Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 5th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

The World According to Hollywood

Pushing the reality envelope.
Edward Jay Epstein

On Sept. 4, 2005, the New York Times printed the following intriguing correction:

An article last Sunday about film piracy included incorrect revenue data supplied by the Motion Picture Association of America. Hollywood's global revenue in 2004 was $44.8 billion, not $84 billion. Of the total, $21 billion, not $55.6 billion, came from sales of DVDs and Videos.

The correction was the result of a Times reporter, Timothy L. O'Brien, asking the Motion Picture Association of America to furnish the combined global take of the major studios in 2004. The six major studios submit their revenue reports to the MPAA, which, in turn, compiles the total revenue received from theatrical distribution, video sales (now mainly DVD), and television licensing. These data are then circulated among top executives in the All Media Revenue Report. (Click here to read the actual report.)

Instead of supplying the New York Times with the actual numbers, the MPAA sent bogus figures. Hollywood's DVD revenue alone was inflated by more than $33 billion, possibly to make the MPAA's war against unauthorized copying appear more urgent. Of course, the reporter had no way of knowing these impressive-sounding numbers were inaccurate and published them in an otherwise accurate story on film piracy. Such are the perils of Hollywood reporting. Since Hollywood is an industry dedicated to perpetrating illusion, its leaders often assume they have license to take liberties with the factual elements that support the movies they make. This practice is euphemistically described by marketing executives as "pushing the reality envelope."

The way in which Hollywood crosses the boundary between the make- believe and the real world takes myriad forms. Consider, for example, 20th Century Fox's creation of an "Extraterrestrial Highway" in Nevada. In 1996, in preparation for a publicity campaign for the movie Independence Day, Fox executives persuaded Nevada Gov. Bob Miller to officially dedicate Nevada's Highway 375 as a safe haven for extraterrestrials who landed their spaceships on it. Fox then placed a beacon on the highway near the town of Rachel, Nev., pointing to "Area 51"—which it described in a news release as the place where the U.S. military operates "a top secret alien study project." To make sure that the story received wider circulation than just Fox News, the studio arranged for busloads of reporters to see the putative periphery of "Area 51." Even though there is no such military base or "Area 51," the "Extraterrestrial Highway" resulted in hundreds of news stories about alien visitors. Not only did this help publicize Independence Day, but it fed into the long-standing paranoid fantasy about government machination to conceal space invaders from the public. (A fantasy that Steven Spielberg, for one, has brilliantly mined in such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Men in Black, and the miniseries Taken.)

Hollywood has pushed the reality envelope in other creative fashions, ranging from a studio creating a fake corporate Web site, as Paramount did with the Manchurian Global Corporation for its remake of The Manchurian Candidate, to counterfeiting a film critic, as Sony Pictures did with the nonexistent "David Manning." It's a given that studios will alter the off-screen lives of stars, as in the case of the unmarried actor Raymond Burr, whose official biography included two imaginary dead wives and a dead child. There's also the common practice of scripting fake anecdotes for stars to recite on talk shows, as, for example, Lucy Liu's vivid description of her co-actress Drew Barrymore clinging to the hood of a speeding car going about 35 miles an hour without a safety cord during the making of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

Nor is it surprising that the culture of deception is so deeply entrenched in Hollywood. The industry, after all, derives much of its wealth and power from its ability to get audiences to suspend disbelief in movies and television programs—even so-called reality shows. Further, to realize full profitability, these illusions must be convincing enough to be sustained in other products—such as videos, theme-park rides, games, and toys—for years, if not decades. So, pushing the reality envelope is simply seen by the entertainment press and the players themselves as just part of show biz.
http://www.slate.com/id/2129112/





Now Playing: Your Home Video
Scott Kirsner

Captain Jack is an atypical movie star. A blind Chihuahua rescued from a shelter, he does not have a B-list celebrity owner or a craving for tacos. And he can be a bit cantankerous, according to his companion, Deborah Tallent. "He didn't like me at first, until I gave him a piece of chicken," she said.

But on the Internet, Jack is one well-known dog, the star of a minor motion picture called "Capt. Jack: The Movie." It's available on ClipShack, one of a new generation of video-sharing sites that offer camcorder Coppolas and cellphone Scorceses a place to upload videos and make them available to friends, family members and the world at large.

Users of the sites, like Ms. Tallent, say that they offer a simpler alternative to sending large video files by e-mail, burning them onto a DVD or posting them on a personal Web site. And, if users opt to make their videos publicly available, they can be viewed - and commented on - by a wider audience.

The entrepreneurs who have started companies like ClipShack, Vimeo, YouTube and Blip.tv are betting that as consumers discover the video abilities built into their cellphones and digital still cameras, and get better at editing the often-lengthy video from their camcorders, they will be eager to share video on the Web. While most of the services are free today, the entrepreneurs eventually hope to make money by selling ads or charging fees for premium levels of service.

Sharing video on the Web is still a new notion. "A lot of people haven't really come to terms with the idea that they can publish their own video online," said Jakob Lodwick, the founder of Vimeo, based in Manhattan. "For the longest time, video has always been connected to a physical tape or a disc. There are still a lot of people who aren't even comfortable sharing their photos online yet."

But many early users of video-sharing services have encountered frustrations with other means of distribution. Ms. Tallent, who lives in Marina del Rey, Calif., said she had tried posting videos directly on her personal Web site, but that was cumbersome, and she ran afoul of her Internet provider's limits on file size.

Paul Krikler, who works for an investment bank in Manhattan, got tired of creating DVD's for his family members so they could enjoy videos of Mr. Krikler's 10-month-old son, Benjamin, chortling at the camera or being fed.

"Making DVD's would've been a less frequent process," Mr. Krikler said. Using ClipShack, "I can put up a couple new clips on a Saturday or Sunday every week, and people can go in and see new clips on a Monday."

Mr. Krikler chooses to allow only his circle of friends and family to view his videos, and says there are about 50 people in that group, including one friend in Australia. He shoots the videos using a digital camera from Canon that is designed mainly to take still pictures, and sends the videos to ClipShack.

Users of the services can upload cinéma vérité directly from the camera, or painstakingly edit the videos using software like iMovie from Apple or Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft. Some services, like Phanfare, charge a monthly fee, and most, with the exception of Google Video, limit the size of videos.

BLIP.TV Service for users who want to integrate video clips into their blogs. www.blip.tv

CLIPSHACK Basic, simple user interface. Limit of 50 megabytes of storage. www.clipshack.com

GOOGLE VIDEO Accepts clips of unlimited length and makes them searchable. video.google.com

OURMEDIA.ORG Stores videos in the Internet Archive, which is intended to be a permanent online trove. www.ourmedia.org

PHANFARE $6.95 monthly fee covers unlimited video posting, but individual videos may not exceed 10 megabytes. www.phanfare.com

VIMEO Circles of friends and family members can easily keep up with and comment on one another's clips. www.vimeo.com

YOUTUBE Site keeps track of most-viewed, most-discussed and best-rated videos; organizes similar clips into "channels," like sports or humor. www.youtube.com

None of the sites should be considered a reliable sole archive for personal video, however, since many do not allow users to download their original file once it has been uploaded. And there is always the possibility that a site may vanish overnight.

At least two sites, Blip.tv and OurMedia.org, promise more permanence by uploading a copy of each video submitted to the Internet Archive, which is run by a San Francisco nonprofit organization whose mission is long-term preservation of digital material.

Graham Walker, who posts his travel videos to OurMedia.org, views that as a benefit. Some of his videos made during a trip to Tibet capture the changes in that country as China exerts a greater impact on its culture. "With your video in the Internet Archive, you feel that you're leaving something for the future," said Mr. Walker, a video producer who lives in Prague.

"Of course, some people may not want that," he added. "Do you really want your new girlfriend to find all the videos you made when you were with your old girlfriend?"

Some video sharers simply want to make their latest clips accessible to a defined group of family members and friends, but others relish making their work public and the serendipity of allowing those who come across it to share their reactions. (Some enjoy both aspects of the services.) Vimeo can even send a user an e-mail or text message when someone else has posted a new comment about his video.

One of Andrew Long's videos on that site, "sugar rush," has been viewed nearly 2,500 times and has inspired 21 comments. (A typical one: "the first few seconds were the awesomest.") It features a friend of Mr. Long's stuffing blue cotton candy into her mouth on a visit to Coney Island. Mr. Long appreciates the social aspect of publishing his video on Vimeo. "I like being able to see what my friends shoot, and comment on it, and have them comment on my stuff," he said. "It's really gratifying."

Since many of the video-sharing sites have not yet established their business models, some users worry what will happen if their favorite site starts charging, or begins placing ads on its pages before the videos themselves. "I'm not against having a commercial on my video," says Schlomo Rabinowitz, a San Francisco bar owner who posts videos using Blip.tv. "But I'm against having just any commercial on it. I would want to have a say, and get some of the money." One of his recent videos chronicles a trip by private plane to a restaurant in Coalinga, Calif., to a try steak house that raises and slaughters its own beef.

None of the major photo-sharing sites, like Snapfish and the Kodak EasyShare Gallery, permit users to upload videos. "Too bad for them," said Cynthia Francis, a founder of ClipShack. Her site allows users to upload either type of media, and Mr. Krikler, a ClipShack user who had been using Snapfish for his still photos, plans to start using ClipShack for both photos and video soon.

Some believe that the video-sharing moment has not yet arrived. Jeff Hastings, general manager of Pinnacle Systems, which makes video-editing software for PC users, says his company's internal research shows that most mainstream users still prefer to save their videos on DVD's. While an earlier version of Pinnacle's Studio software had a feature that allowed users to upload finished videos to a Web site run by the company, that video-sharing feature has vanished from the latest version, Studio 10.

Others, though, are already looking ahead to the next wave of enhancements to online video-sharing sites. One possibility is allowing a user to weave together snippets of video taken at the same event by different people, producing a "master" version of homecoming weekend, for instance. Another idea is creating a queue of interesting video clips that can be watched on a television, said Ms. Francis, perhaps on a TiVo-like set-top box.

The future may also hold a sequel to "Capt. Jack: The Movie," which has been viewed 41 times so far on ClipShack. "He's doing great," Ms. Tallent said of her dog. "He has become somewhat of a local celebrity." Next time around, though, the Captain may demand his own trailer and a share of box-office revenues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/te...iLs4AzUPhp1ucg





A Big Gorilla Weighs In



Sharon Waxman

In hiring Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, to remake the monster classic "King Kong," Universal Pictures took a daring leap, paying him $20 million to direct, produce and be the co-writer of the film.

With seven weeks to go before the movie's release, the risks are becoming clearer. After seeing a version of the film in late September at Mr. Jackson's studio in New Zealand, Universal executives agreed to release "King Kong" at a length of three hours.

The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles: the extra length has helped increase the budget by a third, to $207 million, while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like "Titanic" and the films in Mr. Jackson's "Rings" trilogy.

Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.

The film industry and Universal could use a big seller.

Hollywood has been struggling this year at the box office, with overall revenue down more than half a billion dollars, about 8 percent, from last year's total, according to Box Office Mojo, an online tracking service. Industry experts attribute the decline to a migration of audiences to other forms of electronic entertainment, whether television, DVD's, video games or the Internet. Universal has had a mediocre year at the box office. The studio had a hit in the summer with the comedy "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," but has endured disappointments, like the drama "Cinderella Man," and has had lackluster results with films like "The Perfect Man," "Kicking and Screaming" and "Doom," which opened last week to a tepid $15 million.

Asked about the length of "King Kong," Universal executives said they saw it as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.

"This is a three-hour feast of an event," said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures, who described the film as a tragic love story between the ape and Naomi Watts, who plays Ann Darrow, an actress. "I've never come close to seeing an artist working at this level."

Set for release on Dec. 14, "King Kong" retells the classic beauty-and-the-beast tale first filmed in 1933, with its lasting image of Kong atop the Empire State Building, and remade in 1976. Along with Ms. Watts, it stars Jack Black, Adrien Brody and a 25-foot, computer-animated gorilla.

This time around, the picture depends upon another oversize talent in the person of Mr. Jackson, who was granted an unusual degree of control at a time when studios are trimming costs and tightening their grips on most productions. Not only did Mr. Jackson produce and direct, and also write with his longtime partner, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, but his companies Weta Digital and Weta Workshop also created the physical and computer special effects in the film at Mr. Jackson's studio in New Zealand.

Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount took a risk in granting the director James Cameron a similar degree of control over his famously overbudget 1997 film "Titanic," and eventually came up winners. In that case, Mr. Cameron's three-hour epic, a love story set in the midst of the ship's sinking, went on to break box-office records and win 11 Oscars. With "King Kong," Universal executives say they are convinced that they have an epic of comparable worth, even though they were surprised by the length.

"I anticipated it would be long, but not this long," the Universal chairwoman, Stacey Snider, said. As recently as late September, she expected about two hours and 40 minutes, she said. But on Wednesday she expressed delight with the picture she's got: "This is a masterpiece. I can't wait to unveil it."

The increased length, Ms. Snider said, means that the movie will cost $32 million more than planned, adding to expenses that had already gone up $25 million from an original $150 million production budget.

Who will pay for these budget overruns has been the subject of intense negotiations over the last two weeks, with representatives of the studio and the director haggling over who was responsible, according to those involved in the negotiations.

Ms. Snider said that as of Wednesday, all had been resolved, with the studio more or less splitting the $32 million expense with Mr. Jackson.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Jackson appeared to disagree, saying instead that he would be paying for those expenditures, which were mainly associated with extra digital-effects shots. Referring to his partner, Ms. Walsh, Mr. Jackson wrote: "Since Fran and I believed in the three-hour cut and wanted to take responsibility for the extra length, we offered to pay for these extra shots ourselves. That's what we're doing." He did not say how much that would be, but said the extra effects shot would cost "considerably below $32 million."

A spokesman for Universal responded, "We are working together to cover overages."

In granting Mr. Jackson immense latitude, Universal relied not just on his skills, but also a huge fan base, much of which has followed the production through the director's frequent communications on a Web site, www.kongisking.net.

But few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong's face - with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair - only in recent days.

Universal lost an opportunity to capitalize on a "Kong" revenue stream when an anticipated deal to release the film on Imax screens in December, at the same time the movie would appear in regular theaters, failed to materialize, and Imax chose to show Warner Brothers' new "Harry Potter" film, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."

"We think 'King Kong' will be a big movie," Richard L. Gelfond, co-chairman of Imax, said, "but unfortunately we could not agree on deal terms, including the box-office split."

Ms. Snider said Imax could not guarantee space in its theaters at the time of Kong's release, and acknowledged that both the studio and Mr. Jackson were disappointed.

A spokeswoman for NBC Universal said Bob Wright, the chairman, has been told of the rising cost and length of "King Kong." "Bob is more than aware of what is going on with this production and other major productions, and he has enormous confidence in the leadership team at Universal Studios," said the spokeswoman, Anna Perez.

Ms. Snider said she did not think the three-hour length would be an obstacle for moviegoers. Three-hour epics, she said, are Mr. Jackson's "brand."

Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show. Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office for theater owners, agreed that long movies posed problems. "But if it's a really fine film, it won't be a detriment to its success," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/mo...ilm.html?8hpib





Digital Revolution Set To Sweep India's Bollywood
Narayanan Madhavan

Digital cinema is about to take off in India, home of the world's most prolific film industry, but not without some twists and turns worthy of a "Bollywood" melodrama.

In the United States, a digital roll-out has stalled while Hollywood studios and theater owners fight over who pays for top-quality computer-based projection systems that cost $80,000 to $100,000 per screen.

But in the Mumbai-based film industry known as Bollywood, entrepreneurs are willing to settle for a bit less quality at one-third the cost. They use cheap digital cinema in remote towns to cash in on blockbusters -- and in the process, beat back video pirates, too.

"Piracy can be completely prevented when the entire industry goes digital," said Senthil Kumar of RealImage Media Technologies, a start-up in Chennai (Madras) that makes digital video players.

But as with mobile phones, India opts for value over top quality, a strategy that makes sense in an industry where only one in 12 movies has made a solid profit since 2001.

Industry officials say low-cost digital cinema, called "E-Cinema" in contrast to the top-quality "D-Cinema," is just what Bollywood needs. Though less than 2 percent of the country's 13,000 cinemas are digital, 2006 should see some big roll-outs in India.

"E-Cinema is what is going to be appropriate for countries like India," Kumar says.

India, led by Bollywood, produces about 1,000 films a year and Kumar calls the industry "pure Las Vegas" because producers often gamble on a single blockbuster to make up for several flops. But transporting celluloid prints to remote towns costs more and gives video pirates enough time to mint cheap copies, cutting into profits.

And that is where start up companies like RealImage come in.

Theaters On Rentals

Amit Khanna, chairman of Reliance Entertainment, an arm of India's biggest private group, Reliance, said digital cinema could help the industry make quick profits.

"The idea is saturation release. There is too much content chasing too many eyeballs," Khanna said.

While it takes around 70,000 rupees to make a celluloid print, RealImage rents out digital copies to cinema owners at less than 400 rupees.

Using inexpensive digital copies, a theater can run a movie for four weeks at less than 10 percent of the cost of a print, taking the edge off cinematic flops.

RealImage, which takes an upfront security deposit, but no equipment rentals from cinema owners, is now serving 40 screens in its home state of Tamil Nadu, and there are plans for 100 more across India by December, Kumar said.

Mumbai-based UFO Moviez, a service provider, uses satellites to download movies and last month ordered 500 projectors from U.S.-based Digital Projection International.

UFO now serves 50 cinemas and plans to reach 500 screens by March, a company official said.

Chennai-based Pyramid Saimira Theater Ltd., which uses RealImage players, is also looking to satellites. The company, which has management contracts with cinema owners, is running cheap digital movies in 28 cinemas in Tamil Nadu, and plans to have 100 by the end of November.

UFO said on its Web site that digital systems can track every playback and set an audit trail to check pirates.

Multiplex owner Adlabs Films Ltd. got into digital early with a 100-strong E-Cinema chain, but it did not do well because its single-microchip players offered lower quality. Kumar said the scene has now changed because new E-Cinema players use three microchips made by Texas Instruments Inc. that give Bollywood a better trade-off between cost and quality.

But there are still doubters.

"I don't want to be a mover or shaker in this," Shravan Shroff, managing director of multiplex owner and distributor Shringar Cinemas Ltd., which runs 22 screens.

"I would be a fence-sitter till someone else does it. I can always go and buy the technology later."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





HK Film Circle Welcomes First Conviction Of Peer-To-Peer Infringer
Xinhua

Hong Kong film and television circles have expressed their welcome to the world first criminal conviction of a peer-to-peer infringer.

Chan Nai-ming, 38, was arrested on Jan. 12 for illegal distribution of three Hollywood movies on the Internet through BitTorrent file sharing technology.

He was found guilty of three counts of copyright infringement at Tuen Mun Magistracy on Monday.

The Hong Kong film circle believed that the conviction of the infringer may help deter the acts of copyright infringement and promote the sense of copyright among the public.

Super star Jackey Chan said one of the most important things at present is to adopt detailed regulations on punishing the copyright infringers.

Film Director Er Dongsheng said the problem was brought about by the fast development of science and technology. The illegal loading involves not only the films, but also music and other creative industries. This is a challenge that must be encountered.

Crucindo Hung, president of Federation of Motion Film Producers of Hong Kong, expressed thanks to Hong Kong Customs and Exercise Department which used "three golden hours" to ferret out the suspect.

He said Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has done a good job in intellectual copyright protection since Hong Kong's return to the motherland eight years ago.

Hung said the conviction of the case set a good example for other countries and regions to follow suit, in a bid to crack down on the internet infringements. If the suspect is to be sentenced next month, it will be the best gift from the government to the film sector.

In a separate development, Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce, Industry & Technology John Tsang has warned the public not to infringe on copyrights, following the first conviction of a peer- to-peer infringer on Monday.

Tsang welcomed the verdict, adding that the posting of copyright materials on BitTorrent in Hong Kong has dropped 80 percent since Chan's arrest. He said the verdict will deter infringers, and called on the public, particularly young people, to respect intellectual property.
http://english.people.com.cn/200510/...25_216715.html





Movie Downloads Could Cost Racine Man Up To $600,000

Retiree faces suit over grandson's home computer file sharing
Bob Purvis

A Racine man who says he doesn't even like watching movies, let alone copying them off the Internet, is being sued by the film industry for copyright infringement after his 13-year-old grandson downloaded four movies on their home computer.

The Motion Picture Association of America, on behalf of three major Hollywood studios, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence, a 67-year- old retiree. The suit seeks as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over iMesh, an Internet file-sharing service.

The lawsuit comes after Lawrence, a former employee of Snap-on Inc. and seasonal worker for the City of Racine, refused a March offer to settle the matter by paying $4,000.

"First of all, like I say, I guess I'd have to plead being naïve about the whole thing," said Lawrence. He said his grandson, then 12, downloaded "The Incredibles," "I, Robot," "The Grudge," and "The Forgotten" in December, not knowing it was illegal.

Lawrence said his grandson downloaded the movies out of curiosity. The family already owned three of the four titles on DVD, and his grandson deleted the computer files immediately, he said.

"I personally didn't do it, and I wouldn't do it. But I don't think it was anything but an innocent mistake my grandson made," Lawrence said.

He hasn't settled because he doesn't have the money, and a lawyer said the settlement was likely a scare tactic that wouldn't result in a lawsuit. Now he doesn't know what he's going to do.

"I can see where they wouldn't want this to happen, but when you get up around $4,000 . . . I don't have that kind of money," Lawrence said. "I never was and never will be a wealthy person."

The movie industry readily concedes it won't gain public sympathy suing someone like Lawrence, but a spokesperson said that's not the point.

"We're not asking for anyone's sympathy. We are asking for people to understand the consequences of Internet piracy," said Kori Bernards, vice president of corporate communications for MPAA.

Bernards said the problem is the movies Lawrence's grandson downloaded were then available to thousands of other users on the iMesh network.

"Basically what you are doing when you use peer-to-peer software is you are offering someone else's product that they own to thousands of other people for free, and it's not fair," Bernards said. "People need to understand that when they are swapping movies online they are not anonymous, and that they will face consequences like this lawsuit."

Bernards said that illegal downloading costs the movie industry an estimated $5.4 billion a year.

The industry has filed hundreds of lawsuits against users of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, joining the music recording industry in the crackdown on such networks, said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to protecting civil liberties on the Internet.

Most cases have been settled out of court, he said, and the ones that aren't are moving slowly through the system, where judges have been baffled with how to treat many of the lawsuits.

"Frankly, most of the reaction I have seen from the federal courts has been bewilderment. They aren't used to having hundreds of people who can't afford attorneys coming in not knowing why they are there in the first place," von Lohmann said. Lawrence's case fits the norm in many of the file-sharing suits, where companies go after the parent or grandparent paying for Internet service, although it is often a child doing the downloading.

In some instances, parents have argued they didn't do the downloading and won, only to have the industry sue the child.

"That is not a very pleasant outcome, but if you truly can't afford it, it's probably easier for your child to file for bankruptcy than for you to file for bankruptcy," von Lohmann said.

While the recording industry focuses on people who have downloaded hundreds of songs, it's not uncommon for movie studios to target people with just a few movie downloads, von Lohmann said.

"I think the attitude most of the time is, 'the odds are this wasn't your first one,' and that means sometimes they do hit someone who has downloaded very few movies," von Lohmann said.

Von Lohmann and Bernards said it is unlikely that the studios would seek the maximum penalties of up to $150,000 per movie, but that is of small consolation, said Lawrence, who hasn't even seen the movies cited in the lawsuit.

"To be honest with you, I don't even watch movies very often."
http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/nov05/367482.asp





Peer-to-Peer Goes Legit
Niall McKay

The old-school peer-to-peer network iMesh has left the murky world of illegal file swapping behind with the launch of a new service that enables users to share up to 2 million tracks from the four major record labels.

The New York-based company is charging its 5 million users an a la carte fee of 99 cents to purchase a track, or $6.95 per month to gain unlimited access to the catalog.

On Monday, iMesh appeared to be off to a good start. It was the No. 4 most popular download on Download.com, and more than 150,000 users have downloaded it since last Tuesday. IMesh 6.0 provides users with three months free access to content. It is not available for the Mac platform.

IMesh was part of the first generation of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks along with Napster, Grokster and Kazaa. Together, these networks jump-started digital music in 1999 by enabling home users to download free (but illegal) tracks to their desktop computers. While other peer-to-peer companies fought and lost a landmark 2004 copyright-infringement lawsuit against the music industry, iMesh settled with a $4.1 million payment and continued to trade.

Now the company has built Microsoft Digital Rights Management technology into its software, allowing users to see a complete list of tracks available on the Gnutella network. However, they can only download tracks that they are willing to pay for, or that are not copyright protected.

"We are the first true P2P company to legalize our service," said Talmon Marco, president and co-founder of iMesh. "Unlike iTunes or Rhapsody or Napster, we will also provide access to another 15 million so-called 'gray market' soundtracks free of charge."

Shabtai is referring to the 15 million or so soundtracks available on the Gnutella network whose copyright owners have either deliberately or unwittingly left them unclaimed, which allows users to legally download them. Such services are beginning to provide independent artists with alternative distribution for their work.

Still, analysts said iMesh will have its work cut out for it. Not only is it competing with more-established services like Apple Computer's iTunes, RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Napster (which is no longer a peer-to-peer service), it will also face challenges from other legal peer-to-peer music-sharing services like MashBoxx, which will be launched later this year by former Grokster President Wayne Rosso.

"From a business perspective their main challenge is to convert their installed base, which is used to downloading music for free, over to paid subscribers," said Gartner analyst Mike McGuire. He estimated digital music is one of the fastest-growing sectors on the internet, with sales projected to swell to about $1.4 billon by 2009 from just $335 million in 2004.

IMesh said in coming months it will add online community software to its services, enabling members to share (if they wish) their age, gender and lists of favorite artists.

Users will also be able to share video content. However, iMesh has inked an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America not to distribute any video exceeding 15 minutes in length, thus guaranteeing it will not inadvertently distribute feature-length movies over the internet.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,69457,00.html





Friendster and Grouper Partnership Fuels Personal Media File Sharing
Press Release

Friendster and Grouper Networks today announced a partnership that will allow Friendster users to share unlimited personal media files with each other using Grouper's personal sharing network.

Grouper(TM), launched by the founders of Spinner (now AOL Radio), enables people to share personally-created media like video and photos to the audience of their choice -- friends, family or the general public. Users have the ability to share unlimited amounts of media because Grouper leverages a distributed computing platform. For example, you can share unlimited personal video, pictures, and stream music with your friends!

Friendster, the leading social networking site, provides users a built-in audience for their media -- millions of photos and thousands of videos are updated, viewed and forwarded on Friendster every day. The Grouper/Friendster partnership will extend this, allowing users to:

-- Share your media: Showcase your personality and get to know friends' interests by sharing your own video and photos.
-- Notify your friends: As soon as you share new video and photos let your friends know with built-in communications tools: email, IM and chat.
-- Make new friends: Attract new friends and find common interests with the Grouper Directory and Friendster Network.

"Peer-to-Peer is one of those disruptive technologies, like social networking, that just changes the game. Yesterday, the game was about sharing 10 or 20 photos. Today, it's about what you can create -- there are no limits," said Taek Kwon, CEO, Friendster. "With this partnership, Friendster has leapfrogged other social networking sites. We've shown that a social network provides a context and relevant audience for personal media that used to be hidden on photo sharing sites or personal computers. Now it's a matter of applying that context and audience to an unlimited amount of media."

"Grouper's personal media network was created to make it easy and fun for people to share the videos and photos they shoot," said Josh Felser, CEO Grouper Networks. "Enabling Friendster users to share unlimited numbers of videos and photos dramatically enhances the social networking dynamic, creating more interesting and interactive ways to connect."
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-e...1112005-1.html






Rip and Burn and Download on a Stereo
David Pogue

JUST because a bunch of individual ingredients are delicious doesn't mean they'll taste good when they're all cooked up together. Ask anyone who's ever sampled a 5-year-old chef's rendition of chocolate chip spaghetti with meat sauce and grape jelly.

Similarly, many an electronics company has tried and failed to slap together a decent product from buzzword-compliant components - say, iPods, wireless networks, sound systems and personal computers.

So you might not have high hopes for the Olive Symphony, a $900 hi-fi component (www.olive.us) that merges all of those technologies and more. But instead of creating a multiheaded digital Frankenstereo, the company managed to make all of those technologies and features feel natural together. The resulting box takes a long time to describe, because it does so much. But it takes surprisingly little time to master, and most of its features are usable whether you own a computer or not.

If you're looking for a one-line description, well, think of the Symphony as an iPod for your stereo. Inside is a completely silent, fanless, 80-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 20,000 songs. (A 160-gigabyte model, the Musica, is available for $1,100. It has a fan, but you'd practically have to climb inside the thing to hear it.) The back panel has both analog and digital outputs to your sound system.

The front panel's scroll wheel and bright, monochrome screen permit quick navigation through gigantic music collections by song title, playlist, album name and so on.

Now, Olive isn't the first company to invent a stereo component with a hard drive. What makes the Symphony, which will be shipped to stores next week, so interesting is all the different ways music gets onto and off of it.

Take the built-in CD player, for example. When you slip a CD into the slot and press the glowing Play button, the music begins. The song and band names appear on the screen in huge letters, visible from across the room, courtesy of the machine's built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.

By pressing one button, you can copy the CD onto the Symphony's hard drive. The process takes about 45 seconds a song; you choose the audio format and quality setting. (You get the quoted 20,000-song capacity only with the MP3 format, which is not exactly the audiophile's dream. Choose WAV, AIFF or FLAC for better quality. These are lossless formats - meaning "adored by classical music nuts"- that fill up the hard drive much faster. The Symphony stores about 2,000 songs in FLAC format.)

And what if you have 1,200 CD's? Are you really expected to sit there, drumming your fingers, feeding the box another disc every nine minutes?

Don't be silly. Olive has made an offer you can't refuse: it will preload all of your CD's onto a new Symphony's hard drive. You just pay for one-way shipping for the discs. (This offer is good until at least Jan. 1, 2006. Even after that, the service will always be available, but it won't always be free.)

The Symphony box can also rescue your old records and tapes. If you're willing to connect your tape deck or record player to the Symphony, it can turn each song into a full-blown digital track that behaves just like the songs you've copied from a CD.

Once your music collection is safely ensconced on the Symphony, you can exile the original CD's, tapes and records to the attic. From now on, you can call up any album right on the screen. You can also mix and match tracks into playlists of your own. Better yet, the Symphony's CD player is also a CD recorder, so you can burn your music - including the tunes you've rescued from your old tapes and LP's - onto shiny new CD's.

If your head hasn't yet exploded, there's more: you can also connect an iPod or any MP3 player directly to a U.S.B. jack on the Symphony (which also recharges the player). Amazingly, the iPod's own music collection now appears on the Symphony's screen, ready for playing through your stereo system. (The Symphony does not, however, play copy-protected files, like songs from the iTunes music store.) You can also copy music from the Symphony's hard drive to the iPod, thus getting extra mileage from all the work you (or Olive) did in transferring your CD collection. That is, the Symphony box lets you load and manage an iPod even if you don't own a computer - an industry first.

In fact, the Symphony doesn't even wipe out all of the music that's already on the iPod; it's content to add, not replace. Over all, this Symphony-to-iPod copying business is a pretty slick trick. (With the new video iPod, it's a trick that needs work. In my tests, copying songs from the Symphony had the bizarre side effect of stripping away all the video from the iPod's TV shows, leaving only the audio. The company promises a fix within days.)

Even this, however, is not the end of the Symphony's résumé. It also has a wireless (Wi-Fi) network antenna, so that it can join your home network. Suddenly, there are all kinds of other possibilities.

For example, suppose you keep your music collection in iTunes (the free jukebox software) on your Mac or PC upstairs. That music library shows up on the Symphony box, ready to play on your much nicer sound system downstairs.

In fact, the same stunt works in reverse: the Symphony also shows up as an icon in the iTunes software, so that you can play its music collection on your computer. In this age of copy-protection paranoia, you just wouldn't expect to find this sort of flexibility and simplicity.

Network nerds will be even more impressed to learn that the Symphony is not just a Wi-Fi receiver; it's also a full-blown access point (wireless router) in its own right. That is, if you plug a cable or D.S.L. modem into the back panel, all wireless laptops in the house can share its fast Internet connection. Not yet wireless? Stand back: the Symphony is even a four-port Ethernet router. You can plug four computers directly into it to create a network.

What does all this mean to non-geeks? Simply that the Symphony box and your computers can play each other's music collections across a home network. You can also drag music files directly from your computer to the Symphony's hard drive. You can even use your computer's keyboard to manage song names and playlists; the Symphony's playlist-management software appears in, of all things, your Web browser.

(Olive also supplies a dedicated, more elegant playlist-management program for Mac OS X only.)

Those networking features also mean that the Symphony can be linked to the Internet, making it easy to download to the box new features and updates of CD track names on new albums.

Finally, the Internet connection also permits the Symphony to tune into Internet radio stations. Over 1,000 are listed when you open the package, organized by genre, and you can add your own.

Clearly, this is a machine with vast potential for musical pleasure - and for confusion. In general, the simple, iPoddish, drill-down-to-the-right-menu system keeps all these features easy to find. There's plenty to learn and troubleshoot, however, especially at the outset.

For example, adding this or any machine to a wireless network can be an evening-long headache, especially because you have to tap in your network password using the remote's number pad. Copying songs from a CD seems quick, but a very long period of post-processing is required before they're available for playback on your computer or copying to your iPod. And although the machine itself is sleek, black and beautiful (the more expensive Musica is silver), the remote control is a surprisingly cheesy, plastic, nonilluminated afterthought.

But Olive has big plans for its audio system. For example, in December it intends to offer a companion device called the Sonata ($200), a small, wireless receiver that hooks up to speakers or even to clock radios. You can park Sonatas in up to 20 rooms of the house; each can be playing different music from the Symphony's hard drive.

So, no, you can't mash together a bunch of trendy ingredients and expect to produce a successful dish. But a master chef can create a triumphant whole even from a disparate jumble of different ingredients - just as long as one of them is an Olive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/te...s/27pogue.html





A Virtual Holiday in the Virtual Sun
Mark Wallace

IMAGINE relaxing in a tiny private cove, on a lava beach near the mists of a waterfall. The sun is shining, a tropical bird cries somewhere in the distance and the cares of the working world seem a million miles away.

It's an idyllic vacation spot, but the best thing about it is that it takes less than five minutes to get there from anywhere in the world. In fact, you can reach it without ever leaving your home. That's because it exists not in any physical location but in one of the many virtual worlds that millions of people now travel to every day with the help of nothing more than a decent computer graphics card and a broadband Internet connection.

Though most of these worlds take the form of multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies, a few are simply open 3-D environments whose members can get away from it all in a place filled with colorful diversions and other cyberexplorers like themselves. Even in game worlds, many players log on not to slay orcs or blow up death stars but to spend time with friends, see the sights and take a small vacation without ever stepping foot outside their door.

More than 10 million people around the world travel to such imaginary destinations regularly. They get there via software that lets them guide their onscreen representatives, known as "avatars," through places built entirely of pixels where they can interact with one another. Their destinations include virtual dance parties and nightclubs, auto races and yachting events, "Star Wars"-style cantinas, whimsical underwater jazz clubs and much more.

In a world called Second Life, especially (where the virtual Hawaii described above can be found), so many people visit that profitable businesses have sprung up that earn their proprietors real money, not just virtual currency - in fact, a handful of people earn six-figure incomes there. There are discos, casinos and other sites that can be rented for private parties or even for the virtual weddings many people hold.

"Coming to Second Life was a nice way to get away from the stresses of real life," said Amy McKenzie, a full-time mother of three in Madison, S.D., whose avatar goes by the name Diamond Hope. "But mostly it's a place I can meet my friends and just have a good time."

One California woman, whose avatar is known as SweetBrown1 Mfume, spends many of her after-work and weekend hours socializing with friends in Second Life. (Like most of the people interviewed for this article, the woman asked to be referred to only by her avatar's name. Each person's identity has been verified.) In cyberspace, she said, she can spend time with them no matter their differences in location or time zone. "We can dance, hug and kiss, all across the U.S.," she said.

Edward Castronova, associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, uses a game world in a similar way. He is often away from home at conferences, and from time to time will keep in touch with his wife by meeting up with her in the online game World of Warcraft. To Mr. Castronova, such worlds are more than just games. "These things are really communications devices," he said.

Entering a world like Second Life is relatively simple. Free trial memberships are available at secondlife.com. Software is downloaded over a cable modem or other broadband connection, and on first entering, new members find themselves at a place called Orientation Island.

After a few minutes spent mastering the basic techniques of movement and how to give your avatar a rudimentary makeover, you're released into the wider virtual world to explore the sights and sounds of a place that contains the virtual equivalent of 25 square miles of land and is growing every day.

PRACTICALLY everything in Second Life's world was created by its residents, who come from 80 countries around the (real) world. Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life's world, provides a set of content-creation tools that its members have used to create everything from nightclubs and movie theaters to coffee shops and bars to airships, automobiles and clothing stores, a few museums and one or two libraries and nature preserves.

The company itself creates practically none of the buildings and other sites in Second Life, but provides only the rolling landscape on which the more ambitious of its members build.

On FairChang Island, for instance, one of the 1,000-plus "regions" of Second Life (each covering 16 virtual acres), a simple mouse-click allows members to purchase virtual sailboats that can be sailed around the waters of the virtual world. Prices start at less than a penny, and the money goes to the "resident" who created the item. Payments are made using a virtual currency called "Linden dollars" that can be bought and sold freely with real money on eBay and other sites.

In contrast to most virtual worlds, Linden Lab doesn't mind having its currency bought and sold, and even grants Second Life members ownership of the intellectual property rights to whatever they create in the world. But to create anything of permanence, members must "own" a plot of virtual land (on which they must then pay monthly fees).

A robust economy has sprung up as a result, with one of the most profitable areas being the virtual real estate business. Large tracts of land can be "purchased" at auction in Second Life, often for more than $100 an acre, then subdivided and sold at a profit.

But that doesn't make for much of a vacation. For a cheaper thrill, free balloon rides are available that take you soaring over those plots of land and the fantastic creations that occupy them. Virtual Nascar races are held several times a week on Silver Island. And there are ad hoc events and other attractions that can be located using the directory function built into the Second Life interface.

Many regions are more outlandish. The island of Montmartre, for instance, is filled with fantastical sculpture, floating bridges and platforms and playful spaces to explore. And as more people enter the world, new creations spring up (and sometimes are torn down) on a regular basis. One recent addition, Sleezywood, features trailer homes, junkyards and more than one virtual velvet Elvis.

"It's very interesting to be inside somebody else's vision of what the world should look like," Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab, said. "Unless you're concerned with taste and smell, Second Life provides an almost perfect canvas for creating escapist environments. It's an incredible tourist destination."

For those interested in a more permanent stay, or who just want a sharper outfit for their avatar before venturing onto the virtual dance floor, there are a number of fashion boutiques scattered around the world.

"In real life, I love to shop," said a member who uses the avatar named Rynah Quinn, and who often shops at the Midnight City Mall. "Here I get the same satisfaction, but it's more fun because you can pick the colors and it will always fit."

Others enjoy the many activities on offer. One popular spot is the Neo Realms Fishing Camp in Second Life's Alston region. Created by a team of five residents, Neo Realms lets virtual anglers buy a fishing rod for less than a quarter and then while away the hours casting from the small pier or from lily pads that float nearby. Fishing tournaments with cash prizes are held each week. There is even a Web site (http://fish.neorealms.com) where competitors can check their tournament standings.

The imposing Moonshine Casino in the Mullett region and the Edge nightclub in the Da Boom region are also among the most popular spots in Second Life, and are often crowded with avatars both day and night. In fact, there's a thriving dating scene in Second Life, and avatars are regularly "married" in ceremonies large and small.

LIKE most virtual worlds, Second Life also sees its share of cybersex, in which two people will use a private chat channel within the world to type suggestively to each other, a practice that dates from the early days of chat rooms.

But Second Life adds a visual element to cybersex that chat rooms lack. Poses and animations can be had that allow avatars to engage in all kinds of sexual positions and activities. In addition, there is a virtual sex industry that includes virtual lap dances, virtual escort services and virtual prostitution.

To guide members in what they can expect, Second Life is divided into "mature" regions, where anything goes, and "PG" regions, where sexual content and swearing are not allowed. (The world has a minimum age requirement of 18, but for younger cybernauts, Second Life offers a separate "teen grid" as well.)

A smaller club called the Shelter, in the Isabel region, is designed expressly for those new to Second Life and for those looking for a night out free of sexual overtones.

"Being somewhat of a haven is our primary mission," said Steve Meyer, a Detroit systems engineer who owns the club. Nothing at the club costs money, and instead of disco, hip-hop and "escorts," the Shelter features pop tunes from the 1980's and 90's to dance to, lotteries, game shows and items like virtual clothing and vehicles, all available free to get people started in the world. And if dancing isn't your thing, there's a pool on the patio to relax in.

Although many people keep in touch with their real-world loved ones in virtual worlds, some find relationships that develop in the opposite direction. Ms. McKenzie not long ago met a man in Second Life, lthen met him in real life and is now married to him. The couple were married in South Dakota, and plan to have another ceremony online.

Although worlds like Second Life can be useful for staying in touch or even for forming new relationships, for most people they are simply a casual getaway.

"I like meeting new people, but this is strictly a game for me," a member whose avatar is named Gina Fatale said of Second Life. "Plus, in Second Life I look better."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/tr...28virtual.html





Google Throws Bodies at OpenOffice
Stephen Shankland

Google plans to hire programmers to improve OpenOffice.org, a demonstration of its affinity for open source initiatives and one the company believes also shows sound practical sense.

OpenOffice has its roots in Sun Microsystems' StarOffice suite of programs. Five years ago, Sun turned its proprietary software into an open-source project. Only recently, however, has the competitor to Microsoft's Office attracted serious attention.

Now Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company.

"We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," DiBona said.

Google has shown an affinity for open-source software, which are programs developed in the open and available for free. Many of the company's programmers came of age in the open-source era, so advancing the open-source agenda comes naturally, DiBona said. But the company also has business reasons to justify its open-source embrace.

"We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," he said.

Earlier in October, Google and Sun announced a partnership to boost several software projects, but released few details. Asked about OpenOffice collaboration, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the time only that the search engine power would "work to make the distribution of (OpenOffice) more broad." But OpenOffice, like the other software projects the partners intend to work on, competes directly with Microsoft software--a point that has not gone unnoticed.

As one of the most-watched companies in the industry, Google's involvement has helped Sun draw attention to OpenOffice.org. And there are other reasons the software is taken more seriously as an alternative to Microsoft Office. For one thing, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was just released with a modernized interface and some new features. For another, OpenOffice.org supports OpenDocument, a standardized file format that many endorse as a way to break the lock-in of Microsoft's proprietary formats.

DiBona didn't mention a wider competitive perspective in giving Google's rationale for investing time and money on nonproprietary software. "We were looking for ways to work with Sun and ways to help users. This is a good place to spend some resources," he said.

Google's heavy use of open-source software for its operations has kept its developers in touch with cutting-edge technology, but the do-it-yourself approach has also meant that its employees have technology maintenance responsibilities that most companies leave to others.

Some believe Google eventually will have to settle with a more conventional approach: buying technology instead of building it in- house. Among them is Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Linux seller Red Hat. He said many customers began with their own versions of Linux before turning to Red Hat for support.

"With most customers, we have a relationship that started that way. Every financial services company, the Department of Energy-- almost everyone got Linux in a nonstandard way on their own," Stevens said. But Google probably won't keep its in-house Linux version, he predicted. "That's not where their competence is. They've got a lot of other problems than building Linux distributions."

A peek under the hood
Google is notoriously reluctant to describe the particulars of its search-computing data center, which served the demands of 380 million people in August. But DiBona did discuss some details.

The company uses the Linux operating system for its mainstay search

CONTINUED: What Google won't open-source... service, he said. Its Linux core begins not with software from a company such as Red Hat, or Novell's Suse Linux, but rather from the version that project leader Linus Torvalds posts periodically to the kernel.org Web site.

Among the open-source technologies used by Google are the Python programming language and the MySQL database, he said. In addition, Google's Blogger site uses Apache Web server software and the Tomcat package for running Java programs on the server.

The GCC compiler software, used to create nearly every open-source program in existence, also is widely used at Google.

Sun's Java also figures prominently, even though it's not open-source at its center. "We make great use of Java at the company," DiBona said, including for Gmail. The company claims the Web-based e-mail service has millions of subscribers.

Sun hasn't released the fundamental part of Java--the virtual machine component--as open-source software. However, the Apache Software Foundation is working on an open-source Java effort called Project Harmony, an initiative that now has IBM developer support.

"I think they'll succeed wildly," DiBona said of Harmony. "They're so good at this. They say, 'We're going to write this software,' and it gets done."

Despite Google's liking for open-source software, plenty of programming at the company is proprietary.

"We're never going to open-source PageRank," DiBona said, referring to the algorithm the company uses to choose which search results to present. "It's the thing that makes Google Google."

Open-source output
Google isn't only an open-source software consumer. It's an open-source producer as well: For example, employees submit software to the Apache Axis Web services project, DiBona said.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also employs some open-source notables:

• Sean Egan, leader of the GAIM project for instant messaging software;

• Alex Martelli, a leading Python developer;

• Greg Stein, the Apache Software Foundation chairman and a manager of the Subversion source code management software.

• And Ben Goodger, the lead programmer of the Firefox Web browser project, as well as a few other Firefox programmers.

Google also has published several open-source projects, including tools for debugging software, improving its performance, monitoring MySQL databases and using the AJAX software for richer Web page interfaces.

But so far, there is a significant limit to the group-programming facet of Google's projects: The company doesn't yet accept outside contributions.

Some developers have offered the company contributions meant to improve Google's open-source software--for example, to add 64-bit support to 32-bit software. That cooperation is awkward right now for reasons relating to intellectual-property control, DiBona said.

"We've been slow in being able to accept outside patches," he said. But the company is working on a contributor license that lays out patent and copyright terms for outside contributors. "It's something that pays to be very, very careful about."

The company has helped outside open-source projects, though. Through a $2 million program called the Google Summer of Code, the company sponsored 400 college-age students to work on open-source projects last summer. Each got $4,500 if they met their goals, which 84 percent did. Another $500 went to each of the several open-source projects that helped organize the effort, DiBona said.

Open-source software is good for young programmers, DiBona said, noting that it gives them real-world problems to solve and teaches them self-management skills.

"We think open-source is pretty important," DiBona said. "Without it, the industry would not be as good as it is now to newcomers."
http://news.com.com/Google+throws+bo...3-5920762.html





A New Way To Use The Web

Peer-to-peer software offers faster connection and shared bandwidth
Katya Zapletnyuk

Matthew Gertner may not look like an idealist, though he certainly sounds like one when discussing his new software that he claims will revolutionize how people use the World Wide Web.

The software, scheduled to be released in a few weeks, will help transform Internet technology from its current client-to-server model to a peer-to-peer model, according to Gertner, chief technology officer of AllPeers, the Prague - and Oxford, England - based company that created the new software.

The peer-to-peer model supports the concept that "information wants to be free," which runs counter to the traditional business model pioneered by Microsoft.

Gertner said the software will be available as a free download on the Mozilla Firefox browser — a no-charge browser that enjoys about 100 million users created as part of the Internet's Open Source movement.

Proponents of the peer-to-peer model tout it as economically more advantageous than client-to-server models, where every client must establish a connection with a server and the owner of the server pays the bandwidth charges.

Peer-to-peer models offer faster connections and users don't get blocked because they are sharing the same bandwidth.

"Economically, there is no single payer who must pay for the entire cost — it is shared among all the peers," said Brian Del Vecchio, software developer for Boston-based networking hardware company Datapower.com.

This is the model used to distribute games and large software like the new Open Office software.

Another product of AllPeers is designed to facilitate selling content — a model, Gertner says, that may soon phase out the advertisement-based business model of the Internet.

"We believe that in many cases the advertising model is kind of weak. It is a model that is quite open to fraud and it requires you to change the look of your Web site, which you might not want to do," he said.

Promoting sharing

Web sites are striving to have more of their applications running on the user's machine and not a on central server to speed up connections.

"At a certain point you want to have a real framework for doing this," Gertner said. AllPeers is working to create an extension to the Firefox Web browser that will enable its users to utilize more powerful computer applications by configuring programs so they can run inside the user's Web browser rather than inside a server.

Such a platform, Gertner stressed, will provide a framework that makes it possible to more easily develop applications that can run inside users' browsers and meet directly with each other.

The extension is also designed to help users organize, search and share their personal media files, and automatically converts personal computers into Web servers and Web browsers.

"It is like Google for your media files," Gertner said.

Based on its peer-to-peer model, AllPeers is also developing software, to be launched early next year, designed to make online content sales of articles, photos and videos easier. The software will also provide display and payment options that are user- friendly.

AllPeers, established in 2003, aims to attract five to 10 million users for its product by mid-2006. Gertner said company owners chose Prague as its launch location because of the nation's highly skilled and relatively inexpensive programmers.

"The Czech Republic is a good place to develop software," he said, but company officials were uncomfortable with the state of the country's intellectual property laws.

"We don't feel that the Czech legal system is mature enough to have intellectual property belonging to a Czech company," he said. So AllPeer's British arm took over the property rights issues and serves as a financial vehicle and investor base.

Gertner declined to forecast when AllPeers' business angels will make see investment returns.

"What we think is more important is to build a user base. In this market today it is all about network effect," he said.
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2005/Art/1103/busi4.php





Early Skype Backers Rev For Revver
By Staff, TheDeal.com

Several investors in Internet telephony provider Skype Technologies have reunited to offer an undisclosed amount of Series A financing to Revver, a peer-to-peer video-sharing service with an online presence.

Skype, also a P2P enabler, became the VC feel-good story of the year when eBay purchased it in September in a deal that could be worth up to $4.1 billion if certain benchmarks are met.

Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Richards were original investors in Skype. Draper Fisher Jurvetson participated in a second fundraising round for the company. The firms have teamed again to back Revver, which has developed a technology platform that helps the producers of amateur digital videos share the content online and also generate revenue from their efforts.

So what's the connection?

Perhaps the opportunity to generate hefty advertising revenue from P2P networks, whose potential is untapped.

"The explosion of self-published, popular-content downloaded via e-mails from friends and colleagues, instant messages, or discovered on various Web sites or P2P networks, presents a massive market opportunity," Steven Starr, Revver founder and CEO, said in a press release.

"It's the hope of a whole wave of new investments that VCs are making these days," says Andreas Stavropoulos, a managing director with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, trying to deal with navigating, collecting, aggregating and monetizing self-published content.

Self-publishing technologies such as Web logs and wikis are advancing the online marketplace to a more Web-services-oriented environment--an area VCs will continue to scrutinize for the next several years, Stavropoulos says, because managing self-published content is difficult.

As self-publishing, P2P networks and online file-sharing and distribution grow, costs decline proportionally, so feeding an advertising market and creating revenue from shared content is a focus for start-ups today.

Many business plans landing on his desk, Stavropoulos says, address the "Web 2.0 way of doing things" and its impact on traditional Web business models.

Founded in 2004, Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Revver has developed a video-sharing system that allows users to tap into self-published content for free but links video producers with advertising revenue. With its proprietary tagging technology, Revver facilitates and tracks the distribution of videos, in which sponsors pay to advertise.

Revver will use the money for internal growth, research and development, and sales and marketing initiatives.

Revver is the most recent example of P2P networks receiving VC support.

BitTorrent, a San Francisco start-up that manages Web traffic and cooperative file distribution, raised $9 million from Menlo Park, Calif.'s DCM-Doll Capital Management in late September. Meanwhile, Vivox, a Wayland, Mass., VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) provider raised $6 million from Canaan Partners of Menlo Park and Grand Banks Capital of Newton, Mass., earlier that month.

Skype is the most impressive exit for a self-publishing and P2P network but not the only example. Internet domain provider VeriSign grabbed technologies that fit within purchased aggregate news provider Moreover Technologies in October for $30 million. Moreover, it received venture funding from Atlas Venture, Reuters Venture Capital and Dawntreader Ventures.

VeriSign also acquired Weblogs.com for $2.3 million earlier in the month.

It seems all exits in self-publishing won't be like Skype's sale to eBay, but, Stavropoulos says, "I would like to think Revver has even greater potential."

Board seats will go to Bessemer general partner Rob Stavis and Draper Richards partner Howard Hartenbaum. Both VCs sat on Skype's original board.

Fenwick & West LLP advised Revver.
http://news.com.com/Early+Skype+back...3-5928657.html





U.S. Cell-Phone Tracking Clipped
Ryan Singel

Federal law enforcement attempts to use cell phones as tracking devices were rebuked twice this month by lower court judges, who say the government cannot get real time tracking information on citizens without showing probable cause.

This summer, Department of Justice officials separately asked judges from Texas and Long Island, New York to sign off on orders to cellular phone service providers compelling them to turn over phone records and location information -- in real time -- on two different individuals.

Both judges rejected the location tracking portion of the request in harshly worded opinions, concluding investigators cannot turn cell phones into tracking devices by simply telling a judge the information is likely "relevant" to an investigation.

"When the government seeks to turn a mobile telephone into a means for contemporaneously tracking the movements of its user, the delicately balanced compromise that Congress has forged between effective law enforcement and individual privacy requires a showing of probable cause," wrote Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of New York in the latest decision Monday. (.pdf).

In the Long Island case, the DOJ asked to record the location of the cell towers that handled a call using information in a phone's "control channel," which is separate from the voice channel used in a mobile telephone call, which would give only a rough approximation of a user's locations and movement.

In the Texas case, the government sought to capture information regarding the strength, angle and timing of the caller's signal measured at two or more cell sites -- data that might allow investigators to pinpoint a person's location using triangulation.

Orenstein handed down his 57-page opinion the same day as the Electronic Privacy Information Center released documents acquired in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which showed the FBI had repeatedly violated its own rules about surveillance of American citizens.

The DOJ applied for the real time cell tracking information alongside orders to install so called "pen registers" and "trap and trace devices" which let investigators immediately learn the dialing information of incoming and outgoing calls.

These orders are relatively easy for the government to get since the Supreme Court ruled that there is no expectation of privacy in the phone numbers a person dials, and federal law requires judges to issue the orders so long as law enforcement promises the information will likely be relevant. The government cited another law, the Stored Communications Act, to argue those devices could be also used to capture the location-focused information.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief (.pdf) in the New York case, says the Justice Department may have been using cell phones to track people for a long time, since judges typically don't publish opinions on such orders.

"This is a true victory for privacy in the digital age, where nearly any mobile communications device you use might be converted into a tracking device," Bankston said in a statement. "Judges are starting to realize that when it comes to surveillance issues, the DOJ has been pulling the wool over their eyes for far too long."

Bankston noted in an interview that the Justice Department attempted to convince Orenstein he had the authority, under another federal law called the All Writs Act, to order the cell phone tracking by revealing that other judges had used that statute to authorize real time tracking of credit-card purchases, which the government referred to as a "Hotwatch Order."

It is unclear if those orders are limited to tracking fugitives or if they are also being used in ordinary criminal investigations.

Both judges concluded that Congress needed clarify the laws regarding cell phone tracking.

Though House and Senate lawmakers are currently battling over the final form of the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, it is unlikely the bill will clarify the cell phone tracking issue.

The Justice Department is expected to appeal both judges' decisions, but did not return a call for comment by press time.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,69390,00.html

















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