Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 19th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I feel too well. Why write when one feels well?" – Jacques Nolot


"If you're worried about mortgage payments and gas prices, when you're sitting in `The Dark Knight' for two and a half hours, you're not thinking about any of that stuff." – Paul Dergarabedian


"MERCHANT and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality." – Friedrich Nietzsche


"Maryland residents should feel free to join a peaceful protest without fear that their names will wind up in police files. They should feel free to engage in nonviolent dissent without fear of being branded as 'terrorists' or 'security threat groups' in shared law-enforcement databases." – Susan Goering


"It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity." – U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit


"I can’t listen to it now without gagging." – Les Crane



























Cap This

ATT will likely impose transfer limits on its consumer Internet service plans. This is a fundamental change in the way we now navigate the Internet yet PR flacks are striving mightily to deny it, insisting any caps will be so high most users won’t even be aware of them, let alone “inconvenienced.”

If these proposed limits seem impossibly generous to anyone who still thinks the internet is merely the electronic equivalent of a pneumatic mail tube rest assured they are actually quite stingy for todays file sharers, and as regular users find themselves mulling over what it means to them - while watching and uploading more and more video – they’ll soon run up against limited service and discover it’s no bargain.

If ATT was fair it would allow unused gigs to "rollover" and count towards subscribers’ maxed out months. Fair doesn't exactly seem to be the word that comes to mind here however, not if the steady drumbeat of accusatory statements from executives are any indication.

The other day the head of ATT showed his gift for the obvious when he said something to the effect that “network upgrades aren’t free,” grumpily sounding as if people were somehow swiping his company’s lines. Note to head: I’m paying $100.00 a month for your fastest data and phone subscriptions so cut the baloney. My service is 95% slower than Japan’s NTT and it’s costing me more. Where’s all the money going anyway?

I’m hearing there really isn't a physical bandwidth crunch among the big operators - especially on DSL. Maximizing profits without having to upgrade infrastructure – the holy grail for shareholders – is always a coveted benefit of course and they harp endlessly about the impossibility of building their way out of congestion, self-serving nonsense when you offer the slowest speeds in the western world certainly, but this appears to be only one motivating factor. More relevant I think is curbing competition between the ISPs and their own customers – file sharers in other words. Monopolizing content delivery to favor ATT's own nascent attempts at paid programming - by shutting out swappers - is probably the ultimate reason behind this, but I don’t want to keep singling out ATT because that wouldn’t be fair. Or balanced. So I’ll spread the blame a little. Time-Warner cable has begun instituting caps in selected markets and by now everyone’s heard about Comcast’s ham fisted traffic shaping public relations disaster. Even if cable has technical issues that fiber telcos like Verizon don’t have to deal with, Comcast has gotten some well deserved heat for shutting down peer-to-peer as opposed to balancing load in a more neutral fashion, and again we’re seeing this behavior at the cable companies for probably the same reasons ATT keeps threatening it: fighting their own customers for delivery slots.

If ISPs wanted to do the most for their customer base they’d continually invest in expanding physical capacity, much like the rest of the world does. This would help them in the long run and it would aid America in her perennial economic competition with other nations. Granted this takes some work. If they’d like to do as little as possible ISPs could at least let customers rollover unused gigabytes or allow credits for under-use. Unfortunately that’s too much trouble as well. It turns out the companies want to do nothing. Well, nothing positive for subscribers at any rate. Take their money, cap, end of deal. Customer gets less, company gets more.

In case you’re wondering what the big deal is if caps are so high, never lowered (unlikely) and you don’t ever bump into them except in the rarest of circumstances it’s simple: any limits at any level kills file-sharing, and does it more effectively than any legal strategies yet devised. Here’s why: A cap decimates the uploader base, and without uploaders, you know, the guys with the stuff, content drys up and that means you can’t download. Oops. It is the single most effective way to kill P2P and that’s the point. Overnight we’re back to the US mail.

In areas where users are in monopoly or duopoly markets, and that is just about everywhere in the US today, switching providers isn’t viable or effective. About the only thing subscribers can do to pressure ISPs is to quit the service entirely and say goodbye to the internet. Tough medicine indeed, all the more so because most groups won’t participate in any kind of strike or boycott if it means even a minor disruption in their lifestyle. Take for example the universally loathed RIAA, they’re still around after suing thousands of people because somebody is still supporting member record companies (bad somebody. Bad). But grass roots economic pressure must be brought to bear on these companies if relief won’t come from elsewhere, like Washington. Truth be told we’re on our own here.

Luckily there is a way out of this (this is the internet after all. There’s always a way.) It’s a simple solution in print if somewhat awkward socially but it’s workable and most importantly if applied on a large scale it will be brutally effective against even the most entrenched and unresponsive ISPs. It’s a tactic I’m thinking of calling NodeShare.

The idea is to get together with four neighbors and create a single shared service for all five users. Using a good wireless router and common password the group will run a shared local node using the fastest service plan among them. My telco for instance sells me 5 megs down (actual) for $35.00 a month. It’s not going to impress a Tokyo surfer but it’s the fastest they have and it’s rare I max it out. If I shared the node with four other friends I’d still have on average 1 meg down. Not great but I lived with that for years and filled a few hard drives. Moreover my slice of the bill would be $7.00 which is less than I ever paid for anything, even dial up. The savings actually would top $300.00 in a year. That’s not bad, even if it’s not the point. Once the fastest plan in the group is identified and NodeShare is running, the other four members with slower or equal service can cancel their accounts the moment caps are introduced, making sure to tell customer service it’s in response to the new limits. This means the ISP sees an immediate drop in revenue of 80% per group wherever they cap. An across the board drop in income so devastating the threat alone could be enough to keep caps from happening. It’s so scary it can change policy, including ironically, any TOS on service sharing.

Some subscribers are in markets where download speeds are much greater than mine, up to five to ten times greater, and in such areas any individual NodeShare branch would have that much more capacity, twice as much even as my unshared line has right now. No reason not to have ten members then. They’d be way ahead, especially with the cost savings, a real win-win for those lucky strikers. Of course some areas have speeds slower than mine so those nodes would require finessing, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize here. The goal is to influence corporate decisions we normally have no direct influence over, despite the fact that in the aggregate we support the entire structure and should, by this right, have total control. Capping will do more harm to file sharing than anything tried so far. Anything that can be done to prevent or postpone it short of insurrection should be attempted.

Since the 1990s sharing has changed just about everything distributable by copy, and that means just about all media, from film and music to TV and print. That it happened in a mostly ad-hoc and undirected fashion is all the more fascinating. We didn’t coalesce and organize. We didn’t get up one day and decide. We just…did. The growth was messy, halting and unmanaged but overwhelmingly effective nonetheless. These last ten years have been wonderful for millions of people, due in large part to the freewheeling nature of the Internet. That past however won’t be the best guide in our coming confrontation with the ISPs. It’s going to take a lot of directed effort to win this one. Nothing we can’t handle mind you but it will require a little social finesse, a few chats across the backyard fence, a few burgers, a few beverages. Old fashioned elbow rubbing and new fangled social networking. A slam dunk? Piece of cake? Walk in the park? Maybe not, but if enough people pull this off so that even ten percent pull out of markets when ISPs attempt capping I think we’ll have an effective movement and a sustainable future for peer-to-peer.


















Enjoy,

Jack

















June 28th, 2008




Study Shows More Piracy

More people pirating DVDs
William Triplett

One in three Americans and Brits is making unauthorized copies of DVDs, according to research sponsored by a maker of digital rights management systems.

Those numbers represent an increase over last year, when the same study showed one in four.

The second Consumer Home Piracy Market Research, conducted by Futuresource Consulting online last May, involved 3,613 consumers in the U.S. and 1,718 in Blighty.

Results, released Tuesday, showed that men 18-24 continue to do the most copying and that the U.K. is experiencing a significant increase in copying TV shows on DVD. Last year, 42% of U.K. consumers surveyed said they were copying TV shows. This year, 61% said so.

Both Americans and Brits showed a preference for copying newly released movies over catalog or library films. In the U.K. during the past six months, consumers copied an average of almost 13 new releases vs. nine catalog/library; in the U.S., consumers copied 7.4 new vs. six catalog/library.

In both countries the most popular source for copying DVDs was rented or borrowed discs.

Asked whether they would have purchased the films had they not been able to copy them, 63% of respondents in the U.K. and 77% in the U.S. said they would have purchased all, some or at least a few of the titles, "clearly indicating the scale of the lost revenues to the homevideo industry from home copying," a summary of the study said.

Study was funded by Macrovision, which develops and markets DRM systems.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988588.html





Court Orders Quebec File-Sharing Site Shutdown
Graeme Hamilton

Canada's recording industry has won a court order shutting down a popular Quebec Internet site that allowed users to share music and films free of charge.

The decision is being described as the first time a Canadian court has ruled on the grey area of peer-to-peer file sharing, which record companies say is costing them millions in lost sales.

Quebec Superior Court Justice Pierre Tessier issued the permanent injunction closing QuebecTorrent.com on Wednesday and ordered its operator, Sébastien Brulotte, to refrain from being involved in "any technology allowing the download of any work protected by copyright."

Mr. Brulotte, a 28-year-old resident of St-Jérôme, north of Montreal, is also ordered to refrain from making any comment regarding the dispute "that may be prejudicial" to the record companies that sought the injunction.

Solange Drouin, executive director of ADISQ, the association representing Quebec's recording industry, called the injunction a major victory. File-sharing sites such as QuebecTorrent have cut deeply into compact-disc sales in the province, she said.

"We really hope that this will have a dissuasive effect on other sites that do the same thing with Quebec music," she said, saying there are dozens of them operating in Canada. The association plans to send copies of the injunction to the other sites to let them know they are breaking the law.

"If they don't act accordingly, we'll have to proceed the same way, with an injunction," she said.

QuebecTorrent, which had operated for about two years, specialized in Quebec content, from popular TV shows to the latest hit recordings. In April, it boasted 85,000 users. In an interview last fall with La Presse, Mr. Brulotte, who used the online name Doditz, said he did not consider himself a pirate.

"I see myself as someone fighting against a failing system," he said. "I am not doing this to harm the little artists. It's just that I find the big machines behind them are making too much profit."

In the end, it was the "big machines" that carried the day. ADISQ was joined in its legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which represents the major labels, as well as the Canadian Independent Record Production Association, 20 Quebec labels and a Quebec association of independent film and television producers.

After vowing to fight the action, Mr. Brulotte agreed to shut down his site on the eve of a scheduled hearing this week. In exchange, the plaintiffs dropped a demand for $200,000 in damages.

Michael Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa specializing in Internet issues, said it is not surprising that QuebecTorrent decided not to fight.

"The prospect of both the legal fees and the big organizations on the other side who are prepared to spend millions of dollars on litigation has an enormous chilling effect," he said. "Invariably, individual users, Web sites, cave in the face of these kinds of legal demands."

There is disagreement about the significance of the precedent set by the injunction. Chantal Desrosiers, ADISQ's lawyer, said it is valuable even though the substance of the issue was not argued in court.

"The court would not have issued the order if it had not been convinced that the Copyright Act prohibited that type of Web site," she said. Mr. Brulotte's lawyer, Sébastien Leblond, said part of the reason his client ultimately agreed to the injunction was to avoid setting a bad legal precedent.

"Instead of going to war without the proper equipment, we decided not to hurt the big case," he said, referring to an eventual Canadian court case on the use of the file-sharing protocol known as BitTorrent.

Duncan McKie, president of the Canadian Independent Record Production Association, said he hopes the injunction will persuade users that it is wrong to share copyrighted material online.

"There's not only a legal message, but to some degree a moral message around local culture and its preservation and trying to support artists in Quebec," he said. "Given the situation in Quebec right now and in the record industry in general, it could be pretty damaging if you sort of turn on the tap and say, ‘Everybody, here you go.'"
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=648919





Business Takes Sides in Net Neutrality Debate
Michael Geist

For most of the past two years, the net neutrality issue, which focuses on equal treatment of Internet traffic, was limited to academics and consumer groups pointing to the dangers to the public of a two-tier Internet. That dynamic changed dramatically this year when Bell Canada began "deep-packet inspection" of its traffic and limited the bandwidth it allocates to certain applications at peak times (a practice known as "throttling").

The fallout from Bell's action — including a formal complaint to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a protest rally on Parliament Hill in late May and a private-member's bill introduced by NDP MP Charlie Angus — has elevated net neutrality in the public policy hierarchy. Indeed, CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein told an industry group last month net neutrality "is one of the polarizing issues of the day. It will have to be addressed and debated by all of us."

In recent days the debate has advanced further as the business community begins to take sides.

Online search giant Google led the charge, arguing in a CRTC submission that "providers of broadband internet access services, including Bell, should be prohibited from throttling lawful applications. The Internet is simply too important to allow them to act as such a gatekeeper; the Internet's myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they prefer."

While Google's entry into the debate made headlines, it was not alone. The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, Canada's largest high-tech association, warned "the measures that Bell Canada is applying to manage the traffic of its Sympatico customers as well as its wholesale ISP customers is interfering with the ability of end-users to telecommute and/or work from their home offices and hindering our members from running their business and providing quick customer services."

Skype, the popular Internet telephony service, cautioned that "for the Internet to remain innovative, and continue to deliver productivity gains for consumers and businesses, the CRTC must act — in this proceeding — to protect the interests of consumers."
Kaboose, a Calgary company that ranks as one of the top five family-oriented destinations online, stated "the recent actions of Bell Canada set a dangerous precedent for targeted restriction of innovation."

Redware, an emerging online service for small business owners, said "to permit Bell Canada to continue these restrictive Internet practices would set a dangerous precedent and send a message to Canadian entrepreneurs that this nation is not prepared to support their innovation potential."

Bell obviously has its defenders. Two of its leading competitors — Rogers and Telus — expressed support for its position, with Telus arguing the CRTC should disregard the privacy concerns raised by several consumer groups.

Cisco, a seller of equipment used to manage Internet traffic, warned "broad net neutrality mandates would frustrate consumer interests," while the Information Technology Association of Canada, which is headed by a former Bell executive, suggested the net neutrality debate has been "characterized by confused thinking."

The CRTC is unlikely to quickly solve the net neutrality issue or leave all parties satisfied with Bell's throttling policy. However, the issue has had a galvanizing effect on the Canadian business community, with many lining up with consumer groups and independent ISPs by pointing to the link between net neutrality and a robust innovation framework.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/459502





NDP Candidate to Make Copyright a Byelection Issue in Guelph, Ont.
CBC News

NDP candidate Tom King pledged Friday to make the federal government's copyright reform bill an issue in the upcoming byelection in Guelph, Ont.

One of three ridings that will hold federal byelections in early September, Guelph is expected to be hotly contested by Conservative candidate Gloria Kovach and Liberal candidate Frank Valeriote, after incumbent Liberal MP Brenda Chamberlain resigned in April.

King, a longtime artist and writer, urged Guelph-area residents to get politically involved to prevent the proposed copyright legislation from becoming law and push for rules that are fair to artists and consumers. Valeriote couldn't be reached for comment.

Bill C-61, introduced last month by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner, seeks to update Canada's copyright rules and bring them in line with the country's obligations under the World Intellectual Property Organization treaty signed more than a decade ago.

The bill spells out Canadians' rights with respect to digital copying of content, granting permission to make copies of books, photographs, music and other media.

It found support with a number of entertainment industry groups, including the Entertainment Software Association of Canada and the Canadian Recording Industry Association, for proposing methods of stopping illegal piracy of copyrighted works.

However, the source of most of the criticism is the bill's anti-circumvention clause, which would allow copyright holders to place digital locks on content to prevent copies from being made. Critics claim the clause invalidates all of the other rights granted, thus heavily skewing the bill in favour of copyright holders.

"Under Bill C-61, if you purchase a new computer and move the songs from your iPod to the new computer, the Conservatives believe that is a criminal offence," King said in a news release. "This type of American approach to copyright law does not benefit Canadian consumers, or Canadian artists."

King said he is looking forward to working with grassroots activists on the issue.

The proposed bill won't progress much over the next few months as Parliament is adjourned until Sept. 15. When it resumes, the bill will receive its second reading and then be sent to a committee for closer scrutiny. The Conservatives could make it a confidence bill, meaning that if opposition parties voted it down, they would force an election.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2008/07...copyright.html





Now A German Court Says Open WiFi Owner Is Responsible For What Others Do On WiFi

Remember just over a week ago the good news coming out of Germany concerning an appeals court ruling that noted (properly) that the owner of an open WiFi access point was not liable for actions done by others on that WiFi? Well, apparently there's a bit of a "split" in the German courts. An anonymous reader sends us notice of a news report out of Germany with a lower level court apparently ruling in the exact opposite way (link in German, translations welcome; here's Google's translation). From what the submitter and the translation suggest, the court claims that it's the responsibility of the access point owner to secure the WiFi, and if they do not, they have to take on some liability for what happens on that system. There's no question, apparently, that the owners of the WiFi system did not actually share the file in question. They showed they were not at home at the time of the alleged infringement, and they had no file sharing software on their computer. While the case isn't yet over, the owners of the WiFi access point have to pay court costs, lawyers fees and the amount they were sued for... and they may face criminal prosecution as well.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080717/1558191712.shtml





Sir Cliff Richard Pins Hopes on Law that Will Keep Cash Rolling in Until He’s 113

EU proposes royalty extension for performers
David Charter

The rock dinosaurs of the 1960s are in line for a spectacular windfall after the EU announced plans yesterday to extend musicians’ entitlement to retrospective royalties from 50 to 95 years.

Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey have all campaigned for what the record industry calls “the Beatles extension”, which will guarantee most artists royalties covering their entire careers.

The first Beatles recordings will come out of copyright in 2012 and EMI, which owns them, has been a leading campaigner for the change in legislation. Sir Cliff, 67, sees his first hit go out of copyright this year but under the EU proposal he would not lose a penny before his 113th birthday.

Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, has said that thousands of musicians have no pensions and rely on royalties in their old age. For many campaigners, however, the extra income is probably not essential for paying the winter heating bills. Yoko Ono and Barry Gibb were among 4,500 who took out a newspaper advertisement in 2006 calling for 95-year copyright control.

When the Government resisted their call, arguing that most performers would not benefit, the record industry pledged to take the fight to Europe. At the time, Sir Cliff said: “I’m absolutely fed up with singing Living Doll but I have sung it constantly since 1959 because every time I sing it live it generates sales of the original record and royalties to me.”

Charlie McCreevy, the Internal Market Commissioner, said yesterday that performers’ rights would be brought into line with those of authors, as is the case in America. He said: “A 95-year term would bridge the income gap that performers face when they turn 70, just as their early performances recorded in their twenties would lose protection. They will continue to be eligible for broadcast remuneration for performances in public places and compensation payments for private copying of their performances.”

President Sarkozy of France - a close friend of the venerable crooner Johnny Hallyday - had vowed to try to push the deal through the EU during France’s six-month presidency, which started this month.

Opponents of the proposal say that music lovers would suffer from an end to cheap compilations of old recordings. A government spokeswoman said: “The Government is not convinced that there is an economic case for extending the copyright term for performers. We would need to be convinced of real benefits, particularly that it is truly the performers who will benefit rather than the record labels.”

John Smith, of the Musicians’ Union, said that thousands of unsung heroes of vinyl would benefit. “Countless session musicians who have contributed so significantly to the musical heritage of the UK will greet this recognition with delight and relief.”

Anthony Baldwin, a musician and sound engineer who restores old recordings, said that the proposals marked a black day for music fans. “If the legislation gets through, you can say goodbye to independent European vintage CD reissues,” he said.

The proposals will be considered by the European Parliament and need majority approval by ministers.

Herbie Flowers, who played bass on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side and David Bowie’s Space Oddity, said: “The term of protection for performers has not kept up with life expectancy and it is high time it was changed. I played on a couple of very successful tracks, and it would be unfair for me to stop receiving income for these performances after 50 years - probably just at the time when I will need it the most.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle4347643.ece





Copyright: so Complex, Here's a Slide Rule to Decode it
Nate Anderson

If you don't work in the fields of digital preservation, library science, or copyright law, you might have the impression that copyright is a fairly pedestrian beast—the milk cow of the legal world, if you will. What could be simpler than writing your book, recording your song, or drawing up your vessel hull design? Copyright law immediately grants you a set term of protection. Simple. Clear. Deliciously creamy.

It's also a pipe dream. The reality is that US copyright is a humped and horned animal with two heads, pebbly skin, and a ravenous stomach that gorges itself on the grain called "Complexity."

The American Library Association, which has a tremendous interest in the contours of copyright policy, just this week called on Congress to change one of copyright's odder stipulations: sound recordings made before Feb. 15, 1972 won't enter the public domain until 2067. This invites a "significant risk of loss by thwarting preservation programs because of the uncertainty over whether creating preservation copies would violate copyright law."

To make all this complexity a bit more bearable, the Wired Campus blog points us to a "digital slider" just added this week to the ALA tool chest. It lets users dial up the various copyright terms for works created at different time periods and under different conditions.

For example, the slider shows that copyrighted works created between 1923 and 1977 are in the public domain now if they were published without a copyright notice. But if they were published with such a notice, they may be protected through 2018 or even longer. Err, but only if they were renewed after 28 years; if they weren't, they are in the public domain, even if published with a copyright notice. Clear?

The tool, a slick but simple Flash applet, is the brainchild of Michael Brewer at the University of Arizona, and it's Creative Commons licensed for others to adopt in their own countries. If you're still kicking it dead-tree style, make sure to order one of the earlier, cardboard copyright sliders for five bucks.

The ALA also offers a very nice "Fair Use Checklist" (PDF) that uses the "four factor" fair use criteria to offer a bit of guidance about whether an intended use of copyrighted material might be "fair" (the determination that it is fair can only be made by a judge). For instance, looking at the purpose of the use, teaching, research, criticism, comment, and parody all weigh in favor of fair use; commercial activity, profit, entertainment, and bad faith behavior all weigh against it.

As user-generated content takes the Internet by storm, legions of unschooled-in-copyright creators are pumping out material. Much of this content incorporates at least some bit of copyrighted work, such as pictures, video clips, or music, so the recent plethora of guides designed to make it clear when and how such work can be used is welcome.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...decode-it.html





Textbooks, Free and Illegal, Online

Use of pirated works hurting publishers
Hiawatha Bray

Faced with soaring prices for textbooks, cash-strapped students have discovered a tempting, effective, but illicit alternative - pirated electronic books, available for free over the Internet.

"We think it's a significant problem," said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company's titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.

It's not just textbooks that are being downloaded improperly. Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at the Association of American Publishers in New York, said a survey in May located about 1,100 titles available illegally online, including novels and books on current events.

But textbook piracy is particularly seductive, McCoyd said, because students are often hard-pressed to pay for academic books that can cost more than $100, three times the price of most other books.

A 2007 graduate of the University of Texas who requested anonymity said he routinely downloaded pirated copies during his four years at college. "Textbooks were massively overpriced," said the student, who graduated with degrees in anthropology and English. He added that many books were rarely or never used in class. "All of these things . . . lead me to pirate textbooks off the Internet whenever possible," he said, adding that he continues to download illegally copied books.

McCoyd said publishers have begun offering less expensive paperback versions of some titles, and are themselves selling many legal electronic editions, or e-books, over the Internet. For instance, McGraw Hill Cos., a major textbook vendor, offers most of its titles in electronic form, at lower prices than printed editions. A McGraw Hill physics textbook that costs $135 in hardcover can be downloaded for $80 at the company's online retail store. A Utah company called CafeScribe sells electronic textbooks in a social networking format. CafeScribe's customers can discuss their coursework with others who have bought the same books.

Some instructors avoid textbooks altogether, while still making use of the Web. "I have over the last five years or so stopped the practice of assigning textbooks," said Vincent Rocchio, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "Instead, I publish a group of essays electronically on my course website."

Rocchio said "the outrageous cost of textbooks" makes it cheaper for him to purchase electronic publishing rights and pass the lower costs on to the students.

Still, young people who have grown accustomed to downloading music for free may be readily drawn to the prospect of getting their textbooks the same way. "If someone wants to avoid buying their textbook," said McCoyd, "this is a potential way to get it."

Some of the illegal texts available online are copied e-books, while others are paper editions that have been painstakingly uploaded page by page with digital scanners. "Is it some kid sitting in his basement doing the scanning? We don't know," said Allan Ryan, director of intellectual property at Harvard Business Publishing, an arm of Harvard Business School.

Once copied, some files are distributed through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like the popular BitTorrent. To find a title, an Internet user could visit one of many BitTorrent index sites. The sites don't actually store the illegal files, but provide links to networks of users who have copies. Clicking a link starts a BitTorrent program that downloads pieces of the book from multiple sources to form a complete copy.

Other downloads come from file-hosting sites that store complete copies of books. One such site, Scribd.com, is based in San Francisco. Backed by $3.7 million in funding from venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, Scribd calls itself "the world's largest document-sharing community," with 17 million visitors a month. Users sign up for free accounts, which allow them to post documents on Scribd for other users to read or download. Businesses and educators use Scribd to share legitimate documents, but some account holders post copyrighted materials, including books.

Jason Bentley, Scribd's director of community development and copyright agent, said that his site allows only legal file sharing and that any files posted without permission of the copyright holder are taken down. "We will remove the item or items within hours," Bentley said in an interview. "If you have more than two works taken down for copyright infringement, your account will be closed." A federal law shields websites from copyright lawsuits if they quickly comply with removal demands from the copyright holders. Earlier this month, Bentley told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Scribd gets at least one take-down request a day, including frequent ones from Harvard University Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

McCoyd and other publishing industry officials agreed that Scribd and similar sites do remove books when a publisher complains. But with thousands of titles posted at such sites daily, publishers don't always know that their works are available. And Bentley said Scribd won't take down a file merely because it may have been posted illegally; the publisher must make a complaint.

A recent visit to Scribd revealed plenty of copyrighted materials there. For example, several titles published by Cengage Learning, like the $211 Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, were readily available for free. According to information on the site, more than 300 visitors had viewed the book. Any of them could have downloaded a complete copy.

Unlike the music recording industry, which has sued individuals who download pirated songs, book publishers haven't gone after readers who copy titles through the Internet. But they are pressuring websites that distribute the files. Peter Anaman, senior Internet investigations manager for the law firm Covington & Burling in London, tracks online book piracy for a number of publishers in the United States. Anaman and his colleagues routinely scour the Internet for pirated books, then contact website operators, warning of legal consequences if the files are not removed.

"There's a lot out there, but we've made a great deal of progress," said Anaman. "We've removed thousands."

Complicating enforcement efforts, Anaman said, many book swappers are based in countries such as China and Russia, where US copyright law carries little weight. McCoyd said the publishers' goal is "to keep this activity on the fringes and keep it from taking over the mainstream." But he conceded that fighting the pirates is a job that will not end. "You whack one down," said McCoyd, "and another one pops up."
http://www.boston.com/business/artic...stPop_Emailed2





P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming
Ernesto

The Swarmplayer developed by the P2P-Next research group is now capable of streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P style using a zero-server approach. With a $22 million project budget from the EU and partners, the P2P-Next research group intends to redefine how video is viewed on the Internet.

This new breakthrough technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a webcam feed, to thousands of people, using around the same amount of bandwidth you would use to stream to one or two people. With SwarmPlayer, the user can simply click on a “live” .torrent file and tune into any live BitTorrent channel. To make this possible, the P2P-Next research group created a new .tstream format which is a regular .torrent with live capability.

The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The scientific director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it’s not just the BBC interested in this new technology: “We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future.”

If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth. YouTube 2.0, sort of.

Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and Open Source. “As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don’t already have, without needing to worry about business models,” he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.

“To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible,” Pouwelse said. “However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.”

“Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just in time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.”

Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different than downloading a huge video file. What the Swarmplayer does is download and buffer one minute’s worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.

A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the “UnDownload()” functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you’re watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7 year old code.”

For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available.

The Swarmplayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still work in progress. “We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month,” Pouwelse said, “then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more.” We will certainly keep an eye on these developments, as it may change the way we watch video online.
http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-next-int...eaming-080718/





Final RIAA/Jammie Thomas Briefs in; New Trial Decision Looms
Nate Anderson

The final briefs in the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case are in, and neither Thomas nor the RIAA are conceding an inch of ground. Both sides parse the requisite legal cases with a concern for text and context that would make a biblical scholar weep with joy, and both claim that the "great weight of authority" rests squarely on their own side of the scale. And that's before the gloves come off.

In a legal case that has already had its share of thongs, we've at long last come to the end of the briefs as well. After Thomas was found liable last year for more than $200,000 in statutory damages, she sought a new trial based on a jury instruction no. 15 and the issue of whether making a song "available" over a P2P network was a "distribution" that would violate copyright. The judge in the case said that it would, but has since reconsidered his position, and is considering Thomas' request for a new trial.

The final briefs in that process rehash all the familiar ground about making available, MediaSentry, and the "plain meaning" of the Copyright Act (which, as is usually the case with "plain meaning" arguments, isn't actually plain at all). These are all issues we have covered in depth before as various "friends of the court" have filed briefs in the case. What's most interesting here instead is the passionate appeals to the judge; indeed, both briefs make for interesting reading in part because of the intensity of the argument.

Much is on the line in this case. With several judges recently giving credence to the idea that making available may not be the same as distribution, the RIAA is keen to avoid more rulings in that direction. It also wants to keep its win in the Thomas case unsullied, while Thomas herself would no doubt like another shot at a trial (and the possibility of reduced damages).

Here's the takeaway from the RIAA: "Defendant and its amici are throwing every obstacle they can in the path of the Plaintiffs' enforcement efforts, safe in the knowledge that it is incredibly difficult to catch users downloading works that are made available over networks like KaZaA. Amici are well aware that their view of the law would cripple enforcement of what all concede are widespread and massive violations of Plaintiffs' rights. That cannot possibly be—and is not—what Congress intended."

Whatever you think of the argument, this is (stylistically) a fine bit of writing.

Thomas' lawyer, Brian Toder, mounts his argument by pointing out that the RIAA's outside backers (the MPAA and the Progress & Freedom Foundation) are "either partially owned or financially supported by" the plaintiffs.

In addition, the record labels "rely on what they call 'decades of case law,' but the fact is that the Internet has not been around for decades, and if there is a problem with the Copyright Act, Congress must fix it. In the meantime, the law in this Circuit is that making-available, in and of itself, is not a violation of the Copyright Act, the act of downloading a copyrighted work by an agent of the plaintiff is not a distribution conferring liability upon a defendant, and the plaintiffs here have the same burden every plaintiff has: they must prove their case."

The decision is now in the hands of the judge, who finds himself in the unusual position of being able to make Duluth, Minnesota the center of the technology universe once more simply by ordering a new trial.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ion-looms.html





Anti-Piracy Evidence Put in Doubt by Leecher
enigmax

The accuracy of evidence collected by anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector has been called into doubt. It is alleged that the recipient of a 700 Euros compensation demand for unauthorized uploading was actually operating a client which was modified never to upload, thus making infringement impossible.

There are many cases where data collected by anti-piracy companies has been called into doubt. Apparently even laser printers are pirating media these days, such is the flimsy nature of the data gathering. Now, according to an interesting Heise report, it seems that it’s possible for these companies to log pure downloaders and provide this information to lawyers to process compensation demands, even when no uploading has taken place.

Despite operating a version of eMule modified to never upload (via a so-called ‘leecher mod’), a user of the eD2K network has received a claim for compensation of 700 euros. Anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector allegedly gathered the data in October 2007 and stated that the user had been caught uploading a movie and some adult material.

The accused has claimed that, because of the zero-upload modded client, it was impossible that anything was uploaded. The client itself had never been reset and displayed a operating time of 924 days and it had never distributed a file.

Of course, tracking companies such as Media Protector and Logistep are always super-confident of the accuracy of their systems, even though they are never confident enough to open them up to scrutiny. Lawyers are always quick to point out that the evidence is good enough for the courts to grant orders for the disclosure of user’s personal information, but it’s a one sided process and the defendant never gets the opportunity to contest before their identity is revealed.

In the interests of fairness and transparency, the sooner these companies have their systems opened up for scrutiny, the better. If the systems are proved accurate, then this strengthens the position of anti-piracy tracking companies and enhances their credibility, so one has to question why they are so reluctant to reveal their techniques. Maybe it’s because they are afraid that Cory Doctorow is on the right track?

Perhaps of more concern is why courts are so willing to accept this data as foolproof when seemingly no-one knows how it is collected. And when defendants are denied this information too, fairness seems a distant concept.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...ploads-080714/





Radiohead Open Sources a Music Video
Sam Dean

I'm always interested in the offbeat ways that the benefits of the open source model--lots of eyeballs, community efforts--can be applied to new types of ideas. We posted about several non-software focused efforts in this area recently. Now, as The Guardian is reporting, the band Radiohead has a new spin on this concept. Its new single "House of Cards" has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here--better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.

Radiohead, as you may recall, made waves not long ago when it released an entire album and invited the downloading community to pay whatever it saw fit--including nothing in some cases--for the album. The average downloader who did pay ended up paying about $6 for the album, according to ComScore. That's quite something when you consider that recording artists usually get about $1 per CD sold when they release their music through labels and the grip of the RIAA.

Here are some of the advanced techniques that were used to create House of Cards, from the Google Code site: "No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes."

If you want to create a visualization variant of the Radiohead video, the band will view entries at this YouTube page. Being a musician myself, I like to see this kind of variant of the open source model applied in this way. I have also appreciated similar efforts from the band Nine Inch Nails. It has solicited actual musical parts and remixes--such as recorded guitar solos--from its audience on the Internet, and then incorporated the best ones in its songs, with credits for the contributors. Hey, what works works.
http://ostatic.com/168755-blog/radio...-a-music-video





Paul McCartney Joins Billy Joel at Shea Stadium
Ben Sisario

It takes a lot to upstage Billy Joel at Shea Stadium.

But late on Friday night, nearly three hours into a career-spanning performance advertised as the last concert at Shea before it was to be demolished, Mr. Joel seemed happy to turn over the spotlight to Paul McCartney, who, he said, had just flown in from London.

The sold-out crowd of 55,000 people let out an ear-splitting roar as Mr. McCartney sang the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” with Mr. Joel singing backup and, fitting his reputation as a self-deprecating rock star, looking on from his piano as if he were just another fan himself.

Before beginning “Let It Be,” Mr. McCartney alluded to the Beatles’ first concert at Shea in 1965, the year after the stadium opened.

“It’s so cool to be back here on the last night,” he said. “Been here a long time ago — we had a blast that night, and we’re having another one tonight.”

The concert was the second of two farewell shows by Mr. Joel, who told the crowd earlier in the night: “They’re tearing this house down. I want to thank you for letting me do the job and keep doing it — the best job in the world.”

Mr. McCartney wasn’t the only big guest. The country star Garth Brooks, dressed in a Mets T-shirt, sang Mr. Joel’s “Shameless,” which was a big hit for Mr. Brooks; Steven Tyler of Aerosmith performed “Walk This Way;” and Roger Daltrey of the Who — which played at Shea in 1982 — sang “My Generation” as Mr. Joel smashed a guitar on the center-field stage.

Before the show, fans praised Mr. Joel, Long Island’s favorite son, as an approachable superstar whose songs chronicle everyday New York lives and struggles. “Only New Yorkers have a true sense of what he talks about,” said Lauren Marchiano, 26. As an avowed follower of both Mr. Joel and the Mets, she said, the night was doubly poignant for her.

But the most popular topic of conversation seemed to be how much everyone had paid to get in. Ronnie Glowacki, an administrative assistant from Brooklyn, had been frozen out when tickets went on sale in February; she would say only that she paid “somewhere between zero and $500” to get in on Friday. A Yankees fan, she was there to catch what could be a last glimpse — not of Shea Stadium, but of Mr. Joel.

“I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be doing concerts, so I want to get every one I can get in,” she said. “For me it’s all Billy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/ny...19joel.html?hp





Yusuf Islam Wins Damages For "Veiled Women" Slur

British folk singer Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, accepted libel damages and an apology on Friday from a news agency that reported he had refused to talk to women at an awards ceremony who were not wearing a veil.

The artist, who changed his name after becoming a Muslim in the late 1970s, will donate the "substantial" payout to Small Kindness, a U.N.-linked charity he chairs.

Adam Tudor, the singer's attorney, told London's High Court that the story behind the legal action was published by World Entertainment News Network and was used on Contactmusic.com, a website said to have 2.2 million page views a month.

The article appeared in March last year and suggested that the singer was "so sexist and bigoted that he refused at an awards ceremony to speak to or even acknowledge any women who were not wearing a veil," Tudor said.

"It went on to suggest that Mr. Islam's manager had stated 'Mr. Islam doesn't speak with women except his wife, least of all if they don't wear a headscarf. Things like that only happen via an intermediary."'

Tudor said the article had embarrassed the singer, creating a false impression of his attitude to women and also casting serious aspersions on his religious faith.

World Entertainment News Network issued an apology, saying:

"We now accept that these allegations ... are entirely without foundation, and that Mr. Islam has never had any difficulties working with women, whether for religious or for any other reason."

Islam, 59, is still best known for his hits as Cat Stevens, including "Wild World," "Morning Has Broken" and "Moonshadow."

He sold an estimated 60 million albums as Stevens, but retired from showbusiness in 1978 after converting to Islam. He released his first mainstream pop album since then in 2006.
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...88341620080718





Out of Range?

Simple fixes for getting online
Peter Cochrane

A couple of weeks ago I received a call from one of my start-up companies gearing up for an exhibition and demo that was dependent on having online connectivity.

Unfortunately, the location was at a marina some 500 metres from the nearest wi-fi hotspot and no 3G signal was visible. They wanted to know whether I could help.

In my lab I looked out a couple of old wireless routers and a wi-fi extender plus a wi-fi dongle. About an hour later I was able to get four bars at 200 metres and began to get confident that this was going to be an easy fix.

To get the final throw I needed to focus the energy in a beam and enlisted the help of an old domestic satellite dish and a dongle. The rough and ready set-up is shown below.

On the day the team opted to use the 3G dongle. They managed to pull five bars of signal from an initial level of zero.

So it occurred to me that many of you folks living out in the country, villages and towns, who email me from time to time complaining of net deprivation, might just appreciate this very simple, low-cost solution.

All you have to do is make sure the dongle and especially the USB connector cannot get wet. Anything from a plastic canteen cup to a plastic bag should do the trick - depending on how professional you would like it to appear.

One last warning; watch out for the sun and the UV rays that degrade plastic and for the full enclosures that raise the temperature above 50C. Make sure there is some ventilation and adequate drainage holes should water actually get in.

Oh, and if you are having trouble getting a good mobile phone signal - standing in front of a dish also helps but it isn't very portable. Enjoy.
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0...9259275,00.htm





Internet TV Passes Cable in France

ADSL viewers reach 8.5 million
John Hopewell

Broadband Internet TV has overtaken cable TV in France, according to audience measurement company Mediametrie.

In its latest MediaCabSat Gallic pay TV report, which includes IPTV data for the first time, Mediametrie estimates French ADSL TV viewers at 8.5 million for June 15.

Cable TV viewership dropped from 6.1 million Feb. 17 to 6 million June 15.

Stats do not include sub-cable feeds with fewer than 10-12 channels.

Results underscore France’s status as Europe’s most vibrant Internet TV market, energized by deep-pocketed aggressive IPTV operators such as France Telecom-Orange, Free and SFR-Neuf Cegetel.

"ADSL TV is free for broadband subscribers, and it will continue to grow. Cable will most probably stagnate," said Francois Godard, an analyst at London-based Enders Analysis.

Mediametrie’s report also highlights the continued erosion of broadcasters market share, even in a multi-channel universe. TF1 took a 23.4% share Jan. 1-June 15, down from 25.3% first half 2007. France 2 dropped from 13.5% to 13.3%, France 3 from 9.6% to 9.1%. Only M6 managed to claw back share, rising from 8.5% to 8.8%.

“The decrease of the share of historical broadcasters is not only a result of the launch of cable, satellite and Internet TV. It’s happening within the multi-channel universe as well,” Godard said.

Gaul’s share-challenged broadcasters can take some small comfort from two trends.

Fragmentation is beginning to hurt some of the original fragmenters: Weekly viewership at a clutch of star pay TV channels is leveling off or even declining as more pay TV rivals with a similar focus launch.

Eurosport has held out another four months as France’s premier niche pay TV channel, but weekly viewers stood at 6.7 million, down on February’s 6.8 million and way down on 7.5 million a year ago.

And, in another recent report, “TV in the World: Continuity and Rupture,” Mediametrie claims that France is the major Euro territory “where established channels are holding on best to share.” New channels since 2000 have 17.5% share, as compared with 36.5% in the U.K.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988728.html





It's Boiling Down to Cable Vs. Telecom
David Lazarus

Telecom and cable companies are fond of saying how much competition exists in their respective industries. Dissatisfied customers can always take their business elsewhere, the companies insist.

In fact, few telecom and cable companies actually compete head to head. And now, these businesses are forming unprecedented partnerships as the two industries vie for nationwide dominance over voice, video and Internet services.

AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. -- the three biggest U.S. phone companies -- announced last week that they're working together for the first time to help customers stay connected when they move to a new city.

The companies' new website, Movearoo.com, describes itself as "a one-stop shop for America's moving needs," offering everything from bundled telecom services to change-of-address forms.

What the site doesn't include is any information about what local cable providers may offer for people seeking cheaper communications alternatives.

Meanwhile, six leading cable companies have banded together for something called Project Canoe, which is intended to create a nationwide system for targeting ads to specific viewers.

Project Canoe could give the cable industry a leg up on telecom companies by making their networks more attractive to marketers.

Both Movearoo.com and Project Canoe represent an evolution in how telecom and cable companies operate, an escalating of competition from the company level to that of entire industries.

"It's a duopoly," said Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network in San Diego. "It's two titans battling for the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers."

According to Frank Kellam, Verizon's business development manager, the three big phone companies have been quietly planning for the last year and half to create a "solution to ease the stress of moving."

He said the detente among AT&T, Verizon and Qwest reflects a changing business environment in which cable and, to a lesser extent, online Voice over Internet Protocol service providers like Skype are encroaching on phone companies' traditional territory.

"We are adjusting our strategy to keep our customers away from the cable and VoIP companies," Kellam said.

Joe Izbrand, an AT&T spokesman, echoed this sentiment. He said the telecom companies want to ensure that no matter where people move, "they have choices other than cable companies."

It doesn't take much imagination to foresee even greater cooperation among telecom companies as they try to fend off these rivals.

And as the phone companies become more intertwined as business partners, they'll have less incentive to challenge one another in the few areas where they really do compete, such as wireless service.

In the cable arena, Project Canoe isn't as overt a gesture of defiance toward competitors as Movearoo.com, but in some ways it's an even more sophisticated stab at circling the wagons of one industry.

As it grows harder for marketers to cut through the clutter of the information and entertainment landscape, the Holy Grail for advertisers is to be able to pitch products at the people most likely to buy them.

In other words, movie studios want to reach households with teens. Pet food companies want to reach households with cats or dogs.

That's already possible with some cable systems, but no uniform technological standard exists to give marketers nationwide reach. Project Canoe is intended to remedy that.

The participating companies are Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Comcast, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks. Trade publications say each has chipped in to create a $150-million pool to develop the technology.

"Project Canoe will help the participating cable companies deliver more value to our advertising partners with increased measurability, targetability and interactivity," said Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable. "It also allows cable networks to enhance their advertising offering."

He added: "All of that can be accomplished without compromising the privacy of our customers, which is of tantamount importance to us. In fact, in many ways, targeted advertising, done right, can be beneficial to consumers."

That remains to be seen, as does the impact on cable viewers' privacy.

By definition, targeting a TV ad at a specific household requires knowing what that household watches. Cable companies know this already, of course, but they've never before attempted to profit from that information on such a grand scale.

"How is this different from what Google does?" asked Alex Dudley, a Time Warner spokesman.

Indeed, Google monitors people's Internet searches and targets online ads accordingly.

But most people go online with an expectation that little or no privacy exists in cyberspace. Many people probably feel otherwise about what they choose to watch in their living rooms or bedrooms.

Meanwhile, what sort of targeted ads might crop up after an evening spent watching the Playboy Channel? This could make for some awkward conversations between husbands and wives.

Shames at the Utility Consumers' Action Network said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers.

"All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage," he said. "That's not competition."

Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...7499799.column





Verizon Secures Approval to Sell TV Programming
Ken Belson

State regulators said Wednesday that Verizon Communications can begin selling cable television programming in New York City, a decision that will is likely to give consumers more choices and potentially lower prices.

Unlike Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, which sell video, Internet and phone services in distinct sections of the city, Verizon’s 12-year franchise requires that the company make its products available to residents throughout New York.

Cablevision and Time Warner are not expected to apply for a citywide franchise when their current agreements expire.

Garry Brown, the chairman of the state’s Public Service Commission, said the approval of Verizon’s franchise “a sure-fire win for consumers in New York City.”

Verizon is spending billions of dollars to build a new, high-speed fiber optic network to deliver those services. Just 20 percent of New York’s 3.1 million households now have access to that network. By the end of 2009, Verizon’s network will reach 30 percent of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, while almost every home in Staten Island and about half of Manhattan has access to that network.

A Verizon spokesman, John Bonomo, said the company will announce the details of its new offers in New York in the coming weeks. Not every neighborhood in the 20 percent of the city now covered by Verizon’s network will be able to get television service immediately because central switching offices must still be upgraded to handle video services, he added.

As a condition to get government approval, Verizon must reach every household within six years. The Public Service Commission, citing “the economic realities and scope of building-out the entire City of New York in an environment where Verizon will compete head-to-head with the incumbent cable operators,” gave Verizon six years, instead of five, to meet its target.

To reach that goal, Verizon must negotiate with apartment landlords and other owners to gain access to their buildings, a complicated and time-consuming process.

In the dozens of towns and cities in New York where Verizon has already started selling television, the company has offered introductory prices to convince consumers to drop their cable or satellite services. Often, rival cable and satellite companies have retaliated in kind.

Verizon, for instance, has been selling a bundle of phone, Internet and television services for as low as $69.99 for six months if consumers sign a two-year contract. The company has also offered new customers free flat-panel televisions and other incentives.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Set top Boxes to Revolutionise Internet Architecture

Peer-to-Peer technology delivering content through set top boxes could see data center days numbered.
Andrew Hendry

National ICT Australia (NICTA) has earned a spot in a European Commission project that aims to revolutionise the way information is delivered over the Internet.

The European Commissions 7th Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development is the $50 billion Euro umbrella under which research-related EU initiatives are housed, and is charged with keeping the EU at the forefront of technological research.

The project NICTA is working on, called Nano Data Centers (NADA), is part of the FP7's future Internet initiative, and has attracted almost AUD$5million in EU funding, with NICTA investing over a quarter of a million dollars in resources.

NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones.

NICTA's Networked Systems Research Group Manager, Dr Max Ott, said the traditional way of delivering online services to the user from huge data centers is a very power and space hungry method that is expensive in terms of hardware, networking and cooling costs.

"If you think of services like video, music, entertainment and MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), the end device is not necessarily your PC anymore. Rather it is something like a set top box or a game console, especially in Europe where set top boxes are very common in providing a lot of functionality like triple-play services and things like that."

These set top boxes don't consume a lot of energy, are well ventilated, and are providing more and more efficient output as chip manufacturers create speedier, more energy efficient processors and storage manufacturers create smaller, higher capacity products.

"So why don't we try to push the functionality that we have now in the data center, and distribute it across hundreds of thousands of set top boxes so that we have these 'Nano Data Centers'," Ott explained.

NADA is seeking to leverage advancements in Peer-to-Peer technology to connect the Nano Data Centers to enable them to work together to provide services to end users.

The set top box would essentially be split in two - one half facing the end user with all the typical functionality and services, while the other half acts as the Peer, or Nano Data Center.

"They isolate it using virtualization technologies, and that secure compartment is now talking to all the other set top boxes, co-ordinating and shifting stuff around. Each of the set top boxes has plenty of storage in it so we can put them together and build a massive data store for all those YouTube videos, Flickr pictures or whatever. We're using Peer-to-Peer under the hood to provide a service," Dr Ott said.

Dr Ott admits that the jury is still out on NADA's potential as they haven't yet fully demonstrated its capabilities on par with existing delivery methods.

"But we definitely think if we actually harness all those processing and storage capabilities on the edge, then we don't need a lot of those data centers."

The NADA project is convincing enough to have attracted some of Europe's largest telecommunications companies. Set top box manufacturer, Thomson SA, and European ISP, Telefonica, are among nine contributing partners to the NADA project.

"Telefonica is a key partner and they are running a trial video service to deliver TV, educational videos and stuff like that with a Peer-to-Peer client from inside their cloud, and it's been very successful. And on the other hand we have Thomson SA, one of the largest set top box manufacturers in the world, so they can clearly see the benefits," Dr Ott said.

"The main thing now is if we can demonstrate the benefits, how quickly will the companies turn it into a commercial outcome."

According to NICTA, the NADA project represents a paradigm shift toward highly distributed service delivery platforms and its results promise enhanced performance of home entertainment networks, low-cost content delivery and support for new applications in the online games arena.

Dr Ott said it was the first time NICTA has been included in the FP7, and indicates that Australian ICT research is considered to be at the forefront of the international stage.

"I am delighted NICTA's research into advanced communications architecture and distributed services has been recognised for the world-class contribution it can make to future applications and research platforms. Gaining a place in the highly competitive European Commission Framework program is a tribute to the international standing of NICTA researchers."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...1;fp;16;fpid;1





Telefonica Offers Free Music

Company hopes to drive subscriptions
Emiliano de Pablos, John Hopewell

Copying the strategy that has powered dramatic Internet TV growth in France, Spain's Telefonica is offering more than two million songs entirely free to new and existing ADSL subscribers.

For the moment at least, the free-of-charge offer is a marketing ploy, and limited to music, designed to run from May 26 to May 2009, aimed at driving Telefonica's Spanish ADSL subscriber base.

Songs are offered on Pixbox, Telefonica's online store launched in 2006. Pixbox has seen 1.4 million downloads since the beginning of June, said Jose Gonzalez, director of multimedia development.

Pixbox has added 10,000 new subs since late May, he added.

Telefonica dominates Spain's broadband market with a 57% share, but ADSL penetration is still relatively low in Spain, running at 18.3%.

It may not be completely coincidental that Telefonica's music move comes just as Filmax is launching portal yodecido.com, offering songs and movies for a price, as well as online TV channels.

"We see Filmax as a facilitator more than a competitor, taking into account the level of downloads at other P2P systems. This competition helps the user moves from one segment to another," Gonzalez added.

Telefonica's free-of-charge download system doesn't include movies nor TV series, but Pixbox aims to strengthen its film catalog, increasing the number of titles from 750 to 3,000 in the short term.

Pixbox has deals with Universal and Paramount, and Spanish distributors Tripictures, Aurum, Filmax, Manga and Notro. It's also inked with Spanish producers rights protection society Egeda.

Portal offers movies on a pay-per-transaction basis using both download-to-own and download-to-rent systems, but customer reaction appears to have been slow.

Telefonica is negotiating with other studios and TV series rights holders to broaden its movie and TV package.

In France, where operators offer IPTV free to ADSL subscribers, the Internet TV market has grown to 8.4 million viewers, a Mediametrie report announced Tuesday.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryid=16&cs=1





Last.fm Gets a Makeover, Ventures Into iPhone, Living Room
David Chartier

Music streaming and social community Last.fm has redesigned for a more mature experience, adding more integration and ubiquity across a variety of devices. Ars Technica put on some headphones and rocked out with some of the new features.

Now sporting a much more refined and organized layout, Last.fm is finally filling its shoes as part of CBS' transition to becoming an "audience company" and further extending its reach onto the web. The network purchased Last.fm in May 2007 for $280 million. Since then, Last.fm has introduced significant new features like music streaming from the four major labels—never mind that little squabble with Warner—and a music video initiative.

Last.fm became a bit more interesting some time ago with the introduction of a plug-in for various software like iTunes and Windows Media Player which "scrobbles" a list of the artists and songs you play up to your Last.fm account (not the files themselves). Combined with adding friends and the ability to purchase songs found on the sites at popular digital outlets like Amazon and iTunes Store, Last.fm has morphed into a convenient, free, one-stop social networking shop for exchanging music tastes, discovering new tracks, and keeping up with one's favorite artists.

No fair making fun of our taste in music

Although some long-time fans are upset (scroll down to the comments) with the redesign, we think Last.fm has gained a much more pleasant layout and new features that make it far easiest and faster to begin discovering new music you might like. While you can still install its plug-in to "scrobble" music and harness Last.fm's auto-recommendation system, you can now simply search for artists and click "add to library" to begin building a music profile and find new music.

While listening to any song with Last.fm's streaming player, the song can easily be added to your library to once again keep building a profile and give the site's recommendation engine more preferred tunes to crunch on. The new features are pleasantly convenient: ee found tracks from both pop and indie artists that we've already added to our shopping carts, and being able to stream the entirety of (most) recommended tracks while we're a thousand miles away from our main iTunes library is an appreciated bonus. Last.fm has also improved the sheer speed of its recommendation system so recommended artists appear "in seconds instead of weeks," so the site takes on the responsiveness of talking to an encyclopedic music store employee instead of trading CDs in the mail.

During our testing today, Last.fm frequently took a while to deliver new pages, and streams occasionally broke. It's understandable in a way since the site is probably experiencing higher-than-average traffic because of the buzz. Considering that sites with heavier media to move like YouTube have yet to experience a memorable hiccup, though, we expect a little more out of CBS since Last.fm is such a big push for the company.

In addition to refreshing its site today, Last.fm is branching out into mobiles phones and the living room. Now that the iPhone and iPod touch can officially run third-party applications, Last.fm launched a free native app that can stream any of the 5+ million songs from its library, recommend new songs, and give users access to their favorite artists and tracks. The app's UI is obviously inspired by Apple's iPod application, and it provides straightforward access to Last.fm's key areas and controls, such as banning a recommended track and a list of events from one's favorite artists. Unfortunately, due to Apple's restriction of not allowing applications to run in the background, you can't start Last.fm's iPhone app and do something else like you can with the built-in iPod app. Considering how quickly streaming music like this could gobble up an iPhone's battery while on-the-go, though, we aren't too broken up about it.

In the living room, Last.fm has partnered with Logitech to bring its services to the gadget company's line of Squeezebox wireless music streaming players. Viewers of the CBS show Swingtown can also now visit last.fm/swingtown during and after each episode to listen to a free, on-demand playlist of songs featured from the show.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ving-room.html





Sony BMG Moves to Old CAA Digs

Music unit takes over Beverly Hills space
Phil Gallo

An iconic Beverly Hills office building that became a white elephant in the weak commercial real estate market finally has a tenant.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment will relocate its West Coast headquarters to the former CAA building in January. The diskery, whose U.S. headquarters are on Madison Avenue in New York, is now housed in Santa Monica.

Personnel from Sony's and BMG's labels, publishing and licensing will move into the 65,000-square-foot space, which has been empty since CAA left for its new HQ in Century City in 2007. Sony BMG has signed a 10-year lease on the property.

The edifice had few interested parties since the asking price -- reportedly $5 per square foot -- was mighty steep for a building whose entire first floor consists of lobby space featuring a Roy Lichtenstein painting so huge that it cannot be removed. In addition, it was clearly designed for one company to occupy the entire building, so it was not feasible to convert it into a traditional office building with multiple tenants.

Sony BMG will pay $4 per square foot and cover operating expenses of between $700,000 and $900,000 per year. Sony BMG would not comment on whether it would be making any structural changes to the building.

Designed by I.M. Pei -- his first project on the West Coast -- and built for $25 million in 1989, the CAA building became so closely associated with Michael Ovitz and his regime that the current CAA chiefs made no secret that their move to new digs in Century City was about making a fresh start. Ovitz remains a landlord of the marble structure at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards.

A similar motivation to put a fresh face on business could be driving the Sony BMG move. The diskery, which owns labels such as Columbia, RCA, Arista and Epic, has sharply reduced its staff over the last several years as sales have declined, and execs may want to shed some demons at their various spaces in the entertainment complex at 20th and Colorado in Santa Monica. (Prior to merging in 2004, Sony had 150,000 square feet of office space in Santa Monica, and BMG was using 85,000 in L.A.).

Rick Rubin, the chief creative exec at Sony BMG's Columbia Records, has been quoted as saying he wanted to move the company's offices even though he works only from his various homes. For a New York Times article last year, he took a reporter to an empty space and the CAA building, touting both options, which led to speculation that Columbia would set up a shop separate from the rest of Sony BMG and become L.A.-based.

There are also some Sony Corp. offices in Santa Monica, but they are not part of the move.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988656.html





Bartering Expands in the Internet Age
James Flanigan

Thomas Daley had been helping friends swap sports tickets for golf course green fees and concert tickets as a sideline. But on the advice of a friend, he set up an online trading site, Joe Barter L.L.C., two years ago where college students could trade textbooks, small companies could trade equipment and accountants, plumbers, business consultants and others could advertise their services.

“I was told our site should be for the average Joe, so Joe Barter, get it?” said Mr. Daley, 36.

The company is still struggling to make its mark, he acknowledged in an interview, though he said he hoped an upgrade for the Web site, scheduled for August, along with a stepped-up marketing effort would significantly expand the membership.

The site has 2,500 individual members, who pay nothing to join the network, and 400 business-to-business members who pay fees for consultations and referrals in connection with transactions. Last year, the company’s revenue totaled about $80,000.

Whatever its prospects for success, the Joe Barter site is tapping into one of the largest “little” industries of small companies in America, the barter or trade exchange business. It is a business for “the little guys,” said Robert Meyer, a onetime pitcher for the New York Yankees who since 1979 has published Barter News, a magazine and online site that reports on more than 500 trade exchanges in the United States.

According to Mr. Meyer, about 450,000 companies do business in bartering’s many networks of retailers, services and manufacturers.

The barter business has developed broadly since 1982, he said, when federal law regularized the tax reporting of barter transactions by requiring them to be denominated in dollars for the Internal Revenue Service. More recently, the Internet has spurred the growth of barter.

Still, Mr. Meyer said, “the largest barter companies are relatively small, about $14 million each in revenue per year.” And the commercial barter business pales beside the decade-old development of eBay. Last year that company took in more revenue from commissions — $7.7 billion — than the whole barter industry handled in transactions. And the classified advertising site Craigslist reaches 450 cities in 50 countries and receives 30 million new advertisements a month.

But one of the biggest advantages of bartering, said Steven White, chief executive of the Itex Corporation of Bellevue, Wash., one of the biggest barter companies, is “that it conserves cash for a small business and it brings in customers.”

The company, a trade exchange that has 24,000 small business members who pay registration fees and commissions on transactions, illustrates how the business works with a hypothetical example.

A dentist provides dental work for a lawyer or accountant who also belongs to the Itex network and thus earns value, denominated in special barter dollars, in her account. She may then use those barter dollars to pay a decorator to work on her offices. “In a small business, you have to pay cash for your mortgage and insurance and other necessities,” Mr. White said. “But barter helps you conserve that scarce resource.”

Now 50, Mr. White has led Itex since 2003, but he said he has been in the barter business since 1982 when he founded Cascade Trade Association in Washington State, a company he eventually sold in 2000.

With Itex, he said, he is intent on expanding the trading network by working through brokers and 90 Itex franchises and by acquiring other barter companies.

In the last four years, Itex has grown by about a third to $14.1 million in fees and commissions in 2007. Its exchange processed $270 million in business transactions in 2007. “Distribution is the key to the business, expanding the member network so we can offer more services,” Mr. White said.

The barter business is growing, but slowly. In 2007, the total value of commercial barter transactions reached $6.5 billion, up slightly from the previous year, said Krista Vardabash, investor relations director for International Monetary Systems Ltd. of New Berlin, Wis., also one of the biggest bartering businesses.

The company has been growing much faster than that, reaching $14.2 million in revenue last year on $110 million in transactions, up from $3.9 million in revenue five years ago. Acquisitions of other trading sites have propelled some of that growth.

Donald F. Mardak, 71, founded what is now International Monetary Systems in 1985 after building a chain of piano and organ retail stores in Milwaukee and other cities. In 1989, he raised $8 million in a public stock offering and has driven the company’s expansion by acquiring barter exchanges in 16 states. The company now has 18,000 business members.

“The idea for the barter business hit me when I traded one of my Baldwin pianos for a Mercury Cougar,” Mr. Mardak said in an interview. “The two were comparably priced, but I had paid wholesale for the piano and got retail value for it. So there is leverage in the barter business and that is one of its attractions.”

Mr. Mardak said he, too, planned to continue expanding. “Some of our employees are brokers,” said Mr. Mardak. “We tell them to drum up business. Trading doesn’t happen unless you make it happen.”

He dismisses the idea that trading Web sites like eBay are competition for IMS. EBay is “more of an exchange for liquidating, not trading,” Mr. Mardak said. As for smaller companies, like Joe Barter and other exchanges that have fewer business members, he said “they’re only swap sites, they have no supplier network.”

Mr. Daley of Joe Barter says he thinks the spread of Internet commerce supports his business vision. He plans to avoid using special barter dollars in transactions, relying on Internet trading enhanced by new technology. “I want to keep it simple,” Mr. Daley said. His company is intended to earn its way through business referral fees and online advertising.

“The evolving technology works for us,” Mr. Daley said. “We can target more specific groups; I’m going to hire people to market across the country.”

The barter industry is also aware of evolution. “The Internet is a two-edged sword,” Ms. Vardabash of IMS said. “It facilitates spreading the trading community, but it also brings in competitors of every stripe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/bu...edge.html?8dpc





Google, Viacom Now Clashing Over Youtube Employee Records
Greg Sandoval

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that information, CNET News has learned.

This dispute is the reason the two companies, and lawyers representing a group of other copyright holders suing Google, have failed to reach a final agreement on anonymizing personal information belonging to YouTube users, according to two sources close to the situation.

As part of Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit against Google's YouTube, a federal judge ordered the video-sharing site two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to the sources.

Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been widely criticized for attempting to encroach on the privacy of YouTube users. The parent company of MTV and Comedy Central has always said it never wanted personally identifiable information.

"Viacom suggested the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to accept anonymous information since day one," said a Viacom spokesman.

Critics dispute that and point out that records show the judge in the case only ordered YouTube to hand over information asked for by Viacom. As for the employee records, Google said Saturday that it isn't willing to talk about anything else until that matter of user privacy is resolved.

"Viacom and other plaintiffs never should have demanded private viewing data in the first place," a Google spokesman said in an e-mail. "They should have agreed a week ago to let us anonymize it. We are willing to discuss the disclosure of viewing activity of all the relevant parties. But the simple issue of protecting user information should be resolved now. Our users' privacy should not be held hostage to advance the plaintiffs' additional litigation interests."

According to the sources, Google and Viacom were close to reaching a deal last week about masking user data when Google backed out.

Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube, according to the sources. If Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's co-founders, uploaded a copyright video or viewed them, Viacom's lawyers believe they have a right to know about it, the sources said.

Google may have a tougher time with this issue than the fight to protect user information. Companies sue each other all the time and frequently turn over computer records belonging to employees when pertinent. Often, these records reveal e-mails, memos, and other documents that can shed light on events in question.

YouTube's employee information could prove crucial to Viacom's case against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees knew what was uploaded to the site--or posted pirated clips themselves--YouTube could lose its protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

YouTube maintains that the video-sharing site is an Internet service provider and is protected by the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision, which removes liability from ISPs for illegal acts committed by users. But the DMCA requires that ISPs not have knowledge of the illegal acts or not be able to prevent them.

YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.

It's safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.

Google has been accused of encouraging massive copyright violations by Viacom and by a group of copyright holders represented by the Proskauer Rose law firm. The group includes the top soccer leagues in Britain and France, and U.S. television journalist Robert Tur.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-998...=2547-1_3-0-20





YouTube Agrees to Share Viewer Data

Defendants and plaintiffs in two copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers during evidence discovery, a spokesman for Google said late Monday.

Earlier in July, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them to prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.

Google said it had now agreed to provide lawyers for Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England, a large viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and Internet address data that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

“We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class-action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. “They have agreed to let us anonymize YouTube user data.”

Viacom, owner of movie studio Paramount and MTV Networks, requested the information as part of its $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the online video service YouTube and its parent, Google.

Judge Louis Stanton of the Federa l District Court in Manhattan ordered Google on July 1 to turn over as evidence a database with usernames of YouTube viewers, what videos they watched when, and users’ computer addresses.

Privacy activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups argued in response that the order “threatens to expose deeply private information” and violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.

Viacom said at the time that it needed the data to demonstrate video piracy patterns that are the heart of its case against YouTube. But it sought to diffuse privacy fears, saying it had no interest in identifying individual users.

One outstanding disagreement between the two parties is on how to handle the YouTube viewership data of YouTube and Google employees, which Judge Stanton also had ordered YouTube to turn over.

Mr. Reyes said the agreement covered not just employees of the defendants, but also those of companies tied to the plaintiffs, including Viacom and the Football Association Premiere League.

The sides agreed that the new data privacy agreement did not cover employees and that they would work out how to share this data in coming weeks.

YouTube faces two separate, but parallel lawsuits, that for purposes of preliminary motions and evidence discovery are being treated as one. Viacom filed the first lawsuit, and a separate class-action was later filed by English Premiere League soccer, several other European sports leagues, along with music publishers and videographers. The cases are unlikely to come to trial before 2009 or 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/te.../16google.html





Is the iPhone Killing Terrestrial Radio?
Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins

You have to just love it when a more well known industry expert and pundit than yourself says something you’ve been trumpeting for close to a decade. Today, I got that warm fuzzy feeling down in the cockles of my heart when Jeff Jarvis boldly proclaimed “tear down the broadcast towers!”

In case you’re (somehow) not familiar with Mr. Jarvis, he’s a widely published journalist (and active blogger) that has worked for TV Guide, People, The New York Daily News, and the San Francisco Examiner as well as the creator of the Entertainment Weekly. So to say he has a finger on entertainment’s pulse is a moderate understatement.

In his most recent blog post, he details his experiences with his brand new iPhone and a conversation with his wife regarding the audio entertainment choices.

Pandora is a wonder, creating my own radio station, live and on the fly without need for a broadcast tower. CBS is streaming all its stations over the cell network but when I told my wife this she kept asking, “Why would I want to listen to a CBS station?”

“That’s not the point,” I huffed. “We don’t need broadcast towers.”

“OK,” she said, “but I still don’t want to listen to CBS stations.”

So count that as two strikes against radio. Digital radio? Heh. Satellite radio? I’m paying for it and I want Howard on my iPhone.

For years I’ve been saying that the days of radio are numbered (long before, actually, I realized that the days of newspaper were numbered). One of my first experiences as an independent journalist was on streaming radio with Shoutcast-like systems, far before the days of podcasting. What I saw back then wsa the groundwork for something disruptive and game-changing - the displacement of traditional talk and ClearChannel-style music radio by the thousands of amateur DJs developing software, infrastructures, communities and full on New Media alternatives.

The only thing it lacked, in fact, was mobility. Sure, if you crossed your eyes just right and prayed, you might get that jicky version of mobile Windows media player to stream your station right. Problem was that bandwidth was almost always an issue, and when it wasn’t, the software was. The software engineers and the mobile carriers literally conspired together to prevent streaming radio from becoming a serious contender on Internet ready mobile devices.

Now, they have no such compunctions, and while streaming radio is dead in its old form, like Jarvis observed, there are many new competitors like Last.FM, Pandora, and a bevvy of podcasting DJs. The portable, Internet-enabled entertainment portal is a thing of the present. Not only is radio in mortal danger from all sides, but so is TV. A number of entertainment portals like iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu are coming dangerously close to providing ample mainstream entertainment at a fraction of current cable costs.

None of that takes into account the professional, semi-pro and quality amateur content being created on the web. Folks like us at Mashable, folks at Rev3, or any other host of independent video producers that create podcast content now are making available their content to the mobile device user’s impulse.

There are a few things that remain until the domination is complete.

Prices must be feasible. To completely replace radio, the cost of owning the device and accompanying bandwidth contract must be in reach of the average consumer. Attention: AT&T and Rogers - $100 a month won’t cut it. Think more along the lines of $30-$50. All you’re providing is the band, not the entertainment. To put your pricepoint so high, you’re forcing all content producers into the free, ad-supported model. This is an acceptable position near-term, but long-term is unsustainable.

Devices must be ubiquitous. Currently, of couse, iPhones (and the comparable devices from other manufacturers) are in the minority. Most folks have phones that serve primarily as mobile voice communication devices. This is rapidly changing, but this metamorphosis will be stalled if the device manufacturers artificially prop up prices outside the reach of the average consumer.

Service must be net neutral. Carriers, don’t get greedy! You can provide your own content to your customers, but there’s plenty of money to be made being the band provider without inhibiting those out there with their own content to push. With the advent of WiMax and muni-WiFi on the horizon, by following the path of the CableCos and going non-net neutral will only hasten their development, and eventually put you out of business.

Devices must be technology agnostic. The iPhone seems to be nicely RSS compliant and is finally opening up to the idea of third party app development. This is good. I haven’t extensively tested all the devices competing with the iPhone, but three generations of devices ago, I had. The biggest deal-breaker out there was that each OS had their preference on what sort of streaming media it would play. As a result, hardly anything worked universally, and any time a producer chose a format, they were automatically shutting out 80% of their potential audience. With the proliferation of device types, no producer can function on only a best case scenario 20% of a potential audience.

There are some caveats, but unlike any other time in the history of mobile and entertainment technology, things seem to be moving towards a happy ending.

Though it pains me to say this, I will: “Thanks, Apple.”
http://mashable.com/2008/07/14/iphone-radio/





Apple Sells 1 Million iPhone 3Gs in First Weekend
AppleInsider Staff

Despite widespread activation problems, Apple said Monday that it sold its one millionth iPhone 3G on Sunday, just three days after the new handset launched worldwide on Friday, July 11..

"iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.

Last year, Apple managed to sell just 270,000 iPhones during the first two days. Although the Cupertino-based electronics maker did not release a three day tally for first-generation iPhone sales, it would take the company nearly two and a half months to sell its one millionth unit.

"It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world," Jobs added.

Unlike last year when opening weekend iPhone sales took place exclusively in the United States, this year's roll-out was helped by simultaneous launch in 20 addition countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

The three day sales total is sure to send a shriver down the spines of rival handset makers and is particularly impressive given widespread activation issues that plagued the launch from the get-go, at times slowing sales and activations to a snails pace.
Although the new handset went on sale at 8:00 a.m. Friday morning, Apple retail stores around the country were still battling long lines -- sometimes hundreds of customers deep -- in the late evening hours on Saturday and Sunday morning.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...t_weekend.html





Vista Users Greeted with an Unexpected Surprise: MobileMe
Ed Oswald

While they may have no intention of ever signing up for the service, Windows users are finding an unexpected addition to their Control Panels.

A link for "MobileMe Preferences" has begun appearing at the bottom of the Control Panel screens of those who have installed the latest Apple iTunes software -- according to one user, without any notification at all.

The MobileMe preference panel has also been reported to be showing up in Windows XP as well.

MobileMe does feature Vista compatibility, and the most recent update to iTunes, version 7.7, added functionality necessary for iTunes to work with the service -- although it is not necessary to sync information.

It is through iTunes 7.7 where Apple added the MobileMe functionality to Windows computers. The tutorial for setting up MobileMe on a PC confirms this. As Step 1 clearly reads, "Download and install the latest version of iTunes. iTunes includes the software required to set up MobileMe on your PC."

Some may take issue with this: Apple never explicitly said that MobileMe software would come as part of the new version of the software.

However, Apple distributing software like this is nothing new. For example with QuickTime, the company has used its player software to also deliver its iTunes music service, which some users have found to be intrusive. And last March, Apple used iTunes' Software Update service for Windows as a way of pushing its Safari browser. Other companies have adopted similar approaches in an effort to promote a new product on the back of an already established one.

Users have not yet revealed whether they've discovered a method to remove the MobileMe icon without uninstalling iTunes 7.7 altogether.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Vist...eMe/1216398741





Apple Sends Another MobileMe Apology E-mail and Extension
Arnold Kim

Amidst the rocky .Mac to MobileMe transition last week, Apple made one other mistake that it is now apologizing for. Apple had been preauthorizing charges up to 121 GBP to European customers who signed up for a free MobileMe trial. For debit accounts, this preauthorization charge may actually remove that amount of money from the customer's available balance. Apple is working on reversing those preauthorizations and sent out new apology letters to those customers.

Dear MobileMe Member,

Apple has identified and resolved an issue that caused an incorrect, temporary authorization hold of 121 GBP to be placed on your credit or debit card when your MobileMe trial account was created. We have addressed the issue and want to apologize for any inconvenience.

Typically when you create a new trial account, your credit or debit card is verified by authorizing a small charge (equivalent to USD $1). Unfortunately, an error caused the incorrect amount to be preauthorized for your card. Be assured that this is not a charge, but only an authorization hold. The hold is released by the card-issuing bank after a predetermined period, usually between a week and a month. Where possible, Apple is working to have these holds removed earlier.

To show our appreciation for your continued loyalty, we have extended your free trial period by 30 days. This extension is in addition to the 30-day extension of which you were notified on July 16, for a total of 120 days of free MobileMe service.

Look for the extension to be reflected in your account settings in the next few weeks. You may now enjoy MobileMe free of charge until [November 8, 2008], after which your annual paid subscription will begin.

Thank you for being a MobileMe customer.

Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team

Apple is now offering those affected an additional 30 days to their trial service above and beyond the original 30 day extension for the rocky transition. As a result, affected users will get a total of 120 days of free trial MobileMe service before they are required to start their subscription
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/07/19/...and-extension/





Free Apps No Longer Dominating iPhone App Store.
Erick Schonfeld

When the iPhone App Store launched last Friday along with the new 3G iPhone, free apps made up 24 percent of the 552 apps available. In other words, the most popular price point was free. The rest of the apps ranged in price from 99 cents to $9.99 and even more. Instead of dictating a uniform price, as he did with music, Steve Jobs let the market decide what price apps should go for.

The market is already doing that sorting. According to Greg Yardley at Pinch Media, as of this morning there were 798 iPhone apps available through the App Store on iTunes, and only 20 percent (161 apps) are free. The most popular price point is now 99 cents, with 24 percent (188 apps). The second most popular is $9.99 with 12 percent (96 apps, including Enigmo, an addictive puzzle game, and the handy GuitarToolkit).

All the other price points are shifting to either 99 cents or $9.99, implying that the sweet spot is 99 cents for most apps just as it is for songs. But with the caveat that if your app is good enough people will be price insensitive.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15...one-app-store/





Apple Files Suit Against Psystar
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

It seems that Apple has grown tired of Mac-clone Psystar and has filed suit against the Florida company at the federal district court for the northern district of California.

The initial imformation came my way via lawyer Jorge Espinosa’s blog (he’s a lawyer who specializes in domestic and international protection of trademarks and copyrights):

Apple, Inc., manufacturer of the well known line of computers and software, filed suit on July 3 in the federal district court for the northern district of California against Florida company Psystar, Inc. The suit alleges counts for violation of its shrink wrap license, trademark and copyright infringement.

I think that this pretty much spells the end for Psystar. The company has been pushing its luck for some time now, and now the fun is over
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2240





Class D Amplifiers Are Shrinking and Greening Your Electronics
Eliot Van Buskirk

Technology has democratized the music industry in many obvious ways -- notice how every band, regardless of stature, has a MySpace page? But one of technology's more subtle effects has been to make our sound systems smaller, lighter and greener.

The special sauce: Class D amplifiers, the first real advance in speaker design in decades. These amps were once thought to be appropriate only for low-end audio devices like cellphones. But with continuing refinements they have started showing up in everything from flat panel televisions and computers to high-end sound systems.

"Imagine a light bulb in your house," said NHT audio engineer Gordon Chang. "If you turn it on all the way, it's too bright, and if you turn it off, it's too dim. Now if you turn it on and off really quickly, you can get the light to look like it's halfway between on and off."

Traditional amplifiers achieve the same effect using electrical resistance, similar to a dimmer switch that controls the light. Those resistors turn valuable electricity into unwanted heat, which necessitates bulkier design. Ever wonder why your ultra-thin panel television sounds so great despite having so little real estate dedicated to audio? The Class D amplifier, which is having a massive, albeit largely unacknowledged effect on consumer audio devices, is responsible.

"The big advantage with Class D amplifiers is that they're much more efficient from an energy usage point of view than conventional Class AB amplifiers, which are what you've seen in most audio equipment up until now," said John Widder, market development manager at STMIcroelectronics, a semiconductor manufacturer.

He said Class AB amps typically run at between 15 and 40 percent efficiency when playing back music, while Class D amps run at between 40 and 85 percent. And that's only part of the picture.

"The advantages of that efficiency then ripple through the entire system … power supplies can be smaller, or if it's battery operated equipment, the battery life is longer," said Widder.

"But then, in addition, because the amplifier's more efficient it has less heat to get rid of, so heat sinks can be smaller, or maybe (the devices) don't even have a heat sink at all, which makes the equipment then smaller and lighter. You can have things like five or seven channel home theater systems in very small boxes with very high output power."

These efficient designs lower shipping costs and ultimately contribute less mass to our planet's landfills. The effect may be negligible on a per-unit basis, but when you consider that Class D could result in the vast majority of the world's sound-producing electronics consuming less than half as much energy as they used to and they are being manufactured at much smaller sizes, it's clear that the economically-driven trend towards Class D amplifiers will have a significant positive effect on the environment.

Class D amplifiers are superior to their predecessors in many ways, but none of them matter to music fans unless they sound good, too.

"Initially," explained Widder, "Class D was only used in applications where audio was a secondary consideration" such as in cellphones. No longer. Most high-end plasma and LCD televisions now use Class D amplifiers, as do several home theater systems.

I too can bear witness to how excellent Class D can sound, having reviewed the Kuller Aux Out 400, a $1,000 audiophile-quality bookshelf system.

Long considered unworthy of high-end music applications, Class D's more recent specs are praiseworthy: sub-tenth-of-a-percent total harmonic distortion and frequency response equivalent to that of Class AB (see diagram). Class D even has some sonic advantages over its predecessor, says Widder: "low -- or even zero -- crossover distortion" (which occurs in Class AB amps when one output stage takes over for another) and "very high dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios" (meaning that it has many levels between soft and loud, with very little noise interfering with the sound of the music).

So who's making this stuff? ABI Research analyst Steve Wilson told us that two companies are responsible for a good amount of the high-end Class D electronics in home theater setups: IcePower (a division of Bang & Olufson) and D2Audio. Meanwhile, a company called TriPath made the chips used by the Aux Out 400 speaker set I liked so much -- a version of Class D it calls "Class T" (for TriPath).

At this point, anyone with even a mild geeky streak will want to know how Class D's sound improved enough to spread from cellphones to home theater systems, where sound quality is a big priority. As it turns out, the change has been largely a matter of filtering and design.

Since a Class D amplifier has an output that switches between on and off, the noise created by that switching must be filtered out. "You just have to be careful with the filter design and circuit board layout," said Widder. "It takes a little more work on the part of the designer." As word spreads among the audio community that Class D amps are ready for prime time, we can only expect these design improvements to multiply.

Class D amplifiers may not have much name recognition, but they're already changing the ways we listen to music, with the welcome side effect of shrinking and greening the world's audio hardware. A little respect is long overdue.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/...d-amplifi.html





Japanese Boffins Develop Long-Life Flash

Low power chips could last hundreds of years
Simon Burns

Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists.

The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo.

Flash memory chips are widely used in products such as Apple's iPhone, mini notebooks like the Asus Eee PC, video games consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, flash memory cards, digital cameras and Flash-based SSD hard disk drives.

Current Flash chips are estimated to have a useful lifetime of around a decade for most applications.

However, some applications that require repeated writing and rewriting of data can theoretically cause cells to wear out much faster, sometimes rendering a Flash device useless within a few years.

This can happen when a large area of Flash memory is used as a swap file or virtual memory, or to store constantly updated log files.

The continuing miniaturisation of conventional Flash memory chips also threatens to reduce their lifetime.

This and other factors make conventional high-density Flash cells unworkable at circuit sizes below 20 nanometres, the scientists claim.

The new ferroelectric Nand Flash memory cell developed by the Japanese scientists can be scaled down to at least 10 nanometres. The next generation of conventional flash cells will use a 30 nanometre circuit density.

The ferroelectric Flash memory cell can be rewritten more than 100 million times, compared to a conventional cells lifetime of around 10,000, its inventors claim.

To prolong their life Flash memory chips use a 'wear-levelling' process in which all cells are used equally, and worn out cells are 'retired' without disabling the whole chip.

The ferroelectric cells use a rewriting voltage of fewer than six volts, compared to about 20 volts for conventional chips.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...g-life-created





Adeona Laptop Tracker

Overview

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How do I use it?

Using Adeona only requires downloading and installing a small software client. Adeona is free to use.

Why Adeona?

With the growing ubiquity of, and user reliance on, mobile computing devices (laptops, PDAs, smart phones, etc.), loss or theft of a device is increasingly likely, disruptive, and costly. Internet-based tracking systems provide a method for mitigating this risk. These tracking systems send, over the Internet, updates regarding the current location of the device to a remotely administered repository. If the device is lost or stolen, but maintains Internet connectivity and unmodified software, the tracking system can keep tabs on the current whereabouts of the device. This data could prove invaluable when the appropriate authorities attempt to recover the device.

Unfortunately, with current proprietary tracking systems users sacrifice location privacy. Indeed, even while the device is still in the rightful owner's possession, the tracking system is keeping tabs on the locations it (and its owner) visit. Even worse, with some commercial products, even outsiders (parties not affiliated with the tracking provider) can "piggy-back" on the tracking system's Internet traffic to uncover a mobile device user's private information and/or locations visited.

Adeona has three main properties:

• Private: Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device.
• Reliable: Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring retrievability of recent location updates.
• Open source and free: Adeona's software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations are secret, the tracking system's design is not.

The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture. Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can access them.

The History of Adeona

Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. This system is the result of recent academic research started at the University of Washington, with participants now also at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Davis. The foundations of the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy properties — are published in a research paper at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.

The lead Ph.D. students on the project are Gabriel Maganis and Thomas Ristenpart, working with UW faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy.
http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/





At the Uneasy Intersection of Bloggers and the Law
Jonathan D. Glater

There is no better way to get a blogger talking than by telling him what he cannot publish — although you might forgive a government prosecutor for thinking otherwise.

A grand jury subpoena sent by prosecutors in the Bronx earlier this year sought information to help identify people blogging anonymously on a Web site about New York politics called Room 8.

The subpoena carried a warning in capital letters that disclosing its very existence “could impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with law enforcement” — implying that if the bloggers blabbed, they could be prosecuted.

“We were totally perplexed,” said Ben Smith, who co-founded Room 8 with Gur Tsabar. (The site calls itself an “imaginary neighbor” to the press room — Room 9 — in City Hall in New York.) The two promptly began looking for a lawyer. “We knew enough to be scared.”

This, of course, is a blogger’s nightmare: enforced silence and the prospect of jail time. The district attorney eventually withdrew the subpoena and lifted the gag requirement after the bloggers threatened to sue. But the fact that the tactic was used at all raised alarm bells for some free speech advocates.

The demand for secrecy raised the unnerving prospect that prosecutors could quietly investigate anyone who posts comments online, while the person making those comments is unaware of and unable to respond to the risk. The tactic also robs bloggers of one of their most powerful weapons: the chance to spread the word and turn the legal attack into an online cause célèbre.

Lawsuits over information posted online are usually civil, not criminal — that is, they are filed by private citizens or companies trying to keep something off the Web. Courts have developed ways to evaluate the claims, often using tests to balance the First Amendment’s protections of speech against the harm caused by whatever someone wrote or said.

Using such an analysis earlier this year, a federal judge in San Francisco reversed an order disabling a Web site that allowed the anonymous posting of documents, after he weighed concerns about the order’s effect on free speech.

In that case, efforts to block access to the Web site, called Wikileaks, ended up attracting far more attention to the documents posted there.

But there are fewer precedents explaining how courts should evaluate criminal subpoenas, according to legal experts. Perhaps that is because prosecutors are more cautious about the risk of violating the First Amendment and so issue fewer criminal subpoenas, or because the subpoenas themselves carry language prohibiting disclosure of their terms.

“In the criminal context it’s trickier because it’s the government asking for stuff, and I think it’s going to be harder to fashion a rule, especially when the government is not exactly willing to part with the reasons” for requesting the information in the first place, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

Without knowing the motives of prosecutors, he continued, judges may be hard-pressed to balance their needs against the importance of free speech.

Bloggers concerned about possible litigation may want to check the privacy policies of their Internet service providers, to see whether they include a pledge to notify any customer whose site is the subject of a subpoena, Mr. Zittrain said.

Armed with that knowledge, a blogger could fight the subpoena in court. Software also exists that is intended to make it difficult to identify those who want to be anonymous online.

Some of the people blogging on the Room 8 site are named, but many choose to be anonymous. Mr. Smith said he called the assistant district attorney in the Bronx who had issued the subpoena to try to find out more about why prosecutors wanted the Internet Protocol, or I.P. address, of the person who blogged under the name Republican Dissident. But the prosecutors would not share any information, he said.

An I.P. address, together with the date and time of an online comment, can help identify the computer used to make that comment.

Mr. Smith said he was not opposed to helping prosecutors in all cases. “Was somebody found face-down on their keyboard and the I.P. address was going to help identify the killer?” he said. “We’re not free speech absolutists here.”

Steven R. Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said on Monday that the office had no comment on any investigation related to the subpoenas sent to Room 8. Mr. Reed, however, said it was not uncommon for subpoenas to include nondisclosure language in order to protect an investigation.

In this case, he said, “The district attorney was not aware that a subpoena was sent nor was he aware of the content of the comments, until after the subpoena was sent. The district attorney reviewed the matter, determined that a subpoena was not necessary at this time, and directed that it be withdrawn.”

Because of that withdrawal, Mr. Smith and his lawyers could share court filings in the case and talk about it openly.

In addition to Republican Dissident, prosecutors wanted to identify several other people who chose to post comments anonymously. Some of the comments cited news reports about investigations to support their criticism of Republican officials.

The prospect of helping to unmask some of the commenters on the site made Mr. Smith and Mr. Tsabar nervous.

“If our anonymous bloggers were to learn that we’d been handing out their identities to politicians whom they’ve been criticizing, I think they’d be much less likely to write on the site,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Tsabar found lawyers willing to represent them free at Public Citizen Litigation Group, a public interest law firm that has been active in other cases involving free speech online.

Pro bono representation was important, Mr. Smith said, because Room 8 does not generate much advertising revenue. Both founders have day jobs unrelated to the site, Mr. Smith as senior political writer at Politico, the online news site devoted to politics, and Mr. Tsabar as vice president at Ketchum, a large public relations firm.

Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer at Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington who has played a role in many free speech cases involving technology, filed a motion to quash the subpoena and argued that the proceedings should not be secret. Filings in the case are on Public Citizen’s Web site.

“They refused to go anyplace and tell me, what are they investigating, why is this speech relevant,” Mr. Levy said. Prosecutors also opposed posting a note on the blog announcing the subpoena, though they eventually permitted Room 8 to try to send an e-mail message in May to Republican Dissident about it. No one answered, but by then, Republican Dissident had already deleted all of his or her posts from the Room 8 site.

“Generally, people post anonymously sometimes for a good reason, sometimes it’s for a bad reason,” Mr. Levy said.

“We argue for a balancing test,” he continued. “Let the discovery be had when there’s a good reason for it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/technology/15law.html





Australian Wins Blog Libel Case
Keith Fraser

A Nanaimo man has been ordered to pay an Australian man more than $179,000 in damages arising from hundreds of libelous statements he made on numerous websites over a four-year period.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice D.A. Halfyard found that Patrick Michael Sullivan defamed Robert Griffin, a 43-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, in Internet postings from May 30, 2003 up until the trial in Nanaimo in April.

A war of words had erupted between the two men on a website used by depressed and suicidal people.

The judge ruled that the defendant maliciously made false allegations that Griffin was, among other things, a stalker, abuser, harasser, killer, sexual predator, pervert, coward, manipulator and hate monger who threatens other people with death and violence.

Halfyard said he agreed with the plaintiff's submission that the statements were "numerous and monstrous," "outrageous" and "so extreme that it is difficult to find case precedents that come anywhere close."

Griffin said that the postings broke him emotionally and physically, ruined his relationship with his girlfriend, made him fearful of going out in public and in large part caused a suicide attempt that required him to consult psychologists.

The judge ordered Sullivan to pay $150,000 in general and aggravated damages for libel, $25,000 for breach of privacy and $4,600 in special damages.

He also ordered an injunction be imposed on Sullivan preventing him from posting any further defamatory messages on the Internet.

"This was an extreme and vicious campaign of Internet libel," said Griffin's lawyer Dan Burnett. "For over four years the defendant posted hundreds of outrageous accusations against the plaintiff, which he admitted at trial had no basis. The high damage award and the injunction reflects how much harm can be inflicted by a person bent on using the Internet for a smear campaign."

Sullivan could not be reached for comment.
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/ne...e-53716564d361





Scooping the Political Pollsters
Julie Rehmeyer

Who will win the election in November? A technique from baseball stats may predict the answer.

Nate Silver was bored. He’d graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and gone on to a typical consulting job, but it didn’t interest him much. Not as much as baseball, that’s for sure.

The job came with one nice perk, though: access to a cool, geeky statistics software package. It was just the thing for analyzing baseball data. Before long, Silver could use it to predict how good a baseball player’s season would be — and he could do it better than anyone else.

Silver’s method catapulted him into a new career as a hotshot baseball analyst. But his tendency to noodle around with side interests didn’t stop. He tackled a new game, politics. The result? Once again, he bettered all the old-timers.

He’d been tracking politics for a while, and questions kept popping up for him. Did Clinton really appeal more strongly to poorer voters? Did Obama have an advantage in caucus states as the pundits said, and if so, by how much? And most importantly, who was going to win? Numbers, Silver figured, could help find the answers.

He used the same techniques he’d been so successful with in baseball, and he often found a different story from the one the media was telling. His main tool was a standard statistical workhorse called multiple regression analysis, which allowed him to tease out which factors were most strongly influencing an outcome. Obama was doing better among rich folks? Not quite, Silver said. He was really doing better among more educated people, who also happen to have more money.

He decided to share his observations, but with caution. “Sports and politics are strange bedfellows,” he says. He used the pseudonym “Poblano” (“Hey, I do like Mexican food”), posting his observations at the liberal website DailyKos.com. Soon, thousands were reading his posts every day.

What he was really after were predictions. The media often reports the results of the latest poll as if it alone offers the best information about what’s going to happen. But public opinion doesn’t change all that fast, Silver reasoned. It made much more sense, he thought, to combine the results of all those polls.

Another website, RealClearPolitics.com, had pioneered this approach, but Silver figured he could do it better. Some polls are simply better than others, he noted, so he counted those from companies who had been more accurate in the past more heavily. Then he started applying tricks from baseball.

He creates his baseball predictions by matching current players with similar past players. Similarly, for each congressional district, he found another district that had already voted whose voters had similar education levels, income, racial mix, religious makeup, etc. Odds are, he figures, the votes in the two districts will be pretty close. He combines this demographic analysis with the polling data to get his best guess.

On May 6, his methods were put to the test. The latest polls said Clinton had drawn close to Obama in North Carolina. But Silver’s model didn’t buy it. In South Carolina and Virginia, Obama had done much better than the polls predicted. When the model matched each district in North Carolina with a similar one in South Carolina or Virginia, it calculated that Obama would clean up with a 17-point win.

Pollsters jeered. On Slate.com, Mickey Kaus said the prediction was made “by a blogger using a sophisticated model that ignores ... what's been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. Wright. I predict this person is wrong!”

But when the results were in, Obama won by 14 points. Silver beat every established pollster. And Poblano became a sensation, an instant election authority. A few weeks later, he decided it was time to come out with his real identity. “You can’t get quoted in The Wall Street Journal as a chili pepper,” he says.

Pollsters have been dissecting his success ever since. “I was completely intrigued by what he did in the primaries,” says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com. Blumenthal points out that Clinton and Obama each did well with particular demographic groups that were remarkably consistent over the course of the primary. This was the reason that Silver’s model was able to do so much better than the polls.

He didn’t manage to nail every primary. For example, South Dakota is demographically very similar to North Dakota (where Obama had won by 15 points). Late polls, however, showed Clinton a whopping 26 points ahead. Silver bet on a narrow Obama victory, but Clinton’s heavy campaigning in South Dakota paid off with a nine-point win — about halfway between the polls and Silver’s projection.

Now that the focus has turned to the general election, Silver has had to modify his methods. Without the state-by-state rollout of the primaries, he’s turned to the results of past presidential elections to supply data for his demographic analysis.

So who’s going to win? If the election were held today, Silver’s model says that Obama would win by five points (good news for Silver, an Obama fan). Silver’s best guess is that come November, Obama will still win, but not so handily, since big leads early on almost always narrow with time. His model accounts for that and projects a three-point win.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University, says that he likes Silver’s analyses very much, but the irony is that Silver’s demographic approach may be too powerful for its own good. Silver is combining a demographic analysis (which changes only slowly) with poll results (which come out every week). Gelman believes that this early in an election, the demographic analysis alone is far more telling than polls could ever be. “The logic of the situation would push him toward not using the polls much at all until a month before the election,” Gelman says. “But then he wouldn’t have much news to report every week for his blog.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ical_pollsters





Olive Riley, World’s Oldest Blogger, Dies
p2pnet news

Olive Riley, the worlds oldest blogger, died over the weekend.

“It was mind blowing to her,” news.com.au has her great grandson Darren Stone, declaring.

“She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia,” and, “on a continual basis, not just once in a while.”

And indeed, “An Australian woman, known as the world’s oldest Internet blogger, has died at the age of 108,” reports Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

“Since February last year, Riley has posted more than 70 entries on her Life of Riley blog, which she jokingly called her ‘blob,’ sharing her thoughts about life through the entire 20th century. She also posted clips of her singing and talking on YouTube.”

In her final post on June 26, “an increasingly frail Olive noted she couldn’t “shake off that bad cough,” says news.com.au.

She would have turned 109 on October 20.

Her funeral will be held at Palmdale Cemetery, on the NSW Central Coast, late this week.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16370





Wistful Singer, Jo Stafford, Is Dead at 90
Stephen Holden

Jo Stafford, the wistful singing voice of the American home front during World War II and the Korean War, died on Wednesday at her home in Century City, Calif. She was 90 years old.

The cause of death was congestive heart failure.

A favorite of American servicemen, Ms. Stafford earned the nickname G. I. Jo for records in which her pure, nearly vibrato-less voice with perfect intonation conveyed steadfast devotion and reassurance with delicate understatement.

She was the vocal embodiment of every serviceman’s dream girl faithfully tending the home fires while he was overseas. First as a member of the Pied Pipers who sang with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied the young Frank Sinatra, and later as a soloist, Ms. Stafford enjoyed a steady stream of hits from the late 1930’s to the mid-1950’s.

Her biggest hit, “You Belong to Me,” in 1952, sold two million copies. Ms. Stafford sang everything from folk songs to novelties to hymns. Her gift for hilarious musical parody was first revealed in the 1947 novelty sensation “Temptation” (“Tim-Tayshun”), a hillbilly spoof recorded under the name of Cinderella G. Stump with Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. It reached No. 1 on the music charts.

A decade later, a popular party act with which she and her husband, the arranger and conductor Paul Weston, amused their friends became a secondary comedy career, in which they impersonated Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, an excruciatingly inept New Jersey lounge act “presented by Jo Stafford and Paul Weston.”

While Mr. Weston played the wrong chords and fudged the rhythm, Ms. Stafford sang a half-tone sharp. Mr. Stafford won her only Grammy, for best comedy album (“Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris,”) in 1961. The records faking the Edwardses, the last of which was a hilariously inept 1977 single of “Stayin’ Alive” backed by “I Am Woman,” rank as classic pop spoofs alongside those of Spike Jones and Weird Al Yankovic.

But it was as a balladeer crooning standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Haunted Heart,” “All the Things You Are,” and “The Nearness of You,” that Ms. Stafford distilled as pure a vocal essence of romantic nostalgia as any pop singer of 1940’s and 50’s.

Ms. Stafford was born Jo Elizabeth Stafford in Coalinga, Calif., near Fresno and brought up in Long Beach. As a child she studied voice and hoped to become an opera singer but because of hard times decided to join her older sisters Christine and Pauline in a country-and-western singing group, the Stafford Sisters, who performed on the radio in Los Angeles.

After the Stafford Sisters broke up, Ms. Stafford, with seven male members from two other groups, formed the Pied Pipers, an octet that caught the attention of Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl, arrangers for the Tommy Dorsey band. Reduced to a quartet, the group joined Dorsey and quickly gained fame as the backup singers for the young Frank Sinatra.

In 1940, the No. 1 hit, “I’ll Never Smile Again” established the creamy Dorsey-Sinatra-Pied Pipers sound.

Ms. Stafford recorded her first solo record with Dorsey, “Little Man With a Candy Cigar,” in 1942. Her first husband, John Huddleston, whom she later divorced, was a singer in the group.

Two years later, she left the band to sign with Capitol Records, the new label established by Johnny Mercer and along with Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee was one of its three female pop mainstays. Mr. Weston became named Capitol’s musical director and Ms. Stafford’s arranger and conductor. They eventually married in 1952. Weston died in 1996.

Ms. Stafford is survived by their son Tim Weston of Topanga, Calif., their daughter Amy Wells of Calabasas, Calif. a younger sister, Betty Jane, and four grandchildren.

During the early Capitol years, Ms. Stafford’s USO tours and V-Discs (recordings specially made for servicemen) earned her the nickname G. I. Jo. In 1945, “Candy,” in which she and Pied Pipers accompanied Mr. Mercer went to No. 1.

From the mid-40’s on, Ms. Stafford was a major radio star, who sometimes used her show, “The Chesterfield Supper Club,” to acquaint the public with southern Appalachian folk music. She recorded a groundbreaking album, “Jo Stafford Sings American Folk Songs,” and followed it with “Songs of Scotland.”

The folk-pop singer Judy Collins has credited Ms. Stafford’s version of “Barbara Allen” as a major inspiration for her early folk career. In the late 940’s and early 50’s Ms. Stafford teamed Gordon McRae teamed for a series of hit duets, including “My Darling, My Darling,” from the Broadway musical, “Where’s Charley?” and the devotional song, “Whispering Hope.” When Mr. Weston left Capitol Records for Columbia, Ms. Stafford followed him.

Her Columbia albums, like “Swingin’ Down Broadway,” “Ski Trails” “Ballad of the Blues,” and “Jo + Jazz” (with the arranger Johnny Mandel) foreshadowed the modern concept album. Her biggest hits for the label included “Make Love to Me,” a pop version of Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya,” and “Shrimp Boats.”

On several hits she was teamed her with Frankie Laine and of those the most popular was their duet of another Williams song, “Hey, Good Lookin.’ After a falling out with Columbia in the late 1950’s, Ms. Stafford returned to Capitol, the joined Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label.

In 1966, Ms. Stafford went into semi-retirement. After “Stayin’ Alive,” she retired completely from the music business. She re-appeared once, in 1990, at an event honoring Frank Sinatra.

Many of her hits have been reissued on Corinthian Records, a record company Mr. Weston founded as a religious label.

Many years after her retirement, Ms. Stafford looked back happily on her musical life with Mr. Weston. “Our talents — his and mine — fit the music of the time,” she said. “And the music fit us. We were very fortunate, because if both of us were starting out today, we’d starve to death!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/ar...afford.html?hp





Les Crane, Talk-Show Host, Dies at 74
Bruce Weber

Les Crane, a provocative talk-show host who was the first to challenge the primacy of Johnny Carson on late-night television — and lose — died Sunday in Greenbrae, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 74 and lived in Belvedere, Calif.

Mr. Crane’s daughter, Caprice Crane, confirmed his death.

Personable, cocky and well-attuned to the tenor of the times, Mr. Crane predated Howard Stern as a “king of all media”; his multifaceted career began in radio, moved to television and ended in computer software, with a stop in between as a Grammy-winning recording artist, though even he would have shuddered at calling his recording art.

An early, and by later standards, tame incarnation of a shock jock, Mr. Crane was a radio star in San Francisco in the early 1960s. From a studio in the hungry i, a nightclub that was a launching pad for performers like Mort Sahl, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce, he took listeners’ calls from all over the West Coast, fielding their questions, sometimes with a celebrity guest, and often dismissing callers’ comments on current events and culture with brusque wit or outright disdain, simply hanging up on some in what was then a startling breach of accepted etiquette.

His station, KGO, was owned by ABC, and the parent company transferred Mr. Crane first to the local television affiliate and then to its flagship station, WABC in New York. The show, initially with the title “Night Line ... With Les Crane” and later as “The Les Crane Show” was first broadcast in September 1963, beginning at 1 a.m. Within two months it was the object of civil rights picketers protesting the appearance on the show of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.

Calling him “the bad boy of late night television,” The New York Times described Mr. Crane’s role on the show as “public relations expert, complaint-department chief, psychiatrist and tough hero to the callers.”

The show was well-received, and Mr. Crane, telegenic, blithely confrontational and at least partly hip — he conducted the first American television interview with the Rolling Stones, in June 1964 — was attractive enough that the following summer the network gave him a weeklong tryout in the 11:30 p.m. slot with a more conventional talk show, again called “The Les Crane Show,” which was broadcast in five big cities. The week featured interviews with Richard Burton, Shelley Winters, Melvin Belli and Marguerite Frances Claverie, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald

“We’re sitting here in the studio of a major broadcasting company in America and we are talking to the mother of a man it is alleged assassinated our President,” he said on the air, adding: “It’s pretty wonderful, isn’t it? Pretty exciting.”

The tryout was successful, but the show was not. On Nov. 9, 1964, Mr. Crane, just 30 years old, went up against Carson, who had taken over NBC’s “Tonight” show from Jack Paar two years earlier. The Crane show was canceled just a few months later, in spite of Mr. Crane’s interview with Bob Dylan, during which Mr. Crane asked Mr. Dylan, then 23, about the songwriters who influenced him and about the overall message of his songs. Hank Williams and Cole Porter were the answers to the first question. To the second, Mr. Dylan said: “Eat?” Mr. Crane returned to the show in June but lasted only until November.

Mr. Crane was born on Dec. 3, 1933, but sources about his birthplace conflict. His name at birth, his daughter said, was Lesley Stein, adding that she thought he was born in New York. According to an ABC biography, he was born in Long Beach, N.Y. The Daily News in New York once reported that he was born in the Bronx, and various Web sites say San Francisco.

Mr. Crane graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans and spent four years in the United States Air Force as a jet pilot and helicopter flight instructor; for years afterwards, he wore a bracelet with his Air Force wings on it, a reminder, he said, “that whatever I’m doing is safer than what I used to do.”

Mr. Crane married five times. His fourth wife was the actress Tina Louise whom he met and married while she was at the height of her popularity as the glamorous sexpot on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.” They divorced in 1971 after a five-year marriage. Besides his daughter, a television writer who lives in Los Angeles, he is survived by his wife of 20 years, Ginger Crane.

After the demise of his Carson challenge, in 1968 Mr. Crane had another short-lived talk show, this time on WNEW-TV in New York. He also worked as an occasional actor on television, appearing on “The Virginian,” “Burke’s Law” and “Love, American Style.”

In 1980, Mr. Crane went into the burgeoning computer software business, becoming chairman of the Software Toolworks, whose successes included “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.” But of all his endeavors, the most well-known was one he later wanted to forget.

In 1971, his recording of the inspirational poem “Desiderata” became a cultish hit and even won a Grammy for best spoken-word recording. A cross between flower-child naïveté and New Age dreaminess, it hit a chord at the time, but by 1987, Mr. Crane had changed his tune.

“I can’t listen to it now without gagging,” he told The Los Angeles Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/ar...n/15crane.html





Charles H. Joffe, Movie Producer, Is Dead at 78
Dennis Hevesi

Charles H. Joffe, a co-producer of Woody Allen’s movies and the business expert in the talent agency that managed the budding careers of a host of high-profile comedians that also included Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and David Letterman, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 78 and lived in Los Angeles.

The cause was lung disease, said his wife, Carol.

In 1978, when Mr. Allen’s “Annie Hall” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it was Mr. Joffe who picked up the Oscar at the ceremony in Los Angeles while Mr. Allen remained in New York playing clarinet in a gig with his jazz band.

Mr. Joffe was the brash, wise-cracking, cigar-chewing contract bargainer in the talent agency Rollins Joffe, which booked Lenny Bruce’s first act in New York in the 1950s. The agency later mentored, among others, Dick Cavett, Robert Klein, Tom Poston, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Martin Short and Martin Mull. The firm, founded by Jack Rollins, later became Rollins Joffe Morra & Brezner.

When it signed Mr. Crystal in the 1970s, he was struggling as a member of a comedy act called 3’s Company while moonlighting as a substitute teacher on Long Island. Mr. Rollins told him he should work alone; Mr. Joffe handled his contracts. By 1985, Mr. Crystal was earning $25,000 for each “Saturday Night Live” show, a sum that, as his character Fernando would say, was “mahhh’vlous.”

Mr. Joffe “excels at nailing down the big money in negotiations,” an article in The New York Times said that year.

Eric Lax, author of “Woody Allen: A Biography” (Alfred. A. Knopf, 1991), said in an interview Monday that starting with Mr. Allen’s movie “Take the Money and Run,” in 1969, “Charlie was able to guarantee Woody total artistic control over his films, something almost unheard of in Hollywood.”

“Woody got casting approval, script approval and final cut,” Mr. Lax said, “and he’s kept it ever since.”

Mr. Allen’s films are billed as Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe productions. But it was Mr. Joffe, as an agent, who traveled with Mr. Allen when he began acting and, later, making movies.

Charles Harris Joffe was born in Brooklyn on July 16, 1929, the son of Sidney and Mae Popper Joffe. His father was a pharmacist. His mother died when he was in his 20s, and his father remarried.

In addition to his stepmother, Esther Joffe, and his wife, the former Carol Holofcener, Mr. Joffe is survived by a son, Cory; two stepdaughters, the film director Nicole Holofcener and Suzanne Joffe; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Joffe graduated from Syracuse University in 1950. While a student there, he ran a business managing and booking bands into local nightclubs. After graduating, he moved to New York and was hired by the MCA talent agency. Three years later he went to work for Mr. Rollins; by the early 1960s he was a partner.

Mr. Lax said Mr. Joffe’s advice to Mr. Allen could be blunt, in a fatherly kind of way. In 1966, when Mr. Allen was playing James Bond’s illegitimate nephew in “Casino Royale,” a spoof of the Bond thrillers, he became very frustrated.

“Woody saw the dailies and said, ‘This stuff is just awful,’ ” Mr. Lax said. “And Charlie said, correctly: ‘You’re trying to get into the film business. It’s going to be a big picture, and you’re in it with a lot of stars. You’re having a nice time in London, playing poker every night, visiting all the museums. Just shut up.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/movies/15joffe.html





A 3-D Movie Places in the Top 5 at Weekend Box Office
Brooks Barnes

“Journey to the Center of the Earth” — promoted as the first live-action feature shot in a new digital 3-D process — sold a modest $20.6 million in tickets at North American theaters over the weekend, placing third among the five highest-grossing films for the period.

During a weekend of intense competition that included “Hellboy II” reaching No. 1 and an Eddie Murphy film that couldn’t crack the top five, the estimated total for “Journey” was diminished by a shortage of movie theaters capable of screening the movie in its intended 3-D format. The producers had hoped there would be a minimum of about 1,400 auditoriums with the technology. But theater owners have moved more slowly than expected to install the expensive system. By Friday, when “Journey to the Center of the Earth” opened, there were only 954 screens.

As a result, New Line, the recently slimmed-down branch of Time Warner that released the $54 million picture, had to scramble to tweak the marketing for the film — going so far as to drop “3D” from the title — and implement a standard two-dimensional release in tandem. That may have confused moviegoers.

Still, there were hints buried deeper in the box-office returns suggesting that 3-D is well on its way to becoming a force at multiplexes. Auditoriums screening the movie in 3-D sold more than three times as many tickets as those showing the standard version. About 57 percent of the total gross for “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” based on the classic Jules Verne tale, came from 3-D screenings.

In comparison, 3-D screenings of “Beowulf,” the computer-generated picture that opened last November, generated just 28 percent of its opening-weekend gross. (“Beowulf” was available in 3-D on slightly fewer screens.)

Michael V. Lewis, the chairman of RealD, the company behind the technology used in the film, said he was “ecstatic” about the public’s response. “This demonstrates the power of 3-D and we are going to continue to roll out the technology on a global scale as quickly as possible,” he said.

Elsewhere at the multiplex, “Hellboy II: Golden Army,” starring a comic-book demon and released by Universal Pictures, opened in the No. 1 slot, selling about $35.9 million in tickets, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.

The opening for this $85 million movie significantly outperformed its 2004 predecessor, creating a potential franchise for Universal. Its success is a validation for the studio, which chose to continue with the character after Sony Pictures, which distributed the first movie, passed.

“Hancock,” starring Will Smith as a misanthropic superhero, was a close No. 2 with an estimated $33 million in sales. This Sony title, which cost about $150 million to produce, excluding marketing costs, has sold about $165 million in tickets in North America during its first two weeks in release; the worldwide tally is $345 million.

“Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which stars Brendon Fraser, was followed, in fourth position, by the animated “Wall-E” from the Walt Disney Company ($18.5 million for a new domestic total of $162.8 million). “Wall-E” has not opened on a wide scale internationally.

“Wanted,” a Universal movie starring Angelina Jolie as a superhero assassin, rounded out the Top 5 ($11.6 million for a new domestic total of $112 million and a worldwide $176 million). Notable for a dismal opening over the weekend was the most recent offering from Eddie Murphy, “Meet Dave,” which cost about $60 million to produce and is distributed by 20th Century Fox; it sold about $5.3 million in tickets, only enough for seventh place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/movies/14box.html





`Dark Knight' Sets Box Office Record with $66.4M
David Germain

Batman's joust with the Joker has set another box office record.

Stoked by fan fever over the manic performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, "The Dark Knight" set a one-day box office record with $66.4 million on opening day, Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman said Saturday.

The movie's Friday haul surpassed the previous record of $59.8 million set last year by "Spider-Man 3." "The Dark Knight" might break the opening-weekend record of $151.1 million, also held by "Spider-Man 3."

"I think they're in jeopardy," Fellman said of the "Spider-Man 3" records.

"The Dark Knight" began with a record $18.5 million from midnight screenings, topping the previous high of $16.9 million for "Star Wars: Episode III — The Revenge of the Sith."

The opening day grosses for "The Dark Knight" far exceeded the full weekend haul of its predecessor, "Batman Begins," which took in $48.7 million in its first three days in 2005.

Reviews were excellent for director Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins," but they were stellar for his "Dark Knight."

"We've really never seen anything like this," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "The death of a fine actor taken in his prime, a legendary performance, and a movie that lives up to all the hype. That all combined to create these record-breaking numbers."

Buzz had been high for the Batman sequel well before Ledger died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose in January. Trailers last fall revealing Ledger's demented Joker, with crooked clown makeup, turned up the heat even more. The critical acclaim over his performance that built from advance screenings left fans in a frenzy.

"It's a combination of things. Certainly, that's a great part of it, but I think this movie's gross was partly because of the reviews it received and the incredible buzz and word of mouth that preceded it with our early screenings," Fellman said. "And the success and quality of the last one, `Batman Begins,' delivered by Chris Nolan just set the tone for the opening of this movie."

"The Dark Knight" reunites Christian Bale as Batman, the vigilante crime-fighter tormented by personal tragedy, and co-stars Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman. Maggie Gyllenhaal also stars.

The film spins an epic crime duel as Ledger's Joker orchestrates a reign of terror on the city of Gotham aimed to spread chaos and break down the restraint that keeps Batman on the right side of the law.

While critics are taking the film seriously enough to suggest Ledger could be in line for an Academy Award nomination, the action-packed movie also delivers as pure summer movie escapism.

"If you're worried about mortgage payments and gas prices, when you're sitting in `The Dark Knight' for two and a half hours, you're not thinking about any of that stuff," Dergarabedian said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...ob7PAD92118180





Summer Serials
Dave Kehr

Columbia Pictures thought so little of its serials that it apparently didn’t bother to maintain the copyrights for many of them, and it has fallen to individual collectors and enthusiasts to keep them in circulation, often in substandard prints.

One of the independent companies fighting the good fight is Restored Serials (restoredserials.com), which a few months ago came out with a digitally cleaned and polished version of one of Columbia’s most entertaining efforts, “The Green Archer” (1940). Based on a 1923 novel by Edgar Wallace, its 15 lively chapters describe the epic battle between Spike Holland (Victor Jory), a passionately dedicated insurance investigator, and Abel Bellamy (James Craven), a waspish antiques dealer whom Spike suspects of heading a gang of jewel thieves.

The main setting is Garr Castle, a sprawling edifice that serves as Bellamy’s headquarters and is honeycombed with a satisfyingly large number of secret passages and trap doors. The Green Archer of the title is a mysterious masked figure who materializes whenever Holland needs a hand or the plot needs advancing, popping up to pump arrows into bad guys or deliver crucial clues.

“The Green Archer” was one of four Columbia serials directed in 1940 by James W. Horne, a veteran filmmaker best known for his comedy shorts and features starring the likes of Laurel and Hardy (“Way Out West,” 1937), Charlie Chase (“Looser Than Loose,” 1930) and Buster Keaton (“College,” 1927). Like all of his serials, “The Green Archer” is a frequently hilarious exercise in self-conscious camp, created decades before that concept entered the mainstream with the television version of “Batman” in 1966.

Carried along by the surprisingly deft performance of the unknown Craven (whose first film this was), Horne turns the villainous Bellamy into a study in slow-burning, comic frustration. Like the perennially exasperated Edgar Kennedy of the Laurel and Hardy shorts, Craven’s Bellamy stares in disbelief as his bungling minions mess up his most elaborate plans, his temper eventually erupting in torrents of sarcasm. At one point Horne shows three of Bellamy’s hulking henchmen engaged in a fierce game of tiddlywinks.

Stunts like that could have gotten you fired over at Columbia’s chief rival, Republic Pictures, where serials were taken seriously. In his engaging 1995 autobiography, “In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase,” the Republic director William Witney describes exactly that happening to one of his colleagues, Alan James, when he tried to slip a much tamer gag into “S.O.S. Coast Guard” (1937). Republic believed in its serials, even when they weren’t believable, an attitude that might benefit many of today’s popular filmmakers, even as they continue to exploit Republic’s basic formulas. (Hello, Indiana Jones.)

Working with John English, Witney created many, if not most, of Republic’s best serials, among them “Daredevils of the Red Circle” (1939) and “Drums of Fu Manchu” (1940). (The two directors would alternate behind the camera, one filming while the other prepared for his shoot the next day.) Recently the independent distributor VCI (vcientertainment.com) added English and Witney’s rare 1938 “Dick Tracy Returns” to its catalog of digitally restored serials, and it’s a pip: 15 chapters of magnificently staged, marginally plausible action, starring Ralph Byrd as Chester Gould’s pointy-jawed comic-strip cop.

Tracy’s nemesis, as was the custom in the newspaper strip, is a stylized version of a notorious gangster then in the news, in this case, one Pa Stark — a sort of Ma Barker, complete with killer brood, recovered for the patriarchy. Stark is played by one of the most identifiable actors of the form, Charles Middleton, who lent his long, sour face and grand, Shakespearean diction to Ming the Merciless in the three “Flash Gordon” serials.

“He was always cast as the head of the orphanage,” Witney wrote about Middleton, “the one who loved to beat little kids. In real life, he was the nicest, most gentle person imaginable.” (“The Green Archer,” Restored Serials, $19.95, not rated; “Dick Tracy Returns,” VCI Entertainment, $29.99, not rated)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/mo...eo/15dvds.html





Mayor Wants Python Film Ban Ended
Carl Yapp

She's not the messiah, she's the mayor of Aberystwyth and she has a plan.

Sue Jones-Davies is trying to overturn a near 30-year ban imposed by the town on Monty Python's Life of Brian - the film in which she played a role.

Long before she donned her mayoral robes in the mid Wales town, she played Brian's girlfriend in the movie.

Opponents claimed it made fun of Jesus, but she says it's "amazing" that a town like hers still officially bars a movie now regarded as a comedy classic.

In 1979, however, it grabbed the headlines for the wrong reasons, with critics accusing the Python team of blasphemy with its story about a Jewish man who was mistaken for the messiah and then crucified.

Some religious groups picketed cinemas which screened the film.

A number of areas in Wales banned it, as former Python John Cleese recalled during an interview on Channel 4's Richard and Judy programme on Wednesday.

But nearly 30 years on, the new mayor of Aberystwyth wants the restriction lifted in her town.

"Given what's on TV now I think it's amazing a ban in Aberystwyth still exists," said Ms Jones-Davies.

"I think it should be lifted.

"I would like to think that any religion would have the generosity to see the film for what it is, which is a comedy.

"I was surprised at the outrage it caused at the time, but I did not expect or appreciate the impact and never thought it would turn out to be so popular."

The movie has maintained its popularity. It is usually at or near the top of lists of the greatest comedy films.

It featured some iconic lines, most famously the verdict by Brian's mother on her son: "He's not the messiah - he's a very naughty boy".

Parts of the script are still quoted at Ms Jones-Davies today, but she confessed the lines were wasted on her: "I can't remember the lines from the script now - it's nearly 30 years ago," she explained.

Ms Jones-Davies played a revolutionary called Judith Iscariot, and she had a nude scene with the film's hero, Brian, played by the late Graham Chapman.

But she very nearly didn't appear in the movie at all.

"I got the part because somebody dropped out," she said. "I had the same agent as John Cleese and was recommended for the part.

"I went for an interview at a flat in London and all the Monty Python crew were there.

"It was quite funny really because it wasn't a proper interview at all, as you'd expect with Monty Python.

"They were all chipping in and saying, 'Oh yes, she'll be fine'. I wasn't asked many questions."

It was shot in Tunisia, but part of the crucifixion scene had to be filmed in a sandpit in Kent.

"It was great fun to work on, and we had the odd day off. One day I went with Terry Gilliam to buy a carpet and driving along we came to a river," she added.

"Local people nearby were warning us not to go through it, but Terry just drove on - I thought we were going to sink but we managed to make to the other side."

Recalling her famous nude scene, Ms Jones-Davies said: "It was a part and I just played it, although I did call for a closed set.

'Commercial impact'

"It was filmed in a sort of small tunnel, and wasn't very sensual at all."

It is understood a committee made up of church leaders in Aberystwyth recommended a ban in 1979.

Ceredigion council has the power to lift it, but a spokesman said no-one in the licensing department knew about the ban.

But Michael Davies, the owner of Aberystwyth's Commodore Cinema, said he was sure it was still in place.

"As far as I know the Life of Brian is still banned from being shown at the cinema," he explained.

"My father ran the cinema when the ban was imposed and I suppose it would have had a commercial impact at the time because it was a huge film and made a fortune.

"I don't think lifting the ban now would make much of a difference."

Stars such as Spike Milligan and ex-Beatle George Harrison, who financed the Life of Brian when no-one else would, played cameo roles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...id/7514423.stm





Your Guide to the WALL-E Controversy
Sean O'Neal

He’s cute. He’s cuddly. He has the power to make grown women weep with little more than a longing gaze. Like Jesus Christ and E.T. before him, Pixar’s WALL-E is an adorable, otherworldly creature of patience and pure love sent to save humanity from itself—so it’s only natural that people are clamoring for his blood. And perhaps it’s merely indicative of the easy access to self-expression afforded by blogs, but the backlash against WALL-E seems to be spiraling out of control lately. For all your cocktail party needs, I've compiled this handy list of four of the most popular complaints making the rounds about America’s new favorite robot. (Go input yourself, Johnny 5.) Clip and save!

1. It promotes liberal fascism!

WALL-E predicts an Earth choked with waste, sentenced to death by its former inhabitants’ shortsightedness and need for instant gratification—in short, it’s the same logline used by every environmentalist organization asking you to recycle, cut down on your consumption of fossil fuels, and maybe not eat everything out of a Styrofoam container if it’s not too much trouble. So naturally the same people who have accused Al Gore of “fascism” for urging immediate bipartisan action on global warming, namely the ever-vigilant-against-perceived-liberal-bias crusaders at The National Review, have come out swinging against WALL-E, accusing it of promoting “Malthusian fear mongering.” While that line comes from Editor-At-Large Jonah Goldberg—the same man who once drew parallels between Gore and the Nazis with the statement, “One of the most fascist phrases you hear in modern contemporary life in America is this notion that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”—Goldberg also conceded that WALL-E is a “fascinating and at-times brilliant movie.” His fellow columnist Shannen Coffin, however, had harsher things to say:

From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It's a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however. Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are.

(Right, as opposed to making millions off of telling us how powerful, righteous, and handpicked for greatness by almighty God we are.) While the influence of “enviro-wackos” is easy enough for “right-thinking” people to ignore, others—like Editor-In-Chief of The Rational Argumentator Gennady Stolyarov II—see it as an out-and-out Marxist attack. In his essay “WALL-E: Economic Ignorance And The War On Modernity,” Stolyarov cites the fact that fast-food restaurants are serving “health foods,” “landfills are remarkably effective at storing garbage,” and that traditional farming is, like, hard and stuff as flaws in the film’s logic:

WALL-E is an assault on modern civilization, borne of deep economic and historical ignorance. The film shamefully betrays the efforts of countless heroic individuals who have raised humanity out of the muck of barbarism. Its anti-technological, anti-capitalist message needs to be exposed and countered by all thinking individuals.

So in short, give in to WALL-E’s alarmist message and you’ll be pissing on all of human evolution. Have fun in your socialist work camp, toiling to grow vegetables for your new liberal Nazi overlords!

2. It’s prejudiced against fat people!

Of course, the real “villain” in WALL-E isn’t the faceless, greedy corporation (and none-too-subtle Wal-Mart substitute) Buy 'N Large, but the big, stupid man in the mirror: Undone by their own unchecked consumption and aberrant laziness, humans find themselves exiled from Earth and set adrift on a never-ending luxury space cruise, where they spend all day floating around on hover-chairs, slurping cupcake shakes, and playing virtual golf. Such torpidity has caused their bodies to atrophy and balloon to the point where they’re basically amorphous blobs—and thus WALL-E has also managed to piss off America’s “fat pride” community. "Food, fat, feminism" blog The F Word accuses Pixar of “using animation skills for evil” in its perpetration of discriminatory attitudes toward the overweight, saying:

WALL-E specifically singles out and targets obese people as the primary cause of mankind’s demise, further perpetuating the stereotype of the gluttonous, slothful fat person. Furthermore, the film suggests that, in their exaggerated laziness, obese people disregard not only personal health, but also that of the planets, and are held up as the cause for the destruction of the environmental landscape. This is, despite mountains of evidence that show, as a group, fat people do not eat more than thin people, nor are they less active, and that the so-called “obesity epidemic” has been greatly exaggerated by self-serving corporate interests.

That sentiment is echoed over at Fatshionista, which characterizes the film as "deeply unfortunate":

The “villains” of WALL-E…take the form of (the ever so original and not hackneyed at all) Fat! American! Couch! Potatoes! I didn’t want to believe that Pixar, the folks behind last summer’s resplendent Ratatouille, a brilliant movie about the importance of nourishment and appearance not ultimately dictating a person’s (or rat’s) skills or passions, could be capable of perpetrating some sort of heinous obesity crisis storyline but it seems the ugly rumours are true… This is so INCREDIBLY disappointing. I feel personally betrayed by Pixar right now.

And again at CalorieLab, which has been steadily updating reports on the film since late last year, asking:

Will today’s overweight moviegoers spend their money to see a movie that in effect is characterizing their own bodies as the first step on the road to mankind’s downfall?

CalorieLab also digs up quotes from parents of children with eating disorders, who are up in arms over the film reinforcing their anorexic teens’ unhealthy attitudes toward eating:

“I didn’t think for a second that a movie about a little robot could have anything to do with weight. My son keeps making comments about ‘all of those fat, lazy people just sitting around doing nothing.’ We’ve seen a significant increase in [his] anorexic behaviors since we saw the movie yesterday.”

Maybe Kyle Smith's review best sums up the big-and-beautiful backlash when he says,

Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers…The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation.

So wait, Disney’s customers are primarily fat, lazy people who are likely to take umbrage with being portrayed as fat, lazy people—yet for some reason this is supposed to win sympathy for the fat “cause”? Look, I’m all for pointing out hypocrisy, especially when it comes to Disney, but WALL-E’s most egregious offense in this regard is not necessarily the film itself—which, let’s face it, was produced by Pixar’s (according to right-wing critics) “Berkeley hippie” creative staff independent of, if in grudging indirect service to, the Disney marketing machine. No, the main reason to shout

3. It’s hypocritical!

…is the fact that the film, like every Disney product, inevitably comes packaged with the usual tide of tie-in crap, plastic trinkets that roll off the conveyor belt predestined for the landfill. Take Devin Faraci’s report on the film’s press junket for CHUD:

The room was stuffed with what seemed like a hundred or more tie-in products ranging from WALL-E branded plastic Crocs (with tire tread patterns on the soles) to plastic WALL-E action figures to WALL-E branded clothing and bed sets and drapes. When asked which of the items were made with post-consumer recycled material or were made of biodegradable material, the PRbot giving the pitch seemed flustered. She said that they tried to use such materials whenever possible, and pointed out a post-consumer WALL-E branded Kleenex box. Every environmental group will beg you to avoid Kleenex, since they're wiping out Canada's Boreal Forest to give you a place to blow your nose, so the Kleenex connection is fucking pathetic in itself for a movie that trumpets taking care of the environment.

Oddly enough, this also forms the basis for condemnation by The National Review’s Greg Pollowitz, who gets so apoplectic in his effort to paint the movie as leftist propaganda that he accidentally reinforces the movie’s message:

It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over-consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment. All this from mega-company Disney, who wants us to buy WALL-E kitsch for our kids that are manufactured in China at environment-destroying factories and packed in plastic that will take hundreds of year to biodegrade.

Pollowitz has a point: No doubt by the time the year 2700 rolls around, disposable WALL-E tchotchkes like these cheap promotional wristwatches will be blanketing our graves, so all’s fair in pointing out the hypocrisy, and maybe even joining him in his proposed boycott of all such tie-in merchandise. But, uh, I thought all of that stuff about factories destroying the environment and the evils of non-biodegradable plastic was just a horror story concocted by liberal Nazis out to scare us into acquiescence? Does the hypocrisy of the film’s promotional campaign somehow mean that we’re not facing an eventual solid waste crisis? Is this the same logic that dictates that, because Al Gore travels by jet, he’s wrong about global warming?

My brain is starting to unravel from all of these logical loopholes, so before I curl up under my desk weeping, here is the fourth (and my personal favorite) strain of anti-WALL-E sentiment:

4. It’s too popular!

The howling backwoods that is IMDB.com is where film criticism goes to die (and then have its corpse gang-raped, called a racist, and accused of supporting Al-Qaeda), but it’s amazing how much stock people still place in its ranking system. Right now WALL-E’s message board is overrun with commenters aghast at the film’s high placement on the completely meaningless and arbitrary Top 250 Films, which compiles numerical “votes” to paint a topsy-turvy world where Se7en far outranks Citizen Kane, Vertigo, M, and Chinatown, to name but a few, and The Shawshank Redemption is second only to The Godfather. Last week, WALL-E edged out Schindler’s List, cracking the top six and sending users into a frenzy: Seeking to counteract all of the “10” votes, many people have been encouraging others to rate the film a “1” out of pure spite, setting off a storm of controversy on the message board that rivals only those ever-popular “Maggie Gyllenhaal is a terrorist!” threads for utter pointlessness. The film has since dropped down to number 19, a fact many of its detractors are now gloating over as though that indicates a shift in the public opinion towards rationality.

Of course, the real question is why all of this matters so much to those who have put WALL-E in their crosshairs. Why is so much effort being expended to decry a nearly wordless film about the slapstick shenanigans of a lovelorn machine? As Gawker puts it:

One reason for the conservative disappointment with the movie is because Pixar is the cultural equivalent of the swing voter: despite its hippie culture, the studio has been attuned to shifting public attitudes; indeed, given the lead-time on Pixar projects, it's successfully anticipated them. The studio's most political project before WALL-E was The Incredibles; the 2004 movie is a not-so-disguised argument against enforced equality and political correctness, and was adopted by conservatives as a morality play of their own. This time, however, Pixar is voting Democrat.

Given the current childish squabbling between voters who have reduced the upcoming election to inarticulate name-calling like “NoBama” and “McSame,” this sort of forced, knee-jerk backlash isn't entirely surprising (if still entirely disheartening). But my fellow Americans, whatever your political beliefs, I ask you: If we can’t come together over a cute fucking robot, what chance do we have?
http://www.avclub.com/content/node/82609





Angus MacLane of Pixar: The Den of Geek Interview

Angus MacLane, the supervising animator on Wall E, talks about the secrets of Pixar, the joys of Lego, R2D2 and his love for James Camerons' Aliens...
Simon Brew & Mark Pickavance

Supervising animator Angus MacLane has worked at Pixar for well over ten years, on shorts such as Geri’s Game and One Man Band, through to Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc, Cars and Ratatouille (to name but a few). With his latest project, Wall E, soaking up acclaim across the globe, he spared us some time to talk about the film, his enthusiasm for Lego, the films that inspired him and where new animators should look to start.

The technological advances you must face with every Pixar project seem to us quite dramatic. How does that manifest itself with every new film? How early do you have to ‘lock’ the look of a project?

The look of the film is locked when the film comes out, I think! You can still affect things in many ways. But initially there’s the pre-production process, and we sort out what the look of the film is going to be. Early on they’ll do painting, and the production designer Ralph Eggleston was very specific about this is the look I want, and worked with Andrew [Stanton, director] very closely to establish the look of the film.

I don’t think it changed that much as we went through the film. So that was established pretty early on. I would say two years into it, the story’s being sorted out, the look of the film has then gone through an iteration of being on the screen in actual finished film, and I think that’s when it’s sorted out.

And does the software you use alter much as you go along, over a three year production cycle?

The software for the actual execution of the film doesn’t change that much. Because you really need to lock it to one piece of software. Maybe there’ll be an update here and there, and they’ll be individual sub-programs developed. For example there was a program developed for Wall E just to get his treads to lock to the ground, so they recognise the ground and wrap around and drive as you translate him along. That was technology that was developed as an offshoot from a very similar program from Cars, in keeping the tyres on the ground. But that’s about as automated as we get. Everything else is pretty much hand animated.

Pixar has a reputation for pathfinding in many ways. How much is that determined now by the stories you want to tell, and how much by the increased pressure of competitors snapping at your heels?

To tell you the truth, I don’t think internally that we’re that interested in finding the next big thing to tackle technologically. We’re not like oh, we need to make it difficult for ourselves, because the stories do that just fine on their own!

With every film, people say don’t the computers get faster? Well yeah, they do, but the appetite for what the film needs to be grows just as much. So I think that we are always interested in telling good stories. What happens is that you’ll make a movie, finish it and say what’s next. Oh, we’re gonna make a film with fish! Fish, huh? What do we need for fish? Well, we need water, and we need to figure out how we’re going to move them around, and so for whatever’s coming up next, there’s new, unique challenges for each thing. It’s certainly this film is much different from Rat[atouille], and Rat was much different from Cars. You get into a situation where the story’s going to give you plenty of challenges.

This film in particular seemed to have a much longer gestation period than many of the Pixar projects, and we’re told it was referred to in the meeting that started it all back in the early 1990s. Is it something that Pixar has always had in the background, but needed a certain level of success first?

No, it wasn’t quite like AI, where the technology didn’t exist yet to make this brilliant film. It was an idea that they’d had, and they hadn’t really figured it out yet, and they’d put it on the back burner. It’s not like there was somebody in a room waiting! It was an idea that was shelved for a while, and after a bunch of other films were made, Andrew was interested in telling that story and they went back to it. It wasn’t in constant flux. You imagine this separate office just devoted to it! It wasn’t like that at all. It was after Nemo, and it was something that Andrew just couldn’t get out of his mind.

The look of the film, and the sheer visual scale of Wall E is remarkable, and again breaks boundaries. There were clearly some very strong decisions made at the start there, in terms of the vision of the project?

I think it was always going to be a sci-fi opera set in space, a tribute to the 60s and 70s sci-fi films that we all were interested in. Andrew was like well we’re going to make a robot movie that’s about robots, but it’s a 60s or 70s sci-fi film. Are you interested? I said yes, of course I’m interested! And he said it’s going to be a love story. It had the element of simultaneously being something new, this robot love story, with something familiar, which is to try Pixar does space. And I think that’s really kind of exciting going into it. A lot of us are movie geeks, many of us are sci-fi geeks, myself included, and we just tried to make a film that would have echoes of what you’d seen before, but would be really something unique and individual, and be very personal to us as film makers.

And when you come to the point where you’re going ahead with the project, and you’re tasked with animating a robot, how did you tackle that?

It’s actually very similar to animating fish!

You think about fish, and you’re like I don’t know how I’m going to animate these things, and you look at footage of fish and start off by trying to replicate it exactly. And then once you figure out how fish move, you go okay, I’ve got a scene where a character, Fish X, says blah blah blah, and so you go after he says blah blah blah, I’ll have the tail wiggle a little bit, just to remind the audience that this guy’s underwater. And then we’ll flip the fin a little bit, and wiggle around, and so you get this thing where you’re always giving indications to the audience that the character is what they are.

In the case of Wall E, we studied machines, and hydraulics, and robots, and saw what defines robotics. A lot of it is that a robot only moves as much as it has to. It has one motor that does one thing. So if you treat it that way, have one idea at a time, and slightly overlap that so the movie doesn’t last ten hours, you can build robotic movement that’s really charming. A lot of times we’d just be focusing on making just one motor look like it was just turning the head, and you’d get so much out of that, as we’d seen in previous films like Star Wars, where you’d see R2-D2 just rotate his head a little bit. There’s something really charming about that.

Is R2-D2 as close as you’d get to a template for a robot with charm?

Yeah. I don’t think we were ever worried… well, we wanted to make him charming, but the drawings were cute, and we saw how it played in the story reel, so when it got to animation it was more about trying to make it look believable. Figuring out that methodology as to how the mechanics worked was our guide to working out how he worked as a machine. And once you’d got the machine going, you could just tweak it slightly and give it personality very easily, as previous films such as Luxo Jr showed.

The film opened to huge numbers in the States. Yet this was perhaps the project viewed by outsiders as the riskier Pixar project. How would you encapsulate the secret of the success?

It’s kind of like Radiohead, right? They have the success that they have, and so they so we’re going to make an album, we’re going to release it for whatever you want to pay. Radiohead is able to do that. I don’t know, I think we’re able to make the movies we’re able to make because people go to see them and support us. We make movies that we think would be good, and we’re the harshest critics on ourselves. So as long as we keep making movies that we believe in, and push ourselves to tell the best stories that we can, even when it’s not financially convenient to do so, then I think that we’ll hopefully find an audience.

I’m happy that people are seeing the movie, and I’m very proud of this film. When I watch it I have to admit I guess it is pretty risky. It’s like wow, it’s amazing this movie got made, because you could see a bunch of aspects about it that a lesser studio would say ‘I don’t think we’re going to invest money in this’. It’s totally weird in the best possible way. And that’s why I’m proud to have worked on it.

You say you’re your harshest critics…

… oh yeah!

So how late can you leave a change to the film when you’re animating something so sophisticated?

[Pause] You always try and catch things as you’re going along, and most of the time you do. So it’s just a matter of the economics of the change. Every film that we’ve made has always gone through a dark period where it needs to be reworked, and it kind of sucks. And so the strength of the studio has always been to stand behind making the best film possible. Like I said earlier, even when it’s not financially convenient.

So to be able to make that movie or rework that movie is the value of Pixar. This film is no exception. It was never horrible, there was stuff that needed work, there’s a natural story process that we do. We make it, put it on screen, see what it looks like, if stuff isn’t working, we rework it. We did that on this film, and to huge advantage.

When I went to a screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, this probably eight year old kid asked do you like the movie, and is it what you pictured when you started working on it? And that was a very astute question. I had to admit, it’s the best version I’ve ever seen of the film, so even though when you work on a film, it’s really hard to get a perspective of watching it as a movie, after you’ve seen it a few times, I can appreciate it as an audience.

Does the animation process at Pixar follow the almost-traditional hand drawn style, where specific animators get specific characters to work with? You yourself seem to have a brief across a lot of productions at once?

It’s not quite the same, as we don’t have supervising animators for each character, and we don’t have assistants underneath that supervising animator who work only on that character. I think that the reason why is that everyone can be good at some character. And if you just limit animator X to character X, they may have a great take for a certain scene with a different character. You don’t want to just relegate them to one character they may not be into that much.

Brad Bird would say that none of us are the best animator in the world, but collectively we are the best in the world. So that approach of spending your money wisely, or giving everyone a shot to do everything is a really wise approach. It also helps keep egos in check, and you do the best work with what you’re given. Every shot can be great, I firmly believe that.

I’ve been looking at pictures of your Lego models that you make, and my personal favourite is Chewbacca as a DJ. What do you think is the best thing you’ve ever made out of Lego.

[Laughs] I don’t know! The great and horrible thing about the Internet is that you build something, and you think you’re so great, and then you look online. There are apparently people who have limitless time and money to make the most amazing creations.
I don’t know if I have a favourite. I’m very proud of the Wall E I made! I don’t have that much time to build stuff, and most of the stuff that’s online is so old because I’ve been busy making a movie. I don’t think I’ve built the best thing yet!

Would you ever consider a Lego and Pixar computer game?

Oh I hope so! I would be over the moon if they sorted that out! I would hopefully be very much involved with that process! But at this point I have no knowledge of anything.

What would be the non-Pixar movies that inspired you, that you’d recommend to our readers?

I would say that if you’ve never seen Le Cirque Rouge, that’s a great movie. My favourite movie of all time is Aliens. Recent favourites include Children of Men, that was just amazing. The best film I’ve seen this year is The Visitor, directed by Tom McCarthy, and – I’m trying to think of some wild card – you know what else I saw that’s great? It’s called Planet B-Boy, it’s a documentary about a breakdancing competition. A fabulous character study, totally amazing.

Trying to thing of other oddball films to recommend! We have a thing at work called movie club, and I’m a total movie nerd so some of the younger animators I’m telling them ‘if you haven’t seen these movies…’ and I’m sending them out, telling them they’ve got to watch Two Days Of The Condor and Parallax View, Taking Of Pelham 123, The Guns Of Navarone… We all have a real affinity for that era, the 70s films. I think the films that we’re most inspired by are live action films. If you haven’t seen Mon Oncle, that’s pretty sweet. It’s totally slow but it’s totally an animator’s movie, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Finally, for anyone looking to break into animation, what advice would you give them?

I would say be persistent, and keep trying. A friend of mine, he’s a music composer, he’d got some advice from an old pro when he started. And the old pro said to him that people who succeed in the business are not those that are the most talented, and they’re not the people that know the most people, but they are the people who are able to endure. I think that there’s something profound about that. It’s the old saying, it doesn’t happen by mistake: it’s opportunity met with preparation. So when you get the opportunity, make sure you’re prepared.

And start drawing! Because nobody draws anymore. It’s such an amazing thing. I think that things that will make you a good animator are the things that make you a good drawer, and vice versa. So keep drawing!

Angus MacLane, thank you very much!
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/8663...interview.html





Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot
Anne Eisenberg

ROBOTS already cut the grass and vacuum rugs. Now they are helping with a more artistic job: creating vast photographic panoramas with ordinary cameras.

A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.

Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.

The roboticized camera mount and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. The work was part of a project to introduce people to different countries and cultures through images.

The GigaPan provides a low-cost alternative to sophisticated motorized camera mounts on the market used to take panoramic photos, said Greg Downing, co-founder of the xRez Studio in Santa Monica, Calif., which specializes in gigapixel photography. The motorized mounts can cost thousands of dollars, he said, and typically require a high-end camera.

Dr. Nourbakhsh said the Carnegie Mellon robotic mount, to be released commercially later this year, would be priced “so that as many people as possible can afford to use it.”

“We hope it will cost in the low hundreds of dollars — well below $500,” he said. The GigaPan will attach to any ordinary point-and-shoot digital camera.

About 300 test models of the GigaPan robot and software have been tried worldwide during the past year by scientists, schoolchildren and photography fans, among others, Dr. Nourbakhsh said.

People can share their panoramas at a Web site provided by Carnegie Mellon (www.gigapan.org).

Ronald C. Schott, an assistant professor of geology at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., who tried the GigaPan during its testing phase, has posted many of his panoramas at the site. Preparing to shoot the pictures is straightforward, he said. The photographer attaches the mount to an ordinary tripod, attaches the camera and decides on the breadth of the scene. Then the robot goes to work, dividing the total vista into segments and clicking away.

Dr. Schott, who had earlier tried to create panoramas on his own by moving the tripod for each shot, thought that the robot did a far better job. “Doing it manually was tedious and often ineffective,” he said.

Dr. Schott’s GigaPan images can be seen at (http://www.gigapan.org/viewProfile.php?userid=1252). “As you zoom in you get progressively higher resolution images, and at the deepest level is the fully detailed image that the robot shot,” he said.

The details in these images often surprise him. “I find things I hadn’t noticed when I was in the field,” he said. “This gives you the joy of discovery not found in traditional photos.”

Richard Palmer, an environmental health specialist at the Hawaii State Department of Health in Honolulu, also tested the GigaPan. One main advantage of the system, he said, is that users can use a telephoto lens rather than a wide-angle one, providing more detail and depth to the image.

“That means that when you zoom in to look at the images, you are viewing them just as you would if you were looking through a pair of binoculars” with powerful magnification, he said. “You can take panoramas from video, but you won’t have a still image that you can stop and look at in this high detail.”

One of Dr. Palmer’s panoramas — of Hanauma Bay on the coast of Oahu in Hawaii — has 1,750 total frames, 25 rows by 70 columns. (http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5322) The exposures and number of frames were calculated automatically by the computer inside the GigaPan.

It took about an hour and a half for the robot to shoot the scene in a fairly silent process, with only “a low hum, and the steady click of the camera,” he said.

Dr. Palmer was busy, too, during the shoot. The robotic device attracted a lot of attention from bystanders as it captured the scene, and he ended up protecting it from them, lest they overturned it.

Dr. Palmer plans to use the GigaPan both for artistic images and for documenting Hawaii’s natural ecosystems. “It’s another way to be creative,” he said. “It’s therapy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/te...y/20novel.html





Disney Taps Into Blu-ray’s Interactive Technology
Brooks Barnes and Eric A. Taub

The Walt Disney Company, along with the broader entertainment industry, is counting on “Sleeping Beauty” to help awaken interest in Blu-ray DVDs.

In October, the company will release a 50th anniversary edition of the classic animated movie in the high-definition Blu-ray format. But Disney is not stopping there. “Sleeping Beauty” will also come with unusual features geared toward a generation of viewers that embraces interactivity and social networking.

Viewers can watch the movie in tandem with friends in other locations and chat using a laptop, P.D.A. or cellphone. (Comments appear on the screen.) Parents who are not able to watch the film with their children can record a video message that will pop up during a designated scene as the child watches. Viewers will also be able to compete against others around the world at trivia.

All of these activities are possible because of a technology that connects Blu-ray discs with the Internet, which the entertainment industry is calling BD Live. Disney and other studios, including Lionsgate and Sony, believe that BD Live could be Blu-ray’s killer app, potentially altering the tepid response that consumers have given Blu-ray to date.

“Our research shows that so many people watch TV with their laptop nearby,” said Lori MacPherson, senior vice president and general manager for Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment North America. “Online gaming and texting are already popular. The question is, how do we harness this?”

Hardware is a giant hurdle. First-generation Blu-ray players are not compatible with BD Live and cannot be upgraded. Although Sony’s PlayStation 3 can use the technology, there is currently only one BD Live Blu-ray machine — Panasonic’s DMP-BD50K model — and it costs about $800.

Several new BD Live-enabled machines will arrive in stores by fall, but they will still be out of reach for many. The new Blu-ray players will sell for as little as $400.

There is also the problem of acquainting consumers with a technology that sounds daunting. In reality it is fairly simple to use, but Disney plans advertising and demonstrations in stores and elsewhere to help introduce it to the public.

“We need to demystify this technology for the mass market,” said Bob Chapek, president of Disney’s home entertainment unit.

The lack of compatible hardware has not stopped the studios from incorporating BD Live features. They assume the market will catch up. Lionsgate released BD Live titles in January 2007. With “Saw IV” and “War,” viewers can exchange messages with other fans and see the conversation as the movie is playing. Text chat, which Lionsgate calls MoLog, for “movie log,” is also available in the recent release of “Rambo.” The company said it would add BD Live features to selected titles in the future.

Sony currently has eight BD Live movies, including “Men in Black” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” By the end of August, an additional eight movies will be available, including “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and three “Starship Troopers” titles.

Viewers of “Walk Hard” can download three featurettes. “Men in Black” offers a multiplayer game, and viewers can upload a still image of themselves into two of the three “Starship” movies, which will then be incorporated into a series of stills from the movies.

Consumers will also be able to download new trailers appropriate to the rating of the movie they are watching.

Lexine Wong, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s senior executive vice president for worldwide marketing, is pitching Blu-ray with BD Live as “packaged media that feels new and exciting.”

“BD-Live lets us have a direct relationship with the consumer, which we could never have with packaged media,” she said.

Making DVDs exciting is a trick movie studios are desperate to pull off. After years of blistering growth, domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research, the first annual drop in the medium’s history.

While DVDs are still a big business, any decline is cause for concern because DVD sales can account for as much as 70 percent of revenue for a new film. Results for 2008 have been mixed, with overall sales flat. Sales for the DVD version of the box office hit “I Am Legend,” for example, were notably soft.

Blu-ray discs, which sell at a sharp premium to standard DVDs, are growing quickly but still occupy a tiny bit of the market. The industry estimate for sales of Blu-ray discs in 2008 is nearly $1 billion, up from $170 million last year.

The BD Live-enhanced Blu-ray discs cost even more. The “Sleeping Beauty” Blu-ray set will carry a suggested retail price of $40.

Another barrier, according to consumer surveys, is the opinion of many people that they do not need to upgrade to high-definition DVDs with futuristic-sounding side offerings; standard DVDs are good enough.

Mr. Chapek of Disney brushes aside that skepticism. “Henry Ford said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse,” ’ ” Mr. Chapek said. “We don’t rely on the consumer to have our vision for us.”

Although “Sleeping Beauty” is Disney’s first BD Live-enhanced Blu-ray release, all of the company’s future Blu-ray titles will include BD Live features. Mr. Chapek says he sees BD Live as Blu-ray’s breakthrough moment.

“The idea of my little girl being able to experience a movie and chat in real time with her grandparents across the country is very exciting to me,” Mr. Chapek said at a recent BD Live demonstration in Los Angeles. “I can’t help but think it will be exciting to a lot of consumers, too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/bu.../14bluray.html





On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff
John Markoff

WHEN Steven P. Jobs introduced the Apple iPhone 18 months ago, he contended that viewing the Web on it was comparable to browsing on a desktop personal computer.

As it turns out, Mr. Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens.

It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.

The experience is not limited to special-purpose applications — say, to public transit sites like Nextbus, which are ideally suited for viewing on a smartphone. Evening commuters impatiently waiting for their rides home obviously are not going to race back to the office to check the schedule on their PCs — but they can find it easily on their hand-held devices.

A quick trip to Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Zillow or Powerset, all of which have been redesigned to take advantage of the iPhone, makes it clear that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to exploring cyberspace. By stripping down the Web site interface to the most basic functions, site designers can focus the user’s attention and offer relevant information without distractions.

It’s obvious that reading a Facebook newsfeed or looking up the value of a friend’s home on Zillow doesn’t require a 20-inch computer display. It may also make more sense to keep the grocery list, play a game or read an online newspaper while mobile.

Moreover, a new wave of applications from companies like eBay, Bank of America and America Online that are designed for the second-generation iPhone 3G, which went on sale Friday, will further blur the line between the Web and the iPhone. The eBay application is available as a free download from Apple’s new “app store,” which is part of its iTunes service, and allows users to track auctions, place bids and flip through images of items for sale.

“By having fewer items to scan for on a small display, users can find what they want more quickly and can be more confident that they have made the right choice,” said Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist who founded the Human-Computer Interaction Library at the University of Maryland. “If you just put the juicy stuff up there it works better.”

In a recent article and accompanying video posted on his Web site, Edward Tufte, the information and visualization designer at Yale, argues that the iPhone’s success is attributable in part to the decision by iPhone designers to dispense with clutter — all of the irritating buttons and menus that are part and parcel of a typical computer interface.

“The content is the interface, the information is the interface, not the computer administration debris,” he said in a video critique of the iPhone.

He also notes that the iPhone succeeds by “intensifying” information, made possible in part by its higher resolution display and in part by packing more useful information in each display.

As next-generation smartphones and mobile Internet devices are introduced by Apple’s competitors, the iPhone’s large advantage will almost certainly disappear. But as a result of a combination of higher screen resolution and software design, the iPhone today is clearly the best hand-held device for viewing the Web. Apple’s hope is that the iPhone 3G will cement its lead by extending the range of wireless broadband beyond WiFi hotspots.

When Mr. Jobs demonstrated the original iPhone, he proudly showed how it could be used as a window onto a full-size newspaper Web page. The iPhone user could navigate by moving the page under the window with his finger and then double-tapping on a particular item or article to zoom it up to take full advantage of the iPhone screen.

Since then, however, the window metaphor has largely given way to custom-tailored, vertically oriented Web sites. Text appears large enough for users to read comfortably, and mobile Web sites are redone so that the user scrolls only up and down, not sideways, to view information.

The shift to vertical Web pages is a big step forward, says Donald Norman, an expert in user-oriented design at the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm.

“A small window into a huge space is horrible,” he said. “It makes for a great demo, but it’s very frustrating to use.”

The advantage of the iPhone is particularly clear for Web sites where a great deal of searching is not required, he said.

In some instances, Web sites have even offered features or displays before they are available on full-sized Web browsers.

That is the case with the new Powerset interface to the Wikipedia Web site developed for the iPhone. Powerset, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, offers three tabs that allow users to explore Wikipedia in different ways, including an outline view that visually displays the information extracted by the Powerset software technology for results of each query.

“The small screen forces you to be even more ruthless and focus on usability almost like a haiku,” said Barney Pell, Powerset’s founder and chief executive. “That’s what happens with design for the small screen. You have to think about what the most important thing the user is doing is.”

Is it time to write the obituary for the desktop PC? Not just yet.

“This works fine for many small common tasks,” Mr. Shneiderman said, “but I want my radiologist and air-traffic controllers to be using multiple large high-res displays.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/te.../13stream.html





Sony Reveals PlayStation Movie Download Service
Derrik J. Lang

Sony is raising the curtain on a PlayStation 3 movie download service.

The company announced at the E3 Business and Media Summit it will launch a downloadable movie service today featuring films from such studios as Disney, Fox and Warner Bros.

The standard and high definition videos can be downloaded to the console and transferred to a PlayStation Portable. Rentals will cost $2.99 to $5.99. Purchases will cost $9.99 to $14.99.

Sony also announced it will sell an 80-gigabyte PS3 model for $399 beginning in September. Among the new games revealed were "God of War III" and "Massive Action Game," which will allow up to 256 players to battle online.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Valuable Group Grabs Movie Beam

Indian conglomerate nabs VOD service
Diane Garrett, Patrick Frater

The Indian conglomerate behind digital pioneer UFO Moviez has acquired Movie Beam, the video-on-demand service that was founded by Walt Disney Co.

The Valuable Group, headed by Sanjay Gaikwad, announced Thursday that it had acquired all the assets, trademarks, IPR and alliances of the 'push VoD' service that was first launched in 2003. Price of the transaction was not disclosed.

Disney and other backers spent over $100 million developing the service, but sold it at a fire-sale price of $10 million in March 2007 to rentailer Movie Gallery. The service was closed down in Dec last year after Movie Gallery filed for bankruptcy and went into Chapter 11 administration.

"This acquisition (will allow) us to deliver ethnic and Hollywood content to homes and the hospitality industry worldwide," Gaikwad said in a statement. "Films will be delivered in High Definition and viewers will get access to library films as well as the latest releases on a first day first show basis. We have earmarked an investment of $100 million over the next two years for the re-launch of this service in North America, UK and other overseas markets."

Service was developed by Disney, Intel and Cisco with coin from private equity backers. It worked by piggybacking on PBS digital broadcast signals to offer movie downloads to dedicated set-top boxes. Disney was not able to roll it out beyond three test cities and took a write down of $56 million after shuttering it for the first time in summer 2005.

"We will be rolling out the service by the end of 2008 in 3 markets,” Ameya Hete, Executive Director, Valuable Group and CEO MovieBeam, said. “We have added some cutting edge features to the MovieBeam service that will bring additional and currently unrealized revenues back to the entertainment industry and the deserving constituents."

Valuable Group operates in three business sectors media, technology and infrastructure. UFO has installed digital film projectors in some 1,200 movie theaters in India and parts of South Asia having developed a simple to use business model that provides exhibitors with current technology, delivers movies by satellite and does away with virtual print fees.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988784.html





Amazon Plans an Online Store for Movies and TV Shows
Brad Stone

In a significant step toward vanquishing the local video store and keeping couch potatoes planted firmly in front of their televisions and computers, Amazon.com will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

“For the first time, this is drop dead simple,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media. “Our goal is to create an immersive experience where people can’t help but get caught up in how exciting it is to simply watch a movie right from Amazon.com with a click of the button.”

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is also pursuing the technology and media world’s holy grail — an Internet pipeline to the TV. It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs.

The video store will be accessible through the Sony Bravia Internet Video link, a $300 tower-shaped device that funnels Web video directly to Sony’s high-definition televisions. That is an awkward extra expense, for now. But future Bravias are expected to have this capability embedded in the television, making it even easier to gain access to the full catalog of past and present TV shows and movies, over the Internet, using a television remote control.

Mr. Carr said Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices. “We can support both streaming and downloading,” he said. “Our goal is to continue to establish partnerships with all companies who have a connected device.”

Amazon Video on Demand will be accessible to a limited number of invited Amazon.com customers on Thursday before it opens more broadly to other users later this summer.

Films and TV shows from almost all the major studios and television networks are available for sale or rental to Amazon’s customers in the United States, at varying prices depending on the program and whether people buy or rent it. The lone holdouts are Walt Disney and ABC, which Disney owns. Both have close relations with Amazon’s digital rival, Apple.

Although Amazon does not release revenue numbers for its digital initiatives, its 10-month-old digital music store, Amazon MP3, is viewed favorably as a solid runner-up to iTunes from Apple. But it is far behind iTunes, which recently surpassed Wal-Mart Stores as the leading supplier of music in the United States.

Amazon Unbox, the company’s original download-only video store, was largely seen as a disappointment because it required customers to download special software to watch the programs they bought. The service also worked only on Windows PCs and TiVo set-top boxes.

To make the new service more enticing, the first two minutes of all movies and TV shows will begin playing for users on Amazon.com immediately when they visit a title’s product page on the digital video store.

It will also let users buy a TV show or movie without actually downloading the video file to the PC’s hard drive. Amazon will store each customer’s selection in what it calls “Your Video Library.” Customers can then watch that show or movie whenever they return to Amazon, even if it is from a different computer or device, a solution that neatly gets around studio concerns about piracy.

“I can be at my office, purchase a movie, and then it will be available on my television at home,” said Robert Jacobs, a senior manager at Sony Electronics. “Creating this on-demand available-everywhere access to premium content is going to be very attractive to consumers.”

Amazon will have some formidable rivals if it hopes to dominate the emerging world of digital video. Apple, Microsoft, Google and Netflix are all looking to capture the coveted real estate in the living room as well. Apple has had the most success with video on its iTunes video store and its Apple TV set-top box. It recently added content from several movie studios and introduced video rentals to the service.

Amazon Video on Demand is not expected to generate significant profits for Amazon, which must pay large royalties to Hollywood studios and develop the costly technical infrastructure required to make the service operate reliably.

But Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, may have another goal in mind. Establishing a foothold on televisions could be a way to let couch potatoes and television advertisers link up to the rest of Amazon’s online store with a click of the remote control.

“That is certainly a possibility for the future,” Mr. Carr said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/te.../17amazon.html





New WinAmp Update Brings Online Music Stores
Andre "DVDBack23" Yoskowitz

AOL has announced that the latest update to their popular WinAmp software will give the program access to online music stores.

The update, to version 5.54, lets users buy songs, ringtones, tickets and physical CDs directly from the Jukebox although AOL has not revealed which online music stores will be integrated into the software. There was word that the stores integrated would offer DRM-free MP3s.

Besides the online music store integration, the update "builds in access to AOL Radio's streaming channels, an ability to find videos and other artist info without leaving the software, and a toolbar to let Firefox and other web browsers control WinAmp."
The new version is available for free in a Basic version as well as part of the Pro edition which sells for $20 USD and allows for built-in ripping of CDs to any format the user wants.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/14835.cfm





SMPTE What?

A handy collection of music composition terminology
By D.R. Stewart

While this list is far from exhaustive, it's a fine cheat sheet for some of the most common terms heard among film and TV composers. All definitions have the blessing of ASCAP workshop overseer Richard Bellis.


ASCAP. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Established in 1914, ASCAP is the first and leading U.S. performing rights organization (PRO) representing the world's largest repertory totaling over 8.5 million copyrighted musical works of every style and genre from more than 330,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members. ASCAP has representation arrangements with over 90 similar foreign organizations such that the ASCAP repertory is represented in nearly every country around the world. ASCAP protects the rights of its members and foreign affiliates by licensing the public performances of their copyrighted works and distributing royalties based upon surveyed performances. ASCAP is the only American PRO owned and governed by its writer and publisher members.


composer. Creates original music to enhance the emotional, comedic or dramatic moments in the film.


dub stage. Where all of the sound elements for the film -- dialogue, FX and music -- are mixed together. Sometimes called the final mix. Involves adjusting levels up and down, cleaning up "production" sound and making choices about sound effects and, in some cases, music placement.


Hummer. Derogatory term for a composer who doesn't prefer to notate his own music, with the implication being that he merely hums his parts for others to orchestrate.


music cue. A single piece of music within the score.


music editor. Finds and inserts temporary music in order to enhance the film editing process as well as various early screenings. When the composer has been hired, he breaks down the timing of all scenes that will have music into minutes, seconds and frames. This information is used by the composer to create music that is in perfect sync with each scene. Once the score has been recorded, he then prepares the musical elements for the dub stage. He is also responsible for cutting in songs when they are used as part of the score. Additionally, he might be called upon to prepare playback tracks for scenes in which the cast is dancing or singing.


music prep service. Once known as copyists. A company like JoAnn Kane Music now provides many additional services including maintaining libraries of film scores, providing orchestrators, preparing sketches for the orchestrator from MIDI files and proofreading the music before it goes to the recording session. They work with many software programs, including Sibelius and Finale. Due to the speed of a recording session and the expense involved, pristine music prep services are crucial. Mistakes on a scoring session with a full orchestra can be costly in dollars and reputation.


music supervisor. Finds songs for the film and handles all the clearances for those songs. The final selection of songs represents a creative collaboration between the filmmaker and the music supervisor. It can be difficult to match the song with a film for a number of reasons. Most often the challenge is finding the right song for the right license fee.


orchestrator. When acoustic instruments will be used for the score, the composer might create a "sketch" for each cue. This is a condensed version of what the musicians will be playing. It may be either written by the composer or electronically "mocked-up." The orchestrator takes this sketch and writes the notes for each individual instrument in the ensemble.


scoring mixer. Also known as the engineer. Responsible for recording and mixing the score. The scoring mixer may work in an electronic environment or record acoustic instruments on the Scoring Stage.


scoring stage. Where the musicians assemble to record the score.


Sibelius/Finale. Computer programs that allow you to create a score and all of the individual parts for the orchestra. This is the electronic equivalent of paper and pencil in music. Revisions of the musical composition and the attendant parts are much easier.


sketching. Creating the cue in a condensed format to give to an orchestrator or synthistrator.


SMPTE. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers; usually refers to time code, for which this organization developed various standards. SMPTE is recorded as an audio signal and is also usually shown in a window on the screen for reference purposes. An example of a time code location might be 01:00:16:23, which refers to a time code location of "one hour, zero minutes, 16 seconds and 23 frames."


spotting. The process of deciding where in the film the music should be, what it should say and often choosing the exact SMPTE location where the music will start and stop.


stem. A sub-mix of a particular group of tracks. Rather than 40 tracks being mixed down to just two (aka stereo), stems (aka sub-mixes) are created combining several instrument tracks -- say, all percussion in one stem, brass in another. When all stem faders are set to the same position on the mixing console, it creates the final mix. This gives the mixer the opportunity to make slight adjustments to the mix without going back to the 40 or so original tracks.


synthistrator. An orchestrator who creates a synthesized mock-up recording.


ProTools. Hardware and software that has replaced multi-track recording tape in all but a very few instances. Currently the state-of-the-industry when recording and dubbing film music and sound FX.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988776.html





Neil Young, Where Politics and Technology Meet
Ben Sisario

When Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young booked a concert tour for the summer of 2006, it was supposed to be an easygoing, no-surprises reunion ticket for the Chardonnay set.

But Neil Young being Neil Young, it ended up a much more confrontational affair. Prodded by Mr. Young, the band reshaped the program around his album “Living With War,” a grungy jeremiad written, recorded and released in a few weeks that spring.

“I played them the record and said, ‘This is all I want to do,’ ” he recalled in an interview this week.

As recorded in Mr. Young’s new documentary of the tour, “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” which opens July 25 in New York, Los Angeles and 17 other cities, his band mates took to the antiwar theme eagerly. (In one scene, David Crosby calls the band “a benevolent dictatorship” and adds, “Neil is in charge.”) But the audiences were not exactly unanimous in agreement. In Atlanta, the first verse of Mr. Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President” brought boos, middle fingers and worse.

“The ‘Living With War’ album got such a varied reaction,” Mr. Young said. “Extreme negative and personal attacks, all kinds of things I had never had before from any kind of record. But that’s what made it so interesting, and such a great subject for a film. We didn’t know what was going happen, but we knew something was going to happen.”

To establish a journalistic tone for the film, Mr. Young hired Mike Cerre, a former ABC war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be “embedded” on the tour, interviewing fans and capturing the mood of the shows.

“I called my wife and cameraman and told them I was going to be embedded in a rock tour,” Mr. Cerre said in a telephone interview. “They thought I said Iraq. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone.”

Mr. Cerre said he was given complete freedom to produce 12 newsy segments. Larry Johnson, the film’s producer, said most of them were used, and with only minor editing for length. Mr. Cerre found some support among concertgoers for the band’s politics, but what stands out are unflattering shots of the aging group onstage — like Stephen Stills, then 61, struggling to get up after a fall during “Rockin’ in the Free World” — and complaints from fans, not always civil, who disapproved of the political message.

When asked why he included such harsh reactions and images, Mr. Young said simply: “Because it was harsh. It’s content. This is a documentary.”

Mr. Young’s career as a musical provocateur is well known, but his interests as a multimedia mogul aren’t. “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” made under his pseudonym, Bernard Shakey, is the fifth release in his sporadic career as a director, following the surrealistic comedy “Human Highway” (1982) and “Greendale,” based on his concept album of the same title from 2003.

He also has a company developing high-quality audio downloads and a project to convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV — all 2 1/2 tons and 19 1/2 feet of it — to ultra-efficient electric power, with the help of an international network of scientists and businessmen. Even more ambitious is his archives project, using technology for Blu-ray discs (the prevailing high-definition format of DVD) that he developed with Sun Microsystems. The first of five volumes, a 10-disc package covering 1963 to 1972, is scheduled for release in October.

At 62, Mr. Young still wants to change the world, and he seems to embrace the contradictions of his persona. Staying at the swank Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was interviewed with two signed Picasso prints over his shoulder, but his plain shirt and rumpled khaki pants were spattered with paint. Giving a photographer less than 60 seconds to shoot his portrait, he seemed very much the impatient superstar, but in an hourlong interview he was casual and energetically talkative.

He said he has no great box office expectations for “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” which might be wise, given the poor ticket sales of recent war documentaries. This year’s Oscar winner, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” from Alex Gibney, has brought in about $275,000.

“My films are pretty wacky,” he said. “They definitely don’t have much of a commercial appeal. This is probably the most serious film I’ve ever made. It’s more like journalism.”

In conversation Mr. Young went back and forth between politics and technology, and in discussing his Lincoln Continental project — called “Linc-Volt” — he linked the two. Its goal, he said, is to eliminate the need for oil and therefore the cause for war. “Why are we having a war?” he said. “It’s all about energy. Trying to get rid of the reason for the war, that’s something that’s doable.”

His archive project is not political but is challenging nonetheless. Conceived more than a decade ago but stalled for technological reasons, it uses the high-quality multimedia capabilities of Blu-ray to display music, video and other digital documentation through a file-cabinet structure — pull out the cabinet with a click and choose the rarity. A demonstration revealed some astonishing footage, like two moments from the 1971 sessions for the album “Harvest” and a spontaneous performance at a Greenwich Village folk club in 1970.

Like the archives, “CSNY: Déjà Vu” involves no small amount of nostalgia. The first words in the film are, “In the 1960s the Vietnam War was raging,” and the antiwar activism of the Vietnam era is frequently invoked, both as bona fides for the band’s history of political protest and as a foil for the more conservative climate that the four men encounter nearly 40 years after their first performances together.

But Mr. Young rejected a suggestion that the film might be more about Vietnam than about Iraq.

“It’s about war; it’s not about either one of them,” he said. “In our sound-bite society, ‘Let’s Impeach the President’ and the political side of it seems to be the side that the press focused on the most. But that’s an offshoot of the real story, which is the tragedy of war, and the families, and how it affects people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/movies/19neil.html





An Examined Life of Wicked Pleasure
Dennis Lim

“BEFORE I Forget,” the new feature by the French writer, actor and director Jacques Nolot, trains an unflinching spotlight on a species that, to judge from the movies, might as well be extinct: the aging homosexual. Practically a lifetime removed from the buff heroes of the typical boy-meets-boy romances, Mr. Nolot’s Pierre is a 60ish writer and ex-gigolo who has been HIV-positive for 24 years. He faces the obligations and mortifications of his daily life with caustic wit and an air of dignified resignation. There are social calls and psychotherapy sessions, as well as sleepless nights and a regimen of pills. And even though his body can’t always keep up, there is quite a bit of sex: half-hearted encounters with young hustlers, more out of habit than desire.

“I don’t know if it’s provocation, but there is a wicked pleasure to the film,” Mr. Nolot said on a warm May evening at Le Select, the famous literary cafe in Montparnasse, not far from where he lives. “I expose myself, and I show myself naked and sick. Here is how we are, how we live. People can take it or leave it.”

“Before I Forget,” which had its premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes last year and opens in New York on Friday, is the final installment in a trilogy of films, all concerned with loss and all starring Mr. Nolot, that he calls “partly autobiographical.” His alter ego in “L’Arrière Pays” (1998) travels to his provincial hometown to see his dying mother. “Porn Theater” (2002), a remake of a short of Mr. Nolot’s that starred his adopted son, who died with AIDS, depicts the ritualized interactions among the patrons at a movie house. “There are codes of conduct in these places, which I’ve observed myself,” he said. “There’s a lot of respect and love, even in loneliness and frustration.”

With “Before I Forget,” a memento mori in the form of a deadpan, dry-eyed comedy, Mr. Nolot, who turns 65 next month, draws even more directly from his life — and from the looming prospect of his death. “The character is not very far from myself,” he acknowledged. In referring to Pierre, he switched between the first and third person. Partly for budgetary reasons, he filmed in his own apartment. Pierre’s car is Mr. Nolot’s, as are, he noted impishly, the condoms and lubricant used in one of the sex scenes.

“When you see Jacques’s films, you recognize him,” said the director François Ozon, a friend of Mr. Nolot’s who cast him as Charlotte Rampling’s lover in “Under the Sand.” “Most of all you recognize his dark humor. He’s able to find amusement in himself. He talks of himself as an old queen with all these problems, and he’s very funny, but there is a despair inside.”

Mr. Nolot is still a striking, dapper presence, with his thin mustache and pomaded hair. But in “Before I Forget” he exposes his flaccid, mottled flesh and films himself naked in unflattering profile. “This is a man who used to be paid for his handsome young body,” he said. “I thought it was important to show his aging body.”

He is aware that this cinema of carnal embarrassment and corporeal ruin has no place amid the youth-obsessed body consciousness of mainstream gay culture. “The gay community doesn’t appreciate it because it sees itself as always irresistible,” he said. “I have nothing to do with the typical gay cinema. In fact I’m against it. I choose not to comfort the spectator.” (John Waters, writing in Artforum, called “Before I Forget” “the best feel-bad gay movie ever made.”)

The bitterest truth of “Before I Forget” is that with age comes a reversal of roles. Pierre and his friends, once beautiful kept men, are now the ones paying for sex: the hustlers have become the johns. Mr. Nolot depicts this fading generation of Parisian gay men not just as a subculture but as a veritable economy, with its own complex negotiations and transactions. Almost every conversation centers on money: the cost of rent boys and shrinks and, crucially, the inheritance that awaits when benefactors die.

“Jacques is very open about money,” Mr. Ozon said with a laugh. “He says it has to do with being a gigolo when he was young and always dealing with money.” Some details from that period of Mr. Nolot’s life — leaving his village in southwestern France, turning tricks as a naïve newcomer to Paris — can be found in “J’embrasse Pas” (“I Don’t Kiss”), a 1991 film with a screenplay by Mr. Nolot and direction by André Téchiné. (Mr. Nolot has had small roles in many of Mr. Téchiné’s films, most recently last year in “The Witnesses.”)

In “Before I Forget” Pierre reminisces about the days when he “used to go cruising with Roland Barthes,” the philosopher who was a lover of Mr. Nolot’s and who died in 1980. (Mr. Nolot was 20 when they met; Barthes was nearly 50.) “You can imagine we weren’t exactly talking semiotics when we were together,” Mr. Nolot said.

While writing the film, details of his youth came back to him, he added, among them Barthes’s memorable characterization of him as “a whore in the semantic sense.” “It’s amazing when things come back to you decades later,” he said. “That’s the magic of writing.”

Writing, for Mr. Nolot, is a primal act of self-preservation. “Malaise is a driving force,” he said. “The difficulty of living triggered the necessity of writing.” He composed his first play, he said, “on the verge of suicide.” “Before I Forget,” the threat of oblivion implicit in its title, originated under similarly urgent conditions. “I had no choice but to make this film,” he said. “I wrote it by talking into a recorder for five Sundays.”

It is a sign of his relative peace of mind that Mr. Nolot, for now, is not working on anything new.

“I feel too well,” he said. “Why write when one feels well?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/movies/13lim.html





Polanski Asks Prosecutor to Review Film’s Claims
Michael Cieply

Will Roman Polanski be bailed out, finally, by a film?

Mr. Polanski, the director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” fled the United States 30 years ago on the eve of being sentenced for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. Now, Mr. Polanski and his lawyer have asked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to review a new documentary in which a former deputy district attorney claims to have coached the judge in the case.

In the film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” the former prosecutor, David Wells, describes advising Judge Laurence J. Rittenband to send Mr. Polanski to prison for a psychiatric review, though Mr. Wells was not involved with the case.

Mr. Wells also points out to the judge, who died in 1993, what Mr. Wells considered defiant behavior by Mr. Polanski. Mr. Wells, in an interview in the film, says he showed Judge Rittenband a photograph of Mr. Polanski with two girls taken in Germany before his sentencing. “ ‘Judge,’ I said, ‘Look here. He’s flipping you off,’ ” Mr. Wells recalled.

Mr. Polanski has been a fugitive since 1978 when he fled to France to avoid a possible prison sentence or deportation.

In a phone interview on Tuesday, his lawyer, Douglas Dalton, said Mr. Wells’s self-described contacts with the judge appeared to violate California law and legal ethics. At the time, Mr. Wells worked in the Santa Monica courthouse of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, but, after some initial involvement, he was not assigned to the Polanski case.

“There could be a motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct,” Mr. Dalton said.

“We want to develop information about the extent of the ex parte contacts, what other communications Wells had, whether anybody else was aware of them, that sort of thing.”

In general, Mr. Dalton acknowledged, fugitives have little standing to press conventional appeals. But, he said, California law would permit either a judge or the prosecutor’s office to seek remedies on behalf of Mr. Polanski, including dismissal of the case, if either believed the judicial process had been corrupted.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles district attorney, Stephen L. Cooley, said she was not aware of any plan by Mr. Cooley’s office to change its stance in the case because of Mr. Wells’s comments.

In a phone interview from his home on Tuesday, Mr. Wells denied that his contact with the judge had been improper, saying it occurred in open court during routine discussions of cases.

“I didn’t tell him to do it or that he should do it,” Mr. Wells said of the judge’s decision to put Mr. Polanski in prison for 42 days for psychiatric review. “I just told him what his options were.”

Charles Whitebread, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said it would be unusual for a judge to reopen the case. “That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be justified or couldn’t happen,” he said.

In an e-mail message this week, Mr. Polanski, 74, said he would not make any decisions until Mr. Dalton had finished reviewing Mr. Wells’s actions. “I’m not ruling anything out,” he said. “I believe that closure of that entire matter is long overdue.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/mo...7polanski.html