Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 3rd, '07

[JackSpratts]

"[Louisiana State University’s] new advertising line shows Tad behind bars after downloading music. It stresses the penalties one may incur for committing music piracy." – Keith Lorio


"Either you believe in the user-generated revolution or you believe ISPs rule the world. I believe ISPs don't rule the world. If I am paying for my broadband, I have the right to share it with other people." – Ferran Moreno


"You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage." – David Mamet


"Future archaeologists will be able to identify a 'Vista Upgrade Layer' when they go through our landfill sites." – Siân Berry


"Who would have thought you could use a laptop as a diagnostic tool? Now it’s the first thing we whip out." – Donny Seyfer


"In conclusion, your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected." – Linden Lab


"To be honest I'm afraid of the music industry falling apart." – will.i.am


"We’ve been thinking about getting together and starting a band called Black People." – Damon Locks


"I am going to keep downloading music simply because I got to have my Grand Funk Railroad and not pay for it." – Kayne Gorney


"1-31-07 Never Forget." – Aqua Teen fan






















Easy Like Sunday Morning

Alliance has been running now for exactly one week and one thing is clear: it is much easier to connect to than WASTE, the famous privatenet predecessor. That's not all. It extends security beyond WASTE by disallowing mass invitations. Handing out invite codes is safer when they can be used only once. I believe it also separates users on the same mesh from those one may not wish to trade with, making for a more comfortable social experience, although I haven't fully explored this provision due to members’ limited login time over the last seven days. As for its primary reason for being, I can confirm transfers are very fast when the upload speed is there.

The application falls down in some areas however. Chat is basic and there is no information about shares beyond title and type. No file sizes, nor bitrates, nor pixel widths, nor creation dates nor any of the other useful details traders require beyond those mentioned, although this will probably change in future releases. Alliance is fine then for Sunday swapping but advanced users won’t be taking this app too seriously until it grows up a bit.

For now though that may be enough. It’s the perfect application for beginners interested in exploring the world of privatenets, and that's a very big deal since this increasingly important space has been off-limits to everyone but geeks. Ease of use tops Alliances list and for many that will be the most important aspect of this client, and here it leads the pack.

If you have a few friends or co-workers or family members you want to casually share with but you're looking for something more private than Rapidshare and far less complicated than the BitTorrent upload process simply swap Alliance codes and you'll be on your way. Quickly, safely and securely.












Enjoy,

Jack















February 3rd, 2007






Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software
Jason Pontin

BJARNE STROUSTRUP, the designer of C++, the most influential programming language of the last 25 years, has said that “our technological civilization depends on software.” True, but most software isn’t much good. Too many programs are ugly: inelegant, unreliable and not very useful. Software that satisfies and delights is as rare as a phoenix.

All this does more than frustrate computer users. Bad software is terrible for business and the economy. Software failures cost $59.5 billion a year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded in a 2002 study, and fully 25 percent of commercial software projects are abandoned before completion. Of projects that are finished, 75 percent ship late or over budget.

The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Programmers don’t know what a computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring over illustrated manuscripts.

Worse, programs today contain millions of lines of code, and programmers are fallible like all other humans: there are, on average, 100 to 150 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, according to a 1994 study by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. No wonder so much software is so bad: programmers are drowning in ignorance, complexity and error.

Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions of computer users.

Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be richer programmer-billionaires — Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Page of Google come to mind — but they became rich by founding and managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing code.

He designed Microsoft’s most successful applications, Word and Excel, and he devised the programming method that the company’s software developers have used for the last quarter-century. Mr. Simonyi, 58, was important before he joined Microsoft in 1981, too. He belongs to the fabled generation of supergeeks who invented personal computing at Xerox PARC in the 1970s: there, he wrote the first modern application, a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on page.

Even at leisure, Mr. Simonyi, who was born in Hungary and taught himself programming by punching machine code on Russian mainframes, is a restless, expansive personality. In April, he will become the fifth space tourist, paying $20 million to board a Russian Soyuz rocket and visit the International Space Station.

Mr. Simonyi says he is not disgusted with big, bloated, buggy programs like Word and Excel. But he acknowledges that he is disappointed that we have been unable to use “our incredible computational ability” to address efficiently “our practical computational problems.”

“Software is truly the bottleneck in the high-tech horn of plenty,” he said.

Mr. Simonyi began thinking about a new method for creating software in the mid-1990s, while he was still at Microsoft. But his ideas were so at odds with .Net, the software environment that Microsoft was building then, that he left the company in 2002 to found Intentional Software.

“It was impractical, when Microsoft was making tremendous strides with .Net, to send somebody out from the same organization who says, ‘What if you did things in this other, more disruptive way?’ ” he said in the January issue of Technology Review.

For once, that overfavored word — “disruptive” — is apt; intentional programming is disruptive. It would automate much of software development.

The method begins with the intentions of the people inside an organization who know what a program should do. Mr. Simonyi calls these people “domain experts,” and he expects them to work with programmers to list all the concepts the software must possess.

The concepts are then translated into a higher-level representation of the software’s functions called the domain code, using a tool called the domain workbench.

At two conferences last fall, Intentional Software amazed software developers by demonstrating how the workbench could project the intentions of domain experts into a wonderful variety of forms. Using the workbench, domain experts and programmers can imagine the program however they want: as something akin to a PowerPoint presentation, as a flow chart, as a sketch of what they want the actual user screen to look like, or in the formal logic that computer scientists love.

Thus, programmers and domain experts can fiddle with whatever projections they prefer, editing and re-editing until both parties are happy. Only then is the resulting domain code fed to another program called a generator that manufactures the actual target code that a computer can compile and run. If the software still doesn’t do what its users want, the programmers can blithely discard the target code and resume working on the domain workbench with the domain experts.

As an idea, intentional programming is similar to the word processor that Mr. Simonyi developed at PARC. In the jargon of programming, Bravo was Wysiwyg — an acronym, pronounced WIZ-e-wig, for “what you see is what you get.” Intentional programming also allows computer users to see and change what they are getting.

“Programming is very complicated,” Mr. Simonyi said. “Computer languages are really computer-oriented. But we can make it possible for domain experts to provide domain information in their own terms which then directly contributes to the production of the software.”

Intentional programming has three great advantages: The people who design a program are the ones who understand the task that needs to be automated; that design can be manipulated simply and directly, rather than by rewriting arcane computer code; and human programmers do not generate the final software code, thus reducing bugs and other errors.

NOT everyone believes in the promise of intentional programming. There are three common objections.

The first is theoretical: it is based on the belief that human intention cannot, in principle, be captured (or, less metaphysically, that computer users don’t know what people want).

The second is practical: to programmers, the intentional method constitutes an “abstraction” of the underlying target code. But most programmers believe that abstractions “leak” — that is, they fail to perfectly represent the thing they are meant to be abstracting, which means software developers must sink their hands into the code anyway.

The final objection is cynical: Mr. Simonyi has been working on intentional programming for many years; only two companies, bound to silence by nondisclosure agreements, acknowledge experimenting with the domain workbench and generator. Thus, no one knows if intentional programming works.

Sheltered by Mr. Simonyi’s wealth, Intentional Software seems in no hurry to release an imperfect product. But it is addressing real and pressing problems, and Mr. Simonyi’s approach is thrillingly innovative.

If intentional programming does what its inventor says, we may have something we have seldom enjoyed as computer users: software that makes us glad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/bu...ey/28slip.html





Piracy Worked for us, Romania President Tells Gates

Pirated Microsoft Corp software helped Romania to build a vibrant technology industry, Romanian President Traian Basescu told the company's co-founder Bill Gates on Thursday. Basescu was meeting the software giant's chairman in Bucharest to celebrate the opening of a Microsoft global technical centre in the Romanian capital.

"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," Basescu said during a joint news conference with Gates.

"It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world ... Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania's friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates."

Gates made no comment.

Former communist Romania, which has just joined the European Union, introduced anti-piracy legislation 10 years ago but copyright infringements are still rampant.

Experts say some 70 percent of software used in Romania is pirated, and salesmen still visit office buildings in central Bucharest to sell pirated CDs and DVDs.

Foreign investors say Romania's IT sector is one of most promising industries in the fast-growing economy thanks to high level of technical education in Romania, low wages and the country's thriving underworld of computers hackers.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...-Feb-2007+RTRS





Vista's Fine Print Raises Red Flags
Michael Geist

Vista, the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, makes its long awaited consumer debut tomorrow. The first major upgrade in five years, Vista incorporates a new, sleek look and features a wide array of new functionality, such as better search tools and stronger security.

The early reviews have tended to damn the upgrade with faint praise, however, characterizing it as the best, most secure version of Windows, yet one that contains few, if any, revolutionary features.

While those reviews have focused chiefly on Vista's new functionality, for the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista's "fine print." Those communities have raised red flags about Vista's legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user.

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.

Even after installation, the legal agreement grants Microsoft the right to revalidate the software or to require users to reactivate it should they make changes to their computer components. In addition, it sets significant limits on the ability to copy or transfer the software, prohibiting anything more than a single backup copy and setting strict limits on transferring the software to different devices or users.

Vista also incorporates Windows Defender, an anti-virus program that actively scans computers for "spyware, adware, and other potentially unwanted software." The agreement does not define any of these terms, leaving it to Microsoft to determine what constitutes unwanted software.

Once operational, the agreement warns that Windows Defender will, by default, automatically remove software rated "high" or "severe," even though that may result in other software ceasing to work or mistakenly result in the removal of software that is not unwanted.

For greater certainty, the terms and conditions remove any doubt about who is in control by providing that "this agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights." For those users frustrated by the software's limitations, Microsoft cautions that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software."

Those technical limitations have proven to be even more controversial than the legal ones.

Last December, Peter Guttman, a computer scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand released a paper called "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection." The paper pieced together the technical fine print behind Vista, unraveling numerous limitations in the new software seemingly installed at the direct request of Hollywood interests.

Guttman focused primarily on the restrictions associated with the ability to play back high-definition content from the next-generation DVDs such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (referred to as "premium content").

He noted that Vista intentionally degrades the picture quality of premium content when played on most computer monitors.

Guttman's research suggests that consumers will pay more for less with poorer picture quality yet higher costs since Microsoft needed to obtain licences from third parties in order to access the technology that protects premium content (those licence fees were presumably incorporated into Vista's price).

Moreover, he calculated that the technological controls would require considerable consumption of computing power with the system conducting 30 checks each second to ensure that there are no attacks on the security of the premium content.

Microsoft responded to Guttman's paper earlier this month, maintaining that content owners demanded the premium content restrictions. According to Microsoft, "if the policies [associated with the premium content] required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs." While that may be true, left unsaid is Microsoft's ability to demand a better deal on behalf of its enormous user base or the prospect that users could opt-out of the technical controls.

When Microsoft introduced Windows 95 more than a decade ago, it adopted the Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" as its theme song. As millions of consumers contemplate the company's latest upgrade, the legal and technological restrictions may leave them singing "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1640/159/





Cracking Vista DRM

Update on Driver Signing Bypass
Alex Ionescu

I apologize for the lack of news, but after attending CUSEC, I had to spend my time on catching up the two weeks of school and work that I had missed, and exploiting Vista ended up going on the backburner, especially as I had to re-install VMWare 6.0 (which wasn’t being helpful with me) and a new Vista 64-bit image.

That being said, it turns out the code I’ve written does not work out of the box on a Vista RTM system. Although it can be effective when combined with a reboot, this doesn’t provide any advantage of any of the myriad other ways that this could be done (including booting with the disable integrity checks BCD option or the /TESTSIGN flag).

However, it does bypass DRM. As part of the Protected Media Path, (PMP), Windows Vista sets up a number of requirements for A/V software and drivers in order to ensure it complies with the demandes of the media companies. One of these features, which has been heavily criticized as being the actual reason behind driver signing, is that “some premium content may be unavailable” if test signing mode is used. Originally, I assumed that this meant that the kernel would set some sort of variable, but this didn’t make sense: once your unsigned driver could load, it could disable this check. After reading the PMP documentation however, it seems to me that the “feature” explained is more likely the cause of this warning on premium content.

This feature is the ability of the PMP to notify A/V applications that there are unsigned drivers on the system, as well as provide a list of unsigned drivers. The idea is that the application can either outright refuse to play content, or that it can scan for known anti-DRM drivers which might be attempting to hook onto the unencrypted stream. This leads me to believe that it’s up to applications, not the OS, to enforce this DRM check.

The great thing about the code I’ve written is that it does NOT use test signing mode and it does NOT load an unsigned driver into the system. Therefore, to any A/V application running, the system seems totally safe — when in fact, it’s not. Now, because I’m still booting with a special flag, it’s possible for Microsoft to patch the PMP and have it report that this flag is set, thereby disabling premium content. However, beause I already have kernel-mode code running at this point, I can disable this flag in memory, and PMP will never know that it was enabled. Again, Microsoft could fight this by caching the value, or obfuscating it somewhere inside PMP’s kernel-mode code, but as long as it’s in kernel-mode, and I’ve got code in kernel-mode, I can patch it.

To continue this game, Microsoft could then use Patchguard on the obfuscated value…but that would only mean that I can simply disable Patchguard using the numerous methods that Skywing documented in his latest paper.

In the end, the only way that PMP is going to work is with a Hypervisor, and even that will probably fail.

Unfortunately, with almost 0% use for the open source community (which can use test signing mode for their drivers), documenting my method and/or releasing a sample might be viewed as an anti-DRM tool, and defintely a DMCA violation. Although used on its own, this POC doesn’t do anything or go anywhere near the PMP (I don’t even have Protected Media, HDMI, HD-DVD, nor do I know where PMP lives or how someone can intercept decrypted steams), a particularly nasty group of lawyers could still somehow associate the DMCA to it, so I’m not going to take any chances.

It’s quite ironic — Microsoft claims driver signing is to fight malware and increase system stability, so if I get sued under DMCA, wouldn’t that be an admission that driver signing is a “anti-copyright infringment tool”?.

I’d really love to release this tool to the public though, so I will look into my options — perhaps emphasizing the research aspect of it and crippling the binary would be a safe way.
http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=24





Apple: iTunes Users Should Wait on Vista
May Wong

Apple Inc. is urging some iPod and iTunes users to hold off on upgrading computers to Windows Vista, warning that the iTunes music software may not work well with the new operating system from rival Microsoft Corp.

Apple said iTunes may work with many Vista computers, but the company knows of some compatibility problems and recommends that users wait until it resolves the issues with an iTunes update in the next few weeks, the company said in a statement provided Friday by spokesman Derick Mains. The iTunes software is key to synching music on computers with iPod portable players.

Microsoft launched Vista, its first major overhaul of Windows in five years, on Tuesday.

Though Microsoft and Apple are partners in some cases — iTunes works with Windows PCs and Microsoft Office has a version for Macs — the two are also entrenched rivals. With Vista's launch, Apple ramped up its ad campaign attacks against Windows.

According to a notice posted on Apple's Web site, compatibility problems include the inability to play music or video purchased from the online iTunes store, difficulties synchronizing contacts and calendars and possible failures of iPods plugged into a Vista computer. Apple also outlined precautionary steps users could take to try to minimize any problems should they upgrade to Vista now.

Adam Anderson, a spokesman for Microsoft's Windows division, said the company did not believe iTunes users "should stop using Vista for these reasons."

The company said it is working with a long list of partners, including Apple, to make sure their software is compatible with Vista. When the new operating system launched, Microsoft claimed more than 5,000 hardware and software products were already Vista-compatible.

The company has a dedicated team working with Apple on getting iTunes running smoothly on Vista, and it will keep at it "until they have the program running to the quality level they're shooting for," Anderson said.

Apple has sold more than 90 million iPods since the product was launched in October 2001.

Article





Green Party Asks: Who Has The Key To Your Vista PC?

Green party slams Vista Landfill nightmare

Microsoft's latest operating system, due for release tomorrow, is defective by design, putting Microsoft and the corporate media in control of your computer. (1)

Beneath the gloss they have hidden traps that take away important consumer rights, force expensive and environmentally damaging hardware upgrades.

All computer hardware, such as monitors and sound cards, will have to obey Microsoft's rules for encrypting content in order for consumers to use Vista to play 'premium' content, such as Blu-Ray and HD DVD disks. Although it is unlikely to prevent copying, it will make Vista more attractive to Hollywood film distributors, while also locking them into a Vista content distribution system.

Derek Wall, Green Party Male Principal Speaker, said: "So-called 'digital rights management' technology in Vista gives Microsoft the ability to lock you out of your computer. Technology should increase our opportunities to consume media, create our own and share it with others.

"But Vista helps the corporate media take away our consumer rights. Silence in government betrays a shocking complacency in the face of this latest attack on our rights."

Vista will also be power hungry, as it requires more processing time to encrypt and decrypt 'premium' content, and looks around the computer every few milliseconds to check that nothing is trying to distribute de-coded 'premium' video or sound.

He continued, "Vista requires more expensive and energy-hungry hardware, passing the cost on to consumers and the environment. This will also further exclude the poor from the latest technology, and impose burdensome costs on small and medium businesses who will be forced to enter another expensive upgrade cycle."

Consumers, businesses and government bodies should protect their interests by migrating to free software, rather than upgrading to Vista, says Wall.

"Free software can run on existing hardware, reduces licensing costs for small businesses and affords important freedoms to consumers. The UK Government should capitalise on this opportunity to promote the use of free software in public bodies."

Greens predict that an enormous amount of hardware will be junked by consumers and companies as Vista will refuse to play Blu-Ray and HD DVD content with current monitors and sound cards.

Siân Berry, Green Party Female Principal Speaker added:

"There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista - except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That's an offensive cost to the environment.

"Future archaeologists will be able to identify a 'Vista Upgrade Layer' when they go through our landfill sites."

By controlling the technology that delivers video content on computers, and owning the licenses that make the hardware and software work, Microsoft will be in a very strong position to dictate terms to consumers and content producers. Apple's itunes store works in a similar way already, selling songs that can only be played on Apple ipods and iTunes software.

"We should remember that this is about Microsoft trying to dictate the way that video content gets delivered - much as Apple are trying to do with iTunes - in order to corner the market.

"Now is the time to act, if we want to see the Microsoft monopoly kept out of the video market."

She added that Green Party also supported complaints by computer manufacturers that XAML, a Vista-only internet mark-up standard, would be another attempt to extend Microsoft's virtual monopoly.(2)

"Microsoft are determined not to play fair and we hope the EU stand up to them. The best way of course is to insist that we purchase products that work with open rather than closed standards."
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2851





Gates: With Vista, Seeing is Believing

Not sure what Vista means for you? Bill Gates would be happy to show you.

While some reviewers have given lukewarm opinions on the new operating system, the Microsoft chairman says that a three- or four-minute demo should convince most people that Vista has much to offer over Windows XP.

Gates sat down with CNET News.com on the eve of Vista's consumer launch, along with the release of Office 2007. In part one of a two-part interview, he responds to the critics, outlines his Vista sales pitch and talks about the potential of a comeback for peer-to-peer computing.

In the second part of the interview, to be published later this week, Gates talks Xbox, Windows Live and whether TV as we know it is outmoded.

Q: You've been waiting for this day for a long time. How important is the launch of these two products (Vista and Office) for Microsoft?
Gates: Windows Vista is the platform that almost the entire industry builds on, whether it is innovative hardware or software applications. Having it out in the marketplace and letting them use that as the foundation for their work, it's very exciting. We've had 5 million people help guide us in this, tell us that it is ready to go. This is our chance to thank them and let everyone else get the benefits of all the work.
Given that people spend more time on Windows PCs than watching TV now, having that be the best experience possible is worth a lot.

Q: I took a look at all the advertising circulars over the weekend as all the PC retailers started trying to advertise Vista. It seemed like there was still a bit of a challenge for them to figure out what to sell. How big a challenge is it to try and explain what Vista is to consumers.
Gates: Well, with software the best thing is always if you can let people have about a three- or four-minute demo. Then they'll really understand why we think this is a big "wow." We talk about how it's easier--that's things like search, and the setup and the user interface. We talk about safer--that's parental control, antiphishing. We talk about better-connected, the simple Wi-Fi capability. More entertaining--that's HD Movie Maker, DirectX 10 games.

I don't think after you've seen it for three or four minutes, you'll say, "Wow, that's the same as XP." You'll see it's quite different. Given that people spend more time on Windows PCs than watching TV now, having that be the best experience possible is worth a lot.

Q: If you were talking to a friend and you were trying to convince them to upgrade to Vista and they were skeptical, what would you tell them? What things about Vista are the most compelling?
Gates: It would be easiest if I could take them over to my machine and show them how Photo Gallery lets you find and organize things in a better way. I could show them the great graphics capabilities that Windows Vista has unlocked. I'd show them on parental control how I can set the time for my son's work with the PC. Or, for my daughter, how I can look at an activity report and see what kind of Web sites she's going to.

Pretty quickly they'd get a concrete view. For some people, just the fact that it turns on faster, the way we've made that a lot better. Different things will appeal to different people.

Q: Some of the changes with Vista are things that aren't necessarily visible the first time you turn it on. It's things under the hood for developers. What changes in computing do you think Vista will help bring about?
Gates: Things like peer-to-peer. We've got an infrastructure in there. Advanced use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so all the applications don't have to go and rebuild those things. I was really impressed seeing how HP had taken their touch screen and made photo-type scenarios really simple. You don't even think you are using software when you select and organize and do a little bit of editing. It's so natural.

Q: You mention peer-to-peer. We haven't heard a lot about peer-to-peer lately. It got kind of a bad rap from the music-sharing days. Is that technology ready for a comeback, and what sorts of things does it allow?
Gates: We have rich APIs (application programming interfaces) and we actually use those ourselves to let you set up a meeting with somebody who is nearby and share a screen with them. We haven't seen it as something that all software people can build on. Most people have had to build their own infrastructure and that's meant that it has really limited the usage. Now we are seeing that (software makers) in general can write peer-to-peer applications. It's up to them to show us where it can go.

Q: One of the things that Microsoft tried to introduce with Vista is the idea that megahertz isn't necessarily the best way to measure a PC. The Windows Experience Index was an attempt to give you an overall sense of how powerful a PC is. We've seen it go from something that was really prominent in the early test versions to something that is maybe not as prominent. Is it still something that's important?
Gates: Our team has done a great job on this, where you can look at the score in each individual area, like the graphics or CPU. You can also have an overall rating. It had gotten so confusing for people to try and understand these things, that we decided just having a linear scale in a few of the key areas and a way of bringing that together, it would help you in terms of picking games out or knowing what the right hardware is. (We've done) a lot of work with the industry to try and take what has been very complex and bring it down to a numeric scale.

Some of the early reviews of Vista haven't exactly been glowing. I'm curious what you make of that?
Gates: Actually, most of the reviews have been very positive. In some ways, people covered the schedule, but they forgot all of the cool stuff that was going on. So they are kind of amazed now that they look and (see) hey, this is what this has been all about.

You laid out the vision for where you guys were going with Vista at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in 2003. From your perspective, how much of that vision is reflected in the product that is shipping this week?
Gates: We were able to achieve virtually everything we set out to do. We did not change the file system into a database-like approach. That turned out to be a little ahead of its time. With the exception of that, the presentation richness, the security, the organization-type things that we have here. It's very dramatic. Obviously, we will do more in the future, but this is the foundation that will make Windows computing far simpler.

Office and Vista are just now becoming available for consumers, but they have been available to large businesses since November. Do you have any sense yet of how quickly businesses might be moving to the new product?
Gates: We've got some huge customers like Citicorp, with 350,000 desktops, who have decided to make that move fully this year. A lot more software distribution is being done over the network, so you are not having to visit the machines. It is easier for corporations to do the upgrade than it would have been in the past. A lot of people with their corporate licenses have these upgrades available to them. We expect to see a faster uptake than ever before on a new version. Obviously consumers have been faster to move to the new thing than businesses in general, but here we've made the ease of migration the best it's ever been.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590-6154480.html





Bill Gates on Vista and Apple's 'Lying' Ads

Bill Gates explains why you should buy his new operating system, what he’s doing next and why John Hodgeman bugs him.
Steven Levy

On the morning of the launch of the Vista operating system earlier this week, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates talked with NEWSWEEK’s Steven Levy about the new version of Windows—and the one after that. He also shared his views on those Apple television commercials in which the Mac is represented by a hip guy and the PC by, well, a dweeb. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch?
Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that's got photos. As I went through, they'd think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

Vista has been a very long time in coming, and parts of it were jettisoned along the way. Do you feel satisfied at the outcome now that it’s finally shipped?
Well, we released Windows XP about five years ago. During that time, we’ve had, I think, three releases of Media Center, four releases of [Windows Media], Tablet releases, Windows XP SP2, which was really a very major release. So in no sense has Windows been standing still. Actually, if you look at Windows strength versus Linux, or versus anything, it’s done very well, because we have this big ecosystem. Next time around we’re going to have a lot more agility. A lot of what we put into this version was layering work that will let us take the upper parts of the system, like the browser, and let us do more regular releases. So there [will be further releases] at least every couple of years, and in some parts maybe even yearly. And we learned a lot during the Vista [process]. People can see how we’ve mixed together our Office talent and Windows talent to get the best of both worlds, and how we’re going to do things going forward.

You also talk about improved security in Vista.
Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You’re [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we’ve got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.

Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I've never seen it. I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—
That’s for my customers to decide.

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

Is this Vista launch the last hurrah of the big operating system?
Well, people have said that at every major Windows release. Java was going to eliminate Windows programming, or thin clients were going to eliminate people buying PCs. Operating systems keep getting better and richer, and they allow developers then to take advantage of that. We're doing more innovation now at the operating-system level than we've ever done. As we sit down and think, what are the things we're going to do in the next release, there's no shortage of radical things that will be happening in the operating system.

You mentioned that Microsoft can now be more agile in updating. Are you thinking of rolling upgrades as opposed to big major releases?
No, you'll have big releases. When you go in and enable a new kind of application, you want to get your partners behind it, you want to get them building the hardware that's related to that. It really simplifies things for people to think, OK, here's what I got in Windows Vista, here's what I'm going to get in this next major release. The more avid users download the upgrades in between, but of XP users how many downloaded a browser that was more advanced than the one they had? Maybe you and the people you know all did, but most people don’t.

How many actually do?
I would say it's less than 30 percent. We’ve had this incredible desktop search [available for download] that won every review, and I’ll bet that less than 10 percent of Windows users went and got that. Now with Windows Vista, you get something better. For most users, it’s the first time they’ve seen it at all.

So you feel in 2010-2011 Microsoft will be back with the next big one?
Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

You’re leaving your full time role at Microsoft in July 2008. What involvement are you going to have in the next operating system?
First of all, there's tons of people who help make those decisions, so I wouldn't overstate my role in the past. But I'll have full involvement, the [same] involvement I've ever had in the key decisions for those products.

So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like?
Well, it will be more user-centric.

What does that mean?
That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services [a way to connect to Microsoft via the Internet] to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks, they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.

With Xbox and Zune, Microsoft has adopted an end-to-end approach, where you write the software, design the hardware and run the services. Will Microsoft now change its mobile-phone strategy and adopt an end-to-end approach, the way Apple has with the iPhone?
No, I don't think so. People like different styling, media storage, capability [in phones]. The benefit we get from having lots of great hardware partners is pretty phenomenal. And our software can run on any one of those things.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek/





French Students to Get Open-Source Software on USB Key
Peter Sayer

French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high-school students at the start of the next school year.

The sticks will give the students, aged 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend's house or in an Internet café -- but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.

It's a way to reduce the digital divide, said spokesman Jean-Baptiste Roger.

The sticks will probably contain the Firefox 2 Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, an office productivity suite such as OpenOffice.org 2, an audio and video player, and software for instant messaging, he said.

The exact mix of software will be defined by the company that wins the contract to supply the sticks, but will be open source, he said.

At the European arm of the foundation behind the Firefox browser, Mozilla Europe president Tristan Nitot hailed the news as "an excellent surprise."

It could even be a way to fight software piracy, he said, since the open-source software that the sticks will contain may be freely and legally copied.

"It's better to copy that than Microsoft Office: it's cheaper, and it's legal," he said.

School heads will distribute the USB (Universal Serial Bus) sticks to 130,000 students at the start of the next academic year, as they arrive for their first of three years at high school. There are 476,000 students in the 468 public high schools operated by the council and the 213 privately run schools it funds. Apprentices at the 173 professional training centers funded by the council will receive the other 45,000 sticks.

If the project goes well, there's no reason why funding shouldn't be renewed next year, said Roger.

The council plans to spend €2.6 million (US$3.4 million) on the USB sticks this year, a small fraction of its overall educational budget.

School funding in France comes from many sources. Teachers are paid by the national government, while the provision of teaching facilities including the construction and maintenance of schools is paid for by local governments: city authorities, in the case of primary and middle schools, and regional councils in the case of high schools. In 2006, the Greater Paris Regional Council's budget for maintaining high school facilities, including buildings, libraries and its 120,000 computers, totalled €728 million. It also spent €195 million on facilities for apprentices in professional training centers.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20...nfoworld/85707





US Teen in Music Piracy Lawsuit Accuses Record Companies of Collusion
AP

A 16-year-old boy being sued for online music piracy accused the recording industry of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to a lawsuit filed by five record companies, Robert Santangelo, who was as young as 11 when the alleged piracy occurred, denied ever disseminating music and said it is impossible to prove that he did.

Santangelo is the son of Patti Santangelo, the 42-year-old suburban mother of five who was sued by the record companies in 2005. She refused to settle, took her case public and became a heroine to supporters of Internet freedom.

The industry dropped its case against her in December but sued Robert and his sister Michelle, now 20, in federal court in White Plains, a New York City suburb. Michelle has been ordered to pay $30,750 (€23,700) in a default judgment because she did not respond to the lawsuit.

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, responded at length on Tuesday, raising 32 defenses, demanding a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy's reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees.

His defenses to the industry's lawsuit include that he never sent copyrighted music to others; that the recording companies promoted file sharing before turning against it; that average computer users were never warned that it was illegal; that the statute of limitations has passed; and that all the music claimed to have been downloaded was actually owned by his sister on store-bought CDs.

Santangelo also claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, "have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States."

The papers allege that the companies, "ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy" by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency "to make extortionate threats ... to force defendants to pay."

The Recording Industry Association of America, which has coordinated most of the lawsuits, issued a statement saying, "The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact."
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...nload-Suit.php





Bang! Pow! Zap!

TV Battles Peer-To-Peer Pirates
Marc Cieslak

Movie and music piracy has been common place for years, but now the pirates of the net have set their sights on completely new targets - hit US TV shows.

In the old days when you wanted to watch a TV show you needed a television - what a quaint, 20th Century notion.

With the advent of broadband, viewers are increasingly turning to the web and peer-to-peer downloading software to get their fix of the latest TV shows.

There is just one small problem with this P2P trend - a large proportion of this downloading is illegal.

US TV programmes like Lost, Prison Break and Heroes have become some of the most illegally downloaded content on the web.

Shows broadcast on the east coast of the US are routinely pirated and appear online hours before they are broadcast on the west coast of America.

The rise of P2P file sharing sites is one of the driving factors behind this growth. P2P sites connect users to one another rather than to a central server, so data can then be shared amongst those users.

"P2P file sharing is a huge issue online at the moment. We are seeing millions of people engaging in the practice on a daily basis," said David Price, Head of Piracy Intelligence at Envisional.

"Over one month you might see 10 million downloads just of the clients that are being used to file share. You could easily see a million downloads of a single TV episode."

One anonymous file sharer explained how he did it: "The software I use to download TV shows at the moment is BitTorrent. There are several pieces of software that all do the same thing, Azureus is quite good, but BitTorrent is the most user friendly and basic.

"It's very, very easy to find the shows you're after. There are several websites that my friends have told me about.

"I do a Google search within that website and can find anything I want."

Once you have downloaded a piece of software like BitTorrent a quick visit to any number of P2P sites reveals the extent of the problem.

If I perform a quick search for Kiefer Sutherland's action show 24, pages and pages of files appear.

Some entries are individual episodes, but lots of them are entire seasons of the show.

While many illegal file sharers may feel they are safe due to the enormous scale of the problem, it is still possible to track their activities, and in some cases introduce legal sanctions.

Legal action

But downloading illegal content is hardly an anonymous activity, as Mr Price explained.

"When you download a piece of content your IP address, which is like the address of your computer on the internet, can be relatively easily tracked.

"When you find that information it is quite easy to track that IP address back to a particular service provider.

"Then the internet service provider can or will, if you take legal action, supply the names of the people who are responsible for that particular IP address."

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) tracks down pirates and brings them before the courts. "We look to sites that we hear about, that we've got intelligence on, and we examine what's happening on those sites, and we continue to investigate and eventually we will be taking enforcement action," said Fact's director general Kieron Sharp.

"We've already done so in some cases, one particularly high profile case in the past, and we will continue to do that."

Mr Price, however, is not convinced it is that easy. "There are a couple of problems with this," he said.

"The main one is that the ISPs are very unwilling to supply subscriber details. They see it as being a matter of privacy and they are not prepared to reveal those kinds of details unless they are given a court order."

We asked a file sharer if he was concerned about prosecution. "I don't really consider the legal consequences because there are so many people downloading these things it's going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. It's not really a worry," he said.

'Fight back'

But broadcasters are using the web as weapon to fight back against the tide of illegal torrents.

TV networks across the globe have started to stream shows on their own websites, often at reduced quality to their broadcast counterparts, but free to view nonetheless.

Mr Price thinks this is only going to increase.

"In the US people have already followed that sort of line. We have seen broadcasters streaming their top shows through their own website, with adverts.

"You can go to the ABC website and watch Lost, you can go to the NBC website and watch Heroes.

"In the US networks are selling episodes of Lost and episodes of other shows on iTunes for about $1.99 a go."

In addition to broadcasters, internet start ups like Babelgum have adopted P2P technology as a solution to legally distributing TV shows over the web.

Skype and Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis claim their P2P TV offering Joost will provide full screen broadcast quality pictures.

Joost is still in beta testing and lacks any really compelling content, but with rumours of deals with big broadcasters in the offing, this kind of legal P2P sharing could help the TV networks force the web pirates to walk the plank.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ne/6301355.stm





BBC's Download Plans Get Backing

TV shows like Doctor Who are expected to be available for download later this year after the BBC Trust gave initial approval to the BBC's on-demand plans.

Under the proposals, viewers will be able to watch popular programmes online or download them to a home computer up to a week after they are broadcast.

But the trust imposed tough conditions on classical music, which could stop a repeat of the BBC's Beethoven podcasts.

Full approval of the on-demand plans will follow a two-month consultation.

After that, the BBC will be able to launch its long-awaited iPlayer, a computer application which allows audiences to watch or download any programme from the last seven days.

A programme will remain playable for 30 days after being downloaded or seven days after being watched.

The BBC Trust, an independent body that replaced the corporation's governors at the beginning of 2007, said the on-demand plans - which also cover cable TV - were "likely to deliver significant public value".

But it agreed with broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which said earlier this month that the iPlayer could have a "negative effect" on commercial rivals.

As a result, the trust has imposed several conditions on the BBC.

It wants the corporation to scale back plans to let downloaded "catch-up" episodes remain on users' hard drives for 13 weeks, suggesting that 30 days is enough.

Role Of The BBC Trust:

· Replaced BBC Governors
· Twelve trustees appointed by the Queen on ministers' advice
· Trustees earn about £35,000 a year
· Independent of BBC management
· Work on behalf of licence fee payers
· Ensure value for money
· Set limits for BBC services
· Handle appeals from BBC complaints process

Chris Woolard, head of finance, economics and strategy at the Trust, defended the decision to cut the storage time.

When people record a programme at home "if they don't look at it within 48 hours, they don't look at it at all", he said.

But some shows will be able to remain on a viewer's computer beyond the standard seven-day window using a feature called series stacking.

Every episode of a "stacked" series would be made available until a week after transmission of the final instalment.

Trustees said the BBC needed to be clearer about which programmes would be offered on this service - but suggested "landmark" series "with a beginning and end", like Planet Earth or Doctor Who, should be eligible.

The trust also asked the BBC to explore ways of introducing parental controls to its on-demand services, as it is worried at the "heightened risk of children being exposed to post-watershed material".

Podcasts also came under scrutiny, with the Trust recommending that audio books and classical music be excluded from the BBC's download services.

"There is a potential negative market impact if the BBC allows listeners to build an extensive library of classical music that will serve as a close substitute for commercially available downloads or CDs," it said.

The news will be a disappointment to the one million people who downloaded Beethoven's symphonies in a Radio 3 trial in 2005.

But trustee Diane Coyle admitted the board "could still change its mind if there was a public outcry and it was backed up by evidence".

Licence-fee payers can now have their say on the BBC's plans, and the trust's conditions, in a two-month public consultation.

The trust said it expects to publish its final approval by 2 May.

The BBC Trust replaced the BBC's governors at the beginning of the year, and this is one of its first major decisions.

BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas said it was seen as the first test of the Trust's independence from the corporation's management, and that many would think it had passed it by imposing tougher conditions than Ofcom did in its own report on the issue.

Many of the BBC's commercial rivals had wanted Ofcom to take on the role of regulating the corporation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/6316857.stm





Disney's iTunes Sales Reach 1.3 Million
Jacqui Cheng

Disney has sold 1.3 million movies in its first three months on iTunes, Disney CEO Bob Iger said in an interview with the Financial Times this week. The movie studio, which saw solid sales in the first eight weeks since its iTunes introduction, had downloads skyrocket through the holiday season, pushing them well past the 1-million mark.

The two movies responsible for taking Disney past 1 million sales were Pirates of the Caribbean and Cars, said Iger. However, he said that DVD and mass retail sales of those same movies also sold well—in fact, they actually exceeded Disney's expectations on both counts. "We believe the pie is getting bigger," Iger said, emphasizing that Disney's online movie sales did not cannibalize the traditional media sales as some studios and retailers have feared.

If iTunes is doing so well for Disney, how come more studios haven't hopped on board? At the Macworld Expo this January, Steve Jobs announced that one more studio was joining Disney in offering movie downloads via iTunes: Paramount. This brought the total number of movies on iTunes from 100 to about 250—a respectable increase, but still a fairly small number in comparison to some of the competition. Apple continues to hope that Disney's success on iTunes will pull other studios out of their shells, but seems to still be having trouble sweet-talking them to an agreement.

Part of the reason other studios are afraid to join iTunes—aside from retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart making veiled threats of lowering DVD order volume—is because they don't feel comfortable with Apple's DRM terms. As we wrote in January about Hollywood's views on DRM, an unnamed studio exec said outright that Apple's DRM rules were too lax, with the ability for users to authorize up to five separate computers (unlimited iPod authorizations) and unlimited playthroughs. "[Apple's] user rules just scare the heck out of us," the exec told BusinessWeek.

Perhaps once Paramount shows some of its numbers in addition to Disney's, other studios will warm up a bit more and be willing to join in. Until then, it looks like Disney and Paramount will be alone in sharing the iTunes glory for a while.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070202-8758.html





Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win.
Heather Chaplin

AS director of the 13-year-old Slamdance film festival, the indier-than-thou alternative to the Sundance Film Festival that concludes here Sunday, Peter Baxter has dedicated a good portion of his career to showcasing the work of artists toiling outside the mainstream. Three years ago, in that same anti-establishment spirit, he broadened the festival’s boundaries to include the Guerrilla Gamemaking Competition, a forum for independent video-game makers to do what their counterparts in film get to do every winter up the street: show their work, make deals and rub elbows.

Considering how few places independent game makers have for this sort of interaction, perhaps it’s not surprising that the mood the previous two years approached euphoria. “We felt proud just to be associated with Slamdance,” said Andrew Stern, who, along with his partner, Michael Mateas, took home the grand jury prize last year for their game Façade, an interactive drama about a marital crisis inspired by Ingmar’s Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” and Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ”

Tracy Fullerton, a professor of game design at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, was so impressed by what she encountered last year that she persuaded U.S.C.’s Interactive Media Division to sponsor the 2007 competition by offering two six-week student fellowships at the school’s Interactive Media Lab.

But this year that euphoria was nowhere in sight. An entrant called Super Columbine Massacre Role Playing Game! made it to the finals, and in the process attracted complaints about its provocative content. So Mr. Baxter reluctantly opted to withdraw it from the competition. But the anger over his decision has dwarfed the original objections, and many entrants have chosen to leave the festival altogether.

The game in question combines real video images of the 1999 Columbine High School killers and snippets of their conversation with intentionally low-resolution 2-D graphics meant to replicate the look of an early-1990s Nintendo-style role-playing game. To its champions the game is a landmark example of how video games can explore deeply disturbing material, and a powerful condemnation of the culture that produced the Columbine tragedy. To its detractors it’s a study in appallingly bad taste, a horrid trivialization of a tragic event.

The controversy highlights the questions that experimental game makers face as they seek to evolve from a loose conglomeration of people with similar interests into a full-fledged movement. What will it take for their medium to be considered a legitimate art form? And should games even try to address painful or distasteful subject matter?

The game room at the Treasure Mountain Inn here this month was filled with the same red beanbags chairs as last year, but the crowd of 20 or so game designers had withered to half that number, and what had been a ring of more than a dozen humming computer terminals was now a handful of monitors. The rows of folding chairs set up for presentations were half empty, and where last year there was excited chatter on all sides, this year an uncomfortable quiet permeated the room.

The story of how this once-electric gathering lost its luster began with a phone call earlier this month by Mr. Baxter to Danny Ledonne, a 25-year-old Colorado filmmaker and the creator of Super Columbine. Overriding the panel of the judges who had included the game among the 14 finalists, Mr. Baxter told Mr. Ledonne that he had decided to withdraw his game because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he’d been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

“I personally don’t find the game immoral, because an artist has a right to create whatever he wants, whether a filmmaker or a game maker,” Mr. Baxter said. “But when you’re responsible for presenting that work to the public, it becomes more complicated.”

Mr. Ledonne, who lives with his parents and had never made a video game before Super Columbine, said he could sympathize with Mr. Baxter’s predicament. “I knew right away what he was going to say,” Mr. Ledonne explained, “so I was just thinking, are they going to reimburse me for my air fare?“ He said he had received multiple death threats since he posted Super Columbine on his Web site in April 2005. “I’ve learned that games are expected to be for children, and when you create a game that’s not, people get very upset,” he said.

“I’m not really a provocateur in person,” he continued. “I inherited this society, which I truly feel is moribund and completely unsustainable. To me the Columbine shootings was like the canary in a coal mine.”

When word of Mr. Baxter’s decision found its way to the Internet, it set off a hailstorm of pent-up anger and indignation among independent game designers. The decision also prompted a flurry of open letters to Slamdance asking for Super Columbine Massacre to be reinstated. One by one over a period of about a week, 7 out of the remaining 13 finalists withdrew their games in protest, an act of solidarity almost unheard of among a group of people known more for working long hours in isolation than participating in group action. (One game, Toblo, made by a group of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash., was reinstated by the college, which owns the rights.)

A few days later Mr. Baxter heard from Ms. Fullerton at U.S.C. “We became sponsors because we wanted to be part of a contest that stood for certain values having to do with freedom of expression and creativity,” she said. “And when it didn’t anymore, we had to pull our support.”

Kellee Santiago, part of the U.S.C. team that made flOw, a sort of New Age Pac-Man that was among those pulled from the competition, said: “It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that games still are not considered a valid creative medium. It’s like saying that games aren’t allowed to cover serious subjects, and if you do, you must be doing something tasteless.”

To Mr. Baxter, though, it’s not that simple. “Games really are potentially a far more powerful medium that film, aren’t they?” he said while sitting at the Morning Ray Cafe just a few feet from the underpopulated gaming room. “In films you play a more passive role. You’re sitting back looking at something. Because of the role-playing aspect, games literally take the level of our participation to a whole other level. You are actively engaged in the outcome of your actions. Games are going to affect us in different ways, in ways we don’t fully understand yet.”

As he sipped his coffee, Mr. Baxter then said exactly what he had studiously avoided saying for two weeks: “Absolutely, games should be judged by a different criteria than film. I just don’t accept a direct comparison.”

To many of today’s independent game designers, the commercial video-game industry has become stagnant and intolerably risk-averse as game budgets reach tens of millions of dollars and design teams swell into the hundreds. But the advent of digital distribution and affordable game-building tools from companies like GarageGames has allowed them to create a broad spectrum of unconventional games.

Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-founder of the game-development company Persuasive Games (whose slogan is: “Think games are just for fun? Think again”), was a finalist at the past two Slamdance competitions. One of his recent games is Bacteria Salad, in which the player’s goal is to harvest cheap produce and sell it for as much profit as possible. Another is Oil God, where the goal is to double consumer prices in five years: “Wreak havoc on the world’s oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster!”

In another recent game, Darkgame, designed by Eddo Stern, a Los Angeles artist, players wear a device on their heads that translates the game’s visuals into physical pulses. At different points in the game the senses of sight, sound and touch are stimulated, which Mr. Stern hopes will create feelings of claustrophobia and anxiety as well as the usual feelings of wonder and excitement players expect from games.

Sam Roberts, the game director of Slamdance, was visibly pained by the withdrawal of so many intriguing entries this year. “The game competition is here to pay attention to new young artists who have great ideas,” he said. “My biggest disappointment is that six fantastic games weren’t here to take advantage of that.”

Acknowledging that the event was seriously compromised, Mr. Roberts let the attendees vote on whether to award any prizes at all at this year’s competition. On Monday evening they decided not to.

Nonetheless Mr. Roberts said he was optimistic about the future of the event. “These are issues that we can’t avoid as we push the boundaries of what games can be,” he said. “In the end all this debate ended up sparking a lot of discussion and opening a lot of people’s eyes to that fact that there are artistically inclined games out there. And that’s a good thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/arts/28chap.html





Games That Sell While Others Languish
Matt Richtel

Some of the video game industry’s smartest minds thought that couch potatoes wanted richer graphics and more challenging virtual worlds. It turns out that a lot of potatoes simply wanted to get off the couch.

That may be the best explanation for the growing popularity of the Nintendo Wii, the new video game system that has players jumping, punching and swinging, giving them an aerobic workout right in front of their television sets.

The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players’ motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game world. In electronics stores and elsewhere, there are growing signs that the Wii has taken the lead in buzz and sales over another new console, the Sony PlayStation 3, which offers new superlatives in processing power and graphics.

The competitive picture became clearer on Tuesday, when Sony reported disappointing profits that industry analysts attributed largely to the expensive and shaky rollout of the PlayStation 3 and lukewarm demand for the complex machines. By contrast, Nintendo said last week that its own third-quarter sales were up 40 percent from a year earlier, buoyed by Wii sales.

Both consoles were hard to come by during the holiday shopping season. This week, visits to stores in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Austin, Tex., turned up several with PlayStation 3’s in stock, while the Wii was sold out.

The PlayStation, reflecting Sony’s longstanding dominance, seemed destined to be the one that gamers would snap up. But the Wii is winning many converts who are playing games by moving not just their thumbs but the whole complement of limbs.

“You’re up and you’re moving, and it makes you feel more involved,” said Tracy Ciardiello, 28, a stay-at-home mother in Berkeley Springs, W. Va., who bought one of the last Wiis available at a Wal-Mart nearby on Sunday morning. “After an hour, a thing pops on the screen that says, ‘Why not take a rest?’ That just made me laugh.”

The Wii and the PlayStation 3 were both released in November and are competing with the Microsoft Xbox 360, also a more powerful game machine. It is a battle with immense stakes, given that the video game industry generated more than $12 billion in sales last year.

It is too early to declare a winner. Video game industry analysts said one question hanging over the Wii was whether it was a fad, or whether it would end up creating a new generation of more casual game players — or even become a viable alternative to more powerful machines.

But it appears that Nintendo has already created an unexpected three-way contest, while calling into question conventional wisdom that video games are the domain of testosterone-driven gadget freaks who can zone out for hours while conquering computer-generated foes.

“Nintendo came at things sideways — they made stuff that’s silly and fun,” said Jeff Gerstmann, senior editor of GameSpot, a Web site with video game news and reviews. “It has created a new style of gaming.”

Nintendo recently announced that during the holiday quarter, it shipped 3.2 million Wii consoles and sold 17.5 million games. Sony said it shipped 1.84 million PlayStation 3’s in the quarter, and sold 5.2 million copies of game software for the console.

Nintendo might sell more Wiis if it could make and ship more of them. Company officials said they are shipping around a million worldwide every month, half of those to the United States, but retailers say they cannot keep them in stock.

“The last time they were here, we had 40 and they sold out in 15 minutes,” said John Weeks, who works in the electronics department of the Target store at South Bay Center in Boston. The Wii was last in stock there on Sunday and sold out quickly, making the console physically demanding for shoppers as well.

“I heard there were people here at 5 a.m. waiting,” Mr. Weeks said.

Target shoppers in search of a PlayStation 3, however, were in luck. In addition to the handful out on the floor on Tuesday, there were at least 15 PlayStations in back waiting to be sold.

Retailers around the country said that while the PlayStations had been selling well, they were generally remaining on the shelves for a few days or a week.

Helping the Wii is its $249 price, compared with $499 or $599 for the PlayStation 3, depending on the model, and $299 or $399 for the Xbox. The competition seems to be benefiting all three companies by getting consumers interested in a medium that has languished a bit.

Dave Karraker, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said the Wii did not belong in the same category as the more powerful PlayStation 3. “Wii could be considered an impulse buy more than anything else,” he declared.

Mr. Karraker said Sony was selling out the 100,000 PlayStation 3 units it was shipping into the United States each week, albeit somewhat more slowly than before Christmas. “The frenzy we saw at the holidays has subsided a bit,” he said.

Besides, Mr. Karraker added, Sony thinks the Wii is attracting newcomers, while the PlayStation will be the console of choice for hard-core and committed gamers.

So is the Wii expanding the video game market, or is it stealing customers from Sony and Microsoft?

For Will Brazelton, 23, a student at San Francisco State University, the answer is both. An avid gamer, he said he planned to buy a PlayStation 3 eventually, but he was in a local EB Games store on Monday seeking a Wii. He said the system seemed especially fun. Also, his sister, even though she is not an avid gamer, had agreed to pay half.

Alas, the store had no Wiis, and the manager, Joe Conforti, told Mr. Brazelton that there was not any sure path to getting one.

It is “basically luck,” Mr. Conforti advised. He said the calls were coming in hourly from people interested in a Wii, and that when stock does come in, it lasts only an hour or two.

For some serious gamers, it is not a question of choosing among systems. Robert Davis, 29, a martial-arts instructor who lives in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and owns a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360 and a Wii, said the Nintendo console was an enjoyable alternative but not a replacement for the more advanced machines. “It’s fun mainly because it’s different, but once that wears off, some people are just couch potatoes,” he said.

Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America, said the Wii was changing the perception of what kinds of games adults like to play. The console, she said, “has turned it all upside down.”

Ms. Kaplan bristled at Sony’s suggestion that the Wii only appeared to be in higher demand because there had been fewer shipments of it. “That’s absolutely inaccurate,” she said, adding that Nintendo was at least equaling Sony’s shipments.

Still, analysts said the challenges for the Wii included whether Nintendo and third-party developers would produce enough games to keep console owners and prospective buyers happy. GameSpot said developers planned to release some 76 games for the Wii in 2007, compared with 127 for PlayStation 3.

“At the end of the day, Wii is a terrific secondary system for hard-core gamers,” Mr. Gerstmann of Game-Spot said. But he added that many such gamers had not yet embraced PlayStation 3. “They’re waiting for the good games to come out,” he said.

Some gamers echoed that sentiment. “If I get the PlayStation 3, it would be after the price drops and I see what new games come out,” said Alex Chan, 23, a graduate student from Sacramento, who was with some friends at an EB Games store in the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall in Cambridge, Mass. He said he already had a PlayStation 2 and was interested in getting a Wii.

The Ciardiello family, in West Virginia, are converts to Nintendo, having made a transition from the PlayStation 2. Ms. Ciardiello, who has three young children, said her husband did some research about which console to buy. She said he liked the idea of getting started without spending a lot of time reading a manual — and, more fundamentally, being a bit active while they played.

That part, she said, has been borne out. “My husband broke a sweat playing golf on there,” she said.

Katie Zezima contributed reporting from Boston, Cassi Feldman from New York and Bill Kidd from Austin, Tex.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/te... tner=homepage





Hobbled by Disappointing Sales and a Loss at the Game Unit, Sony’s Profit Drops 5%
Martin Fackler

TOKYO, Jan. 30 — The dip in Sony’s quarterly earnings released early Tuesday underscores what many analysts call the biggest single challenge now facing the recovering Japanese electronics conglomerate: the shaky start of its long-awaited PlayStation 3 game console.

On Tuesday, Sony said net profit slipped 5.3 percent, to 159.9 billion yen ($1.31 billion), in the quarter ended Dec. 31. The company, based in Tokyo, blamed a large loss in its games division, despite rebounding sales in its bread-and-butter consumer electronics.

The games division posted a quarterly operating loss of 54.2 billion yen ($446 million), in contrast to a profit of 67.8 billion yen in the quarter a year earlier. Sony said the decline was a result of a decision to set the price of the PlayStation 3 below the cost of production as a way to bolster market share. It also pointed to one-time start-up costs for PlayStation 3, which was released in Japan and the United States in November.

Analysts, however, said the weak results reflected more fundamental problems with the new console — a high price tag and a complexity that is scaring away all but die-hard game fans. They added that Sony still had plenty of time to turn PlayStation 3’s fortunes around, but only if it cut prices further and made the console more appealing by adding games.

“PlayStation 3’s performance so far? In a word, bad,” said Yuta Sakurai, an analyst at Nomura Securities. “It is clearly not good for Sony that a strategic product is off to a weak start. But it’s still early. This race is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Sony and its chief executive, Howard Stringer, had hoped that PlayStation 3 would become the company’s latest “champion product,” much like its predecessor, the PlayStation 2, which became a worldwide blockbuster with more than 106 million units sold since 2000.

Faced with rising Chinese and other Asian competition, Sony badly needs PlayStation 3 to be a hit of the same magnitude, analysts say. This need is compounded, analysts said, by the reality that Sony has no other potential megahits now visible in its product pipeline.

But as Tuesday’s earnings showed, consumer response has so far been disappointing at best, the analysts continued. This has added to recent woes of Sony that include an embarrassing recall late last year of laptop batteries, some of which caught fire.

The poor performance of the games division stood in contrast to other parts of the company’s sprawling lineup of products. Sony said Tuesday that it was increasing its profit forecast for the year after strong sales of core consumer products like television sets and digital cameras and movies like the newest James Bond film, “Casino Royale.”

Consumer electronics, the biggest division, posted an operating profit of 177.4 billion yen ($1.46 billion), up 102.8 percent, helped by the popularity of Bravia flat-panel TVs, Vaio computers and Cyber-shot digital cameras. Analysts agree that the strong sales in the once-ailing electronics division, the world’s second largest behind the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, the parent of Panasonic, have been a success story for Sony and Mr. Stringer.

Another has been improving sales by Sony’s movie studio, which has produced a string of hits including the Bond film and “The Da Vinci Code” — one of Mr. Stringer’s pet projects. Sony is also hoping to continue mining the success of its Spider-Man films with the release of “Spider-Man 3” in May.

The movie division had an operating profit of 26.2 billion yen ($215.4 million), reversing a loss of 400 million yen a year earlier. The improved results helped Sony do better than analysts’ predictions that its net profit would fall by half in the most recent quarter. They also helped Sony raise its projected net profit for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 110 billion yen, from an October forecast of 80 billion yen.

But analysts said that before Sony could pull out of its long slump once and for all, it has to deal with the problems in its game division.

One reason, they said, is that so many other new products are riding on PlayStation 3’s success. Sony hopes that the console will showcase two of the most recent technologies, the Blu-ray next-generation DVD drive and the high-speed Cell microprocessor.

“Sony needs to raise demand for its semiconductors to recoup its huge capital investments in chip factories,” said Yoshiharu Izumi, an analyst at JPMorgan Securities, who said those investments run in the billions of dollars. “Fixing its chip business goes together with improving the games division.”

Tuesday’s results provided the latest glimpse at the weaker-than-expected demand for PlayStation 3, analysts said. Sony said it shipped 1.84 million PlayStation 3s in the quarter, and sold 5.2 million copies of game software for the console. Nintendo, by contrast, recently announced that it shipped 3.2 million units of its new game console, Wii, and sold 17.5 million copies of software in the period.

As recently as the Las Vegas electronics show early this month, Sony proclaimed that it had met its targets of shipping a million PlayStation 3s in the United States and Japan. But independent research groups say that Wii has outsold PlayStation 3 by 2 to 1 in Japan and by a smaller margin in America. The Microsoft Xbox 360 has also outsold PlayStation 3 in the United States, as has the Sony PlayStation 2.

Some of PlayStation 3’s problems can be attributed to manufacturing delays that pushed back its release by months, and then slowed production. The delays pushed PlayStation 3’s release in Europe back to March.

But analysts and consumers also point to a more basic problem: appealing to consumers. While PlayStation 3 surpasses both Wii and Xbox 360 in performance and graphics, the critics say it suffers from the same problem as many other Sony products: it is overengineered, scaring away average shoppers.

Many consumers have also favored the Wii and Xbox 360 because of their lower prices. At $249 in the United States, Wii is half the price of the cheapest PlayStation 3, while Xbox starts at $299.

“For many consumers, it’s still just too much,” Mr. Sakurai of Nomura said, “too much machine for too much money.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/te...gy/31sony.html





The DRM Root Kit fiasco

Sony BMG Settles FTC Charges

U.S. regulators said Tuesday Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to reimburse consumers up to $150 for damage to their computers for selling CDs with hidden anti-piracy software.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, which announced the settlement with the big media company, its anti-piracy software limited the devices on which music could be played to those made by Sony Corp. or Microsoft Corp. It also restricted the number of copies that could be made and monitored consumers' listening habits to send them marketing messages.

The FTC said the software also "exposed consumers to significant security risks and was unreasonably difficult to uninstall."

The settlement requires the company to allow consumers to exchange through the end of June the affected CDs purchased before Dec. 31, 2006, and reimburse them up to $150 to repair damage done when they tried to remove the software. It also requires Sony BMG to clearly disclose limitations on consumers' use of music CDs, bars it from using collected information for marketing and prohibits it from installing software without consumer consent.

For two years, Sony BMG also must provide an uninstall tool and patches to repair the security vulnerabilities on consumers' computers and must advertise them on its Web site. The company also is required to publish notices describing the exchange and repair reimbursement programs on its Web site.

Sony BMG did not admit a law violation and the settlement is subject to public comment for 30 days, after which the FTC will decide whether to make it final.

Representatives from New York-based Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann AG, did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday morning.

In 2005, the company shipped more than 12 million compact discs on 52 Sony BMG titles, each loaded with one of two content protection programs, and about 7 million of those CDs were sold. The Digital Rights Management software installed itself on consumers' computers without their knowledge or consent.

Last month, the company settled similar cases with more than 40 states, agreeing to pay more than $4 million and to reimburse customers.

Shares of Sony slid 10 cents to $46.90 in pre-market activity after closing at $47 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, where they have traded between $37.24 and $52.29 in the past year.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8MVLL3O1.htm





Finally: VideoScan Releases High-Def Disc Sales Numbers

After over six months of head-to-head combat, we finally have an all-inclusive independent yardstick against which to compare Blu-ray and HD DVD disc sales, thanks to the first public release of sales numbers from Neilsen VideoScan.

Nielsen VideoScan is home entertainment industry's leading source for competitive sales info, tracking point-of-sale data from all channels of video distribution including mass merchants, audio/video retailers, electronics outlets, grocery stores, drug stores, and internet sites.

And while the numbers are still not quite as crispy as we'd like (you won't find any hard sales figures here -- only an index of how each format is faring against the other), they do suggest some trending that's likely to be music to the ears of Blu-ray supporters.

According to VideoScan, during the first two weeks of January, Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD by more than a 2:1 margin. It should be noted that the two weeks in question saw only two new high-def disc releases -- both from Blu-ray ('The Covenant' on Jan 2, and 'Crank' on Jan 9).

More interestingly, VideoScan's numbers indicate that during the seven days between Jan 7 and Jan 14, Blu-ray managed to close the gap of total discs sold since inception with HD DVD by over seven percentage points, suggesting that if the current trend continues, the two formats could be at disc sales parity within weeks.

The release of this VideoScan data follows months of speculation and conjecture on both sides of the fence. While format boosters have released sales figures for hardware, the studios have held high-def disc sales numbers close to their vests, leaving fans to parse Amazon sales charts and analyst reports in search of some sense of who's "winning" the format war.

With the anticipated continued weekly release of these numbers, supporters of both formats should have a somewhat more definitive yardstick against which to measure their format's disc sales prowess. As always, stay tuned... (Thanks to Brian for sending in this tip!)
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/456





Blockbuster Shuts Down in Peru, Piracy Blamed

The last movie rental outlet under the brandname of U.S. home entertainment giant Blockbuster has closed its doors in Peru, where it is often cheaper to buy a pirated DVD, than it is to legally rent one.

Randy Hargrove, U.S.-based spokesman for Blockbuster Inc, told
on Wednesday the closure was linked to competition problems, but did not elaborate any further.

"I can confirm the last shop shut down a few days ago... For now there are no plans to reenter the Peruvian market," he said.

Illegal copies of DVDs with Hollywood blockbusters can be bought for around $1 from street vendors in downtown Lima, while it often costs twice as much to rent a licensed copy.

There were a dozen Blockbuster franchise rental outlets, operated by Video International Peru, in the country two years ago. Local daily newspaper El Comercio said Video International Peru officials last year blamed piracy for slumping revenues of the franchise.

Article





Net Neutrality Act Once Again on the Agenda
Michael Talbert

On January 9th, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat Byron Dorgan reintroduced the Internet Freedom Preservation act to the Senate. Better known as the Net Neutrality Act, the bill was killed by the Senate last year in a vote split down party lines (Democrats yea, Republicans nay), with the exception of Senator Snowe. With the Democrats having a slight majority in the Senate, the bill certainly has a better chance this time around, but it still needs 60 votes to prevent a Republican filibuster.

The impetus for the bill started back in 2005, when broadband network executives began discussing the possibility of charging companies that use a high percentage of bandwidth. Most notably, in an interview with a Business Week, SBC chairman Ed Whitacre Jr (now AT&T CEO) stated: "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"

Whitacre went on to say, "The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!"

Whats nuts is that he actually said that. What followed was a grass roots uprising from Internet companies, consumer groups, and bloggers, concerned about broadband service providers having the ability to determine what applications and services are provided to the Internet consumer. Conceivably, even searches performed on the Internet could lead directly to a site owned by the provider.

Broadband service providers already charge consumers up to $60 a month for Internet service, and now want to turn around and charge companies like Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Vonage for their bandwidth usage. What you see on the Internet would be totally under the influence of your broadband service provider the so called Gatekeeper, and a once free and unfettered Internet would evolve into a scripted and censored interactive television network.

And what about up and coming technologies such as Voice over IP telephony? If you dont pay, you dont play! The pure play VoIP providers like Vonage, Packet8 and Skype offer some of the lowest rates in the history of the Telecommunications industry. Wouldnt AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast just love to tax these companies right out of business! These big boys also offer VoIP phone service, but prefer to start at $40 calling plans rather than the pure plays $10-$20 plans. At 3 million and growing, consumers are realizing the value of Internet Telephony. Let the Gatekeepers charge for the pipe, and the little guys are sure to suffer, as will the consumer in the form of higher prices.

The Gatekeepers complain that they built the network, and they should be able to recoup their investment. Fine, but does that mean they should be able to shape the face of the Internet? Companies like AT&T need to find another way. The Internet was and is a place where the little guy has as good a chance as any to make it big. Google, YouTube, Skype and Vonage all started small, and are now leaders in their Internet industry.

The Net Neutrality act would prohibit service providers from blocking or degrading access to Internet content and services. They also could not prevent consumers from connecting external devices to their network, with the exception of devices posing a threat to security. The prioritization of types of content, applications, or services would be allowed under the condition that it is done free of charge, and that it is done for all types of that particular content. For example, the prioritization of packets to insure Quality of Service for Voice over IP must be done for all VoIP providers free of charge to them.

Another interesting proposal in the bill would require that broadband companies offer standalone broadband service, to be enforced by the FCC. A recent ruling by the FCC in Atlanta decried that Bell South (now AT&T), was not obliged to unbundle its DSL broadband service from a traditional telephone line. This would open up the opportunity for consumers to acquire a DSL broadband connection without having to pay for traditional phone service.

Whitacre and company (AT&T) recently agreed to adopt the spirit of net neutrality for a period of 2 years so that they could get approval from the FCC to merge with Bell South. It worked! Bell South and Cingular Wireless will soon be known, once again, as AT&T.

Senator Dorgan maintains that the Internet was a place where anyone with a good idea could create a business. "The marketplace picked winners and losers, not some central gatekeeper," said the Senator. "That freedom--the very core of what makes the Internet what it is today--must be preserved."

With a new sheriff in town, maybe, just maybe it will be.
http://www.abcarticledirectory.com/A...e-Agenda/31886





Does Network Neutrality Mean an End to BitTorrent Throttling?
Nate Anderson

Now that BitTorrent is all grown up and has been given the keys to its parents' car, ISPs are faced with the difficult decision about how to handle the protocol. Companies from around the world have been throttling the service, which can sometimes eat up three-quarters of a provider's total bandwidth. Throttling could be seen as a legitimate response to this bandwidth crunch if all BitTorrent content were illegal, but of course, it's not. So what's an ISP to do—especially if they have agreed to run a neutral network?

BitTorrent has always had its legal uses—one popular application is distributing Linux ISOs—but legal uses of the software have become increasingly common over the last year. BitTorrent (the company) has announced its own plans to go legit, offering DRMed Hollywood movies from major studios. The company has already raised almost $9 million in venture capital and has signed deals with several of the major studios. Its service should launch sometime in February.

Or consider Zudeo, the BitTorrent-based service from Azureus, which is trying to do much the same thing, but in high-definition. It is also poised to send massive amounts of traffic through the 'Net, but ISPs won't be able to tell simply by looking at a packet whether it's legitimate or not.

The protocol has become popular enough that Opera has built-in support for BitTorrent downloads, and Blizzard's own World of Warcraft update program is built on open-source BitTorrent technology.

While this litany of legal services can lead to cries for ISPs to stop shaping BitTorrent traffic, the reality remains that a large percentage of this traffic is still illicit file-swapping. And whether it's legal or not, no ISP is thrilled to have 80 percent of their network capacity given over to serving BitTorrent downloads.

What's an ISP to do? That question is made even more difficult for companies that have agreed to abide by network neutrality provisions. So far, the only US company to do so in a binding way has been AT&T, which agreed to provide a neutral network for several years as part of its merger agreement with BellSouth.

Such agreements could prevent companies from shaping BitTorrent traffic on their networks, which would be great for World of Warcraft players, Linux users, and fans of Lost, but could have a negative effect on the speeds of those just out to surf the web for business or pleasure.

ISPs that have made no such agreements may not need to worry about BitTorrent taking over their networks, but they do need to wrestle with the issue of how to handle it now that so many legal uses of the protocol are available. Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let BitTorrent flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who don't download torrents?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070201-8750.html





Surveys: Internet Traffic Touched by YouTube

For the first time in years, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing isn't eating as much network bandwidth as video sharing and other types of Internet traffic, say two equipment vendors whose products help carriers manage and monitor bandwidth usage.

Ellacoya Networks Inc. , which sampled about 2 million broadband customer connections, reports that Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) traffic now uses 39 percent of network bandwidth in the networks it monitors, while P2P traffic uses only 37 percent.

Sandvine Inc., which sampled some 2.7 million broadband hookups, came back with results similar to Ellacoya's. Sandvine reports HTTP traffic now uses 38 percent of network bandwidth in North American networks, while P2P usage has fallen to 36 percent.

The rise in HTTP traffic is attributable to the popularity of video sharing services like Google Video, YouTube Inc. , and others. As people watch streaming video over the Internet, those videos are typically coming "live" from a central, managed server, as opposed to a network peer. In fact, YouTube's packets make up 4 percent of the HTTP traffic, Ellacoya says, or 2 percent of total network bandwidth use.

"We saw an obvious rise in overall Web traffic and a rise in HTTP video streaming as a second aspect," says Fred Sammartino, Ellacoya's VP of marketing. "Video trumps everything because it is ten times or a hundred times bigger than images."

Ellacoya's survey found that BitTorrent remains the most popular P2P file type used in most North American networks, followed by file types used by services such as Gnutella (Limewire) and eMule.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115816





Viacom Demands YouTube Pull its Videos Down
Eric Bangeman

Viacom, which owns popular cable networks Comedy Central and MTV, has demanded that YouTube remove all Viacom content from the popular video-sharing site. If you're having a feeling of déjà vu reading this, it is because late in October, YouTube was also forced to take down all of the Comedy Central clips at Viacom's behest.

A couple of days later, many of the clips began reappearing on YouTube and subsequently-added clips have yet to be removed. At the time that the clips were first removed, Viacom publicly expressed its desire to find a workable business model for making its TV content available on the Internet.

Over the past several months the two companies have been engaged in negotiations over revenue sharing. Those negotiations broke down over the last couple of days as the two companies failed to bridge the gap between them.

Viacom and other media companies have been exploring the possibility of creating their own video site, one where they would have absolute control over the content and get to keep the lion's share of the revenues generated. The demand may just be a negotiating ploy by Viacom, an attempt to force YouTube to sweeten the pot, or the media company may be about to launch its own Internet video venture.

While YouTube has a vast amount of user-created content up on its site, one of its chief draws is the copyrighted content captured from TV—music videos, clips from TV shows, and sports highlights—and posted by its users. Google, which purchased YouTube last fall, knew that pleasing all the rights holders would be difficult at best, but has remained determined to "legitimize" all of the content available on the site.

YouTube, and later Google, were able to sign on a few rights-holders, most notably Universal and Sony BMG. Other content creators took an equity stake in YouTube in exchange for allowing their content to remain on the video sharing site.

During its earnings call earlier this week, Google said that it was hard at work on audio and video fingerprinting technology that would make addressing copyright infringement issues easier. The content identification system under development would go a long way towards appeasing copyright holders, but is that really in Google and YouTube's best interests? Much of what makes YouTube great is the fact that its the users who decide what goes up and what becomes popular. The content creation industry has proven itself to be notoriously short-sighted in the past, especially when it comes to relinquishing any degree of control over how its music and programming is used. As a result, rights-holders like Viacom may simply end up taking their ball and going home.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070202-8756.html





BoxCloud: Dead Simple File Sharing
David Chartier

Billing themselves as "dead simple file sharing for design and media professionals," BoxCloud seems to have a good thing going here. If you deal with a lot of clients and customers who simply aren't hip to FTP or other ways of transferring large files, BoxCloud offers a pretty simple, nay - dead simple - alternative. Featuring software clients for both Windows and Mac OS X (though when Download Squad found them last year they apparently offered a Linux client too), all you need is someone's email address to share a file of any size with them. Your lucky recipient, be they a client, friend, family member or co-worker, will receive an email with a link to download the file from your BoxCloud page. But herein lies the twist: BoxCloud doesn't host the file, so you aren't charged for space - your computer must be running BoxCloud's client, be on, and connected to the internet in order to share the file (i.e. - you host it). Their service plan then simply charges you for monthly bandwidth, not storage space, and plans start at 1GB/month for free, moving on up to 20GB for $9/month.

Sure, anyone who's domain + hosting savvy will scoff at this service, but anyone looking for brainless and painless file sharing might appreciate BoxCloud's simplicity. If you're interested, take their tour for more info on how simple sharing can be.
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/29/boxcl...-file-sharing/





Skinkers Secures £2m in Funding for P2P Service
Greg Brooks

Skinkers, the desktop communication company, has secured £2m in funding to roll out the Skinkers Live Delivery Network, a peer-to-peer communication service.

The company, which signed a technology spin-out deal from Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab last year that also saw the tech giant take a stake in the company, raised £1.75m from existing investor New Media Spark, with the remainder from other existing investors.

The investment in the new peer-to-peer delivery system will allow the company to ensure that any services are delivered in real-time by taking the burden of delivery from their servers and distributing it across a peer-to-peer network, allowing businesses and consumers to receive high quality, digital feeds including text, audio and video in real time on their desktops.
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/31485/...P+service.html





New Version of Orbit Downloader Now Available
Press Release

New version of powerful software in an all-in-one downloader makes it easy for users to download files, including flash-based video clips. The program is fast, light and can handle all kinds of files. Over one million users around the world have adopted Orbit Downloader in three short months. The program was also named top 10 software in 2006 from Baixaki.

Beijing, China, January 30, 2007 -- Orbit Downloader recently announced version 1.3.2, the latest release of the popular all-in-one downloading software, perfect for video clip downloads and downloading files from file sharing services. The easy to use, small program is fast and helps even internet novices easily save the streaming media and flash video clips so popular on the Internet. With this new release of the program, developers have made the program a top choice among All in One Downloaders.

The first version, Orbit Downloader 1.0.0.1, was released in Oct.2006 with some basic functions. Now the current version, 1.3.2, released in Jan. 2007, makes Orbit Downloader a speedy downloaders, helping users get files from file sharing programs. Internet users the world over agree -- the number of Orbit's users has exceeded one million in three months since release. In 2006, Orbit Downloader was named a top 10 program by Baixaki, a popular dowloads database.

Orbit Downloader features include:

*Super fast and super light
Orbit Downloader is based on p2p and multi-source downloading technology, which let users download files up to 500% faster than before. Orbit Downloader is written with efficiency in mind, it typically uses less than 3MB of memory and 3% of CPU when downloading. Additionally, the installation package is less than 1.6MB.

*All-in-one downloader for online video and other files
Orbit Downloader can download Flash video and other video clips, including stuff from sites like Youtube, Google, MySpace, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, etc. It can also help file sharing easier, making downloads from RapidShare.com much faster, safer and more stable. Additionally, Orbit Downloader supports most file-sharing service websites, including Megaupload.com, Badongo.com, Sendspace.com, YourFileHost.com, Uploading.com, FileFront.com, 4shared.com, TurboUpload.com, Depositfiles.com, FileFactory.com, and many more.

*Capture flash/streaming Media
When users hover on a flash video clip or streaming media file in a webpage, Orbit Downloader displays a small button. Users can easily download the file with a single click.

In future releases, the Orbit team will add some new functions, such as Download schedule / Zip preview / Add-on, all in response to user feedback. The enhancements will help make Orbit Downloader the top choice for file sharing programs and video clip downloads.

"We're driven to constantly make improvements to Orbit Downloader," said Mei Ai, spokesperson for the Orbit Team. "We hope users will find Orbit Downloader a powerful program that meets all their downloading needs."

For more information on how Orbit Downloader can help make file sharing and video clip downloads easier, visit www.orbitdownloader.com

Contact:
Mei Ai
86-10-85252585
Orbit Team
http://www.orbitdownloader.com/
http://press.xtvworld.com/article16621.html





P2P Media Summit NY to Highlight P2PTV

Early Registration Rates End January 30th for DCIA’s First NY Conference & Exposition
Press Release

The Distributed Computing Industry Association (www.DCIA.info), a trade organization with nearly one-hundred Member companies representing peer-to-peer (P2P) and social networking software providers, content rights holders, and service-and-support companies, today announced speakers and sponsors for its upcoming P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY. This first-ever DCIA New York Conference & Exposition is scheduled for February 6th-8th in New York, NY, and will focus on P2PTV, the industry’s newest high-growth phenomenon.

P2PTV refers to video distribution on the Internet using P2P technologies. Many DCIA Members now offer solutions to help content rights holders, ISPs, client applications, and other participants in this rapidly emerging distribution channel, accomplish this at astonishingly low costs and with astoundingly high quality of service (QoS).

“We are very pleased to announce that Next New Networks’ Fred Seibert and FTI Consulting's Bruce Benson will be our luncheon speakers, and our keynotes now include Altnet’s Kevin Bermeister, damaka’s Siva Ravikumar, iMesh’s Robert Summer, INTENT MediaWorks’ Les Ottolenghi, Raketu’s Greg Parker, QTRAX’s Allan Klepfisz, and VeriSign’s Todd Johnson,” said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty in making the announcement.

P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY sponsors now include FTI Consulting, INTENT MediaWorks, Digital Containers, Javien Digital Payment Solutions, and BUYDRM. For more information, please visit www.dcia.info/P2PMSNY2007. Early registration rates, which save attendees up to $200, end January 30th.

A special highlight of the summit will be its live P2PTV workshop. Digital Containers’ CEO Chip Venters will conduct a demonstration of a P2P super-distribution ecosystem, and Pando Networks’ CEO Robert Levitan and CTO Laird Popkin will conduct a live demonstration of its latest BitTorrent-based offerings.

The Tuesday February 6th Conference features keynotes from top P2P software distributors, panels of industry leaders, and valuable workshops. There will be a continental breakfast, luncheon, and networking cocktail reception with live entertainment.

All attendees will receive a copy of the new P2P Digital Watermark Working Group (PDWG) white paper, now being completed with the participation of the Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The February 7th-8th Exposition is being held in conjunction with Digital Hollywood’s Media Summit New York (MSNY), and registration for the full DCIA Conference & Exposition includes that event as well.

The Policy Track features Alston & Bird’s Aydin Caginalp, Dreier's Joshua Wattles, MasurLaw’s Steve Masur, the MPAA’s Fritz Attaway, and Oversi’s Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski, and will address the post MGM v. Grokster world – new rules for P2P.

The Technology Track features Abacast’s Michael King, CacheLogic’s Andrew Parker, Digimarc’s Tony Rodriguez, and Javien’s Leslie Poole, and will address P2P file sharing – the evolving distribution chain.

The Marketing Track features KlikVU’s Lowell Feuer, Polytechnic University’s Keith Ross, SafeNet’s John Desmond, and Ultramercial’s Dana Jones, and will address P2P business models – what’s working and what’s not.

The Content Distribution panel features Babel Networks’ Erik Lumer, Blacksmith’s Al Smith, Jun Group’s Mitchell Reichgut, and MediaPass Network’s Daniel Harris, and will address the perspective of artists and rights holders – P2P for content creators.

The Solutions Development panel features Cinea’s Rob Schumann, Media Global Intertainment’s Steve Rimland, PeerApp’s Frank Childs, and RawFlow’s Ian Franklyn, and will address advancement – creating the commercial P2P ecosystem.

The Support Services panel features BUYDRM's Christopher Levy, Friend Media Technology Systems’ (FMTS) Jonathan Friend, Keystone Tech Group’s Limor Schafman, and P2P Cash’s Tom Meredith, and will address accountability – tracking transactions and paying the players.

Live showcase entertainers for the post-conference networking cocktail reception include Kirsten DeHaan, the “Internet’s First Rock Star” Scooter Scudieri, and Al Smith.

Registration can be done online at www.dcia.info/P2PMSNY2007/register.html or by calling 410-476-7965. For sponsor packages and speaker information, please contact Karen Kaplowitz, DCIA Member Services, at 888-890-4240 or karen@dcia.info.

About the DCIA
The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) is a non-profit trade organization focused on commercial development of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and related distributed computing technologies.

DCIA Membership is organized into three Groups: Content, Operations, and Platform. The DCIA conducts working groups and special projects, such as the Consumer Disclosures Working Group (CDWG), P2P Digital Watermark Working Group (PDWG), P2P PATROL, and the P2P Revenue Engine (P2PRE). It also publishes the weekly online newsletter DCINFO.


DCIA
Editorial Contact:
Kelly Larabee
410-476-7965
kelly@dcia.info

http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=6128





Music Industry Hesitates Over Ad-Funded Downloads
Laurence Frost

There's still no such thing as a free lunch — just yet. But consumers now expect an increasing array of online media and services, from phone calls and maps to videos and even games, to be delivered without charge.

So when SpiralFrog, an obscure startup, announced a deal with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group last August to offer free, advertising-supported music downloads, it made headlines as a bold but natural step — giving the record company a share of the fast-growing Internet advertising pie, while squeezing out pirates. EMI Group PLC signed up the following month.

But the arrival of ad-supported downloads from mainstream music catalogs appeared this week to have suffered a major setback. SpiralFrog sent its attorney to the Midem music industry gathering in Cannes to replace former CEO Robin Kent, who was ousted late last month — when the service had been due to go live.

"There's been a management shake-up," Marc Jacobson of law firm Greenberg Traurig told a conference at which Kent had been due to speak.

SpiralFrog still plans to launch, Jacobson said, but has no firm date. He declined to elaborate and made no comment on speculation that the company had been unable to sell enough advertising to meet royalty fees.

Despite a boom in download sales over the Internet and mobile phones, the music market as a whole is shrinking as digital revenue growth fails to offset a decline in CD sales. Total music revenues fell between 3 percent and 4 percent globally in 2006, according to estimates by IFPI, the industry's leading global body.

Illegal file-sharing accounts for up to 100 times as many song downloads as Apple Inc.'s iTunes, the market leader in legal online music sales, according to Intent MediaWorks, a U.S.-based consulting firm that specializes in digital distribution.

SpiralFrog and other embryonic ad-supported services promise a new approach to tackling piracy. Proponents see massive demand from peer-to-peer users who, they believe, would gladly put up with commercial messages in return for the peace of mind legality brings.

If you can't beat them, the theory goes, then at least make some money out of them.

"It's such a significant stream that, if you can monetize it and take it over, you can get paid a lot of money," said Les Ottolenghi, Intent's founding chief executive.

The attention generated by SpiralFrog "proves there is an interest level to find a solution to ad-based media and entertainment for the consumer," he said.

The market may be there, but doubts remain over whether the terms on offer can persuade enough established recording companies to enter it seriously.

Although SpiralFrog had signed up EMI and Universal before its launch plans were canceled, it had failed to win deals with the other two majors, Warner Music Group Inc. and Sony BMG Music Entertainment — a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG.

Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG's executive vice president for digital sales, rejected suggestions that hardened file-sharers could be tempted only by free offerings. "They don't expect their Xbox to be free," he said. "They don't expect the ringtone on their cell phone to be free."

Although signed up to SpiralFrog, EMI still harbors reservations about ad-supported download and subscription sites. Roger Faxon, who heads the publishing division, said the company was ready to experiment with such services — but only "if we can understand the economic model and how our songwriters will be appropriately compensated."

EMI is negotiating to sell its music on video-sharing site YouTube.com and popular online hangout MySpace.com, Faxon said, declining to elaborate. "I tend to believe it's these models that will capture the public's imagination, rather than the straight download models."

Free music has always had a place in the industry, other observers point out, and recording companies should not try to deny it a new role in the digital age.

"Radio sells music for free," French economist Jacques Attali said during a Midem meeting. "But radio is doing very well with advertising and other kinds of revenues."

Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am — in Cannes with the band's female vocalist, Fergie, for a joint appearance at France's NRJ Music Awards — gave his own take on the industry's troubles.

"To be honest I'm afraid of the music industry falling apart," said will.i.am, whose real name is William Adams. "The thing that makes me nervous is the hesitation that record companies have about the new technologies."
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/new...ews_Technology





A Flat Fee for Tunes?
Victoria Shannon

CANNES A year ago, the music industry was in near hysteria over the French government's proposal to impose a global license fee that would stand in for royalty payments on the purchases of digital music over the Internet.

This year, with music sales still sinking like a rock, the record labels are no longer apoplectic about the possibility of such a fee, which could be collected by Internet service providers through their customers' monthly subscription charges.

"It's a model worth looking at," John Kennedy, head of the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, said at a press briefing last weekend in Cannes at Midem, the annual global music market. "If the ISPs want to come to us and look for a blanket license for an amount per month, let's engage in that discussion..."

But Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was the co-host of the briefing, quickly interjected: "...on a voluntary, commercial basis."

What's going on here? Is it really possible that we could get the right to copy the music we own digitally and move it among our various music players in return for something as simple as a monthly fee? One group a year ago proposed the fee at €6.66, or $8.66, a month, which would then be distributed by the traditional collecting societies to musicians and other copyright holders.

Three key changes have taken place in the past year that make the environment a bit friendlier to such a proposal, at least from the point of view of the major recording companies, which the phonographic industry group represents.

One is the steady erosion in music industry sales. Revenue from digital downloads did double in 2006, but revenue from retail CDs fell even more. This leaves Kennedy, at his most optimistic, hoping for overall music sales this year to be flat.

The second change is that such a fee is precisely the way that Microsoft structured a deal with Universal Music Group over its Zune player.

This fall, the two companies agreed to a plan that gives Universal a fixed amount of money for each digital music player Microsoft sells. While no one is calling it a piracy fee, an "interoperability" license or even anything similar, the deal is nonetheless a precedent. Jason Reindorp, head of marketing for Zune, said Microsoft was in talks with all of the other major labels over a comparable arrangement.

And thirdly, the global discussions about "interoperability" - whether or not you can play your purchased digital music on whatever device you want - are heating up again, at least in Europe.

On Monday, consumer groups in Germany and France allied with their counterparts in Norway, Denmark and Sweden to push Apple to make songs sold from its iTunes online store compatible with music players other than iPods.

Norway has set a September deadline for Apple to change its approach, while in France, a government commission is being established to take up complaints over interoperability on a case-by-case basis.

On Tuesday, Apple acknowledged the heat by releasing a statement. "We've heard from several agencies in Europe, and we're looking forward to resolving these issues as quickly as possible," the company said.

"We shouldn't kid ourselves," Kennedy said. "Steve Jobs holds the biggest key to interoperability. He faces advice from us and pressure from various governments around the world." As far as Jobs giving in, he added, "it's going to be at the stage where he thinks it is commercially advantageous to him."

With each passing day - and some insiders are saying that CD sales in 2007 are already markedly below a year ago - it is becoming clear that someone will have to pay to make the digital music business easier for consumers.

Whether it is the device makers like Microsoft and Apple, Internet access companies or the music industry itself, I don't think it matters much to consumers: The cost will get passed down to us in the end, anyway.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/...ss/ptend25.php





Napster Chief Expects Boost From Cell Phones

Most consumers haven't accepted the subscription model of renting rather than buying music, but Napster's chief says this is likely to change over the next year.

Once synonymous with piracy in online music, Napster now offers music via a subscription service. But it is hindered by the dominance of Apple Computer's iPod which, due to a rights management issue, cannot play music purchased via Napster.

Napster Chief Executive Chris Gorog says Apple's approach is "anti-consumer" and had held back the subscription model. But Gorog expects the picture to change as consumers turn to mobile phones that also operate as MP3 players. He believes this access to a wider market will introduce more music fans to the concept of unlimited subscription services.

"The key obstacle to date to moving into mass adoption for the subscription model has been the iPod which has had the very large majority of market share with MP3 players," he said. "But the dynamic that will be happening…in this calendar year is the phenomenon of music-enabled cell phones…Napster will be going from an available market place…of basically zero to ubiquity."

In its earliest days, Napster almost single-handedly launched Internet song swapping but was forced to close in July 2001 after a series of legal battles over copyright infringement.

It relaunched as a legal download site in 2003.

Earlier this month, Napster announced that it had signed a deal to become the exclusive online music subscription service to AOL, giving it access to an additional 350,000 subscribers on top of its current 566,000 paid subscribers.

Gorog said he expects the majority of AOL customers to join Napster, making it the No. 1 subscription service worldwide.

eMusic, the independent subscription service, announced this month that it had 250,000 subscribers. Rhapsody, another service, does not publish its subscriber numbers.

Digital rights management, or DRM, was introduced by copyright holders to stop unauthorized duplication.

Napster uses the Microsoft's Windows PlayForSure system which was dealt a blow recently when Microsoft launched its own music device, the Zune player, with a different DRM.

But Gorog said he is not concerned by Zune as he did not think it was a "player" in the market and said Microsoft is still supporting the PlayForSure system, with mobile phone makers Nokia and Motorola signing up.

Napster said in September that it had hired investment bank UBS to look into several possibilities after it received "interest by third parties." Gorog would not give any further details on the issue and said simply that all options were on the table.
http://news.com.com/Napster+chief+ex...3-6154971.html





‘Dreamgirls’ Banked on Best Picture, and Lost
Laura M. Holson

Oscar theorists all have their notions about the failure of “Dreamgirls” to get a best picture nomination last week, despite eight other nominations for Academy Awards and an all-out drive by its backers for top honors.

Too few voters saw the musical at industry screenings, one argument goes. Performances by the newcomer Jennifer Hudson and by Eddie Murphy, each of whom received nominations, overshadowed the film, others say. Marketers were seduced by the movie’s admiring press.

Or, perhaps as Bill Condon, the “Dreamgirls” director who wrote the script for the 2003 Oscar-winner “Chicago,” said on Friday, “I think academy members just liked the other movies better.”

Whatever its cause, the snub left Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks SKG, Viacom units that financed the film, scrambling to capitalize on prospects that were suddenly less dazzling. As well as prestige, a best picture nomination is a valuable asset and can give a film like this one — a musical seeking mainstream credibility — an added boost in theaters and on DVDs.

In the background too were two of Hollywood’s must substantial figures. Brad Grey, Paramount’s chairman, had been through a rough year and could have used the good news of a best picture — something he may still get with “Babel.” David Geffen, though not credited as the producer of “Dreamgirls,” was nonetheless responsible for its birth, having waited 25 years to see a reinvention of the original play onscreen.

Nowhere is the line between selling and overselling more delicate than in an Oscar campaign. And “Dreamgirls,” having stumbled in a dance of managed expectations, may well be remembered as the picture that showed how far a studio cannot go in seeking a prize.

“I don’t see a reason to vote for, or not vote for, a movie simply because it is a front-runner,” said Tom Pollock, a producer and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives the Oscars.

Mr. Pollock, who declined to say what movies received his support, described the “Dreamgirls”’ stumble as just another bad break in a tough game. “There are 6,000 people in the academy,” he said, “and they all have different opinions.”

But executives behind the film were left to wonder what exactly had gone awry.

“What is a ‘best picture?’ ” asked Rob Moore, Paramount’s president for worldwide marketing, distribution and operations. Mr. Moore noted that “Dreamgirls” found itself competing with nominees of a more typical bent toward serious drama, including “Babel,” another Paramount film; “Letters From Iwo Jima,” released by Warner Brothers Pictures, and “The Queen.”

“The category isn’t ‘most entertaining movie,’ ” Mr. Moore noted.

In the weeks to come, the discussion will surely turn to the effect of last week’s nominations on the film’s box-office prospects. Paramount executives are encouraged. In an unexpected twist, they said, interest in it appears to have increased, as curious moviegoers want to see what the controversy is all about. The studio said it is on track to make more than $100 million at the box office in the United States — still short of the $171 million in ticket sales for the popular musical “Chicago,” but enough to ensure profit on a film that cost about $74 million to make, after marketing costs, foreign sales and revenue from all sources are factored in.

But those who argue that the “Dreamgirls” team would have done better with a softer sell can point to much.

A year before its debut in theaters, studio marketers had decided to sell the film with its bold musical numbers, a fictional treatment loosely based on the rise of the Supremes, as a “must see” event. In 2005, “Dreamgirls” teaser trailers were attached to movies like “The Producers,” another musical of a much different flavor, even before filming began. And last February, Paramount was already inviting reporters to a cocktail party at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where scenes for the movie were shot.

At the time, a few hundred reporters and others gathered under a rain-soaked tent to watch scenes from the film on flat-screen television. Later, they were given a tour of the set.

Terry Press, then a DreamWorks executive who headed “Dreamgirls” marketing, said on Friday that much of the early exposure was meant to counter any sense that the picture, with its all-black cast, would be a tough sell for mainstream audiences.

Also, the studio did not want the movie to be tainted by the showings of “The Producers” and “Rent,” musicals that bombed at the box office in 2005. The early hype reached a zenith in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where, according to Mr. Moore, the studio was fighting to get foreign exhibitors on board early.

On May 19, Paramount threw a lavish party at the grand Hotel Martinez, flying in the film’s stars, Beyoncé Knowles, Jamie Foxx and Ms. Hudson for the celebration. There, the director introduced four songs from the film and the cast to a wildly enthusiastic crowd.

“I think the one thing that really caught people by surprise were the performances by Jennifer and Eddie Murphy,” Mr. Moore said. (Ms. Hudson played Effie, the role made famous by Jennifer Holliday on Broadway, and Mr. Murphy played a James Brown-style performer.) “People were saying, ‘Wow, it feels like a big hit movie.’ ”

Indeed, the party caused a stir at Cannes and in Hollywood. Photographs of the handsome cast circulated widely on the Internet. Bloggers and columnists gave the movie early raves. A Foxnews.com columnist, Roger Friedman, predicted that “Dreamgirls” would “be a monster of a movie.” Lavish praise by a Hollywood blogger, David Poland, set off a debate among readers when he wrote, among other things, that Mr. Murphy’s performance “stinks of Oscar.”

“Later on, people accused us of the big hype thing,” Mr. Condon said. “But people would see it and love it. I know the perception was we were coming on like a Mack truck.”

Mr. Moore said the goal of the campaign was commercial success for “Dreamgirls.” But Ms. Press, asked when the “Dreamgirls” marketing campaign ended and its Oscar promotion began, replied, “That’s a good question.”

Neither she nor Mr. Moore, who said they hired two Oscar consultants for the film, offered an answer or would discuss the marketing budget, which experienced marketers in Hollywood have put near $40 million.

By November, the “Dreamgirls’” publicity machine was in overdrive ahead of a limited release on Dec. 15. Oprah Winfrey played host to the cast on her show. (Beyoncé, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Foxx also appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair) and hailed the film as Oscar-worthy.

Paramount covered the usual bases in the awards campaign, for instance by seeking to get as many guild members as it could to early screenings. The movie’s celebrity-packed premieres in New York and Los Angeles were popular events. But things stretched toward the extraordinary when Ms. Hudson embarked on a 10-city publicity tour, with screenings for patrons who paid $25 to attend.

The campaign clearly made an impression on the media crowd: More than a month before the Oscar nominations were to be announced, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Oscar bloggers, called “Dreamgirls” an early front-runner for the academy’s best picture award.

Studio executives and others began to believe it, especially after “Dreamgirls” was nominated for five Golden Globe awards in December (winning three) and received critical praise from industry guilds.

“It’s not like we ran trade ads and we got calls from people who said, ‘You’re crazy. What are you doing?’ ” Ms. Press remarked.

But even then, the filmmakers say, they were conscious that early Oscar confidence could be misplaced. “The advisory here, as always, is don’t start believing your own publicity,” said Laurence Mark, who produced “Dreamgirls.”

The notion that the movie was not seen by enough academy members — though discounted by Mr. Condon — stemmed from its relatively late wide release on Dec. 25, and the fact that screener DVDs were sent out after many executives had left for the holidays.

Another unforeseen hitch involved what some in Hollywood are calling “the Clint plot twist.” The Oscar-winning Clint Eastwood is an academy favorite who directed “Flags of Our Fathers,” the World War II drama about the battle for Iwo Jima, which was an early Oscar favorite but fared poorly when released in October.

So in November, Mr. Eastwood asked Warner to move up the release of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” a Japanese-language companion movie to “Flags,” once planned for 2007, thus qualifying it for Oscar consideration. Despite its late entry, “Letters” was nominated for best picture, leaving many in Hollywood to wonder if “Dreamgirls” had been edged aside.

“You are not entitled,” Mr. Condon said of the Oscar, an honor he won in 1999 for writing “Gods and Monsters,” and for which his “Chicago” script was nominated. “It’s a gift. That sense that you deserve it is wacky.”

Besides, avoiding added weeks of best picture campaigning brought a perverse benefit: reduced costs.

“We were never going to win even if we were nominated,” Mr. Condon said, laughing. “The money we would have spent on the campaign, the insane amount of money we saved. People spend like drunken sailors, you know.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/bu...rtner=homepage





Directors Who Go Together, Like Blood and Guts
Whitney Joiner

STUCK in traffic here some months ago, the director Robert Rodriguez — many of whose films had already dabbled in cannibalism, torture and murders of every degree and then some — began wondering how to get attention for his next effort. The answer, he decided, was a machine-gun leg.

As Mr. Rodriguez’s notion evolved, the leg became a stump on the body of the 33-year-old actress Rose McGowan. Ms. McGowan’s character, a go-go dancer, has lost her limb to zombies. Her ex-boyfriend, played by Freddy Rodriguez (no relation to the director), helps her fight back, attaching an automatic weapon to what’s left. The result is spattered throughout “Planet Terror,” a movie within the forthcoming meta-movie “Grindhouse,” from Mr. Rodriguez and his collaborator Quentin Tarantino, both of whom have been laboring for months to shock and amaze an audience that thinks it has seen it all.

“I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever thought of that before,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez said of his high-caliber epiphany during an interview at his Troublemaker Studios here last month. “Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.”

For Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino, the central problem of “Grindhouse,” due from the Weinstein Company on April 6, is a nettlesome one: how to top yourself when you’ve built a career on going over the top. Mr. Rodriguez had already tried killing as fast as he could — most recently in “Sin City” — as had Mr. Tarantino with a guest-directing spot in that film and his own “Kill Bill.” Lethal stump notwithstanding (and, yes, the director Sam Raimi played with a similar idea in “Darkman”), the solution, they perceived, would lie not simply in violence but also in breaking through the walls of the medium.

“Grindhouse” is being billed not as one movie, but two for the price of a single ticket. “Planet Terror,” from Mr. Rodriguez, is 80 minutes long, and tells a story of, well, biochemical terror. Mr. Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” clocking in at 90 minutes, has to do with a murderous stuntman and his car. The films are connected by trailers for four movies that do not exist, by four directors who do — Eli Roth (whose most recent real film was “Hostel”), Rob Zombie (“House of 1,000 Corpses”), Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead”) and Mr. Rodriguez himself.

The experiment, if it works, will be a triumph both for the filmmakers and for Weinstein, which is readying the largest promotional push since its founders, the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, established the studio on their exit from the Walt Disney Company’s Miramax unit in 2005. To hear Bob Weinstein tell it, the industry itself has something riding on the exercise. “The whole theatrical business is looking for something new, a little showmanship,” he said recently. “These guys took something old and are making it new.”

Even in the era of all-knowing fandom, the reinvention to which Mr. Weinstein refers may take some explaining, a process that will get help from a partnership with Yahoo and “as big a TV and marketing campaign as possible,” Mr. Weinstein said. The film also stands to benefit from a series of grindhouse movies currently appearing every Friday on IFC.

By the filmmakers’ lights “Grindhouse” is a gift to moviegoers who miss, or missed, the experience of watching B-grade genre pictures of the sort that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s sold what the big studios wouldn’t: usually sex and gore. The films, often shown back to back, were plugged with garish posters that promised more than their pathetically low budgets could deliver. (In that spirit “Planet Terror” isn’t about another planet at all, but our own, at a particularly bad moment.) The theaters too were sometimes a fright.

“Grindhouses were usually in the ghetto,” Mr. Tarantino said in a phone interview. “Or they were the big old downtown movie theaters that sometimes stayed open all night long, for all the bums. At the grindhouse that I went to, every week there was the new kung fu movie, or new car-chase movie, or new sexploitation movie, or blaxploitation movie.”

Audiences aren’t supposed to be comfortable with this new film. As part of the game, the two directors have “aged” their movies, adding scratches, dust and dirt to the prints. “That’s part of the lurid quality,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It feels like it’s a popular film that’s been screened a bunch of times. The texture, all the scratches, makes it look really creepy, like you’re watching something you’re not supposed to, where anything could happen at any moment.”

And since the old grindhouse films were often missing reels, both filmmakers have purposefully cut out a segment of their movies. “My whole thing is to play with the audience,” said Mr. Tarantino. “I guarantee you, when it pops up ‘Missing Reel,’ the entire theater is going to scream. They might very well be screaming my name: ‘Quentin, you bastard! We hate you!’

“And then the next reel starts, and all of the sudden, people who don’t like each other suddenly like each other now. ‘What happened to that guy?’ The only way to do a missing reel is, it’s got to be something you can’t wait to see.”

On visiting Troublemaker Studios, it became apparent that such self-conscious cinematic slumming takes a lot of work. Remains of the shoot were scattered about: supply trucks in military garb were huddled in one corner; across the lot a collection of smashed-up automobiles were piled on top of one another, defeated, while two menacing black muscle cars lurked nearby, white skulls painted on their hoods.

In a darkened office Mr. Rodriguez tinkered with one of his computers, deciding which sequences of “Planet Terror” to show. “This section is so creepy,” he said, cueing up a hospital scene in which Josh Brolin takes revenge on his wife, an anesthesiologist played by Marley Shelton, by slowly and deliberately pricking her hands with her own needles.

In the film a biochemical weapon is released from an abandoned military base — thus the Army trucks — in a small Texas town outside Austin. Residents quickly become infected and crowd the local hospital. The virus has a gruesome effect of course: Not only do the victims’ bodies start to disintegrate (lots of bubbly skin, pus-filled sores and tumors), but they become murderous zombies.

Mr. Rodriguez said “Planet Terror” was inspired by the early-’80s movies of John Carpenter, who directed seminal horror films (“Halloween,” “The Thing”) as well as action movies (“Escape From New York”). And like Mr. Carpenter’s movies, “Planet Terror” is “very brooding.”

Mr. Rodriguez added: “It takes place at night, and weird things happen, yet everything is played very seriously, so you buy into it. Even though she’s got a machine-gun leg, it’s not jokey in any way.”

Mr. Tarantino, when thinking about his contribution, was fresh from having viewed a run of slasher films. “I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do a slasher film,’ ” he recalled. “But what’s good about the slasher-film genre is that it’s so specific. This has to happen, then this has to happen. They’re all very similar, and that’s kind of what you like about them.”

Knowing he couldn’t just copy the classic format — a killer on the loose with a knife, the “final girl” left at the end (“That would just be too self-reflective”) — Mr. Tarantino devised his own version. “Part of my fun in doing genre cinema, since everyone knows the rules well, whether unconsciously or not, is leading you down a road and giving you all the information that you’ve gotten in other movies, and then using your own information against you,” he said.

In “Death Proof” a sociopathic stuntman played by Kurt Russell stalks and kills women with his car, the black one with the white skull. “This was something I’d had in the back of my mind from making movies: that stuntmen can reinforce a car and pretty much make it death-proof,” said Mr. Tarantino. “You could drive it 100 miles an hour into a brick wall just for the experience.”

Citing the fast and furious 1971 car-chase film “Vanishing Point” as inspiration, Mr. Tarantino said he hoped that “Death Proof” would include “one of the greatest car chases, if not the greatest car chase ever made. I’ll take Top Three.”

But most of “Death Proof” isn’t action or dismemberment. It lies in the interplay between women who, in the course of evening bar hopping in Austin or joy riding in rural Tennessee, meet the stuntman, Mike. “I always loved it in horror films when you actually got to care about the characters so much that you almost resented that the horror was going to come in,” Mr. Tarantino said. “You don’t want these people to die.”

His “girls,” as he lovingly refers to them, include the actresses Rosario Dawson, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jordan Ladd and Ms. McGowan, and the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Uma Thurman’s double in “Kill Bill”), who plays herself. Mr. Tarantino called his female characters’ dialogue, which simultaneously evokes both “Sex and the City” and teenage girls’ MySpace profiles, “some of the best dialogue I’ve ever written in my life.” After finishing the script he sent it to Bob Dylan, because he thought Mr. Dylan “would appreciate the wordplay.” He has not yet heard back.

The filmmakers are counting on younger viewers to be considerably more responsive to what Mr. Tarantino calls their “subversion from within.” They expect to direct or produce a series of such double features for the Weinsteins. “We’ve thrown around so many ideas, it’s just a huge concept to wrap our brains around,” said Mr. Rodriguez.

Mr. Tarantino was a bit more cautious about the likelihood of future installments. “Who knows if we’ll do it?” he said. “We say we’re going to do all this stuff. I was going to do a bunch of Japanese animation sequels and prequels to ‘Kill Bill.’ Haven’t seen them lately, have you?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/movies/28join.html





Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, Nights Are Noir in Fog City
Wendell Jamieson

The orange and blue neon lights of the Castro Theater shone blurrily on the damp asphalt beneath the crisscrossing catenary wires of the streetcars. The words on the marquee in the Friday night gloom, read: “Marsha Hunt: In Person.”

Ms. Hunt made more than 50 movies before her career was wrecked in 1950 by the Hollywood blacklist. One of them, a 1948 crime melodrama called “Raw Deal,” has gone on to an unlikely second life as a favorite of the cultish devotees of film noir. On Friday it opened the fifth annual Noir City film festival here, and Ms. Hunt, 89, was on hand to watch its dreamlike silvery hues make a rare appearance on a big — very big — screen.

Lithe and glowing, Ms. Hunt took the stage after the film and said she was surprised not only that this dark little B movie had found fans nearly 60 years after its release, but that so many of them were here, nearly filling the Castro’s more than 1,400 seats. The crowd was a mix of young and old, polished and scruffy, with only a few fedoras in sight.

“I can’t get over this,” Ms. Hunt said as the film festival’s founder and organizer, Eddie Muller, genially interviewed her at the foot of the stage. “It was a strange sort of film,” she added, “about as negative as you can get. They hadn’t coined the term ‘noir’ yet.”

She’s right. It’s hard to imagine a darker film, literally or figuratively, than “Raw Deal.” Consisting almost entirely of luminescent day-for-night photography, it’s the story of an escaped con (played by Dennis O’Keefe) and the two women who love him (Ms. Hunt was one; Claire Trevor was the other), and features, among other pitch-black set pieces, a villain (Raymond Burr) who disfigures his girlfriend with a flaming dessert, and a furious midnight brawl in a seaside taxidermy shop. At the end everyone is either ruined, dead or under arrest.

And that darkness was just fine with the moviegoers here, which applauded vigorously as the closing titles rolled, just as they had at the beginning when the credit for the film’s director of photography, John Alton, the master of all that darkness, appeared on screen.

Mr. Muller, an author and film noir aficionado, dreamed up the film festival five years ago as a way to increase visibility for the Film Noir Foundation he runs, which works to restore the movies, and to promote his own books. (He most recently helped write Tab Hunter’s autobiography.) The Castro, built in 1922 and recently refurbished, had some dead time in January, and the festival (which runs this year through Feb. 4) was born — with a bang. The first double bill in 2003, “The Maltese Falcon” and “Dark Passage” — two seminal San Francisco noirs — sold out.

“It was huge right out of the gate,” he said. ”It totally threw me.” In the years since, he’s sold an average of 880 seats a night.

Of course subject matter and city are well matched. San Francisco has a noir pedigree rivaling that of New York or Los Angeles, its fog, slanting streets, circa-1940’s office buildings and dank narrow streets creating untold scores of blind alleys for characters unlucky enough to be trapped in them. Several noirs, including “Raw Deal,” have been set here.

On Friday the weather didn’t disappoint, with a steady rain falling much of the day. The sun made a half-hearted attempt to appear around noon, then gave up and went back to bed.

The Noir City festival may not be Sundance, but it too has its celebrities and scenes. Before “Raw Deal” on Friday the Castro’s balcony was crammed for a reception, with an open bar, a jazz band and Ms. Hunt signing copies of her book, “The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ’40s and Our World Since Then” (Fallbrook, 1993).

Among those on hand was Richard Erdman, 81, a character actor whose face is as recognizable — his credits include “Stalag 17” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” — as his name is unknown. He had a supporting role in “Cry Danger,” the first film on Saturday night’s double bill, and looked so familiar standing there at the reception that it was almost impossible not to run up to him and say, “Haven’t we met before?”

Like Ms. Hunt, Mr. Erdman seemed a little puzzled as to why exactly, so many years later, these movies are finding a new following. Asked for a theory, he thought for a moment and said: “I really have no idea. I’m not putting it down, I just don’t understand it.”

He heaped praise on Mr. Muller and his crew of volunteers for running a high-class operation. “They’re not chintzy,” he said, sipping a glass of white wine.

Film noir is enjoying something of a second golden age at the moment. In addition to the San Francisco festival, the Film Forum in New York City offered a major noir series last year, and studios like Warner Brothers and Fox have ratcheted up their noir reissues to such an extent that many films that never made it out on VHS are appearing on DVD. Just last week Warner Home Video released 1952’s “Angel Face,” starring Robert Mitchum, which had only been available on foreign or pirated VHS tapes. Mr. Muller provides the commentary track.

“With film noir, if you show it to a group of 20-year-olds, they’ll find something to get hooked on,” said George Feltenstein, Warner Home Video’s voluble senior vice president for marketing for its classic catalog. “There is a sexiness to it, there is a mystery took it. These are very seductive movies, they are not cookie-cutter.”

Warner Brothers has released three noir box sets. The first, which came out in 2004 and featured titles like “Out of the Past” and “The Asphalt Jungle,” hit No. 1 on Amazon.com’s DVD list. This year Warner’s fourth noir set will include 10 rather than 5 movies. Here’s a scoop for noir fans: Two will star Mr. Mitchum.

Whatever the machinations of the DVD business, here at the Noir City festival, everyone was in a pretty good mood by the time the second title of opening night, “Kid Glove Killer,” a super-rarity from 1942, rolled to its conclusion. This one had a happier ending, with Ms. Hunt getting a marriage proposal, delivered beneath a microscope, from a skinny and surprisingly big-haired Van Heflin.

Coats and fedoras went back on, and the crowd headed for the exits. Ms. Hunt stood by the door, shaking hands and signing autographs, as her new legions of fans emerged onto the shiny street and headed off into the night.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/movies/29noir.html





Any Little Gems? Who Cares? Sundance Is a Hot Brand Now
Manohla Dargis

Before it was a brand, a media circus and an adjunct of Hollywood, the Sundance Film Festival was exhilarating, a blast. It was also small.

In 1993, the first year I attended the festival, it showed 71 new features culled from more than 350 submissions and attracted some 5,000 attendees. That year Robert Redford told Variety that the festival, then in its ninth year, was putting the brakes on growth because “when you start expanding on something, you run the risk of losing quality.” That was then, this is now: This year, the festival presented 125 features (from 3,287 submissions) for an estimated audience of 52,000, including some 1,000 accredited journalists from around the world and 900 registered film industry types.

Although this year’s edition, which ended yesterday, was widely perceived as a critical disappointment, good and great work is still shown at Sundance, even if these days it’s often the festival itself that makes bigger news than the films. This works to the festival’s advantage, since the Sundance brand helps obscure the reality that there simply isn’t enough quality American independent work, particularly of a saleable kind, to justify an event of this size. That probably helps explain why Sundance has dramatically increased the number of foreign-language selections and also why it gives pride of place to studio specialty division films, as it did this year with the premiere of Mike White and Paramount Vantage’s touching comedy, “Year of the Dog.”

As it happens, “Year of the Dog” was one of the best films I saw at this year’s festival. I thought about skipping the screening because the film is slated to open in a few months, but I like Mr. White’s screenplays — he wrote the 2002 Sundance favorite “The Good Girl” — and I wanted to see what he would do for his first stint as a director. That “Year of the Dog” is actually a studio film, not an independent, probably won’t matter to most moviegoers, even those who like their evening’s entertainment stamped with the indie label. The film is a bit offbeat, stars Molly Shannon and looks as if it was made on the cheap. It’s independent-like.

I was happy to see “Year of the Dog,” but I don’t know what it was doing at Sundance. Certainly the film didn’t need a boost from the festival, though the festival did seem to need it, just as it seems to need all those movie and television stars who now show up year after year, both onscreen and off. Stars bring the media, which helps bring the crowds and helps keep Sundance, and the boom town of Park City, Utah, on the map, no matter how disappointing the offerings. The ever-expanding indie-film apparatus — which encompasses the specialty divisions and independent companies, print and online reporters as well as other festival personnel — is now big enough that it doesn’t really matter if the festival has an off year. It doesn’t even matter to Sundance.

Founded in 1981, the Sundance Institute, which owns the festival, was dedicated to (as its Web site explains) “the development of artists of independent vision and to the exhibition of their new work.” The early 1980s were a growth period for American independent film, with titles like “Return of the Secaucus 7” and “My Dinner with Andre,” but there wasn’t much infrastructure or anything especially sexy about the scene. When Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee hit in the mid-1980s, bringing a young, punk-style D.I.Y. ethos with them, the independent landscape began to shift; it cracked wide open in 1989, the year Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” played first at Sundance, then Cannes.

The success of Mr. Soderbergh’s film raised the temperature and the noise — including at Sundance — though it would take a few years for the full effect to be felt. In 1993 Hollywood was in attendance at the festival, but Miramax Films wasn’t yet part of Disney; the stakes were lower than they are now, the deals were smaller. Independent distributors like Miramax and October Films were rooting around for work that would provide an alternative to Hollywood. Now Miramax and the other specialty divisions look for material that can add some diversity — a pinch of quirky here, a dash of edgy there — to the studio slate while their big studio brethren tap Sundance veterans like Christopher Nolan to guide some of the priciest projects on the lot.

In some respects Sundance’s stated mission to nurture independent filmmakers and give them a platform has been a roaring success, so much so that one studio executive and long-time festival attendee I know would like to see it shut down because, well, as he put it, “mission accomplished.” I’m not so sure. What I do know is that Sundance has become a very big machine in which it has become increasingly difficult for modestly scaled films without stars, without powerful brokers and backing and manufactured buzz to attract attention. I also know that most of the films that are picked up for distribution will quickly disappear when they are released. They will play in theaters for a few weeks, a couple months, then fade.

Not that it matters in the heat of the festival, when the temperature rises so high it’s a wonder that the ice covering the sidewalks doesn’t melt. The movies may not be terribly good, the art of the deal may matter more than the art of cinema to most attendees and worthy work may go unnoticed and unloved, but Sundance is hot. And it will continue being hot as long as it serves the interests of the film industry, as long as its corporate sponsors stay onboard and as long as the indie-film apparatus keeps ballooning.

Independence is a boom market. It’s a lifestyle choice, a state of mind, a backward baseball cap, a magazine feature, an Oscar hopeful, a mirage, a nostalgia trip. Each January it is a collective fantasy that even a doubter like me finds hard to resist because every so often a film cuts through the noise to hit you smack in the solar plexus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/movies/29next.html





Hollywood Monster Rampage: Art vs. Egos
Janet Maslin

BAMBI VS. GODZILLA
On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business

By David Mamet

250 pages. Pantheon. $22.

David Mamet’s “Bambi vs. Godzilla” takes its title from a two-minute animated short (actually “Bambi Meets Godzilla”) in which the monster crushes the innocent little fawn. This would make a fine metaphor for the way the film business treats artists if it didn’t mean miscasting Mr. Mamet in Bambi’s role. As the lacerating essays in this uneven but icily hilarious collection make clear, he is far better suited to stomping on Tokyo.

“Bambi vs. Godzilla” is devoted to pet peeves, some of them standard. No surprises here: Mr. Mamet abhors crass producers, meaningless spectacles, focus groups, ambitious studio drones and specious screenwriting. About one particularly bad sequel, he says: “Jewish law states that there are certain crimes that cannot be forgiven, as they cannot be undone. It lists murder and adultery. I add this film.”

That Jewish law is invoked more than once here. And the book repeats itself on certain points, like Mr. Mamet’s boundless admiration of “The Godfather.” Perhaps the repackaging of redundant journalism in book form (much of this material comes from his column for The Guardian of London, though some originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine) belongs on the same list of transgressions, but no matter. Mr. Mamet writes with insight, idiosyncrasy and a Godzillian imperviousness to opposition.

Like Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies” and William Goldman’s books of advice on filmmaking, Mr. Mamet describes the process from the ground up, with a keen eye for evidence of the absurd. He claims to have seen a sign on a movie set reading, “Gum is for principal cast members only,” since this is a business that never forgets about pecking order. And after promising to offend several groups with one thesis, he suggests that the hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome (“early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways”) add up to the job description of a movie director.

Mr. Mamet, who has nothing but disgust for the emphasis on backstory and characterization that can turn a movie into mush, also notices how much the idiom of the modern screenplay overlaps with that of the personals column, so that a character may be described as “beautiful, smart, funny, likes long walks and dogs, affectionate, kind, honest, sexy.” This filler, he says, winds up “replacing dialogue and camera angles, the only two aspects of a screenplay actually of use.”

Much of “Bambi vs. Godzilla” is devoted to separating useful and useless aspects of the filmmaking process. “It is enough to drive one to the fainting couch,” he says about Hollywood’s paralyzing practice of making films of increasing expense and diminishing worth. When he sees a poster that lists the names of 18 producers, he wonders whether “the film, perhaps, is being made no longer to attract the audience but to buttress or advance the position of the executive.” If this kind of bureaucrat has replaced the old-fashioned intuitive mogul, “it is not that the fox has taken over the henhouse but, if I may, that the doorman has taken over the bordello.”

With entertaining bitterness Mr. Mamet skewers the kind of person destined to succeed in this corporate culture. And a figure skewered by him winds up sounding as tough and treacherous as someone from a Mamet play. “The young bureaucrat-in-training” is apt to learn “that success comes not from pleasing the audience but from placating his superiors until that time it is reasoned effective to betray them.” As for the screenwriter-in-training at film school, “one can study marching, the entry-level skill of the military, until one shines at it as has none other,” he writes. “This will not, however, make it more likely that one will be tapped to be the Secretary of the Army.”

If such opinions are apt to disappoint anyone looking to Mr. Mamet for career advice, they will delight those who share his cynicism. Is there a worthwhile message to be found within the big, vacuous blockbuster? Yes: “You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.” He finds this brand of wastefulness equally conspicuous in current moviemaking and military strategy.

If Hollywood’s idea of entertainment is actually “tincture of art,” and if studio executives “want, in effect, to find the script for the hit of last year,” how can a serious filmmaker stay afloat? By recognizing the vital difference between stimulation and drama, for one thing. (“One may sit in front of the television for five hours, but after ‘King Lear’ one goes home.”) By resisting demands for arbitrary alterations in one’s work, the kinds of changes that raise doubts about the work’s seriousness. What would happen, he asks, to an architect who was similarly accommodating? (“Would you mind moving the staircase? Thank you. Now would you mind moving the skylight?”) And by understanding the etiquette of betrayal, Hollywood style. “Should the project go awry,” he writes, “you will be notified by a complete lack of contact with those in whose hands its administration has rested.”

Some of “Bambi vs. Godzilla” is painfully contorted. (“What shibboleth, you wonder, will I list to augment your umbrage?”) Some of it goes nowhere. But most of this sharp, savvy book is amusing and reassuring. Somebody with a keen knowledge of gamesmanship knows exactly how Hollywood’s games are played. And refuses to play by the rules.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/books/29masl.html





Radio Days
Dave Marsh

SOMETHING IN THE AIR
Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.

By Marc Fisher.

Illustrated. 374 pp. Random House. $27.95.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, broadcasting experts predicted that the advent of television would kill off radio. Many of them didn’t especially want it to survive, since it could only hold back the acceptance of TV. In fact, the radio those experts knew didn’t survive. By the mid-1950s, the national networks that had dominated since the ’20s had all but evaporated, replaced by more than twice as many local stations. Television took over presenting broadcast drama and comedy, variety shows and in-depth news.

Yet radio itself survived. Radio outstrips television as a means of conveying intimacy and, precisely because it doesn’t show but can only tell, may stir the active imagination more deeply. It’s cheaper to operate a radio station, and in those years broadcasting equipment was much more mobile, making it perfect for local presentations. With recorded music (before the advent of TV, most radio programming consisted of live performance), stations found a cheap programming source that attracted enough listeners to generate its lifeblood — advertising revenue — even after TV took hold.

In “Something in the Air,” Marc Fisher takes the story from there, arguing that radio — those who programmed and performed on it, and the music they played — inspired his entire generation to come together: “We grew up dancing and dreaming to the same soundtrack, and we were therefore somehow united,” he writes. “Until the Great Unraveling of the late 1960s and early ’70s, this shared pop culture was a meeting ground for our nation, a commons that we only years later realized we had lost.”

But Fisher can’t deliver on this premise, because it simply isn’t true. Different groups of people experienced that period differently, and they listened to radio differently too. The kids in Fisher’s neighborhood, and mine, spent 1963 listening to the Chiffons and Motown and were led to dream of a better world. The black kids in Birmingham, Ala., spent part of that year listening to local radio not only for those hit records but for coded messages about where to gather for illegal demonstrations that concretely changed their world for the better. Those are not equivalent experiences.

But most of “Something in the Air” isn’t concerned with its broad premise, and therein lies the book’s value. It provides a history of the development of radio in the postwar era, but it works best when it backs away from the general and settles upon particular broadcasters who fascinate Fisher. He writes engagingly about the late-night giants Jean Shepherd and Bob Fass, the shock jock Tom Leykis, the National Public Radio co-founder Bill Siemering, the Long Island radio rebel Paul Sidney and the white R & B disc jockey Hunter Hancock.

There are reasons to quarrel with the history. Fisher likes to settle on a single source for each section, which would be fine if he’d written a collection of profiles rather than a book billed as a comprehensive historical survey. Giving a history of Top 40 radio with only a single paragraph about the programmer Bill Drake (inventor of the hyperkinetic “Boss Radio”) is like writing a history of hit singles with only a single paragraph about Phil Spector. Writing about New York City radio’s response to the arrival of the Beatles through the eyes of WABC’s Bruce Morrow, without even mentioning “the Fifth Beatle,” WMCA’s Murray the K, is just bizarre.

In his chapter on satellite radio, Fisher grows so fixed on the programmer Lee Abrams of XM that the rival Sirius network all but vanishes. (Disclosure: I am the host of a show on Sirius.) The chapter on shock jocks focuses so completely on Leykis that the portions on the much more important Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern (who gets only three pages) feel like intrusion.

Fisher has little to say about anything that happened outside the East Coast. B. Mitchell Reed, the great Los Angeles disc jockey who inspired Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” is mentioned only briefly, for his work in San Francisco. There’s nothing about CKLW, in Windsor, Ontario, which was the No. 1 station in both Detroit and Cleveland for more than a decade. Wolfman Jack is mentioned for his role in “American Graffiti” and his brief dalliance with WNBC in New York, but there is only a passing acknowledgment of his long career in Mexican border radio, which could be heard from San Antonio to Buffalo. Fisher adores late-night radio, but he says nothing about the legendary John R. and Hoss Allen of WLAC Nashville, who also had an audience across broad swaths of the nation.

Fisher describes how disco divided the rock radio audience and galvanized black and Latin listeners, who had been written off by FM rock radio, though he writes about such matters superficially. He claims that black disc jockeys simply “mimicked Top 40’s style,” which I presume means he never heard Martha Jean the Queen, Butterball, Georgie Woods, the Magnificent Montague or, for that matter, the young Sly Stone. If anything, the mimicry ran in the other direction. Readers will finish “Something in the Air” with no insight into how Spanish-language disc jockeys played the key role in delivering hundreds of thousands of immigration-rights supporters into the streets of Los Angeles and other cities last year, because Fisher says absolutely nothing about Latin radio in general and its crucial role in the Chicano community in particular. Turning out those demonstrators was a much greater accomplishment than the “Rush Rooms” that sprang up in restaurants across the nation in Limbaugh’s heyday, which Fisher does mention.

Fisher provides a good deal of useful information about satellite and Internet broadcasting, and there are solid discussions of the consequences of the Federal Communications Commission’s laissez-faire policy toward fairness and community service and on the Clinton administration’s successful efforts to change the rules that prevented large corporations from owning large blocks of stations. He writes a devastating account of one of the focus groups that many big-city stations use to pick their playlists, arguing that such questionable research (each recording is judged by a seven-second sample) leads to unimaginative programming. He also has the courage to defend payola: “Despite the ugly underside of the promotion business,” he writes, “the old payola had a desirable result: a wider variety of music got on the air.”

The problem, in the end, is the vastness and mutability of the radio culture that developed in the half-century since TV took over as the family hearth. Fisher’s book is at its best when he lets himself speak about passions that are almost but not quite private: the importance of his first transistor radio; the way that radio and its successors blew musical winds of change into his life; the near magical effect of listening to someone who is committed not to playing good music or making political points but simply making good radio, whatever form it may take. In such moments, readers will find that they and Fisher have much to share — not as a generation, but simply as lovers of a medium that, however scorned and abused, retains its fascination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/bo...w/Marsh.t.html





Open Source Radio is A Sound Salvation
Bess Kargman

Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don’t give you any choice
‘cause they think that it’s treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.

-Elvis Costello, “Radio Radio”

——-

If you’ve never seen Elvis Costello’s legendary SNL performance of “Radio Radio” from 1977, you can watch it here.

The song sharply criticizes the commercialization of mainstream radio (“They’re saying things that I can hardly believe”) and one can only imagine the shock NBC executives experienced that night considering their radio station was the very sort Costello condemned. Performing “Radio Radio” without warning at SNL got Costello banned from the show for 12 years.

Not all that much has changed in the world of terrestrial radio since then. Just look at the long list of radio stations Clear Channel owns.

But new media and technology is finally reversing the trend of putting “the radio in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel,” as Costello would put it.

“I don’t see a single future for radio, as things seem to be splitting and recombining in interesting ways. When mobile operators are offering access to services like Rhapsody over 3G, satellite services like XM and Sirius are offering recording functions for their receivers, discovery services like Last.fm and Pandora are making it easier to find and listen to new music, and when community broadcasters are starting to regularly broadcast via the Web, I’m not sure there is a capital-R Radio any more, said Douglas Arellanes, Head of Research and Development at Campcaster. (See Full Intreview Here).

Campcaster is new open source software, launched by the Media Development Loan Fund, that essentially allows you to run your own station. It’s a bit like Pandora.com, where you can architect your own musical program and share it with others, but it comes with additional tools for audio broadcasting. Last month NewAssignment.Net wrote about Chicago Public Radio’s Secret Radio Project, which plans to air mostly user-generated content via a new format at a different frequency. Well, Campcaster essentially allows you to run your own station.

Best of all, Campcasting is free and on an open source platform, which means that anyone who knows code can make any changes to the software.

This means the media is being democratized on two levels. Everyone has a chance to get their voice heard “and the unsung heroes in broadcasting - the engineers - get something with its workings transparent and open for improvement; as opposed to commercial products, Campcaster is not a “black box” and has been specifically designed to encourage technical innovation,” said Arellanes. (See Full Intreview Here).
http://www.newassignment.net/blog/be...en_source_radi





Bridge Projects Continued Growth For Digital Media
FMQB

Bridge Ratings has released a new study, projecting the future of various forms of digital media, including satellite radio and HD Radio. Bridge predicts a continued, steady growth for both XM and Sirius (presuming the two companies don't merge) over the next 13 years. The company expects both companies to have well over 17 million subscribers each by 2020, with XM keeping its slight lead over the competition.

Internet radio is predicted to explode, with Bridge expecting just under 200 million listeners to be tuned in by 2020. HD Radio may have a slower growth curve, but 4.68 million HD Radio units could be sold by 2009 and over 35 million HD Radio receivers bought by 2020.

As for terrestrial radio, Bridge sees an overall up-and-down trend of cume listenership, with erosion of the audience starting to take hold by 2015. Podcasting is also expected to steadily grow and really take off down the road. MP3 player sales are also expected to continue increasing over time, breaking 400 million sold by 2010, however not even 300 million of them will be in use at the time.

Bridge notes that "because our predictive polling cannot foresee changes in technological and sociological change,, the figures shown cannot take these into consideration. Traditional analog radio, even with advances such as HD technology, may sustain popular use - especially among older listeners."

The entire study can be found here.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=340394





Truly Indie Fans
Jessica Pressler

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

“For a long time I was laughed at by both black and white people about being the only black person in my school that liked Nirvana and bands like that,” said Mr. Martin, now 23, who lives in Seattle, where he is recording a folk-rock album.

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The Internet has made it easier for black fans to find one another, some are adopting rock clothing styles, and a handful of bands with black members have growing followings in colleges and on the alternative or indie radio station circuit. It is not the first time there has been a black presence in modern rock. But some fans and musicians say they feel that a multiethnic rock scene is gathering momentum.

“There’s a level of progress in New York in particular,” said Daphne Brooks, an associate professor of African-American studies at Princeton. She was heartened last summer by the number of children of color in a class she taught at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where kids learn to play punk-rock standards.

There is even a new word for black fans of indie rock: “blipster,” which was added to UrbanDictionary .com last summer, defined as “a person who is black and also can be stereotyped by appearance, musical taste, and/or social scene as a hipster.”

Bahr Brown, an East Harlem resident whose Converse sneakers could be considered blipster attire, opened a skateboard and clothing boutique, Everything Must Go, in the neighborhood in October, to cater to consumers who, like himself, want to dress with the accouterments of indie rock: “young people who wear tight jeans and Vans and skateboard through the projects,” he said.

“And all the kids listen to indie rock,” he said. “If you ask them what’s on their iPod, its Death Cab for Cutie, the Killers.”

A 2003 documentary, “Afropunk,” featured black punk fans and musicians talking about music, race and identity issues, and it has since turned into a movement, said James Spooner, its director. Thousands of black rock fans use Afropunk.com’s message boards to discuss bands, commiserate about their outsider status and share tips on how to maintain their frohawk hairstyles.

“They walk outside and they’re different,” Mr. Spooner said of the Web site’s regulars. “But they know they can connect with someone who’s feeling the same way on the Internet.”

On MySpace, the trailer for Mr. Spooner’s new film, “White Lies, Black Sheep,” about a young black man in the predominantly white indie-rock scene, has been played upward of 40,000 times.

Rock was created by black artists like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and Elvis Presley and other white artists eventually picked up the sound. In the ’60s, teenagers were just as likely to stack their turntables with records from both white and black artists — with perhaps a little bit of Motown, another musical thread of the time, thrown in, said Larry Starr, who wrote “American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV,” with Christopher Waterman. But that began changing in the late ’60s. By the time Jimi Hendrix became the ultimate symbol of counterculture cool, with his wild wardrobe and wilder guitar playing, the racial divisions were evident.

Paul Friedlander, the author of “Rock and Roll: A Social History,” noted that Hendrix became popular just as the black power movement emerged. Yet his trio included two white musicians and his audience was largely white. That made him anathema to many blacks.

“To the black community he was not playing wholly African-American music,” Mr. Friedlander said, even when Hendrix formed a new all-black band.

By the early ’70s, “you began to have this very strict color line,” Mr. Starr said. Music splintered into many different directions and, for the most part, blacks and whites went separate ways. Black musicians gravitated toward genres in which they were more likely to find acceptance and lucre, such as disco, R & B and hip-hop, which have also been popular among whites.

The next few decades saw several successful and influential black musicians who crossed genres or were distinctly rock, such as Prince, Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz, and rock melodies and lyrics have been liberally sampled by hip-hop artists. But rock is still largely a genre played by white rockers and celebrated by white audiences.

THE recent attention given several bands with black members — like Bloc Party, Lightspeed Champion, and the Dears — could signify change. “Return to Cookie Mountain,” the second album by the group TV on the Radio, a band in which four of the five members are black, was on the best-album lists of many critics in 2006. Around the country, other rock bands with black members are emerging.

On an evening in December, at Gooski’s, a crowded dive bar in Pittsburgh, Lamont Thomas, sweating through a red T-shirt that read “Black Rock,” played the drums behind the lead singer Chris Kulcsar, who was flinging his skinny frame around the stage, and the guitarist Buddy Akita. The bass player, Lawrence Caswell, dreadlocked and gregarious, introduced the band, a punk quartet from Cleveland with the name This Moment in Black History.

“The funny thing is, a lot of people assume from the name that we’re just white kids being ironic,” Mr. Thomas said.

This may be because their fans, like the ones who attended the show at Gooski’s, tend to be white, although there are usually one or two people of color, Mr. Caswell said.

Nev Brown, a photographer and writer from Brooklyn, said that at the indie rock shows that he has covered for his music blog, FiddleWhileYouBurn.com, he is almost always the only black person in the room. Some fans are curious about why he is at the show and try to talk to him about it.

“And then you get idiots, like people who think you’re a security guard,” he said.

Damon Locks, a Chicago-based publicist and singer in a hardcore band called the Eternals, said he is frequently mistaken for “one of the other three black guys” in the city’s rock-music scene. “We joke about it,” he said. “We’ve been thinking about getting together and starting a band called Black People.”

That kind of isolation is one of the reasons Mr. Spooner, the documentary director, regularly showcases black and mixed-race rock bands at clubs. For a band to participate, the lead singer must be black. This caused some friction early on, he said. “A lot of white people were offended that I was saying, ‘This is for us,’ ” Mr. Spooner said on a recent evening at the Canal Room, a club in downtown Manhattan, where he was the D.J. between sets for multiethnic bands like Graykid, Martin Luther and Earl Greyhound.

But, he added: “Almost every black artist I know wants to play in front of their people. This is bigger than just rocking out or whatever.”

Mr. Thomas, of This Moment in Black History, said that white fans sometimes want to know why he is not rapping. “It’s the stupidest question,” he said.

Just as often, it is African-Americans who are judgmental. “There’s an unfortunate tendency for some black people to think if you listen to rock music or want to play rock music, you’re an Uncle Tom,” Mr. Thomas said.

LaRonda Davis, president of the Black Rock Coalition, an organization co-founded by Vernon Reid of Living Colour in the mid-80s to advocate for black rock bands, said the resistance is rooted in group-think. “Black people were forced to create a community,” she said. “We’re so protective and proud of it, like, ‘We have to protect our own,’ and why should we embrace something that has always excluded us?”

Nelson George, author of “Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Boho’s: Notes on Post-Soul Culture,” suggested that the rock ’n’ roll aesthetic had been a major deterrent. “Black kids do not want to go out with bummy clothes and dirty sneakers,” Mr. George said. “There is a psychological subtext to that, about being in a culture where you are not valued and so you have to value yourself.”

But lately, rock music, and its accouterments, are being considered more stylish. Mainstream hip-hop artists like Kelis wear Mohawks, Lil Jon and Lupe Fiasco rap about skateboarding, and “all of the Southern rap stars are into the ’80s punk look, wearing big studded belts and shredded jeans,” said Anoma Whittaker, the fashion director of Complex magazine. At the same time, the hip-hop industry’s demand for new samples has increased the number of rock songs appearing on hip-hop tracks: Jay-Z’s latest album features contributions from Chris Martin of Coldplay and R & B artist Rihanna’s current single samples the New Wave band Soft Cell.

“Hip-hop has lost a lot of its originality,” said Mr. Brown of Everything Must Go, the East Harlem skateboard shop. “This is the new thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/fa...Blipsters.html





Rolling Stones Top Forbes List Of 06's Richest
FMQB

The rich get richer, as The Rolling Stones have topped Forbes magazine's list of the biggest moneymakers in the music biz for the second straight year. Mick, Keith and the boys raked in $150.6 million in 2006, with $138.5 million of it coming from their extensive Bigger Bang tour.

Coming in second was the husband-and-wife Country couple of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, collectively collecting $132 million. Country act Rascal Flatts finished third with $110.5 million, with Madonna bringing in $96.8 million for fourth place and Barbara Streisand rounding out the top five with $95.8 million.

The rest of Forbes' top ten is as follows: Kenny Chesney ($90.1 million), Celine Dion ($85.2 million), Bon Jovi ($77.5 million), Nickelback ($74.1 million) and Dave Matthews Band ($60.4 million).
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=339774





Why the FCC Will Get Media Ownership Wrong Again

And What They Should Do to Get it Right
Mark Lloyd

In the summer of 2006, Zogby International conducted a poll demonstrating that Americans know more about the Three Stooges than the fundamental structure of our democracy. Seventy-three percent of Americans could name all three Stooges, just 42 percent could name the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. The poll also showed that while 77 percent of the people can name two of the Seven Dwarfs, just 24 percent can name two Supreme Court justices.

Even though the Zogby poll was commissioned by television reality show producers, they are asking the right sort of questions. The same cannot be said of the Federal Communications Commission, which once again is failing to exercise its congressional mandate over media ownership rules in our country.

The Federal Communications Commission will complete its review of FCC media ownership policies this spring. All those concerned about the state of our democracy should be very worried, which is why the Center for American Progress early next week will unveil a new set of formulas that the FCC could use to measure the diversity available to all communities in local media markets across the country. But first, let’s outline the problem.

The last time the FCC engaged in an ownership review the Republicans in charge of the regulatory agency rammed through a set of rules designed to loosen restrictions on media concentration so that the big mainstream media conglomerates could further tighten their grip on public discourse in America. Once the public got wind of this, there were widespread howls of protest, causing both Congress and the courts to step in to undo some of the damage.

As the Third Circuit Court of Appeals said last year in the case that overturned the FCC’s first set of media ownership rules: “The FCC’s delegated responsibility to foster a robust forum for national debate is unique in administrative law and essential to the vibrancy of our deliberative democracy.” Yet the FCC, obliged by the court to review what it had originally proposed, continues to listen almost exclusively to the big broadcasters as they lobby to raise the ownership cap.

Case in point: Mark Mays, the president of Clear Channel Communications, which controls more than 1,200 radio stations across the country, argues that “free radio is at risk.” He insists “There’s room,for free radio companies to own more than eight stations” in a single market. Mays argues that the new kid on the block, satellite radio, is creating competition for broadcast radio and therefore the federal government needs to step in to protect “free radio” by allowing the giants to get even bigger.

That Clear Channel, which generated nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2005, is crying for government relief to allow it to acquire even more broadcast licenses should be laughable. But the FCC, particularly when dominated by Republicans, is peculiarly susceptible to these “market” arguments. Make no mistake, the FCC is listening.

Whatever happened to the FCC’s obligation to consider the public interest? Well, that depends on what the meaning of the public interest is. As long as the FCC defines the public interest as some sort of competition in media markets, then the FCC can assure Congress that letting Clear Channel get bigger is in the public interest. After all, they are just positioning themselves to compete with satellite radio.

Even though the FCC will occasionally acknowledge that the fundamental purpose of broadcast regulation is to further the informed discussion so necessary to a democracy, this is almost always immediately ignored. The world is so topsy-turvy at the FCC that the measure the agency used to justify loosening the media ownership rules in 2003, its so called Diversity Index, is actually based on something used to measure market concentration, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.

The HHI was developed as a tool to identify and curb antitrust violations; the latest approval of the merger between telecommunications giants SBC and AT&T shows how effective the HHI is at limiting monopolies. Still, the FCC deserves some credit for attempting to use modern tools to rationalize and explain why Big Media should get what it wants. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the Diversity Index in principle but rejected the way the FCC calculated it.

Unfortunately, the FCC has learned the wrong lesson and seems to want to avoid developing any sort of measurement tool the public or the courts could critique.

Instead, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, with little input from his colleagues at the agency, has commissioned a small set of vaguely described studies that seem to focus on changes in the media market. The FCC gives no hint that it is even considering the impact local media will have on local democratic engagement in its second review of media ownership concentration rules. Index or no, the FCC cannot think outside the box of market considerations.

But what if the FCC did something that was really new? What if it defined the public interest in a way that actually seemed to coincide with what most of us think that means? What if the FCC defined the public interest to mean the best interests of a democratic public? What if the FCC created an index that could really show the relationship between media ownership and what local citizens know about government?

As a new Congress controlled by Democrats begins oversight of an FCC controlled by Republicans, it is crucial to begin asking why the agency repeatedly fails to ask the right questions before it tries to loosen media concentration rules. Congressional oversight, however, is not sufficient. An entirely new way of discerning media diversity in local American broadcast markets is clearly needed.

That’s why the Center for American Progress in partnership with Fordham University’s Donald McGannon Communication Research Center and a small group of media scholars developed a way to measure local media diversity and its impact on local civic knowledge. Our Local Media Diversity Metrics is really a fairly straightforward count of all the independent local media (from newspapers to the Internet) that actually produce local news and public affairs programs in a given community. This new index is complemented by our new Civics Index, which is a measure of local civic literacy from sample communities.

In the development and testing of these metrics we identified a variety of problems about the way the FCC determines whether broadcasters are operating in the public interest. Most notably we found an over reliance on private data companies such as The Nielsen Co. and Arbitron Inc. for information about the activities of federally licensed broadcasters, and a failure to capture media owned and operated by women and minorities.

On Tuesday, Jan. 30, the Center will host an event in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill to unveil our new Local Media Diversity Metrics and Civic Metrics. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) will deliver the opening address, after which the authors of the Center’s report will discuss their new methodology for the FCC to set local media ownership rules.

The work of determining whether our present or future media ownership policies promote democratic engagement and civic knowledge should not be left to private industry. We believe that the proposed measurement tools will help clarify the true impact of the FCC’s media ownership rules on our democracy.
http://www.fmqb.com/goout.asp?u=http...ia_myopia.html





FCC to Feel Unfamiliar Heat From Democrats
Charles Babington

As congressional Democrats prepare to give the Federal Communications Commission its toughest scrutiny in years, a rivalry between the powerful agency's two most prominent Republicans is raising questions about its readiness to handle barbed questions and stiff challenges.

The Republican-controlled FCC -- which makes far-reaching decisions on telephone, television, radio, Internet and other services that people use daily -- has sparred infrequently with Republican-controlled congresses. But the Democratic-run 110th Congress is about to heat up the grill, starting with a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on Thursday.

Senators vow to press the chairman and four commissioners on matters such as media-ownership diversity, Internet access, broadcast decency standards and delays in resolving various issues. The hearing may cover the waterfront, Democratic staff members say, but there's little doubt that the agency will face a tone of questioning unseen in recent years.

"They've effectively emasculated any public-interest standards that existed" for radio and TV stations, said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), a committee member who plans sharp questions on decency, media consolidation and other topics. "The entire Congress for years now has been devoid of any kind of oversight," he said, and the new Democratic majority is launching a process that will force the FCC to "beat a path to Capitol Hill to respond."

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a senior House Commerce Committee member, said he plans "comprehensive hearings on net neutrality" later this year. The term refers to measures barring telephone and cable service providers from charging Web-based companies for priority access to the Internet. Markey supports such proposals, while the FCC's Republican members generally oppose them.

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican with close ties to the Bush administration, will be the focus of Democrats' criticisms. But some industry analysts think those lawmakers may try to find an ally in Commissioner Robert M. McDowell, another young Republican loyalist with a reputation for intelligence and political ambition. The two have clashed on at least three significant issues in the past several months, creating what some see as a rift that could be ripe for exploitation.

"McDowell has been critical of Kevin Martin on a number of occasions," said industry analyst Blair Levin. Although both men are conservative Republicans, Levin said, their independence is partly explained by their different political bases -- Martin's in the Bush administration, McDowell's in Congress.

In the legal, lobbying and industrial circles that monitor the FCC, opinions vary on the severity of the Martin-McDowell rivalry.

Publicly, the two men have played down their differences and said they have a good working relationship. "The chairman and I have been friends for more than a decade," McDowell, 43, said in an interview. "We have a strong and durable relationship. . . . We will still have some differences, but we work together."

A spokeswoman for Martin, Tamara Lipper, said the two men "have a very good relationship."

The FCC's commissioners -- currently three Republicans and two Democrats -- are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and allowed to operate largely independently of each other. Intra-agency and intra-party feuds are not uncommon, and many analysts noted that Martin clashed with former chairman and fellow Republican Michael K. Powell.

"When Michael Powell was FCC chairman, Kevin Martin was viewed as the maverick Republican," said Philip J. Weiser, a law professor at the University of Colorado who specializes in telecommunications. "And now he has to deal with his own maverick Republican."

Martin, 40, and McDowell clashed even before McDowell arrived at the FCC in June. McDowell handed Martin a stinging setback by saying the FCC had no authority to require cable companies to carry additional digital broadcast channels, a key industry issue that Martin hoped to bring to a vote.

The two subsequently tangled on other issues, most notably the $85 billion merger between AT&T and BellSouth approved by the FCC last month. Martin needed McDowell's vote to break a deadlock. But McDowell effectively held the process up, insisting that he could not take part in a vote because he previously worked as a lobbyist for an association representing companies that competed against AT&T and BellSouth.

McDowell's sharp criticism of arguments in favor of a full commission vote were widely regarded as a rebuke of Martin. Ultimately, the merger was approved, but only after the companies made concessions sought by the two Democratic commissioners.

Martin, McDowell and their colleagues may need all the camaraderie and cohesion they can muster at next week's hearing. With Democrats now in control of Congress, Dorgan said, "the running room of the FCC is going to be limited."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012501736.html





Internet to Revolutionize TV in 5 Years: Gates
Ben Hirschler

The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

The rise of high-speed Internet and the popularity of video sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube has already led to a worldwide decline in the number hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.

"Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it," he said.

"Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior."

At the moment, watching video clips on a computer is a separate experience from watching sitcoms or documentaries on television.

But convergence is coming, posing new challenges for TV companies and advertisers.

"Because TV is moving into being delivered over the Internet -- and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that -- you're going to have that experience all together," Gates said.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer's profile.

"In the coming months we're going to do experiments to see how people interact with these ads to build an effective model that works for advertisers and works for users," he said.

Advertisers are already racing to adapt their strategies to the growing power of the Web, and more and more promotional cash is tipped to migrate from television to Web sites in future.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070127/...internet_tv_dc





Subscription Television, The Wave Of The Future
Rust

It’s been a number of years since I’ve subscribed to cable TV at home. Among other reasons, most of the shows are crap, what isn’t crap is interrupted constantly by commercials that are twice the volume of the show I’m attempting to enjoy, and I don’t really want to pay $100 a month to get the few channels I feel are actually worth watching on occasion.

The current model of subscription television works as follows. You pay a service provider (a cable or satellite company) a monthly fee for the right to view entertainment, news, and educational programming at their convenience. Your service provider will, at no extra cost, insert highly energetic and distracting untargeted advertisements at regular intervals. These ads will interrupt the broadcast so you don’t miss anything. As a special bonus, if the service is ever interrupted, you will need to wait for a period of time (potentially anywhere from a week to a decade) before you can watch a rerun of the show(s) you missed.

Oh, that is so worth the money!

This model of subscription television does have it’s good sides. There are, thanks to those advertisements that companies pay such large amounts of money for, literally hundreds of channels and thousands of shows you can watch. With that many simultaneous programs, chances are that you can turn your TV on and find something to watch any time you like. Of course, if you don’t subscribe to every channel your provider carries, you might not find the things you want. Even if you do, chances are pretty good that you didn’t really want to watch it right now.

Enter the PVR, or Personal Video Recorder. Since the 1970’s, and much against the content industry’s wishes, you have been able to record a television show during it’s broadcast, and then watch it at your convenience. By the early 80’s, content and service providers had realized that the battle against time-shifting was lost, and control was once again with the viewer (to some extent, at least). More recently, you have been able to record those shows digitally to a DVD or hard drive or some other form of electronic memory. This is fundamentally no different than recording to analog tape (a la VHS or Beta), yet the content industry is once again up in arms to save it’s archaic and profitable business model.

Even more recently, content providers have been pushing service providers (and indeed, even governments) to abandon the analog airwaves and start broadcasting solely digital signals. Why? Is it because digital looks better? No. Anyone with a good television set can see that most DVD videos show compression artifacting during certain types of scenes, while analog (VHS) recordings do not. Is it because digital broadcasts are more convenient for the viewer? Again, no. You have to buy a digital cable box or satellite receiver, and buy a television with digital or high-definition inputs. Is it so you can finally make use of all the neat features your new digital PVR has? Nope. In fact, that’s just about the last thing the content providers want, and by extension, the service providers.

In reality, the main reason that digital TV is being touted as the next big thing by the content providers is because it is easier for them to control - once the right laws are in place. They can force service providers to bend to their will simply by threatening to withdraw their content from that providers offerings. So you end up with pretty decent looking television shows, broadcast in high-definition to that shiny new digital receiver, that you’re not allowed to time-shift, record, or otherwise enjoy on your schedule.

So what are you paying them for?

Ah right, there is little other choice right now.

So here’s what I would like to see happen. Currently, I watch about four different television shows on a regular basis - Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and typically a current reality show (which is Grease: You’re The One That I Want right now). If it was convenient for me to sample more shows, I would probably find a few more that I like enough to want to watch.

I would like to pay a nominal subscription fee (say, $10 per month) and receive only those four shows (though I’d be allowed at least a channel’s worth at that price - say 20 shows). I want them without commercials, I want them to be high-definition, I want to time-shift them, and I want to be able to watch them at least twice each. If I can simply subscribe to a video RSS feed and download the shows as they’re being broadcast, great. If I have to receive them over the normal cable connection, I want advertisements to run the rest of the time so I’m not forced to watch them (and turn my television down) every 9 or 12 minutes during the best parts of my show.

You’re maybe thinking “Dude, no way they’ll do that for $10 a month! At 20 weekly shows (presumably), that’s only about $0.12 per episode (80 episodes per month!” I say that’s about right, but you’re currently paying, say, $50 a month and you can watch thousands of episodes per month. That works out to way, way less than $0.12 per episode! In fact, if you’re paying $50 per month for cable and receive 50 channels, and we assume that each channel will have an average of 24 shows per day, that works out to 36000 episodes per month at a mere $0.0014 each! If they take my suggestion, I’ll be paying nearly 100 times more than that! How can they possibly go wrong! The maths don’t lie!

The sad fact is that many people are paying $1.99 per episode at online stores like iTunes, an amount that is, to say the least, astronomically high compared to cable and satellite (over 1400 times higher).

Clearly, the content providers and producers do not want my business. Their business actions are the equivalent of selling bottled water at $100 per bottle during a flood. This is why people pirate television shows.

Didn’t anyone in charge do the math?
http://digitalrights.ca/2007/01/subs...of-the-future/





The First P2P PVR from NDS Plus Innovative "Distributed DVR"
Chris Tew

NDS LogoNDS is the company that is majority owned by NewsCorp and previously replaced TiVo to create the DirecTV PVRs. While these PVRs have not had the best of times, NDS has today announced some very innovative IPTV products.

The first is what NDS call the "Distributed DVR" which allows users to use hard drives from anywhere on a home network instead of being restricted to a hard drive on a single PVR. This itself is brilliant and will give users a lot more freedom when it comes to storing content.

The second is ShareTV where users can share content stored on their PVRS with other subscribers over a P2P network making the world's first Peer to Peer PVR (from what I'm aware of).

It sounds like the recordings will be protected by DRM and only available to other subscribers to the IPTV service, but it does sound like you will be able to download TV shows that you haven't even recorded.

This effectively allows you to get huge libraries of videos and TV shows, which you can then store anywhere on your home network. I very much like the sound of this.

I wonder if this will end up being rolled out as a DirecTV service given the close ties NDS has with DirecTV already.
http://www.pvrwire.com/2007/01/29/an...ents-from-nds/





At Last, Television Ratings Go to College
Louise Story

For decades, Nielsen Media Research has affixed the same value to every college student watching television while away at school: zero. As a result, industry executives have complained for years that shows appealing to a younger audience have been underrated.

But, starting today, college students count.

Shows like “America’s Next Top Model” and “Family Guy” are expected to see their ratings surge this week as Nielsen Media Research, a unit of the Nielsen Company, includes the viewing of students living away from home in its count for the first time.

In the TV world, a boost in Nielsen ratings often means a boost in advertiser dollars, so the adjusted ratings are good news for networks with high college viewership, like ESPN, Fox and CW.

Adult Swim, a block of adult programming on the Cartoon Network that expects its 18- to 24-year-old audience to jump by 35 percent with the new ratings, is so excited about the change that it ran an ad telling viewers about it in mid-October.

“It’s going to validate what advertisers have always assumed, which is that college students are watching our programming,” said Jeff Lucas, a senior vice president at Comedy Central. Mr. Lucas said that the network’s own research shows that “South Park,” “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” and “The Colbert Report” have a large college audience.

It’s too early to know how much more advertisers will pay for shows with larger audiences because of the college ratings. Network executives, of course, said they expect to be paid for the higher ratings. If advertisers decide to spend more on shows that demonstrate high college viewership, TV networks may decide to dedicate more of their schedule programming to college tastes.

The college ratings are the first of two major changes in the way viewing habits are rated. In May, Nielsen will start releasing figures on the number of people who actually watch commercials, separating them from viewers who walk away or switch channels when the ads come on. The potential impact of ad ratings on network revenue has not been calculated.

Nielsen’s move into colleges is its first step in an ambitious plan to track TV viewing wherever and whenever it takes place. Long focused only on viewing of home television sets, Nielsen is building portable meters to track when people see TV in bars, restaurants, gyms, stores and other places outside the home. And, within two to three years, Nielsen plans to merge data from its online unit with its TV unit to calculate total viewing on all media.

“The holy grail here is how to measure consumers as they go from TV to iPod to cellphone and back,” said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal.

But the first step — measuring students’ viewing of television — comes with its own pitfalls. College students still watch a significant amount of television, spending three and a half hours a day tuned in on average, about an hour less than all people on average, according to Nielsen.

But college students are not watching only TV. They are also among the most likely consumers to be browsing the Internet, watching streaming video, text messaging on their cellphones and playing video games — sometimes all at once.

“College students have the television on in the background at the same time they undoubtedly have their computers on,” said Matt Britton, chief of brand development for Mr. Youth, a marketing firm based in New York. “They’re online — searching Facebook, doing research, shopping.”

Their media habits make them targets of marketers, but just how attentive college students are while they are watching TV may give advertisers pause about how much they can trust their viewing.

“The people meter just measures if the set is on and what they’re watching. But are they doing their homework, are they talking to friends; what else are they doing while the ad is showing?” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, an ad-buying agency.

Still, Mr. Adgate said, advertisers may increase their payments to networks with large college audiences because of the perceived lifetime value of the college market. “If you can get them using your product at age 20, they could be using it for the next 60 years,” he said.

Until now, the 18- to 24-year-olds counted by Nielsen were mainly those who did not attend college, attended part-time or still lived at home. During holiday and summer breaks, of course, many college students are home and were counted by Nielsen at those times on their parents’ set-top boxes. (There are 10,000 households with Nielsen boxes tracking their viewing, and from those households, Nielsen extrapolates national viewing estimates.)

Over the last decade, several TV networks with shows aimed at young people grew increasingly frustrated that college students were not counted. About five years ago, Turner Broadcasting, which owns Cartoon Network and TBS, approached Nielsen about the issue.

Over the next year, Nielsen held discussions with its clients who pay for the ratings — the networks and the advertising agencies. As with most tests of new offerings, Nielsen wanted a group of clients to pay the costs of evaluating the college market. By 2003, Turner, WB, CBS, MTV Networks, Fox and ESPN agreed to pay, and Nielsen started pilot tests.

To add college students to the ratings, Nielsen contacted the roughly 450 families in its sample who had children in college. About 30 percent of those families agreed to let Nielsen put a meter in the college student’s dorm room or off-campus apartment. Some families did not agree simply because their child did not have a TV set at school.

The change will affect the perception of viewing behavior, particularly for viewers 18 to 24. College students, for example, watch more television during the day, when young people not in college are more likely to be at work.

The prime-time shows the college and noncollege population picks to watch are also not always the same. While “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Simpsons” were popular in November on and off campus among 18- to 24-year-olds, shows like “Ugly Betty” and “America’s Next Top Model” were far more popular among college students than among other people that age.

In fact, the No. 1 one show for college males in November was Comedy Central’s cartoon show, “Drawn Together.” According to a Nielsen analysis, “Drawn Together” would have had an average audience of about 435,000 18-to 24-year-olds in November. But, since college students were not counted, the Nielsen rating in that age group totaled only 272,000 people that month.

Some TV networks are planning to spend more money marketing their shows on college campuses this spring since they will now see results in the ratings. Mr. Britton of Mr. Youth said two broadcast networks had contacted his firm about increased marketing on college campuses.

MTV already operates a network, called mtvU, that is seen exclusively on college campuses. MTV has found advertisers like Ford interested in specifically focusing on college students on the 750 campuses where mtvU is seen in places like dormitories, fitness centers and dining halls. Now that Nielsen is tracking college viewing, more college-focused networks or programming could be developed and sold to advertisers.Amy Adams, a freshman at Muskingum College in Ohio, said she and her roommate watch movies together on ABC Family and TNT on weekends. Other people in her dorm watch far more TV than she does, Ms. Adams said.

“As I walk down the halls, I always hear the TV on in someone’s bedroom,” she said. “Even in the mornings, too.”

Aviva Halperin, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said watching TV is a social event for her and her housemates. They watch “24” every week, and they like to watch it when broadcast, using commercial breaks as a time to chat.

“I know this sound really silly, but ‘24’ feels real because it’s close to our own fears, and it feels more real when I watch it in real time,” Ms. Halperin said. “When I watch it on TiVo, it’s not as gripping.”

The lack of TiVo and other digital video recorders is another advantage of student viewers. Young people are more likely to channel surf and fast-forward to skip commercials, Nielsen’s research shows. But perhaps because of their cost, DVRs are owned by only about 3 to 4 percent of college students, according to Student Monitor, a college student research firm based in Ridgewood, N.J. (About 13 percent of American households have DVRs.)

On the downside for broadcasters, college students, like many people their age, also spend a fair share of their day playing video games — nearly two hours a day, not including online games, according to Nielsen.

Still, college students last week said they thought it was about time they were counted by Nielsen.

“It’s kind of silly that we weren’t,” said Beth Lovisa, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s so not true that we don’t watch any.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/bu...29nielsen.html





Inside the Lucasfilm Data Center
Daniel Terdiman

Given the cult-film status of 1971's THX 1138 in the George Lucas universe, it should come as little surprise that the total capacity of Lucasfilm's giant data center is 11.38 petabits per second.

Granted, that number--which represents the value one would get by adding up the bandwidth capacity of all the company's 1 gigabit per second desktop machines and its 10-gbps backbone--is purely theoretical. But in an environment like Lucasfilm, which is celebrating four Oscar nominations this week, and where self-referential history is a big parlor game, numbers like that are nothing to be messed with.

The 10-gbps backbone is the core of the data center's network. That rate is faster than the prevailing industry standard of around 1 gbps for most servers.

"They're hesitant to change that capacity," Kevin Clark, Lucasfilm's director of IT operations, said of the total theoretical bandwidth number.

For IT professionals, Clark must have one of the most enviable jobs in the world. After all, after spending several years at enterprise software maker Autodesk, he now oversees a 10,000-square-foot data center--Clark said that might equate to the size of a Google data center, or one run by a financial institution, though those types of organizations would operate more of them--that houses the computing guts of the Lucasfilm empire, the corporate umbrella for Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasarts, Lucasfilm itself and StarWars.com.

The data center, which is housed on a lower level of the Letterman Digital Arts Center where Lucasfilm is headquartered, opened its doors in 2005 as Lucas was moving much of that empire to San Francisco's Presidio, a former army base in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, from its previous home across the bay in San Rafael.

And while a major data center move for any company would be disruptive, Clark and his team had to find a way to minimize the impact on the many major motion pictures, video game projects and other initiatives it was involved in at the time.

"If the systems go down here in corporate, you might not have your e-mail for a couple hours," said Greg Grusby, ILM's technical publicist. "If the systems go down in this data center, you lose $50 million."

In fact, Clark said, the data center "far exceeds" the computing power of any other production house in the world.

From Web sites to e-mail to graphic rendering, all the bytes pass through here at this high-tech movie production company.

All told, the data center currently has more than 2,000 servers. At its core are 198 Verari servers, in three matching front-and-back racks of three rows of 11 servers each, all dual-core/dual-processor Operton server with 16GB of memory.

Clark said that he expects that number to double within the next month.

And with a host of projects in the pipeline, including Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Evan Almighty, the next Harry Potter film, Transformers and more, it's important that Clark and his team keep up with the company's computing needs.

"There's a large R&D effort that drives much of the this," he said, "based on the goals of the projects."

Beyond the 198 Verari servers, the center also sports row after row of "legacy" servers, including racks of 65 Angstrom Microsystems servers.

"It doesn't take long to turn legacy," Clark said. "Sometimes it's only six to seven months before we're moving on to the next technology."

And when considering which servers to buy next, Clark explained that he pays close attention to the performance per watt of potential purchases.

"Power utilization is a big thing for us," Clark said. "We do have a keen eye on performance on that front."

Given the company's business, it's no wonder that Lucasfilm also has a substantial storage system. It is using a Network Appliance SpinOS network-attached storage system, and will soon be moving to GX cluster.

And that's crucial, since films like Pirate of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, for which ILM received a best visual effects Oscar nomination Tuesday, can require 60 terabytes of storage, Clark said. And the next release in that franchise's series, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, will likely require at least 50 percent more storage, he said.

In total, he added, the storage farm has more than 300 terabytes of capacity.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-6153647.html





Harry Potter’s Final Act Is Set for July 21
Motoko Rich and Julie Bosman

J. K. Rowling, the author of the record-setting Harry Potter series, announced today that the seventh — and last — book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be published on July 21.

That will be just eight days after the release of the film version of the fifth volume in the series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” portending a huge summer for fans of the young wizard.

Millions of fans around the world are fiercely anticipating this latest installment. But the end of the series, in which Ms. Rowling has hinted she may kill off one of the main characters, comes as a bittersweet finale not only for readers but also for the publishing companies, booksellers and licensees that have cashed in on the international phenomenon since it began more than nine years ago with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It is hard to imagine how the publishing industry will ever replace the sensation that spawned midnight parties and all-night lines to get the books the moment they went on sale. When “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.

For this final installment, the cover price will rise to $34.99, compared to $29.99 for the previous volume, although many retailers are offering substantial discounts, often as high as 40 percent.

Scholastic, Ms. Rowling’s American publisher, which represents about 37 percent of Harry’s global books in print, is clearly on the hot seat as it prepares for life after the boy magician. “It’s the question that everybody asks about,” said Frederick Searby at J. P. Morgan, an equity analyst who follows Scholastic’s stock. “What happens to Scholastic after Harry Potter?”

On its own, a new Harry Potter title has the power to juice up sales significantly, not just at Scholastic, but throughout the industry. On the London Stock Exchange, the announcement of the new book’s publication date by Bloomsbury, Ms. Rowling’s British publisher, sent its shares up 2.2 percent. In New York trading, the shares of Scholastic rose about 1 percent in the morning but fell back by afternoon. In a year without Harry, his absence becomes an excuse for falling sales.

In the fiscal year ending May 31, 2005, one in which Scholastic did not publish a new hardcover Harry title, for example, sales in its children’s book publishing division dropped 15 percent to $1.15 billion from $1.36 billion. Last year, several bookstore chains, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, mentioned the lack of a Harry Potter hardcover as a reason for declining sales in the second quarter.

Scholastic officials readily admit that there is no one book or series waiting in the wings to succeed the Harry Potter series, which has 120 million copies in print in the U.S. and 325 million worldwide. “If I suggested that I had in the pipeline the one thing that is going to replace what Harry has been to the company, that would be arrogant and ill-informed,” said Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division. Instead, she said, the company had a number of projects that it believed could generate a sizable chunk of revenue.

Richard Robinson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, is quick to emphasize that despite the outsize attention that Ms. Rowling and her series attracts, it is not the pillar upholding the company. He said that even in a record year like 2005, when sales of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” generated about $175 million in revenues, that was about 13 percent of the company’s book sales and only 8 percent of Scholastic’s total revenues, which include income from educational publishing, children’s television programming, DVD’s, computer software and its international division.

He pointed out that pundits had questioned Scholastic’s survival after the decline of other wildly successful series from the publisher, like Goosebumps and The Babysitters Club. Each of those series have more books in print than all of the Harry Potter books combined. Coming projects include a new series by Ann Martin, author of “The Babysitters Club” titles, more books from Cornelia Funke, the best-selling German fantasy writer and a new sort of junior chick-lit series for 9 and 10-year old girls called “Candy Apple.”

When the company announced first quarter results in September, analysts noted that while sales in the book unit were down by half because of the absence of a new Harry Potter title this year, sales of other books were up 19 percent.

Ms. Holton added that the publication of the last Harry book does not signal the death of the series. “I don’t think there is an end to the Harry Potter franchise,” she said, because new generations of readers will continue to discover the books. Currently, she said, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” sells about 500,000 copies a year.

Scholastic has signed a multi-book contract with Meg Cabot, the author of "The Princess Diaries" and "All-American Girl," Ms. Holton said on Thursday. Ms. Cabot is writing a series for younger girls that will be introduced in spring of 2008.

“Scholastic has dodged the big bullet twice,” said Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University and an analyst for the Book Industry Study Group, which produces “Book Industry Trends,” an annual study of book sales. “I think the company is essentially sound and will continue to be successful,” he added. “But they’re just not going to have that big cash flow and may have to go out into the marketplace and pay a lot of money to replace” Ms. Rowling.

In the years following the publication of the last Harry Potter title, Mr. Greco predicts that growth in revenues in children’s books will decline from double-digits in Harry years to the low single digits.

Stephen Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said that while Harry had provided a strong boost to sales, he was not concerned about the end of the franchise. Like Ms. Holton, he said, “it will be with us for our entire lifetime and beyond.” What’s more, he said, even though sales of a new Harry title were significant in the month they came out, over all, they represented less than 1 per cent of total annual sales.

And it may be that some booksellers never made that much profit from Harry Potter anyway. “If we sell the book at 40 percent off, I don’t think we’re making that much money,” Mr. Riggio said.

Indeed, said Constance Sayre, principal of Market Partners International, a consultant to the publishing industry in New York, “The competing amongst the chain stores and the warehouse clubs for discount probably limited their profits enormously.”

And the end of the Harry Potter series is not the most pressing problem facing publishers of books for children and young adults; competition from other forms of entertainment is the real threat. “When you look now at an 8- or 10-year-old, they are truly online, they are IMing their friends, they are text-messaging, they have an iPod where they are watching and listening to music,” said Susan Miller, president of Mixed Media Group, which develops books, television shows and movies for children. “They have a lot of other ways to spend their time, media wise and, if you like to consume stories you can be watching something on the television. There are a lot of places for them to be entertained.”

Still, there’s always this possibility: Ms. Rowling could just write another series. “At some point she’ll come out of retirement and pull a Michael Jordan,” said Mr. Searby of J. P. Morgan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/bo...aae&ei=5087%0A





Final Harry Potter Book Gets Record Amazon Orders

Amazon.com Inc. said on Friday first-day advance orders for " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last installment of
J.K. Rowling's successful book series, were 547 percent higher than for its predecessor.

Thursday's pre-orders for "Deathly Hallows" exceeded the first two weeks of pre-orders for its predecessor, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Seattle-based Amazon said. "Half-Blood Prince," released in July 2005, generated more than 1.5 million pre-orders on Amazon, the online retailer said.

The final Harry Potter book is slated for release on July 21. Scholastic Corp. (Nasdaq:SCHL - news) publishes the book in the United States, while Bloomsbury Publishing handles the book in Great Britain.

Article





The (Super Bowl) Party's Over
Robert King

Churches in Indiana and across the country are scrapping traditional Super Bowl viewing parties in wake of the NFL’s stance that mass viewings of the game on big screen TV’s would violate copyright law.

The issue came to light Thursday when the Star reported that the NFL had told Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis that its plans for a Super Bowl watch party in front a big screen TV would be illegal.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Thursday the league stands by its interpretation of copyright law and would look into any violators that comes to the league’s attention. The main concern for the league, Aiello said, is groups that charge admission to watch games and those that use a TV screen larger than 55 inches to show the game.

A story about Fall Creek’s plan to cancel its game viewing plans prompted dozens of calls and more than 500 email comments to the Star’s website Thursday. Aiello said media from around the country have been inquiring with the league as well.

In Indianapolis, home of the AFC Champion Colts, Indian Creek Christian Church and Castleton United Methodist Church are among those who have cancelled plans to watch the game in their churches.

The issue came to light after the NFL confronted Fall Creek about its promotion of a “Super Bowl Bash” at the church that would bring together congregation members to watch the game with a projection TV.

Aiello said the league has a longstanding policy against “mass out-of-home viewings” of the Super Bowl, even if the hosts don’t charge admission. The NFL makes an exception to that, however, for sports bars that show televised sports on a regular basis. And that point has been a point of considerable anger among people who have contacted the newspaper in response to the story.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dl...RTS03/70201036





Multiplying the Payoffs From a Super Bowl Spot
Stuart Elliott

HERE is a lesson in new math, Madison Avenue style: The most expensive advertising buy of the year may turn out to be something of a bargain.

That buy is, of course, a television commercial during the Super Bowl, typically the most-watched program of any year. And while the cost this year sets a record, at an estimated average of $2.6 million for each 30-second spot, more than two dozen marketers believe it makes sense to spend that much money despite the many cheaper alternatives.

This counterintuitive belief is predicated on a big if — if the Super Bowl is not the end of a marketing game plan but the beginning, the premium cost is economical. The spot needs to be buttressed by a panoply of complementary extensions into new media like Web sites, video clips, cellphone text messaging, blogs and short films.

In other words, one of the most traditional ways to peddle products, the 3o-second TV spot, is being made relevant again by the explosion in nontraditional media choices.

For instance, Anheuser-Busch, which typically buys the most commercial time of any Super Bowl advertiser, will for the first time use e-mail messages to invite consumers to vote for their favorite Super Bowl spots by sending text messages or visiting a Web site. Also, all the company’s Super Bowl commercials will be posted the next day on a new Web site, bud.tv.

“What you have to recognize is where the consumer’s going,” said Robert Lachky, executive vice president for global industry development and chief creative officer at the Anheuser-Busch division of Anheuser-Busch.

•

That is particularly true, he added, for the drinkers ages 21 to 27 who are the target audience for much of the marketing for his beer brands like Bud Light.

Nationwide Insurance plans to preview its Super Bowl spot, a humorous look at the marital and career woes of the rapper Kevin Federline, by posting it Monday on its Web site (nationwide.com).

“Half the people in the United States watch the Super Bowl, but half don’t,” said Steven R. Schreibman, vice president for advertising and brand management at Nationwide Financial. “How do you reach them?”

“The Super Bowl is the only media property where the advertising is as big a story as the content of the show,” he added, “so you want to see how much you can leverage it.”

Mr. Schreibman is still agog at the response to the Nationwide spot during the Super Bowl last year, featuring the hunk Fabio demonstrating that “life comes at you fast,” to quote the campaign theme.

For months afterward, computer users were still visiting Web sites like ifilm.com to watch the commercials, Mr. Schreibman said, adding: “We got 1.8 million downloads on that one site. Fabio himself keeps me apprised of that.”

Garmin, a maker of G.P.S. navigation devices that will be a first-time Super Bowl sponsor, is posting video clips about its commercial on the company blog (garmin.blogs.com). The entries will be updated periodically until the game, which will be broadcast Feb. 4 by CBS.

“To look at the Super Bowl as ‘30 seconds and gone’ was never a part of the plan,” said Jon Cassat, director for marketing communications at Garmin. “We think a great audience out there responds to traditional media like television,” he added, “and we think there is a great audience out there we will reach through viral means.”

•

To be sure, opening the wallet so wide for ads does not have universal appeal. For instance, a survey of board members of the National Sports Marketing Network, an organization with chapters in 11 cities, found that only 31 percent would recommend a Super Bowl spot to their chief executive or chief marketing officer. And 41 percent said they believed Super Bowl spots were not worth the investment.

“It’s not right for everyone,” said Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

“Some of them, you scratch your head,” he added. “In the hype of the Super Bowl, they get carried away.”

But for “the right marketer, the Super Bowl makes wonderful sense if you think of it as a springboard to other things,” Professor Calkins said, adding: “Put the ads on the Internet. Get all the P.R. you can. Make the most of your media investment.”

Even the executive at CBS in charge of selling the estimated 30 minutes of commercial time during the game acknowledges that the spots in and of themselves are no longer, to mix sports references, slam-dunks. “It’s changed as the media have changed,” said JoAnn Ross, president for network sales at CBS. The focus now among the advertisers, she added, is on “what they can do to further the message.”

Indeed, Ms. Ross said, CBS is arranging for all the spots shown during the game to go up on one of its Web sites (cbssportsline.com) as soon as the game ends. And the network is talking to Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless, she added, so subscribers can watch the commercials on their cellphones.

Here is information about efforts by other Super Bowl advertisers to extend their commercial buys.

CAREERBUILDER The job search service is teasing consumers about its Super Bowl commercials with a humorous online promotion, the “Age-O-Matic” (at ageomatic.com and careerbuilder.com), which purports to show the toll taken over time by a “soul-sucking job.”

There are also teaser spots on TV to tell viewers that CareerBuilder is saying goodbye to the comic chimpanzees that appeared in its Super Bowl commercials in 2005 and 2006.

“If a campaign doesn’t have a whole bunch of legs, it shouldn’t get launched,” said Peter Krivkovich, chief executive at the CareerBuilder agency, Cramer-Krasselt. “If you add the legs, you can put your campaign on turbocharge.” CareerBuilder is owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune.

FRITO-LAY The Frito-Lay unit of PepsiCo is sponsoring a contest for consumers to create a Super Bowl commercial for Doritos snack chips. The work of the five finalists, selected from 1,100 entries, can be watched on a Web site (crashthesuperbowl.com). The winning spot, chosen through an online vote, will run exactly as the consumer made it, the company promises.

“It was worth the risk we took,” said Ann Mukherjee, vice president for marketing at Frito-Lay. “It has far exceeded any online promotion Frito-Lay has ever done.”

Frito-Lay will throw a Super Bowl party on Feb. 4 for the finalists to “watch the game and find out in the moment” who won, Ms. Mukherjee said, and the results will be taped for future use online.

GENERAL MOTORS The Chevrolet division of General Motors is sponsoring a contest for teams of college students to create an idea for a Super Bowl spot, which a Chevy agency, Campbell-Ewald, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, will produce for the game.

The contest is chronicled at chevycollegead.com and the five finalist teams are the stars of “Webisodes,” video clips styled like TV shows. They can be watched online at cbs.com/specials/superbowls_greatest_commercials/chevy/. The winning team will be revealed on a special, “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials,” on CBS on Feb. 2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/bu...7ac2a7&ei=5070





Boston Officials Livid Over Ad Stunt
AP

Livid about a publicity campaign that disrupted the city by stirring fears of terrorism, Boston officials vowed to prosecute those responsible and seek restitution, while others mocked authorities on Thursday for what they called an overreaction.

Officials found a slew of blinking electronic signs adorning bridges and other high-profile spots across the city Wednesday, prompting the closing of a highway and part of the Charles River and the deployment of bomb squads.

The 38 signs were part of a promotion for the Cartoon Network TV show ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'' a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball. The network's parent is Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc.

''It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme,'' Mayor Thomas Menino said. ''I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred.''

The 1-foot tall signs, which were lit up at night, resembled a circuit board, with protruding wires and batteries. Most depicted a boxy, cartoon character giving passersby the finger -- a more obvious sight when darkness fell.

Two men who put up the promotions were to be arraigned Thursday on charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. Authorities say Peter Berdovsky, 27, of Arlington, and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown, were hired to place the devices.

Berdovsky, an artist, told The Boston Globe he was hired by a marketing company and said he was ''kind of freaked out'' by the furor.

''I find it kind of ridiculous that they're making these statements on TV that we must not be safe from terrorism, because they were up there for three weeks and no one noticed. It's pretty commonsensical to look at them and say this is a piece of art and installation,'' he said.

Fans of the show mocked what they called an overreaction as about a dozen gathered outside Charlestown District Court on Thursday morning with signs saying ''1-31-07 Never Forget'' and ''Free Peter.''

''We're the laughing stock,'' said Tracy O'Connor, 34.

''It's almost too easy to be a terrorist these days,'' said Jennifer Mason, 26. ''You stick a box on a corner and you can shut down a city.''

O'Connor said there's nothing wrong with being vigilant, but said she said it was ridiculous to shut down a city ''when anyone under the age of 35 knew this was a joke the second they saw it.''

Authorities vowed to hold Turner accountable for what Menino said was ''corporate greed,'' that led to at least $750,000 in police costs.

As soon as Turner realized the Boston problem around 5 p.m., it said, law enforcement officials were told of their locations in 10 cities where it said the devices had been placed for two to three weeks: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

''We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing campaign was mistaken for a public danger,'' said Phil Kent, chairman of Turner, a division of Time Warner Inc.

Kent said the marketing company that placed the signs, Interference Inc., was ordered to remove them immediately.

Interference had no comment. A woman who answered the phone at the New York-based firm's offices Wednesday afternoon said the firm's CEO was out of town and would not be able to comment until Thursday.

Messages seeking additional comment from the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network were left with several publicists.

A voice mail box for Berdovsky was full Wednesday night. The Associated Press was unable to find whether Stevens had a lawyer.

Authorities are investigating whether Turner or other companies should be criminally charged, Attorney General Martha Coakley said. ''We're not going to let this go without looking at the further roots of how this happened to cause the panic in this city,'' Coakley said.

In Seattle and several suburbs, the removal of the signs was low-key. ''We haven't had any calls to 911 regarding this,'' Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb said Wednesday.

Police in Philadelphia said they believed their city had 56 devices.

The New York Police Department removed 41 of the devices -- 38 in Manhattan and three in Brooklyn, according to spokesman Paul Browne. The NYPD had not received any complaints. But when it became aware of the situation, it contacted Cartoon Network, which provided the locations so the devices could be removed.

''Aqua Teen Hunger Force'' is a cartoon with a cultish following that airs as part of a block of programs for adults on the Cartoon Network. A feature length film based on the show is slated for release March 23.
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/ne...7-1292551.html



Hair-Raising Press Conference





Turner to Pay Cost of Boston Security Scare: Report

Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay the full cost -- around $1 million -- of a security alert in Boston triggered by battery-powered cartoon advertising signs for one of its shows, The Boston Globe reported on Friday.

Authorities are investigating the role of U.S. media group, which took out an advertisement in the newspaper on Friday to apologize for Wednesday's daylong security scare triggered by a "guerrilla" marketing campaign.

"We did not intend to perpetrate a hoax," the ad said.

The Globe, quoting Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, said the company would pay costs expected to top $500,000 in Boston and another $500,000 for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and two nearby cities.

Menino was not immediately available to comment.

The 12-inch (30-cm) signs -- a total of 38 across the city under bridges, on storefronts and near busy train stations -- were meant to promote an animated character for an adult-themed show on Turner's Cartoon Network called "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." A movie version is also being produced.

Authorities have charged Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, in the security alert, Boston's biggest since the September 11 attacks. They pleaded not guilty to charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct.

Prosecutors said the two were paid by a New York marketing company hired by Turner Broadcasting System Inc., and Menino has said the city may sue the company, a unit of Time Warner Inc.

The signs were encased in dark plastic with wires protruding and lights wired to an electronic circuit board, and included a character making an obscene gesture. After the first one was found on Wednesday morning, police responded to calls of similar devices in at least eight other areas.

At the peak of the alert, authorities mobilized emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, hundreds of police and the U.S. Coast Guard as traffic came to a halt in busy areas on Wednesday. Roads, bridges and even part of the Charles River were closed.

Article





Did Boston Ad Stunt Really Backfire on Turner?
Paul Thomasch

A promotional stunt by Turner Broadcasting may have set off a security scare in Boston and put the network under fire, but it also achieved just what such campaigns set out to do: Stir up big buzz for little money.

As part of what is known as a "guerrilla" campaign, Turner Broadcasting placed small, animated billboards to promote a cartoon for adults around Boston, New York, Los Angeles and other cities several weeks ago.

The ad campaign took an unintentional turn on Wednesday, when Boston authorities mistook the devices for possible bombs and shut down parts of the city.

It was Boston's biggest security scare since the September11 attacks and investigators are looking into Turner's role, but some experts say the promotion still may be chalked up a success.

"They achieved far more than they probably ever set out to with this group of, say, 21- to 35-year-olds that they were trying to reach," said Tracy Ryan, an advertising professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Ryan, like other experts, criticized the decision to place the electronic devices around cities given the current political environment. But industry watchers also said that the audience for the cartoon, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," is often hard to reach through more conventional methods.

"They respond well to things that are nontraditional and rebellious," Ryan said. "This target market probably thinks it's fantastic that they were able to cause an uproar."

A unit of Time Warner Inc., Turner Broadcasting worked on the campaign with Interference Inc., an agency known for the sort of low-cost guerrilla or viral campaigns that promote brands with unconventional marketing.

In a statement, Turner Broadcasting said it regretted the devices "were mistakenly thought to pose any danger."

Interference Inc. could not be reached for comment.

Butterflies, Popsicles And Spray-Paint

Other such campaigns, in which advertisements crop up in unusual places or unexpected ways, have stumbled in the past.

Snapple, for instance, tried to erect an immense, 25-foot popsicle in 2005 to promote a line of frozen treats, only to have it melt and swamp New York's Union Square.

IBM also ran into trouble with officials in several major U.S. cities when it spray-painted advertisements for its Linux operating systems on sidewalks and street corners. Microsoft Corp. came under criticism when it littered New York streets with MSN Butterfly decals.

But Andrew Benett, chief strategy officer of Euro RSCG Worldwide, called the Turner stunt "kind of the apex" of guerrilla campaigns that went awry.

"But it's very safe to say, while not done on purpose, it may have been far more successful than planned," he said.

Still, while Turner Broadcasting may have successfully reached the audience of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," it likely faces a broader public relations headache, said Drew Neisser, the chief executive of Renegade Marketing Group.

"They got a lot of P.R.-- but they are probably not happy on the corporate level," said Neisser, who has overseen viral campaigns such as using an old checkered cab with HSBC's logo to give free rides to the bank's customers in New York.

"The question becomes in all this does the marketer have any responsibility to the world at large? Obviously my perspective is they do," said Neisser. "You should be able to sell your products without making the world any worse."

Jamie Tedford, senior vice president for marketing and media innovation at Arnold Worldwide, an advertising agency, echoed concerns about corporate responsibility in marketing.

"Unfortunately, it might end up as a short term gain in viewership because of this stunt," he said. "This is a perfect example of crass, old-school saying that all publicity is good publicity."

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It’s Taking on a Life of it’s Own
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Levi’s Turns to Suing Its Rivals
Michael Barbaro and Julie Creswell

United States Patent and Trademark No. 1,139,254 is not much to look at: a pentagon surrounding a childlike drawing of a seagull in flight.

But the design for a Levi’s pocket, first used 133 years ago, has become the biggest legal battleground in American fashion.

Levi Strauss claims that legions of competitors have stolen its signature denim stitches — two intersecting arcs and a cloth label — for their own pockets, slapping them on the seats of high-priced, hip-hugging jeans that have soared in popularity.

So Levi’s is becoming a leader in a new arena: lawsuits. The company, once the undisputed king of denim and now a case study in missed opportunities, has emerged as the most litigious in the apparel industry when it comes to trademark infringement lawsuits, firing off nearly 100 against its competitors since 2001. That’s far more than General Motors, Walt Disney or Nike, according to an analysis by research firm Thomson West.

The legal scuffles offer a rare glimpse into the sharp-elbowed world of fashion, where the line between inspiration and imitation is razor thin. After all, clothing makers’ trade secrets are hung on store racks for all to see, and designs can be quickly copied with small changes to exploit a hot trend.

The lawsuits, which Levi’s says it is compelled to file to safeguard the defining features on its jeans, are not about the money — one settled for just $5,000 in damages. Instead, the company says, they are about removing copycats from stores. Nearly all the cases have settled out of court, with Levi’s smaller rivals agreeing to stop making the offending pants and to destroy unsold pairs.

But those competitors say the lawsuits are the last resort of a poor loser, a company that has lost billions in sales, laid off thousands of workers and flirted with bankruptcy as the denim industry exploded.

“They missed the boat,” said Tonny Sorensen, chief executive of Von Dutch Originals, a six-year-old denim and clothing manufacturer sued by Levi’s six months ago for allegedly borrowing the company’s double arcs for a back-pocket design. “Now they want to make a lot of noise and scare people away.”

Mr. Sorensen said his pocket design “did not look like Levi’s at all” because of subtle differences like placing the arcs “one inch to the left” and stitching a line to resemble “a pirate’s hook.”

Nevertheless, Von Dutch agreed to remove the jeans from dozens of boutiques and destroy hundreds of unsold pairs. “It was one style and it was not that successful anyway, so we made the decision not to fight it,” Mr. Sorensen said.

In the majority of cases, Levi’s accuses competitors of copying its design of two arcs that meet in the center of the pocket or its famous Levi’s tab, a folded piece of cloth sewn into the vertical seam of the garment.

Robert Hanson, Levi’s president for North America, said the company manufactured “a product that a lot of people are copying and copying with a lot of success.”

Instead of relying on Levi’s designs for what he called a “running start,” competitors should “look for other devices that don’t come remotely close to the Levi’s trademarks,” Mr. Hanson said. “Be more innovative.”

But the privately held Levi’s, whose founder sewed together the first pair of jeans in 1873, has been unable to exploit the latest $200-a-pair denim craze — and now claims scores of smaller competitors are riding high because of what it created. When consumers’ tastes shifted toward designer jeans that were bejeweled, torn and frayed, Levi’s was still selling basic $30 pairs at K-Mart.

In this dispute, back-pocket stitching has become the fashion equivalent of ink blots, with plaintiffs and defendants seeing in the new designs what they want, or need, to see. So far, Levi’s view is prevailing.

The company’s team of denim detectives — there are 40 across the world, scouring boutiques and department stores — has spotted what they considered offending stitches on jeans from the biggest names in the clothing business: Guess, Zegna, Esprit, Lucky Brand and Zumiez, to name a few.

Even companies that have painstakingly worked to avoid infringing on Levi’s trademarks have found themselves in the company’s crosshairs. At Rock & Republic, one of the country’s fastest-growing jeans makers, designers intentionally placed a cloth label on the right hand side of a back pocket, not the left, which would violate a Levi’s trademark.

Levi’s sued anyway, arguing its trademarks forbid placing such a label on a vertical seam of a back-pocket. During a tense, five-hour settlement discussion in San Francisco several weeks ago, the chief executive of Rock and Republic, Michael Ball, upbraided Levi’s lawyers for their aggressive tactics.

“I take it personally that you try to dictate how I design my jeans,” he recalled saying. Still, Mr. Ball said he agreed to stop placing the label on the vertical seam of a right-hand pocket for two years to avoid a drawn-out legal battle.

In an interview, Mr. Ball said his back-pocket stitching “was not remotely close to Levi’s” and that he agreed to a settlement, in part, because “I will get bored with that design soon anyway.”

Executives at Levi’s concede they missed important fashion trends as the denim industry ballooned over the last several years, but they deny the lawsuits are connected to any downturn in their business.

Instead, they say they are simply trying to preserve their intellectual property. Like pharmaceutical companies that sue generic drug makers over their patents or technology companies that duke it out over who owns the right to microchip designs, Levi’s says it is trying to protect its most valuable asset, its trademarks.

Clothing companies have battled counterfeiters and each other for decades over design trademarks. Lacoste has defended its alligator, Polo Ralph Lauren fights for its polo player and Nike fiercely protects its famous swoosh.

In that respect, Levi’s is no different. As far back as the 1970s, it sued the firm that made Wrangler jeans over the use of identifying tabs on clothing. “We protected our trademarks when business has been terrific and when it’s been difficult,” said Mr. Hanson.

Yet difficult only begins to describe Levi’s business today, after it failed to exploit the designer denim boom in what is widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles in the American clothing business. Levi’s sales have plummeted more than 40 percent since 1996 to $4.1 billion, forcing it to close dozens of factories and lay off nearly half of its workforce, or 7,600 employees, in the last five years.

The clothing company faced two major problems over the last decade. Its image and brand — button fly, rugged, and all-around bad-boy cool — was largely built for men, its jeans cut boxy and loose- fitting. At the same time, the company, which once distributed its jeans largely through department stores catering to the rich, had shifted into lower-priced retailers like J.C. Penney, Sears and Wal-Mart.

In the mid-1990s, though, the denim industry underwent a seismic shift as small upstarts began designing tight-fitting, feature-flattering women’s jeans and distributing them through luxury boutiques and department stores.

Women suddenly began snapping up jeans from manufacturers like 7 for All Mankind and True Religion that cost more than six times what Levi’s charged. Levi’s did not produce a premium denim line, Capital E, until just last year.

“The emergence of all this denim sold at astronomical prices simply passed them by,” said David Wolfe, creative director of the Doneger Group, a fashion consulting firm in Manhattan. “They should have jumped on the bandwagon but they did not even seem to see the bandwagon rolling, which amazed everyone in the fashion industry.”

The denim manufacturers who recognized the trend openly concede that Levi’s has served as an inspiration, if not template, for their products.

“Everyone is borrowing from them, it’s inevitable,” said Michael Silver, the founder of Silver Jeans, who has had several legal run-ins with Levi’s. “They should be happy that people are copying them,” he said.

But Levi’s is not flattered. “The value of the brand will become diluted if the marketplace becomes crowded with products with similar tabs or stitching to ours,” said Thomas M. Onda, a global intellectual property lawyer for Levi’s.

So employees at Levi’s keep walking into stores and scanning the racks for rivals who dare to stray to close its trademarks, as Steven Shaul, the founder and chief executive of Jelessy Jeans, learned when he slapped several intersecting arcs on a back pocket.

At the time, Mr. Shaul, who loves Levi’s and wears its jeans all the time, was confident his design bore no resemblance to the Levi’s trademark. “It was not even close,” said Mr. Shaul, whose jeans sell for between $200 and $400 a pair.

“It was an original design,” he said. “Why would I use Levi’s stitching? If my jeans sell for $200, I would not knock off $40 jeans from Levi’s.”

Nevertheless, Levi’s sued in 2005. “The first night after I was sued by them I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “The second night, no sleep again. Then I started talking to people in the industry and I realized, hey, everyone’s been sued by Levi.”

Relieved, he quickly settled the case, agreeing not to sell jeans with the offending stitches. “I did not even hire a lawyer,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/bu...rtner=homepage





Apple Ordered To Pay Legal Fees For Bloggers
Jason Lee Miller

A California court made it clear to Apple that if the company wanted to find out who leaked details of an in-development product to bloggers, they'd actually have to do it legally. That lesson cost the company almost $700,000 in legal fee reimbursement.

This drama begins in 2004, when Mac fan sites AppleInsider and PowerPage reported the technological details about a product codenamed "Asteroid." Apple sought the identity of the sources who leaked the information by filing suit against the bloggers, and subpoenaed their email records from email service provider Nfox.com. The company claimed that the reports violated California's trade secret laws.

A Santa Clara County court ordered Apple to pay the legal fees of their opponent this month, a development considered "a large moral victory for bloggers," according to Macnn.com.

The case brought up several important questions related to the status of the blogosphere: Do bloggers qualify as journalists? Can blogs be considered news sites? Does a private company have the right to suspend the protection of journalistic sources guaranteed by the First Amendment?

Though the court didn't actually qualify the bloggers as journalists, it was assumed that they were journalists for purposes of opinion, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who headed up the defense.

The EFF also convincingly maintained, based on the expert opinion of Professor Thomas Goldstein, former Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and of the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, that AppleInsider and PowerPage qualified as legitimate online news sites:

The publishers, editors and authors connected with Power Page and Apple Insider are engaged in trade journalism, bringing news to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

Further, Apple was prevented from accessing the email records of the defendants under the federal Stored Communications Act, which forbids ESPs from disclosing the contents of customers' emails and other electronic communications to private parties.

Though Apple claimed it had a right to protect its trade secrets, the EFF responded that the case wasn't about business rights, but about the means by which Apple can seek evidence. Subpoenaing journalist sources is not an acceptable means of discovery.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/to...rBloggers.html





Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False
David D. Kirkpatrick

Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

The Clinton-Obama article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics, the Iraq war or the Bush administration, including a widely discussed report on the Insight Web site that President Bush’s relationship with his father was so strained that they were no longer speaking to each other about politics.

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site.

“Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Mr. Kuhner’s ability to ignite a news media brush fire nonetheless illustrates how easily dubious and politically charged information can spread through the constant chatter of cable news commentary, talk radio programs and political Web sites. And at the start of a campaign with perhaps a dozen candidates hiring “research directors” to examine one another, the Insight episode may be a sign of what is to come.

To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.

With so much anonymity, “How do we know that Insight magazine actually exists?” Professor Whitehead added. “It could be performance art.”

But hosts of morning television programs and an evening commentator on the Fox News Network nevertheless devoted extensive discussion to Insight’s Clinton-Obama article, as did Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts.

And the Fox News rival MSNBC has picked up several of Insight’s other recent anonymous “scoops.” Among them: that Mr. Bush was afraid to fire his adviser Karl Rove because “he knows too much”; that there is a rift between President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the president’s support for Israel; and that Mr. Bush spent the months before the midterm elections in a bunker-mentality focused on the Iraq war and the elections to the exclusion of all else. Mr. Kuhner has appeared as a guest on both networks.

A spokesman for MSNBC declined to comment. Representatives of News World Communications, the arm of the Unification Church that owns Insight, could not be reached for comment on Sunday night.

Mr. Kuhner said, “Our report on this opposition research activity is completely accurate,” and he argued that all major news organizations relied on anonymous sources. Mr. Kuhner, in an editor’s note on Insight, said the Web site could not afford to “send correspondents to places like Jakarta to check out every fact in a story.” The Web site pays up to $800 for an article.

Mr. Kuhner said he was not yet convinced by reports from officials of the elementary school that Mr. Obama attended in Indonesia about its secular history. “To simply take the word of a deputy headmaster about what was the religious curriculum of a school 35 years ago does not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting,” he wrote.

Insight was founded two decades ago as a conservative print magazine called Insight on the News. It started the career of the journalist David Brock, who became famous for writing sensational magazine articles and books about Anita Hill and later Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Brock later recanted much of what he had written, and now runs a liberal media group dedicated to countering what it considers be conservative bias in the news media.

Insight had thousands of subscribers, but its reputation was checkered by its false reports, which included an assertion that President Bill Clinton was selling plots at Arlington National Cemetery to Democratic campaign donors, and, during the Bush administration, that Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction might have been found.

Officials of the Unification Church closed the print magazine about a year and a half ago, and tapped Mr. Kuhner to run it as a stand-alone Web site. He worked for three years, from 2000 through 2003, as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times. Before that, he was a history professor, but did not finish his dissertation. After leaving The Washington Times, he worked for a Republican policy group.

Mr. Kuhner said he insisted on editorial independence, reporting only to the board of New World Communications. Under his tenure, Insight’s Web site has claimed a series of anonymous scoops, many centered on the White House. In addition to the article about Mr. Bush’s feud with his father, there was also a January 2006 report that the United States was preparing for a covert attack on Iran and a February 2006 report that Vice President Dick Cheney would step down after the midterm elections.

Mr. Kuhner said Insight stopped using bylines to encourage contributions from reporters for major news organizations. He said such contributors could not write what they knew under their own names for their main employers, either for fear of alienating powerful sources or because of editors’ biases.

“Reporters in Washington know a whole lot of what is going on and feel themselves shackled and prevented from reporting what they know is going on,” Mr. Kuhner said. Insight, he said, “is almost like an outlet, an escape valve where they can come out with this information.”

“The team I have has some of the most seasoned, experienced reporters in this town, so I know the material I am getting is rock-solid.” he said. “The reporter has to give his or her word that, ‘It is solid, Jeff,’ ” Mr. Kuhner said.

During an interview, he invited this reporter to moonlight for Insight. “I will take a look at your work,” he said. “I will do a background check. You may get a call from me.” He declined to say where the contributor who offered the Clinton-Obama story worked.

“I said, ‘That is a sexy story, if you can confirm it,’ ” Mr. Kuhner recalled. After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/us...rtner=homepage





Newspapers Search for Web Headline Magic
Elinor Mills

On January 2, The Wall Street Journal Online posted a story with the headline: "Green Beans Comes Marching Home."

It happened to be an article about the Green Beans Coffee Co., which serves overseas U.S. military bases, opening its first cafe in the United States.

Let's say you were interested in the subject but didn't know the Journal had written an article on it. You might type into a search engine some combination of keywords like "Green Beans," "coffee," "U.S. military," "bases" and "soldiers." Various combinations failed to return a link to the article in the first page of results on Google. Using all of the keywords and terms separated like that did find the article, but not on The Wall Street Journal site. Instead, it was on a blog site that had reposted the article word for word.

The example points to the dilemma many newspapers and other print media find themselves in when posting articles online. Pithy, witty and provocative headlines--the pride of many an editor--are often useless and even counterproductive in getting the Web page ranked high in search engines. A low ranking means limited exposure and fewer readers.

News organizations that generate revenue from advertising are keenly aware of the problem and are using coding techniques and training journalists to rewrite the print headlines, thinking about what the story is about and being as clear as possible. The science behind it is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and it has spawned a whole industry of companies dedicated to helping Web sites get noticed by Google's search engine.

It's clearly having an impact.

In November, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked Boston.com, the sister Web site of The Boston Globe, as the fourth-most trafficked newspaper Web site in the country, even though its print circulation is ranked 15th by one audit bureau. "We're regularly beating the bigger boys, like the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal...and part of the reason is SEO," said David Beard, editor of Boston.com and former assistant managing editor of its print sibling, The Boston Globe.

"We have Web 'heds.' We go into the newspaper (production) system to create a more literal Web headline," said Beard. "We've had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper. It's been a big education initiative."

The Times Online, which is based in the United Kingdom and is a division of News Corp., gets anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of its traffic from search engines, said Times Online Publisher Zach Leonard. The site modifies headlines it imports onto the Web site from its print affiliates, The Times and The Sunday Times. The company also started training its editorial staff on SEO last summer and is investing in a new content management system that will launch with a new

"Nine to 12 months ago, if you said 'SEO' to most of the (news) team they would scratch their head. Now it's a part of their job," Leonard said. "We have to recognize that search is driving much of the behavior on the Web. Newspapers that don't understand that at the highest level, all the way up to the editors, simply won't exist."

The Wall Street Journal is a unique case. Most of its content is walled off from the public Internet and accessible only through subscription. This particular article was among the free content and visible to search engines.

To rank high in the search engines, the Journal headline should have included the term "coffee," "cafes," or even "Starbucks," said Stephan Spencer, founder and president of SEO firm Netconcepts.

"For one thing, 'green beans' isn't a terribly popular search term," he said. "Secondly, a fraction of those searchers will be looking for the coffee supplier; most will be looking for recipes." His suggested headline: "U.S. Military Coffee Supplier to take on Starbucks with Cafes Stateside."

That might seem a bit unwieldy to many journalists, but Spencer assures that a balance can be reached between being straightforward and fun. Newspapers are increasingly jumping on the SEO bandwagon to stay alive.

Spencer recommends that Web sites not only use keywords in the headline, but also include a more descriptive, keyword-rich version of the headline in the title tag, which appears in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window when looking at a Web page. He also suggests that Web sites use keywords in the anchor text, which is the underlined text in a hyperlink. A keyword carries more weight in search engines if it is located at the beginning of a headline, he said.

Other SEO tricks include frequently and consistently interlinking between related stories and items on a Web site and tagging the content accurately across the Web page, including changing headers and tabs on pages to mundane, rather than cleverly named, terms.

"The headline itself doesn't necessarily have to be modified if you know how SEO works," said Spencer.

Journalists can see how popular specific keywords are and get suggested alternatives by using Google's AdWords Keyword Tool or paid services like WordTracker.com or Keyword Discovery.com.

Inventive but direct
But consulting software and statistics to rewrite a headline may seem anathema to traditional journalistic standards of artistically stretching for the headline that will best lure readers' eyes to the article. That can be accomplished by being pithy (Ford to City: Drop Dead), poetic (Headless Body in Topless Bar), witty (Super Caley Go Ballistic. Celtic Are Atrocious), rhyming (Sticks Nix Hick Pix) or shocking (Bastards!). And no computer can help with that.

"A lot of journalists spend a lot of time perfecting headlines and being clever, and now you've got to be more direct. It's going to be a different art, I think," said Sree Sreenivasan, a teacher in the new media program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a reporter for WNBC.com.

"How do you get eye-catching, interesting headlines that make people want to click, but at the same time are relevant to search engines, which are nothing but dumb robots going around looking for keywords?" said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute, a training organization for journalists.

"If the search engine is all about making information more accessible and making the online experience more pleasant, I wish they would work with the people designing the pages," Finberg said. "A lot of sites have gotten into this...content management trap."

With the news sites all striving for clarity to be search engine stars there is the danger that sites covering the same news will have strikingly similar headlines. That just means headline writers have to work a little harder to make their headline stand out, experts said. But at least on the Web there are no real space limitations like on a print page, said Neil Chase, editor of continuous news for The New York Times.

"The flip side is if you look at a one-column lead story on page one of The New York Times it's really hard to find a headline to fit that space. It's a real art," Chase said. "You expand that to the space available on the Web site and you may come up with something more compelling with more words."

In a newspaper, the pictures and accompanying features, or sidebars, around the article can help give context to the story. For example, the infamous "Bastards!" headline the San Francisco Examiner ran on September 12, 2001, was accompanied by a large photo of the World Trade Center towers engulfed in flames. With the Web, there may not be photos or other indicators of what is being referenced in an obscure headline like that.

But that's part of the evolution of mass communications in a digital age.

"There's nothing doom and gloom about it," Chase of The New York Times said. "It's just one of the many changes in the industry."
http://news.com.com/Newspapers+searc...3-6155739.html





China Censorship Damaged Us, Google Founders Admit
Jane Martinson

Google's decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday.

Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its "Don't be evil" motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets.

Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: "On a business level, that decision to censor... was a net negative."

The company has only once expressed any regret and never in as strong terms as yesterday. Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe.

Last year in a speech in Washington Mr Brin admitted the company had been forced to compromise its principles to operate in China. At the time, he also hinted at a potential reversal of its stance in the country, saying "perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense".

From what was said yesterday a policy change seemed unlikely in the near future. Co-founder Larry Page said: "We always consider what to do. But I don't think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception."

Much of the harm had come from newspaper headlines, he said, which affected perception for most people, who then did not read the actual articles.

Since moving into China, Google has been compared to Microsoft because of its dominant position and power. "We are very sensitive to people talking about us in that way," said Mr Brin. Mr Page described the differences between the two technology companies by saying "we have very open partnerships, we are very clear about being fair with revenues."

Speaking about one of the hot topics of this year's meeting in Davos, Mr Brin said he had decided to offset his carbon emissions after growing concerned about his own use of private jets, despite not really being sure about the efficacy of such programmes. "I was concerned about my private jet travel and whatnot ... I wanted to offset it so I did."

Mr Brin said yesterday that he would feel a "bit better about it" by doing something "more specific" but declined to outline what that might be. The company's charitable arm, Google.org, takes an interest in the environment, they said. Both men are known to have driven fuel-efficient Toyota cars.

Exactly what is inside the two men's private jet, however, has become the stuff of dotcom legend after a legal spat between the holding company that owns the Boeing 767 and a designer hired to re-fit it, went public last summer. Documents published in US newspapers included plans for a lounge for Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, and two state rooms for the co-founders. There were also calls from the founders for hammocks to be hung from the ceiling of the plane.

Both founders yesterday offered some solace to the newspaper industry, which has been most threatened by the growth of online news providers. Larry Page said: "I believe in the future of newspapers," before admitting that he reads all his news online. His colleague said he read a Sunday newspaper "and it's nice".

Rather than suggest paid-for content was doomed, they called for a new model to collect revenues. "I should probably pay for the Wall Street Journal but I don't because it's a hassle," said Mr Page, who is worth billions. "I'm not worried about the money thing, it's just a hassle."
http://business.guardian.co.uk/davos...999994,00.html





Spanish Start-Up Whisher Promises Free Wi-Fi For All
Marguerite Reardon

A small Spanish start-up called Whisher is thumbing its nose at U.S. broadband providers as it prepares to launch a new service that lets people share their broadband connections via Wi-Fi.

Whisher, based in Barcelona and backed by Switzerland's leading phone company, Swisscom, and the venture firm Benchmark Capital, is one of several emerging start-ups that is taking broadband to the people by providing access through existing residential Wi-Fi networks.

Starting Tuesday, users can download the beta version of the company's software from its Web site. The service and software are free. Users aren't required to offer up their own Wi-Fi access to use other Wi-Fi networks around the world.

Wi-Fi, which uses unlicensed radio frequency technology for accessing the Internet, is a relatively cheap and ubiquitous technology. Not only is it embedded in almost every laptop shipped today, but mobile devices such as cell phones are also coming equipped with the technology.

While companies such as EarthLink are building new networks to blanket cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans with Wi-Fi signals, Whisher and Fon Wireless, another Spanish start-up, are banking on the willingness of large numbers of people to share their excess broadband with others. And just as Skype, another European start-up, challenged the established telephone companies by providing free Internet calling, Whisher also hopes to shake up the establishment by offering an easy way to share and access Wi-Fi for free.

"Either you believe in the user-generated revolution or you believe ISPs rule the world," said Ferran Moreno, co-founder and CEO of Whisher. "I believe ISPs don't rule the world and how the Internet works. If I am paying for my broadband, I have the right to share it with other people, as long as I am not reselling the service. And we are not reselling access."

Of course, there is one small snag in Moreno's utopian view of free Wi-Fi for everyone. In the U.S., it's illegal.

"Sharing broadband access outside of your dwelling is a violation of our subscriber agreement," said Maureen Huff, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable operator in the U.S. "We've taken steps as a company to inform our customers that passive or active theft of our services is illegal, and people who violate these agreements can be prosecuted on a criminal and civil basis."

Time Warner and other broadband providers such as Verizon Communications said it's rare that they have to take action against subscribers sharing their broadband service outside their home. When they become aware of such a situation, the broadband providers typically contact subscribers and remind them of the companies' policies. In 90 percent of the cases, users stop sharing their broadband, Huff said.

But representatives from each company said that if illegal sharing persists, the company takes action, which could result in users getting their service cut off or even facing prosecution.

"We don't actively police this," said Bobbi Henson, a spokeswoman for Verizon Communications. "But if we become aware of a situation, we will do something, especially if we see a degradation of service. We have a duty to our customers to keep an optimum level of service."

So far, broadband providers have not come down hard on other companies proposing to build free Wi-Fi networks that cobble together networks using existing Wi-Fi hot spots. But this could be because these networks are still relatively new, and their service models require additional equipment.

For example, Fon, based in Madrid, launched its service last year. Initially, the service required users to download software onto their existing Wi-Fi routers. The software on the routers then splits the Wi-Fi signals to provide a private network indoors and a public one outdoors. But downloading software onto a router proved too difficult for most users. In the fall, the company introduced the La Fonera router. The company has been giving away devices to spur adoption.

As of October, the company only had about 112,000 La Fonera and Fon-enabled routers registered as part of its network. Henson of Verizon said the company has seen little to no impact from Fon on its network so far.

Moreno believes Whisher's approach could be more successful, much faster than Fon's model. The main reason is that Whisher's solution is completely software-based. The company has developed peer-to-peer software that runs on any Linux, Mac or Windows machine and works over any Wi-Fi network. The software works by providing the necessary authentication registered users need to gain access to a particular Wi-Fi network. The company keeps a database of registered users and hot spots. When a user wants to connect to a Wi-Fi network, the software finds the best access point and automatically provides secure access to that network.

Whisher's solution is much more than providing free Internet access, Moreno said. The software also creates a wireless social network that allows users to send instant messages, share files and establish private and public micro-community networks using Wi-Fi hot spots. Members of the community are encouraged to tag, rate or leave comments about any wireless hot spot.

The interactive and social nature of the software also provides a lot of control to people sharing their Wi-Fi connection. Because all users are registered with Whisher, the person who owns the residential network can see which users are on his network at any given time. Users on the network can communicate with each other through IM. And if the network owner doesn't want someone using his connection, he has the option to block people trying to access his connection.

Like any other social network, Whisher's success is completely dependent on getting people to download the software and also to share their connections. Like Skype, which also uses peer-to-peer client software, Moreno believes that an easily downloadable client that provides free Internet access will have wide appeal.

But Henson of Verizon is skeptical that American broadband consumers will actually be willing to use other people's connections, even if it's free.

"Most people don't want to share their connection," she said. "They want to be able to call customer care when something goes wrong, and they don't want to have to rely on their neighbor as their Internet service provider."
http://news.com.com/Spanish+start-up...3-6154438.html





Hotels Must Mend Their Ways

"Wake up, it's the 21st century," says one supporter of silicon.com campaign...
Will Sturgeon

In its Fair Wi-fi campaign, silicon.com is urging hotels to stop ripping off customers with extortionate fees for wi-fi and internet access, and we have a huge weight of support behind us (sign our petition.

Influential figures from a broad spectrum of professions are all united behind silicon.com and our claim that rip-off prices for wireless internet access are not only unjustifiable but will stifle and restrict business.

Grant Shapps MP, vice chairman of the Conservative Party, told silicon.com it is worrying that the UK is the most notable offender with these rip-off charges, adding it could damage UK business.

Shapps said: "To keep the UK competitive it's vital business services are available at competitive rates. I congratulate silicon.com for taking the initiative of raising this important issue."

Big businesses certainly agree. Josh Claman, UK head of Dell, told silicon.com: "For business travellers, the ability and convenience of accessing the internet at every hotel they stay should be a given. Affordable, high-speed internet access is something business travellers rely on and it should be a basic service for guests. It should come as standard."

Even within the extended family of the hotel industry there is an awareness rip-off prices will come back to haunt it in the long run.

Tony Walsh, development director at bookings agent LateRooms.com, cited research that suggests wi-fi access is now more important to business travellers than leisure facilities such as a gym - the use of which is often covered by the room rate.

Walsh said: "Customers are currently held to ransom by expensive third-party wireless and broadband providers, and hotels could use free internet access as a major selling tool to business travellers. It is a fact that hotels offering this free service are more popular."

And end users, the ones most affected by rip-off charges which are proving a major obstacle to seamless connectivity, also say it is time for a change.

Arun Aggarwal, head of consulting practice (EMEA) at Tata Consultancy Services, added: "Hotels have to stop using this ridiculous 'minibar' approach to a service as essential as internet access.

"While I understand that hotels have overheads it seems the costs for making use of these facilities are at best disproportionate and at worst daylight robbery.

"Business travellers account for a significant proportion of many hotels' revenue-streams and, as such, should be treated as valued customers to be supported rather than 'cash cows' to be exploited at every opportunity."

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, offshoring director at The National Outsourcing Association, told silicon.com: "My work is seriously compromised if I am away on business or working during a conference in London and I can't get online - or to get online I have to pay an extortionate fee.

"It's about time the hotel industry realised almost all business travellers need wi-fi access as a basic utility that is factored into the room cost - just as the water and electricity use is.

"Wake up, it's the 21st century."
http://www.silicon.com/research/spec...9165300,00.htm





At Davos, the Squabble Resumes on How to Wire the Third World
John Markoff

Here in the Swiss mountains at the World Economic Forum, the annual conclave of world leaders, concerns over a growing digital divide this year have taken a back seat to the challenge of climate change.

Being out of the limelight, however, has not dimmed passions over what the best way is to deploy computers in the developing world. The controversy boiled over on Saturday at a breakfast meeting here where Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, squared off with Nicholas P. Negroponte, the former director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, whose nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child is trying to develop a low-cost computer for the 1.2 billion children in the developing world. His prototype XO computer is designed to sell for $100 by the end of 2008.

Intel has also contributed significant resources to the cause, including its own design for an inexpensive laptop computer, albeit one that is currently more expensive than Mr. Negroponte’s.

On Saturday, Mr. Barrett, speaking about Intel’s efforts to train teachers to use personal computers, said that it is impressive to see what students “are able to accomplish with some help from a teacher,” adding, “You can literally change people’s lives.”

But Mr. Negroponte suggested that Intel executives had engaged in a campaign to discourage world leaders from committing to purchasing his laptop systems. Mr. Negroponte also accused Intel of marketing its strategy to the developing world.

“Craig and I sometimes argue, and he called our thing a ‘gadget,’ ” Mr. Negroponte said, referring to the XO. “I’m glad to see he’s got his own gadget now. Craig has to look at this as a market, and I look at this as a mission.”

Other executives suggested the dispute was doing little to forge a common strategy to use computing to advance economic and educational development.

“I do hear marketing going back and forth between you,” said Michael J. Long, a senior vice president at Arrow Electronics, an industry components supplier. “We ought to concentrate on how we can help. The question is what can I do when I leave this room.”

The dispute between Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Barrett, who was formerly Intel’s chief executive and who is now chairman of the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communications Technologies and Development, covered both substance and philosophy at the annual digital divide meeting, which has been presented for three years by David Kirkpatrick, a columnist for Fortune magazine.

Also present at the meeting was Michael S. Dell, chairman of Dell Inc., as well as top executives from Sun Microsystems and Advanced Micro Devices.

Mr. Negroponte, who has quarreled publicly with both Microsoft and Intel executives in his quest to give simple portable machines to hundreds of millions of children, has long been known for his iconoclastic positions on economic development and education.

Recently at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, he introduced himself as the “good bin Laden” — a reference to the notion that his low-cost laptop is terrorizing some companies in the computer industry because of the possibility that it will transform markets for personal computers in the developing world.

At the Davos session, Mr. Barrett sketched out a four-point program for getting involvement from emerging economies including affordable hardware, low-cost data communications, local curriculum and educators.

In contrast, Mr. Negroponte offered a vision based on working through children. He attacked projects that instruct teachers and students how to use programs like Microsoft Office.

“I think they should be making music and playing and communicating,” he said. “It has to be a seamless part of their lives.”

Despite initially trying to persuade Intel to back his project, Mr. Negroponte has chosen to use a low-power processor from Advanced Micro in his laptop, which was being exhibited here at a hotel near the conference center where the annual World Economic Forum is held.

It is still not certain whether Mr. Negroponte will succeed in his crusade. At the meeting, he said he now has eight handshake agreements with heads of state, including the recent additions of Rwanda and Uruguay.

However, he has also said that he will not begin manufacturing the laptop in volume unless he has firm commitments from one country each in Asia, South America and Africa. Other countries that have expressed interest include Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria, Thailand, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Mexico.

During an interview here, he said he now expects firm commitments by March and for manufacturing to begin in April.

Despite his publicly combative stance with respect to Intel, Mr. Negroponte has apparently moved to patch up his disagreements with Microsoft, and a version of Windows may be available from governments that chose that software instead of the Linux that the One Laptop Per Child organization is developing.

One Laptop officials said that the computer might cost $10 to $20 more to run Windows, because of hardware support.

Separately at the meeting on Saturday, John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, proposed an industry plan to deploy advanced data networks in developing economies with contributions of engineering staff time of 1 percent.

Mr. Gage, who headed the NetDay project for connecting American schools to the Internet, said that rural areas in the developing world would cost as little as a $1,000 a kilometer, compared with $1 million to deploy a network over the same distance in New York City
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/bu...s/29cheap.html





In Politics, the Camera Never Blinks (or Nods)
Tom Zeller Jr.

BEYOND its fulfillment of a constitutional requirement, the president’s annual State of the Union address has come to provide much pomp. It’s a prime-time gala where Washington’s best and brightest gather for an evening in the media spotlight, and where the nation tunes in with varying degrees of interest, cynicism or boredom at the bloated spectacle of it all.

Oh, sure, there’s the actual speech itself. But generally speaking, the odds for climactic elements — for truly earth-moving, unexpected locutions — are so low as to be negligible.

Copies of the speech are customarily distributed to members of the news media ahead of time — on the condition, of course, that they not be published until after the president begins his delivery. But in the age of the Internet, even that handshake agreement between the press and president has broken down: Copies of the speech could be found at sites like the Drudge Report and ThinkProgress.org well before President Bush began his address shortly after 9 p.m. last Tuesday.

“We’ll start respecting White House embargoes when they start telling the truth,” wrote the editors at Think Progress.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Web gremlins would chuckle as the cameras panned the chamber Oscar-style last week and alighted on what appeared to be Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, a presumed candidate for the Republican nomination for president, in an unguarded moment of slumber.

It is, perhaps, also no surprise in the age of YouTube — where unscripted video clips have become political Molotov cocktails — that a “McCain sleeping” snippet was uploaded to the Internet and was being discussed and linked in short order.

Whether the original intent was political sabotage or simple humor is hard to say, but either way the clip went straight for Mr. McCain’s Achilles’ heel: his age. He is now 70 years old. By 2008, if elected, he would be the oldest president to move into the White House.

So a video of the elderly statesman appearing to doze during the president’s speech — and particularly during a portion of the speech where terrorism was being discussed — seemed to put questions of his fitness for office in stark relief.

And in that sense, the video brouhaha — a short-lived and misguided brouhaha, considering that he wasn’t sleeping after all — constitutes one of the first “macaca moments” of the 2008 campaign. It is also a sign that Mr. McCain — and every candidate who has, or will, throw a hat into the ring — will have a very, very long road ahead.

Now, for those who have been living under a rock, it was former Senator George Allen of Virginia who was caught on video last August referring to an opposition aide — who was of Indian descent — as “macaca,” a racial slur obscure to many Americans, but potent enough to have caused a media frenzy when the video hit the Internet. Mr. Allen was not re-elected.

Reasonable people can disagree on the extent to which that single incident was to blame for Mr. Allen’s defeat, but there was no question in anyone’s mind that the YouTube culture — in which every public moment can be clipped, cropped and distributed instantly across the globe by anyone at any time — had changed the rules of the game. As with the broken embargo on the State of the Union speech, there is no longer the default expectation that exposure can be managed. All bets are off.

The theory of Mr. McCain’s supposed nap got an early boost from Tucker Carlson of MSNBC, who was blogging the speech live at hardblogger.msnbc.msn.com.

“If you’re McCain, who will be over 70 by 2008, you’ll want to make doubly sure to demonstrate your alertness and vigor,” Mr. Carlson wrote just after 10 p.m. Tuesday. “You definitely won’t want to slump in your seat, out cold, when Bush starts talking about Iraq. And yet that’s exactly what McCain did tonight, napping on camera for 10 agonizing seconds.”

On Wednesday morning, the Drudge Report carried the headline “McCain Eyes Wide Shut During Bush Speech,” along with a link to a “Sleepy Senator John McCain” video clip that had been uploaded to YouTube (and is still available of this writing: snipurl.com/McCain). It shows Mr. McCain in a straight-on shot, sitting in the crowded chamber, chin to chest, with eyes that appear to be closed.

David All, who runs the David All Group, a Washington firm focusing on developing new-media strategies for Republican campaigns, theorized at his Web site, davidallgroup.com, that the original uploader — a user going by the sobriquet monzsca — was not likely a political operative himself, but rather someone who simply thought the clip was funny. Mr. All suggests, however, that others seeking to damage Mr. McCain saw an opportunity.

“Though the clip was not created by an opposing campaign, it was probably identified by at least one of those campaigns as a tool to swipe at McCain to help make the argument that McCain is ‘too old’ to be president, and passed it along to Drudge,” Mr. All wrote on Thursday, in a deconstruction of the “Sleepy John” affair.

“Whether he meant to or not, the YouTube user created a video that went viral, amplified by a coveted Drudge link,” he wrote, “and is now getting a lot of front page treatment on a popular Web community, YouTube.”

From Drudge, the clip and the discussion bounced around the blog circuit (including the Screens blog here at The Times as well as my own Times blog, The Lede), as did a swell of countervailing evidence, which ultimately won the day: it seems that Mr. McCain was, like just about everyone else in attendance that night, simply glancing down at his copy of the speech and reading along.

Mr. All gives high praise to swift action by McCain operatives, who uploaded a separate YouTube video showing a perky Senator McCain applauding heartily during the speech (snipurl.com/Hearty). They also pointed bloggers to links of a video montage — prepared by the folks at The Hotline’s On Call blog — demonstrating that others who were gathered in the House chamber that night, while clearly reading something in their laps, also appeared to be napping if shot at some angles (snipurl.com/ReadClips).

It was good political gamesmanship, and the thrust and parry provide an object lesson in the power of Internet video, particularly in the political arena. A candidate, an elected official, even a journalist who remains ignorant of this weapon — how to handle it, how to know when it has been unleashed and from what direction — proceeds at a certain peril.

Of course, even one’s best efforts at damage control may go unappreciated.

Said one commenter at Mr. All’s site: “Asleep or not, McCain et al. forgot one of the maxims of modern politics: When cameras are in the room, keep your head up and smile.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/te...gy/29link.html