Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 16th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy." – Red Herring


"Consumers don't want or need the ultimate device. They don't want to pay for the ultimate device; they don't trust the ultimate device; and, they don't want to deal with the complexity of the ultimate device." – Sean Baenen


"They could be proposing here the greatest mass criminalization of conduct by otherwise law-abiding citizens since Prohibition. Congress should think long and hard before they treat noncommercial infringement by ordinary citizens...the same as prosecutions of organized crime." – Phil Corwin


"It never occurred to me to push the limits of the public domain." – Zina davis













British Music Industry Wins Round in P2P Fight
Ed Raymond

The British music industry has scored a legal victory with a High Court ruling that requires Internet service providers to provide names and addresses of British citizens who share copyrighted music over peer-to-peer computer networks.

Two music industry trade associations in the United Kingdom have won a court case that clears the way for them to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of people who use peer-to-peer music trading Web sites.

The British High Court ruled that ISPs must hand over names and addresses of British residents suspected of posting and downloading songs on such sites as Kazaa and eDonkey.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) association and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry -- the organizations that filed the suit -- say they are giving the providers 14 days to comply. Currently, 28 Brits are in their legal sights.

Just this past week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Recording Industry Association of America , letting stand a lower court's ruling that the RIAA must follow the guidelines of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in obtaining subpoenas to dig up names of suspected copyright violators.
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml...story_id=27626


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Feds Target Alternative Media Web Site
John Borland

An alternative media network called the Independent Media Center said Friday that federal law enforcement authorities confiscated several of its Web servers, shutting down many of its independently run sites.

The group said in a statement on its Web site that federal authorities issued a court order requesting the computer equipment Thursday morning to United States-based Web hosting provider Rackspace. The hosting company subsequently handed over the Web servers, located in its London facility, to authorities, Independent Media Center (IMC) said.

Rackspace issued a terse comment on the issue, saying it responded to a subpoena in an investigation that did not originate in the United States.

"Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities," the company's statement read. "The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter."

A spokeswoman for IMC said the group had not been told why it was the subject of an investigation.

"We don't know why it happened," said Hep Sano, a member of the IMC organization in San Francisco. "We did not receive a copy of the subpoena. Right now, we're trying to organize legal help to figure out what the procedure is."

She added that the group thinks the issue might be related to recent requests by the FBI asking that the site remove photos posted by IMC's Nantes affiliate, purportedly depicting Swiss undercover police.

An FBI representative in Texas, where Rackspace is based, did not return calls for comment.

The IMC site said the loss of the Web servers affected local independent media sites serving Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Germany.
http://news.com.com/Feds+target+alte...3-5404073.html


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U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study
Michael Hill

Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move?

The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums.

Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.

Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk - virtually impossible.

Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Yener will track the times that messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic.

If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said.

In search of "hidden communities," Yener also wants to check messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what's being discussed in groups.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the nation's intelligence agencies.

The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal strictly on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor the FBI would comment on the grant, with a CIA spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used. Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms' usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from Web mail to hiding messages on designated Web pages that can only be seen by those who know where to look.

"In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on a home page about tea cozies, I don't know whether if you're any better if you think chat would be any particular magnet," Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they are young teens.

But the idea of the government reviewing massive amounts of public communications still raises some concerns.

Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.

Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy.

"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ws/9894237.htm


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Equal to war on terror

United States Justice Dept Wants Sweeping New Antipiracy Powers
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation's intellectual-property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a "widespread" problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize "passive sharing" on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that "induce" copyright infringement.

"The department is prepared to build the strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual-property crime in our nation's history," Attorney General John Ashcroft, who created the task force in March, said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon.

In an example of the Justice Department's hunger for new copyright-related police powers, the report asks Congress to introduce legislation that would permit wiretaps to be used in investigating serious intellectual-property offenses and that would create a new crime of the "importation" of pirated products. It also suggests stationing FBI agents and prosecutors in Hong Kong and Budapest, Hungary, to aid local officials and "develop training programs on intellectual-property enforcement."

The Recording Industry Association of America applauded the report, saying that "for those who work in the community of record labels, songwriters and artists, the commitment of focus, energy and resources outlined in this report is music to our ears." The Motion Picture Association of America joined the applause, thanking the Justice Department for "defending our country's economy against pernicious IP pirates."

Phil Corwin, a lobbyist for Sharman Networks, distributor of the popular Kazaa file-sharing software, said the Justice Department seems "to be endorsing a war on copyright infringement modeled in large part on the war on drugs. That should invite very close scrutiny of the recommendations."

"They could be proposing here the greatest mass criminalization of conduct by otherwise law-abiding citizens since Prohibition," Corwin said. "Congress should think long and hard before they treat noncommercial infringement by ordinary citizens...the same as prosecutions of organized crime."

Tuesday's report was not focused exclusively on Internet piracy: It also included recommendations about responses to trademark infringements, trade secret violations and fake pharmaceuticals. But the Internet-related bills it endorses are at the heart of the ongoing political battle pitting Hollywood and the music industry against the computer industry, "fair use" advocates and librarians.

By backing the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act--which criminalizes common uses of file-swapping products--and the Induce Act, the report lends the authority and prestige of the nation's largest law enforcement agency to the pitched battles taking place in Congress this year. While the Induce Act enjoys support from the MPAA and RIAA, it has been savaged by technology firms including CNET Networks (publisher of News.com), BellSouth, EarthLink, Google, MCI, RadioShack, Panasonic, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications and Yahoo.

The report also opposes legislative efforts to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly restricts hardware or software that can "circumvent" copy protection mechanisms. The 1998 law should stay intact, the Justice Department says, arguing that the law should prevent "deliberate and unauthorized circumvention."

Among the report's authors: Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel; Kevin Ryan, the U.S. Attorney for Northern California; and no fewer than five assistant attorneys general at the Justice Department.

In an unusual twist, one section of the report that was being considered in August seems to have vanished in the final draft.

Hewitt Pate, assistant attorney general for antitrust and a task force member, indicated at a conference in Aspen, Colo., that the report would oppose a bill to let the Justice Department sue pirates in civil court. But no discussion of the so-called Pirate Act--approved by the Senate in June--appears in the final report.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5406654.html


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Subpoenas Snubbed In File-Sharing Fight

Privacy trumps piracy as the Supreme Court throws out an appeal from the RIAA.

The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy.

On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena.

Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing - a fight it is slowly losing.

The lawsuits in question were between New York’s Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C.

“This was nothing more than a massive fishing expedition by the RIAA, and would have affected thousands, maybe millions, of Internet users,” said Sarah Deutsch, Associate General Counsel at Verizon, which has 3 million Internet subscribers. “Instead of pursuing the due process route, the recording industry was trying to take a huge shortcut.”

Since the Supreme Court threw out RIAA’s appeal on Tuesday, the association will have to continue with a costly and time-consuming “John Doe” process of legal action. Under this process the RIAA has to individually file a lawsuit against each unidentified file sharer.

While the RIAA would not disclose the amount of money it spends on legal fees, Ms. Deutsch said it’s worth it for the sake of preserving personal privacy and safety.

If the RIAA had its way, according to Ms. Deutsch, the law would make it possible for anyone to walk into a courthouse and issue a subpoena against Internet providers, forcing them to provide names and other personal details of their subscribers on the basis of a simple allegation of file sharing.

But the RIAA seems undaunted by the setback.

“Today’s decision will not deter our ongoing anti-piracy efforts,” said Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president of Legal Affairs at RIAA, in a statement. “The John Doe litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool.”

The RIAA had been pushing to extend a provision of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provided for the issue of subpoenas to identify alleged infringers, to file sharing. But with Tuesday’s decision, the RIAA’s struggle against file sharing grows murkier and more futile.

In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals, among them a 12-year-old girl, under the John Doe method. Since then, it has sued over 5,000 people.

Missing the mark

According to Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a public interest group in Washington, D.C., that deals with technology policy, there are two reasons why the subpoena method was a bad idea: the difficulty in ascertaining whether the files being traded are legitimate, and the inaccuracy in tracing file sharers through their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

“The RIAA has these software robots implanted in file-sharing software that track users by their IP addresses,” she said. “But these addresses change frequently.”

Ms. Sohn also said that tracing the correct IP address is no guarantee that the correct user will be identified.

“We had the case in Massachusetts where this grandmother who listens to Celtic music was issued a ‘cease and desist’ letter for trading hip-hop files,” she said. “It later turned out that it was her teenage grandson who was sharing the files.”

File sharing is an issue that obviously cannot be ignored. According to research firm Forrester, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, illegal downloads accounted for $700 million in losses for the recording industry in 2003, a third of the $2-billion total that the industry lost last year.

Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester, said that while file sharing has been damaging to the recording industry, the RIAA should attempt to join the file sharers, rather than try to beat them.

Mr. Bernoff cited the success of iTunes as an example of the potential that the phenomenon of legal music downloads has.

Apple recently announced it had sold 125 million paid music downloads since April 2003, which was when the iTunes store first opened. Forrester research reported that digital downloads will bring in $3.1 billion in revenues in 2008, nearly a quarter of the music industry’s revenues of $13.8 billion.

“The genie’s out of the bottle now,” he said. “And you obviously can’t put it back in. Maybe the RIAA should concentrate less on stamping out file sharing and more on how to profit from it.”
http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...ctor=Americas#


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High Court Bounces Latest RIAA Effort
Roy Mark

The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected the music industry's effort to revive a controversial practice that briefly forced ISPs (define) to reveal the identities of thousands of accused peer-to-peer (P2P) music pirates with no notice to the alleged infringers.

In denying a writ of certiorari to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the court upheld a December 2003 decision by an appeals court that reversed a lower court ruling ordering ISPs (ISPs) to comply with the subpoena provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Under the DMCA, a subpoena can be issued by a court clerk who only checks to make sure the subpoena form is properly filled out. This differs from a standard subpoena, which requires some underlying claim of a crime.

On the basis of the lower court ruling, the RIAA issued more than 3,000 subpoena requests to ISPs and filed almost 400 copyright infringement actions.

Verizon initially resisted complying with the DMCA subpoena requests filed by the RIAA. A district court ruled in favor of the RIAA, but Verizon ultimately prevailed. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the DMCA did not authorize copyright holders to obtain a subpoena requiring the release of the name, address and telephone number of any Internet user based solely upon the filing of a one-page form that had not been reviewed by a judge.

"Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the personal privacy, First Amendment rights to free speech and free association, and the safety of every Internet user in this country," Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate counsel for Verizon, said in a statement.

Deutsch, who argued Verizon's case before the appeals court, added, "The Supreme Court's action is a victory for consumers, for the Internet and its continued growth, and it marks the end of a dangerous and illegal subpoena campaign that threatened the constitutional rights of all Americans."

The RIAA responded with an e-mail comment from Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president of Legal Affairs.

"Today's decision will not deter our ongoing anti-piracy efforts. The 'John Doe' litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool."

Verizon originally argued that the DMCA subpoena only applied in cases where an ISP stored the copyrighted material on its servers. Because people using P2P networks store the material on their own hard drives, Verizon said it was exempt from the DMCA subpoena. Verizon subsequently questioned the actual constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena, privacy rights violations, the potential dangers of the subpoena being misused by non-copyright holders and even the future growth of the Internet.

"This decision means copyright holders and their representatives -- or identity thieves and stalkers posing as copyright holders -- will not be allowed to obtain personal information about Internet users by simply filing a one-page form with a court clerk," Deutsch said.

"The Supreme Court has now finally shut a door that was otherwise left wide open to false accusations, negligent mistakes, as well as to identity thieves and stalkers, who could use the cursory subpoena process to obtain the name, address, and telephone number of any Internet user in the country -- without the user even knowing about it."

The December 2003 appeals court decision forced the RIAA to use the more conventional "John Doe" subpoena request that requires a judge's consent. Using the John Doe subpoenas, the RIAA has continued to sue thousands of alleged P2P file-swappers.

"This decision reaffirms the fact that a legitimate process for legal recourse already exists -- the John Doe lawsuit -- and that the RIAA should follow it. We are pleased that the RIAA has already changed its copyright enforcement and business practices to conform to this recognized approach, which ensures that due process is protected before an Internet user's personal information can be obtained by anyone who seeks it," Deutsch said.

The Supreme Court also handed Verizon and the other Baby Bells another legal victory Tuesday when it refused to hear several appeals to force the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to permit long distance and competitive local exchange carriers to lease Bell lines at a discount.

A lower court ruling earlier this year rejected the FCC's effort to force line sharing on the Bells.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3420681


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Supremes Quietly Change Piracy Debate
Cynthia L. Webb

The Supreme Court handed Internet services providers and privacy advocates a crucial victory yesterday when it decided to pass on an important Internet piracy case.

The morning papers, however, missed the boat on reporting the significance of the case, with most newspapers skipping the development all together or running wire copy on their sites.

In refusing to hear the case, the justices rebuffed an effort by the recording industry to establish once and for all that Internet service providers should have to hand over the identities of suspected file-swappers who subscribe to their networks. They also tacitly rejected the notion that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a legitimate tool for tracking down Internet pirates.

It's one of the biggest setbacks yet to the entertainment industry's legal maneuverings (replete with lawsuits, subpoenas and courtroom drama) to fight digital piracy, but to get a clear picture of what the court did, readers had to turn to the trade publications and wire service reports.

"The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy," Red Herring reported. "On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena. Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing -- a fight it is slowly losing. The lawsuits in question were between New York's Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C."

Bloomberg noted that the Supreme Court "refused to make it easier for the recording industry to force Verizon Communications Inc. and other Internet service providers to identify subscribers who share copyrighted songs online." Wired News said the court's action is "effectively stopping one of the legal tactics of the music business as it tries to stamp out piracy."

The Associated Press, however, reported that yesterday's decision does not signal the end of the road for the Verizon-RIAA case. "The Supreme Court on Tuesday sidestepped a dispute over whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers illegally swapping music and movies online. The subject, however, may be back at the court soon. The Bush administration agrees with recording and movie companies which want to use a 1998 law to get information about Internet users, but the administration also had encouraged the Supreme Court to wait to settle the issue. The recording industry had sought court intervention now, arguing that more than 2.6 billion music files are illegally downloaded each month and that the law is needed to identify culprits," the AP said.

• Red Herring: Subpoenas Snubbed In File-Sharing Fight
• The Associated Press via The Washington Post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Internet Piracy Case (Registration required)
• Bloomberg via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Verizon Wins Court Appeal
• Wired News: Music Industry Spurned By Court

Verizon, in a statement lauding yesterday's action -- or inaction -- by the Supreme Court, called it "an important victory for the personal privacy, free expression rights and safety of the more than 100 million Internet users in the U.S." The company reminded people that "the Court of Appeals decision, written by Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg and handed down on Dec. 19, 2003, held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) did not authorize copyright holders and their agents to obtain a subpoena requiring the release of the name, address and telephone number of any Internet user based upon the filing of a one-page form with the clerk of the district court."

InternetNews.com quoted Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate counsel for Verizon, who said, "The Supreme Court's action is a victory for consumers, for the Internet and its continued growth, and it marks the end of a dangerous and illegal subpoena campaign that threatened the constitutional rights of all Americans."

Reuters said the development yesterday is not likely to seriously affect the recording industry's legal campaign, as RIAA investigators have sued roughly 5,000 individuals using the John Doe process." The John Doe process is required by the lower court's ruling, which requires a lawsuit to be filed to reveal the identity of suspected file- swappers, Reuters explained. "Today's decision will not deter our anti-piracy efforts. The 'John Doe' litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool," said Stanley Pierre-Louis, RIAA's senior vice president for legal affairs, as quoted by Reuters.

• InternetNews.com: High Court Bounces Latest RIAA Effort
• Reuters: Supreme Court Won't Weigh Net Music Tactics

Bloomberg, in its coverage of the news yesterday, gave a rundown of the RIAA's legal trail so far. "The Recording Industry Association of America is trying to stop Internet users from swapping copyrighted music for free on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster instead of paying for it through online music stores such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes. The industry has filed more than 5,400 lawsuits against online users swapping copyrighted music for free since September 2003."

Recall that just last week entertainment industry trade groups filed a plea to the Supreme Court to overturn a separate lower court ruling and decide if "peer-to-peer" networks are liable for illegal swaps made by customers. They said lawsuits can't compensate for the "multibillion-harm" caused by infringement by P2P sites Grokster and StreamCast. The Supreme Court has yet to decide on the request.

But buried in its story covering yesterday's action, Dow Jones Newswires said: "The Supreme Court's decision to leave the lower court ruling untouched could impact other pending copyright litigation efforts by the music industry."

• Dow Jones Newswires via the Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court Rejects Music Industry's Appeal (Subscription required)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct13.html


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Kazaa No Longer King Of P2P
John Borland

Kazaa, once a top nemesis of record companies and movie studios, appears to have lost its role as the world's most popular file-swapping software, network watchers said on Monday.

According to BayTSP, a California firm that monitors file-swapping networks on behalf of entertainment companies, Kazaa rival eDonkey was the most widely used peer-to- peer application last month.

Kazaa's lead on rivals has been sliding for more than a year - at least since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started filing lawsuits against individual file swappers, with a focus on the Kazaa network. But many observers say Kazaa simply hasn't kept up with the technological times.

BayTSP Chief Executive Mark Ishikawa said: "We've known that trend was coming. It was just a matter of time. eDonkey is a much better protocol for large files."

Kazaa's slide, along with eDonkey's rise, has marked a slow generational shift in the file-swapping world, analogous to the explosion of Napster alternatives when that original song-trading service went offline.

The spread of broadband networks, DVD burners and increasingly powerful compression technology has helped boost online demand for videos, including full- length movies. Previously, the vast majority of file-swapping traffic had been focused on MP3-formatted music.

Several of the new file-trading software packages, including eDonkey, have created their technology in order to speed the transfer of large files of this kind. Kazaa's core technology, by contrast, is now several years old.

Another video-friendly technology, called BitTorrent, also has quickly gained users but does not have a simple way of measuring how many people are online at any given time. Net-monitoring company CacheLogic found last summer that Kazaa had fallen far behind BitTorrent in terms of bulk traffic sent over the internet.

According to BayTSP, eDonkey averaged 2.54 million users a day in September, while Kazaa averaged 2.48 million users a day. Those figures have fluctuated for weeks, but this was the first month-long sample in which eDonkey had retained the lead, Ishikawa said.

A US spokesman for Australia-based Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent, had no immediate comment on the news.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch...9124899,00.htm


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India: Need For A Balanced View On Intellectual Property Rights

Government today said that a balanced view has to be taken on intellectual property rights as phenomenal technological advancement is a double-edged weapon posing both opportunity and serious challenges.

"The main issue remains how to balance the interest of creator in the society and that of the need of the society at large in an optimum way in this digital environment," HRD Minister Arjun Singh said inaugurating a three day symposium on "Emerging issues of Copyright Protection in the Digital Environment".

An ideal regime of intellectual property rights should therefore strike a balance between the private incentives for the innovators and the public interest at large by maximising access to the fruit of creation, he said.

Ten years ago, India was groping in the dark as "we did not know where to begin and where to end" in bringing about a law on the issue. "Today I can say with a sense of satisfaction that India was able to bring into the statute book a law which was fairly modern and an effort to maintain equilibrium".

Singh said that because of the trans-border nature of the technology, new norms have to be evolved to see that innovativeness and creativity was duly rewarded and all other stakeholders also got their due reward. PTI
http://www.123bharath.com/news/index...lnews&id=28584


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Mais oui

Fair Use in France
p2pnet.net News

Is downloading hundreds of DVDs or copying hundreds of friends' movies fair use?

In France, the answer seems to be "yes".

The criminal court of Rodez (south of France) has freed a 22-year-old Internet user who'd copied 488 movies from the Internet and from DVDs loaned to him by some of his friends.

During a non-related investigation in February 2003, the French police found hundreds of movies and the man appeared before the court on August 4 for copyright infringement.

On Wednesday, the court acquitted him.

Although details of the judgment haven't yet been made public, we're guessing the judge relied on France's private copying provisions which allow "the copy and reproduction of works strictly restricted to the private use of the copyist and not intended for collective use".
http://p2pnet.net/story/2714


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Newest Netsky Is Pesky
TechWeb News

The newest Netsky worm, which first appeared earlier this week, gathered steam on Thursday and caused security firms to upgrade their alerts to users.

Dubbed Netsky.ag by most anti-virus vendors, the worm remains concentrated in Brazil and Argentina, where it first appeared Wednesday, but copies have escaped South America to end up on machines around the globe.

The worm is relatively easy to spot by English speakers, since the subject headings used by this mass mailer are written in Brazilian Portuguese. Among the headings spotted are ones such as "Abra rapido isso!!!!" (open this now!) and "receitas de bolo" (cake recipes).

Netsky.ag spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses it harvests from compromised machines, as well as through shared network folders and peer-to-peer networks.

If the attached file -- which comes in .pif, .com, .scr, .bat, or .zip -- is run, a dialog box pops up with text reading, "File corrupted replace this!"

McAfee raised its warning for Netsky.ag Thursday from Low to Medium because of a higher-than-usual number of copies submitted by customers and trapped by its e-mail snares.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/50500131


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Redefining Television
Mark Pesce

I have been attached to the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. I was invited there as a consultant, with a brief that allowed me to redesign the curriculum of a venerable film school, and place it squarely into the middle of the 21st century. Note, I did not say the start of the 21st century - that wouldn't be very interesting, or very helpful. Students at AFTRS will be practitioners well into the middle of the 21st century - certainly through to 2030 or 2040. So it's my job to look forward a bit, and incorporate that forward view into my teaching…

In the earliest days of television, writers like George Orwell in 1984 and Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 projected television as the instrumentality of a totalitarian future - a monolithic entity dispensing propaganda. And, if any of you occasionally watch Fox News, you can see they weren't that far off the mark. But here's the thing: the monolithic days of television are numbered. Actually, they've already passed - though, as yet, very few people realize this.

To understand why, we need to go back to first principles. What is television? Here's a functional definition:

Television is the capture, encoding, transmission, reception, decoding and display of moving images.

This definition applies to the Golden Age of television, and to the present era. Yet the definition of every word in the definition of television has changed, because of the introduction of digital production, encoding, transmission, reception, decoding and display technologies.

First, let's talk about image capture: the means of production have changed. A decade ago you'd need a million dollars of camera, sound editing and broadcast production equipment to create television programming. Today you can capture DTV broadcast-quality content with a $6000 HD camera from Panasonic, which you can then bring into Final Cut Pro and edit on your $5000 Dual G5 PowerMac. For a little more than ten thousand dollars, you can create television programming that would be absolutely indistinguishable from anything created by Warner Brothers or Fox.

Just because you can produce television programming on the cheap doesn't imply you'll be any good at it. You're still going to need a cinematographer who knows how to handle a camera, a location sound recorder who can give you something intelligible to listen to, a sound designer and sound editor, a film editor, a set designer, a broadcast titles designer, and so forth. If you don't have these practitioners, you'll simply create programming that looks as cheap as the equipment it's been produced on. Although equipment has gotten cheap, film and television production remains a craft tradition, and this means that the AFTRS and institutions like it, which teach the craft of film and television production, will continue to have an important role to play.

Next, encoding. Australia and Europe use PAL; North America uses NTSC (which evidentially is an abbreviation for Never The Same Color). Both are analog standards for the transmission of moving images. Analog television of either variety is like the vinyl album - something which you've no doubt heard of - and perhaps even seen a DJ use in a set - but many of you won't have handled them, at least not often. (Here I am at age 41 and I feel like I hail from the era of steam locomotives and buggy whips.)

CDs came along in 1982 and digitized audio, quantized it, turning a continuous waveform into a discrete stream of zeroes and ones. The same thing has happened to television with the advent of digital TV. ATSC - (an abbreviation for Another Television Standards Catastrophe) -specifies the transmission format for television signals in the USA, while DVB is the standard in the UK and Australia. These standards are very similar, though not interoperable. (This represents a missed opportunity which will have grave consequences for broadcasters.) The moving images themselves are encoded in MPEG-2 format. This means that the encoded data stream for digital television is identical to the standard used on DVDs, in almost every respect.

This encoded digital TV signal can be transmitted in any number of ways, and that's where the definition of the word transmitted has changed radically. You can beam it through the air using ATSC or DVB - as they do in the USA, the UK, and here in Australia. So you can buy a digital TV set - an HDTV set, as they're more commonly known - and connect it to your antenna, and receive broadcasts in standard definition - 720x576 for PAL, 720x480 for NTSC, but the signal can go all the way up to 1280x960 - which is very high-definition indeed! A digital television broadcaster can choose to allocate this digital signal bandwidth any way they see fit; they can send you four channels of Standard Definition programming, or a single high-definition stream - each requires the same amount of broadcast bandwidth. The broadcaster could eschew video altogether, and they can transmit a stream of data - pictures, text, sounds, etc. - in place of a video stream. Because the stream is digital, it's got all the flexibility and programmability we've come to expect from digital technologies.

Because it is a digital stream, the MPEG-2 video encoded within the ATSC/DVB digital TV signal can be copied and reproduced faithfully, an infinite number of times, with no loss in quality. We'll come back to this point, but just for the moment let it linger in your minds - and think of all the MP3s you have sitting on your hard disks, iPods, etc. And keep in mind that MP3 is another subset of the same MPEG standards used for digital television.

Ok, so we're halfway there. We've gotten moving images encoded and transmitted. Well, sort of. We conceive of television signal transmission as radio waves moving through the ether, but bits are bits are bits. They could be sent over the air, or they could be a stream of bits on a digital cable system, as with FOXTEL Digital in Australia or any of the major cable systems in the US, or the AUSTAR or DirectTV satellite broadcasting services.

But I overlook the obvious. Yes, I could get my transmission over the airwaves, or over a digital cable hookup, but this ignores the fact that I already have a very high-speed digital data stream coming into my house - broadband internet. Back in Los Angeles I had 1.5 megabits of ADSL, for which I paid the princely sum of $72 a month. (In Sydney I have 1 megabit of wireless broadband in my home, from BigAir, for which I pay $100 AUD a month - about the same amount in "real" dollars.) Back in 1987, when I was working full-time in data communications, that much bandwidth would cost a business $10,000 a month. Minimum. So I guess we could say that the same thing has happened to bandwidth costs that happened to computer costs; we've gotten more and more for less and less.

And that brings us to the discussion of the receiver. The definition of the television receiver has changed as well. If you go to an electronics retailer and buy an HD television set you're paying for two things - one of them is the oversized high-resolution display, and the other is a sophisticated computer, inside the set, which decodes the received digital television data stream and puts it onto the display.

[A side note: the price point of HD television sets is about to plummet because of some chips introduced by Intel earlier this year. It's expected that by Christmas 2004, they'll be selling for under a thousand US dollars. HD sets are already outselling analog sets, in dollar volume (because they cost a lot more than analog sets) but in 2005 or 2006 they'll begin to outsell analog sets both in the USA, in raw numbers of sets sold.]

An HD set is just one alternative if I want to receive digital TV. A few weeks after I arrived in Australia, I purchased a $300 card for my PC (DigiTV PCI) that plugs into a $15 pair of rabbit ears I bought at Woolworth's, and which gaffer taped to the top of my monitor. (It makes for a very pretty picture, let me tell you, because everything old is new again.) With this card I can now receive the five free-to-air digital terrestrial broadcasters in Australia: ABC, SBS, 7, 9 and 10. If I've got the antenna adjusted just so, I get crystal clear moving images on my 17" computer monitor, with incredibly rich stereo sound. My little home experiment in geekdom - more about that in a moment - proves an important point: an HD set really is very closely akin to a modern PC.

Because this DTV tuner card is in my PC, and because my PC has a fairly large array of hard disks - about 300 GB, all told, with about 35 GB reserved for my MP3 collection - I can use my digital television tuner like a VCR, and record the digital stream to my PC's hard disk. (These digital recorders are more commonly known as personal video recorders, or PVRs.) Because the signal is digital from reception to storage, there is no loss in quality, ever. When I record "The Sopranos" - which is transmitted in high-definition on Channel 9 - I can play back in the same high-resolution image transmitted by Channel 9. It is, in fact, the same image, bit for bit.

Even better - and here's where it gets a little worrying, if you're a producer or broadcaster - I can burn a DVD of that episode of "The Sopranos" and it will look as good as if I'd bought the DVD from HBO. There is no difference - the video on HBO's DVD contains the same bits as were transmitted by Channel 9 and recorded by my PC.

This fact is in fact so worrying to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, that they've lobbied for the inclusion of a "broadcast flag" which will be sent within the DTV signal and which all DTV hardware must read and honor. When the hardware reads the broadcast flag, it must refuse to share that DTV stream across the Internet. (Whether the broadcast flag will forbid burning to a DVD is another question altogether - an open one.) The USA's FCC threw the MPAA this little bone, but it's being contested by public interest groups and is currently spiraling its way through the American court system. (You all know what that means.)

The trouble here is that the MPAA is the motion picture association of America. They have no control over what happens in Australia, Europe, or, rather more significantly, in China. The broadcast flag must be in all DTV receivers purchased in the United States after April 2005. But plenty of people - such as myself - are buying DTV receiver cards well in advance of that date. Those cards won't see or acknowledge any broadcast flag. I'll never have to obey the dictates of the MPAA, in America or not - unless the MPAA manages to convince the WIPO to make the possession and use of these cards illegal - which, given the current state of affairs in the war over digital copyright, isn't entirely unthinkable. After all, they could be used to promote terrorism. Or something.

So while the MPAA is trying very hard to put its thumb in the dike of digital television, the rest of the world will do as it pleases - at least until Free Trade Agreements ties all of us so closely to the USA that we're bound by the same copyright law that rules America.

For now, in Australia, I can do as I please. I can record my favorite programs on my PC. That PC is connected into my home network. When my iBook is at home, it's on the same network. There's also an old Sony laptop at home, running Linux, which serves as the home firewall, gateway and web server. That machine is my interface to the internet, and it utilizes the Windows file sharing on my PC to gain access to the recordings on my PC-based digital television - which it then makes available over the web for everyone else to see - if they know the URL.

Right now those files are so big - about 2 GB per hour for a DTV broadcast in Standard Definition - that it's unlikely anyone would bother to download them. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than MPEG-2 can be used to encode video programming. If I used Windows Media 9 Series, for example - an excellent compression standard for video - I could compress an episode of "The Sopranos" into about 150 MB. It wouldn't look quite as nice, mind you, but with the bandwidth I have at home - and the bandwidth I have at the office - I could watch any of my recorded television shows from my desk at the Australian Film Television and Radio school.

If I didn't mind sacrificing a bit more quality, I could probably get the whole hour of television down to a tidy 50 or 60 MB. Hardly anything at all, these days - it could easily fit onto one of those key-chain sized USB drives. At AFTRS, I'd be able to download the program from my home web server in about seven minutes. That means I'd be doing better than real-time: it means that wherever I go, my TV can follow.

And that brings us to another aspect of the redefinition of TV. If a digital TV is simply a computer that is capable of receiving, decoding and displaying a DTV signal, isn't my computer on my desk at AFTRS a TV too? It doesn't have the card that allows it to receive and decode free-to-air DTV broadcasts, but it can certainly receive a DTV signal that's being transmitted by my web server.

Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Doesn't that mean, in the context of the definition that we've been tossing around, that I've become a television broadcaster?

Now you start to see where I'm going. Every computer - from the desktop PC at work to my lovely Macintosh iBook, to a handheld 3G mobile phone, to the just-announced Sony PSP handheld gaming and video platform - every one of these devices is potentially a DTV receiver. All they need is the proper software to decode the proper data stream.

Now that I know that I'm a television broadcaster, I've decided make it easier to get to my recorded DTV programming. So, in my vanishingly brief moments of free time, I'm working to string together a suite of open- source software which automatically takes all of the DTV programming I've recorded and makes it available at a variety of resolutions, on my web server, so that anyone can access it, at any time, from anywhere in the world.

Ok, I may be a bit of a geek, in that I'm going to roll-my-own, but that's only because I want to have a thorough understanding of how these pieces work together. You can buy off-the-shelf software for Windows that does all of this. (SnapStream is just one of the many programs in this fast-growing segment of home "media server" software. The transcode package is its Linux equivalent.) You can do it today. You don't need to be a computer geek. You just need to spend a few hours learning how to configure everything to your own satisfaction. And then, you too can be a television broadcaster.

The first thing that flows from recognition of the reconfigured nature of broadcasting in the age of digital television - the thing the became clear to me as I workshopped these ideas with a group of film producing students at AFTRS back in March - is that I have disintermediated the terrestrial broadcast networks. They're simply not needed any more.

Why would I tune my DTV receiver to Channel 9 to record "The Sopranos," when it's simpler and more efficient for me to grab the program stream from the HBO web server or download it from one of my friends who has been to visit the HBO web server?

Once the broadcast networks moved to digital, they became entirely obsolete, because I can get a stream of bits from anywhere in the world that I can get a high-speed connection to the internet - and that means most everywhere in the world. Since I only care about the program, not about the broadcaster, I'll abandon the broadcaster as quickly as I possibly can.

I'm not telling you broadcasting is going to be obsolete. I'm telling you that it's already obsolete. It's a done deal. We've seen the lightning strike, and all we're doing now is waiting for the thunderclap. The only thing holding broadcasting together today is inertia, marketing, and copy protection. Once a programming producer figures out that they can distribute their programming via broadband, it's all over.

Well, guess what: AOL has already started distributing Everwood, a Warner Brothers TV series, via broadband. And the BBC has just announced a test of "flexible TV" - which will allow broadband users in the UK to watch BBC programming when they want, wherever they want to watch it, over the Internet.

That's not to say that I think the broadcast networks have no future whatsoever. But that future is radically different, because, when we redefine television, we create a need to redefine broadcasting. Here are three basic ideas that I've had - which are by no means intended to be exhaustive - about the future of broadcasting as a business. These are the some of the new rules for broadcasting in the age of digital television.

Rule One: Live Rules

Beyond anything else, television is a live medium. Whether it's a footy game, Big Brother Up All Night, the Academy Awards, or the latest terrorist tragedy, TV performs an irreplaceable function as reporter of events-as- they-happen. And although the viewer can and should be able to watch the digital television data stream from any compatible receiver, the broadcaster is, in this case, the producer, creating value by producing the live event. As drama, comedy and factual programming become freely available for download, the broadcaster will transform into the producer of choice for live event coverage. Channel 7 in Australia tried to do this as they switched to a mix of mostly sport programming; but they were a bit too far ahead of the curve - and they didn't make their broadcast content available over broadband.

Rule Two: Aggregate the Advertisers

Historically, broadcasters have functioned as aggregators of eyeballs for advertisers. There's no reason they can't continue to do that. After all, a program's producer will still need to get paid for the programming they create, and they're going to be at a bit of a loss in this brave new world where the broadcasters have all vaporized in a puff of bits. Broadcasters should shift their focus from being aggregators of eyeballs to becoming aggregators of advertisers - they can get Fox together with Ford, for example, to sponsor a series like "24". There's a problem, however: global advertising agencies already do this. Today's broadcaster is going to begin to look more and more like an ad agency, and will be working within that much more competitive market. That said, the inside advantage that a local broadcaster can bring to a global product like "The Sopranos" or "24" is the precise mix of advertising that needs to be cut into a particular package of programming. If Fox or HBO are going to make their programming available, free for download, they're going to want to ensure that they maximize their revenue streams by precisely targeting advertising sales for every potential viewing market. That's a job that the local broadcasters are uniquely suited for.

Some of you might be asking: without audience aggregation, how will we know what to watch? That's what the broadcasters will ask, and will point out that you'll have to winnow through a lot of chaff to get to the grain. (Obviously they haven't been watching their own programs.)

There is an answer to this as well. More and more, the internet functions as a high-quality filter to help us find what we want; I see something and I email my friends, and they email their friends, and on and on and on. The rise of "social software" such as Friendster and Orkut means that it has become increasingly easy to disseminate my likes and dislikes among my circle of friends (who will tell their friends, and so on, and so on). A TV producer can still do a press tour and raise awareness of upcoming programming, but even in the absence of PR junkets, social software ensures that television viewers will have little trouble finding the best of the best. Social software, directed toward media choice, that's something I want to call peercasting.

How does a producer realize revenue in this new world of digital television? When you've got bits on a disk, you can fast-forward through the commercials at the touch of a button. Or perhaps one of your friends will edit them out before he posts the program to his server - and only one person on Earth needs to do this for everyone to have access to a commercial-free version of the program. So commercials will need to change radically. We're already seeing the more advanced advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble and BMW, offering up short films by major directors as a new advertising vehicle. The commercials will need to be more interesting than the programming, or they'll be left on the digital cutting-room floor. Product placement - which is used extensively in "24" and "Survivor" - is another possibility. The road ahead for the producer is unclear - and that means it's prime time to be inventive, creating new forms of revenue generation for television producers.

Rule Three: Respect the Audience

With the advent of the PVR and store-and-forward television viewing, the program schedule is freed from the tyranny of the programmer, empowering the viewer. PVR owners watch 71% more television, on average, because they're watching programs which they're most interested by - not just the programs screening at a particular moment. (They also watch 35% less advertising.) But a program schedule is only useful to the PVR insofar as it is adhered to by the broadcaster. And, sadly, this is absolutely not the case in Australia. I've been asking everyone I know why television programmers here do not begin their programs at their scheduled times - why "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" can run fifteen minutes into the scheduled start time for "Sex in the City", for example - because this cavalier attitude toward television schedules makes it nearly impossible for a VCR or PVR to be used to record programming. This is going to become a more pressing problem when the FOXTEL Digital PVR is rolled out later on this year. (Unless that PVR can adapt to the sudden changes in program schedules - which is not impossible, and given the attitude of Australian television programmers, probably necessary.)

If promptness is a virtue - and it is, in my book - Australian commercial broadcasters (it's curious that all three commercial broadcasters do this regularly, while the two public broadcasters do this only rarely) have been doing little except anger their audiences. When the audience didn't have any alternatives, the broadcasters could get away with it. But now, in the new era of television redefined, they have an alternative. When broadcasters upset their audiences, they'll drive those audiences into alternate forms of delivery - and they'll be cutting their own throats. Respect is more than a nice idea - it's going to be the only way that broadcasters will be able to maintain an audience in the age of digital television.

All of this can be summed up in a very neat phrase: as broadband succeeds, broadcasting will fail. And nothing, short of the economic collapse of Western civilization, is going to impede the uptake of broadband. It will continue to transform our culture, and the delivery of our cultural products. That's very good news, because it opens up a world of possibilities which have nothing to do with the politics and economics of broadcast licenses, and everything to do with creativity.
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/redefiningtv.html


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F.C.C.'s Chief Turns Into Pitchman for Converting Nation to Digital TV
Matt Richtel

The legendary consumer electronics salesman Crazy Eddie is no longer around. But the job of hawking televisions has been taken over in recent weeks by a new TV personality: Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Some of his critics are arguing that Mr. Powell and the F.C.C. have no place spending tax dollars promoting $2,000 consumer electronics devices.

The commission is taking the lead on a new consumer education campaign called "DTV - Get It!" But the commission is not just going to ask consumers to buy TV's: it has started a Web site, www.dtv.gov, that gives shopping and programming tips along with advice for setting up digital television.

"The F.C.C. wants to be a partner in helping consumers understand what it will actually take once they bring home their beautiful new high-definition sets to really get it online," Mr. Powell said in Washington on Oct. 1.

Three days later, he appeared on "Monday Night Football'' on ABC to promote the virtues of digital television to the technology's core audience: sports fans.

A spokeswoman for the F.C.C. defended Mr. Powell's push for digital television. But a nonprofit group called Commercial Alert sent a letter late last week to 160 members of Congress, urging them to withdraw financing from the campaign.

"Do you really believe that with all the troubles facing our nation, the federal government should be on a crusade to encourage people to buy costly new television sets?" the letter read in part.

In an interview, Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, reacted even more strongly to Mr. Powell's appearances, saying, "What's Powell going to do next, give Sharp and Sony seats on the F.C.C.?"

The F.C.C. wants television signals to be broadcast digitally within five years so that analog airwaves can be used by the government for public service and safety messages, among other things. But that cannot happen until more Americans have the digital sets able to receive programming and advertising - a potential boon to the television makers, who envision selling DTV's into every American living room.

In the view of Mr. Powell, the digital upgrading harks back to another time when the country was at crossroads: "the transformation from black-and-white to color,'' he said last week.

So come on down, America, and get yourself a digital TV. Tell 'em Crazy Mikey sent you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/technology/11fcc.html


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Microsoft’s Latest Plan for TV
Saul Hansell

TELEVISION has been something of a great white whale for the Microsoft Corporation. The company has tried to sell WebTV and build software for TV's and cable boxes. It has even invested billions in cable systems. So far, these efforts have been expensive and have not yet put Microsoft into the position it covets: the maker of the software behind every glowing screen.

Tomorrow, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, ventures into Hollywood to announce a renewed assault on a different front in his war of the tube, one that builds on Microsoft's greatest strength: Windows.

Mr. Gates will unveil a new version of the Windows XP Media Center, software that combined with specially configured personal computers from dozens of manufacturers, turns the PC into a photo album, jukebox, DVD player and, most important, a TV set with a built-in recorder.

The first two editions of the software have been slow to gain acceptance in the market, representing about 3 percent of home computers sold. But, Microsoft hopes to turn that around with the latest version, which will add a few features and improve the technical quality of the television picture and the video recorder; both at times have been spotty.

More importantly, say industry executives, demand will be spurred by a series of new hardware devices using the Windows software that will be introduced tomorrow. Several manufacturers, including Linksys, a unit of Cisco Systems, and Hewlett-Packard, are expected to introduce versions of a product Microsoft announced last January called the Media Center Extender, a device that allows a television signal to be sent from a Media Center computer to a television in another room, by way of a wireless network .

And perhaps most significant, some of the new Media Center computers will have prices below $1,000, about half that of the first models.

Still, it is an open question whether people want to watch television on their computers. "Convergence solves a problem consumers don't have," said Sean Baenen, a managing director of Odyssey, a consumer research firm. He said that simpler, single-purpose machines are easier to use.

So far, the record of Media Center PC's is mixed. Since they were introduced in 2002, computers using the first two versions of this software have been slow sellers. IDC, which had forecast sales of 1.5 million of them this year, now sees sales at 550,000 units for all of 2004.

Roger Kay, a vice president of IDC, says sales of Media Center PC's have lagged because they are buggy, too hard to use, and often too noisy to put in a living room. And even among the small group of users, they haven't developed the fanatical following of TiVo, the stand-alone video recorder.

"I haven't been in some placid home where the people who use Media Center PC's think it is great and a part of their life," Mr. Kay said.

Brad Brooks, the marketing manger for Windows, said that Mr. Kay had undercounted the software's sales and had overstated its flaws.

"We're pretty happy where we are after only 22 months in the market," he said. "We have grown past 3 percent of the market." He said that over the next few years, Media Center machines would represent 10 percent to 20 percent of the market.

Mr. Brooks said this growth would be driven by the new software to be introduced tomorrow - along with a series of related new products by hardware makers. He declined to say what specific changes would be in the new version, but press accounts and industry executives say they include a modest set of new features and improvements to the user interface.

"We are going into Version 3 of the Media Center edition, and everyone says that Version 3 is Microsoft's sweet spot."

Stephen Baker, the director of industry analysis at the NPD Group, a research firm, is skeptical even of the existing sales of Media Center PC's. "A lot of their sales have been accidental," he said. "Someone wants to buy the best PC out there, and this is the one with all the bells and whistles"

That isn't such a bad thing, Mr. Brooks said. "Our partners say that the media center is their highest-margin PC."

Microsoft, too, gets higher margins. Industry analysts say that PC makers pay a premium of $20 to $40 over the roughly $50 a computer that Microsoft gets for the basic edition of Windows.

Regardless of how they get Media Center computers, Mr. Brooks said people like them when they get them home. Microsoft's surveys, he said, found that more than 90 percent of the owners of the Media Center computers are satisfied with them, far more than the percentage of basic PC owners. Eight out of nine, he said, would recommend the product to a friend.

But research by both Microsoft and computer makers found that most of the initial users of the machines were using them on their computer monitors, presumably on their desks. Only a small minority use the highly promoted ability of the computers to link to TV sets and sound systems for use in family rooms. (The machines come with remote controls and software with very large type so that they can be used by people sitting on the couch across the room from a big TV set.)

One reason, perhaps, is that video-recording functions and picture quality have not been as good as on a device like TiVo. A survey by Forrester Research found that people who recorded video on their computers were less satisfied than users of specialized recorders. Microsoft says new hardware and software will help fix these problems.

Microsoft and other researchers have been surprised that many initial Media Center users use it more for managing digital photographs than for watching television.

The media extender device may give Microsoft its desired beachhead in the living room. But those devices are emerging technology and have an initial price tag of about $250. A recorder from TiVo, by contrast, can be bought for less than $100 after rebates, although it has a fee of $12.95 a month, which the Windows system does not.

Sony has sold a similar system for several years to link its Vaio PC to a computer in another room, but sales were modest. More than half the Vaio desktops have TV tuners, but most do not use the Windows Media Center software. Todd Titera, the product manager for Vaio, said Sony's customers liked to watch television and especially to edit their home movies on their computers. But rather than using its product to send the pictures to their family room TV's, they used a simpler method. They burned DVD's of movies and then walked them to their DVD player.

Hewlett-Packard is also trying another approach to sneak into the living room: building a computer that is the size and appearance of a large DVD player that can be stacked alongside other home theater devices. Like a fancy receiver, it has all sorts of jacks for sound and video coming in and out on the back. The front has a drive for DVD's and CD's, a jack to hook up a video camera, and a slot for an extra hard drive. The device is a full Windows computer, but it is meant to be used with a television rather a monitor.

It also has a price tag close to $2,000. John Romano, Hewlett's senior vice president for consumer products, says this version is "not already for the mainstream market yet." But as with all technology, he said, prices will fall. And Hewlett has high hopes for new versions of its regular Media Center PC's that will sell for less than $1,000.

But even as prices fall, many researchers wonder whether people want a single machine to handle their television, music and photos.

"Consumers don't want or need the ultimate device," said Mr. Baenen from Odyssey. "They don't want to pay for the ultimate device; they don't trust the ultimate device; and, they don't want to deal with the complexity of the ultimate device."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/te...microsoft.html


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TV Group to Show Anti- Kerry Film on 62 Stations
Jim Rutenberg

Up to 62 television stations owned or managed by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group - many of them in swing states - will show a documentary highly critical of Senator John Kerry's antiwar activities 30 years ago within the next two weeks, Sinclair officials said yesterday.

Those officials said the documentary would pre-empt regular night programming, including prime time, on its stations, which include affiliates for all six of the major broadcast networks in the swing states of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Called "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the documentary features Vietnam veterans who say their Vietnamese captors used Mr. Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, in which he recounted stories of American atrocities, prolonging their torture and betraying and demoralizing them. Similar claims were made by prisoners of war in a commercial that ran during the summer from an anti-Kerry veterans group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Two of the former prisoners who appeared in the Swift Boat advertisement were interviewed for the movie, including Ken Cordier, who had to resign as a volunteer in the Bush campaign after the advertisement came out.

Sinclair's plan to show the documentary was first made public by The Los Angeles Times on Saturday.

Mark Hyman, Sinclair's vice president for corporate relations, who doubles as a conservative commentator on its news stations, said the film would be shown because Sinclair deemed it newsworthy.

"Clearly John Kerry has made his Vietnam service the foundation of his presidential run; this is an issue that is certainly topical," he said. Asked what defined something as newsworthy, Mr. Hyman said, "In that it hasn't been out in the marketplace, and the news marketplace."

Because Sinclair is defining the documentary - which will run commercial free - as news, it is unclear if it will be required by federal regulations to provide Mr. Kerry's campaign with equal time to respond.

But acknowledging that news standards call for fairness, Mr. Hyman said an invitation has been extended to Mr. Kerry to respond after the documentary is shown. "There are certainly serious allegations that are leveled; we would very much like to get his response," he said.

Asked if Sinclair would consider running a documentary of similar length either lauding Mr. Kerry, responding to the charges in "Stolen Honor" or criticizing Mr. Bush, Mr. Hyman said, "We'd just have to take a look at it."

Aides to Mr. Kerry said he would not accept Sinclair's invitation.

"It's hard to take an offer seriously from a group that is hellbent on doing anything to help elect President Bush even if that means violating basic journalism standards," said Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman.

Sinclair's plans put Mr. Kerry's campaign in an awkward position similar to the one in which it found itself in August, when the Swift Boat group first began running commercials against him containing unsubstantiated charges that he lied to get his war medals. Mr. Kerry's aides at first held back from responding, so as not to give the group and its charges more attention - a decision that some Kerry aides now acknowledge cost him in public opinion polls.

Mr. Clanton said Mr. Kerry's campaign would call on supporters to stage advertiser boycotts and demonstrations against Sinclair's stations.

A group of Democratic senators, including Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dianne Feinstein of California, readied a letter calling for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the move, arguing that the documentary was not news but a prolonged political advertisement from Mr. Bush and, as such, violated fairness rules.

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, an advocacy group promoting greater media regulation, said he did not think the film would qualify for a news exemption. And, he said, even if it did fall under equal time provisions, those are based on candidate appearances and in this case, since it is Mr. Kerry who appears, "albeit disparagingly," stations would be required to show Mr. Bush or possibly the independent candidate Ralph Nader, if they requested it.

Sinclair was already a galvanizing force for Democrats. The political donations of its executives have gone overwhelmingly to Republicans, according to a review of donations on Politicalmoneyline.com. In April Sinclair refused to run an episode of "Nightline" on its stations in which the anchor Ted Koppel spent the entire program reading the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

"Stolen Honor" was produced by Carlton Sherwood, formerly a reporter with The Washington Times. His Web site says he received no money from any political party or campaign but got initial funding from Pennsylvania veterans.

The documentary has been distributed by mail order and via streaming Internet connections. Mr. Hyman said Sinclair was not paying for the right to broadcast it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/po... tner=homepage


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Nature Loves A Copy


Thousands of olive ridley sea turtles arriving at La Escobilla Beach in Oaxaca, Mexico, to lay their eggs.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Sea Turtles Defy Oblivion

Olive ridley sea turtles are making a comeback, largely because of Mexican conservation efforts.


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Phone Line Alchemy: Copper Into Fiber
Ken Belson

Rick Montey and his two-worker crew want to present a new image of the local phone company: prompt, friendly and hands-on helpful.

At the home of T. J. Smith here in this Fort Worth suburb, Mr. Montey helped choose an inconspicuous spot to bore a small hole through the side of the house for the fiber optic line that would enable Mr. Smith's son to download big computer files quickly for his graphic-design work and let his granddaughter pull video clips off the Internet.

Three hours later, only after the Smiths knew how to use the new system, Mr. Montey and his crew pulled away in their Verizon Communications truck. The family paid nothing for the installation, beyond the $34.95 monthly fee for the high-speed fiber optic service - which they can drop at any time.

The new offering is part of a multibillion-dollar bet by Verizon and the other Bell companies. They are gambling that by going door to door to replace century-old copper wire technology with high-speed fiber optic lines, they can hang onto their most valuable asset: a direct line into the home of each customer.

Verizon and the other regional Bell companies are losing customers by the millions as people drop their old phone lines in favor of cellphones, e-mail and ever cheaper phone services from cable companies.

To battle back, the phone companies are trying to outdo their archrivals, the cable companies, by installing a network of fiber optic lines to reach tens of millions of American homes - lines able to carry not only phone calls but television programming and Internet connections at six times the speed of cable company lines.

In the process, the Bells hope to become a counterweight to cable companies that often operate as monopolies in their specific regions.

"Without fiber, their customer base will evaporate," said Michael Render, president of Render, Vanderslice & Associates, a market research firm in Tulsa, Okla., that tracks fiber optic networks. "The world is changing too rapidly. Building fiber networks is a must-do."

Though the service is available now only in this small town and a few other cities nationally, Verizon expects to make its fiber connections available to a million homes in parts of nine states by the end of the year.

For all the billions of dollars Verizon and the other Bells plan to spend, success is far from assured and failure could be catastrophically expensive. Cable providers, with lines into 73 million homes, are a formidable opponent, particularly with their new Internet phone services. And it is not certain either that the Bells will be able to offer fiber-based services compelling enough to get customers to sign up, or whether future technologies will render all that expensive fiber obsolete.

Still, if the Bells need any reminder of why they need to act now, they have only to look at AT&T. The old Ma Bell spun off the regional Bell companies more than 20 years ago to pursue a seemingly unfettered communications future, but it has fallen on such hard times that this summer AT&T decided to retreat almost entirely from the residential phone market.

Despite the urgency, it will take years, if not decades, to wire every home with fiber. The Bells are starting first in suburbs and new communities, where access is easier. In cities like New York, the Bells are likely to bring fiber only to the basements of multi-story buildings, not all the way to each individual apartment, and then use existing copper lines to bridge the gap.

As the telephone companies embark on this most ambitious rewiring of America since the old Bell System strung copper lines from telephone poles early last century, they know that today's competitive market will not let them approach their job as the regulated monopolists of yore.

They have to keep appointments, rather than expecting consumers to wait home all day for the phone truck to drive up. They no longer mail customers Internet-access gear and expect them to figure out how to install it, as the Bells have often done in recent years with their high-speed D.S.L. service. And in this hotly competitive era, they are not charging an installation fee - even though the job, in equipment and labor, can easily cost $1,000 or more a home.

"I've never thought of myself as a salesman," said Mr. Montey, a 25-year Verizon veteran, "It's the biggest challenge in my career."

Within weeks of AT&T's decision to back away from the household market, Verizon, the biggest Bell company, began offering its first residential fiber service to customers here in Keller, a town of 30,000 people 15 miles north of Fort Worth. From April to August, Verizon contractors dug up Keller's neatly laid streets and buried fiber optic cables that connect to the Verizon central switching station in town.

Customers like Jim and Margaret Archer are the types of Keller residents that give Verizon hope. The Archers struggled for years to send e-mail and search the Web with their pokey Internet connection through a dial-up modem and a regular phone line. Their house was too far from Verizon's central switching office to get a faster digital subscriber line.

So when Verizon began burying fiber cable in their neighborhood, the Archers jumped to order the service. "Now we've got the good stuff," said Mrs. Archer, 61, a part- time paralegal. Next year, they hope to dump their satellite dish when Verizon begins selling TV programming via the fiber network to compete with the local cable TV provider.

Fiber, which carries digital information as pulses of light rather than electric current, is not new. For years, phone carriers have been laying fiber between their municipal switching stations, on long-distance routes and across oceans. But only now are the regional Bell companies, having lost 16.3 percent of their local-line customers in just the last four years, laying fiber to residences.

Nationwide, only 146,500 homes have been connected to fiber, said Mr. Render, the market researcher. That number is up from 64,700 homes in September 2003, Mr. Render said.

The numbers should continue growing. Verizon plans to spend $3 billion to offer fiber service to three million homes nationally by the end of 2005. SBC, dominant in the Southwest and the Midwest, and BellSouth, big in the Southeast, have also been installing fiber to homes in newly built neighborhoods in their regions. In older areas, they are taking fiber to switching stations or to the curb, and relying on old copper lines to reach the house, a strategy that may reduce connection speeds.

To build a nationwide fiber network comparable to the cable industry's, the Bells would have to spend at least $100 billion, or $1,000 a home, experts say. But so far, the companies have committed themselves to spending only about $10 billion, before determining whether further outlays make sense. And even that amount has raised alarm bells on Wall Street, where investors remain wary of costly projects.

Still, the experience of running fiber cable past every home in Keller and selling services to consumers has given Verizon a taste of what may follow. Early indications are that customers like the price: as little as $34.95 for one of the fastest Internet lines, a price comparable to what cable companies charge for considerably slower connections.

Getting the service to consumers is another matter. In Texas and other states with flat expanses, workers typically bury the fiber using boring machines that often lay the lines near the older copper cables. In places where the terrain is hilly or rocky, lines are strung from poles, a faster, cheaper process, although one that leaves the fiber line susceptible to storms.

After a customer puts in an order, Verizon sends a crew to connect the main fiber line to the side of the customer's home. Then another installation crew, like the one led by Mr. Montey, connects the fiber to equipment inside and outside the house.

This is a new kind of work for Mr. Montey. For decades, phone companies have operated as stodgy utilities, with little need to improve customer service. With fiber, they have to turn themselves into retailers. Phone workers, accustomed to splicing lines and hanging from phone poles, are now spending hours teaching customers about their broadband connections, even becoming PC advisers because so many home computers are riddled with viruses.

The company said it was too early to say how many homes in Keller had subscribed to the service, although it said it had received up to 80 orders a day.

Verizon is now laying fiber in Dallas County, Tex.; Huntington Beach, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; and in parts of six other states. The company has not announced the additional six states, but said most are in the Northeast. Analysts have said the list includes New York and New Jersey.

Because it has been swallowing the installation costs, Verizon is eager to use the fiber to start selling television programming, which analysts say will be comparable in price to many basic cable packages. To do so, Verizon and the other phone companies are having to negotiate contracts with networks, buy the equivalent of cable TV franchises from municipalities and sell advertising to fill their air time.

Despite its high installation costs, fiber could be a money-saver in the long run. Unlike copper cables, glass fibers do not rust, and require less electricity and maintenance. By 2008, Verizon's fiber network could save the company about $1 billion annually in operating costs, according to analysts.

SBC, which is running fiber cable only to newly built homes and neighborhood switching stops in older areas, will get only 70 percent of the savings that Verizon's network is expected to achieve, but it will spend only half as much time and money on the project, according to Ernie Carey, the chief of SBC's $6 billion fiber installation project.

The continued reliance on copper for the final link to the homes of consumers makes sense to some experts, who say improvements in software compression and Internet connection technology make to-the-home fiber unnecessary. They point to companies in Japan and South Korea that are already selling high-speed Internet connections and video over copper networks.

No matter how much fiber they bury, the Bells cannot be complacent because the cable companies will continue to market their own services.

"The cable guys are not going to wait three or four years" for the Bell companies to catch up, said Jeffrey Halpern, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "The Bells need a revolutionary change, not an evolutionary change."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/te...y/11fiber.html


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Movie industry pressure

France May Allow Cell Phone Jammers

PARIS (AP) -- Watch a movie or make a mobile phone call. Soon, in France, you might not be able to do both at once.

The government's industry minister has approved a decision to let cinemas, concert halls and theaters install cell phone jammers -- on condition that emergency calls can still get through, officials said Monday.

Jean Labbe, president of the National Federation of French Cinemas, said the measure was a response to ``a long-standing request'' from cinemas of all sizes.

Cinemas have invested heavily to improve comfort, and ``the authorization of jammers is the cherry on the cake,'' he told France Info radio.

Industry Minister Patrick Devedjian gave the go-ahead Friday, backing a decision by the Telecommunications Regulation Authority to allow jammers, his ministry said in a statement.

Devedjian specified however that emergency calls and calls made outside theaters and other performance spaces must not be affected.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/inte...g-Mobiles.html


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Spyware Cases Filed
AP

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday filed the first case in the country against software companies accused of infecting computers with intrusive "spyware" and then trying to sell people the solution.

The commission accused the companies of infecting computers with unsolicited software, showering computer screens with pop-up ads and then trying to get consumers to pay $30 to fix it. It is seeking an injunction to get the companies, owned by the same person, to stop and to offer restitution to consumers.

The agency requested a temporary restraining order from the Federal District Court for New Hampshire against Seismic Entertainment Productions, Smartbot.Net and Sanford Wallace.

This week, the House passed two bills that would outlaw spyware.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/technology/08spy.html


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Taking a SpotCode to a Destination

The Intel lab in Cambridge, England, has been working on applications for a technology it calls SpotCodes, which can be used like bar codes to provide information or instructions to suitably equipped camera cellphones. Bango, a Cambridge-based company working on ways to commercialize SpotCodes, provided this sample, which works with camera phones using the Symbian Series 60 operating system.

Most of the new systems work on the same basic principle: software converts a camera phone's built-in lens into a scanner, similar to a bar-code reader's. When the lens is pointed at a recognizable symbol, the phone's display becomes a real-time viewfinder. In the case of SpotCodes, for example, once the lens detects the symbol, red cross hairs appear. Clicking then initiates a given service, like loading a Web page or transmitting an e-mail address.

A list of compatible phones and instructions for downloading the necessary software to your phone are at bango.net/spot.

Once a phone is equipped, go to the Bango Spot reader icon on the phone's menu page. Pointing to the code shown here and pressing any button when prompted should direct the phone's browser to www.nytimes.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/te...iosk-side.html


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CDs To Come In Three Classes
Hannah Cleaver

German music fans no longer willing to pay full price for CDs which they can copy or download for practically nothing are being wooed back to the shops with a three-class system of CD pricing.

Music and media giant Bertelsmann, or BMG, is next month launching the scheme while Sony is thought to be preparing its own version for the autumn.

Under the system, customers will have the option of buying a basic version of a new release for €9.99 - it will come without a cover, simply with the information printed on the disc, much like a home-burned one.

The "normal" version, with full cover and notes, will cost €12.99, down from the current average price of €16.99 and there will also be a luxury, often limited, edition priced at €17.99 that will have a DVD component and remixes as extras.

Despite the immense interest in the digital download systems such as iTunes, the music industry is in a transitional phase during which it needs to keep customers buying music - and this means CDs - rather than losing them to illegal or free sources.

Maarten Steinkamp, head of BMG Germany, says that although it has sold 20 times more digital music than expected, the online music business is still very much in its infancy and nothing is being taken for granted.

"The online business is developing splendidly… [but] everything we earn from downloads is a bonus," he told German magazine Der Spiegel.

The dire state of the compact disc market is illustrated by German figures for the week before last, which show approximately 330,000 online songs being sold, against just 312,000 single CDs.

Meanwhile, annual sales have dropped from 52m CD singles in Germany in 1997 to 24m last year while the album CD market has shrunk from sales of 197m in 1997 to just 134m last year.

"We must finally become customer friendly and offer music fans a broad choice. The music industry has sat motionless on its backside for far too long," said Mr Steinkamp. "The cheap version will be similar to a self- burned CD, with no cover and just the title printed directly on to the disc.

"That is our anti-pirate CD."

He hopes to increase CD sales by a quarter with the new strategy, although says that he is prepared to take a risk on profits. "We are in no way certain of success," he said.

"We might even lose money. But we have to finely tailor what we offer to the demand and try something new."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...06/ixcity.html


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Indymedia to U.S., U.K., Swiss and Italian Authorities: "Hands Off Our Websites"

Evidence is beginning to mount that the authorities of at least four countries (Switzerland, Italy, U.K. and U.S.A.) are involved in last week's seizure of two of Indymedia's servers that brought down more than 20 of the Indymedia network's web sites and several internet radio streams. Indymedia has yet to receive any official statement or information about what the order entailed or why it was issued.

An FBI spokesperson, Joe Parris, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a subpoena to the provider who hosted the Indymedia servers in the U.K., but that it was "on behalf of a third country." (1) Daniel Zapelli, senior federal prosecutor for Geneva (Switzerland), confirmed that he has opened a criminal investigation into Indymedia coverage of the 2003 G8 Summit in Evian. (2) Zapelli will provide details of that investigation at a press conference on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutor of Bologna (Italy) Marina Plazzi stated that she is investigating Italy Indymedia because it may "support terrorism." (3) Plazzi says she will provide more information on Thursday, October 14th.

Meanwhile international journalist associations have come forward in support of Indymedia. "We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White IFJ General Secretary. (4)

Indymedia is consulting with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to retrieve its servers and prevent further government attacks on free speech. "EFF is deeply concerned about the grave implications of this seizure for free speech and privacy, and we are exploring all avenues to hold the government accountable for this improper and unconstitutional silencing of independent media.," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. (5)

As of Monday, October 11, five of the downed websites have been restored, including Brasil, Euskal Herria, Poland, UK and Nice. Indymedia volunteers are working around the clock to restore the remaining sites, however at least four of them - Uruguay, Italy, Western Massachusetts and Nantes - have suffered data loss as a result of the governments' action.

"This FBI operation gives us even more reason to continue with what we have been doing for several years," says an activist from Italy Indymedia.

"Uruguay has a long history of media repression. We don't have the money to pay for web hosting, and so we rely on the solidarity of other countries. Actions like the seizure of the servers make the whole world insecure for free media," says Libertinus, an Indymedia volunteer from Uruguay, one of many Indymedia web sites that was caught in the FBI actions as a bystander. "Uruguay's national elections will take place on October 31st. It's a bad time for this to happen."
http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml


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Finnish Software Eliminates Dangers Of The Internet

A Finnish company has launched a product that can be used to prevent children and young people from visiting adult pages on the Internet.

In addition to pages in Finnish, the Block! software of the company Hitback.fi Oy also identifies offensive European pages. ”The problem with other than Finnish software is that it blocks access to, e.g., the pages of the Finnish municipality Pornainen or the OKO Bank of Pornainen,” states Mr Kimmo Junttila, the company’s managing director.

The software is aimed at companies whose employees might surf illegal web sites during their working hours. In addition to this, Block! identifies 143 different Peer-to-Peer networks, i.e. file sharing programs, which can easily be blocked. According to Hitback.fi Oy, P2P networks operated by a few users have become a problem on many housing companies’ shared broadband connections.

Tekes, the National Technology Agency of Finland, has provided funding for the company’s product development.
http://www.innovations-report.com/ht...ort-34710.html