Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – February 16th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The girls here are not like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. They are pretty, but they have good heads on their shoulders." – Lindsay Clubine


"It may be decades before the Internet reaches its full potential as a conduit for ideas. Ironically, it isn't going to get there through technological breakthroughs, but through changes in national and corporate policies." – Jonathan Strickland


"While we recognize that technologies that are improperly implemented introduce increased risk, we recommend any potential changes to the statute be technology-neutral." – Karen Evans, U.S. CIO


"For me, this is deeply embarrassing. It reflects poorly on my service to the community." – Maryland Legislator Robert A. McKee, R-Washington


"My first observation is that she has exceptionally good taste in poetry." – Paul Muldoon


































February 16th, 2008





Record Label Quits, Uploads Albums onto The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Dependent Records, an independent record label from Germany recently decided to shut its doors and upload all its albums onto The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, a year ago the the CEO of the label mentioned piracy as one of the main reasons why they decided to quit.

Nonetheless, a few days ago Dependent records’ CEO Stefan Herwig decided to upload all the albums from his label -which mainly features aggrotech, electro-industrial and futurepop artists- onto The Pirate Bay.

In the description on the torrent download page Herwig writes: “I closed down my record label Dependent Records for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on The Pirate Bay,” stressing that it’s a legal torrent, approved by the label.

Over the past few months, more and more artists have decided to make their music available for free on BitTorrent sites. However, this move from Dependent Records seems to be a bit odd, especially when you read why the label decided to close its doors.

Little over a year ago, Stefan Herwig wrote: “We are not closing our doors because of the existence of pirate websites, but because there are simply too many people who enjoy our bands and their songs who do not wish to pay for them.”

Herwig and his team got frustrated when they saw their albums appearing on P2P networks. They don’t seem to buy the argument that indie artists actually profit from these new technologies, as Herwig writes: “A popular claim often seen on Internet fora maintains that the P2P culture weakens the majors and bolsters the independent labels. This is, we can assure you, 100% bullshit. Even if there are listeners who download first and buy later, they are clearly in the dwindling minority.”

We understand Herwig’s frustration, but 100% bullshit is not completely accurate. Several studies have shown that most artists, especially those who are not mainstream, profit from filesharing. The dwindling minority Herwig is talking about probably exists because of filesharing, and may have never discovered Dependent Records’ artists if their albums weren’t available there.

Music consumption has changed significantly the last decade. People consume more music simply because it is available, illegal or not. The challenge for the the recording industry is to find ways to monetize this demand, for example by all-you-can-eat plans for a fixed price. The bottom line is, piracy has shown that music is more popular than ever, and no artist will ever argue that this is a bad thing.
http://torrentfreak.com/record-label...atebay-080210/





The Pirate Bay: No Drop in Danish Traffic
Thomas Mennecke

In the continuing cat and mouse game that has otherwise earned the reputation of being called the great online copyright war, The Pirate Bay and the IFPI have brought this ongoing battle to the global stage. Although the entertainment industry vs. P2P struggle has taken on global ramifications before, the level of desperation on both sides hasn't been seen since Napster. The fight has finally been brought to the ISP. Whoever can emerge intact will likely help formulate the path of the Internet for many years to come.

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) fired some of the first shots earlier this week in Denmark. One of Denmark's most prominent ISPs, Tele2, was forced by a court decision to block The Pirate Bay from their customers. This met with significant protest from members of the file-sharing community - but nothing earth shattering. The technical sophistication of the block is elementary in nature, which at best provides a speed bump on an otherwise uneventful highway.

The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block.

"...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI," the blog post reads. "Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk."

"We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There’s no noticable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after."

The Jesper Bay, a spin off of The Pirate Bay, provides users with detailed instructions on how to bypass the block. Using the OpenDNS option has proven so far to be the most popular method. OpenDNS connects the end user to a global DNS (Domain Name Service) server, instead of the ISP's DNS server. Considering the ISP places the block at the DNS level, OpenDNS provides an excellent course to avoid Internet filters.

The lesson learned here is that even with ISP filtering, the Internet is unavoidable.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1659





Danish Pirate Bay Block Breaks EU Law
Ernesto

Last week a Danish court ordered the ISP “Tele2″ to block its customers access to The Pirate Bay. The decision heated the debate on ISPs Internet filtering, and it now turns out that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.

In last week’s court ruling it was concluded that “Tele2″ had assisted in copyright infringement because they give their customers access to The Pirate Bay, thereby copying copyrighted material in their routers. It reads: “The telephone company’s dissemination of access to the www.thepiratebay.org entails the transmission of copyright protected material through the companies routers.”

A crucial factor in the ruling is thus that the ISP commits copyright infringement in their routers when they allow access to The Pirate Bay. An absurd claim of course, and even more serious, it opposes the Infosoc Directive, that formed the basis of the Danish copyright law.

In in Article 5 of the Infosoc Directive it is clearly stated that “copying in routers” is allowed, as an exception to and a limitation of the rights holders’ exclusive rights. Even more so, this is non-negotiable, and every member state of the EU must accept it. Oscar Swartz, an Internet pioneer and writer in Sweden who has been researching the case extensively rightly argues that the Danish court misinterpreted the Directive in this case.

The misuse of the article in question has been confirmed by Cecilia Renfors, a Swedish judge and special governmental investigator who had the assignment to propose new legislation to combat unauthorized file-sharing. “She refers to the former opinion by the Swedish government and reconfirms that a Danish model would NOT be compatible with Article 5.1 in the Infosoc Directive. She also repeats the opinion that the Danish way actually nullifies the whole purpose of that Article,” Oscar writes.

The Danish ISP Business association has decided that they will challenge the decision in court. Ib Tolstrup, the director of the association said in a podcast interview with Computerworld that Tele2 is going to challenge the ruling, as they realize they are the only nation in Europe that talks about “copying in the routers”. Tolstrup further said that, if Denmark wishes to be a top IT nation, the topic must be put on the political agenda because a Google block is not far away if they do not challenge the courts decision.

In a comment to TorrentFreak Swartz said: “I am surprised that the Danish ISPs have simply accepted the rulings in Denmark when they are so obviously illogical and dangerous. The courts say that any network provider performs “copying” in their routers. If that is correct the consequences are enormous and The Pirate Bay and the two other cases in Denmark would just be the beginning.”

Swartz continues: “I think the case shows that we have to fight all the time. Stand up. Not back down. Work hard. Make research. Try to get the message out to media. What I miss in Sweden, and Denmark of course, is professors and lawyers who are also participating in the fight for communications freedom. Like in the EFF in the U.S. where top professors and lawyers donate time and knowledge to support cases in court. Where are they here?”

In a response to the courts decision, The Pirate Bay launched jesperbay.org. The site is named after Jesper Bay, the head of the Danish IFPI, and gives detailed instructions for affected customers on how to regain access to The Pirate Bay.

Interestingly, it turns out that the block by Tele2 didn’t have the effect that the IFPI was hoping for. On the contrary, Pirate Bay traffic from Denmark went up, instead of down. However, this case is about more than The Pirate Bay, it is about censoring the Internet.
http://torrentfreak.com/danish-pirat...eu-law-080213/





Village People Hire Web Sheriff for Assault on The Pirate Bay, ABBA on Standby
enigmax

In a twin assault, the Web Sheriff anti-piracy outfit is looking to recruit Swedish group ABBA to fight against The (Evil) Pirate Bay, and at the same time launching legal action on behalf of The Village People. Please note Mr Sheriff, they sang “In the Navy” - they don’t really have one.

The Web Sheriff likes to appear to be different with its methods to stamping out Internet piracy. The Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, first appears to employ a more considered approach by attempting to negotiate the removal of unauthorized content with the site owner, but in a friendly way.

The big, gold Web Sheriff badge is worn with pride on Giacobbi’s chest but with an almost comedic quality which may help to tip the balance with a site admin as he laughs at the situation, rather than panics. “We’re trying to be more civil,” Giacobbi told CNet last year. “We have good relationships with most of the file-sharing and blogging sites, and when we ask them to take down material, the vast majority of them respond straight away. In some cases, the sites give us access to their databases, and we remove content ourselves.”

One site that does respond to them right away is The Pirate Bay. You can read their hilarious exchanges here, but the real point is - when does a ‘civil approach’ turn into something else? Well, as it turns out, as soon as you refuse to comply.

“There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy” said Giacobbi, as he announced legal action against The PirateBay on behalf of the artist, Prince. “They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”

Essentially, “See you in court”. Back to business as usual for the anti-pirates, then.

Now, John Giacobbi, CEO of Web Sheriff has said in an interview with e24.se that he’s hired lawyer Lars Sandberg from Stockholm law firm Södermark to work on the case in Sweden. “We are suing for damages of millions of dollars, and they will be filed at both Swedish as well as US courts.” he added.

Interesting is Giacobbi’s attempt to recruit Swedish (I think I can use the words) mega-group, ABBA, to become some type of positive, cleansing influence to counter the dark forces of The Pirate Bay. This is good versus evil on a scale never experienced before, or at least the chosen imagery implies as much.

“It would be also be good/appropriate if the members of ABBA could take up the fight against these pirates, as they personify the Swedish music industry’s successes and are renowned ambassadors for Sweden, contrary to The Pirate Bay.”

Then, as if dragging ABBA into this bloodbath wasn’t enough, to level things up against The Pirate Bay ‘Four’ - the Sheriff has recruited a police officer to fight them - and he’ll be bringing some friends: an American Indian chief, a cowboy, a construction worker, a man dressed head to toe in black leather and even a guy from the military. Oh boy.

Yes, the Web Sheriff is teaming up with Prince and style-icons The Village People to claim back damages for every one of their albums that have been made available via The Pirate Bay. The Village People want compensation for losses on their single ‘YMCA’ and Prince wants compensation for about 40 of his albums (including some Greatest Hits albums).

When faced with the quote from U2 manager Paul McGuinness who told the Financial Times that the industry should focus on ISPs instead of filesharers, Giacobbi said: “I totally agree. For years, we have said that web hosts, who earn millions and billions in hosting sites, must take responsibility and control these sites.”

When it was put to Giacobbi that public opinion on filesharing had changed and that generally people feel it should be legalized, he responded: “People ask themselves why they should buy something when they can get it for free. But then they aren’t taking into account that someone has created the music or the movie and has invested big money in it. It is also the producer that owns the rights themselves to decided how and to whom their creative work should be distributed.”

It didn’t do ABBA’s image any good when their label was accused of picking on fans in 2006, so you have to question why they would get involved when The Pirate Bay is so popular with music lovers, especially in Sweden.

If you line them all up - The Pirate Bay Four, The Web Sheriff, Prince, ABBA and The Village People, if nothing else, it’s certainly a memorable image.

But you knew that, didn’t you John
http://torrentfreak.com/village-peop...heriff-080215/





Visions of an Online Music Cartel?
Greg Sandoval

U.S. law often comes down hard on price fixing. That's why a magazine story in October about efforts to create a music subscription site potentially backed by the top four music labels may have sounded alarms in Washington.

Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment have received requests for information from the U.S. Department of Justice about a proposed music site called Total Music. The DOJ interest comes after an October BusinessWeek story that said Doug Morris, Universal's CEO, pitched an idea for a subscription site to at least two of his three main competitors, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. A source with knowledge of the discussions told CNET News.com that Universal Music also went to The EMI Group with the plan. This, say antitrust attorneys, was sure to raise eyebrows at the DOJ.

"Let's say Ford and GM decide to get together to sell cars," said Bob Lande, a professor at the University of Baltimore Law School. "We would blink a couple of times and then we'd say, 'Hey, that's a cartel. You can go to jail for that.'"

So why would Universal Music risk backing an idea that might have the appearance of a price-fixing scheme, right in the middle of a feud with Apple? That feud with Apple could well be the answer.

In July, Universal Music considered not renewing a long-term contract that enabled it to sell digital music through Apple's iTunes, according to a story in the The Wall Street Journal. The record companies have long asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs for the ability to set their own song prices on iTunes. Jobs has refused, and the price for most songs remains 99 cents.

The music industry has been forced to wait for an attractive iTunes alternative to show up. Morris may have grown tired of waiting.

Besides talking to his competitors, Morris also approached Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and MySpace to gauge their interest in the subscription site, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

There isn't enough information available to determine whether any laws were broken in Universal's meetings with its competitors, said Lande, but he also added that his "gut instinct says that it sounds fishy."

Perhaps the biggest problem for Universal and Sony BMG is that BusinessWeek reported Total Music would offer an all-you-can-eat music service for $5. The mention of a price, if accurate, indicates that the music labels may have discussed price. And that sounds like a potential violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Lande said.

The Sherman Antitrust Act makes it illegal for anyone to make deals to limit competition. Violations of the Act are felonies that can land someone in jail for up to 10 years, Lande said.

Lande said that in some cases even attempting to fix prices violates the law.

One source close to Total Music, who asked to remain anonymous because of the pending DOJ investigation, disputed BusinessWeek's assertion that prices have ever been mentioned.

What hasn't been answered yet is why Morris would attempt something that would definitely run into a legal roadblock. Is there any scenario whereby the record labels could partner to sell music together?

Lande said he could think of only one scenario: The music industry was allowed to form a body called the Broadcast Music Inc. BMI is a performing-rights organization that collects license fees on behalf of musicians, composers and other music artists from radio stations across the nation.

The group was allowed to form because it's impossible for a single music artist to police hundreds of broadcasters that might be playing his or her music. It also isn't an anti-competitive practice, Lande said. "I don't think the same application would apply (in the Total Music scenario)."

Dominick Armentano is a research fellow and free-market advocate at the Independent Institute, a think tank in Oakland, Calif. He believes companies should be allowed to do what they want in a truly free market--that includes price fixing. But even Armentano said that under current U.S. law, there's no way competitors can gather to discuss price. He could think of only one way that the music labels could legally go into business together.

"They could try to merge," Armentano said. "Mergers have been allowed to go through in the past and the companies have then been allowed to fix prices. But I doubt that the DOJ would allow them to do that either. That would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act." That part of the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, is designed to regulate mergers and acquisitions whenever they might diminish competition.

Armentano, who has written books backing the idea that price-fixing companies would still compete with each other in other areas of their business, said charging higher rates also typically invites other competitors into the market.

What if competitors fix prices that are lower than anywhere else? Would the government smile on that?

Not a chance.

"The offense is fixing the price," Lande said. "You never get into high price or low price. If you fix the price you're violating the law. Judges don't want to get into what the price is now. The price might be $5 today but next month it might be $8 and the next month $10. All they want to know is whether this is price fixing."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-986...?tag=nefd.lede





MusicStation Max: Unlimited Free Music Downloads from All Major Labels
Nate Lanxon

London-based company Omnifone today announced the launch of MusicStation Max -- a worldwide mobile music download service that offers 'free' unlimited downloads of music from the four major labels (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner), directly to mobile phones over the air. In the UK, Omnifone will offer a catalogue of 1.5 million tracks -- a solid figure, but not one that will cover the entire catalogue of each major label.

The service will launch in the first half of this year with handsets manufactured by LG. Participating mobile networks will offer the special MusicStation Max phones, and will offer service plans that include an unlimited data plan to be used for music downloads. And yes, this lets users download, listen to and store an unlimited number of tracks from all four major music labels, on their mobile phone. The cost of the unlimited plan may be a part of the handset's initial cost, or may be added on to a monthly fee. This is so far unclear, and an Omnifone spokesperson wouldn't comment on pricing or even whether any deals had been struck with phone networks. But there's something more interesting.

Each MusicStation Max phone comes with PC and Mac software that's connected to your phone contract. Every time you download a song to your phone, the same song is downloaded to your computer for playback through your PC speakers. Yes, it's DRMed, so no transferring to iPods, CDs or other handsets. We weren't able to wrangle any details regarding whether you'll be able to play files back on a player of your choice. We were told these PC downloads will be at a higher bit rate than those downloaded on a phone though, but specific codec details weren't disclosed. It's likely to be a part of Microsoft's PlayReady service, announced at 3GSM last year.

After the phone's contract is up, users can continue to play songs downloaded to their handsets and computers already, or purchase a new handset in order to continue accessing new music.

It's easy to be sceptical about an arrangement such as this, and rightly so. But Nokia's 'Comes With Music' project with Universal is certainly overshadowed by MusicStation's deals with every major label.

But the other angle to look at is how this works financially. Here's how: you pay the operator for a handset or contract. A portion of this will certainly be passed to Omnifone for the music service. But the operator, on top of the usual contract revenue, gets to charge for unlimited data, therefore taking revenue as a result of its tie-in with Omnifone. On the surface this means free music, legally, with everyone getting paid. So far, so good.

The success of this project, however, will depend on certain factors. Firstly, the cost to the end user. It's almost certain that the handset or contract will be more expensive with the MusicStation service than an identical one without. This may be harder to determine if the phones supplied are exclusively available to MusicStation Max customers. If the customer sees an identical phone without the unlimited downloads being cheaper, they'll see this as a subscription service -- which it sort of is -- and not a free-for-all.

The other issue is DRM. But of course it would be. The major labels are competing with the true free-for-all of BitTorrent and other P2P services, and any customer who's used to pirating music that plays on an iPod will be unlikely to buy into a service that gives them less of a selection, especially when that limited selection won't play on their MP3 player.

But could piracy and legal mobile downloads exist side-by-side? It's certainly true that the average LimeWire user -- hell, even advanced LimeWire users -- are not pirating using a mobile phone, and the idea of legal downloads while they're on the bus might just appeal. The majors have nothing to lose here since the music's being pirated anyway, and the ease of free and legal downloads to a portable device may steer some to consider other legal downloads (though we admit these people will be a minority).

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out. It's a limited catalogue at launch, handset ranges will initially be small and it's likely that some customers (us included) won't see the deal as 'free unlimited downloads', but rather unlimited downloads for a nominal, bundled fee. But if it's easy, if the phones are good, if the catalogue is decent and the cost is all but transparent, it stands some chance.

We just hope it doesn't turn out to be another Qtrax debacle.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic...0.htm?fullread





ShareReactor Admin Found Guilty of ‘Commercial’ Copyright Infringement
enigmax

The administrator of eDonkey link site, ShareReactor has been found guilty of ‘commercial’ copyright infringement. Following police raids in 2004, it’s taken 4 long years for the case to come to a conclusion, and after all that, Christian Riesen, aka Simon Moon, has to pay a token fine of just $4200.

With an estimated 250,000 members and around 7 million page impressions a month, ShareReactor was one of the world’s most popular eD2K link sites. Similar in operation to sites that host .torrent files, eD2K (eDOnkey) link sites carry no copyright material and merely point to data hosted elsewhere. Despite this, the site received multiple legal threats every month.

The fact that the site didn’t host any copyrighted material didn’t stop the Swiss Anti-Piracy Federation (SAFE) - backed up by major movie studios - from complaining to the police. On March 10th 2004, the site was shut down by Swiss police, who seized all of the servers and detained the site owner, Christian Riesen, aka Simon Moon.

According to an earlier interview, Riesen was initially tricked into going to Police.

“They sent me a letter requesting my presence ‘regarding finances in general’ from the ‘fraud division’ of the police here,” he said. “Since I am self employed I thought someone made some accusation. So nothing bad in mind with my documents all in order, I went there. It wasn’t about the finances, it was all about ShareReactor.”

The police detained Riesen for around 9 hours while they quizzed him about the site. He explains: “[The police] Asked about ShareReactor. Asked me where money came in and where it went to. The whole thing lost steam pretty fast as they saw how big a loss ShareReactor produced every month, and how little money in total was flowing at all. SAFE told them something about 15.000 Euros income a month, while they told newspapers that is was 76.000 Euros.”

After the police questioning Riesen recalls: “At the end of the day, the investigation judge said ‘and now we go and raid your house’ and so we drove there.” Riesen said the police took a lot of stuff from his house: “two ShareReactor servers, my private machine, my girlfriend’s private machine and my folder with all bank files, although i gave them a copy of all my bank activities of the last 4 years already. Also all my backups went with them. At the end ShareReactor was down and I had none of my data left, personal and otherwise.”

In June 2004 the ShareReactor forum reappeared (minus the eD2K links) and in September 2006 the site made a full return, albeit under new ownership. However, the return was short-lived and just a month later the site closed again.

Now, some 4 years later, the District Court of Frauenfeld, Switzerland has decided that as the ShareReactor site was the main source of income for 28 years old Riesen (through on-site advertising and donations), he is guilty of ‘commercially’ assisting others to commit copyright infringement by ’simplifying’ access to illegal content.

After 4 years of investigations the court decided that for running the world’s biggest eDonkey link site, Riesen - who now lives in Canada - should be fined 4,700 Swiss Francs - roughly $4,200.

Waste of money, anyone?
http://torrentfreak.com/sharereactor...guilty-080212/





Threat Of Jail Time Increases Respect For Copyright, Microsoft Says

Microsoft has launched a campaign to teach teens about intellectual property rights and the risks they face when breaking the law.
Thomas Claburn

Teens appear to be willing to curtail illegal downloading when told they face fines or jail time.

This finding, among many in a survey published by Microsoft on Wednesday, is the basis for the software company's new campaign to teach teens respect for intellectual property rights.

"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, in a statement. "This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help prepare their students to be good online citizens."

Microsoft's survey found that about half of the teenagers surveyed (49%) said they are not familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading content from the Internet. Only 11% understood the rules well, and of those, 82% said downloading content illegally merits punishment. Among those unfamiliar with the law, only 57% supported punishment for intellectual property violations.

It's not clear whether Microsoft's statement to teen respondents -- "When you do not follow these rules you are open to significant fines and possibly jail time" -- is entirely accurate, particularly when teens under the age of 18 are involved. Emily Berger, an intellectual property fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical. "I think it's being used as a scare tactic," she said. "It's a real stretch of the law to say it's theoretically possible."

Nevertheless, Microsoft wants to correct teens' woeful ignorance. To do so, it has turned to Topics Education, a developer of custom curricula, to create a curriculum called "Intellectual Property Rights Education" for middle school and high school teachers. The Microsoft-sponsored curriculum consists of Web-based resources and case-study driven lesson plans that aim to engage students about intellectual property issues.

To support its teachings, Microsoft has launched MyBytes, a Web site where students can create custom ringtones, share content -- "their own content," as Microsoft makes clear -- and learn more about intellectual property rights.

As to whether Microsoft can teach teens to respect intellectual property, the jury is out. But the company has tried to do so before and has little to show for it. In 2004, Microsoft was among the companies backing "Play It Safe in Cyber Space," a national campaign backed by the Business Software Alliance and funded by the Department of Justice, to dissuade kids from downloading content from peer-to-peer networks. Needless to say, the campaign's cartoon ferret mascot hasn't exactly put an end to online copyright violations.

Indeed, while such educational efforts win funding from intellectual property stakeholders, they have yet to win the hearts and minds of the public. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains a Web site called CampusDownling.com to encourage legal downloading. And since 2003, it also has been known to sue people it believes to have downloaded music illegally.

Access Copyright, a Canadian copyright enforcement group, in 2006 launched a "Captain Copyright" Web site and backed a lesson plan to teach students respect for copyright law. The project was greeted with widespread ridicule online and accusations that the site itself was violating copyright law.

In August 2006, the site was shuttered and this explanation was subsequently posted: "Despite the significant progress we made on addressing the concerns raised about the original Captain Copyright initiative, as well as the positive feedback and requests for literally hundreds of lesson kits from teachers and librarians, we have come to the conclusion that the current climate around copyright issues will not allow a project like this one to be successful."

The Microsoft survey also found that many teens believe online music is overpriced. It found that 41% of teens believe the cost to download a song should be between $0.50 and $1. Twenty-six percent of respondents said digital songs should cost less than $0.50 and 21% said online music should be free.
http://informationweek.com/news/show...leID=206503467





RIAA Gets Does' Names After School Threatened with Contempt
Eric Bangeman

Hours after a federal court judge ordered Oklahoma State University to show cause why it shouldn't be held in contempt for failing to respond to an RIAA subpoena, attorneys for the school e-mailed a list of students' names to the RIAA's attorneys. But now that the RIAA has what it wanted, the group is unsure about how to go about sending out its prelitigation settlement letters. Some of the students are represented by an attorney, meaning that the RIAA is barred from contacting them directly.

The case in question involves 11 OSU students accused of using P2P networks to infringe on the Big Four labels' copyrights. The students have fought hard to keep their identities secret, filing motions to quash the subpoenas and later attacking the credibility of the RIAA's expert witness. The judge denied the motion to quash the RIAA's subpoenas in November, ordering OSU to provide the identities of the students it believed were behind the IP addresses flagged by MediaSentry.

That's where things got a little bit sticky. In a filing on Monday, the RIAA noted that OSU said it would provide the info in late November. Further requests by the plaintiffs' attorneys in December, January, and "several times" already this month went unanswered, with one exception. On February 1, the university sent the RIAA's attorneys an e-mail that referenced an attachment containing the data sought by the labels, but the attachment wasn't actually attached.

The RIAA's normal course of action upon getting a school to cough up data on its students is to send them prelitigation settlement letters offering them the chance to avoid a lawsuit by means of a four-figure payment. Some of the OSU Does have hired an attorney, however, which makes sending out settlement letters difficult. "[A]t this time, Plaintiffs are simply unable to determine which of the Doe defendants are represented by an attorney without breaking the prohibition [against contacting represented defendants directly]," notes the RIAA in a filing. The attorney in question, Marilyn Barringer-Thompson, has so far refused to identify her clients either by name or IP address.

If that name sounds familiar, it may be because she represented Debbie Foster, one of the first defendants to triumph over the RIAA and win attorneys' fees. Barringer-Thompson has a history of aggressively litigating file-sharing cases brought by the music industry, and the RIAA looks like it's facing an another protracted and potentially costly fight here as well.

If nothing else, the OSU case serves as a reminder of the obstacles the RIAA has faced in its nearly-one-year-old legal campaign against college students. The labels have seen the Oregon Attorney General criticize their conduct in a case involving 17 University of Oregon students. In another case involving seven students at the College of William & Mary, a federal judge barred the RIAA from doing its usual end run around the legal system; seven months later the RIAA still doesn't know the identities of the students.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-contempt.html





Tolkien Heirs Sue New Line Over Millions From ‘Rings’
Motoko Rich

Following in the footsteps of Peter Jackson, the director of the Oscar-winning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, heirs to J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the books on which the films are based, are suing New Line Cinema for failing to pay them at least $150 million, which they say they are owed as part of the movies’ gross receipts.

In a complaint filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, trustees of the Tolkien Trust, a British charity, joined trustees of a private family trust of Tolkien heirs and the British arm of HarperCollins Publishers in suing New Line Cinema for breach of contract.

Charging “unabashed and insatiable greed,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint that New Line, which produced and distributed the “Lord of the Rings” movies, had failed to pay anything despite a nearly 40-year-old contract that entitles the trusts and the publishers to 7.5 percent of the films’ gross revenues, less certain costs.

According to the complaint, the three movies generated about $6 billion in box office receipts and ancillary revenues from DVD sales, cable television licensing fees and other sales, although Steven Maier, the British-based lawyer for the trustees, said they had not been allowed to audit the receipts from the second and third films.

In the complaint, the plaintiffs argue that New Line has “clearly engaged in the infamous practice of creative ‘Hollywood accounting,’ ” by excluding certain revenue from calculations and racking up costs that have so far prevented the studio from paying out a single dime.

“I think that it’s going to be extremely interesting to see how New Line is going to explain to a jury that these films grossed $6 billion and yet by their calculations the creators’ heirs are not going to get even a single penny,” said Bonnie Eskenazi, the United States lawyer for the trustees.

A spokesman for New Line declined to comment.

According to the complaint, the trustees and a predecessor to HarperCollins signed a contract with United Artists in 1969 for the film rights to “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The trustees and the publisher were entitled to a 7.5 percent share of the gross receipts. New Line eventually inherited the rights to make the movies in 1998.

Mr. Jackson sued New Line in 2005 and settled last year, paving the way for New Line, owned by Time Warner, to produce two movies based on “The Hobbit,” with Mr. Jackson serving as the executive producer.

In the current lawsuit the plaintiffs are also seeking unspecified punitive damages and are asking the court to terminate New Line’s rights to make any subsequent films based on “The Hobbit” or “The Lord of the Rings.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/bu...a/12movie.html





‘The Rings’ Prompts a Long Legal Mire
Michael Cieply

According to the legend, one ring ruled the rest, with cruelty, malice and a will to dominate all life. It has also provoked an awful lot of litigation.

This week heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Hobbit,” and a group of publishers joined the battle with a lawsuit demanding at least $150 million from New Line Cinema, the movie studio that hit the jackpot with three enormous hits based on the trilogy.

They are hardly the first: in fact, the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic “franchise” for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour.

Peter Jackson, who directed, helped write and helped produce the movies, only last December settled a nasty suit, appearing to clear the way for his involvement in a long-awaited movie version of “The Hobbit.” In that legal action he had accused New Line of cheating him out of tens of millions of dollars by selling subsidiary rights for books, DVDs and merchandise to members of its own corporate family, Time Warner, for less than market value.

Meanwhile, the Saul Zaentz Company, named after the producer known for his collaborations with the director Milos Forman, recently filed a complaint of its own. It charges New Line with blocking its attempt to audit the accounting for the movies, which are said in the Tolkien suit to have taken in $6 billion in revenue around the world.

The litigation history surrounding the movies is almost as complicated as the lore of Middle-earth. The Zaentz company had sold the film rights to the Tolkien books to Miramax, when that studio was run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Miramax sold them to New Line — and had already sued, been countersued and settled once on claims that New Line defrauded it of $20 million by improperly tabulating foreign theatrical revenue.

Then came 16 New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise. According to court records, a trial has been scheduled for December.

To some extent, the flood of suits is business as usual in Hollywood, where success has a thousand fathers, and they all want to be paid. Yet there is something extraordinary in the spectacle of litigants, one after another, filing claims for a bigger piece of the “Rings” trilogy.

Some of the problem may grow from a distinction between how foreign distribution of movies is handled at New Line, an independent studio now owned by Time Warner, and at Hollywood’s full-blown majors.

“What they’re accounting for is different than the majors, because the majors are worldwide distributors,” said David Colden, an entertainment lawyer with the Beverly Hills firm Colden, McKuin & Frankel, which is not involved in any of the litigation. New Line’s international division works through foreign distributors that are not part of the company, while major studios are equipped to distribute directly abroad. The way New Line calculated payments based on its revenue from its foreign distributors of “Rings” was a major issue in the first Zaentz suit, filed in 2004.

The Tolkien suit may prove to be especially troublesome for New Line, if only because it has the earmarks of a public relations nightmare. The plaintiffs include a charitable trust that is overseen by family members of the author, who died in 1973, and includes among its beneficiaries worthy organizations like the Darfur Appeal and the World Cancer Research Foundation.

In a complaint filed on Monday in the Los Angeles Superior Court, the trustees and others say they have never received a penny from a 39-year-old agreement that they say promises 7.5 percent of the gross revenue from any films based on Tolkien’s famous novels. New Line, whose spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit, is accused, among other things, of defrauding the Tolkiens by improperly deducting more than $100 million per film in payments to the Zaentz company and Miramax from the pool from which the trust and others would be paid.

At least the allegation makes clear that somebody has been making a lot of money out of New Line for the “Rings” movies, lawsuits notwithstanding.

Beyond that, things are likely to become murkier as the sharp accusations of the Tolkien complaint, which speaks of the movie studio’s “unabashed and insatiable greed,” are ground through the filings and evidence that can turn an everyday lawsuit into a blockbuster.

Asked why the Tolkiens waited so long to file their complaint — New Line’s first “Rings” movie was released in 2001 — Bonnie Eskenazi, a lawyer with the Los Angeles firm Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, said it was because they are proper, and British. “They do things politely, in a certain manner,” said Ms. Eskenazi, who added that the family tried for years to settle without going to court. But it became obvious to the trusts, she said, that New Line “was not going to meet their obligations unless they were sued.”

The dispute accelerated after the family in January hired Greenberg Glusker, among Hollywood’s most aggressive litigators. (In the author Clive Cussler’s suit over the movie “Sahara,” the firm had been battling Philip Anschutz and O’Melveny & Myers, the firm that also represents New Line.)

From the beginning, various Tolkiens were wary of the Jackson movies. Three of the author’s children declined to attend the premiere of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” and they resisted Mr. Jackson’s plan to put the movies’ props in a “Rings” museum, arguing that display of the artifacts was permitted only during promotion of the films. Reluctant manner aside, the Tolkien family may have found an opportune moment to seek money from New Line. That mini-studio, hurt by the soft performance of last fall’s fantasy epic “The Golden Compass,” has been eager to get “The Hobbit” under way.

In addition, Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, the company’s top executives, have been in discussions with Time Warner about New Line’s (and their) future; to have yet another suit pending over “Rings” cannot build confidence in their leadership.

In her complaint Ms. Eskenazi has already made some hay out of Mr. Jackson’s suit. She pointed out that the federal court in Los Angeles issued heavy sanctions related to the destruction of books and records. That “accounting chicanery,” she argued, was damaging to the Tolkiens.

As the legal paper piles up, however, the heirs and their lawyers will have no small task in sorting out the nuances of a literary-rights agreement that was made in 1969 with United Artists, which in 1976 sold the rights to Zaentz, which in 1997 licensed them to Miramax, which assigned them in 1998 to New Line.

And before they are done, there will be plenty of time for someone else to sue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/movies/16ring.html





'Passion' Writer Sues Mel Gibson
Alex Fletcher

The co-writer of The Passion of the Christ has sued Mel Gibson for deceiving him over the film's scale.

Benedict Fitzgerald has claimed that he was told the movie would be a low-budget affair and was therefore willing to take a lower wage and smaller cut of the profits.

Fitzgerald's lawsuit said that Gibson engaged in a "chronic and conspiratorial pattern of deceit".

The Passion of the Christ ended up with a budget close to $30 million and took an estimated $370 million domestically.

Fitzgerald argues that he "accepted a salary substantially less than what he would have taken had he known the true budget for the film".

The lawsuit adds: "Because of his background, because of his deep and personal religious convictions (which he believed to be shared by Gibson) and because of his passion for the project, Ben forewent pursuing other scripts and exclusively devoted the following years of his life to The Passion without requesting or receiving any additional compensation.

"Gibson preyed monetarily on Ben, taking advantage of his unbridled enthusiasm for the project and with full cognizance of Ben's fundamental personal and spiritual beliefs."

A legal representative for Gibson's Icon Productions told People magazine that Fitzgerald was "handsomely compensated" for his work on the project and that the lawsuit was "utterly baseless".
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/a...el-gibson.html





Sidelined by the Strike, Comedy Goes Online
Dave Itzkoff

HISTORY will judge whether Jerry O’Connell will be best remembered as the cornfed football prospect in “Jerry Maguire,” the awkward chubby kid in “Stand by Me,” or as the husband of Rebecca Romijn. But for a few glorious days last month, Mr. O’Connell, 33, was seared into the minds of thousands of Internet surfers as a cocky, cackling replica of Tom Cruise, in a parody of a Scientology recruitment video.

Sidelined for several weeks by the Writers Guild of America strike, Mr. O’Connell, who currently appears in the ABC sitcom “Carpoolers,” was recently inspired by a widely disseminated clip of Mr. Cruise evangelizing on behalf of his church. On a whim Mr. O’Connell called a “Carpoolers” co-star, Jerry Minor, and within hours they were filming their own version of the video, in which Mr. O’Connell wears a familiar black turtleneck and spouts twisted takeoffs of Mr. Cruise’s homilies. (“It is a privilege to be an actor because you know that you really are no help to anyone.”)

After learning how to download the footage from their video camera, they gave the raw material to a “Carpoolers” editor, Ryan Case, who assembled the short and provided it to the comedy Web site FunnyOrDie.com.

Within two weeks the video had been watched more than 1.7 million times, leaving Mr. O’Connell eager for his next taste of Internet fame.

“The bottom line is, we’re people who work in comedy, and because of this strike, we’re sort of bored,” Mr. O’Connell said in a telephone interview. “Maybe I’m watching too much of ‘The Wire’ these days, but you’re just jonesing for that next fix.”

While the three-month writers’ strike dealt a devastating blow to the entertainment industry, suspending the production of numerous films and television series, it has also imbued the nascent medium of Web-based comedy videos with a new vitality, as countless furloughed talents — writers and actors; veteran humorists and novices — learned to use their newfound free time to produce their own shorts.

While some of the more popular Web sites for original comedy shorts, like SuperDeluxe.com and CollegeHumor.com, say they have not seen spikes in their online traffic resulting from the strike, they have, anecdotally, noticed more video submissions and story pitches coming their way since the strike began.

“More people are aware of opportunities because they’ve had some more time to sit around online while they weren’t writing,” said Drew Reifenberger, the general manager of SuperDeluxe.com, the comedy portal owned by Turner Broadcasting. “I guess that’s, in a perverse sort of way, a good thing for us.”

Like Mr. O’Connell, the actor Milo Ventimiglia found himself unencumbered when the strike halted work on his popular NBC show “Heroes,” as well as a feature film he was developing with his producing partner, Russ Cundiff. So they began shooting a series of 30-second videos of themselves battling with “Star Wars”-style light sabers in mundane locations around Los Angeles, and posting the segments on YouTube.

While the ambiguous, Zen-like clips have generated just tens of thousands of hits so far, they provided Mr. Ventimiglia and Mr. Cundiff a valuable diversion that has, in the words of Mr. Cundiff, prevented him from “playing a lot of Xbox, or just, like, looking at Milo and how pretty he is.”

For some established comedians, the strike offered an opportunity to chase more esoteric muses on the Web. While waiting for “Saturday Night Live” to return, Fred Armisen, a member of its cast, worked on ThunderAnt.com, which is home to quirky video skits he creates with the musician Carrie Brownstein. (In one segment they play proprietors of a feminist bookstore; in another, Mr. Armisen portrays Saddam Hussein as if he were the aging lead guitarist in a rock band.)

“It’s more like kind-of comedy than actual comedy,” Mr. Armisen said. “We don’t set out to make the funniest thing in the world, just these pieces that are interesting to us. It’s pure art, and there’s no commerce involved, which is not a political thing. It’s just my own laziness that I haven’t gotten it together to ask for money for it.”

Others who remained gainfully employed during these months have been happy to take advantage of their friends’ and colleagues’ sudden availability. While the strike did not prevent David Wain, the comedian and filmmaker, from finishing his directorial duties on an untitled comedy feature for Universal, he has used the time to recruit idle writers and actors for “Wainy Days,” a Web program he produces and stars in for MyDamnChannel.com.

One recent episode, titled “The Pickup,” a merciless satire of the VH1 series “The Pickup Artist,” written by the screenwriter Jon Zack and starring Paul Rudd (the “Knocked Up” star) as a pompous lothario named Alias, has been watched more than 1.7 million times on YouTube alone. Mr. Wain pointed to this as a creative achievement he might never have accomplished if not for the strike.

“It’s been great,” said Mr. Wain, a Writers Guild member. “We can call up almost anyone, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I thought I would be making these things by myself on my laptop, and now it’s like I’m running a whole TV series.”

The viewership numbers generated by these Web sites, where success is still measured in the hundreds of thousands, rather than millions, do not yet pose a threat to traditional broadcast television. But several executives and industry observers said that in recent months they have seen a stratification of Internet humor.

“We’re sort of in the cable-television era of Internet entertainment,” said Sam Reich, the director of original content at CollegeHumor.com, a Web site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Over the past year viewers have turned to a few Web sites for comedy videos — YouTube, FunnyOrDie.com, and others — supplemented by an expanding constellation of smaller sites that offer just a handful of videos at a time.

This evolution, Mr. Reich said, has not only affected how people are watching Web content but also the kinds of content they are looking for on the Web. “Just as when cable started, and there were all of these networks popping up with very cheap and very nonsophisticated content, the same is true of the Internet,” he said. “Our online tastes are still very primal. We tend to watch stuff that’s very candid.”

The low-fidelity, look-at-me aesthetic is one that has played particularly well to the strengths of the comedy short. “When they say that all writers are storytellers, I just laugh at that,” said Matt Besser, a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, who recently started UCBcomedy.com. “A majority of them are, but there’s a lot of writers who write sketch comedy, and a sketch isn’t a joke, and it isn’t a sitcom. I don’t know any really great stories that are three minutes long.”

Sketch comedy “just has its day right now,” he added. “This is sketch’s medium, really.”

It is even a medium for sketch writers to comment that there are far too many comedy videos on the Internet.

Before the strike began, Liz Cackowski and Maggie Carey were hard at work on their Web comedy series “The Jeannie Tate Show,” in which Ms. Cackowski plays a suburban soccer mom who broadcasts her own Internet program from the driver’s seat of a minivan.

During the strike they stopped writing a “Jeannie Tate” television pilot script, while continuing to edit and post their Web shorts, work on MySpace and Facebook pages for the Jeannie Tate character and occasionally wonder how new Internet talent would be able to attract attention in an ever-expanding field of clutter.

“I love it when people say, ‘I want to make a viral video,’ because it’s like saying, ‘Let’s make an Oscar-winning movie,’ or, like, ‘Let’s write a best-selling book,’ “ Ms. Cackowski said. “You can’t force that.”

Even comedians who have established beachheads for themselves on the Internet are feeling the pressure, said Donald Glover, a writer for “30 Rock” and a member of the popular Web-based comedy troupe Derrick (derrickcomedy.com). “There’s no room for, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea — I’ll just wait to shoot it in a week or so,’ ” he said. “Because somebody will think of it and have it on the Internet by later that night.

For some recent entrants to the field of Web comedy, keeping up with all the new videos on the Internet is exhausting. “I’m seeing a lot of it,” Mr. Armisen said. “I’m also ignoring a lot of it. After my 15th e-mail of, ‘Hey, check it out,’ I just can’t watch it all.”

But for others, like Mr. O’Connell, the boundless promise offered by the Internet is reason enough for those already employed in creative pursuits to revel in a new avenue for their creative energies.

“A couple of actor friends who shall remain nameless keep calling me and Jerry Minor and Ryan Case, pitching us ideas for short videos, like we’re moguls or something,” Mr. O’Connell said.

But he was sympathetic to the plight of his unnamed actor pals because he too understands the sting of rejection. “I already pitched another idea to Jerry and Ryan,” he said, “and they said no. They already turned me down.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/ar...on/10itzk.html





Writers Vote to End Strike, Putting Hollywood Back to Work
Michael Cieply

Hollywood’s writers made it official on Tuesday night, voting to end their bitterly fought strike at the 100-day mark by an overwhelming margin.

Of 3,775 writers who cast ballots, 92.5 percent voted in favor of ending the strike. Officials of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East disclosed results of the tally here an hour after voting closed at 6 p.m.

“The strike is over. Our membership has voted, and writers can go back to work,” Patric M. Verrone, president of the West Coast guild, said in a statement.

The decision to end the strike became all but inevitable after the guilds’ governing boards on Sunday unanimously approved the tentative three-year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, following strong expressions of support at mass meetings on both coasts.

Union members must still decide whether to ratify the contract in coming days. But Tuesday’s vote to end the strike brought relief to an industry that wants to get its television productions and future movie schedules back in order.

Wednesday morning will bring a rush to the office by television writers who are especially eager to get existing series like the CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men” and the ABC drama “Grey’s Anatomy” quickly up to speed.

The strike upended the television viewing habits of millions of Americans by shutting down production on most dramas and comedies and forced movie studios to halt some big-budget films. It also dried up the livelihoods of not just the 12,000 guild members but tens of thousands of people who rely on such productions for work.

How much economic damage was wrought by the walkout has been subject to debate.

Writers predicted that the strike would cause $2.5 billion in economic losses if it continued to the five-month mark, as did their 1988 strike. But a report from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimated losses for a strike of that length at only about $380 million, because companies had already spent heavily to stockpile programs and other factors.

As of Tuesday afternoon, a running tally by the producers’ alliance estimated that the walkout had cost writers about $285 million in lost wages and had cost workers in other film unions nearly $500 million.

The strike’s end appeared to make a walkout by Hollywood’s actors less likely when their contract expires June 30. The actors’ unions have not yet opened negotiations; but the road map for digital media compensation laid out in recent agreements with both writers and directors raised the prospect that similar solutions could work with actors.

The writers’ dispute was settled when company executives — notably Peter Chernin, the News Corporation president, and Robert A. Iger, the Walt Disney chief executive — opened talks with Mr. Verrone, along with David J. Young, executive director of the West Coast guild, and John Bowman, who headed the unions’ negotiating committee. A crucial break came when the two sides created a provision that provides the guilds a gain in the payment for digital distribution of entertainment beyond the terms of a recent deal between Hollywood producers and the Directors Guild of America.

Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS, said Hollywood executives might do well to spend more time with guild leaders in coming months, if peace is to prevail in the long term. “The lesson is, we shouldn’t meet every three years,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/bu...ia/13vote.html





Viewed From All Angles, Who Won in the Strike?
David Carr

When the Writers Guild of America held its annual awards ceremony Saturday night in Manhattan, it felt more like a victory celebration. So after a long and bitter strike, the writers won, right?

On points, yes, probably. On principle, certainly. From a practical perspective, maybe not so much.

True, the writers guild was able to wrest a major concession from management — winning a piece of digital revenues — the kind of victory that has largely eluded organized labor in the past few years.

Tony Gilroy, the writer and director of “Michael Clayton,” who was there as a nominee, argued that, while the strike had been punishing, it was clearly necessary.

“As writers and directors, we have our nose in the tent for real for the first time,” he said. “There are question marks about how it will be implemented, but there is no one who can argue that the strike was not necessary. We would never be in the position we are without it. Anybody who says the strike was a bad idea is dead wrong.”

It is equally true, however, that the strike was bad for writers in the short term. The delays caused by the strike prompted the studios to ask themselves a fundamental question about the need to finance all manner of pilots for a traditional upfront extravaganza followed by a traditional introduction in the fall. That system, fairly unchanged through the years, has historically been lucrative for writers.

Emboldened by the strike, the studios severed existing contracts with writers, successfully turned over more of their prime-time schedules to reality programming and vowed to hold the line on filming new shows for next season.

Some 70 development deals in which writers were essentially paid lucrative stipends to come up with shows that might not ever be broadcast are now gone, and they will not be coming back any time soon.

The events are likely to bring at least a few lean years to the workaday writers. With less spending on pilots, established writers will be in the hunt because they lost their cushy deals on the lot. With increased incursion from all forms of reality programs, finding work that pays the bills, never mind the residuals, is going to be a slog.

Will the studios stick to their new vows of restraint? Perhaps there’s an instructive comparison with another business run by big egos in search of talent, Major League Baseball.

Every few years, the baseball owners announce that there’s a new austerity in the air and that they won’t overspend on players. But just before spring training starts, they get nervous and suddenly a pitcher like Ted Lilly — the baseball equivalent of an assistant gag writer on “Two and a Half Men” — gets something like $10 million.

One studio executive interviewed Monday (who, like every studio executive, declined to be identified while saying anything negative about the people he will be dealing with everyday) said that the writer’s short-term pain wasn’t necessary, that they could have had a deal without the acrimonious strike.

That may not quite track. By taking a reflexively hard line in the negotiations from the start, the studios more or less invited the strike, calculating that the writers, a disparate group with varying interests, would quickly splinter. They guessed wrong: despite constant suggestions that cracks were appearing, the center held.

One of the longer-term consequences of the strike that studios will now have to deal with is a group that is remarkably united — from the show runners in possession of lucrative deals to mostly unemployed writers fighting to get into the business.

“I think that you would have to say that the strike was a qualified success, if for no other reason that they kept solidarity among the show runners and the rank and file,” said Jonathan Handel, an entertainment lawyer at the TroyGould firm who formerly worked for the guild.

Still, the question remains for the writers: will the piece of future digital revenues they captured be worth the grief endured these past few months? It won’t be in the near future. Advertisers are so much less valuable on the Web, and the real money remains in so-called legacy media.

The negotiating committee for the writers is proud that they were able to establish a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, but that win will be largely symbolic unless there is a fundamental change in the economics of digital distribution.

Clearly, the studios think there is some kind of future there. Buried in the small type Monday was an announcement by Viacom’s studio Paramount that it will create a division to develop programming for wireless devices (i.e., iPhone). It’s hard to picture a situation where little programs for tiny screens will kick up the kind of network salaries and residuals that have been the mother’s milk of writers for decades.

Still, the writers got their foot in the door, a much better outcome than many observers believed possible. And that means the writers are now joined at the hip with the producers in finding out just what the future holds. Perhaps at the next awards show, they should toast their new partners and pray it works out for both of them.

What about viewers — the real victims of the strike, deprived of new episodes of “Heroes”? There was some keening on the message boards, but mostly, the public shrugged and worked on their “Guitar Hero” chops.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/ar...strike.html?hp





As the Tides Turned: Hollywood in 1967 Through the Lens of Five Films
Janet Maslin

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION

Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

By Mark Harris

Illustrated. 490 pp. Penguin Press. $27.95.

In the same year and even on the same planet, five crazily diverse films became nominees for the Academy Award for best picture in 1967. At its April 1968 ceremony the academy chose among an instant-classic vision of the brand new Generation Gap (“The Graduate”), a painfully dated Hollywood dinosaur (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), a fierily innovative, mythic outlaw tale (“Bonnie and Clyde”), a walking lecture on racial prejudice (“In the Heat of the Night”) and a budget-busting musical full of animals (“Dr. Dolittle”). The last of these, stinker that it was, appropriately had to be filmed on sets with drains patrolled by workers wielding brooms.

It seemed to be a boom time for the movie business. When Variety, in 1968, printed its list of all-time top-grossing movies, a third of them were 1967 releases. And yet, as Mark Harris explains in a landmark new film book, “Pictures at a Revolution,” the whole industry was poised on the brink of irrevocable change.

Mr. Harris sifts through the evidence with reportorial acumen and great care, conjuring up the social and cultural history of a lost world and drawing on sharp new interviews with many of its major players. Forty years after the fact, people like Dustin Hoffman, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Sydney Pollack, Robert Towne, Robert Benton, Lee Grant and Buck Henry sound as if they’re still making sense of 1967’s tidal wave.

“Pictures at a Revolution” can take its place alongside top-shelf film industry books like “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” “Final Cut,” “The Studio” and “The Devil’s Candy” for qualities all of them share: the big-picture overview, the nuts-and-bolts understanding of exactly how films evolve from the drawing board to the screen, and gratifying antennae for all forms of Hollywood-related horror stories. But if Mr. Harris has his share of hair-raising particulars about, say, Rex Harrison (whose unhinged and abusive Dr. Dolittle seemed in need of his own doctor), his main emphasis is much more serious.

With a restrained, level-headed wisdom not often found in stories of the movie world, Mr. Harris brings welcome sanity to heated subjects like the intellectual brawling among film critics that greeted “Bonnie and Clyde.” He has a fine way of cutting through the conventional wisdom about such events so that real wisdom can emerge.

The task of seguing among five such different films is a tough one. But Mr. Harris handles it seamlessly, in part because his book is tethered to larger subjects than the making of individual films. Racial politics, for instance, plays a huge part in this story, thanks to the illustrative presence of Sidney Poitier, the only bankable black actor of his time and a man much criticized for sticking to dehumanizingly righteous roles. Mr. Poitier figured in three out of the five best picture nominees. (Though he did not appear in “Dr. Dolittle,” he was courted to play a particularly benighted role in it, and was the star of both “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and the eventual best-picture winner, “In the Heat of the Night,” though it was his co-star Rod Steiger who came home with the best actor award.)

Thoughts from Mr. Poitier’s own memoir, “The Measure of a Man,” are among the insights culled by Mr. Harris. Mr. Poitier’s experiences were bruising, but they paved the way for a drastically altered professional landscape for black actors by the time 1967 was over. (In an early screenplay for “In the Heat of the Night,” Mr. Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs was equipped with a copy of “The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre” to establish his bona fides.)

Mr. Poitier’s role in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is shown to signal the end of an era, not only for implausible, hamstrung black characters but also for veteran screen personages like Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. By then, compared to either of them, Mr. Poitier was a much bigger box office draw.

The movies’ new eagerness to push the envelope in 1967 is illustrated in different ways by “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.” In tribute to that spirit of change, “Pictures at a Revolution” begins as an aficionado of the French New Wave, Robert Benton, stole away from his job as Esquire’s art director to watch “Jules and Jim” on an afternoon in 1963. Intrigued by a sense of wide-open opportunity, and working on the four- to five-year development process that seems par for the course, Mr. Benton and his partner, David Newman, were inspired to write “Bonnie and Clyde” in hopes of persuading François Truffaut to direct it.

They came reasonably close. And when the flirtation of “Bonnie and Clyde” with New Wave directors brought Mr. Truffaut and his friend Jean-Luc Godard together for a screening of a crime-spree film from the late ’40s, Mr. Benton remembers thinking he was as close to heaven on earth as he would ever be.

“He now believes I was right?” Warren Beatty, the film’s star and producer, asks Mr. Harris about Arthur Penn, who directed “Bonnie and Clyde.” “That’s funny, because I now believe I was wrong.” Here and throughout “Pictures at a Revolution,” there is a sense of reassessment and new perspective, with Mr. Harris as a thoughtful, unobtrusive catalyst for his interviewees’ reflections.

The book’s anecdotes about “The Graduate” sound similarly fresh and candid, and are enlivened by small, telling signs of a bygone time. Mr. Nichols, who directed it, talks of repeatedly playing hit songs by Simon and Garfunkel as he cut his film — until it finally occurred to him that he could put well-known, supposedly used-up music into a movie score.

With its huge cast, wealth of information and impressive gravitas, “Pictures at a Revolution” is a particularly accomplished debut book by Mr. Harris, who has worked in various capacities at Entertainment Weekly. For a journalist’s book about Hollywood, it steers gratifyingly clear of sounding star struck. There is nothing breathless about “Pictures at a Revolution” except some of its principals’ galvanizing admiration for the French New Wave.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/books/11masl.html





Wars Past and Present, Rockers Evergreen
Dennis Lim

In 1970 the Berlin International Film Festival ground to a halt over a movie about American wartime atrocities. “O. K.,” a film by the German director Michael Verhoeven, dramatized an actual event that had made headlines a few years earlier: the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by a group of American soldiers. (The incident later inspired Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War.”) After the movie’s premiere, some members of the jury, led by the American director George Stevens, called it incendiary and demanded that it be pulled from the competition. The ensuing uproar — a flurry of protests, resignations and canceled screenings — was enough to shut down the festival.

This year the most topical film at the Berlinale, as the festival is known here, is another account of moral failure in the midst of an American occupation. “Standard Operating Procedure” revisits the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the now defining images that brought them to light, but being a film by Errol Morris, the master of the ambiguous documentary, it is less likely to inflame tempers than to induce a lingering unease.

“Standard Operating Procedure” draws conclusions similar to those of Rory Kennedy’s “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” and Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” in debunking the “bad apple” rationale that pinned the blame for the abuses on a few rogue soldiers. But Mr. Morris’s approach, relying on interviews with five of the seven convicted perpetrators, is more personal and more philosophical.

The firsthand testimonials collectively illustrate — to borrow the title of his previous film — the fog of war. The relevant questions, as Mr. Morris scrutinizes these photographs, are not just what happened and why, but what we think we see and what we want to believe. As investigative journalism, “Standard Operating Procedure” can feel incomplete. As a meditation on the limits of understanding, it is productively open-ended.

History has a way of making itself felt at this festival, which has never shied from movies that address Germany’s painful past or from political subjects in general. The specter of the aborted 1970 Berlinale — its volatile mood of last-gasp ’60s radicalism and looming disillusionment — has hovered over the 2008 edition.

The festival opened on Feb. 7 with Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert film, “Shine a Light,” an aging-boomer sequel to that definitive death-of-the-’60s document, “Gimme Shelter.” Among the retrospective sidebars was a survey of American movies about the Vietnam War, from “In the Year of the Pig” to “Coming Home.” The Forum section of the festival, which began as a rebel counter-event in the ’60s and typically shows more adventurous work than the official selection, included a tribute to Koji Wakamatsu, the Japanese new-wave veteran and leftist who made his name in the pinku (soft-core) genre.

Mr. Wakamatsu’s new film, “United Red Army,” was one of the festival’s bright spots. An engrossing three-hour chronicle of the Japanese militant left, which gained momentum through the ’60s before splintering into extremist factions in the early ’70s, this shape-shifting docudrama progresses from breathless history lesson to grueling chamber piece (as revolutionary ideals devolve into ritual barbarism) to tense action thriller.

Mr. Wakamatsu, 71, shot the final act, a hostage standoff in a mountain lodge, in his own country house, which he claims to have razed in the interests of realism. Like “Standard Operating Procedure,” “United Red Army” (which features a rousing score by the American experimental composer Jim O’Rourke) takes mass confusion as its subject and renders it with impressive clarity.

Another highlight (and another throwback), Peter Geyer’s “Jesus Christ Savior,” culled from newly unearthed recordings, documents the ranting, hypnotic debacle that was Klaus Kinski’s 1971 “Jesus tour.” This one-man show turns amusingly interactive as the spectators heckle and interrupt the irate Mr. Kinski, repeatedly driving the would-be messiah offstage and perversely feeding his persecution complex.

With most of the program unveiled, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” receiving its European premiere here, towers over the rest of the competition, which has been marked by letdowns from promising and established filmmakers alike. José Padilha, the director of “Bus 174” (2002), an intelligent documentary dissection of a bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro, made his fiction debut with “Elite Squad,” a violent, cop’s-eye view of Rio’s favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique.

“Julia,” Erick Zonca’s first feature since “The Dreamlife of Angels” in 1998, is a distended riff on John Cassavetes’s “Gloria,” though Tilda Swinton reinvents the Gena Rowlands role in “Gloria” with her usual gusto.

Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” an eruption of good cheer from a British kitchen-sink miserablist, has its vocal admirers — it was bought by Miramax and seems likely to win an award at Sunday’s closing ceremony — but how you feel about the film, a mirror image of Mr. Leigh’s equally single-minded “Naked,” will depend on your ability to stomach the brutally chirpy heroine (played by Sally Hawkins).

Amid these relative disappointments, the South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, who has made a specialty of the acerbic, precisely observed romantic fable, seemed more than ever a model of consistency. Often compared to Eric Rohmer, he reinforces the connection by setting his characteristically droll new film, “Night and Day,” among a group of Korean artists in Paris.

Like the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cannes entry of last year, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” the movie is part of a series commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, which stipulates that a scene be filmed at the museum. Mr. Hou shot a group of schoolchildren in thrall to Félix Vallotton’s “Balloon.” Mr. Hong plants his sexually frustrated hero before the close-up female genitalia of “The Origin of the World,” the Courbet painting once owned by Jacques Lacan.

In a festival short on notable discoveries, the Thai director Aditya Assarat has stood out as a name to watch. His first feature, “Wonderful Town,” a quietly unsettling love story set in a provincial seaside town still recovering from the 2004 tsunami, arrived here after winning top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this month.

But no first-time filmmaker received a bigger spotlight than Madonna, whose directorial debut, “Filth and Wisdom,” screened out of competition, in the Panorama section. While her public appearances drew fans and paparazzi, the press screening attracted a throng of rubbernecking journalists, anticipating a vanity disaster of epic proportions. Madonna’s last film as an actress, after all, was the universally maligned “Swept Away,” directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie, a punching bag for critics. Her “director’s statement,” in which she declared herself eager to follow in the footsteps of Godard, Pasolini and Fellini, was not going to help her cause.

But “Filth and Wisdom,” while often broad and corny, is by no means a disaster. In fact this comedy about three struggling London roommates, whose respective aspirations broadly reflect the Madonna career (singing, dancing, helping African orphans), has a surprising sweetness and a charismatic lead performance by Eugene Hutz, frontman of the Gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello. In a quite unexpected development, Mrs. Guy Ritchie just might turn out to be the best filmmaker in her family.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/mo...on/16fest.html





Teen's Interview With John Lennon Yields Oscar Nod
Etan Vlessing

A 1969 encounter between a 14 year-old Beatles fan and John Lennon has inspired "I Met the Walrus," a five-minute Canadian film contending for an Oscar for best animated short.

Think "Almost Famous" with the Beatles. Except this portrait of a young boy in a dream landscape is told from his lips. The voice track for "I Met the Walrus" is based on an interview Jerry Levitan did 39 years ago with a surprisingly accommodating John Lennon.

Levitan, now a lawyer in Toronto, recalls doorstepping as a fake photographer to get into Lennon and Yoko Ono's room at the city's King Edward Hotel.

"My heart was beating so fast. I was like Al Pacino in 'The Godfather,' where he's in the restaurant with the planted gun and about to kill the cop," he says, remembering how he summoned the courage to knock at Lennon's door.

When Levitan did knock, the door opened a crack, he uttered "Canadian News," and was led in.

Levitan recalls Lennon throwing him a broad smile as he entered the crowded room. He fumbled with a Super 8 camera and an old Kodak Brownie around his neck to maintain his ruse.

After Levitan got Lennon to sign his copy of the "Two Virgins" album, he summoned yet more chutzpah.

"I just said to John, 'Can I come back later and bring a tape recorder and do an interview on peace so I can let kids listen to it?"' he recalls.

To his surprise, Lennon agreed. Later that day, Levitan jumped a long line of media, including U.S. network news reporters, to do a 40-minute interview with Lennon and Ono.

For 36 years, Levitan sat on the audiotape, until 2005 when he met Toronto-based animator Josh Raskin.

The duo agreed to pare the 1969 interview down to five minutes and overlay the voice track with a visual narrative of pen sketches by James Braithwaite and digital illustrations from Alex Kurina.

The resulting animated short has earned a host of awards on the festival circuit on its way to the Oscars.

Animator Raskin says festival audiences empathize with a young boy's nervousness and disorientation in his hero's midst while a visionary Lennon boldly riffs on youth culture and global conflict.

"You hear a larger-than-life figure interviewed by a relatively naive, over-excited teenager," Raskin observes.

Levitan, who produced "I Met the Walrus," says his Beatles encounter forever changed his life, not least because knocking at Lennon's hotel room door could have gone horribly wrong had the famed Beatle or his handlers turned him away.

"My big fear (was) someone (saying), 'Who are you? You're nothing, go away!' How would I have picked myself up from that?" Levitan says.

Instead, Lennon welcomed the Beatles fan across the threshold and saw value in making a recording with a 14-year-old to reach yet more young people with his message.

"The most important thing (for Lennon) at that moment wasn't getting on CBS or ABC, but talking to this kid for a long time," Levitan marvels.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...9c61ae74fc4b4e





Roy Scheider, Actor in ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 75
Dave Kehr

Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Seimer, said.

Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.

Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like “Klute” (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fonda’s New York call girl; and in William Friedkin’s “French Connection” (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackman’s marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.

Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Mr. Scheider earned his distinctive broken nose in the New Jersey Diamond Gloves Competition. He studied at Rutgers and at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where he graduated as a history major with the intention of going to law school. He served three years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. When he was discharged, he returned to Franklin and Marshall to star in a production of “Richard III.”

His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Romeo and Juliet.” While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in “The Curse of the Living Corpse” (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. “He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut,” recalled Ms. Seimer, a documentary filmmaker. “He loved to demonstrate that.”

In 1977 Mr. Scheider worked with Mr. Friedkin again in “Sorcerer,” a big-budget remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French thriller, “The Wages of Fear,” about transporting a dangerous load of nitroglycerine in South America.

Offered a leading role in “The Deer Hunter” (1979), Mr. Scheider had to turn it down in order to fulfill his contract with Universal for a sequel to “Jaws.” (The part went to Robert De Niro.)

“Jaws 2” failed to recapture the appeal of the first film, but Mr. Scheider bounced back, accepting the principal role in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical phantasmagoria of 1979, “All That Jazz.” Equipped with Mr. Fosse’s Mephistophelean beard and manic drive, Mr. Scheider’s character, Joe Gideon, gobbled amphetamines in an attempt to stage a new Broadway show while completing the editing of a film (and pursuing a parade of alluring young women) — a monumental act of self-abuse that leads to open-heart surgery. This won Mr. Scheider an Academy Award nomination in the best actor category. (Dustin Hoffman won that year, for “Kramer vs. Kramer.”)

In 1980, Mr. Scheider returned to his first love, the stage, where his performance in a production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opposite Blythe Danner and Raul Julia earned him the Drama League of New York award for distinguished performance. Although he continued to be active in films, notably in Robert Benton’s “Still of the Night” (1982) and John Badham’s action spectacular “Blue Thunder” (1983), he moved from leading men to character roles, including an American spy in Fred Schepisi’s “Russia House” (1990) and a calculating Mafia don in “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993).

One of the most memorable performances of his late career was as the sinister, wisecracking Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” (1991).

Living in Sag Harbor, Mr. Scheider continued to appear in films and lend his voice to documentaries, becoming, Ms. Seimer said, increasingly politically active. With the poet Kathy Engle, he helped to found the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, dedicated to creating an innovative, culturally diverse learning environment for local children. At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.

Besides his wife, his survivors include three children, Christian Verrier Scheider and Molly Mae Scheider, with Ms. Seimer, and Maximillia Connelly Lord, from an earlier marriage, to Cynthia Bebout; a brother, Glenn Scheider of Summit, N.J.; and two grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/mo...heider.html?hp





Regulators Now Spooked by Ghost Stories

China has added ghosts, monsters and other things that go bump in the night to its list of banned video and audio content in an intensified crackdown ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Producers have around three weeks to look through their tapes for "horror" and report it to authorities, the General Administration of Press and Publications said in a statement posted on the government Web site.

Offending content included "wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror," the administration said.

The new guidelines aim to "control and cleanse the negative effect these items have on society, and to prevent horror, violent, cruel publications from entering the market through official channels and to protect adolescents' psychological health."

The regulations suggest China, where graphic, pirated sex and horror movies are available on most street corners, is keen to step up its control of the cultural arena ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August, which are widely seen as a coming-out party for the rising political and economic power.

They come just weeks after Beijing clamped down on "vulgar" video and audio content, slapped restrictions on Internet sites and handed down a two-year film-making ban to the team behind the steamy "Lost in Beijing."

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...42888920080214





Blu Monday

Netflix Goes Blu

Netflix Inc., the online movie rental company, said Monday it is switching exclusively to high definition DVDs in Blu-ray format, following four major movie studios in selecting the Sony technology over the standard put forth by Toshiba.

Toshiba and Sony have been vying to set the standard for high-definition DVDs for several years. The stakes are high because the winner will also get a boost in sales of DVD players needed to read the new format.

Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Buena Vista have endorsed Blu-ray. Paramount and Universal Studios publish their high definition DVDs in Toshiba's HD DVD format.

Netflix has stocked both formats since they became available in 2006, but said the decision of four of the six major studios to issue films only in Blu-ray format made it likely that the Sony format will prevail.

"From the Netflix perspective, focusing on one format will enable us to create the best experience for subscribers," the company said, adding that not many customers order high-def DVDs.

Many consumers have held off on buying a new DVD player required to view HD format while the studios decided in which format to publish.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8UO4VAG4.htm





Best Buy to Recommend Blu-Ray Format

Best Buy Co Inc, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, said on Monday it will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp's Blu-ray high-definition video format.
The decision gives Sony yet another victory in the battle with Toshiba Corp's HD DVD to be the high-definition DVD format of choice.

Earlier on Monday, online video rental company Netflix Inc said it would exclusively stock Blu-ray DVDs after some of the world's biggest movie studios decided in favor of that format.

Best Buy said it believes consumers will benefit from the choice of one HD DVD format.

"Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products," Brian Dunn, Best Buy's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

Best Buy will prominently feature Blu-ray hardware and software beginning in March, but will also carry an assortment of HD DVD products for customers who want those, Best Buy said.

(Reporting by Brad Dorfman; editing by Carol Bishopric and Braden Reddall)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...AS040320080211





Samsung Sued Over "Defective" First-Gen Blu-Ray Players
Eric Bangeman

Blu-ray may be at the cusp of victory over HD DVD in the next-gen format war—especially with Netflix's decision to stop offering HD DVD rentals—but some of the decisions its backers made in the format's infancy may be coming back to haunt them. A Connecticut man has filed a lawsuit against Samsung and a bunch of John Does in federal court over what he calls the "defective" Samsung BD-P1200 Blu-ray player.

At issue are some significant title-compatibility problems with the player. In his complaint, plaintiff Bob McGovern says that a number of movies he purchased after buying his BD-P1200 wouldn't play on the device. He also accuses Samsung of failing to offer firmware updates to remedy the problem, saying that the consumer electronics giant "does not intend to provide future firmware updates or otherwise repair" the problematic player.

As one of our readers pointed out via e-mail, the P1200 has a checkered reputation when it comes to hardware reliability. A massive thread in the AV Science forum is filled with numerous complaints about the player. "I have had the BDP 1200 for 7 weeks. Not a finished product," reads one post. "Should not have been brought to the market until it was fully beta tested. Would not play Blu-ray Weeds. Was told needed updated software."

There may be another issue lurking in the background: all Blu-ray players have a hardware profile which denotes the base set of requirements that a player must support in order to be certified. The first of those was Profile 1.0, which made local storage, network connectivity, secondary audio, and secondary video decoders all optional features.

The meager requirements of the 1.0 profile mean that Blu-ray players which fail to implement the optional features won't be able to take advantage of picture-in-picture, which requires secondary decoders. 1.0 players are also unable to store local content, lacking the 256MB of storage mandated by the 1.1 profile. Profile 1.1 discs should still play on 1.0 players, however, but the extra features will not work.

As we pointed out in our coverage of the 2.0 spec, there's no upgrade path for older players due to the changed hardware requirements—a simple firmware update will not suffice. (If you want the most future-proof Blu-ray player available, we suggest the PS3.)

With HD DVD players hitting store shelves in April 2006, the Blu-ray Disc Association was feeling the pressure to get their products out as quickly. Samsung was first to market with a Blu-ray player, releasing the BD-P1200's predecessor, the BD-P1000, in June 2006 after a delay of a month or so. Like the first-generation P1000, the P1200 supported the original Blu-ray 1.0 profile. For a while, Samsung had the Blu-ray market to itself as Sony and Pioneer players were delayed even further. The competitive pressure from HD DVD was arguably the reason for approving Profile 1.0, even though it limited the potential of the first players and ensured that they'd never be compatible with future profiles.

McGovern's suit, which seeks class-action status for his lawsuit as well as the usual damages and attorneys' fees, may prove to be the first significant bit of backlash from early-adopters upset by the limited feature set of and lack of an upgrade path for Profile 1.0 players.

If you have PACER access and want to check out the complaint, the case number is 2:08-cv-00663
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...y-players.html





Wal-Mart to Officially Discontinue HD DVD Sales by June
Joshua Topolsky

With HD DVD, things are just going from bad, to really bad, to worse, to car-crash-you-can't-stop-looking-at. You can file this one under that latter category, as Wal-Mart has officially announced its intentions to stop stocking HD DVD players and movies by June. According to reports, the retailer came to the decision after Netflix and Best Buy made announcements concerning their position in the HD format war. Susan Chronister of Wal-Mart wrote on the company's blog, "By June Wal-Mart will only be carrying Blu-ray movies and hardware machines, and of course standard-def movies, DVD players, and up-convert players." Susan went on to deliver what we consider a total burn by adding, "if you bought the HD [DVD] player like me, I'd retire it to the bedroom, kid's playroom, or give it to your parents to play their John Wayne standard-def movies, and make space for a BD player." Look, we're not gonna say that this is it for HD DVD, but... uh, it doesn't look real great.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/15/w...sales-by-june/





Toshiba to Drop HD DVD, Sources Say

Company says no decision has been made
Thomas K. Arnold and Erik Gruenwedel

The format war has turned into a format death watch.

Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May.

Officially, no decision has been made, insists Jodi Sally, vp of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products. "Based on its technological advancements, we continue to believe HD DVD is the best format for consumers, given the value and consistent quality inherent in our player offerings," she said.

But she hinted that something's in the air. "Given the market developments in the past month," she said, "Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players."

Immediately after the Warner announcement, the HD DVD North American Promotional Group canceled its Consumer Electronics Show presentation. The following week, data collected by the NPD Group revealed Blu-ray took in 93% of all hardware sales for that week.

Toshiba subsequently fired back, drastically cutting its HD DVD player prices by as much as half, effective Jan. 15. But a hoped-for consumer sales surge never materialized; retail point-of-sale data collected by the NPD Group for the week ending Jan. 26 still showed Blu-ray Disc players ahead by a wide margin, 65% to 28%.

Software sales have declined as well. The latest Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales data show the top-selling Blu-ray Disc title for the week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's "Across the Universe," sold more than three times as many copies the week ending Feb. 10 as the top HD DVD seller, Universal Studios Home Entertainment's "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Blu-ray Disc titles also accounted for 81% of all high-def disc sales for the week, with HD DVD at just 19%.

Toshiba had been pitching its discounted HD DVD players toward the standard DVD crowd as well as high-def enthusiasts, noting in its ad message that the new players would make DVDs look a lot better as well. And as a last-ditch effort, the company ran an ad during the Super Bowl -- a 30-second spot that reportedly cost $2.7 million.

But in the end, sources say, the substantial loss Toshiba is incurring with each HD DVD player sold -- a figure sources say could be as high as several hundred dollars -- coupled with a series of high-profile retail defections has driven the company to at last concede defeat.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...d0bfb0c25aa58d





European Archives Release Vintage Films Online

Where do you go if you want to watch rare archive films such as a 1916 documentary about life on a German submarine or John Ford's 53-minute Western Bucking Broadway from the following year?

Until now, the answer would have been a trip to one of the film archives that house these prints, respectively London's Imperial War Museum and the French Film Archive.

But that is about to change with the launch in April of a Europe-wide video-on-demand platform bringing together content from 37 film archives and cinematheques across the continent. And the good news for film buffs is that it's free.

European Film Treasures, as the site will be known, is the brainchild of Serge Bromberg, founder of Paris-based historic film and restoration specialist Lobster Films. The European Union's Media Program has pledged to put up half of the approximately 500,000 euros ($725,000) needed to fund the project for its first year.

European Film Treasures is hoping to tap into a chunk of the huge audience for free online video sites like YouTube and Bebo.

"The difficulty today is not so much to find old films and restore them, it's finding an audience for them," Bromberg says. "These are some of the best films shot in Europe over more than 80 years, but it's often difficult to convince people to see films like these."

Each partner archive will propose films, and a jury of historic-film specialists will decide which to include on the video-on-demand site based on criteria such as historical interest and artistic quality. Footage will be accessible for streaming only, not download, but the site may, in the future, extend to associated DVD sales.

Films will be available in their original language, with translation where needed into English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The site is expected to launch with about 100 titles, but the aim is to include as many as 500 films, once fully loaded. Lobster is coming up with original music to accompany silent films.

It took two years to convince all the archives to come on board. "They thought it was a good idea but considered it impossible. The idea is not just to show their films, but also to present the archives and their work," Bromberg says.

The only major national archive that decided not to be represented was from Belgium. "That is to their great shame," Bromberg opines.

Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the British Film Institute's National Archive, says VOD is a well-adapted platform for these early and short films, which are otherwise difficult to program.

"(In the theater), you may get a few thousand viewers," Dixon says. "On the Web, you can get hundreds of thousands or even millions. If you put it out there, people will find it. You get that long-tail effect."

As with the other partner archives, the BFI is not putting in any financing but simply making films available. "We're in a good position to do that, as (we're) probably the biggest film archive in Europe," Dixon says.

Among films the BFI is submitting are Daisy Doodad's Dial, a 1913 British-made comedy starring U.S. actress Florence Turner, and a rare film of a French boxing champion. "We'll pick things that have appeal, like the boxing film, which will be really interesting for the boxing community because it's not seen before," Dixon contends.

For its part, the Danish Film Institute is submitting a 1923 Danish film that is one of the earliest examples of a viable talking film; an animated-sausage commercial film from the mid-1930s that uses Dufay Color, a mosaic screen additive system that predates Technicolor; and a raunchy 1910 one-reeler about Copenhagen nightlife.

"These are films that we restored recently. They're all entertaining films, one about color and cinema, one about sound and cinema. It's broadening people's idea of the development of cinema," said Thomas Christensen, curator of the DFI.

"It's great that there's this kind of channel for content that is otherwise sitting fallow in the archive," Christensen said. "I don't expect it to become a blockbuster phenomenon. It might never be more than marginal, but it's an interesting channel to be represented on. I think this is very much a transition time, and we have to explore the possibilities."
http://www.news.com/European-archive...3-6230267.html





Discovery Channel Accused of Political Censorship for Dropping Oscar-Nominated Doc on U.S. Torture

Days after its Academy Award nomination, the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was dropped by the Discovery Channel over concerns it was “controversial.” The film investigates some of the most egregious abuses associated with the so-called “war on terror,” including the US torture of prisoners. We get reaction from filmmaker Alex Gibney.

Guest:

Alex Gibney, Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is the writer, director, producer and narrator of Taxi to the Dark Side.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the issue of the media. A new documentary called Taxi to the Dark Side was recently nominated for an Academy Award. The film investigates some of the most egregious abuses associated with the so-called war on terror, including the US torture of prisoners.

PFC. DAMIEN CORSETTI: You put people in a crazy situation, and people do crazy things.

SGT. KEN DAVIS: People being were told to rough up Iraqis that wouldn’t cooperate. We were also told they’re nothing but dogs.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Interrogators were telling the guards, strip this guy naked, chain him up to the bed in an uncomfortable position, do whatever you can.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You had these young soldiers, very little training, just as the rules were changing, and they weren’t told what the new rules were.

SGT. KEN DAVIS: You start looking at these people as less than human, and you start doing things to them you would never dream of. And that’s where it got scary.

GEN. RICHARD MYERS: It was only the night shift. There’s always a few bad apples.

PFC. DAMIEN CORSETTI: The brass knew. They saw them shackled and hooded, and they said, “Right on! Y’all are doing a great job.”

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: There were emails from FBI personnel down at Guantanamo saying, “You won’t believe what’s going on down here. We’ve got to disassociate ourselves.”

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You have no right to a lawyer. You have no right to witnesses. You don’t really know what the charges are. And you certainly don’t know what the secret evidence is against you.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: They saw an intentional decision taken at the height of the Pentagon to put out a fog of ambiguity.

AMY GOODMAN: Excerpts of Taxi to the Dark Side. The Discovery Channel has bought the rights to the Oscar-nominated film and had planned on airing it, but this week filmmaker Alex Gibney learned Discovery has dropped plans to air the film because it’s, quote, “controversial.” Alex Gibney is the award-winning director, writer and producer of Taxi to the Dark Side. He joined us about a week ago to talk about the Oscar-nominated film, but today he’s back to respond to Discovery.

What happened, Alex?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn’t so interested in discovery. I mean, I heard that—I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves. It turns out, Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel.

AMY GOODMAN: They bought the rights, though.

ALEX GIBNEY: They did.

AMY GOODMAN: So they own it.

ALEX GIBNEY: They own the rights for the next three years. They own the broadcast rights. It’s currently playing in theaters, where people can see it, but we had hoped that it would have a broad airing on television. And indeed, you know, one of the reasons I went with Discovery was because they had told me, “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.”

AMY GOODMAN: But if they still own the rights, can they just not air it for three years and keep you from airing it anywhere else?

ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, they can. That’s their right, because they paid for it. Now, we’re hoping that they’ll agree to sell it to somebody else, you know, maybe for a profit, if they need to do that. But I’m hoping at the very least that they’ll allow somebody else to take it on so it can be shown to the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: And this comes just before the Oscars.

ALEX GIBNEY: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: The film opens with a taxi driver. Say briefly, though we talked about it last week, though, for those listeners and viewers who might not have watched it, the significance now of Discovery not airing this.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, the film follows a taxi driver, an Afghan taxi driver, who was taken into American custody, and after—in the course of a five-day interrogation, he was so badly beaten that he died. And indeed the Army coroner classified it a homicide. We used the case of Dilawar, this young man, to look at the de facto and indeed sometimes-stated policy of torture used by the Bush administration. And we follow—indeed, we also look at Mohammed al-Qahtani in Guantanamo and the interrogation techniques used on him there, the man who is now on trial in the—or supposed to go on trial through the military commission process.

AMY GOODMAN: So we get to see 24—well, perhaps when the writers’ strike is over—where Jack Bauer tortures people right and left. But we don’t get to see your film, Taxi to the Dark Side.

ALEX GIBNEY: That appears to be the case now, and I’m hoping, like I say, that Discovery will relent and sell it to somebody else, so we can see it. But at the moment, they appear to be sitting on it, and they’ve told us unambiguously that they have no intention of airing it, and, indeed, they asked our distributor to take its logo off. But then, when they were told how much it would cost, they said, OK, leave the logo on.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask lawyer Vincent Warren, the effect of popular awareness that comes from movies like Taxi to the Dark Side, if they get a showing on television, the effect that has in the legal arena, in the kind of work that you do representing prisoners?

VINCENT WARREN: It is extremely important that Taxi to the Dark Side and other films like that are out there open for public view, because I think, as you were pointing out, this is a government-sponsored program of torture. We all know that it’s happening. But the government is not telling us that. And it’s up to filmmakers and up to reporters and journalists, people like Alex, people like yourself, to be able to get the information out there. It is literally the only way that we can have public currency about the issues.

And let’s remember that all of the concessions and admissions, such as they are by this government, were not done out of the goodness of their heart. They’ve been done by public pressure. They admit what they can’t deny, and they deny what they can’t admit. And as long as films like Taxi to the Dark Side are out there, it allows us to put pressure on this government to admit to what they’ve done, because they won’t tell us that on their own.

AMY GOODMAN: Does the public have any role in this, Alex Gibney, can have any effect on Discovery?

ALEX GIBNEY: I hope so. I hope the letters and phone calls will start coming to Discovery and say, “Let us see the program.”

AMY GOODMAN: But your film does go to the Oscars, the Academy Award ceremony.

ALEX GIBNEY: The film does go to the Oscars, to the Academy Awards ceremony, in a little less than two weeks. And it’s in theaters now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Alex Gibney, I want to thank you for being with us, and congratulations on the Oscar nomination, not only for this, but you’re also executive producer of No End in Sight—

ALEX GIBNEY: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —which is another documentary that was nominated—

ALEX GIBNEY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —Oscar-nominated. I want to thank you both for being with us. Alex Gibney, Taxi to the Dark Side is his film. You can go to theaters, or perhaps you’ll get to see it on television. Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/1...cal_censorship





Facebook Can Ruin Your Life. And So Can MySpace, Bebo...

People will post just about anything on social networking sites. And the information can be used against them. David Randall and Victoria Richards report
Ida Bergstrom

In the judicial backwater of a New Jersey federal court, a case is being heard that nominally affects two families but should also make millions of Britons think twice about something they do every day: put highly personal information on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo.

An American insurance company, in defending its refusal to pay out a claim, is seeking to call in evidence personal online postings, including the contents of any MySpace or Facebook pages the litigants may have, to see if their eating disorders might have "emotional causes". And the case is far from a lone one. Suddenly, those saucy pictures and intimate confessions on social networking sites can be taken down and used in evidence against you in ways never dreamed of.

In the US, a sex assault victim seeking compensation faces the prospect of her MySpace and Facebook pages being produced in court. In Texas, a driver whose car was involved in a fatal accident found his MySpace postings ("I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunkaholic") part of the prosecution's case. From Los Angeles to Lowestoft, thousands of social network site users have lost their jobs – or failed to clinch new ones – because of their pages' contents. Police, colleges and schools are monitoring MySpace and Facebook pages for what they deem to be "inappropriate" content. Online security holes and users' naivety are combining to cause privacy breaches and identity thefts. And what all this, and more, adds up to is this: online social networking can seriously damage your life.

Just ask the 27 workers at the Automobile Club of Southern California fired for messages about colleagues on their MySpace sites; the Florida sheriff's deputy whose MySpace page revealed his heavy drinking and fascination with female breasts – and swiftly found himself handing in his badge; the Argos worker in Wokingham fired for saying on Facebook that working at the firm was "shit"; the Las Vegas teacher at a Catholic school fired after he declared himself gay on his MySpace page; the staff of an Ottawa grocery chain fired for their "negative comments" on Facebook; the 19 Northampton police officers investigated for Facebook comments; and Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who told his employers he had a family emergency, but whose Facebook page revealed he had, in reality, been cavorting in drag at a Hallowe'en party.

What these and other cases show is that employers and authorities are now monitoring what people imagined were private websites – and using the contents against them. Last September, David Rice, Britain's second-ranked tennis junior, and Naomi Brady, national U-18 champion, had their funding pulled and coaching suspended after the Lawn Tennis Association found pictures of them drinking beer, partying and, in Ms Brady's case, posing at a nightclub with her legs wrapped around a vending machine. And last summer, Oxford University proctors disciplined students after pictures of them dousing each other in shaving foam, flour and silly string in post-exam revelry were found on their Facebook pages.

At Cambridge, at least one don has admitted "discreetly" scanning applicants' pages – a practice now widespread in job recruitment. A survey released by Viadeo said that 62 per cent of British employers now check the Facebook, MySpace or Bebo pages of some applicants, and that a quarter had rejected candidates as a result. Reasons given by employers included concerns about "excess alcohol abuse", ethics and job "disrespect".

Viadeo's UK country manager, Peter Cunningham, said the results should act as a wake-up call to anyone who has ever posted personal information online. "Millions of people are leaving personal information online, much of which is cached and remains available via search engines even after the author has removed the web page," he said. "When people who are not the original intended audience – such as potential employers – find this information, it can have a major impact on their decision making process."

In America, the monitoring of social networking sites for content that may interest employers and officialdom is now so routine that software is being put on the market that will automate the process. Sure enough, software to try to defeat the snoops is also emerging – offering the prospect of a privacy "arms race" in the years ahead. ReputationDefender, for instance, offers the embarrassing personal information equivalent of credit reports, claiming it can help expunge from the online record material you regret revealing. Michael Fertik, the firm's CEO, said demand for their service is now "ridiculous", with hundreds of UK clients already.

He said: "Young people today do the same thing they have always done on paper, but now they do it on a web page... The first thing we do is lobby those involved and, quite simply, ask them to remove the material by going first to the individual, then to the moderator or administrator, then, if necessary, to the ombudsman or ISP controller."

What he and other experts emphasise is the online innocence of many social network site users. Privacy specialist William Malcolm of Pinsent Masons law firm said: "Rather than looking at what information constitutes a risk, it's better to think, 'Who am I sharing this information with?' If you're not sure about the identity of a third party on the website then you have to ask yourself if you would do that in an offline context, and the answer is that you probably wouldn't."

Few people bother to read the fine print of a social network site's agreement, and the consequences of using one can occur in the most unexpected ways. A Newport Pagnell man, for instance, was ordered by magistrates not to contact his estranged wife, but when he joined Facebook, an automatic "friend request" was sent to everyone on his email list, including his former partner. She contacted police; the man was arrested and got 10 days in jail.

The first Facebook or Bebo divorce case cannot be far away. Divorce specialist Elizabeth Allen, head of family law at Stephens and Scown, Exeter, said: "Social networking has much more scope for trouble because of the public element. It's got the potential to be more explosive. It's just like airing your dirty laundry. We've had divorces that have been due to Friends Reunited in the past and that will be replaced by Facebook with the next generation. Now most people who would never have written a love letter to someone are writing it all down and sending it because they somehow think it's different."

As well as unwise posting of content, there is also an unknown but large number of people whose privacy has been compromised, or their identities stolen, as a result of their own naivety combined with the security vulnerability of the social network sites, and the willingness of others to exploit that. Last month, for example, a hacker downloaded half a million private pictures from MySpace and made them available on the file-sharing site BitTorrent.

Although MySpace, Facebook and Bebo do what they can to maintain the privacy of their users, there is a constant stream of security breaches related to the applications placed on the sites. These number in the tens of thousands, most of which have been devised not by corporations, but individuals. Virtually all of them require a user to sign away various bits of personal information in return for getting the application, and, to begin work, all an identity thief needs is a name, address, date of birth, and a pet's, parent's or sibling's name. And the use of social network pages to perpetrate serious sexual or anti-personal crime is well known. Virtually every week a sexual predator is found to have used MySpace or Facebook pages to groom young girls.

That something as ubiquitous as social network sites (they have 13.7 million UK users) are exploited by paedophiles and other serious criminals is not surprising. Happily, the numbers affected are small. But the use of personal page content in civil disputes, divorces, employment and legal actions will affect far more of the millions now innocently sharing their thoughts and intimate moments with the online world.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good-faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards."

In the New Jersey insurance case, involving Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, judges have yet to decide if they will allow the use of online postings to outweigh privacy rights. But many think it only a matter of time before such evidence is routine. Vanessa Barnett, ecommerce lawyer with Berwin Leighton & Paisner, said: "I have come across it in the recruitment field where employers are trying to form behind-the-scenes information on candidates. It doesn't surprise me that they're doing it and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that insurance companies in the UK are doing it either."

Social network sites have brought unexpected pleasure to millions. But if present trends continue and users fail to wise up, the sites could soon be bringing them some equally unexpected shocks.

Online history: The rise and rise of social networking

Mid to Late 1990s First social networking sites emerge, such as sixdegrees.com and classmates.com. By 1999 MySpace is in operation; at the same time Hertfordshire couple Steve and Julie Pankhurst, devise Friends Reunited.

22 March 2002 Friendster is launched by Jonathan Abrams in California. For a while it is considered the No 1 social networking site.

March 2003 MySpace, widely held to be the biggest social networking site of them all, is launched by Tom Anderson.

4 February 2004 Facebook is launched by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. Initially the network is only for Harvard students. Within two months all the Ivy League schools are included and over the next two years more universities, high schools and corporations are added.

2 September 2004 A lawsuit is filed against Zuckerberg by ConnectU founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, alleging that he illegally used the concept and codes for their site after he worked for it as a programmer.

January 2005 Bebo launched by UK couple Michael and Xochi Birch. The site quickly climbs to the top of the social networking league.

23 August 2005 The domain facebook.com is purchased for $200,000.

March 2006 Facebook reportedly turns down an offer to buy the site for $750m, allegedly claiming it should be able to fetch $2bn.

September 2006 'Wall Street Journal' reports Yahoo is in talks with Facebook to buy the site for $1bn.

22 August 2006 Facebook signs a three-year US-based deal with Microsoft to be the exclusive provider of advertising on the site in return for a revenue split.

11 September 2006 Facebook opens to everybody 13 or over with an email address.

28 March 2007 ConnectU's lawsuit is dismissed without prejudice. They immediately refile and are granted a new hearing.

3 August 2007 Six major British firms, among them Vodafone, Halifax and Virgin Media, remove their adverts on Facebook after they appear on a rotating basis on a BNP-related page.

October 2007 A Tory aide, Philip Clarke, is suspended from his job after posting pictures of him applying burnt cork to another aide along with racist comments on Facebook.

24 October 2007 Microsoft buys a 1.6 per cent share in Facebook for $240m and will now begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally as well as in the US.

December 2007 Zuckerberg publicly apologises for launching the dubious advertising system Beacon on Facebook.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...bo-780521.html





How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
Maria Aspan

Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.

Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

In response to difficulties faced by ex-Facebook members, a cottage industry of unofficial help pages devoted to escaping Facebook has sprung up online — both outside and inside the network.

“I thought it was kind of strange that they save your information without telling you in a really clear way,” said Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm who founded a Facebook group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account.” The group has almost 4,300 members and is steadily growing.

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

Its privacy policy says that after someone deactivates an account, “removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.”

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

“Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,” Ms. Sezak said in her message. “Users can then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.”

But even users who try to delete every piece of information they have ever written, sent or received via the network have found their efforts to permanently leave stymied. Other social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster, as well as online dating sites like eHarmony.com, may require departing users to confirm their wishes several times — but in the end they offer a delete option.

“Most sites, even online dating sites, will give you an option to wipe your slate clean,” Mr. Das said.

Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were also on the site. “I work in a small office,” he said. “The last thing I want is people going on there and checking out my private life.”

“I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to manage saw my stuff,” he added.

Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.

That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including more than 50,000 Facebook users’ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option on the program.

Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook’s users, who the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated 110 million monthly active users).

The network is still trying to find a way to monetize its popularity, mostly by allowing marketers access to its wealth of demographic and behavioral information. The retention of old accounts on Facebook’s servers seems like another effort to hold onto — and provide its ad partners with — as much demographic information as possible.

“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network that has certified Facebook.

Mr. Burlison’s complaint spurred the Information Commissioner’s Office, a privacy watchdog organization, to investigate Facebook’s data-protection practices, the BBC reported last month. In response, Facebook issued a statement saying that its policy was in “full compliance with U.K. data protection law.”

A spokeswoman for TRUSTe, which is based in San Francisco, said its account deletion process was “inconvenient,” but that Facebook was “being responsive to us and they currently meet our requirements.”

“I kept getting the same answer and really felt that I was being given the runaround,” Mr. Burlison said of Facebook’s customer service representatives. “It was quite obvious that no amount of prodding from me on a personal level was going to make a difference.”

Only after he sent a link to the video of his interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News to the customer service representatives — and Facebook executives — was his account finally deleted.

Steven Mansour, 28, a Canadian online community developer, spent two weeks in July trying to fully delete his account from Facebook. He later wrote a blog entry — including e-mail messages, diagrams and many exclamations of frustration — in a post entitled “2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account” (www.stevenmansour.com).

Mr. Mansour, who said he is “really skeptical of social networking sites,” decided to leave after a few months on Facebook. “I was getting tired of always getting alerts and e-mails,” he said. “I found it very invasive.”

“It’s part of a much bigger picture of social networking sites on the Internet harvesting private data, whether for marketing or for more sinister purposes,” he said. His post, which wound up on the link-aggregator Digg.com, has been viewed more than 87,000 times, Mr. Mansour said, adding that the traffic was so high it crashed his server.

And his post became the touchstone for Mr. Wallin, who was inspired to create his group, “How to permanently delete your Facebook account,” after joining, leaving and then rejoining Facebook, only to find that all of his information from his first account was still available.

“I wanted the information to be available inside Facebook for all the users who wanted to leave, and quite a few people have found it just by using internal search,” said Mr. Wallin. Facebook has never contacted Mr. Wallin about the group.

Mr. Wallin said he has heard through members that some people have successfully used his steps to leave Facebook. But he is not yet ready to leave himself.

“I don’t want to leave yet; I actually find it really convenient,” he said. “But someday when I want to leave, I want it to be simple.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/te...1facebook.html





Quitting Facebook Gets Easier
Maria Aspan

Aiming to address the privacy concerns of disenchanted users, Facebook.com said on Tuesday that it was trying to make it easier for people to delete their accounts permanently from the social networking site.

Until now, Facebook has offered only a deactivation option, which keeps copies of the account’s personal information on the company’s servers. It is possible to delete an account fully using a cumbersome manual method, but it is difficult; many users complained that Facebook did not provide clear instructions.

On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they can direct the company by e-mail to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.

“We’re always working to improve the user experience,” Katie Geminder, director for user experience and design at Facebook, said in a statement sent by e-mail.

“We are measuring the effects of the change we made yesterday, and if we think more needs to be done to improve the user experience for deleting an account, we’ll test different implementations and measure them accordingly,” she added.

The updated Facebook help page now includes the question “How do I delete my account?” The answer: “If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added.”

The entry then says, “If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.”

Ms. Geminder said that Facebook’s policies were a reflection of the fact that many people came back to Facebook after they stopped using the site for a time. “On any given day, the number of users reactivating their accounts is roughly half of the number of users deactivating their accounts,” she said.

As The New York Times reported on Monday, some Facebook users who wished to close their accounts had been unable to do so, even after contacting Facebook’s customer service representatives. Many departing users, who could spend weeks or months trying to erase their accounts without success, turned to unofficial guides like the Facebook users group “How to permanently delete your Facebook account.”

Since Monday, almost 3,000 people have joined the group, which counted more than 7,000 members on Tuesday evening and had been growing by the hour. “I honestly did NOT know they kept your data after you deactivated your account,” one new member wrote on the group’s board. “I’m not leaving until I finish university,” she added, “but I’ll be glad of the info when I do.”

Another new member wrote, “Though I plan to stick around Facebook for a while, I joined this group so I know how to delete my account/profile when I do desire to leave. Thank you!”

Magnus Wallin, the Swedish patent examiner who founded the group, said his reaction to the company’s policy change was mixed. “Information on how to do it is great,” he said in an e-mail message. “But it should be really easily available. Not at the bottom of the help pages. And a ‘form’ sounds like you have to explain yourself. A regular delete button would be preferable, in my opinion.”

Facebook blamed a technical snag for the predicament of Nipon Das, a business consultant in Manhattan who spent two months trying to delete his account but nevertheless continued to receive messages and notes from friends through Facebook.

“Mr. Das appears to have an active account on Facebook, which is why you are able to view his mostly empty profile and why he still may be receiving messages or friend requests,” Ms. Geminder said. “If Mr. Das wishes to deactivate or delete his account from Facebook, his profile will not be viewable by anyone.”

Mr. Das — who described his plight by quoting lyrics from the Eagles song “Hotel California” that say, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — has found himself cast as an unlikely mascot for disgruntled Facebook users. Several of them have found his empty profile and sent him messages, “ranging from Eagles song quotes to those of support,” he said.

“I have turned into the test case,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/te...gy/13face.html





HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web
Motoko Rich

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

HarperCollins also plans to upload a different title by Mr. Coelho each month for the rest of the year.

For more than a year, visitors to HarperCollins’ Web site have been able to use the company’s Browse Inside function to look at some pages of most of the publisher’s current titles. Ms. Friedman said she believed that by displaying even more of the book’s content free, more readers would be enticed to buy.

Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins, said that the free electronic editions would be available only for one month, and readers would not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reader like Kindle from Amazon.com. The print function will also be disabled, but readers will be able to link to retailers like Amazon.com to buy copies of the books.

Ms. Friedman said she doubted most people would read the entire versions online, but HarperCollins would track whether the editions actually helped increase sales. “We will know very soon if we sense any kind of cannibalization,” she said.

There is evidence that readers still buy books even if they can get the content free on the Web. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a children’s novel illustrated with cartoons, was published online three years ago at Funbrain.com, an educational Web site. But the physical book has spent 42 weeks on the New York Times Children’s Chapter Books best-seller list.

Reached by telephone in Paris, Mr. Coelho said: “I believe that generosity pays off.” On his own blog, he gives readers links to pirated editions uploaded by readers in numerous languages. “I believe that they are not going to go beyond 20 or 30 pages” when reading on the Internet, he said.

Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist, short story and comics writer, is asking readers of his blog to vote on the title they would most like to give as a gift. An electronic scan of the winning title will be offered free on the HarperCollins site later this month. Mr. Gaiman said the online effort was not so different from what has been going on for generations.

“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.” Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.

HarperCollins will also begin offering 20 percent of some books two weeks before the hardcover editions go on sale. Starting Tuesday, readers can see the first fifth of “The Perfect Wife” by Victoria Alexander; “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews; and “Friend of the Devil” by Peter Robinson, all books that go on sale later this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/bu.../11harper.html





OLPC Book & Music Drive and XO Hackathon

Share the love with One Laptop per Child, the Creative Commons, Textbook Revolution, and the entire world!

Take action:

• Submit the free books you know of!
• Share CC-licensed songs, movies, and more!
• Bookmark-books with del.icio.us tags: “ftbp” for books and “livecontent” for quality CC works that should make the LiveContent DVD!
• Publishers, authors, and editors - consider putting your works under a Creative Commons license so we can spread them around the world!

Join us:

• OLPC Jam in Boston!
• Throw your own barcamp or jam!
• On IRC: #olpc-content on irc.freenode.net!

We are collecting all the free books, movies, music, and other content that we can in the next five days! Then, on Tuesday (2/19) the Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD as part of LiveContent 2.0 with big selection of CC licensed materials that we are gathering—this DVD will be distributed to events like South by Southwest and elsewhere. The bundle of books and educational resources we collect will be used by One Laptop per Child to send all over the world for children, families, and schools! And will compiling and reviewing the best college-level resources they can find for the coming re-launch of their new, community driven site!

On Saturday, there will be a hackathon/jam at Olin college. We hope others will create jams and barcamps and jams, and we will be adding them to the list above as they do!
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2008...and-hackathon/





New and Promising BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

BitTorrent’s popularity is still growing, and new sites are launched every day. Unfortunately it is impossible to feature all the new sites here, so we decided to post a selection of BitTorrent sites that look promising, or offer something new.

PizzaTorrent

PizzaTorrent is a meta-search engine, inspired by the enormous success of another site we introduced last month, YouTorrent. The site has a similar look and feel as YouTorrent, but it also includes some unique features. One of the most significant differences is that it sorts the torrents by category. In the sidebar you can also click on one of the indexed sites to perform a direct search.

The search results are presented in a clean way and ordered by rank, which is the output of a formula that looks at the torrent name, keywords, date added, number of seeds and seeds vs. peers. The administrator of PizzaTorrent told TorrentFreak that his site is indeed based on the YouTorrent concept, but that he will continue to add more unique features.

Bit-Tunes

Bit-Tunes is a BitTorrent /iTunes mashup based on the popular blog platform Wordpress. The site collects information from iTunes on both the newly released and most popular albums available on the iTunes store. It fetches the album cover in high-resolution from online stores such as Amazon, and matches every album dynamically with torrent downloads available on various BitTorrent sites.

The Bit-Tunes administrator told TorrentFreak: The purpose of the site is to discover great music albums and new artists, and download music DRM-free without the need to go through the iTunes Store or own an iPod. I have a bunch more ideas of which contextual information can be added to every album (buy it on Amazon, preview / listen online), to provide an even better user experience.

LookTorrent

LookTorrent is another BitTorrent meta-search engine that was launched recently. The difference with PizzaTorrents is that search results are presented in tabs, similar to Torrent-Finder. Each tab shows the search results of one BitTorrent site, and you can select which sites you want to search. In addition, LookTorrent allows users to rate the sites and it displays search suggestions at the bottom of every results page.

ShareByte

ShareByte is different from most other search engines because it is a community driven site where users add and edit the torrents. At the moment is is still a bit low on content, but the idea might appeal to people who like to participate. All the files are categorized and links to subtitles, video trailers, IMDB ratings and more are included, or can be added by users.

In addition, the site offers some useful features to registered users, as they can add torrents to their favorites and rate the audio and video quality of the files.

As said before, BitTorrent meta-search engines can be really useful, but they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. A bit more diversity might be a good idea, especially in the long term.
http://torrentfreak.com/new-and-prom...-sites-080214/





EU Suggests Singers and Musicians Should Earn Copyright Fees for 95 Years
AP

Singers and musicians should earn royalty fees for 95 years - almost double the current 50-year limit, a European Union official said Thursday as he promised to draft new copyright protection rules.

"If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years," said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union's internal market chief. "These royalties are often their sole pension."

People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.

Most European composers and lyricists currently receive lifetime copyright protection which is passed on to their descendants for another 70 years. The new EU rules would not change that.

But the change would mean that performers would get the same 95-year copyright period enjoyed by their U.S. counterparts.

The extension would not benefit only stars such as French crooner Charles Aznavour or British pop star Cliff Richard, McCreevy said. Session musicians who played on a recording would also be able to draw on a new fund.

Record companies that refuse to rerelease a record during the extended copyright period should not be able to prevent artists from moving to a new label, he said.

McCreevy said the new rules should not increase consumer prices because the price of records out of copyright is often the same as — or higher than — that of newly released discs.

The EU executive also wants to look again at reforming copyright levies charged on blank discs, data storage and music and video players to compensate artists and copyright holders for legal copying when listeners burn an extra version of an album to play one at home and one in the car.

The commissioner said he did not want to scrap the charges but wanted to see how realistic it was to charge them on all equipment.

Electronics manufacturers claim it is unfair to hand over millions of euros (dollars) in fees to copyright collectors for all devices containing a storage facility — such as phones that can play digital music files or even printers.

Most European countries charge copyright levies, which add €10 (US$14.59) to the cost of an 8 gigabyte MP3 player in Finland, €7 (US$10.21) in France and €2.56 (US$3.73) in Germany, manufacturers' group EICTA says.

Composers' representatives say these charges are exaggerated. Copyright levies, totaling €555 million (US$657 million) in 2005, are collected by artists' rights groups who distribute them to music and film copyright holders, performers and record companies.

In some countries, a portion of the money also supports cultural projects, from festivals to scholarships.

The levies are charged and paid to artists in 19 of the EU's 25 nations. None are charged in Britain, Ireland or Cyprus, and different plans exist in Greece, Luxembourg and Malta.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...-Royalties.php





Lessig For Congress?
luge

With the unfortunate passing of Congressman Tom Lantos, parts of Silicon Valley and San Francisco will be holding a special election in June to send a replacement to Congress. Given the area, it would be great to have someone who is both tech- and policy-aware fill the seat — and it looks like that just might happen. Lawrence Lessig has apparently bought "change-congress.com. " A "Draft Lessig" group is forming on Facebook, featuring some of Lessig's old co-workers at Harvard and Jimmy Wales, among others. No word from Lessig himself yet, but he's been increasingly vocal about politics of late. If it happens, it would be a huge step forward for the representation of technology in Washington.
http://politics.slashdot.org/politic.../1432200.shtml





Indie Coffeehouses Tell Starbucks: Bring on Your Free Wi-Fi
Eric Lai

Like many indie cafes, Seattle's Bauhaus Books and Coffee has long relied on free Wi-Fi to help bring in customers.

"In the evenings, the whole bar along the window will be lined with people using their computers," said Grace Heinze, a 13-year manager at Bauhaus, located between downtown Seattle and the trendy neighborhood of Capitol Hill.

Bauhaus has thrived despite all of the Starbucks shops that have popped up around it: 15 within half a mile, and 38 within one mile.

So is Heinze worried that the fiercely artsy cafe, named for the 1920's German art movement and replete with memorabilia, might lose customers to Starbucks now that it is dumping its high Wi-Fi rate — $6 an hour, or $10 a day — in favor of two free hours of Wi-Fi a day to any customer?

Not really.

"People come here because they like our atmosphere and because they like our coffee," Heinze said. "We're not feeling very uptight about this."

On Monday, Starbucks announced that it will replace longtime Wi-Fi partner T-Mobile with AT&T at its 7,000-plus coffee shops.

Anyone holding a Starbucks Card — whatever the value remaining on it — is eligible for the two free hours of Wi-Fi. Cards can be bought online for as little as $15.

"This is great news for consumers," said David Blumenfeld, senior vice president at Wi-Fi directory provider JiWire Inc. "Wi-Fi at Starbucks just became a lot less expensive, and I expect many more people to take advantage of it."

An additional two hours of Wi-Fi costs $3.99, while a monthly membership that gives access to any of AT&T's 70,000 hot spots worldwide costs $19.99 per month.

Meanwhile, the 12 million AT&T customers subscribing to a DSL package faster than 1.5Mbit/sec. will get unlimited access for free at Starbucks, in addition to the free access they already get at many McDonald's and Barnes & Noble stores.

AT&T is the largest Internet service provider in the U.S.

"I think it's safe to assume that given Starbucks' ubiquitous presence, offering free Wi-Fi could be a significant acquisition channel for AT&T with this deal," Blumenfeld said.

Small chains and indies

Wi-Fi hot spots began emerging around the beginning of the millennium. Propelled by the fast-growing popularity of laptops, Wi-Fi-enabled coffee shops quickly supplanted the older-style cybercafes, which relied on the expensive purchase and upkeep of PCs.

Still, until several years ago, many cafes were granting access to their Wi-Fi hot spots through codes given only to paying customers, according to Jack Kelley, president of Seattle regional chain Caffe Ladro.

There was the fear "that if public Wi-Fi was free, you'd fill your place up with 'campers,' " Kelley said, referring to patrons who linger all day without buying anything.

But that didn't happen after Ladro's 12 Seattle area cafes switched to free Wi-Fi several years ago. Nowadays, "we don't even care if you sit in the parking lot and use it," Kelley said.

Asked about the impact of Starbucks' move on his business, Kelley retorted, "Wi-Fi is free everywhere these days. Isn't Starbucks a little behind the times?"

In fact, some firms still make a tidy business selling Wi-Fi access. Take Boingo Wireless Inc., which charges $39 per month for access to 100,000 hot spots worldwide.

That remains competitive, especially to traveling businesspeople who are used to paying $10 a day in their hotel rooms.

But many regional or national coffee chains competing with Starbucks already offer free Wi-Fi, or are moving in that direction.

Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee, reportedly the second-largest coffee chain nationwide with about 500 stores, automatically grants one free hour of Wi-Fi to any patron. When that expires, customers buy something more than $1.50 to get an access code granting unlimited usage the rest of the day.

Fellow Minneapolis chain Dunn Brothers offers free Wi-Fi with no strings attached at its 90 locations. Similarly, Seattle-based Tully's offers totally free Wi-Fi at about 80 out of its 150 stores.

Emeryville, Calif.-based Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc. will begin testing Wi-Fi at several stores starting next month, according to CIO Tom Cullen. If successful, Peet's will roll out free Wi-Fi at all of its 150 stores. No schedule has been set.

Los Angeles-based The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf did not return a request for comment. Through a deal with AT&T, it has offered Wi-Fi at about 150 stores for several years, though it costs $3.99 for two hours, even for subscribers. Some Coffee Bean locations, however, appear on JiWire to be free.

Who's picking up the tab?

As pressure mounts to make more Wi-Fi hot spots free, some operators are turning to Web advertising to offset costs or make money. Those ads are delivered during log-in or at the user's landing page.

JiWire serves up ads to more than 8 million users per month on various Wi-Fi networks, including Boingo, Blumenfeld said, at rates far higher than ones on typical Web pages.

That kind of advertising "sounds gross" to Ladro's Kelley, though.

"It's just like all of those ads in the movie theatre," he said. "I say, enough is enough."

That's fine, said Blumenfeld, who thinks that most independent cafes, even those relying heavily on free Wi-Fi to attract customers during the slower afternoon and evening hours, will continue to do fine.

"Many patrons of the smaller coffeehouses will continue to support their local shop due to loyalty, unique surroundings versus corporate giant, community support, convenience of location, etc.," he said. "Any customer losses may also be offset simply because there continues to be so much more demand for Wi-Fi access in general."

Bauhaus' Heinze seconds that.

"We're close to two colleges, and we are in a neighborhood with a lot of apartment buildings," she said. Despite competing in Starbucks' backyard, Bauhaus, according to Heinze, has never "done anything reactive. And isn't that the whole point of being an indie coffeehouse, being your own self? If that happens to be similar to what Starbucks does, that's fine."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Comcast Posts Higher Profit, Sets Dividend
Kenneth Li

Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Thursday it will pay an annual dividend and set a 2009 target to complete a $7 billion stock buyback program, two actions aimed at addressing investor demands to boost its share price.

Shares of the largest U.S. cable operator jumped 6 percent in pre-market trading after it also reported quarterly earnings that beat Wall Street expectations by 2 cents a share.

"Investors were desperate for a sign that this company is ready to return cash to shareholders," Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett said. "They got that in spades today."

He added, "By putting a defined timeline on the buyback and buying back $1.25 billion in the fourth quarter, the company has clearly signaled their confidence in the future cash-flow prospects of the business."

Comcast said it will pay an annual dividend of 25 cents per share, payable on April 30, 2008. The company also said it will complete its $7 billion buyback by the end of 2009.

Shares of Comcast have lost more than a third of their value since a high last July on a slowdown in adding new subscribers from increased competition from phone and satellite rivals and the impact from a weaker economic environment.

That's why the company, which faced criticism from some of its shareholders who have demanded a better payout, ramped up its share buyback in the fourth quarter. Comcast repurchased $1.25 billion worth of its stock, compared with about $447 million in the same period a year ago.

Comcast reported a 54 percent rise in fourth-quarter net profit to $602 million, or 20 cents per share, from $390 million, or 13 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue rose 14 percent to $8.01 billion.

Wall Street expected Comcast to post a profit of 18 cents and revenue of $7.94 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Comcast lost 94,000 basic video subscribers but added 523,000 digital video subscribers, 331,000 broadband customers and 475,000 net phone subscribers in the fourth quarter.

Quarterly operating cash flow rose 19 percent to $3.08 billion.

The company said it expects full-year 2008 consolidated revenue and operating cash-flow growth of 8 to 10 percent. Consolidated capital expenditures as a percent of revenue is expected to fall to 18 percent.

Consolidated free cash-flow growth is expected to rise at least 20 percent above 2007's $2.3 billion.

Comcast founder Ralph Roberts on Wednesday relinquished his salary of about $1.85 million in 2007, opting to be paid $1 per year. He currently serves as an advisor to his son, Chief Executive Brian Roberts.

Shares rose to $18.95 from a close of $17.81 on Wednesday on the Nasdaq.

(Additional reporting by Franklin Paul; Editing by Mark Porter/Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...AS098720080214





Many Obstacles to Digital TV Reception, Study Says
Roy Furchgott

Nearly six million people with digital receivers may still lose TV signals when digital-only broadcasts begin next February, a new study says.

The study by Centris, a market research firm in Los Angeles, found gaps in broadcast signals that may leave an estimated 5.9 million TV sets unable to receive as many channels as they did before the changeover. It may affect even those who bought the government-approved converter boxes or a new digital TV. To keep broadcast reception, many viewers may have to buy new outdoor antennas, the study found.

The Centris study predicts greater disruption of service than government agencies like the Federal Communications Commission have acknowledged.

The federal government estimates that 21 million American households have primary TV sets that receive only over-the-air signals. But it says most will continue to get a digital signal by means of a digital-to-analog converter box, which costs about $50 to $70. It is helping to underwrite the cost of a converter box by issuing $40 coupons.

Centris said it looked at a more detailed method for predicting the coverage pattern of TV signals than the government had used.

However, the problems with reception could be far worse, according to engineers who have taken signal measurements. One study of the first HDTV station by Oded Bendov, the consultant hired to replace the broadcast antennas on the Empire State Building, found that digital signals did not travel as far as either model had predicted.

“For the people with rabbit-ear antennas, I would say at least 50 percent won’t get the channels they were getting,” Dr. Bendov said. “I would say a lot of people are going to be very unhappy.”

Digital reception is more affected by hills, trees, buildings and other interference than analog has been. An analog TV picture degrades gradually, getting more snow or ghosting as a signal becomes weaker.

But digital TV is subject to the “cliff effect” — the picture is excellent until the signal gets weak and the picture suddenly drops out.

The number of sets that the Centris study projects will fail varies from city to city, based largely on the landscape. In Las Vegas, which lies in a flat basin, the study estimates that 2.5 percent of over-the-air TVs would lose at lease one of five major networks. In Philadelphia, which has more hills, 5 percent of over-the-air TVs would lose reception, while in St. Louis, 10 percent would lose reception.

Centris says, based on the F.C.C.’s data, a digital signal would travel 60 to 75 miles in those three cities. However, Centris says its own model showed that the signals would degrade at 35 miles.

Whether a TV gets a strong digital signal may depend on seemingly minor impediments, said David Klein, executive vice president of Centris. “Are there big trees in your area? Is there a big retaining wall next your house?” he said. “It’s not a matter of, ‘is reception good in your neighborhood’; it’s a matter of, ‘can I get the signal in the bedroom?’ ”

Centris also estimated that of the 117 million TVs not connected to cable or satellite, up to 80 percent have set-top rabbit-ear antennas that may not be able to pull in an adequate digital signal. Many of those sets will require a better antenna or a cable or satellite connection to do so.

Electronics manufacturers say the quality of the TV’s receiver and converter will play a role.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/te.../11analog.html





50% Of All BitTorrent Downloads are TV-Shows
Ernesto

Reports show that 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download TV-series, quite an impressive number. In total, over a billion TV-shows are downloaded every year, and this number continues to rise.

It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.

In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes” was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes are downloaded every year worldwide.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years - over 40 percent are TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it to download a TV-show.

The popularity of TV-torrents hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, there are reports of TV-studios that allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, by leaking unaired pilots intentionally. While the movie and music studios continue to fight their “war on piracy”, most of the TV-studios lay low.

On the contrary, Anne Sweeney -the president of the Disney-ABC television group- admitted that she was “inspired” after seeing a pirated copy of the hit-show “Desperate Housewives”. The pirated copy of this popular TV show was the main reason (besides the money) for Disney to sell their shows online. “Coming ‘face to face’ with the high-quality, commercial-free pirated version (of Desperate Housewives) told Disney that it was not just competing with other broadcasters, but with digital pirates and as such was an experience that prompted us to do the iTunes deal with Apple.” Sweeney said at the time.

BitTorrent’s popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by actors either. Masi Oka who plays Hiro Nakamura in the popular show “Heroes”, made some pro-BitTorrent comments earlier this year. When he was in France to promote the series (before they aired), he was surprised to see how many people had already seen the show thanks to BitTorrent. Oka said that BitTorrent is a great promotion tool, but added “Hopefully, if they can buy the DVD after they watch it on BitTorrent, that would be great.”

One of the members of EZTV, the leading TV-torrent distribution group, told TorrentFreak in an earlier interview that he doesn’t think their work has a negative impact on the TV-industry either. “The only possible impacts can see are positive ones,” Boggibill said “it is free publicity, which may lead to higher ratings when people “discover” new shows and also larger numbers of DVD purchases - it is my understanding that many of the people that download TV shows from us are avid TV fans and will usually buy DVD boxsets of shows they like.”

A factor that plays a role in the rise of unauthorized downloading of TV-shows is that most people simply don’t see it as stealing. It is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels and it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free. It’s not a threat, but more an opportunity.
http://torrentfreak.com/50-percent-b...ads-tv-080214/





Putting Candidates Under the Videoscope
Brian Stelter

One late night last November, Mitt Romney, campaigning in Greenville, S.C., was approached by three young women in bright matching outfits looking for a hug. Mr. Romney, thinking they were cheerleaders from nearby Clemson University, obliged.

The young women worked at a Hooters restaurant. Unfortunately for Mr. Romney, Scott Conroy, who works for CBS News, filmed the hug with his Sony hand-held camera and sent the image to the television network’s political desk in New York. The video was published online the next morning. “You’re standing there doing your job, and all of a sudden Mitt Romney’s hugging Hooters girls. It’s one of the times you’re glad you’re filming,” Mr. Conroy recalled.

Mr. Conroy, whose job title is “off-air reporter,” (because he does not normally appear on television) is one of many young journalists hired by the networks to follow the candidates across the country, filing video and blog posts as they go. Originally hired to cut expenses — their cost is a fraction of a full television crew’s — these reporters, also called “embeds,” have produced a staggering amount of content, especially video. And in this election cycle, for the first time, they are able to edit and transmit video on the fly.

As a result, the embeds have changed the dynamic of this year’s election, making every unplugged and unscripted moment on the campaign trail available for all to see. One particular video shot of American flags tilting over behind Hillary Rodham Clinton last November has been viewed more than 300,000 times on the ABC News Web site. A video of the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shoving a member of Barack Obama’s staff at a New Hampshire campaign rally has drawn almost 150,000 views on YouTube.

“There have always been cameras around campaigns. What is different now is how much more portable they’ve become and how much more prevalent,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, who was the traveling press secretary for Mr. Romney’s campaign until the Republican candidate dropped out last week.

Through cable television, network news sites and video sharing sites, these unexpected and unguarded moments at rallies and during campaign stops have become part of the narrative of the election. The campaigns themselves are well aware of how video clips can magnify a mistake or attach a faux pas permanently to the candidate.

“Whether it’s a metaphor for the campaign or just a funny moment from the trail, there’s a lot of demand for that kind of stuff,” said Aaron Bruns, a political embed for Fox News Channel.

The methods of the off-air reporter trade are also increasingly being used as networks look for new ways to expand coverage while cutting costs.

Bulky satellite transmission units are gradually being replaced by portable broadband-based gear. Last year, ABC News assigned seven young journalists to serve as one-person bureaus in foreign countries where the network had not previously assigned correspondents. Fox News Channel has promoted technology that allows it to broadcast live reports from a moving vehicle.

Athena Jones of NBC News is, at 31, one of the oldest off-air reporters employed by the networks. She summed up the attitude of her colleagues: “We have a lot of mouths to feed. If you feed something in, someone will probably find a place for it in the 24-hour cable news beast.”

Until January, off-air reporters like Mr. Conroy and Ms. Jones were the only television producers traveling with the presidential contenders. Since the Iowa caucuses, larger crews have followed the leading candidates to most campaign events, but the off-air reporters still film the rope lines and photo opportunities that are seemingly more intimate events for the candidates. The off-air reporters for ABC even post their itineraries on the social networking Web site Facebook.

“We basically keep our eyes and ears open at all times,” said Eloise Harper, the ABC News off-air reporter who shot the video of the flags falling behind Senator Clinton. “We’re always watching the candidates.”

The emergence of off-air reporters dates to 1988, when the networks sought to save money by sending full TV crews to only some campaign events. Partly because most off-air reporters are relatively young and not members of a union, they create some cost savings for networks.

The off-air reporter role became especially prominent in 2004 when NBC News renamed them “campaign embeds,” in an allusion to the embedding of correspondents during the Iraq war. During that election, hand-held cameras became ubiquitous, but the reporters did not have a ready-made outlet for their video.

Four years later, the 2008 presidential campaign is being conducted in the era of YouTube. Spurred by the proliferation of inexpensive hand-held video cameras and broadband Internet access, the dispatches that were once distributed internally are now published on blogs, and the video clips that would have wound up on the cutting room floor are posted on Web sites.

The ubiquitous camcorders and immediate Internet access do make the campaigns more wary of potential pitfalls. If a candidate becomes irritated during a newspaper reporter’s interview, the instance may merit only a sentence in the next day’s article. But if the exchange takes place in front of video cameras, “It gets put on the Internet for the whole world to see, not just for that day’s news, but repeatedly over time,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said.

Stephen Hess, a professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University, noted that many people now own cellphones with picture- and video-taking abilities.

“Every camera reflects the opportunity for someone to see what’s going on with the election, which is a good thing,” he said. “And yet, what’s going on is now so staged, so that’s a bad thing. Neither is going to be reversed.”

In an unusual arrangement, NBC News shares campaign reporters with the political news service National Journal; National Journal pays the salaries, NBC pays the travel expenses and MSNBC.com supplies the equipment.

CBS and ABC said their off-air reporters are full-time employees. A majority of Fox News’s embeds are also full time. CNN initially assigned producers to each early caucus and primary state and now embeds reporters with each candidate.

David Westin, the president of ABC News, said the demand for campaign trail content is almost unlimited. “Originally, the off-airs were just used to inform our reporting behind the scenes,” he said. “Now, they do reports by themselves.”

Unscripted moments can be recorded by other sources. The video of former President Bill Clinton dozing off during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day church service in Harlem was recorded by a stringer for The New York Post’s Web site.

Mr. Romney briefly created an Internet video sensation last month when he used the word “bling” and the hip-hop song “Who Let the Dogs Out?” while surrounded by African-American teenagers at a campaign stop in Florida. Some of the reporters cringed, wondering whether the incident would be perceived as a “macaca moment” or merely “goofy Mitt Romney.” But Mr. Conroy had already filmed it, as had other TV crews.

“None of the candidates have forgotten what happened to George Allen,” said Brett Hovell, the ABC off-air reporter assigned to John McCain.

Campaigning for a United States Senate seat in Virginia in 2006, Mr. Allen pointed to a volunteer for an opposing candidate, commonly called a “tracker,” who was videotaping his speech and called him “macaca,” a term with racial overtones. Campaign “trackers” are still prevalent on the campaign trail, recording candidate events for opposition purposes, but the off-air reporters serve a similar function.

“There’s never a moment when we can’t file something,” Mr. Conroy said. “That’s a big benefit in terms of getting things up quickly, but it also means that we’re working every waking minute of the day.”

Most of the off-air reporters started shadowing the campaigns full time in September. Their relative inexperience, combined with the constant deadline pressure, has raised some concerns about this increasingly digital type of election coverage.

“When you have young people covering their first campaign, it’s very difficult to hold campaigns accountable, to say, ‘The candidate should answer questions about this,’ or, ‘Why is this fund-raiser closed to the press?,’ ” said Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst at Time magazine, who followed Bill Clinton in 1992 as an off-air reporter for ABC at the age of 26.

Mr. Halperin places some blame on major newspapers that rotate more experienced reporters on and off the campaign trail. Mr. Westin of ABC said he has never seen a correlation between a correspondent’s seniority level and willingness to ask tough questions.

For Ms. Jones of NBC, the most memorable part of a recent day with Mrs. Clinton was the sighting of a black Elvis impersonator. Her camera was rolling as the impersonator, Dwayne Turner, who goes by the nickname Belvis, serenaded Mrs. Clinton at a Little Rock, Ark., restaurant on Jan. 30.

“One for the money, two for the show, you can do it, Hillary, go, go, go,” Mr. Turner sang, bringing a smile to Mrs. Clinton’s face. It was a made-for-the-Internet moment.

“I uploaded it as soon as I could,” Ms. Jones said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/bu...a/11video.html





The Beautiful Duckling Gets the Presidents and the Poets



Mary Jo Murphy

WE can be certain that when Dorothy Parker wrote, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” she didn’t have in mind women like Carla Bruni, cruising the Pyramids in her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses on the arm of her beau, who moonlights as the president of France.

Nevertheless, Ms. Bruni, who married President Nicolas Sarkozy last weekend, drew her inspiration from Parker — as well as Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare and Yeats — in an album that topped the pop charts last year in France and will be released next week in the United States. The album, “No Promises,” features Ms. Bruni’s smoky French-accented voice half-singing and half-talking the English words of the poets to the accompaniment of her own music.

If certain, when this life was out —

That yours and mine should be —

I’d toss it yonder like a Rind,

And take Eternity.

That’s Emily Dickinson, and you can now listen to Ms. Bruni breathe it.

Something is a little off here. Haven’t Dickinson and Parker and Yeats, at least, always belonged to the girls who do wear glasses? The girl-gang universe doesn’t neatly divide into bluestockings versus fishnets (we’re told and so we must believe). But it seems unfair that Ms. Bruni should compete for the spoils (rock stars, philosophers, presidents) with brains and beauty, all the while blithely appropriating the secret solace of those who might have considerably less of both. She poses on the album cover with a book: bluestockings. But she’s wearing a short white nightie: fishnets. The glasses-wearers might not begrudge her Clapton or Jagger, but leave them their tortured poets.

It doesn’t help that in a video promotion for the album she sings Yeats while skipping beside the Seine as if she were singin’ in the rain instead of cooing:

Come, let me sing into your ear;

Those dancing days are gone,

All that silk and satin gear;

Crouch upon a stone,

Wrapping that foul body up

In as foul a rag:

I carry the sun in a golden cup.

The moon in a silver bag.

Puzzled by these discordant notes, I consulted the poet Paul Muldoon, who also is the new poetry editor of The New Yorker, plays in a rock band and has had his own words set to music (although not yet, as far as I know, by Carla Bruni, who features only dead poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries).

What did he think about Ms. Bruni’s choices, for a start?

“My first observation is that she has exceptionally good taste in poetry,” Mr. Muldoon wrote in an e-mail message. “Yeats was himself very interested in the song tradition and wrote, partly, within it. He was a master of the ballad and of that great device that spans both the verse and song traditions — the refrain. In the case of Emily Dickinson, much of her poetry is indistinguishable from the ballad tradition and, more often, the alternating eight- and six-syllable lines of the hymnal. So I’m certainly looking forward to hearing what Carla Bruni comes up with. In general, I welcome the idea of poetry casting its net as widely as possible, including its taking in the song tradition from which it sprang.”

It must be said here that Ms. Bruni’s good taste was influenced by her good friend Marianne Faithfull (another Jagger alumna), or her “dear professor,” as Ms. Bruni has referred to her more than once. She told the Italian magazine XL that Ms. Faithfull had advised, “Every evening you should read a Shakespeare sonnet,” to aid her efforts at songwriting in English. “Instead, I fell in love with the poetry of Yeats and Emily Dickinson,” she told the interviewer.

Ms. Bruni thought to combine her lyrics with the words of the poets who inspired her. But then, she told The Times of London: “I realized there was a worrying contrast between the very dense writing of these poems and my lightness. My texts seemed really poor, the whole thing lost its homogeneity and so I just kept the poems.”

And the poems in the eight-six pattern are, as Mr. Muldoon noted, “eminently singable.” (It’s sometimes remarked that poems in that meter can be sung to the tune of the theme from “Gilligan’s Island,” although Ms. Bruni never goes that giddy.)

Mr. Muldoon didn’t venture to speculate on what an attraction to these poets might say about Ms. Bruni, but noted: “Thematically, there does seem to be a wistfulness throughout these choices, a sighing either for what was or what might have been. How that refers to Carla Bruni I really couldn’t tell you, except that we tend to prefer sadness to happiness in art, if not in life.”

And that is the point. We like to think this sort of loneliness and longing is the domain of the femme far less fatale.

But Madame Sarkozy, like us, is a femme mortal, too, and her selections, made as a former supermodel neared the wrong side of 40, are certainly a reflection of that. Mirrors figure in 4 of the 11 poems. In Yeats: “From mirror after mirror, no vanity’s displayed.” In Dickinson: “I held my spirit to the Glass, To prove it possibler.” In Rossetti: “Fades the image from the glass, And the fortune is not told.” And finally, in Auden: “Blow the cobwebs from the mirror, see yourself at last.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/we.../10murphy.html