Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 10th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken." – Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.


"Rap fans aren't so much tired of listening to rap as they are tired of paying for it." – Jeff Stewart


"Domestically, boxoffice was up in 2006. Internationally, it was on a tear." – Gregg Kilday


"The rates are disastrous. I'm not aware of any Internet radio service that believes they can sustain a business at the rates set by this decision." – Joe Kennedy


"We are making the first steps in reading out what the specific contents of people's thoughts are." – John-Dylan Haynes


"It’s the most useful Google fringe benefit." – Wiltse Carpenter


"Looking forward to future business together." – RIAA






































March 10th, 2007






The Last Days of Internet Radio?

A decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to raise royalty fees could put some small online radio stations out of business
Olga Kharif

Kurt Hanson runs a Chicago-based online radio station that streams more than 300 channels of classical, jazz, oldies, and other music genres aimed at adults. The station, AccuRadio, lures more than 1 million visitors a month—not bad for a startup that's only been around since 2002. If a Mar. 5 decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) takes effect, AccuRadio may not be around much longer.

The decision, due to take effect sometime during the next two months, could raise royalty fees paid by some online radio stations more than tenfold—enough to put many smaller stations out of business, Hanson says. Currently, most small Webcasters have paid royalties calculated as a percentage of revenue. Under the new rule, those outfits will begin paying on a per-song, per-listener basis. "The more intensively an individual service is used and consequently the more the rights being licensed are used, the more the service pays, and in direct proportion to the usage," according to the 115-page ruling.

Here's what the change will mean for AccuRadio. The station employs six full-time staff members and records about $500,000 in annual sales, mostly from advertising. Of that, Hanson pays record labels about $50,000 in royalty fees. The rule change, which will impose fees retroactively, will jack up royalty fees to more than $600,000 for 2006. Other Webcasters will be in the same boat. "I don't think any of the operators would break even," Hanson says. "Internet radio is in danger of becoming extinct," shouts a headline posted on the company's Web site, urging listeners to sign a petition or send a message to Congress. "The rates are so high that they exceed 100% of most Webcasters' total revenues!"

Battle Royal

Hanson and his peers aren't getting much sympathy from music labels and SoundExchange, the company that collects royalties on behalf of the recording industry and urged the royalty fee change. The last time royalties were negotiated, in 2002, "we had the same exact response: that this is terrible, it's going to put everybody out of business," says SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson. "But the industry grew." Indeed, revenue from online streaming music radio has risen to $500 million from $49 million in 2003.

But that's thanks in part to Congress, which stepped in and decreed that smaller Webcasters would pay on a per-revenue basis. Larger Webcasters such as Time Warner's AOL Radio, Yahoo!'s online station, and Clear Channel's Online Music & Radio already pay on a per-listener, per-song basis—though their rates too would rise under the most recent set of changes.

Specifically, from 2006 to 2008, Web radio music royalty rates will double to 0.14¢ every time a song is streamed to a listener. For a Webcaster playing 14 songs an hour, that will come to 2¢ per listener per hour in 2008. For radio stations with thousands or millions of listeners, those pennies add up. "The rates are disastrous," says Joe Kennedy, chief executive of Pandora, which creates custom radio streams for users. "I'm not aware of any Internet radio service that believes they can sustain a business at the rates set by this decision." The board stipulates further double-digit royalty rate increases through 2010.

Bad for Business

Even large companies such as Yahoo Music may not be able to afford the new rates, says the Digital Media Assn. (DiMA), which counts Yahoo as a member. "DiMA companies are reevaluating the viability of the Internet radio business," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of DiMA, in a statement. As a result, some Webcasters may have difficulty raising money from venture capitalists and may have to shutter their business or seek to be acquired by large companies that can absorb the losses. "The rates have come on the high end of what's been expected, and valuations will be lower," says Rags Gupta, a former Live365 Internet Radio executive who now consults for venture capitalists and digital media companies.

Bummer for the growing slice of U.S. listeners flocking to Internet radio. As much as 19% of U.S. consumers 12 and older listen to Web-based radio stations, according to a survey of 3,000 Americans released by consultancy Bridge Ratings & Research on Feb. 21. That's up from 15% a year ago and indicates some 57 million weekly listeners of Internet radio programs. More people listen to online radio than to satellite radio, high-definition radio, podcasts, or cell-phone-based radio combined.

A "Sinking Ship"?

To cope, some broadcasters are already considering moving operations overseas, out of the CRB's reach. Others are looking into playing fewer songs and expanding talk shows. Some may run more ads. Trouble is, most listeners want mainly music. And increasing the frequency of ads or raising ad rates won't work for some smaller sites, where advertisers haven't exactly been knocking down the door. "We were just getting our foothold, now we have to start all over again," says Bryan Payne, CEO of Spacial Audio, a seller of software and services for Internet broadcasters. "We are all on the same sinking ship."

Unless the CRB decision can be reversed or renegotiated on appeal. Indeed, the decision itself states that it "does not mean that some revenue-based metric could not be successfully developed as a proxy for the usage-based metric at some time in the future by the parties." Many Webcasters are counting on DiMA and larger Webcasters to renegotiate the deal. On Mar. 7, when a subcommittee of the House committee on Energy & Commerce will hold a meeting on the future of radio, DiMA is expected to offer criticism of the decision. Some Webcasters hope Congress will get involved and establish different royalty rates for small broadcasters. The now-expired Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002 stipulated that certain noncommercial Web radio stations didn't need to pay royalties at all, while other small businesses only paid a percentage of their expenses or sales.

Jeff Bachmeier, president of Minneapolis-based Web radio station Club 977, says the recording industry benefits from the existence of small Webcasters and should be willing to be a party to renegotiated terms. "I don't think the labels want Internet radio to go away," he says. After all, people often discover songs on the radio and then buy the actual recordings. A DiMA survey of 1,008 online music radio listeners and music services subscribers published in January found that nearly half are spending more than $200 per year on music, and nearly 30% are spending more than $300. Before the Internet, an average consumer only bought about $100 worth of CDs a year.

Negotiations over fees could take months, however, while the impact on the Web radio industry is expected to kick in almost immediately. "It's just sad for Internet radio because it has such high potential," says Paul Palumbo, founder of consultancy AccuStream iMedia Research. "Wranglings over copyright will limit its growth," he says. "It's going to cause confusion, concern, and pulling back."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...07_534338.htm?





Proposed Net Radio Royalties to Exceed $2.3 Billion by 2008

If newly proposed rates for Internet radio broadcast royalties are ratified, annual fees for all station owners are projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2008, more than four times that of terrestrial radio broadcasters.

A recent article from BetaNews has analyed facts and figures on royalties currently paid by terrestrial radio stations to the three major performance royalty organizations (PROs) -- ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC -- and has determined that, under the new rates proposed last week by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), Internet radio stations operating in the U.S. would have to pay $2.3 billion in performance royalties annually, compared to $550 million for the more than 14,000 terrestrial radio stations combined.

The difference in annual cost per listener for Internet vs. terrestrial radio is even more astounding. According to the same figures, terrestrial radio stations paid $1.56 per listener on average in 2006. In contrast, under the newly proposed royalties, Internet radio stations will pay $8.91 per listener for the same year, and rising to $15.59 per listener -- ten times that of terrestrial stations -- by 2008.

Internet radio stations, like ClubNetRadio, and their millions of listeners currently are making their voices heard on this issue, and you can help. Please visit our home page to read more information on how you can support us in the fight against this decision that threatens the existence of the entire U.S. Internet radio community.
http://www.clubnetradio.com/news/Pro...neral/271.html





YouTube Builds Network of Content Providers
AFP

YouTube, the video social-networking website owned by Google, is building a vast network of content providers, a company spokesman told AFP.

YouTube has concluded "more than 1,000 partnerships" with content providers both big and small, YouTube spokesman David Song said late Friday, confirming a New York Times report.

He declined to comment further on the company's strategy of constructing a huge authorized library.

YouTube has run into legal disputes with companies such as Viacom, parent of MTV and Paramount Pictures. YouTube was forced to remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom television programs in February after a promised copyright protection system was not installed on the popular website.

On Friday the British Broadcasting Corporation announced it had agreed a deal with YouTube, joining the likes of US broadcasters NBC, CBS and Fox.

The BBC said it hoped to reach YouTube's monthly audience of over 70 million viewers and generate wider interest in its programs, its own website and eventually related content on its proposed BBC iPlayer commercial download service.

The British broadcaster will put on YouTube video clips from its programs and will set up three "networks," two devoted to entertainment and one featuring news.

Other new deals YouTube announced this week include an agreement with the National Basketball Association. That deal includes the creation of a new area on the website, the NBA Channel, where fans can access original NBA content and submit their own basketball video clips as well as rate those of other people in a program called "Post Up the NBA."

Google bought YouTube in November in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070304...Ws9IVKHTlk24cA





Microsoft to Blast Google Over Copyright Policy
Daisuke Wakabayashi

Microsoft Corp. is set to launch a blistering attack on rival Google Inc. on Tuesday for what the software giant argues is the Web search leader's "cavalier" approach to copyright protection.

In prepared remarks to be delivered to the Association of American Publishers, Microsoft Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin argues that Google's move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

The Microsoft attorney's comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five major book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.

"Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs," says Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade secret law at Microsoft.

"Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop," said Rubin, noting that Microsoft takes the position of seeking the copyright owner's consent before they copy.

Competition is heating up this year between Google, the world's dominant provider of Web search services, and software giant Microsoft, which recently entered the Web search market.

At the same time, Google has recently expanded into the business software market with a set of Web-based subscription services it sees as a major revenue generator which could chip away at Microsoft's 15-year dominance of computer software.

Rubin invokes criticism that Google has faced since its acquisition late last year of YouTube, which has come under fire from several major media companies for allowing widespread copyright infringement of professionally produced video.

"In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: 'Trust us - you're protected. We'll keep the digital copies secure, we'll only show snippets, we won't harm you, we'll promote you,'" Rubin argues in his speech.

"But Google's track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best," he said.

David Drummond, Google's senior vice president for corporate development and its chief legal officer, said in response that Google works with more than 10,000 publishing partners to make books searchable online and has recently added the BBC and NBA basketball league as YouTube video partners.

"We do this by complying with international copyright laws, and the result has been more exposure and in many cases more revenue for authors, publishers and producers of content."

Rubin cites anecdotal media reports that a handful of Google sales people were caught encouraging advertisers to capitalize on the demand for pirated software on the Web.

Rubin sides with publishers in criticizing Google's ambitious plan to scan millions of published works in the world's great libraries and make them available to consumers via its Google Book Search system. He said by scanning copies of published works without first seeking copyright holders' permission, Google opens the door to massive infringement.

The attorney also says Google's defense of 'fair use' is overly broad. "Concocting a novel "fair use" theory, Google bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books," Rubin argues.

Drummond replied: "The goal of search engines, and of products like Google Book Search and YouTube, is to help users find information from content producers of every size."

The publishers' lawsuit against Google, filed in October 2005 in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York, remains in the discovery process with no trial date set.

Microsoft's move bears parallels to an attack five years ago by the Redmond, Washington-based company on so-called "open source" software, which has emerged over the past decade as the biggest alternative to Microsoft's Windows software franchise.

Microsoft argued then that open source software jeopardized property rights and threatened to undermine the software industry as it argued in favor of "shared source" software that reinforced intellectual property rights.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33131320070306





Microsoft Exploits Google's Copyright Vulnerabilities
Cynthia Brumfield

Microsoft is publicly attacking Google for what the company contends is the search giant’s “cavalier” approach to copyright issues. In an orchestrated press campaign, Microsoft has released to top news outlets copy of a speech (speech now on Microsoft’s website) to be given today by Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting.

The speech is a no-holds-barred condemnation of Google, a phenomenally successful company that sticks in Microsoft’s craw. While holding out Microsoft’s own online book search efforts, Live Search Academic and Live Search Books, as morally and legally superior, Rubin blasts Google’s Book Search. Rubin’s main criticism is that Google’s book scanning efforts rely on the fair use doctrine rather than individual deals with book publishers.

In my view, Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. In doing so, it undermines critical incentives to create.

Rubin then goes on to conflate Google’s book project with YouTube’s problems surrounding uploaded videos that contain copyrighted content (which Mike at TechDirt points out, are two completely different issues).

In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: “Trust us - you’re protected. We’ll keep the digital copies secure, we’ll only show snippets, we won’t harm you, we’ll promote you.” But Google’s track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best. Anyone who visits YouTube, which Google purchased last year, will immediately recognize that it follows a similar cavalier approach to copyright. Since YouTube’s inception, television companies, movie studios and record labels have all complained that the site knowingly tolerates piracy. In the face of YouTube’s refusal to take any effective action, copyright owners have now been forced to resort to litigation. And Google has yet to come up with a plan to restrain the massive infringements on YouTube.

Rubin sticks the knife in even deeper by throwing in yet another, completely different intellectual property issue, that of Google’s past sale of keyword searches that linked to sites which offer pirated content.

Another example is equally distressing. Microsoft was surprised to learn recently that Google employees have actively encouraged advertisers to build advertising programs around key words referring to pirated software, including pirated Microsoft software.

Microsoft is clearly flinging the dung around, but why? Rubin answers this question in part in his speech. Google has been so successful, has built such a useful search business, that practically no other company can compete. Publishers and the public think only of Google when it comes to search, although Rubin weirdly tries to spin Google’s dominance as somehow a byproduct of its disrespect for copyrights. “From the perspective of your business, Google’s approach is troubling for another reason. It assumes, in effect, that Google is the only game in town.”

However, the real motivation for Microsoft’s bald bid to tarnish Google is simply this: Google is vulnerable right now on copyright matters because of the highly publicized difficulties the company has experienced in cutting video content deals for YouTube. Even though Google’s vulnerability is more a matter of PR and not law, Microsoft sees an opening to try to weaken what had until recently been an unshakeable rival.

Although Microsoft’s attempt to exploit Google’s YouTube problems is understandable, it’s also slightly repulsive and reeks of desperation. The software titan is hoping to build itself up by tearing Google down, never a good long-term strategy for success. Microsoft might damage Google’s reputation in the short-term, but it’s highly doubtful that Google’s incredible usefulness, not to mention its solid legal footing, will slip over time.

In the meanwhile, Microsoft will still be Microsoft, still playing distant second to Google. I would argue that Microsoft has damaged its own reputation with this lambast, showing to the world how it’s willing to tear down rivals instead of building itself up. That’s just not classy.
http://www.ipdemocracy.com/archives/...bilities.p hp





Searching for Michael Jordan? Microsoft Wants a Better Way
John Markoff

Internet searching was at the forefront of the technologies that Microsoft displayed on Tuesday at an event intended to showcase the company’s research prowess.

Despite a lack of visible progress in catching up with Google, the leader in Internet search engines, Microsoft says it still believes that it will eventually turn the tables by improving the quality of its search results and by changing the way computer users search.

It is all part of an arms race for search supremacy that has engaged top researchers at both companies.

During a morning session for more than 300 visitors at the Microsoft Conference Center, Lili Cheng, a user-interface designer for the Windows Vista operating system, showed off a new service called Mix that will allow Web surfers to organize search results and easily share them.

Ms. Cheng, a Microsoft researcher trained as an architect, has moved back and forth between research and product development positions at the company. She said Mix would be released in six to nine months.

A second tool demonstrated, called Web Assistant, is intended to improve the relevance of search results and help resolve ambiguities in results that, for example, would give a user sites for both Reggie Bush and George Bush.

“This is a prototype of a browser that aims to change the way we interact with information,” said Silviu Cucerzan, one of the researchers who designed the new tool.

So far, Microsoft has failed to gain ground against the dominant search provider Google. Data released by Nielsen/NetRatings last week showed Google fielding 53.7 percent of all search queries, while Microsoft had an 8.9 percent market share. Moreover, in the past year, the number of queries Google handled has risen by 40 percent, while Microsoft’s figure increased by only 2.5 percent.

“Microsoft people are really passionate about search, and we want to compete and to win,” said Dan Liebling, a member of the Microsoft Research staff working on techniques to improve the relevance of results in Microsoft’s Live Search service.

Among other things, the results can be refined based on records of earlier searches by thousands of others and the ways those users changed search terms when they did not get the results they were seeking.

Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, has built a tool to help determine relevance called Personalized Search. It pulls together several hundred results and then compares them with the index that Windows users can build of the documents on their hard drives, a feature called Desktop Search.

She demonstrated the effectiveness of the program by searching for Michael Jordan. By culling through local information on her hard drive, the program was able to discern that she was interested in finding the Michael Jordan who is the machine-learning expert at the University of California, Berkeley, not the basketball player.

Search in the future will look nothing like today’s simple search engine interfaces, she said, adding, “If in 10 years we are still using a rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.”

Microsoft researchers are exploring other ways to exploit clues about the context of a search as well as conversational-style interfaces that will be more powerful than the way users now enter and modify search terms, Ms. Dumais said.

The sessions on Tuesday opened a three-day event, Techfest, for reporters and business partners and for up to 7,000 of the company’s 70,000 employees. The projects shown on Tuesday were mostly ones that Microsoft may turn into products within a couple of years.

About half of Microsoft’s 750 researchers from around the world have come to take part in the event, according to Richard Rashid, a former Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who founded and leads Microsoft Research.

He acknowledged that he had originally opposed the idea of Techfest when it began six years ago, but was struck by how enthusiastically it was embraced by Microsoft employees.

“We realized we were clearly tapping an underserved community,” he said. Now the company uses the event to move technology from its research division into products.

That includes monitoring which employees visit which lectures and booths and looking for patterns, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/business/07soft.html





Wikipedia Looks to Conquer Search Next
Ed Oswald

The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.

At a news conference Thursday in Tokyo, Wikipedia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said Wikia -- the commercial face of Wikipedia -- plans to take as much as five percent of the search market.


Wales criticized search leaders Yahoo and Google for keeping their search technologies under wraps and not letting users have a say in the process. He claims that the constant improvement of the technology would also give it a leg up on the increasing problem of search result spam.

The software used by Wikipedia is made available freely to other sites as long as they provide a link back to the company, and Wikia could arguably be credited with spurring the explosion of the wiki as a Web-authoring medium.

If Wales is successful, the wiki-like search project could be serving about half the search queries of Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live, which accounts for 10 percent of the search market in most surveys.

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken," Wales says on a wiki devoted to the project. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Wiki...ext/1173376387





FAA May Ditch Microsoft's Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo

FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops.
Paul McDougall

March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft's public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google's new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware.

In an interview, FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops. Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. "It's a different sort of computing strategy," he said. "It takes the desktop out of the way so you're running a very thin client. From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages."

Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition last month at a price of $50 per user, per year. It features online e-mail, calendaring, messaging, and talk applications, as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet. The launch followed Google's introduction of a similar suite aimed at consumers in August. The new Premier Edition, however, offers enhancements, including 24x7 support, aimed squarely at corporate and government environments.

Bowen said he's in talks with the aviation safety agency's main hardware supplier, Dell Computer, to determine if it could deliver Linux-based computers capable of accessing Google Apps through a non-Microsoft browser once the FAA's XP-based computers pass their shelf life. "We have discussions going on with Dell," Bowen said. "We're trying to figure out what our roadmap will be after we're no longer able to acquire Windows XP."

Bowen, however, said he has not definitely ruled out an FAA-wide upgrade to Windows Vista and related software -- if Microsoft can satisfy his concerns over compatibility with the agency's existing applications and demonstrate why such a move would make financial sense given Google Apps's low price. "We have a trip to Microsoft scheduled for later this month," said Bowen.

Like the Department of Transportation, the FAA -- technically under DOT but managed separately -- has its own moratorium in place on upgrades to Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Microsoft Office 2007. Among other things, Bowen said the FAA's copies of IBM's Lotus Notes software don't work properly on test PCs running Windows Vista.

Bowen's compatibility concerns, combined with the potential cost of upgrading the FAA's 45,000 workers to Microsoft's next-generation desktop environment, could make the moratorium permanent. "We're considering the cost to deploy [Windows Vista] in our organization. But when you consider the incompatibilities, and the fact that we haven't seen much in the way of documented business value, we felt that we needed to do a lot more study," said Bowen.

Because of Google Apps' sudden entry into the desktop productivity market, what once would have been a routine decision at the FAA to eventually upgrade to Microsoft's latest software is now firmly up in the air. With similar debates doubtless playing out at other government agencies -- and in the private sector -- Microsoft is going to have to work a lot harder than in past years convincing customers to follow its well worn path of new releases and follow-on patches.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=197800480





Calif. School District Aims 5,000 Desktops at Linux
Chris Preimesberger

A school district technology director is making wholesale changes in her employer's IT system by migrating most of 5,000 Windows desktops to a new setup based primarily on Linux-powered desktop PCs and thin clients. The change aims to reduce annual costs, offer many more applications, and use less energy.

Windsor, Calif. School District IT administrator Heather Carver is migrating most of the district's 70 servers and most of its 5,000 desktop machines from a mostly-Windows environment that is quickly becoming obsolete to a new mixed environment that includes PCs running SUSE Linux, Wyse Linux thin-client terminals, and a smattering of Mac and Windows machines.

When all the phasing-in is completed sometime next year, the district will be operating about 2,000 SUSE Linux desktops, 50 SUSE Linux servers, 2,700 Linux thin clients, and a few hundred Mac and Windows machines for special purposes, Carver said.

Additionally, she expects to save thousands of dollars each year in hardware and software costs by doing it.

"One key to all this is that we're using Citrix (as the bridge) to run Windows apps on thin-client terminals -- which the adults are most used to -- on the new SUSE Linux 10.1 servers," Carver told DesktopLinux.com. "The kids, well, they adjust to new operating systems and applications very quickly, so a changeover to Linux is no big deal."

Citrix Presentation Server enables Windows applications, hosted on remote servers, to "run" on networked thin clients (or PCs) that need not themselves be Windows machines. Using Citrix, the thin clients act as remote consoles -- the applications run on the servers, while screen contents, keyboard entry, and mouse movements traverse the network between the servers and the thin clients. In this manner, Citrix can be used to run such standard-issue Windows-based education applications as KidPix, Reading Counts, and Type to Learn from the Linux servers with no problems, Carver explains.

"It's the adults that tend to stay with what they're familiar with," added Carver. "This way, they can run their Windows apps as usual on the Linux OS, and everybody is happy."

Following Easter break in a few weeks, about half of the 3,500 students and 250 teachers will be working on Linux-based thin clients running OpenOffice.org, and most of the district's servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

At this point, Carver said, she isn't sure exactly how many actual Linux desktops will be cohabiting along with Linux thin clients and Macs. "We'll end up with 2,500 to 3,000 thin clients, and will keep some Macs in the audio-visual departments," Carver said.

The rest of the 5,000 -- between 2,000 and 2,500 -- will be Linux-driven desktops with a small number of Windows machines mixed in, she said.

One major advantage to all this consolidation is that teachers and students alike will now have the advantage of a lot more applications to choose from -- Linux or Windows -- because both will run "seamlessly" on SUSE 10.1," Carver said.

A number of the servers have already been migrated to Linux, and Carver says she's already noticing a downward change in the district's electric bill.

"Thanks to the new thin-client Linux system, we've been able to shut off 36 machines -- and we've set it up so teachers can log into their school desktops from home to grade papers and do other work," Carver said. This has encouraged teachers to work from home more often, whereas in the past they would have had to come back onto campus and work from their offices, she said.

"I think we saved about $300 on last month's power bill already," Carver said. "I've been monitoring it."

When Carver arrived last August, she saw an IT system that would have needed upgrades in hardware and software that would have totaled about $100,000. No way the district could afford that, she said.

"I was looking at spending $100 per year for 30 Microsoft Office installations, and we just weren't going to go for that," Carver said. OpenOffice.org, with its similarity to Office and free cost, has been well accepted, she added.

Even so, Carver still looked for ways to to keep some Windows machines -- mostly for the teachers' and administrators' sakes.

Carver said it cost the district about $2,500 per school to migrate to Linux, compared with the estimated $100,000 it would have cost to upgrade their Windows infrastructure.

"The uptime benefit has been tremendous," Carver added. "We wanted people using the same apps anyway -- a system can't handle five email clients, etc. We've standardized on the key applications, and people aren't having the issues (security, installation, maintenance, etc.) they used to have with Windows, so that been's a real advantage."

So far, the migration from Windows to Linux has progressed smoothly, Carver told DesktopLinux.com. Next, she hopes to start branching out with her migration setup to other school districts.

"I've been talking to Cloverdale (a neighboring town and district). It makes sense for us to share resources and help each other," Carver concluded.
http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS4958455863.html





Schools Across Japan May Switch to Linux
Shioyama

Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce the open-source operating system Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future. According to an investigation conducted in the spring of last year, there are currently over 400,000 computers at schools in Japan running on either Windows 98 or Windows Me, systems no longer supported by the software manufacturer Microsoft. The prohibitive cost of replacing these machines with newer models, as well as the rising price of proprietary software, prompted school teachers and administrators to propose the possibility of switching to open-source software as an affordable alternative. A conference held in Tokyo on March 2-3, attended by around 2000 government officials, teachers and education board members from across the country, considered the idea of reclaiming these older computers by switching from unsupported and out-of-date versions of Windows to the operating-system Linux, which can be freely downloaded from the Internet. A teacher from a high-school in Fukuoka Prefecture explained: "Having to always install the latest software is costly, and it makes things very difficult for us. From now on, I want to actively move toward the use of free open-source software" [1].

The idea of switching to Linux has become an increasingly active topic of consideration over the past few years in Japan. Starting in late 2004, a trial study conducted at a handful of schools across the country, comprising a total of roughly a thousand students, experimented with using Linux-based systems in the classroom environment. Three hundred Linux-installed computers were distributed to these schools and subsequently used in a variety of classroom activities such as science experiments, report-writing, and internet-based research. While certain issues arose in the context of these activities related to dependencies on Windows-based software such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, the project on the whole was largely successful and students are reported to have enjoyed and benefited from working in the Linux environment [2].

Last week's conference in Tokyo, organized under the title of "E-squared Evolution", included numerous demonstrations and presentations, as well as panel discussions with researchers, teachers, and administrators. The conference was organized through the Center for Educational Computing (CEC), a group under the control of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), set up to promote the use of computers at schools within Japan [3]. Software on display included KNOPPIX, a version of Linux which can boot and run entirely from a CD, without the need to install anything on a hard disk, as such making minimal demands on computer architecture. A group of Japanese university researchers and teachers have developed a variant of this minimal system specifically designed for educational institutions, entitled Knoppix Edu. At the conference, a group from one school demonstrated the operation of a robot installed with a camera and wireless LAN, as well as a cross-platform suite of tools for 3D animation (Blender), entirely operated under the minimal KNOPPIX O/S [4,5]. Other open-source systems currently in use at schools in Japan include Turbolinux, Debian Linux, and the Java Desktop System R2 [6].

Under the title of the "Open School Platform (OSP) Portal", the CEC plans to follow-up the current phase of open-source educational integration, which completes its operations this month, with a new phase in which Linux software, documentation and packages will be made freely available at the group's website. From 2008 onwards, the project aims to move into a new phase in which the goal will be to install open-source systems on existing computers currently running outdated and unsupported Windows software [4].

The move toward open-source software within Japan mirrors similar transformations ongoing within educational institutions in numerous other countries around the world. An article late last month in Linux.com reported that "Linux and open source software are receiving increased interest within the educational sector as an alternative to Microsoft Windows Vista," noting that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), among others, warned of "lock-in" risks due to Microsoft's licensing programs. In Venezuela, the government has gone so far as to make it illegal ― by issue of a Presidential Decree ― to use proprietary software in public educational institutions, giving rise to several open-source movements [7]. Meanwhile, Chinese government officials reportedly now regard the open-source community as "a key to its software industry" and plans to invest more resources in Linux-based systems [8].

It remains to be seen to what degree the current drive for open-source software within Japan will succeed in its long-term goals. However, given the increasingly stringent financial constraints imposed on educational institutions and the heavy price tag demanded by proprietary software, it seems unlikely that the inroads the open-source community has forged thus far within Japanese educational settings will be easily reversed. Further progress will ultimately depend on the level of grassroots involvement in development and promotion of the open-source option, and on the degree of pressure exerted by monopolistic proprietary software manufacturers in response to this threat to the corporate profit margin.
http://gyaku.jp/en/index.php?cmd=contentview&pid=000112





The Road to Hardware Free From Restrictions: How Hardware Vendors Can Help the Free Software Community
Justin Baugh and Ward Vandewege

Introduction

The computer hardware market is steadily evolving towards a more standardized ecosystem based on unrestricted hardware. Already, smaller vendors are realizing increased sales by ensuring that their hardware works optimally with free software and that drivers are easy to develop and maintain. Industry leaders have already been realizing these benefits in the server market, but have yet to make the same commitment for consumer hardware.

Vendors who understand this evolution will reap the benefits of leveraging the free software community. Vendors who fail to realize this will be left behind in the marketplace by more nimble competitors.

Free software drivers

One of the biggest problems facing the free software community today is the lack of free software drivers for common hardware. Significant advances have been made in providing drivers for GNU/Linux systems, either by tacit support from manufacturers or by an arduous process of reverse engineering. Two citadels of binary-only drivers still remain: wireless network interfaces and video cards. There is wide community support for free software drivers for all hardware. (The Free Drivers Petition to hardware producers currently has over 5,000 signatures.)

Almost all current wireless cards and USB devices either require binary firmware loaded by a free software driver, or require the use of Windows drivers via a free software emulation layer (Ndiswrapper). Ndiswrapper is an inefficient use of processor cycles. The binary drivers it requires are often of poor quality, which can lead to stability problems and support headaches.

Most video cards won't perform at their full potential without binary drivers, especially in 3D applications.

The usual problems with proprietary software apply. Bugs in the proprietary drivers can result in a security vulnerability in the system itself that cannot be corrected without vendor intervention. Bugs noticed by the community can take months to be fixed—if they are fixed at all. Vendors regularly ignore the concerns of users who have already purchased their product. For instance, in the specific case of the binary NVidia drivers, there have been several high-profile security vulnerabilities that remained unpatched for far too long.

Hardware that requires binary firmware with a free software wrapper simply circumvents the issue by moving all intelligence into a black box that the user cannot open. This is merely smoke and mirrors—it creates the illusion that the hardware vendor respects freedom while the concerns of the community remain marginalized.

How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could require that full low-level technical documentation be made available for the hardware that goes into their products. This documentation should be made available in an unrestricted way, as used to be common practice.
Vendors could encourage the development of free software drivers for their hardware either by writing the drivers themselves or by supporting community development efforts.
Vendors could work with the community to get these drivers included in the standard version of the kernel, Linux. Doing this makes driver maintenance and upgrades much easier for developers as well as users.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

Hardware that is well-documented and supported by free software drivers will be significantly more useful to both the members of the free software community and the wider public. A reputation for hardware free of restrictions equates to positive product reviews, a stronger brand image and increased sales. (“In the survey of 1,800 young people, released by Cone Inc. and AMP Insights, two Boston marketing companies, 89 percent said they are likely to switch from one company's brand to another if the second brand is associated with a good cause.” Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2006.11.09, Peter Panepento.)

Respecting the users' freedom is a mark of an ethical company. (Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/.)

Proprietary BIOS locks

There are a number of serious issues with the proprietary BIOSes that are shipped commonly with consumer systems from the big vendors. Two particularly glaring problems are:

The lock on the use of minipci cards in laptops

Several major vendors use code in the BIOS to lock down their machines' otherwise completely standard minipci slots so that they only accept a couple of pre-approved extension cards. This is a major problem, particularly because the pre-approved cards are often manufactured by vendors that are hostile to free software, like Broadcom.

Disabling of the hardware virtualization functionality in modern CPUs

It has been reported that some machines with CPUs supporting hardware virtualization have those features disabled in the factory BIOS. One vendor claimed that virtualization had not been tested on its product, which is why the feature was disabled. (See “Business support forums - nw8440 - VT disabled in bios”.)

It is worth noting that no OEM motherboard manufacturer implements similar restrictions.
How hardware vendors can help

The vendor should not deliberately cripple hardware through BIOS locks or DRM in the BIOS.
How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

By removing artificial restrictions, users will be free to use their hardware to its maximum potential, including the freedom to combine hardware as they see fit. To a large tech-savvy community like the free software community, this freedom makes or breaks purchasing decisions.

Free BIOS support

There is a movement underway to replace proprietary BIOSes with a free BIOS. The major community effort is behind LinuxBIOS. (See http://linuxbios.org.)
How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could support the community by providing access under a permissive license to all the low-level hardware documentation necessary to port a free BIOS to their systems, and ideally offer engineering support.

Hardware vendors could ship hardware with a free BIOS instead of a proprietary BIOS. The free software community values hardware that can be run fully with free software from the BIOS up, and is willing to pay for it.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

It is in the hardware vendors' best interest to support a free BIOS, because it offers a number of advantages over proprietary BIOSes:

Most of the code is written in C, which is much easier to maintain than assembly code.
It runs almost entirely in 32-bit protected mode.
Rather than continuing design decisions made in the 1970s, it is based on modern architecture.
Revolutionary new features are possible, like embedding an entire kernel in the ROM chip.
Boot-up time is only a couple of seconds, which is a fraction of the time an average proprietary BIOS takes.
The vendor is not dependent on one proprietary BIOS vendor for any changes and fixes to the code.
Since it is licensed under the GPL, there are no patent or per-board royalties, or licensing fees.

The “Microsoft tax”

It is nearly impossible to purchase consumer hardware without a Microsoft operating system pre-installed. The vendors that do offer such systems usually discourage their purchase by hiding them. Vendors that pre-install GNU/Linux often only list the option for select systems. In neither case do vendors commonly provide a discount, even though they save money by not including an OEM Microsoft license.

How hardware vendors can help
Vendors could offer “no operating system” as an option on all their systems, including consumer systems, and particularly laptops.
When “no operating system” is selected, vendors should reduce the price of the system by the cost of the Microsoft OEM license.
Vendors could offer some GNU/Linux distributions as an option on systems, including consumer systems, and particularly laptops. These systems should be tested for subsystem functionality like ACPI.

How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

By selling and promoting more hardware without a pre-installed operating system, or with a GNU/Linux operating system, vendors will become less dependent on Microsoft. Millions of people are already using GNU/Linux systems. The free software community will undoubtedly support vendors that sell hardware without subjecting their customers to the “Microsoft tax.” Lower costs to the vendor mean lower prices and increased sales.

Digital Restrictions Management

The free software community opposes the imposition of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). As current software implementations of DRM have proved insecure, arduous and unmanageable, this anti-consumer technology is increasingly moving into hardware. Traditionally, hardware vendors have encouraged innovative uses of new technology and media, not restricted them. This culture of innovation is what the entire computer hardware industry is based on.

How hardware vendors can help

Hardware vendors could resist pressure by the media companies to stifle this innovative culture, and actively lobby for laws that protect consumers' rights.
How will this improve the situation for the vendor?

The free software community will flock to any vendor that protects the rights of the consumer by delivering “hardware free from restrictions.” Vendors that sell equipment that is “defective by design” will see their sales and community support diminished.

By steering clear of DRM hardware, vendors would also remain free to innovate, rather than having to clear every new product with Big Media.

Conclusion

By making the recommended changes in any or all of these five areas (free software drivers, proprietary BIOS locks, free BIOS support, the “Microsoft Tax,” Digital Restrictions Management) hardware vendors will help establish a mutually beneficial relationship with the free software community. Vendors will realize increased sales, and the free software community will have hardware that meets its ethical requirements.

The Free Software Foundation is eager to assist hardware vendors interested in making the changes recommended in this paper. Vendors should not hesitate to take advantage of this largely unexplored opportunity.


Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/how_..._can_help.html





BIOS Emulation Toolkit For Windows Vista x86

Download link:
http://rapidshare.com/files/19283398/ParadoxVista.zip (Link removed. - Jack)

What's the purpose of this release?

Bypassing the product activation requirement of Microsoft Windows Vista x86.

How does it work?

Microsoft allows large hardware manufacturers (e.g. ASUS, HP, Dell) to ship their products containing a Windows Vista installation that does NOT require any kind of product activation as this might be considered an unnecessary inconvenience for the end-user.

Instead these so-called 'Royalty OEMs' are granted the right to embed certain license information into their hardware products, which can be validated by Windows Vista to make obtaining further activation information (online or by phone) obsolete.

This mechanism is commonly referred to as 'SLP 2.0' ('system-locked pre-installation 2.0') and consists of the following three key elements:

1. The OEM's hardware-embedded BIOS ACPI_SLIC information signed by Microsoft.

2. A certificate issued by Microsoft that corresponds to the specific ACPI_SLIC information.

The certificate is an XML file found on the OEM's installation/recovery media, ususally called something like 'oemname.xrm-ms'.

3. A special type of product key that corresponds to the installed edition of Windows Vista.

This key can usually be obtained from some installation script found on the OEM's installation/recovery media or directly from a pre-installed OEM system.

If all three elements match Windows Vista's licensing mechansim considers the given installation a valid system-locked pre-activated copy (that does not require any additional product activation procedures).

So the basic concept of the tool at hand is to present any given BIOS ACPI_SLIC information to Windows Vista's licensing mechanism by means of a device driver.

In combination with a matching product key and OEM certificate this allows for rendering any system practically indistinguishable from a legit pre-activated system shipped by the respective OEM.

How do I use it?

Preliminary hint:

Most operations described below require elevated privileges, so disabling UAC (Run->MSCONFIG.EXE-> Tools->Disable UAC) for the time being is recommended, Of course, it can be safely re-enabled after all steps have been performed. Otherwise OEMTOOL.EXE and some SLMGR.VBS operations must be explicitly run with adminstrative privileges.

1. Install the Windows Vista x86 edition of your choice without entering any product key during setup. Basically any Windows Vista x86 installation media will do, regardless if it's MSDN/Retail/OEM/ETC

2. Install the emulation driver.
INSERT THIS FILE INTO THE C: SO THE FILE IS IN C:.XRM-MS E.G. C:ASUS.XRM-MS" if you chose to install the default driver Run OEMTOOL.EXE, select the OEM BIOS information to emulate (ASUS might be a good choice given the fact that it's the only OEM for which a complete set of product keys is provided ) and hit the '' button.

If prompted about whether to install an unsigned driver, allow it.

(For some odd reason Microsoft didn't wanna sign this one...)

3. Reboot your machine.

4. Install the OEM certificate matching your OEM selection during driver installation by running

SLMGR.VBS -ilc .XRM-MS

(e.g. "SLMGR.VBS -ilc C:ASUS.XRM-MS" if you chose to install the default driver and extracted the certificate file to C:)

Note that this operation might take quite a while depending on your system, so be patient.

5. Install an OEM product key matching the installed edition of Windows Vista x86 by running SLMGR.VBS -ipk

(e.g. "SLMGR.VBS -ipk 6F2D7-2PCG6-YQQTB-FWK9V-932CC" if you're running Windows Vista Ultimate using the default emulation driver)

Note that this operation might take quite a while depending on your system, so be patient.

See PKEYS.TXT for a list of OEM product keys published by different OEMs.
http://www.uploadcrap.com/?subaction...from=&u cat=&





Social Networking’s Next Phase
Brad Stone

Next week Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley heavyweight, plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site, according to people close to the companies’ discussions.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

The new social networking players, which include Cisco and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.

“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”

Social networks are sprouting on the Internet these days like wild mushrooms. In the last few months, organizations as dissimilar as the Portland Trailblazers, the University of South Carolina and Nike have gotten their own social Web sites up and running, with the help of companies that specialize in building social networks. Last month, Senator Barack Obama unveiled My.BarackObama.com, a social network created for his presidential campaign by the political consulting firm Blue State Digital.

Many of these new online communities cater to niche interests. Shelfari, a Seattle-based start-up, recently began a service to let book lovers share their opinions. This week it received an investment from Amazon.com.

Mr. Andreessen’s Ning, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is fashioning itself as a one-stop shop catering to this growing interest in social networks. Anyone can visit the site and set up a community on any topic, from the television show “Battlestar Galactica” to microbrew beers. Ning users choose the features they want to include, like videos, photos, discussion forums or blogs. Their sites can appear like MySpace, YouTube or the photo sharing site Flickr — or something singular.

Those setting up Ning communities can pay $20 a month if they want the site free of text advertisements delivered by Google. They also have the option of delivering their own advertising, as CBS does on Ning-based social networks for its shows “CSI” and “The Class.”

Mr. Andreessen said that even with its two acquisitions, Cisco might be underestimating the ease of combining technologies behind Tribe.net and its earlier acquisition, Five Across.

“The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches,” he said.

Tribe.net, which developed the technology that Cisco is now acquiring, almost led this new social networking phase. In 2004, the U2 singer Bono approached the company and asked it to create a separate network for his antipoverty campaign, One.org, according to several former employees. Tribe.net, founded by Mark Pincus, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor, decided to remain focused on building a destination site, like Friendster and MySpace.

Bono went on to create the One.org network with Yahoo. Mr. Pincus left Tribe.net in 2005 but repurchased the company from lenders last summer when it was nearly out of money. Today, Tribe.net is primarily used by artists who attend the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

Executives at Cisco and Utah Street Networks, Tribe.net’s parent company, declined to comment on their deal or its terms. But people close to the discussions said Tribe.net would remain an independent site, while its underlying technology would go to Cisco.

Several former employees have left Tribe.net to start their own firms offering social network tools. Alexander Mouldovan, who had been a product manager there, started a company called Crowd Factory to design social networks for large companies. He is now building services for several telecommunications customers and says the new model makes more sense for Internet users.

“If I’m into fly-fishing, that is where I’m going to spend my energy online,” he said. “I don’t think it is easy for MySpace and Facebook to adapt and bend to the needs of individual brands.”

One challenge is getting users to join new social networks when there are few other members. For example, Google helped Nike design its soccer community site, called Joga.com, but it does not appear to have significantly attracted users.

“I think this will work for certain kinds of brands, and other brands are just barking up the wrong tree,” said Paul Martino, a former Tribe.net chief technology officer who is now the chief executive of Aggregate Knowledge, a service that taps the online behavior of other users to provide shopping advice.

Another challenge is persuading users to enter their information over and over when they join new online communities. To solve the problem, several firms are pushing a standard called OpenID, which would let users sign on and easily transfer profile information among social sites.

Marc Canter, a former Tribe.net consultant who has created his own social networking firm, People Aggregator, was an early supporter of OpenID. “Humans are migratory beasts, and we do not want to re-enter our data every time we join a new site,” he said. “Users own their data and should be able to move it around freely.”

Cisco is positioning itself for the day when mainstream consumers are spending much of their time taking part in these online communities. With the acquisition of Tribe.net, it is also trying to further its quest to become a consumer-oriented company. In the last few years, it has purchased the wireless router company Linksys and the set-top-box maker Scientific Atlanta, giving it a significant presence in many American homes.

Dan Scheinman, the mergers and acquisition chief who led the Linksys and Scientific Atlanta purchases, now runs a new division at Cisco called the Media Solutions Group, which has been responsible for the deals for Five Across and Tribe.net.

After the Five Across acquisition, Mr. Scheinman said in an interview that Americans were quickly changing their media consumption habits. He said his new group would let Cisco help its media customers, like TV networks and cable companies, develop their sites and move more of their content onto the Web.

“Part of our job is to form a relationship with media companies and deliver technologies and services to them, so consumers can consume what they want online,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/te...8&ei=5087%0 A





Media Titans Clash and Audiences Lose
Eric Pfanner

For 3.3 million cable television viewers in Britain, "Lost" has disappeared. So have several other popular American series, including "24" and "The Simpsons."

The shows vanished from cable last week when British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite television company, pulled several of its channels, including those that broadcast the U.S. series from Virgin Media, the main cable provider in Britain.

The companies ostensibly ended their relationship because of a simple disagreement over the cost of carrying the channels on cable. But analysts say that the dispute boiled over publicly because the companies are fighting a broader battle over the British pay-TV market. This has turned the likes of Homer Simpson and the castaways of "Lost" into pawns for some far more powerful media figures: On one side, Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand; on the other, the Murdochs.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is the largest shareholder in Sky, and one of his sons, James, is the chief executive. Sky, with more than eight million subscribers, has long dominated pay-TV in Britain, relegating cable to also-ran status.

Suddenly, however, Sky faces a revitalized competitor in Virgin Media, the result of a recent merger between the two main cable providers, NTL and Telewest. Branson entered the picture when the combined company bought the British operations of Virgin Mobile, giving him a stake in the cable operator, which licensed the Virgin brand name from him.

Branson, who has climbed aboard airplanes, hot-air balloons and elephants for marketing stunts that helped build Virgin Atlantic Airways into a competitor to British Airways, wasted little time in trying to raise Virgin Media's profile.

Last autumn, Branson prodded Virgin Media to explore a bid for ITV, the largest commercial broadcaster in Britain. But that effort failed when Sky instead swooped in, buying a 17.9 percent stake in ITV — enough to foil Virgin Media's efforts to add a big content-creation and over-the-air broadcast business to its portfolio.

Virgin Media cried foul, protesting that Sky's move went against the spirit of British rules on concentration of media ownership, given that News Corp.'s British assets also include several newspapers — the Sun, the Times and the News of the World. British media laws state that Sky can own up to 20 percent of ITV, as long as it does not exert undue influence, but the government announced last week that it had asked the media regulator, Ofcom, to examine the deal.

Analysts say an Ofcom investigation, regardless of the outcome, was probably a political necessity, given a perception that News Corp.'s papers have been cozy with the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. That image was strengthened by widely published photos showing Rupert Murdoch seated next to Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer and the presumptive heir to Blair, at a panel discussion during the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January.

After Sky's ITV deal, Branson accused the government of being "scared stiff" of Rupert Murdoch. Branson said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he felt no personal hostility. "I like him, actually," Branson said. "If you asked him the same question about me, you would get the same answer."

Neither Rupert nor James Murdoch has commented publicly on the dispute with Virgin Media. A spokesman for Sky said accusations that the investment in ITV would weaken media choice in Britain "don't hold up," given that the satellite broadcaster offers a range of different news channels.

"Virgin is not a victim," the spokesman said. "Virgin is trying to use regulation as a commercial tool."

The Branson-Murdoch rivalry moved out of dealmakers' suites and regulatory offices and into viewers' living rooms with the decision by Sky to withhold its channels from Virgin Media.

Several weeks ago, Sky had already antagonized Virgin Media by running advertisements warning cable viewers that they might lose access to channels like Sky One, which shows "Lost," and Sky's 24-hour news channel. Virgin said it objected to Sky's attempt to raise the fees for running the channels on cable, despite the fact that viewership has fallen. Sky maintained that the price increases were justified because it was adding new channels to the package for Virgin Media, and because of additional investments in the existing ones.

The claims and counterclaims, detailed in a flurry of newspaper advertisements and press releases last week, grew more strident as the deadline for the negotiations approached last Wednesday, with each side accusing the other of acting in bad faith. At one point, Virgin and Sky even argued over who had initiated a telephone call between James Murdoch and Steve Burch, the Virgin Media chief executive.

Behind the seemingly petty aspects of the dispute are big changes in the competitive relationship between the two companies, Virgin Media said.

"This is not just about the carriage agreement," said Neil Burkett, chief operating officer of Virgin Media. "We now have a very viable proposition under the U.K.'s most loved and best- known brand."

Cable television has suffered from a reputation for bad customer service in Britain, analysts say. Burkett said Virgin Media was taking steps to improve that, along with making investments in video on demand and improved content offerings. The company is also trying to appeal to customers by marketing a "quad play" of telecommunications and media services — television, fixed-line and mobile phone calls and broadband — in one package.

Sky has responded to that challenge by rolling out its own broadband offering. Both sides, facing a threat from free digital television beamed over the airwaves, have also announced plans to add so-called digital terrestrial services.

Both Virgin Media and Sky may have to do a bit of damage-control in the meantime, analysts say. Virgin Media tried to make light of losing the Sky channels. On its electronic program guide, it briefly replaced the slot for Sky News on Thursday morning with a listing reading, "Sky Snooze, try BBC."

But Virgin Media later bowed to pressure from a consumer group, the National Consumer Council, announcing that it would allow customers to cancel their subscriptions with no penalty because of the loss of the Sky channels.

Burkett at Virgin said that he did not expect negotiations on the Sky channels to be reopened.

For its part, Sky has said that it stands to forfeit about £60 million, or $116 million, a year from the loss of channel carriage fees from Virgin Media, as well as from reduced advertising rates, because the channels will now reach 3.3 million fewer viewers.

Sky appeared to be gambling that it would make up some of that lost revenue by appealing to Virgin Media subscribers who cannot live without "Lost."

"There's only a certain amount of premium content," said James Healey, media analyst at Ernst & Young in London. "And if you've got that, you may not be willing to play nicely with the other children in the group."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ess/uktv05.php





The Karmazin Way: Build It, Sell It, Run It, Repeat
Richard Siklos

MEL KARMAZIN could sell microwavable ice to Eskimos. He started his career in ad sales at WCBS radio in New York four decades ago, quickly proved himself to be a master closer, and has been peddling his wares ever since.

“Mel is the singular best salesman I have ever met in my life,” said Joel Hollander, the chief executive of CBS Radio, who spent much of his career working for Mr. Karmazin. “He’s very aggressive, to say the least.”

The capping moment of Mr. Karmazin’s radio career came in 1997, when he sold Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS Radio), a vast collection of stations he and partners had built, to what was then the broadcast company CBS Inc.

Though he had little experience in television, Mr. Karmazin’s hero status on Wall Street and his zeal for growth catapulted him into the chief executive’s chair at CBS after only a couple of years. A mere nine months later, he pulled off another coup and sold CBS to Viacom, on the condition that he would run the combined media conglomerate as its president.

The Karmazin rocket finally ran out of fuel in 2001, when Viacom’s chief executive and controlling shareholder, Sumner M. Redstone, lost confidence in Mr. Karmazin’s relentless focus on costs and quarter-to-quarter results, coupled with an unpardonable failure to invite the billionaire to lunch. (Mr. Redstone went a step further last year by sort of undoing the deal and splitting off a new CBS Corporation, which he also controls.)

Anyway, gazing at Mr. Karmazin’s career, you start to get the picture behind what happens when you put him in the big chair: he is forever building and selling, even when it looks like he’s buying. And so, two years after he became the chief executive of Sirius Satellite Radio, it should come as no shock that he has struck a deal to merge the company with its only direct rival, XM Satellite Radio.

Not coincidentally, if the deal goes through, he will again end up running the combined entity.

Last week, Mr. Karmazin took his campaign to win over lawmakers and regulators to Washington with his pitch that a single satellite radio company would mean more choice and lower prices for consumers — rather than create a foreboding monopoly, as his former chums in the terrestrial radio business contend.

Speaking before an antitrust task force of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Karmazin said he was shocked by the very idea that anyone would see a monopoly as the logical result of merging the only two satellite radio broadcasters. “There is no monopoly or duopoly,” he told the hearing. “That’s the most bizarre thing I have ever heard.”

Mr. Karmazin’s essential message is that satellite radio is competing with all forms of audio entertainment and information — from commercial radio to iPod jacks in cars to Internet radio and maybe even people humming as they walk down the street.

On Feb. 19, the day the merger was announced, Mr. Karmazin had a similar message for me: that it was wrong to compare his proposed deal with the merger of the direct broadcast satellite companies DirecTV and EchoStar, which regulators turned down in 2004. “The only thing that you could even think of as similar between those companies and us is that they both use satellites,” he said. By Mr. Karmazin’s reasoning, the television business has an entirely different structure.

Whether this is conviction or sophistry, it is very hard to throw Mr. Karmazin off his message, even when he seems to be contradicting himself.

Early in his tenure at CBS, for example, he was dismissive of the Internet as a business. But he quickly changed tack and did some clever deals in which the company traded ad space on its TV network to Web start-up companies for equity, which it cashed in on shrewdly during the stock market bubble a few years ago.

Similarly, the pre-Sirius Mel was a satellite-radio skeptic. He later argued that what changed his mind was the defection of Howard Stern, whose career he had nurtured, from CBS/Infinity to Sirius for an estimated $500 million pay package. Mr. Karmazin said the potential of having the controversial but popular Mr. Stern anchoring Sirius helped entice him out of a brief post-Viacom retirement to join the company.

Sirius has certainly blossomed since Mr. Karmazin came on board in November 2004: it had just under 800,000 subscribers then but has more than six million now.

After chalking up billions of dollars in losses since its inception in the early 1990s, the company will begin generating positive cash flow this year, Mr. Karmazin says, and he contends that Sirius does not need to merge with XM and its eight million customers to survive.

But the costs of acquiring and keeping customers remain daunting. And what tears him up inside, he said, is Sirius’s stock price, which, at a closing price on Friday of $3.55, is 28 percent lower than the day before he joined the company. “It’s been a great two years,” he told me. “If there weren’t a Quotron in my office, it would have been the perfect job for me.” (A key to Mr. Karmazin’s legendary salesmanship is that he can be quite funny.)

One of the messages that Mr. Karmazin brought to Washington is that a combined satellite broadcaster is better for choice — Mr. Stern and major sports leagues would ultimately be available to subscribers of both services rather than one or the other.

Among the biggest hurdles he and XM face is persuading the regulators that merging would be better for consumers than the satellite radio rivals’ long-promised and long-delayed new receivers that would allow listeners to switch from one service to the other without having to pull one receiver out of their cars and install another.

As far as price is concerned, Mr. Karmazin made it plain to the House committee that he would be willing to agree to a price cap for the combined service to seal the deal. The pitch is that raising prices isn’t really feasible anyway because most of what satellite radio is competing with out there is free — particularly on the radio.

ONCE more, this seems slightly at odds with statements that Mr. Karmazin made only a few months ago, Jonathan A. Jacoby, a Banc of America Securities analyst, wrote last week in a report. At an investor conference in December, Mr. Jacoby said, Mr. Karmazin talked up the potential for raising prices beyond the $12.95 a month most people pay now.

Clearly, Mr. Karmazin and his counterparts at XM have their work cut out for them in getting their deal past regulators. But one thing you can take to the bank is that he will do whatever it takes to get the deal done. If he does pull it off, the question will be this: What company would the master pitchman want to sell the combined XM-Sirius to next?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/bu.../04frenzy.html





F.C.C. Chief Questioning Radio Deal
Stephen LaBaton

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has privately questioned recent Congressional testimony by the architect of a proposed merger of the nation’s two satellite radio companies that subscribers would both pay the same monthly rate and receive significantly more programming.

As he sought to sell the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio to Congress, and by extension to regulators like Mr. Martin, Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius, vowed last Wednesday that prices would not be raised and that listeners would benefit enormously by getting the best programming from both companies.

But in separate conversations with two people after Mr. Karmazin’s testimony to a House committee, Mr. Martin said that subscribers may be surprised to learn they may actually have to pay more than the current monthly rate of $12.95 if, for example, they want to receive all the games of Major League Baseball (now available only on XM) as well as all the professional football games (now only on Sirius).

Mr. Karmazin, reached on Tuesday, said his testimony was not misleading and that he meant to say two things: subscribers wanting to keep their existing service would not face a price increase, and listeners who wanted the best of both services would pay less than the combined rate of $25.90.

Mr. Martin, in an interview on Tuesday, suggested that the details had not been clear from the testimony. He emphasized that he was not questioning the motives or candor of Mr. Karmazin but that there was “a need for greater clarity” over what was being proposed for fees and programming.

“The commission will need to determine the benefits to consumers of this deal, and in doing that, we will need to carefully look at what price will be frozen and what consumers will be getting for that price,” Mr. Martin said, adding that the hearing left those issues unclear. “When they talk about freezing rates and lowering rates, are they talking about it in terms of the current rate of $12.95 for each service, or are they referring to the combined rate of $25.90?”

The two people who talked to Mr. Martin — one working to get the deal done and the other a critic — said they understood his comments to reflect his skepticism about both the deal and the way it was being sold in Washington as more beneficial to consumers than it might actually be. The two did not want to be identified because they said these were private conversations.

Mr. Martin said that the proposed deal had “not even been filed with the commission yet,” and that he would carefully consider the arguments of both the supporters and the opponents before reaching a decision.

The $13 billion proposed deal cannot be completed without the permission of antitrust lawyers at the Justice Department and a majority of the five commissioners at the F.C.C.

The commission gave the two companies spectrum licenses for the satellite radio services in the 1990s on the condition that they not merge, and it would have to waive that condition for the deal to go forward.

Mr. Martin has said that the companies have a high hurdle to conquer in persuading the commission that the deal would be in the public interest.

At last week’s hearing before the antitrust task force of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Karmazin insisted that subscribers could count on a significantly greater offering of programs and no increase in prices. That juxtaposition led some lawmakers to conclude that consumers who pay the same monthly fee for one service would be getting the benefits of the other.

“This merger will give people more choice than they have before and lower prices and, very importantly, less confusion,” Mr. Karmazin testified. “Our vision of the way it works is that if you are an XM subscriber, you have the Major League Baseball, you have whatever number of channels available to you now. But what we contemplate is that we would take some other content, and again we have to work with our content partners. But the hope would be that we would get Nascar to agree to be on XM as well. We’ll get the N.F.L. to agree to be on XM as well.”

At another point in the hearing, he said, “We are saying we are not going to raise our price, and we’re going to offer the consumer something that they have not had before.”

Critics said that the companies had not been candid about their intentions to offer more services for more than $12.95.

“It’s a sleight of hand going on here,” said Gene Kimmelman, vice president for federal affairs at Consumers Union, which opposes the merger. “They highlight the price freeze for the old package. They’re leaving the consumer with the impression of a price freeze. They say you will get the best of both services. But they never tell you what the rate will be for that.

“Regardless of what Mr. Karmazin intended,” Mr. Kimmelman went on, “he has left many consumers with the impression they will receive a combined package of Sirius and XM channels for $12.95, when in reality the price will probably be much higher.”

Mr. Karmazin is scheduled to appear before a second Congressional panel on Wednesday.

In the interview on Tuesday afternoon, he said he thought he had been clear that to get the best of both XM and Sirius, consumers would have to pay more than the monthly rate of $12.95, but less than the combined rate of $25.90. Consumers who just want to stay with their existing lineup would be guaranteed the same price, he said.

“If the merger is approved there will be lower prices and more choice,” Mr. Karmazin said. “If the merger is not approved, there is no discussion on price and there is no discussion about more choices.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/bu...a/07radio.html





He Runs That Mickey Mouse Outfit
Laura M. Holson

IT wasn’t the first time John Lasseter, the director of “Toy Story” and “Cars,” had sat through the screening of a not-quite-ready animated film. But when he saw an early cut of Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” last March, he watched it with a new eye. He wasn’t just a fellow director, and a founder of Pixar Animation Studios. This time he was the boss, the chief creative officer of animation for the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to acquire Pixar two months before.

As he sat in a dark theater on the first floor of Disney’s animation studio here, something bothered him about the villain. Almost all of Pixar’s animated movies had an evil foil. In “Toy Story” Buzz Lightyear and Woody escaped a cruel neighborhood bully. In “A Bug’s Life” an ant saved his colony from a menacing grasshopper and his thuggish crew. By contrast the lanky villain in “Robinsons,” the story of an orphan who builds a time machine in order to find his mother, was neither threatening enough nor scary.

After the screening Mr. Lasseter and his colleagues from Pixar and Disney met with the director, Stephen Anderson, and told him so. For six hours.

Ten months later Mr. Lasseter was back in the screening room, watching Mr. Anderson’s new version of “Meet the Robinsons,” which is set for release on March 30. Nearly 60 percent of the original film had been cut. A diabolical sidekick had been added. And in one thrilling scene the orphan, Lewis, is chased by an oversize dinosaur. Later, when asked about the movie’s ending, Mr. Lasseter’s rubbery smile turned upside down and he pretended to cry.

“The audience is going to be sobbing,” he said, dragging his index fingers down his cheeks. “It is really going to get them.”

A Hollywood outsider whose independent shop popularized computer animation, Mr. Lasseter, 50, might seem an odd fit for a studio built on old-school cartoons and the mythology of Snow White and Cinderella. But since Pixar was acquired, Mr. Lasseter has been heralded as a latter-day Walt Disney, a cultural arbiter who can rekindle the spirit of Disney’s famous animation at its theme parks, on store shelves and in a theater near you.

Since the days of the 1928 Mickey Mouse classic “Steamboat Willie,” animation was Disney’s undisputed long suit. But after a recent decade-long parade of disappointments, most famously the 2002 bomb “Treasure Planet,” the studio was desperate for a change of fortune. It abandoned its hand-drawn tradition in favor of computer-generated fare. In the process the keepers of the Magic Kingdom lost much of their cultural cachet.

Enter Mr. Lasseter who, along with a close team of handpicked animators had made Pixar this generation’s premier storyteller with an unbroken string of hits including “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” The first filmmaker to run Disney’s animation operations since Walt Disney died in 1966, he said he wants to reclaim the studio’s golden era.

Since those early days, though, almost everything has changed. On the Disney campus, the creative culture is tattered still from years of cost-cutting and political infighting. And in the world at large audiences have moved on. The sweet wholesome tales of Mickey Mouse and friends don’t have the same relevance for a generation raised on violent video games, distracted by 500 cable channels and preoccupied with Web diversions like MySpace.

“I’m not sure it’s a trivial challenge,” said Jim Morris, a Pixar producer who is working on the forthcoming “Wall-E.” “As charismatic as John is, he can’t do everything.”

Long-time colleagues say the force that will guide the coming changes — to the studio’s offices, to the films at the multiplex, to Christmas toys and rides that can make vacationing families queasy — is Mr. Lasseter’s own unique sensibility. He gets his inspiration from real life — his own. “Cars,” which lost the animated feature prize to “Happy Feet” at last Sunday’s Oscars, was the byproduct of a cross-country road trip he took with his wife and five sons. The idea for “Toy Story 2” was hatched when his children sought to play with toys he stored in boxes. And the die-cast collectibles he had issued for “Cars” were similar to the Hot Wheels he played with growing up in Whittier, Calif., in the 1960s.

That said, his greatest test may be getting Disney’s battle-worn animators to embrace the new culture he is trying to create while at the same time churning out a movie a year. “John doesn’t really change,” said Andrew Stanton, the director of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” who is a close friend and frequent collaborator. “People change around him.”

MR. LASSETER rarely sits still. His hands dance and wave in the air in front of him as he rattles off ideas, a sometimes artful stream of consciousness that can range from the shape of a tree he saw that morning to the laws governing wheelchair ramps under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Even during a lunch interview at Disney’s studios after several days of being shuttled between hourly meetings and nightly screenings, he is alert and focused.

How then, he was asked, did he plan to restore Disney animation’s cultural prominence?

He seemed almost dumbstruck by the question. He sat mute for a moment then turned to two attentive publicists sitting close by, searching their faces for an answer.

“I don’t know what to say,” he uttered, sounding mildly annoyed. “I don’t think like that. I trust in my instincts. I’m a product of what this company has created. I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me. I also love my toys. My Hot Wheels, my G.I. Joes.”

But of course he has a plan.

Mr. Lasseter and Edwin Catmull, a Pixar founder who was named president of the combined animation groups of Disney and Pixar and who oversees operations, have designs for a new headquarters in nearby Glendale. While the building will have Silicon Valley-style comfy couches, coffee stands and open spaces for animators to gather, it won’t be a replica of Pixar’s 16-acre campus in Emeryville, Calif., where artists play afternoon badminton games and executives zip between in-house meetings on scooters. “When we came to work here, we said Pixar is Pixar, Disney is Disney,” Mr. Lasseter said. “We did not want to come here and turn it into Pixar.”

Still, the cultural shift they are devising seems more like Pixar than not. For one thing, Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull are encouraging animators to experiment more with their craft. For another, they hope to reintroduce hand-drawn movies. Simply put, the two do not want to see the art form lost. “One of the things I find distressing is that when money gets tight, the money for drawing dries up,” Mr. Catmull said. “When people draw, they are learning to see.”

Since taking over, Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull have instituted a program to revive the hand-drawn animated short. “The whole purpose is to get these artists ready for feature films,” Mr. Lasseter said.

The day after he won a Golden Globe for “Cars,” Mr. Lasseter and 13 animation executives gathered in Story Room 1 on the second floor of the studio in Burbank to hear an art direction pitch for a new short film featuring Goofy titled “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.” On one wall were nine boards with images of Goofy drawn by Disney artists between 1942 and 1948. Looking at one image, Mr. Lasseter said: “What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it. That is something to make sure you have. Do the pupils have different shapes for expression?”

“Sometimes they change size,” answered Dale Baer, an animator.

“I like it when they are a little bigger,” Mr. Lasseter said.

“I love this stuff,” he said later, reflecting on the 60-year-old Goofy drawings and the animation division’s new logo, a short scene from “Steamboat Willie.” “We want to look back and look forward at the same time. This stuff lasts forever, every single movie. ‘Dumbo’ gets me every time. That moment when, at the same time, their trunks are touching? Long after I am gone they will make audiences cry.”

Mr. Lasseter talks a lot about making audiences cry. “John will go straight to as much emotion as possible,” said Lee Unkrich, the director of the recently announced “Toy Story 3” from Pixar. “It can become sappy.”

But as much as Buzz Lightyear had Woody, Mr. Lasseter has a creative foil in Andrew Stanton, whom Mr. Unkrich described as having “a more biting way.” Mr. Unkrich said, “You never felt them slip sliding into something emotionally shallow.” (Mr. Stanton has stepped into a leadership role at Pixar now that Mr. Lasseter spends two days a week in Burbank.)

“I am, by nature, an honest person,” Mr. Lasseter said. “I wear my emotions on my sleeve. There is no ‘behind closed doors’ with me. It’s the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear. We choose to be honest and open.”

So much so that Mr. Lasseter established a “story trust” at Disney, a mirror of the “brain trust” at Pixar where directors and story editors criticize a movie’s flaws more than any filmgoer might. “They are not back-patting sessions,” Mr. Catmull said. The six-hour meeting about “Meet the Robinsons” was one such session. Mr. Anderson later called it “one of the hardest days of my life.”

Harder still for those animators who don’t adapt. Chris Sanders, a longtime Disney animator who was a director and writer of the hit “Lilo and Stitch,” had developed a movie called “American Dog,” the tale of a Hollywood dog star who gets lost in the desert. Last year Mr. Lasseter and directors from both Pixar and Disney attended two screenings of the movie and gave Mr. Sanders notes on how he might improve the story, Mr. Unkrich said. Mr. Sanders resisted the suggestions, Mr. Lasseter said. So in January he was replaced by another director.

Asked about the episode, Mr. Lasseter abruptly interrupted an interview to confer with publicists, asking “What can I say here?”

After a brief discussion Mr. Lasseter explained that Pixar often added or replaced a director if a film needed help. “Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn’t take it to the place it had to be,” he said carefully.

Mr. Sanders, who is negotiating his exit from Disney, declined to comment. “John doesn’t force his solutions on you,” said Brad Bird, who directed “The Incredibles” and is close to Mr. Lasseter. “But that doesn’t mean he is going to go quietly.”

MR. LASSETER was born in Hollywood in 1957 and raised in nearby Whittier. His mother was an art teacher and his father a parts manager at a car dealership. After graduating from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts in 1979, Mr. Lasseter became a Disney animator for five years before joining Pixar in 1986. As a youth he was a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. It remains a favorite.

In the early 2000s Disney’s theme parks were derided for being shabbily maintained, and when Mr. Lasseter joined Disney, the chief executive, Robert Iger, made him a creative adviser to the theme parks, in part to oversee the quality of Disney’s attractions.

“No jokes today,” Mr. Lasseter said as he suppressed a smile halfway through a recent 8 a.m. meeting with a design team from Walt Disney Imagineering that was showing him a prototype of the new Toy Story Mania theme park ride based on “Toy Story.” “I want to play!”

Toy Story Mania is a video-game-style attraction designed by Disney in which riders seated in moving cars earn points when they shoot targets on a 3D screen. Mr. Lasseter climbed into a makeshift seat propped up on a plywood platform and hunkered down, ready for a test run. As the design team yelled, “Go! Go! Go!,” he concentrated, his tongue darting out the side of his mouth while his finger quickly grazed the trigger.

“I got a little confused as to which color was mine,” said Mr. Lasseter as he climbed out of his seat after earning 32,500 points, 1,700 more than his opponent. When one executive suggested rewarding high scorers by having a treat like an ice cream cone or a cookie show up onscreen, he said, “I have a diabetic son, and I don’t think we want to give food as a reward.”

But what concerned him more was when he was told that an outsider had been hired to animate some of the characters on the screen, including Woody.

“Are we making the right decision to have the characters animated by another company?” he asked the game’s designer, Sue Bryan. “I’m not comfortable with these people animating the characters, especially if we are dealing with Buzz Lightyear and that clear helmet and the reflection. We want to that to be right.”

“We’ve got the groundwork laid,” she replied.

Mr. Lasseter remained firm. He instructed a Pixar colleague, Roger Gould, to talk to the outside company. “I really want to control quality,” he said. “I don’t want outsiders rendering the characters.”

Mr. Lasseter has an executive from Disney’s consumer products division, Mary Beech, assigned to work with him on merchandising ideas.In addition to toys, he wants to expand Disney’s offerings for adults. Pixar’s coming film “Ratatouille” is about a rat named Remy who lives in a French restaurant and adores good food. That gave Mr. Lasseter an idea. “We had our people over to the kitchen of Thomas Keller at the French Laundry restaurant and we camcorded him cooking ratatouille,” he told Ms. Beech when she stopped by the Burbank office recently. “Thomas Keller went nuts for Hanley china,” he said, referring to the British china maker. “That got me thinking about the high end. It’s really elegant, but slightly cartoony. Maybe we could do the same idea for china.”

“Sur La Table is talking a real soup pot and ladle,” Ms. Beech said, referring to the upscale gourmet cooking store.

“One of our favorite gifts we’ve given out at Christmas is the cheese of the month club,” Mr. Lasseter said of himself and his wife, Nancy. “What if we used ‘Ratatouille’ to do that? What if we did with Costco the cheese of the month club? We could have Remy writing about cheeses. We could have an in-store display.”

Ms. Beech smiled as two onlookers in the office laughed. Mr. Lasseter’s notions about cheese and china sounded a little un-Disney-like.

But then again, maybe not. Disney recently announced a new line of wedding gowns inspired by Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella that sell for as much $2,900. And, as every wedding-goer knows, brides want new china too.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...tures/lass.php





An Aspiring Mogul’s Quick Rise and Fall
By Sharon Waxman

The journey of Henry Winterstern is a classic Hollywood tale: of this town’s irresistible lure, the particular hunger it breeds and the hubris that so often leads to a sudden demise. But this rapid rise and fall came with some trendy hedge-fund trimmings.

A gravel-voiced, Canadian-born investor with a flair for turning around ailing companies, Mr. Winterstern arrived two years ago, aiming to remake a tiny distributor, First Look Pictures, into a full-service independent studio that would rival the likes of Lionsgate. Backed by millions from a New York hedge fund and a blue-chip Wall Street investment bank, much like a new crop of other Hollywood ventures, he wasted little time building his mini-empire. He hired some well-known executives, and put into production or bought about a dozen films, including “The Dead Girl” with Toni Collette and Giovanni Ribisi, and this year moved his bulked-up staff of 140 to baronial new offices in Century City.

By last Friday he was gone, done in by a disastrous 2006 at the box office and a taste for spending, with little cash flow to show for it.

While neither First Look Studios nor Prentice Capital Management, the hedge fund that backed him, gave a reason for Mr. Winterstern’s resignation, the studio’s board issued a statement this week thanking him for his efforts. “First Look Studios is poised to become a major independent in the marketplace,” read the statement. “Henry provided this company with a foundation on which to do that.”

Mr. Winterstern said on Wednesday that the decision to resign was his own after the board rejected his bid to buy a production company, Nu Image/Millennium Films. “There was a divergence of opinion,” he said. “I wanted to build the company and make it larger, and the board wasn’t interested in going that way.”

The 49-year-old Mr. Winterstern, who has the craggy looks and hunched-over affect of a street fighter, never claimed to have much movie experience. But convinced that distribution was the place to make money, he planned to build a studio using his talents at raising money and strategic thinking that were successful in his turnaround of the Wet Seal, a maker of clothing for teenagers, in collaboration with Prentice Capital earlier this decade.

Prentice Capital invested $70 million with Mr. Winterstern to build the studio, in tandem with a credit line of $80 million from Merrill Lynch. Mr. Winterstern merged First Look Pictures, an indie distributor, with his own Capital Entertainment Group in 2005. (He remains its largest individual shareholder.) He gave the rechristened First Look Studios a rousing mission statement, saying in part: “First Look is a maverick. We are primarily accountable to ourselves. We want an audience looking at films from First Look to know — as Howard Hawks once said — just who made the picture.”

Mr. Winterstern hired industry veterans like Ruth Vitale, the former Fine Line and Paramount Classics executive, as president of First Look Pictures, and Stuart Ford, a former Miramax executive, to run the international distribution arm. And he quickly began to spend. In addition to expanding the company to several divisions — television, international, home entertainment — Mr. Winterstern acquired the video production and distribution arm of Blockbuster, DEJ Productions, for $25 million, and the video distributor Ventura Distribution for about $20 million, along with television syndication packages from Pinnacle Entertainment. He then started making movies in order to fill the distribution pipeline.

At Sundance this year and last Mr. Winterstern was a presence, leaping into the bidding wars. “He was there when we were negotiating all night,” said Celine Rattray, a producer of “Dedication,” a romantic comedy starring Billy Crudup and Mandy Moore, which sold in January for $3.5 million to First Look and the Weinstein Company.

But Mr. Winterstern’s first movie choices didn’t register with the public. Despite some good reviews, “The Dead Girl,” about a mysterious corpse, took in a paltry $19,000. “Wassup Rockers,” about a group of skater boys, written and directed by Larry Clark (“Kids”), took in just $620,000. The box office returns didn’t deter First Look from moving into the gleaming new building that was erected as headquarters for the Creative Artists Agency. Furnished at a cost of $4 million, the headquarters are “excellent, really fantastic, but you kind of go, ‘Wait, this isn’t Paramount, where you’re expecting to do a $70 million movie,’ ” said Gavin Polone, a producer who had meetings there recently and admired the cavernous entryway and zebra-stripe woodwork.

“They’re an independent, and they’ll come back and say, ‘Make it for less.’ And we’ll say, ‘The amount less you want us to spend to make the movie is what you spent on the receptionist station,’ ” he added.

Senior executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, said the company had $50 million in losses last year. Mr. Winterstern said the loss was not nearly that high but declined to be more specific.

The final straw, according to two senior executives, came in recent weeks, when, after persuading Prentice to give First Look an $8 million short-term loan in January, it became clear that First Look would be unable to repay it in April, as expected. (Mr. Winterstern said the company would have had the cash to repay the loan, but wanted to buy Nu Image/Millennium. “I had a growth-platform vision, and that required more capital,” he said.) Last Thursday he faced the board in New York. He resigned the following day.

The sudden change at First Look has created anxiety among producers of the seven films the studio plans to release this year, including “King of California,” starring Michael Douglas as a manic-depressive who believes there’s buried treasure in the San Fernando Valley. “Obviously we’re concerned about that,” said Michael London, one of the film’s producers, who added that he had received reassuring calls from Ms. Vitale. Michael Zimmerman, the chief executive of Prentice Capital, has told the First Look staff that the company will not fold. But it remains unclear who will lead it.

Up next is an animated adult comedy, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters,” based on the cult television series. Others include “An American Crime,” starring Catherine Keener as a mother of seven who imprisons a teenager in her basement; and “Smiley Face,” a comedy by the director Gregg Araki (“Mysterious Skin”), about the misadventures of a pot-smoking actress.

Mr. Winterstern is not the only comer who has found Hollywood an easy place to enter but a hard place to survive. Philippe Martinez came to Hollywood two years ago backed by capital from London, and has had disastrous results with films like “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj,” and has sparred with producers over money. Mr. Martinez recently downsized radically, and left his Century City offices to work out of a small space in Beverly Hills.

But Mr. Winterstern’s Hollywood adventure was shorter than most. “It was so quick,” said Ms. Rattray, the producer. “He burst onto the scene — he was so aggressive, and then gone so quickly.” And First Look may not have heard the last of Mr. Winterstern. Asked about a rumor that he might attempt to reacquire the studio, the deposed mogul laughed and said, “Absolutely not.” Then he called back to say, “It’s possible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/movies/08first.html





Mutiny At Take-Two Interactive

Investors launch a coup against the publisher's board; share price rises as a result of the proposals...
Jon Wilcox

A significant proportion of investors in publisher Take-Two Interactive have today launched a 'coup' against CEO Paul Eibeler, unveiling plans to replace him with Strauss Zelnick - former President of BMG Entertainment, the publisher acquired by Take-Two in 1998 that was subsequently re-branded Rockstar Games.

The group of investors, which have a 46% stake in the publisher, has also stated their intention to review the position of Karl Winters, Take-Two's Chief Financial Officer.

The dramatic move comes just days after the publisher released its financial results for the 2006 fiscal year, part of an agreement to retain Take-Two Interactive's position on the US-based NASDAQ stock exchange. The company has been pressure in recent months, and is one of a number of publishers investigated by the US Securities & Exchange Commission for irregular stock option practices.

Speaking to the BBC, JP Morgan analyst Dean Gianoukos said that the success of the investor's plans would be "a positive for the company, assuming key development personnel are retained." According to the BBC, shares in Take-Two rose by 18% as a result of the news.

Take-Two Interactive is yet to issue a statement on the investor's plans.
http://www.totalvideogames.com/news/..._11386_0_0.htm





"Micro-Networks" to Debut
Press Release

Next New Networks today unveiled its plans to launch 101 micro-networks over the next five years to create a new kind of media company specializing in targeting vibrant communities on the Internet. The company will add one to three networks per month in the months to come, and today it announced its first slate of six networks that begin to demonstrate the breadth of the company's offerings, which range from cars to fashion to ideas/viewpoints. The company also announced that Saban Capital Group and Benchmark Capital Europe are joining in its Series A investment being led by Spark Capital, and that Jonathan Miller, former AOL chairman and CEO, will join the company's board of directors.

Each micro-network from Next New Networks is its own unique entity, hosting its shows on a distinctly branded website. New and archived shows can also be found on iTunes and YouTube, and viewers are invited to contribute, share and distribute the network content. New episodes of each three to eight minute show will be regularly scheduled either daily or weekly.

The networks at launch are:

-- Channel Frederator (www.channelfrederator.com) -- a network packaging together some of the world's coolest and funniest cartoons as sent in by the viewers and served fresh each week.

-- Fast Lane Daily (www.fastlanedaily.com) -- a network featuring the day's latest news from the showrooms and design studios of the automotive world, as well as car communities and the blogosphere.

-- PulpSecret (www.pulpsecret.com) -- the world's first network devoted to comic book news and culture, featuring The PulpSecret Report produced by David P. Levin (TV Land Confidential).

-- Threadbanger (www.threadbanger.com) -- the first network for people who create their own fashion, featuring "Thread Heads," a weekly DIY fashion show.

-- VOD Cars (www.VODCars.com) -- the #1 online car network, featuring the very best clips for the speed-obsessed community at large.

-- Veracifier (coming soon) -- a network devoted to original reporting, ideas and commentary, featuring a daily show from the blog Talking Points Memo, by Joshua Micah Marshall.

"If television reaches broad audiences, and cable reaches niche audiences, our micro-networks are the next step, reaching precisely targeted communities," said Herb Scannell, co-founder and CEO, Next New Networks. "Ultimately, we are about serving audiences."

Scannell added, "We are thrilled to have such an impressive roster of investors to round out our funding. And having Jon join the board is not only very exciting, but also a strong validation of our model."

The company's series A round led by Spark Capital now includes investments from Saban Capital Group and Benchmark Capital Europe, as well as The Pilot Group, founded by Robert Pittman, former COO of AOL TimeWarner and CEO of MTV Networks, and About Change Ventures, founded by Christiane zu Salm, founder of the German interactive TV channel 9Live.

Jonathan Miller, who joins the Next New Network's board of directors, was responsible for setting the strategy and overseeing the businesses and operations of AOL, the world's leading interactive services company. Prior to AOL, Miller was president and CEO of USA Information and Services (USAIS). His experience also includes senior-level positions with USA Electronic Commerce Solutions, USA Broadcasting, Nickelodeon and the Paramount Comedy Channel in London.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/03/08/2401967.htm






Senators: Not so Fast on Broadcast Treaty
Eric Bangeman

For almost two years, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been hard at work drafting a broadcast treaty. Designed originally to limit signal theft from broadcasts, the scope of the treaty has at times narrowed and widened significantly throughout the process of drafting the treaty. The US Senate, which is tasked with the responsibility of approving treaties, has weighed in the Broadcast Treaty, encouraging the US delegation to work towards limiting the scope of the treaty.

Tech community split over WIPO broadcast treaty

In a letter sent to the Register of Copyrights and the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking Republican member of the Committee expressed their concerns about the scope of the treaty. "The Revised Draft Broadcasting Treaty appears to grant broadcasters extensive new, exclusive rights in their transmissions for a term of at least 20 years, regardless of whether they have a right in the content they are transmitting," read the letter.

The Copyright Register and Director of the USPTO make up the US delegation to the WIPO, and the senators want them to work towards a treaty that is "significantly narrower in scope," one that would provide no more protection than that necessary to protect the signals of broadcasters. Sens. Leahy and Specter want them to advocate for the position when the next meeting of the Standing Committee in June.

The WIPO Broadcast Treaty is a complex beast. Originally, the treaty was just meant to cover signal theft—cases where a broadcast is retransmitted without authorization. As treaty discussions continued, broadcasters began pushing towards a rights-based approach, one that would allow them to specifically authorize and deny the use of their signal to others. Over the months of discussions, the treaty has changed many times, but there have been some consistent areas of concern.

One of those is public domain material, which could potentially be locked up by broadcasters just by showing it. By doing so, they could gain exclusive rights over the content. At one point, the treaty contained no provision for fair use—another significant problem with the treaty. In the US, one of the biggest concerns is that the Broadcast Treaty would be unconstitutional, as IP rights in the US are restricted to creative works and not extended to broadcasters.

Last October, the WIPO dropped the rights-based approach for the time being. With Sens. Leahy and Specter expressing their concern with the treaty—saying that it "would needlessly create a new layer of rights that would disrupt United States copyright law"—it appears that the rights-based approach is truly dead.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...st-treaty.html





For Obscure DVDs, a Precarious Future
Bryan Reesman

AMONG the glories of the rising tide of DVD sales was the wave of discs that revived lost or overlooked works by filmmakers like David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Dario Argento, Jess Franco and Takashi Miike. Now some of the companies that brought those movies into homes are getting pulled under and may take future releases down with them.

The Digital Entertainment Group, a nonprofit trade consortium, reported for the first time in 2006 that overall DVD shipments were stuck at about 1.65 billion units, roughly the same as 2005, after years of rapid growth. According to the weekly DVD Release Report, combined DVD releases dropped to 12,887 in 2006 from 13,712 in 2005.

In effect the video market is glutted. For big studios that means more jousting over future formats that may restart sales. But for specialty companies that have traded otherwise unavailable horror, action, art-house and exploitation titles, the glut has meant a struggle to survive.

“I started in this business in 1992, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen the market,” said Don May Jr., president of Synapse Films, which has released “Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” and the controversial Leni Riefenstahl documentary “Triumph of the Will.” “We’re all drowning in a sea of DVDs. Five or six years ago maybe a hundred titles a week would come out. Now we’re fighting 200 or 300 titles every Tuesday.”

With the demise of Tower Records and various Musicland companies — including Sam Goody and Media Play — many smaller home video companies are feeling financially squeezed, as a result both of fewer outlets and of income owed from chain-store bankruptcies.

“Losing Tower Records and Musicland was a big blow,” said Norman Hill, founder of Subversive Cinema, home to cult titles like “Eraserhead” and the Jamaican documentary featuring Bob Marley, “Land of Look Behind.” “What I’m missing the most right now, even as a consumer, is being able to walk into a retail store and have a breadth of choice. When a major studio cannot get their catalog titles into the retail chains anymore, the independents are having an even worse time.”

Mass retailers like Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Target have limited shelf space, and Best Buy has become less diverse in its stock.

“The big-box stores are ruthless about returning if they don’t turn over enough,” said Gary Baddeley, president of the controversial, documentary-driven Disinformation Company, which has released “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.” “The DVD business is a returnable one. A sale is not always a sale.”

As independent retailers dwindle, larger chains focused more on mainstream titles seem to “control and set the arbitrary taste for the entire market,” said Matt Kennedy, former president of Panik House Entertainment, which specializes in international genre movies like “The Curse of the Crying Woman” and “The Pinky Violence Collection.” “Not getting a title into one of these stores can be the death of a small label, but so can getting one in. If you get an order for 40,000 titles and only sell 4,000 because it was left boxed in the back, misfiled by category or never entered into inventory, it can mean bankruptcy.”

The industry’s push toward new formats is also potentially problematic for the smaller players. The quality of mass-market digital downloads is debatable, and the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, which require substantial investment in new equipment, are already taking up shelf space that might have gone to specialty titles.

“I think high-definition is turning out to be the laser disc of the video business today,” said Bill Lustig, the director of “Maniac” and owner of Blue Underground, an eclectic company with titles including “My Brilliant Career” and “Tombs of the Blind Dead.” “It’s taking up a very, very small percentage of the market, and I don’t know if we will see it grow. Most people are happy with their standard-def DVDs and don’t want to replace their movies.”

The suppliers are trying to address the downward sales trend through different means: MPI through acquiring television and theatrical rights for DVD titles; Starz Home Entertainment (formerly Anchor Bay Entertainment) by expanding into nontraditional retail outlets like Kohl’s; Viz Media by taking its anime business into download-to-own with “Death Note”; and Allumination FilmWorks by branching into family and animation titles.

“You have to market more, advertise more and make customers aware of the alternatives to traditional retail,” said Greg Newman, vice president for acquisitions and development of MPI Media Group, which specializes in classic television on DVD, documentaries, music titles and horror films. MPI’s increasing online sales have become an important revenue stream, but as more money is spent on consumer awareness, less will be allocated to catalog acquisitions, and future selections “are going to be as safe as possible,” he said.

Lisa Nishimura-Seese, general manager of Palm Pictures, noted that the contraction and expansion in the independent world is cyclical and cited the importance of “mom and pop” outlets with personalized service that feed a growing interest in independent film. Regional chains like Newbury Comics and Hastings are also supportive of indie companies.

On the mass retail level Target, a sponsor of IFC’s “Cinema Red” programming block on Monday nights, now features an eclectic “IFC Indies” section that spotlights 48 movies a month. Evan Shapiro, general manager and executive vice president of IFC TV, said sales of Target’s existing indie titles have increased substantially as a result of the IFC-selected section, which was also helping smaller distributors like New Video and Genius Products break into the chain.

Most of February’s “IFC Indies,” however, came from major studios or high-profile independents with major distributors. Small indies cannot afford premium store placement and other distribution costs the way larger companies can.

Even for successful independent companies, “where you send consumers has become trickier,” said Dan Gurlitz, vice president for video of Koch Entertainment Distribution, purveyors of foreign and art-house films and British television. Book retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble are selling DVDs, he noted, while Internet shopping and mail order are still strong revenue-generators for many categories. But many consumers have yet to make the leap to regular online shopping, and the vital, serendipitous “impulse buy,” which has traditionally stimulated DVD sales, is less likely in an overcrowded virtual arena.

“If you’re a retailer and carry 100 titles, you’re still going to get 80 percent of your sales from 20 of those titles,” said Jay Douglas, a vice president at Ryko Filmworks, which distributes numerous indie labels including No Shame Films, Heretic Films, Severin Films, Discotek Media, Mondo Macabro and Grindhouse Releasing. “If you carry 10,000 titles, the 80/20 rule will still apply. The question is whether you want to devote that space to entertainment software or to something else?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/mo...eo/04rees.html





Burning for you

Download DVD Specification Gets Approval
Martyn Williams

A technology that allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs using the same content-protection system as commercial discs received official approval on Thursday.

CSS Managed Recording was approved at a meeting of the DVD Forum in Tokyo, according to a source close to the forum.

The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players, according to the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), which proposed the technology. The DVD CCA is responsible for licensing the CSS (Content Scrambling System) copy-protection system used on most commercial DVDs.

Despite Thursday's approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.

Such a system might offer commercial movies but could just as easily offer content that is unavailable on DVD today because the market for it is too small. With custom burning it could be profitable to offer such content.

If such professional applications are successful then further services that allow consumers to download and burn in their home "are likely to follow," the DVD CCA said.

The DVD Forum could not be reached for comment.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2007...IWn5XFSZEjtBAF





The Larynxes That Invaded Broadway
Andrew Adam Newman

CHRISTINE PEDI is describing Debbie, the 15-year-old she plays in the revival of Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio.” “She’s kind of scrawny, wears tank tops and too much eye makeup, and thinks she’s grown up,” Ms. Pedi explains in an interview. “She is too fond of Doritos. She’s calling from her pink bedroom, where she has stashed all her teen stuff — her cigarettes and birth control.”

The play’s set designer and prop master have not worried about any of those details, however, because Debbie is never seen. She is one of the play’s 30 callers, brought to life by Ms. Pedi and four other voice performers.

In their line of work, Broadway roles don’t come up every day, and for them “Talk Radio” feels like validation: the best voice-over actors can, with just a line or two of dialogue, make you see characters you can only hear, and juggle a range of accents more diverse than a Benetton catalog.

Though “Talk Radio,” which opens March 11 at the Longacre Theater, focuses on the shock-jock Barry Champlain (played by Liev Schreiber and originated Off Broadway by Mr. Bogosian), the callers “really are the heart and soul of the play,” said Robert Falls, the revival’s director, adding, “The play is about voices in the night.”

While the actors auditioned, Mr. Falls shut his eyes. Later he grilled them about what room in the house they were calling from and what it looked like. The mental images were useful for the actors too.

“I have a full biography of all my characters,” said Cornell Womack, who plays, among other callers, a Hispanic cat lover and an elderly African-American man. He added: “These characters have real needs, and these calls come out of real places and real experiences. They’re not caricatures. They’re not just funny voices.”

If you missed Mr. Womack in his small part in “On Golden Pond” on Broadway last year, or in his recurring role on the FX Network’s “Rescue Me,” you may have heard him in commercials for Hennessy V.S. Cognac or for the candy Creme Savers. (“I have the voice of a sucker,” he said, laughing.)

Ms. Pedi has appeared in “Forbidden Broadway” and does not always pretend to be on radio: She is a host of shows about Broadway on Sirius Satellite Radio. But like Mr. Womack she has a résumé of voice-overs, including a shared credit with another “Talk Radio” voice actor, Adam Sietz: In a recent commercial for Silk Soymilk, the two played talking cattle.

Mr. Sietz meanwhile can be heard in ads for Nestea, saying, “Ahhh.” He has recorded characters for video games and last year won Gamespy.com’s best character award for Khelgar Ironfist in Neverwinter Nights 2. Mr. Sietz also had a small role in last year’s revival of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.”

In “Talk Radio” his sole onstage appearance (the others have small onstage roles too) comes when the curtain rises. He is Sid Greenberg, the tax-adviser host of a show right before Barry Champlain’s. When the tax show ends, Mr. Sietz switches from a bellowing announcer voice to a conversational voice, as if he were speaking through a bullhorn that was suddenly switched off.

After his exit Mr. Sietz dashes to one of three soundproof booths — built directly under the stage in the basement of the Longacre — to play Mr. Schreiber’s first caller, a transvestite. Shrugging his shoulders and tilting his head in character, Mr. Sietz said, “He sounds a little like Harvey Fierstein,” sounding — equal parts gravel and honey — a little like Harvey Fierstein.

Audio acting has changed over the years. Harlan Hogan, author of “V.O.: Tales and Techniques of a Voice-Over Actor,” has delivered familiar lines like “Raid kills bugs fast, kills bugs dead,” “It’s the cereal even Mikey likes” and that Head and Shoulders chestnut, “Because that little itch should be telling you something.” When he started out in the early 1970s, “everyone had gigantic voices,” he recalled, adding: “I was only 25 years old. It scared the dickens out of me.” Today the most sought-after voices are not necessarily the most sonorous, but rather those that sound familiar and authentic. “It’s less sell, more tell,” he said.

What begins as side work for extra money can turn into a lucrative career, said Johnna Gottlieb, a former voice agent who now works as a consultant and teaches a voice-over class at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. “You can make $10,000 a year doing it, but there are people who make several million,” she said. “I’ve had clients do so well in voice-overs that they started turning down theater roles.”

Barbara Rosenblat has made a specialty of a kind of voice work that approximates acting. Ms. Rosenblat, whose characters in “Talk Radio” include an older Russian woman obsessed with people who don’t pick up after their “doggies,” is among the audio book industry’s most highly regarded narrators. Noting her knack for accents, the magazine AudioFile said Ms. Rosenblat “is to audiobooks what Meryl Streep is to movies.”

But while Ms. Streep nails one accent per performance, Ms. Rosenblat juggles many in a single page of a novel. “I remember one instance when Barbara was performing speakers from Thailand, Japan and China in a conversation, and she was able to make it very clear who was speaking,” said Claudia Howard, executive producer of the publisher Recorded Books.

Ms. Rosenblat last appeared on Broadway in “The Secret Garden.” That was in 1993. When she read about plans for a “Talk Radio” revival, Ms. Rosenblat hurried to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and parked herself in front of a monitor to watch a videotape of the original 1987 production. She was not watching quite so discriminatingly as she was listening. Then she had to get reacquainted with playing well with others.

“You are interacting with someone else,” Ms. Rosenblat said. “You don’t have the same level of control. We are all cogs in a larger wheel.”

One of those cogs is Marc Thompson, whose callers include a disabled man speaking almost exclusively in clichés like “When they give you lemons, make lemonade.” A married father of two, he was a minister for the New York City Church of Christ when he was laid off two years ago. The future appeared bleak. “I looked at selling life insurance,” he said.

Instead Mr. Thompson, who holds an acting degree from New York University, started going on auditions. He had been doing voice-over work on the side while preaching and soon found jobs on MTV’s “Daria” and the Cartoon Network’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” He may be most familiar for the Citibank identity theft commercial where two elderly women sitting on a sofa drinking tea have dubbed-in biker-dude voices. “I’m Thelma, the lady on the left,” he said.

When he received a callback for “Talk Radio,” he was elated, especially because he has limited stage experience. But then he realized he would probably have to reject any offer: the play is peppered with profanity, and Mr. Thompson, who still preaches on occasion, does not curse.

It turned out there were enough callers with mild language that he was cast anyway. “When they told me, I cried,” said Mr. Thompson, who, inevitably enough, ended up playing an evangelical Christian caller. “They’ve been really understanding and gracious. Two years ago I had nowhere to go. I feel blessed, and I think it’s a miracle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/theater/04newm.html





Voice of the Many, but Rarely Herself
Frank J. Prial

The role of Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Prof. Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady,” requires an actress capable of expressing hauteur, exasperation and motherly concern, sometimes all at once. What it does not require is a singing voice, as it is among that classic musical’s few roles without a song.

So who has been cast in the New York Philharmonic’s concert-style revival at Lincoln Center this week?

None other than Marni Nixon, perhaps the most famous singing-voice-without-a-face in the history of motion pictures.

“I’d love to have a song in the show,” Ms. Nixon said during an interview in her West End Avenue apartment in New York. “I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’s Lament?’ But it isn’t going to happen, of course.”

Among her unseen roles were the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in “The King and I,” Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Margaret O’Brien in “The Secret Garden” — as well as, most famously, Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning screen version of “My Fair Lady.”

Most recently, in 1998, she was the animated Grandmother Fa in Disney’s “Mulan.”

For her part, Ms. Nixon, 77, said she understood perfectly why the studio moguls chose to place famous faces in the starring roles and relegate her to the shadows.

“Hollywood wanted recognizable stars,” Ms. Nixon said. “And the fact that a lot of the stars couldn’t sing was only a minor inconvenience to the big producers.”

Her first dubbing job was for Miss O’Brien in “The Secret Garden” (1949). Miss O’Brien, 12 at the time, was one of Hollywood’s top child stars. Ms. Nixon was 19.

Her first major job, she said, was singing the role of Anna in “The King and I” (1956). “Deborah was tough to work with, but she was a complete professional,” Ms. Nixon said of Miss Kerr. “We worked on phrasing, we worked on interpretation, everything. It’s hard to believe now, but each number took a week.”

A dubber, Ms. Nixon explained, doesn’t simply substitute her voice for the actress’s voice. “The important thing is to sound as the actress would sound if she were doing the actual singing,” she said.

It being Hollywood, of course, sometimes the jobs verged on the ludicrous. Her work with Marilyn Monroe, for instance, in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), consisted of just one phrase in one song — perhaps the musical’s most famous, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The phrase: “These rocks don’t lose their shape.”

If the studio bosses had had their way, Ms. Nixon said, she would have done more. “Actually, the studio wanted her entire voice dubbed,” she said. “They thought her voice was silly. I thought her voice suited her persona beautifully.”

In 1964, when Ms. Nixon was tapped to sing Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor’s screen version of “My Fair Lady,” one of her chief concerns was how the choice would sit with Julie Andrews, who had had great success with the role onstage but was passed over by Hollywood for the established star: Hepburn.

“I did the job,” Ms. Nixon said, “but I felt uneasy,” especially when she and Ms. Andrews later worked together in “The Sound of Music.”

The story is now part of Hollywood lore: Ms. Andrews came out ahead by starring in Disney’s “Mary Poppins” and winning the Oscar for best actress in the same year that “My Fair Lady” was released.

Ms. Andrews seemed to harbor no grudges, Ms. Nixon said. When the two appeared in “The Sound of Music,” she said, Ms. Andrews made a point of seeking her out, shaking her hand and saying, “I like your work.” (Ms. Nixon played one of the nuns.)

When Ms. Nixon was cast as Eliza in a City Center revival of “My Fair Lady,” Ms. Andrews helped her overcome anxiety about handling the role.

Ms. Nixon received a modest reward for her highly praised dubbing work: stepping in front of the camera before millions of people as a presenter at the 1969 Academy Awards. The category? Best musical score.

Perhaps naturally, not all the people whose voices she dubbed were happy about it. When filming “West Side Story,” Wood refused to cooperate, and Ms. Nixon worked by herself on the musical numbers. It was not entirely Wood’s fault; the studio bosses were keeping her in the dark about Ms. Nixon’s true role.

“She thought I was there for backup and that she would be doing the entire picture,” Ms. Nixon said. “In fact, they didn’t like her singing, and, without telling her, proceeded to use my voice.”

And when Wood found out? “Well, she was enraged,” Ms. Nixon said.

Ms. Nixon will be surrounded by a high-wattage cast at this week’s Philharmonic staging of “My Fair Lady,” including Kelsey Grammer as Henry Higgins, Kelli O’Hara as Eliza Doolittle, Brian Dennehy as Alfred P. Doolittle and Charles Kimbrough as Col. Hugh Pickering. There will be four performances in Avery Fisher Hall, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Born in 1930 into a musical family in Southern California, Ms. Nixon started learning the violin at 4. Soon she had a singing act with her sisters. But young Marni had bigger plans. As a child she was an extra in dozens of films. As a teenager she joined the Roger Wagner Chorale (in which her best pal was another teenager, Marilyn Horne) and began to sing in local concerts. She won enough parts to make her solo debut at 17, in “Carmina Burana,” under Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though the dubbing work has drifted away, Ms. Nixon said, she keeps busy. “I still do a lot of singing,” she said. “The idea is to choose the things that are possible for me to do well and to be useful to the play at the same time. It’s just too bad people know how old I am because my voice sounds like I’m much younger.”

She was in the Broadway musical “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ ” with Christopher Walken, in 1999, and she has put together a one-woman show about herself, titled “The Voice of Hollywood.”

She describes her show as a stroll down memory lane. “I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life,” she said. “People always love to ask me questions. And why not? I’ve had a really fantastic life, I think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/theater/06marni.html





At Night, Farmer Trades His Tractor for the Blues
Erik Eckholm

Thursday is known as “family night” at Po’ Monkey’s juke joint here, but that doesn’t mean you should bring your kids to this patched-up sharecropper shack that has swayed with rhythms and blues for nearly 50 years.

The distinction here is with Monday, the only other night that Po’ Monkey né Willie Seaberry, 65 and a farmworker by day, opens his little club. On Mondays, the strippers make the two-hour drive from Memphis to work a raunchier crowd for tips.

Not that some Thursday patrons, mostly black men and women, middle-age and up, aren’t above a little dirty dancing themselves, although fully clothed. The D.J. stretches his definition of the blues, playing modern R&B that has every bottom shaking.

If there is a floor show on Thursdays at this club, one of the last old-style juke joints, the kind where the Delta blues once incubated, it is offered by Mr. Seaberry himself.

Around 9 p.m., as patrons begin to fill a room decorated with toy monkeys, beer posters and a silver disco ball, Mr. Seaberry emerges in a startling suit of red with white pinstripes and a snazzy white hat, and smoking a cheroot.

He works the crowd, which includes retired teachers, current and former farmworkers and a sheriff from Greenville, as he ferries $2 cans of beer.

An irrepressibly smiley man with a trimmed moustache, Mr. Seaberry grew up in a nearby shack, at the tail of the era when mechanization of cotton farming and the lure of Chicago depopulated the region.

But he has never let poverty stop him from strutting.

Later, he disappears to his bedroom at the back and re-emerges, now wearing a white suit; soon, he changes into a plaid suit with a red derby, and still later into dark pink.

“If I don’t get out there acting like a clown, people think there’s something wrong with me,” Mr. Seaberry explained. He said he owned more than 100 suits.

“A lot of folks wanted to get out, listen to the blues and fight and shoot,” he said of the onetime proliferation of such clubs, adding that his own has never seen much violence.

For much of the last century, juke joints were the main nightspots for rural blacks. Now, with the casinos of Greenville a half-hour away and younger blacks into hip-hop, Mr. Seaberry does not open his club on weekends.

The word “juke” is believed to be derived from the African-influenced Gullah dialect of the Southeast coast, in which “jook” means “disorderly” or “wicked.” In 1934, the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “Jook is a word for a Negro pleasure house,” often a “bawdy house” where black workers “dance, drink and gamble.”

In the Delta of northwest Mississippi, an alluvial plain where cotton and sharecropping long ruled, juke joints were condemned by preachers as the houses of the devil, but they offered welcome relief from drudgery. Touring these clubs in the early 20th century, men like Charlie Patton, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson pioneered the blues as an art form.

Just when did Mr. Seaberry start the club? His own memories can be vague.

“I don’t know exactly to a T,” he said. “Maybe 40 or 50 years ago.”

And what is the source of the name?

“Po’ Monkey is all anybody ever called me since I was little,” he said. “I don’t know why, except I was poor for sure.”

He doesn’t recall any blues stars ever playing at his club, which has live music on special occasions. The place doesn’t make much, he said — guests pay $5 to enter and can buy beer or bring their own liquor and buy mixers. The pool table costs 75 cents a game.

“I was going to get married once, even got a license,” he said, “but we started getting into it, and the preacher never did register that license.”

He has farmed all his life. Now, on the adjacent corporate farm, he spends these days in overalls on a tractor, preparing fields for soybean planting.

Alfred Kemp, 67, who was helping serve drinks, said, “I grew up here with Willie, chopping and picking cotton.” He thinks the club opened around 1961.

“When I was a boy, there was a juke joint every five miles,” he said. “Now this is the only one around.”

In earlier, tenser days, the local white people seldom ventured to Po’ Monkey’s, but in the last decade some have started dropping in.

Blues fans from Japan and Europe have also found their way down the unmarked gravel track off Highway 61, seeking an authentic juke joint experience as they tour Delta landmarks. But on the music front they may be disappointed. Although Mr. Seaberry said, “I love all music as long as it’s the blues,” the line drawn in his club is at hip-hop culture. Hand-lettered signs say “No Rap Music, Just Blues,” and ban baggy, falling-down pants.

The other night, the 38-year-old D.J. spun nary a B. B. King song, let alone the earlier blues that grew out of gospel, field chants and brilliant guitar innovations.

“Let’s hear some oldies,” the D.J. announced as he put on a Bobby Bland song from the 1960s and then a revved-up version of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” a 1970s hit.

“No one really wants to hear the old blues any more,” Mr. Kemp, Po’ Monkey’s boyhood friend, said.

But he added, “For almost 50 years, we’ve been having a good time here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/us...9&ei=508 7%0A





Hardware-Based Rootkit Detection Proven Unreliable
Ryan Naraine

For years, we've been convinced by companies like Komoku and BBN Technologies that hardware-based RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to sniff out the presence of a sophisticated rootkit on a compromised machine.

Not so fast, says Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher at COSEINC Malware Labs.

Rutkowska, an elite hacker who specializes in offensive rootkit research, has found several ways to manipulate the results given to hardware-based solutions (PCI cards or FireWire bus).

At this year's Black Hat DC conference, Rutkowska demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU.

Rutkowska's research, though purely theoretical, underscores the need for multiple solutions (hardware and software) to work in tandem during forensics. It also highlights just how scary the threat from sophisticated rootkits can be. If, as Rutkowska proved, forensic examiners cannot rely on images collected from RAM, then it's basically game over.

Jamie Butler, a rootkit guru who works with software- and hardware-based anti-rootkit tools, said he was "very impressed" with Rutkowska's presentation. "We already know that software isn't reliable and now we know that you really can't trust the hardware either. You really need to combine both and, even then, you just never know," Butler said.

"I really don't want to meet the attacker who is at that level," he said. "That is scary stuff," Butler said, referring to the techniques used during Rutkowska's presentation.

In three different scenarios, Rutkowska showed how an attacker can crash a machine during memory acquisition. In this case, it would be a denial-of-service against the forensics examiner looking to find traces of malware on a hijacked machine.

She also described a "covering attack" where the malware is programmed to present garbage data to the hardware trying to read physical memory.

A third scenario is what Rutkowska described as a "full replacing attack" where the malware author not only hides malicious code from the memory acquisition tool but actually provides arbitrary/fake content to the examiner.

The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said.

Rutkowska suggests that hardware vendors come up with a special "auditing" interface dedicated only to memory acquisition.

"I'm thinking about motherboard manufacturers adding a special port which would allow for *direct* (this time really "direct") access to RAM and potentially some other critical resources like e.g. CPU system registers and maybe even caches," she said.

Here are the slides from Rutkowska's presentation (PDF).
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=109





EMI Rejects Warner Music's $4.1 Billion Bid

Britain's EMI Group has rejected a 2.1-billion-pound ($4.1 billion) cash takeover proposal from Warner Music Group, saying on Friday that accepting such a deal would not be good for its shareholders.

"The board concluded that it is not in the best interests of EMI shareholders to entertain a preconditional offer which would entail prolonged regulatory uncertainty and unacceptable operational risk at a critical time for the company," EMI said in a statement.

The world's third-largest music company and home to Robbie Williams and Coldplay, EMI said it held a board meeting on Friday after receiving a nonbinding proposal from Warner, which indicated that it might be prepared to make a bid at 260 pence per share.

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, with artists ranging from Madonna to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, approached EMI about a possible bid at the end of January, despite uncertainty over whether it would win European regulatory approval.

Warner declined to comment.

EMI had said it would consider any bid, in terms of the price offered and whether it would be approved by European regulators.

Shares of EMI, which issued a profit warning in February, rose by as much as 8 percent after it rejected the proposal. The shares closed 4.45 percent higher at 246 pence ($4.82).
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6163844.html





RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online
NewYorkCountryLawyer

"The online community now has an opportunity to see the fruits of its labor. Back in December, the Slashdot ('What Questions Would You Ask an RIAA Expert?') and Groklaw ('Another Lawyer Would Like to Pick Your Brain, Please') communities were asked for their input on possible questions to pose to the RIAA's 'expert'. Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor's lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii).

Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor's attorneys, had this comment: 'We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers' responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people. The computer scientists among you will be astounded that the RIAA has been permitted to burden our court system with cases based upon such arrant and careless nonsense.'"
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/03/237211





Downloading and Record Sales-Not all Genres are Equal
Jeff Stewart

[NOTE: Some people seem to take this post as a sign that I support the RIAA, and their various attacks on consumers. Just because I think they're essentially right about downloading hurting CD sales doesn't mean I agree with their "solutions", such as lobbying to strike down Fair Use bills, or absurd lawsuits on little old ladies. I think the current situation calls for a change in their business model, such as a digital subscription service. ]

Music sales were down sharply this past year, reinforcing the RIAA's contention that illegal downloading is killing the industry. But some genres were hit harder than others. Once one of the biggest moneymakers in the American music industry, sales of Rap music dropped a staggering 21% last year, making 2006 the first time in 12 years that a rap album has not graced the top ten best-selling album list

In light of this, others have argued that rap music's lack of originality has finally caught up to it, and fans are beginning to realize it's the same thing over and over.

But 50 Cent's top album sold over 5 million copies of his last album in 2005, almost 200% more than the top rap album of 2006- that's an awfully fast realization on the part of rap fans, who have been driving big sales since for rap without complaint since the 1980's. The Oscar win of Three Six Mafia last year and rap's influence on mainstream pop acts such as Justin Timberlake (whose new album is produced by hip-hop producer Timbaland) shows that rap remains popular in the publics' consciousness.

I offer a third possibility- rap fans pirate, bootleg and download music more than fans of any other musical genre.

Looking at the health of rap music torrents on popular torrent downloading sites such as Pirate Bay and Mininova, rap fans aren't so much tired of listening to rap as they are tired of paying for it. And some of the hottest products in rap include mixtapes such as DJ Drama's "Gangsta Grillz" series, which the record labels don't make a dime off of. A good promotional strategy? Not if you look at the sales figures.

Other genres, such as country and pop, have been hit less hard because their fans download less, and the genres that suffer the least from downloading are thriving in today's climate. More resilient genres such as Country are less popular on torrent downloading sites. And increasingly, the most popular and healthy genres of music are the ones that see the least downloading of all.

Selling just under 4 million copies as of this writing, the bestselling album of 2006 was Disney's "High School Musical", which caters to a demographic of 9-14 year old children. In many cases, these albums are being bought for the kids by their parents.

And there actually is one genre of music that saw a sales increase last year- Christian music, by more than 5%. Who wants to bet that Christian music has the lowest rate of downloading and bootlegging of any genre?
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/5...by_Downloading


Editor’s note: A recently published peer-reviewed study found file-sharing had no negative effect on record sales. – Jack.





A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side
Noam Cohen

In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity.

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.

To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.

Mr. Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to protect himself from bad actors who might be angered by his administrative role at Wikipedia. (He did not respond to an e-mail message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.)

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud.

Mr. Jordan’s deception came to public attention last Monday when The New Yorker published a rare editors’ note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, “neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name,” and that it took Essjay’s credentials and life experience at face value.

In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine’s article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake, which “Essjay knew to be false.”

After the article appeared, a reader contacted The New Yorker about Essjay’s real identity, which Mr. Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.

In an e-mail message on Friday, The New Yorker’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: “We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

The New Yorker editors’ note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site’s growth. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said of Mr. Jordan’s alter ego.

On Thursday, Mr. Wales, who is traveling in Asia with intermittent Internet connections, stuck by that view. In a statement relayed through Wikipedia’s public relations officer, he said that at that time, “Essjay apologized to me and to the community at large for any harm he may have caused, but he was acting in order to protect himself.

“I accepted his apology,” he continued, “because he is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.”

But the broad group of Wikipedia users was not so supportive. Mounting anger was expressed in public forums like the user pages of Mr. Wales and Essjay. Initially, a few people wrote to express support for Essjay, along the lines of WJBscribe, who left a message saying: “Just wanted to express my 100 percent support for everything you do around here. I think you were totally entitled to protect your identity. Don’t let all the fuss get you down!”

By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Mr. Jordan’s actions “plain and simple fraud.”

Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception by flaunting a fictional Ph.D. and professorship to influence the editing on the site.

“People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments,” said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for which he is covering the story. “Those will get looked at again.”

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term “imprimatur,” as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book “Catholicism for Dummies,” saying, “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”

Over time, Wikipedia users said, Essjay did less editing and writing and spent more time ensuring that the encyclopedia was as free of vandalism and drawn-out editing fights as possible.

By Saturday, Mr. Wales changed his mind about the episode. He cleared off the “talk” section of his own Wikipedia user page — usually cluttered with personal requests, policy debates and compliments — so that “this statement gets adequate attention” and announced that he had “asked Essjay to resign his positions of trust within the community.” He said “that my past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.”

Complicating matters for Mr. Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Mr. Wales helped to found in 2004. Mr. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.

Mr. Snow said the Essjay case “is about the community, the trust the community depends on in terms of being able to review the work we each do.”

“Even though you don’t necessarily know these people personally,” he added, “you see the work enough times and get to know that work.”

Mr. Jordan announced his resignation from Wikipedia on his Essjay user page on Saturday night. In a brief note below, he said simply, “It’s time to make a clean break.”

That page had been a model of industry, with tallies of the more than 20,000 articles he edited and statements of personal philosophy and Wikipedia policy. Where there had been the motto in Latin, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito” (“Yield not to misfortunes, but advance all the more boldly against them,” according to some translations), there is a stark rectangular black box with the word “retired” written in white capital letters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/te...ipedia.html?hp





Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web

Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks
Ellen Nakashima

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.

The law-school board, one of several message boards on AutoAdmit, bills itself as "the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world." It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets' dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google's powerful search engine.

The site's founder, Jarret Cohen, the insurance agent, said the site merely provides a forum for free speech. "I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have," Cohen said.

The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy. The chats are also a window into the character of a segment of students at leading law schools. Penn officials said they have known about the site and the complaints for two years but have no legal grounds to act against it. The site is not operated with school resources.

Nor is it the only forum for such discussions, but it may be the largest "and is certainly the highest profile," said David A. Hoffman, a Temple University law professor who has conducted research on AutoAdmit.

Employers, including law firms, frequently do Google searches as part of due diligence checks on prospective employees. According to a December survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization, roughly half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in vetting job applications. About one-third of the searches yielded content used to deny a job, the survey said. The legal hiring market is very competitive. What could tip the balance is the appearance that a candidate is a lightning rod for controversy, said Mark Rasch, a Washington lawyer and consultant who specializes in Internet issues.

The trend has even spawned a new service, ReputationDefender, whose mission is to search for damaging content online and destroy it on behalf of clients. Generally, the law exempts site operators from liability for the content posted by others, though it does not prevent them from removing offensive items.

"For many people the Internet has become a scarlet letter, an albatross," said Michael Fertik, ReputationDefender's chief executive. The company is launching a campaign to get AutoAdmit to cleanse its site and encourage law schools to adopt a professional conduct code for students.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and free speech advocacy group, said anonymous cyber-writers can be sued for defamation. A judge can require a Web site host or operator to disclose a user's identifying information. Also, he said, the Internet allows those who feel slandered to put forth their own point of view. "The cure to bad speech is more speech," he said.

The chats sometimes include photos taken from women's Facebook pages, and in the Yale student's case, one person threatened to sexually violate her. Another participant claimed to be the student, making it appear that she was taking part in the discussion.

"I didn't understand what I'd done to deserve it," said the student. "I also felt kind of scared because it was someone in my community who was threatening physical and sexual violence and I didn't know who."

The woman e-mailed the site's administrators and asked them to remove the material. She said she received no response. Then she tried contacting Google, which simply cited its policy that the Web site's administrator must remove the material to clear out the search results.

AutoAdmit.com, which also uses the domain name xoxohth.com and which hosts Google-served ads, was launched in 2004. Cohen and his partner, Anthony Ciolli, cite First Amendment ideals. "We are very strong believers in the freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas . . . and almost never censor content, no matter how abhorrent it may be," they wrote in a posting on someone else's blog. The vast majority of chat threads, they wrote, are school-related. "The only time you'll see 20 or so racist threads on the site is if you proactively search for them."

They said the success of the site's message boards -- they claim 800,000 to 1 million unique visitors a month -- owes to its free, anonymous exchange of ideas. "In fact, one finds overall a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored," they wrote.

One chat thread included a sexual joke about a female Holocaust victim.

In another comment, a user said a particular woman had no right to ask that the threads be removed. "If we want to objectify, criticize and [expletive] on [expletive] like her, we should be able to."

In another posting, a participant rejected the idea that photos be removed on moral grounds: "We're lawyers and lawyers-in-training, dude. Of course we follow the law, not morals."

"I definitely don't agree with a lot of the conduct on the board," Ciolli said in an interview. But, he said, only Cohen, who created the message board, has authority to have the comments removed. Cohen, in a separate interview, said he will not "selectively remove" offensive comments, and that when he has attempted to do so, he was threatened with litigation for "perceived inconsistencies."

Another Yale law student learned a month ago that her photographs were posted in an AutoAdmit chat that included her name and graphic discussion about her breasts. She was also featured in a separate contest site -- with links posted on AutoAdmit chats -- to select the "hottest" female law student at "Top 14" law schools, which nearly crashed because of heavy traffic. Eventually her photos and comments about her and other contestants were posted on more than a dozen chat threads, many of which were accessible through Google searches.

"I felt completely objectified," that woman said. It was, she said, "as if they're stealing part of my character from me." The woman, a Fulbright scholar who graduated summa cum laude, said she now fears going to the gym because people on the site encouraged classmates to take cellphone pictures of her.

Ciolli persuaded the contest site owner to let him shut down the "Top 14" for privacy concerns, Cohen said. "I think we deserve a golden star for what we did," Cohen said.

The two men said that some of the women who complain of being ridiculed on AutoAdmit invite attention by, for example, posting their photographs on other social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace.

Cohen said he no longer keeps identifying information on users because he does not want to encourage lawsuits and drive traffic away. Asked why posters could not use their real names, he said, "People would not have as much fun, frankly, if they had to worry about employers pulling up information on them."

One woman e-mailed the University of Pennsylvania Law School associate dean, Gary Clinton, in February to ask for his help in persuading Ciolli remove the offensive threads. Clinton told her that since he became aware of AutoAdmit two years ago, he has had "numerous conversations about it" with Penn officials. "I've learned that there appears to be little legal recourse that we have as an institution," he wrote. He said he has had several conversations with Ciolli and has "pointed out time and again how hurtful these ad hominem attacks can be to individuals, and have asked him to delete threads." The effort, he noted, "has been largely unsuccessful."

In a telephone interview, Clinton said the university's position has not changed. "We believe we don't have grounds under the university's code of conduct to proceed," he said.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030602705.html





University Bans BitTorrent Sites
enigmax

While students at universities in the US are pressured by the RIAA, Cardiff University citing pressure from increasing numbers of copyright infringement notices, has taken out a blunt instrument and banned it’s students from accessing some of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, regardless of the legitimate content they contain.

The Information Services department of Cardiff University in the UK has notified 25,000 students of its intention to protect the university from a rising tide of copyright infringement notices due to ‘inappropriate use’ of P2P. It will accomplish this by the wholesale banning of a whole range of BitTorrent search engines and trackers from the university network.

Dear All,

Following receipt of a number of copyright infringement notices, Information Services is taking steps to protect the University.

The principle source of these copyright infringements is inappropriate use of peer-to-peer file sharing, for example Bit Torrent.

A number of web sites have been identified which primarily provide access to a high proportion of copyrighted, pornographic or offensive material. Access to these sites, listed below, will be prohibited.

This policy is not aimed at restricting legitimate academic investigation. Should access be required please contact insrvAssist.

Sites with prohibited access:
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentscan.com/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://torrent-finder.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentreactor.to/
http://www.torrentportal.com/
http://www.mininova.org/
http://skflan.nl.tp
http://www.onlytorrents.com/
http://www.mybittorrent.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.torrentradar.org/
http://www.demonoid.com/
http://www.smaragdtorrent.org/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrents.to/
http://www.torrentvalley.com/
http://www.torrentshub.com/
http://fenopy.com/
http://extratorrent.com/
http://btjunkie.org/
http://www.bittorrent.am/
http://www.astatorrents.com/
http://www.meganova.org/
http://www.bitdig.com/
http://torrentattack.org/

Your insrvAssist contact for this message is XXX XXXXX.

Thank you,
Security Team

Previously, students using P2P applications Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella had been told: “IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent the application from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.”

Its quite obvious that this message did not stop students from continuing to share files and the banning of the above sites is unlikely to stop them either. New sites appear all the time and although the blocklist takes out some major torrent sources, there are many hundreds more - e.g TorrentReactor.to is blocked but not TorrentReactor.net.

The excellent Yotoshi gets no mention and even President Bush’s torrent site is unbanned and fully available. Interested students will find the Linux stuff here.
http://torrentfreak.com/university-b...torrent-sites/





Meet EZTV, The Leading TV-torrent Distribution Group
Ernesto

EZTV has been the leading TV-torrent distribution group for over a year now. They collect and distribute the TV-torrents, that find their way to millions of people every week. Time to have a chat with one of the EZTV crew members, to find out a little more about them.

For those who are not familiar with EZTV. They are the ones that do the initial seeding for the TV-torrents indexed by sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay. They also have their own site, with useful tools like a TV-calendar, an episode list, and a countdown list that shows how many days you will have to wait until your favorite TV-show returns.

We had the chance to do ask Boggibill, a member of the EZTV crew, some questions.

TorrentFreak: When was EZTV founded? and what was the main reason to start a TV-torrent distribution group?

Boggibill: EZTV was founded a short time after TVTorrents.tv and btchat went down (Spring 2005). Their disappearance left a void in the “market”, and someone decided to fill that void. That being said, we have no affiliation with these pre-EZTV era groups.

TorrentFreak: Do you think that distributing these (copyrighted) shows is morally wrong? That is, do you consider sharing shows to be the same as stealing?

Boggibill: In no way is this wrong. There is absolutely no way what we are doing would have any negative effect on the TV industry whatsoever - I’d refer you to an “old” Piracy Is Not A Crime article on TV torrents, but I’ll just give you the short version here. The Nielsen ratings system, from which all TV companies make their money, is based on so-called “Nielsen families” that have a special box attached to their TV sets. This box basically reports what they are viewing, and Nielsen then “blows up” the numbers to account for the whole population. It is an idiotic system, but IMO it works to our advantage (and the TV industry’s) - the chances of one of the Nielsen families being an active user on our site is *low*. This means that our download numbers will have absolutely no negative impact on the ratings.

TorrentFreak: Do you think that sharing TV-shows might have a positive impact on the TV industry?

Boggibill: Yes I do, the only possible impacts I can see are positive ones; free publicity, which may lead to higher ratings when people “discover” new shows and also larger numbers of DVD purchases - it is my understanding that many of the people that download TV shows from us are avid TV fans and will usually buy DVD boxsets of shows they like. Many of these are foreigners, that can’t view the shows normally. This is free money for the industry. I don’t understand why they would be upset with that. Moreover, the BitTorrent way of distributing material is the future, not only of filesharing, but of information distribution in general - be it television content, movies, games and other software. We firmly believe this to be true.

TorrentFreak: How many people are working with EZTV at the moment?

Boggibill: We have a small but dedicated team who works for EZTV. they are very good at what they are doing.

TorrentFreak: Where do you get the shows? And how many people seed these shows initially for EZTV?

Boggibill: We get our shows from “the scene”, a very secretive lot… and we have quite a few initial seeders. The amount varies from torrent to torrent, though. Also, we could always use more - come on IRC and talk with an op, if you have more than 5mbit upload bandwidth and want to help out!

TorrentFreak: What are the most popular shows distributed by EZTV?

Boggibill: We have tracker scrapes on our website, so this is easily accessible information. The most popular shows are obviously Heroes, a show that has gained a LOT of steam lately, btw), Lost, 24, Prison Break, Battlestar Galactica, Greys Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and the Stargates.

TorrentFreak: How many visitors does eztvefnet.org currently have? and did you ever expected that the site would be such a great success?

Boggibill: We recently peaked 210 000 unique visitors, and 600 000 page views per day. We didn’t really expect it to be as big as it is now, to be honest. At least not all of us did. We figured there’d be other groups that would show up and compete… if you can call it that, I guess the only thing we’re “competing” about are bragging rights and they’re not really worth much are they? Anyway, we soon realized that that wouldn’t really happen and began preparing for ever-increasing traffic… still working on that.

TorrentFreak: Are there any future plans or developments for eztvefnet.org you want to share with our readers?

Boggibill: We always have future plans, this is part of what makes us good I think. We always strive for perfection. What those are… well I can’t really say

TorrentFreak: What makes EZTV stand out compared to other distribution groups like VTV? Are you in contact with other groups?

Boggibill: We aren’t really in competition with VTV, we cooperate on many levels. Having too many overlapping releases would just be stupid, so there’s some coordination going on there. And what makes us good, I’d say dedication, organization and experience. We also have a good relationship with The Pirate Bay, they’ve been of great help many times - well, PRQ, really.

TorrentFreak: What do you think the future of TV, and TV-torrents will look like?

Boggibill: I think BitTorrent.com is on to something. Right now, their biggest issue - possibly the only significant one - is the DRM one. Of course, this is “the big one” isn’t it… but yes, I do believe we will see more “legal” alternatives in the future. The torrent model is the most efficient distribution model available, it is just a matter of time before the industry realize this. Another solution with a lot of potential is Joost, that one will be interesting to follow.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for this short Q&A, anything you want to add to this?

Boggibill: Keep fighting the good fight, TorrentFreak people
http://torrentfreak.com/meet-eztv-th...ibution-group/





Stations to Pay $12.5M in FCC Settlement
John Dunbar

Exasperated listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over on the radio may have something to cheer about: a pair of innovative deals that could shake up the music playlists of some of the nation's largest radio-station chains.

Four major radio broadcast companies have tentatively agreed to pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists in separate settlements aimed at curbing the persistent practice known as "payola," according to sources.

Payola - generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay - has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal following a series of scandals in the late 1950s.

Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

The settlement between the government and the four broadcasters was reached in conjunction with a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.

The American Association of Independent Music, a group of independent record labels, has received a commitment from the same four broadcasters for the free airtime, the sources said.

In addition to airplay, the broadcasters and the independent labels have also negotiated a set of "rules of engagement" that will guide how record company representatives and radio programmers interact.

The free airtime would be granted to companies not owned or controlled by one of the nation's four dominant music labels - Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Group.

The practice of payola, or "pay-for-play," has evolved over the years and become more difficult to track.

In recent years, "independent record promoters" have acted as middlemen to deliver payments to radio stations in exchange for airplay. Other forms of inducement include lavish prizes meant for listeners that wind up going to station employees; promises by record companies of concerts by well-known artists in exchange for airplay; and payments for promotional expenses and station equipment.

Under the FCC consent decree, broadcasters would agree to closer scrutiny in their dealings with record companies, including limits on gifts, a promise to keep a database of all items of value supplied by those companies, the employment of independent compliance officers to make sure stations are following the rules and even a new "payola hotline" for employees to report infractions.

Broadcasters admit to no wrongdoing under the three-year settlement, which has not yet been made public.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...ttlements.html





Bobby Brown Bails on Interview with Station that Freed Him

Almost as soon as he was sprung from jail by a radio station's money, Bobby Brown and Hot 99.5 FM bailed on the deal.

The R&B singer had spent three nights in a Massachusetts jail for failing to pay child support when the station on Thursday paid the $19,150 he owed on the condition that Brown appear on "The Kane Show" for a week. He was supposed to discuss the case and how he could turn his life around during studio appearances beginning Monday.

But Brown backed out of an on-air phone interview with the morning show Friday, insisting he had not agreed to be an employee of the station.

"That wasn't our deal," said Brown, who hung up after Kane pressed him.

"We thought we clearly communicated to Bobby our intentions, but once we had him on the air this morning it was clear that we were not on the same page," said Kane, who goes by one name.

The station and Brown's attorney mutually decided the deal was not in Brown's best interest and that Brown would return the money.

"We feel that there are better things we can do with the money locally," Kane said.

Brown was arrested while he was watching his daughter's cheerleading competition at Attleboro High School this week.

Phaedra Parks, Brown's attorney in Atlanta, had earlier said the singer has been struggling to meet monthly payments to Kim Ward, of Stoughton, Mass., the mother of his two teenage children. Brown and pop diva Whitney Houston are divorcing after 14 years.

It was the latest in a series of child support troubles for Brown, a Boston native best known for the solo hit "Don't Be Cruel." In 2004, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for missing three months of payments, but the sentence was suspended after he paid about $15,000. He also paid $11,000 in delinquent child support in October after being threatened with arrest.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...hat_freed_him/





Blackbeard’s Ship to be Excavated

Notorious pirate’s vessel ran aground off North Carolina’s coast in 1718
AP

A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of notorious pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years, officials working on the project said.

“That’s really our target,” Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist, said Friday while discussing 10 years of research that has been conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach.

The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was a French slave ship Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Several officials said historical data and coral-covered artifacts recovered from the site — including 25 cannons, which experts said was an uncommonly large number to find on a ship in the region in the early 18th century — remove any doubt the wreckage belonged to Blackbeard.

Three university professors, including two from East Carolina University, have challenged the findings. But officials working on the excavation said Friday that the more they find, the stronger their case becomes.

“Historians have really looked at it thoroughly and don’t feel that there’s any possibility anything else is in there that was not recorded,” said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Project. “And the artifacts continue to support it.”

Wilde-Ramsing said a coin weight recovered last fall bearing a likeness of Britain’s Queen Anne and a King George cup, both dated before the shipwreck, further bolster their position.

Recovered items eventually to go on public view
So far, about 15 percent of the shipwreck has been recovered including jewelry, dishes and thousands of other artifacts. The items are being preserved and studied at a lab at East Carolina University, and eventually more will become available for the public to view, Claggett said.

Nearly 2 million people have viewed shipwreck artifacts since 1998, including at a permanent exhibit at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort and at a maritime museum in Paris, project officials said.

Researchers shared some of their findings Friday at the North Carolina Museum of History. They said studying the artifacts will provide insight into the era’s naval technology, slave trade and pirate life.

Blackbeard, whose real name was widely believed to be Edward Teach or Edward Thatch, settled in Bath and received a governor’s pardon. Some experts believe he grew bored with land life and returned to piracy.

He was killed by volunteers from the Royal Navy in November 1718 — five months after the ship thought to be Queen Anne’s Revenge sank.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17434128/