This is a transformational current -- we are talking about the communications and computing industry transforming into something that has never existed before. This is not your parents' telecom service."

The ruling appears to pull in the best-known P2P telephone service, Skype, which eBay recently purchased for $2.6 billion. Skype offers optional pay services called SkypeIn and SkypeOut that permit customers to receive calls from, and make calls to, the traditional phone system. That means it will have to re-engineer its system to make its customers wiretappable, even during free peer-to-peer calls between Skype users -- something that might not be possible. The company did not return a call seeking comment.

Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sees this as an example of how the FCC order could hinder innovation by providing companies with a financial incentive for restricting their offerings.

"This might be where CALEA distorts things," Tien said. "It might cause a company to ... say, 'We will just have one of these capabilities, not both,' and this will keep them out of CALEA, while still offering 75 percent of functionality that people want."

SIPphone, which appears to use peer-to-peer architecture and allows for calls into and out of the traditional network via a third-party contractor, would also likely be affected by the new rules, but Wired News was unable to reach company representatives by press time.

When the FCC announced in 2004 that it intended to extend CALEA to VOIP companies, it indicated that the rules would differentiate between managed and unmanaged services, leading many to believe that peer-to-peer companies would not be affected.

The final rules discarded that line, relying instead on a differentiation between voice applications that touched the public network and those that didn't. Applications such as multiplayer gaming chat and telephony through instant- messaging services such as AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk are thus exempt.

FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield was unable to elaborate on the change, but pointed Wired News to portions of the final ruling that said the difference between a managed and unmanaged service was muddy and that the line between a connected and unconnected service was much clearer.

According to the ruling, telecommunications giants SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, which each offer a traditionally routed VOIP service, both argued for extending CALEA to all VOIP providers, including any using peer-to-peer architecture.

The FCC's order also forces all broadband internet service providers to comply with CALEA, and a recent FBI proposal would expand the wiretapping requirements to reach emerging in-flight broadband systems on commercial airliners. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology say they plan to file a lawsuit challenging the FCC's authority to extend CALEA to the internet.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69277,00.html

Japan Preparing VoIP For Mobile Phones In 2007
AP

Japan is readying a new network for cell phones that will allow people to connect to the Internet to talk over the phone more cheaply and transmit data more quickly.

The government plans to introduce mobile Voice over Internet telephony by 2007, officials said Thursday.

The mobile service under consideration at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will allow people to use Voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VoIP, phone service, on cell phones -- similar to what's now available on fixed lines.

The mobile VoIP services now more common allow people merely to connect their cell phones to the Net at ``hot spots'' using Wi-Fi wireless access.

Nations around the world are working on Internet telephony on mobile phones, and the Japanese government effort highlights this nation's efforts to keep up with global telecom trends.

The proposal for the network, which will also transmit large amounts of data such as streaming video on cell phones, is being discussed in a ministry panel of experts and telecommunications officials and is set to reach a decision in December, said ministry official Junko Koizumi.

Although details, including the kind of mobile VoIP technology, are not yet decided, several carriers are expected to apply for licenses to offer mobile VoIP services, which are likely to be cheaper than talking on cell phones today, she said.

The Internet Protocol mobile phones are expected to relay information at up to 15 megabits per second -- more than a thousand times faster than the fastest third-generation cell phones now available in Japan at 384 kilobits per second.

Such speeds may slow down if too many people use the service in the same area, and voice quality may go down, Koizumi said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12893071.htm

Skyping the Hype
Meelis Kitsing

"Supermodels not wanted. We want your brain." This ad, in English, appeared in Estonian newspapers in 1999. At the time, the advertisement seemed ironic in a country where the biggest international breakthroughs had been achieved by skin-and-bones supermodels, such as Carmen Kass. Now the anti-supermodels irony is history. The result of the brains attracted by the ad -- the peer-to-peer (P2P) Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) venture called Skype -- was sold to eBay in September for $2.6 billion.

The ad was placed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, a Swede and a Dane, who later became known as the founders of Kazaa (a P2P filesharing program) and Skype. It seems to be about the only commercial message Zennstrom and Friis had to pay for. Despite their efforts to remain geeks, the Swedish-Danish tandem and the Estonian programmers behind Kazaa and Skype became supermodels in their own right. They were on the front page of the New York Times as early as 2002. When their new program, Skype, was still in its beta version, Fortune magazine ran a feature story, the lead of which opened with a scene in the trendy bohemian bar Noku in the Old Town of Tallinn. Now Skype is becoming a household name, with magazines ranging from the Economist to Vanity Fair fawning over the venture -- which has yet to make a profit and had a turnover of $7 million last year and expects to earn $60 million this year.

Despite the media frenzy, Skype should not be dismissed as hype. Skype users swear by the superb quality of the experience. A recent conversation with a Stanford-educated Indian computer engineer who frequently makes calls to India via Skype confirmed the excellence of service. Prior to using the service, he doubted the quality, based on a number of technical problems he foresaw as hampering the technology's potential. To his surprise, he discovered that Skype actually provided better quality than experienced in regular phone calls to India.

Unlike many other VoIP service providers, Skype (like the file-sharing program Kazaa) relies entirely on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. P2P technology creates important technological advantages compared to the traditional server-client model. The Skype directory is entirely decentralized and distributed among network nodes. This in turn implies that Skype can increase its scale rapidly without added investments for expensive and centralized infrastructure.

For instance, the Skype team's previous undertaking, Kazaa, has often been called the new Napster. However, the Napster comparison completely misses an important technological difference. While Napster utilized client-server structure for some tasks, Kazaa relied entirely on P2P technology. Naturally, the technological difference translates into crucial legal and economic implications. In the case of Kazaa, it has been more difficult to hold the distributors of file-sharing program responsible for illegal downloading of files. Due to the use of server-client structure by Napster, documentation of its direct involvement in illegal file-sharing was easier.

This technological aspect explains why P2P VoIP is economically superior to server-client VoIP as well as to traditional telephony. Economic superiority has a tremendous effect on the competitive rivalry in the telecom market. Skype has a lower cost structure, thereby enabling lower prices in comparison with non- P2P VoIP and traditional phone services. It is also easier to scale Skype's subscribers, because Skype does not need to invest in additional infrastructure for accommodating new users - a necessary investment for non-P2P centralized VoIP service providers and, obviously, traditional telephony companies. Hence, Skype is not growing rapidly because of hype but rather, due to its technological and thus economic superiority. The quality of this disruptive technology has created hype - not other way around.

Most interesting is the origin of this superior technology. It did not emerge in the high-tech clusters of Silicon Valley or Boston's Route 128. Skype's management and marketing office is in London. The company is registered in Luxembourg. However, all the programming and product development is carried out in Tallinn, Estonia.

Furthermore, Skype's programmers were not in any way backed by the government. Quite the opposite, it received relatively little attention before skyrocketing to international fame; the local "technology gurus" and politicos with technological leanings were busy searching for the "Estonian Nokia." Just half a year ago, many local IT and telecom analysts were still underestimating the role Skype might play in changing the traditional telecom landscape. And then overnight, millions of dollars poured into the country and Skype has become a part of eBay.

Loose networks of computer programmers and small companies in libertarian and bohemian environments are behind such success. Estonia's reforms in the 1990s created an open environment for Internet diffusion and related technologies in Estonia. A recent report out of the World Economic Forum on the competitiveness of countries ranked Estonia as 20th in the world -- far ahead of any other new EU member states and also ahead of many "old" EU members. The country has consistently placed in the top ten of various rankings on economic freedom during the last years.

The conventional account of Estonia's success in entering the information age overnight, despite its initial backwardness, has overemphasized the role of direct government intervention, and has perhaps given attention to some large companies while ignoring a vast number of small technology companies. Certainly, due credit must be given to politicians for opening the market and carrying out rapid liberalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this sense, the government has contributed to this achievement by not interfering much in the market during the last decade. Technology entrepreneurs and creative destruction took care of the rest.

Nevertheless, technological successes have led to attempts by politicos to capitalize on the achievement by showing themselves as true heroes. Such a posteriori rationalization and this self-congratulating attitude has created some unnecessary public sector financed pet projects. The shortcomings of direct government intervention are well demonstrated by the sorry saga of the national gene project, where public sector money was poured in and politicians dominated the supervisory board. Despite many years of hype and political backing, the gene project has nothing to show for the taxpayers' money spent so far.

Hence, the difference between the bohemian, non-hierarchical culture of Skype and the government- backed gene project could not be more telling. The success of Skype and the failure of the gene project can be understood in the context of research by Richard Florida, who emphasizes the importance of "creative classes" for the emergence of new technology enterprises. Technology, talent and tolerance, what Florida calls the 3Ts, are mutually self-enforcing and their combination is vital for entrepreneurship. In other words, Florida identifies the linkages and positive externalities of technological, economic, and artistic and cultural creativity. Indeed, the story of Skype demonstrates that bohemian clubs have better chances for contributing to the emergence of a new technology venture than does government intervention.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/102005A.html

Estonians Break Ground, Vote Online
Jari Tanner

This tiny former Soviet republic nicknamed "e-Stonia" because of its tech-savvy population is breaking new ground in digital democracy. This week, Estonia became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the Internet.

Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment conducted Monday to Wednesday as a success.

Election officials in the country of 1.4 million said they had received no reports of flaws in the online voting system or hacking attempts.

But critics say the fact that no problems emerged shouldn't give people comfort that Internet voting is safe from hacks, identity fraud and vote count manipulation. Potential attackers, they say, may simply wait until Internet voting is more widely used - by which time it would be harder to stop.

In the United States, the Pentagon canceled an Internet voting plan for military and overseas citizens in 2004 because of security concerns. Plans for large-scale voting in Britain have also been dropped.

"The benefits don't come anywhere near the risks," said Jason Kitcat, an online consultant and researcher at the University of Sussex, England. "It's a waste of money and a waste of government energy."

He acknowledged that Estonia's system was the most secure to date, but said no system was "good enough for a politically binding election."

Thousands of people voted online in Democratic primaries in Arizona in 2000 and Michigan in 2004. The city of Geneva, Switzerland, has held several online referendums, the first in January 2003.

But Estonia is the first to extend it to voters nationwide, experts said.

"They have the perfect population size to do something like this," said Thad Hall, a University of Utah political scientist and co-author of a book on Internet voting. "As they have success, people will start to copy their success."

Estonia has the most advanced information infrastructure of any formerly communist eastern European state.

It gave the Linux-based voting system a trial run in January, when about 600 people voted online in a referendum in the capital, Tallinn. The plan is to allow online voting in the next parliamentary elections in 2007.

"I believe this is the future," said Mait Sooaru, director of an Estonian information logistics company who cast his electronic ballot Monday. "It was easy and pretty straightforward."

To cast an online ballot, voters need a special ID card, a $24 device that reads the card and a computer with Internet access. Some 80 percent of Estonian voters have the ID cards, which have been used since 2002 for online access to bank accounts and tax records.

Election committee officials said the ID card system had proven effective and reliable and dismissed any security concerns with using it for the online ballot.

Arne Koitmae, of Parliament's elections department, said Internet voting would make it easier for people in remote rural locations to vote.

Election officials said only 9,317 people out of 1.06 million registered voters opted to vote online. Estonians were also given the option of voting by mail and in person on Sunday.

Koitmae said many ID card users still lack the reading device, which explains the low turnout of online voting.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

Broadband Subscriber Growth Slows
AP

Broadband subscriber growth started to slow in 2005, according to a new study from Kagan Research.

The Monterey, Calif.-based research firm forecasts 9.3 million net new broadband subscribers in 2005 - down from the 9.5 million in 2004. That figure is seen dropping off to 8.1 million net new users in 2006 with continued decreases thereafter. For 2009, Kagan forecasts 5.6 million net new broadband subscribers for a total of 72.4 million.

The slowing growth coincides with broadband's ascending popularity. This year marks when "high- speed data services have finally overtaken dial-up connections as the dominant pathway to the Internet for U.S. consumers," senior Kagan analyst Ian Olgeirson said in the report.

The firm estimates a total of 45.2 million broadband subscribers by the end of 2005, and 29.6 million dial-up users. A year ago, the ratio was almost even with 35.8 million broadband households and 35.1 million dial-up users.

Cable currently dominates the broadband market with roughly a 60 percent market share, though Kagan projects that will shrink to 53 percent by 2009.

Phone carriers, which are busy upgrading their networks, should see growing market share - from 35 percent in 2001 to 40 percent in 2009.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

Power Companies Enter the High-Speed Internet Market
Ken Belson

The idea has been around for years. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, utility companies have long offered high-speed Internet service to consumers over their power lines.

But American utilities are only now beginning to roll out broadband connections on their grid.

For Jim Hofstetter, a salesman for Cadbury Schweppes, the food and beverage company, this new option was far better than the high-speed connection he used for years from his local cable provider.

"I would never go back now that I have this," said Mr. Hofstetter, who often works from his home office in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati. He pays $30 a month for the service from Current Communications, an Internet service provider, which uses the power lines run by Cinergy, the local utility in Cincinnati. That cost is about $15 cheaper than comparable Internet access from either Cincinnati Bell or Time Warner Cable.

The Current service can be piped into any electrical outlet in Mr. Hofstetter's home, with no reduction in speed even when he, his wife and their three daughters are online at the same time. All that is needed is a baseball-size jack that plugs into the wall and is connected to a computer with an Ethernet cable.

Known as broadband over power line, or B.P.L., the service is poised to challenge the cable and phone companies that dominate the high-speed Internet market. Instead of burying cables and rewiring homes, B.P.L. providers use the local power grid, which means that any home with electricity could get the service.

For now, the two biggest commercial B.P.L. services in the United States are operated by Current and Cinergy in Cincinnati, and the city of Manassas, Va., which has teamed up with ComTek Communications Technology, another B.P.L. provider.

[On Oct. 5, Manassas and ComTek announced that B.P.L. was now available in every home in the city.]

Dozens of other utilities across the country are testing the service and hiring specialists like Current and ComTek to run it.

While the technology is not new, the home adapters and equipment on telephone poles that transmit data over power lines as radio signals have only recently become affordable enough for companies to start selling the service.

Current's service is now available to more than 50,000 homes in Cincinnati, and it plans to reach 250,000 homes by 2007. The company declined to say how many subscribers it has, but industry analysts estimate that about 15 percent, or 7,500, of the city's households have signed up since the service was introduced in October 2004.

While its subscriber rolls are still modest compared with those of cable or phone companies in Cincinnati, Current's early success has shown other utilities - some of which dabbled disastrously in telecommunications in the 1990's - that B.P.L. could be a viable business.

With equipment prices falling, Internet access companies like EarthLink, which do not control their own data lines but contract with cable and phone companies to use their networks, are looking at B.P.L. as an alternative delivery system, too.

"It doesn't matter what pipe you use as long as you have a pipe into the house," said Kevin Brand, the vice president for product management at EarthLink, which plans to introduce a B.P.L. service in the first half of 2006. "The power companies don't want to do this alone and they need an Internet provider like us to make this fly."

The Federal Communications Commission is also promoting B.P.L. as an alternative to the cable and phone companies that dominate the broadband market. Since nearly every home has electricity, the commission hopes that utilities can provide high-speed access to rural areas where phone and cable companies typically do not sell the service.

To the Hofstetters in Cincinnati, the advantages are obvious. They do not need to sign up with a separate broadband provider. No wires are strung along the walls and no clunky modems are required.

They have two broadband adapters that they can move to any outlet in the house. When Mr. Hofstetter takes his computer to a different room in the house, he takes an adapter with him, plugs it in and is instantly connected to the Internet. He can buy extra adapters for about $30.

"I'm not sure we can make broadband much more simple than this," said William H. Berkman, Current's chairman. "It's like when Wal-Mart automated everything."

For big utilities like Cinergy, the additional revenue from selling broadband is just one benefit. Since B.P.L. equipment atop telephone poles sends data signals both to and from homes, the technology can help utilities quickly spot power outages as well as monitor each home's electricity use. That capability, if broadly deployed, could save utility companies millions of dollars by eliminating the need for meter readers.

"Providing broadband over power lines is really about using the network better," said James E. Rogers, the chief executive of Cinergy, which formed a joint venture with Current in 2004.

This "smart grid" technology is a big reason utilities around the country are showing more interest in B.P.L. In July, I.B.M. formed a partnership with CenterPoint Energy, a Houston-based utility, to develop broadband services. Other utilities, including Con Edison in New York, have started testing the service.

Investors are also taking note. In July, Google, the Hearst Group and Goldman Sachs invested an estimated $100 million in Current. And equipment makers like Intel and Motorola have recently joined the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, which is developing standards for adapters and other B.P.L. equipment.

In the meantime, B.P.L. providers have been besieged with complaints from ham radio operators, who say that B.P.L. signals interfere with their radio signals. The National Association for Amateur Radio said that Current had done a better job than other B.P.L. providers in avoiding frequencies that ham radio users occupy.

Jay Birnbaum, Current's general counsel, noted that last year the F.C.C. ruled that B.P.L. companies could provide their service as long as they transmitted radio frequencies below certain levels. The ham radio association, however, wants the F.C.C. to conduct more tests.

Current is already planning to introduce new services, including an Internet phone service later this year. Customers will be able to plug their phones into a B.P.L. adapter instead of a wall jack for a traditional phone line.

Mr. Hofstetter, for one, is eager to try the phone service, because he now spends nearly $200 a month on local and long-distance calls. Current expects to sell a bundle package of broadband and unlimited phone service for less than the phone companies charge for similar services.

"If these guys ever get into video, I'd get that, too," Mr. Hofstetter said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/te...owerlines.html

Microsoft Befriends Some Competitors
Allison Linn

Here's a possible slogan for Microsoft Corp.: If you can't beat 'em, join the guys who are having the same problem. Microsoft struck two deals this week with sometime adversaries aimed in part at taking on mutual competitors.

Those partnerships with RealNetworks Inc. and Yahoo Inc. could signal a return to Microsoft's roots of successfully challenging IBM by finding the right allies, analysts say. And both show how seriously Microsoft takes competitors, including Google Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.

Microsoft "grew to a point where they thought they were big enough they could weather any storm," said analyst Rob Enderle. "I think they've been reminded recently that nobody's really big enough."

RealNetworks, the Seattle-based digital media company, on Tuesday announced a broad partnership with longtime nemesis Microsoft that also settles all the company's antitrust complaints. A series of agreements to share technology and promote each other's products could better position both companies to fight against Apple's market-leading iPod player and iTunes music service.

The need to compete better could not have been more clear when, the following day, Apple announced its newest iPod, which plays video, including some hit TV shows, that can be downloaded from iTunes.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs strutted across a stage Wednesday touting his latest product, Microsoft and Yahoo were announcing that they had finally agreed to make their instant messengers work together.

That deal is designed in part to take on America Online Inc.'s more popular instant messenger. But analysts say the companies also probably have one eye on Google, which launched its own messenger last month.

The mostly free software for sending lightning-fast text over the Internet is popular with business users and teens alike because it electronically mimics regular conversation. Many also see lucrative potential in up-and-coming services like video chats, computer- to-computer calling and perhaps even efforts to sell music or other products.

The RealNetworks deal follows several years of efforts by Microsoft to carve a place in the living room - and in people's portable gadget collections - for Windows-based systems that can deliver music, TV shows and movies to consumers.

Various Windows Media technologies have been key to that effort, and companies including Creative Labs Inc. and Samsung Inc. have had portable Windows-based products on the market for the past year.

But analyst Phil Leigh with Inside Digital Media said the video iPod's attractive price, combined with the television content it has already snagged, including ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," gives it an immediate edge over those fledgling efforts.

"Based upon the demand that they've got for the iPod per se, it's pretty clear that the video iPod is going to outsell all of the other devices that were introduced in the Microsoft ecosystem a year ago," Leigh said.

On the heels of the Yahoo-Microsoft announcement came news that AOL, a division of Time Warner Inc., has been talking with Google and Comcast Corp. about taking a joint stake in AOL. Those talks could perhaps edge out Microsoft, which has held its own talks with AOL over partnering in areas including search and instant messaging.

Analyst Charles Di Bona with Bernstein & Co. said Microsoft's recent partnership efforts could show that the company is refocusing on its roots as a platform company, providing the base software but leaving it to others to provide hardware and content.

That's the strategy Microsoft used in its early, extremely successful days, when it paired its operating system with computer makers' hardware to beat International Business Machines Corp.

In recent years, Microsoft has moved more into content with projects such as MSNBC and Slate, the online magazine it has since sold.

But going forward, Di Bona expects the company to focus less on content, such as its music download site, and more on partnerships that encourage others to use products such as its Windows Media software and copyright protection technology.

"They don't want to beat the iPod per se; they want to provide the software that allows other people to beat the iPod," he said.

Leigh said a disadvantage of that strategy is that Microsoft has to coordinate with multiple hardware and content providers, and can't always control how good the end result is.

"The Microsoft ecosystem has a lot of moving parts, and in the Apple ecosystem, Apple has complete control," Leigh said.

Also, although Microsoft has traditionally built itself on successful partnerships, some companies may be distrustful of working with the world's largest software company.

A big fear has been that to partner with Microsoft is to be owned by Microsoft, and the bullying tactics that came out during the company's U.S. government antitrust case are still fresh on the minds of some technology executives.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, has made it a priority to settle most of the company's outstanding private U.S. antitrust complaints, and a key part of some of those settlements has also been to forge business deals and increase goodwill.

Microsoft reached a massive antitrust settlement with Sun Microsystems Inc. last year that included a pledge to work together. Outside the courts, the company also has signed deals such as its cooperation agreement with phone maker Nokia Corp. in February.

Smith said the recent partnership push comes as the computer industry is evolving to be more focused on people using many different technologies over the Internet. That's forced Microsoft to change its philosophy, working to make its products more compatible and its relationships with others in the industry more harmonious.

"Consumers want to be able to use technology from multiple companies simultaneously, and so we have to work with each other in the industry, both to promote that kind of interoperability while we also continue to compete with each other," he said.

Companies such as Sun, Real and Nokia also have stressed that they continue to battle Microsoft one some fronts. And Di Bona said the partnerships shouldn't be taken as any indication that Microsoft, known for its brutally competitive streak, is getting soft.

"I don't think they view themselves as sort of the also-rans teaming up with the also-rans," he said. "They're definitely still in this to win. They're just deciding what stick they want to use."
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...10-14-21-04-10

Control

Senators: Bloggers May Not Be True Journalists
Anne Broache

Politicians indicated on Wednesday that a proposed law offering journalists special privileges might not be extended to Web loggers.

"The relative anonymity afforded to bloggers, coupled with a lack of accountability, as they are not your typical brick-and-mortar reporters who answer to an editor or publisher, also has the risk of creating a certain irresponsibility when it comes to accurately reporting information," Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said in a statement prepared for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on reporters' privilege legislation.

The hearing came as politicians are weighing the Free Flow of Information Act. The current wording of the measure, proposed in identical form in the U.S. House of Representatives, offers protection of confidential sources for anyone who "publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical in print or electronic word." The District of Columbia and every state except Wyoming already have some form of protection on their books.

Wednesday's hearing largely centered on broader tensions that remain between the Justice Department, which opposes the measure on the grounds that it would inhibit its investigative powers, and representatives from the news media, who contended that protection of confidential sources is essential for doing their work. New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in an Alexandria, Va., jail this summer because she refused to give up the name of a confidential source, participated on a panel clamoring for federal action.

"I'm here because I hope you will agree that an uncoerced, uncoercable press, though at times irritating, is vital to the perpetuation of the freedom and democracy we so often take for granted," she said.

Only a fraction of the questioning from senators hinged on whom should be covered by shield laws.

Largely echoing remarks he made during the first hearing on the topic, Cornyn voiced hesitance over whether the proposed shield law should apply to the "Internet blogger who has a cell phone with a camera, and maybe a laptop computer, and can publish with equal ease as a journalist."

Cornell University law professor Steven Clymer, who spoke on a panel that expressed reservations about the bill, told Cornyn that he thought the current wording of the bill would cover bloggers. Clymer indicated that he viewed this as a "dangerously broad" move that would undermine the idea of granting privileges at all.

Skepticism about treating bloggers as professional journalists is not new. Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is the primary sponsor of the shield law bill, told a journalism conference last week that bloggers should "probably not" be considered real journalists. (In the realm of election law, however, lawmakers have called for blanket exemptions for Internet publishers.)

It's clear that as lawmakers pursue the measure, debate over the definition of "journalist" will weigh heavily on the process.

Cornyn on Wednesday called for "serious discussion of what constitutes the term 'reporter.'" Lack of agreement on that definition has stalled federal efforts at shield law legislation for years, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, in a statement.

"With bloggers now participating fully in the 24-hour news cycle," he said, "we might face similar challenges in defining terms today."
http://news.com.com/Senators+Blogger...3-5902539.html

ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

Canadian Privacy Commish Denies Patriot Act Complaints

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner has denied a series of complaints launched after a major bank disclosed that U.S. law enforcement could access credit card user's personal information. The Commissioner concluded that Canadian privacy legislation "cannot prevent U.S. authorities from lawfully accessing the personal information of Canadians held by organizations in Canada or in the United States, nor can it force Canadian companies to stop outsourcing to foreign-based service providers."
http://www.privcom.gc.ca/cf-dc/2005/313_20051019_e.asp

CBS Expands Podcasting To Soap Operas

The WSJ reports on an initiative from CBS to make podcast version of its soap opera Guiding Light available for free download. The show began as a radio program in 1937.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112956084439070707.html

Qualcomm Sues Broadcom In Escalating Patent Dispute

Qualcomm Inc. has sued Broadcom Corp. for alleged patent infringement in an escalating legal battle between the two rivals. The lawsuit accuses Broadcom of improperly using Qualcomm's technology related to compressing video files so that they can be more easily transmitted.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...,2937602.story

'DVD-Jon' Profiled By WSJ

The WSJ profiled Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon. Johansen is targeting Apple Computer Inc., repeatedly hacking the software that runs its popular, Internet-based iTunes music store to remove restrictions on how many times purchased songs can be copied or on which devices they can be played.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112933886505169569.html

JackSpratts · 20-10-05, 08:05 PM

DVD Jon Lands Dream Job Stateside
Annalee Newitz

Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.

"I have no idea what I'll be doing, but I know it will be reverse engineering, and I'm sure it will be interesting," Johansen told Wired News during a Friday stopover in San Francisco.

A world-famous reverse engineer by the time he was 16, the soft- spoken tinkerer outraged the motion picture industry in 1999 for his work on DeCSS, a successful project to crack the encryption on DVDs that led to Hollywood's first lawsuits under the United States' controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, Johansen's hacks for Apple Computer's iTunes software and Microsoft's Media Player have made headlines, and his blog -- titled "So Sue Me" -- has become must-see surfing for digital media geeks and, one suspects, entertainment company lawyers.

In a posting to his website late Tuesday, Robertson said he'd snapped up Johansen to work on a "significant new project" called Oboe at his digital music company MP3tunes. Oboe will "bring digital music into the 21st century," Robertson wrote.

"We have been e-mail acquaintances for a while," said Robertson in an e-mail interview. "I hired him because we happen to have a major project underway at MP3tunes.com where I thought his skill set would fit perfectly."

But what is an avowed media liberator doing in a country where entertainment companies routinely sue college students for making copies of movies?

Quite simply, times are changing.

Until recently, Johansen's controversial work was protected by Norway's laws, which allowed people to reverse- engineer digital copy protection for lawful purposes. But in July, Norway adopted a European Union directive similar to the DMCA that outlaws circumventing copy protections for any reason.

"In Norway, you have the same laws (as in the United States) now," he says, "so it makes no difference if I'm doing my work here or there."

Johansen became the poster boy for free tinkering when he refused to stop distributing DeCSS with LiVid, a Linux DVD player. That's when the Norwegian police, egged on by U.S. entertainment companies, arrested him under that country's computer crime laws for breaking into his own media.

Undeterred, Johansen fought and won both cases brought against him in Norway, and continued his quest to release digital media from the shackles of overly restrictive copy protection. Since then he's built free software tools that crack Apple's AAC audio format -- the encryption systems used by iTunes -- and the Windows Media Player codec for streaming video.

PyMusique, another tool Johansen and two other engineers released earlier this year, allows people with Linux operating systems to buy music from the iTunes store and save it in an unrestricted format.

Johansen said he will be continuing this kind of work at Michael Robertson's latest venture, San Diego-based MP3tunes, an online digital music store that sells MP3s unfettered by digital rights management copy-protection systems.

Fresh off a plane from Norway and sampling his first California beer, Johansen said Friday he wasn't worried that his penchant for ripping apart DRM would get him into trouble in the United States.

"I still haven't heard anything from Apple about my hacks," he said with an infectious grin. "There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay called jhymn that's been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened."

Johansen added: "I plan to continue my research, but I won't be writing any tools (while in the United States)."

As for what kind of research he might pursue, Johansen says he's intrigued by Helix, the DRM system used by RealNetworks, because "it's the same audio format as Apple's, but higher quality." Real's music store is only open to U.S. customers, which has been frustrating for Johansen. "Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won't bother reverse-engineering it," he said. "Now that I can get an American credit card and sign up for their store I might look into it."

Although he dismissed the idea of being arrested with a shrug, Johansen admitted his stop in San Francisco -- 800 miles north of San Diego -- was planned in part as an opportunity to consult with attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Jennifer Granick, a cyberlaw attorney at Stanford Law School who often works with the EFF, said Johansen would be wise to be cautious. "Johansen has been out of the reach of the U.S. government and the DOJ," she said. "The fact is that when you've done something that the authorities think is illegal under U.S. law, you'll probably attract attention when you're capable of being arrested."

Nevertheless, Johansen is glad to be in the states, where he'll get a chance to contribute to software that ordinary people will use. "I took a job in the U.S. because I wanted to work on products that would get into end users' hands," he said. "In Norway, most of the jobs are in server software, niche stuff. The Opera browser is one of the few Norwegian products aimed at users."

In late summer, Johansen returned from a year in France and started his job search by pinging Robertson, whom he said "supports the work I do on open systems" and seemed like a good match for the quiet hacker.

Robertson is also no stranger to legal troubles -- his previous company, MP3.com, was sued by multiple companies in the record industry over its music locker business model. And in 2001, Microsoft filed a trademark infringement suit against Robertson's Linux startup, Lindows, which last year changed its name to Linspire in a settlement with Redmond's lawyers.

MP3tunes, whose name is a sly reference to iTunes, lets music lovers buy MP3s of their favorite music that can be played in any device, without a restrictive DRM system that impedes them from saving legal copies on multiple devices. "It's the record store model you'd like to see," said open-source entrepreneur John Gilmore, founder of Cygnus. "You can do whatever you like with your music within the bounds of copyright law."

This suits Johansen just fine. He's still strongly opposed to DRM, particularly because he believes it punishes consumers rather than prevents piracy. "People use my programs to put iTunes songs on non-iPod players," he said. "They're playing these files legally. Companies shouldn't use the law to prevent consumers from doing something legal."

The former DVD liberator is also dismayed by the future of movie disks, because new high-definition DVDs use several million keys in their encryption scheme, as compared to the 400 keys used in the Content-Scrambling System, or CSS, the method used to encrypt regular DVDs.

"Once again, this is a scheme that won't stop piracy, but it will stop open-source players," he said. "Pirates will steal one key, and not tell anyone about it. Then they'll decrypt HD-DVDs and put them on the net. But if you want an open-source player, you'll have to show your key, so (companies) will be able to find you and stop you."

Perhaps it makes sense that Johansen is excited to be in America. Now he's in the country that produces most of the world's media -- and most of the world's DRM, too. It's a media liberator's candy box.

And a media fan's. "Is the movie Serenity good?" he asked a reporter earnestly after finishing his beer. Assured that it is, Johansen broke out in another wide grin. "I'm so glad I get to see it now! It wasn't going to reach Norway until December."

Then, more seriously, he added, "I'm not scared about being arrested now that I'm here. Michael has good lawyers."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,69257,00.html

Cool, a Video iPod. Want to Watch 'Lost'?
Richard Siklos

THE introduction of Apple Computer's video iPod last Wednesday was greeted as an epochal event. The portable, personal, digital world - as you've no doubt heard by now - is here, and there is no turning back. And just as it took the vision and brio of Steven P. Jobs, Apple's founder, to drag the music industry into the 21st century with the iPod and the iTunes online music store, it was only a matter of time before he would do the same with what quaintly used to be known as the moving image.

And so, the video iPod. And with it, Mr. Jobs's particularly clever coup: sealing a deal with his quasi-estranged partner, the Walt Disney Company, to distribute downloaded versions of such hit Disney-produced shows as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" on the new gizmo, at $1.99 each. It's not exactly 500 channels of entertainment, but it's a good anchor tenant, supplemented by pay-per-download music videos and other clever features, such as films from Mr. Jobs' other outpost, the animation studio Pixar.

Only a fool would bet against Mr. Jobs, whose iPod now thoroughly dominates the digital music market against rivals like Sony. But here goes: at first blush, the video iPod is not about to revolutionize Hollywood in the way the iPod revolutionized music.

Why? Two reasons. One is that studios are not rushing to make their most popular movies and shows available for the video iPod (note that only Disney shared the stage with Mr. Jobs last week, and the primary motive may have been its desire to repair relations with Pixar). Perhaps even more important, mobile gadgets with access to everything that is already on television are on the way.

Just last week, EchoStar, the satellite broadcaster, released one such device, a portable personal video recorder called PocketDISH; it got much less notice than the video iPod got. Think of PocketDISH essentially as a pocket-sized TiVo - a small computer that lets you record television shows onto a hard drive with the click of a button - with a screen for watching what you've recorded. And like TiVo and its clones, it can record any program you can watch on a full-sized TV at home, and then allow you to fast- forward through the ads when you view it.

The obvious shortcoming of the video iPod (at least in its first iteration) is that by being Internet-based it can offer a scant library of material. Apart from Disney's hits and whatever else iTunes offers in coming months, other media giants like NBC Universal have not yet fully digitized their vast libraries of shows and movies and made them available via the Internet. They're worried about piracy, for one thing, but they're also not quite convinced that there is a good business case for online distribution.

Also, while there is an amazing amount of effort going into mobile entertainment, there is still considerable debate about what kind of video people might actually want to watch on the go. "You have to create new content for these new platforms," says Gregg Spiridellis, who along with his brother runs JibJab Media, a company that creates short-form spoofs like a John Kerry/George Bush cartoon that was widely e-mailed during the last election. "People behave differently when they're walking around with their iPod or a cellphone from when they're sitting on their couch with a clicker."

With portable video recorders like PocketDISH, there is no debate - at least not if the name of the game is taking shows on the road. These portable video recorders enable you to record cable or satellite programs and watch them either on the device itself or on a full-size television, which, let's face it, is what most shows were produced for, and how people feel comfortable watching movies. (The new iPod also plugs into a regular TV.)

Not surprisingly, the biggest proponents of portable personal video recorders are the companies that are already in the business of selling packages of shows and channels: cable and satellite providers. And these companies, unlike Apple, already have all the shows most people like to watch.

The first PocketDISH has a 30 gigabyte hard drive to store programs, matching the capacity of the new iPod. But the iPod gets its programs from iTunes, where Apple plays the toll-master; PocketDISH, which EchoStar created with a French company, Archos, in which it has a minority investment, takes its material off of any television at no additional charge.

Everyone from Microsoft to Comcast - in other words, the usual suspects - is working on or looking at similar pocket-size recorders. At least two companies, Pace Micro Technology of Britain and Samsung of South Korea, have said they plan to introduce models early next year. There is also TivoToGo, a service that can forward recorded shows to various mobile devices, even Sony PSP handheld gaming units.

Other variations on this portable theme are bubbling up in the consumer electronics and software worlds.

One California company, Sling Media, has created a device called Slingbox which forwards your cable service to any computer via a high-speed connection. Another, Orb Networks, offers software that works with a TV tuner card to forward any kind of digital media, including television programs, from your home to a computer or mobile device.

Of course, probably the biggest factor working against the instant success of a video iPod is that the video world has yet to experience the copyright-infringement meltdown that the music industry did a year or two ago, when millions of people were swapping songs free rather than buying CD's in stores.

There are no bogeymen like the original, illegal Napster or Kazaa to bring everyone to Mr. Jobs's table - at least, not yet. Rather, as more people get high-speed connections to their homes, Mr. Jobs is positioning his new device as a pre-emptive strike against pirates and file-sharers.

There is no disputing the wisdom in that, or of Apple's supremacy over just about any rival these days in introducing a device using its marketing and design prowess and brand appeal.

And there are chewy, unresolved legal questions raised by gadgets like the PocketDISH or Slingbox.

Still, the video iPod only has it half right: if it took material from the television as readily as it did from the Internet, it could be a blockbuster. But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of "Lost" from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?

Unlike its musical forebear, the video iPod may not be ready for prime time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/bu.../16frenzy.html

Hollywood Calls for Cut of Video IPod Pie
Gary Gentile

In a show of unity, five unions representing actors, writers and directors issued a joint call for talks to make sure their members get a cut of revenue generated by the sale of TV shows on Apple's iTunes software.

The unions sent a clear message to TV producers.

"We have not yet heard from the responsible employers of our members," their joint statement said. "But we look forward to a dialogue that ensures that our members are properly compensated for this exploitation of their work."

The presidents of unions representing Hollywood writers and actors were lunching at a popular Beverly Hills restaurant on Wednesday when they saw a TV report about a deal to allow episodes of ABC shows such as "Lost" to be downloaded for portable viewing on the new video iPod from Apple Computer Inc.

In doing the deal with Apple, ABC became the first network to allow viewers to download episodes of their shows the day after they air on TV. Other networks are expected to follow shortly.

The development was news to Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America, west, and John Connolly, president of the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists.

The two called their counterparts at the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, East, which covers writers east of the Mississippi.

The show of unity was unusual, coming from unions that are sometimes at odds over issues such as royalties from DVD sales.

"We developed a new piece of stationary that never existed before," Verrone said of the joint statement.

The unions have not yet called ABC or its parent, The Walt Disney Co., to discuss how much of the $1.99 that Apple is charging for a single episode should go to writers, actors and directors.

"The guilds are our business partners, and we always welcome a dialogue with them on any business- related issue that affects their members," ABC said in a statement.

The groups already have agreements that cover the re-use of their work on the Internet or in "pay per view" models, such as video on demand. The unions also have newer agreements covering work produced for the Internet.

Under the WGA contract, writers are entitled to 1.6 percent of the license fee paid by networks to the producers of a show. The ABC hits "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," are produced by Touchstone Studios, Disney's TV production arm.

Actors are entitled to 3.6 percent of the license fee.

A conflict could arise if studios decide to treat the Internet downloads the same as a DVD sale, which might result in lower payments.

"We have to learn more about the actual technology," Verrone said. "I'm thrilled by the notion I can watch my shows in the palm of my hand, but I also want to make sure we are paid appropriately."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT

2009 Likely to Be Digital TV Deadline
Jennifer C. Kerr

Congress is zeroing in on early 2009 as the time for the country to make the switch to digital television broadcasts, a move that will give viewers sharper pictures and better sound.

A Senate bill would set a firm deadline of April 2009, according to a draft proposal obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008.

In addition to working out a compromise on the date, lawmakers must decide whether to keep a Senate provision calling for the federal government to pay for converter boxes that would allow people who don't have or can't afford a digital TV, or cable or satellite, to continue to receive over-the-air local stations.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is expected to take up the bill Wednesday.

Current law calls for television broadcasters to switch to all-digital transmissions by late 2006, or when 85 percent of households have the ability to receive digital signals. But there's confusion about how to count the 85 percent, so Congress is stepping in to set a so-called "hard date" - requiring broadcasters to end the transmission of their traditional analog signal.

The broadcasters' move to all-digital will free up valuable radio spectrum.

Some of the frequencies were promised to public safety groups in 1997, and they've been waiting for years for the broadcasters to vacate the analog spectrum. Those channels will help improve congestion and other communications problems on the emergency radios used by fire, police and others.

Besides setting a hard date, the Senate bill would designate an undermined amount of money, possibly $1 billion, to help public safety officials buy new equipment or invest in networks that would help improve communications across their own communities and across entire regions.

The spectrum that isn't allocated for public safety will be auctioned by the government. Congressional officials estimate its value at about $10 billion.

In a letter to lawmakers on Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other industry leaders urged Congress to speed the transition to DTV so the auctioned spectrum could be used for wireless broadband and other services, especially in rural and poor areas. They called for the earliest possible deadline but said it should be no later than Jan. 1, 2009.

A member of the coalition that sent the letter said he wasn't disappointed that the proposed deadline in the Senate bill is April 7, 2009.

"We are not going to argue over a few months," said Ralph Helmann, senior vice president of government relations at the Information Technology Industry Council. "Having a hard date was very significant."
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...10-14-21-08-01

Exploding Demand for Secure Internet TV and Video Distribution Fuels Kontiki's Momentum and Launch of Kontiki 5.0

Company Announces Fifth Generation of Its Delivery System Has Been Chosen by BBC, America Online, Inc., Avanade and Others to Enable Highly Interactive and Secure Delivery of Entertainment and Corporate Information

Press Release

Kontiki today announced the fifth generation of its flagship software, giving consumer media companies and enterprises the industry's most advanced, fully-functioned and secure solution for delivering DVD-quality video across the Internet or enterprise. Demand for Kontiki's field- proven delivery system is increasing rapidly, as consumer media companies seek new ways to monetize their content and enterprises embrace new media-rich methods of effectively communicating with employees and customers.

Called Kontiki 5.0, the new, enhanced platform enables content providers and enterprises to securely publish, protect, deliver and track rich media content at a fraction of the cost of traditional distribution systems, while giving users on-demand access to rich media content. Kontiki is already deploying its platform at some of the world's largest media companies including America Online, Inc. and the BBC, in addition to a number of large enterprises including Avanade.

Just as enterprises have always been concerned with protecting and securing online video content distribution, consumer media companies are beginning to focus on the same issues as technology advancements and broadband access become more widespread and pervasive. With broadband adoption expected to reach 46 million households by 2008 and increasing consumer demand for rich media content to be delivered via the Internet, the need for secure solutions to deliver content to a wide range of users is real.

"With consumer spending for online content reaching into the billions of dollars last year and the demand for high-quality, online video soaring, consumer media companies are looking to leverage the Internet for new revenue streams and marketing vehicles. At the same time, enterprises are looking for cost-effective ways to distribute vital content to their clients and employees," said Todd Johnson, CEO of Kontiki. "Kontiki 5.0 allows consumer media companies to take advantage of opportunities now. With Kontiki 5.0, our customers can quickly and cost-effectively deliver the most compelling video-on-demand experiences available today."

The new Kontiki 5.0 platform features enhanced central management and controls to support legal and legitimate publishing activities, copyright protection through digital rights management (DRM), full-screen DVD-HDV quality and a highly-scalable and cost-effective delivery model. The platform is also fully customizable to support the extension of consumer branding.

"Kontiki has worked with the BBC on phase one of the trial for our integrated Media Player (iMP) and we are currently in the middle of phase two. Kontiki's product allows the BBC to trial the properties of a legal peer-to-peer distribution capability to cost-effectively make our programmes available to audiences whenever and however they want them," said Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology for the BBC.

Alex Blum, Vice President of Audience Products at America Online, Inc. commented, "AOL's continued efforts to lead in the general migration from text based experiences on the web to video based experiences continues through our successful trials of Kontiki's delivery platform for high-resolution video."

Kontiki 5.0 Delivery Management System

A new plateau for rich media delivery, the Kontiki 5.0 delivery management system is a comprehensive software solution that expands on the company's pioneering video delivery software. The enhanced platform combines:

-- Content security -- Allows only authorized users to receive and view content and employs MS DRM (Digital Rights Management) to prevent unauthorized or illegal copying or sharing of content with another individual or device. This assures the enterprise that sensitive video communications cannot be sent externally and guarantees consumer media companies that their copyrighted content cannot be compromised through illegal file sharing.

-- Content audit and tracking features -- Lets companies know that content has been delivered to a user's device, and provides the ability to view timely reports, such as most popular content items, when end-users viewed content and how long they viewed it. Consumer media companies can measure the effectiveness and popularity of specific content. Enterprises can measure content consumption by employee or by region. For example, an enterprise rolling out a sales training program can measure who has viewed the training content and how frequently they accessed the content, allowing measurement against sales performance.

-- Controlled publishing -- Only authorized users or groups can publish content for distribution. For example, unauthorized communications from a disgruntled employee or the publishing of content into the system from outside of the company is prevented.

-- Efficient P2P Delivery -- Maximizes the delivery and download speed of media content and manages bandwidth usage to reduce service provider costs. The peer-to-peer download process is transparent to the end user and does not impact the performance of the device.

-- Customization and Integration -- Kontiki 5.0 features a robust set of APIs enabling the enterprise and consumer media company to create fully customized and branded user interface.

-- DVD-HDV Quality -- Video quality is preserved, with full-screen, DVD or HDV quality.

Major Enhancements in Kontiki 5.0:

-- Consumer Services -- Kontiki 5.0's set of robust APIs enables consumer media companies to build powerful IPTV platforms for the consumer, offering services such as a TV-style program guide with search, season tickets and tags to popular content. It also allows content providers to build additional services into their offering such as ad-serving and payment systems.

-- Complete UI Customization and Branding -- Both the enterprise and content provider have the option to fully customize and brand the UI to create a rich interactive experience for the end user.

-- Fast Distribution From Behind the Firewall -- Kontiki 5.0's new UDP-based protocol allows content to be delivered from one device behind a firewall to another device behind a different firewall. This is a particularly powerful feature for content providers wanting to deliver authorized content to consumers in a more efficient way without worrying about firewall settings blocking authorized content or impacting the performance of the network.

-- Scalability -- Kontiki 5.0 exceeds its predecessor in the size of files it can distribute, now accommodating file sizes in the tens of terabytes. This supports even the largest of consumer facing deployments using the largest media files such as DVD images.

-- Application Integration -- Kontiki 5.0 is flexible enough to be deployed as a standalone application, as Windows based service, or as an ActiveX control, so it can be easily integrated as part of an enterprise or consumer portal or embedded within a custom media client application.

-- Support for Multiple Devices -- Content can be played on multiple devices in addition to PCs and laptops, such the Apple iPod and Windows Media Center devices.

Global firms like Avanade, a technology integrator specializing in Microsoft enterprise solutions, and professional services leader Ernst & Young, are benefiting from the Kontiki platform through secure content sharing and publishing, uninterrupted business operations, improved employee-to-client distribution of content, and optimized network bandwidth.

"Avanade required a secure solution that could co-exist with our existing network infrastructure," said Jeff Laird, manager of Avanade Learning & Knowledge Services operations for Avanade. "By deploying a complete content delivery solution from Kontiki, we can enjoy worry-free file distribution that is easy to maintain, while our employees concentrate on business matters versus technology issues."
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en

P2P Television and Radio - Help Beta Test My Program
Jhooks

I have made a program for streaming audio and video with peer-to-peer technology.

Stream-2-Stream (abbreviated "s2s" or "S2S") allows anyone with a broadband connection to set up their own internet television or radio station. Stream-2-Stream is a peer-to-peer network for streaming audio and video. Stream-2-Stream saves bandwidth by passing streams from one peer to another, rather than everyone getting a stream from one central server.

Stream-2-Stream is free open source software available for anyone to use or modify.

Stream-2-Stream is coded in java and runs on any platform that supports the Java Runtime Environment (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more). The graphics library used is Swing.

Stream-2-Stream is a derivative work of P2P-Radio, Stream-2-Stream supports shoutcast and icecast streams. Supported codecs are MP3, NSV, and Ogg Vorbis.

The website is http://s2s.sourceforge.net
I really need people to beta test my software.

It would really help if people could make some stations. To make one you can simply enter the address of an existing shoutcast or icecast station.

Hope to see some of you there
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22079

Note: All illustrations as well as the original article can be found here – Jack.

Using PCs and TVs As Clients in Your Digital Home Entertainment Network
Terry Ulick

Whether you configure your home entertainment network as a peer-to-peer or client/server network, you mix PCs and media extenders connected to TVs, powered speakers, or home stereos. Media extender devices allow a low-cost solution where existing TVs can be used as displays connected to a media extender client playing media from a main server PC. This chapter will help you integrate various media devices into your home network.

For more information on home entertainment networks, visit our Digital Lifestyles Reference Guide or sign up for our Digital Lifestyles Newsletter

If you have ever worked in an office or used computers that were a part of a large network, you’ve seen how one large computer acts as a "server" to provide data and even programs for a number of "clients" connected to it through a network.

You can create many different types of networks when you combine computers and share data. Although this book is using a straightforward approach without trying to complicate things with a lot of tech terms, you should know some basic networking terms. As an example, your home entertainment network can be configured as one of the following:

Peer-to-peer—Often referred to as P2P or ad hoc, peer-to-peer is a simple approach to networking where you connect any number of PCs together on a network, and each is an independent device with its own files and programs. Each computer can share files and devices with other computers on the network, and you can establish which files and devices are shared by each computer. You can think of a peer-to-peer network as a "file sharing" configuration.
Client/server—In a client/server configuration, one main computer is dedicated as a server. The server contains most all data, and the other devices on the network, clients, access and use data from the server. The server can also be the primary device connected to the Internet with client devices sharing that Internet connection. Used most often in business and workplaces, this type of network allows easy management of files and access to data.

Each of these network strategies works well in a home network. At home, if you have two computers and you network them together, a peer-to-peer network is a simple solution when sharing files and a printer or accessing the Internet is the goal.

A client/server network is a good choice when a home network is configured for entertainment. As you will learn throughout this book, you can have essentially non–computer devices such as TVs and stereos playing media files from a computer on a network. Because such devices do not have their own storage and have simple computers that power them, they become clients that require a server.

Because media files can be very large and you want to be able to access them from any device in your home, it makes sense to put all your media files on one main storage device—the server.

In a client/server network, you can put most of your investment in the main server and use relatively inexpensive devices as clients. If all you want to do is listen to music from your main PC in your bedroom, rather than buy another computer and place it in your bedroom, you can simply buy a wireless media player and put it in the bedroom connected to a TV or a home stereo or set of powered speakers. It is a "client" device and it doesn’t need its own hard drive or computer display.

Let’s take a look at how each type of network works in a home entertainment network.

Using a File Sharing Configuration

A P2P configuration (referred to here as simply file sharing) works perfectly in a home entertainment network. If you have a number of PCs, this might be a good solution. Each PC has its own hard drive that can store media, and you can configure the network in a way that each computer can share the media files from other computers in the network.

P2P or file sharing networks, as shown in Figure 3.1, work essentially as a file sharing solution. A number of PCs in one local area network (LAN) operate as self-standing PCs. When needed, the PCs in the P2P network can share files and even devices that are connected to them, such as printers.

Figure 3.1 In a file sharing network, fully equipped PCs each share data and devices such as printers or connections to the Internet with each other.

When creating a file sharing network, you can still use the strategy of making one PC on the network the primary location for storing media files. Although there are multiple PCs on the network, each with its own hard drive, it is still a good practice to use one main drive for storing shared media files.

File sharing networks work best when all the devices in the network have a true "peer" status: They are fully independent computing devices that can function without a network present. In a home entertainment network, new types of devices on the network are essentially media players without data storage or even an operating system that require a host computer to act as a server to them.

A client/server network is appropriate when you use media player devices.

Understanding Client/Server Networks

When you have media players and media extenders on a network, they require a server where they get media content files to play. This setup creates a more traditional client/server network, as shown in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2 A client/server network has a main PC acting as a data server to both PCs and media player devices such as TVs and stereos connected to media extenders.

As shown in Figure 3.2, the primary PC that is used as the media server is connected directly to a router. It acts as the network hub and controls access to files from the other PCs and devices on the network. It also controls access to an Internet connection and other PCs and devices in the network access the Internet through its connection. With media extender devices or even other PCs, they can all use the security and firewall of the hub computer.

To understand this configuration better, a look at media extender devices is required.

Using Media Extenders in a Client/Server Network

Media extenders are relatively new devices, and they are essential additions to any home entertainment network. Here’s why.

It really doesn’t make sense to buy a full-powered PC that is capable of connecting to a TV, stereo, or powered speakers when all you use it for is viewing media files. And in many ways, a computer is a little too complex for the task: It requires keyboards and a mouse, and it’s big, clunky, and expensive.

A better solution is a small device that can connect directly to a TV or stereo and allow you to view video or photos or play music anywhere on the network.

Such devices, called media extenders, are now available at most major electronics stores, and they are changing the makeup of a home entertainment network. Selling for about $100 to $250, it’s a small computing device designed to work on a Windows XP home network. Each media extender contains its own simple user interface and TV and audio connectors; you connect it to a TV and a stereo. Using a supplied remote control, you can easily find and play a media file from your server PC.

Tip

Chapter 9, "Adding TV and Media Extenders to the Network," shows how media extenders work and how you add media extenders to your home entertainment network.

Figure 3.3 shows a typical media extender and its connections for networking and attaching to a TV or stereo.

Figure 3.3 Media extenders connect to your network and play media files on TVs or stereos.

The media extender uses media player software that installs on a PC to play media located on that PC via the extender. It is essentially a client to a PC acting as a server. The media extender has the ability to interact with the media player software on the server and pull media files through the network and play them.

Media extenders are client/server networked devices. When you have several media extenders in your home, you find that the strategy of a client/server network works well for the media extenders and also for other PCs (although they do not require any special media serving software). The other PCs can simply use Windows Media Player or other media playing software accessing files shared from the main server PC.

Using PCs on a Client/Server Network

One of the advantages of a client/server network is that you can use PCs as clients. When acting as a client, you can use a PC that has a minimal configuration. You do not need client PCs to have large hard drives, DVD burners, or much of the power that the server PC has.

It’s okay if the client PCs are fully powered and as well equipped as the main server PC, but it’s okay if they’re not. As long as they meet the minimum requirements for running Windows XP (detailed in Chapter 2, "Configuring Your PC As an Entertainment Server") and are equipped with a network connection, either wired or wireless, you can access media files from your main server.

For a PC in a home entertainment network, even though you don’t need some of the large storage and processing power that the server PC has, you need the following to use the client PC as a media playing device:

TV-out display card—Your display card should have a TV-out connector so that you can view video, recorded TV, and pictures on a TV connected to the PC. You can use a TV rather than a computer monitor to view media. If you have a large enough computer monitor and it is used in a smaller room, you might find a computer monitor connected to a client PC adequate for most media viewing.
Powered speakers or connection to a stereo—Whether you are listening to music files or viewing video on your client PC, you want a good sound system connected to it. Your client PC is essentially becoming your home stereo device, and even TV viewing is enhanced with a good sound system.
Wireless keyboard and mouse—As with any PC used as a media player, you want the freedom and flexibility of a wireless keyboard and mouse when using your client PC.

With the preceding equipment, just about any PC functions well as a client PC. In addition to the benefits of playing media content from the main server PC, the client PC continues to function as a traditional PC in your home, making it a great multitasker.

Putting the Right Device in the Right Place

If you are mixing both PCs and media extenders in a client/server home entertainment network, it is important to put the right device in the right place.

By understanding what type of activity you do in each room, you can easily determine what type of device is best for each location.

Tip

Just because you are building a home network doesn’t mean you need multiple PCs. You can have just one PC that acts as the entertainment server to TVs and stereos connected to media extenders throughout your home.

Because you are creating a home entertainment network, it’s a given that you should be able to access all your entertainment content from any device located in your network. A bigger question is how you experience that content. The type of display you use, the size of the display, the basic ergonomics of your room, the sound system—these are all key factors in having a great media experience.

With a mix of PCs and media extenders, the same is true for a great computing experience. When you are surfing the Web, reading and writing emails, word processing, and using creative programs for photo editing and music management, you need a good computing work space.

A PC using a TV as its display is perfect for watching TV and videos, but you do not want to do much traditional computing with such a display. TVs are extremely low-resolution and can be fuzzy for computing work. Also, if you’ve set up your room for media watching, you’ll probably be sitting pretty far back from the display and on a comfortable chair rather than an office chair.

The reverse is true for media playing. If you’ve set your client PC in an office setting, it’s great for computing but won’t be comfortable for watching a long movie or listening to music for any length of time.

This whole "TV versus computing dilemma" is termed the 10-inch/10-foot experience. Using it as a rule helps you plan which type of device configuration is best for a room based on whether you will be primarily doing computing or playing media. Figure 3.4 shows the computer viewing experience, and Figure 3.5 shows the TV viewing experience:

Ten-inch—General and office computing tasks are best done at least 10 inches from a display, as shown in Figure 3.4. You also should use a high-quality, high-resolution computer monitor for computing.
Ten-foot—Watching TV, watching picture slideshows, and listening to music is best done about 10 feet from a display, and that display should be a good TV.

Figure 3.4 General computing is best done with a computer monitor as a "10-inch" experience.

Figure 3.5 Watching media is best done with a TV as a "10-foot" experience.

Of course, the preceding rules could be 6-inch/6-feet or even 12-inch/12-feet, depending on your displays and what is comfortable for you.

There will be locations where you plan to do both media viewing/playing and computing. One solution is to use a PC and take advantage of the display card’s ability to connect both a computer monitor and a TV to the PC at the same time.

When you are using the PC for general computing, sit at a table or desk in the room and locate the computer monitor there for a 10- inch experience. When you want to kick back and play some media, take the wireless keyboard and mouse over to the couch and have a 10-foot experience watching media files on the TV.

Using PCs When Computing Power Is Needed

Even when watching media, sometimes a PC is the best device if you want to mix your media experience with content and information from the Internet.

Media extenders are essentially media playing devices that are limited to playing media files but have little or no computing power. They are not designed to surf the Web or do any traditional computing functions.

If you want to find more information about shows you are watching, play along with interactive TV shows from their websites, order a CD when you are listening to a song playing from a streaming music channel, or take a quick break to check your email, you might want to use a PC rather than a media extender—at least in that location.

Currently, PCs still have an edge over media extenders because they do allow you to mix content from the Internet with the media you are playing. When needed, you can always use them as PCs for email and getting news, sports, and weather.

Table 3.1 is a simple guide to which type of client is best suited for any location.

Table 3.1 Selecting a PC or Media Extender Client

Activity
PC
Media Extender

Watching TV
X
X

Viewing photos
X
X

Listening to music
X
X

Ripping CDs
X

Viewing enhanced TV
X

Surfing the Web
X

Editing video
X

Email
X

As you can see, PCs are capable of all activities, but they cost more than a media extender. Many of the activities in Table 3.1 can be done on one single PC, and you might find that a full PC is not needed in many locations if they are primarily used for media viewing and playing.

Using TVs for Media Playing

Just as PCs are best suited for detail work such as general computing, TVs are best for media playing for a number of reasons and some surprising new ones.

On the most basic level, you probably have at least one good TV, perhaps several, that you can put to work as displays connected directly to your PCs’ display cards or to media extenders. This keeps the cost of your home entertainment network down because you are using equipment you already have—in a brand new way.

Lowest Cost Media Viewing Solution

PC monitors, especially flat panel LCDs, are still pretty expensive when compared to TVs. A 20-inch computer LCD monitor is at least $1000 compared to at 20-inch TV, which can be purchased for as little as $100.

Traditional TVs, which are cathode ray tube (CRT) displays, have a very low resolution of 320x240 pixels and are not good when used as a display for general computing. Figure 3.6 shows the difference between the same website viewed on a TV (left) and a standard computer monitor (right).

Figure 3.6 The same website displays differently on a TV (left) and a computer monitor (right).

The TV image is small (320x240 pixels), and also the image is blurry and hard to read. The computer image has a much higher resolution (for example, 1024x768 pixels, and often much higher depending on your video card and monitor) and is extremely sharp. TV displays were never intended for computing applications, and because standard TV images are so low in resolution, regardless of which display they are viewed on, TV images are low quality by their very nature.

That applies to TV as we have known it for the last 50 years. Recent changes to TV broadcasting and display technology are changing all of that. Digital TV broadcasts in high definition are changing the quality of TV images and TV monitors. If you are using an HDTV tuner card, and if you plan to use a computer monitor for viewing HDTV, you need a video card and a computer monitor that can display the full HDTV resolution of 1920x1080 or better.

If you’ve been to just about any electronics store lately, you’ve no doubt been dazzled by a whole new generation of high-resolution flat panel TVs that come in plasma and LCD varieties. Flat panel screens are the future of TV, and the great news is that not only are they incredible TVs, but they also make great computer monitors. Figure 3.7 shows one of the new flat panel plasma TVs in action.

Figure 3.7 A Gateway flat panel plasma TV works great for viewing TV or computer applications.

Plasma and LCD TVs are essentially the same technology as LCD computer monitors. Many on the market today can function either as a TV or as a computer monitor. Even when one is functioning as a TV hooked to the TV-out connector of your computer’s display card, it has such a high quality image that it can be used to view computer applications.

In a home with plasma or LCD flat panel TVs, you can freely mix both media viewing and computer applications on the same display. Remember to use a screen saver (most media extenders and DVD players feature them) because plasma and LCD TVs are subject to "burn in" if you keep the same image on the screen for long periods of time.

Listening to Music with TVs

A TV can also be a good device for listening to music. Because TVs have their own speakers, it might be good enough for music, but chances are it’s not.

If you are using a TV connected to a media extender, you might want to consider connecting the audio-out connectors on the media extender to a set of powered speakers (or a home stereo if you prefer). Connect the video-out connector to the TV. This setup provides you with a perfect combination of picture and sound.

Tip

Media extenders that you attach to your TV have a set of audio jacks that can be connected to a stereo or set of powered speakers. If the sound from your TV isn’t that great, you can add a set of powered speakers to the media extender and have great sound using your TV as your onscreen guide to your music.

Some TVs have audio-out connections of their own, which allow you to connect the TV’s audio directly to a set of powered speakers or a home stereo. If this is the case, you can use those connectors. Connect the audio-out from the media extender to the audio-in of the TV. Then, connect the audio-out connectors on the TV to the speakers or stereo.

In a home entertainment network configuration, you select music and control it using either a TV or computer monitor, so it’s good to begin thinking of music as something you control with a visual interface.

Summary

Whether you configure your home entertainment network as a peer-to-peer or client/server network, you mix PCs and media extenders connected to TVs, powered speakers, or home stereos. Media extender devices allow a low-cost solution where existing TVs can be used as displays connected to a media extender client playing media from a main server PC. TVs are good for playing video and displaying simple media menus but are not high enough quality for computing applications. A new generation of flat panel plasma and LCD TVs are capable of functioning both as TVs and computer displays.
http://www.informit.com/articles/pri...y.asp?p=412918

DirecTV's Stock Has Taken a Beating. Is a Buyback the Fix?
Geraldine Fabrikant

It has been a tough year for shareholders of the DirecTV Group, the satellite television company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

Fears about competition from telephone and cable companies have buffeted its stock price, which has fallen 12.9 percent this year. The shares rose 19 cents, or 1.3 percent, on Friday to close at $14.57 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Anxious analysts who have endorsed the stock are hoping shareholders will get a Christmas present as a reward for their loyalty. On Dec. 23, a tax ruling that prohibited DirecTV from buying its own shares will lapse, clearing the way for the company to go on a buying spree if it chooses to do so.

The analysts point out that the company's healthy balance sheet would permit it to buy back the entire stake of 215 million shares, or 15 percent of the company, that is held by the General Motors Pension Trust, although few of them expect the company to authorize such an aggressive purchase.

But even a far smaller buyback might give a lift to the stock at a time of increasing concerns about cable competition.

The cable industry, itself under siege from both the telephone companies and satellite operators, is getting more aggressive at pricing its packages of video, data and voice services. Last week, Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, said it might join in a bid to acquire a stake in AOL from Time Warner, potentially allowing it to offer instant messaging and other AOL services to Comcast customers.

In June 2004 the Cablevision Systems Corporation introduced a "triple play" - phone calls, Internet access and television channels - for $89.95 a month. The offer jolted the industry. In just 12 months, Cablevision signed up 174,000 triple-play customers and added about 55,000 new subscribers, the first annual increase for the company in two years, bringing its total to 3 million subscribers. "Satellite had been eating our lunch," Cablevision's chief operating officer, Thomas M. Rutledge, acknowledged in a recent interview.

Although Cablevision raised the price of the triple play to $115 for subscribers signing up for a second year, Mr. Rutledge said that the churn, or turnover rate, among these subscribers was 18 percent lower than that of other customers.

The cable packages and Comcast's interest in AOL "appear to make the competition for home video subscribers more competitive," said Craig Moffett, an analyst who follows cable and satellite TV for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Not that Cablevision has cornered the market. Last year DirecTV added 1.7 million new subscribers, and it added another 730,000 through the second quarter of this year, for a total of 14.7 million subscribers. That makes it the second-largest provider of multichannel home video after Comcast, which has 21 million subscribers.

In the second quarter that ended June 30, DirecTV reported a profit of $161.5 million, compared with a loss of $13.3 million a year earlier.

DirecTV's subscriber growth rate has slowed this year, but that may not be all bad. Chase Carey, DirectTV's chief executive, said the company had opted for slower growth as it tried to reduce last year's higher churn levels, which were partly a result of taking on too many customers with weak credit.

"We have recognized that our churn rate was too high, and we have been monitoring the credit," Mr. Carey said.

Aryeh Bourkoff, a media analyst at UBS Securities, said the market was "very competitive for video services, and cable is beginning to offer the triple-play bundles, which has improved their competitive positioning, therefore making growth prospects more costly for DirecTV."

That specter of increased competition puts pressure on DirecTV to buy its own shares, he said.

Today, Mr. Murdoch owns 34 percent of DirecTV's shares through his News Corporation. The General Motors Pension Trust said early last year that it would sell 110 million shares of its stake, though ultimately it sold only half that amount.

Now there is some speculation that the trust may try to cut a deal with DirecTV to sell its shares to the company at a slight premium, on the theory that DirecTV does not want those shares dumped on the open market. A spokesman for the trust declined to comment, as did Mr. Carey.

Whether DirecTV will buy shares from the pension trust or the public is not clear, but certainly concern about the sale of the pension fund holdings is weighing on the stock, analysts agree. "We continue to believe that DirecTV's potential purchase of the G.M. stake would be a big catalyst," Douglas Shapiro, of Banc of America Securities, wrote in a recent report. That would eliminate the concern about a major sale that has depressed the stock price.

Thomas Egan, of Oppenheimer, added: "They could buy up all its shares with existing cash, which would be a big boost to holders." DirecTV has $4 billion in cash and a revolving credit line of $500 million. "It is the only company in the entertainment space that has more cash than debt," Mr. Egan said.

Owning a satellite TV business had long been a dream of Mr. Murdoch, who is chairman of DirecTV; he bought the shares in 2003 when the company was still a tracking stock of General Motors.

The link to News Corporation inevitably raises questions of the satellite company's strategy. For example, did DirecTV rush to expand last year, spending heavily for new subscribers but then suffering from high churn, because the additional subscribers gave the News Corporation's cable networks, including Fox News and FX, wider distribution? Mr. Carey says this was not the case.

Some analysts say they believe that even though growth has slowed, there are opportunities for DirecTV to add families with new homes or those who once had only broadcast TV.

"As the number of people who take only broadcast declines, the big growth in satellite does not come from cable, it comes from new homes or former broadcast-TV-only homes," Mr. Egan said. "Last year, cable lost between 400,000 and 500,000 customers, but satellite gained about 3.2 million."

Not everyone is so sure. Mr. Moffett, of Sanford C. Bernstein, has put a sell rating on the stock, because of competition and because he says he believes the company is entering a tough phase when it will be spending heavily to offer more new equipment: high-definition television and digital video recorders.

Mr. Carey said he was more optimistic because he believed that the cost of equipment was gradually coming down. DirecTV has been able to add subscribers, he said, because "at the end of the day, the core question is who provides the best television experience."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/te...ectv.html?8dpc

Lifetime's Place Is in the House (and Senate)
Kate Aurthur

"Ladies and gentlemen, the United States is one of the largest markets for sex slavery in the entire world. We need to realize that modern-day slavery is only occurring because we choose to ignore it."

If these words sound more like lines from a political address than dialogue from a made-for-television movie, that may be because they were inspired by a speech that Tony Blair gave in 2003. It got Trevor Walton - a senior vice president at Lifetime, who was in London at the time - thinking, and the result is "Human Trafficking," the channel's first mini-series. Starring Mira Sorvino as the sexy-but-determined government agent who delivers those words, it is scheduled to be broadcast on Oct. 24 and Oct. 25 at 9 p.m. "The biggest percentage of people that are trafficked in the world are women, and women are our business at Lifetime," Mr. Walton said in an interview.

Lifetime has been unquestionably successful in that business: it is the No. 1 cable channel among female viewers. Since its debut in 1984, it has offered women the television equivalent of comfort food. Its programs - the soft-focus "Intimate Portrait" biographies of everyone from Kelly Ripa to Bella Abzug, reruns of "Designing Women" and "Golden Girls," and movies in which, more often than not, someone is stalking Shannen Doherty or Jaclyn Smith - provide a warm, consistent hum.

In recent years, however, Lifetime has promoted its issue-oriented programming by tying it to direct appeals to viewers to improve their lives. In April, for instance, after the broadcast of "Terror at Home," a documentary about domestic abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline had a 7,000 percent increase in calls.

But Lifetime's most surprising experiment has taken place off screen. Through its public affairs office, it has become a political lobbying force - and quite an effective one at that - rallying its audience to back laws about a broad slate of women's issues.

The Justice for All Act of 2004, for example, which sought to speed the DNA testing of rape kits, wasn't getting a lot of attention on its own. ("I had many a press conference," said Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from New York who sponsored the act, "and the only press in the audience was Lifetime TV.") So Lifetime collected 110,000 signatures. President Bush signed the bill into law last year.

And after broadcasting "Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story," a movie in which Angie Harmon was spied on by a creepy, high-tech neighbor, Lifetime brought Ms. Harmon to Washington to introduce legislation that would criminalize such behavior. A variation of the bill (the Video Voyeurism Protection Act of 2004) passed last year. Congresswoman Maloney said of Lifetime, "They literally have mobilized themselves into an advocacy organization that, I would say, has growing clout in Washington."

This unlikely effort has been led by Lifetime's executive vice president of public affairs and corporate communications, Meredith Wagner. In its early days, she said over drinks at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, Lifetime had a vague image as a network for women, but "we didn't really know what we were." So she and Bonnie Hammer, who has since become the president of the USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel, started searching for inexpensive, topical documentaries. "We'd go down to my house in the Village and watch the tapes and drink wine all night," Ms. Wagner said. "It was great because there was no downside - the ratings were zero." Lifetime began to produce public service announcements to go with some of its movies, and to hold screenings in Washington. "We were making it up as we went along," she said. "But we started to get really an interesting response from our viewers."

The ratings stopped being zero. Along the way, Lifetime started voting drives, beginning with the 1992 election, and joined with the Ms. Foundation for Women for the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day, in 1993. Its first big legislative push was in 1996, in support of a bill against "drive-through mastectomies," the practice of sending women home the same day they have surgery. That bill didn't pass, but it has been reintroduced many times, including this year by Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, and Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, backed by the more than 11 million signatures Lifetime has collected in the intervening years.

Becoming involved in direct political advocacy violates a basic rule of mainstream media. Since companies never know which part of the audience they may be alienating, it is regarded as bad for business (except in those cases where it is an extension of business, as when media conglomerates lobby the Federal Communications Commission about increased fines).

So why does Lifetime do it? The answer has as much to do with synergy as with democracy. And it places Lifetime in an unusual position, between politics and entertainment.

Take the mastectomy issue. In winter 2000, Lifetime's public affairs department took the writers and producers of the series "Strong Medicine" to Washington to meet with representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and with health advocates. "We said, 'Tell us what's going on,' " Ms. Wagner said. " 'Tell us what trends you're seeing, the issues that we need to cover.' " What they heard turned into story lines in the series. This season, drive-through mastectomies are featured in an episode to bolster the case against them.

In the case of "Human Trafficking," antiviolence organizations and human rights groups brought the issue to Lifetime's attention, Ms. Wagner said, and "Trevor was charged to look at programming that would support these kind of efforts." Mr. Walton hired a director (Christian Duguay) and an executive producer (Robert Halmi Sr.). Then the public affairs department organized conversations with groups like Equality Now and the International Justice Mission, which rescues trafficked girls from brothels. Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, called the discussions "substantive and serious."

As Betty Cohen, the president and chief executive officer of Lifetime Entertainment Services, said, "I believe our advocacy work does a lot of things for us." That includes, evidently, the ability to lure Ms. Sorvino, an Academy Award-winning actress, to the network. "Mira did this movie because she cares about this cause," Ms. Cohen said. "I would love to have more actresses and actors bring their projects to Lifetime if it's something that's important to themselves personally, and important to women as an audience."

In the mini-series, Ms. Sorvino plays an ambitious agent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who is unwavering in her efforts to break up a ring led by Robert Carlyle ("The Full Monty"). The women and girls have been trapped into slavery by false promises of romance or jobs.

Ms. Bien-Aimé, who read the script and gave comments to Lifetime, said, "They wanted to do a lot of intelligence work on the issues in order to craft a credible story, to give a portrayal of the trafficking issue in a way that's palatable to American audiences."

And, perhaps surprisingly, the Department of Homeland Security also signed on to advise.

Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who read the script and visited the set, said, "There is a certain amount of dramatic license - we like to call it feasible fiction." But, she continued, "in terms of looking at this type of case, it's a fairly accurate portrayal of the complexity of the types of cases we see."

Lifetime has planned two screenings of the mini-series this week, one in New York City at the United Nations, and the other in Washington, with panel discussions about trafficking featuring the immigration agency and State Department officials. It is also supporting two anti-trafficking bills before Congress, and will direct its viewers to sign petitions on its Web site after the broadcast of the mini-series. Congresswoman Maloney, a co-sponsor of one of the trafficking bills, said, "The more Lifetime can help with the public advocacy, the better chance this legislation has."

But are legislative tie-ins good entertainment? For Lifetime, the answer continues to be yes.

Part of the Justice for All Act was named for Debbie Smith, a woman from Virginia who was raped in 1989, and whose rape kit sat on a shelf for six years. During that time, Ms. Smith lived in fear of the man who had sexually assaulted her and had threatened to find her again. When the kit was finally tested accurately, she learned that he had been sentenced to life in prison for another crime, information that could have spared her years of anguish. In addition to Lifetime's petition efforts on the bill's behalf, the network produced several public service announcements featuring Ms. Smith. When the law passed, she appeared in a spot thanking viewers.

With such a triumphant ending, her story has inspired, naturally, a movie, now in development at Lifetime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/ar...on/16aurt.html

Flix Tix

Business Down

Overall, U.S. and Canadian business for the top 12 films Friday through Sunday was down more than 18 percent from the same weekend in 2004, marking the third straight weekend of year-to-year declines, according to box office tracking service Exhibitor Relations Inc.

Ticket sales for last week's box office champ, ``Wallace & Gromit,'' released by DreamWorks Animation SKG, dropped 27 percent from its opening weekend to post a two-week tally of $33.3 million.

The Jodie Foster thriller ``Flightplan,'' knocked off its No. 1 perch last weekend by ``Wallace & Gromit,'' fell two more notches to fourth place in its fourth weekend on ticket sales of $6.5 million. That brought cumulative business for the film, released by Walt Disney Co.'s Buena Vista Pictures, to nearly $70.8 million.

The No. 5 slot this week went to ``In Her Shoes,'' a story of sisterly rivalry directed by Curtis Hanson starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette. ``Shoes,'' released by News Corp.-owned 20th Century Fox, grossed $6.1 million in its second weekend to boost its running tally to $20 million.

Rounding out the top 10 movies at the box office were ``Two for the Money,'' starring Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey as sports gambling agents, ``A History of Violence,'' ``Tim Burton's Corpse Bride'' and ``The Gospel,'' Exhibitor Relations reported.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...boxoffice.html

The Future of Opera on Disc (if It's to Have One)
Anthony Tommasini

FOR several months before releasing its new recording of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," EMI Classics, in tones both momentous and ominous, stoked stories in the news media that it could well be the last studio recording of a major opera ever made. At least EMI refrained from affixing a label to that effect on the packaging of this deluxe release.

It's not news that the cost of making a studio recording of an opera, let alone a monumental Wagner work, has become prohibitive. The golden days when a Renata Tebaldi was routinely ushered into the studio to record all her major roles in complete versions, sometimes multiple versions, may be over. Today, assembling the necessary orchestral and choral forces, and a cast desirable enough to entice picky opera buffs can easily push the price tag for a project like a new "Tristan" over $1 million. So why did EMI undertake this venture, when there is such a rich legacy of great "Tristan" recordings? The rationale can be summed up in two words: Plácido Domingo.

Mr. Domingo's decisive move into the Wagnerian heldentenor repertory came in 1991, when the Metropolitan Opera mounted Otto Schenk's production of "Parsifal" specifically for him. He was 50 at the time. Since then his portrayals not only of Parsifal but also of Siegmund in "Die Walküre" have been justly acclaimed.

Mr. Domingo's ambition is boundless. Though aching to take a shot at Tristan, he sensibly concluded some years ago that it was too late in his career and he would never have the stamina for a staged performance. A studio recording was the only way he could put his stamp on the role.

To make the project enticing, EMI has surrounded Mr. Domingo with top-notch colleagues. The dynamic conductor Antonio Pappano leads the orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, eliciting a lush, surging account of the score. The Swedish soprano Nina Stemme brings an earthy voice and vulnerability to Isolde. The remarkable German bass René Pape makes a vocally commanding and heartbreaking King Marke. To seal the deal, EMI offers two starry tenors in cameo roles: Ian Bostridge as the Shepherd and Rolando Villazón as the Young Seaman.

Clearly EMI intends this new "Tristan" to be seen as a throwback to the era when, at their best, major studios took the time and spent the money to assemble dream casts that could not have been brought together for staged performances.

Maybe that era, sadly, is gone. Yet hold on. Late last year, Deutsche Grammophon released a new version of "Tristan und Isolde," which pointed to another way of doing things, a practice that has steadily grown in the last 10 years: live recording. Taped at the Vienna State Opera in 2003, this is a gripping and affecting account, blazingly conducted by Christian Thielemann, with the soprano Deborah Voigt in her first stage performance of Isolde, the tenor Thomas Moser as Tristan and a solid supporting cast.

Overall, the history of live recordings is rather shady. Think of all those bootlegged accounts of Maria Callas that once surreptitiously circulated among fanatics. More recently, EMI has been legitimizing those recordings and releasing them, sonically cleaned up as much as possible, in its comprehensive Callas Edition. But through the years there have been many distinguished, well-engineered and perfectly legal live recordings of operas, like the 1977 account of Strauss's "Frau Ohne Schatten" from the Vienna State Opera, with the eminent Straussian Karl Böhm conducting a cast led by Leonie Rysanek as the Empress and Birgit Nilsson as the Dyer's Wife. For many this remains the definitive recording.

Today's digital recording techniques are awesomely sophisticated. As long as engineers have a few complete takes of the opera to work from, they can bring about wonders, replacing a single wrong note with the right one, achieving near-ideal balances, even blotting out audience noise. In orchestral repertory the London Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony have been leading the way with highly successful ventures into producing and distributing their own live recordings. Colin Davis and the London Symphony have even taken on opera, including an award-winning account of Berlioz's epic "Les Troyens," recorded live in concert in London in 2000.

In comparing the two "Tristan" recordings, you cannot ignore the circumstances under which they were made. The recording conditions naturally affected the results.

Since Mr. Domingo's Tristan is the selling point of the EMI release, his work will receive the most scrutiny, as it should. When he announced his intention to record this touchstone role, the most strenuous heldentenor part in the repertory, the idea smacked of hubris. Yet Mr. Domingo, now 64, has been singing so well of late that it's starting to seem a little frightening. What Faustian pact has he made?

But even he concedes that he had to pace himself carefully. He recorded "Tristan" in the London studios of EMI over six weeks, no doubt taking frequent vocally replenishing breaks.

In many ways his performance is a remarkable achievement. Only a tenor of his comprehensive musicianship could have learned this daunting role so thoroughly so late in his career. His singing is, for the most part, burnished, energetic and deeply felt.

Yet it must be remembered that he matured significantly in the roles of Parsifal and Siegmund as he performed them on stage over the years. His Tristan lacks a comparable lived-in quality. Sometimes he sounds almost unnaturally energetic, as if he had just returned from a long break or some days off and was determined to prove something. In places you feel that he substitutes generic vigor for depth.

During the early scene in Act II when Tristan and Isolde, high on the love potion, illicitly meet outside King Marke's castle, Mr. Domingo sings with such vehemence that his sound turns leathery. Yet he brings tenderness and lyricism to the opening stretches of the love duet, which is not surprising: he knows this music, having recorded the complete scene with Ms. Voigt in the studio for a 2000 EMI release, "Wagner Love Duets," conducted by Mr. Pappano.

During the prolonged Act III scene as the dying Tristan deliriously awaits Isolde's arrival, Mr. Domingo puts everything on the line, shifting between halting intensity and frenzied ardor. His countless admirers will want this recording, a capstone to his staggering discography. More hardened Wagnerians may deem it an honorable effort.

The selling points of the Deutsche Grammophon live "Tristan" are Mr. Thielemann's conducting and Ms. Voigt's Isolde. In the right work, when Mr. Thielemann is on, he is hard to top. This is the right work, and is he ever on. The performance is an uncanny balancing act: volatile yet inexorable, intense yet ruminative, by turns highly charged and spacious. Without ever seeming didactic, he reveals the rhetoric of the music: the beginnings, endings and overlappings of phrases and the structural layout of the score.

Ms. Voigt makes an ideal fit in Mr. Thielemann's conception. Some may find her singing lacking in vocal allure. But her radiant power, subtle shadings and Apollonian approach are deeply moving in a different way. And as always with this artist, it's a pleasure to hear a daunting role sung with such accuracy, rhythmic integrity and crisp German diction.

Mr. Moser's Tristan is almost the opposite of Mr. Domingo's. Mr. Moser, American born and nearly 58 at the time of this recording, began in lighter repertory, then moved successfully in midcareer to weightier German roles. In recent appearances at the Met, his voice has varied; it is sometimes firm, sometimes shaky. But he is in good form here, singing with stamina and depth. What he lacks is what Mr. Domingo has in abundance: vocal charisma. Hearing Mr. Moser's portrayal, some Wagner buffs will say, "You see, that's why we need Domingo's Tristan."

The engineering of this live recording seems nearly flawless. The orchestra sounds great; the voices come through vividly. And making live recordings is vastly more affordable than studio equivalents. Clearly this is where the business is heading.

James Levine seems to think so. He has said that given the financial and scheduling pressures that afflict recordings today, he is in no rush to take the Boston Symphony Orchestra into the studio, even if he could entice a major label into a contract. But live recording? That's another story, he said, his eyes lighting up during a news conference when his appointment as music director was announced. And when it comes to opera, the live recording route makes even more sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/ar...ic/16tomm.html

Folkies Go Upscale
Thomas Staudter

With the closing of the Bottom Line, the guitar-strumming stalwarts of the singer-songwriter genre may have thought they had lost their last reliable Manhattan showcase. But as if calibrated to make the most of all the Bob Dylan news, this season offers two new stages for folk, one of which is very far in spirit from that dusty old nightclub.

Carnegie Hall will initiate "City Folk Live at Zankel," and the Chelsea nightclub Satalla will feature "Under the Radar." Both series are developed with one of the genre's strongholds: WFUV (90.7 FM), Fordham University's public radio station.

Ara Guzelimian, Carnegie Hall's artistic adviser, said that after Zankel Hall opened in 2003, he decided to broadened the scope of musical offerings. That included folk, which WFUV has supported since the late 1980's.

Rita Houston, the station's music director, will be "picking all the artists from a fan's point of view," she said. The season of four concerts starts on Oct. 27 with Suzanne Vega, followed by Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky on Nov. 18, Jane Siberry in March and Dan Bern in April.

Ticket sales for "City Folk Live at Zankel" have been strong, Ms. Houston said, and she has already been asked to plan for a 2006-7 season.

All of which comes as good news, Ms. Vega said: "It's hard for people without big record deals or large followings to find venues to play at, and Carnegie Hall has that reputation - the association gives a nice luster to the singer-songwriting name."

The monthly "Under the Radar" series at Satalla, at 37 West 26th Street, began in September and continues on Nov. 8 with a triple bill featuring two finalists from this year's Mountain Stage NewSong Contest - Ina May Wool and the contest winner, KJ Denhert - and Terence Martin. The series is programmed by John Platt, host of "City Folk Sunday Breakfast." "Often a lot of these artists play at places outside of the city," Mr. Platt said, "but getting a date at a venue like Satalla can be akin to a seal of approval on their careers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/ar...ic/16stau.html

FTC Clamps down on File-sharing Service Site
Press Release

Washington, D.C. – A U.S. District Court judge has halted the deceptive ads of a Web operation that claimed that membership in MP3DownloadCity.com would allow users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs to transfer copyrighted materials without violating the law. The FTC will seek a permanent bar on the deceptive claims, redress for consumers, and a requirement that the defendant notify consumers who signed up for membership that the programs he promotes to share copyrighted files may subject them to civil or criminal liability.

According to the FTC, the defendant markets and sells a tutorial and referral service that promotes the use of P2P file-sharing software programs to download digital music, movies, and computer games. Unlike a licensed subscription service, the defendant’s service does not provide its paying customers with a license to download and share copyrighted music, movies, or games. Instead, for $24.95, the defendant instructs consumers on the use of free P2P file-sharing software provided by others, such as Kazaa.

According to the FTC’s complaint, consumers are lured to become members by deceptive claims that subscribing to the defendant’s service makes P2P file sharing legal. Internet ads for the service make claims such as:

AND BEST OF ALL PEOPLE ARE NOT GETTING SUED FOR USING OUR SOFTWARE. YES! IT IS 100% LEGAL;
Why Are We The #1 Free MP3 Music Download Site? . . .
Download and Watch DVDs and Movies Still in Theaters; and
Rest assured that File-Sharing is 100% legal.

But, according to the FTC complaint, the defendant’s customers who use P2P file-sharing programs to download copyrighted material, or who make it available to others, without the copyright owner’s permission, are engaged in copyright infringement and could face civil and criminal liability.

The FTC charged that the defendant violated the FTC Act by falsely claiming that membership in its service made P2P file sharing legal. The FTC has asked the court to order a permanent halt to the deceptive claims, order the defendant to pay consumer redress or to give up his ill-gotten gains, and notify customers that they could face civil and criminal liability. A hearing to extend the court’s temporary ban on defendants’ deceptive claims is scheduled for October 21, 2005.

The defendant in the case is Cashier Myricks Jr., doing business as MP3downloadcity.com, based in Los Angeles, California.

The Commission vote to authorize staff to file the complaint was 3-0, with Commissioner Jon Leibowitz not participating. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

The FTC has published a consumer alert, “P2P File Sharing: Evaluating the Risks”.

The Commission wishes to acknowledge the assistance of The Center for Democracy and Technology in this matter.
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/articl...51019191945975

Uni-verse

Mystery Donor Gives Stanford Free Yahoo Music
John Borland

Students at Stanford University will get a year of free digital music, thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor to the college.

Beginning next week, Stanford will join a growing number of other colleges around the country in promoting or providing free access to online music subscription services, aiming to draw students away from legally risky file-swapping networks.

Unlike some other universities, Stanford has declined to pay for students' subscriptions itself, or use student fees to subsidize the costs. But during the program's first year, which the college regards as a pilot project, the costs will be covered by the outside donor's money.

"We did not want to earmark university funds, because this is not part of our research or teaching mission," said Susan Weinstein, Stanford director of business development.

The Stanford service will be the first school music program for Yahoo, which launched its digital music subscription service in May and has sought to attract subscribers quickly by undercutting rivals' prices.

As with other subscription services, Yahoo allows unlimited streaming or downloads of songs to a computer. Unlike its rivals, it also allows subscribers to transfer songs to portable devices for the same price, $6.99 a month. Other services charge a higher price for subscriptions compatible with portable devices, because record labels charge a higher wholesale rate for those rights.

In Stanford's case, at the end of the trial year, students' monthly subscription rates will go up to $1.75 a month for the basic Yahoo subscription, and $4.75 a month for the version compatible with portable devices, Weinstein said.

The university chose Yahoo after evaluating it along with several other services, and seeing it get the best review from students, Weinstein said.

Although news of the anonymous donor's support quickly sent speculation winging toward Stanford alums and Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, Weinstein said the money would have applied to any music service, and was not tied to use of the Yahoo program.
http://news.com.com/Mystery+donor+gi...3-5894967.html

Former RealNetworks President Sings New Tune As Chief Of Cdigix
Dan Richman

Larry Jacobson, a president at RealNetworks until 18 months ago, has become the first chief executive of Cdigix, a young provider of on-campus digital entertainment and instruction that's moving to Seattle from near Denver.

"I enjoy working in businesses when they're scaling, building out," said Jacobson, 46, in an interview Wednesday. "In the case of Cdigix, we're at that point in our development. Real is at a different point."

In conjunction with Jacobson's appointment, privately held Cdigix has raised nearly $10 million in an initial round of venture funding to accelerate development and marketing.

One executive from each of two institutional investors has joined the company's board.

Cdigix offers four products, all aimed exclusively at college or university students on campus: digital video on demand, digital music, online access to digitized audiovisual course material and a campus-wide network for socializing.

Jacobson will lead the company's staff of 55, a count that includes part-time, on-campus interns. Cdigix's founder and president, Brett Goldberg, 28, will become executive vice president.

"I'm ecstatic about having Larry on board," Goldberg said. "It would be difficult for us to find someone else who has the relationships and the knowledge to make us successful."

Jacobson, a native of Boston, served as president of the Fox television network and as president and chief operating officer of Ticketmaster Corp. before arriving at Seattle's RealNetworks in February 2001.

After ending his stint there in April 2004, Jacobson worked briefly for Getty Images Inc. of Seattle before seeking a leadership position in the venture world.

One such opportunity, he said, was Cdigix, which sought a new CEO. Cdigix is the "doing business" name of Sea Blue Media LLC, which Goldberg founded in 2002.

The startup didn't land its first music contract with a school until September 2004. Since then, it has signed on 34 schools -- more than any competitor.

Among them are Duke, Yale, Tufts, Purdue, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and the University of California schools at Irvine, Riverside and San Diego. Some of the contracts are long-term and exclusive.

Schools are good customers for digitized entertainment because they will happily pay for music and video to avoid legal problems with students seeking it from unlawful sources, Jacobson said. Using a service such as Cdigix can also ease wear and tear on campus help-desk personnel by minimizing viruses and worms students pick up using peer-to-peer software, he said.

"We have both Cdigix and Napster on campus, but I've just found Cdigix to be a real different breed of cat," said Charles Phelps, provost at the University of Rochester. "Cdigix offers a whole range of services. These other people are selling music, basically."

A number of forces are coinciding to improve the market for services such as Cdigix, Jacobson said.

Campuses usually have robust, high-powered computer networks, easing the technological challenge of supplying high-quality material to students. Record companies are cutting the cost of their content.

And students are realizing the value of lawful music services and the downsides of file-sharing software.

One competitor in the market has a famous name: Napster. That Los Angeles- based company, which has stopped facilitating the unlawful free exchange of music online, has contracts with 15 schools. One of them is the University of Washington, which began service this fall.

Other competitors include Ruckus Network Inc., of Herndon, Va., and even RealNetworks' own Rhapsody subscription service.

Though students still use peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Kazaa, "there's a dent being made" in illegal listening, partly by the fear of lawsuits filed by the recording industry, Goldberg said.

He said Cdigix can trump its competition by offering a broader range of services, especially its provision of highly profitable online educational materials.

And though the number of colleges and universities in the United States is limited, Cdigix could grow by pursuing alumni, high schools, boarding schools, the military, colleges abroad, and other organizations with campuses and their own networks, he said.

Typically, schools pay Cdigix a fee for its services, which are provided free to the students. Additional revenue could come from starting to sell advertising on its services, Goldberg said.

Cdigix's three major technology suppliers -- RealNetworks, Microsoft and MusicNet -- are all located in Seattle, "so it's an ideal place for companies like Cdigix to relocate and to grow," Jacobson said.

The company plans to move here by mid-2006 and could employ as many as 100 people by this time next year, Goldberg said.

Cdigix's venture funding was provided by Meritage Private Equity Funds, of Denver, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, of Bethesda, Md. Jim Dovey, investment director at Meritage, will become a director, as will Roger Novak, a general partner at Novak Biddle.

Novak Biddle also backed Blackboard Inc., a Washington, D.C., maker of software facilitating online education, on whose board Roger Novak sits.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine..._cdigix20.html

Promotion, Price Cuts Could Save The Music
Markeysha Davis

Like many college students, I love my media.

In my down time, I indulge in music, movies, books, magazines and TV. I find it disappointing, however, when I walk to the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Wayne State University’s campus and see how inflated the CD prices are. The prices of newly released CDs at the bookstore stagger between $16 and $18.

We pay enough money at Wayne State for our education, as far as textbooks, tuition, transportation and living expenses are concerned.

After busting the bank for these expenses, why do we have to deal with pricey entertainment?

High prices discourage students from buying items from stores like Barnes & Noble and turn some to Internet piracy to fulfill their entertainment needs.

The Internet offers hundreds of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, where people can download and share anything from computer software to music to the latest film release. These programs are illegal and risky, but to some serve as a cheaper alternative to overpaying for CDs and DVDs.

The Recording Industry Association of America has blamed P2P file-sharing programs for the declining trend in record sales.

As reported by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries in 2003, illegal downloads either matched or exceeded commercial sales in Germany, Japan and the United States total, with overall record sales falling almost 11 percent.

The RIAA has been adamant about stopping Internet file sharing, thinking it would reverse the trend.

Though in some cases, the sales of music have not been dependent on the amount of file sharing being done, but the affordability of the product.

In recent years, however, the price of music has decreased considerably. According to NPD MusicWatch, in 2003, Universal Music Group began lowering wholesale prices in order to offer cheaper music prices to consumers, making deals with retailers to sell some CDs for under $10 during promotional periods.

Some music download programs like Napster and iTunes sell music by the track for as low as 99 cents.

Now, what is the entertainment industry doing wrong?

The music industry is failing in promotion and recognizing trends with consumers. Many popular artists or artists with potential to sale albums are shelved while flavor-of-the-week artists are pushed out almost too early. They’re hoped to be the saving grace of the recording industry.

Proper promotion techniques would include putting teaser CDs in stores or teaser tracks online for consumers to sample music on a wider scale.

The increase in enhanced CDs has also helped CD sales, though minutely.

Trend recognition is also important. Because there is one “whisper song,” doesn’t mean there needs to be five versions of it.

The recording industry needs to stray from redundancy and respect originality. If the artists and music presented to the public are more diverse, then the music industry may see a positive change in consumer response.

I have yet to see a price drop on CDs at our Barnes & Noble.

If they put more into their music, though, I might be willing to splurge.
http://www.southend.wayne.edu/module...p?storyid=1791

University Warns About Illegal File Sharing
Molly Leaverton

University administrators are making an increased effort to inform students of the consequences of file sharing.

Punishments include being blocked from the Santa Clara network as well as a legal suit for as much as 150,000 dollars per illegal file.

Last year 24 Santa Clara students were identified as participating in illegal file sharing, and this year the first notice was given during welcome weekend, before school even began.

The Santa Clara network has also been affected by the increased amount of file sharing, according to Ross Dykes, Student Technology Services Manager.

"Organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are targeting universities because they are worried that our students are learning the wrong life long habits and they are trying to make an example of them," said Chief Information Officer Ron Danielson.

Administrators also worry about liability for the university.

"If the infringing files are placed on a Santa Clara university-owned machine, or the works have been downloaded by a student employee, the University may also be exposed to potential liability," said University President Paul Locatelli, S.J., in a mass email.

Some students believe that file sharing is a legitimate way to support artists and spread music that people may not otherwise be exposed to.

"As long as you support artists in some way, music should be something that should be shared and made available to all," said sophomore Alex Cost.

"I think it is morally wrong in that it takes money away from artists whose CDs people would buy ... but at the same time it gives more notoriety to some artists who no one would hear of if they had to buy their music," said freshman Dan Buglione.

"Students have said 'yes it is illegal but the record companies are ripping us off, this is an act of civil disobedience'. While that's an ethical stand that a person takes, it's important to realize that taking an ethical stand like that can come with consequences," said Danielson.

Danielson serves as the agent registered with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He is the informant that is contacted when private companies such as Sony Music, or MGM detect that someone on the Santa Clara network has illegally downloaded copyrighted material.

These companies detect that someone has downloaded copyrighted material by either setting up a fake file sharing site and observing who attempts to download or by programming robots to download from people who are making copyrighted files available for others to download via peer to peer programs.

When a company identifies file sharing, Danielson is notified.

"On average about three notifications are given a month that students that have been identified as illegally file sharing," Danielson said.

Although the school has never had a repeat offender, if someone were identified possible consequences could lead to "permanent loss of network access or to other sanctions," said Locatelli.
http://www.thesantaclara.com/vnews/d.../434e190a9a9a3

University Aims to Decrease Illegal P2P File Sharing
Lisa Basile

A major component of today's culture involves internet technology and one of the most popular trends is file sharing. File sharing is the process of obtaining music or movies for free over the internet using peer-to-peer software, such as Kazaa, Gnutella or iMesh. Most of these file sharing programs are illegal, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that represents the U.S recording industry, has made many attempts throughout the past few years to ban the action.

On Jan. 27, 2005, the Collegiate Presswire published a press release on www.cpwire.com stating that 717 file sharers were sued by the music industry for copyright infringement. Of those 717, 68 were downloading music while using their respective school's computer networks. The University was among 23 educational institutions listed as having students being sued.

According to cpwire.com, many universities nationwide are either negotiating or have agreed to offer legal music services to students residing on campus. Accordingly, this fall the University chose Ruckus as the digital entertainment network, providing students with unlimited access to movies and music.

For $14.95 per semester, members will gain access to 1.2 million songs, social networking applications, and the ability to share downloaded music. For $29.95, students will have access to both music and movies and hit T.V. shows.

"The Ruckus digital entertainment network is an alternative to illegal file sharing," Chief Information Officer Frank Monaco said. "We decided to look for options among the many downloading services out there after learning of the possibility of a small number of our students being sued for illegal downloading."

CEO and chairman of Ruckus William J. Raduchel said, "We have worked hard to provide a service that allows students to safely find friends and socialize, upload their own creative and original content, and download a variety of legal movies, music and television programming." By merging college students' interests (music and social activity) Ruckus is a great choice for universities.

Freshman Renee Scheidt said, "I think it's a good idea to have the network, even if [it's like] Napster and LimeWire all over again. It prevents lawsuits or, at least, the potential for them."

However, Scheidt admitted she does have LimeWire on her computer but because the University has set up firewalls, she has to go outside of Maria's Tower to actually download the music.

According to the Appropriate Use Policy for Information Technology (Version 1.3, Aug. 14, 2003) "the official Pace University position on P2P file sharing utilities is that the software itself is not illegal, nor banned by Pace University. It is illegal, however, to download or share copyrighted material for which you do not hold the copyright."

The policy further states that rulings by the courts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have held that Internet Service Providers, the University being our provider, is obliged to present the identity of users of specific Internet Protocol Addresses or "userIDs" of those file sharing. It also states that, "individual students, faculty and staff may be held personally liable for violations of copyright laws."

Sophomore Lindsey Gunsch thinks the university whose network is being used by a student for downloading "should not have to be held responsible for an individual's actions." Gunsch believes it is unfair for the school to be involved with any student who is committing a crime on his/her own computer.

Freshman David Maxwell said, "The penalty for downloading a couple of songs is far from what the act is worth, which is 10 to 20 thousands of dollars for maybe 99 cents worth of material. It degrades the reputation of the record industry, the vision of the artist, and puts the defendants in a very tight financial situation just to pay a fairly small amount of money considering the music industry takes in billions a year. If anything, charge the people the cost of the C.D.: $15."
http://www.pacepress.org/media/paper...-1026082.shtml

Download Dealings: Students Skirt Music Piracy Regulations
Zach Ahmad

Like many college students, Jason Sterlacci has a lot of music stored on his computer. Also like many of his peers, he hasn't paid for much of it.

Sitting in his dorm room in Ivory Tower, the senior uses a program called myTunes Redux to browse through nearly 50,000 songs from more than 100 people in his building. Finding a copy of Coldplay's X&Y on "Sean Caffrey's Music," he drags and drops the song list to his own library, downloading the full album in about 30 seconds.

Essentially a hack of a legitimate iTunes service that allows users to see what others are listening to, myTunes Redux allows people using the same broadband circuit, such as the one found in a dorm, to copy songs directly from one another onto their own hard drives. Since it operates in a closed network, it's twice as fast as traditional file-sharing programs - and harder to monitor. It's just one of the new ways students are skirting a growing Recording Industry of America counterinsurgency on illegal music downloading.

"I stopped paying for music as soon as I got this," said Sterlacci, who estimates he's downloaded more than 300 songs in the past month. "I haven't bought a CD all year, which is really unusual for me."

"It's really convenient to be able to download five albums in the course of a minute," Sterlacci said. "I do consider it a form of stealing, but I'm too addicted to music to quit."

Buoyed by a landmark Supreme Court decision in June that said peer-to-peer file-sharing services could be held responsible for their customers' illegal actions, the recording industry has stepped up efforts to stop the widespread swapping of copyrighted music over the Internet.

College Culprits

At the heart of the battle is the college dorm scene, where every student has an Internet connection and iPods are as ubiquitous as backpacks. In a report delivered to Congress last month, a joint committee made up of representatives from higher education and the recording industry chided universities for having "yielded to complacency in their methods of addressing piracy on campus."

Prepared in advance of a hearing on students' file-sharing habits, the report cited myTunes and similar programs as some of the key obstacles in the fight against music piracy on college campuses. Members of Congress have since called on the General Accountability Office to study universities' efforts to curtail illegal file-sharing over their networks.

"College students are some of the most avid music fans," said RIAA spokesman Amanda Hunter in an e-mail. "Because music habits and customs they develop now are likely to stay with them for life, it's especially important for us to educate them about the law."

As some have already found out, the campaign amounts to more than just strong words. On Sept. 29, the RIAA announced its most recent wave of lawsuits targeting individual file-sharers on more than 17 college campuses, bringing the total number of students targeted to 940. That includes three GW students sued in 2004.

By logging onto programs such as Kazaa and BearShare, the RIAA finds users uploading copyrighted files and traces it to their dorm room, then sends the school a subpoena demanding they reveal the student's identity.

"The law is quite clear here," Hunter said. "U.S. copyright law prohibits the unauthorized duplication, performance or distribution of a creative work, and we expect students and universities to act in accordance with the law."

Universities crack down

Schools are responding to the pressure. After the 2004 lawsuits, GW became one of the first to offer the legal file-sharing service Napster to students at no direct cost. Similar programs have since been established at nearly 70 colleges and universities across the country, tripling in just the past year.

Some schools are taking things a step further. The University of Florida has drawn attention for its homegrown tracking program Icarus, which monitors transmissions over the school's Internet network and blocks downloads of copyrighted material. The school has seen a 50 percent decrease in offenses each of the two years the program has been in place, Hunter said.

Yet as recording officials, lawmakers and universities try to buckle down on illegal downloading, some question the effectiveness of their tactics. Despite an increase in user lawsuits, the music industry sold $2.4 billion less in recordings than in 1999, when peer-to- peer file-sharing first began to blossom. Students say they don't see the risk, and activists call the suits a waste.

"If the goal is to stop downloading, it's a failure on that front. If the goal is to get artists compensated, it's a failure on that front as well," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a law firm that specializes in intellectual property issues. "The only people getting paid at this point are the recording industry's lawyers."

Moreover, students have been slow to embrace free legal technologies. At GW, less than half of the student body uses the complimentary Napster service, causing the University to question renewing its contract with the company until it received a gift from an anonymous donor.

With schools urging students to go legal, the recording industry filing lawsuits and students seemingly indifferent to both, it's unclear how or if a compromise will be reached.

Some are urging the RIAA to capitalize on the current open market. Lohmann suggests a system by which universities would pay a per-student fee directly to the recording industry, which would in turn allow users to download freely using any program without legal repercussions.

"You need to focus on getting artists compensated for file-sharing that's going to happen anyway," Lohmann said. "I think universities could be a very good baiter for some kind of blanket licensing experiment."

Recording industry officials say they plan to stay their course. Hunter said she's encouraged by an increase in schools offering legal programs and believes the programs' use will grow. Though as long as illegal sharing continues, she said, so will user lawsuits.

"Just as we must hold accountable the businesses that encourage theft online, individuals who engage in illegal downloading must also know there are consequences to their actions," Hunter said. "These lawsuits have helped arrest the tremendous growth of illegal peer-to-peer use, and we will continue to aggressively pursue them."

While lawyers and industry executives squabble about compensation and property rights, in the dorm rooms themselves, the music plays on.

"I can see the problem, but I don't think you're going to able to stop it," sophomore Thomas Brennan said. "The recording industry is already making so much money. It's not going to hurt if you download one song."
http://www.gwhatchet.com/media/paper....gwhatchet.com

DC++ Popular For File-Sharing
Christine Wang

An alternative to traditional file-sharing applications that consume large amounts of Internet bandwidth has surfaced in dorm rooms across campus. Direct Connect Client, known as DC++, allows files to be transferred at the speed of the University's internal network without taking up any bandwidth.

The program uses a hub that allows only users on the UT network to connect to it, said William Earle, an electrical engineering junior, who knows about the program. Earle, who used to live in a UT dorm, said that many residents used the program. The hub filters out non-University IP addresses.

"The UT network is like a big LAN," Earle said. So "It doesn't take any bandwidth to transfer files." For dorm residents who have weekly bandwidth allocations, DC++ has become a popular file-sharing application. When using the program, a search returns a list of files, and then a direct connection is made from one user to the other, Earle said.

In addition to being connected on campus, each user is required to have 5 GB of information to share, said Kyle Chai, a biomedical engineering senior who has also seen dorm residents using the program.

"You download directly from other people at an average rate of about three seconds per song," Chai said.

With other file-transfer programs such as BitTorrent, a user is "simultaneously downloading and uploading [the same file] to multiple users," he said.

DC++ allows all types of files to be transferred, but users have control over which files they choose to share, said Chai. While he has not heard of any security breaches yet, the program does make a direct connection, and if they really wanted to, "people who know how to manipulate the system could get into your computer," Chai said.

Peer-to-peer and file-sharing applications that are not configured properly have been the cause of extreme but unintentional bandwidth use, said Dan Updegrove, UT vice president for Information Technology.

InformationTechnology Services does not have a problem with students using the UT network to transfer files and does not "police the network" on the downloaded content, Updegrove said.

"File-sharing is legal," he said. But, warned, "copyright infringement is not."

The University gets about 23 notifications per month regarding possible violations of copyrighted material. Most of these come from the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America, and most are the result of the use of file-sharing applications, said Randy Ebeling, associate vice president of Information Technology.

"All such Digital Millennium Copyright Act notifications are addressed and passed on to the proper potential offender," Ebeling said.

On the second offense, an interview is scheduled with Student Judicial Services who will decide the course of action and consequences, Updegrove said. "In the last 14 months, there have been only eight second offenses and no third offenses," he said.
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/medi...-1023903.shtml

LimeWire Becomes P2P Icon
Thomas Mennecke

During Napster’s reign, this early P2P network became a household name. Although not the first P2P or file-sharing network, it brought this once obscure Internet medium into the limelight. Over time however, the RIAA would pursue this network and force it into submission in the spring of 2001.

Yet the cultural impact of Napster was unmistakable. This network brought together communities of individuals that would otherwise use the Internet for little more than web surfing and email. It introduced a new world to the Internet masses that broadened the horizons of millions.

There was little doubt the impact Napster had on the general public. With 26 million registered users and 1.5 million simultaneous users at its peak, Napster was a highly publicized network. College students, adults, teenagers and seniors – just about everyone got in on the action. The name “Napster” became synonymous with the ability to download music off the Internet. Ask anyone during this time how to obtain music on the Internet, and the answer was nearly always “Napster.”

However in 2001, millions suddenly found themselves without a means to trade files. The only knowledgeable method to find music suddenly vanished. This event would have a profound impact.

Most notably, many participants of Napster would no longer participate in file- sharing. Although statistically the combined total of the P2P population had well exceeded Napster by late 2001, many individuals still gave a bewildered look to the question “how do you obtain music?”

Even several years later, when the total P2P population made Napster appear diminutive, many ex-Napster users simply did not recognize the existence of any other file-sharing method. This population had largely been replaced by younger and more computer savvy individuals who found solace with several various P2P networks.

While P2P was expanding, it had lost its mascot – its face if you will. There was no single network or method the general public could associate with P2P. Kazaa came close, but even with its 4.5 million simultaneous users – triple the size of Napster – it never quite reached the same cultural prominence. This could be attributed to the fact that Kazaa was largely associated with spyware, viruses, false files and corruption, rather than a P2P icon.

This lack of a cultural icon has slowly begun to change. A recent survey conducted by CacheLogic and Big Champagne found that nearly 74% of all files traded on P2P networks were music files. CacheLogic’s study found that Kazaa was no longer a prominent music source, and that a majority of its population was only interested in video files. The study did find however, that a majority of file-traders were heading over to the Gnutella network for their musical needs.

Gnutella was first introduced to the P2P world in April of 2000. Many in the P2P community largely ignored this network, yet it did find itself with a sizable following. Slowly, this poorly performing network would become a top-notch community, thanks to the development efforts of LimeWire and BearShare. Out of the two development teams, LimeWire would become the unequivocal leader of Gnutella, thanks to its open source client, lack of spyware/adware and favorable reputation.

During the 2005, Gnutella and LimeWire would see its population soar. According to LimeWire’s host counter, this network frequently boasts more than 2 million simultaneous users. Some estimates place the total size of this community much higher – perhaps as many as 6 million.

Observations dictate this is not an unreasonable estimate. Gnutella has grown from a virtually useless network to a high performance P2P community capable of obtaining a wide array of information. The ease and resourcefulness of Gnutella, especially for music, has once again given P2P an icon. LimeWire’s cultural popularity has become parallel, if not greater, than Napster, as it too has gained household recognition.

We still ask the question, “How do you obtain music?”
And the answer? “Limewire, of course.”
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=956

Extreme File Sharing
Brian Krebs

Spent a few hours over the weekend poking around Limewire, an online peer-to-peer file-sharing network where an estimated 2 million users share and swap MP3 files, movies, software titles and just about anything and everything else made up of ones and zeroes (including quite a few virus- infected files).

I was sifting the lists not for music or movie files, but for the stuff Limewire users may not know they're sharing with the rest of the network. I quickly found what I was looking for, and then some: dozens of entries for tax and payroll records, medical records, bank statements, and what appeared to be company books.

A search for "cookies" or "paypal," for example, turned up cookie files for a number of financial institutions. Having cookie files exposed might be a little less dangerous if you couldn't also click your way through every shared file on a user's machine. For the most part I found that users who shared sensitive information were also sharing the contents of their entire hard drives.

Some users were sharing many megabytes' worth of e-mails and addresses from their Microsoft Outlook inboxes and archives. But perhaps most revealing was a search for "keylog.txt," which turned up several huge text files no doubt generated by a keystroke logger -- a nasty bit of malware that records everything a victim types and relays the data back to the attacker.

At first, I felt a little weird looking at records of one apparent victim's private (and frequently explicit) online chat conversations from just a few months back. But I wanted to find some contact information in there so I could at least notify this person that their system had been compromised. I found an AIM instant message ID -- but alas, that screen name wasn't signed on. I even found what appeared to be the victim's cell phone number, but got a fast-busy signal upon dialing it.

As I read on, however, it became clear that the victim at some point realized his machine was infected with some sort of virus, as evidenced by his IM complaints to a friend that his antivirus software had alerted him to something evil on his machine.

Over the course of several days (the first 10 or so pages of the keylog record) it appears that the victim tried to repel whatever had invaded his computer. Apparently he failed, because not long after he seems to have stopped searching (or at least stopped complaining about it) -- even though the keylogger was clearly still doing its job.

My guess is that this guy ran an antivirus or anti-spyware scan which found and deleted something, so he figured everything was back to normal.

This reminds me of a concept that security professionals understand all too well: When a computer system is compromised by a virus or worm, the only way to truly clean it is to back up the data and resinstall the operating system, including any software patches issued since the computer was purchased. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for home users, many of whom have trouble understanding why someone would go through the trouble of trying to hack their system in the first place.

None of this to say that antivirus tools and other security applications can't remove these intrusive programs on their own; often they do the job quite nicely. But many of today's more aggressive threats are designed to open the door for other intruders, which might not be so easily detected by security software.

Obviously, the lessons here are: If you're going to use file-sharing networks, be extremely careful about what you download; and, pay close attention to the files and folders you are letting the rest of the world see.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/secu...e_file_sh.html

Learn To Work With P2P

Peer-to-peer technology is shedding its bootlegging image and going legit, but it still has a dark side
Bryan Betts

The dominant traffic on the internet today isn't email or web browsing, it is peer-to- peer (P2P). This is a nightmare for internet service providers (ISPs) and user organisations alike, and it's about to get worse. Legitimate business uses for P2P are starting to appear, and this will make it tricky for network managers to simply block this type of traffic.

P2P is most commonly used in software distribution, where users who have already downloaded a file then make it available for others. Such schemes also break each file into chunks, so you could download different sections from different sources simultaneously. This aggregation increases the bandwidth available, plus if one host goes offline, the file can still be downloaded from others. Popular P2P systems include BitTorrrent, eDonkey and Gnutella.

Originally used to share bootleg audio files, P2P's biggest usage is now sharing video files, especially ripped DVDs or episodes of US TV series that haven't yet been shown in the UK. But the huge size of those video files means that P2P now consumes most of the internet backbone. Stats from CacheLogic, which runs a global monitoring network called Streamsight, show that P2P overtook web browsing as the largest consumer of internet bandwidth during 2002. By the end of 2004, P2P accounted for 60 percent of all internet traffic.

Some ISPs and user organisations have applied blocks or bandwidth throttles to P2P. Hollywood and the music industry, meanwhile, have tried to close down P2P networks such as Kazaa, but the traffic simply shifted towards different networks and different P2P technologies.

But the bigger problem is that P2P is no longer just a bootlegger's tool - now it has legitimate uses, too. Already, some 10 to 20 percent of P2P traffic is compressed data and various Unix file types. The Skype IP telephone system is P2P, for example, and many software companies including Microsoft, which has a P2P system called Avalanch under development, are also looking at the technology as a potential distribution route.

It's now possible to download some Linux distributions via BitTorrent, though thus far these are mainly freeware rather than enterprise versions. The advantage is that would-be downloaders are not limited to whatever upstream bandwidth the software vendor can afford.

Network administrators have grown to hate P2P because it aggressively consumes whatever bandwidth is available. Plus, by making things easier to access it increases demand. And it floods the upstream bandwidth because P2P is symmetrical whereas most broadband subscriber connections like DSL are asymmetric, with downstream rates that are much larger than upstream.
That said, businesses can use P2P as a more resilient method of transferring large amounts of data between multiple sites because it saves their bandwidth by spreading the load and provides a degree of fault tolerance.

Increasingly, P2P will be too useful to block but administrators need to quickly figure out how to separate the good traffic from the bad, or they could soon find themselves swamped by unwanted data transmissions.
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comme...learn-work-p2p

Intel Settlement Revives a Fading Chip Designer
John Markoff

Intel's agreement to pay $300 million to settle a patent dispute with a tiny chip design company is a vindication for a Silicon Valley technologist who was once considered one of the region's visionaries, then vanished from the scene.

The technologist is John Moussouris, a 55-year-old physicist and computer designer, who in 1988 formed a company called MicroUnity as an early effort to bring about a convergence of computing and conventional audio and video media.

During the early 1990's, MicroUnity was briefly one of Silicon Valley's highest fliers with backing from Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and the cable industry.

With more than $100 million in financing, it embarked on the unheard-of strategy of building a chip factory in Silicon Valley, long after most of the region's companies had given up on the idea, instead building new plants in Asia or in other low-cost manufacturing areas. But by the mid-90's those efforts had foundered.

As part of its quarterly earnings report, Intel announced that it had settled a patent suit brought last year by MicroUnity. Of the $300 million to be paid, $140 million was charged against earnings in Intel's most recent quarter.

The deal assures Intel of access to MicroUnity technology, which is used in Intel's current family of Pentium chips, and to patents that MicroUnity has developed more recently. MicroUnity holds 56 patents and has published 14 additional patent applications.

The agreement covers features like hyperthreading, which allows software to perform multiple tasks more efficiently, and processing designs for handling video and audio data. An Intel spokesman, Chuck Mulloy, said Wednesday that the settlement was "in the best interest of the company and the shareholders." MicroUnity's founder, Mr. Moussouris, said he was unwilling to comment because the settlement, filed in federal court in Texas, was still being completed.

A similar dispute between Intel and Intergraph, which ended last year in settlements totaling more than $600 million, was followed in great detail in Silicon Valley. In contrast, the MicroUnity suit drew little attention. The difference in visibility of the two cases may reflect Mr. Moussouris's personal style, which is unusually low profile. Many analysts in Silicon Valley, in fact, thought his company had left the technology development business.

Mr. Moussouris was a protégé of a noted I.B.M. computer designer, John Cocke, and in 1984 was a co-founder of Mips Computer Systems, a pioneering microprocessor developer. In 1988 he assembled a small team of skilled computer designers and set about creating a new style of computing, which would later become known as media processing.

Then in 1996, with MicroUnity's products late to market and the rise of Netscape and the Web, the cable industry's plans for interactive television networks were sidetracked, and overnight there was no demand to fill Mr. Moussouris's factory.

He fought a bitter battle with his investors, who at the time wanted to force the privately held company into bankruptcy. Mr. Moussouris prevailed in the dispute, kept control of his company and then sold his factory to a Malaysian chip maker to avoid bankruptcy.

In 1999 he spun off a small company, MaskTools, and sold it for $21 million to ASML, a maker of chip making equipment based in the Netherlands. The technology offered a way for chip makers to use software and optics to gain more precision than their existing equipment was designed to provide. By increasing manufacturing yields, the advance was extremely valuable to chip makers.

The sale provided a war chest to keep a small group of designers at MicroUnity together, both to pursue its patent claims for its computing design ideas and to press forward on new ideas.

Mr. Moussouris attended Harvard, where he became friends with William Randolph Hearst III, the newspaper heir, and with Jerry Harrison, who became a member of Talking Heads and of the MicroUnity board.

Currently Mr. Moussouris's technical team includes Craig Hansen, a computer hardware architect, who designed hardware for Steven P. Jobs at NeXt, and Alexia Massalin, a software expert, who was a computer wizard as a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1980's. Wired Magazine once suggested that she was the "ultimate nerd genius."

Several years ago Mr. Moussouris said his goal was to create a generation of technology more broadly accessible than current computers.

"I dreamed of building a computer my grandmother would enjoy," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/te...y/20micro.html

Publishers Become Retailers By Selling Online
Jeffrey Goldfarb

Major book publishers have quietly begun selling directly to customers over the Internet, in a move that could transform the trade by putting them in competition with online retailers like Amazon.com.

The publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin, claim to have limited retail ambitions and are simply trying to use their Web sites to help readers.

"We can offer features, services and guidance that might be difficult for another retailer to provide," Penguin Group Chairman John Makinson said. "What we're not going to be is competitors to Amazon or any other retailer in this area."

Nevertheless, publishers have been none too thrilled about retailers like Barnes & Noble encroaching on their territory by self-publishing a range of books, including classics by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mark Twain.

"The retailers have become publishers, so why can't publishers become retailers?" said Pat Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers trade group. "It's an experimental thing. Everyone's trying to figure out what the right thing to do is."

Indeed, publishers are struggling along with many of their media and entertainment peers to adapt to evolving technology that is forcing them to rethink their business models. The issue has been a hot topic of conversation at the Frankfurt Book Fair being held this week.

"The boundaries on publishing, retailing and distribution are getting blurred," said Makinson. "We can't rely any longer on the traditional assumption that we're a publisher, he's a retailer, we won't retail, he won't publish. We'll have to accommodate one another."

Discreet Move

Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books and a unit of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG, launched its online selling venture without fanfare this year, offering its entire catalog of titles in print.

It is giving no discounts, will not waive shipping and handling charges and only will send books to U.S. addresses.

Simon & Schuster, the book publishing arm of media conglomerate Viacom Inc., followed suit in September.

"We're happy with how it's been going," spokesman Adam Rothberg said. "We never expected it would create an avalanche of sales, but it would have been foolish to pass up the opportunity to let visitors to our site buy a book they came to find out about.

"We feel like we're offering a service and the immediate gratification to order the book right there and then."

Amazon.com declined to comment and Barnes & Noble officials could not immediately be reached.

Romance novel publisher Harlequin was an early adapter, first selling directly in the nascent days of the Internet in 1995, the same year Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com.

Since rebranding the site on Valentine's Day 2000, eHarlequin.com has sold millions of books with such racy titles as "Incriminating Passion" and "Silent Desires."

Unlike its rivals, Ontario-based Harlequin does offer a 20 percent discount on all titles and in some cases free shipping.

But like other publishers, Harlequin prefers to shift the Internet conversation to other elements of its Web site, downplaying the notion that it might be poaching customers from the online retailers with whom it partners, and boosting its own profit margins in the process.

"I don't think retailers are threatened by us at all," Harlequin spokeswoman Katherine Orr said. "And they shouldn't be."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False

Bloggers Will Interpret News - for a Fee
Frank Bajak

Bloggers live or die by their wits - and that especially includes those who try to make a business of it.

No one is as acutely aware of that as Mike Masnick, chief executive of Techdirt Inc., a 12-person corporate intelligence service best known for its no-holds-barred public Web journal, or blog, that comments continuously on tech industry developments.

Masnick's 5-year-old enterprise, which grew out of an idea he developed while a student at Cornell in the 1990s, distills and interprets tech news for such corporate customers as Volkswagen AG and VeriSign Inc.

Now, the Belmont, Calif., company has a new customized service that Masnick dubbed InfoAdvisor because it delivers tailored Web feeds from news outlets and blogs pertinent to a customer's interest.

The key: Masnick's corral of geeks - journalists, analysts and engineers - edit those feeds and provide their expert commentary, telling you who and what to trust. Traditional media mostly had a lock on that market before the Internet let loose an information flood.

"There's so much information out there that a lot of you are spending too much time keeping up with things and not doing important things - like your job," Masnick told participants in the Blog On social networking conference this week.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

A Global Information System Needs A Culture Of Sharing
Arthur Carty

Few would question the important role that science, technology and innovation have played in building today’s knowledge society. However, “science” in the 21st century is very different from what it was 50 or even 10 years ago. Science is increasingly international and interdisciplinary; it often crosses traditional barriers of institutions, geography, language and culture. State-of-the-art research involves creating and using data sets of unprecedented size and complexity. With the world looking to science to find solutions to global problems, the need to safeguard, evaluate and exchange information and knowledge has never been more pressing.

Scientists have a long tradition of collaborating and sharing their research results through peer-reviewed journals. Over the last decade, the Internet has speeded up and greatly expanded the research communication system. This evolving system will ensure that the knowledge generated through science – our investment in the future – can be used effectively to tackle the most fundamental problems facing our society.

So, what is Canada’s vision for a 21st-century global system for disseminating and communicating research data? Above all, our goal must be to maximize the impact of research for societies everywhere, not just the developed world. People in developing nations must be able to access and contribute to the vitality of the global research information and communications system. An open-access philosophy is critical to the system’s success: if research findings and knowledge are to be built upon and used by other scientists, then this knowledge must be widely available on the web, not just stored in published journals that are often expensive and not universally available.

From a Canadian perspective, a 21st century research communications system would share certain attributes. It would:

· take full advantage of the enormous potential of new information and communication technologies;
· be capable of handling an unprecedented flow of information in a wide variety of formats;
· bring Canadian research knowledge to the world and bring the world’s research knowledge to Canada;
· be accessible by all Canadians, in all sectors, ensuring that public investment in scientific research leads to wealth creation and improvements in social and cultural well-being.

With this type of system a researcher could access, from any corner of the globe, the full texts of relevant journal articles; a comprehensive set of monographs and theses; research data sets that underlie published outcomes; research reports and non-peer-reviewed research materials from both academia and government; and the electronic tools necessary to manage this volume of material.

Creating a system with these attributes is no longer just a question of developing appropriate technologies; for the most part these already exist. Rather, it’s a matter of building, integrating and improving the technical infrastructure, operational standards, research support systems, regulations and institutional roles and responsibilities. It’s also a matter of nurturing a culture of open access and sharing, beyond what researchers have ever embraced.

Canada is fortunate to have a number of key building blocks in place to facilitate the development of such a system. These include a network of institutional repositories at 26 university research libraries linked by regional initiatives, such as the Ontario Scholars Portal, and a national repository through the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). We have a high-capacity optical data pipeline connecting our universities in CANARIE’s Ca*net4, and a leading online publisher in the Quebec-based non-profit service Érudit.

We still face challenges in building our infrastructure. We need to break down institutional silos, update our regulatory frameworks, help stakeholders become more familiar with new communication channels, and provide adequate training and funding for all this to happen.

Building an effective global information system consists both of this infrastructure and perhaps more importantly a culture of open access and sharing. This is harder to build than the nuts and bolts of the system because it requires a new mindset among researchers, administrators, governments and in some cases companies – everyone involved in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

This past year has seen a major change in the way two important funders of health research do business. The National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom both announced that all research that they fund must be archived in a free repository that’s accessible by other scientists and the public.

However, filling archives, though necessary, will not be able to change the mindset of people in the research enterprise. We have to find ways to motivate researchers in all countries to preserve and exchange their research data, to publish their findings in open access journals and to deposit their published articles in institutional repositories. Granting agencies, governments and institutions must find ways to reward researchers for the real value of their collaborative work and state-of-the-art data management. Institutions, too, need to know that their investments in expanding and improving the quality of their data archives and open-access repositories are recognized as measurable scientific outputs.

Some of these issues will be broached at the World Information Summit taking place this month in Turin, Italy. Canada has to articulate a vision to meet the challenges outlined above. Unless we act, the unprecedented volume of research information will become too difficult to manage, and highly valuable research data will be lost, along with the public investment in our future.

Dr. Carty is national science adviser to the Prime Minister.
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/issu...pinion_01.html

Net Pirates Will Face Stiffer Punishment
Declan McCullagh

Internet pirates with prerelease movies in their shared folders will face stiffer federal penalties starting Monday.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission on Wednesday approved an emergency set of rules that would boost prison sentences by roughly 40 percent for people convicted of peer- to-peer infringement of copyright works "being prepared for commercial distribution."

The changes also say judges may "estimate" the number of files shared for purposes of determining the appropriate fine and sentence. Larger numbers typically yield longer sentences.

This week's sentencing adjustments arose from a law that President Bush signed in April called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. It gave the commission 180 days to revisit its rules to make them "sufficiently stringent to deter, and adequately reflect the nature of, intellectual property rights crimes."

The law was supported by major media organizations, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. It imposes fines of up to $250,000 and prison terms of up to three years, regardless of whether any downloading of a prerelease work took place.

Another change in the sentencing guidelines alters the definition of "uploading" to make it clear that merely having a copyright file available in a shared folder--such as those used by popular file-swapping programs like Kazaa and BearShare--can count as illegal distribution.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, warned that permitting courts to estimate the magnitude of a copyright infringement could prove problematic. "In civil copyright cases I would insist that the plaintiff prove the precise number of the works infringed," von Lohmann said. "It would be grossly unfair to let a court simply guess."

Under U.S. sentencing guidelines (PDF), the base offense level for uploading infringing files is 12 but can be reduced to 10 if it is noncommercial copyright infringement. The commission's emergency amendment adds two points to the offense level, boosting a typical sentence from six to 12 months to between 10 and 16 months if the person had no prior criminal history.

Last month, Curtis Salisbury, 19, pleaded guilty to violating the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Sentencing is scheduled to take place in a San Jose, Calif., federal court Feb. 27.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...3-5905183.html

Until next week,

- js.

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