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Old 24-11-05, 12:27 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 26th, ’05



































"We could literally take a 1 gig piece of video and sell it for 10 cents and make money. You can't do that with conventional electronic distribution." – Greg Kerber


"Merely providing a link is unlikely to create secondary liability for the search engine." – Jennifer M. Urban, Laura Quilter


"The findings are troubling, and seem to indicate a need to further study, and perhaps revisit entirely, the DMCA takedown process." – Jennifer M. Urban, Laura Quilter


"The radio station has been the best choice of my high school career. I can't believe someone would swoop in here and take it from us." – Nicole Fisher


"The law is unlawfully open to interpretation." – Fatih Tas


"G.M.'s not coming out with a product anybody wants." – Daniel Crane



























Merry Thanksgiving

It snowed today. 3" of heavy chuff early this morning makes it a White Thanksgiving at home. Thanks to broadcast TV I watched the computer-colored version of Babes in Toyland & the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Thanks also to content ownership I’m looking forward to unspooling my colorized copy of Miracle on 34th St and streaming selections from a big fat Christmas music folder on my hard drive and wow, I’m having a minor bit of holiday mixup.

At the moment the sun’s out full bore making the snow blindingly white and I just got a list of items we need for the upcoming feast like OJ, ice and a battery for the camcorder. So I think I better put this up now, I may not have time later on, or I may simply be too stuffed to sit in front of the screen. Such a life eh? While many are homeless and hungry some have a lot. Is distribution the key? We’re good at it in the West – not so good elsewhere. I think about it often and give thanks for my good fortune and try to extend a hand to those in need. I hope we’re getting better.

Amongst news here of plant closings and diminished consumer expectations we can at least recognize what we do have, even if others have more, for certainly many more have much less. And while it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Connecticut and I’m streaming A Jazzy Wonderland throughout the house, it is Thanksgiving after all, and I’m glad of that and the family that I have to share it with. I hope next year more of us can say the same.

Happy holidays everyone!



















Enjoy,

Jack















November 26th, ’05





Sony's Escalating "Spyware" Fiasco

Along with lawyers, prosecutors, and furious fans, artists are joining the backlash against the label for slipping a hidden, anti-theft program into users' computers
Lorraine Woellert

Van Zant's Get Right with the Man CD was released in May, but six months later it still was doing better-than-respectable business on Amazon.com (AMZN ). The album ranked No. 887 on
the online retailer's list of music sales on Nov. 2. Then news of the CD's aggressive content safeguards -- a sub-rosa software program incorporated courtesy of Sony BMG -- exploded on the Internet.

To prevent audiophiles from making multiple copies of the CDs, Sony (SNE ) had programmed the Van Zant disk, and dozens of others, with a hidden code called a "rootkit" that secretly installs itself on hard drives when the CDs are loaded onto listeners' PCs. Soon enough, hackers began designing viruses to take malicious advantage of the hidden program, and a Sony boycott had begun (see BW Online, 11/17/05, "Sony's Copyright Overreach").

Growing Outrage.

Overnight, Get Right with the Man dropped to No. 1,392 on Amazon's music rankings. By Nov. 22 -- after the news made headlines and Sony was deep into damage control, pulling some 4.7 million copy-protected disks from the market -- Get Right with the Man was even further from Amazon's Top 40, plummeting to No. 25,802.

The wrath of fans killed Sony's CD copy controls, with the company pulling 52 titles off retail shelves, beginning the week of Nov. 14. But the wrath of bands could be far worse for the company -- and for efforts to protect content in general.

Singers and songwriters are increasingly expressing frustration at devices used by record companies to protect digital content from widespread theft that results when CDs are copied repeatedly or popular tracks are given away on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as LimeWire and BitTorrent. Sony's misstep has been bad for the company -- and its effects could spread much further, should the consumer outcry gain traction with the recording artists who need to keep their fans happy if they want to sell records.

Drop In Sales.

In the beginning, it was cyber libertarians and outspoken consumer groups leading the charge against digital rights management (DRM). But the Sony rootkit debacle has brought the issue home even to digilliterates -- including many of the artists themselves.

"We're really upset about this," says Patrick Jordan, director of marketing for Red Light Management, which represents Trey Anastasio, former front man to jam band Phish. Anastasio's latest solo album, Shine, was released Nov. 1, just as news of Sony's rootkit was worming its way onto Internet blogs and listservs. "I'm expecting a decrease in sales," Jordan adds.

Indeed, Shine debuted with 15,000 sales its first week. But by week two, when the rootkit fiasco was in full swing, sales had plummeted to 7,000. Weekly numbers will be released Nov. 23, and Jordan is bracing for the worst. "It's been damaging, and certainly we're going to discuss that with the label," he says.

Maddening Method.

Recording artists as a group have been among the most vocal backers of so-called DRM schemes as a way to control online theft of music. And many such protection devices are widely accepted, because they're loose enough that they don't impede the average audiophile's listening.

A Sony BMG spokesman declined to comment for this story, but the goal of the Sony rootkit has been lost in the digital fog. The software was meant to set up speed bumps for would-be thieves, yet give consumers some of that much-demanded flexibility. In Sony's case, that meant the freedom to make up to three copies of a purchased disk and play it on multiple platforms, such as a PC or a car stereo, yet prevent posting to P2P sites or massive copying.

What tripped up the company was less its goal than the method used to achieve it. Sony BMG's content-protection scheme, designed by an outside software-security firm, was basically a form of spyware. Rootkit installed itself surreptitiously, relayed back to the company what users were doing with their Sony music, and exposed users' PCs to viruses.

The Cultural Challenge.

Sony now is facing at least three consumer class-action lawsuits, as well as at least one law-enforcement action. On Nov. 21, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott accused the company of violating the Lone Star state's laws against computer spyware.

"Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak-and-dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers," Abbott said in a written statement. "Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses, and expose the consumer to possible identity crime."

But the most serious fallout from the rootkit brouhaha could be the cultural challenge to DRM. Some artists, including the Dave Matthews Band, subscribe to a "trust your fan" mentality, and have begun negotiating with their record labels to omit content-protection provisions from their CDs.

Brokenhearted Artists.

Many others are frustrated with content protections, such as Sony's, which prevent their music from being dragged onto Apple Computer's (AAPL ) iPod. Apple refuses to license the proprietary iPod software to the record labels for use with any music that isn't purchased from its iTunes music-download site.

As Sony BMG and other labels release more CDs with tracks that can't be dragged to iPods, artists are hearing from outraged fans. In response, some artists -- including Tim Foreman, guitarist for Switchfoot, whose Nothing Is Sound release was part of the Sony recall -- used a fan site to post instructions for disabling Sony content protections that prevent consumers from dragging tunes to their iPods.

"We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy," Foreman wrote in a Sept. 14 post first reported by Billboard magazine. "It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat, and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology."

Abandoned Labels?

"This is serious business," says Red Light Management's Jordan. "As managers, we've always supported trusting our fans. Copy protection has nothing to do with trust."

If reaction to the Sony rootkit is any measure, Jordan is right. As news of the secret code grew, music fans began using Amazon's review function to post messages to their favorite tunesters. "Sorry Trey," wrote Freddie, an Anastasio fan from Maryland, "but you should find a new label."

Artists have yet to take such measures -- but if the fallout worsens, Freddie's advice may not sound so drastic.
http://www.businessweek.com/print/te...122_343542.htm





Texas Sues Sony BMG Over CD Rootkit
Nate Mook

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced Monday that he has filed suit against Sony BMG over the use of illegal spyware in its copy-protection mechanism that gained national attention earlier this month.

Abbott also disputed Sony's claims that it had recalled all affected CDs, saying investigators were able to purchase "numerous titles at Austin retail stores as recently as Sunday evening."

The lawsuit notes that Sony's software uses a rootkit "cloaking" technique to hide itself from users and prevent its removal. Abbott says the DRM remains active at all times, even when Sony's media player is not active, which has led to concerns about its true purpose.

"Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers," Attorney General Abbott said in a statement. He also highlighted the security concerns brought about by the rootkit.

"Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose the consumer to possible identity crime."

Since its discovery in late October, news of the rootkit has spiraled out of control, with consumers and artists alike angry at the revelation. In an apology issued last week, Sony said it "deeply regrets any inconvenience to our customers."

But that hasn't stopped lawsuits stemming from consumers' outrage, nor accusations of collusion between security companies and Sony. Texas becomes the first state to sue over Sony's tactics. Consumer lawsuits have been filed in California and New York as well.

Under Texas' Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, Abbott is seeking civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation of the law, attorneys' fees and investigative costs.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Texa...kit/1132596035





New Sony CD Risk Identified
John Borland

Computer researchers uncovered a new security risk Friday related to Sony BMG Music Entertainment copy-protected CDs, which could expose several hundred computers to attack.

This security flaw dealt with different technology than that which has sparked controversy for nearly three weeks, however.

Recent criticism has focused on Sony's release of discs containing copy-protection software created by British company First 4 Internet, which opened listener's computers to hackers' attack. The latest risk is from an uninstaller program distributed by SunnComm Technologies, a company that provides copy protection on other Sony BMG releases.

"This nightmare makes it rather clear that Sony doesn't really care about customers, not only in the way they want to spy on you (and open the door to your pc for any hacker) but rather in the way the handled the whole situation." --Ki Ji

Sony said in a statement Friday that SunnComm had removed the uninstall program from the Web, and was in the process of contacting 223 consumers who had downloaded it while it was available.

The security hole in the uninstall program was similar to one discovered with First 4 Internet's uninstall program several days ago.

In each case, Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten and researcher Alex Halderman found that the uninstall programs responded to commands from their creators' Web sites, but would also respond to malicious instructions from other Web sites.

In its statement, Sony said that SunnComm was developing a new uninstall program for its copy- protection software, and that Felten had agreed to review it before it was posted online.

The SunnComm security risk discovered by Felten and Halderman is limited to the uninstall program, which was distributed separately from the CDs themselves.
http://news.com.com/New+Sony+CD+risk...3-5961560.html





Gartner: Piece Of Tape Defeats Any CD DRM

Anti-piracy technologies 'easily defeated', reports analyst
Tom Sanders

The highly controversial XCP digital rights management (DRM) technology bundled by Sony BMG on 52 of its audio CD albums can be defeated by applying a small piece of tape to the discs, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Applying a piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disk renders the data track of the CD unreadable. A computer trying to play the CD will then skip to the music without accessing the bundled DRM technology.

"After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs," Gartner concluded in a newly published research note.

The use of a piece of tape will defeat any future DRM system on audio CDs designed to be played on a stand-alone CD player, the analyst said.

Gartner predicted that the music industry will start to lobby for legislation that requires computer makers to include DRM technology on their systems.

But the analyst advised that, instead of limiting what users can do with music they have already purchased, record labels should focus on tracking this use.

This would enable a "play-based" model where users are charged a fee based on how they consume music.

Sony abandoned the use of the XCP anti-piracy technology earlier this month after weeks of heavy criticism from security experts and consumer advocates.

The technology sought to prevent users from making illegal copies of the music on Windows computers, but posed a major security risk and was capable of damaging the computer when users attempted to remove the software.

Gartner called the DRM scheme a "public relations and technology failure".
http://www.vnunet.com/actions/trackback/2146367





Kazaa Faces Dec. 5 Court Deadline To Alter System
Jeffrey Goldfarb

An Australian court has given file-sharing network Kazaa until Dec. 5 to either filter copyrighted music from its system or shut down, music industry officials said on Thursday.

The imposition of the deadline follows a ruling in September by the judge in Sydney that Kazaa users were breaching copyright and that the network's owners had to modify the software.

Other global peer-to-peer (P2P) services, which distribute data between users instead of relying on a central server, also have come under fire from courts in recent months.

Kazaa's operators, Sharman Networks, had appealed the judgment. But according to music industry trade group IFPI, the Australian court said that to avoid complete shutdown Kazaa must, as a first step, put in place a keyword filter system within 10 days.

Sharman Networks had said it could not control the actions of an estimated 100 million users.

"It's time for services like Kazaa to move on -- to filter, go legal or make way for others who are trying to build a digital music business the correct and legal way," IFPI Chairman John Kennedy said in a statement.

A growing number of legal online music services such as Apple Computer Inc.'s <AAPL.O> iTunes, Napster <NAPS.O> and RealNetworks Inc.'s <RNWK.O> Rhapsody have grown in popularity over the past year as a new generation of P2P services like Mashboxx hope to offer the advantages of file-sharing without infringing on copyright.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nL24440105





Warner Music to Pay $5 Mln in NY 'Payola' Probe

Warner Music Group Corp., one of the largest U.S. record companies, will pay $5 million to settle a New York state probe into how it influenced which songs are played on the radio, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said on Tuesday.

The probe involved "pay-for-play" practices, commonly known as "payola," in which companies are accused of paying radio stations or promoters to secure air time for songs.

In July, Sony BMG agreed to pay $10 million to settle a related pay-to-play probe.

Warner Music agreed to stop making payoffs in return for airplay, and fully disclose all "items of value" provided to radio stations, Spitzer said. It also issued a statement acknowledging its "improper conduct," the attorney general said.

In a statement, Warner Music said "the reforms we have agreed to with the Attorney General are consistent with the internal reforms that our new management team implemented earlier this year."

Spitzer said the financial benefits involved direct bribes to radio programrs, including airfare, electronics, and tickets to sports events and concerts; payments for operational expenses; radio contest giveaways; hiring independent promoters to funnel illegal payments to radio stations, and buying "spin programs" to artificially increase airplay.

The $5 million will be used to fund music education and appreciation programs, Spitzer said.

Warner Music conducted its initial public offering in May. It was earlier acquired by media mogul Edgar Bronfman Jr., now its chief executive, and a group of private equity investors for $2.6 billion from Time Warner Inc.

Warner Music shares rose 5 cents to $17.45 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...h=Warner+Music





Madonna Loses Plagiarism Case In Belgium

A Belgian songwriter has won a plagiarism case against Madonna with a ruling that will force the country's radio stations to stop playing the star's 1998 hit single Frozen, his lawyer says.

Salvatore Acquaviva won the case in a court in the Belgian town of Mons, where the judge ordered EMI, Sony, and Warner Music to get radio and television stations to stop playing the song, Victor-Vincent Dehin said.

The judge also ordered the three companies to get music stores across Belgium to stop selling not only the single but also Ray of Light, the album on which it appears, he said.

EMI, Sony, and Warner Music each face a fine of more than euro100,000 ($A160,462) if they fail to obey the order within 15 days, he said.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=73024





Vietnamese Parliament Passes Intellectual Property Law

The Vietnamese National Assembly passed important laws, including on intellectual property, in addition to some resolutions during a sitting Saturday.

They included the E-Transaction and Environmental Protection laws
besides resolutions on drafting laws and ordinances and a program to keep surveillance on land use, public projects and law enforcement.

“Much attention was paid to legislators’ opinions on protecting intellectual ownership and geographic origins,” Ho Duc Viet, head of the Science, Technology and Environment committee, said.

Under the Intellectual Property Law, for arts performances for non- commercial purposes – including cultural exchanges or propaganda – permission need not be obtained from creators/owners, or loyalties paid.

However, in case of commercial performances, royalties have to be paid though permission from the creator/owner need not be obtained even for published works.

The resolution on drafting laws and ordinances envisages passing 25 draft laws and discussions on 25 other bills at the ninth and tenth sessions of the National Assembly, scheduled for May and October next year.
http://www.thanhniennews.com/politic...1&newsid=10679





Hong Kong

Accused Music File Sharers Risk Being Revealed By Law
Justin Mitchell

If the High Court orders four local Internet service providers to disclose the identities of 22 alleged illegal music file sharers, the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance would allow it, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

While Belinda Pui of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data said she could not comment specifically on the case, she said that an exception provision called Section 58 in the Privacy Ordinance allows for the release of personal data under "quite a number of exceptions."

One of the exceptions is that while personal data cannot be used without the subject's permission for a purpose for which it wasn't originally intended, information related to the "detection of a crime or prevention of unlawful conduct" can be released without the customer's permission.

"The data user may use Section 58 to disclose the data. I think that compliance with a court order is consistent with the original collection purpose. It is the general principle," Pui said.

Her comments came after the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers' Association said Tuesday it will respect the privacy of users but was bound by local laws.

"Third parties requesting ISPs to conduct data matching and disclosure of personal data should base such a request on solid and verifiable evidence," association chairman York Mok was quoted as saying in an AFP report.

Mok said they must also be fully responsible for all costs and damages attributable to such requests.

The association represents 60 ISPs in Hong Kong including Yahoo, IBM and PCCW, one of the local providers being pursued.

The others being challenged are Hutchison Global Communications, Hong Kong Cable and i-Cable Communications, all of which so far have declined to comment on the territory's first legal battle against online piracy by the music industry.

The move was part of a concerted global action taken by 17 countries on November 15, launched by London- based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

IFPI Hong Kong said it had locked onto the Internet protocol addresses of the 22 individuals engaging in illegal file sharing on the Internet. It hoped to seek compensation by bringing civil lawsuits.

However, it could not identify them without the help of the ISPs.

The hearing of the case has been scheduled for Tuesday.

IFPI Hong Kong blames online and CD piracy for losses of more than HK$1 billion annually and a 20 percent drop in the number of people working in the music business.

"We really don't know in which circumstances the court would allow ISPs to provide personal data to the IFPI," Pui said. "But if it occurs the ISPs must comply with the court order."
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...343&con_type=1





30 Percent of DMCA Takedown Notices Questionable: Report

This is a summary report of findings from a study of takedown notices under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.1 Section 512 grants safe harbor from secondary copyright liability (i.e., the copyright infringement of their end users) to online service providers (OSPs), such as Internet access providers or online search engines. In order to receive the safe harbor, online service providers respond to cease-and-desist letters from copyright complainants by pulling their users’ information—web pages, forum postings, blog entries, and the like—off the Internet. (In the case of search engine providers, the link to the complained-of web site is pulled out of the index; in turn, the web site disappears from the search results pages. These notices are somewhat troubling in and of themselves, as merely providing a link is unlikely to create secondary liability for the search engine, in the first place.) Because the OSP is removing material in response to a private cease-and-desist letter that earns it a safe harbor, no court sees the dispute in advance of takedown.

In this study, we traced the use of the Section 512 takedown process and considered how the usage patterns we found were likely to affect expression or other activities on the Internet. The second level of analysis grew out of the fact that we observed a surprisingly high incidence of flawed takedowns:

. Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like);

. Notices to traditional ISP’s included a substantial number of demands to remove files from peer-to-peer networks (which are not actually covered under the takedown statute, and which an OSP can only honor by terminating the target’s Internet access entirely); and
. One out of 11 included significant statutory flaws that render the notice unusable (for example, failing to adequately identify infringing material).
In addition, we found some interesting patterns that do not, by themselves, indicate concern, but which are of concern when combined with the fact that one third of the notices depended on questionable claims:

. Over half—57%—of notices sent to Google to demand removal of links in the index were sent by businesses targeting apparent competitors;

. Over a third—37%—of the notices sent to Google targeted sites apparently outside the United States.

The specifics of our data set may limit the ability to neatly generalize our findings. Yet the findings are troubling, and seem to indicate a need to further study, and perhaps revisit entirely, the DMCA takedown process.
http://mylaw.usc.edu/documents/512Rep-ExecSum_out.pdf





Big Media Loves BitTorrent
Peter Kafka

It sounds great: The guy behind the software that moves a good portion of illegally swapped movies and TV shows through the Internet hooks up with the studios that make the movies and TV programs.

That, more or less, is what Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent software, and the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's lobbying arm, said Tuesday afternoon. Just listen to the press release: "The announcement today is historic in that two major forces in the technology and film industries have agreed to work together."

If Hollywood is looking for a gesture to demonstrate that unlike the music business, which was dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age, it is ready to try to innovative approaches to the Web, the deal is a nice olive branch. But if Hollywood is looking for a way to solve its online piracy problem, this isn't it.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that Cohen can't do a thing to stop folks who want to use his software to swap copyrighted files, no matter how well intentioned he is. All the 30-year-old can do is to promise to try to stop people who visit his BitTorrent site from trading unauthorized files.

But unlike the original Napster, which used a centralized server to connect file-sharing song swappers, BitTorrent is simply software, and it is open source software at that, meaning that anyone who chooses can produce their own version of the program. And they have--there are at least a dozen popular versions of the software, with new ones popping up constantly.

Even folks who use Cohen's official software--his company claims some 50 million downloads since 2003--aren't necessarily affected by the agreement. Only users who use a search engine Cohen installed earlier this year will notice a difference, because Cohen has agreed to take down links to pirated files. And while BitTorrent software may be popular, Cohen's site itself doesn't get much traffic: File-sharing measurement firm BigChampagne says the BitTorrent.com doesn't crack the list of the top 20 sites that specialize in BitTorrent files.

So what does the deal really mean? For Cohen, who just recently transformed himself from a programmer with no interest in business into an entrepreneur who has received $8.75 million from venture capitalists Doll Capital Management, it means he can operate his company without being sued by a Hollywood studio. Given the aftermath of the Grokster case, that's no small thing.

And even for the MPAA, which represents studios such as The Walt Disney Co., Sony, General Electric's NBC Universal, Viacom's Paramount and Time Warner's Time Warner Warner Brothers, the deal isn't entirely symbolic. As Hollywood moves more rapidly into electronic distribution--witness Disney's deal to distribute some television shows via Apple Computer's iTunes, for instance, or Warner Brothers plan to distribute some of its TV catalog through America Online--peer-to-peer software like Cohen's could be a useful way to move big files to paying consumers.

NBC Universal, for instance, has already struck a deal with privately held Wurld Media to begin using peer-to-peer software to distribute some of its films beginning next year. This presumably won't be an enticement to file-sharers who don’t want to pay anything for a copy of Meet the Fockers. But because the method uses less bandwith than a centralized distribution system, peer-to-peer delivery could ultimately mean that consumers could pay less for an Internet download than they would through other outlets.

"We could literally take a 1 gig piece of video and sell it for 10 cents and make money," says Wurld Media Chief Executive Greg Kerber. "You can't do that with conventional electronic distribution."

So give Cohen and the MPAA some credit. When they say, as they did in their press release, that their agreement is "an early experiment in using technology to assist in solving the problems of piracy," they are half right. Turning the BitTorrent site into an authorized distributor won't stop people who don't want to pay for content. But it may help Hollywood figure out how to sell their wares on the Web. Some money is better than none.
http://www.forbes.com/2005/11/22/bit...ent_print.html





Hollywood Makes Deal With BitTorrent Creator In Bid To Stop Piracy – Report

The US movie industry has announced a deal with the creator of a technology that is widely used for copying movies and TV shows illegally over the Internet, the Financial Times reported.

In its online edition, the newspaper said the deal between the Motion Picture Association of America and Bram Cohen, the software developer behind BitTorrent, will remove links to pirated material on Cohen's website, BitTorrent.com.

But the report cited observers as saying the deal will do little to stop online movie piracy.

'There is nothing you can do to shut off the illegal usage of all the online networks that have been set up based on BitTorrent's technology,' Allen Weiner, research analyst at Gartner said.

Instead, he said, deals like this one could encourage legitimate online networks with the backing of the movie industry similar to the way Apple's iTunes music service has become a legal alternative to peer-to-peer music sites.

BitTorrent is used for online networks, known as 'trackers', that help users find movies. It creates a quick way to download movie files.

Cohen said around a third of all the data that passes over the Internet is connected with BitTorrent sites.
http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds...fx2351068.html





Bogus e-Mails Contain New 'Sober' Worm
AP

Austria's equivalent of the FBI said Tuesday that it is investigating a flurry of bogus e-mails sent in its name to people in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

The Federal Criminal Investigations Office said the e-mails warn recipients that they are illegally in possession of pirated software, and that the messages contain the computer-crippling "Sober" worm.

The agency warned people who receive the e-mails not to open the attachments, and said it has nothing to do with their circulation.

An investigation is under way, the agency said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





iTunes Outsells Traditional Music Stores
John Borland

Apple Computer's iTunes music store now sells more music than Tower Records or Borders, according to analyst firm the NPD Group.

The research company tracks downloads from digital music stores, as well as people's purchasing habits at offline retail stores. During the past three months, iTunes made it to the U.S. Top 10 sales list for the first time, NPD said.

"Taking their growth and others' pain, it's not inconceivable to see them cracking into higher ground in the foreseeable future," said NPD music and movies industry analyst Russ Crupnick.

The benchmark is a meaningful sign in digital music's steady progress--and Apple's domination of that trend--toward becoming a significant part of the overall music business.

According to figures from the Recording Industry Association of America, digital sales accounted for slightly more than 4 percent of the market during the first half of 2005, up from about 1.5 percent during the first half of 2004.


Apple's iTunes has maintained more than 70 percent of the PC-based digital music download market throughout 2005, Crupnick said. That market share is likely to climb slightly when Macintosh customers are added in, but NPD does not track those purchases, he said.

For its comparison, the company compared 12 separate song downloads at iTunes to a single album purchase at an ordinary retail store. Using that measure, iTunes scored higher than Tower, Borders and Sam Goody.

Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon.com, FYE and Circuit City all scored higher than iTunes, NPD said.
http://news.com.com/iTunes+outsells+...3-5965314.html





Publisher Sued Over Book Critical of Turkish State
Sebnem Arsu

A Turkish book publisher said today that the government was suing it for distributing a translated book critical of the Turkish identity, army, state and the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The head of Aram Publishing, Fatih Tas, could face three years in jail for issuing the book, "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade," by John Tirman, which focuses on Turkey. It was published in the United States in 1997.

Prosecutors contended that the book humiliated Turkish institutions by including the testimony of people who were subjected to human rights violations by the security forces during heavy fighting with the Kurdish Worker's Party, or P.K.K., in the country's southeastern region in the 1990's.

Prosecutors also took offense at the book for saying that the founder of modern Turkey adopted a nationalism that was "a version of fascism."

The case against Mr. Tas came as a surprise, although he has been sued many times in the past, because the Turkish government has reformed its penal code to favor further freedom of expression in order to qualify for membership in the European Union.

Lawsuits still crop up, however, involving issues like Kurdish rights or state unity, topics that remain sensitive in the eyes of the judiciary.

"The law is unlawfully open to interpretation," Mr. Tas said. "I'm accused of insulting the Turkish identity but the limits of what should be defined as an insult or criticism or scientific analysis are not mentioned in the law."

Several other intellectuals and writers, including the acclaimed novelist Orhan Pamuk, face similar charges, which raise concerns among the members of the European Union about how well Turkey can adapt to the standards of democracy in Europe.

"It's an outrage," said Dr. Sahin Alpay, a political scientist from Bahceshir University. "Nonviolent expression of opinion cannot be considered a crime in the new penal code, but it seems that it would take a quite long time for the authorities to adopt to these changes."

Government officials acknowledge shortcomings in adopting the legal reforms but take an optimist stand in the face of severe criticism from mainly European countries.

"I'll continue to do what I think serves democracy in Turkey and believe that Turkey will attain much better days in future," Mr. Tas said.

Trials of Mr. Tas and Mr. Pamuk are both scheduled for December. The novelist is charged with insulting the state in his comments - appearing in a Swiss newspaper in 2005 - about the Turkish massacre of ethnic Armenians in the last century.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/in...nd-turkey.html





Senate Bill Lets Artists Claim Price for Gifts
Robin Pogrebin

Living writers, musicians, artists and scholars who donate their work to a museum or other charitable cause would earn a tax deduction based on full fair market value under a bill just passed by the Senate.

Currently such work receives only a deduction based on the cost of materials unless it is donated posthumously by the estates.

The measure was approved as an amendment to a broader $59.6 billion tax relief bill passed by the Senate early Friday. It now goes to a House-Senate conference committee. The House version of the tax relief bill does not include the arts provision, but the senators who introduced the amendment - Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican - said they were hopeful that the committee would support it.

Under the bill, artists could donate their work during their lifetimes at full market value provided that it is properly appraised and handed over at least 18 months after it is created.

The provision seems likely to open the way for more acquisitions by cash-strapped museums. "It's very important for cultural institutions and libraries to be able to be the recipient of these works of art that otherwise might go into private hands," said Mimi Gaudieri, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

"Especially for small to midsize institutions with modest acquisition funds, as a gift from the artists, it's a great opportunity to enhance their collections," Ms. Gaudieri said.

The donated work must be related to the purpose or function of the museum or charitable organization receiving the donation.

Mr. Schumer, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the measure would even the playing field for arts donors. "Right now, artists are better off waiting until after they die to donate their works to a charity or a museum," he said, adding that the amendment "fixes that problem and treats artists the same as anyone else who works hard and wants to donate something to charity at the fair market or appraised value."

Arts professionals described the measure as long overdue. "Artists donate to cultural nonprofits or other nonprofits, and all they get is the cost of their materials," said Tom Healy, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which represents arts groups downtown. "If you have a painting that's worth $5,000, you may be able to deduct $20 for the canvas."

As long as the work is physically tangible, it can be contributed as a deduction, said Robert L. Lynch, president and chief executive of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group. "A score has value just like a painting," he said.

Applying the provision may present challenges for the Internal Revenue Service, given that appraising a work of creativity is often a highly subjective process. "It's a pretty new day in tax policy," said Dean A. Zerbe, a senior tax lawyer and investigator for the Senate Finance Committee. "It has the potential for people to want to go back and expand it."

He suggested that some professionals might seek a deduction for a product like a legal brief or a medical operation. "It's something the house will have to look at closely," Mr. Zerbe said.

The bill also comes with stricter rules for the qualifications of appraisers. "The public is now going to be made aware of what a qualified appraiser is," said Fran Zeman, the former chairwoman of the personal property committee of the American Society of Appraisers. "It's important for everyone to understand the importance of using someone who is qualified."

Ms. Zeman said that noncash contributions to charitable groups are often overvalued. The Internal Revenue Service has grappled with the valuation of donations ranging from automobiles to frequent-flier miles.

Mark W. Everson, the I.R.S. commissioner, raised that issue in testimony last spring before the Senate Finance Committee. "Valuation issues are often difficult," he said. "Overvaluations may arise from taxpayer error or abuse as well as from aggressive taxpayer positions."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/ar...ign/22tax.html





Books for Lending, Data for Taking
Alison Leigh Cowan

AT the library at North Carolina State University, students and faculty will soon be able to sign up for an Internet-based service that will alert them when favorite journals are published, with links to the articles. They will also be able to create home pages with links to databases, books, journals, Web sites and other resources.

The library is one of several around the country that are borrowing techniques from Amazon, Netflix and other Internet companies that keep information about their customers' purchases and preferences so they can better cater to their needs or tastes.

The hope is that these on-line programs, whose feasibility is still being tested at this point, will help libraries appeal to a generation that often prizes convenience over privacy.

Yet for the libraries, privacy remains an important issue. The data such personalized programs store - information about what journals someone is reading, for example - could be sought by government agencies under laws like the USA Patriot Act. The act, which gives the government broad antiterrorism powers, must be renewed in Congress by the end of the year; last week Senate Democrats, who dislike some parts of the law, threatened a filibuster.

"Privacy and confidentiality have always been among our core values," said Carolyn Argentati, the deputy librarian at North Carolina State. "So the question is, how to remain true to them in a changing technological and legal environment?"

Libraries have a long tradition of protecting the privacy of their patrons. During the cold war, for example, when the F.B.I. quietly asked libraries to monitor their foreign patrons, many librarians instead worked for passage of laws making library records confidential. In 48 states and Washington, library data is considered private, with some exceptions.

Librarians generally are wary of the Patriot Act, approved after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which makes it easier for law enforcement agencies to gather information in terrorism investigations.

"You cannot protect patrons' privacy right now under this law," said Christine Bradley, the executive director of the Connecticut Library Consortium, which represents 800 local organizations.

A smaller consortium of libraries in the Hartford area has gone to court to fight federal investigators who are seeking patron information in one case. The request is one of an estimated 30,000 made to businesses and institutions each year by federal agents under the Patriot Act. The case has mobilized the American Library Association to join officials of some 400 communities nationwide to urge Congress to consider the impact on civil liberties when it votes on extending the act.

To those who say libraries are special because of their devotion to intellectual freedom, law enforcement officials say terrorism has raised the stakes. They say librarians are naďve to think that libraries should be treated differently from other public places where people congregate without an expectation of privacy.

They also argue that shielding libraries from government surveillance will just convince everyone from terrorists to pedophiles to patronize the local library, much as some of the Sept. 11 hijackers used library computers for some of their dealings.

"It's indisputable that people use libraries to commit crimes because they think they can conceal their identity," Kevin J. O'Connor, the United States attorney for the District of Connecticut, said in a recent talk at the University of New Haven.

But there is an increasing demand for libraries to provide the kind of anticipatory services pioneered over the Internet. Such programs might suggest books to patrons based on what they've borrowed in the past, or help patrons identify a book when they know little about it other than the plot.

"This is getting to be a little bit of a conflict now because some of our patrons would like that," said Michael Simonds, the chief executive officer of Bibliomation, a nonprofit consortium in Middlebury, Conn., that keeps track of circulation records for 64 libraries. "They've gotten used to Amazon and Netflix and those kinds of services."

Eric Lease Morgan, a librarian at the University of Notre Dame and a programmer, said, "It will be a good thing to have the various computer systems be a little more intelligent about you." Mr. Morgan said his latest project, software that can suggest resources to library users based on past selections, should make research easier.

But Michael Golrick, the city librarian in Bridgeport, Conn., said there were large numbers of immigrants in his area who might be wary of the data-gathering nature of such programs. "There are folks in the community who have reason to worry about surveillance, and people who came to this country to avoid the kinds of surveillance and persecution we're seeing tinges of today," Mr. Golrick said.

One solution, he said, is for libraries to purge their records often, so that if law enforcement officials come around there is not much on file. "I can't give what I don't have," he said.

Those rolling out new services say that patrons should be made aware that information will be stored. But some librarians say conspicuous and detailed disclaimers about privacy may make it hard to promote the programs. "Some people argue that those types of warnings are disproportionate to the risk and might scare users away from using the library," said Ms. Argentati of North Carolina State.

Michael Cropper, a graduate student who serves on an advisory committee to the university's libraries, said he knew that any information that is stored can also be shared. But he said there was strong demand on the campus for new programs.

"People tend to clamor for more convenience," Mr. Cropper said, noting that these personalized services make it "easier for people to get what they're looking for."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/we...w/20cowan.html





Google Supports Library of Congress Online Effort
Juan Carlos Perez

Google Inc. is giving a financial boost to a U.S. Library of Congress project to digitize “rare and unique” items and build an online library.

With its US$3 million donation, Google has become the first private-sector contributor to the Library of Congress’ World Digital Library (WDL) project, the two organizations announced Tuesday. The Library of Congress will continue to seek contributions from other private-sector companies for the project.

At this stage, the Library of Congress is looking to develop a plan to lay the technological foundations of the WDL, whose content will mostly be digitized unique items, such as manuscripts.

Google’s library-scanning activities have landed it in hot water recently. Google is digitizing books from five major libraries, including books under copyright protection, to make them searchable online using the company’s search engine. As a result, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have filed separate lawsuits charging Google with copyright infringement.

The program, announced in December and called Google Book Search for Libraries, is a project to scan all or portions of the library collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library and Oxford University. Google says its users will be able to access the full text of books in the public domain, but only a few sentences of copyright books.

The Library of Congress will get special permission to include works in the World Digital Library that aren’t in the public domain.

This isn’t the first time Google and the Library of Congress have collaborated. The two organizations recently completed a project to digitize about 5,000 public-domain books, and Google will scan works considered of historical value from the Library of Congress’ Law Library.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/11...ogle/index.php





At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner
Katie Hafner

Twenty years ago, when Sidney Verba became director of the Harvard University Library, he thought there was a good chance he would enjoy a placid transition into retirement.

Placid is not the word Mr. Verba would use to describe his life now. "Challenging" or "exciting" would better fit the bill, he said, choosing his words carefully.

Mr. Verba is overseeing the university's partnership with Google, which plans to create searchable digital copies of entire collections - tens of millions of books - at five leading research libraries.

The partnership is part of the controversial Google Book Search Library Project, which has provoked lawsuits by publishers and writers' groups that accuse Google of violating copyrights by scanning the books into Google's search database without the permission of the copyright holders.

The University of Michigan, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University have also signed on with the Google project, which expects to scan 15 million books from the libraries.

For Mr. Verba, the decision to support Google's plan was not easy or obvious. He has a unique perspective on the legal and intellectual debate because his various professional roles connect him to every aspect of the creation and use of books.

"It's been dominating my life for the last year and a half," said Mr. Verba, a prominent political scientist who has been a professor at Harvard for more than 30 years. Even now, he is cautious about the implications of the ambitious project.

Until two years ago, the congenial and energetic Mr. Verba was chairman of the board of Harvard University Press. And in that position, he witnessed mounting anxiety about the future of publishing, especially with the advent of digital texts.

"Scanning the whole text makes publishers very nervous," he said. "I have sympathy with that. They have to be assured there will be security, that no one will hack in and steal contents, or sell it to someone."

And as the author or co-author of 18 books, he understands the worry that Google's digitization project might cause writers over loss of income or control of their work. Many of his own books are still in print.

But as a librarian and a teacher, he argues that the digital project will meet the needs of students who gravitate to the Internet - and Google in particular - to conduct their research. And he says he believes the project will aid the library's broader mission to preserve academic material and make it accessible to the world.

He was taken aback when Google was sued, first in September by a group of authors, then last month by five major publishers.

"It's become much more controversial than I would have expected," Mr. Verba said. "I was surprised by the vehemence."

For the time being, Harvard has confined the scanning of its collections largely to books in the public domain and limited the initial scanning to about 40,000 volumes. But it hopes eventually to scan copyrighted books as well, depending on the outcome of the legal dispute. "The thing that consoles me," Mr. Verba said, "is Google's notion of showing only the snippets, which have everything to do with what's in the book, but nothing to do with reading the book."

Google's search of copyrighted works in the library collections allows users to see a limited amount of text surrounding the relevant search term. But to make those snippets freely available on the Web, the books must be scanned in their entirety into Google's database to create a searchable index, which the lawsuits claim violates the fair use provision of copyright law.

Mr. Verba says he believes that showing small excerpts helps direct readers to books they would not know about otherwise, and could help spur sales.

Patricia Schroeder, the former Colorado congresswoman who is president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, which is suing Google on behalf of the five publishers, has a far less sanguine view.

"Look, people should be able to search all this stuff, but it should be the author's choice and not Google's," Ms. Schroeder said. "You can't have a corporation just come in and say, 'We're going to do this and it's good for you.' "

But as an educator, Mr. Verba has watched his students shun libraries in favor of search engines and other electronic resources. In his courses, Mr. Verba has cast a skeptical eye on student papers thick with URL's in the bibliography.

"Everyone with a teenage kid is worried that the younger generation may believe that all knowledge is on Google," said Mr. Verba, who said he nagged his own students to use library books.

"But what this does," he said, referring to the Google project, "is take you to Google, which takes you to the library."

Yet when Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive, first visited Harvard two years ago and put forth the idea of digitizing millions of books spread out over Harvard's more than 90 libraries, Mr. Verba was skeptical. The sheer magnitude of the task seemed staggering.

James Hilton, the interim university librarian at the University of Michigan, for example, said that he asked his staff a year ago to estimate how long it would take to digitize the library's seven million volumes. The answer was more than a 1,000 years.

Then Google came along and offered hope that the project could be done within a decade.

"We are among the most aggressive of libraries doing their own digitizing," Mr. Hilton said. "Google thinks they'll be able to do it in six."

As for Harvard's own back-of-the-envelope calculations, "it would be incredibly expensive beyond anything we could imagine funding," Mr. Verba said. "I didn't think it could be done by anyone, including Google."

One of his main concerns was the physical vulnerability of some of the older volumes. As custodian of his institution's materials, he worried that the physical handling of the books could damage them.

But he said he was impressed by Google's technical competence and the ambitious scope of the project. Still, he wanted to see more details, especially about the protection of the books themselves. He told Google to come back after it had worked out those fine points.

Google did return, some nine months later, details in hand.

"It was clear they had done their homework," said Mr. Verba, who was careful not to talk about parts of the project that fall under a nondisclosure agreement. "They had designed a very efficient means of doing the digitization, in a nondamaging, cost-efficient way. And they were willing to invest a large amount of money."

Although Google will not disclose its investment, outsiders have speculated that the company is spending more than $200 million on the entire project.

Google has also cultivated an aura of mystery around its proprietary book-scanning technology.

Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice president for product management, who is overseeing the Google Book Search project, said the company had built its own scanners, which capture the image of the page using optical character recognition technology. The scanning for Harvard's collection, she said, is taking place at Harvard's book depositories.

Some Google watchers think the company has developed an advanced page-turning scanning technology while others think Google's scanners are more conventional, having workers turn the pages at hundreds of scanners.

Crain's Detroit Business reported last month that Google had leased a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in Ann Arbor to digitize the University of Michigan books. Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman, said Google was looking to expand its scanning facilities for Michigan, but did not have anything to announce.

"It's a fascinating time, and very confusing," Mr. Verba said of the copyright controversy. "And if you ask me if I have a clear view of fair use, the answer is no. It's all up in the air."

Another concern for the plaintiffs in the lawsuits is the second digital copy that Google gives to the libraries as part of each agreement. But Mr. Verba maintains that those second copies will be used only for archiving and preservation, in keeping with a research library's charter.

"We think and hope it is legally the appropriate approach," Mr. Verba said of the Google project. "But we're taking it day by day."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/bu...21harvard.html





CBS Says in Talks with Google for Video Search
Kenneth Li and Michele Gershberg

U.S. television network CBS is in discussions with Internet media company Google Inc. for video search and on-demand video, CBS chairman Leslie Moonves said on Tuesday.

Viacom-owned CBS, which is in the process of splitting itself apart from the faster growing MTV cable networks and Paramount film studios, is seeking other distribution outlets for its top ranked shows including the CSI franchise.

"We're talking to them about a whole slew of things including video-on-demand, including video search," Moonves told Reuters in an interview regarding Google, ahead of Reuters's Media and Advertising Summit next week.

Such talks are occurring across the media industry at a time when entertainment companies are wary of new technologies like the Internet and video games that appear to siphon off consumers of traditional media.

Moonves, however, said he saw more opportunities on the Internet to boost CBS's reach and bottom line.

CBS's discussions have not been restricted to Google and have also included talks with Yahoo Inc., although no deals have yet been struck.

"They need our content, we need their technology," he said, referring to broader discussions with Internet companies. "We argue about which is more important. I think ultimately my content, no matter how you get it, content is still the most important thing."

In September, Viacom's UPN television network struck a deal with Google to offer exclusive video streams of its "Everybody Hates Chris" comedy show. The premier show was offered for four days at Google Video service.

Google is just one of a handful of big Internet companies that seek to offer video programing on the Web. Yahoo is seeking to license more video for its service.

But finding a way for media and Internet companies to work together has not been without snafus. Shortly after Google debuted its video search in June, copyrighted videos from random users crept onto the service, drawing the ire of the very media companies Google aimed to attract.

Google removed the videos after a few days.

Then there's digital video recording technology company TiVo Inc., whose early plans to let some of its customers send recorded videos directly to Apple Computer Inc.'s new iPod digital media player could set the stage for the next copyright fight.

"There's some intellectual property questions about the situation," Moonves said about TiVo's plans.

What's certain is big media needs to offer legitimate alternatives. "Video on the Internet is taking off like mad," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, which has reported that about 46 percent of online households were already watching videos.

Eyeing how the music industry's slow reaction to new technology ravaged sales, U.S. television networks have been busier experimenting online, Moonves said.

"They'd be better off moving as quickly as possible to embrace these technologies," Bernoff added about television networks.

More Vod With Les

More shows are expected to be offered to cable, satellite television and wireless services as well, Moonves said.

CBS announced a one-year deal to let Comcast Corp. cable customers view episodes of some of its shows at the click of their remote for 99 cents earlier this month.

Moonves, who is also co-chief operating officer of Viacom, said the company was in talks with satellite television operator DirecTV Group Inc. for similar deals, although he did not specify when, or if, any deal would be struck.

"We've spoken with DirecTV, sure," he said. "I think you'll see more and more of those deals happening along the way, as well as you'll see more and more deals like ABC did with the iPod."

Although Moonves did not address discussions with Apple's iTunes service, which began selling episodes of ABC's "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" in October, sources have said the two are in discussions.

Viacom's widely held class b shares rose 3 cents to $33.67 on the New York Stock Exchange in afternoon trading. Google shares rose $6.03, or 1.47 percent to $415.39 on Nasdaq.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RS&srch=google





NBC Universal Deal Highlights P2P Pivot
Jay Lyman

Although the major Hollywood movie studios have historically resembled the recording industry -- which sued thousands of individual users -- when it came to P2P, it appears the big screen and TV content giants have learned from the song swapping struggle and may be faster to take advantage of legitimate digital distribution.

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It used to be that peer-to-peer (P2P) operators and major music and movie entertainment companies mentioned in the same statement indicated some sort of legal action by either side, but the latest announcement -- a deal for NBC Universal content to be available on Wurld Media's Peer Impact P2P service -- has the two holding hands.

In what was called a deal for the first legitimate P2P operator to offer video on demand, the companies said NBC Universal's movies, including "Ray," "Meet the Fockers" and others, would be legally available on the Peer Impact service online.

Industry analysts praised the deal, highlighting other experiments -- such as Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) deal with ABC for shows on the video iPod -- and said although the studios may be better positioned to leverage P2P, there are significant hurdles ahead.

"I think clearly they are all looking at this, and looking at different ways of doing it," Gartner research director Mike McGuire told TechNewsWorld. "It used to be something they hated," he added of P2P. "The real crucial thing is they're at least trying it."

Embracing Technology

Although the major Hollywood movie studios have historically resembled the recording industry -- which sued thousands of individual users -- when it came to P2P, it appears the big screen and TV content giants have learned from the song swapping struggle and may be faster to take advantage of legitimate digital distribution.

NBC Universal and Peer said their agreement would make programming available to P2P users for one day rental.

"This agreement with Wurld Media furthers [our] commitment by allowing consumers to view the highest-quality movies securely on their computers," said a statement from NBC Universal Cable president David Zaslav.

Experimental Use

McGuire said other trials, including the BBC's and the Apple-ABC iPod deal, represent the content holders' first try at legitimate online distribution of video.

"The challenge now is the experiment to see how this channel works," he said. "It is definitely their first shot, their first experiment, so this is going to be fine-tuned."

The analyst added that while there is an expectation of ownership with music, consumers may be more willing to pay for limited viewing of video, which they are accustomed to with rentals.

Nevertheless, McGuire said while the technology and architecture may change, the business model may be the biggest issue for online and on demand video.

Content and File Size

Jupiter Research Vice President Michael Gartenberg told TechNewsWorld the NBC Universal-Peer and Apple-ABC deals signal entry into a new area.

"A lot of this is going to come down to what content is available and how is it available," he said.

Gartenberg added there are major differences with video, which is not something consumers typically watch over and over as they do with music, and which is a dramatically larger file size.

"That has a significant impact as well," he said, adding although there are digital rights management and technology issues to deal with, it is good to see content holders attempting to get ahead of the curve.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/...P-Pivot.xhtml#





Join a Revolution. Make Movies. Go Broke.
Charles Lyons

ARIN CRUMLEY, 24, and his girlfriend, Susan Buice, 27, sat in their cramped apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, in front of the computers on which they edited their independent film. Post-Its on a nearby wall read, "Eat Less," "No More Banana Chips" and "Work Succeed." An oversized skateboard leaned precariously against a makeshift desk. Several women's wigs were scattered on the floor.

Mr. Crumley and Ms. Buice spoke about their 14-month ordeal making "Four Eyed Monsters," which dramatizes how they met online, and in which they co-star. The movie was well received at its Slamdance Film Festival premiere in January and screened at 16 other festivals. But like so many independent labors of love, it has yet to attract a theatrical distributor.

"If the result was going to be this," Mr. Crumley mused, "a film with no distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? That's a tough question to answer." Ms. Buice added: "The answer is, 'no,' it's not O.K. for our film to have been mildly successful on the festival circuit. But otherwise, it was just a jaunt into the abyss and now we have financial hell to pay."

The first-time filmmakers used their $10,000 in savings to begin production and borrowed $55,000 on seven credit cards to complete the film. Ms. Buice's parents have contributed $20,000 more for film festival travel and living expenses.

In that, Ms. Buice and Mr. Crumley appear typical of a generation of filmmakers determined to bring their visions to the screen, never mind that a staggering number of completed films don't get farther than the filmmakers' closets. In one measure of the glut, the 2005 Sundance Film Festival received more than 2,600 feature-film submissions - up nearly 30 percent from a year earlier - and selected only 120.

But as technology continues to reduce the cost and difficulty of making a movie, and eager news media scour the landscape for the next Steven Soderbergh, an endless rush of newcomers has jumped headlong into filmmaking.

Cindy Konits, 51, who teaches video arts at Villa Julie College in Baltimore, for instance, has just completed a 20-minute film called "The Way I See It." Four years in the making, it was inspired by a fact that haunted Ms. Konits when she was a child: her mother's first cousin, Dr. Henry Abrams - who had been Albert Einstein's ophthalmologist and friend - kept Einstein's eyes in a jar inside a dresser drawer. Even now, at 94, he still does. In 2001, Dr. Abrams granted Ms. Konits permission to videotape the eyes and make a film about them. "My film explores perceptions of mortality, body parts and perception itself," she said, adding that she planned to submit her short to film festivals.

Sydney Pollack, the director - who has served as a creative adviser at the Filmmakers Lab of the Sundance Institute -said a price must be paid for democratizing any art. "The minute everyone is allowed in, something changes in terms of standards of excellence," he said. "I don't know whether that is good or bad."

And Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, warned that tales of overnight success can have a negative effect. "One of the problems with the Cinderella stories is that they create enormous expectation that people come out of the box fully grown," he said. "Filmmakers are not allowed enough time to enjoy a sense of growth."

But Lloyd Kaufman, the founder of Troma Entertainment, an independent film company that over 30 years has built a library of some 800 low-budget films, sees only a positive side to democratizing film. "We need to destroy the conspiracy of elites that's killing art and commerce," Mr. Kaufman said, seated in his office in Clinton in front of a poster of his latest film, the comedy "Poultrygeist."

What makes the independent film landscape particularly treacherous, though, is that most independent pictures are either self-financed or backed by individuals who've staked their own cash - and are left holding the bag when, as in the vast majority of cases, the movie turns out to have no commercial future.

Even without a distributor, "Four Eyed Monsters" is hardly an epic failure, if a failure at all, but the situation is dire for its creators. "My parents are really supportive of the creative lifestyle," Ms. Buice said. "But they're not rich people. They are middle class. It's causing problems at home. They like the movie but they are really freaked out by the financial situation. They're constantly on my case. 'Are you eating?' 'Did you pay the rent?' 'Did you pay your taxes?' My mom is very concerned about the credit-card debt."

SINCE their first interview for this article, Ms. Buice and Mr. Crumley have sublet their $1,200-a-month Brooklyn apartment and moved in with Ms. Buice's parents in Massachusetts. Still, they may have a leg up on the thousands of other filmmakers looking for a distributor. They have just posted the first of a series of planned video podcasts featuring additional content related to the film on a Web site, myspace.com, and on iTunes. In a follow-up interview, Mr. Crumley said that after just one week the material had been viewed by 14,000 Internet users.

"Media is not completely democratized yet because distribution is not a democratic thing," Mr. Crumley said. "We're looking at other ways to make our movie available in these different formats so that word of mouth can take over where we left off."

Doug Killgore, 58, has no credit-card debt but he feels indebted to the investors who put up the $1 million budget for "The Trust," a dramatization of the mysterious murder of William March Rice, for whom Rice University was named. Mr. Killgore said he still hoped to find a domestic distributor, even though the film made the festival rounds back in 1992. "I don't regret making the film at all," he said from Houston, where he now teaches at Rice. "I just regret that people who put their money into the film didn't get it back."

Many independent filmmakers have migrated to related careers. Emily Morse, 35, was co-director of the documentary "See How They Run," about the 1999 San Francisco mayoral race. It made its premiere at the 2002 South by Southwest Film Festival; Ms. Morse discussed a sale with distributors yet never closed a deal. She acted in several friends' films, worked as a print model, and recently started her own podcast, an online radio show called "Sex With Emily" that uses the motto, "Saving the world one orgasm at a time."

Ms. Morse, who lives in San Francisco, feels some creative people today are too fixated on using film to tell their stories, particularly in a climate where finding a distributor is so tough. "You need a reality check that a lot of people aren't getting," she said. "There are lots of other ways to get your story out there. Right now the convergence of media is moving so quickly."

But not so quickly that it's abetting the drive to make one's own film. Ilja Maran, 13, of Long Beach, Calif., just completed his first film, "Sauce," a 25-minute short capturing him and his friends performing skateboarding tricks. "This came out so well I definitely want to do another one," he said. "I'd enjoy being a filmmaker, especially if you were filming something of interest to me like skateboarding or other sports. But not if it's going to be a soap opera or something."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/movies/20lyon.html





A Party Girl Leads China's Online Revolution
Howard W. French

On her fourth day of keeping a Web log, she introduced herself to the world with these striking words: "I am a dance girl, and I am a party member."

"I don't know if I can be counted as a successful Web cam dance girl," that early post continued. "But I'm sure that looking around the world, if I am not the one with the highest diploma, I am definitely the dance babe who reads the most and thinks the deepest, and I'm most likely the only party member among them."

Thus was born, early in July, what many regard as China's most popular blog.

Sometimes timing is everything, and such was the case with the anonymous blogger, a self-described Communist Party member from Shanghai who goes by the pseudonym Mu Mu.

A 25-year-old, Mu Mu appears online most evenings around midnight, shielding her face while striking poses that are provocative, but never sexually explicit.

She parries questions from some of her tens of thousands of avid followers with witticisms and cool charm.

Chinese Web logs have existed since early in this decade, but the form has exploded in recent months, challenging China's ever vigilant online censors and giving flesh to the kind of free-spoken civil society whose emergence the government has long been determined to prevent or at least tightly control.

Web experts say the surge in blogging is a result of strong growth in broadband Internet use, coupled with a huge commercial push by the country's Internet providers aimed at wooing users. Common estimates of the numbers of blogs in China range from one million to two million and growing fast.

Under China's current leader, Hu Jintao, the government has waged an energetic campaign against freedom of expression, prohibiting the promotion of public intellectuals by the news media; imposing restrictions on Web sites; pressing search engine companies, like Google, to bar delicate topics, particularly those dealing with democracy and human rights; and heavily censoring bulletin board discussions at universities and elsewhere.

So far, Chinese authorities have mostly relied on Internet service providers to police the Web logs. Commentary that is too provocative or directly critical of the government is often blocked by the provider. Sometimes the sites are swamped by opposing comment - many believe by official censors - that is more favorable to the government.

Blogs are sometimes shut down altogether, temporarily or permanently. But the authorities do not yet seem to have an answer to the proliferation of public opinion in this form.

The new wave of blogging took off earlier this year. In the past, a few pioneers of the form stood out, but now huge communities of bloggers are springing up around the country, with many of them promoting one another's online offerings, books, music or, as in Mu Mu's case, a running, highly ironic commentary about sexuality, intellect and political identity.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new.

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

A fresh example was served up last week with the announcement by China of five cartoonlike mascot figures for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They were lavishly praised in the press - and widely ridiculed in blogs that seemed to accurately express public sentiment toward them.

"It's not difficult to create a mascot that's silly and ugly," wrote one blogger. "The difficulty is in creating five mascots, each sillier and uglier than the one before it."

A leading practitioner of the sly, satirical style that is emerging here as an influential form of political and social commentary is a 38-year-old Beijing entertainment journalist named Wang Xiaofeng. Mr. Wang, who runs a site called Massage Milk, is better known to bloggers by his nickname, Dai San Ge Biao, which means Wears Three Watches.

His blog mixes an infectious cleverness with increasingly forthright commentary on current events, starting with his very nickname, which is a patent mockery of the political theory of the former Chinese Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, which was labeled San Ge Dai Biao, or the Three Represents.

In a recent commentary, as the government stoked patriotic sentiment during the commemoration of the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, Mr. Wang asked who really fought the enemy, making the provocative observation that only two Communist generals had died fighting Japan, while more than 100 of their Nationalist counterparts had.

"In blogging I don't need to be concerned about taboos," Mr. Wang said. "I don't need to borrow a euphemism to express myself. I can do it more directly, using the exact word I want to, so it feels a lot freer."

Another emerging school of blogging, potentially as subversive as any political allegory, involves bringing Chinese Web surfers more closely in touch with things happening outside their country.

Typically, this involves avid readers of English who scour foreign Web sites and report on their findings, adding their own commentary, in Chinese blogs.

Several bloggers like this have become opinion leaders, usually in areas like technology, culture, current events or fashion, building big followings by being fast and prolific.

One of the leading sites was run by Isaac Mao, a Shanghai investment manager who had built a following writing about education and technology. His site, isaacmao.com, was later blocked by the authorities after he posted a graphic purporting to illustrate the workings of the firewall operated by the country's censors.

Mr. Mao, an organizer of the first national bloggers' conference in Shanghai this month, recently went back online at isaacmao.blogbus.com/s1034872/index.html.

By far the biggest category of blogs remains the domain of the personal diary, and in this crowded realm, getting attention places a premium on uniqueness.

For the past few months, Mu Mu, the Shanghai dancer, has held pride of place, revealing glimpses of her body while maintaining an intimate and clever banter with her many followers, who are carefully kept in the dark about her real identity.

"In China, the concepts of private life and public life have emerged only in the past 10 to 20 years," she said in an online interview. "Before that, if a person had any private life, it only included their physical privacy - the sex life, between man and woman, for couples.

"I'm fortunate to live in a transitional society, from a highly political one to a commercial one," she wrote, "and this allows me to enjoy private pleasures, like blogging."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/in...4bloggers.html
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Profiles

Putting the Napster Genie Back in the Bottle
Saul Hansell

San Francisco

SHAWN FANNING turns 25 on Tuesday, and it's been a very long seven years since he wrote a little computer program that let him trade electronic music files with his dorm mates at Northeastern University in Boston, where he was a freshman. He called it Napster, after his nickname, and it quickly grew into an Internet phenomenon - not to mention the music industry's bęte noire until it was shut down by the courts four years ago.

Now the public spotlight is turning back to Mr. Fanning, this time as a symbol of how big business and the disruptive force of the Internet just might find a way to get along. This month, Grokster, one of the file-sharing services that emerged after the original Napster vanished, stopped distributing its software and agreed to pay the record industry $50 million, which it has no prospect of ever raising. Grokster decided to give up on a legal battle that had effectively been lost when the Supreme Court unanimously decided in June that it and other file-sharing services could be held liable if people used them to steal copyrighted works.

By year-end, a new version of Grokster will appear - this one sanctioned by the record industry because it will use technology, built by Mr. Fanning, that requires file-swappers to pay for copyrighted material. In other words, Mr. Fanning, who let the genie out of the bottle when he created the copyright-busting Napster, is now selling a way to put the genie back into the bottle.

His new company, called Snocap, has produced software that can enable music services to fulfill the original promise of Napster - a community of dedicated fans exchanging a wide selection of music - while monitoring the file-trading for copyrighted works. The new Grokster will still use peer-to-peer technology, which lets users download songs directly to one another's computers. But when a user tries to get a copyrighted file, Snocap can block the download or force the user to pay for it, depending on what the artist and label want.

IF Snocap catches on - still a very big "if" because only one file-sharing service has signed up to use the software - it will vindicate Mr. Fanning's passionately held belief that if Napster had been allowed to live, it would have become a legitimate and profitable sales outlet for artists and music companies. After the original Napster closed, the name was sold to a new company that sells licensed music under paid subscriptions and does not use peer-to-peer technology.

"Nobody has ever built a reliable peer-to-peer service, where people can really access all the music they want in one location," Mr. Fanning said. "Once I got it into my head, I couldn't imagine the media space without one."

Yet curiously, at this crucial time for his young company, Mr. Fanning is pulling back from day-to-day operations and declining most opportunities to appear in public to champion it. Always painfully shy, Mr. Fanning says he wants to defer to the company's management, including a newly hired chief executive, Rusty Rueff, who had been a senior executive at Electronic Arts.

In the meantime, of course, Apple Computer and other companies have built thriving, unquestionably legal music-downloading businesses. And others are trying to build authorized paid services using peer-to-peer technology.

Mr. Fanning's vision is much more ambitious than these others. He doesn't simply want to impose fees for the same songs that are available through Apple's iTunes and other stores. He wants to create an open system that would allow anyone with music to share - big labels and garage bands alike - to register their works with Snocap and set the economic terms under which songs could be traded. Snocap would collect the fees, using software that listens to each song in participating file-sharing services, matching songs that listeners order with those in the registry and forcing users to pay the price the song owner demands.

If this works for music, Snocap may ultimately serve as a template for resolving some of the thorniest problems facing all sorts of copyrighted material, according to Jonathan Spalter, a former Vivendi official who worked as Snocap's chief executive in 2003 and 2004; he left after differences with Mr. Fanning.

"They have a shot, but it's a nine-bank billiard shot and they have only one stroke of the cue to get it right," Mr. Spalter said. "You need to get consensus from a firmament of major labels, independent labels, the publishers, courts, legislature, the peer-to-peer to companies, retailers and other actors. This is the ultimate, purest form of herding cats."

The record companies, meanwhile, have escalated their attack on digital piracy, suing file-sharing software makers and the people who share music and hiring white-hat hackers to pollute the file-sharing networks with songs that purport to be the latest hits, but actually contain only static or worse.

If any of these tactics have restrained piracy, the effect is modest. Album sales are 30 percent below their level the year when Mr. Fanning let Napster loose, and 10 times as many songs are downloaded from file-sharing services as are bought from paid services like iTunes. So it should come as no surprise that the record companies are starting to embrace Mr. Fanning's idea that peer-to-peer file-sharing services can be reconstituted as legal sales outlets.

"Many of the people on these networks are not so much there to get their music free, although some of them certainly do," said Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chief executive of the Warner Music Group. "In the next year or two or three, we can develop legal services with the same availability of music, the same vibrant communities, that free services will not be so compelling." Last week, Warner became the last of the four major labels to agree to supply music to Snocap.

It is still unclear how many users of those free peer-to-peer services will start to pay when software like Grokster starts to demand money for copyrighted songs. It is not that difficult to find so-called open source file-sharing software, which is developed by elusive networks of volunteers who may well be out of the reach of the recording industry's lawsuits. And Grokster users who don't update to the new version of the service will still be able to trade songs with one another free.

"I don't know if someone can be successful transferring from regular, free file-sharing to paid file-sharing," said Thomas Mennecke, a news editor at Slyck, an online site for file-sharing users. "If you are going to pay for a song, why not use iTunes, which has the Apple iPod coolness?"

He doesn't see much impetus for hard-core users to start paying for their music. "I only see file sharing getting bigger and better," he said. "If you shut down the commercial guys, the open-source systems will always be there."

Snocap will not necessarily be the main beneficiary if legal file sharing takes off. The only service that has agreed to use its technology is Mashboxx, a start-up backed by Sony Music. It has agreed to buy the Grokster name and use it to sell a version of its service. Complicating this partnership is the fact that Mr. Fanning has a stormy relationship with the man who created Mashboxx, a loquacious former music publicist and file-sharing promoter named Wayne Rosso.

Snocap still hopes to recruit other customers from the major file-sharing services, many of which are negotiating with the record industry to see if they can avoid being sued. Some services are simply shutting down and some are being courted by IMesh, which has its own approach to a legal peer-to-peer system.

Mr. Fanning began working on what would become Snocap the day after the old Napster closed in September 2001. Gathering a few of his close friends and compatriots in a San Francisco music studio, he tried to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. He had been on an emotional roller coaster, becoming a hero to millions delighted with instant free music and then an archvillain to the music industry, even though he was pushed to Napster's sidelines by the series of grown-ups who tried to profit from his invention.

In the end, Napster was the quintessential Internet company: it upended a huge and powerful industry without ever earning a dime itself. And after all the plans failed, all the lawsuits were lost, all the money was spent and all the outside managers departed, Mr. Fanning decided to try to get his revolution back.

HE started over, working with Jordan Mendelssohn, a programmer who was an early Napster employee, and won the backing of Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley angel investor who had provided crucial early financing to Napster. He also hired two prominent lawyers - John T. Frankenheimer of Loeb & Loeb in Hollywood and Fred Davis, son of the recording executive Clive Davis, in New York - to persuade the record companies to cooperate with him, the person most closely identified with all their troubles. "My job was to market the so-called Antichrist back to the music industry," Mr. Davis said.

Executives at the major labels received Mr. Fanning's idea enthusiastically. After all, it was as if he had found a way to put a police officer and a cashier in the satchel of every shoplifter on the planet. But Snocap stalled nonetheless. Developing the software turned out to be much more complicated than Mr. Fanning had anticipated, and he could not win the cooperation of file-sharing companies. And despite the music executives' enthusiasm, negotiations with their lawyers dragged on for months.

As Mr. Fanning struggled, Andrew R. Lack, the former head of NBC who took over Sony's music operation in 2003, wondered if he could make peace with the users of file-sharing systems, and approached Mr. Rosso, the former president of Grokster. Mr. Rosso says Mr. Lack had an idea: Was it possible to let people try out songs free? What if they could get whole songs, not the 30-second samples available on iTunes, but require them to buy the songs they really liked? The response from most other file-sharing services was chilly, but Mr. Rosso thought enough of the idea to create a new service - Mashboxx - along the lines that Mr. Lack had outlined. Soon, he found that Snocap's technology offered the best way to identify copyrighted songs on the network. (Mr. Lack was not available to be interviewed for this article.)

Unlike iTunes and other "closed" systems, where people can buy only what the retailer chooses to sell, Mashboxx is a true "open" peer-to-peer system that in theory can download any song from any computer that participates in a file-sharing network. This could include something that a garage band recorded by itself or a free release by an up-and-coming indie group.

If a Mashboxx user tries to download a song that has been registered as copyrighted in Snocap's database, however, Mashboxx will either block the download or substitute a free but low-quality version on which an announcer invites listeners to pay for a high-quality version without announcements if they like what they hear. The free version would expire after being played five times.

Mr. Rosso says that this tests the theory that people use peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing networks to try out songs, and that they will pay for music they like. "It is the great hypocrisy leveler," he said. "We will see if people use P2P to sample music or not."

Mr. Fanning and Mr. Rosso are now in a wary dance. Mashboxx and Snocap need each other, but their founders are mutually antagonistic. Indeed, Mr. Rosso is everything that Mr. Fanning isn't. Mr. Fanning is young, a gifted technologist, deadly serious about Snocap and terminally shy. Mr. Rosso is 56, a technological neophyte driven by opportunity rather than conviction, and a blue-ribbon publicity hound who once represented Harry Connick Jr. and Aerosmith, among others.

These days, Snocap's bustling offices fill a floor of an old warehouse building nestled between two skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco. Surrounding two dozen cubicles filled with programmers and dealmakers are a few conference rooms; a kitchen with free Twizzlers, gorp and soda; a computer room; and another small room with a foosball table and a set of Mr. Fanning's drums.

"I hate mornings," Mr. Fanning said as he arrived one bright day last spring, dressed in torn black jeans, a black ribbed pullover and gray sneakers, looking much as he did five years ago on the cover of Time magazine. He grabbed a Pepsi and wandered out to buy a sandwich for breakfast. Never a coffee drinker, he is trying to cut back on soda; at least he has downgraded from Red Bull.

Now Mr. Fanning is on the verge of settling, somewhat reluctantly, into a more adult phase of his life. He left the house he shared with two buddies in Silicon Valley and moved into a loft on Potrero Hill in San Francisco with his girlfriend, who works at Apple Computer.

Neither she nor the neighbors are quite so accommodating as his old roommates when it comes to his desire to play drums and guitar; when he really wants to cut loose, he says he now has to visit a friend's music studio.

When Mr. Fanning starts to explain the details of the complex software and business arrangements behind Snocap, his eyes glow with the intensity of many of the 20-something entrepreneurs of the dot-com boom. But he is living their dreams in reverse: first he revolutionized an industry, then he made the cover of Time and now he is figuring out the PowerPoint presentations for the business model.

The heart of Snocap is its sophisticated registry, which will index electronically all the files on the file-sharing networks. "Rights holders," which are what he calls musicians and their labels, will use the system to find those songs on which they hold copyrights and claim them electronically. Then they will enter into the registry the terms on which those files can be traded. It could be just like iTunes - pay 99 cents, and you own it - or it could be trickier: listen to it five times free, then buy it if you like it. Or it could be beneficent: listen to it free forever and (hopefully) buy tickets to the artist's next concert. Of course, the rights holders could also play tough: this is not for sale or for trading, and you can't have it.

One of the more interesting aspects of the software Mr. Fanning has built is called "missing masters." After a label sends Snocap all the music it currently publishes, the label's executives can use the software to see all the other tracks available from any particular artist. These are what Mr. Fanning calls "gray tracks" - bootleg recordings made by fans at concerts or in secret by recording engineers in studios. By some counts there are 25 million unique files available on the file-sharing networks, and no more than two million available in authorized download stores.

Some artists and labels may well want to quash these gray tracks, which many consider to be inferior versions of their work. But Mr. Fanning predicted that many would choose to make available - and possibly profit from - music that until now was simply contraband. "There is a huge interest on the part of your fans in this stuff," he said, "and it is already traded, if you don't make available, then you will hinder the growth of your artists' careers."

EVEN as he bubbles with these kinds of ideas, Mr. Fanning is rarely seen in Snocap's offices. Nor is he appearing much in public. He accepted an invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, then backed out, people close to him said, because of his shyness. He says he is confident in Snocap's management and needs time to spend on his personal life.

"I'm trying to step back and look at the big picture," he said last month over a Perrier at his favorite San Francisco steakhouse. "It has been seven years since I started Napster, and I didn't take a break when I started Snocap. That's a quarter of my life."

Moreover, he argued that the ideas behind Snocap were so powerful and inevitable that his second invention would eventually take on a life of its own, as Napster did - albeit far more slowly. "Ultimately," he said, "people will recognize the value of what we have done."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/bu...20fanning.html





Music Is Listening to Him

The record business once spurned tech geeks like Ted Cohen. But he's now a guru in an industry desperate to adapt to digital tastes.
Charles Duhigg

Ted Cohen is an unlikely rock star.

The 56-year-old computer fanatic has a high-pitched giggle and thinning gray hair. Instead of slinging a guitar over his shoulder, Cohen carries a backpack filled with nine cellphones, three iPods, two portable video players and enough wires, cables and tape to mummify Mariah Carey. At 5 feet 8 and 240 pounds, he will never be mistaken for one of the crooning waifs on MTV.

But among music executives, Cohen is something of an American Idol. As senior vice president of digital development at EMI Group, home of Coldplay and the Rolling Stones, Cohen has been in on the ground floor of dozens of online music ventures, including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. And he's one of the most sought-after speakers on the recording industry's endless conference-and-gala circuit.

During a recent Santa Monica symposium, so many people wanted a moment of Cohen's time that he resorted to holding back-to-back meetings in a hallway, where petitioners stood in line to win a brief audience with him.

"Ted is very high-profile," said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Assn. of America. "He's part ambassador and part evangelist." Cohen's celebrity is surprising, even to him. For decades, technologists were relegated to the lower levels of the music business. Then, in the late 1990s, when peer-to-peer computer networks such as Napster Inc. made music easy to steal, techies became outright pariahs.

But now, after half a decade of fighting high-tech change, the recording industry is rushing to embrace it. As consumers spend billions of dollars downloading songs and ring tones online and via cellphones, music executives have become desperate to convince Wall Street that they understand the Internet marketplace.

Suddenly, Cohen and other tech-savvy executives capable of translating between Silicon Valley and Tin Pan Alley are essential. The once-spurned geeks are becoming some of the music world's most respected leaders, and as they ascend, they are changing the industry's culture.

"What Ted is working on is embedded in everything we do as a company now," said David Munns, CEO of EMI Recorded Music North America.

Such change was on display last month when Cohen joined a panel on innovations in music distribution. One by one, speakers from the nation's largest music, computer and peer-to-peer corporations launched into serious forecasts of the industry's bleak future. Cohen managed to keep quiet for almost three minutes before the dire predictions proved too much.

"Listen to this!" he said, cuing the Beatles' "Help!" on his cellphone. "Isn't that great?" he shouted into the microphone.

From then on, it was Cohen's show. In the space of a quarter-hour, he challenged a Yahoo Inc. executive to a mud-wrestling contest, high-fived a friend in the front row, snickered when another speaker mentioned an outdated music player and weighed in on half a dozen other subjects.

"The future has never been more exciting!" he told the room. "We're going to figure out how to make this work!"

When the panel ended, people rushed the stage like groupies at a concert. Cohen's fans, like those of Bono or Cher, hailed him by his first name: "Ted!"

"Ted has made music fun again," said Gabe Adiv of Gracenote, a music software company, as he looked on.

But Cohen's antics are more than eccentricities. They are the key to how he bridges the disparate worlds of music and tech. Under Cohen's guidance, EMI has negotiated with just about any high-tech entrepreneur who stood still long enough to talk.

Sean Ryan, who helped create Listen.com in the late 1990s, said, "EMI was in front of everyone else because Ted was willing to talk to anyone."

It's more than friendliness, Cohen says. It's strategy.

"I try to embody what the industry should become," he said.

Music's love-hate relationship with technology is as old as the recording industry itself.

It began in the early 1900s, when songwriters, fearing for their jobs, begged the federal government to outlaw what they called "ungodly machines": player pianos. Instead of criminalizing the new invention, Congress created the copyright system that exists today, and songwriters relented when they began receiving royalty checks.

It was the start of a pattern: Innovation led to panic, which slowly turned to celebration when profits soared. In the '50s, recording executives said FM radio would kill the music industry. Then they discovered that broadcasts helped sell albums. In the '70s, record companies warned that cassette tapes would make piracy rampant. Then Sony released the Walkman, and music sales hit new heights.

In the 1980s and '90s, some insiders cautioned that the compact disc would make it easier for listeners to steal perfect copies. But when sales skyrocketed, the industry embraced the new format. By 1999, music corporations were larger than ever, shipping $14.6 billion worth of albums and growing at 6% a year.

But disaster loomed. As computer users began trading illegal copies of songs online, music sales began a free fall that has yet to hit bottom.

Cohen was about to find himself in the right place at precisely the right time.

An early adopter of technology and a music fanatic, he had begun collecting clunky reel-to-reel records and computer prototypes in high school. Working as a concert promoter in those days, he hoped to accomplish what were then his two goals: learning how to be cool and earning enough money to buy the gadgets that fascinated him.

After dropping out of Ithaca College after his junior year in 1968, Cohen scored a low-level job with a record label accompanying rock stars such as Alice Cooper and the band Van Halen on tour. But he failed to vault up the corporate ladder. "Technology was not seen as a good career move," he recalled. "You got promoted by finding the next hot band or schmoozing with DJs."

Cohen kept at it, visiting computer companies in his spare time. In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of an upstart company called Apple Computer, couldn't get record executives to return their calls. Cohen, then charged with learning about new gizmos for Warner Music, helped trade a friend's stereo for one of the first Apple computer systems.

Cohen spent much of the 1990s working on interactive videos at technology giant Philips Consumer Electronics, then became an independent consultant, helping computer companies such as Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Liquid Audio Inc. sell music online.

Then in 1999 he was offered the CEO position at a new peer-to-peer music company named Napster. He accepted a job at EMI instead, but the message was clear: Being a techie had suddenly become an asset.

Since peer-to-peer music-sharing networks became popular in 1999, U.S. shipments of recorded music have dropped by more than 30%, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, and U.S. music sales have fallen or remained flat every year.

Which is why there are now so many Teds.

Music's technology visionaries include Larry Kenswil and Rio Caraeff at Universal Music; Thomas Hesse at Sony BMG Music Entertainment; Alex Zubillaga and Michael Nash at Warner Music Group; and many others. Kenswil, Hesse and Zubillaga are among their companies' top policymakers.

"The record industry used to think of technology as termites they could ignore," said Stan Cornyn, who spent 34 years as an executive at Warner Music. "Now the west wing of the house has fallen off. They're desperate for people who can build better places."

Techies are entering the music industry at every level.

"The music world was a pretty insular place before," said Robin Bechtel, who oversees technology initiatives at Warner Bros. Records. Now, Bechtel employs law school dropouts, Internet entrepreneurs and recluses more comfortable navigating online chat rooms than concert auditoriums.

As new executives get their footing, they are pushing record companies to invest in new businesses. Warner Bros. Records has manufactured band merchandise, cut deals with mobile phone service providers and built websites for Internet-based fan clubs. Universal Music is in the cosmetics and nightclub business, thanks to a partnership with the group Pussycat Dolls.

In 2001, Cohen urged EMI to be the first company to make its entire repertoire available to newly created digital music services.

The next year, Cohen helped EMI cement distribution deals with nine Internet firms, more than any other major company. EMI was also the first among its rivals to allow listeners to download permanent copies of songs, transfer tunes to portable music players and make copies to blank CDs. Cohen helped work out the licensing agreements upon which the iTunes Music Store was built.

This year, EMI released a new song by Coldplay via cellular phones, offered listeners podcasts from the band OK Go and launched download services in China and Latin America. Then, in September, Cohen negotiated to release the Rolling Stones' latest album on a memory card playable on mobile phones and computers.

"The only way we win is if we're willing to try everything," Cohen said.

Many of Cohen's efforts have worked. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than 500 million songs. In the last year, U.S. digital music sales have grown by more than 300%.

But technological enthusiasm hasn't been a magic bullet. The music industry's rush online has created bewilderingly incompatible formats. For example, Internet music vendors sell at least four versions of EMI's songs, each of which requires a different player.

EMI's operating profit has declined in each of the last three years. And although U.S. digital music sales are growing, they still have not offset the decline in CD purchases. No company has provided an online service compelling enough to drive most music fans away from file-sharing networks that offer free, illegal downloads.

But to hear Cohen talk, the future has never been brighter.

Just a few years ago, EMI's Wilshire Boulevard headquarters housed several litigation "war rooms," where executives discussed lawsuits against illegal peer-to-peer networks and other companies invading their turf.

Now Cohen makes a habit of hosting the very people the music industry once sued.

The other day, when three executives from a cellphone technology firm arrived at his office for a visit, they found Cohen sitting under a "sound dome" speaker the size of a manhole cover. Gold-plated records hung on his walls, just as you'd expect. But there were also the trappings of a techno-geek: a huge video game terminal, a refrigerator full of Red Bull and a baseball cap that read simply "Napster."

Cohen peppered his visitors with questions about their favorite scenes from the indie sleeper hit movie "Napoleon Dynamite." At the same time, he took a phone call from Hong Kong, fiddled around with a new hand-held DVD player and kept tabs on his e-mail in-box.

When Cohen received an e-mail from EMI's chairman, Eric Nicoli, he laughed, then shared it with the room.

"It says, 'I have no opinion. Once you tell me what the answer is, then I'll have an opinion,' " Cohen said giddily.

Not so long ago, EMI's chairman would not have known Cohen existed, much less sought out his counsel. Now, after years of waiting, Cohen is improbably cool. He turned to his guests, his face flushed.

"OK!" he said. "Let's invent a new business!"
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=1&cset=true





Amazon Wins 1-Click Patent Case
Declan McCullagh

Amazon.com has won what could have been an embarrassing and expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld (PDF here) a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon.

Amazon gained notoriety years ago for attempting to enforce its own 1-Click patent system against Barnes & Noble's Web operations. IPXL, which could try to seek Supreme Court review, claimed in the lawsuit that Amazon's 1-Click system was covered by a patent on electronic transactions.
http://news.com.com/Amazon+wins+1-Cl...3-5967945.html





CoreMedia interview: Multimedia and DRM

With digital downloads remaining a big issues and Sony's DRM implementation in particular making headlines for the wrong reason, we have a timely interview with Dr. Willms Buhse, director products & marketing for CoreMedia, a company specialising in DRM systems.

Music

Online download services are a hot topic, and the role of mobile phones as music players is gaining attention, so let's start with a very topical question: What is your reaction to Motorola's first iTunes phones? A first step in the right direction or a wrong turning?

Proprietary systems like the Apple iPod all meet boundaries sooner or later. The reason is simple: when I buy music I want to play it not only on my PC but also on my mobile phone or my home entertainment system, and vice versa. With the Apple iTunes, digital music services have certainly become very popular and it is certainly a step towards interoperability since the usage is no longer limited to a single device.

But to allow consumers to play their music anywhere on phones from many different manufacturers - within the legal framework as defined by the content owner - the usage of open DRM standards as defined from the OMA is required.

The mobile phone itself was a first step into this market, but I believe, the deal between Apple and Motorola to limit it to only 100 songs was not in the consumer interest.

The obvious disadvantages to music on a mobile phone music centre concern battery life and storage capacity. How do you see these issues playing out over the next couple of years?

Regarding the new iPods I clearly see the advantages of flash based memory and I am very confident that we will see an improvement for the life of batteries as well. I do not see that these minor tech issues are limiting the mobility of consuming digital content in the mid-term.

Even if mobiles do become established as 'content centres' - i.e. people use music download services direct to their phone - phone models are constantly changing. Will this not provide a barrier against phones becoming a personal media centre?

CoreMedia DRM has the broadest reach of all DRM solutions. Setting the benchmark for interoperability and flexibility it works seamlessly with over 400 handsets on the world market and the number is steadily increasing.

Vodafone

You have worked closely with Vodafone recently...

Vodafone, is currently implementing our system into the service delivery platform of its global 3G multimedia services, Vodafone live! With CoreMedia DRM, Vodafone can offer content providers such as music labels a secure platform for the mobile distribution of premium content to Vodafone live! customers.

The DRM was developed in close cooperation between Vodafone, CoreMedia and leading mobile phone manufacturers. We have developed a cost-efficient, secure and scalable DRM solution based on the OMA standards. In view of the fact that 400 different mobile phones are now equipped for OMA DRM, Vodafone has significantly improved the interoperability and user friendliness of Vodafone live! through the implementation of CoreMedia DRM. They are now fully prepared for the rapidly growing premium content business.

Vodafone's move is the biggest step ever taken by the mobile business to implement a DRM solution. Actually, with the Vodafone deal, being the largest DRM deal so far in history, CoreMedia is now on the forefront of DRM technology worldwide. We supply Vodafone's global networks - servicing over 250 million mobile users - with our OMA DRM-based solution.

Does a close relationship with one service provider prejudice relations with the other major players?

No, certainly not. To work with a strong partner like Vodafone has strengthened our expertise in mobile DRM. And it helped to strengthen our partner network with very strong partners such as IBM, HP, Hitachi or Siemens in the Asia-Pacific region.

Telecommunications companies require high-performance and future-proof software solutions to process and market new types of mobile services. They require solutions to optimise existing business processes and open up new areas of success. That is what we deliver. Today, CoreMedia DRM is deployed by mobile operators across the globe on all continents.

What is to stop the likes of Vodafone, or O2 or, perhaps best of all, Virgin Mobile (with direct access to content) from carrying out the work that you do themselves? DRM issues are often carried out unseen behind the scenes as far as end-users are concerned...

We have a strong expertise in content and telco infrastructures. With our large number of content technology experts, we can actually respond at a high speed and be the fastest to implement innovations. Also, we are able to implement additional components that go way beyond the standard including work flows, interfaces or management capabilities - elements that we learnt very early from the area of content management. Combining our knowledge from digital rights management and content management actually is a very compelling offer for all our clients.

Where do you believe power lies between original content creators, service providers and handset manufacturers when it comes to mobile DRM implementations? Which party has the upper hand? Service providers have sourced the content, but handset manufacturers provide the hardware that can control the encryption/DRM that is possible...

The mobile content market will grow to $30 billion globally by 2008.
Mobile music alone is expected to be worth around $3 billion, or 10 per cent of the total music market. For operators to maximize the revenue from this opportunity, they need premium content. To gain access to content such as ringtones, full-track music, video clips and games, content providers need to be reassured that their copyrights will remain secure throughout the whole distribution chain.

This is what CoreMedia DRM is designed to deliver. And our recent news from today, the CMLA licence, underlines this strategy. We help ensure that digital media can only be played when the consumer acquires digital rights to do so in advance - either for preview or rental, with a limitation of usage frequency or of time - or with complete purchase of the media file.

Microsoft

Core Media recently introduced a PC element into its DRM support, providing interoperability between the Mobile OMA standard and Microsoft Windows Media DRM. How difficult a technical challenge was that, or are the Microsoft APIs quite straightforward?

CoreMedia is the only company offering this technology at this point - so it's not easy! APIs are not the issue but combining two different DRM schemes in a robust manner.

Is it inevitable that Microsoft eventually makes the most of its installed Windows user base to capture the DRM market, controlling access to content that flows across the Windows operating system?

Many operators are afraid of Microsoft's dominance and at the same time, Microsoft has had difficulties entering the cell phone and consumer electronics sector. So there will be co-existence of different platforms for a long, long time. And it needs players like CoreMedia to deliver technologies that overcome these platform gaps.

3G

Mobile DRM technology for 3G services is an important area for you, how is that market shaping up?

As a recent study of the EU-project INDICARE has shown, consumers set a high value on music they can share between different devices and they are willing to pay for that ability. The study says that consumers prefer paying €1 for a song that runs on any device over paying only 50 cents for a song that runs on only one device. So, it is all about convergence.

It is important for content owners and operators to offer their music services with cross platform capabilities, allowing their customers the choice of where to listen to purchased music. With the combination of OMA DRM and Microsoft DRM, CoreMedia is setting the pace as the leader for multi-DRM, with a strong commitment to open standards and interoperability.

What is the outlook for 3G content services - pickup has still been slow in the UK?

The future of 3G content services lies in new and innovative distribution concepts. Our system pioneers interoperable and innovative peer-to-peer business models such as gifting and viral marketing through superdistribution. The concept of superdistribution allows mobile operators and content providers to transform viral pass-along referrals and peer-to-peer networks into solid sales opportunities with true content revenue opportunities.

It enables consumers to recommend, forward and exchange content amongst each other, through cheap distribution channels. They also can receive rewards such as free minutes or bonus points - one can compare this mechanism with 'digital tupperware'.

Or one can compare it to shareware. But while shareware usually includes voluntary payment procedures, superdistribution has business rules, set by the content provider, that need to be adhered to. Superdistribution requires the standardization and interoperability of systems. Rather than compete, alliances can be formed that can turn this competition, which comes with high costs for competing enterprises, into a peaceful coexistence.

Still, 3G services are in the early days - also in the UK. But in Japan or Korea we can see that compelling services are well accepted by consumers.

DRM

Turning to the wider issues of DRM, in a recent survey we found that only 17 per cent of respondents perceived DRM as a form of copyright protection (which is its core function), which presumably means the remaining 83 per cent see it as a unique, additional constraint. Does DRM have an image problem?

One has to understand that DRM, apart from protecting the rights of the content owner, enables a new business models and gives customers security in the digital content world.

Digital content distribution allows new business and distribution models. In addition one can use a lot of viral mechanisms like peer-to-peer sharing. For example, a system that allows users to share music files with their friends. By creating copies for their friends they would be able to listen to it once. After listening to the songs they would get connected to the billing mechanism where they can decide to purchase it or not. If they decide to purchase the songs forwarded rewards such as free minutes or bonus points would be credited to the original user. This is a very interesting mechanism for creating a new sales channel for digital products such as music.

What is your response to people who take a strong stance against DRM in all its forms - that it represents the dark forces of control that work against information being free?

DRM systems like CoreMedia DRM are the basis for secure and interoperable distribution of digital goods.

Consumers demand seamless access to various types of content using multiple devices for an affordable price. And they are seeking to share various types of content between their own rich media devices and networked systems as well as with friends and family. In addition they expect secure content, which means no viruses.

In the end, I think, it is up to the artists, or whoever are the content owners, to provide it in the way they want it to be perceived. If it is entertainment and was created with a lot of investment one should be able to decide if people who do not want to pay for it should be excluded.

The DRM market is currently booming, I believe - what are the forces driving this, and will they continue?

Consumers demand for 'light media content' like ringtones, games, logos and wallpapers have exploded in the past years, according to the European Information Technology Observatory, reaching €214 million in Germany alone and more than €2bn in Europe in 2004. The trend with ringtones and the like is set to continue with news, entertainment and sports related information services.

Consumer demand for mobile content is set to exceed €7.6bn in 2006. With the total number of mobile users approaching two billion worldwide even the most conservative estimates support these numbers.
With such explosive growth forecasted the need for DRM will become increasingly evident. Content owners are wary of consumers being able to copy and pass-on files, resulting in lost revenues. Thus, they are going to force content and service providers to employ copy protection systems.

Finally, what is your response to the Sony XCP fiasco - how damaging will this be to the industry, and to Sony in particular?

This is unfortunately a disaster. Especially since "xcp" is not a DRM technology, but copy protection. It only prevents consumers from sharing rather than enabling it in a legal way. Sony BMG will most likely be faced with several law suits, which might get it into deep trouble, even endangering its future.

Media companies should learn two things in regards of DRM from this. First, they need to get more involved in technologies that become a critical part of their daily business. Second, selecting the right vendors and building trusted relationships is highly important for media companies.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news/80433 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/80523/co...rm-part-2.html





Holiday Gift Spending To Ease: Survey

U.S. holiday gift spending will likely fall slightly this year and stores will have to offer discounts to satisfy shoppers hunting for bargains, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

U.S. households are expected to spend an average of $466 on gifts this holiday season, down from last year's estimate of $476, the survey by The Conference Board showed.

"Consumers appear to have less Christmas spirit heading into Thanksgiving this year than last year," said Lynn Franco, director of the private research group's Consumer Research Center, in a statement.

"This cautious attitude will have consumers shopping for bargains this season -- retailers will need to offer discounts and promotions to get shoppers into their stores," she said.

About 34 percent of consumers will buy holiday gifts on the Internet, up from 33 percent a year ago, The Conference Board said. Books top the list of online holiday buying intentions.

The top holiday spending region will be New England, where households will spend an average of $568, the survey said.

The lowest spending is expected in the hurricane-ravaged East South Central and West South Central regions, where an average outlay of $423 per household is expected.

Slightly more than 32 percent of households will spend $500 or more on holiday gifts, while 37 percent will spend between $200 and $500, and the remaining 30 percent are expected to spend less than $200, according to the survey.

The survey of holiday gift spending intentions covers a sample of 5,000 households, The Conference Board said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...Y-SPENDING.xml





Mix of Shock and Resignation on G.M. Shop Floors Set to Close
Jeremy W. Peters

When Dan Fairbanks received word from General Motors early Monday morning that his plant had been tagged for closing next year, there were few people in the factory to tell.

About two-thirds of the 300 hourly employees at the Lansing Craft Center, where Mr. Fairbanks is the president of a local chapter of the United Automobile Workers, are temporarily laid off. In fact, they have not worked for most of the year. The Lansing Craft Center is still scheduled to ratchet up production early next month but will close for good sometime next year.

"There are going to be some casualties, and we are one of them," Mr. Fairbanks said. In many ways, the plant is symbolic of the problems facing General Motors. The automaker slowed production there to a trickle as demand for the vehicle it produces, the $40,000 high- performance Chevrolet SSR pickup truck, failed to keep pace with capacity. Although most employees do not come to work, under their union contract G.M. is still required to pay them.

A cold drizzle fell in a mainly empty parking lot at the center as this city took in the news that G.M. would close all or part of 12 operations in North America. Here in Lansing, where two of those plants are situated, the automaker's cuts will be deep.

Still, G.M. employs thousands of people in the area at four plants and is currently building a new factory, with modern equipment. The plants that will remain open will provide some cushion for workers who do not take buyouts.

On Monday, G.M. workers across the country met the news of the plant closings and the job cuts with a mixture of shock, resignation and frustration at the company's management.

"There's a lot of people who rely on G.M., especially in this town," said Michael McCoy, 52, a production worker at the Lansing Metal Center with 30 years at the company. The metal center, a sprawling industrial complex across the street from the craft center that makes sheet metal parts for various vehicles, is also scheduled to close.

About the time the G.M. corporate headquarters in Detroit informed union officials at the craft center of the closing next year, Mr. McCoy and his co-workers on the morning shift at the metal center were summoned to the shop floor by their union chairman and told the news.

Art Baker, the chairman of the local auto workers union that represents the 950 hourly workers at the metal center, said he learned of G.M.'s decision just 15 minutes before he told employees. "It was not the expectation that General Motors was going to get lean and mean," Mr. Baker said. "It was a real shock."

The union called the job cuts and plant closings "extremely disappointing, unfair and unfortunate." The union's president, Ron Gettelfinger, and its vice president, Richard Shoemaker, said in a statement that for workers, "hope is diminished, the future is unclear and communities are less stable."

In Oklahoma, Georgia and other states where G.M. is closing its only plants, G.M. workers will have fewer options than their counterparts in Lansing for jobs that offer such high pay and generous benefits.

"I was awakened out of my sleep and told the plant was closing," said Tammy Andrews, 35, a line worker at the General Motors assembly plant in Doraville, Ga., just outside Atlanta. "I'm going to cry when I go home tonight."

Many of the plants that will close, like Doraville Assembly and the Lansing Metal Center, are more than 50 years old and date back to an era when G.M. held a commanding share of the American car market. As Asian competitors with lower labor costs and vehicles that many Americans consider more desirable have cut G.M.'s market share down to about a quarter of all American vehicles, the automaker has grappled to regain its competitiveness. Closing under-used plants and trimming its work force is one way it hopes to do that.

For cities like Lansing and Flint, Mich., that have for decades looked to the American auto industry to provide much of their livelihood, G.M.'s downsizing means the end of an era in which generations of families could depend on steady work at a car company and a generous retirement plan after 30 years of service.

"It used to be our kids would come in here and follow us, but that's not the trend anymore," Mr. McCoy said. "I just think it'd be nice if General Motors could get everything together, get it fixed and get going again."

Alvin Jones, 59, a line worker at the metal plant, has 40 years of experience but said he resented the idea of taking a retirement buyout. "Once you take the buyout, what's going to be left for you to do?" he asked. Mr. Jones moved to Lansing from the South in the mid-1960's to take a job with G.M. that he assumed would be his as long as he wanted to work.

Throughout his four decades at G.M., Mr. Jones said he had seen the domestic auto industry at some of its highest and lowest points. As he stood outside the Lansing metal plant on Monday and absorbed the news his plant would be closed, he said, "I've never seen it this bad, and I've been around for a lot of years."

Daniel Crane, 27, who installs glass on minivans at the Doraville plant, criticized G.M. for not making cars that sell well. "Who buys a minivan?" he asked. "G.M.'s not coming out with a product anybody wants."

As news of billion-dollar losses, job cuts and benefit reductions has rolled out of G.M. with alarming regularity this year, some workers said they saw the writing on the wall well before Monday. "Everybody in the G.M. system is trying to speculate on where they stand," said Mr. Fairbanks, the Lansing union president. "A total surprise? No. Not with the way things are going."

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Doraville, Ga., for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/bu...22workers.html





I Vant to Drink Your Vatts
Matthew L. Wald

Households across the land are infested with vampires. That's what energy experts call those gizmos with two sharp teeth that dig into a wall socket and suck juice all night long. All day long, too, and all year long.

Most people assume that when they turn off the television set it stops drawing power.

But that's not how most TV's (and VCR's and other electronic devices) work. They remain ever in standby mode, silently sipping energy to the tune of 1,000 kilowatt hours a year per household, awaiting the signal to roar into action.

"As a country we pay $1 billion a year to power our TV's and VCR's while they're turned off," said Maria T. Vargas, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, which sets voluntary standards for energy use, and grants its ratings to the most efficient products.

There are billions of vampires in the United States, drawing more than enough current in the typical house to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department.

These silent energy users include the chargers for devices that run on batteries, like cellphones, iPods and personal digital assistants, and all the devices around the house that have adapters because they run on direct current, like answering machines. Some have both batteries and steady power use, like cordless phones. Experts call all those adapters "wall warts." Many deliver in direct current only half as much energy as they suck out of the wall; the rest is wasted.

Vampires and wall warts are only part of the problem. DSL or cable modems, among other things, are increasingly likely to be left on around the clock. A computer left on continuously can draw nearly as much power as an efficient refrigerator - 70 to 250 watts, depending on the model and how it is used.

It's not that hard to engineer a more energy-aware computer: Dell introduced one in 2004 that drew 1.4 watts in "sleep" mode and just under one watt when "off." But energy-efficient design is not necessarily rewarded in the marketplace, where people who are shopping for the latest shiny electronic device are unlikely to put its energy consumption rate while "off" topmost on a list of considerations.

Energy efficiency experts say the answer lies instead in industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with low consumption when in standby.

Just about everyone supports such a move. President Bush early on announced that electric devices purchased by the federal government would need to meet a standby consumption standard. Congress is pushing forward, too. This summer it passed a bill to set testing protocols for measuring energy use, clearing the way for nationwide consumption standards. The Energy Department held a meeting this week to discuss developing the standards. California has already adopted its own, to take effect in 2006.

Among the worst vampires are big-screen televisions, mainly because of satellite and cable boxes, which can draw up to 30 watts when turned off, experts say.

Indeed, the words "off" and "on" no longer seem to apply; a better word might be "idling."

"They won't even say 'off' now; they'll say 'power,' " noted Alan K. Meier, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency, a consortium based in Paris. "My washing machine draws five watts even when there's no sign of intelligent life."

One culprit is the microchip, whose presence is revealed by a "soft button" instead of a switch. Microchips are generally an improvement over mechanical controls because they are more durable and sophisticated. They also help reduce the size and weight of consumer products. But they require a continuous trickle of electricity. Energy experts say it would be simple to cut that trickle in half - not by running around the house unplugging everything in sight, which would require much resetting of clocks, but by engineering products differently.

It doesn't cost much to make a more efficient device: sometimes just 50 cents a unit, they say. But consumers don't consider invisible energy use - "there's no labeling of power use in 'standby,' " Mr. Meier said, and "no way for people to recognize what a low-standby device is" - making government-imposed energy efficiency the best hope, he said.

The Energy Department would be in charge of setting standby mode standards that would apply to all consumer products sold in the United States. "Things may be a small step for each individual consumer," said Douglas Faulkner, the acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, "but they can add up across the country."

The Energy Star program, whose labels on electronics help consumers comparison shop, has announced that it will not rate a product that fails its standby mode requirements (consumers in the market for VCR's, among other things, can see how they rate at energystar.gov).

"Consumers are buying more electronics, and there are more consumers," Mr. Faulkner said. "So the amount used by these devices is going up."

All the more reason to make each item as energy efficient as possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/garden/17vampire.html





Microsoft to Open the Standard Behind Office

Microsoft took a step toward creating an open standard of technology behind Word and Excel in a move to appease governments and ensure data in documents and accounts can be accessed in decades to come.

The submission of Microsoft's Office Open XML to the Switzerland-based standardisation body Ecma is supported by Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corp, NextPage Inc, Statoil ASA and Toshiba.

"The European Commission, European member states and governments around the world have asked us to open up file formats, and we're going to do that," Alan Yates, business strategy manager at the unit that sells Office applications, including Word and Excel, said on Tuesday.

Government agencies, although not included in the initial list of supporters, were expected to endorse the move in coming days and weeks, Yates told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The move was announced in Europe, because "this is really a hotbed for standardisation efforts, and it is where people appreciate what we're doing in greater detail," Yates added.

Microsoft has been in a long-running battle against antitrust sanctions imposed by the European Commission for abuse of its dominant Windows software. In March 2004, the European Union executive found Microsoft abused dominance of the Windows operating system so it could damage rival makers of work-group servers and media players.

Barclays Capital welcomed the move, because it could start mixing its massive amounts of financial and other data in different applications from many software vendors. "We won't be trapped in Excel and Word," said Stephen Deakin, director for information technology at Barclays Capital, adding it may even strengthen the position of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft's Yates hoped the move to standardise the Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) without charging royalties would build trust among companies and consumers who will use the standard in coming decades.

"It's a matter of trust. There's not the same level of trust in a technology owned by one company, as a technology in the hands of an open standards organization," he said.

Adam Farquhar, head of e-Architecture at the British Library, said the move would ensure digital archives would still be accessible to future generations.

Microsoft, Barclays and others expect Office XML technology to code and tag data will be developed further by many other companies after it has been approved as an open standard.

"This is the start of a great industry," Deakin said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...crosoft+office





File Sharing Program Exposes Hard Drives
Dan Ronan reports

Users of LimeWire may be one click away from their personal information being exposed. Users of LimeWire, a file sharing program used by millions of Americans, might be making their private financial and personal information vulnerable.

A major security flaw with LimeWire makes it easy to search the hard drive of anyone who is also using the program while sending files back and forth.

While News 8 won't expose how to do that, when showed to people who were running LimeWire on their computer they were shocked.

With a few clicks of the keyboard, in just a matter of minutes and with Chrystal Snow's permission, News 8 found out a lot about the Dallas business woman.

"Anything from my bank statements are on there, my resumes, personal information, photos, you name it," Chrystal Snow said about her computer.

She let News 8 try to search her private computer files using LimeWire, and it turned out to be amazingly easy.

News 8 found her credit card records, banking information and proprietary business information.

In an earlier era, the famous bank robber Willie Sutton once said he robbed banks because that's where the money was.

With LimeWire, it is possible to take someone's identity and money.

"I thought you got on LimeWire to share music, and I'm shocked my information is out there for anyone to find," Snow said.

The problem occurred from something written into the program, which was more than likely not an accident.

Dallas computer security consultant Ed Chiarini is one of many warning about the dangers of file sharing. He said what someone can find goes far beyond identity theft.

"There are national security issues when it comes to some files on there," said Chiarini, from WellAwareNet.com.

Experts said what makes LimeWire so dangerous is that anyone using the program can do a secret search of someone else's computer information without the victim knowing it.

"It's the equivalent of you walking into someone's house with their permission and noticing a pile of papers on the table, picking them up and looking at them and realizing I have got your social security number, your tax forms," said Paul Schmehl, University of Texas Dallas computer security expert. "I've got sensitive information you would never let me see."

LimeWire declined repeated requests for an on-camera interview. Instead, the company issued a statement insisting it fixed the problem last spring, and that no further action is needed because the company said the program is safe.

For her part, Snow took LimeWire off her computer immediately and vows never to use it again.

"You never know who it is, or where they are or what they're involved with," she said. "If you can sit down at a computer and in five minutes find really sensitive information, then someone who wants to find it will have already done so."

News 8 also did the same experiment using the most current LimeWire software. The company said you can customize the installation of the program on the computer to avoid making information vulnerable.

But experts said most people who download LimeWire would simply use the default settings.

As News 8 discovered, personal data is there for everyone to find.
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dw...e.495ad3f.html





Law Can't Slow Down Illegal File Sharing

Recently released data from research consultancy XTN Data shows that file sharing over the Internet continues to grow and that most users are unconcerned by potential legal action. Two thirds of people using file sharing software to access music were not concerned by legal action by record labels. Greig Harper, founder of XTN Data commented, "We estimate there to be 52 million people in the US using file sharing software. In the past two years legal action in the US has seen 3,500 cases resolved."

The survey results show that legitimate music download services are rising in popularity but 58% thought they were expensive, 41% thought they were difficult to use and 43% said they didn't offer music they were interested in. Users who were disappointed with legitimate music download services were more likely to illegally download music. For the first time ever illegal download of movies and TV content overtook demand for music downloads. 26% of internet users said they used the internet to download DVDs with those under thirty most likely to do so. For more information, visit www.xtndata.com
http://www.integratedmar.com/ECLbrie...em=BRI112005-2





Mad at cavalier consumers

View From Here: Copyright Clampdown
Carolyn Boyle

Enforcement agencies and IP rights owners are struggling to contain the modern scourge of piracy. Markets are still flooded with fakes, while a pervasive apathy towards intellectual property means that otherwise law-abiding citizens will routinely exploit new technologies to commit copyright infringement without batting an eyelid.

Around the world, efforts have thus redoubled to tackle the pirates head-on through tighter legislation and tougher penalties. In Asia in particular - where the problem is perhaps at its most acute - governments are increasingly adopting a zero-tolerance approach to this contemporary crime and are spearheading vigorous campaigns to stamp out piracy in all its forms.

Copyright infringement

In Malaysia - recently identified by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry as a leading exporter of pirate optical discs - the Government has effectively declared open war on pirates and has shown itself willing to use all weapons at its disposal to win the battle, no matter how deadly. In 2004, the Copyright Act 1987 was revised to beef up penalties for infringement and allow Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs enforcement officers to arrest suspects without a warrant.

Increased police powers

Then earlier this year the Malaysian Government announced that it was considering turning the draconian provisions of the Internal Security Act 1960 against repeat infringers as a last resort. Michael Soo of Shook Lin & Bok explains that the Act empowers police officers to arrest without warrant anyone they "have reason to believe" has acted or is likely to act "in any manner that is prejudicial to the security of Malaysia".

Suspects may initially be detained in solitary confinement for up to 60 days - extendable for up to two years with the approval of the Minister for Home Affairs - and may be denied legal representation and access to relatives during this time.

Working in tandem with the revamped Copyright Act, these sweeping powers of arrest without trial should act as a powerful deterrent against would-be pirates.

Government clampdown

In a separate initiative, the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs has teamed up with the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM) to crack down on the estimated 3,000 outlets that offer truetone mobile phone ringtones without paying royalties to the artists whose songs they use.

This relatively new form of infringement is soaring alarmingly: piracy rates have already topped 90% and one company is reportedly raking in almost RM4.7m (723,000) in illegal ringtone sales. In a bid to nip this disturbing trend in the bud, the ministry and the RIM recently sent out more than 100 warning letters to known truetone pirates, spelling out the potential consequences of their illicit activities: the courts can impose a fine of between RM2,000 (307) and RM20,000 (3,070) for each infringement, as well as a possible jail term of up to five years.

The initiative appears to have had some success: at least four major ringtone companies which previously advertised truetones in local newspapers have fallen conspicuously silent since receiving the warning letters.

Hong Kong, too, has thrown its weight behind the copyright enforcement drive, according to IP lawyers at Wilkinson & Grist. After government dithering last year over whether facilitating the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing would incur liability, the recent arrest of a P2P infringer for the illegal online distribution of copyrighted movies using BitTorrent technology suggests that this question has now been answered in the affirmative.

The customs authorities cooperated closely with the film industry in cracking the case, setting up a special taskforce whose in-depth investigation ultimately unmasked the culprit. Under Hong Kong copyright law, the penalty for distributing illegal copies of a copyrighted work is a fine of up to HK$50,000 (3,750) per infringing copy, plus a maximum four years' imprisonment. The arrest - the first of its kind - hit the headlines in Hong Kong and has also piqued international interest among rights holders, IP practitioners and file-sharers alike. The Hong Kong Government cautioned that the incident should serve as a salutary lesson of the inherent risks of copyright infringement.

In China, meanwhile, new measures jointly introduced by the National Copyright Administration and the Ministry of Information Industry have increased the options available to victims of online copyright infringement, who can now seek administrative relief from internet service providers (ISPs) in addition to civil remedies as before.

An ISP that hosts a website, bulletin board or chat room will be held jointly liable with the content provider either if it knows from the outset that content is infringing, or if it fails to delete or disable access to infringing material after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright owner. Where a takedown notice is ignored, the copyright owner can launch court proceedings and/or seek administrative relief by filing a complaint with the National Copyright Administration, which may order the ISP to cease the infringement immediately, confiscate any illegal income generated from the infringement and fine the ISP either up to three times the illegal income earned, or a statutory fine of up to $12,000 (7,000).

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's Connie Carnabuci and Jennifer Li note that since an administrative action is swifter than court proceedings, the new measures afford a more efficient alternative for copyright owners to protect their rights online. One shortcoming, however, is that no mention is made of how quickly an ISP must react to a takedown notice in order to avoid either administrative penalties or civil liability.

Software piracy

Like copyright infringement, software piracy is rampant thanks to the public's relaxed approach to licensing and the ease with which computer programs can be ripped off. In Malaysia, the Government is casting the enforcement net wider to ensnare software thieves across the whole spectrum of society.

According to Shook Lin & Bok's Michael Soo, large companies are a new target: a series of raids this year revealed that many otherwise reputable businesses habitually use pirated software. The Ministry of Domestic Trade & Consumer Affairs has responded to this revelation with a media campaign intended to educate company directors of the dangers of turning a blind eye to software piracy: they may be held personally liable for such violations, and face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to RM20,000 (3,080) if found guilty.

The ministry also has cybercafe owners in its sights and has advised them to take immediate steps to ensure that all software used on their premises is duly licensed and that licensing terms and conditions are strictly observed.

Indian courts get tough

The Indian courts have also begun to clamp down on software piracy. This represents a turnaround in judicial practice, as for years IP theft was not taken very seriously in India, viewed more as a petty white-collar infraction rather than a true criminal offence.

The Delhi High Court recently heard a case in which an Indian company was accused of loading unlicensed Microsoft programs onto the hard drives of computers it sold. The software giant produced incontrovertible evidence of the infringement in court: it caught the defendant red-handed when an incognito Microsoft employee purchased a computer chock-full of pirate Microsoft software.

Microsoft also submitted as evidence an affidavit from a chartered accountant showing how long the defendant had been in business and the sale price of the computers it sold. Weighing up the evidence, the court awarded substantial damages in an amount of rup1.98mn ($25,150), plus interest at a rate of 9% until the date of payment, based on the software's popularity and an assumption that 100 computers with stolen software were sold each year.

Singh notes that the Delhi High Court judgment should lay the foundations for a vigorous new enforcement regime across the country.

Hard-line Danish approach

Outside of Asia, the Danish judiciary is also taking a hard-line stance towards software theft. Sentences were recently handed down in the biggest piracy case ever to come before the Danish courts. Eight defendants were in the dock, accused of producing, importing and reselling hundreds of thousands of illicit copies of protected computer programs created by cutting-edge software houses such as Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia. The pirate copies were manufactured by companies in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel and Poland, and were then sold online to Danish buyers.

Lawyers representing some of the rights holders made undercover purchases of the pirate software with the aim of launching a civil action against the pirates, but passed this evidence over to the police after they realised the extent of the infringement. Seven of the eight defendants were found guilty by the Copenhagen City Court.

In sentencing the pirates, the court took account of the sheer extent and sophistication of the racket, as well as the handsome profits generated. The two ringleaders were imprisoned for one year and eight months respectively; as the remaining defendants played a lesser role in the infringement, four received jail terms of between two and four months while the fifth escaped with a fine of DKR25,000 (2,300).

The litigation team at Plesner notes that the custodial sentences could conceivably have been longer, given the magnitude of the case - under the Criminal Code, serious copyright infringements can attract penalties of up to six years' imprisonment; but they nonetheless send out a strong message that software piracy will not be tolerated.

Counterfeiting

Today's brand-saturated society is characterised by an insatiable demand for designer labels, but many consumers are unwilling to pay top dollar for high-end goods. The result is a surging trade in counterfeits which shows no sign of abating.

In Hong Kong, whose night markets are still thronged with vendors hawking knock-off products, an anti-fakes campaign originally launched back in 1998 has been revived following the conclusion of a new cooperation framework agreement with Guangdong province. The agreement was hammered out at the inaugural meeting of the Guangdong/Hong Kong Expert Group on the Protection of IP Rights, which aims to enhance cooperation on IP enforcement between Hong Kong and the mainland.

Shops participating in the campaign pledge to trade only in authentic products, and to identify themselves as fake-free outlets on their signage. Rights owners and customs officials have also joined forces to set up the IP Rights Protection Alliance, which will monitor compliance with the anti-fakes pledge.

Elsewhere, the detrimental effects of counterfeiting are felt particularly acutely in Italy, home to some of the world's leading fashion houses. The near-ubiquitous availability of cheap imitations is tarnishing the exclusive image and pristine reputation of luxury Italian brands.

The Government has thus moved to safeguard its celebrated fashion industry with the enactment of a new Competitiveness Decree, which bolsters anti-counterfeiting laws.

As before, fines may be imposed not only on the vendors of fake products, but also on anyone who buys or accepts counterfeit goods, or who persuades others to buy or accept such goods without first determining their origin. But there has been a staggering increase in the level of administrative fines that may be imposed for such offences, from 1,000 (680) to a whopping 20,000 (13,700).

Similarly, the administrative fine that may be imposed for buying or accepting goods which appear fake, due to their quality and the circumstances of their sale or supply, has gone up from 3,000 (2,060) to 10,000 (6,870). Vendors that fail to determine the legitimate origin of goods before offering them for sale can also be fined, and goods purchased `imprudently' - that is, at a price which should raise suspicions that the goods are of dubious provenance - may be seized.

Since the decree came into force, the Italian police have made successful swoops on several historic towns where the summer influx of tourists generates a booming trade in counterfeit goods. Trevisan & Cuonzo's Julia Holden notes that the decree may finally turn the tide in the fight against IP theft, tackling as it does not only the pirates, but also those consumers whose cavalier attitude towards IP rights is the fuel that drives piracy itself.

Carolyn Boyle is editor of the International Law Office.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/nov/1213264.htm





Sony Spyware Debacle Heats Up Copyright War
John M. Moran

You might think the music industry would be satisfied with the progress of its anti-piracy efforts.

Its lawsuits have already led to the shutdown of Napster, the Internet's first peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and more recently to the demise of Kazaa, another popular file-sharing service.

Thousands more lawsuits against individuals accused of illegally sharing files online has convinced many that trading music online isn't worth the risk. That's one reason digital music sales through legitimate online services like iTunes have soared.

But a recent furor involving one of the world's largest music labels, Sony BMG, shows that the industry's fight to protect its product from piracy isn't over. That same furor, however, also shows how tough that fight can be.

The trouble began when Sony BMG added special copy-protection software to about 50 new audio CDs. The software was designed to prevent the songs on the discs from unlimited copying.

According to press reports, about 4.7 million of the CDs were manufactured, and more than 2 million were already in the hands of consumers when problems arose with the copy- protection software known as XCP.

Specifically, a technique used by XCP to hide itself on the consumer's personal computer could be hijacked by viruses and other malicious software. Sure enough, examples of "Trojan Horse" programs that could take advantage of XCP soon surfaced.

The outcry from users was immediate. Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon by announcing that its anti-spyware tool would detect and remove XCP.

And so Sony BMG began a full-scale retreat from its copy-protection scheme, which was included on CDs by such diverse artists as Burt Bacharach, Cyndi Lauper, Frank Sinatra and Trey Anastasio.

The company said it had "ceased manufacturing compact discs with XCP software" and was withdrawing remaining discs from store shelves.

The company also announced it was creating an exchange program that would allow those who had already purchased any XCP-enabled audio CDs to trade them in for a non-copy protected replacement.

At first glance, that might seem like the end of the story - just another failed attempt at copy protection. But Sony BMG gave every indication that it expects to continue developing technologies that aim to limit the right of consumers to copy music from CDs.

"Sony BMG is reviewing all aspects of its content protection initiatives to be sure that they are secure and user-friendly for consumers," the company said in a statement. It added that it "will continue to seek new ways to meet consumers' demands for flexibility in how they listen to music, while protecting property rights."

In short, the days of your unrestricted right to drop a CD into your personal computer, rip the tracks to MP3s and move them over to your iPod or other digital music player may be numbered.

It doesn't matter whether you ever share those songs with friends or strangers. The fact that some people do is keeping the music industry focused on new copy-protection techniques.

The problem is that in trying to protect itself, the music industry makes it harder on the rest of us.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-m...ility-business





Digital Libraries to Aid Teachers Affected by Hurricane Katrina

Two of the nation's leading digital science libraries will offer free online workshops on December 6 and 8 to teachers in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Textbooks and other traditional materials remain in short supply there. The libraries are operated by the Office of Programs at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Program Center will hold the online workshops for science and math teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms. The goal is to familiarize the teachers with online educational materials that are freely available through the libraries and can help compensate for a scarcity of other materials.

"After an event like Hurricane Katrina--with textbooks, lab materials, and even entire schools destroyed--online resources are critical for ensuring that students continue to get a top-quality education," explains Russanne Low, director of strategic partnerships at the DLESE Program Center at UCAR.

The workshops will provide practical ideas for finding and using digital library resources. Instructors will emphasize strategies that can be easily implemented in Louisiana and Mississippi classrooms affected by the storm. They will also address methods for distance learning courses being offered to displaced students. Interactive sessions will include insights from teachers already using NSDL and DLESE resources who will share advice and answer questions.

Despite the storm damage, most of the schools that have been able to open have access to online resources, according to Louisiana educators working with the libraries.

Teachers may register by going to http://www.dlese.org and clicking on the link to Free professional development for teachers impacted by Katrina.

Coming in January: Nationwide Workshops

Building on the workshops for teachers in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, NSDL in January will begin launching free monthly workshops for teachers across the nation. Each workshop will focus on a different theme, such as helping primary and secondary school teachers and university professors use digital libraries for information about particular subject areas.

"Our goal is to assist teachers who want to find, as efficiently as possible, exemplary online teaching materials that will engage their students," says Susan Van Gundy, director of education and outreach at NSDL.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/516241/?sc=swtn





Christian hardball

School Radio Stations Face Competition Over Licenses
Samuel G. Freedman

THE week before classes started in August 2004 at Franklin Central High School here, Steve George stopped in to prepare the school radio station for the coming year. As the faculty adviser to WRFT, he wanted to make sure his students were writing and producing public-service announcements. He had to contact a few of Franklin Central's football rivals to arrange for WRFT to broadcast away games. He was pricing replacements for a 20-year-old remote unit.

Then, on Mr. George's way to the station's studio, the principal intercepted him to pass along an unexpected piece of mail. It was a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking that WRFT be denied its license, which was due for renewal, and that its frequency be given to an outfit called the Hoosier Public Radio Corporation.

Through his 34 years in commercial radio, the career he left to become a teacher, Mr. George had never once been on a station confronted in this way. He could not imagine why anyone would want to take over WRFT in particular, a 50-watt station with an annual budget of $4,200 and inoffensive programs like "Wakin' Up in a Flash," a talk show run by two seniors at the local Chick-fil-A restaurant.

"I thought, 'Is this fiction?' " Mr. George recalled. "Who could do this?"

He has since learned the answer. Hoosier Public Radio is largely the enterprise of one man, Martin Hensley, a former radio engineer who now describes his occupation as "serving God." And the effort by Mr. Hensley to take the F.C.C. license from WRFT, or at least force it to share broadcast time with him, offers but one example of a series of similar conflicts involving student radio stations. At least 20 high school stations, and a handful of college ones, have been fending off challenges to their licenses by Christian broadcasters in the last year.

This flurry of action, which seemed so inexplicable to Mr. George, actually has a fierce logic to it. A loophole in commission regulations makes educational stations unusually vulnerable to takeover attempts.

Moreover, their frequencies are a lucrative commodity, a bargain-basement way to get onto the air. The commission rarely auctions new frequencies on the crowded radio dial, and existing ones sell for $200,000 or so for a 50-watt operation like WRFT's to more than $10 million for a major commercial station.

"It's opportunistic," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that provides legal assistance for student journalists. "People see this as a way to go after stations that are of value and of use. In the process, student voices can be lost, and the entire society loses. From teen pregnancy to school testing, we understand our world better and our teenagers better when we hear them."

In its original rules, the commission allowed competitors to file applications for existing licenses when they came up for renewal but also put the burden of proof on a challenger to prove the current licensee's unsuitability.

When that concept of "renewal expectancy" failed to contain the number of unsuccessful, time-consuming challenges, Congress acted in the mid-1990's to bar petitions to take over a license. At most, under the amended commission statute, a petitioner could ask the F.C.C. not to renew a given license. A loophole in the law, Section 73.561, left educational stations exposed. Such stations must broadcast at least five hours a day six days a week, and have a weekly total of at least 36 hours, to hold a license. The stations are permitted to shut down entirely when school is out of session for weekends and vacations.

Yet if those same stations operate for less than 12 hours a day, every day, they can be made to share their frequency "upon grant of an appropriate application" by a competitor.

Because the commission renews licenses every eight years, taking up applications sequentially from 18 geographical sections of the nation, the loophole went largely unused until the current round of evaluations began in June 2003.

Then the challenges came in a wave, especially as the commission took up stations in the Midwest. The petitions took aim especially at school stations close to or inside major cities - Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis. WRFT's 50-watt transmitter, for instance, can reach virtually the entire city of 781,000.

While Mr. Hensley went after five stations in Indiana and Kentucky, a company named R B Schools spread its efforts from Colorado to Michigan. Based in Keene, Tex., about 25 miles southwest of Dallas, R B Schools is led by Linda de Romanett, who also owns a Christian station in South Carolina.

Thus far, the commission has not upheld any of the challenges. Which is not to say the high schools have been left unscathed. Franklin Central has already paid more than $16,000 in fees to a Washington lawyer who specializes in F.C.C. law, Kathryn Schmeltzer. Some stations have bought service from National Public Radio and others, including WRFT, have bought and installed automation equipment so they can meet the 12-hour requirement without keeping pupils in the studio around the clock.

Seventeen of the stations that ultimately were granted renewals in 2004 and 2005, including WRFT, still face appeals by Hoosier Public Radio and R B Schools.

MR. HENSLEY, for one, sounds unlikely to go away quietly. He presents himself as the victim of an "emotional hate issue" all because "someone finally stood up and said these stations haven't served the public all these years." He specifically faults the high school stations for playing too much music and doing too little "community-oriented" programming, which he says should include Christian shows. Asked why he simply does not buy a station - one of the commercial Christian stations in the Indianapolis area was up for sale last summer - he points out that it ultimately brought $3 million.

Mr. George has prided himself on treating his students like radio professionals. They know from him to dress up when they broadcast from the Chick-fil-A. They know from him to avoid not only profane words but also scatological slang on the air. He has entrusted them to sell sponsorships to local businesses, much as NPR member stations do.

They have been rewarded with first-and second-place finishes for WRFT the last two years in the statewide student radio competition.

There is at least one lesson, though, that Mr. George surely wishes his students never had to learn.

"The radio station has been the best choice of my high school career," said Nicole Fisher, a 17-year-old senior who intends to major in broadcast journalism in college. "I can't believe someone would swoop in here and take it from us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/ny...education.html





This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis
Sandra Blakeslee

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.

One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:

"Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

"This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self."

Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.

Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.

Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22hypno.html

















Until next week,

- js.

















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