Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 28th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"There is no question. Google would tell you that going into China is about making money, not bringing democracy." – John Palfrey


































Masters of Light

What makes an image resonate with the public? Is it context, content, asymmetry? Why do some become classic while others elicit no more than a quick look? The aesthetic value must trigger an emotional response but how much of that response is shaped by events outside the frame? Perhaps a lot after all. This week we’ve been given an astonishing image from the Nation’s Capital that at first glance is nothing more than two girls with lowered eyes and a man at a podium. That the girls are wearing simple clothes while the man is draped in what befits the powerful, and that the girls are out of focus while the man is at the center of light and attention adds weight to the drama, for though the man is commanding, even demanding respect, the girls have their backs turned to him in a most deliberate way, and whatever he’s doing he has clearly lost the approval of these two. This is plain without context, but the story behind the image makes it remarkable.

The man happens to be the attorney general of the United States and the girls are law students at Georgetown University. The AG is telling the students that warrantless spying on American citizens is a justifiable expansion of presidential powers and the students are having none of it. Not with shouts or smoke bombs or other disruptive behaviors do they signal their contempt, but by an age old and socially devastating maneuver: they are shunning him, and it is this the picture clearly transmits.

Already the image and the story are stirring strong emotions across the country, and whether this becomes like other legendary pictures something that fosters great change remains to be seen but make no mistake; the power of an image combined with the ability to instantly and widely distribute it has altered political discourse in a profound sense and changed the way we view ourselves. It has become part of the very fabric we use to create our sense of self.

That it happens free of the constraints of the traditional big media news channels controlled by a handful of companies in league with an establishment that brokers no change except that which feeds its’ ever growing gluttony leaves us with hope for a future that has increasingly seemed bleak.

It is a future shifting in other ways as well. This week Canada saw a legislator brought down by her alliance with that same big media. When pressed, the voters choose ejection over capitulation, ousting pro-industry shill Sam Bulte from a seat she thought secure enough that she contemptuously used it in a series of strident and bizarre campaign speeches that bolstered foreign recording conglomerates while demonizing some mysterious "pro-user zealots" and her own local community of voters.

Perhaps all it really takes is a little light to sway such a voter. Law professor and copyright blogger Michael Geist, whose capsules and links have appeared in the Week in Review for years, did exemplary work illuminating Bulte’s shadowy connections to the industry, which she herself clumsily amplified when her increasingly shrill denials of professional compromise arrived simultaneously with speeches she plagiarized from the very record companies she was claiming independence from.

The light that burned Sam Bulte can shine just as hotly here, or anywhere for that matter where exists a democracy endangered by this devilish pact between corporations buying and lawmakers selling out their constituents, which incredibly seems to be just about everywhere now.

Canada becomes the place that at last provides us with the evidence we need to show that unholy allegiances to media conglomerates lead directly to failure in office and loss at the polls. This is powerful ammunition for the global "pro-user zealots" community and deserves a fitting celebration. If we can’t see the fireworks yet it’s only because they’re so big it’s taking longer to hoist them aloft, but when they do explode their impact and their brilliance will be that much more amazing.
















Enjoy,

Jack.
















January 28th, ‘06





Goodbye Sam Bulte
p2pnet

And that says it all, for Canada at least.

Yesterday saw the Liberals tossed out and the Conservatives eased in as Canada's latest election closed with another minority government slated to take power.

The elections also saw the NDP's Peggy Nash trounce entertainment cartel hopeful Hollywood Sam Bulte, a Liberal with designs on taking the Parkdale-High Park riding – with a little help from her friends in show biz.

Bulte was selected by the movie and music industries to represent them in the new parliament. But thanks largely to the Net and bloggers, with Ottawa law professor Michael Geist to the fore, Canadians clearly showed they didn't want another vested interest candidate in Ottawa.

Cartel favourite Liza Frulla, the Liberal heritage minister, also lost her seat. She's replaced by the Bloc's Thierry St-Cyr.

Not at all incidentally, Geist suggests it's time for all Canadian MPs to take the pledge – the Copyright Pledge.

No Member of Parliament who has accepted financial contributions or other benefits from (i) a copyright lobby group, (ii) its corporate members, or (iii) senior executives as well as (iv) a copyright collective shall serve as Minister of Canadian Heritage or as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, nor sit on any legislative committee (parliamentary or standing committees) conducting hearings or deliberations on copyright matters.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7706





British Parliament Attacked Using WMF Exploit
Tom Espiner

The British Parliament was attacked late last year by hackers who tried to exploit a recent serious Microsoft Windows flaw, security experts confirmed on Friday.

MessageLabs, the e-mail-filtering provider for the U.K. government, told ZDNet UK that targeted e-mails were sent to various individuals within government departments in an attempt to take control of their computers. The e-mails harbored an exploit for the Windows Meta File vulnerability.

The attack occurred over the Christmas period and came from China, said Mark Toshack, manager of antivirus operations at MessageLabs, who added that the e-mails were intercepted before they reached the government's systems.

"The attack definitely came from China--we know that because we log the IP addresses. The U.K. Government was targeted but none (of the e- mails) got through. No one was affected. They were attacked, but they (the government) didn't know about it until we told them," Toshack said.

The vulnerability with the way that WMF images are handled by Windows was discovered in November 2005. In a WMF attack, exploit code is hidden within a seemingly normal image that can be spread via e-mail or instant messages.

The first exploit code targeting the flaw was detected on Dec. 29, but Microsoft did not issue a patch until Jan. 5, after a security researcher released his own unofficial patch.

The British parliament attack occurred on the morning of Jan. 2, before Microsoft's official patch was available. The hackers tried to send e-mails that used a social-engineering technique to lure people into opening an attachment containing the WMF/Setabortproc Trojan horse.

The Trojan, had it been downloaded, would have allowed the attackers to view files on the PC. The hackers may also have been able to install keylogging malicious software, said Toshack, enabling attackers to see classified government passwords.

The attack was individually tailored and sent to 70 people in the government, MessageLabs said. It played on people's natural curiosity by purporting to come from a government security organization. The Trojan was hidden as an attachment called "map.wmf".

The body text of one of the e-mails read:

"Attached is the digital map for you. You should meet that man at those points separately. Delete the map thereafter. Good luck. Tommy"

The hackers could have been successful if the e-mails had reached their destinations, said Toshack. "It's like something you get from 'Spooks'--you can think 'I'm suddenly an MI5 agent.' You can see how it could work--it plays on people's romanticism about spies," Toshack suggested.

Speaking last November, Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute, claimed that the Chinese government was employing malicious hackers.

"Of course it's the government. Governments will pay anything for control of other governments' computers. All governments will pay anything. It's so much better than tapping a phone," Paller said.

Toshack could not confirm whether the Chinese government had been involved. "It is a Chinese hacker gang. I don't know if it is the Chinese government, and I don't know if it's the Chinese government paying a hacker gang," he said.

According to a Home Office source, the U.K. government is concerned about the threat posed by Trojan attacks. A Home Office representative would not confirm or deny that an attack took place over Christmas.

"We do not comment on security matters, but have had discussions with many governments and computer emergency response teams from around the world on the matter of targeted Trojan attacks," the Home Office representative told ZDNet UK.

The attempted attack on Parliament was first reported by The Guardian last week.
http://news.com.com/British+parliame...3-6029691.html





MPAA Finds Itself Accused Of Piracy
John Horn

The Motion Picture Assn. of America, the leader in the global fight against movie piracy, is being accused of unlawfully making a bootleg copy of a documentary that takes a critical look at the MPAA's film ratings system.

The MPAA admitted Monday that it had duplicated "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" without the filmmaker's permission after director Kirby Dick submitted his movie in November for an MPAA rating. The Hollywood trade organization said that it did not break copyright law, insisting that the dispute is part of a Dick-orchestrated "publicity stunt" to boost the film's profile.

Scheduled to debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Wednesday night, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" examines what Dick believes are the MPAA's stricter standards for rating explicit depictions of sex than for gruesome violence. Dick also explores whether independent films are rated more harshly than studio films, whether scenes of gay sex are restricted more than scenes of straight sex, and why the 10 members of the MPAA's ratings board operate without any public accountability.

Michael Donaldson, a lawyer representing Dick, has written the MPAA demanding that it "immediately return all copies" of the film in its possession, and explain who approved the making of the copy and who within the MPAA has looked at the reproduction.

Dick said he was "very upset and troubled" to discover during a recent conversation with an MPAA lawyer that the MPAA had copied the film from a digital version he submitted Nov. 29 for a rating. ("This Film Is Not Yet Rated" was rated NC-17 for "some graphic sexual content," a rating upheld after Dick appealed.) The MPAA's copy of Dick's film was viewed by Dan Glickman, the MPAA's new president, the MPAA said.

The filmmaker said that when he asked MPAA lawyer Greg Goeckner what right his organization had to make the copy, Goeckner told him that Dick and his crew had potentially invaded the privacy of the MPAA's movie raters.

"We made a copy of Kirby's movie because it had implications for our employees," said Kori Bernards, the MPAA's vice president for corporate communications. She said Dick spied on the members of the MPAA's Classification and Rating Administration, including going through their garbage and following them as they drove their children to school.

"We were concerned about the raters and their families," Bernards said. She said the MPAA's copy of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is "locked away," and is not being copied or distributed.

The standard the MPAA is using for itself appears to be at odds with what the organization sets out for others: "Manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owners is illegal," the MPAA's website says. "Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple…. ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences."

Donaldson said in an interview that the MPAA previously had promised in writing that it would not copy the film, but an e-mail exchange does not completely support that claim.

Donaldson added that while he is not planning at this time to sue the MPAA for copyright infringement, he reserved the possibility of filing a lawsuit later. "It's my practice and style to wait and see what they do, go over all of our options, and then make a decision," he said.

Dick, who was nominated for an Academy Award for 2004's documentary feature "Twist of Faith," said in an interview that his film crew acted appropriately in tracking down and identifying the anonymous members of the movie ratings board. But even if he didn't "follow all the rules," Dick said, "I don't know how that allows somebody else to break the law."

Bernards said the MPAA has made copies of other films submitted for ratings, but did not identify any by name.

When Dick submitted his film for a rating, he asked in an e-mail for assurances that "no copies would be made of any part or all of the film," according to a copy of the e-mail exchange.

In a reply e-mail, an MPAA representative did not specifically say the organization wouldn't copy the film, but did say "the confidentiality of your film ... is our first priority. Please feel assure (sic) that your film is in good hands."

The MPAA's Bernards, who said Glickman was unavailable for comment, said the organization was operating lawfully when it copied Dick's movie without his or his producer's authorization. "The courts recognize that parties are entitled to make a copy of a work for use as evidence in possible future proceedings," she said.

The MPAA has not brought any legal actions against Dick, but did call the police when the movie raters complained about being stalked and were worried about their safety. The raters had no idea they were being followed as part of a documentary.

Donaldson said he was unaware of any legal cases that supported the MPAA's position.

One expert on intellectual property and copyright law said that while he was unfamiliar with any cases specifically addressing the issue, the MPAA's argument might work.

"You can't make a copy as a general matter, but you can if you meet several tests," said Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School. It helps the MPAA, Lemley said, that it is not selling the copy of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" for commercial gain.

Dick "is right to say you can't make a single copy unless you have a legitimate defense," Lemley said. "But it seems that in this case, [the MPAA] may have a legitimate defense."
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedi...83,print.story





Seven Admit Copying Star Wars DVD

Seven Star Wars fans have admitted copying Revenge of the Sith a week before its cinema release.

They admitted piracy charges after copying and passing a DVD copy of the movie among them last May.

The six US men and one woman also pleaded guilty to criminal conduct in allowing an eighth person to obtain the film and upload it onto the internet.

They each face a maximum penalty of a $100,000 (£56,000) fine and one year in jail when sentenced on 12 April.

Copyright law

Prosecutors said 28-year-old Albert Valente took a copy of George Lucas's final Star Wars movie from a post-production facility in Los Angeles last May.

It was then passed to Jessie Lumada, 28, Ramon Valdez, 30, Michael Fousse, 42, Dwight Wayne Sityar, 27, Stephani Gima, 25, and Joel De Sagun Dimaano, 33. All seven are from Los Angeles County.

Mr Dimaano then passed a copy to work colleague Marc Hoaglin, 28, from Huntington Beach, who last month admitted putting a copy on the internet.

New US laws make uploading a film before its DVD release a federal crime. Mr Hoaglin is due to be sentenced in March.

Hollywood studios said movie piracy cost the film industry $3.5bn (£1.95bn) per year.

"We are glad to see the Star Wars thieves brought to justice," the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement.

"Stealing copyrights is a serious problem, and the theft and illegal distribution of Revenge of the Sith was a glaring example of how the actions of dishonest people can cheat the movie-watching experience."

Revenge of the Sith went on to take $848.5m (£474.6m) at the global box office.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4650956.stm





Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law
Ed Felten

If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about it.

So I emailed the company that sells VEIL and asked for a copy of the specification. I figured I would be able to get it. After all, the bill would make compliance with the VEIL spec mandatory — the spec would in effect be part of the law. Surely, I thought, they’re not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they’re not going to say that the citizenry isn’t allowed to know what’s in the law that Congress is considering. We’re talking about television here, not national security.

After some discussion, the company helpfully explained that I could get the spec, if I first signed their license agreement. The agreement requires me (a) to pay them $10,000, and (b) to promise not to talk to anybody about what is in the spec. In other words, I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it.

Worse yet, this license covers only half of the technology: the VEIL decoder, which detects VEIL signals. There is no way you or I can find out about the encoder technology that puts VEIL signals into video.

The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret.

Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=958





Major Piracy Bust Against Top Providers
Thomas Mennecke

In the ongoing effort against movie piracy, top providers have become gleaming target. Largely responsible for introducing highly sought after material, top providers are a highly competitive entity that prioritize public recognition over associated risks. Earlier this morning, several top warez providers found themselves shut down at the hands of local police and the entertainment industry.

At approximately 10 AM, local police in a wide spread coordinated effort raided over 300 homes and offices associated with top warez providers. The raids took place in Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic. According to GVU (translated to German Federation Against Copyright Theft), over 30 individuals were arrested in the raids.

The raids also yielded over 20 servers, which provided FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to individuals belonging to the release groups. GVU claims the warez groups were responsible for the proliferation "of illegal copies of films, computer games, music and user software." The enforcement raids were the culmination of the GVU's investigative efforts, with legal follow-through provided by the prosecutor's offices in Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

Rumors of the bust began circulating online today, as members attempted to warn each other. According to warning notices online, the following top providers have, for all intents and purposes, been eliminated; RELOADED, KNIGHTS, TFCiSO, Cinemaniacs, German-Friend, ParadieseBeach and Klapsmuehle. In addition, the leader of RELOADED was reported as arrested during the raids. The GVU confirmed the following release groups were eliminated; Unreality, DRAGON, Laboratory, Heaven, code talk, GTR, ECP, TRCD, AOS, MRM, SITH, GWL, Cine VCD, AHE, Cinemaniacs.

The pursuit of top providers is a primary concern to the entertainment industry, as the proliferation of pirated material often begins with these organizations. From these FTP sources, pirated material (especially movies) trickle down to the Newsgroups, IRC, BitTorrent and finally P2P networks. Initially, these raids may place a damper on spread of pirated material, however the allure of public recognition is simply too great for many to avoid. With time, their role in the online warez community will most likely be replaced.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1065





Blackberry Blackout Threat Leaves CEOs Aghast
Carmel Crimmins

It's not the sub-zero temperatures that have the corporate kingpins shivering in Davos this year but the prospect of life without their "Blackberry."

After Angelina Jolie, the wireless portable e-mail device is the thing every business leader wants by his side at the annual World Economic Forum, where hundreds of chief executives, dozens of heads of state and the odd celebrity couple gather to discuss world woes and corporate trends.

The hi-tech gadgets are an essential tool for staying in touch with the office and the world while negotiating the waves of interviews and meetings held during the five-day jamboree.

But the chance of a Blackberry-less future at next year's Davos summit loomed large this week when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a major patent infringement ruling against maker Research In Motion Ltd.

Now, a federal judge could issue an injunction to block RIM's U.S. business.

"It's just nuts. The idea that someone is just going to switch it off in three or four weeks, even if it's only in the United States, is crazy," Peter Levene, chairman of the Lloyd's of London insurance market, told Reuters.

"Everybody has adapted their working habits to it. If you close it off at a stroke the damage could be colossal."

William Parrett, chief executive officer of Deloitte, USA, agreed that the Blackberry, nicknamed the "Crackberry" for its addictive allure, was a vital business tool, particularly for keeping communications and business lines open during a disaster.

"It would be a significant blow. We made sure all our people had handheld devices at the time of 9/11 because it was the only communications tool we had," Parrett told Reuters.

The legal battle over Blackberry goes back to 2002 when NTP successfully sued RIM for using its patents.

Most Blackberry users are hoping RIM will pay what some say could be as much as a billion dollars to settle with patent-holding company NTP Inc or else develop alternative technology.

"There is too much money at stake. At some point, somebody will blink and work out a compromise," David Rubenstein, founder of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, told Reuters.

"If not, there will be plenty of competitors to Blackberry to fill the lacuna."

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler)
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...CKBERRY-DC.XML





Microsoft To Open Windows To Please EU
Aoife White

Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will license its Windows source code to comply with a European Union antitrust ruling.

The source code provides the building blocks of the operating system that competitors need to make products compatible with Windows.

The company's chief counsel Brad Smith said called the move "a bold stroke."

Microsoft has refused to license the source code in the past. Software developers still will have to pay for the code, which open source advocates will not be allowed to "publish for free," Smith cautioned. The company had "just started to provide this information on both sides on the Atlantic" and regulators "want to see all the details," Smith added.

In March 2004, the EU executive levied a record euro497 million ($613 million) fine against Microsoft, ordered it to share code with rivals and offer an unbundled version of Windows without the Media Player software for what the court saw as an abuse of the company's dominant position in the industry.

Last month, the European Commission threatened to fine Microsoft up to euro2 million ($2.36 million) a day backdated to Dec. 15 for failing to obey, saying the software giant was proving intransigent about sharing data with competitors.

Microsoft has launched a legal challenge that will be heard by the European Court of First Instance on April 24-28. The court - the second-highest in the European Union - stressed that the dates for the hearing were provisional and could still be changed.

Smith told a news conference he was "confident" of winning the case.

Earlier, the EU had repeated its complaints that Microsoft was not complying with its demands.

"Microsoft is not disclosing complete and accurate interface information to allow non-Microsoft workgroup servers to receive full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers," said EU spokesman Jonathan Todd.

He said EU regulators took note that the U.S. Department of Justice was also claiming that Microsoft was failing to provide the technical information asked for in a DOJ settlement.

In December, Microsoft said the EU Commission was trying to undermine its Windows operating system with ever-more-drastic demands for technological transparency, and that it would contest the measure under EU law.

Todd said this was untrue. "We are not moving the goalposts as has been suggested," he said. "We are not changing our demands."

"The Commission's position is that Microsoft is obliged to comply with the remedies imposed in the Commission's March 2004 decision - nothing more, nothing less."

Todd stressed that the final word on whether Microsoft is meeting the terms of the EU antitrust order "rests in the first place with the Commission and not Microsoft."

Microsoft claims the EU demands on opening up its software specifications would also open the door to the cloning of the company's core product, the ubiquitous Windows operating system.

The company has until Feb. 15 to formally answer the complaint. It planned to make a statement to reporters later Tuesday.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Bad day for Beijing

Google: China Decision Painful But Right
Ben Hirschler

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin said his company's decision to self-censor its Chinese search system followed a change of heart over how best to foster the free flow of information.

Google said on Tuesday it will block politically sensitive terms on its new China search site and not offer e-mail, chat and blog publishing services, which authorities fear can become flashpoints for social or political protest. Those actions go further than many of its biggest rivals in China.

"I didn't think I would come to this conclusion -- but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see," Brin told Reuters in an interview in Switzerland.

Google, whose high-minded corporate motto is "Don't be evil," had previously refused to comply with Internet censorship demands by Chinese authorities, rules that must be met in order to locate business operations inside China -- the world's No. 2 Internet market.

"I know a lot of people are upset by our decision but it is something we have deliberated for a number of years," Brin said from the sidelines of the World Economic Forum conference.

At least for now, Google will offer just four of its core services in China -- Web site and image search, Google News and local search.

The voluntary concessions laid out on Tuesday by Google parallel some of the self-censorship already practised there by global rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as domestic sites.

"There is no question. Google would tell you that going into China is about making money, not bringing democracy," John Palfrey, author of a study on Chinese Internet censorship and a law professor at Harvard Law School, on Google's action.

"The practical matter is that over the last couple of years Google in China was censored -- not by us but by the government, via the 'Great Firewall,'" said Brin. "It's not something I enjoy but I think it was a reasonable decision."

In different political circumstances, Google already notifies users of its German and French search services when it blocks access to material such as banned Nazi sites in Europe.

"France and Germany require censorship for Nazi sites, and the U.S. requires censorship based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). These various countries also have laws on child pornography," he said.

The DCMA law requires U.S. Internet service providers to block access to Web sites violating copyrights on materials such as music or movies.

"I totally understand that people are upset about it and I think that is a reasonable point of view to take," Brin said of Google's compromise in China.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)
http://today.reuters.co.uk/News/News...-INTERVIEW.XML





In Case About Google's Secrets, Yours Are Safe
Adam Liptak

The Justice Department went to court last week to try to force Google, by far the world's largest Internet search engine, to turn over an entire week's worth of searches. The move, which Google is fighting, has alarmed its users, enraged privacy advocates, changed some people's Internet search habits and set off a debate about how much privacy one can expect on the Web.

But the case itself, according to people involved in it and scholars who are following it, has almost nothing to do with privacy. It will turn, instead, on serious but relatively routine questions about trade secrets and civil procedure.

The privacy debate prompted by the case may thus be an instance of the right answer to the wrong question. As recently demonstrated by disclosures of surveillance by the National Security Agency and secret inquiries under the USA Patriot Act, the government is aggressively collecting information to combat terror. And even in ordinary criminal prosecutions and in civil lawsuits, Internet companies including Google routinely turn over authentically private information in response to focused warrants and subpoenas from prosecutors and litigants.

But "this particular subpoena does not raise serious privacy issues," said Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia. "These records are completely disconnected. They're just strings of words."

In its only extended discussion of its reasons for fighting the subpoena, a Google lawyer told the Justice Department in October that complying would be bad for business. "Google objects," the lawyer, Ashok Ramani, wrote, "because to comply with the request could endanger its crown-jewel trade secrets."

Mr. Ramani's five-page letter mentioned privacy only once, at the bottom of the fourth page, and then primarily in the context of perception rather than reality.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services," he wrote. "This is not a perception that Google can accept."

Even Google's allies are shying away from legal arguments based on privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, said it planned to file papers supporting Google. But not on privacy grounds. "We will probably not be making that argument," said Aden J. Fine, a lawyer with the civil liberties union.

The issues raised by the new subpoena, while substantial, are fairly technical, according to Professor Wu. "The legal point here is what is the relevancy standard for subpoenas?" he said. "That is interesting to procedure scholars but to no one else."

Other Internet search engine companies, including Yahoo, America Online and MSN, have complied with the same Justice Department subpoena, which also sought a random sample of a million Web addresses. The companies all said there were no privacy issues involved.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, agreed. "We specifically stated in our requests," he said, "that we did not want the names, or any other information, regarding the users of Google."

None of this is to say that subpoenas for search records linked to individuals are inconceivable. Google maintains information that could be used that way, and a subpoena could ask for it. But the recent subpoena does not.

The problem with the subpoena, Mr. Fine said, is more general. "This is another instance of government overreaching," he said.

The government says it needs Google's information to defend a challenge from the civil liberties union to a 1998 law, the Child Online Protection Act, which makes it a crime to make "material that is harmful to minors" commercially available on the Web. The law was enjoined by a federal court in Philadelphia before it became effective, and it has never been enforced.

In 2004, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the injunction, ruling that filtering devices may work as well or better than criminal prosecutions in achieving the law's aims of keeping some offensive materials away from children, and it sent the case back for a trial to explore that question.

At a trial scheduled to start in October, the government will try to prove that filters are ineffective. Philip B. Stark, an expert retained by the government and a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a court filing that the Web addresses and search terms sought from Google and other Internet companies would help him "to measure the effectiveness of content filters."

The government apparently wants to show that real-world searches will pull up offensive materials that filters will not catch. Why it needs Google to do that is unclear, and Professor Stark declined a request for an interview, citing the pending litigation.

Google has not yet filed a response in court, and it has not discussed the case publicly beyond a brief statement citing government overreaching. Its fullest explanation of its position was in Mr. Ramani's letter in October.

Google objected, Mr. Ramani said, because the fit between what the government seeks and what it seeks to prove is poor. He also said that collecting and providing the information was burdensome and that the government could find it elsewhere.

Mr. Ramani did say that "one could envision scenarios" where Internet searches alone could reveal private information, but he provided no examples. But Google's main argument was that its "highly proprietary" trade secrets could be jeopardized.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group that has frequently been critical of Google, said the trade- secrets argument was a serious one.

In other contexts, Google and other Internet companies say they are serious about protecting privacy. But their privacy policies acknowledge that they will comply with valid requests from the government and private litigants. Google's policy, for instance, says it may share users' personal information if it has "a good faith belief" that disclosure "is reasonably necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable government request." Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, said in an interview that the company "complies with valid legal process."

According to a 2004 decision of a federal court in Virginia, America Online alone responds to about 1,000 criminal warrants each month. AOL, Google and other Internet companies also receive subpoenas in divorce, libel, fraud and other types of civil cases. With limited exceptions, they are required by law to comply.

Ms. Wong said Google tried to notify users so they could object in court before the company turned over information about them. But the law forbids such notification in some criminal cases.

Even notification can be small comfort. It means a user must quickly and often at considerable expense find a lawyer and try to persuade a court to quash the subpoena. But the law often offers very limited protection for personal information held by third parties.

That approach no longer makes sense, said Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University. "In the information age," he said, "so much of our information is in the hands of third parties."

Mr. Rotenberg said Internet search records, if collected and linked to individuals, could give rise to a particularly profound invasion of privacy. "It's kind of the shadow of the thoughts within your head — your interests, your desires, your hobbies, your fears," he said.

The situation is more complicated outside the United States. Internet companies have complied with local laws, as they must to do business abroad. Yahoo, for instance, provided information that helped China send a journalist there to prison for 10 years on charges of leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site.

Still, the current subpoena to Google, legal experts said, has given rise to an important debate, whether the facts of the case are apt or not.

"It allows us to have a national dialogue about whether current privacy protections are adequate," said Susan P. Crawford, a specialist in Internet law at the Cardozo Law School. Even if the Justice Department is not seeking private information now, she said, "the next subpoena could ask for that kind of data."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/te...rtner=homepage





Paper Closes Reader Comments on Blog, Citing Vitriol
Katharine Q. Seelye

The Washington Post stopped accepting reader comments on one of its blogs yesterday, saying it had drawn too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail directed at the paper's ombudsman.

The closing was the second time in recent months that a major newspaper has stopped accepting feedback from readers in a Web forum. An experiment in allowing the public to edit editorials in The Los Angeles Times lasted just two days in June before it was shut because pornographic material was being posted on the site.

The Post's blog, which had accepted comments from readers on its entries since it was first published on Nov. 21, stopped doing so indefinitely yesterday afternoon with a notice from Jim Brady, executive editor of www.washingtonpost.com.

Mr. Brady wrote that he had expected criticism of The Post on the site, but that the public had violated rules against personal attacks and profanity.

"Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being," Mr. Brady wrote. "Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about."

In an interview, Mr. Brady said the site had been overwhelmed with what he described as vicious personal attacks against Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman.

She wrote a column about Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion, and said that several Democrats "have gotten Abramoff campaign money," apparently intending to say that they received campaign money from Mr. Abramoff's clients.

Her column generated complaints, and after saying she thought her views were being misrepresented, she was attacked again, prompting her to say she would not post any more replies.

The complaints escalated into what Mr. Brady said were unprintable comments that started "sucking up the time of two people" to keep them from appearing on the blog.

"We were taking them out by the hundreds," he said. "It was just too much to handle."

He added that he believed that the problem was "more issue-based than site-based," noting that The Post has more than two dozen other blogs where no such thing occurs. "This particular issue has inflamed the far left, and it seems to be something they've decided they'll fight," he said.

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of Salon.com, an online newsmagazine that allows open comment from the public, said that The Post had probably drawn such attacks to its site in part because it represents the mainstream media.

"While we're an established news organization, we're not 'the establishment,' " she wrote in an e-mail message, noting that Salon has had to take down only a handful of comments since its blog went live three months ago. In both the Post and Los Angeles Times cases, she wrote, "there was an element of novelty and rebellion and being able to talk back to 'the man.' "

Still, she said, "I think it's a shame that neither organization saw it through, because I think the more obnoxious comments would have died down, and they'd have ultimately gotten the kind of debate they wanted."

Mr. Brady said he expected to reopen the comments at some point, but he needed to figure out how to patrol the site better and "keep it clean."

Mr. Brady held an online question-and-answer session on Friday to address reader concerns about the incident. Many participants complained that The Post was practicing censorship and silencing its critics. Mr. Brady responded that the Post was doing no such thing, pointing to the online discussion and the fact that of 30 blogs maintained by The Post, only one was shut off from outside comment.

"We don't have an obligation to keep every one of those avenues open if we run into problems like we did yesterday," Mr. Brady wrote.

Mr. Brady said that Ms. Howell would address the Abramoff matter in her Sunday column, prompting some participants to complain that she should be thinking more about the online audience rather than adhering to a print schedule.

Others asked how Mr. Brady intended to proceed. He said he was considering prescreening of comments, but he did not like that option.

"Real-time debate about the issues of the day is exciting, and what the Web can provide," he wrote. "Any prescreening makes that harder, but in certain subject areas, it may be the way we have to go."

He also said that The Post was planning to introduce an online debate next week between bloggers and journalists "to start getting to some of the tough questions this issue has raised, specifically how to make sure the dialogue between the media and its consumers can flourish online."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/bu...ia/20blog.html





German Wikipedia Back Up Amid Lawsuit
Matt Moore

The German version of Wikipedia returned to the Internet on Friday after three days offline, a blackout prompted by a lawsuit in which the parents of a dead hacker objected to the site's use of his real name.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the collaborative Web encyclopedia, reached a temporary settlement with a Berlin court that will let users access the German-language version of Wikipedia at http://de.wikipedia.org , hosted in the United States, instead of its usual http://www.wikipedia.de .

The site also remained available by going to http://www.wikipedia.org , and clicking on the German language link.

The Berlin court had issued an injunction taking down Wikipedia's German site Tuesday. But on Friday, the court declared the injunction unenforceable until a final decision is made, noting it was not proper to block access to all of the encyclopedia's entries because of concern about just one.

The case began when the family of the German hacker known as "Tron," who was found hanged in a park in 1998, sued to stop Wikipedia from including the man's real name, citing German privacy law.

A decision is expected in two weeks.

Ultimately, analysts said, it will be difficult to keep the name private, particularly on a site renowned for its open access policy that lets readers modify and edit its 3.7 million articles - a format that has inspired recent scrutiny over Wikipedia's accuracy.

"One can understand that they may not want their late son to be remembered in this way, so one can feel some sympathy toward their point of view," said Graham Cluley of Sophos, a London-based consulting firm. "But in the age of the Internet it doesn't make much difference closing down a Web page which redirects to the Wikipedia Web site, when the information is freely available via other routes."

Another result is that the family may have drawn more attention to the listing than it got before.

"Sadly for the family, getting a court order against http:// www.wikipedia.de will not be the solution they are looking for. I find it unlikely that they will ever be satisfied in this issue, and disrupting http://www.wikipedia.de has only probably drawn more attention to the hacker's short life," Cluley said.

Wikipedia, which boasts articles in 200 languages, is the 37th most visited Web site on the Internet, according to the research service Alexa.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





No Raised Cancer Risk From Mobile Phones: Study
Patricia Reaney

Using a mobile phone does not increase the risk of developing the most common type of brain tumor, according to a study on Friday.

After a four-year survey, scientists at the Institute of Cancer Research in London and three British universities found no link between regular, long-term use of cell phones and glioma.

"Overall, we found no raised risk of glioma associated with regular mobile phone use and no association with time since first use, lifetime years of use, cumulative hours of use, or number of calls," said Professor Patricia McKinney, of the University of Leeds, in a report in the British Medical Journal.

She added that the results were consistent with the findings of most studies done in the United States and Europe.

Anthony Swerdlow, a co-author of the report, from the Institute of Cancer Research, said the survey is larger than any of the other published studies and part of a collaboration involving 13 countries.

During the past two decades, the use of mobile phones has risen rapidly worldwide but there has been no hard evidence to substantiate fears that the technology causes health problems ranging from headaches to brain tumors.

More than 4,000 new cases of brain tumors in Britain and about 20,000 in the United States are diagnosed each year.

Last year, Swedish scientists said mobile phones could pose a higher health risk to people living in rural areas because they emit more intense signals in the countryside.

But the researchers on Friday said they did not find any increased health threats for rural dwellers.

Earlier mobile phones used analog signals which emitted higher power signals than the later digital models. If there were health dangers from mobiles phones, they would be more likely to result from the earlier models but the scientists found no evidence of it.

They questioned 966 people with glioma brain tumors and 1,716 healthy volunteers about how long they had used mobile phones, the make and model, how many calls they made and how long the calls lasted.

McKinney, Swerdlow and scientists from the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham said that among cancer sufferers the tumors were likely to be reported on the side of the head used with a mobile phone.

But Swerdlow said it could be due to over-reporting of patients.

"People have a tendency to remember and/or embellish or falsely remember those things that they think might be relevant," he said in an interview.

McKinney said there is a lack of convincing and consistent evidence of any effect of exposure to radiofrequency fields on the risk of cancer.

"Overall, our findings are consistent with this and with most studies on mobile phone use," she added.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...US-MOBILES.xml





Global Mobile Subscriptions To Grow 20 Pct In 2006: Analyst

Global growth of subscriptions for wireless services will slow to 20 percent in 2006 from 23 percent last year, with the biggest gains in emerging markets, especially some African countries, according to a Strategy Analytics report released on Thursday.

The research firm said that much of the growth will come from areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as more established wireless markets have fewer people left who have yet to buy their first cellphone.

By the end of 2006 there will be 2.5 billion mobile subscribers, up from 2.1 billion at the end of 2005, the report said. This includes about 400 million people with two phones or a separate subscription for laptop data services.

Global wireless service revenue is expected to rise 11 percent to $623.9 billion, according to the report.

While countries such as Russia, India and Indonesia were among the fastest growing in 2005 at 40 percent to 50 percent, African countries such as Nigeria and Algeria could lead the growth in 2006, the report said.

The global wireless service industry is expected to generate $800 billion in revenue in 2010, with emerging markets accounting for about 42 percent of the total.

As the number of potential new subscribers dwindles in well established markets, wireless service providers have been beefing up their networks to boost revenue with services such as music and video downloads.

Subscribers to services on high-speed networks should double in 2006, according to Strategy Analytics. It estimates that by the end of last year, 49 million high-speed wireless customers used services based on the W-CDMA standard, which is popular in Europe.

There were about 26 million subscribers for services based on another high-speed wireless technology EV-DO, which is offered in parts of Asia and by some U.S. service providers, the report said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Global Digital Music Sales Triple
Ray Bennett

Global sales of digital music tripled to $1.1 billion in 2005 and the popularity of recordings on iPods and mobile phones will result in digital music generating 25% of worldwide music revenues by 2010, a music industry trade group said Thursday.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) Digital Music Report 2006, consumers last year downloaded 420 million tracks legally, comprising 6% of global revenues. Record companies doubled the number of tracks available to 2 million as subscription services boasted 2.8 million subscribers in 2005 compared with 1.5 million the year before.

IFPI said that Apple iTunes leads the pack, operating in 21 countries and selling more than 850 million downloads since launching in 2003. Music for mobile phones now accounts for 40% of digital music revenues, the report said.

Speaking at a news conference to launch the report, IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy said that legal downloading in the U.K. and Germany from such sites as iTunes, Musicload and MSN exceeds that from illegal file sharing. "Predictions are always dodgy, but I do believe that by 2010, digital music will comprise 25% of global revenues," Kennedy said.

"This is great news for the digital music market and the wider digital economy. Record companies are licensing their music prolifically and diversely. A new wave of digital commerce, from mobile to broadband, is rolling out across the world," Kennedy said.

The report said the number of online music services grew to more than 335, up from about 50 two years ago. Illegal file sharing remains a problem, however, and the trade body said it has now filed close to 20,000 lawsuits against individuals.

Kennedy said that he will be speaking to Internet service providers at next week's MIDEM international music mart in Cannes about the need for Internet service providers to share in the fight against piracy.

"The challenges we now face are far too big for complacency. In particular, we need more cooperation from service providers and music distributors to help protect intellectual property and contain piracy," Kennedy said. "It is not enough that they share in the success of the digital music business, they need to take on their share of the responsibilities as well."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Apple Computer Alters iTunes Software

Apple Computer Inc. has altered its iTunes software after users raised privacy concerns over a new spy-like song-recommendation feature in the music jukebox program.

The company on Tuesday switched the so-called "MiniStore" feature to give users the choice of turning it on, rather than having it automatically activate with its new version update of iTunes.

The company introduced the recommendation feature last week. The MiniStore window pane with music or video suggestions pops up as users play songs from their libraries.

The feature requires that the information on the songs being played be sent to Apple, which in turn churns out related music titles. It's a type of customization that an increasing number of digital services are adopting.

This differs, however, from, say Amazon.com Inc., where product recommendations emerge as users shop the site, and they presumably understand that whatever data they are inputting online is being sent to Amazon.

With the MiniStore, that exchange of information occurs in the background while users may not even be connected to Apple's iTunes online music store.

The new feature raised some fears over whether Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple was collecting information about a user's private listening session. Apple says it was not storing any of the user data, but posted that point along with the software changes a week later.

"We've listened to our users and made access to the MiniStore an opt-in feature," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Thursday.

In the note to new users, the company clearly states, "As you select items in your library, information about that item is sent to Apple and the MiniStore will show you related songs or videos. Apple does not keep any information related to the contents of your music library."

Digital video recording provider TiVo Inc. faced similar privacy concerns years ago when it was among the first to introduce an automated recommendation service based on a user's viewing pattern. TiVo users must agree to opt in for the service if they choose to use it.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





iPods Pre-Loaded With Video Tread Legal Gray Zone
Chris Marlowe

A tiny Massachusetts company named TVMyPod is selling iPods that come with movies and TV programs already loaded on them, a practice that raises questions of legality as it addresses consumer demand for convenience and portability.

Customers choose any content currently available on a DVD and which iPod they want. TVMyPod then puts the content on the player and ships the original DVDs along with the iPod restored to its original packaging.

TVMyPod co-founder Vijay Raghavan said most people don't have the time or the technology to convert DVDs into the iPod's required format, which is what gave him and his business partner the idea to start the service.

DVDs have copy protection on them, however, and under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act it is illegal to bypass that technology. Raghavan said his company's process does not involve decryption.

He added that moving the content onto the device is a one-way transfer, which since the purchaser gets both the original and the copy is legal under the fair use provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act.

"It's kind of an obsolete law since Congress was not taking into consideration portability," Raghavan said. "These players are exploding on the market, but the legality of it can sometimes be in a gray area."

TVMyPod is not charging for its services yet, so customers pay only the actual cost of the iPod and whatever the price is on Amazon.com for their chosen DVDs.

Raghavan said TVMyPod will set prices when it rolls out its next offerings, which will include consumers sending in their own iPod and possibly a subscription service to keep the content refreshed.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...MEDIA-IPOD.xml





Disney To Acquire Pixar

Long-time Creative Partners Form New Worldwide Leader in Quality Family Entertainment
Press Release

Ed Catmull Named President of the Combined Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and John Lasseter Named Chief Creative Officer; Steve Jobs to Join Disney's Board of Directors

Disney Increases Stock Repurchase Authorization

Burbank, CA and Emeryville, CA (January 24, 2006) – Furthering its strategy of delivering outstanding creative content, Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS), announced today that Disney has agreed to acquire computer animation leader Pixar (NASDAQ: PIXR) in an all-stock transaction, expected to be completed by this summer. Under terms of the agreement, 2.3 Disney shares will be issued for each Pixar share. Based on Pixar's fully diluted shares outstanding, the transaction value is $7.4 billion ($6.3 billion net of Pixar's cash of just over $1 billion).*

This acquisition combines Pixar's preeminent creative and technological resources with Disney's unparalleled portfolio of world-class family entertainment, characters, theme parks and other franchises, resulting in vast potential for new landmark creative output and technological innovation that can fuel future growth across Disney's businesses. Garnering an impressive 20 Academy Awards, Pixar's creative team and global box office success have made it a leader in quality family entertainment through incomparable storytelling abilities, creative vision and innovative technical artistry.

"With this transaction, we welcome and embrace Pixar's unique culture, which for two decades, has fostered some of the most innovative and successful films in history. The talented Pixar team has delivered outstanding animation coupled with compelling stories and enduring characters that have captivated audiences of all ages worldwide and redefined the genre by setting a new standard of excellence," Iger said. "The addition of Pixar significantly enhances Disney animation, which is a critical creative engine for driving growth across our businesses. This investment significantly advances our strategic priorities, which include - first and foremost - delivering high-quality, compelling creative content to consumers, the application of new technology and global expansion to drive long-term shareholder value."

Pixar President Ed Catmull will serve as President of the new Pixar and Disney animation studios, reporting to Iger and Dick Cook, Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios. In addition, Pixar Executive Vice President John Lasseter will be Chief Creative Officer of the animation studios, as well as Principal Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he will provide his expertise in the design of new attractions for Disney theme parks around the world, reporting directly to Iger. Pixar Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs will be appointed to Disney's Board of Directors as a non-independent member. With the addition of Jobs, 11 of Disney's 14 directors will be independent. Both Disney and Pixar animation units will retain their current operations and locations.

"Disney and Pixar can now collaborate without the barriers that come from two different companies with two different sets of shareholders," said Jobs. "Now, everyone can focus on what is most important, creating innovative stories, characters and films that delight millions of people around the world."

"Pixar's culture of collaboration and innovation has its roots in Disney Animation. Our story and production processes are derivatives of the Walt Disney 'school' of animated filmmaking," said Dr. Catmull. "Just like the Disney classics, Pixar's films are made for family audiences the world over and, most importantly, for the child in everyone. We can think of nothing better for us than to continue to make great movies with Disney."

The acquisition brings to Disney the talented creative teams behind the tremendously popular original Pixar blockbusters, who will now be involved in the nurturing and future development of these properties, including potential feature animation sequels. Pixar's 20-year unrivaled creative track record includes the hits Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Disney will also have increased ability to fully capitalize on Pixar-created characters and franchises on high-growth digital platforms such as video games, broadband and wireless, as well as traditional media outlets, including theme parks, consumer products and live stage plays.

"For many of us at Pixar, it was the magic of Disney that influenced us to pursue our dreams of becoming animators, artists, storytellers and filmmakers," said Lasseter. "For 20 years we have created our films in the manner inspired by Walt Disney and the great Disney animators - great stories and characters in an environment made richer by technical advances. It is exciting to continue in this tradition with Disney, the studio that started it all."

"The wonderfully productive 15-year partnership that exists between Disney and Pixar provides a strong foundation that embodies our collective spirit of creativity and imagination," said Cook. "Under this new, strengthened animation unit, we expect to continue to grow and flourish."

Disney first entered into a feature film agreement with Pixar in 1991, resulting in the release of Toy Story, which was hailed as an instant classic upon its release in November 1995. In 1997, Disney extended its relationship with Pixar by entering into a co-production agreement, under which Pixar agreed to produce on an exclusive basis five original computer-animated feature films for distribution by Disney. Pixar is currently in production on the final film under that agreement, Cars, to be distributed by Disney on June 9.

The Boards of Directors of Disney and Pixar have approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antritrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Pixar's shareholders. Jobs, who owns approximately 50.6% of the outstanding Pixar shares, has agreed to vote a number of shares equal to 40% of the outstanding shares in favor of the transaction.

The Disney Board was advised by Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Bear, Stearns & Co. The Pixar Board was advised by Credit Suisse.

Separately, the Disney Board approved the repurchase of approximately 225 million additional shares, bringing the Company's total available authorization to 400 million shares. Since August 2004 through the end of December 2005, Disney has invested nearly $4 billion to purchase nearly 155 million shares. Disney anticipates further significant share repurchases going forward, reflecting Disney's continued commitment to returning value to shareholders over time.

* Based on Disney's closing share price of $25.52 as of 1/23/06.

http://corporate.disney.go.com/news/...124_pixar.html





Konica Minolta Pulls Plug on Camera, Film Business
Nathan Layne

Japan's Konica Minolta Holdings Inc.said on Thursday it would withdraw from the camera and color film businesses, marking the end to one of the best known brands in the photography world.

As part of the surprise move, Konica Minolta said it would sell a portion of its digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera assets to Sony Corp. for an undisclosed sum and cease production of compact cameras by March.

The company said it would stop making photographic film and color paper by March 2007, pulling out of a market shrinking more than 20 percent a year due to the spread of digital cameras, which don't use film to store images.

The world's third-largest maker of camera film after Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film Co. had said in November that it would slash its loss-making camera and film operations, but not completely shut them down.

"I wanted to put a clear end to the matter," Konica Minolta President Fumio Iwai said at a press conference, where the company also announced that Iwai would be replaced by Vice President Yoshikatsu Ota on April 1.

Konica Minolta said in November it expected to post a group net loss of 47 billion yen ($407.9 million) in the year to March as it took a charge of 90 billion yen to rationalise production, write down assets and cut jobs in its camera and film division.

But the decision to completely pull the plug on the business caught analysts and archrival Fuji Photo off guard.

Konica Minolta, created in August 2003 through the merger of Konica Corp. and Minolta Co., has a long history in the camera and film markets, producing Japan's first photographic paper in 1903 and the country's first color film in 1940.

Following the news, Fuji Photo issued a press release saying it would continue making traditional camera film, although analysts said Fuji could be pressured to downsize its business.

"Konica Minolta's move is a positive surprise and I was also not expecting Iwai to step down. This is a bold move rare among Japanese firms," said JP Morgan analyst Hisashi Moriyama.

"I think the stock will go up. The traditional camera and film businesses were seen as a barrier to earnings growth and now it will be completely gone."

Prior to the announcement, shares in Konica Minolta closed up 3.1 percent at 1,278 yen, while Sony rose 0.8 percent to 4,900 yen and the Nikkei average closed up 2.3 percent.

Boon For Fuji Film?

Konica Minolta also said it would stop production of minilabs, machines installed in photo shops and retailers for developing and printing photos, by March. Other makers include Fuji Photo, Kodak and Noritsu Koki Co.. Noritsu will take over maintenance and service of Konica Minolta's minilabs.

By ditching its unprofitable operations, Iwai said the company could focus resources on more promising areas such as color office copiers, liquid crystal display materials, medical equipment and optical devices.

Sony and Konica Minolta formed an agreement in July to jointly develop digital SLR cameras, which are generally more expensive and offer better performance than point-and-shoot compact models, and typically use interchangeable lenses.

Konica Minolta said it would continue to produce digital SLR camera bodies and lenses for Sony based on its Maxxum/Dynax mount system and owners of those lenses will be able to use them on new digital SLR models to be developed by Sony.

But the Konica Minolta brand will disappear, ending a legacy that started when a predecessor of Konica introduced its first camera in 1903. The first Minolta brand camera came in 1933, followed by Konica in 1948.

JP Morgan's Moriyama said Konica Minolta's exit would be a positive for other camera makers such as Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp. as there would one less competitor in a market marked by fierce competition and sharp price falls.

Konica Minolta's camera business lost 7.3 billion yen on an operating basis in the 2004/05 business year, struggling in large part because it doesn't make its own image sensor chips, a key factor in determining camera performance and cost, Iwai said.

Makoto Kurosawa, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, said Konica Minolta departure from film could be seen as a short-term positive for Kodak and Fuji Photo as it would ease supply, but that the outlook for the film market remains tough.

Belgian company Agfa-Gevaert sold its traditional film business in 2004 and Kodak has been downsizing its operations. Fuji Photo has been implementing reform incrementally but has stated clearly its intention to stick with film.

"It's not as if demand will disappear overnight so in the short-term this is a positive as competition will decrease," Kurosawa said. "But over the long term the pressure will be on Fuji Photo to find a strategy for continuing the business without spilling red ink."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RS&srch=konica





Sony Eyes Big Push Into High - End Digital Cameras

Sony Corp. said on Friday it would aim for a quarter of the digital single lens reflexcamera market after acquiring assets for a push into that market from Konica Minolta Holdings Inc..

Konica Minolta announced on Thursday that it would sell a portion of its SLR camera business to Sony for an undisclosed sum, part of its move to pull completely out of the business of selling cameras and photographic film.

The deal was not a total surprise as the two agreed last July to jointly develop digital SLR cameras, which are generally more expensive and offer better performance than simple point-and-shoot compact models, and typically use interchangeable lenses.

Sony is the world's No. 2 digital camera maker behind Canon Inc. but it currently has no presence in the potentially lucrative digital SLR market, having lacked the history selling interchangeable lenses for film SLRs to warrant a push.

The digital SLR market is currently dominated by a handful of traditional camera makers that sold millions of interchangeable lenses during the film era. This is seen as key factor because many of those lenses can also be used on digital SLRs.

Canon and Nikon Corp. control the lion's share of the digital SLR market, but Pentax Corp and Olympus Corp. have recently formed alliances with electronics makers in a bid to boost their sales.

Yutaka Nakagawa, president of Sony's digital imaging business group, told reporters the company would aim for 20-25 percent of the fast-growing digital SLR market by focusing on relatively inexpensive models that could achieve mass-market appeal.

``But because there are few players in this market, I would like to grab an even bigger share than that,'' he said.

Nakagawa said Sony would have several advantages in the market including its ability to produce image sensor chips, displays and batteries in-house, as well as leveraging its strong audiovisual technology used in its electronics products.

Sony plans to launch its first model this summer based on Konica Minolta's Maxxum/Dynax mount system, meaning that existing owners of those lenses -- Konica Minolta sold about 16 million lenses over the years -- will be able to use them on Sony's SLR.

Nakagawa reiterated Sony's target of selling 13.5 million digital cameras this business year to March, seeing little impact from the recent sales suspension of some models in China that local officials said did not meet quality requirements.

``Even if we are affected by China, sales in other countries are strong. We are on track,'' he said.

Nakagawa said he thought digital SLRs would eventually account for 20 percent of Sony's overall camera sales, but he did not expect that to happen anytime soon.

``I don't think it will happen in one year. I don't expect a such a big contribution to profit in the first year.''

Shares of Sony closed up 2.5 percent at 5,020 yen, outperforming the benchmark Nikkei average, which was flat on the day.
http://news.com.com/Sony+eyes+push+i...3-6029190.html





Google Video: Trash Mixed With Treasure
David Pogue

BY now, everybody knows that anything audio is eventually followed by something video. Radio first, then TV. Audio tape, then videotape. CD, then DVD. Music iPod, then video iPod.

And then, of course, there's Apple's iTunes Music Store. The day it began selling videos, too, was the first time that cowering TV executives ever climbed down off of their kitchen tables and allowed somebody to use "TV show" and "Internet" in the same sentence. It was a small, timid test - only five TV series from one network at first, only in the United States, at low resolution and with copy protection - but it was a spectacular success. TV fans bought about eight million videos in the first three months of the service.

You don't sell that much of anything without attracting the attention of your rivals. At the Consumer Electronics Show two weeks ago, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Google all announced new variations on the "download for a fee TV show" formula.

Only one of those ventures has already opened for business: Google Video (http://video.google.com).

Google's video store is a far less controlled experiment than Apple's. In fact, Google doesn't even call it a video store; it prefers "the first open video marketplace." Its big, Google-esque, democratic idea is that anyone, from the biggest TV network to the most talent-free camera-phone owner, is allowed to post videos for all the world to see - and to buy.

If it sounds a bit chaotic, you're right; Google Video's hallmark is its wild inconsistency. On iTunes, you always know what the price will be: $2 an episode. Every show is downloadable and transferable to an iPod. And you know the quality you're going to get: great color and clarity, professional production values, no ads.

AT Google's video emporium, on the other hand, anything goes. Some videos are copy-protected, others not. Some can be downloaded, others viewed only online. The resolution and production quality vary widely. Some have ads. Some offer a three-minute preview, others only 10 seconds. Some videos are free, some cost money. (The price can be anything, although the sell-your-own-video feature won't go live for a couple of weeks. Google keeps 30 percent.) This sort of anarchy isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, it's empowering to think that you can post home movies of your baby or sophomoric "Star Wars" spoofs right alongside episodes of CBS shows and basketball reruns from the N.B.A.

But it's not necessarily a good thing, either. With inconsistency comes disappointment and frustration. Why is it that you can download a Charlie Rose talk show to have and to hold forever, but a "CSI" episode self-destructs after 24 hours?

The offerings break down into three basic categories. First, there's the commercial-TV stuff. CBS offers a strange assortment of 12 past and present series, including "Survivor: Guatemala" (15 episodes), "Star Trek: Voyager" (5), "MacGyver" (3) and "I Love Lucy" (15). The N.B.A. makes all its games available online 24 hours after they are played, for $4 each. Sony BMG offers 52 music videos for $2 each. (At the moment, an American credit card is required to buy videos.)

The second category is what you might call pseudo-commercial: third-tier, no-name, late-night, channel 900 stuff. You can buy movies like "Somewhere in Indiana"; how-to videos like "Rocki's Prenatal Yoga: Labor Preparation 2"; 38-minute movies, like "Adrenaline Rush," that were originally shown in Imax theaters; and concert videos like "Bacon Brothers: Live" (all $15 each).

Frankly, you'd have to be pretty desperate to shell out $15 to watch filler like this play in a window no bigger than a stretched-out Post-it Note (480 by 360 pixels), but there you are.

The final category is the amateur user-submitted material. A huge majority of it is unwatchable trash: home movies, homemade animations and that old Internet standby, the "making fun of incompetent dancers" video.

Yet among this tidal wave of junk, you'll also find some amazing, free, jaw-dropping caught-on-tape moments, those funny Web videos that are passed around by e-mail and eventually attain mythic status; Google Video keeps them in a category called Popular.

It's the same stuff you'll find on sites like youtube.com and stupidvideos.com: hilarious TV commercials that are too racy to show in the United States, clips that would fit right in with "America's Funniest Home Videos," and favorite snippets from network shows.

There is, in all of this, the seed of a great idea: a bustling marketplace, a chance for ordinary people with great ideas, luck or timing to make a little money from their video, while Google handles all the technical server gruntwork. Indeed, submitting a movie is very easy: you download a little uploading program (for Mac or Windows), choose the videos to send (there's no limit on length or size), and specify a price and whether or not you want your video to be copy-protected. Then, providing there's no nudity or sex, Google's human and software-based screeners will look over your video and, eventually, post it.

According to Google, the current Google Video is a beta test, a dry run intended to solicit feedback and suggestions for improvement. That's fortunate, because at the moment, the site is appallingly half-baked. Quarter-baked, in fact.

You want suggestions, Google? Here are a few to get you started.

GIVE US A GOOGLE-WORTHY DESIGN Everyone loves Google's clean, uncluttered design philosophy. But this site has no design at all.

At the top of the home page, Google offers its sole browsing tool: a pop-up menu called Video Store. But it lists only stuff for sale ("Basketball Games," "MacGyver," and so on). Everything else, all the free stuff, is utterly uncategorized. There's no way to browse it except by paging through thousands of pages one at a time, 15 thumbnails per page. (There's a Search box, too, but it's no help unless you already know what you're looking for. And there's a list view, but it's available only for the commercial TV stuff, and not the free and amateur stuff.)

Why is the pop-up menu only on the home screen? Once you've moved to a different page, it's no longer available unless you Back-button your way all the way to the home page.

BUILD UP THE CATALOG Google offers only 10 episodes of "Deep Space Nine," 5 of "The Twilight Zone," and a single episode of "CSI." At least iTunes, when it opened for business, offered all seasons' worth of its TV titles.

MAC VERSION, PLEASE Google Video's TV shows, movies and other copy-protected offerings play back only in a special Google video player - which requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

FILL IN THE WHITE SPACE The infant Google Video is incredibly bare-bones and empty-looking. How about some ratings, categories, parental controls, recommendations or customer comments, a description of the resolution or quality, date of first broadcast or a sense of community?

FIX THE BUGS The Web site itself is quirky and inconsistent. It doesn't inspire much trust, for example, to see the thumbnails of only three "MacGyver" episodes - with a legend above it saying "1-5 of about 5."

Google is surely aware of these limitations and has plans to address them. One aspect of Google Video, however, will not be so easily changed: its copy-protection scheme, a new one that Google wrote itself. You can't burn the shows to a CD or DVD, and can't play them back on portable players like iPods. In fact, most of the TV shows don't play back at all without an active Internet connection, which, for most people, also rules out laptop playback on planes, trains and automobiles. This is sickening news for anyone who thought that two incompatible copy-protection schemes - Apple's and Microsoft's - were complex and sticky enough already. And compared with the ABC and NBC shows available on the iTunes store, the value of the CBS shows looks even worse.

Even if you give Google every benefit of every doubt, this video store doesn't live up to Google's usual standards of excellence. This, after all, is the company whose unofficial motto is "Don't be evil." In the case of Google Video, the company's fans might have settled for "Don't be mediocre."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/te...s/19pogue.html





Satellite TV to Offer Family-Fare Packages

DirecTV Group and EchoStar Communications, the nation's largest satellite television providers, said yesterday that they would offer packages of family-oriented channels, joining cable companies that took similar steps after pressure from regulators.

DirecTV's $34.99-a-month package of 40 channels includes Toon Disney and CSpan. It will begin in April, the company said. EchoStar's chief executive, Charles W. Ergen, will discuss the move today at a Congressional hearing in Washington.

The satellite companies are following the two largest cable companies, Comcast and Time Warner, in offering packages of channels intended to weed out programming that might be inappropriate for family viewing. The pay TV companies are under pressure from Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who has called for voluntary curbs on sexually explicit programming.

"Much of the intent here is to satisfy political pressure," said Matthew Harrigan, an analyst at Janco Partners, who rates DirecTV shares as buy and EchoStar as hold. "At the same time, the companies don't want to lose much revenue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/bu...ia/19tele.html





Clear Channel Launches First Multicast Stations
Gina Keating

Clear Channel Communications Inc on Thursday will launch its first digital multicast channels in New York and San Francisco in an effort to modernize terrestrial radio amid rising competition with satellite radio.

By splitting the frequencies of its radio stations into high-definition (HD) niches, Clear Channel and other terrestrial radio broadcasters can reach broader audiences by providing a more varied menu of content.

In addition to the 10 multicast channels launched on Thursday, the company plans to roll out multicast channels on 15 more stations in Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Los Angeles in the next five days.

The formats of the new channels, which initially will be commercial free, include disco, Hispanic, gospel, "urban oldies," country and traditional jazz.

John Hogan, president and chief executive of Clear Channel Radio, said one of the biggest challenges facing the new HD stations is finding an audience.

"Right now for the high-end audio market, (digital receivers) tend to be expensive and hard to find," Hogan told Reuters. "We are working with consumer electronics folks ... to convince them that this is a reality for us."

Clear Channel has converted 200 stations to broadcast digitally -- about 75 of those can multicast what is referred to as the "HD2" tier of channels.

The multicast channels will be streamed over the Internet. Hogan said the company plans to promote the multicast channels to 100 million listeners who tune into Clear Channel's analog stations weekly, he said.

"Consumers want choice and, while radio has a long history of having created great brands and giving people the information and entertainment and companionship that they have grown to love, we have been limited because analog stations can only broadcast one signal," Hogan told Reuters.

Clear Channel has not disclosed the cost of creating the new programming, but Hogan said the company drew on personnel from existing stations nationwide to set programming for the multicast channels.

The company does not expect to earn any money from multicasting in the short term, and Hogan said the commercial model for the HD2 tier will likely include fewer commercials than the current revenue model.

"Revenue associated with this is a little further down the list of priorities for us," Hogan said. "We see this as a great technological opportunity for us. We know it will take time, effort and energy to create demand...and as we get more consumers listening to HD we will have greater opportunity to monetize it."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Europe Overtakes US As Top PC Market: Survey

Global shipments of personal computers rose 15.3 percent in 2005 with Dell <DELL.O> extending its lead over Hewlett-Packard and Europe overtaking the United States as the largest market, a survey showed on Thursday.

Worldwide sales of personal computers (PCs) rose to 218.5 million units in 2005 from 189.5 million in 2004, according to preliminary data from market research group Gartner.

Shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa grew 17.1 percent to 72.7 million units, overtaking the United States which grew 7.5 percent to 67 million. In 2004, the United States still slightly exceeded Europe, both regions taking about 62 million units.

The fastest growth in 2005 was in Asia Pacific and Latin America where units sales increased 26 percent to 42.8 million and 14.7 million respectively.

Dell continued to grow more than the industry average, as its worldwide PC shipments grew 18.6 percent in 2005. Its global market share ended at 16.8 percent, up from 16.4 percent.

"However, Dell's worldwide growth rate started to slow down in the second half of 2005. During the fourth quarter, Dell's growth slightly exceeded the worldwide average, and it gained more from overseas markets," Gartner said in a statement.

Global number two Hewlett-Packard lost a little bit of ground to its closest rivals as its market share slipped to 14.5 percent in 2005 from 14.6 percent in 2004.

Third placed Lenovo from China, which took over IBM's <IBM.N> PC operations, increased its market share to 6.9 percent from 6.8 percent, and Acer from Taiwan expanded to 4.6 percent market share from 3.4 percent in 2004.

Fujitsu and Fujitsu-Siemens remained steady at 3.8 percent, and were overtaken by Acer.

In the United States, fourth-quarter results confirmed that the U.S. professional market replacement cycle has peaked. "Both small and midsize business and enterprise markets showed softness in demand," Gartner analyst Mika Kitagawa said.

In general, shipments of portable computers were growing fast and desktop computers were not, and Gartner said many shipped PCs were still sitting in warehouses.

"Concerns over inventory continue to exist. With the exception of Hewlett-Packard, all the vendors increased their average days of inventory over 2004, rising for some of them by more than a third," it said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Ripcord Says Buh-Bye to USB Cables in 2007

Whaaaaaaaat? No more USB cables? Is this a dream? Not if Staccato Communications has anything to do with it. The company has just announced the introduction of its Ripcord family at CES which is based on the WiMedia’s Alliance UWB common radio platform as well as the Certified Wireless USB specification. The Ripcord is simply a USB key that will wirelessly transmit from any external hard drive. Set by Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate to be integrated into all if their next generation hard drives, computer makers will also incorporate this technology into their laptops in 2007. That means USB cables will be a thing of the past. Really. Truly.

The transfer rate is a very respectable 480 mbps and most companies who choose to use this technology will only need an external antenna for a complete node based on Certified Wireless USB node.
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/ri...007-146488.php





Big Content Would Like To Outlaw Things No One Has Even Thought Of Yet
Hannibal

The EFF's Deeplinks section has a pretty alarming post about the RIAA and MPAA's attempts to freeze the progress of consumer electronics technology and then start turning back the clock on all of us. Fair use, meet your successor: "customary historic use."

The post points to broadcast flag draft legislation sponsored by Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) that contains provisions which appear to limit digital broadcast media reception devices to "customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law and that prevents redistribution of copyrighted content over digital networks." In other words, if it does anything heretofore unheard of with the digital content that it receives, then it's illegal. And if it does anything "customary" that could also possibly lead to unauthorized redistribution, then it's also illegal. So all the bases are covered!

Can it really be that bad? We already knew that the proposed HD radio provisions are just awful and absurdly draconian, but can Big Content really be trying to put a blanket freeze on innovation and outlaw any possible novel use at all of copyrighted digital broadcast content? I downloaded the PDF and read through it, and it does indeed look that way. There are a few relevant sections, so let's take a look at them.

Here's the first major section in which the phrase "customary historic use" is used:

(2) CRITERIA FOR CONTENT OF REGULATIONS – In achieving the goal of preventing the indiscriminate unauthorized copying and redistribution of certain digital audio content over digital networks, any proposed regulations to govern digital audio broadcast transmissions and digital audio receiving devices shall –

(a) require Commission licensees that transmit digital audio broadcast signals or that manufacture digital audio receiving devices to implement a Broadcast Flag technology to protect digital audio content;

(b) permit customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law;

(c) not interfere with the deployment and spread of digital audio broadcasting to the maximum extent possible; and,

(d) to the extent that such regulations cover devices, cover only devices that are capable, without any hardware alterations or additions, of receiving digital audio signals when such devices are sold by a manufacturer.

(e) not interfere with the monitoring of or gaining access to musical works contained in broadcasts by performing rights organizations for the purpose of collecting or distributing royalties.

This sounds vaguely ominous, but not truly earth-shattering, mostly because it's phrased positively. Unfortunately, by the time you're done with the document you understand that it's worse than it looks at first.

At issue in the legislation are two types of implementation-agnostic "technologies": 1) a "broadcast flag" technology that's embedded in the digital signal by the sender and that tells the receiver what it can and cannot do with the digital content; and 2) a "secure moving technology" that the draft legislation defines as follows:

(b) "Secure Moving Technology" is a technology that permits content covered by the Broadcast Flag to be transferred from a broadcast receiver to another device for rendering in accordance with customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law and that prevents redistribution of copyrighted content over digital networks."

There's the nub of it. The broadcast flag alone isn't enough, because what happens when you want to actually listen to the audio that the device has received? Unless you've got headphones attached directly to your digital radio, you're going to want to move the signal from the digital radio to a stereo receiver (for "rendering" as the draft puts it), even if you're not necessarily planning on ripping the music and uploading it to eDonkey. This where the "secure moving technology" kicks in.

The "secure moving technology" ensures that whatever you do with the signal that leaves the digital broadcast receiver, it definitely won't be anything you can't already do right now. Furthermore, even some things that you can currently do will be outlawed if those things could facilitate piracy. This probably means that such devices won't have much in the way of hi-fi analog outs.

After you read the above definition of "secure moving technology" and then go further back and look at the first section that I quoted above, that first "customary historic use" passage starts to make more sense and to look more insidious. From reading the whole draft, it appears that the "customary historic use" stipulation governs playback on any device, whether it's an attached device or the receiver itself. The broadcast flag is embedded in the signal like a special tag that defines the content's terms of use, while the secure moving technology acts as a sort of DRM wrapper/sandbox for the content that ensures that any (compliant) playback device not only respects the restrictions dictated by the broadcast flag but also does absolutely nothing novel or unexpected with the content that the broadcast flag's terms did not or could not anticipate.

So, if you were planning to launch a startup and make millions off the coming digital broadcast media revolution by inventing the next iPod or by combining digital radio with Web 2.0 and VoIP and Skype and RSS and WiFi mesh networks, then forget about it. When digital broadcast nirvana finally arrives, the only people who'll be legally authorized to make money off of music and movies are the middlemen at the RIAA and the MPAA.

But I hate to end a post on a sour note, so here's a thought to cheer you up. This "customary historic use" thing reminds me of something I once read in a history of Japan that I picked up on sale at Borders. (I'd give the title, but I'm not at home so I don't have the book handy. It wasn't very good anyway.) At the height of their cultural power, the samurai were authorized to kill peasants for an insane number of reasons, including "acting in an other than expected manner." So look on the bright side: at least we don't live in feudal Japan... yet.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060121-6025.html





Mistakes Found In 98% of US Patents
OUT-LAW.com

Almost every US patent contains at least one mistake, according to new research. The vast majority are trivial errors, most of them the fault of the USPTO; but two per cent of the patents examined were found to contain serious mistakes that weakened the core claims.

The findings come from Intellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, such as prior art searching and patent proofreading, from facilities in Minneapolis and India.

Proofreading is an important last step in the process of obtaining a patent because it can identify errors that can affect the patent’s enforceability. Intellevate announced last Friday that its Indian office has just proofread its 5,000th issued patent.

According to Leon Steinberg, Intellevate’s CEO: "We find errors in every issued patent we review. Many of the errors are unimportant, but others, such as missing claim, can impair the enforceability of the patent. We identify the errors so that our clients can decide if they want to file a Certificate of Correction."

Intellevate reported that Certificates of Correction were filed for an estimated 34 per cent of the proofread patents.

Most law firms consider proofreading as a necessary step to reduce their malpractice exposure. Sophisticated corporations view proofreading as the final step in controlling the quality of their patents and ensuring enforceability. However, proofreading is time-consuming and can be expensive. It involves checking the issued patent, which can be hundreds of pages long, against the filed application and all amendments.

In addition to being time consuming and usually costly, it is often a lacklustre task that many law firms and legal departments would rather not have to take on. For this reason, Intellevate says proofreading is the perfect activity to perform off-shore.

"Intellevate has developed proprietary tools that automate part of the proofreading process and has built a team of legal assistants in India who are thoroughly trained and specialise in proofreading services," said Steinberg. "These capabilities, combined with the lower wage rates in India, allow Intellevate to provide clients a vastly superior work product at a fraction of the cost of proofreading on-shore."
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/01/20/ proofreading_errors_in_software_patents/





Chatter

Re:Software Piracy Rate?
Sique

If they wouldn't pirate Photoshop, they would use GIMP, and complain about missing features, some of them would start scratching the itch and bringing GIMP on par with Photoshop, KPT would be recoded from scratch for GIMP, and finally even professional graphic shops would switch to GIMP and save the $700. So in the end no one would ever buy Photoshop, and the coders of Photoshop would be out of work and unpaid. Basicly piracy is the last thing that keeps Free Software from world domination.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170827&cid=14230408


How to Save Music
Tarmle

I've been reading about so much data-loss-woe this Christmas, so many people suffering catastrophic storage failure with no reasonable chance of reclamation. One of the things often lost in such situations is the digital music collection. A victim may have spent years accumulating and editing that massive chunk of data and it's just heartbreaking to think of them having to start over with a music folder containing nothing but Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Highway Blues. But there is a solution that I think might prove both simple and popular:

What you should do is back up all of your MP3s (and other portable music formats) to CDR or DVDR and give this backup to a friend. In the case of your house burning down with your hard drive and your entire collection of source CDs inside you will at least be able to reclaim the digital equivalent from the chosen custodian. In return for this security your friend will have complete access to all your music - an adequate reward, I think, for holding onto a handful of CDRs. And, of course you should encourage your friend to give you a complete copy of their music collection for safekeeping. In fact, it would be wise to exchange copies of music libraries with as many people as possible over the largest geographical area you can, just in case it's the whole town that burns down.

Safe to say, if enough people are doing this, it will make us all so much more secure, and very happy.
http://tarmle.livejournal.com/





From last November

US Man Seeks Movie Plotline Patent

Audacious plan for zombie script
OUT-LAW.com

Moviemakers could sleepwalk into patent infringement if the US Patent Office grants an application that it published yesterday for a “storyline patent.” It is a groundbreaking attempt to protect a fictional storyline with a patent, rather than relying on copyright protection.

Andrew Knight, a rocket engine inventor and registered patent agent, filed the test application in November 2003, the first of its kind, arguing that fictional plots are patentable under the US system.

Knight's story, The Zombie Stare, tells of an ambitious high school kid, consumed by the anticipation of college admission. He prays one night to remain unconscious until he gets the good news from MIT. The letter arrives - 30 years later, due to a postal error - and he wakes up. He soon discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived a normal life. Thus he endeavours to regain 30 years’ worth of memories, lost as an unconscious, philosophical zombie.

His Patent Office application is drafted more widely than this synopsis, to protect his rights, should they be granted, against a range of potential Hollywood adaptations. According to the abstract of his 14-page application:

A process of relaying a story having a timeline and a unique plot involving characters comprises: indicating a character's desire at a first time in the timeline for at least one of the following: a) to remain asleep or unconscious until a particular event occurs; and b) to forget or be substantially unable to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time until a particular event occurs; indicating the character's substantial inability at a time after the occurrence of the particular event to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time to the occurrence of the particular event; and indicating that during the time period the character was an active participant in a plurality of events.

Knight has confirmed that he will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of these published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theatres.

Until now, rights in plot lines have been governed by copyright, which can cover the expression of an idea. But there can be many different expressions of the same sort of idea, which is why many stories, films and plays have the same underlying themes, expressed in varying styles and methods.

Patents, however, give exclusive rights to an underlying idea. They may be granted to anyone who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvements thereof”, provided that certain conditions are met.

These conditions relate to utility, novelty and non-obviousness.

Knight suggests on his website that the plots of several films - including Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village and Groundhog Day - may have been eligible for patent protection. But presumably he doesn't see anything in the memory loss genre as prior art that could damage his own prospects of winning a monopoly right.

He points to a November, 2004 article in the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, A Potentially New IP: Storyline Patents to support his case. He says that the article argued that binding case law strongly suggests that methods of performing and displaying fictional plots, whether found in motion pictures, novels, television shows, or commercials, are statutory subject matter, like computer software and business methods.

Regarding the utility requirement, he quotes the advice of Jay Thomas, Professor of Law at Georgetown University:

“The case law of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has established that virtually any subject matter is potentially patentable,” explained Thomas.

He also quotes Charles Berman, Co-Chair of the Patent Prosecution Practice at Greenberg Traurig LLP: “Due to the broad scope of patentable subject matter, novel storylines may fall within the [utility requirement].”

Berman concluded that non-obviousness probably presents the biggest challenge to patentability: minor variations on a central theme may generate many different storylines.

Nevertheless, Knight asserts that his claimed storyline meets all statutory requirements, including non-obviousness.

According to Knight, the US Patent Office will publish subsequent storyline patent applications, also invented by Knight, on 17 November and 8 and 22 December.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11...otline_patent/





Missed It in the Theater Today? See It on DVD Tonight
Sharon Waxman

Hollywood will inch further toward making movies simultaneously available in theaters, on DVD and on home television screens at the Sundance Film Festival this week, as IFC Entertainment unveils a plan to release 24 films in theaters and on cable at the same time this year.

Beginning in March, the initiative, which the company is calling First Take, will place films in independent theaters while also making them available over a new video-on- demand service that will be carried by all the major cable companies, said Jonathan Sehring, IFC Entertainment's president. The company, which includes a film production and distribution arm, is expected to make the announcement at a news conference on Monday.

"So much great film has fallen by the wayside," Mr. Sehring said. "The studios are collapsing the window between the theatrical release and the DVD. We're taking that one step further."

The company named six films it had scheduled for simultaneous release, including "CSA: The Confederate States of America," a dark, faux documentary that envisions the United States if the South had won the Civil War; "I Am a Sex Addict," a semiautobiographical comedy about a young man who becomes addicted to prostitutes; and "American Gun," a series of stories about the proliferation of weapons across the country, starring Donald Sutherland and Forest Whitaker.

The simultaneous release in several distribution modes, called "day and date" release in Hollywood, has been the subject of intense debate in the industry, as movie attendance in theaters has dropped for three years in a row while cellphones and iPods have become the improbable new hosts for filmed entertainment.

The first big test of the new strategy will be on Friday with the release of Steven Soderbergh's small, cinéma vérité-style film "Bubble," a murder mystery with stars who have not acted before, in Parkersburg, W.Va.

Financed by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, two former Internet entrepreneurs, "Bubble" will open in Mr. Cuban's chain, Landmark Theaters, as well as on his HDNet high-definition network. Even so, the DVD will not be available until the following Tuesday.

In many ways, the independent film world is best suited for experimenting with these new distribution strategies, because of the large number of films that are not widely seen, and because the low budgets make them a less risky proposition.

IFC's initiative will involve more films and almost certainly more viewers. Because the films will be made available on cable, far more subscribers will have access to the video-on-demand service than now receive the HDNet network. Mr. Sehring said IFC's research showed that DVD sales were not affected by the date of release, and decided to hold off there.

The main idea, Mr. Sehring said, was to respond to the pent-up demand for art house-style films that are usually shown only in a few theaters in major cities, and even then only for a week or two.

"Foreign films are not being released," he said, "aside from Sony Classics. And low-budget American films - they're nonexistent. It's left to the really small companies, and they can't afford to take on a lot of films and get them played outside of New York and L.A."

The rise of specialty divisions at major studios like Fox Searchlight and Focus Features has reduced the opportunities for art-house films, he said, because they now specialize in medium-budget, serious films for adults, once the purview of their parent studios.

The IFC service will ramp up to making 10 to 15 films available a month, including some from other distributors, at a cost of $6.95 a month for subscribers or $5.95 per film.

Mr. Sehring said the films would be released in about 10 theaters initially, including IFC's three screens in New York, and in independent chains like Mr. Cuban's Landmark theaters.

How quickly other companies will jump in remains to be seen. Many pointed out that the initiative made sense for IFC's parent, Rainbow Media, which owns the Independent Film Channel, and for Mr. Cuban's company, which owns HDNet. It may make less sense for other film companies without those kinds of pipelines.

And some said that those who move toward day-and-date releases are going to have trouble finding theaters.

David Dinerstein, an experienced industry executive who recently ran Paramount Classics, said: "It's absolutely imperative to the film business as we know it to not have windows that are day and date. I think they'll meet with resistance from exhibitors along the way, with the exception of the independent chains."

But the producer Steve Tisch said he considered the shift inevitable, especially since young moviegoers do not distinguish between different distribution modes. "I think the industry will resist and resist some more, and then slowly embrace it," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/bu...dependent.html





Like This? You'll Hate That.

(Not All Web Recommendations Are Welcome.)
Laurie J. Flynn

On Amazon.com, a customer interested in buying the novel "The Life of Pi" is also shown "The Kite Runner" because other Amazon customers - presumably with similar tastes - also purchased that book. That's just one approach among many in the science of recommendation software.

Web technology capable of compiling vast amounts of customer data now makes it possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific shopper's interests. Companies are finding that getting those personalized recommendations right - or even close - can mean significantly higher sales.

For consumers, a recommendation system can either represent a vaguely annoying invasion of privacy or a big help in bringing order to a sea of choices.

"It's like if your music is in Tower Records and no one knows it, you're nowhere," said Tim Westergren, a founder of Pandora, an online music site, and of the Music Genome Project. "On the Internet, it's that times 100."

But spewing out recommendations is not entirely without risk. Earlier this month, Walmart.com issued a public apology and took down its entire cross-selling recommendation system when customers who looked at a boxed set of movies that included "Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" were told they might also appreciate a "Planet of the Apes" DVD collection, as well as "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and other irrelevant titles.

The company said that the problem was created last year when the Web site set out to promote African-American films for Martin Luther King's Birthday. It linked a set of four African-American films to a group of 263 popular movies also boxed into sets, hoping that the links would give the four films more exposure.

"Unfortunately," said Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, in a statement, "some of the inadvertent combinations were very offensive."

Wal-Mart's trouble stemmed not from the aggressive use of advanced cross-selling technology, but from the near lack of it. Companies with more nuanced strategies have avoided embarrassing linkages.

At NetFlix, the online DVD rental company, for example, roughly two-thirds of the films rented were recommended to subscribers by the site - movies the customers might never have thought to consider otherwise, the company says. As a result, between 70 and 80 percent of NetFlix rentals come from the company's back catalog of 38,000 films rather than recent releases.

"The movies we recommend generate more satisfaction than the ones they choose from the new releases page," said Neil Hunt, NetFlix's chief product officer. "It increases customer loyalty to the site."

Mr. Hunt said NetFlix's recommendation system collected more than two million ratings forms from subscribers daily to add to its huge database of users' likes and dislikes. The system assigns different ratings to a movie depending on a particular subscriber's tastes. For example, "Pretty Woman" might get a four- or five-star rating if other people who share a customer's taste in movies rated it highly, while the same film might not appear on another customer's screen at all, presumably because other viewers with that customer's tastes did not rate it highly.

"The most reliable prediction for how much a customer will like a movie is what they thought of other movies," Mr. Hunt said. The company credits the system's ability to make automated yet accurate recommendations as a major factor in its growth from 600,000 subscribers in 2002 to nearly 4 million today.

Similarly, Apple's iTunes online music store features a system of recommending new music as a way of increasing customers' attachment to the site and, presumably, their purchases. Recommendation engines, which grew out of the technology used to serve up personalized ads on Web sites, now typically involve some level of "collaborative filtering" to tailor data automatically to individuals or groups of users.

Some engines use information provided directly by the shopper, while others rely more on assumptions, like offering a matching shirt to a shopper interested in purchasing a tie. And some sites are now taking personalization to another level by improving not only the collection of data but the presentation of it.

Liveplasma.com, an online site for music and, more recently, movies, graphically "maps" shoppers' potential interests. A search for music by Coldplay, for example, brings up a graphical representation of what previous customers of Coldplay music have purchased, presented in clusters of circles of various sizes.

The bigger the circle, the greater the popularity of that band. The circles are clustered into orbits representing groups of customers with similar preferences.

"This is a way of showing recommendations that are vastly more useful than textual links," said Whit Andrews, a research vice president at Gartner Inc., a market research company in Stamford, Conn.

Another development under way is matching customer tastes across Web businesses, using knowledge of a customer's tastes in music to try to sell them books, for example. "To date, that's been largely uncharted territory," Mr. Andrews said, though not for lack of trying. Web sites have long tried to develop systems for cross- selling among companies that protect customer privacy but also allow sharing of data.

While large online stores are having success through recommendations, smaller Web sites are having a more difficult time using the technology to their advantage. Developing a system for cross-selling is expensive, and perhaps most important, requires amassing a huge amount of customer data to be effective, said Patty Freeman Evans, a Jupiter Research analyst.

As a result, according to Ms. Evans, fewer than one-quarter of online shoppers make unplanned purchases when they are online, a far smaller percentage than customers at actual stores.

Walmart.com's DVD sales site now has no automated recommendation system at all. The music section of Walmart.com, however, uses a system closer to that of Amazon, where customers are given recommendations based on music they've purchased in the past. The company is also looking at using that technology for the DVD section, along with movie reviews and guides that are automatically linked to customer searches.

Carter Cast, president of Walmart.com, says personalized recommendations are one of the company's "important priorities" for its Web store. "It's convenient and helpful for customers, and it does help generate sales," Mr. Cast said, referring to the personalization feature on Walmart.com's music section.

Certainly, Apple's iTunes store has benefited from its ability to recommend songs and artists. In fact, its newest feature, called MiniStore, is able to make recommendations based on songs in users' playlists, no matter where they came from.

When someone is using the MiniStore and selects a song on the playlist, Apple will automatically collect that information. The feature, however, has been criticized by privacy advocates who say it allows Apple to snoop on customers. Under pressure, Apple decided last week to make the feature an option that customers get only on request.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/te...recommend.html





Move Over, HD-TV. Now There's HD Radio, Too.
Eric A. Taub

Traditional broadcast radio, the last bastion of analog entertainment technology, sees a bright future for itself. Its strategy for success is to become more like one of its main competitors, satellite radio.

More channels and music formats, and less-intrusive advertising are critical to its growth, industry executives say.

Last week, Clear Channel Radio and CBS Radio began carrying out that strategy by broadcasting advertising-free digital side channels - complementary music and talk programs - in a combined 43 markets. Digital radio technology allows a broadcaster to offer up to three additional FM channels in the space formerly occupied by one.

The radio industry, like broadcast television before it, is switching to digital technology. With digital technology, AM stations sound like FM, and FM stations approach CD's in sound quality. A retrofit to HD Radio, or high-definition radio, costs about $100,000 per station.

The industry once believed its future would be secure simply by switching to digital technology, but the popularity of satellite radio, MP3 players and Internet radio has changed the game plan.

"Before the iPod and before satellite radio, broadcasters said, 'We already have 40 stations per market. Why cut up the ad pie?' " said Robert J. Struble, president of the iBiquity Digital Corporation, of Columbia, Md., the developer of the HD Radio digital technology. "But the industry recognizes that broader choices and niche formats do make a difference."

Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive of CBS Radio, said, "The radio industry is healthy. It's just not growing fast enough for Wall Street. More options and more programming will allow us to grow faster; this is a three- to eight-year process."

The new side channels being offered by CBS, Clear Channel and other station groups seek to fill in the programming gaps in various markets. In New York, WCBS- FM is now offering an oldies music channel, and WKTU-FM is programming a country music channel. Beasley Broadcast Group is multicasting in 5 of the 17 markets where it has introduced digital broadcasts. The company, based in Naples, Fla., owns 41 stations, and expects to convert all to digital by the end of 2007. Its side channels include country and disco stations.

"HD Radio is the future," said B. Caroline Beasley, the company's chief financial officer. "We have to respond to the emerging competitive technologies."

By the end of 2005, 622 stations were offering digital simulcasts, allowing 80 percent of the United States population to receive a digital signal. That number should jump to 1,200 stations by the end of 2006, according to Mr. Struble.

Few listeners are able to hear the new offerings, however. Digital radio requires the purchase of HD receivers, which remain expensive, although prices are falling rapidly. HD radios for the home are now available for $500. "Tabletop digital radios will be $199 before the end of the year," Mr. Struble said.

As with satellite radio, the HD Radio industry hopes to persuade carmakers to offer digital broadcast radios as factory-installed units. BMW now offers digital receivers in two of its models, as a $500 option.

Digital radio home receivers are available now from Boston Acoustics and Radiosophy; car units are available from a variety of manufacturers.

By the end of last year, about 85,000 digital broadcast radio receivers had been sold, according to Stephanie Guza, an industry analyst with In-Stat, a market research firm. That number should climb to 500,000 by the end of this year, Ms. Guza said.

As the traditional broadcast stations offer new digital side-channel formats, an industry group, the HD Digital Radio Alliance, will oversee the effort to ensure that no two stations offer competing formats in the same market.

Member stations have agreed to keep the side channels free of advertising for at least the next 18 months. Once advertising is introduced, it will not be the same. The saturation of radio advertising is said to be one reason that satellite subscription radio from Sirius and XM has attracted more than nine million subscribers to date.

"We will look at different types of ads," said John Hogan, president and chief executive of Clear Channel Radio. "There's a need to do it differently. Radio is reinventing itself by taking advantage of and embracing new technologies."

The HD Radio technology was devised to be able to offer new types of ads. According to Peter Ferrara, president of the HD Digital Radio Alliance, new advertising formats could include text streaming across the unit's digital display, a push-to-buy button when a consumer hears about a product, or the sponsorship of a block of programming.

Mr. Hogan of Clear Channel expects to see episodic commercials, 15-second spots that follow each other to tell a story.

Broadcast radio executives believe that they continue to hold a trump card that their competition can never match: the local nature of free radio.

"People live in communities and they want to connect in their homes, to see if their schools are open," Mr. Ferrara said.

To encourage listeners to move to the new technology, the nation's major radio station groups have agreed to commit advertising valued at $200 million to promote digital radio.

The promotional campaign will begin this quarter and will tie ads for the technology with promotions for digital radio receivers and radio retailers.

The moves by the industry are expected to breathe new life into a trusted and traditional technology. "AM and FM are still very popular media," said Susan Kevorkian, a program manager for consumer markets at the IDC research firm. "Radio is still familiar and it's free. It's hard to compete with free."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/te...y/23radio.html





Adult Film Maker Digital Playground Picks Blu-Ray
Lisa Baertlein

U.S. adult film maker Digital Playground on Thursday said it will throw its support behind Sony Corp.'s high definition Blu-ray format, adding spice to the multibillion-dollar standards war raging in Hollywood.

"We feel that of the two formats, it's the one that's more future-proofed," said Digital Playground's president and founder, who identifies himself as "Joone."

Sony's Blu-ray competes with the HD DVD format championed by Toshiba Corp. and appears to have amassed more allies in the next-generation DVD format war -- including Apple Computer Inc. Panasonic and the majority of movie studios.

Digital Playground is the company behind the movie "Pirates," which has won honors from the porn industry that calls Southern California's San Fernando Valley home and is estimated to have had 2005 sales of $12.6 billion, according to Adult Video News.

But while Digital Playground, known as an innovator for bringing porn to personal computers, is endorsing Blu-ray, it has not yet found a company prepared to mass- produce its films in the new high-definition format.

Joone said companies who replicate DVDs are hesitant about embracing the porn industry and are committed in putting mainstream Hollywood's movies onto the new discs.

Nevertheless, a spokesman for Blu-ray said the endorsement underscored the format's wide appeal.

"It shows that Blu-ray is appealing to film genres of many types," said Andy Parsons, a spokesman for Blu-ray and a senior vice president at Pioneer Electronics, a unit of Pioneer Corp.

Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, also called Digital Playground's decision a "vote of confidence in the format."

Failure of the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps to reach a unified standard has set the stage for a war akin to the VHS vs. Betamax battle of the 1980s. Each side hopes to reignite the sagging $24 billion home video market with new players and discs that offer greater capacity and interactive features.

But analysts said the adult film vote does not appear to have as much impact now as it had in past format matches.

Aditya Kishore, director of the media practice at the Yankee Group, said adult content providers in the past played a big role in boosting new video technology -- particularly the adoption of video tape and online content distribution.

"The adult industry tends to be open to new technology standards," said Kishore, but noted that mainstream entertainment this time will likely play a bigger role in determining the winner of the standards war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011902785.html





Party Capital of the Year: Tallinn, Estonia
Seth Sherwood

WHEN the British guidebook author Laurence Shorter was sent to research Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a couple of years ago, he knew little about it and had no idea what to expect. "I have to admit," he recalled recently, "I didn't really know where it was."

Six weeks later, Mr. Shorter emerged with a vastly improved sense of the city's location (on the Baltic Sea) and a newfound appreciation of its "full-time party culture," as he described the local vibe in the fruit of his adventure: a slick, hardbound directory of decadent addresses called "A Hedonist's Guide to Tallinn."

The 2004 guide - which lists pubs with handcuff-carrying waitresses, nightclubs with scantily clad dancers, and stylish restaurants representing every corner of the globe - has become a minor bible for the rapidly growing ranks of "time-poor, cash-rich 30-something partiers" heading to Tallinn, as Mr. Shorter described his audience.

How did a city smaller than Fresno, Calif., (population about 400,000) in a former Soviet backwater explode into a hot spot whose "Hedonist Guide" companions include the likes of Madrid and Miami?

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Estonia's integration into the European Union in 2004 have done much to open the nation of 1.4 million. So have budget- airline flights connecting Tallinn with Western European capitals.

But simple geography plays the main role. Just 50 miles across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, Tallinn gets a whopping injection of cash and conviviality from the more than half-million Finns who head across every year - frequently on multiple daily "booze cruises" - to exploit Tallinn's significantly cheaper alcohol.

Pockets filled with kroons (about 13 of them equal a dollar), motivated pleasure-seekers can smoke Cuban cigars at La Casa del Habano, watch rugby over a pint at Scotland Yard, sip cocktails in the Scandi-chic interiors of R.I.F.F., boogie at the huge Club Hollywood or elite Club Prive, watch women lose their clothes at the Soho strip club, and then lose their own shirts at Bally's Casino.

But Finns are increasingly quaffing alongside a new crowd: British bachelor-partyers. Take a summer stroll in the Old Town - the city's medieval center - and you're likely to find a host of Mr. Shorter's besotted countrymen weaving over the cobblestones and into myriad pubs and beer cellars. Many are sent by Tallinn Pissup, a three-year-old travel agency whose sole mission is to send bachelor parties to slosh through the various forms of decadence in the Estonian capital. (It has sister companies for Prague, Budapest and Bratislava.)

"It's quite exciting, because the local populations, especially there in Tallinn, have a great imagination for different activities," says Neil Smith, a founder and marketing manager of Tallinn Pissup. These include parachute jumping, demolition derbies, Doctor Death's Military Academy (machine-gun training) and a "Medieval Lesbian Stripper Show" in an Old Town cellar.

When the effects of all that late-night partying wears off, drinkers' eyes can take advantage of the Old Town's fairy-tale sights, including Middle Ages' houses merchants' guilds, chapels, monasteries and the soaring needlelike spire of St. Olaf's church. Better yet, they can hit the rustic Town Hall Square and its famous 15th-century pharmacy, which still offers relief from ye olde hangover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/travel/22tallinn.html





Publishing

Before the Fame, a Million Little Skeptics
Tom Zeller Jr.

THERE were signs, years ago, that something was amiss. Like the lengthy Minneapolis Star Tribune article that raised questions about some of the more outlandish vignettes in James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," shortly after its release in April 2003.

Or the few mainstream critics - the precious few - who expressed gentle skepticism at the B-movie flourishes in the book's tale of drug abuse, crime and recovery. Janet Maslin, in this newspaper, for instance, winkingly noted that a well-meaning fan, writing a "customer review" at Amazon.com, inadvertently extolled Mr. Frey as "a new voice in fiction."

And what was unknowingly foreshadowed in this final passage of a profile of another troubled writer, in The New York Observer of May 21, 2003, struggling with truth and addiction?

"On the nearby coffee table was a copy of 'A Million Little Pieces,' the memoir by the self-rehabilitated drug addict, James Frey. Sticking from it was a business card, which he took out. It said: Jayson Blair, Reporter. Then: The New York Times.

"Jayson Blair looked at it. 'This is my new bookmark,' he said."

Mr. Frey has not disputed the allegations of myriad embellishments in his book, made by the Smoking Gun Web site two weeks ago. Chief among these is his three- month stint in jail, which apparently never happened.

This is not important, Mr. Frey told Larry King, because he has written a "memoir," and it is the book's "essential truth" that matters.

Never mind that over the last three years, as "A Million Little Pieces" was heralded as a masterpiece and questions about his truth-telling were at a low boil, he had professed the exact opposite.

"The only things I changed were aspects of people that might reveal their identity," he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in July 2003. "Otherwise, it's all true."

Based on such assertions (and with a generous push last fall from Oprah Winfrey, who recommended the book to her club), at least 3.5 million readers laid down good money for the book, and at times it seemed that nearly all of them were chattering about it, with utter devotion, online.

But the truly interesting artifacts in this whole affair are the few, sometimes anonymous, Internet leavings of readers, many with substance abuse histories of their own, who sensed something was wrong long before there was a Smoking Gun exposé.

Certainly, by late last year, with the scrutiny brought on by Ms. Winfrey's endorsement, the skeptical voices had grown diverse and authoritative. And more than Mr. Frey's criminal record was being questioned.

"Having been through treatment," wrote Carol Colleran at Amazon.com in November, "and four other members of my family being through treatment at the facility he so clearly describes, I am offended and angry at him and this book."

Ms. Colleran is a renowned expert on drug and alcohol abuse and a co-author of "Aging and Addiction," a guidebook published in 2002 by the very rehab facility in Minnesota, Hazelden, that Mr. Frey depicts in his memoir.

"There is nothing in the book that is accurate or even remotely true," she wrote.

But who might have been the skeptical soul who left this review at Amazon.com nearly three years ago, just a few weeks after the book's debut?

Date: June 7, 2003

From: A reader

"As an ex-drug abuser and as a writer, I've never been so offended or enraged by a book. ... Notice that the author, though supposedly downing quarts of booze, fistfuls of crack, and incredibly, glue and gasoline, manages to graduate from college, spend a year abroad, keep his friends and support himself. ... I hope some of his 'classmates' at Hazelden decide to blab - or someone chooses to look deeper into the story."

Shortly afterward at the same site, Dr. Larkin Breed, a radiologist from Pleasant Hill, Calif., expressed similar doubts about the infamous scene in which Mr. Frey is forced to undergo a root canal procedure without drugs of any kind.

Date: Aug. 5, 2003

From: lbreed

"I quit reading this book when the author began to describe having his teeth worked on, early in recovery, without analgesia. This would never have happened for a number of reasons. This lowered the author's general credibility to near zero."

Indeed, even as the marketing machinery behind Mr. Frey's book intensified - Amazon.com named it the top pick for 2003 - and a legion of blogs and discussion boards admired its "raw" and "visceral" prose with "ya gotta read this" links to an Amazon or Barnes & Noble shopping cart, an undercurrent of critical analysis was forming.

"The joke is that tens of millions of sobby idiots bought and believed every one of Frey's self-indulgent lies, and accepted his parody of Hemingway laconic narration as high art," wrote John Dolan, an editor of The Exile, an English-language newspaper and Web site based in Moscow, in late 2003.

Just over a year ago, at Amazon, J. North wrote, "I can't believe they tried to pass this off as nonfiction." And in October, a reader from Michigan added that "anyone who has gone through treatment at a center, or works at one, knows that James Frey's description of treatment is largely fictionalized."

Another reader, Lisa Lias, wrote in November, "Maybe this guy did go to Hazelden. But this book is fiction."

Asked recently why she thought so, Ms. Lias, an actor, wrote in an e-mail message, "For my work I have to read a lot of scripts. I know bad dialogue when I see it."

At SmartRecovery.infopop.cc, a discussion site for recovering addicts, a user called jakatak was asked about the book. "Well, if you enjoy a good piece of fiction, I suppose you might like it," he wrote in December. "A national airline allows a person, unattended, to fly with four teeth missing, a hole in the side of his cheek, and blood and vomit on his shirt? Ya, right!"

Mr. Frey has his defenders, including his publishers and Ms. Winfrey. And millions of fans believe his ends justify his means.

But as Mr. Frey retreats into his multimillion-dollar loft and flashes his poetic license, he might do well to take a tour of some of the more confused dialogue now unfolding at some recovery and substance abuse message boards online, if only to solidify the public commitment he has made to never write about himself again.

"I think it upsets me because here's someone who's 13, 10, 8 - or however many years - sober, who has been deceitful, by continuing to tout inaccuracies in his book as factual," wrote a user called Autumn at SoberRecovery.com, a clearinghouse of substance abuse information.

"That, to me, is not a person who comes anywhere close to being what I might have considered a model of recovery at one time," she continued. "And I think the same might hold true for most, if not all, regulars who hang out here. Recovery is important to us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/te...gy/23link.html

[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Delicate Dance for Bush in Depicting Spy Program as Asset
Adam Nagourney

With a campaign of high-profile national security events set for the next three days, following Karl Rove's blistering speech to Republicans on Friday, the White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as an asset, a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year.

Whether the White House can succeed depends very much, members of both parties say, on its success in framing a complicated debate when the country is torn between its historic aversion to governmental intrusion and its recent fear of terrorist attacks at home.

Polls suggest that Americans are divided over whether Mr. Bush has the authority to order the searches without warrants that critics say violate the law and that the president says are legal and critical to the nation's security.

But as the White House and Democrats are well aware, the issue can draw very different reactions depending on how it is presented. These next few days could prove critical, as both Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats move aggressively to define what is at stake.

Americans may be willing to support extraordinary measures - perhaps extralegal ones - if they are posed in the starkest terms of protecting the nation from another calamitous attack. They are less likely to be supportive, members of both parties say, if the question is presented as a president breaking the law to spy on the nation's own citizens.

Viewed from the perspective of the battles over the Homeland Security Act or the USA Patriot Act, this White House holds a tactical edge; it has repeatedly proved highly effective in defining complicated debates against the Democratic Party. Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Rove's speech on Friday to the Republican National Committee was a classic example. "Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," Mr. Rove said. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Democrats - and, though Mr. Rove made no mention of this Friday, some Republicans, too - have indeed challenged the administration for eavesdropping without obtaining warrants. They argue, among other points, that the White House is bypassing legal mechanisms established in 1978 that already allow law enforcement agencies to move rapidly to monitor communications that might involve terrorists. Yet it is difficult to think of a Democrat who has actually argued that it is not "in our national security interest" to track Qaeda calls to the United States, as Mr. Rove contested; he did not offer any examples of whom he had in mind.

Beyond that tactical edge, the White House enjoys the advantage of its platform. The sheer crush of news media attention to a rare public speech by Mr. Rove could not have been lost on Democrats.

By contrast, there is no single Democrat who stands as the voice of opposition. That difference is likely to become particularly glaring this week, with a speech on Monday by Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency; a legal defense of the spying program on Tuesday by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and a visit by Mr. Bush to N.S.A. headquarters on Wednesday. This orchestrated campaign is the work of the same White House that initially offered a crouched, guarded response to the disclosure of the eavesdropping program last month.

Still, in many significant ways the task the White House faces now may prove more daunting than the battles it has waged on this terrain before.

A number of Republicans have joined Democrats in challenging the surveillance program, pointedly reminding the administration that precedents established today will be in place whenever a Democrat returns to power.

"A lot of Democrats?" said one prominent Republican supporter of Mr. Bush, who did not want to be identified while being critical of a White House that famously does not brook criticism. "Democrats, Karl? Republicans, too."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "A lot of conservatives are very skeptical about it. It is not as clean-cut a political win as the administration thinks that it is."

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is planning hearings on the surveillance program. And in an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said he did not think the president had the legal authority for this operation, adding that the White House should seek Congressional approval to alter the 1978 provisions if it thinks they are not working now.

Mr. McCain also came to the defense of Democrats in response to Mr. Rove's suggestion that they were not committed to the nation's security. "Do I think that the president's leadership has been worthy of support of our party and our leadership?" he said. "Yes. But there's too many good Democrats over there who are as concerned about national security and work just as hard as I do."

Beyond that, one Republican analyst who is skeptical about the White House strategy said Mr. Bush's position was hardly helped by the fact that his credibility numbers have dropped along with his popularity since his re-election. Mr. Bush may find that, as some Democrats have suggested, the invocations of Sept. 11 do not have the force they once had.

For their part, Democrats said they have learned from their repeated defeats by this White House. The Democratic presidential candidate of 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Rove and the White House were willfully distorting the Democratic position.

"He's playing an old game," Mr. Kerry said. "Every time they have a problem, they play the 9/11 card."

"We all support surveillance - that's where they are playing word games again," Mr. Kerry said. "You can protect the safety of the American people and you can protect the Constitution."

The political complexity of the issue was reflected in remarks by Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, who, like Mr. Kerry, is considering a run for president. Speaking by telephone on a trip to Iowa, Mr. Romney at first offered full support for the president's surveillance program.

"The eavesdropping is a big matter on the coasts for people who are inclined to dislike the president," Mr. Romney said. "The great majority of Americans think it is the president's first responsibility to protect the lives of the American citizens in an urgent setting where there is a threat of terrorism."

But Mr. Romney called back a few moments later to make clear that he would have a different view if the program were found to be unlawful.

"I would never suggest that the president should break the law," he said. "My guess is, my assumption is, he did not break the law. The president has a responsibility to follow the law, which I believe is likely to be found, but he also has a primary responsibility to protect the American people."

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/po... ner=homepage





Challenge to Hospitality: The ID Check in the Lobby
Joe Sharkey

DON'T try any funny business at the Alex Hotel in Manhattan, Karen Kelly, because they've got your number, sister.

It is 1507. That is the number the desk clerk jotted on the photocopy the hotel made of Ms. Kelly's passport. Ms. Kelly had to produce the passport one night last week when she came into the lobby of the hotel, which is at 205 East 45th Street, to meet an out-of-town business associate.

"My husband and I travel a lot, but that was the most bizarre experience I've ever had in a hotel lobby," said Ms. Kelly, a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

"I'm one of those New Yorkers who doesn't have a driver's license, so I carry my passport with me in case I do need to show a picture ID."

But because she was not checking into the hotel and not going anywhere but the lobby, she did not count on having to produce a government-issued photo ID just to have a clerk phone a guest room from the front desk.

"I was kind of dumbfounded," she said. She handed her passport to the clerk, who made the photocopy and jotted on it the file number, 1507, and the time and date. The clerk told her the copy would be "kept on file for a year," said Ms. Kelly, adding: "At that point, I was kind of irritated at myself. I mean, a hotel lobby is, like, a public place, right? They claim the right to demand ID just to come in?"

That's right, said Mary Lou Pollack, the general manager of the hotel, where a standard single room can cost $475 a night. In fact, she had no apologies at all about the security drill.

"It very difficult to secure a hotel," she said in an interview in a bar just off the lobby of the two-year-old hotel. "We do a lot of high-profile business. We're two blocks from the United Nations and we always have guests who could be targets, which also would make the hotel a target."

The vigilant front-desk scrutiny is not just because of fear of terrorists, she said.

"When we were new, I didn't want this hotel to be sucker punched and to get a bad reputation." At night, she said, nearby Lexington Avenue "is overrun with prostitutes."

"While we were gaining our basic reputation, a lot of our accounts were from very conservative corporations. I was afraid in our early stages that a bad element would take over the hotel," she added. So, she said, "we made the hotel as obviously unfriendly as possible to people who wanted to have no identity."

I dropped by the hotel unannounced, so the public relations squad was not on guard. Since I was inquiring about a reader's complaint, I expected the brush-off. Instead, Ms. Pollack answered my questions directly and spoke passionately about her determination to run a luxury hotel while maintaining security.

It was utterly clear, incidentally, that she was speaking in generalities and casting no personal aspersions on Ms. Kelly.

She even corrected something for the record. Ms. Kelly had been told the copy of her passport would be kept on file for a year. Actually, it is five years, Ms. Pollack said.

Incidentally, before I identified myself, I sat undisturbed for 10 minutes in the lobby. No one asked me for a photo ID. Granted, it was midafternoon and I am a middle- aged male.

I'm just saying, is all ....

This business of increasingly having to show your papers in this country is a can of worms for travelers, and we will return to it here on occasion, especially with regard to the delicate balances between security and privacy.

Let's leave the hotel on the East Side and go to the other extreme, philosophically and geographically. Let me introduce you to John Gilmore, a philanthropist who made his fortune as one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. I spoke with him last month at a coffee shop near his home in San Francisco.

Mr. Gilmore has literally made a federal case out of his refusal to show identification, even to get on a plane.

As a consequence, he has not flown domestically since July 4, 2002, when he was stopped from boarding a flight after declining to show an ID.

"I'm simply not willing to show a passport or an ID to travel in my own country," he said.

Mr. Gilmore has filed a lawsuit against the federal government arguing basically that travel is integral to the right to assembly and that demanding identification from an airline passenger who has been adequately screened for weapons is unconstitutional.

As I said, we will return to this. Meanwhile, the court papers and other background on the case are at www.papersplease.org/gilmore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/business/24road.html





Investigator: U.S. 'Outsourced' Torture
Jan Sliva

The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe said Tuesday that evidence pointed to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the United States, and that it was highly likely European governments were aware of it.

But Swiss Sen. Dick Marty said there was no tangible proof so far of the existence of clandestine centers in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, and complained of a lack of cooperation by EU governments.

His interim report, based partly on results of national investigations and recent press reports, did not break new ground and largely repeated his previous claims that U.S. policies in the war on terror contravene international law on human rights. Allegations that the CIA hid and interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported Nov. 2 in The Washington Post.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of "relocation" or "outsourcing" of torture," Marty said in the report to the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog on whose behalf he is investigating.

"Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," Marty said. He added that more than 100 suspects may have been transferred to countries where they faced torture or ill treatment in recent years.

"The entire continent is involved," Marty told the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, a body comprising several hundred national lawmakers. "It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware."

In his report, Marty analyzed the cases of an Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped from Milan, Italy, in 2003 by CIA agents and a German captured in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Citing an American lawyer, Marty also said six Bosnians were abducted by U.S. agents on Bosnian soil and taken to Guantanamo Bay, despite a Bosnian court ruling ordering their release.

Last week, Italy's justice minister formally asked the United States to allow Italian prosecutors to question 22 purported CIA operatives they accuse of kidnapping the Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in 2003 from a Milan street.

Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was seized Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors claim the cleric, who is also known as Abu Omar, was taken by the CIA to a joint U.S.-Italian air base, flown to Germany and then to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

Marty also said he would follow up on evidence gathered in the case of Khaled al Masri, a German of Lebanese origin reportedly kidnapped from Germany to Afghanistan, in the next stage of his investigation.

Marty, who is expected to issue another interim report in the next few months, complained there was enormous pressure on him to produce evidence of secret CIA prisons but there was not much help from the Council of Europe or governments.

"Not a single day passes without me being asked, 'Do you have any hard evidence, is there any proof?'" he said. "I am not a judicial authority, I have no means of investigation, the logistical support available to me is very limited."

The European Union's top justice official, Franco Frattini, called on all EU governments Tuesday to "fully cooperate" with the investigators.

The Council of Europe launched its probe after allegations surfaced in November that U.S. agents interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at clandestine prisons in eastern Europe and transported some suspects through Europe to other countries.

Human Rights Watch identified Romania and Poland as possible sites of secret U.S.- run detention facilities. Both countries have denied involvement. Clandestine detention centers would violate European human rights treaties.

Marty said there was no irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Romania, Poland or any other country.

"On the other hand, it has been proved that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and all rights and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture," he said. If eventually uncovered, the detention centers would likely be small cells that could be easily hidden, he added.

Marty has obtained flight logs archived by the Brussels-based air safety organization Eurocontrol and satellite images of air bases in Romania and Poland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





Experts: 'Decapitation' May Not End Terror
Charles J. Hanley

The Israeli assassins caught Abu Jihad in his study. They left the chief strategist of the Palestinian uprising with 170 bullets in his body. Over the next two decades, however, the movement only grew stronger, and Israel bled even more. It's called "decapitation," and a missile strike in Pakistan has raised the question anew: Would eliminating Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahri deal a mortal blow to the al-Qaida terror network?

"Decapitation just fuels the movement itself," says Jenna Jordan, a University of Chicago scholar who has closely studied the historical record of such antiterrorist tactics.

"I think that is the lesson of the Israeli efforts over the years," says Brian Jenkins, veteran terrorism analyst with the RAND Corp. research firm.

But, he quickly adds, "that doesn't mean you don't do it."

The Jan. 13 missile strike on a remote Pakistani border village showed again that the U.S. government is still trying to do it.

The early-morning attack, reportedly aimed at al- Zawahri, killed 13 villagers and possibly a few second-rank al-Qaida operatives - but not the bin Laden lieutenant. Its immediate impact could be seen in the streets of Pakistani cities, where thousands rallied, chanting "Death to America," in support of al-Qaida's "jihad," or holy war.

By Thursday, bin Laden's voice was being broadcast throughout the Muslim world, threatening a new terror strike against America.

"The Pakistan case, where you have all those people killed, that's the kind of `bad press' that keeps a movement going," said Jordan, whose 2004 study reviewed 72 international cases, stretching back almost a century, in which militant movements' leaders were targeted and killed.

In most cases, she found, the movements carried on - particularly if they were religion-based, like al- Qaida. Only one in five violent religious groups collapsed when their leaders were eliminated, she determined.

"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," said Richard A. Clarke, who was White House counterterrorism coordinator in 1998, when U.S. missiles were fired at suspected al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill its leaders.

"There's no iron law," Clarke told The Associated Press. "But the law enforcement side, the intelligence side, will always want to eliminate the leadership."

One of the most spectacular "eliminations" occurred in 1988, when Israeli commandos slipped into Tunisia and stormed the exile home of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, the PLO's No. 2 and architect of the uprising that had exploded five months earlier in Israeli-occupied territories.

Abu Jihad was killed, but the "intefadeh" went on, and by the 1990s still more Palestinian groups had joined in, followed by still more decapitations. With the latest tracking technologies, the Israelis have successfully targeted top leaders of the Hamas group in particular.

Some analysts believe this has contributed to a decline in suicide terror bombings since 2003. But the Islamic militant group's following has grown and bombings continue. After two successive Hamas chiefs were killed in 2004, the group vowed "100 reprisals."

"Usually these assassinated leaders are from the public, political wing, but there are many underground military commanders far from Israel's hands," said Islamist researcher Yasser al-Sirri, of London's Islamic Observation Center.

Jenkins noted that diversity in the Palestinian movement makes decapitation difficult. "When you're dealing with a disparate host of terrorist foes over time, as the Israelis have confronted, then it has less effect."

Examples of recent decapitations cited by Jordan and others:

- Shining Path, the Maoist insurgency that rocked Peru in the 1980s, has all but collapsed since the capture of founder Abimael Guzman in 1992. Such ideologically based movements are most affected when their leaders are removed, Jordan found.

- Turkey's Kurdish separatist group PKK declared a unilateral cease-fire in 1999 after leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured, but renounced it in 2004. Its attacks have increased in recent months.

- The entire leadership of Spain's Basque separatist group ETA was arrested in 1992, but ETA bombings and assassinations soon resumed. Territorially based nationalist groups like the Kurds and Basques tend to be resilient, Jordan observed.

When it comes to al-Qaida, which organized the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terror attacks, analysts underscore an important emerging characteristic of the group: It seems to be growing more diffuse and decentralized, as seen in the unending campaign of Iraq suicide bombings carried out in its name.

"Al-Qaida is not one group anymore, but rather an idea," al-Sirri said. "The jihad is not about individuals. If bin Laden is killed or captured, tens of new bin Ladens will be born."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...01-22-12-22-13





Future American Lawyers To Be Proud Of.

... and Alberto Gonzales.

via p2pconsortium

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.



To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.



Fortunately for him, it was a brief speech... followed by a panel discussion that basically ripped his argument a new asshole.

And, as one of the people on the panel said,

"When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough.

In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today."
- David Cole, Georgetown University Law Professor

It was a good day for dissent.
http://insomnia.livejournal.com/6523...c=2&style=mine


(Post a new comment)

Europe Salutes You
(Anonymous)

Here in the UK, the vast majority of us have been despairing of American domestic and foreign policy for some time, and the seeming lack of any kind of visible protest from the American people about the erosion of their civil liberties. Our UK politicians often blindly follow your precedents, so your country's continuing, and all but unhindered, stampede towards an unquestionable dictatorship is somewhat un-nerving for us.

This kind of civil disobedience against the worst kind of steamroller politics ('Say it loud enough and often enough and it becomes true') gives us hope that the tide could still turn.

They should all be VERY proud.
http://insomnia.livejournal.com/6523...c=2&style=mine





Burnoff: Part 1 - The Bad Guys Win
Tarmle

Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it's not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint activated lockers. This is where you must leave all of your electronics, your personal server and peripherals, even your watch, and you had better not be wearing smart spectacles or contacts. As you enter the security zone you're scanned for anything you may have forgotten. Cochlea and optical implants must be capable of responding with a coded RF identification signal to indicate their systems are secure and cannot record. People with older models, or models implanted abroad where such interrogation is illegal, are turned away. Perhaps they would like to see one of the older releases? Once through the scanner you must submit to a biometric ID test - this is where the known bloggers, hackers and spoilers are ejected. Finally there is the non-disclosure agreement to be signed - these days most moviegoers choose to sign via the MPAAs annual subscription, just trying to take some of the hassle out of visiting the cinema. Finally you get to see the film. In the auditorium the audience is constantly scanned by an AI looking for suspicious activity, so don't rummage in your pockets for too long. It's strange that all this effort to protect the movie industry has done so little to improve the movies.

You don't really own your home computer, or even the data you keep on it. Oh, you paid for it, just like you paid for the fibre-optic Internet connection that it can't function without, but now it squats under your TV using your electricity and does more work for the content industry than for you. The nightly security patches it downloads for itself don't secure your computer against attackers, they secure the system and software against you. TV-on-demand seemed like a dream come true when you first opted in and upgraded all your hardware, but the slowly encroaching charges are becoming a disincentive to turn on at all. Sometimes the last episode of a series makes up 50% of the cost of the whole season.

The Internet is not what it used to be. It's expanded, naturally, the technology giving everyone mobile PCs with vast ad- hoc networking capabilities, it's faster, more efficient, and more available, but it's also more restrictive. Since the ISPs were made responsible for the content they deliver their filtering has become neurotic. Anti-terror, piracy, plagiarism and libel filters search every request and response for signs of illegal activity, always erring on the side of caution. Wikipedia's index has been decimated. Popular blogs like Boing Boing now have more lawyers involved than contributors (the one's that have survived that is). Even if you managed to get something illegal through the filters your operating system's regularly updated self-check mechanisms would eventually root it out, or report you to the authorities, usually both.

These days it seems like every time you turn on one of your gadgets you have to fight with its DRM to get it to do what you want. The home movie of your daughter opening her birthday presents is ruined by a patch of grey fog that shifts with every movement of the camera, tracking sluggishly to keep the TV screen in the background obscured. From the codes embedded in TV's update pattern your camera had decided the show was not licensed for this form of reproduction and blocked it. You wish you had thought to turn it off at the time, but squinting into the camera's tiny screen it hadn't looked so bad.

Even once recorded, your own media is not safe. Everything is stored on your home PC, trapped in the solid-state drive's proprietary filing system. Once there, the only reasonable way to transfer it is to another trusted drive from the same vendor - the DRM won't recognise any other brand of mass storage device. In the meantime the PC constantly searches your files looking for illegal material. A recent security patch has destroyed the last video of your father. According to the email report you received that same morning the latest video and photographic scanning protocols had decided something seen in the footage resembled a new government building, the appearance of which is now classified. You know for sure that there is no such building in the footage, it was all filmed in the old man's living room. But there's no way for you to prove that with the offending shots turned to grey fog.

You just don't see physical media anymore. Too easily duplicated, their security too easily cracked, they've been dropped in favour of heavily encrypted and vendor-locked streaming media. You don't 'own' copies of any music or movies these days, instead your monthly subscriptions grant you only the right to temporarily buffer a few seconds of the distributor's authorised files while you watch or listen. Ultimately, that was the reason ad-hoc networking protocols and mobile PC technologies were pushed so hard, not because the customers wanted them but because the music and movie industries needed them to replace the vulnerable duplication method normally needed for such mobile media.

Physical bookshops are a novelty now; they only sell works that are in the public domain, and only to a few die-hard paper enthusiasts. Their prices rise steadily as demand drops and the printing and binding industry falters. Tightened regulation has made it illegal to sell second hand books that are still under copyright - the bookshops will sometimes give the customer a few cents for old books, part of a commission they receive for sending them off to be destroyed by the publishers. Public libraries have almost disappeared - unable to adapt to an environment where more and more books were only available in locked digital formats, they were forced to close all but the largest repositories - and even those are rapidly becoming obsolete. The last book you tried to download to you eReader turned out to be incompatible. The latest novels are now being streamed as well, one page at a time, and you'll have to buy a new reader that supports wireless quantum encryption. It seems odd that you're old enough to remember when photocopiers were still legal.

The only way writers can get their novels read, or musicians have their music heard, is by signing with a content provider who will claim the work as their own and charge people for access. It's nearly impossible for artists to make money anymore. The celebrities you read about, the millionaires who's contribution to the industry was actually rewarded, are a microscopic minority. But wasn't it always that way? There is nothing to stop an author from reading a work aloud in public, or a band from performing to a live audience, but few beyond that space will hear it. Hardly anyone has access to the technology that would let them record what they're hearing, at least not in any permanent form, and even fewer have the means to share it once they have. And god forbid the artists accidentally use a sentence or lyric already claimed by one of the corporations...

Somewhere out there, hackers and open-source software programmers are still working, beleaguered by diminishing supplies of usable hardware, ever tighter controls on imports and the furious unflinching eye of the authorities. They are constantly interrogated, their work searched for copyright and patent infringements, for any new technologies the content providers and national security services can't control. They can write competitive applications, they can make the systems work faster, more efficiently, if they weren't so fearful, they could make it free. What they can't do is tell anyone that needs to know.
http://tarmle.livejournal.com/80182.html





Confirming the Copyright Gap
Michael Geist

The Toronto Star today featured a lengthy article by Sam Bulte titled Closing the Copyright Gap which explains her views on copyright reform (unfortunately the article is not currently online). The article makes the arguments that observers of this issue would expect: WIPO ratification is good, Canadian digital businesses are being hurt by the current framework, downloading is a major problem, and opponents of WIPO treaties "employ hyperbole and ad hominem attacks to get their message out" (sort of like Bulte's comments in the all-candidates meetings or a release she posted last week that included a blatant lie from Margaret Atwood who criticizes "so-called newspaper columnists funded as lobbyists by foreign concerns", but I digress).

In my view, the article provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of what critics of Ms. Bulte's fundraiser have argued. Not that Bulte's copyright policies are not in the best interests of Canada (which they are not), but rather that she is too closely aligned with groups from whom she accepts campaign contributions. In this case, the Bulte article is little more than a rehash of claims made in an assortment of CRIA press releases, speeches, and editorials.

While it is too much to go through each paragraph, allow me to cite just a few examples. First, Bulte spends several paragraphs on the need to ratify WIPO and argues that the Supreme Court of Canada has lamented our failure to do so. This is nonsense - the Supreme Court has actually focused on the need for balance in copyright - but that didn't stop CRIA from making these same arguments in a July 2004 release.

Second, Bulte then argues that the absence of the treaties has hamstrung Canadian digital music services. Bulte says:

"While U.S. online music ventures, such as iTunes and Napsters, are prospering because of the certainty of modern copyright laws there, Canada's legal digital music services have suffered without similar legislation. On a per capita basis, Canadian legal downloads should be the equivalent of roughly 10 percent of U.S. sales. Given Canada's relatively higher broadband penetration, the figure could be even higher. However, lacking the same legal supports, Canadians have downloaded only two percent of the amount south of the border. Why? The OECD reported in June 2005 that Canada has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of unauthorized file sharing in the world."

If the comments sound familiar, consider what CRIA said in a September 5, 2005 release (for my rebuttal back in September see CRIA and Kazaa):

"In other countries, legal music downloading services are thriving, with legions of consumers attracted by the convenience, selection and high quality that are provided. By contrast, Canada's legal digital music sales continue to be hamstrung by antiquated copyright laws and widespread Internet piracy. Digital sales in this country run at one-half of one percent of US levels, but should be in the 12 to 15 percent range given relative broadband penetration in the two countries. An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report released in June of this year found that Canada has the highest per capita rate of unauthorized file-swapping in the world."

Third, Bulte then focuses on software piracy, arguing:

"Currently, 36 percent of all software used in this country pirated according to IDC, far greater than in the UK or the US (each at 27 percent). By not properly protecting copyright-related sectors, we place Canada's economic growth at risk. According to IDC, introducing tougher copyright legislation that resulted in a 10 percent cut to the piracy rate would create 14,000 new jobs, $8.1 billion in new economic growth"

This is what Graham Henderson, President of CRIA wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on January 9, 2006:

"Due to Canada's outdated copyright laws, theft of software is higher in this country (36 per cent of sales) than in our closest trading partners, such as the United Kingdom or the United States (both 27 per cent). Reducing theft by 10 percentage points would create 14,000 new jobs and yield $8.1 billion in economic growth"

Fourth, Bulte then searches for data on the importance of the copyright industries and states:

"In 2000, the gross domestic product (GDP) of our copyright-related sectors was $65.9 billion, accounting for 7.4 per cent of Canadian GDP. These sectors were growing at an average annual rate of 6.6 percent; double that of the rest of the Canadian economy."

In a speech to the National Press Club on September 29, 2005, Graham Henderson told an audience that included Ms. Bulte that:

"in 2000 the gross domestic product (GDP) of our copyright-related sectors was $65.9 billion, accounting for 7.4% of Canadian GDP. These sectors were growing at an average annual rate of 6.6%; double that of the rest of the Canadian economy."

Fifth, Bulte then cites the December 2005 CRIA-commissioned survey on Canadian views on copyright. That would be the same survey that the Ottawa Citizen ridiculed in an editorial, concluding that "we shouldn't take their surveys too seriously."

I could continue but I trust the point is clear. Citing a series of CRIA studies and editorials doesn't prove Bulte's case. It actually makes the point that critics have been raising for the past three weeks.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...k=view&id=1082





ASUI Creates File Sharing Ruckus
David Grunke

Students may soon have the option to download all the music and movies they can handle for free — and they’ll be able to do it legally.

ASUI is currently working out contractual details with Ruckus Network Inc., a digital entertainment service based in Virginia, to provide a legal file-sharing network for the university.

The University of Idaho, like many campuses across the nation, has been looking for a legitimate and inexpensive way to halt illegal file sharing via internal school networks. Growing pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America, which has asked UI to turn over information about students accused of illegal downloading, has forced universities to discourage students from using internal networks for peer-to-peer file sharing. The RIAA has targeted universities in particular, and said illegal file sharing has resulted in a 7 percent decline in annual record sales.

In 2003, 70 cases of illegal file sharing were reported at UI over the course of a few weeks. Since then, ITS has restricted access to peer-to-peer file sharing services such as Kazaa and Limewire, as well as discouraging sharing within the school network. Despite these attempts, the allure of free digital media remains strong.

“I think it’s pretty hard to prevent students from downloading,” said senior Scott Carter, a computer science major. “Offering a free downloading service that wouldn’t get students in legal troubles might be … a good way to solve this problem.”

ASUI is hoping to implement Ruckus as an easy alternative to these problems. The company said it provides access to 1.5 million songs along with 45 streaming movies that change weekly. It also advertises its service as a means for students to connect to one another by sharing files, photos and class information via the school network.

Students would require an on-campus IP address in order to access the service. They must also download a media player from Ruckus in order to play the downloaded material. The program would not be compatible with devices such as iPods, which have been growing in popularity among the college crowd.
Some students may find this to be a significant drawback.

“(We’re) starting to see a lot more iPods around campus,” Carter said. “Some people may find it frustrating they can’t take their downloaded music with them.”
A growing list of schools, including Arizona State University and Northern Illinois University, have contracted with Ruckus, and UI may soon find itself added to the list.

Costs for the service have been estimated to be $10,000 annually. ASUI is currently considering picking up the bill, allowing students access to the service without additional fees. ASUI President Berto Cerrillo said he will have more details worked out in the coming weeks.
http://www.argonaut.uidaho.edu/content/view/1019/48





Oxford University on Pirate-Whacking Campaign
Jon Newton

Oxford University is promoting iTunes on campus. One of its most famous colleges, Christ Church, admits it plans to act as a Big Four anti-P2P cop, with the cartel's British Phonographic Industry darkly "monitoring" the situation in the background.

In the United States, the Big Four music labels now routinely blackmail colleges and universities into peddling product via the likes of Napster and iTunes, with school staff working as unpaid public relations and marketing teams.

EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and Sony BMG wield the threat of lawsuits against students attending schools that fail to comply and no one sees anything remarkable in this -- least of all, state officials, administrators or parents.

Now, Oxford, one of Britain's most prestigious universities, has apparently joined the club by promoting iTunes on campus. Christ Church, one of its most famous colleges, admits it will act as a Big Four anti-P2P cop, with the cartel's British Phonographic Industry darkly "monitoring" the situation in the background.

Shining a Searchlight

More than 75 [Oxford] students were "detected illegally downloading copyright material in the past two years," according to an article in the campus newspaper, The Oxford Student.

"Alan Gay, deputy director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), told The Oxford Student media corporations have already notified the university on 16 occasions this academic year that students have been illegally sharing files such as MP3s and videos. Sixty were detected in the previous year," reads the piece.

"These 'cease and desist' requests are legal notices designed to force the university to stop its members using file-sharing software to exchange copyright material. Gay said: 'You get the impression that there's a big searchlight going round, and sometimes it focuses on us, and sometimes we go for a while without anything happening.'"

More Monitoring

The level of "monitoring and action by film and music companies" has increased, and Oxford apparently has imposed an official ban on the use of peer-to-peer software, charging colleges around 60 British pounds, or US$106, each time a complaint is received.

Oxford colleges pass this fine onto the student in question and reportedly often impose an additional charge. Christ Church was the first college to officially to warn students of the "consequences of file sharing," The Oxford Student says.

Students could face an additional penalty of 50 pounds, or around $89, if caught "illicitly downloading copyrighted material," warns an e-mail sent last week by the Oxford college St. Edmund Hall, otherwise known as "Teddy Hall."

"The illegal downloading of music, films, etc., via file-sharing software is strictly prohibited by the University and College," reads the e-mail, which claims that the dean, Dr. Alistair Borthwick, believes it is only a matter of time before the copyright infringements result in a court case. The e-mail also lets students know that Christ Church will begin a program to "actively scan all Internet traffic within the college."

Students have been warned that if the college detects any use of file-sharing software, other than Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes, offenders will have Internet access revoked.

Differing Approaches

ITunes is not, of course, P2P file-sharing software. It's a purpose-designed, hard-core sales- cum-iPod promotional application loaded with digital rights management technology to specifically prevent sharing.

Oxford's Magdalen College, while also following basic OUCS rules, takes a more relaxed approach to file sharing, according to the Oxford Student piece. The college does not issue additional fines, but it does expect undergraduates to pay the OUCS charge -- 50 pounds ($89) plus Value Added Tax, or VAT -- if a copyright infringement is detected. Keble College's IT department said students would face fines of 100 pounds ($178) to cover administration costs.

The number of notices Oxford receives is surprising, says Matt Phillips, Communications Manager for the British Phonographic Industry. "We know the majority of file sharing within institutions like universities occurs across networks rather than through peer-to-peer ... so we tend to limit our monitoring to communicating with heads of IT and alerting them to the dangers of illegal downloads," he notes.

The labels' previous campaigns at Oxford have not been successful.

In 2002, during an Oxford Union Debate, then Recording Industry Association of America spin-doctor-in-chief Hilary Rosen tried to carry the proposition, "This House believes that the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music."

She failed miserably, the final vote being 72 for and 256 against. So far, at least, free music continues to survive at Oxford.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/48443.html#





Students and Teachers, From K to 12, Hit the Podcasts
Jeffrey Selingo

THE subjects were typical for a seventh-grade classroom: a summary of a mealworm's metamorphosis, strategies on improving memory and making studying easier and a story about a classroom candy thief.

But the discussions last fall at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wis., were not taking place only for their classroom to hear. They were recorded as part of a series of podcasts the students produced and syndicated over Apple's iTunes music store.

"Their audience has moved to the entire world," said Jeanne Halderson, one of two seventh-grade teachers at Longfellow who supervise the podcasts. "The students find that exciting. It's a lot more motivating to write something that the whole world can hear, rather than just something for a teacher to put a grade on."

Podcasting - posting an audio recording online that can be heard through a computer or downloaded to a mobile device like an iPod - is following blogs and online classes as yet another interactive technology catching on as a teaching tool. Currently, iTunes lists more than 400 podcasts from kindergarten through 12th-grade classes, while Yahoo has nearly 900 education-related podcasts. Some are produced by teachers wanting to reach other educators with teaching tips, while many are created by students, like the La Crosse seventh graders with their podcast, at lacrosseschools.com/longfellow/sc/ck/index.htm.

"A podcast is like few other devices that a teacher can use in advancing a student's development," said Daniel J. Schmit, an instructional technology specialist in the college of education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the author of "KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom." "It teaches them to do research, to communicate in print, to speak effectively and grab attention with sound."

One reason podcasting is effective in the classroom, Mr. Schmit says, is that it can be used in every subject. Indeed, "Coulee Kids" is like a weekly variety show, running 7 to 14 minutes, with introductory music. The Nov. 18 podcast included discussions of photosynthesis, the difference between angiosperms and gymnosperms and a segment on adding integers. The Jan. 6 episode featured student interviews about bullying, a follow-up to a report on "20/20."

Of course, students have been producing audio programs for generations, typically using tape recorders or reel-to-reel machines. What makes podcasts better, educators say, is that they are easier to edit than splicing a tape because they are recorded digitally on a computer. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that podcasts are available to a worldwide audience, which can subscribe to them and have them automatically downloaded to their computers when a new installment is posted.

Like other classroom technologies, podcasting requires a learning curve. As a result, teachers already using podcasts in their classes tend to be early adopters of technology. Kathleen B. Schrock, administrator for technology at Nauset Public Schools in Orleans, Mass., said one goal of her podcasts is to persuade teachers "how easy it is to produce one." Ms. Schrock's podcasts (nausetschools.org/podcasts.htm) include short interviews with teachers and administrators about things like how they use technology in their classrooms. This spring, she plans workshops to show teachers in her district how to create a podcast.

"Just the word 'podcast' scares a lot of teachers away," Ms. Schrock said. "There are a lot of misconceptions."

One of the most common is that schools need iPods or other portable audio devices, like MP3 players, to create and listen to a podcast, said David Warlick, who sifts through education-related podcasts and lists good ones for teachers on his Web site, the Education Podcast Network (epnweb.org). "All you need is a computer, access to the Internet and a microphone that you can buy at Toys 'R' Us," Mr. Warlick said. "I listen to podcasts on my computer."

The sound can be edited, and music and other audio elements can be added easily, Mr. Warlick said, using software like Acid Music Studio, GarageBand or open- source Audacity. "Learning the software is the most difficult part," he said.

Ms. Halderson, the teacher at Longfellow Middle School, said she practiced using the podcast software in August, and her students produced their first show the second week of school. "We laugh at that one now," she said. To improve their show, the students listened to podcasts from other schools, including "Room 208" from Wells Elementary School in Wells, Me., and "Radio WillowWeb" from Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha.

Those shows motivated the Longfellow students to perfect their own podcasts, said Megan Wichelt, a seventh grader there. "It's better than learning out of a textbook because you're actually doing something with what you learn," she said. Moreover, the potential audience for a podcast, she added, is so much larger than just the teachers and parents who usually read her essays. "I know other people are listening, so it's very fun to do."

This month, Ms. Halderson got 14 new video iPods for her students, bought from donations and the sale of greeting cards, butterfly houses and birdhouses that were all made by the students.

While she and other educators agree that the technology will never replace a live teacher, there are exceptions. Ms. Schrock of Nauset Public Schools says that teachers could record lessons for absent students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/te...25podcast.html





Music Industry In A DreaM

Digital rights could spark a music revolution, says David Birch
Dave Birch

Suppose the Holy Grail of the content industry, the perfect digital rights management (DRM) technology, is just that: a legend that inspires people to take up an heroic quest, but ultimately a myth? What if that quest turns into another "war on drugs" in which billions of dollars make not the slightest impact on the problem?

The dream DRM, from a content owner's perspective, would be one that tracked, traced and monitored every use of content and ensured it could only be used according to defined rights (with associated payments). In other words, if I try and copy a track from the latest Madonna CD on to my MP3 player to listen to at the gym then the technology would let me, but charge me. Perhaps my PC would contact some kind of rights management centre before copying the track and charge £1 to my account. The MP3 player would only accept downloads after it had checked with the rights management centre to ensure I had paid. All the music in the world would be coded using encryption technology.

For this to work, every device (from televisions to PCs and hi-fis to mobile phones) would need a tamper-resistant chip inside to store and process the rights information (and to decrypt permitted content) and a connection to the DRM centre. Actually, one of these devices (the mobile phone) already has both of these, but let's put that to one side for the moment.

This approach might seem crazy, but it has its proponents: in the US, Hollywood is lobbying for a Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), which would require companies to include government-approved anti-copying technology in computers and electronic devices and would make it illegal for consumers to remove it.

The benefits of this dream DRM are obvious: artists, musicians, film producers etc, would have the full benefit of their labours and pirates wouldn't be able to rip them off. There are other less obvious benefits: the police would be able to ask the DRM centre who had played violent video games recently and the marketing department of a film distributor would know who had watched Terminator 2 before asking them what they would like to see in Terminator 3. Some governments might be interested in who had watched Newsnight (or their local equivalent) so they could target those viewers with advertising. Some governments might be interested in finding out who had watched non-state approved news or listened to subversive music.

Don't panic: for this dream DRM to be 100% effective, it needs an entirely new infrastructure for content management, distribution and access. And this isn't going to happen. Hollywood might think it a good idea, but everyone else thinks it's utterly unworkable. If you had to call up to re-register a couple of hundred CDs on your new CD player, then you wouldn't buy one: you'd just keep the old one. Hence, companies such as Sony (electronics revenues $40+ billion, music revenues $4+ billion) wouldn't sell very many new hi-fis, Walkmans or DVD players. Time for some more reasoned thinking.

DRM technology is a good way of helping people do something they want to do (eg, helping companies manage their software licences) but an ineffective way to prevent them doing things they want to(eg, copying CDs to MP3 players).

Would creative artists starve if the net makes any kind of copyright enforcement impossible? Unlikely. If copyright disappeared tomorrow, Madonna could still get a million dollars for appearing in a commercial. The real losers would be record companies, as almost every indus try observer has pointed out, but that doesn't mean society as a whole would lose out.

If it is impossible to charge for anything other than the first copy of a piece of content, then society will save a lot of money on DRM and all its side effects (lawyers, jails etc). But will artists be motivated to produce content? I think they would. Just as pharmaceutical companies are allowed to patent their inventions for a few years, so the content industry will be allowed to retain a form of restricted copyright that can be policed more effectively.

The average music buyer may be pretty unsympathetic to record companies but they would surely want music and musicians to continue. The record companies might then be transformed into relationship managers, selling the fans a relationship with their heroes that cannot be copied: if you want a ticket for the concert, you have to have bought the CD and that kind of thing. I'm not smart enough to figure out what kinds of things music fans might want from their new cyber-enhanced "one-to-one" relationship with talent, but I'm pretty sure other people are.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...383006,00.html





From September

Backpack Generates Its Own Electricity

New design may offer way for relief workers to power crucial equipment
Daniel B. Kane

In the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, radio and phone communication suffered, in part, when rechargeable batteries died and could not be recharged due to widespread power outages. A new backpack design may offer a way for first responders and disaster relief workers to generate their own electricity for communications devices, night vision goggles, water purifiers or other crucial, portable electronics.

All the person wearing the backpack has to do is walk — the backpack does the rest. The backpack captures energy from the up-and-down movements of its heavy contents and converts this energy to electricity.

The new research is published in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal Science published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

“I wrote the first draft of the Science paper during the relief effort following the 2004 tsunami. I was struck by continual reports of people not being able to communicate because satellite phone batteries went dead,” said backpack inventor Larry Rome.

In light of the power outages that are burdening relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it’s clear that disaster relief workers who can generate their own electricity would be more effective than relief workers without the ability to generate their own power, explained Rome, a biology professor from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

The backpack looks a lot like the metal framed packs people use to carry their gear during long trips. The backpack captures energy from this movement with a series of gears connected to an electric generator.

“The idea behind the suspended-load backpack isn’t complicated. It just took a person with the right background and a little creativity to put the pieces together,” said Rome.

Rome is an accidental backpack inventor. Much of his research is focused on the muscles that allow fish to swim and frogs to jump. He first envisioned a backpack as a sustainable way for humans to generate electricity from walking when he worked on a project aimed at making a submersible vehicle that swims like a fish.

Electrifying hip movement
The side-to-side sway of a person’s hips may be more familiar, but it’s the up-and-down movement of the hips that can power a gadget that feeds on electricity.

When you walk, you put one foot down and then your body vaults over that leg, causing the hip to move up and down by about five centimeters.

If you are carrying a heavy backpack when you walk, it takes extra energy to vault the backpack over your leg. The new backpack harvests this energy by separating the movement of the backpack’s heavy cargo from the movement of the frame.

The cargo compartment of the new backpack, which was filled to weigh between 20 and 38 kilograms (44 to 83 pounds) for a variety of trials, is suspended by springs and moves up and down with respect to the frame. It is this movement of the cargo compartment with respect to the frame that turns a gear connected to an electric generator that is mounted to the frame. Inside this generator, coils of wire within a magnetic field turn when you walk, leading to the production of electricity.

In one backpack “test drive,” the backpack consistently harvested about 7 watts. For comparison, cell phones, global positioning system receivers, and LED headlamps each use less than one watt. So, it appears that walking with the backpack could allow the wearer to run multiple devices at the same time. The generated electricity could also be used to charge batteries.

An 80 pound backpack worn by a disaster relief worker or field scientist often includes 20 pounds of replacement batteries, so the new backpack could allow people to carry fewer replacement batteries.

Power walking for real
There are many creative, though not always efficient, ways to generate electricity on a small scale. For example, a spinning hamster wheel generates enough energy to power a cell phone.

Efficiency is a critical issue for any energy harvesting technique. Clearly, carrying a hamster and all its supplies into the wilderness is much harder than carrying a cell phone replacement battery. Similarly, if carrying the new backpack burned huge numbers of calories, compared to a regular backpack of the same weight, then you would need to carry so much extra food that simply carrying extra batteries might be more efficient.

A series of treadmill tests measuring how much human energy it takes to walk with the backpack revealed that the backpack can serve as an efficient source of electricity. It’s true that you burn a few more calories when you walk with the backpack than a traditional backpack of the same weight. But, you are generating electricity at the same time, and the weight of the extra food that you must carry is far less than the weight of the batteries that would be required if you didn’t have an electricity-harvesting backpack, making this source of energy a “good deal.”

Leg vaulting
The backpack inventors are still in the process of figuring out why the new backpack lets you walk so efficiently. It appears that your leg muscles save energy during the transition between steps: when both feet are on the ground, your legs are bent and your leg muscles are working hard.

Also, each leg appears to supports a greater share of the weight of the pack than usual at the “top” of each step, when only one leg is on the ground. This leg is relatively straight. During this phase of each step, when the body is vaulting over the extended leg, adding extra weight doesn’t make much of a difference.

It is these subtle differences that could make this backpack more comfortable to wear and better for your back, said Arthur Kuo, an engineer from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. Kuo wrote a background article that accompanies the new Science research.

“The backpack’s suspension system might make it more comfortable to wear and the gain in comfort might be well worth it, even without the energy- harvesting capacity,” he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9245155/





A Monster Computer With a Monstrous Price (Liquid Coolant Included)
John Biggs

In this age of $500 laptops and $399 desktop PC's, a $4,329 computer had better inspire awe. Alienware, makers of high-end, U.F.O.-themed PC's, rises to the challenge with its ALX system.

The ALX is a monster. Inside is a gigabyte of ultrafast memory and an Advanced Micro Devices Athlon 64 FX-60+ processor, a special chip with two separate processing centers. This splits up many processor-intensive tasks that are mostly required while playing games, modifying graphics or playing video, and leads to a substantial increase in performance. While the processor's clock speed of 2.6 gigahertz is about average for a modern PC, A.M.D. says the chip is 34 percent more efficient at rendering 3-D graphics.

The ALX also has two graphics cards running in parallel, allowing all of the graphics processing to be handed off to two specialized chips. These cards alone have 512 megabytes of memory on board to handle 3-D games and video.

Within its futuristic heart, the ALX beats with liquid coolant, which is needed because its components can give off as much heat as 10 100-watt light bulbs.

A standard beige PC is fine for paying bills and surfing the Internet, but the ALX could come in handy when games and other important matters beckon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/te...s/19alien.html





Free Website To List Programs With Spyware
Paul Davidson

Here's a new way to attack spyware: embarrass its purveyors.

A free website (StopBadware.org) launching Wednesday plans to provide a list of programs that contain spyware and other malicious software. It will also identify companies that develop the programs and distribute them on the Internet.

Consumers can then decide if a program is safe to download.

"For too long, these companies have been able to hide in the shadows of the Internet," says John Palfrey, who heads the Berkman Center of Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is spearheading the project. "What we're after is a more accountable Internet."

The initiative is being run by Harvard and the Oxford Institute and is backed by high-tech heavyweights including Google and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports' WebWatch is serving as a special adviser.

Spyware invades PCs without users' knowledge when they download applications such as music file-sharing programs or screen savers, or visit certain websites. Often, spyware tracks Web-surfing habits and bombards victims with related pop-up ads. More nefarious versions monitor keystrokes to steal Social Security numbers or passwords for identity theft.

Also on the hit list of the StopBadware coalition are malicious "adware" programs that serve up onslaughts of pop-up ads or software that contains hidden viruses and worms.

At least 60% of home PCs are infected with one or more of these "badware" programs, says Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert.

The prevalence of the programs has spawned a booming industry of anti-spyware and anti-virus software. Internet providers such as America Online and EarthLink include the software free with service. But such programs typically can't identify all the rogue software on a PC and might not be able to eradicate a deeply embedded program even if they do, says Ferris Research analyst Fred Berlack.

By checking StopBadware.org, its organizers say, consumers can choose, in the first place, not to download a program containing the malicious software. The coalition is encouraging consumers to visit the website to log their experiences with harmful programs.

It will then use that information to compile reports on suspect programs, websites and companies that foist the software on consumers without getting their consent. The worst offenders will be spotlighted. It will take several months to gather a significant- size database, Palfrey says.

Some websites already provide information on spyware. Others identify suspect software for a fee. But the StopBadware group says it aims to be the biggest free clearinghouse.

Berlack is skeptical that many consumers will use the service. "I don't think the average Joe has the time or inclination to check every time he opens up a new website or downloads a program," he says.

But Te Smith of consultants FFW Partners, says, "Anything that helps people be more informed is useful. I applaud these companies for using their market presence and reach to try to educate consumers."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/co...e_x.htm?csp=34





Net loss on TV

UPN, WB Shows To Merge On One Channel Called CW
Marisa Guthrie

Hey "Smallville," meet "Everybody Hates Chris."

Come September, the WB and UPN networks will disappear and merge into a new network called the CW that will air locally on Channel 11.

That leaves the future of the Fox-owned Channel 9 - which currently airs UPN shows - unclear.

The new network will be co-owned by CBS Corp., which owns UPN, and Warner Bros. Entertainment, which oversees the WB.

The CW - with the "C" coming from CBS and the "W" from Warner Bros. - will target young, urban audiences. It will feature the best fare from both networks, including UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris" and "America's Next Top Model" and WB's "Smallville" and "Beauty and the Geek."

Other shows that will help launch CW include UPN's "Veronica Mars," "Girlfriends" and WWE's "Friday Night Smackdown," as well as WB's "Gilmore Girls," "Supernatural" and "Reba." "Kids' WB!" will survive also.

"This is an idea whose time has come," Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corp., said yesterday. "It's a scheduler's dream to have successful and critically acclaimed dramas ... comedies ... and reality series. We are going to have quite a schedule."

Exactly what Channel 9 will offer in the fall is unknown, because station officials and those at its owner, News Corp., didn't learn of the merger until yesterday. The Rupert Murdoch-run company also runs New York's Channel 5, Fox's flagship station

"Every change presents an opportunity," said News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher. "We'll announce our opportunity when the time's appropriate. We've only just found out about this."

The merger gives CW a spot on TVs in 48% of the country, including 20 of the top 25 markets, with Tribune stations and CBS' UPN affiliates agreeing to 10-year deals to carry CW.

Starting Sept. 6, the new network will air 30 hours of programming, seven days a week, including five hours of children's programming on Saturday mornings.

Dawn Ostroff, current president of UPN, will take over as entertainment chief at the new network, with WB CEO John Maatta stepping into the CEO post.

Both UPN and WB have struggled to turn a profit since their inceptions more than 11 years ago.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...p-327233c.html





Free Software Award Winner Announced
Press Release

Boston Massachusetts, USA - Wednesday January 25, 2006. At the ceremony for the 2005 Free Software Awards, Richard Stallman presented Andrew Tridgell with the award for the advancement of free software.

Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell was recognized for his work as originator and developer of the Samba project. Samba reverse-engineered Microsoft's version of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is used for file-sharing and print services. This software enables free operating systems to fit into Microsoft-based environments, encouraging greater use and adoption of free software. Samba has been implemented on millions of servers throughout the world. Tridge also released rsync, a highly respected remote file-distribution system, and contributed code to the Linux kernel.

During 2005, Tridge wrote a free software client to interoperate with BitKeeper, a proprietary revision control system used at the time by the Linux kernel developers. His reverse-engineering efforts led BitMover Inc. to remove permission for the use of BitKeeper, paving the way for a free software replacement. The Linux kernel is now being developed using a revision control system called Git, begun by Linus Torvalds and licensed under the GPL.

Every year, three finalists are nominated for the award by the free software community. This year's other two finalists were Harmut Pilch, recognized as founder of Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and for his leadership during the fight against the Software Patent Directive in Europe, and Theodore T'so, recognized for his work on file systems and the Linux kernel.

Previous winners of the Free Software Award

2004 Theo de Raadt
2003 Alan Cox
2002 Lawrence Lessig
2001 Guido van Rossum
2000 Brian Paul
1999 Miguel de Icaza
1998 Larry Wall

http://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-awards-2005





IBM Strives For "Superhuman" Speech Tech
Robyn Peterson

IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology on Tuesday that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs.

Historically, speech technology required the user to limit his speech to a fixed set of phrases in order to interact with a device. With IBM's Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 software package, introduced on Tuesday, the company hopes to allow users to speak commands using phrasing that is natural to them.

In a demonstration today at IBM's headquarters here, for example, users changed a simulated radio station, by speaking any of the following phrases: "Play 92.3," "Tune to 92.3," or "Tune the radio to 92.3."

Though speech recognition is already built into products like Microsoft's OfficeXP, many users still prefer to use their keyboards. Speech recognition can be trained to recognize a particular user's voice. But interpreting sounds from a variety of speakers can be even more challenging, unless a limited library of sounds, or phonemes, is used. Still, though speech recognition by a computer is still far from perfect, the future is bright, according to David Nahamoo, a manager in the human language technologies department at IBM Research.

"At IBM, we have this superhuman speech recognition [initiative in which] the goal is to get performance comparable to humans in the next five years," Nahamoo said.

Want an in-depth lesson on how speech recognition works? Then click here to read this ExtremeTech primer.

Understanding more than speech

Translating a command such as "Play 92.3" requires the device to understand the basic context of the command, a feature known in Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 as Free-Form Command. For Free-Form Command to work successfully, the system must recognize two things: first, that the user is referring to the radio, even if he doesn't use the actual term "radio". Secondly, the software has to be programmed to understand that the term "play" also is a command to tune the radio to the desired station.

But IBM can also make the process simpler by limiting the context of the speech to something relatively simple, such as the command, nouns and phrases associated with just a car's dashboard, according to Nahamoo. By limiting the domain, the system can make assumptions or inferences about what the user would like to accomplish, he said.

IBM partner VoiceBox Technologies implemented ViaVoice in its VoiceBox Navigation system, found in Scion automobiles. With this system, the driver can control XM Satellite Radio via conversational speech. Specifically, the driver can change stations, increase or decrease volume, as well as control other basic functionality.

The user can also search XM content by speaking phrases such as "Who is this artist?" Mike Kennewick, chief executive of VoiceBox, explained. The system must then determine the context dynamically, not only recognizing that a particular song is playing, but that the driver wants to know the artist who recorded the song.

"Algorithms exist that can determine this context on the fly, so you don't have to use predetermined sentence structure," Kennewick explained. "[It's accomplished by] tying speech content to some contextual cues by using environmental information," such as a particular song playing on the XM receiver, he said.

The Free-Form Command functionality was also demonstrated on a simulated GPS navigation system where the user could interact with the GPS navigation system using speech rather than by navigating menus by touch -- a boon to drivers who prefer to keep their eyes focused on the road.

From English to Mandarin Chinese, on the fly

Speech technology can be used to control computers and devices, but it can also be used to communicate with their flesh-and-blood counterparts, too.

MASTOR, the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator application, another IBM research project demonstrated today, dynamically translates English speech to Mandarin Chinese speech. For example, the user can speak English into a microphone, and the system will translate the sentence into Mandarin Chinese, and reply out loud.

The goal of the system, according to Nahamoo, is for someone to be able to "have a conversation with someone who is Chinese, [even if] I don't know Chinese and he doesn't know English."

MASTOR's translations are based on statistical analysis of the language, where the source sentence is first decompiled into a set of conceptual ideas. Then, the translated sentence is constructed in the target language, based upon these conceptual ideas.

IBM's current MASTOR prototype is a PC application that runs on Windows XP and Windows CE, which also means it can be run on a PDA. The software development kit (SDK) is available now, but no final products exist yet for consumers to purchase. A product will probably not be available to consumers for at least another 6 months, an IBM representative said.

Translating television

Want a real-time perspective on the Middle East, from someone who lives and understands the native culture? As globalization continues across the world, it's become a virtual necessity to be up-to-date on news reported in other countries. Tales, another project demonstrated by IBM, hopes to accomplish that goal.

Tales is a server-based system that perpetually monitors Arabic television stations, dynamically transcribing and translating any words spoken into English subtitles. That means that a user can watch Al Jazeera, an Arabic news station, with subtitles dynamically created by the Tales system displayed below the video, IBM officials explained. Videos can then also be viewed via a web browser, with all transcriptions indexed and searchable.

According to Salim Roukos, the project lead for Tales, translations of speech require quite a bit of processing time, meaning that real-time translations are impossible. For now, all video processed through Tales is delayed by about four minutes, with an accuracy rate of between 60 and 70 percent.

The accuracy rate could be increased to 80 percent, Roukos added, if the delay were also increased. However most users of the system felt timeliness was more important than accuracy, especially considering the subject matter was breaking news. By comparison, a human translator can achieve a 95 percent translation rate, he estimated.

Tales is up and running, and users can subscribe to the "Iraq" package, which includes Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language news stations, for an undisclosed price. Don't expect to tune it in during lunchtime, however; Roukos hinted that the price will to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Computers to rival a human

In addition to improvements in accuracy, Nahamoo explained that IBM will work diligently to index and make searchable other forms of content besides text. The Tales project is a tangible step in this direction. "We search on text today, but how about searching on speech and visual content?" Nahamoo said.

If the accuracy of speech recognition nears that of human performance, then will we inevitably encounter more interactive voice response systems, such automated voice mail? People may cringe at the thought, Nahamoo acknowledged, but there's an upside.

"Machines are not judgmental," Nahamoo said. "Some people feel like they are being judged when they phone call centers. That doesn't happen with a machine."
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/...=169923,00.asp





Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Mars, in Glorious 3-D
David M. Halbfinger

A dozen years ago, when they were just what-iffing how to build remote-controlled vehicles for exploring the surface of Mars, Steve Squyres and Jim Bell, scientists at Cornell University, already knew they wanted their rovers to have cameras worthy of an Imax screen.

What they never imagined was that those photographs would actually reach an Imax audience. And without a relative's connections to the movie industry, a documentary maker's connections in Washington, a college student's computer-animating talents and a team of rocket scientists' ability to stitch hundreds of one-megapixel pictures into a seamless high-resolution tapestry, they never would have.

Earlier missions had taken less sophisticated photos of Mars's surface, the kind only an astronomer could love. But when Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell were jotting ideas on a blank sheet of paper, they resolved to give their robots 20-20 vision.

"One of our big goals was to make this an experience like you were there," Dr. Bell said. "The impression we wanted to create was, you step out of your little capsule, you feel a dusty breeze through your hair, and you're seeing this alien landscape for the first time."

The dusty breeze may be a bit of a stretch. But starting Friday in 25 Imax theaters across North America, audiences will be able to behold, for the first time in all their side-of-a-barn-size glory, the visual harvest of the rovers and their more than two years of plowing over the red planet's rocky terrain after traveling hundreds of millions of miles.

The 40-minute movie, "Roving Mars," which was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and is being released by the Walt Disney Company, tells the story of the mission team's mad dash to ready the rovers for launching in 2003, of the tense moments waiting for them to communicate after landing on Mars, and of the eye-opening discoveries the rovers have made since then.

The rovers Dr. Squyres's team designed, Spirit and Opportunity, were expected to last for 90 days or so before succumbing to the harsh Martian landscape and minus- 110-degree nights. They proved unexpectedly hardy, and are sending data and pictures home to NASA to this day.

"Roving Mars" was itself launched in 2000, when George Butler, the director of "The Endurance," a documentary on Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914, was cutting an Imax version of that film. His editor was Tim Squyres, brother of Steve, who has edited many of Ang Lee's films and whose work on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" that year earned him an Oscar nomination.

At one point that June, Mr. Butler said, Tim Squyres was on the phone with his brother, talking about the Mars project, when Mr. Butler heard him mention Imax-quality cameras - "the magic line," he said. He was instantly hooked.

A month later, Mr. Butler screened the Shackleton film in Washington for members of Congress and other officials, including Sean O'Keefe, who was then the NASA administrator. When Mr. Butler told Mr. O'Keefe he had designs on a Mars movie, he said, Mr. O'Keefe offered to help in any way.

Mr. O'Keefe opened doors in the space program, but Mr. Butler said he encountered more resistance, oddly enough, among Imax film production companies, none of which were interested in his idea. "They said that space had been done," he said.

His project finally got moving, Mr. Butler said, when he approached the producer Frank Marshall, who had wanted to distribute the Shackleton movie and loved the Mars idea. Mr. Marshall took it to Disney, where a deal was struck - but only after Dr. Squyres had satisfied studio skeptics that Imax-caliber images could truly be transmitted all the way from Mars.

Indeed, the cameras that Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell had installed on the rovers - somewhere shy of the state of the art even when the rovers were designed - could capture only one megapixel at a time, about the equivalent of a cellphone camera. That would mean stitching about 250 images together seamlessly to create a panoramic picture big enough to fill an Imax screen - a task that takes one to three days on Mars, where the solar-powered rovers can function for only a few hours around noon.

Worse, the distance from Earth restricts the bandwidth of data transmissions to that of an old 128-kilobyte dial-up modem, meaning that it can take up to a week to send a panoramic picture back. (All told, the rovers have put together a portfolio of about two dozen big panoramas, according to Dr. Bell, who is writing a coffee-table book that will include many of them.)

Mr. Butler began filming two months before the launching date, and overcame resistance from NASA engineers who did not want his camera crew, intruding into their sterile assembly rooms, to slow them down. But Dr. Squyres said Mr. Butler's stroke of genius was in renting an Imax theater near Cape Canaveral to screen a few minutes for the entire mission team, just days before the launching of the Spirit rover.

"It was glorious," Dr. Squyres said. "You could just feel this chill go through the audience. That was the moment when we realized the power of the Imax format for telling what is actually a very visual and cinematic story. After that, George pretty much had access to whatever he wanted."

That included about 400 hours of high-definition film of the entire mission over three years, Mr. Butler said - a trove that he said might otherwise have gone untapped for a wide audience.

"Is there anything better that Americans are doing these days than that mission to Mars?" he said. "Here's a space program done for a very low budget, 600 to 800 million dollars. Ten years ago it would have cost a billion dollars. This was a cut-rate mission to Mars. And there was no one to tell the story of what happened."

It was a young Cornell student, Dan Maas, who added the movie's final major ingredient: double-take-inducing computer animations of the rovers' trips to Mars and landings on the planet's surface, and animated images of the rovers that Mr. Maas digitally inserted into the panoramic pictures the rovers had shot.

The intent was to show the rovers going about their tasks, but taking actual pictures of the rovers was impossible, given that each was on a different side of the planet. So Mr. Maas, who is now 24, applied the skills he had learned as an intern at two different Hollywood special-effects houses, this time in the service of accuracy.

"In many cases, we'd take the actual images from the rover and work them a little bit to give you an outside point of view," Mr. Maas said. "We'd build some 3-D geometry, and move the camera off to the side. But the reason that the animated images look so much like the rover's images is that they're made of the real rover images."

In the film, it can be hard to distinguish between the rovers' panoramas - which are still photographs, not video - and 3-D pictures rendered by computer as if seen by someone traversing the surface of Mars, on land or in the air.

"We took great pains to make all of the terrain accurate," Mr. Maas said. "The layperson isn't going to know this, but for somebody who's familiar with the mission, it's all based on 3-D data that was sent back. Every little scrap of rock - it's actually there on Mars."

Dr. Squyres, who said his hope for the mission had been to "show people Mars as it really is," said the movie had matched his own imagination - and exceeded what NASA could do on its own.

"I was finally seeing the Mars that I've had in my head all these months," he said. "We have good computer graphics, but the display capability falls far short of what Imax can do. This is the best look at our data I've ever had. It's the best reconstruction of the landing I've ever seen."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html





Flagging It Up – Learning The Lessons Of File Sharing

In the late 1990s when file sharing websites first emerged, the music industry was caught cold. Record labels were completely unprepared for the hugely popular practice of downloading songs from the internet. Efforts to close down the sites or prosecute individuals met with only limited success in the courts, leaving the record labels to warn that new talent would be stifled and that consumers would end up losing out in the long-run.

But while CD sales declined again last year, the music industry has avoided a meltdown by embracing the technology that threatened to destroy it. After watching anxiously from the wings, record labels have finally taken the plunge and started licensing their music for legal download.

This, combined with the massive popularity of MP3 players like the iPod, has meant that digital music is now a multi-million dollar industry. Music fans, it seems, are quite prepared to pay for downloads.

Now, attention is switching to film and television programmes. Some file sharing sites still enable subscribers to download this type of content but it was never as popular as music. Major films and television shows are now available in a range of digital formats. In the last 12 months alone we have seen the launch of the video iPod and the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which enable users to view media content on the move.

Major studios are keen to have a presence on these new and exciting platforms, which is perhaps a lesson they have learnt from the music industry. But they are also keen to protect their content. Record labels may be winning the battle against unlicensed download sites, but many still use content protection to stop users copying music from CDs to portable devices. Some CDs in fact, will not even play on a PC to prevent misuse.

In the US this week, the Senate has been debating new legislation that would enable broadcasters to protect their content. The proposals would compel product manufacturers to ensure that their devices recognised a flag in the content that would prevent it from being illegally recorded and distributed.

Content providers are adamant that unless they get adequate protection they will be forced to restrict the availability of their material. Opponents to the flag system warn that it could restrict the user's ability to watch films or play music on different devices.

Neither content providers nor lawmakers appear interested in preventing individuals from purchasing a film and being able to watch it at home on their television or on the move using a portable device. The concern is how easy it is to then distribute that content to other users.

In 2003 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a flag system but the ruling was overturned in the Senate. Whatever the result of the current round of deliberations in the US, there are likely to be ramifications for other leading markets around the world.

It is clear that film studios and television production companies will need to protect their revenue streams, but at the same time will be desperate not to get left behind in the way the record labels did.
http://www.avinfo.co.uk/index.php?ma...ry&id=15141664





File-Sharing 'Not Cut By Courts'

Global court action against music file-sharers has not reduced illegal downloading, an industry report says.

The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it was "containing" the problem and more people were connecting to broadband.

The global music industry trade body said sales of legal downloads were worth more than $1bn (£570m) in 2005.

That is up from $380m (£215m) in 2004, with "significant further growth" predicted this year.


DIGITAL MUSIC: STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Legal download sales pass $1bn a year
A library of two million songs legally available
420 million singles downloaded in 2005
19,400 people sued for illegal song-swapping to date
335 legal online music services available
35% of illegal file-sharers have cut back*
14% of illegal file sharers have increased activity*
One in three illegal file-sharers buy less music*
*Jupiter survey of 3,000 people in UK, Germany and Spain

Download stores now offer two million songs - double the number available a year ago - and the total number of legal downloads shot up to 420 million in 2005.

IFPI chairman John Kennedy said the industry was "winning the war but we haven't won the war" against piracy.

The fact that illegal song-swapping had not increased should be regarded as a success, he told the BBC News website.

"I would love to be sitting here telling you that it had gone down," he said.

"As broadband rolls out and as there's an explosion in many countries of broadband, file-sharing is being contained."

But the industry was finding it difficult to persuade existing song-swappers to use legal download services such as iTunes instead, he said.

"Those who've got into the habit of consuming their music for free are very difficult to shift.

More court cases

"And frankly it's an argument for increasing the scale of court cases because at the moment, people still don't think it's going to be them."

There are currently about 870 million song files available to download illegally over the internet, according to the IFPI.

Mr Kennedy also warned that the music industry could sue internet service providers (ISPs) if they do not crack down on their customers who flout copyright rules.

Music piracy could be "dramatically reduced within a very short period of time" if ISPs took action against their law-breaking customers, Mr Kennedy said.

The IFPI's Digital Music Report also revealed that music downloaded onto mobile phones was now worth $400m (£227m) per year - 40% of the digital music business.

'Misunderstood'

And Mr Kennedy backed the continuing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which controls what consumers can do with their music once it has been purchased - either online or on CD.

DRM remains controversial, with some critics arguing it does little to prevent piracy but instead limits what consumers fairly should be able to do with their music.

Earlier this week, the National Consumer Council complained that DRM was eroding established rights to digital media.

Mr Kennedy, writing in the report, said DRM "helps get music to consumers in new and flexible ways".

He said DRM was a "sometimes misunderstood element of the digital music business".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4627368.stm





ISPs 'Should Deny Access'

Last year saw big advances and key legal victories in the record industry's fight against massive illegal internet peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, the head of the world recording industry association, the IFPI, said on Sunday.

Speaking in Cannes John Kennedy called on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who give users access to the internet, to start policing it by denying access to persistent illegal file sharers.

And he condemned the French government's recent move to enable users to download unlimited digital music and films for personal use.

The judgments by four courts in three continents, including Australia, Korea and the United States, represented "a real sea change worldwide" and one that will help the budding digital music business grow, Kennedy told reporters on the opening day of the world's Midem music trade fair.

"We believe we are containing the problem," Kennedy said, describing as misleading recent press reports that the court cases were not stemming the haemorrhaging caused by the enormous online piracy around the world.

He argued that the industry's decision to instigate some 20 000 lawsuits against individuals who illegally share music over file-sharing networks across 17 countries "are changing consumers' attitudes".

Legal downloads of single music tracks more than doubled in 2005 to 240 million, helping the music industry to achieve a three-fold increase in global revenues to $1.1bn, the IFPI reported.

'That's pillage'

But these revenues would have been even larger if it had not been for illegal file sharing, which continues to be widespread around the globe.

Of the one billion songs downloaded from the internet in France last year alone, just 20 million were bought legally, EMI Europe chief executive officer Jean- Francois Cecillon said.

"That's not even theft, that's pillage," Cecillon said.

The real problem is not the new internet downloaders, who on the whole pay for their music, but the seasoned P2P users who are proving very difficult to wean away, Kennedy said.

As for the situation in France, Kennedy said he was optimistic that France would not go through with its proposals, which would legalise web piracy.

Such a measure would kill France's own music industry and "I can't believe that at the end of the day, the French government will want this," he said.

But internet piracy aside, Kennedy remained optimistic about the emerging market for digital music.

He said he believed that digital music revenues will rise steadily over the next few years and should account for 25% of total music revenues in 2010.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...867542,00.html





Court Tells ISPs To Reveal Identities Of Filesharers
Jonathan Cheng

An unprecedented court order will force Hong Kong's four largest Internet service providers to reveal the names, addresses and identity card numbers of 22 alleged music uploaders, clearing the way for record companies to file lawsuits against them.

The record industry hailed Thursday's High Court decision and promised to use it to expand the battle against illegal filesharing.

Ricky Fung, the recording industry's top representative in Hong Kong, said the decision cleared up a number of legal ambiguities surrounding the sharing of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks.

"We'll deal with these 22 first and, with that experience, we'll know how to proceed," he said.

The seven record labels seeking the order - which included local subsidiaries of multinational giants Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music - are expected to proceed with lawsuits against the 22 alleged offenders after the Lunar New Year.

Meanwhile, i-Cable Webserve - the only one of the four service providers to resist the order - announced Thursday it would not appeal the decision. "We respect the court's decision and will carry out its instructions accordingly," said i-Cable spokesman Danny Lo. The other three ISPs targeted in the case - Hong Kong Broadband Network, Hutchison Global Communication and PCCW-IMS - agreed during court hearings earlier this month not to contest any court order.

Judge Jeremy Poon agreed with the recording industry's claim that "massive online infringement" had helped to put record labels' existence "very much at stake."

Hong Kong laws protecting an individual's private information "cannot be absolute" in cases where "public interest or competing private rights and interests may require such protections to be removed," Poon wrote.

A refusal to grant the court order would "give the clearest indication to the copyright infringers that they can infringe with impunity behind the cloak of anonymity afforded by the Internet technology," he added.

"The court can and will, upon a successful application, pull back the cloak and expose their true identity. It is not an intrusion into their privacy."

Fung estimated Thursday the local recording industry had already spent HK$1.5 million on this round of legal action, but would not comment on how much money the labels will seek against the uploaders.

"We can't know what the court will decide is reasonable," Fung said. He pointed to parallel cases in the US which carried penalties of about US$3,000 (HK$23,400) against offenders.

"It is not a matter of money," Fung said. "It is a matter of life and death for the recording industry."

Fung said the recording industry will be willing to settle the cases out of court, but suggested that more warning letters and lawsuits will be on the way.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which Fung represents, claims that two million music files are copied among filesharers every day.

It blames illegal online filesharing for pushing down sales of music CDs in Hong Kong by 32 percent between 2000 and 2004, from HK$926 million to HK$629 million.

"Our purpose is to educate our online friends that you cannot hide on the Internet, and that, morally speaking, this is something that is wrong and comes with a punishment," Fung said.

He hoped the decision will kickstart the legal downloading of music, which the IFPI said last year tripled to 6 percent of worldwide music sales. Fung said lawsuits against illegal file sharers in the US helped "give life to new consumer behavior [there]."

The decision, Fung said, removed a key obstacle for the recording industry should it seek action against other offenders.

"Now that this case has set the precedent, we don't expect it to be difficult in the future," he said.

Fung dismissed fears that the court order may represent a setback for online civil liberties.

"It's not about Internet freedom," he said. "It's about setting a precedent that it's illegal to share files without the authorization of copyright owners."

In a separate statement Thursday, Roderick Woo, Hong Kong's privacy commissioner for personal data, said the court's decision will help clarify the limits and terms of Hong Kong's privacy ordinance.

Fung said that each of the 22 alleged offenders - who were caught during a three-day sweep by the IFPI in November 2005 - were targeted because they were major filesharers, and had shared at least 300 songs each through the now-defunct peer-to- peer filesharing program WinMX.

Initially identified only by the unique IP addresses of their computers, the court order will now force the service providers to reveal their names and other data.

Fung vowed to fight new cases and new technologies as they arose.

"How many steps will we take? We can't say right now," he said. "We still have a lot to do."
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...5&con_type= 1





Walked the plank

Racine Teen Apologizes For Downloading Movies
AP

A 13-year-old boy has publicly apologized for downloading four movies via the Internet and warned others not to swap movies and music illegally.

Ben Rangel of Racine appeared Wednesday before more than 100 seventh- and eight-grade students at Maple Dale School in this northern Milwaukee suburb.

"Sooner or later, my grandpa got in a lot of trouble, and it was because of me. .... I am here to say it wasn't worth it," Rangel said.

The Motion Picture Association of America filed suit against the teen's grandfather, Fred Lawrence, 67, of Racine, last month in U.S. District court, seeking as much as $600,000
in damages, after he initially ignored a letter offering to settle the matter out of court.

Rangel, who was then 12, admitted downloading "The Incredibles," "I, Robot," "The Grudge" and "The Forgotten" over a peer-to-peer electronic file-sharing network in December 2004, not knowing it was illegal.

His appearance at the school was part of an out-of-court settlement Lawrence reached with the film studios last month that included paying them an undisclosed amount.

Rangel was joined at the school by MPAA representatives and Parry Aftab, executive director of Wired Kids, an organization devoted to educating children about online legal and safety issues.

Aftab gave a presentation about Internet piracy.

"You may get it for free, but it will cost you," he said of downloaded movies. "It will cost you losing your computer and being grounded forever. You might get sued. ... That free movie isn't so free when you start looking at all those things."

Lawrence said he was glad to get the matter behind him.

"I understand much better now where these people are coming from. If anybody can do it, then obviously eventually they are going to lose money," Lawrence said.

MPAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said the association was placing an emphasis on education to prevent further litigation,.

"We're not trying to take money out of people's pockets. We're not trying to scare people. What we're trying to do is educate people and empower them with the knowledge of what is wrong and what is right," Duckworth said.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/du...s/13717603.htm





Great Irony Here: New York Pirates Rebroadcasting Howard Stern Free
Brad Kava

Pirate broadcasters in Brooklyn and Queens are rebroadcasting Howard Stern's satellite radio show on conventional FM frequencies, and the irony on this one is sweet.

Will the FCC, which chased Stern off the public airwaves, now crack down on the pirates? The agency needs a complaint to begin an investigation. Will Stern or Sirius be the complainer?

Stern's Sirius may have started a revolution it hadn't planned on.

For those unfamiliar with pirate radio, here are the basics: The airwaves are regulated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Agency, which was created to apportion and license spots on the radio dial, making sure signals didn't bleed over.

The licenses are now worth fortunes, $20 million to more than $100 million, for a good signal. But there are still small holes on the dial, which pirates fill using transmitters that can be bought for as little as a few hundred dollars.

The so-called pirates, who call themselves "free" broadcasters, and see themselves as freedom fighters, have often come up with programming that is ignored by conventional broadcasters.

For example, in San Jose, you can hear a number of good heavy metal pirate stations (sorry I can't reveal the frequencies here, but hunt around, it's not hard). Why? Because commercial radio broadcasters decided it wasn't in the interests of its advertisers, or lucrative enough for them, to program for people who want rock or metal.

So, kids in their bedrooms, or older people with some ingenuity, are broadcasting metal, punk and noncommercial music, sometimes for years, before the FCC gets wind of it and breaks down their doors.

The FCC will only begin an investigation if someone complains. Usually the complainers are commercial broadcasters who claim the signal is causing interference. Sometimes cheapo transmitters can cause problems. Usually, though, the biggest interference is one of cash flow. The broadcasters are threatened by the idea that someone would listen to something that they don't get advertising revenue from.

The radio dial, with impossibly high prices, is basically a government-controlled monopoly, filling the pockets of the large corporations who are the only ones that can afford a signal.

In Chicago there are celebrated pirates in slums, who are giving local news, issues, health programs, and programming content that is absolutely ignored by the corporations who market to the rich. In the Bay Area stations will no longer play music for the young or old, because they aren't in the more lucrative advertising demographic, adults 25-54.

Rebroadcasting Stern's show is especially egregious because it is filled with swear words and because it is a pay service. These pirates are like Napster, and we know how long that lasted before the record companies shut it down.

But they show a form of radio Darwinism. When people want to hear something and the corporations don't provide it, they will find a way to pirate it for the community.

Sirius has been marketing itself as the radio revolution, which it is. It is a true alternative to the stale, limited programming on the conventional dial.

But these pirates are the real revolutionaries. They are giving it away free. What would happen if pirates all over the country started broadcasting Howard's show? A real revolution would begin.

If Stern tries to shut them down, he'll end up in the same position that Metallica was in when it worked to close down Napster. My guess is Sirius will complain, but use proxies to file the complaints, the same way religious groups used shills to complain to the FCC about Stern's vulgarities when he was on commercial radio.

There's a hell of a battle shaping up and it will make for radio history before our eyes.
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/200...irony_her.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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