Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 20th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive." – Trevor Edwards


"I am in the business of selling records and I want to be in a place where we have the opportunity to sell the most records. It's also nice that Wal-Mart pays us a very lucrative royalty; a royalty that no record company could come close to matching. But that's because we are not a loss leader at Wal-Mart. If the Eagles put out a record at Warner or any other major record label, part of the reason they can't pay up is we've got to pay for all of the bad acts they sign and release." – Glenn Frey


"Everyone has been screaming let's have a new paradigm in the record industry; let's figure out a way to do this ourselves. Let's figure out a way to leave the big dinosaur record companies behind that have been robbing from us -- and the consumer -- for the last 60-80 years. Ever since the record business became big business, the labels have been suspect. We just thought we would try something different." – Don Henley


"I can't just call their customer-service center and ask about my drive. There's nothing I can do. I don't know if we can hire an attorney ... is there a black-hole attorney? You can't take a black hole to court." – Chris Walla


"I can do this in the name of Allah, and I will not fail. I could slaughter him in the name of Allah." – Amatullah


"My name is Fountain Hughes. My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was 115 years old when he died. And now I am 101 years old."


"Dumbledore is gay." – J.K. Rowling






























RIAA Targets Usenet

It was bound to happen sooner or later, a matter of when, not if. The dreaded day has arrived and as hard as it may be for Usenet junkies to contemplate, this old and beloved service which swarms petabytes of content almost daily has met the foes that could conceivably reduce its output to a trickle: the US courts and the international recording industry. Or maybe not. The RIAA has announced a lawsuit (167 pg. pdf) against a branch of the system, accusing operators of massive copyright violations and generally boorish behavior - but the amorphous nature of newsgroups, dreamed up nearly thirty years ago by two grad students, makes them a lot tougher to control than a more typical semi decentralized P2P operation like Fasttrack or the newer Bittorrent trackers like the Piratebay. If the courts came down hard on Fasttrack the record companies haven't had much luck lately shutting those other sites down.

When dealing with platforms as opposed to individuals however international courts have generally ignored bedrock legal principals such as who is actually infringing, considering these mere technical trifles, preferring instead to find copyright violations anytime there may be unauthorized distribution, no matter how far removed from the defendant it is. In the states this means the US arms of an organization would likely be found liable, spelling potential headaches for North Dakota's Usenet.com specifically or any US-based operations feeding the giant newsgroup.

The DMCA may provide some harbor for these companies. According to this controversial law takedown notices must be sent by copyright holders before legal action can succeed. If it is within the power of the host, assuming it is the host, to remove disputed material and it does, lawsuits are generally not effective.












Enjoy,

Jack












October 20th, 2007




Ex-Phone Chief Says N.S.A. Sought Data Earlier
Scott Shane

The phone company Qwest Communications refused a proposal from the National Security Agency that the company’s lawyers considered illegal in February 2001, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the former head of the company contends in newly unsealed court filings.

The executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, also asserts in the filings that the agency retaliated by depriving Qwest of lucrative outsourcing contracts.

The filings were made as Mr. Nacchio fought charges of insider trading. He was ultimately convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading and has been sentenced to six years in prison. He remains free while appealing the conviction.

Mr. Nacchio said last year that he had refused an N.S.A. request for customers’ call records in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the agency initiated domestic surveillance and data mining programs to monitor Al Qaeda communications.

But the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks.

The significance of the claim is hard to assess, because the court documents are heavily redacted and N.S.A. officials will not comment on the agency’s secret surveillance programs. Other government officials have said that the agency’s eavesdropping without warrants began only after Sept. 11, 2001, under an order from President Bush.

But the court filings in Mr. Nacchio’s case illustrate what is well known inside the telecommunications industry but little appreciated by the public: that the N.S.A. has for some time worked closely with phone companies, whose networks carry the telephone and Internet traffic the agency seeks out for intercept.

Some of the cooperation is related to the agency’s second major responsibility — the protection of classified government communications systems against eavesdropping or hacking by adversaries. The documents reflect constant meetings and negotiations between the agency and Qwest officials over the global communications network.

The claims could influence a battle in Congress over whether companies that assist the N.S.A. should be given immunity from civil or criminal liability. Some Democrats have opposed granting such immunity unless the Bush administration agrees to reveal more about the companies’ participation in eavesdropping and data mining programs.

Jeffrey Speiser, a lawyer for Mr. Nacchio, declined to comment yesterday.

As part of his defense, Mr. Nacchio claimed that he had knowledge of top secret contracts with the N.S.A. and other government agencies that made the company’s financial prospects brighter than was publicly known. Prosecutors denied the claims.

At the time of the claimed meeting at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters on Feb. 27, 2001, Mr. Nacchio was chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, whose members included top executives of most of the major communications companies. Like nearly every chief executive in the industry, he had been granted a security clearance to work with the government on secret projects.

In the court papers, Mr. Nacchio’s lawyers said he and James F. X. Payne, then Qwest’s head of government business, spoke with N.S.A. officials about the agency’s Groundbreaker project, in which the agency’s non-secret information technology would be contracted to private companies.

At the same meeting, N.S.A. officials made an additional proposal, whose exact nature is not made clear in the censored documents.

“The court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting,” one of the documents states. Another passage says: “The court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest.”

Another document, a transcript of an interview that the F.B.I. conducted with Mr. Payne in 2006, stated that the N.S.A. pressed its request for months afterward. “Nacchio said it was a legal issue and that they could not do something their general counsel told them not to do,” Mr. Payne told the F.B.I. “Nacchio projected that he might do it if they could find a way to do it legally.”

Mr. Payne declined to comment.

In support of Mr. Nacchio’s accusations, his lawyers quoted from one of several lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies, accusing them of violating their customers’ privacy. That lawsuit, filed last year against several companies, asserts that seven months before the Sept. 11 attacks, at about the time of Mr. Nacchio’s meeting at the N.S.A., another phone company, AT&T, “began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the N.S.A.”

The lawsuit contends that the center would “give the N.S.A. direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access” to phone call information and Internet traffic on AT&T’s network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/bu...4qwest.html?hp





Phone Companies Refuse to Provide Data on Spy Program
Neil Roland

Three of the largest U.S. telephone companies declined to answer lawmakers' questions about Bush administration efforts to spy on Americans' phone calls and e- mails, saying the government forbade them from doing so.

``Our company essentially finds itself caught in the middle of an oversight dispute between the Congress and the executive relating to government surveillance activities,'' AT&T Inc. General Counsel Wayne Watts said in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee that was released today by the panel.

Verizon Communications Inc., the second largest U.S. phone company after AT&T, and Qwest Communications International Inc., the fourth largest, also declined to answer many of the committee's questions.

Among the questions, posed by the committee on Oct. 2, were what information the carriers gave the administration without a court warrant, whether they were paid for any of it and whether the administration asked them to install equipment to intercept e-mails.

John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, and other Democrats called on the administration to answer questions about the spying.

``The water is as murky as ever on this issue, and it's past time for the administration to come clean,'' Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who leads the panel's telecommunications subcommittee, said in a statement.

State Secrets

Verizon and Qwest said the Justice Department prohibited them from offering any substantive comment on their roles in the spy program. AT&T said Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell invoked the state-secrets privilege to prevent the carrier from commenting.

McConnell's spokesman, Ross Feinstein, said in an interview today that the House and Senate Intelligence committees have the authority to oversee intelligence activities under the 1947 National Security Act.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel declined immediate comment. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.

Verizon did answer a question from lawmakers about whether the administration asked it to provide ``communities of interest,'' the network of people with whom particular phone customers were in contact. The New York Times reported last month that the FBI had sought details on these networks.

`Calling Circle'

Verizon said the administration asked it to identify a `calling circle' for some telephone numbers. The carrier told the committee: ``Because Verizon does not maintain such `calling circle' records, we have not provided this information in response to these requests.''

Congress approved a temporary measure in July allowing spy agencies to continue intercepting, without a court warrant, phone calls and e-mails of foreign-based terrorists that are routed through the U.S. Lawmakers currently are working on new surveillance legislation.

McConnell acknowledged the existence of the program in August and said telecommunications companies should be given immunity from lawsuits claiming privacy violations. AT&T, Verizon and other carriers are being sued for providing customer information to the government.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democrats' No. 2 Senate leader, said last week he will resist the administration's demand for immunity for the carriers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...refer=politics





Senate Deal on Immunity for Phone Companies
Eric Lichtblau

Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday with the Bush administration that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for any role they played in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Congressional official said Wednesday.

Senators this week began reviewing classified documents related to the participation of the telephone carriers in the security agency program and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had “acted in good faith” in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program and that they should not be punished through civil litigation for their roles, the official said.

As part of legislation on the security agency’s wiretapping authorities, the White House has been pushing hard for weeks to get immunity for the telecommunications companies in discussions with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican. A tentative deal was first reported by The Washington Post.

The Intelligence Committee will begin reviewing the legislation at a closed session on Thursday.

The agreement between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Bush administration would also include a greater role for the secret intelligence court in overseeing and approving methods of wiretapping used by the security agency, the official said.

But it is not clear whether this and other toughened civil liberties safeguards included in the agreement will go far enough to mollify senators on the Senator Judiciary Committee, who will also review the plan once the intelligence panel finishes its work.

Word of the deal came hours after House Republicans used a parliamentary maneuver to scuttle a vote on a measure that would have imposed new restrictions on the security agency’s eavesdropping powers.

At the start of the day, Democrats were confident that the measure would gain approval in the House despite a veto threat from President Bush. But after an afternoon of partisan sniping, Democratic leaders put off that vote because of a competing measure from Republicans that on its face asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again.

The Republican measure declared that nothing in the broader bill should be construed as prohibiting intelligence officials from conducting the surveillance needed to prevent Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda “from attacking the United States.” Had it passed, it threatened to derail the Democratic measure altogether.

Democrats denounced the Republicans’ poison pill on Mr. bin Laden as a cynical political ploy and “a cheap shot.” But Democratic leaders realized that they were at risk of losing the votes of a contingent of more moderate Democrats who did not want to be left vulnerable for voting against a resolution to stop Al Qaeda, officials said. So the leaders pulled the measure, promising to take it up again next week once they could solidify support.

The Republican maneuver “would have killed the bill, and we couldn’t risk that,” said a senior Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal leadership deliberations. “We thought we’d be able to defeat it, but it became clear that we couldn’t.”

The episode revealed, once again, fault lines within the Democratic Party over how to tackle national security questions without appearing “soft” on terrorism in the face of Republican criticism.

Indeed, Republican leaders immediately praised their ability to block the N.S.A. measure as a sign of the Democrats’ weakness on that issue. Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi “underestimated the intelligence of the American people and the bipartisan majority in the Congress to understand what matters most: preventing another terrorist attack.”

Democrats, clearly thrown on the defensive, countered that Republicans were the ones playing politics with national security.

“Once again, House Republicans have chosen to engage in politics rather than substantively address the challenges that face the American people,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader. “Once again, they have offered an amendment that, if passed, would have substantially delayed this important legislation which is designed to protect the American people by proposing language already provided in the bill.”

The Democratic measure would have sought to restore some of the restrictions on the security agency’s wiretapping powers that had been loosened under a temporary measure approved by Congress just before its August recess. The new bill would give the secret foreign intelligence court a greater oversight role in the agency’s interception of foreign-based communications into the United States, and it would provide for more reporting and accountability when the communications of Americans were involved.

The Bush administration has lobbied hard against the measure. One of its chief complaints is that the House bill would not provide immunity for telephone carriers as the Senate measure does.

A day after threatening to veto the House measure, Mr. Bush kept up the political pressure Wednesday in the hours before the bill was to come up for a vote. He said at a news conference that the Democratic plan would weaken national security, and he urged Congress instead to make permanent the measure it passed in August, which broadened the security agency’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight. That measure expires in February.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/wa.../18nsa.html?hp





The Beltway Establishment's Contempt for the Rule of Law
Glenn Greenwald

The Washington Post's Editorial Page, in the establishment-defending form of Fred Hiatt, today became but the latest Beltway appendage to urge the enactment of a special law providing amnesty to our nation's poor, put-upon, lawbreaking telecoms:

There is one major area of disagreement between the administration and House Democrats where we think the administration has the better of the argument: the question of whether telecommunications companies that provided information to the government without court orders should be given retroactive immunity from being sued. House Democrats are understandably reluctant to grant that wholesale protection without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding, and the administration has balked at providing such information. But the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President.

Further leave to the side that these telecoms did not merely allow warrantless surveillance on their customers in the hectic and "confused" days or weeks after 9/11, but for years. Further leave to the side the fact that, as Hiatt's own newspaper just reported yesterday, the desire for warrantless eavesdropping capabilities seemed to be on the Bush agenda well before 9/11.

And finally ignore the fact that Hiatt is defending the telecom's good faith even though, as he implicitly acknowledges, he has no idea what they actually did, because it is all still Top Secret and we are barred from knowing what happened here. For all those reasons, Hiatt's claim on behalf of the telecoms that they broke the law for "patriotic" reasons is so frivolous as to insult the intelligence of his readers, but -- more importantly -- it is also completely irrelevant.

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass. It is not a defense to illegal behavior to say that one violated the law for "patriotic" reasons. That was Oliver North's defense to Congress when he proudly admitted breaking multiple federal laws. And it is the same "defense" that people like North have been making to justify Bush's violations of our surveillance laws -- what we call "felonies" -- in spying on Americans without warrants.

By definition, the "rule of law" does not exist if government officials and entities with influential Beltway lobbyists can run around breaking the law whenever they decide that there are good reasons for doing so. The bedrock principle of the "rule of law" is that the law applies equally to everyone, even to those who occupy Important Positions in Fred Hiatt's social, economic and political circles and who therefore act with the most elevated of motives.

In a 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Rule of Law Revival," Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote optimistically that the "rule of law" has now become the centerpiece, the prime consensus, for most international relations and has been recognized as the linchpin for third-world countries developing into functioning democracies. Here is how he defined the basic principles of "the rule of law":

Legal Bedrock

THE RULE of law can be defined as a system in which the laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning, and apply equally to everyone. They enshrine and uphold the political and civil liberties that have gained status as universal human rights over the last half-century. . . . Perhaps most important, the government is embedded in a comprehensive legal framework, its officials accept that the law will be applied to their own conduct, and the government seeks to be law-abiding. What is happening now in Washington is -- in every respect -- the exact opposite of this. Already, it was revealed that our highest government officials, including the President, broke the law deliberately and for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by the laws we enacted, and all of official Washington immediately agreed that nothing should happen as a result. And nothing did happen.

And now, some of our country's richest, largest, most powerful and most well-connected corporations were caught breaking laws that have been in place for decades, such as Section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934, which provides that "[e]very telecommunications carrier has a duty to protect the confidentiality of proprietary information of . . . customers." 18 U.S.C. 2511 makes warrantless eavesdropping a felony; 18 U.S.C. 2702 requires that any "entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication" without a court order; and 18 U.S.C. 2520 provides for civil damages for any violations.

Here, the Government will not prosecute telecoms for breaking the law, because the government itself conspired in that lawbreaking. Thus, public interest groups and private citizens, including the telecoms' own customers, are attempting to hold them accountable for their lawbreaking by suing them in courts of law.

In response, these corporations are using their vast resources to give money to key lawmakers and pay huge lobbying fees to politically well-connected former government officials to pressure the Congress to write a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that they are immune from accountability for their lawbreaking. They're conniving, literally, to be specially exempted from the rule of law.

And our opinion-making elite is eagerly defending this -- insisting that while the poor irrelevant souls who buy and sell drugs near the corners of their offices are real criminals and those people belong in prison, our nation's telecoms and other high officials, when they get caught breaking the law, should have special laws written decreeing that they are immune from all consequences.

This has become the norm for the Beltway. It is exactly what happened when poor, persecuted Lewis Libby was so unfairly subjected to a mean criminal trial and the possibility of prison -- just because he "technically" committed some felonies. Libby was one of them, not the kind of person who belongs in prison. As Hiatt wrote, in defending Bush's extraordinary commutation of Libby's sentence on the ground that 30 months was just too harsh (while generously allowing that Libby should spend a little time in prison): given "Mr. Libby's long and distinguished record of public service, [] we sympathize with Mr. Bush's conclusion 'that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.'"

And thus, just as they did for George Bush's warrantless eavesdropping crimes and Lewis Libby's obstruction of justice and perjury felonies, the Beltway establishment is now banding together to demand that the telecoms be bequeathed with the legal right to break the law. In his Foreign Affairs essay, Carothers warned of the primary obstacle to the installation of the "rule of law" in developing third-world countries:

The primary obstacles to such reform are not technical or financial, but political and human. Rule-of-law reform will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism, since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure.

Is it possible to find a more accurate description than this of what has been taking place over the last six years in Washington, as the rule of law for our political elites has completely eroded?

If it is actually true that the telecoms did nothing wrong -- if their armies of internal and outside lawyers were actually correct that they had such a strong basis for doing what they did -- then they will not be found liable. They will only be liable if -- despite the best teams of lawyers that money can buy (just like Lewis Libby had) -- they are found by a court to have broken the law. And "good faith" violations are already exempted from the statute (see 2520(d)), a defense they can raise and prove in a court of law if -- as Hiatt and his friends claim -- it is actually valid.

That is how a country that lives under the "rule of law" functions -- whether someone is found to have acted illegally is determined by a court of law, not neatly resolved after the fact with special amnesty laws passed by Congress that they buy. Here is what Carothers identified as the most "crucial" step for third-world countries to take in order to develop a healthy "rule-of-law" culture:

Type three reforms aim at the deeper goal of increasing government's compliance with law. A key step is achieving genuine judicial independence. . . . But the most crucial changes lie elsewhere. Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making and accept the judiciary as an independent authority.

The corruption and sleaze here is so transparent and extreme. We're just sitting by watching as telecoms right in front of our faces purchase from government officials the right to be exempt from lawsuits currently pending in our court system. Government officials, more or less on a bipartisan basis, are about to intervene in these lawsuits and prevent them from proceeding to a determination of whether telcoms violated numerous, long-standing laws. And Fred Hiatt and David Ignatius and Joe Klein and virtually all Beltway "journalistic" opinion-makers think that is the right thing to do, just as they insisted that the President and his aides should never be subjected to consequences for their lawbreaking either.

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law -- at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Telecom Immunity law that Congress seems well on its way to enacting is one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet not only that our Royal Beltway Court is corrupt and decayed at its core. It also proves that they no longer care who knows it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...law/index.html





Senator Chris Dodd Will Put A Hold On Telecom Immunity Bill
Greg Sargent

Senator Chris Dodd plans to put a hold on the Senate FISA renewal bill because it reportedly grants retroactive immunity to telephone companies for any role they played in the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program, Election Central has learned.

Dodd will send a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon informing him of his decision. Dodd also plans to put up a page today at his campaign Web site where opponents of the immunity provision can register their opposition.

“Later today Senator Dodd will be sending a letter to Majority Leader Reid informing him that he plans to put a ‘hold’ on a bill that would provide for retroactive amnesty for telecom giants that were complicit in the Bush Administration’s assault on the United States Constitution," Dodd spokesman Hari Sevugan told Election Central. "Senator Dodd said that he would do what he could do to stop this bill, and with this announcement he has again shown that he delivers results.”

By doing this, Dodd can effectively hold up the telecom immunity bill, because bills are supposed to have unanimous consent in the Senate before going forward. One Senator can make it very difficult to bring a bill to the floor by objecting to allowing it to go to a vote.

Dodd's planned action comes amid reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has reached a deal with the White House on the legislation that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for whatever role they played in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, which was approved by President Bush after 9/11. The White House and the phone companies have been lobbying aggressively for immunity, and the announcement of the immunity deal today dismayed many opponents.

The bill is getting marked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee this afternoon.

Dodd, who has aggressively courted the liberal blogosphere as part of his Presidential run, was being loudly appealed to by top liberal bloggers today to put a hold on the bill. Dodd has for some time now spoken out against the immunity provision but had stopped short of saying that he would exert his power as a Senator to hold up the legislation.

Now, however, he is going to do just that.

More soon.
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/1... nity_bill.php





Implementing Domestic Intelligence Surveillance

Upon lawful request and for a thousand dollars, Comcast, one of the nation's leading telecommunications companies, will intercept its customers' communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The cost for performing any FISA surveillance "requiring deployment of an intercept device" is $1,000.00 for the "initial start-up fee (including the first month of intercept service)," according to a newly disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement (pdf).

Thereafter, the surveillance fee goes down to "$750.00 per month for each subsequent month in which the original [FISA] order or any extensions of the original order are active."

With respect to surveillance policy, the Comcast manual hews closely to the letter of the law, as one would hope and expect.

"If your [FISA intercept] request pertains to individuals outside the U.S., please be sure you have complied with all the requirements in 50 U.S.C. sections 105A and/or 105B," the manual says, referring to provisions of the Protect America Act that was enacted last month. "Requests such as these can not be honored after one year and must be dated prior to February 5, 2008, unless extended by Congress."

Comcast will also comply with disclosure demands presented in the form of National Security Letters. However, the manual says, "Attention must be paid to the various court proceedings in which the legal status of such requests is at issue."

In short, "Comcast will assist law enforcement agencies in their investigations while protecting subscriber privacy as required by law and applicable privacy policies."

At the same time, "Comcast reserves the right to respond or object to, or seek clarification of, any legal requests and treat legal requests for subscriber information in any manner consistent with applicable law."

A copy of the manual was obtained by Secrecy News.

The role of telecommunications companies in intelligence surveillance is under increased scrutiny as the Bush Administration seeks to shield the companies from any liability associated with their cooperation in what may be illegal warrantless surveillance.

Also, there are new indications that the unauthorized warrantless surveillance program pre-dated 9/11. The Rocky Mountain News, the Washington Post, and others reported allegations that the government may have penalized Qwest Communications for refusing to participate in a pre-9/11 National Security Agency surveillance program that the company believed might be illegal.

The Washington Post editorialized yesterday that the telecommunications companies should indeed be immunized against liability, as the Bush Administration desires. Even though it is not known exactly what the companies did, the Post said, they "seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment."

Writing in Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald disputed that view, arguing that patriotism lies in compliance with the law, not in mere obedience to executive authority.
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007..._intellig.html





Governor Kills California Data Protection Law
Evan Schuman

Schwarzenegger claims the proposed data breach security law would have driven up costs for small businesses.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Oct. 13 vetoed—and effectively killed—one of the nation's most stringent proposed e-tail data breach security laws, saying that the bill would have "driven up the costs of compliance, particularly for small businesses."

The proposed California law—AB 779—would have required retailers to protect data in a manner more demanding than the current PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requires.

The bill included a ban on sensitive consumer data information except when the merchant has a payment data retention and disposal policy, "which limits the amount of payment related data and the time that data is retained to the amount," according to the bill.

But it also outright prohibited much data being stored at all after a purchase is authorized by banning a retailer from storing "sensitive authentication data subsequent to authorization, even if that data is encrypted."

Read here about TJX's data breach.

Schwarzenegger, in his veto message explaining why he killed the bill, left the door open to possibly signing a reworked version of the bill. "I encourage the author and the industry to work together on a more balanced legislative approach," he said.

However, the current version of the bill, Schwarzenegger said, "attempts to legislate in an area where the marketplace has already assigned responsibilities and liabilities that provide for the protection of consumers. In addition, the Payment Card Industry has already established minimum data security standards when storing, processing, or transmitting credit or debit cardholder information."

The governor argued that "the industry"—presumably a reference to credit card companies and the PCI Council—is in a better position to know what is realistic and reasonable for credit card security." Also, he said, signing such a bill could actually create a conflict.

"This industry has the contractual ability to mandate the use of these standards, and is in a superior position to ensure that these standards keep up with changes in technology and the marketplace," he said. "This measure creates the potential for California law to be in conflict with private sector data security standards."

Schwarzenegger also said that he objected to ambiguities in the bill's phrasing. "While I support many of the provisions of this bill, it fails to provide clear definition of which business or agency 'owns' or 'licenses' data," the governor said, "and when that business or agency relinquishes legal responsibility as the owner or licensee."

But the Democratic author of the bill suggested that the Republican governor caved in to pressure from the retail community.

"Big business, hackers and ID thieves won today, and consumers and common sense lost," said Assemblyman Dave Jones of Sacramento, the bill's author. "I'm shocked and disappointed that the governor thinks our personal information should be left out in the open for identity thieves and hackers to pilfer. If your slack security leads to a data breach, then you ought to pay for what you caused. 'You broke it, you bought it,' as retailers like to say. How could anybody disagree with this, let alone the governor?"

The bill had passed so easily through both chambers in California—it passed the 40-member state senate last month in a 30-6 vote and had earlier unanimously passed the assembly 73-0—that it is theoretically possible bill supporters could try for a veto override, which would need two-thirds majorities in each body. But as of Oct. 14, no one had publicly said they were going to try to do that.

The concerns about the cost of compliance for smaller retailers has scuttled other state attempts at mandating strong data security rules, including Connecticut, where an initial supporter of such a law backed off as being lobbied by smaller merchants.

Federal efforts to pursue national standards on retail data have also gone nowhere, with hearings on the TJX data breach—which has been seen as a catalyst for state and federal data protection legislative efforts—repeatedly postponed and now tentatively scheduled for November. In January, TJX announced a data breach where the credit card data of some 46 million consumers fell into unauthorized hands, a move widely regarded as the worst retail data security breach ever reported.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2197107,00.asp





House Panel Questions Yahoo Official’s Testimony
Dibya Sarkar

A Yahoo Inc. executive was accused Tuesday of giving false testimony to Congress last year regarding the company's role in the arrest of a Chinese journalist.

A House committee wants Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan to clarify at a Nov. 6 hearing the allegedly untruthful testimony Callahan gave Congress in February 2006.

''We want to clarify how that happened, and to hold the company to account for its actions both before and after its testimony proved untrue,'' Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a press release. ''And we want to examine what steps the company has taken since then to protect the privacy rights of its users in China.''

Yahoo spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said in an e-mailed statement that the committee's accusation is ''grossly unfair and mischaracterizes the nature and intent of our past testimony.'' She said Yahoo's representatives have been truthful with the committee.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said it is considering the committee's request to have Yang and Callahan appear before it.

San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation released documents in late July showing that the Beijing State Security Bureau had written Yahoo saying it wanted evidence about journalist Shi Tao, who was suspected of ''illegally providing of state secrets to foreign entities,'' the committee said.

Shi was arrested at his home after posting material about a government crackdown on media and democracy activists on an overseas Web site. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2005.

The case has raised questions about whether Internet companies should cooperate with governments that deny freedom of speech and frequently crack down on journalists.

Callahan told lawmakers at that 2006 hearing that his company had no information ''about the nature of the investigation'' into Shi, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said in the same statement.

Shares of Yahoo rose $2.58 -- or 9.7 percent -- to $29.27 in after-hours trading. After markets closed, the company reported third-quarter earnings of $151.3 million, or 11 cents per share, which was a slight decline compared with the same period last year. The stock closed at $26.69 during the regular session.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology





G.P.S. P2P

Navigating With Feedback From Fellow Drivers
Roy Furchgott

At about 8:15 on a sunny San Francisco morning I received a call from Gina Bender, spokeswoman for Dash Navigation. She was in her car and running late. “We just got a traffic alert; it looks like there is a little accident or something. E.T.A. will be closer to 8:48.”

It seems like a small thing, but the technology behind that call represents a big change in car navigation systems.

Ms. Bender’s navigation device, a Dash Express, had done something that no other can currently do. It not only reported that there was a tie-up — many systems already do that — but it also told her how long it would take to get through it, based on current traffic reports and its record of past journeys.

What makes the Dash device so different is that it not only receives location data from the satellites of the Global Positioning System, like other navigation units, but it also broadcasts information about its travels back to the Dash network.

The continuous two-way reporting lets the system accomplish several things. It can measure how fast traffic really travels on a given road, and use that to compile a highly detailed and accurate database of traffic information. Dash units can talk to each other, warning the network the second they hit a traffic slowdown. And because the units stay connected to the Internet, information on nearby points of interest like restaurants is instantly available. Dash was conceived by Mike Farmwald, a serial entrepreneur and computer science Ph.D., while he was sitting in traffic on Interstate 280 in the Bay Area on the way to Stanford University. “There was a traffic slowdown for no reason, and I thought, ‘This is crazy, why shouldn’t I know ahead of time?’” he said. “There’s this long chain of cars up ahead. What if the cars could talk to one another?”

The company was formed in 2003 and is backed primarily by Mr. Farmwald; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Sequoia Capital; and Crescendo Ventures. Its system is still in the testing phase, but the company hopes to make Dash units available through major electronics retailers early next year for less than $600 each.

To demonstrate how Dash works, Ms. Bender and Robert Acker, the company’s senior vice president for marketing, drove me from downtown San Francisco to the city’s airport on a Wednesday morning.

Ms. Bender started by typing in the airport address on the Dash unit’s touch-screen keyboard. The Dash then made a calculation and offered three routes, with an estimated time of arrival for each. Even though the major highway, Route 101, showed some congestion, Dash still estimated that it would be fastest.

Behind the calculation were three sources of data. First was standard traffic and traffic flow data from Inrix, a firm that collects data on about 50,000 of the 4 million miles of highways in the United States. This is the same data most G.P.S. units with traffic reporting now use.

Added to that was the individual information Dash had collected. That database helps adjust time estimates based on a motorist’s personal driving habits.

In addition, data collected anonymously from Dash units is added to the group database.

As we drove out of the city, Mr. Acker tapped the screen to search for a restaurant. Most G.P.S. units now have the locations of millions of restaurants, stores and entertainment sites programmed in at the factory. But Dash’s information comes from an instant search on Yahoo Local, so the listings are more likely to be up to date, and you aren’t constrained to search terms listed in a menu like “Mexican” or “Asian.”

To demonstrate, Mr. Acker typed in “dim sum.” The Dash unit sent the request and the car’s location back to the company’s servers. (Drivers can also choose to search for places near their destination or somewhere else.)

Yahoo generated the results, which Dash formatted into one line address cards and sent back to the unit. When the line on the screen was touched, more information was displayed, like the description of a restaurant, its phone number and a star rating.

Dash’s outgoing information is sent over a cellular data network, which is also used to receive things like minor software updates and traffic alerts. Large amounts of data, like major map revisions, come through the Dash’s built-in Wi-Fi receiver. The unit will automatically spot open Wi-Fi networks and connect. Drivers opposed to piggybacking on a strange Wi-Fi can set the Dash to connect only with specified networks.

Dash also uses two specialized information sources: the Oil Price Information Service, which provides current gas prices at specific stations, and West World Media’s Cinema-Source for movie listings and show times.

Garmin, the big maker of G.P.S. units, also offers gas, movie, traffic and weather information through the MSN Direct service in collaboration with Microsoft, but it works very differently.

The data is received over the FM band in the roughly 150 cities where it’s available. It is broadcast in a continuous loop, and it can take up to two days for complete information to transfer.

As we approached the airport, the Dash screen showed a yellow section of road, and sure enough, we hit a slowdown. “Do we detour?” I asked.

Mr. Acker pointed to the screen. “The road ahead is green, which means it clears up in about a half mile,” he said. If there had been red ahead of the yellow, we would have known it was a traffic jam and perhaps detoured. Still, the unit offered up alternate routes, but the time estimates showed them to be no faster. As we passed exits for the alternate routes the Dash offered, they disappeared from the screen one by one.

Whether our traffic alert was coming in from a road sensor or a car up ahead was impossible to determine. To get the system going, 2,014 prototype units were distributed to test drivers, primarily in 25 large cities. About 350 units were in the San Francisco Bay area, and that helped create a database for the demonstration.

The network is what really distinguishes Dash from its competitors, but it can also be seen as its Achilles’ heel because the real benefit of the system isn’t apparent until enough units are collecting data.

“We started seeing that data becomes material with several hundred units in an area,” Mr. Acker said. To really become effective, Mr. Farmwald added, the number would need to be in the low thousands. In the meantime, he said, “it should never be any worse than the other guys.”

The prospect of a G.P.S. unit continuously reporting a car’s speed gives some drivers the willies, but Ms. Bender said that the information was sent anonymously — there was no way to know which car it came from. If the unit is stolen, the company can send a signal to destroy all information in its memory, including driving data and the address book, so that it can’t be extracted.

As we reached the end of the yellow portion of the map, our speed picked up again, as promised. If only the Dash could help with the next jam, the one at airport security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/te...sics.html?8dpc





Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic

Tests confirm data discrimination by number 2 U.S. service provider
Peter Svensson

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

The principle of equal treatment of traffic, called "Net Neutrality" by proponents, is not enshrined in law but supported by some regulations. Most of the debate around the issue has centered on tentative plans, now postponed, by large Internet carriers to offer preferential treatment of traffic from certain content providers for a fee.

Comcast's interference, on the other hand, appears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers.

Number two provider
Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV operator and No. 2 Internet provider, would not specifically address the practice, but spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that it uses sophisticated methods to keep Net connections running smoothly.

"Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent," he said.

Douglas would not specify what the company means by "access" — Comcast subscribers can download BitTorrent files without hindrance. Only uploads of complete files are blocked or delayed by the company, as indicated by AP tests.

But with "peer-to-peer" technology, users exchange files with each other, and one person's upload is another's download. That means Comcast's blocking of certain uploads has repercussions in the global network of file sharers.

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

Matthew Elvey, a Comcast subscriber in the San Francisco area who has noticed BitTorrent uploads being stifled, acknowledged that the company has the right to manage its network, but disapproves of the method, saying it appears to be deceptive.

"There's the wrong way of going about that and the right way," said Elvey, who is a computer consultant.

All types of content
Comcast's interference affects all types of content, meaning that, for instance, an independent movie producer who wanted to distribute his work using BitTorrent and his Comcast connection could find that difficult or impossible — as would someone pirating music.

Internet service providers have long complained about the vast amounts of traffic generated by a small number of subscribers who are avid users of file-sharing programs. Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment.

"We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure all our customers have the best broadband experience possible," Douglas said. "This means we use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers."

The practice of managing the flow of Internet data is known as "traffic shaping," and is already widespread among Internet service providers. It usually involves slowing down some forms of traffic, like file-sharing, while giving others priority. Other ISPs have attempted to block some file-sharing application by so-called "port filtering," but that method is easily circumvented and now largely ineffective.

Comcast's approach to traffic shaping is different because of the drastic effect it has on one type of traffic — in some cases blocking it rather than slowing it down — and the method used, which is difficult to circumvent and involves the company falsifying network traffic.

The "Net Neutrality" debate erupted in 2005, when AT&T Inc. suggested it would like to charge some Web companies more for preferential treatment of their traffic. Consumer advocates and Web heavyweights like Google Inc. and Amazon Inc. cried foul, saying it's a bedrock principle of the Internet that all traffic be treated equally.

To get its acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved by the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T agreed in late 2006 not to implement such plans or prioritize traffic based on its origin for two and a half years. However, it did not make any commitments not to prioritize traffic based on its type, which is what Comcast is doing.

The FCC's stance on traffic shaping is not clear. A 2005 policy statement says that "consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice," but that principle is "subject to reasonable network management." Spokeswoman Mary Diamond would not elaborate.

Opposition
Free Press, a Washington-based public interest group that advocates Net Neutrality, opposes the kind of filtering applied by Comcast.

"We don't believe that any Internet provider should be able to discriminate, block or impair their consumers ability to send or receive legal content over the Internet," said Free Press spokeswoman Jen Howard.

Paul "Tony" Watson, a network security engineer at Google Inc. who has previously studied ways hackers could disrupt Internet traffic in manner similar to the method Comcast is using, said the cable company was probably acting within its legal rights.

"It's their network and they can do what they want," said Watson. "My concern is the precedent. In the past, when people got an ISP connection, they were getting a connection to the Internet. The only determination was price and bandwidth. Now they're going to have to make much more complicated decisions such as price, bandwidth, and what services I can get over the Internet."

Several companies have sprung up that rely on peer-to-peer technology, including BitTorrent Inc., founded by the creator of the BitTorrent software (which exists in several versions freely distributed by different groups and companies).

Ashwin Navin, the company's president and co-founder, confirmed that it has noticed interference from Comcast, in addition to some Canadian Internet service providers.

"They're using sophisticated technology to degrade service, which probably costs them a lot of money. It would be better to see them use that money to improve service," Navin said, noting that BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications are a major reason consumers sign up for broadband.

BitTorrent Inc. announced Oct. 9 that it was teaming up with online video companies to use its technology to distribute legal content.

Affecting others
Other companies that rely on peer-to-peer technology, and could be affected if Comcast decides to expand the range of applications it filters, include Internet TV service Joost, eBay Inc.'s Skype video-conferencing program and movie download appliance Vudu. There is no sign that Comcast is hampering those services.

Comcast subscriber Robb Topolski, a former software quality engineer at Intel Corp., started noticing the interference when trying to upload with file-sharing programs Gnutella and eDonkey early this year.

In August, Topolski began to see reports on Internet forum DSLreports.com from other Comcast users with the same problem. He now believes that his home town of Hillsboro, Ore., was a test market for the technology that was later widely applied in other Comcast service areas.

Topolski agrees that Comcast has a right to manage its network and slow down traffic that affects other subscribers, but disapproves of their method.

"By Comcast not acknowledging that they do this at all, there's no way to report any problems with it," Topolski said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/





Major Pirate Website Shut Down
Katie Allen

The site allowed users to illegally download shows like 24

One of the world's most-used pirate film websites has been closed after providing links to illegal versions of major Hollywood hits and TV shows.

The first closure of a major UK-based pirate site was also accompanied by raids and an arrest, the anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) said today.

A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said.

The arrest and the closure of the site - www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet. The site also provided links to TV shows that were being illegally distributed.

Visitors to the site could get access to major feature films, sometimes within days of their initial cinema release. Recent links took users to illegal versions of the Disney/Pixar animation sensation Ratatouille as well as to most of this summer's blockbusters.

"Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites," said a spokesman for Fact.

The group's director general Kieron Sharp said TV Links was the first major target in a campaign to crackdown on web piracy.

"The theft and distribution of films harms the livelihoods of those working in the UK film industry and in ancillary industries, as well as damaging the economy," he said.

Roger Marles, from Trading Standards said sites such as TV Links allowed people to break UK copyright law.

"The 'users' are potentially evading licence fees, subscription fees to digital services or the cost of purchase or admittance to cinemas to view the films," he added.

The British Video Association estimates that at least £459m was lost to the video, film and TV industries due to piracy in 2006.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2195407,00.html





After Demonoid, Canadian Music Labels Take on BitTorrent Trackers
enigmax

After the CRIA forced Demonoid to block access to Canadian users, four recording labels have turned their attention to two other BitTorrent trackers hosted in Canada, issuing them with Cease and Desists. At least one intends to stand and fight.

There was quite a stir during the last month when we announced that Demonoid had been forced to temporarily close following legal pressures. The site returned but blocked Canadian users under orders of the CRIA. Now it appears that this was just the start of action against Canadian BitTorrent trackers.

Following a Canadian newspaper article which branded them ‘The Pirates of Quebec’, two BitTorrent trackers have been targeted by a collective of Canadian music labels.

The administrator of the 1 year old, 46,000 member ‘QuebecTorrent‘ has received Cease and Desist letters from 4 record labels and is being threatened with further action if they don’t comply.

The demands are:

a) Close the site www.quebectorrent.com and any other site of similar nature which you operate.

b) You must agree to never again directly or indirectly operate any other service which enables the sharing of music.

c) You must post a message clearly indicating the closure of the site and inform your users that sharing music via p2p networks is forbidden by Canadian copyright law unless permission is obtained and royalties paid.

In contrast to the situation at Demonoid who chose to block Canadian users rather than close or re-locate, it appears that QuebecTorrent (QT) don’t want to take this lying down and are hoping to fight this action.

Currently the members are being rallied with a view to obtaining donations - the administrator of QT told TorrentFreak that their lawyer is charging 250$ CAD/hour and although he is financing some of the fight, he simply cannot raise all of the funds.

He told us: “The fees so far are confirmed at 2000$ CAD. I am asking the users for 1500$ and I will pay the rest.”

He also outlines two scenarios - if QuebecTorrent loses in court, it will be very bad for P2P as a favorable legal precedent for the majors would result in an anti-p2p ‘crusade’.

Equally, victory could create a favorable legal precedent for P2P which would benefit the whole file-sharing community.

In summing up, the administrator says that he has a stark choice - either people donate to support the legal defense of the site or he will have no choice but to close it in the face of pressure from these labels.

Anyone wanting to help QuebecTorrent fight should consider donating.
http://torrentfreak.com/canadian-mus...ackers-071018/





The RIAA Attacks Usenet
enigmax

Basking in glory after orchestrating a record punishment for a petty file-sharer in the US, the RIAA takes its legal campaign to the next level. Many may want newsgroups to stay under the radar but it’s too late - major labels have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com and it won’t be going away.

In an ideal world, people would not talk about Usenet. In an ideal world there would be no such things as copyright infringement lawsuits. Sadly, we do not live in an ideal world.

Today we simply have to talk about Usenet and we have to talk about lawsuits.

Major record labels - Arista, Atlantic, BMG, Capitol, Caroline, Elektra, Interscope, LaFace, Maverick, Sony BMG, UMG, Virgin, Warner Bros. and Zomba have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com.

According to Billboard, the complaint filed in the District Court in New York states that Usenet.com provides access to millions of copyright infringing files and, with a nod towards the Grokster Decision, apparently “touts its service as a haven for those seeking pirated content.”

During the Grokster court case, it was ruled that even if a service or tool has substantial non-infringing uses, its owners would be liable for the infringing activities of its customers, should it be deemed that they encouraged their customers to commit copyright infringement. The complaint says that Usenet.com encourages its customers to commit copyright infringement and furthermore, facilitates such actions with its infrastructure.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the lawsuit seems to hang on statements allegedly made by Usenet.com to their customers, claiming that they told them their service is “the best way to get ‘free’ music now that ‘file sharing websites are getting shut down.”

Usenet.com does state that it’s possible to get increased levels of privacy by using their extra ‘anonymous’ service: “Shh… Quiet! We believe it’s no one’s business but your own what you do on the Internet or in Usenet! We don’t log your activity. We don’t track your downloads, and neither can your ISP when you use Secure-Tunnel.com privacy package.” However, helping to ensure the privacy of your customers does not equal encouragement to commit copyright infringement and right at this moment, there doesn’t appear to be any other text on the site that would make Usenet.com fall foul of the Grokster Decision. More details should follow in due course.

The lawsuit states that despite repeated requests by the labels for Usenet.com to remove infringing content, Usenet.com continued to fill its servers with infringing material from the Usenet network and then charges its users for access. It’s claimed that many of the groups offered by Usenet.com have no other use other than to disseminate copyright works and are “explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The labels want Usenet.com to admit they are committing copyright infringement with a view to obtaining an injunction and damages. To date, Usenet.com has refused to remove content or discontinue offering certain newsgroups.

It will be interesting to see if other Usenet providers come out in support of Usenet.com.

Further updates to follow.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-riaa-attacks-usenet-071016/





P2P Industry Frowns as Court Bans Its Service
Bae Ji-sook

The online file sharing service is fluctuating between hope and fear as a local court ordered the nation's No. 1 peer-to-peer (P2P) company to cease services Thursday.

The company argued that such an order could harm the user created content (UCC) market, which is expected to boom in three-to-four years.

Seoul High Court ordered Soribada to shut down its servers that provide connections between users' computer hard drives to download content, which includs music, audio files and some texts. The order is expected to affect other P2P service companies, too.
Earlier, recording company JYP, singer Han Dae-soo and 30 others applied for a provisional disposition against Soribada saying it infringed upon copyrights and asked the court to place sanctions on the company's file copying service.

The P2P company said it will once again improve its file-screening system to avoid the business sanction. The new service will only allow the exchange of files that are allowed by copyright owners.

However, the company argued that the court order had not taken UCC into consideration. The company has been focusing on a new type of UCC P2P service, and said sanctions could hinder the development of the next upgrade. UCC is widely used to share knowledge or ideas and in many cases copyright is unclear.

``The aggressive screening of UCC content will clean up the whole Internet-based service industry,'' a Soribada spokesperson told the Kukmin Ilbo newspaper.

He said the dispute between the music industry and P2P services could determine whether online companies and UCC will survive.

``If you apply the law elsewhere, nearly all portal sites or large Web sites such as Youtube.com, which provide all kinds of UCC, may have to shut down, too,'' he added.

According to the order, Soribada may have to pay a fine of one-to-two million won a day should it be caught providing downloading connections of content without the copyright owner's consent.

Soribada was established in 2000 and became a listed company in 2003. In 2002 a court ruled that its service could violate music copyright, but the company developed a filtering system where singers who wish to ban the free distribution of their music can block the connection.

On Friday, a day after the court ruling, the stock price of the company almost halved, from 6,560 won to 3,655 won per share.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news...113_11840.html





Appeal in RIAA Case to Focus on "Unconstitutionally Excessive" Punishment
Eric Bangeman

A week after signaling her intention to appeal the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict handed down by a federal jury, Jammie Thomas has filed her notice of appeal with the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas is citing the amount of the award as her grounds for the appeal, rather than the jury instructions.

According to a copy of Thomas' motion seen by Ars, Thomas wants a retrial on the actual damages allegedly suffered by the record labels as the result of the sharing of the 24 recordings she was found to have distributed via KaZaA. Her argument is that the award handed down by the jury is unconstitutionally excessive.

It's an argument that has been raised in other file-sharing cases. We first saw it made in the case of UMG v. Lindor, where Marie Lindor's attorney Ray Beckerman argued that the RIAA's actual damages are in the neighborhood of 70¢ per song, less than 0.1 percent of the minimum statutory damage award of $750. Lindor—and others—have argued that, since the labels get about 70¢ of each 99¢ download sale, that's all the damages the record labels are entitled to collect.

The labels have fought hard to keep their wholesale pricing a secret, although RIAA counsel Richard Gabriel—who argued Capitol v. Thomas—later admitted that the 70¢ figure was "in the correct range."

In this, and all of the file-sharing lawsuits, the record labels seek only statutory damages (which are theoretically related in some way to the actual damages suffered), and not punitive damages (awarded to punish the infringer). The range of statutory damages is broad: from $750 to $30,000 for nonwillful infringement and up to $150,000 for willful infringement. Thomas is arguing that any damage award above and beyond the labels' actual damages is "purely punitive" and should be "scrutinized by the Court."

Thomas would like to see the record companies forced to prove their actual damages due to downloading, a figure that Sony BMG litigation head Jennifer Pariser testified that her company "had not stopped to calculate." In her motion, Thomas argues that the labels are contending that their actual damages are in the neighborhood of $20. Barring a new trial over the issue of damages, Thomas would like to see the reward knocked down three significant digits—from $222,000 to $151.20.

In the motion, Thomas' attorney Brian Toder argues that cases like BMW of North America v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell suggest that statutory damages should be capped at 10 times the actual damages suffered. Damages in excess of that are unconstitutional, he argues.

"In the instant matter, defendant Thomas urges the Court to consider the statutory damages to be tantamount to an award of punitive damages, since it is based not upon plaintiffs' losses, but rather defendant's conduct," concludes the motion. "Whether the Court recognizes actual damages of zero dollars, $20 or whatever figure plaintiffs suggest is a fair measure of their actual damages for the 24 subject recordings, the ratio of actual damages to the award is not only astronomical, it is offensive to our Constitution and offensive generally."

In a statement given to Ars Technica, an RIAA spokesperson accused Thomas of not taking responsibility for her actions, and said that they want to resolve the case in a "fair and reasonable" fashion. "It is unfortunate that the defendant continues to avoid responsibility for her actions," the spokesperson told Ars. "We will continue to defend our rights."

Should the court decide against a new trial, Thomas would then have 30 days to appeal the original verdict, and she could use that opportunity to argue that the infamous jury instruction no. 15 was flawed. As we noted in our post-mortem of the trial, the question of whether making a file available over a P2P network is infringement as defined by the Copyright Act is still an open one.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...unishment.html





EFF to File Amicus Brief in RIAA File-Sharing Case Appeal
Mark Hefflinger

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital civil liberties advocate, will file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Jammie Thomas' appeal of a jury verdict ordering her to pay $220,000 to the record industry for offering music in a shared folder on a file-sharing network, Wired News reported.

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann told Wired News that the brief, to be filed with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, will likely focus on a jury instruction that stated the "making available" of copyrighted material on a peer-to-peer network constitutes infringement, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

"If the appeals court rejects that jury instruction, the verdict against Ms. Thomas would have to be thrown out and the case re-tried," voh Lohmann wrote, in a post on EFF.org.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/10...ng-case-appeal





2,000,000 songs

iTunes Plus DRM-Free Tracks Expanding, Dropping to 99 Cents
Jacqui Cheng

It's been a while since Apple launched iTunes Plus, its version of DRM-free tracks sold through the iTunes Store. Only EMI tracks were sold as 256kbps, DRM-free AAC files through the iTunes Store in May, and in June, EMI reported that the iTunes Plus tracks were selling well. Since then, however, we haven't heard much news about it. But according to people familiar with the matter, we will tomorrow.

Apple plans to expand iTunes Plus to include certain indie music labels starting Wednesday, October 17 (or sometime this week, at least). This tiny step is encouraging for those of us who like freedom with our music, but it sucks that more of the larger labels are still holding off from hopping on board. This expansion won't include all independent music labels just yet, although we're optimistic that more will be included in the future.

The bigger news on the iTunes Plus horizon, however, is that Apple plans to drop the price of all iTunes Plus tracks. Currently, each track is $1.29 while "normal" DRMed tracks are 99¢ apiece. That discrepancy will be no longer, as Apple will begin pricing all of its iTunes Plus songs at 99¢ apiece (DRMed tracks will also remain at 99¢).

While we have no information on whether the iTunes Plus songs are selling well, we assume that the decision to drop the price is a response to the Amazon MP3 store. Amazon sells individual tracks for between 89¢ and 99¢ apiece, all without any DRM restrictions. With that in mind, it's kind of hard for Apple to compete at $1.29.

We look forward to hearing more details directly from the horse's mouth very soon.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...ng-to-99-cents





Peer-to-Peer Lending Offers Solution for Strapped Consumers
Aleksandra Todorova

A YEAR AGO, Nicole Newberry was in a financial hole so deep that she had trouble making the minimum payments on her credit cards. Worse, the then 22-year-old had gotten tangled up in the predatory cycle of payday loans. Every two weeks, when she repaid the two loans she owed, she borrowed the money right back to pay for groceries and diapers for her two toddlers. Her predicament was cruelly simple: "Each month, I was making all these minimum payments and getting nowhere," she says.

Then a co-worker told her about Prosper.com1, a peer-to-peer lending web site that facilitates loans between strangers. Consumers seeking a loan list the details of how much they need and why, while those with cash to spare scour the listings and make loans to the ones they choose. Generally, borrowers get lower interest rates than they would with a bank or credit card, while lenders can earn better returns than they would in a money market or savings account.

Within 10 days of posting on Prosper, Newberry received a $9,000 loan at 19%: Enough to pay off the pesky payday loans and all her credit cards, which at that time carried 25% to 27% interest rates. As a result, her monthly payment dropped significantly, to $330 from $800 before consolidation. Her credit score, once a subprime 580, is now 680 and steadily rising. And then there's the 1,800-square-foot icing on the cake: Three months ago, Newberry purchased her first home, a four-bedroom house in Sacramento, Calif.

With the surging popularity of peer-to-peer lending sites, feel-good stories like Newberry's are becoming increasingly common. Since its launch in February 2006, Prosper.com has facilitated $90.5 million in loans among nearly 440,000 individuals. LendingClub.com2, which launched in May exclusively for users of social-networking site Facebook, opened up its services to all consumers in mid-September. Now the site has 20,000 users and has handled more than $1 million in loans. Starting Oct. 15, CircleLending.com3, which sold a majority stake in the company to Virgin USA in May, re-brands itself as Virgin Money. The site manages more than $200 million in loans between friends and family.

Eliminating the bank or credit-card issuer as the middle-man isn't currently the norm, but it's gaining momentum, says Christine Barry, research director of Aite Group, a financial industry research firm. The credit crunch and soft housing market combined have all but killed the idea of using home-equity loans to refinance high-interest credit-card debt and homeowners looking to refinance high-interest mortgages are unable to do so if they have less-than-pristine credit records. And small-business loans, always hard to get from traditional banks, have pretty much dried up.

The result: People are seeking financing from, well, other people. At Virgin Money, loan volume in the past six months has been growing twice as fast compared with the pace last year, according to Asheesh Advani, Virgin Money's CEO. (This is also partly due to the acquisition of CircleLending by Virgin USA, he notes.) At Prosper.com, $62.1 million in loans changed hands year-to-date, compared with only $16.8 million during the same period last year.

But the allure of peer-to-peer lending goes beyond better interest rates and improving one's bottom line. These web sites have become somewhat of a mix of Match.com, Facebook and eBay, with emphasis as much on social networking as on closing a deal. Being part of a group, whether it's an alumni association, employees of a specific company or simply being a friend of a friend, plays a big role. At Prosper, users can create groups that, based on members' repayment history, receive star ratings and can help borrowers get lower rates. At LendingClub, lenders pick borrowers based not only on their credit profile, but also on their affiliations.

"Peer-to-peer lending reminds me very much of the credit union model," says Aite Group's Barry. "You're usually lending to people that belong to the same kind of affinity group. There's a certain degree of trust."

And then there's the fuzzy feeling of helping ordinary people fulfill their financial goals, whether it's getting out of debt, fixing a roof or purchasing a dream wedding dress. "You, as the lender, can feel like Jimmy Stewart [in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life"] and invest in people who you know, and fight the evil banks," says Andrew Nelson, a 48-year-old freelance writer in Alpine, Texas, who has so far loaned more than $20,000 to more than 500 people on Prosper.com. When searching for borrowers, Nelson says he looks as much at their "numbers" — a borrower's credit rating, loan-to-income ratio and repayment history on other loans — as the stories behind them. "If I trust the story, I'll lend the money," he says.

To be sure, peer-to-peer lending doesn't come without risks. For lenders, the biggest danger is default. Of the $3 million lent through Prosper.com in September 2006, for example, $300,000 in loans have already defaulted and more than $200,000 are two or more months late, according to WiseClerk.com4, a web site that tracks Prosper.com activity. Default on mortgage loans taken through Virgin Money is impressively low — 0.5% — but that's because most troubled borrowers choose to restructure loans, for example by tacking missed payments onto the unpaid loan balance. Because their lenders are close friends or family members, "people restructure all the time," Advani says.

For borrowers, meanwhile, there's no guarantee they'll find the money they need. Generally, the basic principle of lending applies here as well: The lower your credit score, the lower your chance of getting financed. (Both Prosper.com and LendingClub.com employ letter grades to assess borrowers' credit worthiness, based mainly on credit scores.) According to WiseClerk.com, of the 14,534 Prosper.com loan listings for borrowers with a "C" rating — that's for borrowers with credit scores between 640 and 679 — only 2,668, or 18%, have been funded. Of the 4,608 "AA"-borrower listings, meanwhile — "AA" are borrowers with scores of 760 or higher — 1,557, or 33%, have been funded.

To make sure her $9,000 loan request got noticed, Newberry shared as much personal information as she felt necessary about why she needed the money and how she would repay them. She even included photos of her with her children and listed the grades for the college classes she attends. She patiently and truthfully answered all questions from potential lenders. "You can't be rude or defensive," she says. "You have to put all your business out there, be honest, and it'll pay off."

Tips for navigating peer-to-peer lending sites

Borrowers
1. Be honest. Don't withhold the details when composing your listing. Be specific about why you need the money and how you'll pay the loan back. Break down your current debts and other monthly expenses and income, says Nelson, the lender on Prosper.com. And don't worry: Sensitive information, such as your Social Security number and full name, isn't published.

2. Pay back responsibly. Peer-to-peer lending services hire collection agencies if you fall behind on a payment. Prosper.com does so as soon as you are more than 30 days late. More importantly, they report to the credit bureaus. "This is not a free lunch," says Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com. "It's something you have to treat very seriously."

3. Factor in fees. These services aren't free. At Prosper.com, you'll pay between 1% and 2% and at LendingClub.com, 0.75% to 2% of the loan balance, depending on your credit grade. (No fees are due if your loan doesn't get funded.) Virgin Money charges a one-time fee between $249 and $2,299, depending on the extent of services received.

Lenders
1. Think like an investor. Before plunging in, make sure you understand the logistics of the peer-to-peer site of your choice. Each site has its own grading method for borrowers' creditworthiness, for example. Lower credit grades command higher interest rates, but the risk is also higher. When picking borrowers, it helps to think like an investor. Diversify among different borrowers. If you have $1,000, for example, split that among 10 or even 20 borrowers. Sure, $50 per person may sound like peanuts, but that's exactly how most peer-to-peer loans get funded. Also, diversify among credit grades. "You can put some money into the high-risk category, but then put some into the less-risky borrowers who are paying lower rates," McBride advises.

2. Factor in fees. Prosper.com lenders pay a 0.5% to 1% annual servicing fee, based on the balance of the loan outstanding. LendingClub.com charges 1% of all payments received each month. Should a loan go to collections, you will also be responsible for the collection agency's fees.

3. Don't lend money you'll need. The loans are generally paid over three years, so make sure you don't lend any money you'll need soon. Think of it as a CD, but one where your investment isn't guaranteed.
http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/i...story=20071015





The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life
Louise Story

STEVE SAENZ used to run a 10K race in 36 minutes. But last spring — 20 years, 2 children and 50 pounds later — he found himself seriously out of shape. A new Web site from Nike, he says, has brought him back on track.

Since April, Mr. Saenz, 53, has been running with a Nike+, a small sensor in his running shoes that tracks his progress on an Apple iPod he carries. After each run near his home in Louisville, Ky., he docks the iPod into his computer and posts details of his run on the Nike+ Web site. There, he has made friends with other runners around the world who post running routes, meet up in the real world and encourage one another on the site.

Nike’s famous swoosh is there all along. For Nike, this is advertising.

“It’s a very different way to connect with consumers,” says Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management. “People are coming into it on average three times a week. So we’re not having to go to them.”

The success of Nike+ is bad news for the traditional media companies that have long made money from Nike’s television commercials and glossy magazine ads.

Last year, Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That’s down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age.

“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Mr. Edwards says he tells many media executives. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

Mr. Edwards may be more blunt than most. But many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.

Adventurous companies like Nike have been experimenting with these alternatives since the 1990s. But now, even the most conventional marketers are making these alternatives a permanent — and ever bigger — part of their advertising budgets.

Last year, Johnson & Johnson decided to boycott the so-called upfronts, an annual event when advertisers get together with television executives to negotiate for commercial time. In August, General Motors said that 2008 would be the last year for its longtime sponsorship of the Olympics. In May, A. G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble, told financial analysts that the company would spend less on traditional media and more on its Web site, in-store advertising and promotional events.

“If you step back and look at our mix across most of the major brands,” Mr. Lafley said, “it is clearly shifting.”



Add it up, and the money flowing out of the traditional media is huge — even at a time when ad budgets in general are growing, advertising research shows. The 25 companies that spent the most on advertising over the last five years cut their spending last year in traditional media by about $767 million, according to Advertising Age and TNS Media Intelligence. And in the first half of this year, those companies decreased their media spending an additional 3 percent, or $446 million, to $14.53 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

True, Nike increased its spending on traditional media in the United States by 3 percent from 2003 to 2006, to $220.5 million. But in the same period, it increased its nonmedia ad spending 33 percent, to $457.9 million, according to the Advertising Age data.

Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising. No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else — like reading an article. Nike executives say that much of the company’s future advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and local sports competitions.

“We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go,” said Stefan Olander, global director for brand connections at Nike. “How can we provide a service that the consumer goes, ‘Wow, you really made this easier for me’?”

BUT media companies rely on advertising to pay the bulk of their programming and newsroom costs. Traditionally, the “service” provided by advertising was cheaper media content for consumers. But the services of the future may be virtual workout coaches, map applications for cellphones, health advice and matchmaking services.

Nike executives portray the shift in strategy as a return to the company’s roots in the 1970s, when, in the words of an early magazine ad, Nike grew through “word-of-foot marketing.” In the early days, Nike displayed posters from local races in stores and was host for local runs on the West Coast. Most early employees at Nike were runners themselves, often disciples of Bill Bowerman, the former college track coach, who founded Nike with Phil Knight, the company’s current chairman.

In the 1980s, Nike began the large television campaigns that propelled the brand to global fame. Early ones included ads starring Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. Its “Revolution” ad in 1987 featured the Beatles song of the same name to introduce the Air Max shoe. And the “Just Do It” series in 1988 showcased images of athletes, including a wheelchair racer and a runner who was 80. In the 1990s, Nike ran ads with Tiger Woods and the United States women’s soccer team that inspired fans and became part of sports culture.

Nike continues to have a strong and ubiquitous presence on television by sponsoring famous athletes. And almost 70 percent of the company’s traditional ad spending was for TV commercials in 2006, though that share dropped to 45 percent for the first half of this year, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Today, however, many Nike ads are shown only on the Internet. Wayne Rooney, the British soccer player, is currently featured in a series of online videos for Nike. In 2005, Nike placed a 2-minute, 46-second clip of the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho online, instead of on TV. The video has had more than 17 million views on YouTube and became so well known that some television networks like Sky Sports and the BBC showed it in their news coverage — free.

“We don’t automatically think about television anymore,” said Joaquin Hidalgo, vice president for global brand marketing at Nike. “There was a time when brands like Nike could tell kids through the medium of television what was cool, what was in, what was not in, because that was the only window they had into the world. That has completely changed now.”

More confirmation that television ads were losing influence came in 2005, when a series of commercials for the Nike ID shoe flopped. The 10 ads for the Nike ID, a design-it-yourself shoe, ran that April on MTV — just the place a marketer might consider ideal for such a message. Now, Mr. Edwards laughs about that campaign.

“I could question whether the work was too creative or just ineffective, but it didn’t work in terms of conversion,” he said in an interview at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. “We didn’t see sales go up. It was just nothing. It was like we ran them, and waited and nothing happened.”

SOMEWHERE along the path toward big-box stores and blockbuster brands, mass advertising lost a good part of its impact. Consumers began splitting their time on the couch between more and more diversions — video games, instant messaging and hundreds of TV channels. Content exploded on the Internet, with free articles and videos available whenever consumers wanted them. And for some people with digital video recorders, the idea of watching a television commercial has started to seem quaint.

“We are all concerned about when DVR penetration has reached critical mass and consumers have been trained to skip all advertising,” said Lee Doyle, chief executive for North America at Mediaedge:cia, an agency that buys ad space. “That’s the world we’re all afraid of.”

A glance at ad revenue at several big companies from last year shows the trend. At the Tribune Company and The New York Times Company, ad revenue increased less than 1 percent last year. Time Inc., the magazine unit of Time Warner, reported ad revenue increases of only 2 percent last year. GemStar TV Guide was down 9 percent. In radio, ad revenue at Westwood One fell 11 percent.

Of course, consumer brands have never spent every cent of their advertising budgets on television commercials, radio spots and print ads. For many years, companies have also mailed promotions to people’s homes, sponsored sports and community events and paid for signs within stores. But there is a growing interest in these and other, newer alternatives to commercials and newspaper pages.

Kraft is paying to advertise in a virtual supermarket in the online world called Second Life. Continental Airlines advertises on chopstick packets, Geico on turnstiles, McDonald’s on the floor of sports arenas and Walt Disney on the paper used on examination tables in doctors’ offices.

Well-known brands are also trying new approaches, hoping to generate buzz both online and off. Procter & Gamble, for example, opened a temporary Charmin-brand public bathroom in Manhattan. Microsoft dropped thousands of parachutes holding software onto a town in Illinois last year, and Target suspended the magician David Blaine in a gyroscope above Times Square for two days.

Some advertisers make their own content and post it online, sidestepping the media outlets. Burger King has created video games, and Sprite, which is owned by Coca-Cola, is running a social networking site for cellphone users.

Digital media spending is doubling every year at many big companies, industry data indicate. But the research firm Outsell found this year that 58 percent of marketers’ online spending went to their own Web sites, rather than to paid ads. More than two million people visited Nike-owned Web sites in July, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Nike’s global sales have climbed in the last four years — to more than $16 billion from $10 billion. And executives say the new type of marketing is a part of that trend.

The company plans to use the Nike+ idea in other sports categories, which could include basketball, tennis and soccer. While $29 for a Nike+ sensor hardly covers the cost of the device and the site maintenance and customer service, Mr. Edwards coolly points out that Nike+ is as much about marketing as it is about product.

AS consumers spend more time online, running their virtual lives and connecting with other people more through typing than talking, Nike executives contend that they also want more physical interaction with brands. Nike is running more events on the ground, like last year’s three-on-three soccer matches for youths in 37 countries and its San Francisco marathon for women.

Nike even calls the third floor of its New York store the “Nike Running Club.” There, runners can map out running routes, receive training advice and attend an evening speaker series — all free, even if they trot in wearing Adidas or Brooks sneakers.

The company pays 5 coaches and 17 pacers to lead runs three times a week in Central Park. Nike running-gear sales clerks are expected to join in. The goal is to use the club to endear people to the brand and to provide opportunities for them to try products.

At a recent Tuesday night gathering, Linda Martello, 34, an executive assistant, said she was grateful to Nike. After she injured one of her calf muscles, she said, a Nike coach helped her figure out that she was wearing the wrong shoes. (She, of course, bought a pair of Nikes.)

“I love it here, I do,” she said as she stretched for the evening run.

Ms. Martello stood to head out on the run.

“And they’re not pushing product in my face, as if I was shopping,” she continues. “That’s why I come here. I’m not pressured.”

The group — 131 that night — sprinted out of the store’s 57th Street entrance, up Fifth Avenue, past the Plaza Hotel and into the southeast entrance to Central Park. Their footwear was varied: some wore New Balance, Saucony, Reebok and Adidas. But Nike dominated, and anyone who saw them jogging would surely notice the Nike swoosh on most of their shirts. The group, though sweaty and of varied athletic abilities, flashed by — turning heads of passers-by and other runners.

A human billboard for Nike.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/bu...edia/14ad.html





Telecoms Outfit Banned From BitTorrent Advertizing
enigmax

A federation of video and media outlets has taken out an injunction against a major telecoms company to forbid them from advertising on a BitTorrent site and any other P2P site in the future.

Arcor, the fixed network operator for Vodafone in Germany has received an injunction forbidding it to advertize on P2P sites in the future.

The injunction was issued by the state court in Frankfurt after the German Association of Video and Media Retailers has complained that Arcor had been advertizing on the BitReactor.to BitTorrent tracker, a site it claims is used to facilitate the sharing of movies, tv shows and music.

The court agreed with the complaint and declared that Arcor must stop advertizing on P2P services or face fines in the future.

TorrentFreak spoke the administrator of the popular BitTorrent site btjunkie, and he said in a response to this news: “Telling companies which web sites they are allowed to advertise on is a big step towards a non-neutral Internet. P2P web sites consist of a hard to reach demographic and blocking companies from accessing that is also I blow to free economic principles.”

Acor stole a few headlines back in September after claims that following pressure from a porn media outlet to clamp down unauthorized sites, it blocked free porn sites (such as YouPorn) at the router level.
http://torrentfreak.com/telecom-outf...tizing-071019/





Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click
Adam Liptak

You can do cool things with Google, like take the pulse of the legal profession.

Google is, of course, more than a search engine. It also sells advertising, including the shaded “sponsored links” that run next to the real search results. It auctions off those ads to advertisers, who agree to pay a given amount each time someone clicks on their link.

“Christmas recipes,” for instance, was going for 54 cents per click the other day. “Britney Spears” cost 36 cents, and “Britney Spears nude” only 21 cents.

But “Oakland personal injury lawyer” cost $58.03. “Asbestos attorney” cost $51.68. And “mesothelioma attorney Texas” — mesothelioma is a kind of cancer caused by inhaling asbestos — cost $65.21.

A Web site called CyberWyre, at www.cwire.org, posts a regularly updated list of the most expensive search terms. “The four leading industries are definitely law, medicine, finance and travel,” said Sam Elhag, who writes for the site. On a recent visit, lawyers and lung cancer dominated the top 10.

Ted Frank, the director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, said the fact that some personal injury lawyers were willing to pay $60 a click was telling, particularly given that relatively few of those clicks would bring in actual business.

“These lawyers don’t really litigate cases — they settle cases,” Mr. Frank said. “And they need a big inventory of cases. The only job of the attorney is to come up with the clients.”

“There is nothing wrong with what Google is doing,” he added. “There is nothing wrong with advertising for clients. It’s just fascinating that clients are worth so much.”

And there is no client more lucrative than one with mesothelioma. That word has hovered near the top of the CyberWyre list since 2003, Mr. Elhag said.

William G. Childs, an assistant professor at Western New England College School of Law, explained why, as he put it, “mesothelioma is clearly the highest-dollar value.”

“It doesn’t happen except through asbestos, with vanishingly small exceptions,” Professor Childs said. “The vast majority of cases settle and settle rather easily. And they’re not hard to work up.”

The market for Google search terms says something, then, about the market for plaintiffs’ lawyers. For reasons that baffle economists, personal injury lawyers all charge roughly the same amount for their services, typically a third to 40 percent of any recovery.

“What explains this puzzle?” asked Alex Tabarrok, who teaches economics at George Mason University. “No one knows.” It may be, he said, that offering to work for less might be thought to signal that you are a bad lawyer.

In any event, Mr. Frank said, the high prices on Google are a direct consequence of this economic anomaly.

“Instead of competing on price,” he said of plaintiffs’ lawyers, “they compete on Google.”

Google advertising has the benefit of being narrowly focused, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. “I assume relatively few people searching for ‘mesothelioma’ are doing it out of idle curiosity,” Mr. Olson said.

But some of them are looking for medical information, and they are often disappointed. “If you are searching for information on mesothelioma,” Mr. Olson said, “you will have to dodge dozens and dozens of lawyer advertisements.”

The top sponsored link that came up yesterday with a search for “mesothelioma,” for instance, was for a site that promised information “about mesothelioma’s causes, symptoms and types of treatment.” It urged readers to contact a toll-free number for more information. In the fine print at the bottom, the site revealed that it was sponsored by a Texas law firm.

For what it’s worth, what little medical information appeared on the site seemed sound and disinterested. That is not always the case, Mr. Olson said. “In areas like cerebral palsy,” he said, lawyers’ Web sites “will steer you into highly tendentious information.”

Personal injury lawyers are not the only ones who advertise on Google. “Tax lawyer” cost $34.32 the other day, “bankruptcy lawyer” $8.46 and “patent lawyer” $5.08.

“Pro bono lawyer” — the kind who handles cases without a fee — went for $2.89. (The top advertiser was a referral service for criminal defense lawyers. And no, they were not volunteering to handle cases pro bono.)

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said lawyers’ enormous enthusiasm for Internet advertising meant the medium might have reached middle age. “Lawyers are usually the slowest to adopt any form of new technology,” she said.

Professor Childs, who has written about advertising by lawyers on Google on his TortsProf blog, lawprofessors.typepad.com

/tortsprof, said he sometimes typed in Web site addresses rather than clicking on sponsored links when doing his research.

“It feels a little weird to cost them 50 bucks to satisfy my curiosity,” he said.

That had not occurred to me. In working on this column, I looked at a bunch of lawyers’ Web sites, at a cumulative cost to them of, oh, $1,000. Sorry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/us/15bar.html?hp





Google Skimps on Its Own Advertising
AP

Like a gourmet chef who rarely eats out, Google Inc. feeds advertising services to hordes of other businesses while skimping on its own marketing.

The recipe has been extremely fruitful. While the Internet search leader has sold more than $30 billion in advertising since 2001, Google has become a household name without buying expensive ad campaigns on television or radio or in print.

''It's almost as if they have this cultural allergy to advertising,'' said Mark Hughes, author of ''Buzzmarketing,'' a book about unconventional ways to build a brand. ''It has been an advantage because it has helped keep them cool. They have zigged while everyone else has been zagging.''

This advertising aversion has freed up money for engineers, computing hardware and other resources that fuel Google's search engine while leaving plenty of profit to keep shareholders happy and lift the company's stock ever higher.

Some marketing experts view Google as the archetype of an Internet-driven age that has made it possible for startups like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to permeate pop culture with little or no advertising.

That's a change from the dot-com boom era in 1999 and 2000 when Internet entrepreneurs went broke paying for Super Bowl ads and other theatrics in a mostly fruitless effort to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were among the first to break that free-spending mold, deciding that advertising didn't make a lot of sense for a company that started out 1998 with just $100,000 before raising $25 million in venture capital a year later. But they have remained marketing misers even as Google accumulated a cash hoard that now stands at $12.5 billion.

The Mountain View-based company believes its austere approach will become more common as major advertisers learn to deploy technology to target consumers.

''We are at an inflection point that could radically change the way marketing is done,'' said David Lawee, who became Google's marketing chief a year ago.

More than 300,000 advertisers already rely on Google's online marketing platform, which primarily shows text-based ads on the search engine's results pages and other online destinations.

Google tries to deliver those ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in the messages, making an educated guess based on the words used in a search request as well as information gathered about visitors' past preferences and Web surfing patterns.

Drawing upon some of the same data-mining techniques, Google is developing marketing tools for TV, radio, print and even video games to help advertisers reach potential customers more effectively -- and perhaps less expensively.

Although Google regularly promotes its brand and services on its own online ad network, that soapbox hasn't been the key to its ubiquity.

Instead, Google has relied on word-of-mouth and the media's obsessive coverage of its every move to establish a prized brand just nine years after Page and Brin first set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Consulting firm Millward Brown Optimor estimates Google's brand is worth $66 billion and calls it the world's most valuable. A separate study by Interbrand estimated the brand's value at $17.8 billion and ranked it 20th in the world.

While major rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. pour more than 20 percent of their annual revenue into sales and marketing, Google devoted 8 percent of its revenue to the category in 2006, spending a total of $849.5 million. Microsoft spent $11.5 billion on marketing and sales in its last fiscal year, while Yahoo spent $1.3 billion. On advertising and promotions alone, Google spent $188 million in 2006 -- roughly the same amount Microsoft spends every two months.

Another Internet bellwether, online auctioneer eBay Inc., consistently earmarks 14 percent to 15 percent of its revenue for advertising. Last year, eBay spent $871 million on advertising, with much of the money winding up in Google's wallet. The Coca-Cola Co., the brand ranked first in the Interbrand survey, spent more than $2.5 billion on advertising last year.

When Google does buy ads, it's often to recruit employees (the company has hired more than 11,000 in the past three years). On a few occasions, Google also has bought ads to highlight lesser-known products, such as a free telephone directory service, GOOG-411, recently featured on billboards in the San Francisco Bay area and rural parts of New York.

Some well-known companies are even more frugal advertisers than Google.

Starbucks Corp. spent just $95 million on advertising last year, 49 percent less than Google did. Like Google, Starbucks made a name for itself by developing a distinctive product that quickly resonated with consumers whose enthusiasm became infectious.

Google believes happy users are worth infinitely more than any goodwill advertising might buy, said marketing chief Lawee.

''If our products are great, our reputation soars,'' he said.

Google's brand also has been bolstered by the media's fixation on the company. Hardly a day goes by without Google's name being splattered across television, radio, magazines, newspapers and, of course, the Internet. That gives the company even more clout with advertisers and even less reason to advertise itself.

''They are at the crest of this wave that gives them a lot of free publicity,'' said Roland Rust, chairman of the University of Maryland's marketing department.

Google has proven adept at orchestrating stories that have little to do with its day-to-day business.

The company attracted headlines last month by funding a $30 million race to the moon. And it made news last year by investing in solar energy to power its headquarters. Some news outlets even filed stories on Google's 2005 search for a new executive chef.
Not all the coverage has been flattering, but even negative stories build brand recognition. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company benefited from a spike in usage of its search engine after The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Page and Brin engaged in a petty spat about the size of the beds on their personal jet.

Industry experts say Google may have to invest more heavily in advertising as it branches in new directions.

It already is selling a suite of online software applications to businesses and reportedly is mulling lending its name to a line of mobile phones. Ventures like those typically rely on more conventional advertising.

''It's inevitable that they will have to advertise more,'' said veteran marketing consultant Bob Kahn, who runs his a Darien, Conn., firm. ''At some point, the power of the Google brand will cease to support all those extremities.''

Although he declined to provide specifics, Lawee also hinted that Google probably will need to increase its marketing budget because many longtime users of the search engine don't know about the company's peripheral products.

''Even with all the attention we get,'' he said, ''that tells me we are still not getting all our messages out.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...ing-Miser.html





Google Passes Microsoft in U.S. Internet Users, Nielsen Says
Nielsen: Web site is No. 1

Google passed Microsoft to become the most visited U.S. Web site, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Google's visitors rose 17 percent to 118 million in September from a year earlier, ahead of Microsoft and Yahoo, Nielsen said. In August, Microsoft was first and Google was second. Microsoft's visitors rose less than 1 percent to 117.7 million in September from a year earlier, while Yahoo's rose 2.7 percent to 109.1 million, Nielsen said. ComScore, which competes with Nielsen in the Internet research market, ranked Yahoo as the most popular U.S. Web site in August.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7156667





P.&G., the Pioneer of Mixing Soap and Drama, Adds a Web Installment
Bob Tedeschi

Can young Ashley find success and happiness in the big city? Will the dashing Eric win her heart? Can she make consumers buy more Tide detergent?

Stay tuned. Or logged on.

The company that brought soap operas to radio, then television, Procter & Gamble, is trying the same strategy online with “Crescent Heights,” a new show intended to reach young viewers where they watch the most — their PCs and cellphones.

The series, which is more sitcom than soap, focuses on a recent college graduate, Ashley, who moves to Los Angeles from Wisconsin to start a career in public relations, and her emerging circle of friends and romantic interests. Written, directed and produced by Hollywood veterans, the three-minute episodes are as polished as any television sitcom.

While the Tide logo makes occasional appearances, clothes are front and center. In one episode, Ashley attends a party and is horrified that her bright yellow dress is the only color in a sea of black, but the dress helps get her noticed by Eric, who plays the early foil to Ashley’s other suitor, Will.

“We want to speak to people about more than just laundry,” said Kevin Crociata, Tide’s associate marketing director. “We provide benefits to the fabrics she wears on daily basis. They have much more meaning.”

The initiative follows that of other marketers and retailers who have found that, especially among their younger customers, sometimes the best way to advertise is to, well, not advertise.

“The product message is there, but it’s not as direct,” said Mr. Crociata. “If the content wasn’t entertaining, we wouldn’t be successful.”

“Crescent Heights,” which Tide is promoting on its television commercials, print ads and packaging, is too new to affect sales. “The reaction so far has been great,” Mr. Crociata said. “We feel like we’ve hit on something that’s entertaining and, in our testing, has shown it’s influencing purchase intent.”

Mr. Crociata said the series, which was taped in an initial set of 10 segments, will help Procter & Gamble evaluate its broader strategy regarding online entertainment. At least one other Procter & Gamble brand, Always feminine care products, has rolled out a scripted online entertainment series.

Procter & Gamble has a long history with such projects, having pioneered radio soap operas at the dawn of that medium, as well as televised dramas. “Guiding Light,” TV’s longest running soap, began on radio 70 years ago, and was first televised in 1955. The “Light” in its title is a reference to candles, which, along with soap, made up Procter & Gamble’s first product line in 1837.

Mr. Crociata said Tide’s executives did not rely on Procter & Gamble Productions Inc., which still produces “Guiding Light,” to deliver “Crescent Heights.” Rather, it used GoTV Networks, a video production company based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., that has also developed technology to create the show in collaboration with P.& G. and distribute shows online and on mobile phones.

Chris Greenleaf, GoTV’s vice president for entertainment, declined to say how much Tide or any of the company’s other clients pay to develop an online series. “Scripted series are more expensive than reality TV, and fewer characters is less expensive,” he said. The show contains only four main characters.

Despite the costs, Mr. Greenleaf said marketers increasingly are developing original series to distribute online and over mobile phones. “Just from us personally, you’ll see a lot more of this in the next year,” he said. “Advertisers are aware that this is where a lot of the activity is, among their demographics.”

Not all marketers have scored successes with online series. Executives at Anheuser-Busch recently said the company would continue its BudTV.com initiative, which features dozens of original programs, despite disappointing viewership since its February introduction.

Procter & Gamble’s chief competitor, Unilever, has fared better in developing multiple series, having created original online programs for its Degree deodorant, Dove soap and Caress skin products, among others. The company’s most successful online entertainment asset, however, revolves around Spraychel, the animated mascot for Unilever’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! brand (at TasteYouLove.com).

Spraychel currently anchors the company’s third online series, “Sprays in the City,” in which she and other vegetables and toppings vie for romantic and gastronomic supremacy. Javier Martin, Unilever’s brand manager for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!, said this year’s Spraychel series has been viewed more than one million times online, with visitors watching for more than six minutes. (Episodes last about three minutes.)

In surveys, Mr. Martin said, viewers were “significantly” more likely to purchase the product than they were before watching the shows.

Retailers, too, are suddenly becoming sitcom producers. American Eagle Outfitters, which is based in Pittsburgh, in August released “It’s a Mall World,” a series of webisodes directed by Milo Ventimiglia, star of the television series “Heroes.” The series revolves around five twentysomethings who work in a mall, one as an American Eagle greeter.

In seeking an offline distribution partner for the series, American Eagle struck gold in MTV, which agreed this fall to run “Mall World” episodes during the first three-minute commercial spot of its “Real World: Sydney” series on Wednesday nights. In exchange, American Eagle agreed to pay MTV an undisclosed sum, and run “Real World” on screens in its 972 stores.

Kathy Savitt, American Eagle’s executive vice president for marketing, said the Web site’s visits jump every Wednesday night by more than 20 percent. More than 75 percent of the new visitors who come to the site to watch the show also purchase items, she added.

Ms. Savitt said the “Mall World” campaign is an adjunct to other marketing approaches.

“While our customers really appreciated MTV programming, they were, through TiVo and other devices, disintermediating a lot of the spots we ran on the network,” she said. “With this, we suddenly feel like we’re truly creating a strategy that’s responsive to the way our customers actually consume media.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/bu...ia/15ecom.html





A Site Warhol Would Relish
Randall Stross

JUSTIN.TV, a San Francisco start-up that provides live video programming on the Web, wants to make you a star as a “lifecaster.” No singing, dancing or storytelling skills are required — only a willingness to broadcast every moment of your quotidian existence in real time. That’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, wherever you go.

But can a business be built upon an audience limited to those willing to watch excruciatingly real “reality TV”? After all, shows like “Survivor,” “Kid Nation” and “Big Brother” are tightly edited highlight reels that squeeze life into a compact entertainment package. Lifecasting, on the other hand, shows life in unabridged form, programming without a thematic concept, without a casting director, without an editor, without anything in the subject’s life that is much different than the audience’s, other than the willingness to be on view.

The technologists at Justin.tv have figured out ways to make video streaming on the Internet inexpensive but haven’t gotten much further than that in puzzling out a business.

When the four co-founders, whose average age is 23, began investigating the costs of distributing video online last year, the major companies that dominate the business of serving video streams quoted charges that would have cost a start-up about 36 cents a user for each hour of video viewed. That’s too expensive to make an advertising-based business feasible. The Justin.tv team pushed the cost of streamed video to less than a penny an hour per user by building its own software that would work with Amazon Simple Storage Service, an inexpensive offering that is open to any Web developer.

With a cost structure that makes video streaming all but free, they thought, they surely could follow YouTube’s example, letting the Crowd supply the programming and the Crowd figure out what’s good. If only it were so easy. YouTube traffics in very short entertainments; lifecasting does not. The Crowd, wise though it may be, probably does not have infinite patience to watch thousands of hours of lifecasting chaff to find a single grain of wheat.

This month, after seven months of beta-phase broadcasting, Justin.tv formally declared that it was open for business to one and all. In its first five days, the company said, it created 18,500 hours of video and pulled in 500,000 unique visitors. What those statistics do not show is how long anyone stuck around. In a sampling I did last week during a weekday, only 44 viewers, on average, could be found at each of the eight most heavily visited channels.

Before Justin.tv began, other live video sites like Stickam and Ustream.tv, had appeared, hosting live shows supplied by anyone wishing to broadcast longer-form video, unconstrained by YouTube’s 10-minute limit. But no other video site had ventured to make lifecasting the centerpiece of its branding.

Lifecasting — as a form of conceptual art — has been around for quite a while. Jennifer K. Ringley’s JenniCam ran for seven pioneering years, from 1996 to 2003; Ms. Ringley was willing to allow the Webcam to stay on, even during times of intimacy. Once the boundary was crossed separating the private and the public, however, lifecasters who followed couldn’t hold an audience’s attention just by crossing the same line — it’s been done. Justin.tv has decided to adopt a PG-13 version of lifecasting: nudity is deemed “unacceptable.”

To start Justin.tv, Justin Kan, one of the co-founders, began his own lifecasting last March. (Whether in the office or at home in bed, he seems to spend an awful lot of time staring at a computer.) Justine Ezarik, Justin.tv’s second volunteer and an attractive young woman, has become one of the site’s most popular lifecasters. When Ms. Ezarik explains to the world every nuance of her just-completed purchase of a sandwich at an airport shop — or when she invites us to watch her watch television for hours in a hotel room — she left me wondering whether her show was a parody of lifecasting and whether she, like Stephen Colbert, never breaks character.

Stewart Alsop, a partner in the venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners of San Francisco, which invested in Justin.tv last summer, is aware of the limitations of the site’s current lifecast offerings. The future, he hopes, will bring more and better choices.

“If there are 6 billion people in the world,” he said, “imagine one million people broadcasting live, 999,000 of whom are boring — but the other 1,000 are really interesting.”

All of Justin.tv’s live video streams are archived, and the best snippets are culled by each show’s owner as “episodes” or by any viewer as a “highlight.” The problem is that once Justin.tv archives, edits and labels these clips, the resulting “best of” shorts become indistinguishable from YouTube videos, vitiating the supposed power of live broadcasts.

Justin.tv’s lifecasters now have the technical ability to broadcast live from anywhere that has wireless Internet service. When Mr. Kan began lifecasting, he had to carry a 15-pound camera and 7-pound battery pack. It was only marginally lighter than the giant satellite dish that Al Franken wore on his hat when he pretended to be a one-man correspondent-and-video crew in “Saturday Night Live” sketches in the 1980s.

Subsequently, the Justin.tv team was able to redesign its system so that a special camera is no longer needed. A tiny Webcam, easy to affix to a shoulder strap, hat or eyeglasses, can be connected to any lightweight Windows laptop with an Internet connection. A 3-pound laptop is still too heavy, however, to be carried everywhere one goes, day in, day out — assuming, of course, that the lifecasters have a destination other than their own home or office.

The current roster favors a stationary camera pointed at themselves seated and immobile, participating in a text chat session that unfolds on half of the screen.

ANDY WARHOL, were he still with us, would enthusiastically embrace lifecasting, not because it enables everyone to become world-famous for 15 minutes, but because the medium is perfectly suited to Mr. Warhol’s taste.

“I like boring things,” he once wrote, and his experimental films deliberately tested his audience’s appetite for tedium. His 1963 classic, “Sleep,” was a black-and-white silent film that had a single actor, single scene and single plot point: the poet John Giorno sleeping — for 5 hours and 21 minutes. When it was shown for the first time in Los Angeles, an audience that was 500 strong began shrinking even before the 45-minute close-up of Mr. Giorno’s abdomen was complete. Still, 50 people lasted for the full 321 minutes.

Those masochistic souls would love Justin.tv.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/te...gy/14digi.html





As Writers’ Strike Looms, Stakes Are Higher for TV Than Film
Edward Wyatt

At lunch in Hollywood last Thursday, Neal Baer, an executive producer of the NBC hit “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” got a telephone call from North Bergen, N.J., where the series is filmed.

An actor on the set of a forthcoming episode of that popular series wanted to change a line of dialogue. To do so he needed the permission of Mr. Baer, who as the show runner of “Special Victims Unit” is the writer and producer who has final say over the program’s scripts and production.

Movie executives generally consider screenwriters to be expendable. But television writers — and particularly the writer-producers who serve as show runners — wield considerable power over a television show, so much so that it often is not clear where their writing duties end and their producing duties begin.

That has big implications if Hollywood writers go on strike next month. Certainly Mr. Baer and the dozens of other producers who also serve as writers on some of television’s biggest hits, and are members of the writers’ union, would not be able to do at least half of their jobs. Whether they could perform any of their duties — or whether most television shows would have to shut down production almost immediately — is an open question.

All of which makes the immediate stakes far higher for television networks than for movie studios, with the writers’ unions — the Writers Guild of America, both West and East — scheduled to announce on Thursday whether their members have voted to authorize a strike when their contract expires on Oct. 31.

In the film business, once a script is completed and turned in, screenwriters rarely are intimately involved on the set with the production of a film. As such, film producers have been stockpiling scripts in anticipation of a writers’ strike.

Television series operate with more of a just-in-time approach to script inventory, however, with the writers, who are employees of a television series, often stepping in to make changes to a script between scenes on the set.

While some series started shooting earlier than usual last summer, few are expected to have more than a half-dozen new episodes taped before a strike begins. That has caused studios to order more reality shows, because those shows do not employ union writers. Some networks have also ordered early production of pilots for new series for the fall of 2008, in case a strike interferes with planning for next season. While some writer-producers say they believe they could perform one job function without the other, others say they cannot.

“If there’s a strike, I do neither,” said Matt Olmstead, the writer-producer who is the show runner for Fox’s “Prison Break.” “I walk out.”

Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, said in an interview on Tuesday that because of the guidelines that the Writers Guild has put out regarding what it expects from its members in the case of a strike, he believes that most of the network’s big scripted shows, including “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives,” would have to shut down production almost immediately in the event of a strike.

“If there were scripts fully written, then normally they would be able to supervise them,” he said of the show runners. “But as per the new rules or guidelines they put out, they’re saying that’s not O.K.”

The Writers Guild of America West, the larger of the two writers’ groups that are negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — that is, the film and television studios — is encouraging that more militant stance.

As part of a set of “strike rules” it circulated to its members this week, the guild said that in addition to being prohibited from writing new dialogue, writer-producers will be prohibited from changing “technical or stage directions,” and from making “changes in the course of production as are made necessary” by the weather, accidents or other “unforeseen contingencies.”

In addition the guild said it “strongly believes” that its members should not even show up for work “for any purpose” at a production where its writers are on strike.

In the minds of some show runners that leaves them in a quandary.

“As a writer I’m labor,” said one show runner, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because he was unsure what course he would take in the event of a strike. “But I also handle a lot of issues on behalf of the people who we are negotiating with,” overseeing budgets, casting and hiring actors, and controlling the pace of production.

During the last Hollywood writers’ strike, which lasted for five months in 1988, it was the show runners who played a major role in ending the walkout, in part through their threat to secede from the writers’ union, according to news reports at the time.
Those show runners — also known as “hyphenates” because of their dual roles — often own production companies that are under contract with television studios, which are themselves often owned by the networks. Some writer-producers have privately expressed nervousness that if they do not come to work in any capacity, they could be in violation of their broader contracts and risk losing their production deals, which are essentially retainers that typically pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Show runners are playing a far bigger role in the early negotiations this year than they did in 1988, when the Writers Guild limited their ability to serve on the union’s negotiating committee, citing their potential conflict of interest.

This time around several writer-producers are members of the union’s 17-person negotiating committee, including Mr. Baer; Marc Cherry, the creator of “Desperate Housewives”; and Carlton Cuse, an executive producer of “Lost.”

Even if the writers go on strike at the end of the month, most scripted series will not immediately find themselves without new episodes. Because they have been filming since mid-summer, many series have completed enough work to provide them with new episodes through the end of the year.

On the Fox hit “House,” for example, the producers expect that they will be able to start shooting the season’s 11th episode by the end of this month, said David Shore, the writer-producer who oversees the series. That episode is currently scheduled to be broadcast on Jan. 8, although if there is a strike, the network might rerun some episodes to try to stretch its new installments into February, a sweeps month.

“I will work as a producer for as long as we have stuff to produce,” Mr. Shore said. “I won’t be working as a writer. That means we won’t have any new scripts coming along. As I see it, should there be a strike, we won’t have any choice but to shut down shortly after.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/ar...on/18show.html





Fearless Digital Pirates Don’t Care About Lawsuits
enigmax

The year 2005 saw the first person sentenced to prison for sharing a movie. In 2007, the possibility of being fined huge amounts became a reality as a music sharer snared by the RIAA picks up a $222,000 bill. So presumably file-sharers are in hiding? Hardly. This fearless internet breed never stops sharing.

Once it became clear that the ‘Grokster Decision’ was actually a win for file-sharing and not the golden bullet against sharers that the industry had hoped for, it became increasingly clear - sharing was simply not going to go away. Today, if one visits the Grokster site, you’re greeted by this message:

There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 83.233.168.134 AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.

Apart from the fact that I am anonymous (the IP is owned by the anonymous Relakks service), this message is typical of the type of useless scare tactics employed by the industry. Time and again the message is “Don’t think you can’t get caught” and “You are not anonymous” or “You can click but you can’t hide”

Millions upon millions of file sharers are responding to these slogans, not with words, but with actions. They ARE clicking and the vast majority simply don’t care about hiding. It’s true that when you use a standard connection on the internet you aren’t anonymous and of course, it’s certainly possible to ‘get caught’. However, as ever more serious headline-grabbing events come and go, file-sharers are getting wise and making their own risk assessments, probably based on: “I’m clicking every day, they never find me. Or any of my friends. Or their friends.”

When Scott McCausland and a handful of other people went to jail for uploading a pre-release movie in 2005, the industry put out the message: You will go to jail for sharing. Well, it’s 2007 now and surprise, surprise - no one else did. It was a special case, it doesn’t apply to 99.99% of file-sharers and it’s useless in the battle against them.

Today in 2007, we hear about Jammie Thomas, the most famous of the 26,000 recipients of legal action at the hands of the RIAA. Sure, she really got hammered with that huge fine and it will deter some from sharing, but the overwhelming majority either haven’t heard about the case or don’t think they’ll be caught - and they could be forgiven for thinking that.

Even if we super over-compensate and say that 100,000 people worldwide had legal action taken against them (it’s nowhere near), this number pales into insignificance when put alongside the conservative estimate of 100 million worldwide file-sharers. Furthermore, take away the legal actions in the United States and the chances of being ‘caught’ edge ever closer to zero. The odds of being ‘caught’ in the rest of the world aren’t quite zero but they’re substantially slimmer than in the States.

Whatever the reality, it’s the perception that really matters and the perception among file-sharers is that while they’re downloading the latest blockbuster movies or millions of TV shows every single week, the chances of being ‘caught’ are close to zero. Therefore the chances of paying a ‘fine’ are close to zero and the chance of going to jail, closer still.

So maybe digital pirates aren’t fearless, brave or even reckless. Maybe they just like to gamble when the odds are hugely - massively - tipped in their favor.
http://torrentfreak.com/fearless-pir...wsuits-071013/





First Alpha Release Of A New Torrent Client
Bogaa

A while back we announced that we were working on a new torrent client. About a year later we have almost finished coding the core of the beast. Currently the client resides in alpha state and a GUI is still missing. However we do plan on finishing everything within a few months. The client is written in C#, mainly because C# is easy to manage and best of all it's portable to other platforms like linux. For now we will focus on windows and move on from there. A few people might think that C# uses a ton of memory and other resources, this is not true, the advantages of using C# instead of C++ are much bigger in our case. The final version will have the following features:

• MultiTracker
• Torrent Creation
• Custom DHT (faster)
• Rss Feeds
• Integrated Search Function (with commenting)
• Custom Peer Exchange
• Fast Resume
• Global/Per torrent Settings
• Download Priority
• more...

The client currently uses about 15MB worth of Ram, the final GUI version should be using around the same amount of memory, which is very reasonable considering the number of features it will have.

For those who wonder, here's a screenshot:



The alpha client is available for download, don't expect to much of it for now: Download
http://seedpeer.com/sitenews/article/31.html





AT&T Ordered to Apply for Local TV License

Blumenthal calls decision 'a landmark victory'
AP

State utility regulators have ordered AT&T to get a cable television license for the Internet service it is currently providing in Connecticut.

Department of Public Utility Control commissioners say a recent federal court decision makes it clear that AT&T is operating its "U-verse" Internet Protocol Television service without proper authorization.

Commissioners have rejected AT&T's video franchise application, which would have allowed the company to operate "U-verse" under regulations that are less-strict than those for cable television.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called the decision a landmark victory for consumers because it will ensure "real" cable television competition throughout the state.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/ci_7184686





State Employee Who Lost Data Suspended
AP

A supervisor at the state Department of Revenue Services was suspended without pay Monday after an investigation into the theft of his laptop computer that contained the names and Social Security numbers of 106,000 Connecticut taxpayers.

Jason Purslow was suspended for six weeks.

His computer was stolen from his car in August at a hotel in New York. Police say it was possible the vehicle was not locked because there were no signs of a break-in.

Purslow violated agency policies regarding the handling of confidential taxpayer information, the Department of Revenue Services said.

Purslow's home number in Cheshire is unlisted and he could not be reached for comment.

Commissioner Pam Law said in a statement that Purslow "exhibited a disregard for sensitive data," but his actions did not constitute willful neglect, which would have been grounds for dismissal.

Purslow, 40, has been at the Revenue Services agency for more than 15 years and earns more than $87,000 a year.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/ci_7184672





Audit Finds Ex-Workers had Access to State Computers
Ken Dixon

The state Department of Revenue Services has allowed former employees, even those who were fired, to retain their access to critical state computer systems, state auditors have found.

The Auditors of Public Accounts, in a report issued Friday, said the DRS is failing to follow its own procedures -- and those ordered in recent years by Gov. M. Jodi Rell -- to secure sensitive data.

The report comes at a time when the DRS is the target of sharp criticism after an employee allowed an agency laptop computer, containing information on 106,000 state taxpayers, to be stolen from an apparently unlocked car at a Long Island hotel during the summer.

Auditor Robert G. Jaekle said Friday that the DRS is only one of "several" state agencies that have failed to remove the computer access of terminated and voluntarily separated employees.

The audit for the two-year period ending June 30, 2006, found more than half of former employees -- 10 of 17 cases surveyed -- retained access to one or more "critical" systems.

Jaekle warned of the potential for former employees to vent dissatisfaction on the department's system.

"It only takes one disgruntled employee with pretty good computer skills to, at the very least, cause some mischief for the state of Connecticut by inappropriately accessing and using system data after they've been discharged," Jaekle said.

"The potential for some hard feelings are there, and that's why these basic questions should be addressed."

The DRS on Friday disputed many of the audit findings, stressing it does cut off computer access in a timely manner following the departure of agency employees. A spokesman for the department said the audit study is "misleading" about exit interview procedures.

The 37-page auditors' report said in 15 of 17 cases examined, the employees were separated without a required exit interview process, and that mandatory interviews with an ethics liaison officer were never conducted.

"There was supposed to be a checklist for terminated employees," Jaekle said. "There have also been new ethics rules over the last few years. In this case there was no checklist on file, and the ethics officer did not conduct exit interviews."

Employees on the threshold of separation from state employment are supposed to hand in ID badges, keys to doors, and card keys to restricted areas, and have their computer passwords and user names deleted.

"A lot of the safeguards ... that prevent unauthorized access to buildings' hardware (and) data on computers should all be taken care of on separation," Jaekle said.

He recalled that in several agencies in recent years, his staff has found similar problems with the timely termination of computer access.

As recently as July, auditors found the state's new $125 million computer system called Core-CT -- operated by the Department of Information Technology, the state comptroller, the Department of Administrative Services and the Office of Policy and Management -- had similar potential problems.

Of the 30 user-identification codes sampled, auditors found three separated Core-CT employees still had active computer sign-ons.

"This was right in the heart of the centralized computer program," said Jaekle, who coincidentally was among the 106,000 state residents whose personal information was on the missing DRS laptop.

One way to prevent access invasion is to upgrade encryption software, Jaekle said. Another, more obvious, solution is for departments such as the DRS to follow the governor's security directive and the agency's own procedures.

"Our recommendation is to follow good business practices when dealing with employees leaving voluntarily or involuntarily, including the disabling of access to the computer system that might have confidential or sensitive data in it," Jaekle said. "When an employee leaves agency service, all their employee rights should end."

Overall, Jaekle said that the two-year DRS audit, which contained 13 areas for improvement, found no evidence of "material or significant" weaknesses.

"We try to point out where agencies aren't meeting the letter of the law and their own operation standards and controls," Jaekle said, pointing to the computer-access issue. "These are areas where potentially some harm can occur."

Sarah Kaufman, spokeswoman for the DRS, said Friday that there are exit procedures.

"While we agree with some of the findings, such as our exit liaison officer was not included in exit interviews, we have taken steps to remedy that," Kaufman said.

"We believe that the report incorrectly suggests that DRS did not have an exit process in place to ensure proper notification when employees were separated or terminated," she said, adding that the agency has had the protocol for 15 years and updated it in May 2006.

"We feel that we are properly notifying specific areas of the agency when an employee is separated or terminated," Kaufman said.

"Some of the steps include notifying our information systems development when an employee has been terminated, so they can eliminate their access to the legacy processing system, e-mail, etc."
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_7233577





TSA Demands Encryption Following Dual Laptop Loss
Lisa Vaas

All data must be encrypted, the TSA orders, after the loss of laptops holding hazmat driver data.

Following the loss and possible theft of two laptops containing the personal data of 3,930 truckers who handle hazardous materials, the Transportation Security Administration has mandated that contractors must encrypt any and all data on top of any deletion policies they have in place.

According to a letter the TSA sent to lawmakers on Oct. 12, the laptops—both of which belonged to a TSA contractor—contain names, addresses, birthdays, commercial driver's license numbers and, in some instances, Social Security numbers of the affected truckers.

First, one laptop was lost. At that time, the contractor, L-1 Identity Solutions' Integrated Biometric Technology division, told the TSA that the truckers' information had been deleted from the system, TSA Public Affairs Manager Ann Davis told eWEEK.

Then, another laptop disappeared. After the second theft or loss, the TSA conducted an IT forensic investigation that ascertained that the deleted information could be retrieved if a thief had the proper training.

"So even though [there's only a] small chance of [the data being misused], we did notify all affected individuals and advised them of what steps to take to protect themselves, and we mandated that contractors need to encrypt any and all data in addition to any deletion procedures that might be in place," Davis said.

The TSA requires that all individuals who transport hazardous waste provide information for a security clearance in a program called the Hazardous Materials Endorsement Threat Assessment that's mandated under the Patriot Act.

This isn't the first time the TSA has found itself in data-breach hot water, and it isn't the agency's biggest data breach, by a long shot. On May 7, the agency announced that a hard drive containing personal information belonging to 100,000 government workers had been lost.

The TSA is also requiring Integrated Biometric Technology to provide free credit reporting to the affected individuals.

L-1 Identity Solutions couldn't immediately provide a spokesperson to give information to eWEEK on the incident.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2199122,00.asp





A Mock Columnist, Amok
Maureen Dowd

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)

By Stephen Colbert

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

So why I am writing Miss Dowd’s column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

While my hat is not presently in the ring, I should also point out that it is not on my head. So where’s that hat? (Hint: John McCain was seen passing one at a gas station to fuel up the Straight Talk Express.)

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: “After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.” On gender: “The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex.” On race: “While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.” On the elderly: “They look like lizards.”

Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.

Let me regurgitate: I know why you want me to run, and I hear your clamor. I share Americans’ nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn’t yet fled to Guangdong. And I don’t intend to tease you for weeks the way Newt Gingrich did, saying that if his supporters raised $30 million, he would run for president. I would run for 15 million. Cash.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

What do I offer? Hope for the common man. Because I am not the Anointed or the Inevitable. I am just an Average Joe like you — if you have a TV show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/op...14dowd.html?hp





Why Commercials Before Movies Is Worse Than Piracy
John

Being subjected to advertising is just something we’ve come to expect in our daily routines, and for most of us, we’ve become so conditioned to various advertising methods that we don’t even think twice about it. There is nothing wrong with advertising in and of itself. It’s how we learn about products, services and entertainment. Advertising is also the big main source of revenue for things we hold dear like television and The Movie Blog (which is 100% funded by advertising), so I’m certainly never going to rail on the evils of advertising.

However, advertising in movie theaters is a topic that has been brought up here on The Movie Blog more than a few times, and a recent report by the Cinema Advertising Council in the New York Post begs us to once again revisit the issue. We’ve all figured that commercials playing in movie theaters was worth a lot of money… but did you realize its worth almost HALF A BILLION DOLLARS? The IMDB gives us this:

Revenue from in-theater advertising rose more than 15 percent to $456 million from $395 million a year ago… The Post quoted CAC Chairman Cliff Marks as expressing the belief that moviegoers are becoming “more accepting” of screen advertising. A recent Arbitron poll indicated that two-thirds of moviegoers “don’t mind” the ads.

Don’t mind the ads? DON’T MIND THE ADS???

First, I should mention here that I don’t mind the idea of movie theaters making money. It’s a business. They exist to make money, and if they can find new creative ways to generate money then I say more power to them. If they can come up with new ways to get my money while providing me with some new service or product that I’m willing to pay for… then good for them.

Second, there are types of advertising in movie theaters I “don’t mind”. For example, if the movie is supposed to start at 7pm and I get into my seat at 6:45pm, I really don’t mind commercials and ads being shown on the screen until showtime. I’m just sitting there anyway, it’s not taking away from my time since the show isn’t advertised to start for another 15 minutes… so really… showing ads in that vacuum is no skin off my nose, it gives me something to look at while I wait, and it generates some income for the theaters. GREAT! It’s a win/win for everyone.

But you don’t have to have a degree in advertising to know that the bulk of that $456 million in ad money doesn’t come from those “pre-show” commercials. Oh no no no no… most of that money comes from the ads I LOATHE. The commercials (not trailers… I like those) that they start playing at the time they advertised the MOVIE was supposed to start.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating.

- When you take my money for popcorn, at least I’m getting a tasty treat

- When you take my cash at the box office, I’m getting to come in to watch the movie

- When you take my time for commercials on TV, I’m getting a “free” TV show out of it

But what are we getting for our time with commercials in movie theaters? When the ad says “Movie starts at 7pm” and I’m in my seat (that I paid admission for) at 7pm, it’s time for you to start giving me what I paid you for… the movie. If you want to show me commercials, fine… give me the movie for free then.

The theater industry is pulling in RECORD amounts of income from those commercials, and unlike TV (where we get a free show), WE GET NOTHING IN RETURN FOR OUR TIME SITTING THERE WHEN THE MOVIE IS SUPPOSED TO START.

Movie theaters have in essence found the PERFECT advertising. Ads that take to audiences time, without giving them anything in return.

I don’t mind theaters making money off me when I get a product, service or entertainment in return… but commercials playing at 7pm when you told me the movie would be starting is doing nothing but STEALING my time. You are taking from me without giving anything in return. HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM ONLINE MOVIE PIRACY!?!?

When we download a movie without giving the movie industry anything in return, they call that a crime (and it is). But when the industry takes our time (sometimes up to 15 or 20 minutes) without giving us anything for that time in return they call it “smart marketing”.

How about I start calling pirating movies “Smart Shopping”. Will piracy be considered ok then?

Remember, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SOME DAY. That means time has value, and when anything else in life takes your time, you get compensated in one form or another. Let’s think of it this way.

TIME

I see approximately 8 films in theater each month. At about 15 minutes of commercials per film (remember, these are ads that begin to play at the movie advertised start time), I end up spending about 2 hours per month watching ads in theaters uncompensated. That’s 24 hours, or a full day of uncompensated ad watching in a year.

MONEY

I’m not a doctor or lawyer, so let’s say my time is worth a measly $20/hour. Since I spent about 24 hours watching uncompensated ads in theaters last year, I figure the movie industry owes me about $480 out of that Half Billion they made last year off my time. Seems fair.

The principle for piracy and time theft is the same. Taking an asset (a movie, or your time) without providing the due compensation for taking that asset. So where do we start the class action lawsuit?

If you tell me the movie starts at 7pm, then when I PAY YOU to get into the movies, there is an implied contract that you give me what I paid for… a movie at 7pm. When you instead put up 15-20 minutes of commercials at 7pm you are stealing my time, and also stealing MY SHARE OF THAT $456 MILLION you made off my time.

So the next time you’re pirating a movie (which is neither something I do nor endorse), let that ease your conscience, because although you’re stealing the $10 you would have paid in admission… they probably owe you about $150 for stolen ad time anyway.
http://www.themovieblog.com/2007/10/...se-than-piracy





Blast from the past

Big Ten Media Conglomerates – Cross Ownership, 2001

http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html??




Britney's New Album Cover Looks Like a Magic Eye Picture
TomZ

Britney Spears' new album cover and tracklisting have been revealed. Without further ado, here is the album cover:



Yep. This leaked to the Internet -- can an album cover leak? -- a couple days ago, but everyone assumed it was a fake, because, you know, it looks like something that was done on Photoshop. Actually, it looks like one of those Magic Eye pictures. If you look closely at this image and unfocus your eyes, you can see the hologram of a hot chick with a snake around her neck.

Here is the tracklisting for Blackout, which comes out October 30th:

1. Gimme More (04:11)
2. Piece of Me (03:32)
3. Radar (03:49)
4. Break The Ice (03:16)
5. Heaven on Earth (04:52)
6. Get Naked
7. Freakshow (02:55)
8. Toy Soldier (03:21)
9. Hot As Ice (03:16) (Formerly called "Cold As Fire")
10. Ooh Ooh Baby (03:28)
11. Perfect Lover (03:02)
12. Why Should I Be Sad (03:10)

[Thanks to Sony BMG]


"Gimme More" is of course the first single. Out of the other 11 songs, 9 of them have already leaked to the Internet (the exceptions being "Freakshow" and "Toy Soldiers," but who knows, they could be out there somewhere - I'm also not entirely convinced these aren't just Silverchair and Eminem covers).

I'd direct you to some of these songs, but with Britney's label getting lawsuit-happy, it's probably not a good idea. Let's just say, if you look hard enough, you can find them. And by the way, here's a link to my recent dissertation on the human mind. It's fascinating, you should check it out.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/Britney's_New_Album_Cover_Looks_Like_a_Magic_Eye_Picture





Led Zeppelin to Make Its Songs Available Digitally
Jeff Leeds

It’s been a long time, but Led Zeppelin, one of the last superstar acts to refrain from selling its music online, is finally offering its catalog to digital-music fans.

The shift by Led Zeppelin, whose reunion concert in London next month has already incited a frenzy for tickets, highlights the clout of digital sales in the music market as mass merchants reduce the shelf space devoted to compact discs. Under a series of new agreements expected to be announced today, the band will make its songs available first as ringtones and similar mobile features starting this week in an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless. Digital downloads of songs from the band’s eight studio albums and other recordings are expected to be available through Verizon and digital-music services, including iTunes, on Nov. 13.

Led Zeppelin’s decision to sell its music online coincides with the end of a fierce bidding war over the rights to administer the band’s catalog of songs, which includes the classics “Stairway to Heaven” and “Rock and Roll.” Under a separate deal the band is to receive an estimated $60 million in exchange for extending its ties to its longtime music publisher, Warner/Chappell Music, for at least 10 years, said three people briefed on the agreement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it.

The deals come as the group, which disbanded in 1980 after the death of its drummer, John Bonham, is back in the limelight. The three surviving members — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones — are performing in concert together next month for the first time in 19 years as part of a memorial tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder of Atlantic Records, which released the band’s albums. (Mr. Bonham’s son, Jason, will play drums.)

The Nov. 26 concert, which is to benefit Mr. Ertegun’s educational charity, also coincides with the release of an expansive two-disc hits collection. Mr. Plant is also releasing a new album he recorded with the blue-grass artist Alison Krauss.

Declining to sell music online hasn’t made Led Zeppelin’s songs unavailable; they are regularly traded on unauthorized file-sharing services. But executives charged with marketing the band insist it still matters to the rapidly evolving legal digital market when a superstar act — particularly one that might mark a rite of passage for young fans — gets on board.

“The great thing about this band, unlike almost any other band that you could think of, is that every single day there is a new 13-year-old kid who’s just starting to get into music” and will discover the group, said David Dorn, senior vice president of e-commerce at Rhino Entertainment, which is marketing the band’s catalog. “That’s a customer that’s coming along for the future.”

Of the few remaining digital holdouts, only the Beatles and Garth Brooks have outsold Led Zeppelin in the United States. The digital-sales potential was one reason the rights to oversee Led Zeppelin’s song copyrights sparked months of wrangling among competing music publishers. (Publishers represent songwriters, who may or may not also be recording artists.) Warner/Chappell spiced its offer with an enticement no competitor could match: Its corporate parent, Warner Music Group, distributes the band’s albums and agreed to raise the royalty rate on certain recordings, according to people briefed on the negotiations.

Preventing the exit of a marquee act was a victory for the publishing company, particularly at a time when competition for copyrights — which generate income through licenses to commercials, radio airplay and the like — is coming from a variety of new players. Songwriters like Elton John and Quincy Jones have defected from Warner/Chappell in recent years, though its revenue overall has edged up so far this year.

Even without digital sales Led Zeppelin’s music had made money steadily. The band remains one of the most-played acts on rock radio stations and recently had an unusual encounter with the Top 40. Sean Kingston, a Jamaican-American pop singer, was permitted to use a few notes of the Led Zeppelin song “D’yer Mak’er” in his song “Me Love” in exchange for granting the band an ownership stake in the copyright, people involved said. The band has also licensed its songs in recent years for a Cadillac advertising campaign and an episode of the television show “One Tree Hill,” among others.

Still, the band is considered selective. “It’s a very special thing to have one in your movie,” said Randall Poster, a music supervisor who licensed a Led Zeppelin song for a scene in the film “School of Rock” after its star, Jack Black, made a personal plea to the band. “It’s the holy sound of the temple of rock.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/ar...ic/15musi.html





When It Takes Three People to Make a Duet
Jon Pareles

PERHAPS it was a coincidence that Robert Plant chose a Russian tearoom called Trojka, which means a threesome or triumvirate, to talk about his new duet album with Alison Krauss, “Raising Sand.” Or maybe it was a subliminal reminder that the album is really a three-way collaboration by an improbable alliance: Mr. Plant, who will be forever known as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin; Ms. Krauss, whose clear voice and deft fiddle style hail from Appalachia; and the producer and guitarist T Bone Burnett, the Texan who is best known for concocting haunted, pensively anachronistic Americana.

They represent three different musical spheres: Mr. Plant’s worldly hard rock, Ms. Krauss’s limpid update of rural traditions and Mr. Burnett’s rangy Texas twang. “Raising Sand” (Rounder), all three say, is like nothing any of them could have made on their own. But Mr. Burnett saw a link between the singers: “They’re two very mystical voices, and the blend of them is mystical,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Los Angeles. “They both sound like they’re singing from some other time. Alison sounds like she just stepped out of the Black Forest, and Robert sounds like Ozymandias,” the Egyptian pharaoh.

With Mr. Burnett leading a malleable studio band, Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss share old and recent songs, drawing on Gene Clark, the Everly Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint, Mel Tillis and Tom Waits. It’s a collection of, mostly, sad songs — tales of love betrayed — floating in their own limbo. Together the collaborators triangulate a terra incognita somewhere between swamp and mountain, memories and eternity. Mr. Plant happily called it “the most amazing collision of styles.”

Sipping a latte and wearing a washed-out brown T-shirt that revealed robust biceps, Mr. Plant was far more eager to talk about “Raising Sand” than about the impending Led Zeppelin reunion. That concert is scheduled for Nov. 26 at the O2 arena in London as a benefit for a educational charity supported by Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Records until his death last year. “It’s a one-night stand,” Mr. Plant said. “I’m taking emotional condoms.” Then he changed the subject.

“Raising Sand” started as Mr. Plant’s project, the latest swerve in a long post-Zeppelin career that has delved into the wide-open-spaces rock of Mr. Plant’s 1983 hits “Big Log” and “In the Mood”; the reimagined vintage R&B of the Honeydrippers; and the rhythms and modalities of Mali and echoes of psychedelia in his current band, Strange Sensation.

“I think that Robert has always done exactly what he wants, and I mean that in a beautiful way,” Ms. Krauss said by telephone from her home in Nashville.

Mr. Plant has been a longtime fan of Ms. Krauss and her string band Union Station, which uses traditional instruments for music that’s steeped in old-timey and bluegrass styles but not bound by them. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland asked Mr. Plant to perform at a 2004 tribute to the bluesman Lead Belly, he invited Ms. Krauss to sing with him. The collaboration went so well that they began to consider recording together.

“Alison and I started talking about material,” Mr. Plant said. “We come from such different worlds that we only knew the top of each other’s world, the cream, the stuff that comes to the surface. We didn’t really know too much about the infinite myriad of influences underneath. And so it was an absolute coup that T Bone came on the scene.”

Ms. Krauss, 36, had already worked with Mr. Burnett on albums including the multimillion-selling, neo-Appalachian soundtrack album for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Mr. Plant and Mr. Burnett, who were both born in 1948, are connoisseurs of older American music who share a taste for the deepest blues.

Mr. Plant came to realize, however, that he had long focused on African-American music, while he had virtually ignored the other side of the racial divide, Ms. Krauss’s stomping ground and part of Mr. Burnett’s down-home foundations.

“I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about American music, but I’d missed out on an entire area,” Mr. Plant said. “I now know that American music is a total panorama. I was cutting it off and thinking it was redneck hell down there. But it’s not.”

Mr. Plant has spent decades as a lead singer, wailing across arenas as Led Zeppelin’s golden-haired belter and, since then, improvising at whim as the front man for his own bands. For “Raising Sand” he would have to harmonize as well.

“I was quite nervous about the idea of finding out just how much of a one-trick pony I am,” he said. “I’ve always been a lead singer. That’s the gig, you know. Especially an English one. You translate usually black music, American music, in a particular fashion which is very English. But melody, and the structure of melody, I can be quite loose with.”

Harmony singing is Ms. Krauss’s element; it’s at the core of bluegrass and the vocal blend she shares in Union Station. Her “stretch” for the album, she said, was riding the rhythm. “It was really an ear-opening experience,” she said. “It’s just a different thing, singing with drums. You have to find a different place to sit.”

Mr. Plant said, “I wanted her to slur more, to become more sassy. She used to say to me, ‘But, Robert, I’m too white.’ I said: ‘No, you’re not white. You’ve only been given that shell. But inside it you’ve got everything.’ And she certainly does.”

As they planned the album, the three principals traded lists of potential songs. “Robert called up and said send five-six songs over, and I played him a couple,” Mr. Burnett said. “He said, ‘That’s a nice little ditty, but Alison wants to do something dark.’ And that was the starting point.”

Although none of the material on the album is new, Mr. Burnett insists there’s no nostalgia. “I think this album is looking into the skull of the present,” he said. “It represents all of the danger and the darkness and the outsiderness and the bleakness that seemed appropriate to this time.”

Mr. Plant brought his own countryish goodbye song, “Please Read the Letter,” and rock-tinged oldies like “Fortune Teller,” which was written by the New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint (under the pseudonym Naomi Neville), and “Gone Gone Gone,” a threat and kiss-off by the Everly Brothers.

When she saw one group of potential songs, Mr. Krauss recalled, she said she felt “I can’t do that.” She called Mr. Burnett, who she said told her, “You’ve called me and said you’re afraid. Robert has said sort of the same thing. And it’s exactly what I wanted to happen.”

The core of the band consisted of Mr. Burnett’s regular studio musicians, who know their way around all kinds of roots music. Despite Mr. Plant’s years of savoring American music “Raising Sand” is the first full album he has made with an American band.

The arrangements use silences and echoes with strategic grace; another factor, Mr. Burnett revealed, is the underlying rhythm. The songs often seem to hover because the beat is understated, elastic or only implied. “We’ve been getting completely away from the notion of beats and more into the notion of rumble or waves,” Mr. Burnett said.

Mr. Plant sings with barely a hint of arena bluster; his voice is aching and androgynous. Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’,” one of the most desolate songs ever written, has distorted guitar chords and Ms. Krauss’s biting Celtic fiddle looming up suddenly out of quiet dobro picking. In “Polly Come Home,” Gene Clark’s testament of utter loneliness, Ms. Krauss sings disembodied layers of harmony that drift around him like ghosts.

Ms. Krauss sings all alone on “Trampled Rose,” a parable of spurned love by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. And she sings lead in “Through the Morning, Through the Night,” a waltz about murderous jealousy written by Clark. Hearing a woman rather than a man sing, “To know that another man’s holding you tight/hurts me little darling” gives the song a bisexual twist, although Ms. Krauss was taken aback by the thought.

“It’s just leaving the song as it was written,” she said. “It wasn’t about anything other than the integrity of the song.”

Unlike Led Zeppelin, Mr. Plant, Ms. Krauss, Mr. Burnett and the band are likely to tour together. “I think the music will change a bit,” Mr. Plant said. “There’s lots and lots and lots of opportunities to do different things within this little format.” A mischievous grin crossed his face. “God only knows how it will affect her audience and my audience. They’ll go, ‘Hell, what’s going on?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/ar...ic/21pare.html





Rock’s Balkanized Route to the Indies
Will Hermes

SURE, the half-naked acrobat suspended by her ankles from the ceiling was remarkable. So was the battered tuba wrapped in red Christmas lights, played by a musician in a black cocktail dress.

Yet the most striking thing about DeVotchKa’s circuslike show at the Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan in August was the music, a quilt of sounds from the international section of the iTunes store. One could hear mariachi ballads, polkas, horas and Gypsy tunes played on accordion, bouzouki, violins. But those sounds informed songs that also echoed the rhythmic bluster and vocal drama of 1980s alternative-rock acts like the Smiths and Talking Heads. The band’s cross-cultural recipe was made explicit when the young crowd began sloshing its beers to a bouncy, Balkanized version of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.”

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian, African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.” And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

Increasingly the back-to-basics movement that has characterized cutting-edge rock this century, from the blues-based hard rock of the White Stripes to the new wave-postpunk revivalism of Interpol, is giving way to music that looks further afield for its influences. And one result is a clutch of acts, many of them from New York, that are internationalizing rock’s Anglo-American vernacular.

This is not the first time. Artists like Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, the Clash and Talking Heads drew polyglot styles into their mix back in the 1980s, often with politics in tow. (Mr. Simon and Mr. Gabriel were exploring African pop during the Apartheid era.) But the impulse has been largely missing from rock’s bag of tricks for a while. And in the case of Beirut and Vampire Weekend, it is producing some of the year’s most buzzed-about new music — music that often feels less studied and less overtly political than that of these groups’ fusion-minded forebears.

Why now? Partly it seems the natural cycle of genres; every back-to-basics art movement dead-ends and requires an infusion of new ideas. And certainly the Internet has made even the most obscure global music easily available.

“Access is key,” said Bill Bragin, director of the Manhattan club Joe’s Pub, which books a large number of international acts. “A blogger or someone says: ‘Check out this cool record by Konono No. 1. It’s really bizarre, super loud Congolese thumb piano music.’ And suddenly all these people are checking them. Also, bands like Antibalas and Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello and Beirut are very good about positioning themselves in the context of youth culture. They’re not pigeonholed as speaking only to the age-30-to-50 world-music crowd.”

You might guess that current global politics have also had a role in spurring the trend. And they have, though not always explicitly. M.I.A. and Bjork both address politics directly on their recent albums. Gogol Bordello and Antibalas, two of melting-pot New York’s fusion-minded veterans, also make politically charged music. Fronted by the Kiev-born Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello mixes Slavic and Balkan music with punk rock and plenty of other styles, peppered with lyrics addressing the immigrant experience and “cultural revolution.” Antibalas has revived and advanced Afrobeat, the Africanized funk fusion pioneered by the Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, from whom they have also adopted a strong anti-authoritarian demeanor. Both bands have addictively kinetic new records and are beginning to attract wider attention. (Mr. Hutz recently performed with Madonna at the Live Earth festival, and he and his band have contributed to her forthcoming short film, “Filth and Wisdom.”)

But a new wave of bands is using ethnic styles in less pointed ways. One of last year’s more left-field Internet success stories was the debut by Beirut, a project initiated by Zach Condon, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter who began a love affair with the Balkan brass-band tradition while exploring electronic music at his parents’ home in Albuquerque. Mr. Condon played almost everything on that album, “Gulag Orkestar,” and its arrangements for trumpet, accordion, ukulele, mandolin, violin and percussion conjure the image of a street-corner Gypsy band somewhere in postwar Europe. For the new Beirut record, “The Flying Club Cup,” released this month on the tiny Ba Da Bing label, he employs a full band to play his Eurail rock, which continues to roam.

“I’m going for a style that’s really outdated: 1940s French chanson,” Mr. Condon said over Korean barbecue and beer at a restaurant in his neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I’m really obsessed with Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour and early Serge Gainsbourg.” Mr. Condon, waifish and blue-eyed, was dressed in an old T-shirt with a bedhead hairdo, and it was easy to imagine him ministering to swooning jeunesse back in the day. Yet his dramatic, warbly vocal style also conjures ’80s rock crooners like Morrissey and the Cure’s Robert Smith.

While Mr. Condon, whose ethnic heritage is primarily Irish-English, has been spending time in Paris of late, he admits his approach to international styles is more instinctive than studied. Nick Urata, lead singer of the Denver band DeVotchKa, operates similarly. Speaking from a tour stop in Germany, he noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern European music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the point. “The ‘authentic’ Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but it’s better to leave it to the masters,” he said. “We figured we were never going to nail it exactly, so why not just take it into our own realm?”

Vampire Weekend, which came together while its members were students at Columbia and has a debut CD slated for January on the independent label XL, makes its music in the same spirit. It’s noted for using African-flavored rhythms and guitar phrases in its upbeat pop-rock, notably on its signature “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (myspace.com/vampireweekend), whose title refers in part to a Congolese style. But rather than replicating an “authentic” sound (the song isn’t, in fact, kwassa kwassa), the band is more interested in collage, understandable for a young group weaned on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop.

“I was always a big rap fan,” said Ezra Koenig, 23, the group’s singer and guitarist. “I’d go to that Web site The-Breaks.com to find the sample source for a song, and I was always excited when the music came from some weird place.”

Mr. Koenig also noted his affection for older rock acts that experimented with reggae and/or world music. Records like “Remain in Light” by Talking Heads and “Sandinista!” by the Clash were cited as touchstones by nearly all the artists interviewed. Which makes sense: Just as those bands were reacting to punk rock’s creative cul-de-sac in the 1970s and ’80s, many of the current bands are reacting to a modern retro-rock trend that has grown stale. “That was definitely something we didn’t want to do,” Mr. Koenig said. “And one way to do something new was to look at different sources.”

Some groups have gone to greater lengths to tap these sources. Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff, who played together in the indie-rock band Golden in the late 1990s, formed Extra Golden with local musicians in Kenya, where Mr. Eagleson was working on a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology. Their experience has been more challenging than that of many of their peers. For instance there was the time Nairobi police showed up at a party at Mr. Eagleson’s apartment and discovered an uninvited guest had some marijuana cigarettes, an incident that cost the band roughly $10,000 to keep the members out of jail.

Then there was the problem of getting the band’s Kenyan members, some of whom lacked passports, to the United States for a debut tour last year. The process took months and was not complete until an 11th-hour intervention by staff members for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, who were assisting promoters of the Chicago World Music Festival, where the group was scheduled to play. By way of a thank-you, one of the standouts on the group’s spirited new album, “Hera Ma Nono” — a fluid mix of American rock, New Orleans funk and the guitar-based Kenyan benga style on the indie-rock label Thrill Jockey — is a traditional-style African praise song titled “Obama.”

American pop musicians adopting styles of other nations have often been accused of cultural colonialism or dismissed as dilettantes. In the Web magazine PopMatters (popmatters.com), one critic wondered if Beirut’s music is simply “a tourist’s picture postcard” that devalues its cultural source material. Vampire Weekend, perhaps hoping to pre-empt criticism, cheekily calls its music “Upper West Side Soweto.” But neither group is pretending to be anything but what it is: an indie-rock band with diverse musical appetites.

Yet in an age when an Anglo-Sri Lankan pop act like M.I.A. raps over samples of Brazilian dance music that reshapes American electro-funk, ideas of authenticity and cultural ownership are slippery. And there is something encouraging in the way younger acts like Beirut and Vampire Weekend can draw on world music styles without needing to turn the act into a political statement, an imperative that doesn’t always serve the art in question. It’s also worth noting, as Mr. Bragin points out, that musicians outside the Anglo-American axis of indie rock, like Nação Zumbi and DJ Dolores from Brazil, are busy making cutting-edge fusions. “There’s a lot more dialogue lately,” he said.

A result, in some cases, is a new breed of fusion that keeps its politics implicit and exists in a nether region between genres. That’s a place Jeremy Barnes is happy to be. A former member of the influential ’90s indie-rock band Neutral Milk Hotel (which he notes was strongly influenced by Bulgarian traditional music) and briefly a participant in Beirut, Mr. Barnes now lives in Hungary, where he records neo-traditional music with local musicians and his collaborator, Heather Trost, under the name a Hawk and a Hacksaw.

“Aesthetically I love indie rock,” he said by cellphone from Tura, a small town where he was collaborating with the cymbalon player Unger Balazs. “And I find the world-music industry nauseating. There’s a lot of bad recordings and bad artwork. But when people define us in either of those categories, I cringe.”

“We love Hungarian music and think it’s beautiful, so how can we ignore it?” he added. “You can’t lie to yourself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/ar...ic/21herm.html





Radiohead’s Warm Glow
Eduardo Porter

I didn’t pay anything to download Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” last Wednesday. When the checkout page on the band’s Web site allowed me to type in whatever price I wanted, I put 0.00, the lowest I could go. My economist friends say this makes me a rational being.

Apparently not everybody is this lucid, at least not in matters related to their favorite British rock band. After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could get for free.

This phenomenon is not new. It’s called tipping. We do it when we go to the restaurant or the barber, or when we ride in a taxi. Though one could argue there are real tangible reasons for this payment — like not losing an ear the next time we get a haircut — the practice of paying more money than we are legally bound to do is still mystifying in an economic sense. For instance, why tip a cabdriver you will probably never see again?

“Since we economists don’t understand tipping, we can’t really say whether this new scheme will work,” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor of economics, said in an entry on his blog. He is not the only economist who is fascinated by the phenomenon. His Harvard colleague, Dani Rodrik, asked his blog readers, “Has Radiohead gone bonkers?” He concluded, “Not at all.” Radiohead will make money. But those who are paying for the download may truly be nuts.

One could argue that rationality isn’t everything. Radiohead fans might just be altruistic beings who out of the goodness of their hearts would like to give some money to a spectacularly successful and probably stinking rich rock band. But somehow, that doesn’t work as an explanation.

Or does it? Some economists suspect that what is going on is that people get a kick from the act of giving the band money for the album rather than taking it for free. It could take many forms, like pleasure at being able to bypass the record labels, which many see as only slightly worse than the military-industrial complex. It could come from the notion that the $8 helps keep Radiohead in business. Or it could make fans feel that they are helping create a new art form — or a new economy. People who study philanthropy call it the “warm glow” that comes from doing something that we, and others, believe to be good.

Mr. Rodrik tested some of this with an experiment of his own. He offered his blog readers the opportunity to get a copy of his new book on globalization and economic growth for whatever price they wanted to pay, and said proceeds would go to the charity Save the Children.

The response suggested that “warm glow” is in demand. A third of the people offered nothing. But the average bid was $21, and he received bids for as much as $145, more than four times the list price. The most interesting part was to hear bidders explain themselves. Those who bid little felt it necessary to provide a reason, like being a poor student. But those who bid high justified it too: many said they liked saving children.

This is all good news for Radiohead, which has boosted its indie credibility, while all the attention might actually boost its revenues. The band also offered online a package of two CDs, two vinyl records and a booklet for about $80, and it plans to release “In Rainbows” as a single CD in January for fans who would rather hear the music with a better resolution than the medium-quality MP3 file available for download.

It is also potentially comforting news for the recording business. The industry has been struggling to find a business plan that will work in an online market in which — despite billions invested in antipiracy measures — fans can pretty much get their music for free if they want to.

Today, music lovers are left but two options: pay list price for an album, or perform what a fan might call a free download and a record company would call theft. Radiohead’s experiment suggests a third way out: let fans pay what they want and give them lots of touchy-feely reasons to want to give as much money as they can.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14sun3.html





Radiohead Proves Fans Will Pay for Downloads
Mathew Ingram

When Radiohead announced its recent "pay what you want" album-downloading experiment, one of the first questions industry watchers had was whether the move might create a snowball effect and encourage other bands to do the same.

If the early speculation about the band's success turns out to be true, however, it could lead to something more like an avalanche than a snowball: According to some estimates, the group may have made over $10-million (U.S.) in a single day.

The day after In Rainbows went on sale on Oct. 10, the Gigwise music blog said it had learned from sources close to the band that the album had been downloaded 1.2 million times.

Although it's impossible to know what downloaders paid, several media polls indicated that a majority of people buying the album were paying $1 to $20.

That suggests that Radiohead could have made more than $10-million in the first 24 hours of making its new record available online, and likely substantially more than that by now.

And those figures don't include the number of fans who chose to pay $80 for the deluxe boxed-set CD version.

Considering that the band will keep the majority of that revenue - in contrast with the small percentage most groups get with a traditional label - more than one band has to be looking at Radiohead's move as a model.

Even before the rumours about Radiohead's windfall, there were reports that the experiment had triggered a wave of interest among other artists.

Two other British bands - Oasis and Jamiroquai - were said to be considering a similar idea, while Nine Inch Nails' front man Trent Reznor announced on his website last week that he had quit his record label and was looking forward to developing a "direct relationship" with his fans.

Even rock dinosaurs Led Zeppelin have apparently decided the Internet might be good for something, although it's unclear whether Radiohead had anything to do with it.

Led Zeppelin, which until now has been one of the major holdouts in online sales, said yesterday that its music will be available as of Nov. 13 through iTunes and other online stores.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ainment/Music/




Free? Steal It Anyway
Andy Greenberg

Piracy, it seems, is about more than price.

That's one of the surprising discoveries to come out of an experiment by the British band Radiohead last week. On Thursday, the group made its latest album, In Rainbows, available for direct downloading from the Web at an unusual price: whatever fans feel like paying. Downloaders who want to pay nothing can enter "zero" in the site's price field and download the album for free.

But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just as they might with any other pirated album.

On the first day that Radiohead's latest became available, around 240,000 users downloaded the album from copyright-infringing peer-to-peer BitTorrent sources, according to Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet. Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day—adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks, given that many of those 1.2 million legitimate sales were pre-orders taken during the 10 days between when the band announced the album and its actual release last Thursday.

With popular album releases, illegal download volumes normally outstrip sales, says Garland. But more surprising is that fans chose to steal music they could legally download for any price they choose.

Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. "People don't know Radiohead's site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day," he says. "It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version."

In Garland's experience, the store price of a new album plays little role in determining how often it will be pirated. Similarly irrelevant are the protective locks that recording companies put on files to try to stop pirates from copying and sharing file, so called digital rights management systems.

"Albums that are popular in retail are popular among pirates," Garland says. "In the big picture, if people want something, some will pay, and others will find a way to take it for free."

Despite the hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads, Radiohead's innovative online release could still be a smart fiscal strategy. By cutting out record companies, the band retains the full revenue stream of album sales, and monies from touring and merchandise sales.

The buzz generated by the band's pay-what-you-want publicity stunt may also boost sales. Radiohead's previous album sold only 300,000 copies in the first week—about one-sixth the number of copies of In Rainbows now in circulation.

An internal memo circulated at EMI, Radiohead's former record label, and obtained by Forbes.com, demonstrates the album's tectonic effects on the music industry.

"The recorded music industry … has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold," writes Guy Hands, EMI's chairman. "The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead's actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy."

But for Doug Lichtman, an intellectual property professor at the UCLA School of Law, the volume of piracy following In Rainbows' release erodes the success of Radiohead's innovation. "If the community rejects even forward-thinking experiments like this one, real harm is done to the next generation of experimentation and change," he says.

Lichtman speculates that users may have interpreted Radiohead's offer as a giveaway and so felt more comfortable downloading the album from other free sources. Fans may also have been turned off by the band's requirement that users register by providing their name and e-mail and postal addresses.

The ultimate lesson may simply be that it's hard to compete with free, Lichtman says. "Registration is a small barrier," he says. "Sadly, even that little bit of cost might too much."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...radiohead.html





Were Radiohead Fans Duped by the Download?
Korina Lopez

At the end of Radiohead's pay-what-you-like download album In Rainbows, will you find pots of gold or fool's gold? That depends on where you stand on the debate.

Fans who downloaded the label-bypassing seventh studio album by the British stars quickly learned that there were a few caveats to the donation-based download. First, the sound quality is not necessarily optimum, encoded at a bit rate of 160 kbps (kilobits per second), lower than Radiohead's earlier albums (though higher than a standard iTunes track download).

Second, Radiohead's management also confirmed that a physical CD of In Rainbows will hit shelves sometime in January, possibly with extra songs.

In an interview last week with British trade magazine Music Week, Radiohead's longtime managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge, acknowledged that the download offer was a piece of a larger puzzle to generate more publicity for the CD release. "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing," Edge said.

Now fans who anted up a reasonable sum for an album they could have gotten free will have to buy the album again come January if they want the improved sound.

"They never said that downloading the album would be the only way to purchase it," says Nate Wilholt, 21, of Grand Rapids, Mich., who spent $2 for the download. "I pretty much figured there would be an eventual traditional release … I would hope fans knew what they were getting into."

Some fans criticized the band's failure to disclose the downloadable version's quality and the release date of the CD. "I would've appreciated knowing the bit rate," says David Sandell, 27, a Chicago fan who spent $6.50 for the download. "But if I knew the MP3 would be low audio quality, I would have paid less."

Others lauded the band's pioneering effort to get the music to their fans quickly. "I think this band is doing the right thing and cutting out the middleman, and they should be rewarded," says Susan Alvare, 30, of Dallas. She plans to buy the download for $15.

Other fans don't miss the difference in sound quality. "I didn't notice that the sound quality is subpar and don't know if I will notice upon my next listen," says Nadia Tuma, 25, of New York. "I'm here for the art and can still appreciate the music for what is it, regardless of minute differences in sound production." She donated $20 for the download.

But Roger Wade, 42, of Portland, Ore., who has not ordered the download, is still unhappy with the band on both counts. "This honor-system gimmick has turned out to be sloppy at best and dishonest and devious at worst. It's common knowledge that 192 kbps is the accepted minimum bit rate among nearly everyone who even knows what a bit rate is.

"And then word that this honor-system release might just be a promotional tool for a longer and higher-quality release in the future is a real kick in the teeth to their hard-core fans who wanted to reward the band for this unique approach to distributing their new material. If I'd offered to pay $10 or more for the download, I would feel like a real sucker at this point."

More fan reaction:

•Bryan Ward, 38, of Westmont, Ill., spent $2. "I plan to buy the box set and the actual CD, but I don't have the money right now. Now I feel guilty that I paid too little."

•Jacob David Sawyer, 27, of Manchester, N.H., donated not a cent. "I'm planning on buying the CD when it comes out, anyway. Why pay for it twice?"

•Jami Sams, 26, of Corona, Calif., spent $7. "I really like the album; in hindsight, I think I should have paid more."

•Michael Gallaugher, 33, of Columbus, Ohio, spent $10 "because it's what it would have cost on iTunes. It just would have been nice to know what the options were going to be beforehand."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/n...download_N.htm





P2P vs Radiohead's "Free" Rainbows: Why P2P Can be a Hard Habit to Break
Nate Anderson

Radiohead's innovative digital distribution arrangement for their new album, In Rainbows, lets people pay whatever they want for the music, including nothing at all. Despite that, BitTorrent swapping of the album has been on the level of other major releases. Are people really so cheap that they won't even register with the band in order to snag a free download? The answer appears to be yes.
Radiohead still needs major label to let world see its “Rainbows”

By handling the recording, mastering, and distribution themselves, the band managed to keep the tubes clear of any Rainbows before the official launch (no mean feat for a hotly anticipated album). Once the album became available for download, though, it spilled immediately onto P2P networks, primarily BitTorrent. According to BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland, who spoke with Ars about the issue, the album was grabbed by BitTorrent users roughly 240,000 times in the first day of release and has tailed off since in "a perfect half-life curve."

Unlike most BitTorrent song swapping, In Rainbows is generally being shared as a complete album. Radiohead, which hasn't been known for singles in the last decade, might be pleased that their work is being downloaded as a whole, but would no doubt prefer that people get it from the band's website.

Garland speculates that convenience is the main factor at work here; price doesn't enter into the equation. Radiohead's site does request a number of user details that go beyond the e-mail address needed to create an account and retrieve the download code, and such a process will put some people off at any price. Plenty of users have simply become accustomed to getting their music from BitTorrent; for this group, it's easier to simply grab it when the album shows up on the network than to visit another site, register, get an e-mail, and then download the songs.

The fact that the band let users set a price for the music also encourages the perception that the price of music should be up to the buyer. If both BitTorrent and Radiohead offer the album for the same price, fans might see little difference between the two sources. In fact, Radiohead's move might even make BitTorrent look increasingly legitimate as a forum for picking up new music. Thus, assessing this as a "piracy versus free" issue isn't exactly right; once some users got the message that it was "free," it didn't matter where they got the album.

Garland agrees that the move "amplifies a long-standing" disconnect between the industry and the people who buy its products, and he points out that this is hardly the first time the issue has arisen. Downloaders have long claimed that "radio is free" and "I can make mixtapes" to defend the free downloading of music from P2P services. Despite the music business' attempt to counter these arguments, radio, mixes, and P2P all "feel like free" to many end users. This hurts the perception that they shouldn't torrent their music, and Radiohead's set-your-own-price model may encourage that feeling (as have record label attempts at using P2P services to promote certain songs; how does a user know if the song they're grabbing is illegal or not if even the labels use BitTorrent to offer free music?).

To Radiohead, there certainly is a difference between sources. The band wants people to use their sites, it wants to collect their information, and it likely wants to send them information about concerts and merchandise at some point down the line. But the band has learned the hard way that money isn't the only thing that matters to Radiohead fans.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-to-break.html





Radiohead Sells 1.2 Million Albums, Spawns 1.2 Million Commentaries
Fred Mills

OPINION: Whew. That pounding in your temples? It’s not the tequila-and-schnapps chasers you were pounding back last night at the transvestite bar—that’s the sound of 1.2 million bloggers, media analysts, music industry talking heads and java hut armchair pundits yammering on and on and on about Radiohead. And it doesn’t look like the hangover’s going away anytime soon.

You know—Radiohead. That obscure indie band from Great Britain who shocked the world a couple of weeks ago when they announced that, newly free of indenture to a mega-corporation (that’s record label to you, pal), they would be releasing their new album In Rainbows digitally on Oct. 10, and that consumers could essentially pick the price they were willing to pay for the digital version. (You could additionally pre-order a hard-copy edition, due in November, that would contain vinyl and expanded CD versions of the album, with the price coming out to about $80 in American currency.)

For the record, I paid £ 2.00, which with the £ 0.45 credit card transaction fee, came to a total of £ 2.45—about $4.97. Full disclosure: to me that seems about five dollars too high for a musical artifact that comes with no packaging whatsoever and, with MP3s at a mere 160kbps, offers sound quality substantially inferior to anything in my vinyl, CD or 8-track tape collection. Factor in 10 cents for some card stock paper (to print out some bootleg artwork I found on the web for the album, natch) and another 30 cents or so for a CDR to burn In Rainbows to, and I’ve forked about close to five and a half bucks. I didn’t even get the proverbial “lousy tee-shirt” to show off my bragging rights.

Out there in the real world, a survey by England’s Telegraph.co.uk of 5,000 fans who downloaded the album revealed that “more than a quarter – 1,429 – paid either nothing or 1p for the recordings. More than half – 2,776 – gave up to £10, while 673 die-hard fans paid £40 for the deluxe box set.” And a few nuts paid £99.99, which was the maximum price you could pay. I’m not sure what category my £ 2.45 lands me in—borderline skinflint but still relatively sane, maybe?

Griping aside, though, the whole experience of obtaining the album was painless and seamless; I put in my quarter, pulled the lever, and ten digital gumballs spiraled down and popped out the chute onto my desktop in less than a minute. (Record labels who service journalists with digital promos and make us wade through all manner of cumbersome, time-consuming procedures just to obtain lousy-sounding approximations of their artists’ latest magnum opi should take heed.)

Plus, it’s a pretty damn good record, one that brings elements of classic-period Radiohead (e.g., OK Computer) to the table alongside touches of Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser and a raft of surprises as well. To paraphrase one reviewer, Radiohead’s become Britain’s premier art-rock band, and on this occasion the “art” contingent in the Radiohead camp definitely held sway over the band’s rockers. The album will undoubtedly figure prominently on a lot of year-end Top Ten lists. Watch for a full review of In Rainbows in the December issue of HARP.

So anyway… media types who track this sort of stuff are estimating that Radiohead moved about 1.2 million downloads across two days. An insider “close to the band” is being cited as the source for that figure, said insider also suggesting that the financial tally was £4.8 million in sales (not counting the pre-orders for the discbox set). Not a bad payday. Chris Hufford, one of the band's managers, told British reporters, "This has been an absolutely fantastic experiment for Radiohead. I can't say what fans have been paying for the new album but it's definitely the case that more people have paid for it than not."

It’s worth noting, however, that worldwide naval gazing and brow furrowing notwithstanding, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood essentially stated the other day that is was never Radiohead’s intention to initiate some revolutionary new model of music distribution (labels have been selling downloads for some time, duh) or even to give away its music as part of some elaborate marketing scheme, but simply to prevent it from leaking out to the public prior to the official release of the physical discbox. Radiohead is also apparently hoping that fans who dig what they hear on the MP3 files will be convinced to purchase the real thing in all its elaborate packaging and up-to-snuff sonics. I think Greenwood’s comments are astute; Radiohead is the type of band who commands a fierce loyalty among fans, the type of fans who probably will want to own the physical product. Me, a Luddite who has zero-to-none interest in downloading and listening to crappy-sounding compressed music, will want to own at least the official standalone CD when it comes out in early 2008 on an as-yet-unspecified label that some industry watchers are predicting will be Side One Recordings/ATO.

There’s already been some backlash (not to mention a lot of meta-navel gazing in response to the backlash… double whew... sometimes a 160kbps MP3 is just a 160kbps MP3, Dr. Freud!) as people trot out, once again, the “what is music worth to consumers?” rhetoric. Over in the Portishead camp—the UK band reportedly has a new album just about completed—we heard complaints that while it’s fine and dandy for an established superstar like Radiohead or Prince to give its music away for free, what about lower-tiered acts who can’t necessarily make the same gamble that Greenwood suggests? But that argument is moot; if you believe the industry narrative of the past few years, peer-to-peer file sharing has already “devalued” music.

So Radiohead hasn’t created a radical new model. They’ve merely served up an additional option. If we’ve learned anything lately, it’s that there’s no one-size-fits-all “model” for bands. There are myriad avenues with which they can travel to reach their fanbase and earn a living, from the tried and true Get In The Van method, to working that MySpace presence like a motherfucker, to flogging music via ads and TV/film placement, to virtual performances in Second Life, and of course to the Radiohead Method.

You know, in the end, dwelling endlessly on all this—the “narrative” and all its tendrils—is a big distraction that takes away from that quaint little notion known as “quality listening time.” To quote the great philosophers at Stiff Records: fuck art, let’s dance.
http://harpmagazine.com/news/detail.cfm?article=11783





The Billboard Q&A: The Eagles' Glenn Frey
Ray Waddell

In this exclusive interview, Glenn Frey takes Billboard through the making of "Long Road Out of Eden," the Eagles' first studio album since 1979. "Eden" is due Oct. 30, exclusively via Wal-Mart stores.

Tell me about the songwriting and recording processes for "Long Road Out of Eden."

We've been working on this album kind of piecemeal up until the last 21 months, but prior to that what was happening on my end was, if I heard a song or I started writing a song that I thought was right for the Eagles, then I would hang onto it and kind of set it aside and say "I think this could go on our record". Through the course of the late 90s and the early part of [this] century, that was what we did.

There were times when we would work for a little while, but we could never really get everybody together to work for any long periods of time mainly because we all live in different places and we all have families. So, it became a little more difficult to parcel our time to work on the record, but in the last 21 months obviously we found a lot of time. Don [Henley] made a lot of sacrifices by coming to L.A. often to work on the record, coming from Dallas.

Don and I had a couple of very productive songwriting periods over the last couple of years. During those times we wrote "Busy Being Fabulous," "Fast Company," [and] we had started on "Long Road Out of Eden" way back in 2001. It was such a long song when we cut the track and tried to imagine verses and bridges and instrumental and all of that stuff, and I honestly didn't know that that song would ever get completed. Then Don just had a burst of inspiration and he told me one day "I think I've got the lyrics for 'Long Road'". And I said, "really?" It was a pretty long piece of material to begin with, but he did a great job finishing that song.

Other songs that we wrote together, [such as] "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture" and a couple of other tunes, in some cases we would have a chorus and some chords, and we would cut the track before we would finish the song if we thought we could come out with some good structure, and we just worked on it here and there when we could. As the record really started to take shape and when we finally got ourselves eight to 10 songs that were close to finished, then there was another big rush of material. That seems like it happens almost every time at the end of a record. You start to get your creative juices flowing and other songs show up, other ideas show up.

Don has a studio in Malibu and I have a studio in L.A. I would work on things on my own with other band members at my studio and Don would work on things on his own with other band members at his studio, and then we would MP3 our work back and forth to each other. When it came time to do background vocals we would do those and it turned out to be a very effective way for us to finish this project.

Obviously you guys still have the chemistry.

Yes, we do. I guess a lot of it was finding and making the time to really hunker down and get this done. Another reason why we ended up doing work in separate studios and e-mailing it back and forth to each other is because, unlike the old days, we have families and commitments with our careers and other interests. You can't have four guys in the Eagles show up for a trumpet overdub. It just doesn't make sense to make everybody come down for a day we are doing percussion on a song.

So we get everybody in the studio for tracking most of the time, although on some occasions I've just kind of tracked with [co-producer] Scott Crago on drums or Don would track with him and [guitiarist/co-producer] Steuart [Smith] and we would build up from there.

What were your goals starting out on this record?

I really had three main objectives for this record. The first objective, which sort of got us over the hump, was to understand we were making a record for our fans and our fans first and foremost love to hear us sing together. I believe with that as the important component, we were able to transcend worrying about whether we needed to make a modern record, a country record, a rock and roll record, a Henley solo album, a Frey solo album. All of that all fell under the umbrella of the Eagles singing and as long as we were singing and we liked the songs, then the material was right for us.

Number two, it was important that we got Henley/Frey material so that everybody, including us, knew that we didn't just work by ourselves, that there was enough collaboration to create at least half a dozen Henley/Frey songs, so we accomplished that.

The third objective was to make sure that we had Timothy Schmit and Joe Walsh represented. We worked hard to do that and I'm very happy that we got two songs for Timothy to sing and we got two songs for Joe to sing and were able to use Joe's guitar talents in the right places and showcase them. So those were the three objectives I had and I felt by the time we finished the record we had met all those.

Disc 1 kind of re-introduces the band and then Disc 2 has these massive powerhouse cuts that really take you on a journey. When you sit down and hear the whole thing at once, you really get that effect that it's a cohesive work.

Thank you for being an astute listener. I spent two days sequencing the record, and like you said I wanted to reintroduce everyone to the Eagles right away. Therefore, we put some of what I would call typical or classic Eagle's material right out of the box. And then slowly as the album plays along, we sort of get into some of the meatier lyrics. I felt that was the way we wanted to go. I didn't think you could come right out and have "Long Road Out of Eden" and "Frail Grasp" be the first songs on the record.

You guys have toured and played a lot in the last 12-13 years, did that make it easier when it came time to put this thing together?

We've been able to keep our band together and our name out there by touring and doing a few shows, sometimes more, sometimes less since the summer of 2001, but it's not like making a record. Once we rehearse and we know all the Eagles songs and everybody's parts are worked out, we are pretty much up and running. Although the physical aspect of touring can be a little taxing, it's not at all like making a record. Making a record is a much more involved, intimate, give-and-take proposition. We knew each other pretty well before 2001, so I can't say that one has much to do with the other.

Talk about the lead off single, "How Long."

The story with "How Long" is my kids were watching YouTube one night about seven months ago and they said, "Dad, come here. You've got to look at yourself." [YouTube] took it down shortly after I watched it, but they were streaming this show called "Pop Gala," a television special we did in 1974 in Holland. I guess we did about eight or nine songs on this show and one of them was "How Long." My kids were laughing at how long my hair was, and there we were playing this J.D. Souther song. And my wife said "you should do this song Glenn, this is classic Eagles" and I said, "You know, you're right." I think we learned it but we didn't record it back in '74 because J.D. Souther wanted to use it on his first solo album, if I'm not mistaken. So it just sort of sat there, but it was rediscovered and I thought "I really think we should cut this, this would fit in nicely with some of the other stuff we have on the album." So we did.

I've heard people say if the Eagles were to come out today they would be a country band, I don't know if I agree with that 100%, but certainly country radio has embraced this single.

I do not pretend to understand all that goes into that kind of thinking. Here is what I know: I never thought we were a country act. If you go back to the days of -- and these are mostly songs that I sang -- "Lyin' Eyes," "Peaceful, Easy Feeling," maybe even "New Kid in Town," I think in the 70s those would not have garnered any significant country airplay.

What I hear now on country radio, and I listen to it off and on, are what I would call pop songs with country lead singers. They become country songs because of the way they are sung. Again, I don't pretend to know what the format is and what the criteria is for country radio right now. I just know that we have a lot of fans and a lot of credibility in that genre. There is only steel guitar on one song on our [new] record, there is only fiddle on one song and it is kind of a Mexican-sounding song. We are just the Eagles and we make these records and we wrote these songs and we put them out and people are allowed to pick up on what they like or what appeals to them.

Would you care to comment on the Wal-Mart exclusive and the business side of things?

I am in the business of selling records and I want to be in a place where we have the opportunity to sell the most records. It's also nice that Wal-Mart pays us a very lucrative royalty; a royalty that no record company could come close to matching. But that's because we are not a loss leader at Wal-Mart. If the Eagles put out a record at Warner or any other major record label, part of the reason they can't pay up is we've got to pay for all of the bad acts they sign and release.

When you play "Long Road Out of Eden" how do you feel it stands up to your body of work with the Eagles?

I think it's going to stand up, I think it's going to be right up there, if you want to know the truth. If you look back on our previous albums of the '70s, those albums are four or five songs deep, and you can just about name them off of each album. You can name the three smash hit singles and then one or two album cuts that were essential to the record.

This record is like 15 songs deep and the other thing that I am really heartened by is that the quality of the recording is so much better now. I think the production level is far superior.

It seems you guys never took the easy way out; you could have phoned it in, to be quite honest, and this album never shows that.

We always felt that the amount of effort you put into anything would somehow show up in the work and I certainly hope it has.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/searc..._id=1003658086


The Billboard Q&A: The Eagles' Don Henley

Henley Delves Into 'Long Road Out Of Eden,' The Eagles' First Studio Album In 28 Years, In This Billboard Exclusive
Ray Waddell

"I've been biding time with crows and sparrows while peacocks prance and strut upon the stage," Don Henley sings on "Waiting in the Weeds," one of several powerful set pieces from the Eagles' new "Long Road out of Eden," the band's first studio album since 1979.

The line is pretty descriptive of the Eagles, Henley believes. "We're a band that knows how to bide its time ... how to wait," he says. "We've just been sort of waiting for some of this bad music to die down, for certain trends to go away, so we can get out there on the dancefloor again."

In this exclusive interview, Henley takes Billboard through the making of "Eden," due Oct. 30 exclusively via Wal-Mart stores.

It's great to see all those Henley/Frey co-written songs on the new record. Can you talk about how the songwriting and recording processes have changed?

The songwriting process hasn't really changed that much. The thing that has changed somewhat is the recording process, and that's because of technology. We've recorded a few songs here and there since the turn of the century, but we haven't done a whole album, and the changes in the technology are amazing.

Clearly, there is still a way to capture the chemistry, even with technology.

We still play instruments and sing. There are still some of the processes that remain organic, and that's the way we want it. But things like editing are a whole lot easier, and you can arrange a song on ProTools if you want to, add an extra verse or change the structure of the song. But what the computer still won't do is write lyrics for you. That still has to come by the sweat of the brow.

There is a lot of social commentary on this record, but there is also a focus on personal relationships and the human condition, as well.

We've always had love songs and we've always had social commentary. I think we've gotten a little bit better at both ends of the spectrum. In fact, I think our love songs have matured a little bit and the social commentary has matured, as well, and gotten maybe a little bolder. But, it's an Eagles album, it's all over the map, both musically and subject-wise. I guess there are more love songs on it than anything else. The last two songs on the record in particular are both messages from Glenn and I to our children.

Those are more about "big picture love" than "I love you tonight."

It's not just a boy/girl thing. We both have young children. We are both trying really hard to be good parents. That's one reason it took so long to make an album, because we are so busy trying to be good parents.

There's a question in the song "Do Something" that kind of struck me as, in many ways, central to the theme of this album: "How did we get on this road we are traveling?"

"Do Something" is an interesting song because it starts out like a love song, a boy/girl song, but then it takes on larger implications. And that line that you pointed out could pertain to a relationship between a man and a woman or it could be a statement about the country as a whole.

Is this an optimistic album?

I think it’s basically an optimistic album, with the possible exception of "Long Road Out of Eden." Of course, that's about the war, and it's also about the human condition. The point of the song is [that] we may think we are civilized, but we have a ways to go yet.

But I think the point of the whole album is summed up on the last song that Glenn wrote with Jack Tempchin, "Your World Now." The crux of the whole thing for me is those two lines: "Be part of something good, leave something good behind." For me that sums up everything, to my children, to my fans, to everybody. If there was one message to this album that I want to impart, that would be it.

There's another line that hit home for me on "Business As Usual": "I thought that I would be above it all by now, in some country garden in the shade." And yet here you are with a new record.

That's right. Here I am, just turned 60. I'm not complaining. I'm thrilled and delighted. None of us ever thought it would go on this long. But we are a determined bunch of guys. We take our time, we are not afraid of the passage of time, necessarily, and we've been sitting one out for a long time. That is kind of what "Waiting in the Weeds" implies. Again, on the surface that’s a love song, but it's also about this band. We've just been sort of waiting for some of this bad music to die down, for certain trends to go away, so that we can get out there on the dance floor again. We are a band that knows how to bide it's time, and how to wait.

"Long Road Out of Eden" has an interesting lyric: "Weaving down the American highway, through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk." Is that what we are doing right now?

I think so. I was originally going to write "weaving down the information highway" because I get on my computer every day and there is so much crap on the Internet, it's such a big waste of time if you aren't careful. There are wonderful things on there, too, it's such a resource of knowledge and information. But, just like television, the Internet has a lot of useless crap going on. In the end I decided that it wouldn't make a lot of sense with the rest of the song just to suddenly go over and start talking about computers and the Internet. So I changed it back to American highway just to make it broader in scope. I think with the words "cultural junk" I got my point across. I think we've cornered the market on cultural junk, pretty much.

You revisit some of those themes on "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture," where I was sorry to hear that journalism is dead and gone.

It's not completely dead and gone, of course. Obviously, there are still people out there who are trying to do a good job and trying to keep some integrity in the work. But for every one of those people, there are 20 or 30 more that are just in it for... I don't know what. Again, that is part of the cultural junk. The interesting phenomenon in this age is you turn on the news on the television or on the computer and you see all these very serious stories, like the war in Iraq, people dying and people being killed, and children being abducted and murdered. And then here comes "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" and "Hollywood Insider" and all this crap. Same thing when you go [online], you see [these stories] side by side, and we seem to give equal weight to both. Sometimes the trivial crap seems to get more weight and more coverage than the important stuff.

The coverage of this war has been, for the most part, nonexistent, except what the military wants us to hear and what the White House wants us to hear and see. That's what's appalling to me. I don't really want to hear any more about Britney Spears, I don't really want to see the train wreck.

It's just a continuation of stuff that I've been harping on for a long time now, the dumbing down of our culture and the dumbing down of reporting, and the abbreviation of everything because people's attention spans are so short. Everything is edited and chopped and shortened, from music videos to news pieces. And there's no time or place for in-depth analysis of anything, or reasonable discussion, reasoned dialogue. It's just people yelling at one another. Everything is about confrontation and controversy and sensationalism. There are no quiet voices. The quiet voices of reason get drowned out and stomped on.

In "Long Road Out of Eden" we tried to touch on all that stuff. It's hard, even in 10 minutes, but I really like it. I think that song is a good piece of work. I like some of the instruments we came up with on there, I like the last verse, the one you quoted. This album’s not perfect. If I were king, I would have done a couple things differently. I might have left a couple of songs off and perhaps made it a single album. But we vote by committee.

There is a commentary on consumerism here, so it’s not a stretch to go from that to talk about the Eagles’ Wal-Mart exclusive. Is there any kind of problem in reconciling the art and the commerce of this?

I certainly had some trepidation about it, but the business has changed so drastically. Wal-Mart is not a perfect company, but as I have said many times in print, they can't possibly be any worse than a major record label. My daddy was a small businessman and he was not a fan of big box retailers or chains or franchises. But this is just the world we live in and there aren’t many places where 60-year-old men, no matter how good their record is, can get this kind of promotion and widespread retail coverage. We are artists, but we are also businessmen and we try to live in the real world.

Some of my environmentalist friends are a little upset because we made this deal with Wal-Mart, but on the other hand I now have the direct line to the CEO of Wal-Mart. I also have a direct line and exchange e-mails on a regular basis with the two whiz-kids they have hired to make the company greener. They have a pretty elaborate and impressive plan laid out.

You really can't change things from the outside. We are certainly making our feelings known about what we believe as far as ecological stewardship and some of the practices of big business that are undesirable and wasteful, and I think Wal-Mart is making an effort.

Let me hasten to add, I am not thrilled with everything Wal-Mart has done, both in terms of doing business with us and on the environmental front and on the matter of some of their employee practices. But you could pick out just about any big company and say the same thing. We wanted to try something new. Everyone has been screaming let's have a new paradigm in the record industry; let's figure out a way to do this ourselves. Let's figure out a way to leave the big dinosaur record companies behind that have been robbing from us -- and the consumer -- for the last 60-80 years. Ever since the record business became big business, the labels have been suspect. We just thought we would try something different. Some people have praised us for it and some people have damned us for it, but that's the way it goes.

When it comes to this new album, are you at the point where you can rise above being a critic and just enjoy it?

Not yet. We just finished it [about] three weeks ago, so I don't have enough distance from it yet. Frankly, I don't want to hear it right now, because I know every little glitch, every little thing I think is flawed about it, I’ll hear. We are going to start rehearsing some of these tunes in October, so I am just trying to basically stay away from it until rehearsal starts so I won't be burned out. We've been living with these songs for a long time.

You guys have been playing together since 1994, why a new album now?

We were never a band that was able to record and write and tour at the same. When you go on tour at this age there is a lot of recovery time involved. Plus, as I've said before, we all have young children, our priorities are different. Not that this album and our music isn't important, but my kids are more important to me than anything, and that's where I put most of my energy these days.

There are some people who seem to think that this is some sort of comeback or we've been away, but, if I might say so, we've been breaking box office records all over the world since '94 and we've been touring quite a bit. It just took us a while to get on a roll again, to get into writing mode and learning how to work with each other again in a studio.

This is still very much a band effort. There is co-writing and there is a lot of intermingling of vocals, a lot of harmonies. At the end of the day, we agonized for two or three years how we were going to make an album that was going to be modern and cool and cutting edge, and finally we said "To hell with it, we are just going to be the Eagles. We are just going to do what we do."

And that comes back around to what we said before about waiting for your time to come again. We wanted to wait until some of the latest trends and fads died down, and you have to sort of wait for people to miss you. It's kind of like that joke in that old country song, "How can I miss you when you won't go away." We've always been good at getting out of the public eye and being gone for a while. You sit around today and you watch these kids who are exposing themselves -- in every sense of the word -- to death, it's ridiculous. We all value our private lives and our families and our charity work, and all the other things that we do, because those things inform our music. You won't see us at most of the award shows.

You've got an awards show coming up, the CMA awards. I've heard people say that if the Eagles were to come out today they would be a country band, but I've always looked at you as a rock band.

I think we are both. A country band wouldn't do "Long Road Out of Eden" and a rock band wouldn't "How Long" or "Do Something," so I don't think we can be put in a box. I think we defy all those labels. We are an American band and what we do is informed and influenced by just about every form of American music you can think of. There is rhythm and blues in there, there is folk, there's rock, there's country. It's all in there, which is one of the reasons I think we have a lasting appeal.

We are pretty excited about doing the CMA's. I did them once before with my friend Trisha Yearwood, I sang with her a few years back. We don't normally do award shows, but we are making an exception because we are honored and so thrilled to have been accepted by country radio. That's kind of a hard club to get into.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/searc..._id=1003658087





In a City Far, Far Away From Hollywood, the YouTube Tales of a Lesser Vader
David Callender

What does it take to parlay YouTube stardom into an entertainment career?

A year ago, when Matt Sloan was working in a bookstore and Aaron Yonda in a metal shop, they were shooting low-budget comedy films that they showed every week on the local cable-access channel here. When a friend suggested they parody the “Star Wars” films, the two were split over the idea of what Mr. Sloan described as “basically Darth Vader in a grocery store.”

But as he and Mr. Yonda began fleshing out the character of Darth Vader’s hapless younger brother, Chad, a shift manager in the Empire Market who can’t land a date despite his Jedi powers, Mr. Sloan said, “I knew we had something special.”

With a neighborhood grocery co-op as their backdrop, they shot the first episode of “Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager” with friends volunteering the talent and labor. They worried about the cost of the $600 Darth Vader costume that Mr. Yonda wore, but, he said, “We really wanted to get the look right.”

Then Chad Vader hit YouTube.

The eight-part saga is one of the site’s biggest hits, having been viewed more than 19 million times since its debut in July 2006. The series has put Mr. Sloan and Mr. Yonda among the site’s top celebrities, along with performers like Jessica Lee Rose, the actress from the LonelyGirl15 series, and Terra Naomi, the singer whose breakout song on YouTube is called “Say It’s Possible.”

While Mr. Yonda and Mr. Sloan may not have much name recognition, they do have big-name professional representation, a choice of projects, and enough money to pay people for their work on season two of Chad Vader, which they say is forthcoming.

This month the camera maker Canon brought them to New York to make a “Battle of the Internet Superstars” video along with Glenn Rubenstein, one of the writers for the Lonelygirl15 series, and Gary Brolsma, who gained YouTube stardom for his vigorous lip-synching of a Romanian pop song (he is better known as the “numa numa” guy).

Whether Mr. Yonda and Mr. Sloan will gain national recognition or remain a niche act is an open question. They still have to pitch their ideas to get work. The entertainment industry, it seems, is trying to make sense of where artists fit into the broader establishment after they make it in the quirky medium of YouTube.

Even so, the success is already far beyond what either Mr. Sloan or Mr. Yonda say they imagined when they began performing together in an improvisational comedy club five years ago.

“Chad Vader definitely gets us in pretty much any door in the entertainment industry,” Mr. Yonda said. “We had the interest of a lot of people before Chad Vader, but Chad has made us more of a hot commodity.”

Because they write, produce, direct and star in their own films, they are poised to become part of a new class of Web-based performers and producers who can shuttle between conventional media, like television and films, and online outlets like YouTube.

“They’re an original comedic voice coming off the Web, and everybody’s interested in that,” said their agent, Dan Shear of the William Morris talent agency, which has represented them for about two years.

Their manager, Kara Welker of the Generate agency in Los Angeles, said the pair’s YouTube success puts them at “the forefront of the whole self-distribution platform,” allowing them to choose where and how their work will appear instead of depending on film studios or television networks to distribute it.

“They’re creating stuff on their own for their own fan base,” she said. “It’s the power of the medium. They’re their own de facto studio.”

Now that they have built a loyal following, their fans will follow them to whichever medium they choose, Ms. Welker said. “Funny is funny, and once you hook into that audience, they’re there for good,” she said.

While they hope to branch out into movies and television, Mr. Sloan and Mr. Yonda said the Internet remains central to their plans. “I don’t really care what medium we work in as long as we have the creative freedom to do what we do and are able to work in an environment that supports our creativity,” Mr. Sloan said.

This year they were among the first performers recruited by YouTube’s new professional partnership program, paying content providers a portion of the site’s ad revenue. Neither Mr. Sloan nor Mr. Yonda would say what the deal is worth, but Aaron Ferstman, a YouTube spokesman, said that most performers in the program “don’t get into this to make money. They have something to share and they want to build an audience and get their material out.”

That seems to describe Mr. Sloan and Mr. Yonda. Although they have quit their old jobs to make films full time, they have no offices or production facilities of their own; they do their shooting on location, their writing in coffee shops and their film editing at home. They still perform once a week in an improvisational comedy troupe, because, as Mr. Sloan said, “improvisation is the backbone of most of our work.”

They say they have no plans to leave Madison and, thanks to the decentralized nature of the Web, Ms. Welker said there is no reason to relocate to continue their careers. “In this day and age, you don’t have to live in Hollywood any more. It’s not the 1920s,” she said.

Madison — the birthplace of the satirical newspaper The Onion — “has a kind of quirkiness about it that makes things interesting,” Mr. Yonda said, adding he and Mr. Sloan have received far more generous support than they might have in a bigger city.

For example, the Willy Street Co-Op, the setting for the Empire Market, where Chad works, rents for about $10 an hour and is open for filming whenever the crew needs the space, said Brendon Smith, the co-op’s spokesman.

Dave Cieslewicz, the mayor of Madison, opened his office to the Chad Vader crew and made a cameo appearance as Chad’s boss. Like The Onion, which has since moved to New York, the series “represents that eclectic, funky vibe we have here,” Mr. Cieslewicz said.

Mr. Sloan and Mr. Yonda said they want to continue making Chad Vader films for the foreseeable future, but as Mr. Sloan put it, “we don’t want to be known as just the Chad Vader guys.”

“My personal dream is to get to the point where we don’t have to do pitches,” Mr. Sloan said. “It’s fun to talk out your ideas sometimes, but I want to reach a level of success where people will say, ‘Listen, we know what you do and we like it, so just go ahead and do it and I’m sure it will be good.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/bu...ia/15chad.html





An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers
Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet

When Osama bin Laden issued his videotaped message to the American people last month, a young jihad enthusiast went online to help spread the word.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.”

Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

His neatly organized site also includes a file called “United States of Losers,” which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Mr. Khan: “You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!”

Mr. Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, is an unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls the “Islamic jihadi media.” He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn. “I will do my best to speak the truth, and even if it annoys the disbelievers, the truth must be preached,” Mr. Khan said in an interview.

While there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups, a message that is increasingly devised, translated and aimed for a Western audience.

Terrorism experts at West Point say there are as many as 100 English language sites offering militant Islamic views, with Mr. Khan’s — which claims 500 regular readers — among the more active. While their reach is difficult to assess, it is clear from a review of extremist material and interviews that militants are seeking to appeal to young American and European Muslims by playing on their anger over the war in Iraq and the image of Islam under attack.

Tedious Arabic screeds are reworked into flashy English productions. Recruitment tracts are issued in multiple languages, like a 39-page, electronic, English version of a booklet urging women to join the fight against the West.

There are even online novellas like “Rakan bin Williams,” about a band of Christian European converts who embraced Al Qaeda and “promised God that they will carry the flag of their distant brothers and seek vengeance on the evil doers.”

Militant Islamists are turning grainy car-bombing tapes into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites like YouTube, the online video smorgasbord.

“It is as if you would watch a Hollywood movie,” said Abu Saleh, a 21-year-old German devotee of Al Qaeda videos who visits Internet cafes in Berlin twice a week to get the latest releases. “The Internet has totally changed my view on things.”

An Internet Strategy

Al Qaeda and its followers have used the Internet to communicate and rally support for years, but in the past several months the Western tilt of the message and the sophistication of the media have accelerated. So has the output. Since the beginning of the year, Al Qaeda’s media operation, Al Sahab, has issued new videotapes as often as every three days. Even more come from Iraq, where insurgents are pumping them out daily.

That production line is the legacy of one man: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed in June 2006 by American bombs.

Mr. Zarqawi learned the power of the Internet in prison, according to a former associate who was imprisoned with him in Jordan a decade ago. Mr. Zarqawi’s jailhouse group of 32 Islamists sought to recruit other prisoners by handwriting a newsletter, Al Tawheed, when it discovered a larger audience.

“We sent them outside, to brothers in Europe and England,” who posted the newsletters on militant Web sites, the associate said, asking not be identified because he said he is involved with Islamist activities.

In Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi embraced the video camera as a weapon of war. “He made the decision that every group should have a video camera with them, and every operation should be taped,” said a Palestinian militant who went to Iraq in 2005 to teach foreign fighters from Morocco and parts of Europe how to build bombs and stage roadside attacks.

Two Lebanese intelligence officials confirmed that the Palestinian, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Omar, had worked with Mr. Zarqawi in Iraq, and he played a video of foreign fighters in Iraq for reporters of The New York Times.

Abu Omar, 37, a muscular man who carried a Glock 21 pistol tucked into the belt of his camouflage pants during an interview at his home in Lebanon, said Mr. Zarqawi also had him tape his bombmaking classes so his expertise would not be lost if he were killed.

“We had two cameramen, people who learned how to do this before they came to Iraq,” Abu Omar said. “And after filming, we had different houses in the area where we made the videos.”

Dahia al-Maqdassi, 26, a Palestinian who said he produced insurgent videos in Iraq two years ago, said, “In every city in Iraq they had a little office where someone did film operations.” He described his “media section” as a house near Falluja where 6 to 10 people worked. “We finished the film and then sent it to jihadi Web sites,” Mr. Maqdassi said.

Propaganda Rap Video

One of the most influential sites is Tajdeed, which is based in London and run by Dr. Muhammad Massari, a Saudi physicist and dissident. Over lunch at a McDonald’s near his home, Dr. Massari said Mr. Zarqawi’s insurgent videos from Iraq inspired local productions like “Dirty Kuffar,” the Arabic word for nonbeliever. The 2004 rap music video mixed images of Western leaders with others purporting to show American troops cheer as they shot injured Iraqi civilians.

Dr. Massari, who helped promote the video, said similar crossover productions soon followed and made their way to his Web site.

“I never touch the videos that are on my forums,” said Dr. Massari, who wears a long white Arabic robe. “Someone with Al Qaeda uploads them, probably at Internet cafes, to password-protected sites. Then they call a friend, say, in Australia or Brasília, and say, ‘Hi Johnny, your mom is traveling today.’ That is the code to download the video. It goes up and down like that a few times, with no trace, until someone posts a link on my site.”

Last spring, Al Qaeda made what analysts say was a bold attempt to tap potential supporters in the United States. In a videotaped interview, Ayman al-Zawahri, a bin Laden lieutenant, praised Malcolm X and urged American blacks and other minorities to see that “we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all of mankind.”

The tape quickly found an audience. Mr. Zawahri “cares about black people,” wrote a blogger with Vibe, the American hip-hop and urban culture magazine, which claims 1.6 million visits a month. “At least, I think that’s why he’s quoting Malcolm X in his latest mix tape, which dropped last weekend.”

Umar Lee, a 32-year-old Muslim convert from St. Louis, offered a stinging critique of Mr. Zawahri on his blog for Muslim Americans, criticizing “the second-class status many blacks live in right in the Arab World.” Soon, Mr. Lee’s blog churned with commentary on the parallels between Arab and black American radicals.

A four-minute version of the hourlong Qaeda video, entitled “To Black Americans,” has logged more than 1,800 views on YouTube in the four months since it was posted.

Among those who posted a link to the YouTube version was Mr. Khan, the North Carolina blogger who said he was struck by the simplicity in the messages of both Al Qaeda and Malcolm X. “They are geniuses for having the ability to mold their ideology into simple yet influential messages that can reach the grass-roots level,” he said.

Mr. Khan produces his blog anonymously, but was identified by The Times through the e-mail account he used in previous online discussions. (Pictures he had posted online helped The Times distinguish him from another, unrelated North Carolina resident, about 10 years older, who has the same name.)

In an interview at a local mosque, where he sat on a prayer rug wearing a traditional Arabic robe, Mr. Khan traced his increasing militancy.

His blog has attracted enough notoriety that vigilante groups opposed to jihadi sites have gotten him shut down a few times in recent months. He said he was somewhat surprised he had not been confronted by government authorities, although, he said, “I’ve never told anybody to build bombs.”

His early postings, beginning in 2003, promoted strengthening Islam in North America through nonviolent confrontations. But with the escalating war in Iraq, bloodshed became a recurrent theme.

He described his favorite video from Iraq: a fiery suicide-bomber attack on an American outpost.

“It was something that brought great happiness to me,” he said. “Because this is something America would never want to admit, that they are being crushed.”

Asked how he felt living among people who had sent soldiers to Iraq, Mr. Khan said: “Whatever happens to their sons and daughters is none of my concern. They are people of hellfire and I have no concern for them.”

A Teenage Transformation

Born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Khan was 7 when his family moved to New York City and settled into the Queens neighborhood of Maspeth.

He mirrored his teenage peers, from their slang to their baggy pants, until August 2001 when, at age 15, he said, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, which was sponsored by a fundamentalist but nonviolent group now known as the Islamic Organization of North America (IONA).

“They were teaching things about religion and brotherhood that captivated me,” Mr. Khan said. He said he went back to school knowing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim, a practicing Muslim.”

He prayed more regularly. He dressed more modestly. He stopped listening to music except for Soldiers of Allah, a Los Angeles hip-hop group, now defunct, whose tunes like “Bring Islam Back” continue to have worldwide appeal among militant youths.

He also befriended members of the Islamic Thinkers Society, a tiny group that promotes radical, nonviolent Islam by leafleting in Times Square and Jackson Heights, Queens.

After moving with his family to North Carolina in 2004, Mr. Khan said, he attended a community college for three years and earned money selling various products, including kitchen knives.

But he began spending chunks of his days on the blog he created in late 2005, “Inshallahshaheed,” which translates as “a martyr soon if God wills.” The Internet traffic counter Alexa.com, which rarely is able to measure the popularity of blogs because they do not have enough readers, ranked his among the top one percent of one hundred million Internet sites in the world.

If Mr. Khan’s extreme rhetoric has won him a wider audience, it has caused him problems at home. Last year, his father tried to pull him back to the family’s more moderate views by asking an imam to intervene.

“I tried to bring arguments from the Koran and scholars, and said, ‘Whatever you are thinking it is not true,’” said Mustapha Elturk, a family friend and the leader of IONA, the Islamic organization that first inspired Mr. Khan. But Mr. Khan did not budge, he said.

Mr. Khan said he separated from IONA over one matter: the organization would not support violent jihad without the endorsement of a Muslim nation’s leader, which Mr. Khan argues is unnecessary.

Mr. Elturk said, “His father and family are really scared that he might do something.”

Attempts to Shut Down Blog

From time to time, Mr. Khan said, his father also cut off his Internet access and, to placate him, Mr. Khan recently added a disclaimer to his blog disavowing responsibility for the views expressed on the site.

He has also been fending off citizen watchdogs who are working to knock sites likes his off the Internet. Twice in September his blog went dark when his service provider shut him down, citing complaints about the nature of his postings.

Mr. Khan has now moved his blog to a site called Muslimpad, whose American operators recently moved from Texas to Amman, Jordan. Their larger forum, Islamic Network, is the host of discussions among English-speaking Muslims. One of their former employees, Daniel Maldonado, was convicted this year in federal court of associating with terrorists at their training camps in Somalia.

Mr. Khan said that he had dreams about meeting Mr. bin Laden and that he would not rule out picking up a weapon himself one day. In a recent essay, he argued that jihad was mandatory for all Muslims, and he cited three ways to fulfill this obligation: join fighters in Iraq, Afghanistan or Algeria; send them money; or promote militant videos as part of the jihad media.

For now, he said, he is fulfilling his obligations by helping other Muslims understand their religion. Recently he posted a video of a news report from Somalia showing a grenade-wielding American who had joined the Islamists.

“He is an example of a Muslim who follows the Religion of Islaam,” Mr. Khan wrote.

Michael Moss reported from Jordan, Lebanon, Germany, London and North Carolina; and Souad Mekhennet from Jordan, Lebanon and Germany. Margot Williams and Hoda Osman contributed from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/us/15net.html?hp





$2.2 Million Grant Calls for Designing Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

The computer’s ability to sift through mountains of data and its dispassionate analytical techniques are invaluable in managing volatile political situations.
Ed Stiles

University of Arizona Professor Jerzy Rozenblit has received a $2.2 million grant to design computer software that will analyze volatile political and military situations.

The software will predict the actions of paramilitary groups, ethnic factions, terrorists and criminal groups, while aiding commanders in devising strategies for stabilizing areas before, during and after conflicts.

It also will have many civilian applications in finance, law enforcement, epidemiology and the aftermath of natural disasters, such as hurricane Katrina.

The Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, known as ATRAP, is a massively complex set of computer algorithms (mathematical procedures) that sift through millions of pieces of data, considering many factors including social, political, cultural, military and media influences, said Rozenblit, who holds the Raymond J. Oglethorpe Endowed Chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the UA.

The software can handle data loads that would overwhelm human analysts, while dispassionately exploring actions and behaviors based solely on the data, sidestepping human cultural biases that might prematurely rule out unorthodox or seemingly bizarre courses of action.

Actions Sometimes Defy Logic
Since the end of the Cold War, our opponents have behaved in ways that defy what we would consider normal logic, pursuing actions that we find almost inconceivable, said Rozenblit, who heads the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UA. Predicting these asymmetric behaviors is difficult and further complicated by the massive amounts of intelligence data available.

ATRAP will use sophisticated computational methods based on game theory, co-evolution and genetic development models to find solutions that make sense in illogical times.

Genetic algorithms analyze situations in an evolutionary context, where actions with the highest “fitness factor” (chance of achieving the greatest success) gravitate toward one another, produce offspring and eventually rise to the top.

Co-evolutionary algorithms analyze how the actions of one group affect the other groups and how those other groups adapt, or co-evolve, in response to the changing situation. For instance, if one group becomes more influential in an area where ethnic factions are vying for supremacy, the other groups will respond in ways that will try to make that first faction less influential, Rozenblit said.

The algorithms are designed to recognize links and patterns within the data and to find connections, much as an investigative reporter might do when examining financial records - but on a vastly more complex and detailed scale.

Predicting the Unpredictable
“The computer can look at very, very complex data sets that as an individual or even as a group of individuals, you could never analyze,” said Brian Ten Eyck, ATRAP project manager and associate director for research support in ECE. “The computer can bring the patterns and connections to the surface and can predict scenarios that might never occur to human analysts.”

Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion, is an example of how ATRAP can respond to changing factors, Ten Eyck explained. “Every time its opponent made a move, Deep Blue recalculated all the possibilities and likely courses of action, eventually settling on the fittest move that would achieve its goal of winning the game.”

However, chess is not an exact analogy because only two players are involved and the end goal is for one player to win.

In unstable areas, winning often means establishing an environment in which the factions co-exist in a win-win situation or at least in an equilibrium in which there are no rewards, and some penalties, for disturbing the status quo, Rozenblit said.

“Deep Blue is a good analogy because it illustrates the complexity of the problems, but in chess you have a finite court and a well-defined set of operations,” Rozenblit added. “Therefore, a move constitutes a valid move.

But what we’re dealing with now is a world with no rules, with infinite possibilities and moves that defy logic, such as total disregard for the basic instinct of self preservation.”

Quick Response is Vital
Ultimately, the software program will be designed to display data in graphical, 3-D and other forms that can be quickly grasped, allowing decision makers to rapidly respond to changing situations, Rozenblit said.

In managing conflicts such as those that occurred in Kosovo or Somalia in the 1990s, commanders will need to respond quickly. “In those situations, we don’t have two months to figure things out,” Rozenblit said. “So the second part of our project involves harnessing massively parallel computing architectures to do computations very rapidly.”

Parallel computing, which relies on several large computers working on portions of a problem simultaneously, will allow commanders to rapidly analyze millions of data points from intelligence reports.

Students and Local Contractors Benefit
While the software ultimately could save millions of lives, it’s immediately benefiting local companies and students in the short term.

Rozenblit plans to outsource some parts of the project to local contractors because the UA part of the research doesn’t involve working with classified data. “There’s nothing about our part of the project that’s classified,” Rozenblit said. “We’re an open, academic institution and it’s difficult for us to be involved in classified work. So we need contractors to handle the classified parts of the project.”

ATRAP research also is giving students valuable skills. “There is a dire need for engineers with expertise in this area and our graduate students and undergraduates are in great demand,” Rozenblit said. One student who recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree after doing research related to ATRAP was hired at an annual starting salary of $90,000.

The ATRAP software is being developed in collaboration with the Army Battle Command Battle Laboratory at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz.

While ATRAP can also address many complex, non-military situations that require analysis of complex data and balancing the desires of competing factions, its military application is equally concerned with conflict avoidance.

“The goal is to handle conflict areas in a manner that leads to stability and support so war is not necessary,” Rozenblit said. “That’s the philosophy behind much of the ATRAP effort.”
http://uanews.org/node/16426





Death Cab For Cutie Guitarist Baffled By Homeland Security's Seizure Of His Album

Government snatched up master hard drive containing song files for Chris Walla's solo LP, which, coincidentally, is politically charged.
James Montgomery

When Death Cab for Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla woke up on Monday, his "To Do" list probably read something like this:

1. Call MTV News to discuss upcoming, long-delayed solo record.
2. Call U.S. Department of Homeland Security to discuss seizure of hard drive containing said long-delayed solo record.
3. Head into town for weekly tuque fitting.

Yes, it seems that recently, Walla's solo record (which has been scheduled to come out at various points over the past, well, four years) took another step toward oblivion when the master hard drive — containing all song files — was confiscated by Homeland Security at the Canadian border, for reasons not abundantly clear, and sent to the department's computer-forensics division for further inspection.

If it sounds like a huge joke, Walla ensures you it isn't.

"It's a true story. Barsuk [Records, which is putting out the record] had hired a courier — who does international stuff all the time and who they had used before — to bring [the album] back from Canada, where I was working on it. And he got to the border and he had all his paperwork and it was all cool, only they turned him away, and they confiscated the drive and gave it to the computer-forensics division of our Homeland Security-type people," sighed Walla, who has produced nearly all Death Cab's output, as well as records by the Decemberists, Hot Hot Heat, Nada Surf, Tegan and Sara and others. "And now I couldn't even venture a guess as to where it is, or what it's doing there. I mean, I can't just call their customer-service center and ask about my drive. There's nothing I can do. I don't know if we can hire an attorney ... is there a black-hole attorney? You can't take a black hole to court."

And though his song files might have disappeared into a web of government bureaucracy, Walla does still have the tapes containing all his songs, which he's now trying to master and mix on his own in order to have the record out — Lord willin' — in January.

"Luckily, the tapes are Plan B, so while I'm bummed about the whole thing, it could be a whole lot worse," he laughed. "I still get to play music. I mean, I'm not at Guantánamo or anything like that. I mean, my drive might be. They could be water-boarding my drive for all I know."

And though Walla's laughing when he mentions Guantánamo, he's not joking when he adds that his record — which he's calling Field Manual — is "very political," packed with songs about issues both foreign ("The Score" tackles the war in Iraq) and domestic ("Everyone Needs a Home" deals with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; "Sing Again" is about so-called "morning after" pills and whether they're a form of contraception or abortion). Easy listening, this is not.

"I'm calling it Field Manual because myself and the guy who designed the packaging were looking through all these Army field guides from World War II. And there was one that he found that was really terrifying, actually," Walla explained. "It was basically a manual issued by the Army in the late '30s, early '40s, about how to build what we now call an [improvised explosive device] in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like how to hide a bomb in a bed or in a tube of toothpaste. Just terrible stuff, and I started having this feeling of, like, 'Well, we need a new field manual.'

"And while it really is a political record, it's also intensely personal, and it's not like, political in a way where I hope to change anyone's mind, because I've been doing my political-rock homework for a few years now, trying to decode what works and what doesn't," he continued. "Basically, it was my hope that I would be able to write a bunch of songs about the sh-- that I think about pretty much every day. But there aren't any character assassinations or indictments on the record. It's tricky to write a political record. It was tough to get to a place where I felt comfortable with the words coming out of my mouth."

And getting to that place has taken awhile. Walla said that though he's been writing songs for years, it took him a long time to figure out just what he was trying to say. As it turns out, he had plenty to say, and Field Manual is the sound of him coming to that realization (he credits the directness of Ted Leo, Against Me! and the Thermals' Hutch Harris as "touchstones" for that discovery). And while he hustles to finish the record — and continue work on Death Cab for Cutie's new record, which he said is "coming along super heavy ... we've got six songs done. They're really bloody" — he's finally prepared to stand on his own, come hell or high water. Or looming, shadow-like government organizations.

"This is a solo record, which is a little bit scary, because there's a feeling of 'Oh, you're officially making a statement,' and you're either the fist-waving left or the flag-waving right, and there's no in between," he laughed. "But I made this record because it felt irresponsible for me to have a platform for what I'm thinking and not use it. And not just to do political songs. If all I wanted to do was cover Air Supply songs, I could've done that too."
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/157...or_cutie.jhtml





Hitachi: Hard Drives Are Getting Better
May Wong

Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.

Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.

A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.

"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.

The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.

A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with an electromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits of data by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.

Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammed more bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitive enough to read the data. The industry looks to new technologies every time physical limitations kick in, and GMR — which allows for extremely thin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism — was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in the early 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.

But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor.

"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit.

By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world's smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.

Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...9pASAD8S9EERO2





Why Big Hard Drives Won't Just Be for Big Nerds: Buzzword

Sure, they’re taking place on a subatomic level that just won the Nobel Prize for physics. But overlooked innovations in hard-drive capacity, as PM’s senior tech editor sermonizes in his trend column, aren’t just letting you record TV shows and save massive amounts of music. They’re pushing us into a new era of computing.
Glenn Derene

Reports of the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded for Giant Magnetoresistance dumbed down the science to the foundations of the iPod. But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics.

For the record, Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) is not a band of 15-ft.-tall mutants who have joined together to save the world from a diabolical villain with the power to influence metal. But you could be forgiven for thinking so, since the term is about as arcane as any that the dual disciplines of physics and computer science have produced. Despite its gargantuan-sounding proportions, the GMR principle is all about the infinitesimally small bits of information squeezed onto hard drives—and how to read them.

Most people in the geekosphere are familiar with Moore’s Law, which observes that the number of transistors on a CPU will double every two years, but not everyone has heard of the corresponding law in the field of data storage. Named Kryder’s Law, after Carnegie Mellon professor Mark Kryder, it predicts regular exponential growth in hard-drive capacity (click here for my Q&A with Kryder). Since the introduction of the hard drive in 1956, when the 1-ton IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) included 5MB of storage, drives have experienced a 50-million-fold increase in capacity. In the early 90s, desktop drives started surging into the 1GB range, and now drives max out at around 1TB (terabyte). On Monday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers ("Hitachi announced 4TB HDDs by 2011. So?" read the headline on Ubergizmo), who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.

Unfair, I say! Hard drives are the most underappreciated technology in the world of computing. It takes some pretty sophisticated tricks at the microscopic—and even the subatomic—level to pack all those bits onto the spinning platters that hold everything from our music collections to pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Every time it seems that those disks are carrying as much information as is allowed by the laws of physics, engineers find a fascinating new method to squeeze out more capacity. In 2005, when the horizontally aligned bits on high-capacity drives were becoming crowded, Toshiba (followed by pretty much every drive manufacturer) upended the bits to a perpendicular orientation to the surface of the platter, aligning them like standing dominoes to squeeze in more per square inch.

Hitachi’s announcement about drive heads was a good deal more esoteric than that: Hard-drive engineers have essentially found a way to redesign and shrink the read/write head (the official name for the technology is "Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistive," or CPP-GMR, drive heads) to allow for smaller perpendicular bits. And the GMR effect is not new. In fact, this year’s Nobel Prize for physics went to France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Grunberg, whose research into GMR in the late 1980s brought about the first real-world application of nanotechnology.

In short, GMR is a quantum-level effect that allows hard-drive manufacturers to use magnetic fields to exploit the subatomic spin of particles. The discovery of GMR launched an entirely new field of applied physics known as spin-based electronics, or "spintronics."

In January, Hitachi announced it would build the first consumer terabyte hard drive, and now the company is ready to quadruple that storage capacity by 2011.

Given the complexity and difficulty of the subject, I imagine the reason Hitachi GST is making announcements about technologies two to four years down the pipeline is to piggyback on the Nobel and take advantage of the only public attention that GMR is ever likely to get.

But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics. Over the past few years, CPUs from Intel and AMD have rolled into the world of gigahertz calculations and split into multiple cores. Consequently, computer users are now buying PCs with awesome processing power that doesn’t always translate into improved real-world performance in tasks such as surfing the Internet, looking at pictures and playing music and movies. But the advent of 100-plus-gigabyte computers has had a huge effect on the way we use our machines, moving them into the realm of entertainment devices, swallowing huge quantities of music, movies and family videos and photos.

Whenever people come to me looking for guidance on purchasing a new computer, my advice is this: Buy as much processor as you think you need, but be sure to buy more hard drive than you’d ever imagine. That’s because once you get into consuming and producing music and video, you’ll start to see those gigabytes fill up awfully quick. Plus, it doesn’t cost much to overestimate—going from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive on a standard Dell desktop computer only adds about $80. And modern operating systems and software are veritable hard-drive hogs—a Microsoft Windows Vista install requires 15GB of free disk space.

Still, despite their massive capacities and apparently unlimited room for improvement, there is reason to question the future relevance of our spinning platter workhorses in home PCs. On the bottom end, flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are chasing HDDs up the capacity ladder—current SSDs have capacities of up to 128GB. On the top end, online storage providers will start to seem like reasonable alternatives as offerings approach infinite capacity and super-high-bandwidth fiberoptic connections to the home become the norm. Meanwhile, if our Breakthrough Award-winning $99 Zonbu laptop is any indication, we may be on the verge of a new era of slim-client computing.

Nevertheless, hard-disk drives have maintained their primacy in the PC thus far because they have routinely kept pace with computer users’ needs and they are relatively cheap solutions for storing tons of data. Current 1TB drives sell for less than $350 and can hold up to 200 DVD-quality movies (far more if you compress them). And as we step gingerly into the world of downloading hi-def, that sort of localized capacity will become even more important.

So even though the rest of the world may not get too excited about the soldierly progress of the hard-disk drive, I’m willing to give it a column’s-worth of respect. Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistance may seem like a hopelessly impenetrable piece of computer science (except to the people who hand out Nobel Prizes), but it’s advances like this that are enabling our DVRs to record Heroes for us while we’re out with friends, and that allow a computer to act as the repository for a collection of music and movies. Because there’s no such thing as too much room for your stuff.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...html?series=21





6 Big Questions for the King of Data Storage

Mark Kryder, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s college of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a legend in the world of computer capacity (click here for more on that underappreciated universe). He's most famous for his prediction about the exponential growth of hard drives, which is an analog to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s famous law about computer processors. We contacted Kryder at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo to ask him a few questions about the future of the hard drive. —Glenn Derene

About how much does hard-drive capacity increase year to year?
The areal density on hard drives and therefore the capacity is currently increasing at about 40 percent per year, and I believe this will continue for the foreseeable future.

What do we need these big hard drives for now?
There is demand for higher capacity in almost all segments of the disk-drive business. Personal video recorders and drives for servers require the highest capacities. As we are just beginning the transition to HDTV, these demands are about to increase dramatically. Recent market studies by IDC have indicated that the supply of disk-drive capacity is lagging demand.

What do you see as the next great hard-drive hog?
HDTV.

In the laptop market, there seems to be an encroachment of flash memory SSDs into the hard-disk drive space. Will flash capacities eventually catch or eclipse HDDs?
It is a misstatement to say flash is encroaching upon hard drives. Until the iPod put hard drives in digital audio players, that market was totally dominated by flash.

However, it also wasn’t a very exciting business. When Apple put hard drives into the iPod, they suddenly provided enough capacity to make digital audio players an exciting market. Now, as Flash has increased its capacity and lowered its cost, it has begun to reclaim some of the territory it lost, but not at the expense of hard drives.

On the contrary, all the flash applications require backup and servers to send audio songs, pictures or whatever over the Internet. And all those applications are fulfilled by hard drives, because they offer much higher capacities and much lower cost per gigabyte. The fact that hard drives are cheap to make means that there always has been a capacity point below which various solid-state memories could offer a lower-cost device. Since storage density for both hard drives and solid state memory devices always increases, that capacity point also moves upward. It should also be pointed out that flash and HDDs are actually complementary. Seagate, for instance, has recently announced its hybrid hard-drive product in which a flash cache provides faster read-access time and lower power operation.

What about online storage? As ISPs start to offer fiber to the home with immense bandwidth, do you anticipate that people will simply migrate to remote storage systems such as Xdrive or box.net?
There is no question that networking is going to improve, and in the future, we will all have servers in our home for our personal digital information. But I believe we will always want our own copy of our personal information. If it only costs you $100 to store all your own personal information so you can always have it accessible and take it with you on a vacation, wouldn’t you do it?

Is Hitachi’s CPP-GMR going to be the only technology pushing capacities to the 4TB mark? What else is under development?
We have all been predicting that perpendicular recording would reach roughly 1 terabit per square inch (which is the areal density that will provide 4 terabytes in a single drive) around 2011. The challenge is to get beyond 1 Tbit per square inch.

The CPP-GMR head has been in research and development in most companies for well over a decade, and it has been recognized for many years that CPP-GMR will be necessary to go beyond a certain areal density around 1 Tbit per square inch. In my view, this announcement is thus much more important for going to 10 Tbits per square inch than to 1 Tbit per square inch, because CPP-GMR heads scale much better than tunneling magnetoresistive heads, which are in current products.

However, to get to 10 Tbits per square inch will require a drastic change in recording technology. Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording and Bit-Patterned Media are technologies that are under development to make that happen. I am the technical director of the Extremely High Density Recording program of the Information Storage Industry Consortium, which Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung all currently support, and we are currently working on this 10-terabits-per-square-inch goal, which would enable a 40-terabyte hard drive.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blog...s/4226863.html





U.S. Companies Fighting Fewer Legal Battles: Survey
Martha Graybow

U.S. companies are getting hit with fewer new lawsuits and initiating less litigation, according to a survey released on Monday.

The poll of in-house law departments suggests corporate litigation may have slowed, although big companies still find themselves juggling plenty of court cases, particularly patent and product liability disputes.

The fourth annual survey of in-house counsel at 250 major U.S. companies, was commissioned by law firm Fulbright & Jaworski LLP.

The survey found 17 percent of respondents said their companies have not had to defend against any new lawsuits this year -- such as those filed by employees, consumers, shareholders, competitors or enforcement agencies -- up from 11 percent a year earlier that did not face a single new suit.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said their company had initiated at least one lawsuit in the past year, down from more than 70 percent a year ago and 88 percent in 2004.

Twenty-two percent said they expect to see the number of legal disputes their companies face increase over the next 12 months, compared with 33 percent last year, the survey found.

The data "point to a pronounced drop in new case filings -- both against, and by American companies, a reversal of the upward trajectory in the number of new lawsuits from our previous three surveys," said Stephen Dillard, chair of Fulbright's global litigation practice.

Sixty-four percent of the companies in the survey were publicly held.

Internal investigations into matters such as stock options award practices are still preoccupying many companies -- though not as much as last year, the poll found.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said their companies have launched an internal probe during the year requiring help from outside lawyers, down from a year earlier, when 63 percent of in-house counsel reported opening such an investigation.

Dillard said stable economic conditions in the first half of 2007 likely reduced the number of disputes involving public companies, including securities class actions and other types of investor lawsuits.

Other recent studies also suggest the number of new securities class-action filings is on the decline. Academic experts say there is no clear reason for the trend.

Not all litigation is declining. Patent cases and product liability lawsuits, for example, are a growing issue, particularly at large companies, the survey found.

For U.S. companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue, patent and intellectual property disputes were cited as the top near-term litigation concern.

The survey also found that a third of corporate law departments count more than 25 lawsuits facing their companies at any one time, with 18 percent dealing with at least 100 simultaneous legal actions in U.S. courts.

(Reporting by Martha Graybow)
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...20630120071015





How to Get Junior to Eat His Veggies Turns Out to Be (Too) Common Knowledge
Motoko Rich

Jessica Seinfeld, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, has a hot best seller with “Deceptively Delicious,” a cookbook for parents of picky eaters. Ms. Seinfeld’s celebrity and an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” have helped propel the book to the No. 1 spot on the hardcover Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list in The New York Times, where it will make its debut a week from Sunday.

But a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld’s book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.

That book, “The Sneaky Chef” by Missy Chase Lapine, who is not a celebrity, also suggests that parents purée healthy foods like spinach and sweet potatoes and hide them in childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese or brownies. A week from Sunday it will be No. 9 on the paperback Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list.

It turns out that Ms. Lapine, a former publisher of Eating Well magazine, had submitted her 139-page proposal for “The Sneaky Chef,” complete with 42 recipes, to HarperCollins twice — once in February 2006 without an agent and again in May last year, the second time represented by an agent. Both times she was rejected. She landed a deal with Running Press in June 2006, the same month that Collins won an auction to publish Ms. Seinfeld’s book.

“Honestly I can’t speculate, and I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything,” Ms. Lapine said. “I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Seinfeld said she had come up with the idea more than two years ago in her kitchen while puréeing butternut squash for her youngest son and cooking macaroni and cheese for her husband and two oldest children. “I’ve been obsessed with this for the past two years,” said Ms. Seinfeld, who worked with a chef and a nutritionist on the book. “I don’t need to copy someone’s idea. I’ve got enough going on in my life.”

Mr. Seinfeld, who joined his wife on the phone, said, “Let’s be realistic — my wife isn’t in this for the money or the publicity.” He added, “I really don’t think we have another Watergate here.”

The basic concepts for several of Ms. Lapine’s recipes — spinach in brownies, avocado in chocolate pudding and sweet potato in grilled cheese sandwiches — also appear in recipes offered by Ms. Seinfeld.

Ms. Lapine, a mother of two daughters who lives in Irvington, N.Y., said that when she compared her book with Ms. Seinfeld’s, she was “uncomfortable” seeing that “those unusual combinations that I thought would brand me as a lunatic showed up here, too.”

Ms. Seinfeld said she had not looked at “The Sneaky Chef,” but noted that any similarities were likely to have stemmed from the use of commonly accepted children’s favorites.

Of course, parents have been swapping tips for how to hide zucchini in muffins for generations, and other books, like “The Art of Hiding Vegetables,” have touched on the subject.

Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins, said the company had rejected Ms. Lapine’s book because it was too similar to another title on its list. He said the publisher agreed to meet with Ms. Seinfeld when she submitted a similar proposal two weeks later because of her name and her agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh of William Morris.

Ms. Walsh described Ms. Seinfeld as “smart, stunning, and infinitely promotable” in a cover letter. Ms. Seinfeld visited the HarperCollins offices and cooked three dishes, impressing editors.

Ms. Lapine’s publisher contacted HarperCollins this summer after an early brochure for “Deceptively Delicious” showed an illustration of a woman holding carrots behind her back, similar to a drawing on the cover of “The Sneaky Chef.” Collins changed its plans for the cover, although, Mr. Ross said, that could have been because “it just looked too awkward to have her holding a plate of brownies with one hand and carrots” in the other.

David Steinberger, chief executive of Perseus, said no legal action was being considered at this time.

“I can’t explain a coincidence like this,” Ms. Seinfeld said, “but I applaud it and I wish there were 10 more books like mine because I’m not in this for a competition, I’m in this to help families.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/ny...9seinfeld.html





J.K. Rowling Outs Hogwarts Character
AP

Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds ''true love.''

''Dumbledore is gay,'' the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. ''Falling in love can blind us to an extent,'' Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was ''horribly, terribly let down.''

Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his ''great tragedy.''

''Oh, my god,'' Rowling concluded with a laugh, ''the fan fiction.''

Potter readers on fan sites and elsewhere on the Internet have speculated on the sexuality of Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past. And explicit scenes with Dumbledore already have appeared in fan fiction.

Rowling told the audience that while working on the planned sixth Potter film, ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,'' she spotted a reference in the script to a girl who once was of interest to Dumbledore. A note was duly passed to director David Yates, revealing the truth about her character.

Rowling, finishing a brief ''Open Book Tour'' of the United States, her first tour here since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a ''prolonged argument for tolerance'' and urged her fans to ''question authority.''

Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...OvV-AD8SCM5HO2





Celebrities Off Guard? ‘TMZ’ Is a Hit
Brian Stelter

The early success of “TMZ,” a new syndicated television show based on the popular Web site of the same name, illustrates just how valuable the celebrity news niche has become.

The show, a half-hour of celebrity scandal, had its premiere on Sept. 10. By the end of the month, it was the top-rated new show in syndication by a wide margin, delivering a 1.7 household rating, or about two million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. Among other syndicated series with premieres this fall, “The Steve Wilkos Show” averaging half as many households, is its nearest rival.

“Entertainment Tonight,” the longtime leader among entertainment shows with a 4.8 household rating the same week, has little to worry about, at least for the time being. But “TMZ” is one of the first sites to successfully turn its Internet brand into a television series, and it has performed especially well among younger viewers.

According to Nielsen demographic data, 61 percent of “Entertainment Tonight” viewers are above age 50. In a nod to its Internet roots, “TMZ” courts a younger audience — people age 50 or older account for just 39 percent of its viewers, which also include a higher percentage of men than other entertainment shows.

“Young people love entertainment. It’s a huge area, and the traditional TV programs didn’t service them,” said Ken Werner, the president of Warner Brothers Domestic Television Distribution.

On television, “TMZ” strives to convey the same bold, irreverent tone it asserts online, relying heavily on paparazzi video of unvarnished celebrity moments. It is available in almost every television market.

The TMZ Web site served as a template and a marketing force for the television series. The site is a joint venture of AOL and the Telepictures Productions division of Warner Brothers, both of which are subsidiaries of Time Warner. Hilary Estey McLoughlin, the president of Telepictures Productions, called the site an “extremely successful and profitable partnership” and said the television show was also expected to become profitable.

According to comScore Media Metrix data, TMZ.com recorded 103 million page views and 10.5 million unique visitors in September, making it the most popular entertainment news Web site. Yahoo’s gossip site, called OMG!, ranked No. 2 in its fourth month of existence. People.com came in third among entertainment sites.

“TMZ, because of its existence on the Internet, is essentially a brand that has acquired a secondary meaning,” Mr. Werner said.

Companies trying to translate Internet successes onto television have faced formidable hurdles in the past. In 2001, Sony Pictures Television developed a pilot for “eBay TV,” based on the auction Web site, but never scheduled it for broadcast. Last December, NBC Universal Television Stations introduced the syndicated show “iVillage Live,” modeled on the Web site aimed at women, but it was placed on hiatus six months later amid sagging ratings. A new version of the show had its debut last month.

Television’s established entertainment destinations are fortifying their Web sites, trying to achieve what TMZ did in reverse: “Entertainment Tonight” introduced a new Web site last month. NBC Universal’s daily celebrity magazine, “Access Hollywood,” is supplying OMG! with content and is expected to introduce a new site in November.

CBS, which syndicates “Entertainment Tonight” and produces a celebrity site called TheShowBuzz, may also bolster its celebrity news offerings with its acquisition of the gossip news aggregator Dotspotter. The 10-month-old site, which trawls the Web for celebrity content and lets users add comments and criticism, was bought last week for $10 million. Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, said the technical expertise of Dotspotter’s Web developer team would be applied across the CBS sites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/bu...dia/15tmz.html





Networks Start to Offer TV on the Web
David Pogue

Music and TV were lazily paddling their canoes down Prosperity Creek when Music suddenly heard a deafening roar ahead. “Help! What’s happening?” cried Music — but it was too late. The canoe tumbled over the Internet Falls, knocking Music upside-down into the churning vortex.

TV, following at a short distance, was determined to avoid Music’s fate. “I shall go with the current and not fight it,” vowed TV. And with only seconds to spare, TV threw every shred of brainpower and muscle into avoiding its doom.

End of Chapter 1.

Now, nobody knows how that story will turn out. But everybody knows that fewer people are watching network TV with every passing year. This year, the networks have mounted their first counterattack. In addition to short mini-videos for the short-attention-span generation, they’re putting full-length free on-demand episodes online. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW are all in the game, with surprisingly pleasant results.

In general, you can catch the four or five most recent episodes of a show online, starting the morning after broadcast.

Techies, of course, have something much better. Using free BitTorrent technology, they can find and illegally download almost any episode of any recent TV show to their computers. (Just don’t get caught. Some Internet providers are starting to shut off the service of BitTorrent fans.)

You can also buy TV shows at Apple’s iTunes store, for $2 an episode without ads. But this approach, too, sticks in the craw of some networks; NBC, for example, has chafed at Apple’s terms, and its shows may disappear from iTunes in December. So what’s it like to watch TV on the networks’ Web sites?

If you have the required fast Internet connection, the picture and sound quality are excellent. It’s all on-demand, too; you can start playing the shows whenever you feel like it. (According to ABC’s research, 77 percent of online viewers are catching an episode that they missed on TV.)

There are some ads, and you can’t skip over them. Fortunately, compared with regular TV, the online ads are scarce indeed. At each break, you generally have to watch only one 30-second commercial — and there’s nothing to stop you from checking your e-mail messages or Dilbert.com while it plays.

And then there’s Joost.

Joost (“juiced,” get it?) is the latest brainchild of the two Scandinavian entrepreneurs who first rocked the record industry with Kazaa (free music for all!) and then the phone industry with Skype (free phone calls for all!). Joost gives your Mac or PC on-demand access to more than 150,000 episodes of TV shows and Web videos (free TV for all!). And last week, Joost threw open its doors; you no longer need a private invitation to download its player software from www.joost.com.

Here it is, then: your Fall 2007 Guide to Online TV, starring Joost, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

JOOST 1.0 BETA Joost is a great concept. The social-networking aspects are especially promising: you can type-chat with other viewers, send links to good shows, and so on.

In some shows, ads play before or during an episode (maximum length: 60 seconds); in others, small ads pop up in the corner of the screen something like those transparent network logos.

Joost’s video quality ranges from O.K. to blotchy. The software is beautiful, but its unlabeled controls are confusing. And Joost’s central organizing concept, “channels,” is also bewildering; although the shows play on demand, they’re also part of a lineup, and you’re often told that certain shows are “Coming Up”—although you can make your own channels, too.

Finally, there’s an awful lot of junk on Joost. Some of the shows are recognizable series from CBS, MTV, VH1, Paramount Pictures, CNN and Comedy Central, like “CSI” variations, “Kid Nation” and a lot of cartoons. But there’s also a lot of Web-video filler. The channels include Audi TV, Australian Food TV and the Circus Channel.

And then there are ones you’ve never heard of.

ABC ABC offers 17 of its most popular series online: “Dancing With the Stars,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Ugly Betty” and so on. If you have a high-powered computer, you can even watch six of them in high definition, which looks sensational.

Each show has about four ad breaks, indicated by a tick mark on the show’s scroll bar. You must watch one ad before viewing any other segment of the show. Once you’ve paid those dues, you can freely jump around in the new segment, rewind and so on. Each show is sponsored by a single national advertiser, and the ads are often interactive. (ABC shows are also available at video.aol.com.) Over all, ABC really has its online act together.

CBS This network’s offerings include a generous 22 series, including “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” some episodes of “CSI,” “How I Met Your Mother” and a couple of soaps. There’s no whole-show scroll bar, so you can’t skip to the last section without slogging through the first, second and third.

CBS is also the most liberal distributor of shows on the Internet. You can find much the same stuff on iTunes, Joost, AOL and so on.

NBC An ad or two appears at the beginning of each episode, at the end and at the regular commercial breaks in the middle.

Unfortunately, the selection isn’t great. Only 13 series await, including “The Office,” “30 Rock” and “Heroes,” although NBC says that more are coming. And you can’t shrink the NBC player’s window down and park it in a corner of your screen so you can watch while you crunch numbers, as you can with its rivals.

FOX Fox’s effort is labeled “beta,” and it shows; I ran into glitches on both Mac and Windows computers. Still, everything plays fine: the most recent three episodes each of “The Simpsons,” “24” and 13 other shows are here. Fox uses the same tick-mark scroll bar as ABC. But an ad also appears before the show, and ads appear in the browser window beside the “TV screen.”

Speaking of NBC and Fox: stay tuned for Hulu.com. When it opens later this month, it will offer full episodes from these networks and others.

Over all, it’s great to see the arrival of online TV episodes that are crisp, clear, current, legal and free. But there are three reasons this development may not make much difference in the big picture.

First, the selection is puny. Each network offers only a fraction of its list, and for a window of only a few weeks. As long as the networks refuse to offer a better-stocked catalog — and a more permanent one — the world will flock to any service that does, like BitTorrent.

Second, you can’t download shows; you can only watch them streamed in real time. You can’t save them, put them on your iPod or burn them to DVD. (There’s hope on this point, however: this month, NBC will begin testing free episodes that you can download to your laptop to watch within a week.)

Finally — and this is the big one — almost nobody wants to watch TV on a computer screen.

Oh, sure, there are various wired and wireless ways to get the computer’s image onto your TV in the living room. But they’re clumsy, expensive and, for most people, not worth the bother. After all these years of pundits assuring us that the TV and the Internet would one day merge, it still hasn’t happened.

In other words, free online episodes are a reasonable attempt by the TV networks to avoid being swamped by the Internet. But will it be enough to keep TV’s head above water? That chapter has yet to be written.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/te...ogue.html?8dpc





What to Do About Pixels of Hate
Michael Moss

ONE by one, starting a few weeks ago, 40 militant Islamist Web sites got knocked off the Internet. Gone were some of the world’s most active jihadi sites, with forums full of extremist chatter.

This disappearance mystified American counterterrorism officials. They hadn’t shut them down, they knew, so who had?

Happily claiming credit for the jihadi blackout is a Christian-Lebanese engineer named Joseph G. Shahda, who is waging a private, and passionate, war on terrorism from his home near Boston.

“These sites are very, very dangerous,” Mr. Shahda said. “And I think we should keep going after them. They are used as recruiting tools for terrorists, arousing emotions, teaching how to hate.”

Except it’s not quite that simple, when you talk to some terrorism experts. Mr. Shahda’s one-man operation highlights the tension over what to do about online jihadi militancy — a tension that has grown along with the material. Perhaps it’s better to shut it down, and try to prosecute those involved. Or maybe the material should be left up, as a way to learn something valuable in the larger battle against terrorists.

“There’s a lot to be gained by watching these sites,” said Brian Fishman, a senior associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

One thing not in dispute is the sheer volume of the material. Al Qaeda has begun issuing videotapes as often as twice a week, while insurgents in Iraq pump them out daily, and the blood-drenched images appear on several thousand militant Web sites that now include upward of 100 in English.

Public concern rose a notch last week when The New York Times reported that one of the most popular English-language sites was run by a 21-year-old Qaeda enthusiast named Samir Khan from his parents’ home in North Carolina. Mr. Khan has done so since late 2005, unchallenged by law enforcement authorities.

“Isn’t there anything this fellow can be charged with, or is he completely free to aid the global jihad from North Carolina and give interviews to The New York Times?” Robert Spencer wrote on his site, Jihad Watch.

But those who are reading Mr. Khan’s blog include officials at the Combating Terrorism Center who, since last year, have been training F.B.I. agents and analysts with the government’s joint terrorism task forces.

Center officials say Mr. Khan’s blog yielded confirmation of an important discovery: that a host of militant sheiks and scholars, dead and alive, are today far more influential than Osama bin Laden.

These men include Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a mentor of Mr. bin Laden’s who promoted global jihad with his writings until his death in 1989, and the center’s findings helped the authorities conclude that Al Qaeda is but part of a larger, and diffuse, ideological movement.

Similar efforts to monitor online jihadists are under way in cities like Berlin, where intelligence and law enforcement officials have created a new multi-agency Internet center, and New York, where the police department this summer published a report on Islamic extremism that drew from the department’s online sleuthing.

Quite apart from the intelligence value of leaving the sites up, it’s not clear what can be gained by shutting them down. Operators of the sites have proved difficult to put behind bars, although legal experts offered mixed views on Mr. Khan’s blog.

“If I were a prosecutor I would look at treason,” said Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant United States attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. While treason has a large burden of proof and such a charge has been brought only once since World War II, Mr. McCarthy said the 1996 antiterrorism law should “make it much easier for prosecutors to win cases, especially in national security.”

“I’d also want to look at criminal solicitation,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I would probably scrub the information this guy is putting out, and see if it contains what you would need to convince a jury, specific commands to commit acts of violence.”

Mr. Khan insists that he has no links to Al Qaeda or other militant groups, and is merely conveying the religious grounds for attacks against American troops, that is, defending Islam from the West.

Some European countries are pressing further with their anti-terrorism laws. The British government this summer won convictions against several Islamic men who merely possessed militant material on their computers.

But in United States, the only online terrorism case that legal experts said had gone to trial was a loss for the government. An Idaho jury in 2004 acquitted a student accused of operating a Web site to help finance and recruit members for organizations like the Palestinian group Hamas.

Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University who has written about terrorism cases, said if he were a prosecutor he would forget about Mr. Khan, based on what he read in the Times article. “Even under the material-support laws, which have been used in a number of cases since 9/11, you are going to have to show more than what is apparent in the story,” Mr. Margulies said.

“You need either a specific plan for attack, like the guys accused of plotting to attack J.F.K. airport, or show this guy is under the direction or control of a group like Al Qaeda, as a paid propagandist or shill.”

Mr. Shahda said he shared concerns about the intelligence value of jihadi sites. But the threat from the online jihadists now includes not only recruitment, he said, but also battlefield know-how. “They tell people how to build car bombs, use suicide belts, be snipers, do guerrilla warfare,” he said.

Mr. Shahda, who goes after the sites by identifying their Internet-service providers and sending those companies e-mail urging them take action, acknowledges that it’s a tough fight. He also said he worried that vigilante efforts were driving some jihadists deeper into cyberspace.

Most of the 40 sites he brought down eventually came back online by switching to new Internet providers.

While Mr. Shahda has prodded companies located as far away as Malaysia to cut their service to militant sites, his current target is closer to home. He said two influential militant sites have moved to an Internet provider based in Tampa, Fla.

“They did not respond yet,” he said, “after several e-mails.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/we...ew/21moss.html





Pirates Take Over Anti-Piracy Website

The Pirate Bay scores another victory over the music biz
Rob Mead

Software pirates have launched an astonishing smash 'n' grab raid on the music biz, stealing the domain name of one of its foremost anti-piracy bodies.

The Pirate Bay has now taken up residence at IFPI.com, a domain once owned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The Pirate Bay now says the site will promote the International Federation of Pirates Interests.

The Pirate Bay is, of course, infamous for being the world's largest BitTorrent tracker with over 630,000 torrents that comprise illegal rips of audio CDs, TV shows and movies, as well as software and video games.

IFPI vs the pirates

The domain name steal is the latest in a long line of skirmishes between The Pirate Bay and IFPI. IFPI had most recently tried - and failed - to secure confidential files from the Swedish police.

When asked to confirm how they got the domain name, Pirate Bay administrator Brokeup told TorrentFreak:

"It's not a hack. Someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it."
http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/inte...leid=605538661