Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – June 18th, ‘05

[JackSpratts]

June 18th, 2005


"Black folks are accustomed to sleeping in the same bed, especially if you're five or six deep and you live in a two-bedroom house because it's all we can afford. Michael is accustomed to that kind of behavior, you know, slumber-type parties." - Morris Griffin


"[It is] very difficult to establish a basis to prove a causal relationship between the size of the drop in music sales and the rise of file sharing." - OECD Report on Digital Music


"Consumers requesting help through a Web site set up by Sony BMG to explain the technology receive an e-mail message telling how PC users can work around the CD's software to unlock the music files and make them available for unlimited copying and transferring." - Jeff Leeds


"[Our copy-protected CDs are] a strong educational tool to communicate to consumers that there is a limit of what they're really allowed to do with the intellectual property that they have just acquired." - Thomas Hesse


"Some people are so taken with this new hobby that they have stopped collecting art altogether in favor of their own digital creations." – Katie Hafner


"They don't have a lot of confidence that Congress will do the right thing." - Dan Burton


"Both judges say neither man was communicating with a child younger than 16." – KRNV Nevada





























Internet Piracy Sails On
Robert MacMillan

Combatants and spectators in the Internet piracy war are checking their watches right about now. They're waiting for the Supreme Court to issue a decision that could shape the future of how people in America get their entertainment.

If you're reading this, chances are that the court decided not to release a ruling today in the MGM vs. Grokster case. The court typically releases its decisions around 10 a.m. Eastern Time, and as each week passes without a ruling, everyone with a stake in -- or a beef about -- the case gets a little more nervous.

The ruling is important because it could be the last word, at least for a while, on whether Internet file-sharing networks should be held liable for sucking millions of dollars out of the entertainment industry by creating havens for pirates to swap illegally copied versions of movies, music and software.

On one side, the Hollywood studios and the world's largest music labels say that the makers of file-sharing software should be punished for creating the means for pirates to thrive online. On the other, the software makers say they created products with legitimate uses, even if most people use them to violate copyright law. The artists and consumers, meanwhile, set up camp on whatever side proves most morally -- and financially -- expedient (See our backgrounder on the case).

This, of course, is the traditional summary of where everyone stands. A report just released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), meanwhile, says that file-sharing networks are not the sole culprits in the recording industry's problems, and that they could become effective music distribution channels.

"The report said it is difficult to establish a causal connection between the rise of file sharing and a drop in music sales. While the music industry's revenues fell 20 percent from 1999 to 2003, other factors, such as illegal CD copying, might have played a role in the decline, the OECD said," according to an article that ran on Wired.com today. "The report recognized the value of fledgling online stores like Apple's iTunes. Last year represented a "turning point" for legal music downloads, the study said. However, online music distribution only accounted for 1 to 2 percent of music revenues in 2004. The OECD expects to see that climb to 5 to 10 percent of revenues. But growing online sales will depend on expanding catalogs to appease demand and sway illegal downloads, the OECD said. The report also suggested exploring new distribution methods, beyond what the OECD called traditional... transactions."

That line of thinking would send most file-sharing software makers rummaging for their best digital copy of Beethoven's Ninth. If the Supreme Court decided that their primary reason for being was to enable a crime, their only hope of survival would be to marry their accuser. Several file-sharing operators indeed have tried to persuade some of the big labels to embrace them, but outside the somewhat different case of Napster and Bertelsmann, this has not happened.

Wired quoted Adrian Strain of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry on the entertainment companies' overall feeling toward file-sharing networks: "The report does not recognize the vast proportion of the use of P2P [peer-to-peer] services that is infringing copyright. ... (It) fails to acknowledge the extent of the damage that this does to the legitimate industry and oversimplifies the issues surrounding DRMs (digital rights management) in the development of the online music sector."

Doesn't sound like peace is about to break out, does it?

You could argue that the entertainment nabobs aren't in much of a mood to parley with anyone when you consider a recent report from the NPD Group that says more people have "large video files" on their home computers. They're probably not home videos either, as the New York Times reported: "Some files might have come from movie-downloading services like CinemaNow, said Russ Crupnick, president of NPD's music and movies division. But others were clearly not obtained legitimately, he said, including many movies not yet shown in theaters. 'You see things on people's computers that there's no legitimate way they belong there,' he said, because they had not yet been commercially released."

It would be interesting to determine what percentage of those files contained the words "Revenge" and "Sith," especially if the NPD Group were spying on Forrester Research editor and publisher Jimmy Guterman. In a piece written for the Boston Globe, Guterman described his quest for Star Wars satisfaction:

"Like thousands of patriotic Americans, I spent Memorial Day weekend illegally downloading a copy of the new 'Star Wars' movie. I was shocked by how quickly I was able to locate a copy on the Net (less than five minutes) and how long it took for the whole thing to end up on my computer (two days and change -- talk about holiday weekend traffic). There were no secret passwords, no locations known only to the cognoscenti. All I had to do was Point, Google, Pilfer."

Guterman owned up to his action, he said, but criticized other people who "are playing the relative-morality card."

"Read the discussion groups on the websites that host free 'Star Wars' and you can read hundreds of energetic, typo-ridden postings from fans convinced that, as one put it, 'Lucas owes us,'" Guterman wrote. "One Net service that uses the popular file-sharing program BitTorrent serves only unreleased material by established performers, as if distributing unreleased material without permission or payment is somehow more moral than distributing officially released material without permission or payment."

He also said that his sinful Sith viewing didn't exactly sizzle, noting that "Watching Jedi joust across a laptop screen is not the way to enjoy something as loud, fast and blunt as a 'Star Wars' film." Of course, if everyone felt the way Guterman does, we'd all own widescreen TVs or learn to love letterbox. Not only that, we'd insist on watching David Lean's and Stanley Kubrick's movies in the theater, not some crummy, pirated ripoff online. But that's just wishful thinking.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061300540.html



No comment from the boss

Spyware, Adware Hide In BitTorrent Downloads
Joris Evers

BitTorrent users, beware: Your download may include adware and spyware.

Purveyors of the applications that produce pop-up ads on PC screens and track browsing habits have discovered BitTorrent as a new distribution channel. According to observers of the trend, videos and music that hide adware and spyware are increasingly being offered for download on various BitTorrent Web sites.

BitTorrent has grown into one of the most widely used means of downloading files such as movies or software. Unlike peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, eDonkey and the original Napster, no central search technology exists for BitTorrent. Instead, links to specific files are posted on Web sites.

While applications such as Kazaa have long been associated with adware and spyware, BitTorrent has not. Until now, that is. Chris Boyd, a security researcher who runs the Vital Security Web site, said he found adware and spyware hiding in BitTorrent files.

In one case, an episode of the Fox TV show "Family Guy" was bundled with several pieces of known adware, according to Boyd. "Under that kind of load, a midrange PC can easily go under," Boyd said. Both spyware and adware are known to hurt PC performance because they use PC resources to run.

In other examples, music files and porn videos came bundled with adware or spyware, Boyd said in an e-mail interview. He suspects that online marketers have launched campaigns to get their software installed on more desktops using BitTorrent.

"This is one of the most egregious spyware infestations that we have seen," said Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software, a maker of anti- spyware software. "It is a major concern. It is going to riddle your system with pop-ups, slow your system down and potentially cause system instability."

The downloaded files typically were self-extracting archives that would also install the unwanted software, Boyd said. In most cases, users would be presented with a dialog box advising that the extra software was about to be installed and given the impression that the install was needed to get access to the desired content, he said.

However, Boyd found, it was possible to get access to the entertainment the user wanted without installing the adware or spyware. Simply declining the adware and spyware license a couple of times gives access to the content, he said.

On his Web site, Boyd listed a Canadian company as one of the businesses that send out adware and spyware on BitTorrent. That company's Web site appeared to have been hacked Thursday, with the front page replaced with a picture and a profane message stating that the company should leave BitTorrent alone.

As of late Thursday afternoon, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen had not replied to an e-mail seeking comment on the issue.
http://news.com.com/Spyware%2C+adwar...3-5750601.html



As Grokster Decision Nears, Hollywood Talks Tough
Roy Mark

As the Supreme Court nears a decision in the Grokster case, Hollywood continued its tough talk against peer-to-peer (P2P) networks dealing in copyrighted materials.

"I'm optimistic that this is going to turn out well for us, but if it doesn't then we have a whole host of other strategies to protect out interests," Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), told a think tank gathering Tuesday.

Hollywood hopes to overturn two lower court decisions clearing P2P companies for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. The P2Ps contend their technology is neutral and should be covered by the Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax decision.

In March, the Supreme Court heard final arguments in MGM v. Grokster, which makes the P2P technology.

In that case, the court decided the use of new technology that could infringe copyrights did not justify an outright ban on that technology, as long as it provides other, non-infringing uses. A decision in the case is expected this month.

"This case presents an important economic and political question: shall we keep in place legal protections that promote the free market or shall we tear down those protections in such a way to allow the black market to prosper and dominate?" Glickman told the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

Glickman said he is optimistic the Supreme Court will rule in the entertainment industry's favor. But if it doesn't, Hollywood is prepared to protect its interests.

"Regardless of what the court does, we're going to continue to pursue our various strategies to deal with piracy and intellectual property rights protection. That means legislation if necessary," he said. "We also will pursue our litigation strategies, education strategies and our technology strategies, no matter what."

Glickman also praised the entertainment industry for embracing digital media technology.

"We have already entered a new era of digital communications for music services like iTunes and nascent [download] movie sites like Movielink and Cinemanow," he said. "These are just a hint at the opportunities to come. These types of legitimate services will continue to develop and improve but only if only strong intellectual property protection is preserved."

According to Glickman, these emerging services are directly challenged by the P2Ps.

"Threatening the development of these type of services is the prevalence of companies that glean their profits by offering a platform for people to obtain music, movies, software and games for free," Glickman said. "Unfazed by the rule of law or respect for the property rights of others, these companies exploit content and facilitate infringement on a massive global scale."

Hollywood won its initial foray against the file-sharing companies when it shut down file-swapping provider Napster, but has consistently lost in the courts since then. In Napster's case, an index of material available for file-swapping was maintained on a central server. Grokster does not use central servers. In that situation, the courts have consistently ruled, Grokster has no control over the actions of its customers.

"Developing viable delivery systems that provide consumers with the high quality content they desire while at the same time protecting that high quality content from theft and misuse is absolutely critical to the survival of this business," Glickman said. "It is also essential that a marketplace develops with respect and favors legitimate delivery systems and legitimate business models and sanctions those who build business models based on the hard work of others."
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3512861



Sony BMG Tries to Limit Copying of Latest CD's
Jeff Leeds

The world's second-biggest music corporation is rolling out its latest answer to digital piracy.

The company, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is owned by Sony and Bertelsmann, is outfitting a broad selection of its latest CD's with software that restricts copying.

The company's use of the software, which is designed to limit consumers to making no more than three copies of a CD, reflects an effort to alter a format that is two decades old and contains music that can be readily copied and digitally distributed.

With the release of more than two dozen copy-restricted titles so far this year, including albums on sale today from the Backstreet Boys, the Foo Fighters and George Jones, Sony BMG is placing a bigger bet on the technology than other companies have, particularly in the United States, the world's biggest market. Sony BMG, which is second in size to Vivendi Universal-owned Universal Music Group, and the two other major record companies have been releasing CD's with anti-copying software in other countries.

But executives at Sony BMG's rivals have been reluctant to release titles with the restrictive software in the United States. They said the software was too easily defeated and that working versions did not allow consumers to transfer music to portable devices and music players as freely as the industry would like.

The companies have been pressing Apple Computer to amend its software to make it compatible with the tools used to restrict copying.

The restrictive software Sony BMG is using on CD's, like it did earlier this year with "Stand Up" by the Dave Matthews Band - is not compatible with Apple's popular iPod. Owners of Apple computers using iPods are able to copy and transfer music on the restricted compact discs freely; the restrictions block PC owners from transferring music to their iPods. But it allows transfers to music players using Microsoft's Windows software.

Thomas Hesse, president for global digital business at Sony BMG, said Apple could "flick a switch" to amend its programming to work with the restrictive software.

"Its just a proprietary decision by Apple to decide whether to play along or not," Mr. Hesse said. "I don't know what more waiting we have to do. We think we need to move this forward. Time is ticking, infringement of intellectual property is happening all over, and we've got to put a stop to it I think."

Apple declined to comment.

Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2, said the move by Sony BMG "looks to me like a very interesting public negotiation."

In fact, consumers requesting help through a Web site set up by Sony BMG to explain the technology receive an e-mail message telling how PC users can work around the CD's software to unlock the music files and make them available for unlimited copying and transferring.

Music executives say the restricted CD's the music industry has released so far - most prominently BMG's sale of Velvet Revolver's "Contraband," last year - have resulted in virtually no consumer complaints. But analysts say that may be because consumers still have such an easy time breaking the restrictions or acquiring the music for free on unrestricted online file-sharing networks.

Still, Mr. Hesse said the introduction of limits on CD's would set the stage for record companies establish new business models. For instance, Mr. Hesse said, a record company using restrictive software might be able to charge a premium for the early online release of a forthcoming album. Mr. Hesse said the restricted CDs are "a strong educational tool to communicate to consumers that there is a limit of what they're really allowed to do with the intellectual property that they have just acquired."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/bu...a/14music.html



CDs to Restrict Copying of Songs

EMI Group plans to join Sony BMG in including anti-piracy technology in its releases that limit how much music can be burned onto discs.
Jon Healey and Charles Duhigg

Music fans who copy CDs for all their pals, take note: It may be time to shed some friends.

Executives at EMI Group on Monday said they planned to begin rolling out CDs with technology designed to limit copying. The technology allows buyers to burn onto CDs only three full copies of a disc's songs, and the burned discs cannot be copied.

Sony BMG is heading even faster down the same road. About half the discs it releases in the United States today have the three-copy limit, and it plans to have a similar restriction on all its U.S. releases by the end of the year, said Thomas Hesse, president of the company's global digital music business.

The new CD technology still has some compatibility issues — most notably, the songs on the discs cannot be transferred directly to Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPods. Such limitations are one reason that the two other major record companies, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group Corp., have yet to make the switch to "secure" CDs.

Nor is the technology foolproof. Executives at EMI and Sony BMG said the point was to rein in copying by the everyday music fan, not to stop determined bootleggers.

Nevertheless, if fans do not rebel, the companies' discs are likely to chart the rest of the industry's path into secure CDs. The goal, label executives say, is to have anti-piracy technology on every track sold, whether it is encased in plastic or downloaded from an online store.

Many music executives blame digital piracy for the prolonged slump in CD sales. That piracy comes in two main forms: free downloading from Internet file-sharing networks and using CD burners to copy entire discs.

The file-sharing issue receives more headlines, but CD burning may be more prevalent. Hesse said a survey by market research firm NPD Group found that fans acquired twice as much music through burned CDs as they did through file sharing.

The labels have been selling secure CDs overseas for several years. But they have been reluctant to bring the discs to the United States until the technology was flexible enough to allow some degree of copying to computers and to blank CDs.

Before merging with Sony Music, Bertelsmann Music Group was the label most willing to experiment with secure CDs in the United States. Its releases included two hits: Velvet Revolver's "Contraband" in 2004 and Anthony Hamilton's "Comin' From Where I'm From" in 2003.

Those CDs used technology from SunnComm International Inc. of Phoenix that blocked the discs from being copied onto a computer. Instead, the discs contained a second set of tracks in Microsoft's secure Windows Media format that could be copied onto a computer, transferred to portable players and burned onto a limited number of CDs.

The technology left several notable holes in the security, however. The burned CDs had no electronic locks to prevent them from being copied an unlimited number of times, and hackers quickly found a way to circumvent SunnComm's technology entirely to remove all the restrictions.

Since then, SunnComm and three other companies have developed a more secure approach. The new versions are designed to allow a limited number of copies that can be burned onto CDs that cannot, in turn, be copied.

EMI plans to begin selling secure CDs in the U.S. in mid-July; the artists affected include 30 Seconds to Mars and OK Go.

Both EMI and Sony BMG plan to let buyers get around the CDs' restrictions so they can get tracks onto iPods. Executives said they were willing to sacrifice security in the name of playability.

Still, the technology leaves at least one analyst skeptical.

"Here you have a product with declining sales, and for the same price you want to decrease the potential value of it," said analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media. "Basically, music companies are saying, 'We're going to lock up the front door of the store now, but the back door is still remaining wide open.' "
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...,1538320.story



Macrovision Sues Two Companies
Matthew Fordahl

Macrovision Corp. has sued two companies it claims offer products that break its patented copyright protection technology and allow consumers to make unauthorized duplicates of commercial DVDs.

In the suit filed Tuesday in New York, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Macrovision said the companies - Sima Products Corp. and Interburn Enterprises Inc. - infringe on its patented copy control technology and also violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"The Sima and Interburn products have very limited commercial uses other than to circumvent Macrovision's copy protection technology and are marketed by Sima and Interburn for use in copying DVDs, among other types of media," Macrovision CEO Bill Krepick said.

The suit is seeking an order to halt the sale of Sima and Interburn products.

Sima, which is based in Oakmont, Pa., has not been served with a lawsuit and declined to comment, said Kathy Ruane, Sima's marketing manager. The company learned of the lawsuit from reporters, she added.

Sima has been selling duplication tools for the past eight to 10 years, she added.

"We have had correspondence back and forth with Macrovision - our lawyers and their lawyers," she said. "As far as we knew, it was correspondence."

Interburn did not return an e-mail message seeking comment. The company, according to its Web site, offers DVD X Copy, a program that allows copyright protected DVDs to be duplicated.

Missouri-based 321 Studios Inc., which created the program, lost several rounds in federal court and eventually retooled the software last year to remove the mechanism that cracked the copyright protection mechanism built into commercial DVDs. Interburn offers older versions of the 321 program.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomw ire.htm



Roars and Tears of Joy, But Not All Favor Verdict
Nick Madigan

The word streaked through the expectant, banner-waving throng in a flash: Michael Jackson had been found innocent of all charges.

A roar greeted the news outside the courthouse here on Monday, much like the jubilation that follows a Super Bowl touchdown. Had there been room on the crammed sidewalk, there might have been a joyous undulating wave.

Some broke into tears.

For most of the milling, dancing fans, the verdict was vindication, pure and sweet, a simple affirmation of their belief that the charges against Mr. Jackson were the result of a prosecutor's insistence on persecuting him.

"Victory! Victory!" Omar Reece hollered, barely able to contain his exuberance.

When Mr. Reece, 25, who traveled from Belleville, Ill., to show his support for the entertainer, calmed down he said Mr. Jackson had "proven himself time and again."

"People have been trying to stop him for 20 years, to destroy his character, to destroy his name, and each time he's come back better, stronger, unbreakable," Mr. Reece said. "This man came to court every single day, strong as can be. I'm ready to party. I'm going to party for a week." He then hugged Ronan Davie, 21, who twice came to Santa Maria from Glasgow to shout Mr. Jackson's praises.

"We've known he was innocent all along," Mr. Davie said before rushing off to hug someone else. Neither he nor Mr. Reece would consider the remotest possibility that Mr. Jackson had ever done something improper with a child.

Others did, though.

"It's sad, it's just sad," said Melissa Baez, 18, who had shrieked in apparent delight for the benefit of a television camera, but then admitted it had been a hollow response to the verdict in Mr. Jackson's favor.

"I think he's just going to be able to molest more boys if they're not going to be able to prove what he's done," Ms. Baez said.

Dennis Kemp, a sales manager for a supermarket here, summed up the hysteria around him: "a bunch of freaks," he said, barely concealing his scorn for Mr. Jackson's die- hard fans, and for the jury that found him not guilty. Mr. Kemp's contempt was fueled, he said, by the fact that he has two children of his own.

"Somebody's done this and they can get off, again," Mr. Kemp said. "The last time he paid somebody off. You'd think he'd be more discreet."

His friend John Carlson, a cookie distributor who has six children, was surprised that the jury did not find Mr. Jackson guilty of providing alcohol to minors, at the least. Mr. Carlson said sympathy for Mr. Jackson might have played a role.

"Maybe the jury thought his life was over," Mr. Carlson said. "Maybe it worked for him to have all that publicity about going to the hospital."

Mr. Jackson's frequent emergency room visits during the trial - on one occasion in early March he was more than an hour late for court and arrived in his pajamas - were among the many strange aspects of a trial that focused worldwide attention on the private and sometimes bizarre life of a fading and apparently fragile superstar.

Throughout the long trial - jury selection began in February - the one constant was the unwavering loyalty of Mr. Jackson's fans. Some of the fans took their devotion to extremes, and got into fights outside the courthouse with people who did not share their views, who taunted them for their faith in him. At least seven people were arrested during the course of the trial, mostly for misdemeanors like disturbing the peace.

Some shouting matches erupted Monday morning after it was learned that the jury was ready with a verdict.

"Guilty!" one man shouted, interrupting another, Morris Griffin, who was preaching the benefits of love and peace and mercy toward Mr. Jackson.

"I got a live one here," Mr. Griffin replied, offended at the suggestion that Mr. Jackson might face time in prison. "We're here to make sure they find him not guilty. Shame on you if you are a Michael Jackson hater."

Mr. Griffin, an African-American who identified himself as a community activist in Los Angeles, said the accusations against Mr. Jackson were prompted by a misunderstanding of his race.

"Black folks are accustomed to sleeping in the same bed, especially if you're five or six deep and you live in a two-bedroom house because it's all we can afford," he said. "Michael is accustomed to that kind of behavior, you know, slumber-type parties."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/national/14scene.html



Justices Expand Rights to Experiment With Patented Drugs
Andrew Pollack

The Supreme Court gave pharmaceutical companies broad latitude yesterday to study and experiment with drugs covered by other companies' patents, a decision that may help speed the development of medical treatments.

The decision means drug companies can do much of the laboratory, animal and human testing needed to win approval of a drug even if the drug would infringe on the patent on another product. However, the new drug could not be sold until the patent on the other drug expired.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous court, said that an existing exemption from patent infringement "provides a wide berth for the use of patented drugs" in developing other pharmaceuticals.

The decision reversed a federal appeals court ruling that the exemption should be interpreted narrowly.

E. Joshua Rosenkranz, the lawyer who argued for the victorious side, said the ruling gave drug companies a head start on developing medicines to be ready to sell as soon as the patents on other drugs expired.

"It gave enormous latitude to conduct the testing necessary to bring therapies to needy patients," Mr. Rosenkranz, who is with the Heller Ehrman law firm in New York, said in an interview.

Sarah Lenz Lock, a lawyer for AARP, a consumer group representing older Americans, also praised the decision, saying it would "speed new drugs to market and lower costs of drugs to consumers."

The case pitted Integra LifeSci-ences, a New Jersey company that had patented a class of compounds, against Merck of Germany, which had paid for a scientist to test some of the compounds for potential use as drugs. Integra sued Merck in 1996.

A jury ruled in 2000 that Merck had infringed on Integra's patents and ordered Merck to pay $15 million, which was later reduced to $6.4 million. The appeals court also sided with Integra. But the Supreme Court ruled for Merck, which is not related to the American drug company of the same name.

The Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of the new ruling.

Mauricio A. Flores, a lawyer representing Integra, said the Supreme Court decision mainly reversed an interpretation of the law by a lower court but did not deal with the specific evidence in this case. He said Integra was still confident that the jury verdict that Merck had infringed would still be upheld.

"This case isn't over," he said. "We live to fight another day."

Mr. Rosenkranz, representing Merck, said the company expected to prevail.

"The Supreme Court pulled every one of the props out from under Integra's position," he said.

The closely watched case had split the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Many big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies submitted briefs on the side of Merck, saying that a narrow interpretation of the exemption from patent infringement would slow drug development.

The drug companies were joined in their argument by the Justice Department and by some consumer groups that often find themselves on the opposite side of issues from the pharmaceutical industry.

Backing Integra were many biotechnology companies that make patented equipment and chemicals used in drug research, as well as some universities, which often invent new research techniques.

They argued that granting a broad exemption from patent infringement would basically put them out of business since their products, which include sophisticated chemical testing machines and enzymes that manipulate genes and proteins, have little use outside of drug research.

Some lawyers for these companies also said it was hypocritical of drug companies, which constantly assert the importance of strong patent protection in spurring innovation, to argue that they should be permitted to infringe upon patents held by others.

The Supreme Court said in a footnote that this case was about research using patented drugs themselves, not about tools used to study those drugs. Therefore, it did not address whether drug companies could use research tools without worrying about patents.

"Research tools were not at issue and this decision isn't a license for people to infringe research tool patents," said Edward R. Reines, who filed a brief on behalf of two tool makers, Applera and Isis Pharmaceuticals.

Robert W. Esmond, a Washington lawyer whose firm filed a brief on behalf of another research tool maker, Vaccinex, said the decision "leads to uncertainty over whether or not those patents are enforceable."

The case revolves around a clause in the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, which set the ground rules for generic drugs. To enable generic drugs to reach the market as soon as the patent on the branded drug expired, the act permitted generic companies to make and test their drugs while the patent was still in force.

The clause permits drug companies to infringe on patents "solely for uses reasonably related to the development and submission of information" to the Food and Drug Administration. But it is not specifically restricted to generic drugs, so there have been questions about how far it extends.

The appeals court that handles patent cases ruled in 2003 that the exemption should be very narrow, covering, in effect, clinical trials but not earlier work like test-tube experiments to determine which of several compounds might be the best drug candidate.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the exemption applied to more than clinical trials.

"There is simply no room in the statute for excluding certain information from the exemption on the basis of the phase of research in which it is developed," Justice Scalia wrote in the 15-page decision.

He also wrote that the law "leaves adequate space for experimentation and failure on the road to regulatory approval," so that work on compounds that do not move forward into clinical trials can still be protected from infringement.

Still, the court said that basic scientific research on a compound, performed without intent to develop a drug, would not be covered. Some lawyers said that questions of what is covered may still have to be decided case by case. Sometimes, the distinction between a research tool and a drug compound, for instance, cannot easily be made.

"They are saying that this exemption goes only so far upstream," said Stephen B. Maebius, a patent lawyer at Foley & Lardner in Washington who represents pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies but was not involved in this case.

In the 1980's, a class of peptides, or small proteins, was discovered by scientists at the Burnham Institute in San Diego. Integra later obtained the patent rights to the peptides.

In 1994, David Cheresh, a scientist at the Scripps Research Institute, across the street from Burnham, discovered that a particular protein was involved in building blood vessels. So a compound that blocks the protein might be useful in blocking the blood supply to tumors.

It turned out that peptides similar to those discovered at Burnham did that. Merck paid Dr. Cheresh to test some of them and one is now in clinical trials to treat cancer.

The patent on the peptides is expected to expire before that drug comes to market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/bu...4bizcourt.html



Real money

Firm Settles Spyware Suit for $7.5m
Nate Mook

Internet marketer Intermix Media, which was sued in April by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer for installing spyware and adware on computers that came in contact with its advertisements, has settled the case for $7.5 million. Intermix also said it would stop distributing its adware, toolbar and redirect programs.

The penalty will be paid over a period of three years, Intermix said, but Spitzer spokesman Brad Maione told reporters that no agreement had been made and the investigation continues. Intermix said it reached "an agreement in principle" that would have to be approved by the courts.

"These fraudulent programs foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers' efforts to remove them from their computers," Spitzer said in April. "These issues can serve to be a hindrance to the growth of e-commerce."

Spitzer has made it a point of his tenure as New York's attorney general to go after what he sees as corporate wrongdoing against consumers. He has successfully taken on Wall Street and several insurance industry firms.

Spitzer has now turned his attention to the Internet, as he argues companies like Intermix are a threat to the success of e- commerce.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Firm...75m/1118853575



Come On Music Biz, Embrace P2P
Bruce Gain

File-swapping networks alone are not to blame for the recording industry's woes and might plausibly be converted into legitimate channels for distributing music, one of Europe's most influential economic bodies has concluded.

In a report issued Monday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -- a Paris-based alliance of developed nations -- also suggested that it's difficult to establish a link between piracy and the music industry's shrinking revenues.

The report said a "re-evaluation" of music distribution needs to happen to achieve a balance between consumers' desire to access digital music and the industry's copyright protection concerns.

"Online technologies could evolve in a manner in which unauthorized use of copyright works are finally transformed into legitimate businesses," said Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an OECD economist and one of the report's authors.

The report said it is difficult to establish a causal connection between the rise of file sharing and a drop in music sales. While the music industry's revenues fell 20 percent from 1999 to 2003, other factors, such as illegal CD copying, might have played a role in the decline, the OECD said.

The OECD is an international organization that promotes democracy and free trade. It was formed to administer the Marshall plan after WWII.

The report recognized the value of fledgling online stores like Apple's iTunes. Last year represented a "turning point" for legal music downloads, the study said.

However, online music distribution only accounted for 1 to 2 percent of music revenues in 2004. The OECD expects to see that climb to 5 to 10 percent of revenues. But growing online sales will depend on expanding catalogs to appease demand and sway illegal downloads, the OECD said.

The report also suggested exploring new distribution methods, beyond what the OECD called traditional "fee per economic unit" transactions.

Instead of paying a set fee to download an individual song, music downloads might become part of a subscription package from a cable television company, internet service provider or mobile-phone carrier, the OECD said.

The OECD report said P2P networks have legitimate uses beyond trading copyright music and movies. P2P networking is a "new and innovative technology which finds increasingly useful applications in new communication and other services," the report said.

"We are looking at different value chains and business models," said Wunsch-Vincent. "We also recognize that this is not only about the music industry, it is also about the ISPs, telecom operators, the computer industry and many other players. The interests of the different players are now starting to converge."

Not surprisingly, the study's findings were questioned by the music industry.

Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry -- the international equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America -- described the report's findings as "mixed."

On the plus side, the report recognized the problem of piracy and the value of legitimate, copy-protected online music services, Strain said.

And while Strain said P2P networks could have a role in the music industry's future, right now the bulk of activity is sharing copyright files -- a situation not reflected in the report, Strain said.

"The report does not recognize the vast proportion of the use of P2P services that is infringing copyright," said Strain. "(It) fails to acknowledge the extent of the damage that this does to the legitimate industry and oversimplifies the issues surrounding DRMs (digital rights management) in the development of the online music sector."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67820,00.html



Hollywood's Boogeyman Is Getting Bigger
Alex Mindlin

As Hollywood moves to fight online film piracy, newly released tracking results show that more and more users have large video files on their home computers.

The NPD Group, a market research company, found an increase of about 60 percent over last year in the number of households with video files of 150 megabytes or larger, about the size needed to store a half-hour television program. And these households averaged about 16 such files, nearly twice as many as last year. The data come from monitoring computers of 40,000 volunteers.

Some files might have come from movie-downloading services like CinemaNow, said Russ Crupnick, president of NPD's music and movies division. But others were clearly not obtained legitimately, he said, including many movies not yet shown in theaters. "You see things on people's computers that there's no legitimate way they belong there," he said, because they had not yet been commercially released.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/te...dSh7s1H4/cvJLg



Mixtape Crackdown Sends a Mixed Message
Kelefa Sanneh

Late on the night of May 13, a hip-hop promoter named Justo Faison died in a car crash in Virginia. And last week, on June 8, the East Village record and video shop Mondo Kim's was raided by the New York Police Department. What do these two stories have in common? Here's a hint: it's cheap, popular and illegal.

Faison was the industry's most energetic promoter of hip-hop mixtapes, the unlicensed compilations (almost always on CD, despite the name) of unreleased new songs, current hits, never-to-be-released freestyles and unofficial remixes. To keep (or get) hard-core listeners excited, rappers are expected to maintain a mixtape presence by supplying DJ's with tracks and also by collaborating with them to release "hosted by" mixtapes. Thanks to Faison, the mixtape world even had its own annual ceremony: he created and produced the yearly Mixtape Awards, a fittingly raucous celebration; this year's attendees included Sean Combs, who won a lifetime achievement award, and the Game.

In the days after Faison's death, rappers and DJ's paid their respects, tribute rhymes started circulating online and a fund was started to help pay for his burial and to aid his family. Contributions have come in from many leading hip-hop record labels including Atlantic, TVT, Tommy Boy and Interscope.

While artists and record labels were celebrating Faison's life and work, the Recording Industry Association of America was finding another way to pay tribute to the popularity of mixtapes. On May 12, the day before Faison died, it announced a crackdown on stores that sold "pirated CD's," a term that refers to "mixed tapes and compilation CD's featuring one or more artists," among other products. (The association's taxonomy of piracy defines "counterfeit recordings" as illegal knockoffs of existing commercial CD's, and "bootleg recordings" as illegal recordings of live performances or broadcasts.)

In last week's raid officers confiscated hundreds of CD's, seemingly concentrating on the shop's well-stocked section of hip-hop mixtapes. Five employees were arrested and spent the night in jail. All five were charged with failure to disclose origin of a recording in the second degree and trademark counterfeiting in the third degree.

After the raid, Brad Buckles, the recording association's executive vice president for anti-piracy, released a statement saying that the Police Department's "steadfast commitment to the fight against piracy has stamped out yet another significant illegal operation." It continued, "Retailers who are making money on the backs of musicians and record companies by selling pirated CD's should know that this is absolutely no way to conduct a business." Reached by telephone yesterday, Mr. Buckles confirmed that an association representative was present during the raid.

Note that phrase "musicians and record companies." In its war against illegal music distribution, the association has often treated these two groups as one and the same, arguing that piracy-happy fans are hurting the artists they love. But when it comes to hip-hop mixtapes, it is in a trickier position: the artists themselves often help produce the same mixtapes that the association is trying to squelch, and shrewd record labels long ago figured out that mixtapes can help drive sales of conventional CD's.

So while record labels donate money to honor a man who helped promote mixtapes, the trade group representing the labels cracks down on those who sell them. And who goes to jail? Well, suffice it to say that the police haven't arrested any of the major-label record executives who profit from the hype generated by mixtapes.

The raid on Mondo Kim's (the East Village location of the Kim's Video chain) was by no means the first of its kind. The recording association has been campaigning against mixtapes for a decade; the organization's 1995 year-end report warned of "the growing popularity of illicit DJ mixes in CD format." The Kim's 5 (has someone printed T-shirts yet?) are probably lucky that they work in a record store frequented by music-industry types (and, yes, the occasional newspaper reporter). When some shop in the Bronx is raided, those hapless clerks can expect far less press coverage.

Oddly enough, two people charged in the Kim's case are fairly well-known musicians. One employee arrested was Chuck Bettis, a familiar figure in the experimental-music scene and a veteran of the cult postpunk bands the Meta-Matics and All Scars. Another was Craig Willingham, known as I-Sound, whose discography includes "Music Is a Hungry Ghost" (City Slang), a collaboration with the German electronic group To Rococo Rot.

The Kim's case highlights the strange position of hip-hop mixtapes, which have been making a bumpy journey toward the mainstream. There was a time when mixtape fans had little choice but to hit the streets in search of fly-by-night salesmen and out-of-the-way stalls. But when an artist as popular as 50 Cent is releasing new material directly (and sometimes exclusively) to mixtapes, and when hip-hop crews like the Diplomats are supplementing their underground mixtapes with official (that is, licensed and legal) mixtapes, then the boundary between street and store gets harder to maintain.

Nowadays, hip-hop fans across the country can buy mixtapes online, although perhaps it is only a matter of time before those Web sites, too, are raided. Meanwhile, some record shops are trying to find creative ways to keep the police and the recording association at bay. After the Kim's raid, perhaps more retailers will follow the lead of one hip-hop shop (which shall remain nameless), where mixtapes are on display but not, strictly speaking, on sale. To get one, you have to buy a CD holder, priced at $7.99 but worth a small fraction of that; with every purchase, you get a "free" mixtape.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/ar...ic/16sann.html



The Downloaders Strike Back
Jimmy Guterman

LIKE THOUSANDS of patriotic Americans, I spent Memorial Day weekend illegally downloading a copy of the new ''Star Wars" movie. I was shocked by how quickly I was able to locate a copy on the Net (less than five minutes) and how long it took for the whole thing to end up on my computer (two days and change -- talk about holiday weekend traffic). There were no secret passwords, no locations known only to the cognoscenti. All I had to do was Point, Google, Pilfer.

I won't pull out the ''I am a journalist and I was just doing research" defense. I acknowledge the indefensibility of my actions. Just because ''The Phantom Menace" and ''Attack of the Clones" insulted the intelligence of anyone over the age of 4 doesn't mean I have the right to swipe George Lucas's latest.

Others are playing the relative-morality card, though. Read the discussion groups on the websites that host free ''Star Wars" and you can read hundreds of energetic, typo-ridden postings from fans convinced that, as one put it, ''Lucas owes us." One Net service that uses the popular file-sharing program BitTorrent serves only unreleased material by established performers, as if distributing unreleased material without permission or payment is somehow more moral than distributing officially released material without permission or payment.

Looking to the Internet for a moral education is a dubious activity, but the new digital world -- in which copyrighted material can be had either for free (unofficially) or at a greatly discounted price (through licensed download services) -- makes me wonder what content is worth nowadays. The time when you had to pay $18.99 to own one great song on an otherwise mediocre CD is gone. Thanks to the licensed download services, you can get a digital copy of that one good song for less than a buck. Maybe this will encourage performers to put more than one song worth buying on a record.

Although the record companies entered this new era kicking, screaming, and litigating, they have started to accept it, experimenting with a variety of innovations to make physical product worth owning. On the film side, dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban is leading an experiment to have films open in theaters and be available on DVD the same day, at a sliding scale of prices. The age of digital media is upon us, and the film companies should stop hunting down individual filesharers (like, er, me) and just keep innovating until they find the right technology and business models.

So, the other night, after everyone else in my family was asleep, I snuck downstairs, put on my headphones, and launched my pirated ''Revenge of the Sith." It looked great, but I closed the file after less than three minutes. Watching Jedi joust across a laptop screen is not the way to enjoy something as loud, fast, and blunt as a ''Star Wars" film. I could transfer the file to a DVD and view it on a larger television screen, but if I want the real experience of seeing the movie, I have no choice but to see it at a theater. Forget legal arguments or feelings of guilt. Paying to see ''Revenge of the Sith" on the big screen is the best way to enjoy this sort of big entertainment -- at least until downloaders figure out how to steal entire movie theaters.
http://www.boston.com/business/perso...s_strike_back/



Enter Avalanche: P2P Filesharing From Microsoft

Researchers at Microsoft's computer science lab in Cambridge have developed a peer-to- peer filesharing system that they say overcomes the scheduling problems associated with existing distribution protocols such as Bit Torrent.

The researchers claim download times are between 20-30 per cent faster, using their network coding approach, than on systems that only code at the server, and between 200 and 300 per cent faster than distributing un-encoded information.

Naturally, Microsoft is very keen to stress that this technology should be used for distributing legitimate content. It even put that in italics in the press material.

The basic principle of the system, dubbed Avalanche, is pretty much the same as BitTorrent. Certainly the problem it solves is: a large file needs to be distributed to many people. One server does not have the bandwidth to deal with all that traffic, so you need to find another way of getting the file to everyone who needs it.

If the file is broken up into smaller pieces, these can be distributed among a smaller number of people, who can then share the pieces to make sure they all eventually have the complete file.

The problem with this approach, as anyone who has ever tried to download content on the system - legitimate or otherwise - knows, is that towards the end of a download, any one downloader could have a while to wait for the particular pieces he needs. As the number of receivers increases, scheduling traffic also becomes more complex, and the whole process slows down.

Microsoft Research's approach gets around this by re-encoding all the pieces, so that each one that is shared is actually a linear combination of all the pieces, fed into a particular function. The blocks are then distributed with a tag that describes the parameters it contains.

Once you have downloaded a few of these, you can generate new combinations from the ones you have, and send those out to your peers. Collect enough of these pieces, and you will have enough information to reconstruct the whole file. Even if you don't have all the original pieces distributed by the person who held the original version of the file.

Peers can make use of any new piece, instead of having to wait for specific chunks that are missing. This means no one peer can become a bottle neck, since no piece is more important than any other. It also means overall network traffic is lower, since the same information doesn't have to travel back and forth multiple times.

Nifty, no?

Have a read of the research paper here (pdf), if this is your kind of thing.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200...ing_microsoft/



Censorship

'Freedom' a Taboo Word on Chinese Internet
Elaine Kurtenbach

Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, had better choose their words carefully - the censors are watching.

Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities - such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

"Prohibited language in text, please delete," the message says.

However, the restrictions appear to apply only to the subject line of such entries. Writing them into the text, with a more innocuous subject heading, seems to be no problem.

Microsoft's Chinese staff could not be reached immediately for comment. However, a spokesman at the tech giant's headquarters in Seattle acknowledged that the company is cooperating with the Chinese government to censor its Chinese- language Web portal.

Microsoft and its Chinese business partner, government-funded Shanghai Alliance Investment, work with authorities to omit certain forbidden language, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director for MSN.

But he added, "I don't have access to the list at this point so I can't really comment specifically on what's there."

Online tests found that apart from politically sensitive words, obscenities and sexual references also are banned.

MSN Spaces, which offers free blog space, is connected to Microsoft's MSN China portal. The portal was launched on May 26, and some 5 million blogs have since been created, Microsoft said.

The Chinese government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material deemed subversive.

Although details of the authorities' efforts are kept secret, users of many China-based Web portals are prevented from accessing sites deemed subversive by the government.

A search on Google for such topics as Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the banned group Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama or the China Democracy Party inevitably leads to a "site cannot be found" message.

Internet-related companies are obliged to accept such limitations as a condition of doing business in China. And government-installed filtering tools, registration requirements and other surveillance are in place to ensure the rules are enforced.

Recently, the government demanded that Web site owners register with authorities by June 30 or face fines.

Sohn said heavy government censorship is accepted as part of the regulatory landscape in China, and the world's largest software company believes its services still can foster expression in the country.

"We're in business in lots of countries. I think every time you go into a market you are faced with a different regulatory environment and you have to go make a choice as a business," he said. "Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here."

The consequences of defying government limits can be severe: at least 54 people have been jailed for posting essays or other content deemed subversive online.

The international media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has protested the online limits, sending letters to top executives of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and other companies urging them to lobby Beijing for greater freedom of expression.

"In terms of the reality of the situation, those business deals are going to continue as globalization expands," said Tala Dowlatshahi, a spokeswoman for the group. "But we want to make sure that pressure is being put on the companies to pressure the Chinese government to ensure a more democratic process."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME



Activist Faces Charges Over Web Posts
Audra Ang

A Chinese political activist goes on trial next week on subversion charges after posting essays and lyrics to a punk song on the Internet, a human rights group said Thursday.

Zhang Lin was detained Jan. 29 in his hometown of Bengbu, in the eastern province of Anhui, after returning from Beijing, where he unsuccessfully tried to attend a memorial service for ousted Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang.

Zhang goes on trial next week for posting almost 200 essays on the Internet, including one that quotes lyrics from a punk song that authorities say incite subversion of state power, Human Rights in China said in a statement.

Zhang has gone on hunger strikes twice to protest his detention and physical abuse while in captivity, the group said.

China's communist government frequently files subversion charges against political activists. A conviction can carry a penalty of up to life in prison.

Zhao, who died Jan. 17 at age 85, was forced from power in 1989 after sympathizing with pro-democracy protesters who occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Authorities detained dissidents trying attending his memorial service to prevent expressions of discontent.

HRIC said no mention was made in Zhang's indictment about his attempt to pay his respects to Zhao.

Instead, the document issued May 23 by prosecutors in Bengbu said Zhang "used the Internet ... to openly disseminate language that misrepresents and denigrates the national authorities and the socialist system, and which incites subversion of state power and the overthrow of the socialist system."

Zhang, who has been imprisoned several times for pro-democracy activities, posted 195 articles between August 2003 and January this year, the group said.

According to the indictment, his work "damaged national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, spread falsehoods, disturbed social order and damaged social stability," HRIC said.

One of his essays quotes lyrics from a song by the Chinese punk group Pangu: "The Yellow River should run dry, this society should collapse, this system should be destroyed, this race should become extinct, this country should perish."

Liu Qing, HRIC's president, said authorities should withdraw their case against Zhang.

"The use of the words of a punk rock song to charge Zhang Lin with subversion shows the lengths to which the Chinese authorities feel compelled to go in persecuting and suppressing those who exercise freedom of expression," Liu said in a statement.

"Zhang Lin has been subjected to constant persecution over the past 16 years, even though his chief aspiration has always been the welfare of China and the Chinese people."

Zhang was introduced to dissident writings while a student at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University in the 1970s. During the 1989 movement, Zhang led student hunger strikes in Bengbu and was later sentenced to two years in prison on charges of "counterrevolutionary incitement."

He was sentenced to three years in a labor camp after cofounding an independent labor rights group, HRIC said.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...%20Dissi dent



Microsoft Censors Blogs at Chinese Portal
Curt Woodward

Microsoft Corp. is cooperating with China's government to censor the company's newly launched Chinese-language Web portal, a spokesman for the tech giant said.

The policy affects Web logs, or blogs, created through the MSN Spaces service, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN.

Microsoft and its government-funded Chinese business partner work with authorities to omit certain forbidden language, Sohn said, declining to provide specific examples.

"I don't have access to the list at this point so I can't really comment specifically on what's there," he told The Associated Press.

On Monday, Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, said bloggers were not allowed to post terms to MSN Spaces such as "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence." Attempts to enter those words were said to generate a message saying the language was prohibited.

MSN Spaces, which offers free blog space, is connected to Microsoft's MSN China portal. The portal was launched on May 26, and some 5 million blogs have since been created, Microsoft said.

China's government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material deemed subversive.

It also recently demanded that Web site owners register with authorities by June 30 or face fines.

Chinese censors scour Internet bulletin boards and blogs for sensitive material, and block access to violators. Sites that let the public post comments are told to censor themselves or face penalties.

Sohn said heavy-handed government censorship is accepted as part of the regulatory landscape in China, and the world's largest software firm believes its services still can foster expression in the country.

"Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here," he said.

Tala Dowlatshahi, a spokeswoman for the international media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, said such arrangements are common when large technology companies do business in China.

The journalists' group has sent letters to the presidents of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco Systems and other companies urging executives to pressure the Chinese government for reforms on free expression.

But the tempting market for Chinese consumers can quiet such pleas, Dowlatshahi said.

"In terms of the reality of the situation, those business deals are going to continue as globalization expands," she said. "But we want to make sure that pressure is being put on the companies to pressure the Chinese government to ensure a more democratic process."

Sohn said filters on domestic products also prevent some language - generally profane or sexually explicit references - from being posted to the Web.

"We're in business in lots of countries. I think every time you go into a market you are faced with a different regulatory environment and you have to go make a choice as a business," he said.

MSN China is a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd., an investment company funded by the Chinese government. Shanghai Alliance invests in new economic development in Shanghai and other parts of China.

China's estimated online population is 87 million, second only to the United States.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS



MS Files Suit Against Software Pirates
Ed Oswald

Microsoft took action on Wednesday by filing four lawsuits against companies in Virginia and California, alleging that the companies were engaging in the sale of pirated copies of Microsoft software. The company was tipped off by calls from consumers to its piracy hotline, 1-800-RU-LEGIT.

Microsoft identified the companies as #9 Software, who had 112 complaints across 35 states and Canada, CEO Microsystems with 66 complaints in 20 states, and Super Supplier, with 18 complaints from people in 13 states.

"We have an obligation to protect consumers and legitimate resellers," Mary Jo Schrade, senior attorney at Microsoft said in prepared remarks. "In filing these lawsuits, we hope to curb the amount of pirated and counterfeit software on the market and keep illegal software from finding its way into the hands of unknowing consumers and businesses."

According to Microsoft, the companies named in the lawsuits were warned that their actions were breaking the law and were given an opportunity to rectify the situation. However, the companies ignored Microsoft's requests and continued to sell unauthorized copies of its software.

"We'll continue to do what we can to educate our channel partners and consumers about the risk associated with selling, buying or using pirated and counterfeit items," Schrade said. "As a last resort, we'll take legal action to help ensure that software identified as Microsoft software actually is genuine, legitimate software."

Also named in the lawsuits alleging copyright and trademark infringement were Winston Group, Inc. and East Outlet, LLC. A second suit against #9 Software was filed alleging the company was counterfeiting COA labels.

COA, or certificate of authenticity, labels are the holographic stickers on the back of Microsoft software that are intended to confirm to consumers that a product is genuine. The labels also include the product key in case the operating system requires reinstallation.

Legitimate resellers of Microsoft software applauded Wednesday's legal moves.

"Consumers benefit tremendously from using genuine software and shouldn't be duped into believing that pirated technology is the same as the real thing," Robert Russell, president of Virginia-based Ill Open Technologies said. "Piracy and counterfeiting are unfair to our customers and us. Microsoft is doing the right thing."
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...tes/1118850575



ICANN Creating Virtual Red-Light District
Anick Jesdanun

A red-light district tentatively cleared for construction on the Internet - the ".xxx" domain - is being billed by backers as giving the $12 billion online porn industry a great opportunity to clean up its act.

A distinct online sector for the salacious, one with rules aimed at forbidding trickery, will reduce the chances of Internet users accidentally stumbling on porn sites, they argue. If only it were so simple:

Zoning in cyberspace has always been a daunting proposition, and participation in the porn domain will be voluntary. Critics wonder why ".xxx" got the OK at all when so many other proposals sit unaddressed, some for years.

Nearly five years after rejecting a similar proposal, the Internet's key oversight body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, voted 6-3 this month to proceed with ".xxx."

ICANN staff will now craft a contract with ICM Registry Inc., the Jupiter, Fla., company that made the bid. If the board and ultimately the U.S. Commerce Department approve it, ".xxx" names could appear in use by the year's end.

The market unquestionably exists: Two in five Internet users visited an adult site in April, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix. The company said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all surfing time involved an adult site.

As envisioned, ICM would charge $60 for each of up to 500,000 names it expects to register, $10 of which would go to a nonprofit organization that would, among other things, educate parents about safe surfing for children.

The nonprofit, run by representatives of adult Web sites, free-speech, privacy and child-advocacy concerns, would determine registration eligibility.

Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new ".xxx" domain name. And that will reduce the effectiveness of software filters set up to simply block all ".xxx" names.

The ".xxx" domain "legitimizes this group, and it gives false hope to parents," said Patrick Trueman, senior legal counsel at the Family Research Council and a former Justice Department official in charge of obscenity prosecutions.

The adult entertainment industry is also hardly behind ".xxx" as a group. Many of its webmasters consider the domain "the first step toward driving the adult Internet into a ghetto very much like zoning laws have driven adult stores into the outskirts," said Mark Kernes, senior editor at the trade monthly Adult Video News.

ICM insists it would fight any government efforts to compel its use by adult Web sites, but the existence of ".xxx" would certainly make the prospect easier.

"There are going to be pressures" to mandate it once available, said Marjorie Heins, coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at New York University's law school. Federal lawmakers have proposed such requirements in the past.

Robert Corn-Revere, a lawyer hired by ICM to address free-speech issues, said the company has pledged $250,000 for a legal defense fund to keep ".xxx" voluntary, and he notes that courts have struck down efforts to make movie ratings mandatory.

"Where governments have tried to use private labeling systems as proxies for regulation, courts have always held those measures unconstitutional," he said.

Even if it's voluntary, supporters say, adult sites will have incentives to use ".xxx."

"If the carrot's big enough, you're going to get sites in there," said Parry Aftab, an Internet safety expert who served as an informal adviser on ".xxx."

Stuart Lawley, ICM's chairman and president, said use of ".xxx" could protect companies from prosecution under a 2003 federal law that bars sites from tricking children into viewing pornography - as ".xxx" would clearly denote an adult site.

All sites using ".xxx" would be required to follow yet-to-be-written "best practices" guidelines, such as prohibitions against trickery through spamming and malicious scripts.

Lawley said those requirements could make credit-card issuers more confident about accepting charges. The online porn industry currently faces higher fees because some sites engage in fraud and customers often deny authorizing payments.

But given the limited effectiveness of a voluntary ".xxx" for filtering, Internet filtering expert Seth Finkelstein calls ".xxx" no more than a mechanism "to extract fees from bona fide pornographers and domain name speculators." (ICANN also gets an unspecified cut of each registration fee.)

Even if it were mandatory, it wouldn't be foolproof.

A domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a site's actual numeric Internet address. David Burt, a spokesman for filtering vendor Secure Computing Corp., said a child could simply use the numeric address when the ".xxx" equivalent gets blocked.

Better technologies exist, he said, including a little-used self-rating system that lets Web sites broadcast whether they contain nudity, violence or foul language, along with the specific forms, such as presence of genitals or passionate kissing.

Burt also favors a ".kids" domain that would serve as a safe haven for children. The U.S. government has approved one under ".us," but support has been cool, with only about two dozen ".kids.us" sites listed.

ICM proposed both ".xxx" and ".kids" in 2000, but ICANN board members resisted them for fear of getting into content control. Instead, ICANN approved ".info," ".biz," and ".museum" and four others.

But pressure has continued to mount for ICANN to expand the number of domain names, and last year it reopened bidding.

ICM resubmitted its application for ".xxx" only, this time structuring it with a policy- setting organization to free ICANN of that task.

That did the trick.

ICANN board member Joichi Ito, who backed ".xxx," wrote in his Web journal that the decision wasn't an endorsement of any type of content or moral belief but a chance for "creating incentives for legitimate adult entertainment sites to come together and fight `bad actors.'"

Anti-porn activist Donna Rice Hughes, however, remains unconvinced.

"They are not going to give up their `.com' addresses," she said of porn sites. "It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that one out."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS



From April

Will TV Indecency Ban Become Censorship?
Frazier Moore

In the minds of many viewers, the current anti-indecency crusade isn't just out to make the airwaves safe for families and children. Another likely goal is to punish TV for its brazen smut-peddling.

With a four-letter word here and a "wardrobe malfunction" there, surely someone in power - the executives, the stars, the creators? - deserves a good thrashing. Viewers may not agree on what indecency is or how to fix it. But they want someone to answer for TV's sins.

No wonder politicians are climbing over one another to yank the chain of the media elite. Cracking down on TV content is the latest rage in the culture wars. And who wants to be seen as a war resister?

Apparently not Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., who recently advocated criminal prosecution for indecent material aired by broadcasters.

A less draconian proposal would expand the purview of the Federal Communications Commission beyond over-the-air broadcasting to add cable and satellite programming - which would place shows from such networks as MTV, FX and even HBO (with its F-word-riddled drama "Deadwood") under the thumb of the feds.

And don't forget a bill passed by the House that would hike existing indecency fines from $32,500 to as much as $500,000 per infraction.

"There's a herd mentality when the issue of indecent programming comes up," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "You can say, `Well, the networks deserve it.' But underneath it all is the First Amendment, and there are very few champions in Congress to warn us about the dangerous consequences of encouraging censorship."

At least one legislator, Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has voiced such warnings. And striking back against indecency zealots, he has introduced a bill that would clarify the FCC's authority for policing content as being limited to broadcast television and radio - not cable, satellite or Internet fare. He calls it the Stamp Out Censorship Act.

"We don't need to have United States government commissars telling the American people what they can watch," says Sanders, who is concerned that already, even without new restrictive laws in force, spooked broadcasters are erring on the side of caution. In other words, censoring themselves.

He points to the 66 ABC affiliates that opted not to air the patriotic war film "Saving Private Ryan" last November because of fears that the FCC might rule certain swear words in the film to be indecent (it didn't). And last spring, some PBS stations removed the image of a nude lithograph from "Antiques Roadshow."

Not too much further down this slippery slope, Sanders warns, "you might find some people here in Congress and some right-wing fundamentalists arguing that, in the midst of the war on terrorism, attacks against the president of the United States border on indecency."

A poll released last week reported broad public support for curbing media indecency. But the Pew Research Center survey found something else: By 48 to 41 percent, respondents saw greater danger in the government imposing undue restrictions on the entertainment industry than from harmful material the industry might dispense.

Media scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney understands the public's concern over vulgar programming. But he has his own theory for the underlying cause of it: fewer and bigger media owners.

"Companies that produce the most vulgar fare," he says, "are News Corp. (owner of the Fox network), Viacom (owner of MTV and more than 185 Infinity Radio stations, as well as CBS, which aired Janet Jackson's Super Bowl flashdance) and Clear Channel (with more than 1,200 radio stations). What these companies have found is, once you gobble up a lot of media outlets, the least expensive way to generate an audience is through vulgarity.

"It's a commercially driven phenomenon," says McChesney, creator of a media reform Web site. "A solution to the problem would be more local ownership and more competition. Let the system work through the problem, without having any censorship."

Much to everyone's surprise, the public rose up against the FCC's efforts to oblige Big Media with eased limits on how many outlets a conglomerate could own. Thanks to citizens' outcry, portions of the rules passed by the FCC two years ago were overturned by Congress. Then a U.S. Court of Appeals tossed out most of the rest.

Says Sanders, "I think you're gonna see the same thing here: `Please, don't tell me what I can watch, especially when I'm paying for the privilege of watching it.'"

He looks for continued public pressure to buck the government-assisted trend toward bigger media conglomerates. And he expects more people to recognize that, however badly they may want to punish the media, censorship will backfire by punishing them worse.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stom wire.htm



Victim of “Republican ideology”

Public broadcasting targeted by House

Panel Seeks to End CPB's Funding Within 2 Years
Paul Farhi

A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster."

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.

In all, the cuts would represent the most drastic cutback of public broadcasting since Congress created the nonprofit CPB in 1967. The CPB funds are particularly important for small TV and radio stations and account for about 15 percent of the public broadcasting industry's total revenue.

Expressing alarm, public broadcasters and their supporters in Congress interpreted the move as an escalation of a Republican-led campaign against a perceived liberal bias in their programming. That effort was initiated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's own chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson.

"Americans overwhelmingly see public broadcasting as an unbiased information source," Rep. David Obey (Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said in a statement. "Perhaps that's what the GOP finds so offensive about it. Republican leaders are trying to bring every facet of the federal government under their control. . . . Now they are trying to put their ideological stamp on public broadcasting."

But the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services, and education asserted that the panel was simply making choices among various worthy government programs, and that no political message was intended.

The subcommittee's action, which came on a voice vote, doesn't necessarily put Big Bird on the Endangered Species List. House members could restore funding as the appropriations bill moves along or, more likely, when the House and Senate meet to reconcile budget legislation later this year. The Senate has traditionally been a stronger ally of public broadcasting than the House, whose former speaker, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), waged a high-profile but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to "zero out" funding for the CPB a decade ago.

The cuts nevertheless surprised people in public broadcasting. In his budget sent to Congress in February, President Bush had recommended reducing CPB's budget only slightly.

Several denounced the decision by the panel, which has 10 Republicans and seven Democrats, as payback by a Republican-dominated House after years of complaints from conservatives who see liberal bias in programs carried by the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Broadcasters noted, for example, that the 25 percent cutback in next year's CPB budget was a rollback of money that Congress had promised in 2004.

PBS, in particular, drew harsh criticism in December from the Bush administration for a "Postcards From Buster" episode in which Buster, an animated rabbit, "visited" two families in Vermont headed by lesbians. And programming on both PBS and NPR has come under fire in recent months from Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the CPB, who has pushed for greater "balance" on the public airwaves.

A spokeswoman for NPR, Andi Sporkin, directly blamed Tomlinson for yesterday's action, saying, "We've never been sure of Mr. Tomlinson's intent but, with this news, we might be seeing his effect."

Tomlinson did not return calls seeking comment. In a statement, he said, "Obviously, we are concerned [by the cuts], and we will be joining with our colleagues in the public broadcasting community to make the case for a higher level of funding as the appropriations measure makes its way through Congress."

John Lawson, the president of the Association of Public Television Stations, a Washington-based group that lobbies for public broadcasters, called the subcommittee's action "at least malicious wounding, if not outright attempted murder, of public broadcasting in America." He added, "This action could deprive tens of millions of American children of commercial-free educational programming."

Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), the subcommittee's chairman, said the cuts had nothing to do with dissatisfaction over public radio or TV programs. "It's pretty simple," he said in an interview. "The thinking was, there's not enough money for everything. There are 'must-do,' 'need-to-do' and 'nice-to-do' programs that we have to pay for. [Public broadcasting] is somewhere between a 'need-to-do' and a 'nice-to-do.' "

The subcommittee had to decide, he said, on cutting money for public broadcasting or cutting college grants, special education, worker retraining and health care programs. "No one's out to get" public broadcasting, Regula said. "It's not punitive in any way."

In fact, none of the Republican members of the subcommittee publicly denounced public radio or TV funding at yesterday's markup. Public broadcasting drew supportive statements from Obey and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.).

Regula suggested public stations could "make do" without federal money by getting more funding from private sources, such as contributions from corporations, foundations, and listeners and viewers.

But the loss of $23.4 million in federal funds for children's educational shows -- which PBS calls its "Ready to Learn" programs -- could mean the elimination of these programs, said an official at Alexandria-based PBS who asked not to be named because the network still hopes to regain the funding. PBS's revenue totaled $333 million in fiscal year 2004.

The Ready to Learn group includes "Sesame Street," "Dragontales," "Clifford" and "Arthur," among others.

The House measure also cuts support for a variety of smaller projects, such as a $39.6 million public TV satellite distribution network and a $39.4 million program that helps public stations update their analog TV signals to digital format.

Small public radio stations, particularly those in rural areas and those serving minority audiences, may be the most vulnerable to federal cuts because they currently operate on shoestring budgets.

"This could literally put us out of business," said Paul Stankavich, president and general manager of the Alaska Public Radio Network, an alliance of 26 stations in the state that create and share news programming. "Almost all of us are down to the bone right now. If we lost 5 or 10 percent of our budgets in one fell swoop, we could end up being just a repeater service" for national news, with no funds to produce local content.

Stankavich, who also runs a public radio and TV station in Anchorage, said public radio is "an important source of news in urban areas, but it's life-critical in rural areas," especially in far-flung parts of Alaska unserved by any other broadcast medium.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060902283.html



Lobbyists' Role for Public TV Is Investigated
Stephen Labaton

Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are examining $15,000 in payments to two Republican lobbyists last year that were not disclosed to the corporation's board, people involved in the inquiry said on Wednesday.

One of the lobbyists was retained at the direction of the corporation's Republican chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, they said, and the other at the suggestion of his Republican predecessor, who remains on the board.

The investigators, in the corporation's inspector general's office, are also examining $14,170 in payments made under contracts - which Mr. Tomlinson took the unusual step of signing personally, also without the knowledge of board members - with a man in Indiana who provided him with reports about the political leanings of guests on the "Now" program when its host was Bill Moyers.

While the amounts of the contracts are relatively small, the issues they pose are part of a broader examination by the inspector general of Mr. Tomlinson's efforts to bring what he says is more political balance to public television and radio and what critics say is political interference in programming.

It comes as Republicans in Congress are threatening to cut support for public broadcasting sharply, and as a number of crucial staff members at the corporation have quit and privately cited concerns on Mr. Tomlinson's leadership.

The people who described the inquiry and the declining morale include officials unhappy with the corporation's course under Mr. Tomlinson. Concerned about retribution, they spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest appointed to the board by President Bill Clinton in 2000, said on Wednesday that he would not comment on details of the investigation but was certain that he had done nothing improper.

"We are confident that the inspector general's report will conclude that all personnel arrangements were and continue to be made in accordance with the statutes and rules governing CPB's use of funds," he said in an e-mail message.

Corporation officials said the two lobbyists did not approach lawmakers but provided strategic advice on handling a bill last year that would have given public radio and television stations more representation on the corporation's board. The measure, which died, was opposed by the White House and Mr. Tomlinson but was supported by stations.

One of the lobbyists, Brian Darling, was paid $10,000 for his insights into Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican who sponsored the provision. This year, he briefly served as a top aide to Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, but resigned after the disclosure that he had written a memorandum describing how to exploit politically the life-support case of Terri Schiavo.

Mr. Darling did not return a telephone call seeking comment.

The other lobbyist, Mark Buse, a former top aide to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said he provided advice on the legislative process over a month and did not talk to any lawmakers. Mr. Buse, who was paid $5,000, said he was hired at the suggestion of Katherine M. Anderson, a former chairwoman of the corporation and a current board member.

The corporation is financed entirely by taxpayer dollars and is supposed to be a political buffer between lawmakers and public television and radio. For years, it has told groups representing the stations that federal law prohibits it from retaining lobbyists to approach lawmakers or push for legislation.

Mr. Tomlinson has said in recent interviews that he has no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, and that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support. His critics, who include top officials at the Public Broadcasting Service and at National Public Radio, say his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

The inspector general is looking at contracts signed by Mr. Tomlinson with a man named Fred Mann to monitor the political leanings of "Now." The inquiry was requested by two Democrats, Representatives John D. Dingell of Michigan and David R. Obey of Wisconsin, after they learned about the monitoring.

Officials said the inspector general was examining whether Mr. Tomlinson, as chairman of the corporation, had the authority to approve the contract or the payments.

Mr. Mann, who was listed in the contracts as living in Indianapolis, could not be located, and officials at the corporation said they knew nothing about him.

The inquiry comes as Mr. Tomlinson finds himself at the center of a political battle that threatens to reduce the corporation's budget significantly, and internal turmoil that has sharply eroded morale and recently prompted significant staff defections. The corporation's general counsel, Donna Gregg, left the corporation this month. Last week, Nancy R. Rohrbach, the senior vice president for corporate and public affairs, submitted her resignation.

Ms. Rohrbach has told friends that Mr. Tomlinson repeatedly ignored her advice. She and other officials were described as being upset last week when Mr. Tomlinson rejected a proposed statement by senior officials at the corporation denouncing a vote by a House appropriations subcommittee that would slash the corporation's budget by 25 percent, or $100 million, to $300 million.

The House Appropriations Committee is expected to approve that measure on Thursday.

Officials said that after the panel's vote last Thursday, staff members confronted Mr. Tomlinson about his refusal to approve a statement condemning the Congressional action.

While public television and radio groups denounced the subcommittee vote and called the corporation to seek a similar statement, late in the day Mr. Tomlinson issued a milder response, saying that the corporation was "concerned" and would "be joining with our colleagues in the public broadcasting community to make the case for a higher level of funding as the appropriations measure makes its way through Congress."

The corporation's Democratic and independent members, meanwhile, are preparing to urge the Republican-controlled board to delay the appointment of a new president of the corporation at its regularly scheduled meeting next week. The former president, Kathleen Cox, left in April after her contract was not renewed.

Mr. Tomlinson has said that his top choice is Patricia Harrison, an assistant secretary of state and a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/po...roadcast.html?



Viacom Board Approves Split
Seth Sutel

Viacom Inc., the media conglomerate that owns CBS and MTV, said Tuesday that its board had unanimously approved a plan to split the company into two separate entities, one focusing on broadcast television and the other on cable networks.

Viacom said the split will occur in the first quarter of 2006. Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone will be chairman and controlling shareholder of the companies, which will both be based in New York.

The company said the separation will be made through a tax-free spinoff, meaning that holders of Viacom shares will receive shares of a new company called CBS Corp., that will include the CBS and UPN networks, a group of TV stations as well as a major radio and outdoor advertising group.

The new CBS company will be led by Les Moonves, the current head of CBS and co- president of Viacom. The other company, which will retain the Viacom name, will include MTV, Nickelodeon, BET and several other cable networks as well as the Paramount movie studio. That company will be led by Tom Freston, the longtime chief of MTV and Viacom's other co-president.
Viacom had announced in March that it was considering a plan to split itself into two companies, saying it wanted to allow investors to value its array of businesses separately.

The company decided to pursue the breakup after becoming frustrated with its languishing stock price. Viacom's shares traded as high as $75.88 in July 2000, but have generally struggled since then, finishing up 11 cents at $34.21 on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday.

Viacom hopes that the MTV-based unit will attract investors seeking fast-growing businesses, while those seeking dividends and more aggressive share buybacks will buy shares in the new CBS Corp., whose businesses are slower-growing but still generate a lot of cash.

The splitup also resolves the pressing issue at Viacom of who will succeed Redstone, who turned 82 last month, as chief executive. Before the splitup plan was announced in March, Freston and Moonves had been seen as competing to succeed Redstone as CEO.

Redstone said in a statement that the breakup would create two "strong, focused and nimble companies" that would give investors options that are "more closely aligned with their various investment objectives."

Viacom also said Redstone's daughter Shari Redstone would take the newly created position of non-executive vice chairman of the board. She had been a member of the company's board since 1994.

Harold Vogel, head of the investment firm Vogel Capital Management, said that while the breakup would "focus the stocks a lot more," it would also cause the companies to incur many new expenses, including having two sets of chief financial officers, legal and compliance departments.

Also, the separated companies could lose negotiating clout with other media entities, especially cable operators, Vogel said. A combined Viacom, for example, could withhold from cable companies the rights to retransmit its highly-rated CBS network in exchange for concessions to carry its cable channels like MTV and BET.

Viacom said it would make further announcements in the coming weeks about the splitup's schedule, the management lineups for the two companies and their financial structures.

The move to break up the company essentially undoes Viacom's acquisition of CBS Corp., which was announced in 1999. Viacom's splitup is also the biggest example of a recent trend among media companies to trim down their holdings as they try to regain favor on Wall Street.

Investors have become disillusioned with many large media conglomerates in recent years amid growing skepticism about the "synergies" to be gained from owning such diverse groups of assets.

Radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. said in April that it would spin off its live entertainment business, and radio station and magazine owner Emmis Communications Corp. said it would sell its TV stations. And the shares of Time Warner Inc., which has also sold several assets including its music company, are still down about 75 percent from early 2000, when it announced its merger with AOL.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...customwire.htm



High Court Declines Media Ownership Appeals

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear appeals by media companies challenging whether ownership restrictions are constitutional, leaving it up to federal regulators to decide the appropriate limits.

The high court turned down appeals by media companies, including Tribune Co. and Gannett, which have argued that the ownership limits the Federal Communications Commission set in 2003 violate free speech rights and a 1996 law.

The FCC eased several ownership limits, including a cross-ownership ban on newspapers, television stations and radio outlets in some markets, but kept restrictions to protect smaller markets from being dominated by a few companies.

The FCC also eased limits on broadcasters owning more than one television station in a market.

Consumer advocates, arguing that the relaxed limits would hurt diversity in viewpoints and opinions, challenged the regulations in court. A federal appeals court last year agreed to put the rules on hold and ordered the FCC to better justify them.

But many media companies, some of whom were represented in appeals filed by the Newspaper Association of America and other trade groups, contended that the FCC should have eased the ownership restrictions further and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. They argued that the limits infringed their free speech rights and the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Tribune Co. publishes The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsday and operates 26 television stations.

Gannett publishes 102 daily newspapers, including USA Today, and operates 21 television stations.
http://news.com.com/High+court+decli...3-5744239.html



Not Guilty In Hyperlink Case

An appeals court has ruled that Stuttgart media designer Alvar Freude is not guilty of aiding and abetting in incitement to hatred and violence against minority groups. The judges in the jury of the 38th criminal division at the first-instance district court ruled without reservation that Freude's reporting about the Nazi web sites, which caused the district government of Dusseldorf to file charges, constitutes documentation of historical events. In his online documentation, Freude had provided links to neo-Nazi web sites and the homepage of Tasteless, which the district government had incriminated. In the Freedomphone web site Freude operated, users were invited to have banned the web sites read to them on the telephone; the court clearly saw this as a satire.

Freude told heise online that he saw this "ruling as good for the Internet, especially for people who have critical views of current politics." Freude said that the public prosecutor had not yet stated whether he would appeal this ruling. However, the public prosecutor had to listen to some criticism from the presiding judge when the ruling was handed down today. In October of 2004, the first-instance court of Stuttgart sentenced Freude to 120 days behind bars.

The testimony of the state criminal prosecution officer showed how shallow investigations have been. In addition, according to Freude this time the judge quickly emphasized that he did not see any criminal activity in Freude's reporting. Nor did the judge entertain the public prosecutor's reference to the protection of youths; rather, the judge reminded the prosecutor of the Adequacy Clause in Section 86, paragraph 3 of the German Penal Code. In his assessment of the web site rotten.com, the judge also did not feel that the prosecution had demonstrated that the site constituted an act of violence, according to Freude's account.

When asked whether he would be reactivating the links he had deactivated in the meantime, Freude stated that he wanted to wait to see the court's written opinion and the reaction of the public prosecutor. (Monika Ermert) (Craig Morris)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/60693



The Web Is in the Air

Alexandria Offers Free Outdoor Access to Wireless Internet
Annie Gowen and Robert MacMillan

A summer afternoon. An iced latte. A park bench in Old Town Alexandria.

All this and free Internet access, too.

This week, Alexandria began providing free wireless Internet access in its historic center, the first local government to offer alfresco Web surfing at no charge.

The one-year pilot program provides outdoor wireless service in an eight-block zone stretching from Washington Street to the Potomac River along King Street -- the Old Town main drag that attracts tourists and residents with its shops and restaurants.

The system, which relies on broadcasting equipment atop City Hall, the Torpedo Factory and a couple of utility poles, is aimed at outdoor cafe patrons or people who prefer parks to workstations, city officials said.

Montgomery and Arlington counties have similar plans for free Internet zones in downtown Silver Spring and around the Clarendon and Court House Metro stations.

Officials said they're thinking of putting one in Arlington's skateboard park. And a nonprofit group, the Open Park Project, is campaigning for wireless access -- known as wireless fidelity or WiFi -- along the entire length of the Mall.

Craig T. Fifer, Alexandria's e-government manager, said the city wants to provide a luxury amenity to its residents while testing a system it could use for more prosaic municipal tasks, such as monitoring traffic.

And it's great public relations.

The service will "promote Alexandria as a high-technology area," Fifer said. "We often market ourselves as a historic area, but this technology helps put us on the high-tech map."

In providing free wireless, Alexandria and other cities -- dozens of which have existing wireless Internet hubs -- in some cases have raised the ire of private network providers. Verizon recently tried to block Philadelphia's $10 million effort to connect the entire city.

Fifer said Alexandria's effort is narrowly tailored not to compete with or replace private providers. He said the network is not secure.

"We're not encouraging you to do anything sensitive with it, like balancing a checkbook or running a business," Fifer said.

Officials in Arlington and Montgomery -- which has WiFi in some of its libraries -- said they hope to entice private companies to install outdoor WiFi systems that would be free to the public and be of minimal taxpayer expense.

Alexandria's effort cost about $20,000 to start and will be $7,800 yearly to maintain.

Verizon, which charges Alexandria customers about $80 a month for wireless access, has no objection to the city's plan, said Eric Rabe, the company's vice president of media relations. But there are better alternatives to city-funded access, Rabe said.

Offering high-speed service, he said, is "complicated, expensive, and there are private providers who are doing it at no cost to taxpayers. But if the city decides they need to do it, we'd like to talk about working with them."

Many businesses in the area and at least one Fairfax County park provide wireless zones for visitors, but not usually for free. A search of http://jiwire.com/ , a national directory of wireless "hot spots," shows 65 locations in and around Old Town. The Holiday Inn on King Street, for instance, offers complimentary wireless service. Starbucks charges $9.99 a day for customers to use its hot spots.

David P. McClure, the president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said many municipalities waste taxpayer money when they provide such networks because they are used only by "very affluent techno elites."

"If you don't have a job where you can take your laptop and do your work in a city park, it's not going to benefit you . . . .We're just taking money from hardworking families and giving it to people who can afford [personal digital assistants] and laptops," McClure said.

Roanoke officials realized early that few residents were using the city's wireless zone in its downtown market, said Kathy Cox, the city's acting assistant director of technology.

"The younger crowds grab onto it fast," she said. Older folks without laptops weren't so interested. To attract more users, the city put eight computer stations in the zone. They pull in about 250 users a month, Cox said.

Local governments' venture into uncharted territory also raises questions about community needs that private companies don't often grapple with.

"Do we really want people checking their e-mail while watching a Little League game?" mused Jack Belcher, Arlington's chief information officer. He and his colleagues are still debating whether there should be WiFi at a new sports facility in Barcroft Park.

In Alexandria, anybody with a computer equipped for wireless access can use the service -- and most newer computers are -- though it probably won't work indoors or much farther than King Street. Consumers can click on the wireless icon on their laptop and choose "Wireless Alexandria" from the list of available networks, Fifer said.

Alexandria resident Che Jarrell, 34, a public policy analyst, has used the service to send e-mails fountainside at City Hall and from bookshops and coffeehouses.

"I think it's wonderful," Jarrell said. "I think every municipal government should offer it as a public good. It has positive benefits -- helping the populace in a city to be more linked to information."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060901770.html



Most Unwired Cities Survey

Wireless Internet access is growing nationwide. Whether at work, at home or on the go, people now have more choices of where and how they access, share and enjoy information and entertainment.

Intel's 3rd Annual "Most Unwired Cities" survey ranks the top 100 U.S. cities and regions for the greatest wireless Internet accessibility. This year's survey reveals a growing number of diverse locations - both indoors and outdoors - where people can log on and connect to the Internet without wires.+ Today, wireless hotspots can be found at coffee shops, colleges and hotels, but they're also popping up at skate parks, pipe shops, gas stations, bowling alleys and golf courses.

Below are the top 100 cities and regions in the United States for wireless Internet accessibility, where you can unwind and unwire:

1. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett- Tacoma, Wash.
51. Ventura, Calif.

2. San Francisco-San Jose- Oakland, Calif.
52. Knoxville, Tenn.

3. Austin-San Marcos, Tex.
53. Pittsburgh, Pa.

4. Portland, Oregon - Vancouver, Wash.
54. Fresno, Calif.

5. Toledo, Ohio
55. Phoenix-Mesa, Ariz.

6. Atlanta, Ga.
56. Buffalo-Niagara Falls, N.Y.

7. Denver, Colo.
57. Providence, R.I. - Fall River- Warwick, Mass.

8. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.
58. Columbia, S.C.

9. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.
59. Little Rock-North Little Rock, Ark.

10. Orange County, Calif.
60. Omaha, Nebr./Iowa

11. San Diego, Calif.
61. Tulsa, Okla.

12. Chicago, Ill.
62. Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, Ohio

13. Boston, Mass.
63. Norfolk-Virginia Beach- Newport News, Va./N.C.

14. Washington, D.C.
64. Syracuse, N.Y.

15. Colorado Springs, Colo.
65. Indianapolis, Ind.

16. Columbus, Ohio
66. New Haven-Meriden, Conn.

17. Charlotte-Gastonia, N.C. - Rock Hill, S.C.
67. Rochester, N.Y.

18. Sacramento, Calif.
68. Memphis, Tenn.

19. Baton Rouge, La.
69. Tucson, Ariz.

20. Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
70. Dayton-Springfield, Ohio

21. New York-Nassau-Suffolk, N.Y. - Newark, N.J.
71. Wichita, Kans.

22. West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla.
72. Mobile, Ala.

23. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Tex.
73. Honolulu, Hawaii

24. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.
74. Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

25. Kansas City, Mo./Kans.
75. El Paso, Tex.

26. Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wis.
76. Middlesex-Somerset- Hunterdon, N.J.

27. Nashville, Tenn.
77. Johnson City-Kingsport, Tenn. - Bristol, Va.

28. Houston, Tex.
78. Akron, Ohio

29. Melbourne-Titusville-Palm Bay, Fla.
79. Grand Rapids-Muskegon - Holland, Mich.

30. Albuquerque, N.M.
80. Bergen-Passaic, N.J.

31. Hartford, Conn.
81. Greenville-Spartanburg- Anderson, S.C.

32. Charleston-North Charleston, S.C.
82. Springfield, Mass.

33. Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah
83. Oklahoma City, Okla.

34. Tampa-St. Petersburg- Clearwater, Fla.
84. Worcester, Mass.

35. St. Louis, Mo.
85. Stockton-Lodi, Calif.

36. Jacksonville, Fla.
86. Louisville, Ky./Ind.

37. Detroit, Mich.
87. Birmingham, Ala.

38. New Orleans, La.
88. Monmouth-Ocean, N.J.

39. Richmond-Petersburg, Va.
89. Augusta, Ga. - Aiken, S.C.

40. Vallejo-Fairfield-Napa, Calif.
90. Jersey City, N.J.

41. San Antonio, Tex.
91. Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla.

42. Las Vegas, Nev.
92. Gary, Ind.

43. Cincinnati, Ohio
93. Fort Wayne, Ind.

44. Baltimore, Md.
94. Daytona Beach, Fla.

45. Ann Arbor, Mich.
95. Wilmington, Del. - Newark, Md.

46. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, N.Y.
96. Allentown-Bethlehem- Easton, Pa.

47. Harrisburg-Lebanon- Carlisle, Pa.
97. Youngstown-Warren, Ohio

48. Greensboro-Winston- Salem-High Point, N.C.
98. Bakersfield, Calif.

49. Orlando, Fla.
99. Scranton-Wilkes-Barre- Hazleton, Pa.

50. Philadelphia, Pa.
100. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Tex.


The survey was sponsored by Intel Corporation and conducted by Bert Sperling, a researcher who specializes in conducting and analyzing data for the nationally known "Best Places" surveys.

Survey findings are based on the number of commercial and public or "free" wireless Internet access points (hotspots), airports with wireless Internet access, and broadband availability. The survey also included community wireless Internet access points, local wireless networks and wireless e-mail devices. The metro areas included in the survey were the 100 largest in the United States, and based on the definitions of Metropolitan Statistical Areas from the U.S. Census Bureau. The data was also calculated at the per-capita level to determine how many people share wireless Internet hotspots within a given city or region. Data was collected from a variety of industry sources between Jan. 1 and April 15, 2005, and weighted across a 100-point scale to allow comparison between categories.
file://localhost/C:/My Documents/News and Information/Articles (single-file html, pdf, doc etc)/Most Unwired Cities Survey .html



No Fi for you!

Some Cafe Owners Pull the Plug on Lingering Wi-Fi Users
Glenn Fleishman

The staff at Victrola Café & Art is sick of talking about Wi-Fi. Given the opportunity, as at a recent cupping in the back of the store to smell and taste the latest in-house roasts, the group prefers to talk about cafe culture, or how to create a nuanced light roasted coffee.

But lately, the subject of Wi-Fi - specifically, the cafe's move to cut back on the free Wi-Fi connection it provides for patrons' Internet use - has been impossible to avoid. "It's distracting," said Jen Strongin, a co-owner.

Victrola started providing free wireless access two years ago after customers asked for it. As in hundreds of other cafes, the owners hoped it would encourage regulars and infrequent patrons to buy more food and drinks. But there was also a disadvantage, staff members said: the cafe filled with laptop users each weekend, often one to a table meant for four. Some would sit for six to eight hours purchasing a single drink, or nothing at all.

Even worse, when lingerers were confronted, they were bellicose. "We get yelled at by people who feel it's their right" to use Victrola's Wi-Fi without making a purchase, Ms. Strongin said. Tony Konecny, the shop's head roaster, added, "It's rarely a pleasant interaction."

But Ms. Strongin and her staff said they were more concerned that the cafe, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, had turned into a place devoid of sound except the light clack of keys, not the focus of lively interaction that she and her husband, Chris Sharp, had intended.

So last month the cafe discontinued the free service on Saturdays and Sundays - and so far it has proved to be a sound business move. Weekend revenue is up and more seats are filled.

Victrola is part of the emerging expectation that cafes will provide Wi-Fi, free or for a fee. In the United States, more than 8,500 cafes offer Wi-Fi, based on online listings of Wi-Fi locations; 3,500 provide it at no charge, according to MetroFreeFi.com, a site devoted to free wireless access. Those offering it free include chains like Panera Bread as well as independent stores; others, like Starbucks, provide the service for a fee through T-Mobile or other providers.

Some of Victrola's customers were in a slight state of disbelief when the Wi-Fi was disconnected. One regular customer repeated over and over, "That just doesn't work for me," Ms. Strongin said.

Where some see a curse, others see a blessing. A Victrola competitor, the Zoka Roasting Company, which has two branches that offer free Wi-Fi, is doubling its store near the University of Washington, adding 1,400 square feet to accommodate 45 more seats.

"Students and young people are the majority of people who hang out at coffee shops, and they all use Internet and computers as a major part of the day," said Jeff Babcock, Zoka's owner. "And I'm not going to exclude that. If it gets too busy and packed, I'll build another one."

Independent cafes have experienced mixed results with free Wi-Fi, however, according to many cafes and hotspot operators. A cafe's nature can be classified as "office," "social," or a hybrid, according to research by Sean Savage, who recently earned his master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis focused on the intersection of technology and society in cafes.

In his work, Mr. Savage found that an office cafe discouraged conversation and was filled with people who came alone and were focused on their work. Social cafes have customers who arrive in groups. "If you come into a place like that and it's a particularly busy time, you get dirty looks if you open a laptop and start zoning out," Mr. Savage said. But the hybrid cafes were more complicated. Many of these hybrid cafes, like the Canvas Gallery in San Francisco, are a "different place at different times of day," he said.

Canvas Gallery is a bar, art gallery, music performance space and coffee shop that has tried several methods to throttle free Wi-Fi use in response to some awkward situations, like laptop users listening to music on headphones while sitting directly in front of a band that was performing.

"People are kind of tired of the laptops," said the manager, Jenny Hay. She said Canvas Gallery experimented with no-Wi-Fi weekends, then went back to full-time availability before deciding last week to set hours of use that end at 5 p.m. weekdays and 2 p.m on weekends.

Ms. Hay said Canvas also tried creating the equivalent of a smoking section for laptop users, but quit after finding that customers moved the signs designating those tables. Ms. Hay said she was still eager to have Wi-Fi users but at appropriate times of day.

Samovar Tea Lounge, also in San Francisco, tried several strategies to discourage lingerers; it was previously an Internet cafe, and some of the expectations from that time remained, said Jesse Jacobs, a co-owner. "When you show up here and there's row upon row of laptop users, it just kind of kills the mood," he said. The store disabled its electrical outlets at one point, but customers did not like it. Mr. Jacobs also tried turning off the free Wi-Fi at busy times, but that left some customers confused as to when the service was available.

Mr. Jacobs said the strategy most recently adopted for dealing with a lingering Wi-Fi user is to have staff members ask, extremely politely and with increasing frequency, whether the patron needs food or tea. "By connecting with them, it's a rare time that there's a problem," Mr. Jacobs said. Ms. Strongin, the Victrola owner, recognizes she cannot force patrons to be gregarious. "Not everybody wants to talk to someone else in the cafe," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/te...gy/13wifi.html



T-Mobile: 450,000 People Paid to Use Wi-Fi
Bruce Meyerson

T-Mobile USA disclosed user statistics from its Wi-Fi business for the first time Monday, reporting that 450,000 customers have paid to access the wireless Internet service in the past three months.

The cell phone company declined to provide a year-ago customer tally for comparison, but did release figures showing a sharp increase in usage for the service, which provides high-speed Internet access for laptops at locations such as Starbucks coffee shops, airports and hotels.

For example, T-Mobile Hotspot users are staying online an average of 64 minutes per login in 2005, up from 45 minutes last year and 23 minutes in 2003. The total number of log-ins has totaled 3 million in the past three months, vs. about 8 million in all of 2004.

The Wi-Fi service is a key business for T-Mobile, which unlike many of its mobile phone rivals is not upgrading its cellular network to deliver high-speed Internet access in addition to phone service.

The company, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG of Germany, does not own the rights to use as large a swath of the airwaves as the competition. It needs to reserve enough of that network capacity for voice service to ensure that its 18.3 million mobile phone subscribers can make and receive calls.

A Wi-Fi connection can be 25 to 100 times faster than a cellular-based Internet service, but the signal can't reach much farther than a few hundred feet from a hotspot. Users of T-Mobile Hotspot can pay by the month, per week or per day.

T-Mobile disclosed the user statistics as it announced an expansion in the number of locations where customers can access the service in the United States and overseas.

The new locations include roaming access throughout 39 more airports in North America for a total of 72, as well as guest rooms at 525 more hotels in the Marriott, Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, Doubletree and Renaissance chains. Previously, the service was only available at Hyatt and Red Roof Inn hotels.

Combined, there will now be 5,700 U.S. locations and 6,500 in Europe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS



Some Good News For Apple

Research company NPD Group recently released some numbers showing that iTunes is more popular than most peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

NPD's MusicWatch Digital service issued a report stating that iTunes was tied with LimeWire for second place in the hearts of music downloaders. Of course, comparing iTunes with a wide-open P2P is kind of like, dare we say, comparing apples to oranges, with one company legally selling songs online, while the other just makes it easier to folks to swap free tunes on the Internet.

In NPD's latest top 10, which reflects online music downloading that took place during March of this year, P2Per WinMX grabbed the No. 1 spot. Other players included P2P outfits Kazaa, BearShare, Morpheus, Ares Galaxy and iMesh dominating the chart. However, legal song-sellers Napster and the Real Player Store also made a strong showing, with the former placing seven and the latter clocking in at the No. 9 position.
http://www.pollstar.com/news/viewnews.pl?NewsID=4061



One-Fifth of Web Users Prefer Online News—Nielsen
Lisa Baertlein

Nearly one-fifth of Web users who read newspapers now prefer online to offline editions, according to a new study from Internet audience measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings.

The first-time study from Nielsen//NetRatings found that 21 percent of those Web users now primarily use online versions of newspapers, while 72 percent still read print editions.

The remaining 7 percent split their time between online and offline editions. Comparable historic statistics were not available.

"A significant percentage of newspaper readers have transferred their preference from print to online editions," said Nielsen//NetRatings senior media analyst Gerry Davidson.

The statistics reflect a broad trend in the newspaper publishing industry.

U.S. newspaper circulation has been falling as audiences increasingly turn to the Internet for news -- both on newspaper-run sites and through companies such as Yahoo Inc and Google Inc., which display news gathered from various sources.

Newspaper publishing revenue is growing slowly, but remains in a prolonged slump. Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo have been posting booming revenue gains on a revival in more traditional online advertising, as well as fast-growing Web search ads.

In response to the increased traffic to news sites, online editions of newspapers often now include frequent news updates, original content, message boards and editorial blogs.

The online edition of the New York Times Co.'s flagship paper, www.NYTimes.com, is the most visited U.S. newspaper site. It had an audience of 11.3 million in May, up 25 percent from a year earlier, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

USATODAY.com had the second-biggest online reach, with an audience of 9.2 million in May, up 15 percent. Rounding out the top three was washingtonpost.com whose audience in May grew 10 percent year on year to 7.4 million.

Visits to Yahoo News and Google News, which were not counted in the study, also have been on the rise.

In May, Yahoo News had an online audience of 23.8 million and the audience for Google News was 7.1 million, respectively up 3 percent and 4 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

(Additional reporting by Paul Thomasch in New York)
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jh...toryID=8820047

[JackSpratts]

Lawmaker Revs Up Fair-Use Crusade
Katie Dean and Evan Hansen

Rep. Rick Boucher is a rarity in Congress when it comes to digital media. He's taken the side of consumers -- not Hollywood and the music industry -- in the sundry controversies surrounding digital entertainment.

When it comes to file sharing, Boucher says he'll fight attempts to stifle it.

He thinks tech companies shouldn't be held liable for products that can be used for unlawful purposes, like pirating media.

He says the balance of copyright law has tipped too far toward the entertainment companies' interests, hampering consumers' rights to use digital media.

And he wants government sponsorship of universal broadband.

While other lawmakers have long-standing relationships with the entertainment industry, whose chief concern is piracy, Boucher sees his pro-technology policies as a way to further education, communication and job creation.

Boucher, a Democrat representing the rural 9th District of Virginia, has introduced a bill to restore some of the fair-use rights taken away by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Boucher was also one of only six candidates supported by IPac, a new, nonpartisan political action committee concerned with intellectual property. IPac favors candidates working for a better balance in copyright law between the rights of creators and those of consumers.

Boucher recently stopped by the Wired News office for a chat about broadband, copyright and the continued clashes between the entertainment and technology industries over peer-to-peer networks.

Wired News: The MGM v. Grokster case now before the Supreme Court has put file sharing in the spotlight. What are your thoughts on peer-to-peer file sharing?

Rick Boucher: First of all I am going to fight, tooth and nail, any effort to hobble file sharing. I mean, if the attack that the industry makes is against file sharing per se, I'm going to fight that, because there are very legitimate uses of file sharing.

Skype is a file-sharing application and that's used by millions of people. (Universities) are using file sharing as a way to disseminate research papers and other legitimate items. Getting away from centralized servers and going to peer-to-peer communications all across the map means the communications are faster and much more user- friendly. I will predict that within a number of years, most of the uses of file sharing are going to be legitimate.

WN: Fair use is all well and good, but isn't the entertainment industry saying, "You can use this stuff, but we are not obligated to present it to you in a form that is easy to copy?"

Boucher: But ... what they are able to do ... is prevent you from using it altogether. All that a creator of digital content has to do is guard it with a very simple technical measure and ... then you may not circumvent that for any purpose. And so the creator of content can take everything to a pay-per-use (format) and that means nothing is free on the library shelf anymore.

This is why librarians so strongly support my bill, they see that coming. History teaches us that when industry has a particular power, if they can make money using that power, that's what they'll do. And in this instance, the content industry has the power to prevent any fair use of their material and I have no doubt that's exactly where they'll go.

WN: Do you feel any sympathy for the entertainment industry? If an individual gets hold of just one copy of a work, it can be distributed widely. Take Revenge of the Sith -- thousands of people had it even before it debuted in the theater. This is an unprecedented kind of access to artistic works.

Boucher: First of all, while the arrival of the internet creates a potential hazard and peril for content creators, it also invests in them broadening abilities. It becomes another distribution medium that they can use and they need to do that. I have been saying (that) to the recording industry every time they have come crying to us (saying), "Oh piracy is costing us this, that and the other and we need to do something about it."

I would spend my time as a committee member when I was addressing them saying, "OK, why don't you do something about it yourself? Why don't you put your entire inventory up on the web and make it available in a user-friendly format for a reasonable price per track and get away from clinging to this old, outdated business model of selling the whole CD?"

Do I have sympathy for them? Not when they're clinging to a relic and when that's getting in the way of making good current business decisions.... They can make a fortune if they do that.

The other point to make is, they are asking us to do something that not only is it unwise from a policy standpoint for us to do, and that is inhibit file sharing, which has legitimate uses. But even if we thought it was wise from a policy standpoint, they are asking us to do something that we really can't.

We don't have -- within the reach of American law -- control over these networks. I mean, if we control one who happens to be a resident of the U.S., or people who generate the software ... it won't be a matter of weeks until a network like that would arise in some island nation where we don't even have commercial relations, much less extradition treaties.

And so we can't at the end of the day do anything that's really meaningful to help. We can make ridiculous laws but we are not going to be able to stop the problem....

The other thing that makes sense is for the industry actually to consider some kind of compulsory license.... If I were the recording industry I'd think seriously about doing that. People are going to be engaged in file sharing anyway: They may as well get some compensation for it. It's not a perfect solution to their problem, but then there isn't one at this point.

WN: What do you think of the state of copyright law right now? There are alternatives like Larry Lessig's Creative Commons option, which gives authors the option of choosing a more flexible copyright license. Do you think there will be a makeover of copyright, or is that off the table?

Boucher: I happen to think Larry is right. In the main I agree with what he is saying. And if you go back and you look at the history of how innovation occurs in creativity, it is an incremental process of people building on other people's innovations. Disney, which is probably the most aggressive of all the studios in terms of copyright protection, owes its major intellectual properties to the works of others.

And because of the falling of (such works) into the public domain, Disney was able to take it and essentially use it as the foundation for Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.... Mickey Mouse was an iteration of somebody named Steamboat Willie that came before. (Disney) didn't create it. Somebody else did.

I think Larry Lessig has performed a very useful function of pointing out how creativity will continue to advance our community and it depends on building on the success of others, and you can't do that if people lock up this property.

WN: How do you rank the current administration in terms of handling broadband policy? There is a lot of criticism about where we are right now.

Boucher: Well-justified criticism. We rank 13th in the world in terms of percent of the population that uses broadband. This is the country that invented the internet. We still create most of the popular internet applications in the U.S. And to be 13th in terms of broadband deployment is not a noble status.

And I fault this administration for not having been more aggressive in finding ways to stimulate broadband deployment more deeply into the population.... Most other countries in the developed world have made it a national priority to deploy broadband and they are putting public resources behind the effort. I think we should.

WN: How will you accomplish this?

Boucher: Two things in particular. One of those is to redefine universal service so as to make broadband an eligible subject for universal service support. Where at the moment it just makes telephone service affordable and that's something that it needs to continue to do ... we should add broadband deployment (to that mission).

(Secondly), I think the time has come for us to set national rules that will clearly get local governments to get involved in providing broadband services.... In some communities in my district, the populations are so small that we don't even have cable systems. And telephone companies haven't seen it as economically advantageous to offer DSL and so there is no broadband at all.

And I think where that happens, the local government has a legitimate role to play in providing the services, exactly analogous to what happened 100 years ago with municipal electric utilities. Where the investor-owned utilities didn't want to provide the service, the local government stepped in, and today, 100 years later, we still have municipal electric utilities. And this is a service every bit as essential in this century as electricity was in the early days.

WN: In the last session of Congress, the technology industry really came together and successfully blocked the Induce Act legislation, which would have held tech companies responsible for creating devices that could be used to pirate digital content. How unusual is that? Is the tech industry finally building more of a presence in Washington? Typically, the entertainment industry has been considered much more savvy and connected.

Boucher: Until about 2000, many of the technology companies had a real hands-off approach toward lawmaking. I think they perhaps somewhat naively thought that at the end of the day, Congress or the president would do what was right. And they either had total faith in the system or they had no faith in it.

I think some probably had one view and some the other. But whichever view they had they weren't dealing with us. They just were not in Washington defending their interests. And then they got mashed with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The tech industry was not involved in that.

I was making the same arguments in 1998 that I'm making today, which is that we shouldn't eliminate fair use for digital media, and we shouldn't say that developing technology that has substantial legitimate uses is wrong just because somebody can misuse it. You know, you don't punish a hammer manufacturer because somebody uses a hammer to break into a house....

Make no mistake about it, this is a war between content and technology, and you don't win a war over the long term just playing defense. And so it's time to go on offense and the way to go on offense is to enact HR 1201 (the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, HR 1201) and that's why you see such a large collection of technology companies supporting this bill.

WN: What's your perspective on the broadcast flag? (The broadcast flag, now moribund, would have protected content from "unauthorized" redistribution, and may yet be resurrected in a different form).

Boucher: The circuit court for D.C. has invalidated broadcast flag rulemaking, saying that the FCC lacked statutory authority (to create the broadcast flag). Not surprisingly, the MPAA has now come to us and said, "We want you to legislate."

I don't think we are going to do that. I have been waiting for a long time for Hollywood to come to us and say, "Here's something we want" because there is something I want. And it's called the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act.

It would do two things. It would codify the Betamax decision of the Supreme Court that says that if you manufacture technology that is capable of substantial non-infringing use -- then if it is put to an infringement purpose somewhere down the road -- then the manufacturer has no responsibility for the copyright infringement....

The other thing that it does is say that if you circumvent a technical protection measure in order to perform a legitimate act such as exercising a fair-use right, you are not guilty of a crime.

Now, I have great support for this measure from the technology industry, which has proudly endorsed it. The public-use community, universities, consumer organizations, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and others have endorsed it.

But the motion picture industry strongly opposes it. So here is an opportunity to have a conversation with them and say, "All right, we understand the importance of the broadcast flag," and you know my normal position is to oppose any kind of technology mandate.

This one is a little bit different in that the only way that I think we are going to have high-value television programming delivered over the air in digital format is if the motion picture industry has some level of confidence that it's not going to get recorded and uploaded to the internet.

We need to make sure if we are going to do the broadcast flag that fair-use rights are preserved. So, for example, people when they record a television program off the internet should be able to move it around inside the home environment from digital device to digital device.

David Cohn contributed to this report.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67853,00.html



AOL Will Focus on Free Music, Video
Anick Jesdanun

Free music and video will be the centerpiece of America Online Inc.'s new strategy to boost advertising revenues by moving most of its content outside its well-manicured walled gardens.

Features that will remain available exclusively to AOL's diminishing base of subscribers, who pay up to $23.90 a month for an all-you-can-eat package, mostly involve software and support: parental controls, special sections for kids and teens, antivirus and other security programs and customer support hotlines operating 24 hours a day.

Internal studies have shown that subscribers weren't staying on AOL simply for its content, so the company decided to make that available to a wider audience for free in hopes of gaining more online real estate to sell to advertisers, said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products.

A test version of the new AOL.com portal, which Bankoff demonstrated Monday for The Associated Press, was expected to be available on June 21. AOL plans a formal launch next month, coupled with advertising campaigns online, on radio and in print.

As it designed the portal, AOL kept in mind the growing number of broadband households, many of which have been dropping AOL accounts when they moved from dial-up to dedicated high-speed access.

Visitors will be able to set the portal's home page to a "Video Hub" mode featuring video links - whether from AOL, Time Warner Inc. sister companies or elsewhere on the Web. Bankoff likens the page to a television guide for the Web.

AOL also is pushing an "AOL Music On Demand" video channel and is developing an "American Idol"-like Web contest carrying as its prize a recording contract. On-demand channels featuring comedy, celebrity news and self-help are also in the works.

To make video easier to find, AOL will incorporate results from its Singingfish multimedia search engine.

Users will be able to create a personalized "My AOL" home page with news headlines, Web journal summaries and other automated feeds from AOL and elsewhere using a technology called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. Such features mimic those pioneered by such competitors as Yahoo Inc.

Beyond programming geared to kids and teens, however, Bankoff was hard-pressed to come up with examples of content that will remain available only to subscribers.

The biggest example is perhaps the feeds under AOL's partnership with XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. Though 20 FM-quality channels will be available for free at AOL.com, subscribers will get 80 feeds and at CD quality, Bankoff said.

And what content is restricted to subscribers might ultimately be sold on an a la carte basis, so people won't have to buy the entire package, Bankoff said.

AOL officials believe they have lost potential audience under their old strategy.

Subscriber-only materials don't show up in search results, and the authentication scheme built into the special AOL software meant AOL couldn't easily direct subscribers from, say, its Moviefone or Mapquest Web sites to its music or sports offerings.

By making content available for free, AOL can simply make it reachable using any Web browser.

But AOL also risks speeding up the erosion of subscribers. Already, U.S. subscription has decreased by about 5 million since its peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.

In the first quarter, AOL posted a 3 percent decline in revenues as it continued to lose subscribers, more than offsetting a 45 percent gain in advertising revenues. Profits rose 10 percent despite the revenue loss because of a decline in telecommunications costs.

AOL last week formally launched free Web-based e-mail, offering its instant- messaging users accounts with "AIM.com" address. Now, AOL is offering to forward e-mail from abandoned AOL.com accounts to AIM.

There is no time limit, and savvy users can still set their e-mail programs with the old AOL.com addresses without paying for them.

Although analysts say many subscribers have been keeping AOL accounts simply for the e-mail, Bankoff said the company's research does not support that.

AOL figures that if people are going to leave AOL anyway, it might as well have them use AIM - and watch ads displayed there - rather than a competitor's service, he said.

"We at least keep them in the family," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME



Creator of Napster To Launch Music Royalties Service
All Financial Times News

The college student who almost six years ago incurred the wrath of the music industry by unleashing Napster, the popular internet file- swapping service, will on Monday move a step closer to launching a new service designed to bridge the gap between record companies and peer-to-peer sites that have become synonymous with online piracy.

Shawn Fanning's new company, dubbed Snocap, was poised to announce on Monday that it would start allowing all artists and record labels to register their music in a database designed to serve as a global clearing house that can identify digital tracks shared across the net and collect royalties on behalf of copyright owners.

The service was designed to enable current peer-to-peer services to morph into legal online music sites through which consumers could buy music. P2P services and online music stores would use Snocap's database to determine what distribution terms and prices apply to each track.

"This registry is key to creating a world of authorised peer-to-peer networks that will attract music fans en masse - enabling consumers to share and discover new artists in much the same fashion as they did with old P2P - but done in a way that respects the rights holder," Mr Fanning, who serves as Snocap's chief strategy officer, said.

Record labels have long complained they have suffered billions of dollars in lost CD sales because current P2P networks such as Kazaa, Grokster and BitTorrent allow tens of millions of internet users to share billions of music tracks free of charge.

Entertainment groups have filed numerous court actions, tried various technological solutions and lobbied the US congress in a long campaign to crush P2P networks. The US supreme court could rule as early as today on a case in a landmark copyright infringement case that pits file- swapping software companies against the music and movie industries.

Snocap has already signed deals with EMI, SonyBMG, Universal as well as several independent labels, and has also held talks with Warner Music. Ali Aydar, Snocap's chief operating officer, said a few big labels had already registered about 250,000 tracks.

However, it was not yet clear how many P2P services were prepared to partner with Snocap. Mr Aydar said his company had struck deals with "a few" P2P services, but said they were not yet ready to launch.

Snocap officials said there were more than 25m unique tracks available through peer-to-peer services.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/pro...612&ID=4885113



Effects Of File Swapping Difficult To Define: Study
Mathew Ingram

Defenders of digital file-sharing got a little ammunition from a study released Monday by the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental body made up of representatives from 30 countries, including Canada.

The report said there was no clear evidence that file- swapping through "peer-to-peer" networks is as harmful to music sales as the music industry has said it is, or that such activity is responsible for the decline in sales of traditional music sources such as CDs.

The study says that it is "very difficult to establish a basis to prove a causal relationship between the size of the drop in music sales and the rise of file sharing." Sales of CDs and the success of licensed digital music services are likely to have been affected by "a variety of other factors," including competition from other entertainment products as well as a general slowdown in consumer spending.

The study also notes that the industry has made up some of the decline in CD revenue through higher prices and sales of other material, such as music videos.

The report, which was put together for the OECD's Working Party on the Information Economy and is available on Harvard University's Cyberlaw website, was originally done in December of last year. but was not "declassified" by the agency until earlier this year. It was prepared by Dr. Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Dr. Graham Vickery of the OECD's Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry.

The OECD report says the global music industry saw a "pronounced fall" in revenue — 20 per cent between 1999 and 2003 — although it notes that this downturn did not occur in every OECD country uniformly. While the industry shrank in the U.S., France, Japan and Germany, for example, other markets such as the United Kingdom and Australia "experienced steady or growing sales" of music CDs through that period.

The study also notes that while on-line piracy has increased, there have also been "other changes in the market environment for music over the past 10 years, such as the increased number of entertainment sources, which may explain changing music sales." The number of simultaneous users on all peer-to-peer networks hit 10 million in October of 2004, with more than half of those in the United States, according to the report.

The study notes that music is an area in which "the transformative impact of digital distribution is strong for both the supply side (artists and the music industry) and on the demand side (new music consumption styles, consumer choice and network users as content creators)." The authors argue that it's important for both sides to "find an equilibrium between available legitimate and innovative uses of new technologies for on-line music and the necessary protection of associated intellectual property rights."

A number of surveys have shown that "most musicians embrace the Internet as a creative workspace where they can collaborate and promote their work," the OECD study said, but "artists are divided about the impact of unauthorized file-sharing on the music business, with some saying that free music downloading on-line has helped their career, some being indifferent and others arguing that it has harmed it."

The agency said that while discouraging on-line piracy should be a focus for governments, it is also important to maintain "an environment where small and innovative players can compete." It added that new business models are "hard to predict in advance," and therefore "legal and other frameworks should be designed to encourage and not to pre-empt innovations."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ory/Technology



Showdown Looms Over Patenting Bill
Huw Jones

EU lawmakers are heading for a showdown over new rules on patenting inventions as a key vote next week may struggle to find a consensus, an outcome seen

favoring big software developers.

Member states and the European Parliament are looking at a bill on patenting inventions that use software. The legislature's legal affairs committee is due to debate the bill on Monday and vote on Tuesday.

"It's not like a budget where you can cut the pie in two. Either you allow patenting or you do not. It's a political decision," Laurence van de Walle, who advises the Greens on the bill, said on Friday.

The bill's sponsor, French socialist Michel Rocard, has pleased people who want minimal patenting, but liberal and center right parties want a broader scope.

A source in the center-right EPP party bloc, which is the largest grouping on the legal affairs committee, said on Friday that Rocard's version of the legislation is "still largely unacceptable."

Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France, was not immediately available for comment.

Lawmakers have come under intense lobbying, reflecting a politically-charged faultline in the world's software industry.

Those who support open-source or free software say copyrighting is preferable to patenting, and welcome Rocard's stance, saying it will allow developers to enter markets that would otherwise be sealed by patents.

Rocard wants a narrow approach to patenting, to effectively include only "programmable apparatus" or hardware applications such as an ABS braking system or a machine to pump insulin.

But the member state version opted for a broad approach to patenting software-related innovations, pleasing large companies such as Nokia and Microsoft which say this will stop copycat devices from countries like China.

EICTA, which represents 51 major multinational companies, said on Friday that lawmakers should reject Rocard's proposals and back what the member states have agreed.

The Greens back Rocard, but said the vote looked tight. "I am not optimistic. It's a dossier where you don't have a middle way," van de Walle said.

"But we have seen many cases where the result of the vote in the legal affairs committee was demolished in plenary," she said, adding that the Greens were trying to switch the vote back to its original slot on Monday.

Full parliament is due to vote on the bill next month.

What's In A Name?

In his latest version of the bill, Rocard has proposed changing the name of the directive to patentability of 'computer controlled invention' from 'computer implemented inventions'.

"The scope of the directive is thus the one of the patenting of hardware devices that use software in order to control this hardware," Rocard says in his report seen by Reuters.

EICTA said changing the title would alter the scope of the rules and leaves the computer outside the invention, which the group says does not represent reality.

Crucial flashpoints among lawmakers remain how to define 'technical contribution', a key criteria for patenting, and whether data processing should be excluded.

Only a simple majority is needed to adopt the bill in committee, but a qualified majority would be needed in the full parliament, a tricky feat if there is no consensus.

The fear among some MEPs that if the bill fails to get a qualified majority then the member state version of the bill would go ahead unchanged, pleasing big industry players.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...PATENTS-DC.XML



Nighthawks at the Night Court

Publisher Sues Warner Music Over Waits Tunes
Chris Morris

Third Story Music, a Los Angeles-based music publishing firm and the successor to the production company that managed singer-songwriter Tom Waits early in his career, has filed a federal suit against Warner Music Group, alleging that Waits has been shortchanged on the sale of digital downloads.

The action, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles on Tuesday, stems from 1972 and 1977 contracts signed by Third Story principal Herb Cohen and Warner- owned Asylum Records regarding Waits' services.

The Waits recordings at issue include such early albums as "Closing Time," "The Heart of Saturday Night," "Small Change" and "Heartattack and Vine."

According to the suit, under the terms of the two contracts, Waits was entitled to royalties of either 25% or 50% from revenues derived from third-party licenses. Third Story maintains that digital music downloads constitute a form of third-party license, and that Waits is entitled to payment at that level.

In 2003-04 royalty statements to Third Story, WMG computed royalties from Waits' digital download sales at the same (and much lower) rate as royalties from the sale of physical product. Under the terms of the '70s Asylum contracts regarding album sales, Waits would be entitled to either 9% or 13% of the 67 cents received by WMG from each 99-cent download.

The action says that in February, Third Story sent a formal notice questioning the accuracy of royalty statements to WMG. The music company replied in March that downloads "are sold to customers such as iTunes and Listen.com just as physical product is sold to...Best Buy and Virgin."

Third Story seeks a declaration that compensation for downloads is governed by the third-party license provisions of the Asylum agreements, and damages in an amount to be determined.

A spokeswoman for WMG, which recently went public about a year after being sold to a private investor group by Time Warner Inc., said the company had no comment.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ic_nm/waits_dc



Court Won't Review Beastie Boys Lawsuit
AP

The Beastie Boys might have to fight for their right to party, but they won't have to defend themselves against claims they stole part of a jazz flutist's recording.

Without comment Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling against jazz artist James W. Newton. Newton contended that the punk rappers' 1992 song "Pass the Mic" included a sample from his musical composition "Choir" without his full permission.

The Beastie Boys paid a licensing fee for the six-second, three-note segment of Newton's work but failed to pay an additional fee to license the underlying composition.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to dismiss Newton's lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The appeals court reasoned that the short segment in "Pass the Mic" was not distinctive enough to be considered Newton's work.

Several members and representatives of the jazz and independent artists community - including the American Composers Forum, the Electronic Music Foundation and Meet the Composer - had filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief in support of Newton.

They urged the Supreme Court to clarify the scope of copyright law, given the growing practice of digital sampling, or recording a portion of a previously existing song, they say increasingly infringes on their ownership rights.

The Beastie Boys burst onto the national music scene in 1986 with their No. 1 album "License to Ill," which featured the party anthem "Fight for Your Right (to Party)."

The case is Newton v. Diamond, 04-1219.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT



Man Charged for Trying to Steal User Data
AP

A man was arrested Monday for allegedly setting up a phony Internet portal site to lure victims into giving personal data, an official said. Police said it was Japan's first arrest linked to a form of identity theft called phishing.

Kazuma Yabuno, a 42-year-old office worker in the western city of Osaka, was taken into custody and accused of violating copyright and unauthorized access laws, a Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said on condition of anonymity.

Yabuno allegedly defrauded users with his phony Yafoo! Japan site, which closely resembled - and has the same pronunciation in Japanese as - that of popular Net portal and auction site operator Yahoo! Japan, the official said.

Police were investigating whether Yabuno came up with the scam to steal credit card information and other sensitive information.

Yabuno launched the Japanese-language site from a personal computer in February and managed it from computers at work and home, the official said. About 20 to 30 unsuspecting users visited the look- alike site weekly, he said.

Yahoo! Japan, which is owned by Tokyo-based Net investor Softbank Corp., said it had alerted authorities about the incident, according to media reports.

It's unclear how widespread such scams are in Japan.

In the United States, phishing victims cost U.S. banks and credit card issuers an estimated $1.2 billion in 2003, according to a report last year by Gartner Inc., an information technology market research firm.

A recent survey of American adults conducted by Denver-based First Data Corp., a major electronic financial transaction company, showed that 43 percent of respondents had received a phishing contact, usually by e-mail.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS



Services Expand World of the Internet
Justin Glanville

Next time you're walking down a city sidewalk, look out for the Internet. It's all around you - and not just in the phone lines and cables running under the streets or in the airborne Wi-Fi streams. In recent months, several services have sprung up to allow a communion of the real world with the Internet, with cell phones acting as the medium.

If you send a text message to an e-mail address scrawled in paint on a subway advertisement or on a sidewalk, for example, you could get some digital pop art on your phone in return.

An adhesive arrow on a telephone poll could hold the key to the history of a nearby building.

One of the most popular of the new projects, Grafedia, translates seemingly ordinary urban graffiti into works of art. A piece of grafedia (multimedia graffiti) is either written as an e-mail address ending in "(at)grafedia.net," or in blue underlined text, mimicking the look of a hyperlink on a Web page.

Sending a message to "in-here(at)grafedia.net" - spotted in Brooklyn - returns a digital image of a man sitting beside a stream. Another New York grafedia artist underlined the word "McDonald's" in blue on a billboard for the fast-food chain; a message yields a portion of a kitschy sign instructing viewers how to avoid choking.

Some people use grafedia as a promotional tool, linking to images or text that includes a personal Web site address or a rock band's name.

An art teacher in Australia creates treasure hunts, with one grafedia image pointing to the next.

The creator of Grafedia, John Geraci, recently graduated from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications program, which explores new applications for emerging technologies. He started the service as an offshoot of his studies.

Geraci likened grafedia to putting a message in a bottle.

"You don't know who will find it and uncork it, and it doesn't really matter," he said. "It's an act of anonymous, artistic sharing, done with strangers in your city."

More than 2,000 images have been uploaded to the Grafedia server since it went online in December, a level of interest Geraci says has exceeded his expectations. (He pays just $7.95 a month for the server space, and costs aren't likely to go up much as there's a 100-kilobyte limit to what can be uploaded for a single message).

Another service, Yellow Arrow, encourages people to plaster adhesive arrows - each assigned a unique code - to physical landmarks or even other people (Yellow Arrow encourages posters to get permission before placing stickers on private property.)

Passers-by who see an arrow can send a text message to a phone number with the arrow's code. The reply message contains information about the place or person.

Some of the arrows simply designate someone's favorite cafe or restaurant ("Best breakfast in town").

Others mark a place where something significant took place. At Central Connecticut State University, a professor had his students post arrows at overlooked historical sites, including a clinic that was among the first in the state to dispense contraceptives.

Then there are more artsy comments, such as one attached to an arrow on a stop sign in Key West, Fla.: "It was here where he laughed heartily, called her a good egg and then threw the cell phone in the pool with no remorse."

The arrows "transform the ordinary into the extraordinary," said Jesse Shapins, a creative collaborator for Counts Media, a New York-based game and entertainment company that started the concept in May 2004. "Counts Media initiated the project to foster a global community around ... local interests and experiences."

The company also makes T-shirts branded with coded arrows. Its wearers can change messages associated with the arrows anytime.

Coded arrows cost 50 cents each; T-shirts are $20. About 15,000 arrows are currently in circulation, Shapins said, and 300,000 more will be bound into an upcoming Lonely Planet guide, "Experimental Travel." Readers of the guide will be encouraged to post arrows at their favorite travel spots.

A Canadian company called (murmur) - complete with artsy brackets - allows people to record stories about specific locations. By dialing a number when they see a sign designating that a location is featured, cell phone users can listen to a personal history of the site.

There are stories about apartment buildings and stores, including a lobster shop in Toronto's Kensington Market where a woman relates a fond memory of shopping with her boyfriend for ingredients for a seafood feast.

So far, the service is limited to three Canadian cities: Toronto (where it started), Montreal and Vancouver. Would-be storytellers must submit an application to the site's curators, who then visit the site with the applicant and record the story.

Such digital signposts to interactive experiences are likely just the beginning as access to the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, Grafedia's Geraci said.

"The boundaries of what we think of as the World Wide Web are arbitrary," he said. "The Web can be anything, anywhere."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS



Second Internet Luring Case In Reno Tossed On Appeal

A second Reno judge has ruled that Nevada's law allowing police to pose as children to lure Internet predators is unconstitutional.

Washoe District Judge Brent Adams says the Legislature needs to amend the statute, which he calls unconstitutional for several reasons.

His order dismissed charges against Anthony John Colosimo.

In a ruling last December, former Washoe District Judge James Hardesty dismissed a similar charge against Jeffrey Thurber.

The law states that "a person shall not knowingly contact or communicate with or attempt to contact or communicate with a child who is less than 16 years of age...with the intent to persuade, lure or transport the child...to engage in sexual conduct."

Both judges say neither man was communicating with a child younger than 16.

The prosecutor on both cases is appealing the latest ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court. If that fails, Deputy District Attorney Jim Shewan says the Legislature will have to change the law.
http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp...5&nav=8faOb3k7



Surveillance

I.B.M. Expands Efforts to Promote Radio Tags to Track Goods
Barnaby J. Feder

Many giants of the computing world, like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems, have been vying to gain recognition as technology leaders in the drive to use radio tags to identify consumer goods. None have been more aggressive than I.B.M., which plans to start yet another marketing salvo today.

The company's consulting practice, I.B.M. Global Services, plans to announce that its consultants will begin selling advice on consumer privacy issues related to the use of radio identification tagging of consumer goods.

I.B.M.'s software division also plans to introduce a "starter kit" of programs intended to help clients more quickly develop ways to link data generated by radio scanners into existing corporate software packages that manage functions like order entry, shipping and inventory controls. And I.B.M.'s printing devices unit in Boulder, Colo., expects to announce plans to market a bar code printer and radio tag dispenser that checks the tags to make sure they are working before applying them to a product.

Each product addresses potential bottlenecks in the spread of the technology, called radio frequency identification, or RFID.

The build-up in I.B.M.'s radio tag portfolio is part of a $250 million investment in sensor technology announced last fall.

RFID proponents say such tags will one day save businesses billions of dollars and make shopping more convenient for consumers by helping keep better track of products in supply chains, warehouses and stores. Radio tags store far more data about a product than bar codes and can be read more quickly, without human intervention.

Giant retailers like Wal-Mart and government agencies like the Defense Department have been pushing manufacturers to adopt the technology rapidly and widely. At the same time, some consumer groups have expressed concern that the tags could be used to build databases that track individual behavior.

Major computer companies view the intricacies of storing, managing and analyzing the flood of data the tags could produce as a significant new business opportunity. But how fast that opportunity could develop is in question.

So far, the rollout has been hampered by spotty hardware performance and the reluctance of manufacturers and retailers to invest heavily until worldwide standards have been established. Many early adopters are also struggling to match the RFID data to existing corporate data systems, a necessity if the data is to be used to adjust shipping schedules or other business practices to save money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/technology/14tag.html



After Sibelius, Finland's Rich Bounty of Musicians
Richard B. Woodward

WHEN you live in a country of only 5.2 million people and your native tongue is unintelligible to virtually everyone outside your borders, you'd better learn to converse with the rest of the world if you don't want to end up talking to yourself.

This is the problem faced by the Finns, and among their many admirable traits has been shrewd adaptation to this exigency. While they hold dearly to the foundations of their national culture, such as the "Kalevala" epic, they also compete internationally in an eclectic array of fields, from cell phone technology to javelin-throwing, and from contemporary architecture and design to ski-jumping.

The Finns' recent emergence as a power in classical music is another case in which they have mastered a lingua franca. Defying a trend in many Western countries, where audiences are dwindling and the tradition itself seems in retreat, Finland has in the last 15 years developed first-class classical musicians out of all proportion to its size. Steady investment in music education by the government has created generations of avid listeners and, according to official figures, more orchestras per capita than anywhere on the globe.

Finland's tiny market guarantees that a number of its musical stars must be exported. The conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Osmo Vanska, Sakari Oramo, and Mikko Franck; the singers Jorma Hynninen, Matti Salminen, Soile Isokoski and Karita Mattila; the violinists Pekka and Jaakko Kuusisto; and the composers Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg have spent a good part of their careers abroad.

But Finns can often catch them on their visits home. For instance, Mr. Vanska has been widely lauded for reviving the fortunes of the Minnesota Orchestra, where he is music director. But last November I heard him in the Finnish provincial city of Lahti, where he often conducts the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in a striking new jewel box of a hall.

Summer is the traditional season to visit Finland for music. The opera festival in the castle at Savonlinna (July 8 to Aug. 6) and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (July 17 to 31) are highly celebrated and well attended. And yet even in the gloom of a Finnish winter, in concert halls and churches and music academies, the variety and level of performances is exceptionally high.

Helsinki is the hub and, apart from its musical offerings, has a calm, dignified profile. Eliel Saarinen's gray granite Art Nouveau train station in the city center is one among dozens of modern architectural landmarks. There's an extensive and efficient trolley system and taxis accept credit cards. For decades, Finland was terra incognita to American tourists and it shows. Starbucks has only lately established a beachhead; local brands are far more common.

The ideal base for cultural excursions, if you can afford it, is the Hotel Kamp. In mid-July, rooms start at $270 at $1.26 to the euro. The Kamp, Pohjoisesplanadi 29; (358- 9) 576-111; luxurycollection.com, is just off Esplanade Park and close to the city's principal musical institutions - Finlandia Hall (designed by Alvar Aalto), the National Opera House and the Sibelius Academy. For those so inclined, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Stephen Holl's building, opened in 1998) and the Ateneum (the national art gallery, situated opposite Saarinen's train station) are also close by. The hotel, which dates back to 1887, has a selection of indoor saunas and superb restaurants.

Even if it was not one of Europe's best luxury hotels, the Kamp would be worth a stop for its associations with Jean Sibelius and his artist friends. It is almost 50 years since the composer's death and yet he remains a looming figure with whom every Finnish musician must contend, either by accepting, rejecting, ignoring, or just bemoaning his prominence. Not only is Sibelius an icon on the currency but he also acts as the country's permanent ambassador by being its first, and still most, internationally recognized name.

"If you asked who is the most important figure in Finnish history, 8 of 10 Finns would say Sibelius," says Mr. Vanska. "In no other country would a composer rank so high."

Concerts in Finland often include a programming nod to Sibelius, even if it's only a song (he wrote one about the Kamp) or piano piece. But the reaction among younger composers, especially in the 1960s and '70's, was a vehement rejection of his romanticism in favor of avant-garde styles imported from elsewhere in Europe. Minimalism has never taken hold in Finland. There is no dominant style any more; instead, a lively pluralism can be heard on the record labels -Finlandia, Ondine, Alba, Bis, and Naxos - that commonly release works by Finnish composers.

On three successive evenings last November, my wife and I attended top-notch performances of both Finnish and foreign music. A production of Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina" at the Finnish National Opera may not have reached Metropolitan Opera standards. But since this piece requires as many as 200 performers on stage, the level of expertise was more than impressive.

Church services on weekends offer another chance to hear outstanding musicians. The Temppeliaukion, a church built into a mound of granite, attracts world-class organists to play its thunderous instrument. We attended a concert of contemporary music on a Sunday night, and even when the string scrapings and percussive rustlings had our minds wandering, the fantastical subterranean setting held our attention.

Finally, at the Sibelius Academy we heard the Sacconi String Quartet in performances of Sibelius and Bartok. One of the top music schools in all of Europe, the academy holds dozens of well-attended events each year. Ticket prices everywhere are far below the levels prevailing in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. The best seats for the Finnish National Opera sell for $85 to $100 (premieres cost more) while it is not uncommon to pay only a nominal fee at the Sibelius Academy.

After concerts we found ourselves dining at Kosmos Kalevankatu 3; (358-9) 647-255, which has an arty but not snooty air and stays open until 1 a.m. in a city where most places close early; or we strolled to the trendier Bank Bistro, Unioninkatu 20; (358-9) 1345-6260, where the décor is mainly Iittala, a Finnish powerhouse of contemporary design. Our one splurge was lunch at the Savoy. Situated on the top floor of a commercial building, with a panoramic view of Helsinki, the restaurant (Etelaesplanadi 14; (358-9) 684-4020, surrounds diners with original Alvar Aalto furnishings. While the food is on the pricey side (a three-course lunch of elk tartar, roasted pike, lime and mango salad, cost $70, not including wine), dining here is such a subtle and memorable experience that patrons won't miss the money for long.

Otherwise, we were happy with the sandwiches and desserts at Café Strindberg (Pohjoisesplanadi 33; (358-9) 681-2030, located in the same building as the Kamp and teeming with young people. Mornings usually began with coffee and pastries at Fazer Café (Kluuvikatu 3; (358-9) 675-049, an Art Deco restaurant and bakery across the street from the Kamp; evenings were best concluded with drinks at Kappeli (Etelaesplanadi 1; (358-9) 681-2440, a glass-and-iron nest of restaurants and bars in the middle of Esplanade Park, and another favorite haunt of Sibelius.

The aristocratic musical tradition that Sibelius represents may weaken among future generations, as it has throughout the world. American pop and rap music is strong among teenagers. But so are music education programs; and polls say that most Finns would still rather read than watch television.

The ebullient conductor Leif Segerstam, who has also composed more than 120 symphonies, thinks that Finland is ideally suited to adapt and absorb new ideas. "We are between the Occident and the Orient," he said over coffee in the living room of his Helsinki home. "We can choose between this and that, and let the motion of coincidence and randomness wash over us. We don't rush after every trend - the Finnish language is like a virus protector - and yet we like technology and new things."

At which point he sang me one of the rough-hewn themes that Nokia has commissioned him to create for its cellphones. Nowhere but Finland, it seems, would a business have good reason to think that its customers might like a burst of contemporary classical music as a ring tone.

Music Information

The best source for the latest and most detailed information on every kind of Finnish music is the Finnish Music Information Center, www.fimic.fi. Information is also available from these sources:

Finlandia Hall, (358-9) 402-41, finlandia.hel.fi/english.

Finnish National Opera, (358-9) 4030-2211, www.ooppera.fi.

The Sibelius Academy, (358-20) 753-90, www.siba.fi.

Savonlinna Festival, (358-15) 476-750, www.operafestival.fi.

Kuhmo Chamber Festival, (358-9) 493-867 www.kuhmofestival.fi.

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/06/1...12finland.html



Digital Future Has Not Yet Arrived

As consumers and music industry executives warm to the idea of easy- access, on-demand entertainment, the market for digital entertainment is poised for dramatic growth over the next several years.

What began with peer-to-peer file-sharing has evolved into wireless ringtones and full-song downloads,
podcasting, internet streaming via blogs, internet radio and more.

This concludes a two-part report that explores the new opportunities and complications the music industry faces as it struggles to keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation. Part one covered interoperability, P2P incentive programs and subscription services. The following article looks at breakthroughs and challenges in the areas of subscription services, podcasting and blogs.

To Subscribe Or Not To Subscribe

While Apple's iTunes Music Store has topped more than 400 million downloads, the music industry is still trying to find a way to make money from digital music.

The revenue margins of the 99-cent download are simply too thin for anyone to make a profit. All-you- can-eat subscription services, however, offer a fatter pie to slice up, and record labels have stated their preference for the system - if the public goes for it.

Subscription music services like Rhapsody and Napster have reported sharply rising subscriber numbers and revenue figures. Rhapsody boasts more than 1 million premium subscribers, and recently beat revenue expectations by $3.5 million for first-quarter 2005. The company's new service upgrade is offering basic users 25 free tracks per month, as well as an option to transfer tracks to a portable player, which it hopes will boost these numbers.

Meanwhile, Napster announced it now has 40,000-plus subscribers, a quarterly increase of more than 50 per cent, and has raised earnings expectations twice, from $14 million to about $17.5 million. Napster is putting $30 million behind an advertising campaign to promote its Napster to Go service, urging fans to "do the math" on the costs of filling an iPod versus signing up for a music subscription.

And Yahoo most recently jumped into the subscription waters with a big splash, possibly initiating a price war with its limited-offer $6-a-month portable subscription fee until the service completes its public testing phase.

But subscription models have proved a hard sell. A recent Parks Associates survey measuring various digital music consumption habits found 40 per cent of its respondents still favor the a la carte download model, while only 8 per cent prefer subscription.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has expressed his disdain for the subscription model. But he also once said Apple would never make a flash-based music device, and the company now owns 58 per cent of the flash market with the iPod Shuffle. Many expect Apple to adopt a subscription model once the economics of doing so make sense.

Invasion Of The Pods

There's still no word on whether podcasting is anything more substantial than a cool-sounding name, but the technology has generated a lot of attention.

Podcasting is a largely do-it-yourself system for recording homemade radio shows into an MP3 file and making that file available for others to download and play on their computers or portable media devices.

Terrestrial radio group Infinity and Sirius Satellite Radio have jumped into the podcasting arena. Sirius has begun broadcasting a talk show by podcast pioneer Adam Curry, who was one of the original MTV VJs. Infinity, meanwhile, has launched what many believe to be the first podcast-only station, broadcasting select podcasts submitted by its listeners on the air and via a new Internet radio station.

To date, the technology has been limited primarily to talk shows, but there is increasing interest in adding music playlists.

But music labels are hesitant to distribute music in a downloadable file unless the proper licensing is obtained. Performance rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP have created blanket licensing schemes to address the podcast issue, but labels have not yet followed suit with a licensing program.

Indie labels and unsigned acts are expected to lead the way in using podcasting to offer virtual showcases of sorts. And several podcast aggregators are preparing to open Web stores to offer surfers a one-stop shop for all their podcast needs. Podchannels is one such company, which is expected to go live in early June.

Blog Exposure

Artists increasingly are turning to web logs, or blogs, for exposure. Unsigned bands as well as established acts like Weezer and Oasis have used such web-based communities to stream their upcoming releases in advance of the official sales date. Blog service myspace.com has taken the lead in this effort, with more than 300,000 bands hosting blogs on the service.

The site's motivation is simple. Myspace.com counts more than 18 million users and has used exclusive music deals to capture a top 10 slot for internet page views month after month, according to comScore Media Metrix.

What's next for blog services? Playlist sharing and integration into instant-messaging communities are already gaining steam. AOL, Yahoo and MSN all offer blog services that let users highlight their favorite songs.

Users can choose to link the music they're listening to at any given time to their IM profile, so others on their buddy lists can see and listen as well.

"We're focused on making music more of a social experience than just a stand-alone silo, listening to music on your own device," says Rob Bennett, senior director of MSN Entertainment.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...a11275,00.html



Blow-Up: Snapshot to Poster
Katie Hafner

ALL it the Lambie Solution.

Tyra Pacheco of Acushnet, Mass., 50 miles south of Boston, was stumped for a way to decorate the new bedroom of her 4-year-old daughter, Annie. In a flash of inspiration, she took digital photographs of two of Annie's most beloved stuffed animals - Soft Lambie and Baby Lambie - and zapped them off to an online photo lab, Ofoto (now kodakgallery.com). Ms. Pacheco had one of the photos enlarged to poster size and three others made slightly smaller. She framed them and hung them on the wall.

Annie was delighted to see her snuggly toys magnified to the monumental dimension of Soviet worker heroes. Ms. Pacheco's total bill: $50 for the prints and about $20 for the frames.

Gone are the days when an 8-by-10-inch print seemed huge. As a new generation of multimegapixel digital cameras floods the market, more and more of the new art going up on walls across America are blow-ups of pictures the wall owners have taken. Even the most amateur digital photographers are finding that shots from their vacations or of their families and pets can take the place of museum prints.

Others are simply snapping digital photos of fine art at museums and having enlargements made. And some people are so taken with this new hobby that they have stopped collecting art altogether in favor of their own digital creations.

"Most people will have a deeper connection to pictures they've made of things they care about than they have to something made by someone else," said Peter Galassi, chief curator for photography at the Museum of Modern Art. "And the technology has changed, so it's now very easy for the labs to do it."

Some home printers will produce prints up to 13 by 19 inches, but for anything larger, a specialized printer is usually required. Professional cameras, however, are not necessarily needed. Ms. Pacheco's 3.1-megapixel camera - a level now found in cameras for as little as $100 - produced pictures of lambies that were so sharp you could see the crinkles in their synthetic wool. Even larger prints can be made with many middle-of-the-road cameras.

Web sites like Shutterfly and Kodak's gallery may not see themselves as the vanguard of a revolution in domestic aesthetics. Their job is to make sure that no surface - whether coffee mug or wall space - goes unadorned by a favorite photo.

Their services, and those provided by high-end photo shops, have come in handy, however, as digital cameras have reached a critical mass. Of every three cameras sold last year, two were digital, according to Photo Marketing Association International, a trade group.

"We couldn't have had this conversation a year ago," said Mitch Goldstone, an owner of 30 Minute Photos Etc. (30minphotos.com), in Irvine, Calif. Mr. Goldstone is seeing an increasing number of customers order multiple 20- by-30-inch enlargements.

At least half the orders he gets are for bigger prints, Mr. Goldstone said; the biggest he offers is 30 by 40 inches. He has also seen high- resolution photos of fine art come through his lab, taken at museums by tourists who want to avoid paying for posters at the museum store. "Michelangelo's 'David' is a favorite one," he said.

Dr. Richard Selby is one of Mr. Goldstone's best customers. A retired neurologist who lives in Dana Point, Calif., Dr. Selby is a frequent traveler to exotic places - Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso in West Africa, for instance - who likes to bring back gifts for friends and family members.

But he has found that he no longer needs to cram statues from places like Papua New Guinea into an airplane's overhead compartment. Instead, he gives 8-by-10-inch prints. As for himself, he orders enlargements and puts them on his walls. When he grows tired of the pictures, he puts up new ones.

Dr. Selby often uses an 11-megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds, but has also seen "amazing things" with a seven- megapixel Canon PowerShot SD500 Digital ELPH. He is especially impressed by how easily he can order enlargements. "I press the button and it's done," he said. "Then I have it back in a day."

People respond differently to a large photograph than they do to a snapshot. The viewer is forced to confront it more directly. Making an image big magnifies its perceived importance, giving it meaning that it may not have evoked in miniature.

Although amateur photographers do not necessarily have an eye for photographs that are aesthetically well served when made huge, that may not always matter. "People should put whatever they want on their walls," Mr. Galassi said. "If they want me to hang their pictures at the museum, that's different. But if they're only themselves and their friends to look at them, why not?"

Not everyone agrees. "Honestly, some photographs function better when printed small, and it's a more intimate experience," said Matt Lipps, a professional photographer in Los Angeles.

"If you take something that's a one-to-one experience and blow it up large, you can never get a proper distance from it," Mr. Lipps said. "It puts it into a public that maybe it shouldn't actually be in, whether it's in a home or not."

Photo sites, however, are finding that big sells. Shutterfly now offers to print digital photos on stretched canvas, as large as 24 by 36 inches. The company did brisk business with the canvas prints around Mother's Day, and expects Father's Day to be busy, too.

"As we start to think about what is beautiful to us and what we wanted to be surrounded by, it's our own personal memories and our own personal creations," said Jeff Housenbold, the chief executive of Shutterfly, whose own office walls are covered with 20-by-30-inch shots of his children.

Talent with a camera is not always necessary. Mr. Goldstone said that his employees often tweaked the photos that came in, adjusting color and intensity before sending a print out.

"We want customers to believe they took the world's greatest picture," he said. "They don't need to know there's quite a bit of work done to it."

Jonathan Goody, a real estate developer in Piedmont, Calif., describes himself as an average but avid photographer. Artwork he buys is quickly being supplanted by artwork he creates. Mr. Goody has decided to chronicle his trips around the world, with a focus on major transportation hubs - downtown Tokyo, Piccadilly Circus and Times Square - all of which have replaced other art on the walls of his two homes.

Mr. Goody said he had no interest in putting photos on anything other than photographic paper. "I don't want T-shirts and mugs and mouse pads and sweatshirts," he said.

Mr. Goody wants prints, and he wants his prints big. Some of his enlargements are 4 by 5 feet. "I frame it and mat it as I would any original piece of art," he said.

When traveling, after a long day behind the viewfinder, Mr. Goody goes to his hotel room and uploads the photos to Mr. Goldstone's site. "He has them on my doorstep when I come home," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/te.../08hafner.html



Yahoo Scoops Up Dialpad

Internet giant will use Dialpad's technology in its own VoIP service.
Paul Kallender

Yahoo has bought VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service provider Dialpad Communications to use its technology in Yahoo's VoIP services, Dialpad said this week.

The cost of the acquisition was not announced.

VoIP technology works by routing calls as data over broadband connections. Early VoIP technology allowed PC users to dial each other, but some current services allow callers to use standard phones or even mobile phones to make and receive calls.

Dialpad, of Milpitas, California, was launched in 1999 and offers VoIP calling services to over 200 countries at rates as low as $0.017 cents a minute for some international calls to some of its subscribers, according to information posted on its Web site.

Apart from monthly subscription services, the company offers a prepaid and a calling card service. The latter allows calls to be made via a regular phone without the need for a PC. The company has over 14 million users, it says.

New Services Coming

Yahoo will use Dialpad's technology to develop new VoIP services, Dialpad says, without giving further details.

Yahoo was not available for comment.

The acquisition is Yahoo's second VoIP announcement in a month. In May, the company said it had improved its PC-to-PC voice communications service, replacing its walkie-talkie technology with a continuous connection service.

Dialpad will continue to accept new subscriptions for its prepaid and monthly services but stopped taking subscriptions for its calling card service on June 13, it says.

It will provide calling card services to existing accounts until those subscriptions expire, it says.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121398,00.asp



BT Rolls Out Mobile, VoIP Combo Phone
Ed Oswald

British Telecom on Wednesday unveiled BT Fusion, the first combined mobile and fixed telephone service. To make it work, specially designed phones will act as a regular mobile phone when away from home, but will switch to a VoIP phone using Bluetooth when the customer is at home.

The first wireless phone to be launched on the service will be the popular Motorola RAZR, which is just like the original version except for the addition of UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access. To connect itself to the home network, the phone includes Class 1 Bluetooth.

UMA is a technology that allows access to GSM services over a regular broadband connection, and allows for seamless handover between a mobile network and a wireless network such as Bluetooth or 802.11.

According to BT, a call from home would save a user up to 95 percent less than making the same call from a mobile phone from home.

To make the technology work, the company will offer subscribers something called the BT Hub, which will detect a UMA-enabled phone and be able to switch the user in mid-call when in range of the network. The BT Hub is also a wireless router, which means the user will just be able to replace his already existing router with the UMA-enabled one.

"We know that many of our customers enjoy the convenience of their mobile phones when they're out and about - but switch to using a landline phone when they arrive back home to save money or because they have little or no mobile coverage," Ian Livingston, CEO of the retail division of BT said.

According to a internal survey by BT, nearly 19 percent of phone users experienced problems with reception inside the home. A common issue with GSM is its relative inability to pass through stone or brick walls, leaving many with signal issues even in areas of strong coverage.

The service will cost consumers 9.99 pounds ($18.04) per month for 100 cross-network minutes, and 14.99 pounds ($27.08) per month for 200 cross-network minutes. A hub and the Motorola v560 will come free with service activation.

According to BT, 400 customers will initially be accepted now, with a wider rollout expected to begin in September. Customers interested in signing up for the service should visit the BT Fusion Web site for more information.
http://www.betanews.com/article/BT_R...one/1118852420



Creative's iPod Photo Rival Delayed
Ed Oswald

BetaNews has learned that Creative has pushed back the release of its highly anticipated Zen Micro Photo MP3 player to at least August, and now says that it cannot confirm retail prices for the unit even though it had publicly announced pricing in January at CES 2005 in Las Vegas.

The Zen Micro Photo won "Best of CES" at the annual consumer trade show, leading CEO Sim Wong Hoo to boast that "the success of the original Zen Micro has been so great that it was tough to deliver an encore in such a short period of time," claiming the judges "had never seen anything like it." Hoo told onlookers that the unit would be available during the second quarter.

However, since then, sales of Creative players have continued to trail those of market-leading Apple by close to a 3 to 1 margin in the first three months of 2005, far behind the company's expectations. Also, Creative's profits have declined 72 percent since last year.

For the March quarter, Creative's profit was $15.9 million compared to $290 million for Apple, much of which the company attributed to the iPod's success.

Pricing for the Zen Micro Photo was announced at CES to be $299 USD for the 5GB capacity and $349 USD for 6GB. But these announcements were made before Apple's restructuring of it's iPod Photo line in which it introduced a 30GB version for $349 - the same price as the Zen Micro Photo with only 6GB.

Creative banked the success of the unit on its screen - a 262,144-color 1.5" OLED. In comparison, the iPod Photo's screen is a 2-inch LCD only capable of producing 65,336 colors. However, it has become clear that Apple, although it may be at a disadvantage in features, intends to price its competitors out of the market.

"iPod momentum presents numerous problems for other MP3 manufacturers. As iPod's share increases, the competitive space for other MP3 manufacturers decreases, Joe Wilcox, senior analyst at Jupiter Research, told BetaNews. "Greater competition concentrated in a small space means non-iPod MP3 vendors may not be able to quickly turn over inventory, which could affect product roadmaps and manufacturers' flexibility to more rapidly release new models."

Creative would not comment on the reasoning behind the Zen Micro Photo delay. Representatives also would not say whether Apple's moves after CES or the company's financial situation has anything to do with the late appearance of the device. "We're targeting August and pricing is not confirmed," a company spokesperson told BetaNews.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...yed/1118857715



From mid Spring

21 iTunes per iPod

Are all those iPods empty?

APRIL 28, 2004 - Today is the one year anniversary of the iTunes Music Store. As of April 15, Apple had sold roughly 60 million iTunes and 3 million iPods (sources below). That's about 21 songs per iPod. For perspective, the smallest iPods hold 1,000 songs, and some hold 10,000 songs. So, when people fill up those iPods, where does all the music come from?

More music than ever

Let's face it: the incredible capacity of computers, iPods, and iPod imitators means everyone is going to listen to much more music than they actually buy. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Filesharing networks have created the largest music library ever, and that's a tremendous benefit for the public.

Everyone can win

Since sharing music seems like it's here to stay, why not just legalize it in such a way that musicians and labels get paid? Voluntary Collective Licensing (VCL) is a proposal for a simple and practical system where you pay a flat fee for "all-you-can-eat" downloads and the money gets divided up to musicians and labels according to popularity. It would only cost you $5 a month, and unlike pay-per-song stores like iTunes (which take 35% of each sale) all of that money would go directly to musicians and record labels. This means that thousands more musicians would be able to make a decent living and everyone would be free to share music without having to worry about getting sued. Check out VCL and take a look at the diagram below.

iTunes - On March 15, Apple announced that they had sold 50 million iTunes and were selling songs at a rate of 2.5 million per week (Apple press release). Another month of sales at that rate is about 60 million sold by April 15.
iPods - On April 15, several newspapers reported that Apple had sold 2.9 million iPods (article).

Why the ratio is actually even lower than 21

For the sake of simplicity, we've assumed that every iTune ends up on an iPod, but that's clearly not the case. Hundreds of thousands of people, at the very least, have purchased songs on iTunes but do not own iPods. On the other side, many people copy CDs they own onto their iPods, so it's pretty clear that not all the non-iTunes music comes from filesharing. Then again, people share CDs in the real world too.

Fight for a Better Music Industry

This site was created by Downhill Battle, a music activism organization that's working to break the major record label monopoly of the music industry and move towards a system that's better for musicians and fans. Visit downhillbattle.org to read more about how the music industry works and to get involved.

Voluntary Collective Licensing at a Glance

Well, a pretty close glance, but certainly a glance worth glancing. And while the diagram looks complicated at first, the experience for users is simple. Pay an extra $5 on your internet bill and share all the music you want. Nice work, Ren.
http://www.itunesperipod.com/



Coming To A Hard Disk Near You
Simon Waldman

You may never have heard of BitTorrent, but it made the latest Star Wars movie available six hours before its official release, it can get you 24 or the OC months before they're on TV and it accounts for a third of all internet traffic. No wonder the entertainment industry has declared it public enemy number one. By Simon Waldman

Friday June 17, 2005
The Guardian

The FBI doesn't like it. The Department of Homeland Security is so concerned that it has closed down websites related to it. The Moving Picture Association of America is waging a war against it. And every day millions of people around the world use it to share music, TV programmes and movies.

The "it" is BitTorrent - a computer program that's the brainchild of the softly-spoken Bram Cohen. It is a super-smart way to share huge files over the internet, and one which, depending on whose side of the argument you listen to, is either an evil tool for those involved with copyright theft, or a work of genius set to transform the media industry as we know it.

Recent research has shown that, last year, BitTorrent was responsible for one third of all traffic on the internet. That's one third. And this despite a wave of legal activity against the peer- to-peer technology (P2P) that underpins Cohen's brainchild.

In essence, BitTorrent is just the latest in a line of programs that started with Napster and allows individuals to swap information with each other over the internet. An OECD report on digital music released this week revealed that at any one time there are as many as 10 million people exchanging files using all forms of P2P. Business Week has estimated that the total number of users could be as high as 100 million.

BitTorrent has become more popular than its competition because it is much more efficient. Systems such as Napster and Kazaa often used to grind to a halt because the files that were being shared sat on one computer, and could only be downloaded as quickly as the lines going in and out of that computer would allow.

Cohen's idea was to break the files up into bits. Once someone downloaded a bit, they also became a source for that bit. As a result, more people downloading a file meant there were also more people uploading it, which meant it actually became faster rather than slower.

Originally intended for software developers to move their work around the net, it wasn't long before BitTorrent became popular with music and video fans. This shouldn't have come as much of a surprise: instead of people simply swapping songs of around 3-4 megabytes, using BitTorrent they could swap whole movies of about 500 times bigger (1.5 gigabytes).

And swap they do. Anything and everything digital is shared. Legal and illegal. People gather on sites where they can download files or "torrents", which they then run on their own computer using special software. If you have a broadband connection and can set it all up (and you need to be reasonably technically competent to do so), you can download an album in an hour; an hour's worth of TV in a couple of hours; and a movie overnight.

A quick word of caution here: first, downloading copyright material is illegal. Second, setting it up is quite fiddly. If you are the sort of person hell-bent on watching the latest Star Wars film while it is still officially only available in the cinema, you will find it much easier to buy it on DVD from the dodgy bloke carrying a bin bag around your local pub.

Needless to say, the advent of torrent sharing is not making the movie industry happy - and, like the recording industry before it, the response is lawsuit-shaped.

The Motion Picture Association of America - the organisation that has been most vehemently against the growth of BitTorrent - has, until now, focused its attention not on BitTorrent itself, but on sites that allow the downloading of torrents. One such site was EliteTorrents.org. It was here that around 100,000 people a day would gather to get the latest files, and it was also here that the final instalment of Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith, appeared - six hours before it was due to open in US cinemas. On May 28, officers from the FBI swooped on a number of homes and offices across the US in what was called operation D-Elite. Within hours, the site was no more.

If you go to EliteTorrents.org today, you will find that its sleek grey design replaced by the logos of the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security alongside a bold announcement: "This site has been permanently shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Individuals involved in the operation and use of the Elite Torrents network are under investigation for criminal copyright infringement."

Dan Glickman the president of the MPAA declared the closure of EliteTorrents was "bad news for internet movie thieves and good news for preserving the magic of the movies".

It's fair to say that the movie industry is rarely first in line for a sympathy vote. It claims that piracy costs it $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year, a figure that doesn't include the losses from internet file sharing. However, the very thing that lays behind the dramatic increase in piracy - the arrival of the DVD - has also brought the industry some quite spectacular dividends. The DVD market in the US last year was worth $21.2bn (£11.6bn); with the retail market alone up year on year by 33%. And it continues to grow every year.

The precise impact of P2P on sales is also a moot point. While the industry believes it has a detrimental affect, this week's report from the OECD on digital music admitted that "digital piracy may be an important impediment to the success of legitimate online content markets", but "it is difficult to establish a basis to prove a causal relationship between the 20% fall in overall revenues experienced by the music industry between 1999 and 2003."

The other debate is whether BitTorrent itself (and, by extension, Cohen) is responsible for piracy. No one is arguing whether or not copyright infringement happens, but whether by banning the software that allows it you are also stifling a new and exciting technology.

At the moment, the US supreme court is making its mind up in the case of MGM v Grokster - where the issue is whether a piece of software itself can be held responsible for the piracy that is committed using it. The landmark case in this area, goes back to 1984 when the movie industry tried to kill off the video recorder. The defendant back then was Sony which now, as a studio owner, finds itself on the other side of the divide.

Whatever develops in the courts, it is clear that BitTorrent offers much more than movie piracy; it might change the future of TV too.

One of the most popular uses of torrent technology is to allow people to watch whatever TV they want when they want it. The latest episodes of major US TV series normally appear on Torrent sites almost immediately after they have been broadcast. This is an unofficial version of video-on-demand: something that has been promised for the best part of a decade by broadcasters but has never been delivered.

Thanks to BitTorrent, however, it is available here and now and free. In this world the traditional restrictions of schedules and broadcasting territories disappear. You want to watch the latest OC, 24, or Desperate Housewives months before it arrives in the UK? No problem. You're addicted to Comedy Central's the Daily Show, but don't subscribe to Cable? It's all yours.

One site, UK Nova, specialises in providing TV programmes to those who can't get them because they are outside the UK. It started as an informal way for a small gang of expat EastEnders addicts to get their daily fix and now, a year later, has a global community of 30,000 people swapping all sorts of new and vintage programming - from Jamie Oliver to Are You Being Served?.

Roger, one of the site's moderators - a British expat living in Germany - stresses that they are providing a service to people who simply can't get these programmes - and they are keen not to do anything to damage the broadcasters' commercial interests. They automatically remove anything that is released on DVD, for example. "If there was a legal service that allowed us to do this," he says, "we'd happily pay for it."

And it just so happens that there is at least one in the offing. The BBC is currently trialing its interactive media player (iMP) with hundreds of hours of BBC video made available for download over the internet up to a week after its original broadcast. IMP itself uses a form of P2P software to allow the files to be downloaded.

But as its technology is adapted, copied and improved, perhaps the greatest legacy of BitTorrent will not be as a way for major broadcasters, record labels and movie studios to distribute their goods. Instead, by reducing the cost of online distribution to almost zero, it allows anyone to have a global audience.

For example, one site, LegalTorrents, offers links to a wide range of music and video from creators who are happy to have their work distributed on the net. You won't find Star Wars there or Mr and Mrs Smith, but you will find The Meaty McMeat Show a "completely insane 99-minute-long animated movie that involves a diseased human organ and his colleague who travel back in time to meet a psychic talking pie".

And how can any technology that allows such a masterpiece to be seen around the world be all bad?
http://film.guardian.co.uk/piracy/st...508465,00.html



Punishments Don’t Fit The Crime Of File Sharing

The Recording Industry Association of America knows if you've been bad or good – and it wants you running scared.

On May 26, an additional 91 college students were sued for illegal file sharing, and for the first time, seven of the defendants are UCLA students.

The RIAA says sharing music is a crime similar to other forms of stealing – i.e., downloading or sharing a song is the equivalent of stealing a candy bar from a store. On some levels the RIAA might be correct; sharing music without consent is illegal, and record companies have the right to seek reasonable punishments.

But the RIAA uses its power to sue individuals as a weapon meant to strike fear in people via the threat of tremendous – and unreasonable – penalties.

In fact, the recording industry shares much of the blame for the current state of affairs. It is unfortunate (one could almost say criminal) that it has resorted to targeting colleges for lawsuits. Students from 51 colleges have been the recipients of RIAA lawsuits since April.

The studios of the RIAA ripped customers off for years with expensive CDs and ignored the constructive potential of the Internet. The industry essentially waited for the release of Apple's iTunes Music Store in April 2003 before it had a serious answer to illegally sharing music online.

More generally, the RIAA's response to file sharing hasn't been to make music more affordable or accessible. Instead, the RIAA spent its energy and money lobbying for extreme punishments for those who share their files.

Let's look at the comparison of stealing a candy bar and the punishment it carries. Stealing anything worth less than $400 is considered petty theft and is punishable by no more than six months in jail, a fine of $1,000, or both.

But in reality, few petty thieves receive the maximum penalty, especially for first offenses. In some cases, California law permits the victims of minor crimes to completely forgive the perpetrator.

Even a more serious crime like driving under the influence is counted as a misdemeanor for the first offense, with a punishment of 96 hours to six months in jail.

But sharing 10 or more "phonorecords" with a total value of $2,500 or more can result in up to five years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and civil penalties.

And a new law signed by President Bush makes possessing a single unreleased song or movie a crime that can result in up to 10 years in federal prison.

In the past, equally ridiculous penalties have been proposed by the attack dogs of the recording industry.

In 2003, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Van Nuys, introduced legislation that would have made uploading a single song or movie over the Internet carry a penalty of five years in federal prison.

Instead of fixing their own industry model, the RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America use their political clout to push for harsher and harsher punishments for file sharers. Copyright owners deserve to profit from their work, but they must moderate their desire to punish with the understanding that copyright infringement is not a violent crime.

It is the responsibility of both the studios and the politicians to make sure the punishment fits the crime.
http://www.dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=33575



'Deep Throat' Sells Story
Edward Wyatt

Universal Pictures and PublicAffairs have agreed to pay close to $1 million to buy the film and book rights to the life story of W. Mark Felt, people involved in the deal said yesterday.

Mr. Felt is the former F.B.I. official who recently said he was Deep Throat, the secret source for Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter, during the Watergate investigation.

The potential sale has been the subject of intense speculation in the publishing industry and in Hollywood since Mr. Felt's identity was revealed last month in an article in Vanity Fair magazine.

The contracts, which are expected to be announced today, include an option to produce a feature film and the rights to a biography based on previously unpublished material written by Mr. Felt after his retirement from the F.B.I.

Peter Osnos, the publisher and chief executive of PublicAffairs, an independent publishing company, said yesterday that the book would be published next spring and would combine Mr. Felt's recollections about his life and his relationship with Mr. Woodward with material written by John O'Connor, the lawyer who wrote the Vanity Fair article. Mr. Osnos declined to comment on the amount to be paid for the book rights.

An option to produce a film based on the material and Mr. Felt's memoir of his life in the F.B.I. was bought by Universal for development by Playtone, the production company owned by the actor Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, according to two people involved in the deal, who asked not to be named. A representative of Universal Pictures did not return phone calls last night.

The full amount to be realized by Mr. Felt's family will not be known for some time and depends on whether a film is actually made, people involved in the deal said. But the largest portion of the $1 million amount is likely to come from the movie rights.

David Kuhn, a literary agent at Kuhn Projects who represented the Felt family in the negotiations, said the family chose PublicAffairs as its publisher not because of a large advance but because of its reputation for producing literary nonfiction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/na... tner=homepage



Ultraportable. Ultracapacity. Ultraquick.
John Biggs

Thumb drives, U.S.B. keys, flash disks - call them what you will, there hasn't been much to get excited about in ultraportable storage. The Pocket Rocket, which is created and sold by Memina (www.memina.com), a Samsung affiliate, could change that. The device has a healthy storage capacity of up to two gigabytes (for $204.99) and it transfers data at speeds faster than some CD-ROM drives.

If you've ever used a flash-card reader to pull large images out of a digital camera, you know how slow flash memory can be. The Pocket Rocket spits out information at 18 megabytes a second, double the speed of an average flash card, and improves the write speed by six megabytes a second. That means large files and images will transfer to and from this 2.5-inch long device in seconds rather than minutes.

Later this month, Memina plans to release a four-gigabyte model with a read time of 30 megabytes a second. The device includes gold-plated U.S.B. plugs to ensure the accuracy of data transfers, and removable caps for protection from whatever else might be in your pocket.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/te...s/16flash.html



ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

Paris Court Orders ISPs To Stop Users From Accessing Site

A Paris court has ordered 10 French ISPs to prevent users from accessing the U.S. based Aaargh! website. The filtering order comes as the plaintiffs in the case dropped attempts to obtain an order against the site's U.S.-based ISP. French coverage at http://fr.news.yahoo.com/050613/7/4glsc.html


Top ISPs Host Most Infected Computers

According to a report released by Prolexic Technologies, Internet "zombie" attacks that attempt to knock computer systems offline are more likely to come from users of AOL than any other source. Prolexic said the report could indicate that some Internet providers do not protect their customers as much as companies like EarthLink. http://tinyurl.com/cvtbh


Fraudsters Use iPods To Steal Corporate Data

Anti-fraud experts warn that Apple iPods, along with other music players that boast hard drives with up to 20Gbytes of memory, could become widely used by employees to fool security officials and breach data security rules. In one case a recruitment agency found much of its client database had been copied to an iPods's memory and used to defraud the firm. http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/new...505890,00.html



Your ISP as Net Watchdog
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities.

Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs--that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.

In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically.

In Europe, the Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers say logs must be kept for between one and three years. One U.S. industry representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Justice Department is interested in at least a two-month requirement.

Justice Department officials endorsed the concept at a private meeting with Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to interviews with multiple people who were present. The meeting took place on April 27 at the Holiday Inn Select in Alexandria, Va.

"It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically," said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'"

McClure said that while the Justice Department representatives argued that Internet service providers should cooperate voluntarily, they also raised the "possibility that we should create by law a standard period of data retention." McClure added that "my sense was that this is something that they've been working on for a long time."

This represents an abrupt shift in the Justice Department's long-held position that data retention is unnecessary and imposes an unacceptable burden on Internet providers. In 2001, the Bush administration expressed "serious reservations about broad mandatory data retention regimes."

The current proposal appears to originate with the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, which enforces federal child pornography laws. But once mandated by law, the logs likely would be mined during terrorism, copyright infringement and even routine criminal investigations. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.)

"Preservation" vs. "Retention"

At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Child protection advocates say that this process can lead police to dead ends if they don't move quickly enough and log files are discarded automatically. Also, many Internet service providers don't record information about instant- messaging conversations or Web sites visited--data that would prove vital to an investigation.

"Law enforcement agencies are often having 20 reports referred to them a week by the National Center," said Michelle Collins, director of the exploited child unit for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "By the time legal process is drafted, it could be 10, 15, 20 days. They're completely dependent on information from the ISPs to trace back an individual offender."

Collins, who participated in the April meeting, said that she had not reached a conclusion about how long log files should be retained. "There are so many various business models...I don't know that there's going to be a clear-cut answer to what would be the optimum amount of time for a company to maintain information," she said.

McClure, from the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said he counter-proposed the idea of police agencies establishing their own guidelines that would require them to seek logs soon after receiving tips.

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, compared the Justice Department's idea to the since-abandoned Clipper Chip, a brainchild of the Clinton and first Bush White House. Initially the Clipper Chip--an encryption system with a backdoor for the federal government--was supposed to be voluntary, but declassified documents show that backdoors were supposed to become mandatory.

"Even if your concern is chasing after child pornographers, the packets don't come pre-labeled that way," Rotenberg said. "What effectively happens is that all ISP customers, when that data is presented to the government, become potential targets of subsequent investigations."

A divided Europe

The Justice Department's proposal could import a debate that's been simmering in Europe for years.

In Europe, a data retention proposal prepared by four nations said that all telecommunications providers must retain generalized logs of phone calls, SMS messages, e-mail communications and other "Internet protocols" for at least one year. Logs would include the addresses of Internet sites and identities of the correspondents but not necessarily the full content of the communication.

Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration criticized that approach. In November 2001, Mark Richard from the Justice Department's criminal division said in a speech in Brussels, Belgium, that the U.S. method offers Internet providers the flexibility "to retain or destroy the records they generate based upon individual assessments of resources, architectural limitations, security and other business needs."

France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden jointly submitted their data retention proposal to the European Parliament in April 2004. Such mandatory logging was necessary, they argued, "for the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of crime or criminal offenses including terrorism."

But a report prepared this year by Alexander Alvaro on behalf of the Parliament's civil liberties and home affairs committee slammed the idea, saying it may violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

Also, Alvaro wrote: "Given the volume of data to be retained, particularly Internet data, it is unlikely that an appropriate analysis of the data will be at all possible. Individuals involved in organized crime and terrorism will easily find a way to prevent their data from being traced." He calculated that if an Internet provider were to retain all traffic data, the database would swell to a size of 20,000 to 40,000 terabytes--too large to search using existing technology.

On June 7, the European Parliament voted by a show of hands to adopt Alvaro's report and effectively snub the mandatory data retention plan. But the vote may turn out to have been largely symbolic: The Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers have vowed to press ahead with their data retention requirement.
http://news.com.com/Your+ISP+as+Net+...3-5748649.html



Poll: Most Want U.S. To Make Internet Safer
Ted Bridis

Most Americans who describe themselves as likely voters believe the government should do more to make the Internet safe, but they don't trust the federal institutions that are largely responsible for creating and enforcing laws online, according to a new industry survey.

People who were questioned expressed concerns over threats from identity theft, computer viruses and unwanted ``spam'' e-mails. But they held low opinions of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers against Internet fraud.

The FBI scored more favorably among Internet users in the survey but still lower than technology companies, such as Microsoft and Dell.

The telephone survey of 1,003 likely voters was funded by the Washington-based Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a trade group that has lobbied the Bush administration to pay greater attention to Internet security. The alliance also has cautioned lawmakers against what it considers unnecessary security laws.

``There are some mixed signals here,'' said Paul Kurtz, the group's executive director and a former White House cybersecurity official. ``There is definitely a desire to see government provide more leadership, but there is some anxiety about what ultimately might come out.''

The survey, to be released today, said 71 percent of people believe Congress needs to pass new laws to keep the Internet safe. But Kurtz said Congress and the Bush administration should do a better job enforcing existing Internet laws against hackers, thieves and vandals and offer incentives for companies to improve security.

``I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something,'' said Dan Burton, the senior lobbyist for Entrust, an online security company and member of the trade group. ``They don't have a lot of confidence that Congress will do the right thing.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/11900157.htm



Press Release

DCIA Achieves Milestone of Fifty Members Trade Association Looks Forward to Supreme Court Decision in MGM v. Grokster Case

The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) announced at the Washington Digital Media Conference today that it has recruited fifty Members since its inception, and expects to surpass that number by its second anniversary on July 1, 2005.

The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) announced at the Washington Digital Media Conference today that it has recruited fifty Members since its inception, and expects to surpass that number by its second anniversary on July 1, 2005.

“The DCIA is dedicated to commercial development of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, and we proudly salute our first fifty Member companies who share in a powerful vision and valiantly pioneer to achieve the enormous potential of distributed computing technologies,” said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty in making the announcement.

DCIA Membership is organized into three Groups: Content, Operations, and Platform. The non-profit trade association conducts working groups and special projects, such as the Consumer Disclosures Working Group (CDWG), P2P PATROL, and the P2P Revenue Engine (P2PRE). It also publishes the weekly online newsletter DCINFO.

DCIA resources include its leaders for Best Practices: Elaine Reiss; Business Administration: Sari Lafferty; Communications: Kelly Larabee; Consumer Research: Rich Feldman; Government Relations: Doug Campbell; Member Services: Karen Kaplowitz; and Technology: Adam Marcus. BigChampagne serves as the DCIA’s official industry data resource.

The DCIA Content Group is comprised of companies like the Jun Group that develops original content for P2P distribution; Sovereign Artists, a music label which has pioneered licensed file sharing as part of its marketing mix; Altnet that has agreements with nearly 100 such top independent labels for P2P distribution of their works; and Trymedia Systems, which distributes computer games from all 12 top major games publishers and 10 top casual games publishers.

Its Operations Group has P2P software developers and distributors like Sharman Networks that distributes Kazaa Media Desktop, the most downloaded software application in history; Grokster, one of the respondents in the Supreme Court case; RazorPop, which distributes TrustyFiles; INTENT MediaWorks that distributes iPeer and myPeer; and Seamless P2P, which provides P2P software solutions for government agencies, educational institutions, and Fortune 500 companies.

The DCIA Platform Group is made up of service-and-support companies, including digital rights management (DRM), payment solutions, business models, and strategic advisory companies like Digital Containers, which has two P2P DRM patents; Javien that provides payment solutions for the new iMesh; Shared Media Licensing, which provides the Weed technology supporting a unique file- sharing business model; and Alston & Bird that advises the Bertelsmann Group.

The names of DCIA’s first fifty Members follow with highlights of their industry participation summarized at http://www.dcia.info/Join/ highlights.htm and available on request, and the full DCIA Membership list can also be found with links to respective company sites on the “Join” page of the DCIA website: 33rd Street Records, A Matter of Substance, Alston & Bird, Altnet, Bennett Lincoff, BlueMaze Entertainment, City Canyons Records, Claria Corporation, Clickshare Service, Cybersky-TV, Digital Containers, Digital River, Digital Static, EZTV, Good Witch Records, Go-Kart Records, Grokster, Indie911, INTENT MediaWorks, Javien, Jeftel, Jillian Ann, Jun Group, KlikVU, Kufala Recordings, MasurLaw, MusicDish Network, NuCore Vision, One Love Channel, P2P Cash, PlayFirst, Predixis, Project V- G, Rap Station, RazorPop, Relatable, RightsLine, Scooter Scudieri, Seamless P2P, Shared Media Licensing, Sharman Networks, Skype, SMARTguard Software, Softwrap, Sovereign Artists, SVC Financial, Telcordia, Trymedia Systems, V2 Records, and Vmedia Research.

The DCIA’s vision is that civilization is experiencing a profoundly significant digital conversion. Traditionally, voice communication was transmitted through telco lines or wireless cells, video content was transmitted through coaxial cable or satellite down-linking, and data was transmitted by dial-up modem or broadband service.

Moving forward, all electronic content will become merged into fungible digital bits that will all be available through a choice of pipelines whether fiber-optic plants owned by telco, cable, or power companies, and/or some combination of satellite and cellular wireless.

Reception will be possible on any networked-device platform, with consumers free to decide they would like to do such iconoclastic activities as watch TV programs on their cell-phone screens or have long-distance conversations sitting in-front of their six-foot diagonal home-theater LCD screens using surround-sound speakers.

The source for content and vehicle for communications will be enhanced P2P, as exemplified by the most recent version of Kazaa that added DCIA Member Skype's Internet telephony offering, and swarming technologies such as ByteTornado, developed by DCIA Member Cybersky-TV, that break large files into thousands of tiny pieces for more efficient transmission.

The impact on entertainment is that viewers and listeners will have instant access to all prerecorded content ever produced that has been digitized and placed in a shared-folder, as well as the ability to be switched instantly to any live event, such as a newscast, sporting event, or musical concert, anywhere in the world.

The DCIA looks forward to the US Supreme Court’s imminent ruling in the high-profile MGM v. Grokster case, and the Australian Federal Court’s ruling in a related case, which should represent landmark decisions informing how content providers and technology suppliers interact in the digital realm generally and with respect to P2P file sharing in particular.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/6/emw252313.htm



The Line Between The Engineered And The Born Is Blurring
Jeffrey R. Harrow

In issues of The Harrow Technology Report I've explored several laboratory experiments involving direct neural connections between living brains and computers. Perhaps the most interesting is the one where monkeys were first taught to play joystick-controlled video games. Their brains were then hard-wired into computers that learned to isolate and interpret the monkeys' thoughts that specifically controlled the joystick. Once this was accomplished, the actual signals coming from the joystick were replaced with similar signals that were generated from the computer's analysis of the monkeys' thoughts.

And the monkeys happily continued playing the video game -- by thought control!

It gets even more interesting -- eventually, the monkeys came to realize that moving the joystick was no longer necessary; they continued to play the video games with their hands resting comfortably in their laps. True non-trivial direct thought control!

Training US!

Now, recent follow-up research described in the May 10, 2005 DukeMed News yields the fascinating insight that at the same time that these monkeys were learning to play their games, and later control remote robotic arms by simply 'thinking it so,' this mental activity was physically altering their brain to better accommodate this new way of thinking!

"...the analysis revealed that, while the animals were still able to use their own arms, some brain cells formerly used for that control shifted to control of the robotic arm [through the 'mental joystick']."

"This finding supports our theory that the brain has extraordinary abilities to adapt to incorporate artificial tools, whether directly controlled by the brain or through the appendages" said Nicolelis. "Our brain representations of the body are adaptable enough to incorporate any tools that we create to interact with the environment. This may include a robot appendage, but it may also include using a computer keyboard or a tennis racket. In any such case, the properties of this tool become incorporated into our neuronal 'space'," he said. According to Nicolelis, such a theory of brain adaptability has been controversial."

"[We're] suggesting that a fundamental trait of higher primates, in particular apes and humans, is the ability to incorporate these tools into the very structure of the brain. In fact, we're saying that it's not only the brain that is adaptable; it's the whole concept of self. And this concept of self extends to our tools. Everything from cars to clothing that we use in our lives becomes incorporated into our sense of self. So, our species is capable of 'evolving' the perception of what we are."

A growing number of Sci Fi authors have been exploring some of the personal and societal light and dark sides of such an innovation. Not to mention the 'competitive advantage' that such 'almost no reaction time' control would give to military pilots, and even to automobile drivers.

As is so often the case, Sci Fi has again led reality: As described in the May 16, 2005 Washington Post, twenty-file year old Matthew Nagel, who was paralyzed when stabbed through the spine, had a "jack" installed into the side of his head that connects to various wires throughout his brain. When he "jacks-in" to a specialized computer, just as for the monkeys, it interprets the neural impulses that would have controlled his natural hand and, instead, causes a robotic hand to do his bidding! Just by 'thinking it so.'

Training Something Else...

This is pretty impressive, to say the least, with incredible potential to ease the impact of certain disabilities, and far beyond.

But looking in a different direction, a University of Florida team headed by professor Thomas DeMarse has now grown a purpose-built biological brain that acts as an autopilot to keep a plane (an F-22 in a flight simulator) flying straight and level!!

And it gets even more interesting: I can attest, having been a Commercial and Instrument Flight Instructor for 30+ years, that it's HARD to get a new student to the point where he or she can control the plane with precision, especially when it involves recovering from unusual attitudes or in rough weather conditions. Yet DeMarse's 25,000 neuron "purpose-built bio-brain" is able to do exactly that!

It works like this, according to a U of F press release: neurons are removed from a rat brain and cultured in a dish that contains a base of 60 electrodes. The neurons begin to grow and to reach out and touch the other neurons around them. In many cases, the first few contacts are not to the neurons' liking, and they withdraw their probes and hunts for new neurons to court. Finally, all of the neurons have "found love in all the right places" and interconnected themselves in just the way they like -- and they begin functioning as a living neural network!

The electrodes then provide information about the plane's attitude to this "brain," and simultaneously receive "correction signals" from the brain that instruct the simulated plane's controls to bring the plane into straight and level flight, and maintain it that way. (It takes about 15 minutes for the "brain" to learn to do this, which it apparently does by itself.)

According to DeMarse,

"There's a lot of data out there that will tell you that the computation that's going on here isn't based on just one neuron. The computational property is actually an emergent property of hundreds or thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain."

Yes, our current electronic autopilots work just fine, thank you, but this early work demonstrates the vast potential for harnessing Nature's computing, life, to do our bidding.

Just The Beginning...

Ex-Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold points out that,

"... it cost $12 billion to sequence the first human genome. You will soon be able to get your own done for $10...

If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better versions of themselves, the line between the engineered and the born begins to blur."

Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil says,

"In the next couple of decades ... life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years. Most diseases will be prevented or reversed. Drugs will be individually tailored to a person's DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells -- nanobots, as they are called -- will be routinely injected by the millions into people's bloodstreams [a $3.7 billion bill for such research that was signed in 2003 certainly adds credibility]. They will be used primarily as diagnostic scouts and patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person's body it can be caught extremely early."

Where this will lead is still anyone's guess, but it's certainly one of the first faint writings on the wall that suggest how NBIC research (the converging of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences) is going to change ALL the rules. Even the definitions of Man and Machine...

Don’t Blink!

http://www.futurebrief.com/jeffharrowline018.asp















Until next week,

- js.
















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