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15-04-09, 07:55 AM
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 18th, '09
Since 2002
  "I’m not sure I want to go back. I’m not sure I can." – Sanjay Mavinkurve April 18th, 2009  Court Says File-Sharing Site Violated Copyright Eric Pfanner A court in Sweden on Friday convicted four men linked to the notorious Internet file-sharing service The Pirate Bay of violating copyright law, handing the music and movie industries a high-profile victory in their campaign to curb online piracy. The court found that the men — the three founders, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well as Carl Lundstrom, who provided financing — had aided copyright infringement by operating the site, which provides links to thousands of songs, films, video games and other material, and helps users download them. They were each sentenced to a year in prison and were also ordered to pay 30 million kronor, or about $3.6 million, in damages to leading entertainment companies. The case has drawn a huge amount of attention among Internet users and media companies alike because of the size of The Pirate Bay — it is estimated to have more than 20 million users — and the defiant stance of its operators. The trial this winter took place amid a carnival atmosphere in Stockholm, with bands playing outside the courtroom and bloggers Twittering away. John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the groups that had supported the case against The Pirate Bay, said the decision “sent a strong message about the importance of copyright.” “We are not triumphant,” he said. “But we are satisfied that the court has clearly said that what they were doing was wrong.” In the near term, however, the decision may have little effect on the day-to-day operations of The Pirate Bay, as the defendants have vowed to continue running the service as they appeal the ruling. Kennedy said music and movie industry groups planned to file additional litigation to try to get The Pirate Bay shut down. He said that while he expected the defendants in the case to “hand over the baton” to others, that might now be more difficult. “There will be less people willing to step up to the plate,” he said. Over the last decade, media companies have won a series of court victories around the world against file-sharing services like Napster — before it reinvented itself as a legal site — Kazaa and Grokster. But unauthorized copying of remains a big problem for record business, in particular, with the music industry federation estimating that 95 percent of music downloads involve pirated work. Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the decision Friday would not result in a “meaningful” decrease in piracy. Internet users are turning to new ways to share music, including streaming and messaging services, which are harder for copyright owners and enforcement officials to detect than downloads. But he said the ruling was “good p.r.” for the music and movie industries. “There’s a lot of value out of it, even though its value is not going to be a meaningful reduction in file sharing,” he said. “They have to be seen to be doing something, in the same way that customs fights drug trafficking — as a deterrent.” Mr. Mulligan said the decision could encourage more music listeners to turn to a growing number of services that provide “free” digital music legally, as part of a broadband subscription or with the support of advertising, for example. “The best way to fight free is with free,” he said. The decision could also help alter perceptions of Sweden as a haven for piracy. A new law that took effect this month makes it easier for copyright owners to pursue illegal downloaders through the courts. Figures from Netnod, which operates Internet exchanges in Sweden, show that the volume of Internet traffic plunged as the law took effect — suggesting, analysts said, that some file-sharers may have been deterred. The Pirate Bay could not immediately be reached for comment on the decision Friday. On the site, a notice was posted calling the decision a “crazy verdict.” “But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow,” it said. “That’s the only thing Hollywood ever taught us.” The Pirate Bay is one of the largest so-called Bit Torrent trackers, which facilitate downloads of large digital files by enlisting the help of other computers. The defendants had maintained that they were innocent because they did not actually host any of the copyrighted material on their own servers. As the media industries battle pirates in court, they have also been lobbying for tougher legislation against unauthorized file-sharing — but with more limited success. In France, the National Assembly last week rejected a government proposal to cut off the Internet connections of persistent copyright pirates, in a surprise vote. President Nicolas Sarkozy has said the government will reintroduce the measure at the end of the month. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/wo...pe/18copy.html  File-Sharing Site Admin Sentenced to 6 Months Jail enigmax A 22 year old man who ran a site which offered links to copyright works has been fined and sentenced to 6 months jail in Spain. While non-commercial file-sharing sites are legal in Spain, the judge decided that because the site had advertising and therefore profited from copyright infringement, this constituted a criminal offense. Back in September 2008 we reported on the case of Sharemula, a site which offered eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games. Like many file-sharing sites, Sharemula found itself the subject of legal action but eventually the Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that the entertainment industry had no case against the site since it has broken no laws. The court ruled that neither the site nor administrators had operated illegally by offering links to copyright works, since they had not done so for profit or commercial gain. Yesterday, Spanish Criminal Court No.1 made its decision in the case of file-sharing site infopsp.com. According to the complainants - Spanish Association of Publishers and Distributors Entertainment Software (ADESE) and the Spanish Videographic Union (UVE) - the site, which had around 17,300 members, operated illegally. The site didn’t host any illicit content itself but instead offered links to video games, movies and music hosted on 3rd party sites. Under Spanish law, so far so good. However, in order to stay legal in Spain, the site needed to demonstrate it was not profiting from copyright infringement - this is where it all fell apart. The court heard that the site carried advertising from Impresiones Web, Google Adsense, Canalmail and Correodirect and also gained revenue via premium SMS. According to the court, this turned the site from a legal entity into one profiting from copyright infringement - a criminal offense. The judge handed 22 year-old site administrator Adrián Gómez Llorente a total fine of 4,900 euros ($6,500) which includes compensation for the complainants. Llorente was also sentenced to 6 months jail but it’s unlikely he will serve this since he doesn’t have an existing criminal record. It is believed that this is the first conviction of its type in Spain. Neither party intend to appeal. ADESE President Alberto Gonzalez Lorca said of the decision, “This ruling is a very important precedent for the videogame industry which is at the forefront of creating jobs and wealth even in a financial crisis, but is helpless against a problem as serious as piracy.” The big question now is how a court would view donations given to torrent sites. We’ve already seen the police in the UK call voluntary donations “subscriptions” in the OiNK case. Time will tell how a Spanish court will view them. http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing...s-jail-090411/ Aussie Movie Pirate Faces Court; Walks Free Samantha Rose Hunt Despite worldwide attention, a 26 year old Australian man has got off a movie piracy charge with little more than a slap on the wrist from Blacktown Local Court. One Australian man is walking free with nothing more than a slap on the wrist after being found guilty and convicted of “camming” movies, which he then supplied to PreVail, a well known “Scene” group, thus making the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) incredibly upset. In the past 3 1/2 years PreVail has released over 200 titles onto the Internet. The MPAA has been working to reduce and (it hopes) ultimately eliminate the availability of camcorded pirated movies, and believed the arrest of Australian man Craig Farrugia would be a step forward in its campaign. 26 year old Craig Farrugia was arrested on February 13, and charged on 18 counts of copyright infringement (each count potentially costing Farrugia $AU60,500, and up to five years imprisonment), after it was alleged that he was a cammer working for PreVail. When police searched his home, they seized video camcording and computer equipment. The equipment was able to be linked to watermarks found on PreVail movie releases which were in turn able to be linked to the cinemas in which the movies were cammed in. Among the movies Farrugia was accused of camming were Marley and Me, Yes Man, He’s Just not that Into You, Bedtime Stories, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua (there's no accounting for movie pirates' taste in movies.) During the trial, Magistrate Keady determined that Farrugia was was “part of an organized criminal conspiracy.” Keady also claimed that the movie industry deserves the same treatment as individual homeowners whose homes are burglarized. His theft was compared to larceny. Regardless of the seriousness which Keady felt regarding the crime, the industry was shocked when the Blacktown Loacal Court in Sydney fined Farrugia, who plead guilty, a mere $AU5,400 and placed him on an 18 month non-custodial good behavior bond. Even though many were appalled by this decision, AFACT Director of Operations, Neil Gane claimed that the case sets a precedent and would deter others from pirating films. The MPA stated, “While we are pleased with the very prompt closure of this matter, we are disappointed in the sentence meted out by the Court as it has failed to recognize the damage this particular crime can have on the industry.” http://apcmag.com/movie-cammer-walks...sappointed.htm What the Wolverine Leak Means for the Future of Piracy Michael Dance Twentieth-Century Fox was the butt of a big prank this April Fool’s Day, when news broke that a copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked onto the net. Movies get leaked habitually, sure, but the circumstances combined to make it feel like a first: It was a DVD-quality copy. Of a massive, big-budget superhero movie. Online a full month before the movie’s release. The bootleg spread like wildfire, and by some accounts there were over one hundred thousand downloads on the first day alone. That’s a lot of conceivable box office revenue. It felt like a first, but it also might be a last. Because the way I experienced it, April Fool’s Day marked the end of piracy’s glory days — the day piracy stopped being casually tolerated by everyone but studio heads. This goes beyond Fox’s you-messed-with-the-wrong-people response to the incident (they put out a statement which went something like, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’re working with the FBI to make sure whomever was responsible will spend the rest of their life worrying about dropping the soap”). And it goes beyond the firing of FoxNews.com’s Roger Friedman, who won the Stupidest (Ex-)Columnist in the World award for writing a review of the bootleg and encouraging people to watch more movies online illegally. (Seriously, man. Twentieth-Century Fox and Fox News are sibling companies, what kind of false sense of job security did you have?) It also goes beyond whether the movie was any good or not. I’ve read good and bad things; the majority of responses haven’t been promising, but then again, we’re talking about the internet. Do the disparagers really think watching it on a fifteen-inch screen with unfinished special effects will provide the same experience sitting in a movie theater will? No, they just like being negative. What it really boils down to is that the online fan community itself condemned the leak. Universally. Ain’t It Cool News, the granddaddy of online movie spoiling and fanboy bitching, ran a story called “We Don’t Want your Wolverine Movie Reviews,” explaining, “the only way you’re seeing it right now is through illegal channels, and we’re not going to condone that.” JoBlo.com downplayed its potential effects, saying that “while there will always be a percentage of internetizens who actively seek pirated/bootleg/camera copies of movies, it’s probably safe to say that the average consumer still prefers the theater experience.” TheBadandUgly.com said they stopped watching the bootleg after a couple minutes, in order to get the better theatrical experience: “Just because you can watch a rough-sketch and go somewhere on the internet to read the entire plot,” the article says, “does not mean you, I or anyone knows what X-Men Origins: Wolverine looks like. Because it isn’t done.” And DarkHorizons.com summed things up by saying “It’s an act that cruelly robs thousands of people of not just months of hard effort, but their potential livelihood as well.” That was the reigning sentiment: even if you don’t care about hurting a big studio, you’re hurting the hundreds of hardworking crew members who spent months on the project. If piracy translates into lost revenue, that’s going to translate into smaller budgets and fewer jobs. If you really want a nail in the coffin? Even some pirates are speaking out against the leak. The New York Times ran a story called “Some Pirates Won’t Watch Illegal Wolverine”, while Gizmodo came out with a “Pirate’s Code of Conduct”, which contained gems like “save action flicks…for the big screen” and ” if you really like it and can afford to do so, buy it.” Does this mean everyone in the world has suddenly found a stringent set of morals? That’s pretty doubtful. But the tide of public opinion has turned. And I am sure about one thing: The fourteen-year-old who stole the copy of Wolverine from his dad’s postproduction and posted it online thinking he was cool is totally crapping his pants right now. http://coedmagazine.com/2009/04/12/w...ure-of-piracy/ MPAA’s Hacking Past Comes Back to Hunt Ernesto The MPAA isn’t known for wasting opportunities to obtain information about BitTorrent sites and their users. In 2005 the MPAA paid around $15,000 to a hacker who obtained emails from TorrentSpy and The Pirate Bay. The case was heard in court and won by the MPAA, but this decision will soon be appealed. In an attempt to dig up dirt on the owner of TorrentSpy and the people behind The Pirate Bay, the MPAA hired a “hacker”, better known as Robert Anderson, to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. Anderson, a former associate of TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnel, configured the TorrentSpy mail server to copy and forward all of the site’s email to his own Gmail account. The 34 pages of information he gathered was then sold to the MPAA for $15,000. TorrentSpy’s owner later sued the MPAA, arguing that they had spied on him illegally, but this case was lost. The court ruled that the MPAA did not technically intercept them under the WireTap Act, although jurisprudence would suggest otherwise. TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnel told TorrentFreak that he has filed a brief at the Court of Appeals and that the MPAA is expected to do the same in the near future. From then on it can take up to a year before the appeal is heard in court. TorrentSpy is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that described the earlier decision as a “dangerous attempt to circumvent privacy laws.” Indeed, if upheld the ruling will basically legalize the unauthorized copying of other people’s emails, which raises serious privacy concerns. The Pirate Bay, who were also the target of MPAA spying activities, have not taken any action. Instead, spokesman Peter Sunde laughed it away. “I think it’s amazingly funny if the MPAA bought information like that, expensively, and against the US law. Only proves their stupidity and that they have no case,” he told TorrentFreak earlier. For the MPAA, losing the appeal might have some serious repercussions, especially for MPAA President Dan Glickman. Glickman is already highly criticized among Hollywood insiders for his lack of effectiveness. Since his contract renewal is due around the same time the hacker case appeal will be decided on, his job is on the line. http://torrentfreak.com/mpaas-hackin...o-hunt-090412/ Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept. David Kravets President Barack Obama is tapping another RIAA attorney into the Justice Department. Monday's naming of Ian Gershengorn, to become the department's deputy assistant attorney of the Civil Division, comes more than a week after nearly two-dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions urged the new president to quit filling his administration with lawyers plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America. The move makes it five RIAA lawyers Obama has appointed to the Justice Department. Gershengorn, a partner with RIAA-firm Jenner & Block, represented the labels against Grokster and will be in charge of the DOJ Federal Programs Branch. That's the unit that just told a federal judge the Obama administration supports monetary damages as high as $150,000 per purloined music track on a peer-to-peer file sharing program. In addition to Gershengorn, the other Jenner & Block attorneys appointed to the Justice Department include: *Donald Verrilli, associate deputy attorney general — the No. 3 in the DOJ, who unsuccessfully urged a federal judge to uphold the $222,000 file sharing verdict against Jammie Thomas. *Tom Perrilli, as Verrilli's former boss, the Justice Department's No. 2 argued in 2002 that internet service providers should release customer information to the RIAA even without a court subpoena. *Brian Hauck, counsel to associate attorney general, worked on the Grokster case on behalf of the record labels. *Ginger Anders, assistant to the solicitor general, litigated on the Cablevision case. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...taps-fift.html Leaked ACTA Draft: More Power to the RIAA Ernesto A recent draft of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) surfaced on Wikileaks this weekend. Among other things, the draft aims to strengthen the power and rights of the entertainment industry and other copyright holders, by letting them choose how they want to be compensated for copyright infringements. ACTA is an international agreement that aims to target piracy and counterfeiting globally. The degree of secrecy surrounding the negotiations is astonishing. Many institutions, the press and various individuals have requested that the participating countries provide an insight into their plans, but none have succeeded thus far. It almost seems they are actively blocking the public from having their say, while in contrast they continue to receive input from anti-piracy lobbyists such as the RIAA and MPAA. However, as time progresses more details about ACTA become public, largely thanks to Wikileaks. With the most recent draft that leaked a few days ago, another piece of the puzzle is completed. The leaked draft covers a wide range of issues which are impossible to cover in one article, so here we focus on the damages section. In this section, it is explained how copyright infringers should be compensated by those who share copyrighted content. It starts as follows: 1. Each Party shall provide that: (a) In civil proceedings, its judicial authorities shall have the authority to order the infringer of intellectual property rights to pay the right holder. (b) In determining the amount of damages of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities shall consider, inter alia, the value of the infringed goods or service, measured by the market price, suggested retail price, or other legitimate measure of value submitted by the rights holder. This basically means that the courts should be allowed to make those who share copyrighted content pay compensation to the rights holders. By itself this is not that groundbreaking, but combined with point (b) it means that the RIAA, MPAA and others pretty much have a carte blanche for the amount of damages they want to request. But it gets even worse. 2. At least with respect to works, phonograms, and performance protected by copyright or related rights, and in the case of trademark counterfeiting, in civil proceedings, each party shall establish or maintain a system that provides: (a) pre-established damages (b) presumptions for determining the amount of damages In the footnote of paragraph 2b it is detailed that the damages should be equal to the number of infringed goods, multiplied by the profit that would have been made if the infringement had not taken place. The “would have been sold” part is crucial here. Is every copyrighted file shared to be considered a lost sale or will there be another formula to calculate the claimed loss in sales? If this paragraph ends up in the final version of the agreement the participating countries are encouraged to come up with a standardized fine for copyright infringers based on lost profit. The way we see it this could easily lead to a situation where file-sharers face thousands of dollars in fines if their IP-address is found sharing a popular movie or music album. The damages section of the ACTA draft continues with the following paragraph that suggests giving rights holders full control over how they want to be compensated. 3. Each party shall provide that the rights holders shall have the right to choose the system in paragraph 2 as an alternative to the damages in paragraph 1. This is even more absurd. It basically means that the RIAA and MPAA will have the right to come up with their own damages formula, where they will probably cite one of their own studies to legitimize asking for exorbitant amounts of damages. Even though this leaked ACTA text is just a draft, and many member states have suggested it should become less extreme, it is crystal clear that the legislation is heavily skewed towards the rights holders. The rights of the public, their privacy and the general criticism on the claimed “loss in profit” because of illegal downloading are all completely ignored. http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-acta-...e-riaa-090414/ Sweden Sees Boom in Legal Downloading The sale of music via the internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. “The first week after the introduction of IPRED, sales increased by 100 percent compared to the previous weeks. I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,” said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services. Their Swedish clients include Tele2, Telia, Åhlens and MTV. Last week's upswing was unusually strong, but legal downloading is experiencing a more long-term boost. InProdicon, however, does not want to release information on the specific number of songs sold. “We have seen a clear sales increase compared to last year. There has been a 20-30 percent increase on an annual basis, but sales fluctuate a bit depending on which artists are launching new albums,” said Brännström. Another clear trend is that Swedish artists are benefiting from the increase in legal downloads. Around 60 percent of the downloaded music is Swedish. “It might be due to the fact that digital stores have a wider selection,” said Brännström. http://www.thelocal.se/18770/20090409/ Online and Anonymous: Swedish ISP Won't Retain Internet Data Now that Swedish ISPs are required to turn over user data to courts for all sorts of offenses, one ISP is fighting back by refusing to archive such data in the first place. The move is legal... for now. Nate Anderson The Pirate Bay has always taken pains to store no data on its users and, as the verdict in its file-sharing trial draws near, at least one Swedish ISP is following suit. Jon Karlung, the head of ISP Bahnhof, says that his company won't turn over any user data to authorities because it refuses to keep any log files. That decision is legal—for now. Karlung is reacting to IPRED, the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive. The Swedish version of this European law went into effect on April 1, and it allows courts to force ISPs to turn over user data. The move stripped away the veil of anonymity that Swedish file-swappers have long enjoyed, leading to an immediate drop in Internet traffic and prompting people like Karlung to reiterate his decision to destroy user data. "It's about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details," he said, according to Swedish newspaper The Local. "We're not acting in breach of IPRED; we're following the law and choosing to destroy the details." Bahnhof won't be able to maintain the anonymity of its users' Internet habits forever, though. In 2006, the EU passed the Data Retention Directive to address just this issue. The directive requires all EU countries to implement some form of data retention legislation, and it specifies terms of six month to two years. Several nations have implemented it already, though Sweden is not among them. IPRED's effect on Swedish Internet traffic, initially chalked up by some to "good weather" on April 1 in Sweden, has been remarkable. The data from a major set of Swedish Internet exchanges shows a dramatic decrease in total traffic from April 1 on, and traffic has not even come close to rebounding since the law went into effect. Moves by more ISPs to destroy all user data could embolden file-swappers once more. So could services like The Pirate Bay's new €5 anonymous VPN, IPREDATOR, assuming that those unwilling to pay for content are willing to pay instead for anonymous access to that content. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-turn-over.ars Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access? Eric Pfanner Is Internet access a fundamental human right? Or is it a privilege, carrying with it a responsibility for good behavior? That is the question confronting policy makers as they try to bring Internet access to the masses while seeking to curb illegal copying of digital music, movies and video games. The United States Congress held hearings last week on the growing problem of piracy, which the American entertainment industry says accounts for the loss of $20 billion a year in sales. Several lawmakers vowed to increase scrutiny of international markets where piracy is widespread. But if events in Paris last week are any indication, legislative solutions will not be easy. French lawmakers rejected an antipiracy plan championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, where the Internet connections of people who ignored repeated warnings to stop using unauthorized file-sharing services would have been severed. Mr. Sarkozy said he planned to reintroduce the measure, but public opinion is solidly against the idea of cutting off Internet users, and many politicians — not just in France but across Europe and elsewhere — are listening. Last month, in a pre-emptive strike, the European Parliament adopted a nonbinding resolution calling Internet access a fundamental freedom that could not be restricted except by a court of law. New Zealand recently suspended a law under which Internet service providers would have been required to crack down on illicit copying. And in Britain, years of discussion between content owners, Internet providers and the government have failed to produce a plan to curb piracy. “There’s increasing understanding that broadband is fundamental to basic economic and social participation,” said Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who studies information technology. “Some people wonder whether this is consistent with cutting off Internet connections.” Content owners have sometimes had more luck with the courts, winning a series of rulings against accused pirates. They are hoping for another favorable decision this week when the front lines of the antipiracy fight shift to a courtroom in Sweden. On Friday, a judge in Stockholm is expected to rule on whether four people connected with a popular file-sharing service, the Pirate Bay, are guilty of criminal violations of copyright law. If so, they could face as much as two years in prison. But both sides have indicated that they would appeal any decision against them, and the Pirate Bay has said that it could keep operating the service from another country. Meanwhile, new ways of sharing copyrighted material are gaining popularity on the Internet. Even as French lawmakers prepared to vote on Mr. Sarkozy’s proposal, the Pirate Bay was offering a new service aimed at foiling both that plan and other efforts to track down file sharers. The site charges users 5 euros a month, or about $6.60, for technology capable of hiding a computer’s Internet address. The system was developed to counter a new law in Sweden that makes it easier for the authorities, going through the courts, to obtain the Internet addresses of suspected copyright violators. Since that law took effect on April 1, Internet traffic has fallen by more than a third, suggesting less unauthorized file sharing, which is estimated to account for as much as half of all Internet traffic. David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, a company based in Cambridge, England, that helps movie studios and other clients monitor copyright violations on the Internet, said that while file sharing by peer-to-peer networks appeared to be leveling off globally, sites that offered alternatives to downloading, like streaming of pirated movies, were growing fast. Pirates are also turning to file hosting services like RapidShare, which allow users to upload files too big to e-mail. Others can then download them from RapidShare. RapidShare, based in Cham, Switzerland, is widely used for legitimate purposes — for advertising agencies wanting to show campaigns to clients around the world, for example — and is password-protected, limiting public access. But music and movie pirates can get around this by posting the lists of available songs or films, along with the passwords, on outside message boards. In several rulings, German courts have sided with GEMA, a German royalty-collection organization, in its complaints that RapidShare facilitates piracy and needs to do more to prevent it. But RapidShare, which is appealing the latest ruling, says that it removes copyrighted material at the owner’s request, and its chief executive, Bobby Chang, say it is “only an infrastructure provider, not a publisher.” Tim Kuik, director of Brein, a Dutch antipiracy organization, says there is a paradox in the way the public views copyright online and offline. “If you put 200 VCRs in your garage and start making and selling copies of films, you will get a visit from the police,” he said. “If you do it from a Web site, everybody says, ‘Hey, freedom of information’ ”. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/te...-piracy13.html French Three-Strike Law Debate To Resume Aymeric Pichevin The debates on French piracy law "Creation and Internet" will resume at French Assemby on April 29, according to French deputy Jean-François Copé. The bill, which features a three-strike scheme to prevent illegal download, was surprisingly rejected by French Assembly on April 9. This caused a great shock to the government and the music industry, which was preparing to celebrate the final adoption of the law. The rejection was considered by the government as an accident due to a dozen deputies of opposing socialist party taking part of the vote at the very last moment, thus putting ruling party UMP in the minority and without time to gather more of their own deputies. Ministry of Culture Christine Albanel, who introduced the draft bill, threatened to leave quit should the bill not pass; it is likely that it will be adopted, with UMP this time taking care of having enough troops present in both assemblies. But while the debates were supposed to be closed, the draft now has to come back in front of the Assembly and then the Senate where it can be amended again. This should bring back discussions on the nature of the sanction (fines instead of internet access suspension) or on whether an infringing user would have to pay its internet access while suspended. The rejection of the law has given new arguments to its opponents, such as consumers' organization UFC Que Choisir or European MP Guy Bono, who both call for the government to abandon what they consider a repressive and ineffective law. If voted, the law should be challenged by its opponents in front of the Constitutional Council, which has the power to rule out the parts it considers in violation of the French constitution. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...a9e2bbbf4bbf12 Australian ISPs May be Liable for Illegal Downloads Andrew Colley THE NSW Federal Court has not ruled out the possibility that an ISP could be in direct breach of copyright laws if it provides internet service to individuals that illegally share files on peer-to-peer networks. A group of copyright holders represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) put the claim to the court as a part of its copyright case against Perth-headquartered ISP iiNet. Most of AFACT’s original claims against iiNet lodged with the court last year were based on allegations that the ISP indirectly breached their members’ copyright. They alleged that iiNet effectively encouraged customers to engage in copyright breaches by failing to take steps to block illegal file sharing activity on its network. However, on February 19, AFACT lodged an amended statement of claim to the court containing new allegations that iiNet engaged in primary acts of copyright infringement alongside illegal file sharers simply by carrying the data through its network and systems. iiNet’s lawyers sought to have the claim removed from the group’s overall list of claims citing Federal Court rules that allow judges to dismiss matters that are unlikely to succeed before they go to trial. However, today, Federal Court Justice Dennis Cowdroy ordered AFACT to furnish further evidence to back its claim rather than strike it from the proceedings altogether. The complex legal claim contended that iiNet’s networks took an active role of copying movies and other copyright content that are at the core the case. It was a departure from the rest of the case which bares some similarities to the 2005 Kazaa trial in which music owners successfully sued Sharman Networks for providing software that allowed internet users to infringe their copyright. AFACT has claimed that by providing “the intermediate and transient storage of, or further or alternatively, the caching of copyright material” iiNet directly engaged in copyright infringement. In its submission accompanying its motion to have the claim dismissed iiNet’s lawyers said that AFACT misunderstood parts of its defence upon which the claim was based. “The applicants seem to suggest that that paragraph amounts to the respondent saying that the use of respondent’s facilities involves the intermediate or transient storage by the respondent of certain matter. Para 57(h) of the defence does nothing of the sort,” they said. iiNet could submit a second motion to have the matter removed from the proceedings once it has seen AFACT’s evidence. However it is more likely that the question will be dealt with when the trial proceeds later this year. Justice Cowdroy also asked the lawyers to consider altering the trial schedule to allow the matter to be heard continuously rather than risk it dragging into next year. The final trial date hasn't been confirmed. http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html Anonymity and Privacy Should Not Add Up to Prison Time EFF Urges U.S. Sentencing Commission to Reject Amendments on Use of Proxies The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged the United States Sentencing Commission to reject modifications to federal sentencing guidelines that would require extra prison time for people who use technology that hides one's identity or location. Under current rules, a criminal defendant can get additional time added to a prison sentence if he used "sophisticated means" to commit the offense. In its testimony before the commission, EFF will argue that sentencing courts should not assume that using proxies -- technologies that can anonymize users or mask their location -- is a mark of sophistication. In fact, proxies are widely employed by corporate IT departments and public libraries and, like many computer applications, can be used with little or no knowledge on the part of the user. "It would be a serious mistake for the United States Sentencing Commission to establish a presumption that using a common technology is worthy of additional punishment," said Jennifer Granick, EFF Civil Liberties Director. "Whether or not a convicted person's use of a proxy is worthy of increased penalties is a case-by-case determination most appropriately made by a court." "While proxies may be an advanced technology, using a proxy is often no more difficult than using Microsoft Word," said Seth Schoen, EFF Staff Technologist. "Many kinds of people use proxies for all sorts of legitimate purposes, so only a court can reliably assess which uses are truly employed as a 'sophisticated means' of committing a crime and which are for privacy, free speech or some other innocent purpose." Schoen will testify about EFF's comments at the Sentencing Commission's public hearing on March 17th in Washington, D.C. For the full testimony: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/us...-statement.pdf For more on the hearing: http://www.ussc.gov/AGENDAS/20090317/Public_Hearing.htm http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/03/17 Gov't Won't Classify Proxies as 'Sophisticated' Jordan Robertson The U.S. government has dropped — for now — a plan to classify the use of "proxy" servers as evidence of sophistication in committing a crime. Proxy servers are computers that disguise the source of Internet traffic. They are commonly used for legitimate purposes, like evading Internet censors and working from home. But they can also be used to hide from law enforcement. The Washington-based U.S. Sentencing Commission was considering a change to federal sentencing guidelines that would have increased sentences by about 25 percent for people convicted of crimes in which proxies are used to hide the perpetrators' tracks. But after digital-rights advocates complained that the proposed language was too broad, the commission struck the controversial language from the amendments it voted on Wednesday. The commission declined to comment, saying it hasn't yet submitted to Congress its formal reasons for the amendment language. The Justice Department supported the proposed amendment as a way to hand down stiffer sentences for people who set up elaborate proxy networks — sometimes in multiple countries — to commit crimes and hide their identities. Detectives often hit a dead end in following a criminal's Internet traffic through a big proxy network because it's hard to win cooperation from some foreign governments and Internet providers to get access to the proxy computers used as relay points. Digital-rights advocates said the amendment would have sent a chilling message about using a common technology that is often encouraged as a safer way of using the Internet. They wanted language clarifying that the amendment applied only to people who used a proxy specifically to commit a crime. http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12152466 OneSwarm v0.6 Released soulxtc Darknet BitTorrent-based P2P application adds features like secure, point-to-point encrypted chat and more. Back in February I mentioned how some of the same researchers at the University of Washington that brought us BitTyrant had developed a new privacy preserving file-sharing client called OneSwarm. Today those same researchers have announced the release of version 0.6. New features in version 0.6: • Secure point-to-point chat • Virtual directory hierarchies (i.e., tags) • Set non-default save location during downloads • Multi-key import • Limit remote access based on IP ranges • Change remote access password method from crypt -> SHA1+MD5 (for long password support) • Option to not stream media files (improves performance when there are few sources) • Fix ‘waiting for handshake’ bug that inhibits downloading if the client has been active for a while • Fix parallel connections being closed too aggressively (causes friends to be disconnected) • Fix rate limit not honored when there is a lot of downloading and forwarding going on • Many miscellaneous bugfixes Based on BitTorrent, and backwards compatible, OneSwarm is one of the many emerging new Darknet file-sharing applications that offers users concerned with privacy the ability to share data away from prying eyes. What OneSwarm does in a nutshell is basically allow users to establish networks of friends or contacts with which to share data. It allows users to then specifically fine-tune which data is shared and with whom. OneSwarm even goes a step further by using source address rewriting to protect user privacy. Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermediaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver. “Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to monitoring by third parties,” reads OneSwarm’s technical report. “To curb the indiscriminate sharing that enables this, we have built OneSwarm, a friend-to-friend file sharing client that restricts direct data sharing to trusted friends with verifiable persistent identities. Associating persistent names with peers gives users explicit control over their privacy by defining sharing permissions at the granularity of data objects and friends.” The only drawback to Darknet apps like OneSwarm will always be the finite amount of data shared and as well as the difficulty in maintaining a large swarm of trusted peers. That said, some will find it useful, especially in countries with overzealous copyright holders. It’s available for MAC, PC, and Linux. DOWNLOAD ONESWARM v0.6 http://www.zeropaid.com/news/85970/o...-v06-released/ Tests of Time Warner Broadband Cap Rescheduled, Debates Continue On second thought, Time Warner Cable decided to hold off on some of its tiered broadband trials, but the controversy isn't resting. Tim Conneally Time Warner Cable's proposed trials of consumption-based billing were originally slated to begin in several markets this summer, where customers would be a part of a tiered pricing scheme. Pricing would have started at 1 GB per month for $15, and go up to 100 GB per month for $75, and include a per-gigabyte overage fee. The public's reaction was less than favorable, and the trials in Texas have been rescheduled. Gavino Ramos, Time Warner's Vice President of Communications told the San Antonio Express News, "What happened as we're continuing to listen was we worked in some of the comments and ideas that got sent to us. We came to the realization, let's do this in October." Trials in Rochester, New York and Greensboro, North Carolina will continue as planned, but consumers look to be equally aggrieved. Some subscribers are planning protests of Time Warner's offices for the proposed trials. One group, called Stop The Cap, believes protests keep price hikes in check. It says, "a handful of major broadband providers are now colluding in a version of telecommunications limbo, with several watching each of the others 'experiment,' to see how low a cap they can set before subscribers and public officials rebel." This sort of bandwidth regulation has stirred debate both about monopoly, due to Time Warner's insular presence in some rural areas and its guaranteed exclusive CATV contracts in metropolitan areas. And don't forget the ongoing debate about net neutrality, which is leveraged in this case to make the argument that all users regardless of their purchasing ability should have access to "the same Internet." When networks are built out, the level of bandwidth consumption must be projected in advance; when those projections fall short, networks encounter serious congestion problems. Now that online gaming, streaming video, remote console and hard drive access, VoIP, and video conferencing are all increasingly common uses of the Internet, bandwidth consumption has exploded. According to Time Warner, it's exploding 40% faster than previously expected. A passage in Time Warner's statement to the FCC on Monday said, "The Commission should remind NTIA that, even under the Broadband Policy Statement, broadband providers are permitted to undertake reasonable network management practices in order to manage the ever-increasing flow of traffic over their networks and thereby address the root causes of network congestion." Whether or not this is the cash grab that the opposition believes it to be, for now, Time Warner can cite a footnote in the FCC's Broadband Policy Statement as protection while it decides how to proceed. http://www.betanews.com/article/Test...nue/1239815400 Time Warner Cable to Shelve New Internet Pricing Plan Time Warner Cable is postponing plans for new caps and fees on Internet data use in the Triad and other test markets. Melissa Buscher, a spokeswoman with the company, said Thursday that Time Warner still believes tiered pricing is the best option for most customers. “It’s clear from the response we’ve gotten from Greensboro and other areas that there’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Buscher said. “What we heard is no one knows what their usage is.” The company stated in a news release that it will shelve the trials "while the customer education process continues." "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing," Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt stated in a news release. "As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. "While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process." Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make Internet usage measurement tools available as quickly as possible to its customers. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was the first to announce the decision today in front of Time Warner Cable's local headquarters in Rochester, N.Y. “By responding to public outrage and opposition from community and elected officials, Time Warner Cable made the right decision today,” Schumer stated in a news release. Earlier this month, Time Warner announced it would test metered usage plans in the Triad; Rochester; and the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio. Under the new system, customers would choose Internet usage plans that cap uploads and downloads at 10, 20, 40, and 60 gigabytes. Customers would pay $1 per GB in overage fees if they go over their caps. The announcement was met with outrage from customers and threats from local and state government to bring in competition and block the move through legislation. In reaction, Time Warner postponed its tests in Austin and San Antonio. For the Triad and Rochester, the company announced two additional tiers, including a “budget” tier allowing 1 GB of data use per month for just $15 and a “super-tier” allowing up to 100 GB of data use for $75. The company also said it would limit overage fees to no more than $75, essentially creating an “unlimited” plan for those willing to pay the fees. Many Triad customers are still angry about the plan, saying that Time Warner has a virtual monopoly on high-speed cable Internet in the area and is capping data use to discourage competition. A protest was planned in Greensboro for Saturday. http://www.news-record.com/content/2...ing_plan_in_ny Why Cable ISP Capping is the New DRM, and Suck Tuan Nguyen I, like many people, have been subscribing to Internet connection services since the days of 300 baud modems. Then I upgraded to 14.4k, 36.6k, 56k, DSL, and now cable. Unfortunately, due to where I am living today, I'm stuck on 3 Mbit Verizon DSL service, which is often running at less than 1 Mbit. Thankfully, my service doesn't have a download cap on it--at least not yet anyway. Much like everyone reading this article, I'm a genuine supporter of advancement in hardware and technology services. Suffice to say, I was happy with the progression of Internet connection services over the years. Recently, however, I would have to say that Internet connection advancement in the U.S. and Canada has been purely an interest of the corporations that provide them and not about serving the consumer--you--and the advancement of technology in America in general. In late March, I wrote an article on Tom's Hardware explaining why HDCP (high definition content protection) is the bane of movie watchers everywhere. Not only is HDCP an invasive technology that kills the enjoyment of movies for enthusiasts, it does nothing to stop pirates. We all know this to be true. Don't think for a moment though, that big media doesn't know this--they absolutely do. Now, they have a new plan. Since big media can't directly go after pirates, they've decided to go after to after the group of people who they think can't do a thing about it: anyone using an Internet connection. You. Several years ago while at DailyTech, I wrote a series on net neutrality. If you haven't heard, the big issue on net neutrality is about ISPs creating tiers of net connections for both businesses and consumers. Tiers allow companies to effectively charge you more for your downloading habits rather than the speed you're after. Net connection services have always been mainly about speed for the consumer. Want to subscribe to a faster service? Pay more. It was simple and effective. Without net neutrality, ISPs not only charges for speed packages but also for how much you download. At the time, Verizon and others were very vocal about net neutrality, especially when the U.S. government and FCC were looking into the matter. Verizon and others made it clear that net neutrality was much ado about nothing. They lied. Time Warner Cable, which provides Internet connectivity for millions is a big opposition to net neutrality. Alright, let's cut the bull: Time Warner Cable, which provides Internet connectivity for millions, wants to screw you. But TWC isn't the only company out there with an interest in charging customers more for less. Most major ISPs are on the same bandwagon. The big reason for this? Online video and music. Cable companies have a vested interest in protecting their business, which is providing TV and movie services to their millions of subscribers. The more online movie and music services that pop online, the more threat there is to their bread and butter. The only way cable providers can slow this process down or stop it, is to limit how much you're able to download. This week, TWC released a new set of tiered connection plans ranging from a ridiculous 1 GB per month plan to something TWC calls the 100 GB "super tier" plan. Super? "We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business," said Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt. Despite what Britt claimed, 2008 was actually a great year for TWC: 10-percent more subscribers, but operating costs didn't go up. So what kind of math did Mr. Britt learn in school? Not the kind of math I learned; but that doesn't matter since Britt had an annual comp of $16.2 million. Here's some more logical math for your consumption: consider TWC's 40 GB tier. It costs a whopping $54.90 per month. If you only watch 7.25 hours a video per week, via Netflix, your Xbox 360, or any other service, you will be slapped with a bill of $200 at the end of the month. Worried? "Don't worry," says TWC's COO Landel Hobbs. "Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds," says Hobbs. That's an incredible deal if I ever saw one. Right? (sarcasm). YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and many other online video services are becoming more and more popular. Arguably, Netflix is putting Blockbuster out of business. Hulu, iTunes, and others like it are a major threat as well. Tiered plans however, ensure that you only get to watch a limited number of videos per month as well keep your downloading of videos to a minimum. Why have a really fast net connection to enjoy online media services and downloading when in reality, you can't? The answer is: so you, your friends, your family, and anyone else you know that has an Internet connection can keep dumping money into traditional cable programming. TWC, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Verizon, and others are not for the consumer in any way, shape, or form. Because of their traditional business practice, which is quickly becoming obsolete, cable providers want to make sure you, the consumer, will pay more to keep them afloat. Download capping is the new DRM. It ensures several things: - You will be more hesitant to download movies and music legitimately--even though you've paid to watch/listen. - You will watch more cable TV (so you can see all those great ads). - You will accidentally pay more for less. - Pirates get a whacking. Big media and ISPs can't effectively eliminate piracy by going after pirates directly or stop online video and music streaming services. So they have a better plan now: go after everyone. What about gamers? Don't watch streaming video and just a serious gamer? This will affect you too. If you like downloading demos, or have to update your favorite games with big updates and patches, prepare to have those eat a big chunk of your monthly download allowance. This is something every gamer has essentially been doing for free, but not for much longer. Any gamer here using Steam? Oh boy... If you purchase say, Call of Duty: World at War off of Steam, it's over 6 GB. If you're paying $29.95 for TWC's 5 GB connection, expect to pay an overage fee for hitting your cap and for the extra gigabyte. You can do something about TWC and others. A for-consumer organization called FreePress has an online petition, which is 500,000 strong at the moment, aims to convince Congress to put a stop to net capping schemes (scams?). Sign up here and make a stand. Glenn Britt, Landel Hobbs, or anyone at TWC who still cares about the consumer, I invite you to e-mail me at tuannguyen at bestofmedia.com. I'll be delighted to talk about how to bring your business into the 21st century. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tim...-drm,7530.html Time Warner Cable Competitor Shelves Unpopular Internet Cap Plan Peter Svensson Time Warner Cable is testing a new way of charging for Internet use — by the amount of traffic rather than solely based on download speed. But now that it's expanding its trial into Rochester, N.Y., it's run into a problem: The local phone company refuses to play ball. Frontier Communications, whose DSL broadband service competes with Time Warner Cable's modems, has shelved its own plans to introduce metered billing. With Time Warner Cable facing the fury of consumers and threats of legislation, Frontier said this week that it won't sell Internet service with "tiers" of usage, much like the minute allowance of a cell phone plan. "We have gotten hundreds of calls from Time Warner customers into our call centers," said Ann Burr, the head of Frontier's Rochester unit. "I guess it's been a public relations crisis for Time Warner." That move bodes poorly for the future of metered Internet billing. Because the idea is unpopular with consumers, cable and phone companies need to match each other's moves in introducing it, or one of them gains a competitive advantage by offering the standard all-you-can-eat service. Stamford, Conn.-based Frontier had 579,900 Internet subscribers at the end of the year. New York-based Time Warner Cable had 8.7 million, making it the third-largest Internet service provider in the country. The cable company started testing metered billing in Beaumont, Texas, last year, offering plans with 5 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes of monthly traffic, then charging $1 extra for each gigabyte over that. By charging by the gigabyte, the cable company said it hoped to shift the cost of providing Internet service, and the cost of upgrading the network, from those who use the Internet the least to those who use it the most. http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12148744 Time Warner`s Broadband Cap Plans Draw Lawmaker's Ire Roy Mark Time Warner's broadband cap plan may result in federal legislation aimed at unfair tiered price structures from Internet providers. Angered over Time Warner's pricing plans, U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York says that's exactly what he has in mind, promising a bill to curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service. Time Warner's broadband cap plan may result in federal legislation aimed at unfair tiered price structures from Internet providers. Angered over Time Warner's pricing plans, U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York says that's exactly what he has in mind, promising a bill to curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service. If Time Warner thought that its hastily revised broadband cap plan to include an unlimited usage tier would appease U.S. Rep. Eric Massa, the cable broadband provider was wrong. Massa, who represents a New York district where Time Warner is planning to roll out its cap plan, said April 10 he is drafting legislation to prohibit unfair tiered price structures from Internet providers. Massa responded sharply April 7 when Time Warner said it was introducing a tiered usage cap plan in a three-state trial pricing program. Massa called it "nothing more than a large corporation making a move to force customers into paying more money." The next day, Time Warner said it would offer an unlimited usage tier. It didn't make Massa any happier. "I am taking a leadership position on this issue because of all the phone calls, e-mails and faxes I've received from my district and all over the country," Massa said in an April 10 statement. "Time Warner has announced an ill-conceived plan to charge residential and business broadband fees based on the amount of data they download. They have yet to explain how increased Internet usage increases their costs." Time Warner’s Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs released a statement on April 9 expressing regret for not adequately communicating to customers its plan to initiate consumption-based billing trials for its broadband Internet services. “We realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate, and we apologize for any frustration we caused,” he said in the statement. “We’ve heard the passionate feedback, and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns." The revised Time Warner plan added the unlimited usage plan to its previously announced idea of having 5GB, 10GB, 20GB and 40GB caps. Prices would range from $29.95 to $75.00 a month, and users would be charged an extra dollar for every additional gigabyte they download, up to a maximum of $75. An unlimited bandwidth plan, therefore, tops out at $150. "Time Warner's decision has the potential to more than triple customers' current rates, and I think most families will find this to be too taxing to afford," Massa said. "Time Warner believes they can do this in Rochester, N.Y.; Greensboro, N.C.; and Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and it's almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers." Massa added that while he favored a "business's right to maximize their profit potential, I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region." Massa also pointed out that for a consumer to receive the same unlimited Internet that they currently do for around $40 per month, they would be billed $150 per month under the new plan. "At a time when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and businesses are struggling, I am compelled to fight against additional, unnecessary burdens placed on my constituents," Massa said. While Massa did not release any details of his proposed legislation, he said the bill will also address the importance of helping broadband providers create jobs and increase their bandwidth while increasing competition in areas currently served by only one provider. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastr...rs-Ire-202147/ FCC Developing Plan To Deliver Broadband Cecilia Kang The Federal Communications Commission yesterday began mapping out a plan to bring high-speed Internet service to the entire nation, starting with questions on how to increase its availability, improve its quality of service and make it more affordable. In a meeting yesterday, acting FCC Chairman Michael J. Copps invited comments from the public on the national broadband plan the agency has been ordered by Congress to complete by February 2010. He said the process for creating the plan will be "open, inclusive, out-reaching and data-hungry." The meeting was largely intended to set the stage for greater debate on contested policies that could be included in the FCC's broadband plan and would likely be spearheaded by President Obama's nominee to lead the agency, Julius Genachowski. The public will be able to submit comments to the agency for the next 60 days and then reply comments will be open for another 30 days. Already telecommunications companies and public interest groups have weighed in at the FCC on things they think should be in the plan. Some carriers want rules on how much large network operators can charge carriers to use parts of their networks. Others say a $7 billion federal phone subsidy program for rural areas should instead be used for broadband. Free Press, a public interest group, said the last administration dropped the ball on broadband deployment. "If we want to see any improvement in the availability and adoption of broadband in this country, we need a strong government watchdog and a broadband plan that puts the public interest ahead of Wall Street's whims," said S. Derek Turner, Free Press's research director. Copps said that, beyond debates on technologies, the FCC would look at coming up with standards for speed and guidelines for what places are most in need of high-speed Internet service. The agency would also focus on demand issues, such as why more than three times as many people in urban areas are not connecting to high-speed Internet service compared with those in rural areas, he said. The government has included $7.2 billion in stimulus funds for broadband development, mostly geared toward rural areas. Among the main reasons respondents to a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey gave for not subscribing to broadband were that service fees and computers were unaffordable and that respondents did not see Internet content as relevant to their lives. Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a public advocacy group, said the agency's plan will likely look at policies in place and see how they can be reformed to increase the availability of broadband and make service more attractive for consumers. "The proper goal of the program is filling holes in our national broadband strategy," Murray said, "not creating broadband networks from the ground up." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040804323.html Dreaming of Cutting the Subscription TV Cord Marguerite Reardon The economy is in the toilet, and I know I'm not the only person in America who is looking for ways to cut costs. Top on my list in 2009 is finding a way to eliminate my $100 a month cable TV bill. Up until very recently, the idea of cutting off subscription TV would have meant skimping on a whole lot of good quality entertainment. I must admit, I don't watch a lot of TV. But I watch enough that I would be very sad if I had to give up HBO's "Flight of the Conchords" or NBC's "30 Rock." But thanks to that wonderful communications network known as the Internet and the fact that big Hollywood studios and TV networks have finally realized that digital distribution is actually a good thing, cable cord cutters, like me, won't have to sacrifice that much or anything at all, depending on what movies and TV programs we like to watch. Thanks to services like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon On Demand, consumers can simply stream or download movies or previous seasons of TV shows directly from the Web any time they want. And for those viewers looking for current seasons of TV shows, they can turn to Web sites such as Hulu.com or TV.com, which have aggregated some of the most popular TV shows for on-demand viewing over the Net. (Disclosure: CNET and TV.com are properties of CBS Interactive.) However, even though it's nice to be able to watch "The Dark Night" or "The Office" on your PC or laptop, many people would prefer to kick back on their couches and view it on that big flat-screen TV in their living rooms. So how do you get all the cool video content from your PC to the TV? Well, there are plenty of options available today and more are coming. LG and Samsung already offer Blu-ray players that can stream Netflix movies; both companies are upping the ante in 2009 with Netflix-friendly home theater systems, HDTVs -- and more Blu-ray players. Panasonic's 2009 VieraCast-compatible plasmas will offer support for Amazon Video On Demand. Meanwhile, a new company called ZillionTV is also working with broadband providers, movie studios, TV networks and advertisers to create an entirely new business model to give consumers yet another easy and cheap way to view on-demand movies and TV shows using their Internet connections. But if buying a new TV or Blu-ray player isn't in your budget for 2009, here's a look at some alternatives. A number of companies are making inexpensive, purpose-built boxes to provide movies and TV shows over the Net. And if you're a gamer, console makers such as Microsoft and Sony already have Internet-based video functionality. For those tech-savvy TV viewers out there who aren't afraid of going the extra mile, there's also the option of simply hooking up a computer to your TV and using that 40-inch flat-screen as your PC monitor to locate and view online video. I've done a little digging through the CNET Reviews archives to highlight the top 10 boxes/computers for accessing video-on-demand content via the Web. Here's a brief summary of each, in no particular order. You can see at a glance what makes each one cool and what makes it not so cool. And you'll get a general idea of how much each one costs. I'm sorry to say that I haven't found a box that offers me everything from all the top movies and TV shows to the best local and live TV programming. But the market is still evolving. And I promise you that the landscape could look very different in 18 months, so stay tuned. Roku Digital Video Player - $99 What makes it cool? At $99, the Roku box is a cheap and simple way to stream movies and TV shows from the Internet to your TV. Users can subscribe to Netflix's Watch Now on-demand video service for as little as $9 a month and watch as many of Netflix's 12,000 streaming movie and TV titles as they like. Roku also recently added even more titles to its service through Amazon's pay-per-view Video On Demand service. For as little as $2 to $4 a pop, viewers can rent movies or TV episodes. The CNET Reviews team gives this device a high score for being simple to set up with built-in wired and 802.11g Wi-Fi networking. It works with all TVs. And the firmware is upgradable, so as Roku adds more services and options like advertising-supported programming from the big networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox--an option that the company is currently exploring -- users can grow with the service. What makes it not so cool? Roku needs more content. Currently, Netflix's streaming library is only a fraction of its DVD-by-mail offerings, especially when it comes to popular recent releases. There's no browser to access Hulu.com or other sites offering other programming online. The CNET Reviews team notes that the video quality for non-HD titles is not DVD quality, especially when viewed on large TVs. There's also no surround sound (yet), and the Netflix queue still has to be managed from a PC. Apple TV - $215 to $329 What makes it cool? Apple TV offers a variety of free and premium media content over the Net directly to your TV. Using Apple's popular iTunes Store, users can rent movies and TV shows, buy and listen to music, view photos and access podcasts. The AppleTV also allows people to stream media from networked Mac or Windows PCs (assuming that it's already been imported into iTunes). Apple has struck deals with all the major movie studios, and some of the titles are in HD. It offers surround sound on some titles as well. The CNET Reviews team also likes Apple's "sleek external design and elegant user interface." The setup is simple and it comes equipped with 802.11n wireless networking. Pricing for movie rentals and purchases varies depending on whether they are in standard definition or high definition and depending on whether they are new releases or older movies. But prices to rent movies are between about $1.99 and $4.99. And movies can be bought for about $15 a pop. The box currently comes in two versions: 40GB and 160GB. What makes it not so cool? AppleTV doesn't work with older, non-widescreen TVs. And once again, the device doesn't come with a browser to access content that's available for free on the Web such as Hulu.com or TV.com. Basically, if it's not something you can get in iTunes, you won't be able to watch it on Apple TV. Vudu - $125 to $150 What makes it cool? Like Apple TV and Roku, Vudu is a dedicated set-top box for playing Internet-delivered video content. But what sets it apart from these other players is that the video resolution is much better at a full 1080p HD resolution. It also offers surround sound. As for content, Vudu offers a selection of movies from all the major studios as well as TV shows. It also offers adult content. And for the budget-conscious viewers, it added a bargain channel to the service that offers a rotating list of 99 movies for just 99 cents a pop. What makes it not so cool? For one, its video library pales in comparison to Netflix or Amazon, which offer 12,000 and 40,000 titles, respectively. What's more, the best-quality HD content requires download queuing before viewing. It can't stream media from other networked PCs, and it lacks Wi-Fi. 2Wire MediaPoint Digital Media Player - $99 with included 25-movie download credit What makes it cool? This box is very similar to the Roku, AppleTV and Vudu devices. The single-purpose box, which costs $99, is essentially free since it comes with a 25-movie credit. It streams Blockbuster OnDemand video titles to your TV. There's no monthly fee, and it has built-in Ethernet and 802.11g Wi-Fi for easy networking. Blockbuster OnDemand offers more, newer titles than Netflix. And the device allows for progressive downloading, which means movies can be downloaded and then viewed on slower connections. What makes it not so cool? The CNET Reviews team doesn't recommend this device. They say the remote is tiny and cluttered. There is no HD viewing, and it offers a small selection of movie and TV titles. And like other boxes built for streaming alone, it has no Web browser for accessing free online video content. Microsoft Xbox 360 - $180 to $400 What makes it cool? The Xbox 360 is primarily a gaming console, but it also offers an on-demand movie rental service from Netflix as well as from its own Xbox Video Marketplace. According to the CNET Reviews team, it has a superior selection of games and excellent online gaming and communications via Xbox Live. The box also doubles as a digital media hub and Windows Media Center extender. And it plays DVDs. What's not so cool? The system is big and noisy. There's no built-in wireless networking. And like the purpose-built video streaming boxes, it doesn't have a browser for accessing other free online video content. And at around $300 (for the 60GB version), it's on the expensive side if all you'd like to do is stream movies and TV from the Web. (You also need to have a $50 a year Xbox Live Gold subscription to access the Netflix feature.) But if you're looking for a gaming console, DVD player and Netflix-capable media center too, this might be a box to consider. Sony PlayStation 3 - $400 What makes it cool? Like the Xbox 360, the Sony PS3 is primarily a gaming console that also happens to offer online movie and TV viewing on your TV. Movies can be bought, or they can be rented for 24 hours from the online Sony PlayStation Store. Movies are available from most major Hollywood studios and TV networks. Unlike the Xbox 360 and the other online video appliances, the PS3 also has a built-in Web browser that allows users to find and view any Web content on their TV. The console has built-in Wi-Fi as well. And in addition to games and online videos, it also plays standard DVD movies and HD Blu-ray movies. What makes it not so cool? The biggest knock against this device with respect to movie watching is the fact that the media and commerce options are not nearly as developed as Xbox Live, according to CNET Reviews. TiVo HD/Series3 - $250 to $300 What makes it cool? Like the gaming consoles, the TiVo HD/Series3 is much more than an appliance for watching TV over your broadband connection. It's also a digital video recorder that can record two HD programs simultaneously while playing back a third, previously recorded one. But in addition to being a pretty cool DVR, it also offers on-demand movies over the Internet from Netflix, Amazon, CinemaNow and Jaman. What makes it not so cool? The biggest issue with TiVo is the price. While the upfront cost is a reasonable $300, it also requires a monthly subscription fee for the DVR function, which can add up over time. And if you are trying to replace your subscription TV service, it seems like you wouldn't need a DVR to record shows, because you'd be able to get them on-demand whenever you wanted to watch something. And like other devices mentioned here, the TiVo does not come with full Internet browsing to get already available video online. SlingCatcher - $200 to $300 What makes it cool? SlingMedia's SlingCatcher lets owners of the companion Slingbox product place-shift viewing from one room to another (say, from the living room to bedroom), so you can watch live TV or stuff that's recorded on your DVR, for example. But the SlingCatcher also includes SlingProjector software (Windows only, for now) that streams any video playing on your PC to your TV. That includes video from Web sites like Hulu.com, TV.com and YouTube on your TV. Viewers can also use the SlingCatcher to view movies downloaded on their PCs from services such as Amazon or iTunes. Basically, anything you can play on your PC can be viewed on your TV via the SlingCatcher. What makes it not so cool? The Web video viewing is a bit kludgy. You pretty much need to keep a laptop or desktop on to access the TV shows and online video content you want. That means navigating to new videos and sites needs to be done from the PC -- not from through the SlingCatcher's remote. Mac Mini - $599 to $799 What makes it cool? The Mac Mini is a tiny computer with a cute and slick design that easily fits in a home entertainment center. And because the Mac Mini is a full-blown computer using Apple's operating system, it can easily surf the Web and play video from any Web site offering video. This includes Hulu.com, TV.com and all the major TV networks offering video on their Web sites as well as user-generated sites such as YouTube. Viewers could also download movies from Amazon or iTunes and watch them on the big screen via the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini comes in two configurations: a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive; or 2GHz Core 2 Duo chip, 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. What makes it not so cool? The Mac Mini is expensive. The low-end version costs $599, and the high-end version costs $799. And because it's a computer, users will need to get a wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate and search for content. Acer Aspire X1700 - $479 What makes it cool? This desktop PC is compact and includes an HDMI video and digital audio output, making it a good pick for a low-cost, compact PC to stream online videos to the TV. Like the Mac Mini, the fact that the Acer Aspire is a full computer means that viewers can surf the Net and watch video from any Web site. This includes sites that offer free TV shows like Hulu.com or they can download movies from Amazon or iTunes and watch them on the big screen. Of course, users could also use the computer to view movies from BitTorrent and other sites that offer movies via peer-to-peer services. What makes it not so hot? This particular PC is not as fast as the competition, notes the CNET Reviews staff. And just like with the Mac Mini, the fact that the Acer is a computer means that users will have to use a mouse and keyboard to navigate and search for content. http://tech.msn.com/products/article...entid=18526937 GOP Admits it Owns FOX? Don't "Misunderestimate" Republicans FairWinds On April 6, 2009, the University of Colorado hosted the 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs, which included a panel presentation entitled Rebranding Republicans: Don't Misunderestimate Us, recorded by and broadcast on C-SPAN. Among the panelists was Robert G. Kaufman, author of In Defense of the Bush Doctrine: Moral Democratic Realism and American Grand Strategy, published in 2007. In a ten-minute presentation, Mr. Kaufman posited five "core principles" that Republicans must embrace if they are to succeed "when Obama fails." There is much to find disturbing in Mr. Kaufman's presentation, such as his assumption that Obama will fail and his assertion that "multiculturalism is a euphemism for the Balkanization of the United States". However, his "recommendation" that the GOP "acquire another television network" to disseminate its message in future elections is both an audacious proposal and a stunning admission. FairWinds's diary :: :: Kaufman stated: Quote:
Acquire? Another? Freudian slip or not, this statement is stunning for two reasons. First, there is the casualness with which a noted political scientist suggests that a political party should "own", a television network for purposes of disseminating a political message during elections. Second, it is predicated on the implicit assumption that the right already "owns" FOX. (It also suggests that we may have yet another channel around which to surf a wide berth in the future.) FOX's blatant conservative bias is no secret, of course, but Kaufman goes still further. His unequivocal affirmation of the truth is gratifying. In 2004, film director Robert Greenwald produced his excellent documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, which revealed editorial Vice President John Moody craven machinations to alter news content. Through a series of internal editorial directives to news staff, Moody exerted top-down pressure to propagandize the news in favor of Republicans. In 2005, Slate's Timothy Noah wrote: Quote:
From the lips of Bush's Apologist-in-Chief to our ears, "FOX: a GOP 'acquisition' that should be replicated." http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20...e-Republicans- Gotcha TV: Crews Stalk Bill O’Reilly’s Targets Brian Stelter When Bill O’Reilly’s camera crew ambushed Mike Hoyt at a bus stop in Teaneck, N.J., a few months ago, the on-camera confrontation and the microphone in his face reminded him, oddly enough, of the “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace. Mr. Hoyt, executive editor of The Columbia Journalism Review, was well-versed in the venerable art of the on-camera, on-the-street confrontation, perfected by Mr. Wallace and other hard-charging television journalists in decades past. Now, in an appropriation of Mr. Wallace’s techniques, ambush interviews have become a distinguishing feature of Mr. O’Reilly’s program on the Fox News Channel. Mr. Hoyt, one of more than 50 people that Mr. O’Reilly’s young producers have confronted in the past three years, said the interviews were “really just an attempt to make you look bad.” In almost every case Mr. O’Reilly uses the aggressive interviews to campaign for his point of view. Mr. O’Reilly, the right-leaning commentator who has had the highest-rated cable show for about eight years, has called the interviews a way to hold people accountable for their actions. “When the bad guys won’t comment, when they run and hide, we will find them,” he said on “The O’Reilly Factor” recently. In recent months the ambushes have come under increased scrutiny, partly because the targets have changed. While most of the initial subjects were judges and lawyers whom Mr. O’Reilly perceived to be soft on crime, many of the past year’s subjects have been political and personal opponents of the host. Mr. Hoyt, for instance, was criticized for assigning an essay about right-wing media to a writer with a liberal background. Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor for The New Yorker, was confronted for what Mr. O’Reilly described as taking a “Factor” segment out of context. And Amanda Terkel, a managing editor at the liberal Web site ThinkProgress.org, was interviewed about a protest she helped organize against Mr. O’Reilly. Ms. Terkel’s case generated immense attention on the Internet last month partly because she called it an incident of stalking and harassment. ThinkProgress discussed taking legal action but instead decided to lead a mostly unsuccessful effort asking advertisers to boycott Mr. O’Reilly’s program. The Fox News producer responsible for most of the ambush interviews, Jesse Watters, refused repeated interview requests. But the network did make David Tabacoff, the program’s senior executive producer, available to comment. Mr. Tabacoff — who started a telephone interview by asking, “This is going to be a fair piece, correct?” — said the interviews are “part of the journalistic mission” of “The O’Reilly Factor.” He called the program an “opinion-driven show that has a journalistic basis.” “We’re trying to get answers from people,” he said. “Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods.” The attitude, as summarized by Mr. Watters in a BillOReilly.com blog post: “If they don’t come to us, we’ll go to them.” A Fox spokeswoman said the interview approach was first used in 2002. It became a staple of “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2006. Since then Mr. Watters, a 30-year-old who worked for a Republican candidate for New York attorney general, Dora Irizarry, before joining Fox in 2003, has approached high school principals, lawmakers, journalists and celebrities whom Mr. O’Reilly has accused of being dishonest. He conducts background checks, uses Google Earth’s mapping software to scout the locations and tries to identify a public place where he can surprise the person. Some interviews require days of waiting in trucks and hotels. When the subjects don’t answer — at least not to the satisfaction of Mr. Watters — the questions become more provocative and emotional. Last summer Mr. Watters asked Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont about that state’s criminal statutes and asked, “About how many dead girls are we going to tolerate here?” Sometimes the questions are statements. While trying to provoke a Florida judge last month Mr. Watters seemed to speak on behalf of the victims of a sexual molester, saying, “You owe that family an apology.” While Mr. Watters has never been injured on the job, there have been some close calls. In Virginia Beach, while confronting Meyera Oberndorf, the city’s mayor, about its laws toward illegal immigrants that Mr. O’Reilly calls too lenient, Mr. Watters said the mayor’s husband tried, unsuccessfully, to seize the microphone. “This will be great TV,” Mr. Watters recalled remarking to the camera operator and sound technician in a blog post. Rather than “60 Minutes,” the confrontations may bring to mind the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who documented his attempts to ambush the chairman of General Motors in his 1989 film “Roger & Me” and later asked members of Congress to enlist their children to serve in Iraq in 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Mr. O’Reilly has rejected the comparison, saying on Fox in 2006 that Mr. Moore is “doing it to put it in his movie and exploit it,” while “I’m doing it because there’s no other way to hold these villains accountable.” Some subjects of the interviews strongly disagree. “They weren’t interested in my views,” Mr. Hoyt said of the January incident. “They just wanted to have me looking surprised or irked or whatever.” After several minutes at the bus stop, the camera crew tried to board the bus with Mr. Hoyt, disembarking only after the driver demanded that they leave. In some cases the subjects of the interviews seek help from the police. Matthew Dowd, who has since retired as a Kansas judge, said Mr. Watters “kind of jumped me” outside a restaurant two years ago, prompting his wife to call 911. In at least three other instances, subjects called the police. For some journalism practitioners Mr. O’Reilly’s tactics are unsettling. “Nobody should hijack the power of journalism or use the public airwaves (or cable signals) simply to settle personal scores,” Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that supports journalism education, said in an e-mail message. Ten of the last 12 people confronted by Mr. O’Reilly’s crews were either outwardly liberal or had criticized Republicans. Fox staffers insist, however, that Mr. O’Reilly is not partisan, and Ron Mitchell, an “O’Reilly Factor” producer, said that “if you go over the dozens and dozens of these, the primary balance is not about left or right.” (In October, for instance, Mr. Watters approached the ousted Merrill Lynch chief executive, E. Stanley O’Neal, outside his apartment.) Regardless, some people criticized by Mr. O’Reilly have learned how to avoid added embarrassment when it is their turn in front of Mr. Watters’s microphone. When he confronted Rosie O’Donnell at a book signing to ask about her views of 9/11 conspiracy theories — she had said on “The View” that it was impossible that World Trade Center 7 could have fallen the way it did “without explosives being involved” — a member of her entourage placed his hand over the camera lens. Ms. O’Donnell told her employee to stop, adding, “That’s what they want you to do.” Mr. O’Reilly played the tape the next weeknight. http://nytimes.com/2009/04/16/arts/t.../16ambush.html Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers Brooks Barnes LOS ANGELES — Kelly Peña, or “the kid whisperer,” as some Hollywood producers call her, was digging through a 12-year-old boy’s dresser drawer here on a recent afternoon. Her undercover mission: to unearth what makes him tick and use the findings to help the Walt Disney Company reassert itself as a cultural force among boys. Ms. Peña, a Disney researcher with a background in the casino industry, zeroed in on a ratty rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. Black Sabbath? “Wearing it makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie,” said Dean, a shy redhead whose parents asked that he be identified only by first name. Jackpot. Ms. Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just that kind of psychological nugget. Disney is relying on her insights to create new entertainment for boys 6 to 14, a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of “Davy Crockett” but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare like “Hannah Montana.” Children can already see the results of Ms. Peña’s scrutiny on Disney XD, a new cable channel and Web site (disney.go.com/disneyxd). It’s no accident, for instance, that the central character on “Aaron Stone” is a mediocre basketball player. Ms. Peña, 45, told producers that boys identify with protagonists who try hard to grow. “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks,” she said. Actors have been instructed to tote their skateboards around with the bottoms facing outward. (Boys in real life carry them that way to display the personalization, Ms. Peña found.) The games portion of the Disney XD Web site now features prominent trophy cases. (It’s less about the level reached in the game and more about sharing small achievements, research showed.) Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research. Disney is so proud of its new “headquarters for boys,” however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers. Thus far, Disney’s initiative is limited to the XD channel. But Disney hopes that XD will produce a hit show that can follow the “High School Musical” model from cable to merchandise to live theater to feature film, and perhaps even to Disney World attraction. With the exception of “Cars,” Disney — home to the “Princesses” merchandising line; the Jonas Brothers; and “Pixie Hollow,” a virtual world built around fairies — has been notably weak on hit entertainment franchises for boys. (“Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Toy Story” are in a type of hibernation, awaiting new big-screen installments.) Disney Channel’s audience is 40 percent male, but girls drive most of the related merchandising sales. Rivals like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network have made inroads with boys by serving up rough-edged animated series like “The Fairly Oddparents” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” Nickelodeon, in particular, scoffs at Disney’s recent push. “We wrote the book on all of this,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president for research of MTV Networks, which includes Nickelodeon. Even so, media companies over all have struggled to figure out the boys’ entertainment market. News Corporation infamously bet big on boys in the late 1990s with its Fox Kids Network and a digital offering, Boyz Channel. Both failed and drew criticism for segregating the sexes (there was also a Girlz Channel) and reinforcing stereotypes. The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true. The people on Ms. Peña’s team have anthropology and psychology backgrounds, but she majored in journalism and never saw herself working with children. Indeed, her training in consumer research came from working for a hotel operator of riverboat casinos. “Children seemed to open up to me,” said Ms. Peña, who does not have any of her own. Sometimes the research is conducted in groups; sometimes it involves Ms. Peña’s going shopping with a teenage boy and his mother (and perhaps a videographer). The subjects, who are randomly selected by a market research company, are never told that Disney is the one studying them. The children are paid $75. Walking through Dean’s house in this leafy Los Angeles suburb on the back side of the Hollywood Hills, Ms. Peña looked for unspoken clues about his likes and dislikes. “What’s on the back of shelves that he hasn’t quite gotten rid of — that will be telling,” she said beforehand. “What’s on his walls? How does he interact with his siblings?” One big takeaway from the two-hour visit: although Dean was trying to sound grown-up and nonchalant in his answers, he still had a lot of little kid in him. He had dinosaur sheets and stuffed animals at the bottom of his bed. “I think he’s trying to push a lot of boundaries for the first time,” Ms. Peña said later. This kind of intensive research has paid dividends for Disney before. Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney ABC Television Group, noted it in her approach to rebuilding Disney Channel a decade ago. “You have to start with the kids themselves,” she said. “Ratings show what boys are watching today, but they don’t tell you what is missing in the marketplace.” While Disney XD is aimed at boys and their fathers, it is also intended to include girls. “The days of the Honeycomb Hideout, where girls can’t come in, have long passed,” said Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide. In Ms. Peña’s research boys across markets and cultures described the television aimed at them as “purposeless fun” but expressed a strong desire for a new channel that was “fun with a purpose,” Mr. Ross said. Hollywood has been thinking of them too narrowly — offering all action or all animation — instead of a more nuanced combination, he added. So far results have been mixed. Disney XD, which took over the struggling Toon Disney channel, has improved its predecessor’s prime-time audience by 27 percent among children 6 to 14, according to Nielsen Media Research. But the bulk of this increase has come from girls. Viewership among boys 6 to 14 is up about 10 percent. “We’ve seen cultural resonance, and it doesn’t come overnight,” Mr. Ross said. Which is one reason Ms. Peña is still out interviewing. At Dean’s house her team was quizzing him about what he meant when he used the word “crash.” Ben, a 12-year-old friend who had come over to hang out, responded, “After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing.” Growing self-conscious, Ben added, “Am I talking too much?” Not even close. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/ar...on/14boys.html "Hannah Montana" Rocks Box Office OMG! OMG! Sixteen-year-old actress Miley Cyrus became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood on Sunday as her first nonconcert movie topped the North American box office, earning twice as much as Disney had forecast. Walt Disney Co's "Hannah Montana: The Movie" sold $34 million worth of tickets at the three-day Easter weekend, as fans of the perky starlet rushed to see the first big-screen adaptation of her hit Disney Channel TV series. Cyrus returned the favor, turning up with her father and co-star, Billy Ray Cyrus, at theaters in Utah and Tennessee and blogging about her wild weekend on Twitter. "omgomg! my fans rock! the movie is doing great you guys! omg AND its all cause of you!!!! I LOVE U ALL! IF YOU HAVENT SEEN IT YET CHECK IT!," she wrote, using the "omg" acronym as shorthand for "Oh, my God." As in her TV show, Cyrus plays a regular schoolgirl by day and a pop star by night. But her father (Billy Ray Cyrus) decides she needs to get back to her small-town roots, so takes her on a surprise trip to her old Tennessee home where love and other complications ensue. Going into the weekend, Disney had hoped "Hannah Montana" would perform in the same range as 2003's "The Lizzie McGuire Movie," a vehicle for Disney Channel star Hilary Duff. "Lizzie" opened to $17.3 million in 2003, and ended its domestic run with $42.7 million. Disney Surprised On Sunday, the studio denied that it had deliberately set a low target. "It caught us by surprise. No doubt about it," said Chuck Viane, the studio's president of domestic theatrical distribution. "Outside of Wow! what can you say?" Exit polling showed that women made up 80 percent of moviegoers, and 60 percent of the audience was aged between two and 17, Viane said. Cyrus' previous big-screen outing, "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour," opened with $31 million last year, ending up with $65 million to become the biggest concert movie of all time. Disney will soon begin shooting another Cyrus movie, "The Last Song," Viane said. Cyrus is now a bigger draw than Oscar-winners like Julia Roberts and Jodie Foster, who each had $13 million openings with their last movies, "Duplicity" and "Nim's Island," respectively. Last weekend's champion "Fast & Furious" slipped to No. 2 with $28.8 million, taking the 10-day total for Universal Pictures' race-car thriller to $118.0 million. The studio is a unit of General Electric Co's NBC Universal. DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc's "Monsters vs. Aliens" was down one at No. 3 with $22.6 million in its third weekend; its total rose to $141 million. Also new was the dark comedy "Observe and Report," which opened at No. 4 with $11.1 million, falling short of the expectations of its distributor, Warner Bros. Pictures. The Time Warner Inc.-owned studio had hoped for an opening in the $14 million to $15 million range. The Japanese-inspired fantasy "Dragonball Evolution" opened at No. 7 with $4.7 million, also a little lower than the modest forecasts of its distributor 20th Century Fox. But the News Corp-owned studio said the film is doing better internationally with sales to date of $37 million. (Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Doina Chiacu) http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5391MY20090413 X-Rated Star Marilyn Chambers Dies at 56 John Rogers Marilyn Chambers, the pretty Ivory Snow soap girl who helped bring hard-core adult films into the mainstream consciousness when she starred in the explicit 1972 movie "Behind the Green Door," has died at 56. The cause of death was not immediately known. A family friend, Peggy McGinn, said Chambers' 17-year-old daughter found the actress' body Sunday night at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Canyon Country. Chambers was pronounced dead at the scene, the county coroner's office said Monday. Chambers and fellow actresses Linda Lovelace and Georgina Spelvin shot to fame at a time in the early 1970s when both American social mores and the quality of hard-core sex films were changing. For the first time, films like "Behind the Green Door" and "Deep Throat" (also released in 1972 and starring Lovelace) had decent acting and legitimate if fairly thin plots. As the audiences for them grew to include couples, they also began to take on higher production values and to be seen in places other than sleazy theaters. But "Behind the Green Door" brought something more in Chambers, an attractive young woman who had begun her career as a legitimate actress and model. While the film was still in theaters, the public learned that its star was the same young blonde smiling and holding a freshly diapered baby on boxes of Ivory Soap. The manufacturer quickly replaced her, but it was later discovered that she also had a small role in the 1970 Barbra Streisand film "The Owl and the Pussycat." "She was the first crossover adult star. She was the Ivory Snow girl and when she decided to make an adult movie that was big news," Steven Hirsch, co-CEO of adult filmmaker Vivid Entertainment Group, told The Associated Press on Monday. "It was the first adult movie that was more than just a bunch of sex scenes," Hirsch said of her breakthrough film. "She was an actress and she brought that ability to the set of 'Behind the Green Door.' That's part of what made that movie so successful." In an online chat with AdultDVDtalk.com in 2000, Chambers attempted to explain what caused her to take such a radically different career path after "The Owl and the Pussycat" and her modeling work. "Back then in my naive brain I was thinking that something like 'Behind the Green Door' had never been done before and the way our sexual revolution was traveling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career," she said. She learned afterward, she said, that wasn't the case. "There will always be a stigma on people who do adult films," she said. "It's unfortunate that that's the way society has made it." She followed "Green Door" with the hard-core films "Resurrection of Eve," in 1973 and "Inside Marilyn Chambers" in 1975. Then she announced in 1976 that she was giving up adult films to pursue other interests. She starred in the 1977 horror movie "Rabid" and put together a song-and-dance show that played Las Vegas and elsewhere. She returned to adult films in 1980 in "Insatiable" and through the rest of her career went back and forth between explicit movies and R-rated ones. "She was a pioneer, and an amazingly secure woman. I admired her for being at the forefront of an industry that was so taboo when she started," said Jenna Jameson, currently one of the industry's biggest stars. Hirsch noted that one of the most striking things about Chambers' career was its longevity in a business where stars quickly fade. She still has a photo gallery on the Web site Adult Video News and the Internet Movie Database credits her as recently completing a film called, "Porndogs: The Adventures of Sadie" with Ron Jeremy. Although Chambers was quick to point out in 2000 that she had done more R-rated films that X-rated ones, she made no apologies for the latter. "I have to say that the adult films have been a total pleasure," she said. "They were like getting paid to live out my greatest fantasies. The rest of the stuff ... sometimes got to be a real grind." Chambers, born Marilyn Ann Briggs, on April 22, 1952, grew up in Westport, Conn. She got her start in adult films after answering an ad placed in a San Francisco newspaper by pioneering adult filmmakers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Married and divorced three times, she is survived by her daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor; her brother, Bill Briggs; and her sister, Jann Smith. http://www.newstimes.com/ci_12138335 Actors Guild, Producers Reach Tentative Agreement Edward Wyatt The Screen Actors Guild has reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with a coalition of major Hollywood movie and television studios, the two sides announced Friday. People close to the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the union’s board of directors has not yet reviewed the proposal, said that the agreement provides the actors with no substantial gains over contracts previously signed by other show-business guilds. The actors union achieved one major goal, however: a proposed contract that would expire in June 2011, at roughly the same time as those of the unions representing writers, directors and other television personalities. The actors sought that date because it hopes the combined leverage of the four unions will allow them to put more pressure on the Hollywood studios for better terms on compensation for digital content. The proposed settlement was announced jointly by the Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major Hollywood studios. The two sides said they would not disclose details of the agreement until after it is reviewed by the actors union’s national board of directors at a meeting on Sunday. If the board approves, the deal will be sent to the union’s 120,000 members for ratification, which requires a majority vote. The previous contract expired in June, and actors have been working without a new pact since then. The proposed new deal would last approximately two years from the date of ratification and would not be retroactive to the previous contract’s expiration — a feature desired by the producers’ alliance. Some board members have already said that they will oppose the proposed agreement and will encourage members to vote it down. Those board members, part of the Membership First coalition, constitute a minority of the union’s national board but hold a majority of the positions on the board of the Hollywood local, the biggest single unit of the Screen Actors Guild. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-agreement/?hp Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility Charles McGrath MIKE NICHOLS, the subject of a two-week retrospective starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art, is not an obvious choice for a place as artsy and highbrow as the MoMA film department. MoMA retrospectives tend to be awarded to brooding European auteurs — Bernardo Bertolucci and Milos Forman were the last two — and not to commercial Hollywood directors who include on their résumé pop hits like “Working Girl,” “The Birdcage” and, just recently, “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mr. Nichols’s movies have made money, and a few, like “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge,” have been recognized as cultural landmarks. But because of their commercial shimmer, their way of eliciting exceptional performances by top-of-the-line stars, it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself. “If you want to be a legend, God help you, it’s so easy,” Mr. Nichols said the other day over coffee in his Times Square office. “You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different things.” If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, their writerly attention to detail. They’re almost invariably based on good scripts, from which he extracts extra layers of nuance. The organizer of the retrospective, Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of film at MoMA, said: “Here is a guy who is in some ways quintessentially Hollywood, and yet you can see in his movies a consistent through-line. He’s an example of how popular cinema can be vision based.” Nora Ephron, who wrote the script for Mr. Nichols’s movie “Heartburn” and co-wrote his film “Silkwood,” said recently: “It’s supposed to be a given that Mike doesn’t have the visual style of, say, a Scorsese. But that isn’t fair. Mike doesn’t use the camera in a flamboyant way, but he has a style just the way a writer who’s crystal clear has a style. He has an almost invisible fluidity.” She added: “One of the main things about Mike’s movies is that, with a few exceptions, they’re all really smart movies about smart people. They’re about something. And he’s funny. You’re certainly not going to lose a joke. And if there’s one hidden, he’ll find it.” Mr. Nichols is now 77 but hardly slowing down. Among the possible projects on his plate are movies based on scripts by David Mamet and Tony Kushner and a theatrical revival of a Harold Pinter play. He is beginning to think about simplifying and de-accessioning, though. He’s unloading his horses, for example. He used to own 150 but is now down to 6, and they’re “on the way out,” he promised. He also doesn’t listen much anymore to his classical record collection. “As a young man I got to a bad stage where I knew every recording of every piece,” he said. “But I spoiled it. I was a pseudo-expert without any real knowledge.” “Until about a week ago I thought ‘Vesti la giubba’ meant ‘clothe the Jew,’ ” he added, referring to the famous aria in which Pagliacci sings about putting on his clown costume. “So I came to love silence, because it’s so rare, and it’s now my favorite aural condition.” Still boyish looking, Mr. Nichols retains an impish grin and the deadpan, quicksilver wit that for a while made him and Elaine May the most innovative comedians in the United States. Paragraphs spill out of him as if outlined: the three reasons for this, the four most important examples of that. And Mr. Nichols’s greatest improvisation is still himself. He wakes up every morning in his Fifth Avenue apartment, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols. He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and he arrived in New York in 1939, at the age of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction to whooping cough vaccine) and with almost no English. All he could say was: “I do not speak English” and “Please, do not kiss me.” He enrolled at the Dalton School, where an early classmate was Buck Henry, and set about cultivating what he calls his “immigrant’s ear.” “Semiconsciously I was thinking all the time: ‘How do they do it? Let me listen,’ ” he recalled, and added: “I’ll tell you the most extreme example of immigrant’s ear in all of Western civilization. My grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was quite a well-known writer in Germany. He was also very political, and he was part of the two-week provisional Weimar government after the kaiser fell. When the government fell, he was taken to the police station and beaten to death. His best friend, who was also in the government, escaped, made his way to Sante Fe, changed his name to B. Traven and wrote ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ That’s the ur-immigrant story.” Mr. Nichols’s story is scarcely less dramatic. His father died when he was 12, plunging the family into genteel poverty. Lonely and self-conscious about his looks, he found solace in the movies and theater, thanks in part to the generosity of Sol Hurok, who had been one of his father’s patients. He attended the University of Chicago, floundered a bit, and then was heaped with undreamed-of success, first with Ms. May, whom he met in college (along with Susan Sontag and Ed Asner) and next as a theater director. His string of Broadway hits (including “Annie,” “The Odd Couple” and “Spamalot”) may be even more remarkable than his movie record, and Mr. Nichols is one of very few in the performing arts to score the grand slam of major American entertainment awards: he has a Grammy, an Oscar, four Emmys and eight Tonys. He is a shrewd dealmaker, and he has been rewarded like a foundling prince, so that along the way there were countless girlfriends, multiple wives (Diane Sawyer, to whom he has been married since 1988, is his fourth), paintings, cars, a stable. The only thing he doesn’t have enough of anymore is time. He used to love to develop a play out of town, then close it down and put it aside for a few months. “Everything gets simpler on the shelf,” he said. He also recalled, with amazement, how long he was allowed to work on “The Graduate,” which he directed when he was in his mid-30s. “We prepared that film for about a year,” he said. “They gave us a little bit of money — about three million bucks — and we rented some space out at Paramount and went to our bungalows every day. I remember one day the art director came and said that when Mrs. Robinson got undressed maybe we should see the marks from the straps of her bathing suit. That was a day’s work — time just spent soaking yourself in a subject.” He and Buck Henry, the screenwriter, spent three or four weeks working just on the famous montage sequence in “The Graduate,” he said, and he added: “It’s painful and hard to remember now how long and how carefully we worked. I really do think it’s important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking and doing what I call ‘naming things,’ which is just explaining what happens in every scene. Now you have to do it all in your head, and you have to do it pretty damn fast, because nobody’s going to pay you to do prep. You’re going to have to do it on your own time. It can be done, of course, but it’s just much harder — unless you’re Buñuel, and I think about him pretty much every day. You have to look for a way to free yourself, and he had the best conceivable way: he just jumped to the surreal.” Ms. Ephron compared Mr. Nichols’s way of preparing to psychoanalysis. “You sit there for days and days,” she said, “and he keeps asking questions. What is this scene in the movie about? What does it remind you of? You free associate. And eventually you figure it out.” Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.” The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable. “I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks, we’ve got a police escort, we can’t do this over and over. Get on the bus and laugh, God damn it.’ I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve gone nuts. The next day I looked at what we’d shot and went, ‘Oh my God, here’s the end of the movie: they’re terrified.’ My unconscious did that. I learned it as it happened.” During the filming of “Angels in America” for HBO, he recalled, he was amazed by Meryl Streep. “I said to her, ‘How did you ever think of making Ethel Rosenberg funny?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you never know what you’re going to do until you do it.’ That’s it. That sentence says it all, and it’s what happens when you’re in the very highest realms of this stuff. The director can’t make it happen. It’s about all being in the same place and being moved by the way each of your imaginations kindles everyone else.” Ms. Streep said: “What makes Mike so great is one of the hardest things for people temperamentally drawn to directing. People who direct tend to want to be in control, and Mike’s gift is knowing when to take his hands off and just let it happen. A lot of directors are still dealing with the text when you’re on the set. Mike has done all that beforehand, so when you get on the set you feel it’s a secure world where all the architecture is in place. You can jump as hard as you want and the floor won’t give way.” Mr. Nichols said he had to keep reminding himself how new his profession was. “Movie acting was invented less than 100 years ago — movie acting with sound,” he explained. “You know how Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare invented us? It’s a fascinating idea, and you can go quite far with it. You could say that it’s in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed. This is what Garbo was such a master of: actual thoughts that had not occurred before that particular take. And you can see this taking tremendous leaps with Brando and Clift and then with Streep.” He added: “The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That’s the thrill of it, the miracle — that’s what holds us to movies forever. It’s what we wish we could do in real life. We all see something and understand it together, and nobody has to say a word. There’s a good reason that the very best sound an audience can make — in both the theater and the movies — is no sound at all, just absolute silence.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/movies/12mcgr.html 'Die Hard' Director Indicted in Wiretaps Case AP A federal grand jury on Friday indicted a Hollywood director who had withdrawn a guilty plea to a charge accusing him of lying to federal agents investigating a celebrity wiretapping case. John McTiernan, who directed ''Die Hard'' and ''Predator,'' was indicted on two counts of making false statements to the FBI about private investigator Anthony Pellicano and one count of perjury for allegedly lying to a federal judge while trying to withdraw his guilty plea. His attorney, S. Todd Neal, said the indictment is ''really nothing new'' and promised to rigorously defend his client. ''The prosecutor has taken one count and tried to expand it into more charges in a new indictment,'' he said. ''There seems to be retribution because John refused to play ball the way the prosecutors wanted and because we were successful on appeal.'' McTiernan pleaded guilty in 2006 to making ''knowingly false'' statements to an FBI agent about Pellicano, whom he admitted hiring to wiretap a business associate. But before he was sentenced, McTiernan asked the judge to withdraw his plea, arguing he didn't have adequate legal representation, was jet-lagged and under the influence of alcohol when he pleaded guilty. The judge refused so McTiernan, 58, appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which vacated his four-month sentence and ruled that he was entitled to a hearing on whether he could withdraw his plea. In February, he was allowed to reverse his plea. Pellicano was convicted last year of wiretapping film producer Charles Roven for McTiernan and bugging phones of celebrities and others to get information for his clients. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...-Wiretaps.html On the Lookout, With a Digital Security Camera Anne Eisenberg STANDARD surveillance cameras guard homes, businesses and public spaces around the clock, but they do the job imperfectly: fish-eye lenses can distort the image, and pan-and-tilt cameras may point the wrong way at a crucial moment. Now a new, six-ounce security camera the size of a deck of cards uses a different approach to cover a 180-degree field of view. It employs fixed, inexpensive sensors that divvy up the surveillance job, and smart software that instantly puts their separate views together into one live streaming video. The camera, the Digital Window D7, uses five 1.3 megapixel sensors just like the ones in camera phones, each aimed at its slice of the total view. Ingenious programs and a controller chip synchronize the five images as they are received, stitching them simultaneously into a panoramic stream that transmits at 15 frames a second. To be released this year, and to be sold for about $800, the camera is a good example of what’s ahead in the field of computational photography, said Paul Worthington, a senior analyst at Future Image, a consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif. Computational photography, he said, draws on the power of computer software and processing to extend the capabilities of digital imaging. The Digital Window security camera may be a bargain for consumers, Mr. Worthington said, in part because its powers come not from expensive components, but from software that makes use of off-the-shelf sensors. “Fabricating a single, large sensor is expensive,” he said. “Instead, this camera takes advantage of cheap sensors” and uses computer programming to unite their powers. “This is an impressive technology for surveillance,” he said. “It’s a more affordable way to get a high-quality, wide-angle image with no distortion.” The camera is a product of Scallop Imaging, a division of the Tenebraex Corporation, an optical technology company in Boston. The name “scallop” was chosen because the rim of that bivalve’s shell is lined with a multitude of tiny eyes. “The scallop distributes the imaging task,” just as the Digital Window camera distributes its imaging job, said Peter Jones, president of Tenebraex. “We use lots of sensors and aggregate their images through the computer.” The camera is part of a new generation of digital surveillance systems that can communicate over a computer network. Surveillance has traditionally been done by analog, closed-circuit TV systems, which still comprise the bulk of the security market. But because devices like Scallop’s, called Internet Protocol, or I.P., cameras, use computer networks, they can be accessed remotely and inexpensively through a Web browser. “You can have 500 or 1,000 cameras all operating on one system,” said Alastair Hayfield, a market research analyst at IMS Research in Wellingborough, England. I.P. security products account for about 15 percent of the total market for video surveillance, he said, and their sales are growing much faster than those of analog systems. “The I.P. devices are attracting a lot of attention from manufacturers looking to get into the market, which is becoming fairly substantial, with lots of long-term opportunities to make money,” he said. At Scallop Imaging, Ellen Cargill, director of product development, said the Digital Window camera’s high-speed video interface grabbed data from the sensors, held it in its memory, then applied the calibration that created the final video stream. Users see the 180-degree view on their security monitor; they can also click in for a closer, high-resolution look at a fraction of the screen without losing the 180-degree view. “Typically when a camera zooms in, the full field of view is lost,” she said. “We are hoping to offer something different.” OTHER companies, including Adobe in San Jose and Refocus Imaging in Mountain View, Calif., are developing systems that take advantage of computation photography techniques. Kevin Connor, vice president of product management for professional digital imaging at Adobe, says the company is experimenting with a combination of lenses and software to process enough data in one shot, for example, that the focus of the image can be changed after the shutter snaps, something that is now impossible. “We can capture the light rays in a scene and then later calculate a photo at any focal length,” he said. “You can refocus your shot after it is captured.” Using such a system, which produces data files that can be processed to create a focal point, a photo that is focused on a person’s face with the background showing only in a blur, for example, could be changed afterward so the fuzzy objects were now in focus. At Refocus Imaging, Ren Ng, the chief executive, says the company is developing a next-generation digital camera with the same goal, changing the focus of an image after it is taken. “Computational photography is the future of imaging,” he said. “If you capture enough information, you can use software to perform the physical functions of the camera. You get possibilities that seem impossible, like refocusing.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12novel.html Software That Monitors Your Work, Wherever You Are Damon Darlin PEOPLE need to be watched. Back at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, seized on that basic management precept to design a building that would become a touchstone for architects of a new age. Calling it the Panopticon, he arrayed prison cells in a semicircle. The innovative layout gave a smaller number of guards the ability to watch a greater number of prisoners. In other words, it cut costs. The Panopticon design is still in use today, and not just in prisons around the world. It was easily adapted for factories and offices. But what happens in the information age, when workers are no longer there in front of the manager, but working from home — maybe in their pajamas, or maybe with a cat on their lap and a peppy Lily Allen tune playing on the iPod? In many managers’ eyes, they wouldn’t do as much work. No worries. Software becomes the new Panopticon. It can monitor workers who, conveniently, do most of their work on computers. It can also measure their efforts and direct work to those who do it best. LiveOps, a rapidly growing company in Santa Clara, Calif., that operates virtual call centers — agents working from home across the country — has also found that software can perform other management tasks. How it uses that software points to the direction in which technology is taking the workplace. Founded in 2000, LiveOps fields some 20,000 “home agents,” all independent contractors who take orders for products advertised on late-night TV, sell insurance or transcribe recordings for other companies. The agents even take pizza orders. If there is a storm in a particular city and pizza orders surge because no one is going out, calls to the pizza store are routed to LiveOps agents thousands of miles away. (The delivery boy still has to brave the rain and the wind. Software hasn’t solved that problem.) The virtual call center is nothing new. A number of companies, like Elance, oDesk and Guru, assemble freelance work forces to take on specific tasks so that companies don’t have to run call centers or hire additional employees. TopCoder and RentACoder have done it specifically for computer programmers. A start-up, Serebra Connect, hires college students in developing economies to do work. But Maynard Webb, the chief executive of LiveOps, says he thinks that the company’s software gives clients like Kodak, Colonial Penn and TristarProductions, a direct marketing company, an advantage. The software moves a company beyond simple cost-cutting. Mr. Webb says greater efficiencies can be found because the company’s software measures the results from each agent according to criteria determined by the client. If a client wants agents to persuade callers to buy additional products, the software tracks that — and then directs calls to the agents who do it best. Those agents prosper. What about the agents who aren’t so good? “No one gets fired,” Mr. Webb said. “They just don’t get work.” Software becomes a passive-aggressive manager. He thinks the concept can be expanded to any line of work — like health care, retailing, publishing and law — where the output can be measured. And the advantage for LiveOps, which Mr. Webb says has been profitable since 2006, is a harbinger of things to come. “The economics are better. No buildings. No benefits,” said Mr. Webb, a former eBay executive. (LiveOps’s 300 employees do get benefits.) Before everyone wrings their hands at the horror of an economy shifting to workers paid by the minute doing piecemeal work at the kitchen table while monitored by an all-seeing computer, consider that Mr. Webb isn’t having trouble finding workers. “There are way more people who want to work in this model than we have room for,” he said. He says that the company accepts only about 2 percent of all applicants, and that his contract work force has an average age and education level higher than at call centers. And attrition, a major problem in the call center industry, is lower, less than 10 percent after the first 300 calls. Mr. Webb says it’s because his work force is happier. Dawn Linseman, a LiveOps sales specialist in Madison, N.C., says she checks the LiveOps internal Web site every day for statistics on how well she meets the clients’ criteria. “If you keep your stats up, your calls are back to back,” she says. She started in 2004 and handles mostly infomercial orders from a spare bedroom she converted into an office. She schedules her work around the needs of her family, grossing about $18,000 a year working about 24 hours a week. “As soon as my son gets his driver’s license, I’ll be working full time,” she says. Yes, she wishes she had the benefit of company-provided health insurance, which she doesn’t get as a independent contractor. A plan offered by her husband’s employer covers the family. But she says she is much happier than she was when was an accounting manager for a Michigan supermarket chain. “I don’t miss the office politics,” she said. Indeed, she recruited her sister, who does a lot of work transcribing medical reports. Mr. Webb says the best workers can bring in about $50,000 a year. “If they get really good, I hire them as managers,” he said. Software, always on and always watching, remains the real middle manager. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12ping.html EU Starts Action Against Britain Over Data Privacy Huw Jones The European Commission started legal action against Britain on Tuesday for what the EU executive called a failure to keep people's online details confidential. EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said the action related to how Internet service providers used Phorm technology to send subscribers tailor-made advertisements based on websites visited. Britain has two months to respond to the charges, a Commission spokesman said. BT admitted in April last year that it had tested Phorm in 2006 and 2007 without telling its customers, the Commission said. The trials sparked "snooping" accusations from privacy groups and concern from the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, but found support from UK telecoms regulator Ofcom. Phorm told Reuters earlier this month it was delighted with the trials it had held in Britain and that it was in talks on further international expansion through joint ventures and did not fear regulatory intervention. Reding said Internet users in Britain had complained about the way the UK applied EU rules on privacy and electronic communications that were meant to prohibit interception and surveillance without the user's consent. "Technologies like Internet behavioral advertising can be useful for businesses and consumers but they must be used in a way that complies with EU rules," Reding said in a statement. "We have been following the Phorm case for some time and have concluded that there are problems in the way the UK has implemented parts of the EU rules on the confidentiality of communications," Reding said. BT carried out new, invitation-based trials of Phorm in the final quarter of 2008 that resulted in a number of complaints, the Commission said. Phorm has said it is in talks with two other British Internet service providers, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse, and has launched a South Korean trial. The European Union executive said it was concerned that under UK rules, interception was lawful when the service provider had reasonable grounds to believe consent had been given. "The Commission is also concerned that the UK does not have an independent national supervisory authority dealing with such interceptions," the Commission said. Reding called on Britain to change its national laws to ensure there were proper sanctions to enforce EU confidentiality rules. Unless Britain complies, Reding has the power to issue a final warning before taking the country to the 27-nation EU's top court, the European Court of Justice. If it rules in favor of the European Commission, the court can force Britain to change its laws. (Editing by Dale Hudson) http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53D26M20090414 Even a Print Advocate Turns to the Web Stephanie Clifford The Magazine Publishers of America spends its money and time conducting research to prove that the printed page is worthwhile, and to persuade advertisers to spend money there instead of on the Internet. Now, as it puts together the 28th annual Kelly Awards for magazine advertising, the organization is for the first time allowing consumers to vote for their favorite magazine ad — online. People can vote at mag-ads.com beginning Monday for the magazine ad they liked the best this year, from among 27 finalists. Isn’t having an online contest for print advertisements a little contradictory? “Not at all,” said Ellen Oppenheim, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of the organization. “Advertisers use multiple media and a mix to achieve their results. Magazines have Web sites. We don’t shy away from the fact that all media contributes.” The organization is using some safeguards to stop virtual ballot-box stuffing, like blocking multiple votes from the same I.P. address — be warned, ad agencies — but Ms. Oppenheim said that “what we cannot stop is, to be honest, if they tell all their friends and family to vote. But you know what? That happens in other voting, too.” Judges will select the other winners of the Kelly Awards, and the winner of America’s Favorite Magazine Ad and the other honorees will be announced in mid-June — also online. “We do it virtually because advertisers and agencies are scattered across the country,” Ms. Oppenheim said. Asked why she did not run the contest in magazines, Ms. Oppenheim’s response hinted at some of the bigger problems facing the magazine industry. “In today’s world, where people want to do something instantaneous, to ask them to fill out a ballot and send it back?” she said. “We thought more people would just go online and vote.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/bu.../13awards.html ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer. A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists. The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants. Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing. The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.” Of course, like traditional media, the hyperlocal sites have to find a way to bring in sufficient revenue to support their business. And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Some have shouldered the cost of fielding a sales force to reach mom-and-pop businesses that may know nothing about online advertising. One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small. “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who has followed the hyperlocal market for a decade. “Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.” Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013. One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up in an office building in Chicago overlooking noisy El tracks, which is stitching together this hyperlocal future one city at a time. Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco. It fills those sites with links to news articles and posts from local bloggers, along with data feeds from city governments, with crime reports, restaurant inspections, and notices of road construction and film shoots. (The New York Times has a partnership with EveryBlock to help New York City readers find news about their elected officials.) One day last week, the EveryBlock page for Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, showed that the police had answered a domestic battery call two blocks from his home and that a gourmet sandwich shop four blocks away had failed a city health inspection. “We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood,” said Mr. Holovaty, 28, who worked at The Washington Post before creating EveryBlock two years ago. In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods. Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year. One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws. “We believe there’s currently a void in the amount, quality and access to information at the community level, a function, unfortunately, of all the major metros suffering and pulling back daily coverage of a lot of communities,” said Jon Brod, co-founder and chief executive of Patch. This month, the home page of The Star-Ledger’s Web site, based in Newark, twice referred to articles first reported by Patch. Outside.in publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate. Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web. One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts. That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online. But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content. “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/te...yperlocal.html Print is Still King: Only 3 Percent of Newspaper Reading Happens Online Martin Langeveld Surprise. All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way. This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers. Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.) We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable. Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.) So, U. S. daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print. Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month. How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers. So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split. So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly. Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs. Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.) On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62. Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy? The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven. POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data. As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online. I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising. ________ *Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months. **According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/pri...appens-online/ In Switch, Magazines Think About Raising Prices Stephanie Clifford Fifty-eight cents. For that, you could get one-eighth of a Starbucks latte. It is also what subscribers paid, on average, for each issue of Time magazine last year. This is the Time magazine that sends foreign correspondents into Zimbabwe, assigns photographers to capture the war in Afghanistan, and fact-checks and edits every word before issues are printed. And that is before its costs for ink, paper and postage. Time is in good company — most big magazines’ subscriptions cost on average little more than a dollar an issue. But now, as they consider the decline in advertising and the success of magazines that have increased prices recently, some publishers are wondering whether they can raise their prices without losing subscribers. “We’re realizing that the product is undervalued,” said Michael A. Clinton, the chief marketing officer of Hearst Magazines, which raised cover prices on more than half of its magazines last year and plans to raise subscription prices this year. Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy. In the last six months of 2008, subscribers paid an average of 47 cents an issue for Newsweek, 77 cents an issue for BusinessWeek and 89 cents an issue for Fortune, according to an analysis of their filings with the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Even Condé Nast’s magazines, filled with luxury ads and dispatches from far-flung locations, are cheap: 87 cents an issue for The New Yorker, 89 cents for Allure and just over a dollar each for Condé Nast Traveler and Bon Appétit. “Obviously, you can hardly even mail that particular issue for 80 cents, but what makes up the difference is the advertising,” said John Fennell, an associate professor of magazine journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. It is a “model where magazines essentially try to gain as many subscribers as they can and allow advertising to pay the bills.” Most major magazines have cut prices recently as part of an effort to increase subscriptions. A New York Times analysis of circulation data for the 50 largest and most expensive magazines showed that in the last four years, as overall prices rose 14 percent, subscription prices dropped an average of 9 percent. (Lower subscription prices do not necessarily mean less revenue for the publisher, however. When publishers reduce their reliance on subscriptions sold through agents, the subscription prices can fall, but the publisher earns more because it is no longer sharing the subscription revenue.) Decreases at individual magazines were more substantial: Parents magazine’s price dropped 51 percent, Elle’s 41 percent and Fortune and Fitness’s 34 percent. “Think about the cost of a movie ticket. Think about the cost of your subscription for cable television. Think about the cost of going to a sporting event,” Mr. Clinton, the Hearst marketing chief, said. Those industries, he said, “have kept pace in passing on more of the cost to the consumer, and the consumer’s willing to pay for it.” The Economist is leading the charge on expensive subscriptions, and its success is one reason publishers are rethinking their approaches. It is a news magazine with an extraordinarily high cover price — raised to $6.99 late last year — and subscription price, about $100 a year on average. Even though The Economist is relatively expensive, its circulation has increased sharply in the last four years. Subscriptions are up 60 percent since 2004, and newsstand sales have risen 50 percent, according to the audit bureau. “We get more money out of our readers than advertisers, and that’s a very different model,” said Alan Press, senior vice president for marketing in the Americas at the Economist Group. “We’ll never discount the kind of content we have.” The Economist’s readers, it could be argued, are professionals who can afford price increases. But one of the most popular and expensive mass magazines, People, has also been raising its prices without losing readers. The subscription price for People has risen about 5 percent, to $104 a year, in the last four years. The cover price has risen 21 percent, to an average of $4.09 (including special issues, which cost more). In that time, People’s subscription and newsstand sales have both increased slightly. “Our strategy right now is to maintain a premium price on both sides of the equation,” said Paul Caine, who oversees People as the president and group publisher of Time Inc.’s style and entertainment group. Many publishers argue that these magazines are the exception, not the rule, and say they would lose too many readers if they raised their prices. “Sports Illustrated could theoretically charge $100 a year and have a much smaller circulation, but we wouldn’t be maximizing what the enterprise could make,” said John Reese, the vice president for consumer marketing in the Sports Illustrated group. “It’s amazing how price-sensitive people are,” said David Ball, the vice president for consumer marketing at Meredith, which owns magazines like More and Fitness. “Honestly, we’ve tested raising it 50 cents and we see a drop-off — sometimes startlingly high.” Interestingly, whether consumers pay $5 or $50 for a subscription does not affect their perception of the magazine, according to a study conducted four years ago by the media consultant Rebecca McPheters for publishers including Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith. “There was no difference between the engagement of those who paid less and those who paid more,” Ms. McPheters said in an interview. “Since then, we’ve done a lot of work around public-place readership, and we find that public-place readers who pay nothing are almost as engaged as those who pay.” Given those findings, the price a consumer pays should not matter to advertisers, since it does not affect the reader’s attitude toward the magazine, said Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., the group president for consumer marketing at Condé Nast. Mr. Sauerberg said that prices were constantly tested, and “the fact is, the pricing comes as a result of what the consumer is willing to pay.” Still, he has raised prices on renewal subscriptions for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair recently, and Vanity Fair raised its cover price from $4.50 to $4.95 with the April issue. “When we can do it, we do it,” Mr. Sauerberg said. More magazines may follow as they watch others that have done it. Real Simple, for example, has raised its subscription prices 17 percent in the last four years and had an 18 percent rise in subscriptions. In the same period, Cosmopolitan has raised its subscription rate 8 percent and orders have risen 19 percent. Given the economy, it may not be “a propitious moment to launch this,” said Victor S. Navasky, chairman of The Columbia Journalism Review, but “to the extent that the publication is aimed at a segment of the population that can afford it, why not?” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/bu...ia/13circ.html New York, Through Playboy’s Eyes Joshua David Stein Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, a magazine devoted to breasts and things, has created a utopian commune where the external world conforms to his weltenschauung. In his California domain, women are all equally blondes, both ladies and lawns are manicured, robes are velvet and are worn throughout the day. But Hefner’s Playboy mansion in Holmby Hills is open to only a select few. How might we glimpse Hef’s world beyond the gates? With Playboy’s City Guides, a newly launched feature on its vaguely NSFW Web site, it’s easy to find out. As a tool to build Web traffic, Playboy’s travel guides might not be playing to their strengths. But as an indicator of its aesthetic applied to the concrete, they do nicely. New York à la Playboy becomes a town of sports bars, cigar rooms and clubs with names written in sans-serif fonts. Potential playboys are steered toward Allen & Delancey for its “lusty, hot-under-the-collar cuisine” (whatever that means) and to Adour for a “deal-closing dinner.” What kind of deal might be closed judging from the illustrations of small nude women that populate the guide, riding a football (ESPN Sports Zone), riding a beer bottle (the Chinatown bar Apothèke) and being playfully squirted with seltzer (Lure Fish Bar)? Some of the choices are obvious. Peter Luger is the best steak house. The Beatrice Inn — “the Bea (as it’s known to regulars)” — is the New York lounge of choice (if it’s open). Some are simply predictable. The Rooftop Pool and Loft at the Gansevoort Hotel, for instance, is tapped as the New York Hookup Spot. Its bar is “always packed with beautiful women, with lots of out-of-towners looking for adventures. Conveniently,” it notes, “there are rooms right downstairs, a flick of your credit card away.” Some choices are just sad. Rick’s Cabaret and Steakhouse gets the nod for New York Strip Club only, one assumes, because the Playboy Club folded in 1986. In fact, the guide seems, more than chauvinistic, simply and wistfully nostalgic for a bygone New York. A New York in which, after a night of watching football with the guys, smoking a Cuban cigar and gorging on foie gras-topped Kobe burgers, a man could, with a “flick of a wrist,” find a buxom blond Playmate for the evening. With men wildly less employed than women, that New York, if it ever did exist, has ended. And it seems that Playboy might be gone with it. The company announced it would be shutting Playboy’s Manhattan offices on May 1. http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2...boys-eyes/?hpw Kindle 2's Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red Priya Ganapati Amazon's Kindle 2 is slimmer, faster and has longer battery life than its predecessor. But the newly launched e-book reader falls short when it comes to how well it displays text, say some users. "When you read a lot of text on the screen, the contrast on the text drops as the font size gets smaller, which is the exact opposite of what the reader wants," says Ted Inoue, a Kindle 2 owner from Pennsylvania who has extensively analyzed the issue. It's a problem that didn't exist for the first generation of Kindle owners. Kindle 2 has font smoothing algorithms and its screen offers more levels of gray in order to better render text and pictures. But the changes have backfired by making text more difficult to read at smaller sizes. The problem seems especially acute for older users. Kindle 2 owners are discussing the issue on Amazon's forums (about 480 messages have been posted in the thread) and have called for Amazon to offer a quick fix to the problem. It's vexing enough for some to have returned their Kindle 2 devices to Amazon. Others have downgraded, by exchanging their Kindle 2 units for the earlier model. Amazon released the first generation of the Kindle e-book reader in 2007 and offered a refreshed version in February this year. One of the major improvements has been that Kindle 2 has 16 shades of gray "for clear text and even crisper images," compared to the four shades that the earlier version had. The changes are proving to be particularly problematic to Kindle 2's users who don't have 20/20 vision. While the font size threshold varies, most complaints have been around the smallest three font sizes available on the device. Kindle 2 offers a single default typeface and users cannot change it. "The new basic font on the Kindle 2 is thinner and not as dark as the K1," says Andrys Basten, a Berkeley, California-based web programmer who also has a Kindle-focused blog. "Its like writing with a fine point pen versus a darker point pen." Basten owns both generations of the Kindle. Kindle 2's improved gray scale renders photographs and illustrations better than the old version, but it is a problem when translating text that was originally designed to be in color. (See here for a quick explanation on how the gray scale works.) "With the Kindle 1, all people would get is black shading for text that was originally in color," says Basten. "Now there is increased gradation, which makes text lighter, and some people have trouble seeing it." Kindle 2's display is supplied by E Ink, which also produces the "electronic ink" displays used in most other e-book readers. E Ink did not respond to a request for a comment. Then there are the font smoothing algorithms. Without those algorithms, pixels along the edge of a letter would have typically been rendered as black. Instead, they are now available in several shades of gray, as shown in the photographs above. "In conventional backlit displays that works well," Inoue says. "But on a reflective screen like Kindle's, you are just losing contrast rather than enhancing the image." The algorithms do produce smoother lines but they do not take into account the human psychology of perception, says Inoue. "Most people don't have perfect vision," he says. "What I find is that anything that degrades the contrast is going to make it blurrier." Amazon says the disgruntled customers' gripes are not reflective of how most users feel. "A few customers have said they prefer Kindle 1 with less shades of gray, but for the overwhelming majority it’s the opposite -- they enjoy the smoother text and crisper images on Kindle 2," says Andrew Herdener, director of communications for Amazon in a statement, without offering any other details. Still, Inoue and other Kindle 2 users say there are a few easy fixes that Amazon can make to keep everyone happy. One is to render text below a certain font size without applying any anti-aliasing to it, says Inoue. "This is not a perfect solution, as people with extremely sharp vision will notice the blockiness and may find it objectionable," he says. "However, for the majority of the population, the pixelation that occurs will be blurred out by the eye, making the fonts appear bold and smooth." Another solution could be to offer a way to make the fonts at lowest three sizes bold. And if nothing else works, suggest Inoue, add a darker skin to the Kindle to offset its all-white body. The darker skin helps create an illusion of increased contrast. Some users have gone a step ahead. Andrei Pushkin, a Kindle 2 owner has created a fonts hack that replaces the default Kindle 2 fonts with ones that support a wider range of Unicode characters, including, for example, Cyrillic. That's a step too far for Basten, who says she would rather wait for an official update. "I see the relative lightness of the new font but it doesn't bother me," she says. "I am not complaining much because I really like my Kindle." http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/0...-2-displa.html Amazon Says Error Removed Listings Motoko Rich In response to nearly two days of angry online commentary, particularly on Twitter, Amazon.com said on Monday that “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” had caused thousands of books on its site to lose their sales rankings and become harder to find in searches. Most of the company’s online critics complained that the problem appeared to have a disproportionate effect on gay and lesbian themed books, leading to cries of censorship. The titles that lost their sales rankings during the weekend included James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” the gay romance novel “Transgressions” and “Unfriendly Fire,” a recently published book about the government’s policies on gays in the military. But in an e-mailed statement that came late Monday, Amazon said 57,310 books in several broad categories had been affected, including books on health and reproductive medicine. On Sunday night, an Amazon spokeswoman told The Associated Press that there had been a “glitch in our systems,” but the company offered no further explanation for most of Monday, allowing suspicion and conspiracy theories to run rampant. One hacker even tried to take credit for the incident, writing on his blog that he had taken advantage of bugs in Amazon’s Web site to trick people into flagging gay-themed books as inappropriate. Thousands of Twitter users included the tag “#amazonfail” in their messages on the subject, pushing it onto rankings of the most popular topics on the site and drawing in other users. Some affected books started appearing in searches, with sales rankings restored, by early afternoon on Monday. Sales rankings on Amazon are important to authors because they help place books on the Web site’s best-seller lists and help shoppers find them. Many of the affected titles disappeared from basic searches so that, for example, a search from Amazon’s home page for “E. M. Forster” did not turn up “Maurice,” Forster’s classic novel about a homosexual relationship. Nathaniel Frank, the author of the well-reviewed “Unfriendly Fire,” said he could not find a link to the hardcover edition of his book last weekend. Word of the problem started spreading across blogs and Twitter on Sunday after Mark R. Probst, the author of “The Filly,” a gay western romance for young adults, posted on his blog that several gay romances, including his, had lost their sales rankings on Amazon. Mr. Probst e-mailed Amazon and got a reply that said the company was excluding “ ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best-seller lists.” In an interview on Monday, Mr. Probst said he was giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt. “I believe it was an error,” he said. “I don’t think it was anything malicious they were trying to do.” But other authors were unconvinced that the changes were caused by a simple glitch. “There are mistakes and there are mistakes,” said Daniel Mendelsohn, an author whose memoir “The Elusive Embrace” lost its sales ranking over the weekend. “At some point in this process, which I don’t understand because I’m not a computer genius, the words gay and lesbian were clearly flagged, as well as some kind of porno tag. I say, do I want my book in anyone’s mind to be equivalent to a porno? And the answer is no.” Mr. Mendelsohn pointed out that books like “American Psycho,” a novel with sexually and violently explicit content, did not lose its sales rank. He teamed up with others affected by the problem, including the playwright and author Larry Kramer, to start a petition to boycott Amazon. As of Monday afternoon it had attracted more than 18,000 names. Mr. Kramer said on Monday that he was willing to shelve the boycott for now. But in an e-mail message he wrote: “I don’t think for one second that this was a glitch,” adding, “We have to now keep a more diligent eye on Amazon and how they handle the world’s cultural heritage.” Several publishers whose books were affected, including Simon & Schuster, the Penguin Group USA and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, declined to comment. Calls to a Random House representative were not returned. Christopher Navratil, publisher of Running Press, a division of the Perseus Book Group, said in an e-mail message that his company had been in touch with Amazon to make sure its books were “ranked fairly and appropriately.” At least one author said he had encountered malfunctions in his sales rankings on Amazon as far back as February. Craig Seymour, an associate professor of communications at Northern Illinois University and the author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” a memoir, said his book had disappeared from most searches for several weeks but was restored in late February. In a blog post late Monday, Mr. Seymour wrote that Amazon’s statement was a start, but not sufficient. “It does not explain why writers, like myself, were told by Amazon reps that our books were being classified as ‘adult products.’ ” Amazon said in the statement that it planned “to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.” It did not elaborate on its statement. Even after it explained the scope of the problem, Amazon continued to face criticism for its slow and limited response to the online blowup, particularly at a time when sites like Twitter can so easily accelerate and amplify a public outcry. “Frankly, it’s surprising to hear that Amazon, which was a pioneer in the digital space, would miss this opportunity to react in real time and to manage this crisis better than they did,” said Gene Grabowski, chairman of the crisis and litigation practice at Levick Strategic Communications in Washington. Mr. Grabowski added that he hoped Amazon had learned a lesson. “If it happens too often and you show a disregard or disrespect for the online conversation, then you’re going to be at a big disadvantage,” he said. Miguel Helft contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/te.../14amazon.html Amazon Has Banned My Account - My Kindle is Now a (Partial) Brick Ian I have been a loyal Amazon.com customer for many years, but today, I received an email stating that I have been banned from the site and my account has been closed, because I apparently have an extraordinary rate of requesting refunds due to a variety of factors. This is patently not true: I have only returned items that were defective, in complete accordance with their policies. I was not trying to game the system, I was not trying to get things for free - I just wanted products that worked properly, and if they didn't, they went back. There was no warning; in fact, when I asked a question about the lightness of my Kindle's e-ink, a cs rep said "no problem, I'll send you a new one" -- and even after I told him "don't bother if it's going to be the same, mine is OK" -- he sent a new one anyway. I have certainly kept thousands of dollars worth of items purchased from Amazon and planned to be a lifelong customer. The ban from the main site is bad (and inexplicable) enough, but... I have now discovered that I cannot manage my Kindle2 account (I can't log into Amazon) or purchase any new content. In effect, I now have a $359 brick, not covered under any warranty, not able to be used the way it was meant to be, not able to be returned (not that I even want to, I just want to keep reading!) I called customer service several times today; the supervisors there explained that I cannot use the Kindle store but "I can get content onto the machine different ways." I have emailed the proper address, but I'm not hopeful of a positive solution. I know you all don't know me from Adam, but I'm a good guy and didn't deserve this at all -- and no, I'm not going to bash Amazon here -- instead, I'm just going to tell y'all I'm going to make every call and write every (professional) email I can to get this situation resolved. But please let this be a lesson to all of us - when you buy a Kindle, you are really buying a service- -and that service can be turned off at a whim. Not cool at all. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...amazon+banning Google Book Settlement Faces Legal Assault Stephanie Condon A proposed settlement in a copyright lawsuit involving Google's book search has drawn applause, envy, and from a handful of critics, an attempt to derail the deal. The settlement covers orphan works, meaning books that are still copyrighted but whose copyright holders can't be located. Google would like to scan in and digitize those books as part of its efforts to create a digital library of impressive breadth and scale. Millions of orphaned works are currently hidden away in library stacks, sometimes ignored because anyone who attempts to digitize them may be subject to copyright infringement. It's unclear whether the owners of these works will ever resurface. For books, Congress has tried--and failed--to address those concerns for individuals interested in using material from copyrighted but orphan works. Now, under the terms of its settlement related to its Google Books Library Project, the Mountain View, Calif., company is essentially trying to adopt the whole orphanage. For advocates of free online access to books, the Google Books initiative, which is digitizing the works of several major libraries, may seem like an entirely positive development. Google faced lawsuits from publishers and authors, however, for allegedly "massive" copyright infringement, and eventually agreed last year to a settlement. While most groups concerned with Google's singular access to orphan works are considering filing briefs with the court before a June 11 hearing, at least one group, Consumer Watchdog, is asking the Justice Department to intervene and plans a meeting on Monday with department officials. "Google's going to have an unfair advantage against any competitor because they will have already settled this issue," said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court. (Consumer Watchdog is a California-based advocacy group that opposes what it calls "big business" lobbyists; its budget was about $3 million in 2007.) In addition, an article at Wired.com last month noted that a group at New York Law School that plans to file legal objections is bankrolled by Google arch-rival Microsoft. The future of orphan works was left unsettled last year when the Orphan Works Act of 2008, which passed in the Senate, failed to make it out of committee in the House of Representatives. The bill would have enabled individuals or entities to use orphan work material under certain terms, given they made a diligent attempt to first find the rightful owner. The issue has fallen by the wayside in Congress as politicians focus on President Obama's priorities, and the House and Senate judiciary committees focus on patent reform. The proposed settlement has made the topic timely again, though, for those interested in seeing orphan works made available for online consumption. Complicated Terms Because the settlement resolves a class action suit, authors have the right to "opt out" of the agreement. If the authors do not come forward, however, the terms of the settlement say Google has the right to digitize their work. So while Google will be free from liability if it chooses to digitize these works, other groups interested in using them will still face the risk of violating copyright. For its part, Google said on Friday that it stands behind its letter to the U.S. Copyright Office from 2005, in which it laid out suggested rules for orphan works, including that a "reasonable search" for the owner should limit liability for infringement under copyright law. "We strongly support an approach to orphan works that would truly remove legal and practical deterrents for good faith re-users to move archival treasures off of dusty shelves and into circulation for the public's benefit," Google lawyer Alex Macgillivray said in a statement Friday to CNET News. "Effective orphan works legislation should provide a clear, 'objective' standard for defining a diligent search, so that users who meet this standard can rest assured of their safe harbor without undue legal uncertainty." The settlement still needs to receive court approval, and a number of parties may raise concerns with the court over the far-reaching, and somewhat surprising, terms of the settlement. Concerns about public access to orphan works may be of no concern to the court, however. Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District Court of New York is responsible for approving a settlement that is fair to the class that brought forth the suit--not a settlement that meets what some advocacy groups say is a more compelling, broader public interest. "There's a deep cleverness" to the settlement, said Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. "Google is getting something that no one else can get." So what does this mean for the future public access of orphan works? A handful of scenarios could play out that would impact access to the books. Antitrust authorities could intervene in the settlement, or Congress could pass legislation to allow for other mass digitization projects. Other companies could try to replicate Google's strategy of undertaking a digitization project and working out a settlement. Or the judge could reject the settlement, and Google could press on with its fair use case. Consumer Watchdog is appealing to the Justice Department on the grounds that the orphan works situation, along with another provision of the settlement, both create barriers for other companies interested in digitization efforts. The group believes the department could potentially ask a court to compel Google to sub-license the orphaned works if the settlement is approved. Could Congress interfere? While Consumer Watchdog's Court thinks the Justice Department may be the most likely entity to intervene, he said "if Congress wants to step up, it would certainly level the playing field." The Orphan Works Act of 2008, as well as its earlier versions, could not have been practically applied to a mass digitization project such as Google's, since it required the user to seek out the rights holder for every work in question. The Authors Guild, a group representing more than 8,000 authors that was a party in the settlement, said it would likely favor legislation that would give other entities the same access to orphan works as Google will acquire in the settlement. "It would depend on the details," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "There are a lot of things built into the Google agreement, such as security protocols, no-download rules, that protect the rights holders of orphan works." While there's no indication any such legislation will be introduced, Aiken said it may be more easily pursued, thanks to the settlement. "We'd have a template for a way that it can work in which rights holders' interests are protected and yet works are made available," he said. Legislators should wait for authors to come forward, though, to claim their potential earnings from the settlement. He said the number of orphan works has already begun to shrink, thanks to the settlement. "Eventually you wind up with a group (of books) that really are orphans, even with the incentive of the settlement," he said. "Those are the works that something may have to be done about and probably are the proper subject of legislation." Google, not surprisingly, strongly supported orphan works legislation in the past. However, "one has to wonder if they acquire this settlement whether or not this level of interest will continue," said Peter Brantley, the director of access for Internet Archives, a nonprofit founded to build an Internet library, which is opposed to the settlement. (Google on Friday reiterated that it has "long supported and continues to support" such a law.) "There's a complex mix of renewed interest (in orphan works) but an attenuation of interest in major actors like Google because they got what they want," Brantley said. Of course, there is the possibility the settlement could be rejected. "If it were up to me, I'd rather have Google win the fair use case," said Samuelson. "Then other mass digitization efforts could happen. I think they had a pretty good shot at it." http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10216485-38.html Tech Recruiting Clashes With Immigration Rules Matt Richtel Where’s Sanjay? The question comes from one of dozens of engineers around a crowded conference table at Google. They have gathered to discuss how to build easy-to-use maps that could turn hundreds of millions of mobile phones into digital Sherpas — guiding travelers to businesses, restaurants and landmarks. “His plane gets in at 9:30,” the group’s manager responds. Google is based here in Silicon Valley. But Sanjay G. Mavinkurve, one of the key engineers on this project, is not. Mr. Mavinkurve, a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay the foundation for Facebook while a student at Harvard, instead works out of a Google sales office in Toronto, a lone engineer among marketers. He has a visa to work in the United States, but his wife, Samvita Padukone, also born in India, does not. So he moved to Canada. “Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said. “The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realize how dumb they’re being.” Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs. Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard. The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove, the Hungarian-born co-founder of Intel; Jerry Yang, the Chinese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google’s Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin. But technology executives say that byzantine and increasingly restrictive visa and immigration rules have imperiled their ability to hire more of the world’s best engineers. While it could be said that Mr. Mavinkurve’s case is one of a self-entitled immigrant refusing to live in the United States because his wife would not be able to work, he exemplifies how immigration policies can chase away a potential entrepreneur who aspires to create wealth and jobs here. His case highlights the technology industry’s argument that the United States will struggle to compete if it cannot more easily hire foreign-born engineers. “We are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power — not hypothetically, but as we speak,” said Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel. Mr. Barrett blames a slouching education system that cannot be easily fixed, but he says a stopgap measure would be to let companies hire more foreign engineers. “With a snap of the fingers, you can say, ‘I’m going to make it such that those smart kids — and as many of them as want to — can stay in the United States.’ They’re here today, they’re graduating today — and they’re going home today.” He is opposed by staunch foes of liberalized immigration and by advocates for American-born engineers. “There are probably two billion people in the world who would like to live in California and work, but not everyone in the world can live here,” said Kim Berry, an engineer who operates a nonprofit advocacy group for American-born technologists. “There are plenty of Americans to do these jobs.” The debate has only sharpened as the country’s economic downturn has deepened. Advocates for American-born workers are criticizing companies that lay off employees even as they retain engineers living here on visas. But the technology industry counters that innovations from highly skilled workers are central to American long-term growth. It is a debate well known to Google, and it is a deeply personal one to Mr. Mavinkurve. An Eye on America Sanjay Mavinkurve (pronounced MAY-vin-kur-VAY) was born in Bombay to working-class parents who soon moved to Saudi Arabia. He thought everything important in life was American — from Baskin-Robbins and Nike Airs to the Hardees’s and Domino’s in the food court at the shopping mall. When in the car, he and his older brother played a game, naming all the things they could see that came from the United States. “I know this sounds romantic, but it’s true: I always wanted to come to America,” said Mr. Mavinkurve, lanky, with bushy hair and an easy smile. “I admired everything in the way America portrayed itself — the opportunity, U.S. Constitution, its history, enterprising middle class.” When he was 14, he and his brother were accepted at Western Reserve Academy, a private school in Cleveland, and received scholarships. During his senior year, Mr. Mavinkurve finished near the top of his class, ran cross-country and track, and scored 1560 out of 1600 on the SAT. Next stop: Harvard. His freshman year, he won the prize for best essay written in French, a comparison of books by Annie Ernaux. His friends described him as social but with a quiet, determined work ethic. He took the toughest classes, and to make money he took a job cleaning toilets in the dorm. He remained patriotic; on his dorm wall, he hung an American flag his brother had purchased at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written. But he knew he could lose his immigration status after he graduated and his student visa expired. So he decided to major in computer science, which he understood to be in demand, and entered a four-year program for a master’s degree. In 2003, his final year, he and three friends decided to build a Web site where college students could connect. Mr. Mavinkurve wrote the computer code. Eventually, the team disbanded, although some of its work evolved into Facebook. He had helped create the foundation for a product that has become a national sensation. He started at Google in August 2003, as a product manager on the teams that developed Google News and the Google toolbar, then worked on the look and feel of the video search, and on the early versions of Google Maps for cellphones. He developed a reputation for helping design the way the products look, and making them simple to use. Still, he had ample reason to worry about his visa status, given the limits on how many visas are issued for skilled immigrant labor. It is a category whose significance has been growing since the 1920s, when politicians and business executives started recognizing the value of skilled immigrants. After World War II, companies began actively recruiting scientists, among them Nobel Prize winners, from around the world. The emphasis on skilled labor was codified in the Hart-Celler Immigrant Act of 1965, which said that for 20 percent of immigration spots, candidates with certain skills would get preference to stay indefinitely, though that 20 percent also included the family members of those skilled immigrants. (At the time, 74 percent of visas were given to people to be reunited with family members here, and 6 percent for political refugees from the Eastern Hemisphere.) Reflecting the growing importance of technology — and responding to industry lobbying — in 1990 Congress set aside 65,000 temporary work visas, known as H-1B visas, for skilled workers. The visas, which are sponsored by companies on behalf of employees, permit three years of work, with an automatic three-year extension. The limit was raised twice as the technology sector boomed, to 115,000 in 1999 and to 195,000 in 2001. But those temporary increases were not renewed for 2004, and the number of H-1B visas reverted to 65,000. (There are an additional 20,000 H1-B’s for people with graduate degrees from American universities.) Since 2004, there has been a growing gap between the number of H-1B visas sought and those granted, through a lottery. In 2008, companies made 163,000 applications for the 65,000 slots. Google applied for 300 of them; 90 were denied. In 2004, Mr. Mavinkurve was one of the lucky ones. “You can be very proud,” said the congratulatory e-mail message he received from an immigration lawyer at Google. Good fortune followed at Google. In honor of the country that made it possible, on June 14, 2004, Flag Day, Mr. Mavinkurve made a laser print of an American flag and taped it to a white board in a Google hallway. The flag remains. When Google went public that August, Mr. Mavinkurve was on his way to becoming a multimillionaire. “I remember quantifying: for each dollar the stock goes up, I make more than my mother and father make together in a whole month at work,” he said. Indeed, recent immigrants like those at Google have been successful. “The thing distinctive about this generation, and I think unprecedented, is that they are coming with the highest level of skills in the leading industries,” said AnnaLee Saxenian of the school of information at the University of California, Berkeley. She added that this was acute in Silicon Valley because of its entrepreneurial culture. “You don’t see immigrant success at any other place in the U.S. at anywhere near the same scale,” she said. The Guy With the Answer The role Mr. Mavinkurve played in Google’s success was on stark display in early 2007, when the company’s map-making team faced a problem that even the best and brightest could not solve. The team met in Winnipeg, one of many conference rooms at Google headquarters named for foreign cities, like Algiers, Tunis and Haifa. International tributes take other forms; over cubicles in one building hang flags from dozens of countries. The cafeteria, where much of the fare is ethnic, includes Indian and Chinese food stations. These touches are appropriate. Of Google’s 20,000 workers, 2,000 were born abroad and work on temporary visas, while numerous others (the company would not disclose how many) have become American citizens or been granted permanent residency, the so-called green card status. The work force is international, and so is the company’s market. With the mobile phone, Google believes it can expand in places where reaching the Internet over computers is difficult, and create advertising-supported versions of maps and other services so consumers can effectively use the services free, exchanging not money, but attention. But back in late 2006, maps produced by the service were taking too long to download and appear on phones. As customers waited for the maps to form, they racked up huge bills from cellphone providers, which at the time were charging for every minute or every byte of data transferred. Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. The user would not see the difference, but the load times would be reduced 20 percent. Mr. Mavinkurve used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering and an understanding of graphics to find a solution that had eluded the rest of the team, said Mark Crady, a manager in the maps group. “He’s one of the best U.I. guys I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Crady said, referring to user interfaces. “Google Maps for mobile reflects Sanjay.” Many innovators in Silicon Valley come from overseas; 42 percent of engineers with master’s degrees and 60 percent of those with engineering Ph.D.’s in the United States are foreign-born. Foreigners also spur innovation by broadening understanding of consumers abroad. For instance, on the advice of Chinese-born workers, Google dotted its mobile maps for China with fast-food restaurants, which locals use as navigational landmarks. When Google cannot get visas for people it wants to hire, it seeks to accommodate them in overseas offices, like the bureaus in Britain and Brazil from which map-team members attend meetings via video conference. That work-around presents a number of drawbacks, one of which is especially apparent when one worker is in California and a colleague is in India. “It’s 11 hours to Hyderabad,” Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, says of the time difference. “We do video conferences where we’re up late and they’re up early. Maybe a video conference is as good as a formal meeting, but there are no informal meetings. As a result, we lose the pace of work, and we lose trust.” The larger risk is employees growing unhappy working at a distance, or foreign companies recruiting them. For his part, Mr. Mavinkurve, in Toronto, typically talks with colleagues via video conference, e-mail or instant message. But he does fly twice a month to headquarters and once a month to Britain, his life a whirlwind of time zones and virtual interaction. For Google and Mr. Mavinkurve, working here would be better. The trouble is, he fell in love. Stuck North of the Border He sits at a rooftop pub in Toronto, drinking Canadian amber beer. His wife, Ms. Padukone, 27, sips sangria. Evident between them is a respect, and slight emotional distance — understandable given their brief history together. In 2006, while working for Google in Mountain View, Mr. Mavinkurve saw his future wife’s photo on the cover of a newsletter published by his Indian ethnic community, the Konkani. She was attending college in Singapore. He found her pretty, so he e-mailed her. “For three months, we sent messages back and forth — but regularly,” she said. “I hate talking on the phone,” he explained. They arranged to meet while Mr. Mavinkurve was in Singapore during a flight layover on his way to India. They met for two hours, and connected. They were engaged in January 2007 in India, their second meeting. They married there in 2008. Like first-generation immigrants throughout American history, Mr. Mavinkurve has deep ethnic ties but is quickly assimilating. His wife is no different. But visa rules preclude her from working in the United States unless her husband gets a green card. That process can take two years. So they live in Toronto, where she recently landed a job in finance. Mr. Mavinkurve and his wife get little sympathy from Mr. Berry of the Programmers Guild, a nonprofit group with a volunteer staff that lobbies Congress on behalf of American-born high-tech workers. To Mr. Berry, 50 — who lives in Sacramento, where he was born — it is unfathomable that Google, which receives one million résumés a year, cannot find enough qualified Americans. Further, he says immigrants depress wages. By law, H-1B workers must be paid prevailing wages, but there are conflicting studies on whether some employers actually pay less when they control the fate of the sponsored workers. Even some of the supporters of allowing in more skilled immigrants say the H-1B system is flawed because it gives employers so much power over employees. As the recession deepens, many people, including members of Congress, have criticized companies like Microsoft and Intel for laying off Americans while retaining visa holders. Google says it will cut 350 workers this year. Mr. Berry says his skills and education — a bachelor’s degree in computer science from California State University, Sacramento — are denigrated by an industry that asserts that the best talent comes from overseas, via Ivy League schools. He worries about the employability of his children, who are studying engineering at top colleges, the University of Southern California and California Polytechnic State University. Mr. Berry, for his part, works at a major technology company he declines to name because his employment agreement precludes him from talking about his employer when in his advocacy role. He does not believe that skilled immigrants are essential to innovation. In fact, he argues the opposite. “In my experience,” he said, “foreign software programmers are less likely to step out of the box and present alternatives to management.” His arguments have caught the attention of some on Capitol Hill. “Not all our own people are able to get good jobs right now,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and one of the members of Congress who oppose temporary work visas. Mr. Sessions favors broad immigration reform that puts even greater emphasis on admitting people with skills. He even wants to ask visa applicants to take a scholastic aptitude test. But he opposes temporary workers, whom he argues have incentive to work for less and return to their countries to share what they have learned. This puts him at odds with tech companies. “They need to step up and look at what’s in the national interest,” he said. Google estimates that it spends about $20 million a year on its immigration efforts — including lobbying, administration and fees to a law firm. Microsoft, while it would not disclose expenses, probably spends more. Its in-house immigration team numbers 20 lawyers and staff members. On the political front, the tech industry lobbies Congress through an organization called Compete America, which includes titans like Intel, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. “The next generation of Google engineers are being turned down,” says Pablo Chavez, Google’s senior policy counsel. “If a foreign-born engineer doesn’t come to Google, there is a very good chance that individual will return to India to compete against us.” At the rooftop pub, Mr. Mavinkurve and his wife both express some anger. He thinks America should embrace him, given his contributions and taxpaying potential. After Google went public, he paid more than $200,000 in federal taxes on his income from salary and, mostly, sales of his shares, just in one year. He misses interaction with colleagues. It hinders efficiency, slows work. He is physically drained from travel. He is frustrated that he cannot put down roots in America, and maybe start his own company, because he cannot leave Google, his visa sponsor. He says he feels, on one hand, great gratitude that America gave him extraordinary opportunity. But he says he fulfilled his side of the bargain by striving and succeeding. “Dude, I love this country,” he said. But he doesn’t feel loved back: “My devotion is unrequited.” To Stay or to Go On each of Mr. Mavinkurve’s twice-monthly visits to the United States (he keeps a room not far from Google), he meets with two friends at the Red Mango frozen yogurt shop on University Avenue in the heart of Palo Alto. Over scoops of green tea yogurt, they brainstorm for their next venture. But he is not sure he can start a company — at least in America. Unless he gets his green card and his wife can work, he would be the only breadwinner, risking his savings, and he says they would be unhappy. “Quitting Google means saying goodbye to my green card,” he said. If America will not have him, he might have to stay in Canada. The proof is on the wall of the two-bedroom high-rise apartment he shares with his wife — who is pregnant — and his parents, who have moved in with them. On the living room wall is a Canadian flag. “Quality stitching,” he said, fingering it. Mr. Mavinkurve, who once hung American flags in his dorm room and then in Google’s hallway, still loves America. But the Internet-era immigrant, who moves so quickly between worlds, cannot decide where to land. Where is Sanjay? Even he is not sure where he belongs. “I’m not sure I want to go back,” he said of the possibility of moving back to the United States. “I’m not sure I can.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12immig.html Making a PBX 'Botnet' Out of Skype or Google Voice? Robert McMillan Flaws in popular Internet-based telephony systems could be exploited to create a network of hacked phone accounts, somewhat like the botnets that have been wreaking havoc with PCs for the past few years. Researchers at Secure Science recently discovered ways to make unauthorized calls from both Skype and the new Google Voice communications systems, according to Lance James, the company's cofounder. An attacker could gain access to accounts using techniques discovered by the researchers, then use a low-cost PBX (private branch exchange) program to make thousands of calls through those accounts. The calls would be virtually untraceable, so attackers could set up automated messaging systems to try and steal sensitive information from victims, an attack known as vishing. The calls might be a recorded message asking the recipient to update their bank account details, for example. "If I steal a bunch of [Skype accounts], I can set up [a PBX] to round-robin all those numbers, and I can set up a virtual Skype botnet to make outbound calls. It would be hell on wheels for a phisher and it would be a hell of an attack for Skype," James said. In Google Voice, the attacker could even intercept or snoop on incoming calls, James said. To intercept a call, the attacker would use a feature called Temporary Call Forwarding to add another number to the account, then use free software such as Asterisk to answer the call before the victim ever heard a ring. By then pressing the star symbol, the call could then be forwarded to the victim's phone, giving the attacker a way to listen in on the call. Secure Science researchers were able to access accounts they had set up using an online service called spoofcard, which allows users to make it appear as though they are calling from any number they wish. Spoofcard has been used in the past to access voicemail accounts. Most famously, it was blamed when actress Lindsay Lohan's BlackBerry account was hacked three years ago and then used to send inappropriate messages. The attacks on Google Voice and Skype use different techniques, but essentially they both work because neither service requires a password to access its voicemail system. For the Skype attack to work, the victim would have to be tricked into visiting a malicious Web site within 30 minutes of being logged into Skype. In the Google Voice attack, the hacker would first need to know the victim's phone number, but Secure Science has devised a way to figure this out using Google Voice's Short Message Service (SMS). Google patched the bugs that enabled Secure Science's attack last week and has now added a password requirement to its voicemail system, the company said in a statement. "We have been working in coordination with Secure Science to address the issues they raised with Google Voice, and we have already made several improvements to our systems," the company said. "We have not received any reports of any accounts being accessed in the manner described in the report, and such access would require a number of conditions to be met simultaneously." The Skype flaws have not yet been patched, according to James. EBay, Skype's parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The attacks show how tricky it will be to securely integrate the old-school telephone system into the more free-wheeling world of the Internet, James said. "This kind of proves ... how easy VoIP is to screw up," he said. He believes that these kinds of flaws almost certainly affect other VoIP systems as well. "There are people out there who can figure out how to tap your phone lines." http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009...r-google-voice Skype Unloved Vidya Ram Having failed in its attempt to sell Skype, eBay is now poised to carve off the business via an initial public offering. That could be a gamble. Market conditions allowing, the online-auction titan will float Skype next year, eBay chief executive John Donohoe said late on Tuesday. This suggests that eBay's apparent sale talks with Skype's Scandinavian founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and three private equity groups, have broken down. The bidders had reportedly been offering eBay around $2.0 billion for the business, $600.0 million less than what the founders had sold it to eBay for in 2005. Donohoe's announcement could be a veiled attempt to find another bidder for the Skype; eBay has, of course, denied this. Trouble is the Internet telephony service is a tough sale. Skype might be a a popular communication tool, accounting for around 8.0% of the world's international calling according to Telegeography, but translating "eyeballs" into "revenue" has proved challenging. Skype's customers only spend an average 11.3 cents a month on its service, compared with the typical spend of around $50 a month for a cellphone. Analysts have also doubted eBay's goal to double Skype's $551.0 million in revenue last year, to $1.0 billion. Taking Skype to the next level would require considerable capital investment, says Atlantic Equities analyst James Caldwell, and that could deter a buyer. As if the cloudy revenue model weren't enough, Joltid, a firm which owns the intellectual property rights to the peer-to-peer technology that Skype uses, has been attempting to end its licensing deal with the firm. (Joltid is owned by none other than Zennstrom and Friis.) EBay has fought back in a London court, but the prospect of appeals and counter-appeals on an issue so core to Skype's success could be enough to put off investors already hesitant to open their purse strings. With eBay struggling to find buyers in the technology and private equity spheres, the obvious question is whether ordinary investors will be convinced to buy shares. There are are plenty of tech IPO horror stories to put them off: back in 2000, 3Com's floatation of the hand-held computer maker Palm was so oversubscribed it sent the price soaring--and the stock has lost 98.0% of its value since. http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/15/sky...echnology.html eBay to Buy S.Korea's Gmarket for up to $1.2 Billion Rhee So-eui and Marie-France Han eBay Inc offered to buy South Korean online retailer Gmarket Inc for up to $1.2 billion, making it the leader in the world's sixth-largest e-commerce market. The U.S. online auctioneer said it already secured 67 percent of Gmarket, as top shareholders including Yahoo Inc and Interpark agreed to eBay's cash tender offer. Interpark, a South Korean online mall operator, said it would sell its 29 percent stake in Gmarket to eBay for $350 million, while Yahoo said it was selling its 10 percent stake. A source familiar with the situation said the sale would result in $120 million in proceeds for Yahoo, and a $52 million pre-tax gain. The tender price of $24 per share represents a 20.2 percent premium to Gmarket's latest close of $19.96. Assuming all outstanding shares are tendered, the total purchase price would be about $1.2 billion. Nasdaq-listed Gmarket runs customer-to-customer market places and has more than 10 million registered users in South Korea. It competes with eBay's South Korean unit, Internet Auction Co. eBay said it would combine Gmarket, which is focused on fashion, with Internet Auction, whose strengths are in electronics and sports goods. When combined, Gmarket and Internet Auction would have 87 percent of the country's online customer-to-customer market and more than 30 percent of the Web shopping mall market, according to the Korean antitrust agency. eBay had already won conditional approval from the antitrust watchdog. The deal is expected to close in the current quarter, and Gmarket shares will delist from Nasdaq on completion. Shares in Interpark were down 6.9 percent by 12:23 a.m. EDT after earlier hitting their highest level since mid-December 2007. The Kosdaq market was up 1.6 percent. (Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco, Park Jungyoun in Seoul; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner & Ian Geoghegan) http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53F0PI20090416 YouTube Korea Squelches Uploads, Comments Stephen Shankland Citing free-speech concerns about an anonymity-blocking law in South Korea, Google has disabled the ability to upload YouTube videos or comment on them in the country. "We believe that it is important for free expression that people have the right to remain anonymous, if they choose," the company said in a blog post that also tells people that they can get around the restriction by using a different country's version of the site. A Korean law requires "real-name verification" for Internet services with more than 100,000 different daily users, Google said. Under the law, people must identify themselves with a name and identification number before they can upload video or post comments. Google shared this translation of its Korean blog post, explaining the situation: Quote:
YouTube, Universal Music Group to Launch Music Site AP YouTube and Universal Music Group are teaming up. Their "Vevo" site will feature music and music videos. It will launch later this year. In an announcement today, the companies say the site will launch with the entire catalog of music videos from Universal. That's the world's largest recording company and a unit of France's Vivendi SA. YouTube is owned by Mountain View-based Google. The companies will share ad revenue on the site Vevo.com, as well on a Vevo channel on YouTube. Universal already has the most watched channel on YouTube with some 3.5 billion views. http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12108069 Sony, Lionsgate Included in YouTube Deal Full-length films, TV episodes on sites controlled by studios Andrew Wallenstein and Steven Zeitchik YouTube on Thursday announced a deal with multiple studios, including Sony and Lionsgate, that will seed the site with full-length, ad-supported library films and TV episodes. Details are still emerging, but essentially YouTube users who click on a film will be redirected to sites controlled by the studios, which will be able to serve their ads to, and collect traffic from, their own video player. The films -- which will include such newer releases as "Casino Royale" and "Super Size Me" and older titles such as "Single White Female," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Slacker" -- will be promoted on YouTube in designated areas for premium entertainment. Unlike their television counterparts, studios have by and large been hesitant to provide full-length features for free via Web sites. MGM is one of the few studios to offer full-length movies, which it does via its own channel on YouTube. Partners for TV shows -- including "Beverly Hills, 90210," "Star Trek," "Charlie's Angels," "MacGyver" and "Jericho" -- are Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, National Geographic. Thursday's deal reflects YouTube's increasing aggressiveness in attracting more advertising revenue through premium content but with enough copyright protection to make the studios comfortable. The news comes on the heels of a breakthrough pact YouTube announced with Disney to get shortform excerpts of content from ABC and ESPN. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...13592db0369cd7 Author of Rickrolling Song Says Google 'Exploited' Him Greg Sandoval The man who co-wrote "Never Gonna Give You Up," the 1980s song revitalized by the Rickrolling phenomenon on YouTube last year, is accusing Google of exploiting him. The music video, featuring singer Rick Astley, has been viewed more than 150 million times but Pete Waterman earned about $16, just enough money to buy a CD. Waterman told U.K publication The Telegraph, that he earns more from local radio than YouTube. He also compared himself to "a documentary on the exploitation of foreign workers in Dubai." "I feel like one of those workers, because I earned less for a year's work off Google or YouTube than they did off the Bahrain government," Waterman told the paper. Several U.K. artists have criticized Google and YouTube for allegedly not compensating artists well enough. YouTube has stopped presenting music videos in Britain because the company says a royalty rights group there is asking for unreasonable rate increases. "We absolutely believe that artists should be compensated fairly," said a YouTube spokesman. "But how much the artist gets paid is between the artist and the label." YouTube has also ceased playing music videos in Germany after a royalty rights group there began asking for a rate increase. Rickrolling was the name used to describe sending links to the music video of "Never Gonna Give You Up" but disguising the name of the link so the receiver wouldn't know it was coming. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10218302-93.html Google Losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube David Silversmith Google is spending more than $2 million a day on YouTube -- and it is nowhere near seeing a return on that investment. Indeed, it may be losing up to $1.65 million daily on the video site. According to financial firm Credit Suisse and Internet measurement provider comScore Inc. , YouTube Inc. is on track to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009. That's the good news. The bad? To support those visitors, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) will spend more than $2 million dollars daily -- to be exact, up to $2,064,054 a day, or $753 million annualized, according to Internet Evolution calculations of YouTube's costs derived from a range of sources, including Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. , comScore, Credit Suisse, and Google itself. Now, Google does not disclose sales figures by division, so there is no definitive revenue number for YouTube. The range of estimates from financial analysts stretches from a low of $90 million (Bear Stearns) to a high of $240 million (Credit Suisse). All the numbers are well below the estimated maximum of $753 million Google is spending annually, based on our calculations. So, depending on whose version of revenues you accept, Google is losing anywhere from $513 million to $663 million annually on YouTube, or anywhere from $1.4 million to as much as $1.65 million every day (see chart below). Let's make it personal: The average visitor to YouTube costs Google more than a dollar ($513 million to $663 million in estimated losses divided by 375 million unique visitors). In effect, Google is paying you to enjoy YouTube videos. In return, it gets the chance to show you some advertising. But adoption of those big-ticket items (YouTube sells homepage roadblock ads at $175,000 per day and branded channels at $200,000 apiece) has been limited, and Google AdWords image advertising remains the primary revenue source for YouTube. A YouTube spokesman declined to comment on these figures or any conclusions of this blog. Meanwhile, to deliver YouTube, Google is bleeding money in the following areas... • Bandwidth: If YouTube will get 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and each user downloads video at 400 kbit/s (based on figures from a range of sources), the cost to Google of YouTube bandwidth is a minimum of $1 million a day. This assumes YouTube is paying a minimum of 50 percent of the lowest market rate for megabit-per-second services. • Content acquisition: YouTube gets lots of user-generated video for free, but it has to pay for name-brand videos from sources like Sony/BMG and CBS. According to Credit Suisse, YouTube could pay up to $260 million -- about $710,000 a day -- to acquire content in 2009. Notably, Google just inked a deal with Disney to get short clips from ESPN and the Disney/ABC Television Group. More publicity for YouTube, more visitors -- but this is an expense, as YouTube pays royalties to Disney. • Revenue share: If you provide videos to Google and join its revenue sharing program, then you get a commission if ads are shown alongside your content. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will "share" away $24 million this year -- $66,000 per day. • Hardware, storage, software, collocation, electricity, etc.: Every minute, Google claims that 15 hours' worth of video is uploaded to YouTube -- equivalent to 86,000 new full-length movies weekly. Credit Suisse estimates the average video uploaded is 30 to 40 Mybtes and that YouTube is storing at least 5 petabytes of video. Given market estimates of about $2 per gigabyte, it's possible Google spends roughly $13 million -- $36,000 every day -- to store YouTube's stock in trade. • Other overhead: Add to the costs just mentioned all the overhead it takes to run any business -- sales, marketing, administration, all the elements that comprise cost of revenues. On December 31, 2008, Google spent 38.4 percent of total revenues on these items. Assuming the same percentage for YouTube and factoring high-end estimated revenue of $240 million for YouTube in 2009, the cost of YouTube revenues conceivably amounts to roughly $92 million, or $252,054 daily. If you prefer the low-end revenue estimate of $90 million, the cost of YouTube revenues would be $34.5 million, or $94,520 per day. Now take this economy, in which advertising revenues are declining while all of YouTube's costs are increasing. The forecast is only that Google will start losing more money per day. On the lighter side, you have to give Google credit for losing money with class! The first participant in its recent "Call to Action" for nonprofit partners raised over $10,000 in one day from a video. Classy of Google, yes. It might also be a tax write-off against its monstrous losses from YouTube. http://www.internetevolution.com/aut...doc_id=175123& Phil Spector Convicted of Murder Jill Serjeant and Alex Dobuzinskis Eccentric music producer Phil Spector was convicted on Monday of murdering a Hollywood actress in 2003, and will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. In his second trial, held after jurors deadlocked in 2007, Spector, 69, was found guilty of second-degree murder by a Los Angeles jury. The man once revered for revolutionizing pop music in the 1960s with his layered "Wall of Sound" production technique, faces 18 years to life behind bars when he is sentenced on May 29. Lana Clarkson, 40, a B-movie actress, died of a shot to the mouth, fired from Spector's gun in the foyer of his home outside Los Angeles on February 3, 2003. The two met hours earlier at a Hollywood nightclub. California criminal defense attorney Darren Kavinoky said Spector could be paroled only after spending the initial 18 years in prison. "He's got a better chance of winning the lottery than ever being released," said Kavinoky, who was not involved in the case. Spector, who worked with The Ronettes, The Beatles, Cher and Leonard Cohen at the height of his fame, denied murdering Clarkson. His lawyers said on Monday they would appeal. He did not testify at either trial and although his hands shook while the verdict was read, he showed little emotion. He was taken into custody immediately after the verdict. Spector 'Has A Problem With Rage'-Prosecutor Prosecutors argued that the shooting of Clarkson was part of a pattern of gun play and violence that Spector displayed toward women. After the verdict, prosecutor Alan Jackson told reporters Spector "has a problem with rage, and he is a bully." Spector's lawyers claimed that Clarkson was depressed about her failing career and committed suicide. She worked as a hostess at the House of Blues in Hollywood when she met the man who produced songs like the Righteous Brothers' hit "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin.'" Clarkson starred in such little-known movies as "Barbarian Queen" and "Amazon Women on the Moon." Clarkson's family, who also filed a wrongful death civil suit against Spector, said they were "pleased that the jury had rejected the distortion and trashing of (her) life by the defense." "Justice has been served," they said in a statement. "Mr. Spector has to take responsibility for his actions." The two long trials featured testimony from five women and a jury visit to the mock castle where the reclusive Spector lived. None of his old pop music friends testified in his defense. Spector attorney Doron Weinberg criticized the decision to allow several female witnesses to testify about incidents dating back 20 years. It "left us with very little of a chance to have a fair trial," Weinberg said. The jury forewoman told reporters the panel based their decision on the totality of the evidence, rather than specific incidents. Spector had a troubled early life. His father committed suicide, his sister spent time in mental institutions and Spector suffered bouts of severe depression. Shortly before Clarkson was shot, Spector told British journalist Mick Brown in a rare interview that he had a bipolar personality and had "devils that fight inside me." In 2006, he quietly wed for the fourth time, marrying model/actress Rachelle Short, who is about 30 years his junior. (Additional reporting by Bob Tourtellotte.) http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...53C5PW20090414 Bring Out Your Dead Ben Ratliff I WENT to a Phil Lesh concert in New York last fall, on the third night of a 14-night run. I sat next to a man who looked informed: he listened with familiarity and good humor and a touch of impatience, as if he wanted to fast-forward through certain parts. “Seen any of the other shows?” I asked. “I’ve been to every show since 1972,” he said. “In the New York area.” His name was Jimmy . By his definition, “every show” meant every concert by the Grateful Dead, the San Francisco rock band, until the death of Jerry Garcia, its guitarist and singer in 1995, and then every subsequent show by Phil Lesh, the band’s bassist, who has led various touring bands with a sound much in the spirit of the Dead. We got to talking. I asked when he thought the Dead reached its peak, game to try out a half-formed argument for 1975, or thereabouts. “Well, I agree with the people who say it was May 8, 1977,” he said. Jimmy was jumping a level on me. There are at least five different levels to how fans talk about the Dead. The basement level concerns the band’s commercially released albums. This is how a lot of interested but inexpert people once talked about the Dead — myself included — in the early 1980s. I had a couple of skunky-sounding audience tapes, tinkling out distant brown scurf from Nassau Coliseum, but I was an unconnected kid. I listened to “Live/Dead,” “Europe ’72,” and “Anthem of the Sun” — all in the racks at Sam Goody. The next level is periods or eras, the conversation I was prepared for. There was the aggressive, noisy, color-saturated improvising from 1968 to 1970; the gentler and more streamlined songwriting and arranging of ’72 and ’73; the spooky harmonies of 1975; the further mellowing and mild grooves that lay beyond. Next comes the level of the Dead’s best night: Jimmy’s level, one based on years of close listening to noncommercial live recordings, from the band’s own engineers or radio broadcasts or audience tapers. These began circulating in the early ’70s and became commonplace by the mid-1980s, after I had wandered off the trail. After that comes particular songs within particular performances. (Some will say the “Dark Star” from Veneta, Ore., on Aug. 27, 1972, or the “Dancing in the Street” from Binghamton, N.Y., on May 2, 1970, encapsulates much of what they like about the Grateful Dead.) Beyond that is an area with much thinner air: here involving, say, audience versus soundboard tapes, the mixing biases of different engineers, techniques of customizing early cardioid microphones, and onward into the darkness of obsession. In any case, once you get to Level 3, you have a sufficiently authoritative understanding of the Dead. Or so I thought. The Grateful Dead was a 30-year ramble of touring. It continued after Garcia’s death in a kind of post-history: first as the Other Ones, and later simply as the Dead (no “Grateful”), which is the name it will tour under this year. (The band now includes the original members Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, as well as the guitarist Warren Haynes and the keyboardist Jeff Chimenti; the tour begins today at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina.) It was also an intellectual proposition, in how the band brought new information and states of mind to a century of American music: bluegrass, folk, blues, Motown, Bakersfield country and so on. For me it often works best intellectually; I confess I hear shortcomings even in a lot of good Dead shows — intonation problems, weak singing, calamitous rhythm. I would say I’m more interested in the question of its best night ever than the answer. But that may not be the right question anymore. THE GRATEFUL DEAD’S live recordings represent a special order of surfeit. Nearly 2,200 Dead shows exist on tape, of the 2,350 or so that the group played. Most of those are available online — either for free streaming on Web sites like archive.org and nugs.net, or for download on iTunes, like the “Dick’s Picks” series and the more recent “Road Trips” archival series, which uses master-tape audio sources. The obvious solution to this terrifying situation, one would imagine, is to delimit the options: to narrow that number down to a very small canon of the best. The canon of great Dead shows was built over 20-something years of the band’s existence, and is still developing. It was first created by word of mouth — from the demons who started the cult of Dead tape trading in the early ’70s — and later by fanzines and books like “The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium,” three volumes of concert-tape reviews and essays on minutiae. There are also 12 published volumes of “Deadbase,” full notations of Dead performances; much of this information is available online at deadbase.com. Because of the culture of taping and collecting around the concerts, the audience developed a kind of intellectual equity in the band. And as the fans traded more and more tapes, in the nonmonetary currency of mind-blow, a kind of Darwinian principle set in: the most-passed-around tapes were almost quantifiably the best. If a tape wasn’t that good, its momentum sputtered, and it became obscure. Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.” DAVID LEMIEUX has been the tape archivist and CD producer for the Grateful Dead’s official archival releases since 1999. Mr. Lemieux said he has listened to the Cornell concert “virtually weekly” since the late ’80s. What’s so great about that show? I asked him. The group had just finished making the studio album “Terrapin Station,” which included a long and intricate suite sharing the album’s title; it was well practiced. Garcia had just completed editing of “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert documentary of sorts, and a long and costly ordeal. Perhaps the members felt unburdened and retrospective: the set list made an even sweep of the band’s career up to that point, from the early-repertory “Morning Dew,” with its cathartic but carefully paced five-minute solo by Garcia, to the up-to-date “Estimated Prophet.” (Much has also been made, by those who were there, about the Fátima-esque appearance of snow on that May evening.) Mr. Lemieux characterizes the recording as the Dead concert one would likely want to pass on to the most people: it pleases the most tastes. But the Cornell tape also reached a critical number of people at a critical moment. Almost 10 years after the concert, a cache of soundboard tapes made by Betty Cantor-Jackson, the Dead’s live recording engineer, were scattered far and wide when her house in Nicasio, Calif., went into foreclosure and her possessions were sold at public auction. The sound quality of the “Betty Boards,” which began circulating in 1987, was exceptional: so good that for the initiates, it nearly reinvented listening. She made her own stereo mix on a separate feed from the house P.A. mix, strictly for posterity, and she considered the mixes from 1977 among her best. (“I want you to be inside the music,” she once said of her audio ideal. “I don’t want stereos playing at you, I want you to be in there, I want it around you.”) The Cornell show was the first widely circulated tape to sound that good. Also in 1987 the Dead had a hit single, “Touch of Grey.” Suddenly the band was so popular that it could sell out Giants Stadium in July and return in September for a five-night run at Madison Square Garden. A new excitement about the band, its present and its past, recharged its fan base and grew it enormously. But the standards by which we judge the Grateful Dead have changed since then. Over the past several years it has become possible to know entire periods with the same detail and definition with which we once saw individual concerts. In some sense we’re rolling back the microscope to get a closer view. In the late ’80s information access was limited. You had to work for your collection. It wasn’t all online. In 1987 the ability to point to a certain show — a Cornell ’77 or a Fillmore East 1970 — indicated great knowledge. But we can also now say that it indicated a kind of lack of knowledge. Because more and more of us now know, from better and better audio evidence, how the band sounded in the weeks and months around those famous nights. For example the Dead played a concert 20 days after Cornell, in Hartford, that some, including Gary Lambert, a host of the Grateful Dead Radio show “Tales From the Golden Road” on Sirius XM, consider just as good. (That show, taken from the master tapes engineered by Ms. Cantor-Jackson, has just been released by Rhino in heretofore unbeatable audio as “To Terrapin: Hartford ’77.”) And it played a show in Buffalo one night later, on May 9, which Mr. Lemieux prefers. “To me the question is: Does Cornell stand up to the rest of the tour?” said Dan Levy, a longtime fan of the band. (He wrote the liner notes for “Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 1,” a recent archival release of some 1990 performances.) “And then, since you can listen to a dozen shows from April and May of ’77, you realize that the next question is: How does one tour compare to another? This is where there’s some new motion in how the band is considered. The kinds of e-mails I’m getting now are saying things like, ‘We really should reconsider 1980.’ ” IF you ask the elder members of the Grateful Dead’s touring retinue, the best-show question becomes quickly irrelevant. Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, the early LSD chemist and sound engineer for the Dead in the ’60s and ’70s, reacted with a kind of combative pluralism. “All the shows of my era were good,” he said in an e-mail message. “ ‘Best’ is a value judgment reserved for each person.” Then he moved on to received wisdom about shows that he knew intimately, having recorded them himself: “The Fillmore East shows in February of 1970 are seen by many as very special.” Ms. Cantor-Jackson answered with similar indirectness. “Rumor has it,” she said by e-mail, “the fans’ favorite is a ’77 Cornell gig.” But she also wrote of a performance from July 16, 1970, at the Euphoria Ballroom in San Rafael, Calif., when the Dead was joined by Janis Joplin for the song “Turn On Your Lovelight.” That show receives a dismal rating in the “Compendium.” But: Ms. Cantor-Jackson was there; San Rafael is her hometown; and Joplin had become important, and would be dead a few months later. Why shouldn’t her memory attach special value to that concert? This is an example of valuing the experience over the artifact: a way of appreciating the Dead that’s slipping away from us, gradually being replaced by a way that’s far less sentimental, far more critical, but curiously, inclusive rather than narrow. Original members of the band seem interested by the best-show question, but aren’t inclined to think that simplistically. Having lived the 5,000 or 6,000 onstage hours in real time, they tend naturally toward the wide-view mode that the rest of us are only starting to know. I asked Mickey Hart, the drummer, what he thought about Veneta ’72, a winner in a best-show poll on the concert-recording site Lossless Legs, at shnflac.net. (It’s also — ahem — one of my favorites.) “I don’t remember it,” he said. (To be fair, he was on a hiatus at the time.) He remembers periods, he explained. And bad gigs — Woodstock, for instance. A few free shows in the ’60s and ’70s, when playing felt like an act of generosity. And the band’s all-consuming, six- to eight-hour practice sessions of the mid-’60s, when it was pushing beyond blues and pop. Since Mr. Hart obviously sees his time with the Dead as a journey, what does he say when someone starts asking him about the specifics of a single night, brandishing dates and concert-hall names? “I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “I always say ‘Yes.’ ” Mr. Lesh said he thinks along remarkably similar lines. He remembers the free shows, the early years, ’75 to ’77, parts of the late ’80s. He doesn’t remember Cornell ’77. “I haven’t listened to Cornell for a long time,” he said in a telephone interview. Was there any sense of immediate recognition, I asked, right after the band finished a great show? “We may have walked off and looked at each other and said, ‘Whoa,’ ” he said. “But generally there wasn’t a lot of that. Performing takes a lot out of you. Physical and mental energy. When it’s been a good show, you’re kind of drained. ” And what does he say to the pinpointers, the best-show-ever-ists? “I appreciate it, and honor it, and, you know, wail on,” he said. “But it’s an individual thing. Maybe they were there. A lot of people gravitate to the shows that they had seen. Since Jerry’s death I get the feeling that a lot of the Heads need to confirm for themselves that it was as good as they thought it was.” Maybe that’s the best one can do at the highest level of engagement. Not to try to listen for the best night ever; not even to listen for the best period ever. But to try to figure out why we’re listening at all. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/ar...ic/12ratl.html Shuttering Neverland: Michael Jackson’s Effects Go to Auction Ben Sisario The king’s crown, scepter, ice cream cart and life-size Lego model of Darth Vader are for sale. Those items, along with the statues of E.T. and the cast-iron gate decorated with the royal coat of arms of Britain, could belong only to Michael Jackson, whose style of self-enshrinement has always mixed the regal and the childlike. They are part of an auction of Jacksoniana so large that it has been installed in a former Robinsons-May department store here. In a preview for the news media on Monday, workers carried signs from Neverland painted with Maxfield Parrish-like pastorals, while inside Mr. Jackson’s goods were arranged in loose, thematic sections: glittering stage costumes over here, Disney collectibles over there, paintings of Mr. Jackson as an Elizabethan noble here and there. “We’ve recreated Neverland,” said Darren Julien, the president of Julien’s Auctions, which is conducting the sale. But Mr. Jackson’s financial troubles have been well publicized — Neverland Valley Ranch, Mr. Jackson’s former home (and amusement park and zoo) 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles, narrowly escaped foreclosure last year — and for a visitor browsing through his record-sales awards and rhinestone-encrusted socks, it’s never quite clear whether you are picking over the refuse of the most prolific collector since Charles Foster Kane or prying away items that may still have sentimental value. To be clear, Mr. Jackson initially supported this sale but lately has balked. Indeed, Mr. Jackson’s representatives have tried to stop the sale in court, saying that he was never given an opportunity to sift out personal effects. One motion was denied by a judge two weeks ago, but another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. Mr. Jackson, who hired Julien’s last year to conduct the sale, recently sold out a 50-concert run at the O2 arena in London, beginning in July. The auction, with 1,390 lots taken from Neverland, opens for public viewing on Tuesday; the sale is to run April 22 to 25. A five-volume, 900-page catalog is available for browsing online (juliensauctions.com). In addition to bids submitted at the scene, online bids will be accepted. Put together, the items form a picture of their owner that isn’t exactly surprising, given Mr. Jackson’s very public eccentricity. But in its sheer quantity the collection is a revealing tour through some of Mr. Jackson’s obsessions. For one, he likes his military-style outerwear, and he likes it to sparkle. There’s the red lamé jacket, for example, with gold tassels and red bugle beads (Lot No. 1,141, estimated at $4,000 to $6,000). And, more modestly priced, the navy-and-gold number with crown-shaped brooches, worn at a 1999 news conference with Nelson Mandela (No. 1,273, $400 to $600). When Mr. Jackson likes something, he really likes it. Bronze garden statues of young children frolic by the dozen. Disney cartoon characters, along with Peter Pan — whose Neverland island gave the Jackson estate its name — pop up in paintings and figurines, sometimes dressed like their collector. And then of course there are the gloves: 13 of them (Nos. 1,366 through 1,374), each one covered in “iridescent Swarovski loch rosen crystals.” The most recognizable design, in silvery white and dated to the early 1980s, is estimated at up to $15,000, and it sits in an honored position in the center of the auction’s front room, along with a scepter and crown. But the majority of the items have far lower estimated values — hundreds have been priced at less than $1,000 each — and whether you interpret those prices as reflective of Mr. Jackson’s taste, pop-cultural status or largess toward his fans probably determines whether you have any interest in bidding. If Mr. Jackson has his way, however, all of it will remain off the market. As part of the deal last year that saved Neverland from foreclosure, Mr. Jackson had to remove all his possessions from the estate, according to court documents. Rather than find storage for it all, Tohme R. Tohme, the president of MJJ Productions, Mr. Jackson’s company, and a spokesman for the singer, signed a contract consigning to Julien’s “all movable and removable personal property located at Neverland Ranch.” “They approved the press release,” said Mr. Julien, whose company has handled memorabilia auctions for Barbra Streisand, Cher and other celebrities. “Michael himself even drove by the auction site.” But Alan S. Gutman, MJJ’s lawyer, said that Julien’s never made good on a promise to let Mr. Jackson review the catalog and remove any personal items. “That would include his awards, wardrobes, the gloves, photographs, gifts he received, letters that he received, things of that nature,” he said. Mr. Tohme declined to be interviewed for this article. This is not the first time that a Jackson auction has been contested in court. Two years ago another large collection — the contents of a warehouse that had been lost by Mr. Jackson’s parents and siblings, as part of a bankruptcy settlement — made its way to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and lawsuits flew like arrows. The sale went on as planned, but it brought in a modest $1 million. Mr. Julien said he was confident that the auction would take place, and noted that Mr. Jackson and MJJ Productions were the owners of the property, and would collect the profits of the sale. (The auction house takes commissions of 35 percent.) Representatives of Julien’s say that the company has invested $2 million into the auction, and that it expects to raise $15 million to $20 million in sales. “It’s going to be massive,” Mr. Julien said. “It’s unlike anything anybody has ever seen.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/ar...ic/14jack.html Like Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart Change Music Prices Rachel Metz Apple's iTunes Store isn't the only one that has adjusted prices for its digital song downloads recently: Changes are showing up at Amazon's and Wal-Mart's online music stores, too. Apple Inc., the dominant digital music retailer on the Internet, shifted Tuesday from selling all songs for 99 cents apiece to a tiered pricing model where songs cost 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 each. Recording companies are choosing the prices. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple also eliminated the copy-protection technology that limited users' abilities to copy and play songs on devices other than Apple's own iPods. On the same day Apple made its changes, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s online music store began selling tunes for $1.24, 94 cents and 64 cents apiece. Previously, they cost 74 cents and 94 cents apiece. In an e-mail, Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala said the pricing adjustments are "reflective of new costs set by the music industry." Elsewhere on the Web, Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is also selling individual song downloads for as much as $1.29. Most songs currently cost $1.29, 99 cents, 89 cents or 69 cents each. Amazon did not say when it began selling songs for $1.29; when the store first opened in September 2007, songs sold for 89 cents and 99 cents. Wal-Mart and Amazon downloads had already been free of copy protection. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040803425.html iTunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings Glenn Peoples Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price. While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs. On Wednesday, one day after the price increase, the iTunes Top 100 chart had 40 songs priced at $1.29 and 60 with the original $0.99 price point. The $1.29 songs lost an average of 5.3 places on the chart while the $0.99 songs gained an average of 2.5 chart positions. Seven of Wednesday’s $1.29 songs had been priced at $0.99 on Tuesday (there were 33 songs priced at $1.29 on Tuesday morning). Those seven songs lost an average of 1.9 chart positions from Tuesday to Wednesday; one of them gained ground, eight lost position and one remained the same. The remaining 33 songs priced at $1.29, whose prices went unchanged from Tuesday to Wednesday, lost an average of 7.7 chart positions. A similar trend was seen the following day. The 53 songs priced at $0.99 rose an average of 1.66 places on the chart; 24 rose on the chart, 18 dropped and 11 remained even. The 47 songs priced at $1.29 lost an average of two chart positions; 11 rose on the chart, 27 dropped and nine remained even. Ten of the $1.29 tracks were priced at $0.99 the day prior and they lost an average of 12.4 chart positions. A number of the tracks with a Tuesday-to-Wednesday price increase that gave up chart position were from Rascal Flatt’s Unstoppable (and one track from Unstoppable dropped off the Top 100 altogether). The two-day trend mirrored the two previous one-day trends. On Thursday, 47 songs on the iTunes Top 100 chart were priced at $1.29. The more expensive songs had lost an average of 2.7 chart positions from Tuesday to Thursday. Only six of the $1.29 songs rose up the chart while 29 dropped and 12 remained at the same chart position. The 53 songs that had remained priced at $0.99 during that two-day span had gained an average of 1.96 chart positions. Of the $0.99 songs, 32 rose up the chart, 12 dropped and nine stayed even. The 32 songs that had remained at $1.29 for all three days had lost an average of 3.3 chart positions. By Thursday, there were a total of 15 songs that had risen to $1.29 from a $0.99 price on Tuesday. Over the two-day period, those 15 songs had lost an average of 1.5 chart positions. Nine songs fell off the chart during from Tuesday to Thursday. Five were priced at $0.99 and four were priced at $1.29. Price appeared to have little impact on these songs’ movement. Most songs were at or near the bottom of the chart, so their decline is not extraordinary. Ten songs entered the chart during this period. Five were priced at $0.99 and five were priced at $1.29. These changes are solely chart position, but a general idea of incremental changes in revenue can be reached. By looking at the unit sales of the most recent Soundscan top track downloads chart, the different between chart positions can offer a view into how moving up and down the chart impacts revenue. An assumption here is that the iTunes Top 100 chart is representative of the Soundscan top track downloads chart. Given its market dominance, this is a reasonable assumption. The average final rank of the songs that dropped on the chart is about #45 and the average chart drop was about three positions. On the most recent Soundscan top track downloads chart, the difference between the #42 and the #45 chart position equals weekly sales of about 2,080 units, or about 300 units per day. A #42 track sells almost 9,800 downloads in two days. A #45 track sells just under 9,200 downloads in two days. The retail value of the #42 position over two days at $0.99 per track is about $9,700. The retail value of the lower #45 position over two days at the higher $1.29 price is about $11, 861. The increase of $0.30 per track offsets the drop in units sold by nearly $2,200 over two days. The difference in rankings is magnified at higher positions on the chart. A song that drops from #7 to #10, for example, could lose about 4,500 units over two days but gain an incremental $3,600. For a price increase (to $1.29 from $0.99) to result in an equal or greater amount of revenue, unit sales would to drop by no less than 23.3%. On the most recent track download chart, the different between #42 and #45 was only 3.5%. One has to move up to #6 on the chart to get to a difference greater than 23.3%. The difference between the #6 and the #3 chart positions equals a 30% drop in unit sales while the difference between #7 and #4 is a 19% drop in unit sales. This analysis does not take into account sales trends that would have existed with the absence of price changes. For a variety of reasons such as radio play, media attention, placement on the iTunes storefront or time since release date, tracks naturally rise and fall on the chart. Given the high number of songs at both price points, it is reasonable to assume songs’ upward and downward momentums could have canceled each other out. What is left is an incomplete but valuable look at the impact of price increases on relative sales performance. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...4543e3d671922a NAB "Cautiously Optimistic" About Performance Royalty FMQB In a new interview with TV Newsday, NAB President and CEO David Rehr addressed a number of topics pertaining to broadcasters. But one of them was the issue of the Performance Rights Act, which would force radio stations to pay royalties to artists for playing their music. As the Performance Rights Act goes through Congress, there is an opposing resolution called the Local Radio Freedom Act which has now been signed by over 100 lawmakers. Rehr said that he is "cautiously optimistic that we will be successful" in fighting the Performance Rights Act. "At the end of the day, the record labels have to pass a bill through the House and the Senate and get it signed by the President of the United States. That's a hard thing to do," he added. Earlier this month, House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) suggested that broadcasters should negotiate with record labels over the idea of paying royalties for airing music. In response to that, Rehr told TV Newsday that negotiating is not an option. "NAB and I have strong and profound personal respect for Mr. Boucher. We just fundamentally disagree with him," Rehr said. "About 18 months ago when we introduced our anti-performance-tax resolution, we started out with 50 members and ended up with a little over the majority of the House. This time we introduced with 109, twice as many. I also think the radio business is more engaged on this issue than it was six, eight, 12, 18 months ago. One of the players we needed to bring to the table was the record labels. In the previous 18 months, all you saw on Capitol Hill were the artists saying that this performance tax should be placed on radio stations. At the recent Judiciary Committee hearing, really for the first time, the heads of the record labels were there and publicly disclosed that 50 cents of every dollar is going to be paid to a foreign record company. I think that helps us, particularly in this economic period that we're in." http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1273425 Copyright Term Extension Stalls Andre Paine The U.K. biz is facing up to a lengthy delay before making any progress on the issue of term extension for copyright in sound recordings. Following an earlier setback in March, when the term directive was initially rejected in a vote of the Council of the European Union, the proposal has again been blocked. The U.K. government had altered its position from no change, and given its backing to the increase of copyright term from 50 to 70 years (the original European Commission plan had been for a 95-year term). But several countries were still blocking the directive when it was discussed again last week. Although it is likely the directive will now miss the opportunity for a first reading in the EU and is unlikely to progress this year under the presidency of Sweden, the U.K. government is putting a brave face on the setback. "It is clear that that outcome will not kill off the proposals to extend copyright term but rather that member states need more time to consider the details of the proposal and reach an agreement," said a spokesperson for the U.K. Intellectual Property Office. "The blocking minority vote against the current proposal will not end the process. "We should not be surprised by this, as few proposals are concluded as quickly as this. The number of technical issues still being raised indicates the need for careful consideration before agreement will be found. We are confident that the additional time we have will allow us to reach an agreement for performers on this issue." There were previously issues surrounding the session fund measure, for which record companies would set aside part of the additional revenues for performers, and the clean slate proposal to prevent the use of previous contractual agreements by labels to deduct money from the additional royalties. It is understood the U.K. government had got other countries supporting the directive to agree to changes it wanted to make these measures permanent, enabling Britain to back the directive, but it was not enough. "The U.K. supported the proposal of an extension to 70 years with permanent benefits to performers," added the spokesperson. "We are obviously disappointed that we could not get agreement to go straight to a deal with the Parliament, but do remain confident that we can get there." http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...90db648085cb9d Facebook Reaches 200 Million User Mark Scott Duke Harris It's official: Facebook has crossed the 200 million user mark, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post on Wednesday. "Growing rapidly to 200 million users is really a good start," Zuckerberg said. Along with congratulations in various languages — 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States — the news was met with some critical comments on Zuckerberg's own page. "Please bring back the old new FB," one user said, noting Facebook's penchant for changing its look. Facebook's dramatic growth since its launch in 2004 has fueled hopes that it may open itself to investors with a Wall Street stock offering amid questions about whether its revenue can keep up with higher computing costs. But the company says its balance sheet is healthy. In a recently leaked internal memo, Zuckerberg said revenue is expected to grow 70 percent this year. In marking the milestone, Facebook also updated its statistical records. The Palo Alto-based social networking leader says that 100 million users visit the site every day, and users have an average of 120 "friends" on their networks. The service is available in 40 languages, with more in the works. Facebook also invited users to celebrate the milestone by visiting the site's Gift Shop to purchase digital gifts for friends to benefit an array of 16 charities. More than 90 percent of the proceeds would go to the charity, with the remainder covering transaction costs. Facebook said it would not retain any of the proceeds. While noting Facebook's "good start," Zuckerberg said the ambition is much larger: "We've always known that in order for Facebook to help people represent everything that is happening in their world, everyone needs to have a voice. This is why we are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organization working for change." Several Facebook users who commented on Zuckerberg's post questioned how Facebook's redesign seemed influenced by the rising popularity of Twitter, a social network based on text messaging. A tech insider waggishly congratulated Twitter founder Evan Williams. Another offered advice that seemed grandmotherly: "Please make it so we don't have to see everything our friends are doing all the time, Mark. It is just too much and overwhelming for us oldsters. Like all the quizzing and things. Thank you, dear." http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12099452 Internet used by More Than Half in U.S. Election More than half of U.S. adults used the Internet to participate in the 2008 election -- the first time that threshold has been crossed, according to a study released Wednesday. Some 55 percent searched for political news online, researched candidate positions, debated issues or otherwise participated in the election over the Internet, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found. New forms of Internet communication such as blogs, social-networking sites like Facebook and video-sharing sites played a prominent role, the nonprofit group said. Among its findings: * 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election; * 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others; * 52 percent of those on a social network used it for political purposes. The Internet has grown steadily as a source of political news since 2000, when 11 percent of voters went online to keep up with political developments. That figure now stands at 26 percent. Among young voters and those with broadband connections the Internet has eclipsed traditional media like television, radio and newspapers, the survey found. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama used the Internet to mobilize an army of volunteers that helped him defeat Republican John McCain in the November 4 election. Obama supporters tended to be more engaged online than McCain backers, the study found. While 26 percent of Obama supporters active on the Internet posted their own thoughts or other content in an online forum, only 15 percent of McCain-backing Internet users participated, for example. The nonprofit group surveyed 2,254 adults between November 20 and December 4, 2008. The survey has a margin of error of 2 percentage points. (Reporting by Andy Sullivan, editing by Alan Elsner) http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53E6UL20090416 Intel Says PC Sales Have Reached a Bottom and Forecasts Moderate Growth Matt Richtel In another sign that the worst of the economic downturn might have passed, Intel said on Tuesday that the personal computer industry had bottomed out in the first quarter of the year. Paul S. Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, said, “The worst is now behind us.” The company, which makes computer chips, reported that net income in the first quarter fell 55 percent from a year ago. It forecast modest growth in the coming months, but industry analysts said that a rebound would be anything but sharp and fast. “The best word for it is ‘stabilization,’ ” said Glen Yeung, an analyst with Citi. But he was cautious about how much good news that represented. “The reason they have found the bottom is because it’s been so bad that it’s hard to imagine it could have gotten worse.” Mr. Otellini said in the company’s earnings announcement, “We’re seeing signs that a bottom in the PC segment has been reached.” He also said that consumer demand remained relatively stronger than corporate demand and that demand in the United States and China appeared to be recovering more quickly than in Europe, Japan and emerging markets around the world. Intel reported that its net income fell to $647 million, or 11 cents a share, from $1.44 billion, or 25 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. The company reported sales of $7.1 billion, down 26 percent from $9.67 billion, reported a year ago. Intel reported net income a share, excluding one-time charges, of 8 cents, beating the consensus Wall Street estimate of 2 cents a share. The analysis consensus was that Intel would report revenue of $6.98 billion. Intel said it was not confident enough in the state of the economy to provide a revenue estimate for its second quarter. But it said that “for internal purposes” it was planning for flat revenue in the second quarter. Wall Street analysts had hoped for a rosier outlook. After its earnings announcement, Intel’s shares fell in after-hours trading Tuesday by 5.4 percent, to $15.14. It had closed Tuesday at $16.01, up 3 cents. Intel’s stock has had a mini-rally over the last month, rising from about $13. One area of the computer business that has been relatively strong has been the sale of low-cost, Internet-centric machines the industry calls mini-notebooks or netbooks. But Intel had a sharp drop in the quarter for sales of its Atom processor, a chip that powers some of these devices. The first-quarter sales of $219 million were down 27 percent from the fourth quarter of last year. Intel attributed the drop to computer makers’ using their excess inventory of chips. The company expects demand to return as those inventories grow leaner. Intel’s gross profit margins of 45.6 percent were several percentage points above what analysts had expected, but a number that was decidedly low by its historical standards. In the previous quarter, gross margins were 53 percent; they were 59 percent in the third quarter. Gross margins have not been this low since the third quarter of 2001, when they hit 46 percent, Edwin Mok, an analyst with Needham & Company, said. Intel forecast that margins would remain in the mid-40s in the current quarter. “This might be a little disappointing for the street,” Mr. Mok said. Mr. Yeung drew a distinction between the tepid reaction of the stock, which in Intel’s case tends to trade on projections of its gross margins, and the positive outlook that the computer market appeared to have hit a bottom. Citi projects, for instance, that the number of notebooks built in the second quarter will increase 10 to 15 percent from the first quarter. Netbook shipments are expected to grow 15 to 20 percent in the current quarter, and shipments of desktops are expected to be flat or down 5 percent. But Mr. Yeung said the market had a long way to go. He said that demand for computers was as far from average historical demand as it had been in more than a decade. “Fundamentally, business has been getting better since the beginning of February,” he said. But “it’s not like it’s going gangbusters.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/te...es/15chip.html Parsing the Nuances of Windows 7 Decisions Larry Dignan A new survey reveals that 84 percent of IT pros don't have plans to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year and that half of respondents are considering alternatives. But it pays to parse a few nuances. The survey, which was conducted by Dimension Research and commissioned by KACE, a systems management appliance company. The survey had 1,142 respondents and 99 percent of them had a Windows operating system installed at their companies. The spin here has been that it's somehow bad that most IT professionals won't jump to Windows 7 in the next year. However, Windows 7 is still in beta and hasn't been released yet. Of course, 84 percent won't upgrade to Windows 7 in a 12-month time frame. If you go April to April and Windows 7 is launched in October-ish, that means IT pros would have just six months to make the leap. In the OS upgrade world, that speed just doesn't happen. Cast in that light, the figures in the pie chart to the right actually look pretty impressive to me. So within two years, 59 percent of IT pros plan to upgrade to Windows 7. The good news: that's some pent-up demand. The bad news: Vista is the reason there's pent-up demand. But what really caught my eye is the secondary headline about Windows alternatives. The headline: 50 percent of IT pros are considering a move from Windows. Operative word: considering. You'd be dumb not to consider a move. In fact, I'd argue that the other half of IT pros aren't doing their job: you should always assess alternatives. If you break down the 50 percent considering a move away from Windows, 14 percent are actively making a jump. That's up from 11 percent in 2008 and 9 percent in 2007. You can determine whether the money quote here should be: • 36 percent are staying, i.e,. Microsoft is still winning. or • 14 percent are bolting, i.e., alternative operating systems are gaining steam. The truth is probably in the middle. Another nuance to ponder. Apple's OS X is the most likely platform to replace Vista or Windows 7, with 27 percent eyeing the Mac platform. The rub: that percentage is down from 29 percent in 2008. Perhaps the headline should be that Vista, Windows 7 and OS X are in decline--and that Ubuntu is on the rise. In any case there's a lot of fun to be had with numbers in this survey. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10217917-75.html iBotnet: Researchers Find Signs of Zombie Macs Ryan Naraine Malware hunters at Symantec have discovered a direct link between a malicious file embedded in pirated copies of Apple’s iWork 09 software and what appears to be the first Mac OS X botnet launching denial-of-service attacks. Writing in the current issue of Virus Bulletin (subscription required), researchers Mario Ballano Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli found two malware variants — OSX.Iservice and OSX.Iservice.B — using different techniques to obtain the user’s password and take control of the infected Mac machine. The variants have been found inside bogus copies of iWork ’09 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 which were shared on the popular p2p torrent network. The author of the malware downloaded the original/trial versions of each program and introduced a copy of the malicious binary into the packages. Users who then downloaded and installed the applications from the torrent download would have been infected. It is estimated that thousands of people have downloaded the infected torrent files. They describe this as the “first real attempt to create a Mac botnet” and notes that the zombie Macs are already being used for nefarious purposes. The researchers pointed to this blog entry that describes a a PHP script, running as root, launching attacks against an unknown Web site. The article goes into detail on the botnet’s peer-to-peer engine, startup and encryption capabilities and configuration file structure and concludes that the person who wrote the malware is not the same as the person who actually ‘used’ it. “The code indicates that, wherever possible, the author tried to use the most flexible and extendible approach when creating it – and therefore we would not be surprised to see a new, modified variant in the near future,” the researchers added. http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3157 China Denies Role on US Grid Hacks Shaun Nichols The Chinese government is denying any involvement in the reported infiltration of US electric grid systems.. Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu as saying that any sort of involvement from China in the incident "doesn't exist at all." The denial follows a report in the Wall Street Journal which claimed that agents from China and Russia along with several other countries had infiltrated the computer systems charged with managing electricity in the US and left behind software payloads which could be used to control or disable electric grids in the US. Security experts warned that while the incident showed glaring holes in the US security infrastructure and that in a time of conflict such an attack could have catastrophic effects for the country. "We hope that the concerned media will prudently deal with some groundless remarks, especially those concerning accusations against China," Jiang said. This is not the first time that China has been accused of hacking US computer systems. In 2007, the Pentagon blamed a series of break-ins on hackers working for China's People's Liberation Army. Last month, the country was also said to be behind a massive spying operation involving individuals in 103 countries. http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/1...rid-hacks.aspx Cybersecurity Act Would Give President Power to 'Shut Down' Internet Greg Fulton A recently proposed but little-noticed Senate bill would allow the federal government to shut down the Internet in times of declared emergency, and enables unprecedented federal oversight of private network administration. The bill's draft states that "the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic" and would give the government ongoing access to "all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." Authored by Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 seeks to create a Cybersecurity Czar to centralize power now held by the Pentagon, National Security Agency, Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. While the White House has not officially endorsed the draft, it did have a hand in its language, according to The Washington Post. Proponents of the measure stress the need to centralize cybersecurity of the private sector. "People say this is a military or intelligence concern," says Rockefeller, "but it is a lot more than that. It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity." Snowe added, "America's vulnerability to massive cyber-crime, global cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks has emerged as one of the most urgent national security problems facing our country today. Importantly, this legislation loosely parallels the recommendations in the CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies] blue-ribbon panel report to President Obama and has been embraced by a number of industry and government thought leaders." Critics decry the broad language, and are watchful for amendments to the bill seeking to refine the provisions. According to opencongress.com, no amendments to the draft have been submitted. Organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology fear if passed in its current form, the proposal leaves too much discretion of just what defines critical infrastructure. The bill would also impose mandates for designated private networks and systems, including standardized security software, testing, licensing and certification of cyber-security professionals. "I'd be very surprised if it doesn't include communications systems, which are certainly critical infrastructure," CDT General Counsel Greg Nojeim told eWEEK. "The president would decide not only what is critical infrastructure but also what is an emergency." Adds Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Essentially, the Act would federalize critical infrastructure security. Since many systems (banks, telecommunications, energy)are in the hands of the private sector, the bill would create a major shift of power away from users and companies to the federal government." http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Cybers...wers_0413.html PIN Crackers Nab Holy Grail of Bank Card Security Kim Zetter Hackers have crossed into new frontiers by devising sophisticated ways to steal large amounts of personal identification numbers, or PINs, protecting credit and debit cards, says an investigator. The attacks involve both unencrypted PINs and encrypted PINs that attackers have found a way to crack, according to the investigator behind a new report looking at the data breaches. The attacks, says Bryan Sartin, director of investigative response for Verizon Business, are behind some of the millions of dollars in fraudulent ATM withdrawals that have occurred around the United States. "We're seeing entirely new attacks that a year ago were thought to be only academically possible," says Sartin. Verizon Business released a report Wednesday that examines trends in security breaches. "What we see now is people going right to the source ... and stealing the encrypted PIN blocks and using complex ways to un-encrypt the PIN blocks." The revelation is an indictment of one of the backbone security measures of U.S. consumer banking: PIN codes. In years past, attackers were forced to obtain PINs piecemeal through phishing attacks, or the use of skimmers and cameras installed on ATM and gas station card readers. Barring these techniques, it was believed that once a PIN was typed on a keypad and encrypted, it would traverse bank processing networks with complete safety, until it was decrypted and authenticated by a financial institution on the other side. But the new PIN-hacking techniques belie this theory, and threaten to destabilize the banking-system transaction process. Information about the theft of encrypted PINs first surfaced in an indictment last year against 11 alleged hackers accused of stealing some 40 million debit and credit card details from TJ Maxx and other U.S. retail networks. The affidavit, which accused Albert "Cumbajohnny" Gonzalez of leading the carding ring, indicated that the thieves had stolen "PIN blocks associated with millions of debit cards" and obtained "technical assistance from criminal associates in decrypting encrypted PIN numbers." But until now, no one had confirmed that thieves were actively cracking PIN encryption. Sartin, whose division at Verizon conducts forensic investigations for companies that experience data breaches, wouldn't identify the institutions that were hit or indicate exactly how much stolen money was being attributed to the attacks, but according to the 2009 Data Breach Investigations report, the hacks have resulted in "more targeted, cutting-edge, complex, and clever cybercrime attacks than seen in previous years." "While statistically not a large percentage of our overall caseload in 2008, attacks against PIN information represent individual data-theft cases having the largest aggregate exposure in terms of unique records," says the report. "In other words, PIN-based attacks and many of the very large compromises from the past year go hand in hand." Although there are ways to mitigate the attacks, experts say the problem can only really be resolved if the financial industry overhauls the entire payment processing system. "You really have to start right from the beginning," says Graham Steel, a research fellow at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control who wrote about one solution to mitigate some of the attacks. "But then you make changes that aren't backwards-compatible." PIN hacks hit consumers particularly hard, because they allow thieves to withdraw cash directly from the consumer's checking, savings or brokerage account, Sartin says. Unlike fraudulent credit card charges, which generally carry zero liability for the consumer, fraudulent cash withdrawals that involve a customer's PIN can be more difficult to resolve since, in the absence of evidence of a breach, the burden is placed on the customer to prove that he or she didn't make the withdrawal. Some of the attacks involve grabbing unencrypted PINs, while they sit in memory on bank systems during the authorization process. But the most sophisticated attacks involve encrypted PINs. Sartin says the latter attacks involve a device called a hardware security module (HSM), a security appliance that sits on bank networks and on switches through which PIN numbers pass on their way from an ATM or retail cash register to the card issuer. The module is a tamper-resistant device that provides a secure environment for certain functions, such as encryption and decryption, to occur. According to the payment-card industry, or PCI, standards for credit card transaction security, PIN numbers are supposed to be encrypted in transit, which should theoretically protect them if someone intercepts the data. The problem, however, is that a PIN must pass through multiple HSMs across multiple bank networks en route to the customer's bank. These HSMs are configured and managed differently, some by contractors not directly related to the bank. At every switching point, the PIN must be decrypted, then re-encrypted with the proper key for the next leg in its journey, which is itself encrypted under a master key that is generally stored in the module or in the module's application programming interface, or API. "Essentially, the thief tricks the HSM into providing the encryption key," says Sartin. "This is possible due to poor configuration of the HSM or vulnerabilities created from having bloated functions on the device." Sartin says HSMs need to be able to serve many types of customers in many countries where processing standards may be different from the U.S. As a result, the devices come with enabled functions that aren't needed and can be exploited by an intruder into working to defeat the device's security measures. Once a thief captures and decrypts one PIN block, it becomes trivial to decrypt others on a network. Other kinds of attacks occur against PINs after they arrive at the card-issuing bank Once encrypted PINs arrive at the HSM at the issuing bank, the HSM communicates with the bank's mainframe system to decrypt the PIN and the customer's 16-digit account number for a brief period to authorize the transaction. During that period, the data is briefly held in the system's memory in unencrypted form. Sartin says some attackers have created malware that scrapes the memory to capture the data. "Memory scrapers are in as much as a third of all cases we're seeing, or utilities that scrape data from unallocated space," Sartin says. "This is a huge vulnerability." He says the stolen data is often stored in a file right on the hacked system. "These victims don't see it," Sartin says. "They rely almost purely on anti-virus to detect things that show up on systems that aren't supposed to be there. But they're not looking for a 30-gig file growing on a system." Information about how to conduct attacks on encrypted PINs isn't new and has been surfacing in academic research for several years. In the first paper, in 2003, a researcher at Cambridge University published information about attacks that, with the help of an insider, would yield PINs from an issuer bank's system. The paper, however, was little noticed outside academic circles and the HSM industry. But in 2006, two Israeli computer security researchers outlined an additional attack scenario that got widespread publicity. The attack was much more sophisticated and also required the assistance of an insider who possessed credentials to access the HSM and the API and who also had knowledge of the HSM configuration and how it interacted with the network. As a result, industry experts dismissed it as a minimal threat. But Steel and others say they began to see interest for the attack research from the Russian carding community. "I got strange Russian e-mails saying, Can you tell me how to crack PINs?" Steel recalls. But until now no one had seen the attacks actually being used in the wild. Steel wrote a paper in 2006 that addressed attacks against HSMs as well as a solution to mitigate some of the risks. The paper was submitted to nCipher, a British company that manufactures HSMs and is now owned by Thales-eSecurity. He says the solution involved guidelines for configuring an HSM in a more secure manner and says nCipher passed the guidelines to customers. Steel says his solution wouldn't address all of the types of attacks. To fix the problem, would take a redesign. But he notes that "a complete rethink of the system would just cost more than the banks were willing to make at this time." Thales-eSecurity is the largest maker of HSMs for the payment-card and other industries, with "multiple tens of thousands" of HSMs deployed in payment-processing networks around the world, according to the company. A spokesman said the company is not aware of any of the attacks on HSMs that Sartin described, and noted that Thales and most other HSM vendors have implemented controls in their devices to prevent such attacks. The problem, however, is how the systems are configured and managed. "It's a very difficult challenge to protect against the lazy administrator," says Brian Phelps, director of program services for Thales-eSecurity. "Out of the box, the HSMs come configured in a very secure fashion if customers just deploy them as is. But for many operational reasons, customers choose to alter those default security configurations — supporting legacy applications may be one example — which creates vulnerabilities." Redesigning the global payment system to eliminate legacy vulnerabilities "would require a mammoth overhaul of virtually every point-of-sale system in the world," he says. Responding to questions about the vulnerabilities in HSMs, the PCI Security Standards Council said that beginning next week the council would begin testing HSMs as well as unattended payment terminals. Bob Russo, general manager of the global standards body, said in a statement that although there are general market standards that cover HSMs, the council's testing of the devices would "focus specifically on security properties that are critical to the payment system." The testing program conducted in council-approved laboratories would cover "both physical and logical security properties." http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/pins.html South Carolina Court Awards $1.8 Million Libel Judgment Against Blogger Sam Bayard The Sun News reports that a South Carolina state court has awarded Scott Brandon $1.8 million in damages for defamation arising out of statements published on the Myrtle Beach Insider blog. Brandon, who is the head of an ad agency with offices in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, sued local businessman Donald Wizeman in April 2008, claiming that Wizeman was the author of Myrtle Beach Insider and that Wizeman had defamed him by publishing a June 2007 post calling him a "failed lawyer" and criticizing one of his ad agency's campaigns. Wizeman denied that he was the author of Myrtle Beach Insider, but admitted agreeing with its content. The $1.8 million award came after Circuit Court Judge Diane S. Goodstein granted summary judgment in favor of Brandon after a hearing in September 2008. The CMLP has not obtained a copy or transcript of the judge's ruling, but she presumably found that no material issue of fact remained for a jury to decide and determined that Brandon was entitled to judgment as a matter of law (no small feat in a defamation case). Judge Goodstein then assigned a "special referee" to determine damages. In late January 2009, the referee awarded Brandon $800,000 in compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in punitive damages. There may have been some procedural glitches in the process, however. For one thing, Wizeman was not present at the summary judgment hearing in September and said in court filings that he did not receive notice that it was taking place, according to The Sun News. If this absence wasn't Wizeman's own fault, then it certainly casts doubt on the fairness of the court's determination on the merits of the lawsuit. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. In addition, at some point in the proceeding, the court also ruled that it would deem Wizeman the author of the disputed blog post despite his denials because he failed to respond to a discovery request that he admit or deny being the author. Wizeman, who initially represented himself but later hired a lawyer, maintains that he did not receive this discovery request either. Wizeman filed an emergency motion for reconsideration and relief from the judgment, but the court denied his request in January, saying that Wizeman's motion did not raise any "novel legal issues for the court's consideration," according to The Sun News article. Wizeman filed a notice of appeal in February 2009, hoping that the claimed procedural defects will win him a reversal. For the time being, however, this huge judgment stands as a chilling reminder of the risks involved in publishing online and an impetus to brush up on the basics of defamation law before hitting "submit." http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009...gainst-blogger Computer Science Student Targeted for Criminal Investigation for Allegedly Sending Email EFF Challenges Illegal Computer Seizure and Ongoing Data Searches by Campus Police Boston - A Boston College computer science student has asked a Massachusetts court to quash an invalid search warrant for his dorm room that resulted in campus police illegally seizing several computers, an iPod, a cell phone, and other technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the student, who has petitioned the court for the immediate return of his property and is demanding that investigators be prohibited from any further searches or analysis of his digital data. Massachusetts State Police participated in the search and are overseeing the forensic analysis of the seized property. "This search warrant is invalid, as there is no probable cause that a crime was committed at all," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "Every day this student's private information is in the hands of the police department, he suffers harm to his property interests and his constitutional rights." The dorm room search stemmed from an investigation into who sent an email to a Boston College mailing list alleging that another student was gay. Police say they know who sent the email and that the sender committed the crimes of "obtaining computer services by fraud or misrepresentation" and obtaining "unauthorized access to a computer system." However, nothing presented by the investigating officer to obtain the warrant, including the allegation that the student sent the email to the mailing list, could constitute the cited criminal offenses. Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed in support of the search warrant application include: the student being seen with "unknown laptop computers," which he "says" he was fixing for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer; and the student uses two different operating systems, including one that is not the "regular B.C. operating system" but instead has "a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on." "The police used inapplicable criminal laws as a basis for a fishing expedition to determine the author of an anonymous email," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Now, this student has been suspended from his job, and he is without a laptop and other devices he needs to do his schoolwork. His private communications and papers are in the hands of police who are searching for evidence without just cause. Even his cell phone and iPod were taken, clearly an overreach if the goal is tracking the source of an email." The motion to quash the search warrant was filed with assistance from Fish & Richardson attorneys Adam Kessel, Lawrence Kolodney, and Tom Brown. No court date has been set yet to hear the motion. For the full motion for emergency relief: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/in...mergencyRelief... For more on this case: http://www.eff.org/cases/re-matter-s...boston-college http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/13 Innocent Photographer or Terrorist? Tom Geoghegan Misplaced fears about terror, privacy and child protection are preventing amateur photographers from enjoying their hobby, say campaigners. Phil Smith thought ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean turning on the Christmas lights in Ipswich would make a good snap for his collection. The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera. After explaining he didn't need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal "stop and search", then asked to delete the photos and ordered not take any more. So he slunk home with his camera. "People were still taking photos with mobile phones and pocket cameras, so maybe it was because mine looked like a professional camera with a flash on top," he says. "I wasn't very pleased because I was taken through the crowd and through the barriers at the front and people were probably thinking 'I wonder what he was doing.' "To be pulled out of a crowd is very daunting and I wasn't aware of my rights. "It's a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can't stand in the street taking photographs." 'Crazy' officials But he's not the only snapper to fall foul of the authorities while innocently pursuing a hobby or working. Austin Mitchell MP has tabled a motion in the Commons that has drawn on cross-party support from 150 other MPs, calling on the Home Office and the police to educate officers about photographers' rights. Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes. "There's a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this." Photographers have every right to take photos in a public place, he says, and it's crazy for officials to challenge them when there are so many security cameras around and so many people now have cameras on phones. But it's usually inexperienced officers responsible. "If a decision is made to crack down on photographers, it should be made at the top. It's a general officiousness and a desire to interfere with people going about their legitimate business." Furtive photos Steve Carroll was another hapless victim of this growing suspicion. Police seized the film from his camera while he was out taking snaps in a Hull shopping centre. They later returned it but a police investigation found they had acted correctly because he appeared to be taking photographs covertly. And photography enthusiast Adam Jones has started an online petition on the Downing Street website urging the prime minister to clarify the law. It has gained hundreds of supporters. He says it has become increasingly difficult to take photos in public places because of terrorism fears. Holidaymakers to some overseas destinations will be familiar with this sort of attitude - travel guides frequently caution readers that innocently posing for a snapshot outside a government building could lead to some stern questions from local law enforcers. But in Britain this sort of attitude is new. So what is the law? "If you are a normal person going about your business and you see something you want to take a picture of, then you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private," says Hanna Basha, partner at solicitors Carter-Ruck. "But if it's the London Marathon or something, you're fine." There are also restrictions around some public buildings, like those involved in national defence. And under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without reasonable suspicion, providing the area has been designated a likely target for an attack. Child protection has been an issue for years, says Stewart Gibson of the Bureau of Freelance Photographers, but what's happened recently is a rather odd interpretation of privacy and heightened fears about terrorism. "They [police, park wardens, security guards] seem to think you can't take pictures of people in public places. It's reached a point where everyone in the photographic world has become so concerned we're mounting campaigns and trying to publicise this." It seems to be increasing, he says. "There's a great deal of paranoia around but the police are on alert for anything that vaguely resembles terrorism. It's difficult because the more professional a photographer, paradoxically, the more likely they are to be stopped or questioned. "If people were using photos for terrorism purposes they would be using the smallest camera possible." Complaint The National Union of Journalists has staged a demo to highlight how media photographers are wrongly challenged by police. In May last year, Thames Valley Police overturned a caution issued to photographer Andy Handley of the MK News in Milton Keynes, after he took pictures at the scene of a road accident. Guidelines agreed between senior police and the media were adopted by all forces in England and Wales last year. They state that police have no power to prevent the media taking photos. They state that "once images are recorded, [the police] have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if [the police] think they contain damaging or useful evidence." And in the case of Phil Smith, an official complaint about the Christmas lights incident helped sort matters out. Not only did he receive a written apology from Suffolk Police, but also a visit from an inspector, who explained that the officer, a special constable, had acted wrongly. And there was one consolation for Mr Smith as he trudged home while lamenting the shots of Letitia Dean that never were - she didn't turn up anyway. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/7351252.stm Judith Krug, Who Fought Ban on Books, Dies at 69 Douglas Martin Judith F. Krug, who led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, including helping found Banned Books Week, then fought laws and regulations to limit children’s access to the Internet, died Saturday in Evanston, Ill. She was 69. The cause was stomach cancer, her son, Steven, said. As the American Library Association’s official proponent of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech since the 1960s, Ms. Krug (pronounced kroog) fought the banning of books, including “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye” and sex manuals. In 1982, she helped found Banned Books Week, an annual event that includes authors reading from prohibited books. She also fought for the inclusion of literature on library shelves that she herself found offensive, like “The Blue Book” of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The book is a transcript of a two-day monologue by Robert Welch at the founding meeting of the society in 1958. “My personal proclivities have nothing to do with how I react as a librarian,” Ms. Krug said in an interview with The New York Times in 1972. “Library service in this country should be based on the concept of intellectual freedom, of providing all pertinent information so a reader can make decisions for himself.” In 1967, Ms. Krug became director of the library association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which promotes intellectual freedom in libraries. In 1969, she was appointed executive director of its Freedom to Read Foundation, which raises money to further First Amendment issues in court cases. The issues have changed over time. In December 1980, Ms. Krug’s observation that complaints about the content of books in public libraries had increased fivefold in the month since Ronald Reagan was elected president was widely reported. In an interview with The Times, she said that many of the complainants identified themselves as members of Moral Majority, a strongly conservative group, but the Rev. George A. Zarris, chairman of Moral Majority in Illinois, denied there was any organized effort. But the situation illustrated a frequent conflict in issues over library censorship. Ms. Krug pushed what she often described as a pure view of the First Amendment against what her opponents often said was the democratic will. “What the library associations are trying to do is make the voice of the people null and void,” said Nancy Czerwiec, a former primary school teacher who led the fight to ban a sex education book from the Oak Lawn Library in Illinois. That controversy was settled when the library agreed to lend the book only to adults. Ms. Krug later became a leader in fighting censorship on the Internet, an issue taken up by libraries because many people with no computers at home use library computers. The question involved not just a limited number of books for a particular library’s shelves, but efforts to keep theoretically unlimited amounts of indecent material from children by means of technological filters. In 1997, an alliance of civil liberties groups, with Ms. Krug a principal organizer, persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Jerry Berman, founder and chairman of the Center for Democracy & Technology, which promotes free speech on the Internet, said in a statement, “Her legacy rests in the constitutional challenge that secured the free speech rights for the Internet that we exercise today.” More recently, Ms. Krug fiercely fought a provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows federal investigators to peruse library records of who has read what. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft dismissed protests about the law as “baseless hysteria.” Judith Rose Fingeret was born in Pittsburgh on March 15, 1940, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. She worked as a librarian at the University of Chicago and elsewhere before joining the library association as a research analyst. In addition to her son, Ms. Krug is survived by her husband, Herbert; her daughter, Michelle Litchman; five grandchildren; her two brothers; and her sister. Ms. Krug credited her parents as inspiring her passion for free expression. In 2002, she told The Chicago Tribune about reading a sex-education book under the covers with a flashlight when she was 12. “It was a hot book; I was just panting,” she said, when her mother suddenly threw back the bed covers and asked what she was doing. Judith timidly held up the book. “She said, ‘For God’s sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don’t hurt your eyes.’ And that was that,” Ms. Krug said. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15krug.html Game Addiction: The Real Story What is video game addiction? What are its boundaries, its symptoms, and its treatments? How wide is its scope? In this GameSpot AU feature we speak to researchers, psychologists, medical bodies, and gamers to gauge their thoughts on the cause and effects of video game addiction. Laura Parker What is video game addiction? What are its boundaries, its symptoms, its treatments? How wide is its scope? And is it even a medically recognised condition in the first place? In Part One of this GameSpot AU feature we speak to researchers, psychologists, medical bodies, and gamers to gauge their thoughts on the causes and effects of video game addiction, the significance of its recognition as such, and the potential for future research. We also look at this issue from the game makers' side, as well as explore some real-life cases of addiction. If asked to define "video game addict," most of us would reply that a video game addict is someone who likes to play a lot of video games. But that definition is as close to the truth as the definition "someone who likes to inject a lot of heroin" is an accurate portrayal of a heroin addict. Our unfamiliarity with video game addiction stems not just from the ease with which the term "addiction" is thrown around, but also from a vast misrepresentation of the issue in the mainstream press, with sensationalist headlines like Video game addicts are not just shy nerds (June 5, 2008, Chloe Lake, NEWS.com.au) not an uncommon sight. Add to this a lack of medical and psychological research, and it's no wonder we think video game addicts are just people who like games too much. Defining game addiction Before we explore whether video game addiction exists and what form it takes, we need to know what it means to be an addict. At its core, addiction is a psychological disorder that affects the way the brain functions by impacting chemical processes related to motivation, decision making, learning, inhibitory control, and pleasure seeking. Behavioural addictions like gambling and sex are forms of psychological dependence; addictions to substances like drugs and alcohol are forms of both psychological and physical dependence. An addict is defined by his or her psychological compulsion to carry out certain behaviours or consume certain substances that are often detrimental to his or her health or well-being. Although this repeated consumption often leads to other problems in areas of social and mental health, an addict cannot stop him- or herself from recurrent use. The hallmarks of addiction are often an increase in time spent in the consumption of these behaviours or substances at the expense of other activities; recurrent failed attempts to stop; and recurrent preoccupation and intense psychological urges or desires that are difficult to control. Video game addiction is still a newcomer to the field of psychology and is not yet medically recognised as a proper addiction due to the lack of research conducted into its causes and effects. So, while it's common for clinics to specialise in the treatment of drug, alcohol, gambling, sex, and other addictions, it is not common for clinics to specialise in the treatment of video game addiction. However, during the last five years, countries like China, South Korea, the Netherlands, Canada, and the USA have begun to recognise the health threat posed by video game addiction and have opened clinics that deal specifically with the problem. The argument for excessive video game play as a real psychological addiction is that a person gains psychological reinforcement from playing, and excelling at, a game. By becoming an expert at a game, a person releases a neurochemical known as dopamine in his or her brain, whose function is to make us feel good. This is a natural response humans have to good experiences, such as eating favourite foods, listening to music, or watching a good movie. For it to be a psychological addiction to video games, it rests on how much dopamine is released in those who are believed to be video game addicts, in comparison to the levels released during other positive lifestyle activities. Symptoms of video game addicts are varied--they can range from social isolation, poor social skills, and erratic mood swings to neglect of responsibilities such as health, regular sleeping, hygiene, financial commitments, and work and study responsibilities. A new addiction Now that we know what addiction is, we need to see if video game addiction fits the pattern of a medically recognised addiction. In July 2006, the world's first video game addiction clinic opened in Amsterdam. The event sparked the curiosity of the global press--it was the first time video game addiction was acknowledged, and the subsequent coverage pointed to the increasing popularity of video games and the people who just couldn’t stop playing them. Almost all media reports at the time and subsequent reports dealing with video game addiction pointed to the few instances of video-game-related deaths as examples of addiction, wishing to demonstrate the debilitating effect of video games. But few reports actually defined addiction or indicated that not all video game addicts eventually kill themselves, or others, through excessive playing. The cases most often cited include a South Korean man who collapsed in an Internet cafe after playing Starcraft for 50 hours; a man in China who died after playing online games for 15 days consecutively; a 13-year-old boy from Vietnam who strangled an elderly lady with a piece of rope because he wanted money to buy games; and a number of cases in the United States involving angry teenagers murdering family members over games and consoles. The fact that the latter cases have more to do with displays of deep mental instabilities rather than addiction was not mentioned in the reports, an omission that no doubt has contributed to the public's widespread confusion about what video game addiction really is. In the research field, things are a little different. The last five years have seen a progress in the recognition of video game addiction as a real addiction, with more research dedicated to studying its scope, causes, and effects. At the 2006 annual meeting for the American Medical Association (AMA), a resolution was adopted commissioning the AMA's Council on Science and Public Health (CSAPH) to prepare a report reviewing and summarising the research data on the emotional and behavioural effects of video games, including addiction potential. The report, based on information from scientific literature from 1985 to 2007, concluded that there is currently insufficient research to definitely label video game overuse as an addiction. However, the report's authors used several case studies and surveys to find evidence of video game addiction, arguing that symptoms of time usage and social dysfunction/disruption present in video game overuse also appear in other addictive disorders, and, despite its reluctance to name video game addiction as a definitive mental disorder, the CSAPH recommended that the AMA strongly encourage the inclusion of video game addiction as a formal diagnostic disorder in the upcoming revision of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM is widely recognised as the standards manual defining mental disorders. It provides diagnostic criteria for mental disorders and is used by researchers, doctors, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies and policy makers. It has been revised five times since it was first published in 1952, updating existing disorders and adding and removing new and redundant disorders. The CSAPH's recommendation to encourage the inclusion of video game addiction in the upcoming DSM was followed up by the AMA in June 2007, and, in response, the APA stated that "if the science warrants it, this proposed disorder will be considered for inclusion in the DSM-V, which is due to be published in 2012." GameSpot AU contacted the APA and received the following statement in regards to video game addiction and the 2012 edition of the DSM: "There is no way to state specifically whether or not the issue of video game addiction will or will not be included [in the DSM of 2012]. What we can say is that our workgroups are considering all issues, new science and research as they are continuing work on the DSM-V." A need for research Studies into video game addiction are scarce. However, the increased recognition of the issue amongst the scientific community means more and more researchers are beginning to look seriously at video game addiction. Daniel Loton, an ethics officer and former psychology honours student from Victoria University, used his thesis to explore the relationship between social capacity and problematic video gameplay to try to determine the cause of video game addiction. Loton used the Social Skills Inventory (SSI), a broad scale that measures basic social skills, to survey 560 male and 61 female gamers with an average age of 23.4 years. His survey found a very small connection between social capacity (that is, social skills and self-esteem) and video game playing. Given the past research on the topic, Loton said his study yielded surprising results. "To use the words of the American Medical Association after it had conducted a review of the literature, problem gamers are likely to be...somewhat marginalised socially, perhaps experiencing high levels of emotional loneliness and/or difficulty with real-life social interactions," Loton said. "Considering this past research, I would have expected social skills and self-esteem to drop as problematic play increased. Instead, only a tiny relationship emerged." The results revealed that basic social capacity is not the central cause of problematic video gameplay. Broadly speaking, no serious negative consequences of playing video games were revealed, even when playing to the extreme. Loton thinks his results may turn attention away from the assumed link between social capacity and problematic video gameplay and direct attention to other characteristics such as behaviour moderation, depression and stress, locus of control (that is, feelings of control one has over one's environment), and arousal (using games to get excited or to relax). Richard M. Ryan, a psychologist and professor of psychology, psychiatry, and education at the University of Rochester in New York, has been focusing on a different aspect of video game addiction: motivation. Ryan and his team are testing the idea that psychological needs for control, mastery, and connection can be readily satisfied within games. "People can feel a lot of autonomy and competence during play, and also it can be a place to relate with others, albeit in a virtual context," Ryan said. "We think that this poor self-control, combined with a more impoverished life, leads a subset of players to sink deeply into the gameworld and in time to feel an obsessive need to play. The obsessive player feels he/she has to play, does it too much, and gets less fun and satisfaction out of it. It also crowds out other satisfactions in life, compounding the problem." Ryan and his team found that when games were played for less than 10 hours a week, there was no evidence of negative effects on wellness; when games were played in excess of 20 hours a week, signs of ill-being emerged--negative mood, symptoms of depression, and more impoverished relationships. The team's studies showed that those who overuse games are getting fewer of their needs satisfied in their lives outside of games. "We also discovered players who report obsessive attitudes toward games--they are preoccupied with their games, feel compelled to play, and feel tension when they cannot or are not playing. This latter set of players also shows signs of negative effects on psychological functioning." Ryan thinks the lack of quality research into video game overuse will be rectified with time as games become more sophisticated in the ways they satisfy people’s psychological needs. “We have a lot of people, some in the media and some in the sciences, who are too ready to make very strong claims about video games, whether we are talking about aggression, addiction, or cultural estrangement, based on very little evidence. I think that is especially how the media often sells stories. Some commentators exaggerate risks, and on the other hand there are defenders of games who deny any and all problems and attack any perceived bad news. "Games are relatively new in our culture, and such vacillation between hysteria and denial I suspect often greets any new phenomenon, from hip-hop to the Internet to video games. Both sides usually have some part of the truth, but it may be a while before at least we as scientists, much less as a society, have a coherent understanding." Achieving a coherent understanding of video game addiction may be easier said than done. Putting aside the lack of research into the subject, there is always the immediate human reaction to find blame for a phenomenon that’s not yet understood. Whenever the subject of video game addiction arises in the public forum, there is one type of game that is almost always mentioned: massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Based on what we already know about addiction, it is clear that addictive behaviour can occur when playing any type of game. However, research to date has focused more on MMORPGs due to their highly competitive and in-world social nature. MMORPGs Dr Andrew Campbell runs the Brain and Mind Research Institute Clinical Centre at the University of Sydney, a child and adolescent practice that has dealt with video game addiction involving MMORPGs. Dr Campbell and his team have looked closely at the factors that attract players to games where they are willing to give up other aspects of their life in order to play. “The types of games these players were obsessed with were very popular titles that involved complex economies and merit systems,” Dr Campbell said. “They gave each player a sense of being skilful, clever, and part of a team or community. They also instilled in them a sense to continue with the game no matter how many rewards or ‘levels’ they attained in the game. More often than not, the players never thought about the end of a game, especially in a MMORPG world. “We have looked at how some players gain self-esteem from the ‘mastery’ of a game--thus leading us to the hypothesis that these types of players are always looking for a place in a social group where they feel valued, admired and ultimately, comfortable. In the case of video games, players do not feel as much of a ‘body’ response to winning, but more of a mental sense of satisfaction that impacts their ego and sense of self. They want to continue feeling this, and so return to the source--the game itself.” According to Dr Campbell, research into video game addiction conducted from the early 1980s to the present has been contradictory on the seriousness of it. While some theorists believe that video game playing is an example of obsessive rather than addictive behaviour, other theorists believe video game addiction could be as serious as gambling, alcoholism and even drug addiction. His own research to date has been inconclusive, but has led Dr Campbell to raise new questions about what factors obsessive video game players attain from playing games, in comparison to what they would desire to have in their social lives if they had to give up playing video games. “For example, do they want popularity, do they want to engage often in competitions where they can demonstrate mastery or do they simply want to achieve a feeling of belonging to a community?” Dr Campbell says that whether video game addiction exists, or whether it is merely obsessive behaviour that is detrimental to the social and healthy development of gamers, the best treatment is prevention. “Gamers who think they may be addicted need to take the time to see how their lives have changed since playing a game continuously. What friends do they associate with and what are those friends interested in? Are they more moody, losing sleep and generally disinterested in any activities outside of the games they play? If a person is concerned that they may have a problem with their video game playing behaviour, the most important thing to do is talk their concern over with a close relative or trusted friend who is not involved in the same gaming behaviour as the person.” The 2007 report into the addictive nature of video games published by the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health also pointed to MMORPGs as a particular concern, indicating that although video game overuse can be associated with any type of game, it is most commonly seen among MMORPG players. According to the report, MMORPG players represent approximately nine per cent of gamers. The report stated that: “Researchers have attempted to examine the type of individual most likely to be susceptible to such games, and current data suggest these individuals are somewhat marginalised socially, perhaps experiencing high levels of emotional loneliness and/or difficulty with real life social interactions. Current theory is that these individuals achieve more control of their social relationships and more success in social relationships in the virtual reality realm than in real relationships.” It’s no secret that the most prevalent MMORPG is World of Warcraft. With a subscriber base currently sitting at 11.5 million subscribers, the game is a phenomenon. World of Warcraft’s second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2.8 million copies in the first 24 hours of its release in November last year, going on to sell over four million copies in the first month. Given the game’s scope, its players more than likely make up the majority of the nine per cent of those who play MMORPGs. And as such, it's no wonder that WoW often finds itself portrayed as the addict's choice when it comes to mainstream coverage of game addiction. Blizzard has previously acknowledged its game's addictive potential, and says it has built in specific features within the game to try and curb the problem. "Like most other games, World of Warcraft is designed to be fun and compelling and should be recognised as another means of enjoyment, such as watching television, playing sports or reading books," a Blizzard spokesperson told GameSpot AU. "As with those forms of entertainment, it is ultimately up to the individual player or his or her parent or guardian to determine how long he or she should spend playing games. We feel that a person's day-to-day life should take precedence over any form of entertainment, and in fact, World of Warcraft has elements that allow players to take natural breaks. "For example, as World of Warcraft players advance their characters in the game, they can benefit from a feature called the Rest System, an integral game mechanic designed to enhance gameplay, which rewards them with an experience boost based on the amount of time spent between play sessions. This feature has been in the game since launch. Players can also use the in-game clock to set an alarm that notifies them when their desired playtime has been reached. Another example would be the design of the quests and dungeons in World of Warcraft. Quests can generally be completed by individual players or together with friends in less than an hour. The same goes for many of the game’s dungeons, which are designed to be completed wing by wing at the player’s discretion rather than all at once. This design allows players to make appreciable progress in the game with a minimal time commitment during any given play session. "And for minors, the game’s parental-control system makes it easy for parents and guardians to set play schedules for the account. This feature is very straightforward, and it’s web-based, which means parents and guardians can manage their child’s access to the game from any browser, as opposed to having to log in to the game to do so. To use it, parents or guardians simply select blocks of time, such as homework time after school, when the game will be inaccessible for that account. We’ve even provided pre-made schedules, such as 'weekends only' and 'after school and weekends', to make things easier. A different perspective Between clinical research, public perspective, and the gaming community’s understanding of video game addiction, there is another point of view that demands a voice: the self-confessed addict’s. David, a 28-year-old gamer from Mt Isa in Queensland, Australia, spends up to 20 or more hours a week playing games, usually first-person shooters. Although he’s been a gamer for 15 years, it wasn’t until his recent decision to start studying again that he first noticed his habit was becoming a problem. “My sleep, studying and physical condition have all suffered because I play games too much,” he said. “Sometimes it takes me a while to fall asleep because I think about a game I’m playing. I also leave assignments to the last minute. I find it especially frustrating if I am left alone for a day, because I will end up playing way too much.” David says that he does not suffer if he has not played for a period of time, but he admits he always has a game at the back of his mind, acknowledging that if he continues his habit he will also continue to suffer in other aspects of his life. Twenty-three-year-old X (who does not wish to be named) also plays more than 20 hours of games a week. He’s been playing games since the age of six, beginning by favouring RTS games and eventually moving on to shooters and strategy games like Call of Duty 4 and Warcraft 3, and RPGs like KOTOR and Oblivion. He says gaming became a problem when he was first left alone to monitor how much time he spent playing them. “I was 14 and there was nothing really stopping me from playing too much, so I did. Over time, I’ve found that the more I game, the harder it is to concentrate. For example, I find it extremely hard to just sit down and write an assignment or do some reading for university; every few minutes, my mind is wandering back to games. If I haven’t been playing games for a week or two for one reason or another, then I find my concentration improving and gaming doesn’t dominate my thoughts nearly as much.” “I know that if I spent even one fifth of the time that I game on study, then my grades would have been a lot better. On more than one occasion I’ve stayed in and gamed instead of going out. And as far as wellbeing goes, I have trouble sleeping, my posture isn’t great and I even carry my right shoulder forward a little because I use it for the mouse, which has given me shoulder problems. I even get in a bad mood when I perform badly whilst playing," he said. “During the period of time I’m playing games and in the short term (a few hours, to a couple of weeks) after quitting them, I can experience anything from insomnia, to trouble concentrating, to restlessness--usually all three. It’s after I haven’t played any games for a few weeks that these symptoms start to disappear.” In X’s group that he plays games with, gaming is encouraged--the group has developed its own subculture around playing, and there is never talk of ‘excessive gaming’. However, X has found relationships with other groups of peers and his parents have suffered. When it comes to defining what his habits mean, X believes the problem is psychological. “I find that when I’m playing games, I’m fine and most other times when I’m not playing games, I want to be playing games. I don’t know what will happen if I continue to play games this way--I have full-time employment lined up for next year which is probably going to dominate most of my waking hours, so it might be that a lot of my problems take care of themselves. Then again, if I only have a few hours to myself every night and I’m filling them with gaming, then my social life might suffer even more.” X says he has never thought about getting outside help, but would consider it if more aspects of his life begin to suffer. In the meantime, he sees video game addiction becoming an increasing problem in society as more people become gamers and the competition aspect is played up. “Where you have a problem that isn’t recognised as a problem and where the effects aren’t readily identifiable or measureable, then that problem is going to get a lot worse before enough people realise it’s there and resolve to do something about it. Couple that with the fact that gaming is also coming more and more into the mainstream and you’ve got a bunch of serious problems sitting just off the horizon. For the first time, a large percentage of the population is gaming and in the next few generations, I can only see that figure increasing. “There’s also the status of gaming itself. Clans are being sponsored, the industry is booming and players are actually making money out of it. People are making a living from playing games. Gaming is being marketed like a sport, which in many ways is a fair classification--it’s often highly competitive, takes skill and teamwork. However, there are some serious negatives to playing too many games, negatives which don’t exist with normal sports.” http://www.gamespot.com/features/6207309/index.html Music Downloading Hearing Can't be Streamed Online Russell Contreras Oral arguments in a music downloading lawsuit filed by the recording industry against a Boston University student can't be streamed online, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a previous decision that allowed online streaming and said it was "bound to enforce" rules that close federal courtrooms in Massachusetts to webcasting and other forms of broadcast. Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing student Joel Tenenbaum, had requested that a courtroom video service be allowed to transmit a hearing to the school's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which wanted to stream it unedited on its Web site with free access. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner approved the request in January. But the Recording Industry Association of America appealed the decision, arguing that it violated federal court guidelines on cameras and threatened its ability to get a fair trial. The federal appeals court agreed with the recording industry and said Gertner's ruling was based on "incorrect interpretation" of the law. "This is not a case about free speech writ large, nor about guaranty of a fair trial," the court wrote, but about "the governance of the federal court." Nesson did not return phone calls after the ruling. Fourteen news organizations, including The Associated Press and The New York Times Co. (NYT), had urged the appeals court to allow online streaming. In a concurring opinion, Judge Kermit Lipez agreed that Gertner erred in allowing webcasting of oral arguments. But Lipez wrote that existing rules prohibiting online streaming should be re-examined. Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., is accused of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, ultimately demanding $12,000. He could be forced to pay $1 million if it is determined his alleged actions were willful. The recording industry has said in court documents that its efforts to enforce the copyright law are protected under the First Amendment. In December, the group said it had abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers' access if they ignore repeated warnings. The recording association said it will still continue to litigate outstanding cases. Pirate Party Membership Surges Following Pirate Bay Verdict Ernesto The Pirate Bay verdict is being criticized by the Swedish public and protests are being planned. Opposition to the decision is widespread, indicated partly by the surge in new memberships to Sweden’s Pirate Party. It has seen its ranks grow by 20% in the handful of hours since the verdict and the number of members is increasing by the minute. Support for the Swedish Pirate Party grew increasingly healthy after the government came up with more stringent copyright legislation. Its membership has surpassed that of the well established Green Party, and more than half of all Swedish men under 30 are considering pledging their vote to the Pirate Party in the upcoming 2009 European Parliament elections. Today’s verdict in the Pirate Bay case only strengthens support for the site. Many people have been blown away by the harsh sentences and will protest in the streets of Stockholm tomorrow. The upside seems to be that people have realized that the current climate needs to change, indicated by the Swedish Pirate party gaining many new members. Over the past few hours over 3000 members applied, raising the member count from less than 15,000 up to more than 18,000. “We’ve surpassed another party in parliament, making us the 5th largest in member count, and our youth section is about to take the number 1 position,” Swedish Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak in a comment. Christian Engström, vice-chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party said in a comment that the verdict is their ticket into the European Parliament. For the upcoming European election, the Pirate Party requires 100,000 Swedish votes to get a seat, a goal that is within reach after today. The Pirate Party is a strong supporter of reforming current copyright laws and party leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak earlier that their aim is to “shake the political copyright world at its core.” http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...erdict-090417/ Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - April 11th, April 4th, March 28th, March 21st Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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