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22-06-06, 11:58 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 24th, ’06
  "I have serious doubts whether today's copyright laws bring any increased benefits for the society at all." – Karl-Henrik Pettersson "We must break various rules of law in acquiring all the information we achieve for you." – Touch Tone Information Inc. "You shouldn't be worried about being spied on by your government. These days you can't go anywhere without a camera watching you whether you're in a grocery store or walking down the street." – Sid Heal "1984 has finally arrived. I can't believe this is happening in a liberal place like Washington." – Todd Boutte "The potential for abuse is enormous." – Former U.S. senior counterterrorism official "I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was. You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly." – Kathleen Walsh "Hollywood's overall business rose for the fifth-straight weekend." – David Germain "I used to joke with him, 'You'd never get me in a "Star Trek" uniform, even on Halloween, it's not going to happen.' Next thing I know, I'm wearing a uniform." – Mike Bednar "I’d say this is a dream come true." – Paul Reubens "We are a signpost that there's a new approach that could drive the cost of the client device to nothing. This could change the world." – Stephen A. Dukker "People are going to be having sex with robots within five years." – Henrik Christensen File Sharing Does Not "Defy The Laws Of Nature" Dan Glickman is a tool. There. It needed to be said. An educated man I suppose, he obviously knows better. So when he says giving away product for free and being more successful "defies the laws of nature" he says it as a paid collaborator and lobbyist for his media mogul masters and we see it for what it is: self-serving nonsense from the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, just like the previous drivel from Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen before him. Where to begin…Ok, Nature does lots of things for "free" of course. Ever savored a cherry? How does that work? Well, trees "give them away." For free! Not that I care to assign intent, but essentially they hope to entice animals like us to spread their seeds, and naturally, we're happy to oblige. But we are not obligated, and there is a difference. Plants have been found on islands far from their origins, carried by birds hundreds of miles over water, all because they were smart enough to offer something for free. This natural system of free distribution is perhaps the world’s oldest profession, and nothing works better. Ah Mr. Glickman, if anything defies the laws of nature it is so-called copy controls. Nature is hell-bent in using any means at her disposal to make more and more of herself, not less. It’s a good thing too - our very existence depends on it. No, I’m afraid nature is the last thing media company monopolists care to emulate. Their operating principals are the very antitheses of it. Hell if Glickman and the assorted media thugs now stealing our cultural future were such naturalists, they’d quit the MPAA and start new P2P programs! And file-sharing would be a bowl of cherries. Enjoy, Jack  June 24th, ’06  For Real? p2pnet With Big Four Organized Music member EMI trying to cosy up to YouTube, the RIAA, owned by EMI, Warner Music, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, has been firing off Cease & Desist letters to YouTubers. Seemingly, the C&D's are, "demanding that they take down videos of kids singing along and dancing to their favorite songs," as Cory Doctorow points out on Boing Boing, going on, "This is pretty crazy, of course - as Battelle says, 'Wake up. This is how we use music in the real world. Get over yourselves'." "But, Doctorow continues, "that's just the beginning of the story. Last July, RPG Films got a takedown notice from someone who claimed to be the RIAA. RPGFilms hosts videos of people's video-game characters dancing to music - rock-videos made with games. They shut down and there was a terrible stink about it, and the RIAA actually contacted us to tell us that they hadn't sent the notice - it was a fake. "We reported that, and I asked RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) Director of Communications Jenni Engebretsen some followup questions." Q: Are forgeries like this common occurrences? A: I can't really say - I'd have to speak to our folks to see if this happens with any frequency. As I stated in my email, we haven't initiated any legal action of any kind. Q: Do you plan to pursue the forgers who sent out the bogus takedown in your name? A: I need to check into that, that's all the information I have at this point. Q: Will you pursue a claim against RPG Films for the use of your member-companies' copyright music in the films they host? A: We have not initiated any communication or legal action against them. Forecasting future actions is not something we do. Q: Do you have an institutional policy on the use of your member companies' music in noncommercial fan-films made from video-games? A: I need to check on that. Q: That's great, thanks. I'll post this and update the post when you get back to me. However, says the Boing Boing post, that was all she wrote or, rather, said. "In fact, I couldn't get her on the phone at all," says Doctorow. "I'd ring her from my home number and mobile phone and no one picked up, and I never received a response to my emails. Eventually, I called her from a different number while travelling in the US and she answered. I asked her about all those 'I need to check on that' and 'I'll get back to you' answers. "She said, 'Yeah, we don't have any comment on those questions'. "So now we've got the RIAA (?) sending takedown notices to YouTube over kids who rock out to the songs they love. You have to wonder -- if this is a forgery, has the RIAA decided to do something about it? If it's not, does that mean that they now have a policy about fan-films made with music? "If Ms Engebretsen is reading this, I'd be glad to hear any comment you'd care to make on those questions now." http://www.p2pnet.net/story/9090 Next Action: Freedom Rings at the RIAA PeterB Freedom Rings at the RIAA Update: June 23rd, 9:30am Eastern -As of last night, over 3,600 people have joined this campaign to stand up for freedom and against DRM. Join today and give a piece of mind to executives at the IFPI (Germany), BPI (UK), SNEP (France), CRIA (Canada) and the RIAA (US). The action has begun and will continue until late tonight. When you sign up below, you will be given a page that provides information on executives at the these orgs, their phone numbers, and results from our calls! June 21 - In the last 3 weeks nearly 3000 people have signed up at DefectiveByDesign.org to take action. We have gotten emails from all over the world; people want to step up, take action and proclaim their support of digital freedoms by opposing DRM. On Friday, June 23rd, we will coordinate a day of action, and this time it doesn't involve yellow hazmat suits. You don't even have to leave your desk. We will provide contact numbers for executives at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and similar organizations around the world. We're asking you to proclaim your support for digital freedoms by calling the RIAA and telling them what you think of DRM and what you think of them! Spread the word about this call-in by asking your friends to register today! When you log in on Friday we'll give you a special number to call. After you've made your call, you can let us know how it went. The more people that take part, the more fun this will be. With just 480 calls at one minute each, we can let the industry hear our voices all through the workday. The RIAA pushes DRM on us; it's time to push back! http://defectivebydesign.org/node/138 "We must break various rules of law in acquiring all the information we achieve for you." Police Bypass Courts for Telephone Records Get data from shadowy world of information brokers Ted Bridis and John Solomon Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers. These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press. The law enforcement agencies include offices in the Homeland Security Department and Justice Department - including the FBI and U.S. Marshal's Service - and municipal police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Utah. Experts believe hundreds of other departments frequently use such services. "We are requesting any and all information you have regarding the above cell phone account and the account holder ... including account activity and the account holder's address," Ana Bueno, a police investigator in Redwood City, Calif., wrote in October to PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas. An agent in Denver for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Anna Wells, sent a similar request on March 31 on Homeland Security stationery: "I am looking for all available subscriber information for the following phone number," Wells wrote to a corporate alias used by PDJ. Congressional investigators estimated the U.S. government spent $30 million last year buying personal data from private brokers. But that number likely understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any price. PDJ said it always provided help to police for free. "Agencies from all across the country took advantage of it," said PDJ's lawyer, Larry Slade of Los Angeles. A lawmaker who has investigated the industry said Monday he was concerned by the practices of data brokers. "We know law enforcement has used this because it is easily obtained and you can gather a lot of information very quickly," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., head of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. The panel expects to conduct hearings this week. Whitfield said data companies will relentlessly pursue a target's personal information. "They will impersonate and use everything available that they have to convince the person who has the information to share it with them, and it's shocking how successful they are," Whitfield said. "They can basically obtain any information about anybody on any subject." The congressman said laws on the subject are vague: "There's a good chance there are some laws being broken, but it's not really clear precisely which laws." James Bearden, a Texas lawyer who represents four such data brokers, compared the companies' activities to the National Security Agency, which reportedly compiles the phone records of ordinary Americans. "The government is doing exactly what these people are accused of doing," Bearden said. "These people are being demonized. These are people who are partners with law enforcement on a regular basis." The police agencies told AP they used the data brokers because it was quicker and easier than subpoenas, and their lawyers believe their actions were lawful. Some agencies, such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, instructed agents to stop the practice after congressional inquiries. The U.S. Marshal's Service told AP it was examining its policies but compared services offered by data brokers to Web sites providing public telephone numbers nationally. None of the police agencies interviewed by AP said they researched these data brokers to determine how they secretly gather sensitive information like names associated with unlisted numbers, records of phone calls, e-mail aliases - even tracing a person's location using their cellular phone signal. "If it's on the Internet and it's been commended to us, we wouldn't do a full-scale investigation," Marshal's Service spokesman David Turner said. "We don't knowingly go into any source that would be illegal. We were not aware, I'm fairly certain, what technique was used by these subscriber services." At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spokesman Dean Boyd said agents did not pay for phone records and sought approval from U.S. prosecutors before making requests. Their goal was "to more quickly identify and filter out phone numbers that were unrelated to their investigations," Boyd said. Targets of the police interest include alleged marijuana smugglers, car thieves, armed thugs and others. The data services also are enormously popular among banks and other lenders, private detectives and suspicious spouses. Customers included: -A U.S. Labor Department employee who used her government e-mail address and phone number to buy two months of personal cellular phone records of a woman in New Jersey. -A buyer who received credit card information about the father of murder victim Jon Benet Ramsey. -A buyer who obtained 20 printed pages of phone calls by pro basketball player Damon Jones of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The athlete was "shocked to learn somebody had obtained this information," said Mark Termini, his lawyer and agent in Cleveland. "When a person or agency is able to obtain by fraudulent means a person's personal information, that is something that should be prohibited by law." PDJ's lawyer said no one at the company violated laws, but he acknowledged, "I'm not sure that every law enforcement agency in the country would agree with that analysis." Many of the executives summoned to testify before Congress this week were expected to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and to decline to answer questions. Slade said no one at PDJ impersonated customers to steal personal information, a practice known within the industry as pretexting. "This was farmed out to private investigators," Slade said. "They had written agreements with their vendors, making sure the vendors were acquiring the information in legal ways." Privacy advocates bristled over data brokers gathering records for police without subpoenas. "This is pernicious, an end run around the Fourth Amendment," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading privacy group that has sought tougher federal regulation of data brokers. "The government is encouraging unlawful conduct; it's not smart on the law enforcement side to be making use of information obtained improperly." A federal agent who ordered phone records without subpoenas about a half-dozen times recently said he learned about the service from FBI investigators and was told this was a method to obtain phone subscriber information quicker than with a subpoena. The agent, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with reporters, said he and colleagues use data brokers "when he have the need to act fairly quickly" because getting a subpoena can involve lengthy waits. Waiting for a phone company's response to a subpoena can take several days or up to 45 days, said police supervisor Eric Stasiak of Redwood City, Calif. In some cases, a request to a data broker yields answers in just a few hours, Stasiak said. Legal experts said law enforcement agencies would be permitted to use illegally obtained information from private parties without violating the Fourth Amendment's protection against unlawful search and seizure, as long as police did not encourage any crimes to be committed. "If law enforcement is encouraging people in the private sector to commit a crime in getting these records that would be problematic," said Mark Levin, a former top Justice Department official under President Reagan. "If, on the other hand, they are asking data brokers if they have any public information on any given phone numbers that should be fine." Levin said he nonetheless would have advised federal agents to use the practice only when it was a matter of urgency or national security and otherwise to stick to a legally bulletproof method like subpoenas for everyday cases. Congress subpoenaed thousands of documents from data brokers describing how they collected telephone records by impersonating customers. "I was shot down four times," Michele Yontef complained in an e-mail in July 2005 to a colleague. "I keep getting northwestern call center and they just must have had an operator meeting about pretext as every operator is clued in." Yontef, who relayed another request for phone call records as early as February, was among those ordered to appear at this week's hearing. Another company years ago even acknowledged breaking the law. "We must break various rules of law in acquiring all the information we achieve for you," Touch Tone Information Inc. of Denver wrote to a law firm in 1998 that was seeking records of calls made on a calling card. The FBI's top lawyers told agents as early as 2001 they can gather private information about Americans from data brokers, even information gleaned from mortgage applications and credit reports, which normally would be off-limits to the government under the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act. FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers may have obtained financial information, agents could still use the information because brokers were not acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a data warehouse. The FBI said it relies only on well-respected data brokers and expects agents to abide by the law. "The FBI can only collect and retain data available from commercial databases in strict compliance with applicable federal law," spokesman Mike Kortan said Monday. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT File-Sharing Police 'Need Better Training' Those who investigate copyright crimes should go back to school for a crash course in how to better deal with illegal file sharing, the Swedish Police and prosecutors have recommended. Such investigations should also be concentrated to those international prosecutors in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, as well as police with similar capabilities in the same locations, the recommendation said. The National Criminal Investigation Department suggests coordinating reports of crime, as well as assisting other police agencies in investigating. Certain prosecutors would get a 10 day class. The head of the Pirate Party, a group advocating file sharing in Sweden, said the class period was much too short to learn so much technical information. Investigators are recommending a five-week-long class as part of police training. Sweden became the focus of a file-sharing controversy after police shut down the popular Pirate Bay Web site. Last year the county passed a law banning the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet without payment of royalties, in a bid to crack down on free downloading of music, films and computer games. Violators can face a two-year prison sentence. http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20060616 Sweden And Finland Leading Direct Connect Countries TankGirl Sweden is the leading country in the world when it comes to Direct Connect hubs. With its estimated 1,300 hubs Sweden has a clear lead, although Finland with its 1,100 hubs is also a major DC nation. Countries like US, UK and Holland come way behind, each having 400-600 hubs. These interesting estimates come from security consulting company Gothia Protection Group located in Göthenburg, Sweden, and they were reported today by Sweden's largest informtion technology news site IDG. Among the customers of Gothia is the MPAA who used company's intelligence services to chart Pirate Bay activities earlier on. As for the users of DC hubs, Gothia's measurements give Sweden a similarly convincing lead. An estimated average of 180,000 Swedes are connected to the various DC hubs at any given time. Also on user counts Finland has the second place with its 80,000 concurrently connected users. When asked for possible reasons for Sweden's world dominance on Direct Connect, Hans Bornsjö from Gothia considered the main reason to be the high broadband penetration in the country. The highly competitive broadband infrastructure has been built partially on Swedish state's subsidies. Another factor Bornsjö considers important is the extremely liberal attitudes of the Swedes regarding availibility of information. For example, the Swedish laws require almost all official information to be publicly available. As the filesharing technology has advanced, the public's expectations for the free availibility of information have moved over to the filesharing scene to apply also to all copyrighted material like music and movies. http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22805 Politicians Smell Votes In Sweden's File-Sharing Debate Ivar Ekman The Jolly Roger-waving, pro-piracy demonstrators are no longer in the streets here, but the police raid in late May on the popular file- sharing Web site, The Pirate Bay, is still making waves, increasing pressure on politicians to change Sweden's copyright laws. The Swedish debate ties into events in France over the past few months, where an effort to legalize peer-to-peer sharing of films and music, charging downloaders a global fee, was recently voted down in the French Parliament. "The process for change has now begun in Sweden, but it's clear that this problem cannot be solved by one country alone," said Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested that Sweden impose a fee similar to the one proposed in France. "More countries have to come out of the closet." The fallout from the May 31 raid on The Pirate Bay has made clear just how widespread and deeply entrenched file-sharing has become in Sweden. Online forums have been filled with protests against the raid, and a pro-piracy demonstration in early June drew close to 1,000 people. A poll published in early June showed that three out of four Swedes between 18 and 21 supported file-sharing, even if it was illegal. With parliamentary elections coming in September, five of the seven major Swedish political parties have in recent weeks expressed a will to take a new look at the Swedish copyright laws, which, in accordance with an EU directive from 2001, makes unauthorized downloading or uploading of copyright-protected files illegal. "We're talking about as many as one million potential voters that the political parties now have discovered," Ilshammar said. "Suddenly they feel they need to treat them with some care." Even the justice minister, Thomas Bodstrom - who was recently called a "lackey to the American record industry" by Anna Sjodin, the chairwoman of the youth wing of his own party, the Social Democrats - has expressed a will to listen to "new suggestions" on the issue. "As a country at the forefront of information technology, we also have to be at the forefront of how we legislate the issue," Bodstrom said in an interview by telephone. "Above all, we have to say yes to technological development, and encourage people to use computers and to download." The idea of a levy, which would be collected in a manner similar to the television license fee that many European countries require citizens to pay, has for some time been part of the wider debate over how to handle intellectual property in the digital age. What is new, with the events in Sweden and France, is that the idea is now gaining political momentum. But the global fee concept is highly controversial on both sides of the piracy debate. The record and film industries have repeatedly said that legalizing unauthorized file sharing would effectively end copyright protection as we know it, while a general levy would be both insufficient and unfair as compensation for the artists. The pro-piracy forces, on the other hand, complain about how such a system would be unmanageable and unfair. "This is an idea that they've thrown out there in a panic," said Rickard Falkvinge, the chairman of Piratpartiet, a pro-file-sharing Swedish political party that has more than tripled its membership, to 7,000, since the raid on The Pirate Bay. "It creates more problems than it solves." The European Commission, which, as part of the Lisbon Agenda of economic goals, is striving to harmonize European copyright legislation, wholeheartedly agrees. In a recent consultation document, the commission warned against the proliferation of levies in recent years. Across Europe, various levies are imposed on blank CD and DVD disks, hard disks, disk drives, computers, printers and cellphones, among other things. Additional levies, like one on broadband, would carry "a serious risk of a backlash" according to the document. Instead, the commission prefers the continued spread of digital rights management and other content-protection technologies. But the recent events indicate that momentum for change is building. Besides the Pirate Bay hullabaloo in Sweden and the debate over levies in France, the past few weeks have also seen increased attacks on the "walled garden" digital rights management approach of Apple's popular iTunes music store. Once again, France has been the vanguard, coming close to passing a law that would have required Apple to make iTunes songs compatible with all portable music devices. This week, Norway, Denmark and Sweden followed the French example, with government consumer protection agencies in the three countries saying that iTunes breaches Scandinavian consumer laws, and that Apple will have to lift restrictions on playing music from iTunes on rivals' devices. On Wednesday, Apple was given an extended deadline, until Aug. 1, to respond to the agencies' accusations. Many experts say that, in the end, an alternative to current copyright legislation will have to be created, and that a global fee is one likely solution. "The way it works now, it is a little as if you give the consumer a lollipop, and then smack them over their heads, saying that they can't use what they've bought," said Uma Suthersanen, a professor of international copyright law at Queen Mary, a college at the University of London. "The industry and the politicians will simply have to sort it out." http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...ess/levies.php Stalking, MPAAs New(?) modus operandi Anakata For those of you who haven't followed the Swedish news, a quite funny (or tragic) thing has surfaced: Apparently, on several different occasions, MPAAs Swedish lawyers hired a private eye to stalk me! This must've been very entertaining for the poor Tex Murphy clone doing the actual groundwork, as my daily activites can basically be summed up as "eat, sleep, work" (often on very odd hours). It kind of flattens me to get this level of attention from my dear pals at MPAA, and it really adds nicely to the image of them being raving lunatics (the Swedish Antipiratbyrån are calm, rational and fair in comparision!). Because they started it, I'm going to do some stalking of my own! Hah! As a starter, I'll just note that MPAAs Swedish lawyer has forgotten to pay her bills on time on several occasions, mostly parking tickets (despite earning over $100k/year)... http://thepiratebay.org/blog.php?id=30 MP3 Search Engine is Illegal According to Dutch Court The Dutch court ruled that the MP3 search engine “zoekmp3.nl” is infringing copyright. This is a remarkable ruling, since none of the files that the search engine is linking to are actually hosted at zoekmp3’s servers. Initially the lower court decided that it was not illegal to link to illegal files, however, the appeal court did not agree. It is not hard to find copyrighted MP3’s on the internet, a simple search for Radiohead on google returns a list full of copyrighted material. However, according to the Dutch court, zoekmp3 was structurally and knowingly linking to infringing content, and having a disclaimer that the search results might infringe copyright is not sufficient in this case. Tim Kuik from the Dutch anti-piracy organization “Brein”, the initiator of the case, was delighted to hear the news and stated: Finally some clarity, you cannot use a website to facilitate the piracy needs of your visitors. The ruling could possible have negative consequences for the large number of bittorrent sites that are hosted in The Netherlands. MP3’s and torrents are obviously not the same, and the present ruling will therefore not apply to the bittorrent search engines and trackers in The Netherlands. However, it is a step in the wrong direction. http://torrentfreak.com/mp3-search-e...o-dutch-court/ 3 years in le slammer France Softens iTunes Law, but Apple Is Still Disgruntled AP Leading French lawmakers voted Thursday to water down a draft copyright law that could force Apple Computer to make its iPod music player and iTunes online store compatible with rivals' offerings. But the changes did not appear to go far enough to satisfy Apple, which dropped the strongest hint yet that it might withdraw from the French downloading market rather than comply. Currently, music bought on Apple iTunes can be played only on iPods, and an iPod cannot play songs bought from rival stores, like the Sony store Connect. Critics have called the restrictions anticompetitive and anticonsumer. The National Assembly, France's lower house, voted in March to force companies like Apple and Sony to hand over exclusive copy-protection technologies to any rival that wanted to offer compatible music players and online stores. While the compromise adopted Thursday still asserts that companies should share the technical data essential to such "interoperability," it tones down many of the tougher measures backed by the lower house. It also maintains a loophole introduced last month by senators, which could allow Apple and others to dodge data-sharing demands by striking new deals with record labels and artists. Apple, which had condemned the lower house proposals as "state-sponsored piracy," nevertheless hinted that the new draft law could affect its presence in France. "We are awaiting the final result of France's legislative process, and hope they let the extremely competitive marketplace driven by customer choice decide which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers," the company said in a statement after the vote. A spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, said Apple had "nothing further to add," when pressed on whether the company was threatening withdrawal — a move that could leave hundreds of thousands of French iPod users unable to purchase new music from iTunes. The compromise text, approved by a joint committee of Senate and Assembly members, is subject to a final vote this month in the two chambers, both controlled by the governing Union for a Popular Movement. Only the government can introduce further amendments. The bill will establish a regulatory authority that can order companies to license their exclusive file formats to rivals — but only if the restrictions they impose are "additional to, or independent of, those explicitly decided by the copyright holders." Lawyers say this means Apple and Sony could avoid sharing their FairPlay and ATRAC3 formats, provided they obtained permission from the artists whose music they sell. Consumer organizations argue that musicians confronted with the market power of iTunes — Apple claims 80 percent of legal United States downloads but publishes no figures for individual European markets — would be unable to refuse such a condition. The French draft law also introduces penalties for a range of online piracy offenses — up to a maximum three-year jail term and a 300,000-euro ($380,000) fine for knowingly offering or advertising a download service for pirated music or video. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/te...gy/23ipod.html Busted!: Critic Caught Selling Screeners Martha Fischer If you review movies for long enough, you end up with a lot of screeners around the house. Me? Because I'm terrified of both the law and distributors, I put them under my mattress and don't show them to even my closest friends. (They actually think I detail cars for a living.) Others, however, sell them, which pisses off the people who are missing out on profit because of that illegal distribution. And, every once in a while, the offendeding critics get their asses busted by the man. Case in point: Paul Sherman, a freelancer who will never, ever get another screener in the mail. Paul, your name is mud. Variety reported this morning that Sherman has been busted for selling over 100 screeners to warez groups, organizations that distribute software (and, obviously, movies) for download. From what I can gather, these groups are incredibly organized, and do business less for profit than to make things available to their users (warez users, feel free to help us out in the comments -- I'm basically going on the wikipedia entry). Over a few years, Sherman was paid a grand total of $4714 for 117 discs. And, now that he's been caught, he could be fined up to $250,000 and spend three years in prison. Uh huh. And this is worth the risk why, again? http://www.cinematical.com/2006/06/2...ing-screeners/ Torrentspy Names Alleged MPAA Hacker Greg Sandoval A month after accusing the Motion Picture Association of America of conspiring to commit data theft, the operators of a file search engine presented more details regarding the alleged relationship between the MPAA and a man who admits hacking the small company's network. Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, charges that the MPAA paid the Canadian resident $15,000 for information on Torrentspy and its executives, according to documents filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles. "I contacted (the MPAA) and offered to provide it information regarding (Torrentspy.com founder) Justin Bunnell and Torrentspy," according to a signed statement by Robert Anderson, the man identified elsewhere in the filing as a "hacker." Among the claims by Valence Media is that as part of its attempt to gather information on Torrentspy, the MPAA hired private investigators to comb the trash cans of Torrentspy executives. Valence Media obtained this information from Anderson, who for undisclosed reasons has agreed to help the company against the Hollywood industry group, according to copy of the suit obtained by CNET News.com. Valence Media has asked a judge to order the MPAA to turn over the information taken by Anderson and to identify anyone that the association may have shared it with. This is the latest volley in a legal battle that began in February, when the MPAA sued Torrentspy and other directories that it accuses of contributing to the theft of copyright movies. Some file sharers use search engines, such as Torrentspy, to locate downloadable movies. The movie industry group has aggressively pursued those accused of distributing copyright material, as well as directories that the MPAA says are abetting piracy. An MPAA spokeswoman did not immediately return phone calls, but the association issued a broad denial to Torrentspy's initial charges. Valence Media charged in its suit that on June 10, 2005, MPAA executives met with Anderson, a resident of Vancouver, Canada. Dean Garfield, the MPAA's director of legal affairs, was among the association's representatives who agreed to pay Anderson $15,000 to obtain private e-mails, financial and technology information, according to the court documents. Garfield could not be immediately reached for comment. An MPAA executive told Anderson: "We don't care how you get it," Valence Media alleges in the court documents. Anderson, who could not be immediately reached for comment, was successful at breaching Torrentspy's computer system, Valence Media alleges. By rigging Torrentspy's e-mail system, Anderson received copies of company e-mail as soon as they were sent or received, as well as important login information, according to the suit. This allowed him broad access to company data, Valence Media claims. The company's suit said Anderson managed to pilfer a spreadsheet of company earnings and expenses, indexes of file architecture, screen shots of proprietary search functions and even a utility bill belonging to one Torrentspy executive. In July 2005, the MPAA reviewed Anderson's work and wired $15,000 to a Toronto-based bank account, according to the court documents. Sometime after, Anderson had a change of heart, according to a signed statement by Anderson that was included in the court filing. In fact, Anderson was actually acquainted with Bunnell. He had done some marketing work for another company associated with Bunnell, Anderson said in his statement, but his relationship with the Torrentspy founder apparently ended acrimoniously in April 2005. "After our business relationship ended, I was upset with Justin Bunnell," Anderson said in the statement. He then contacted the MPAA and offered to retrieve information on Torrentspy executives including Bunnell, as well as other Torrent file search engines. Anderson has provided a written agreement signed by an MPAA executive and other documentation related to Anderson being hired to gather information on Torrentspy and its executives, said Ira Rothken, Valence Media's attorney. Also included in the filing is a copy of the alleged contract that was signed by Anderson and MPAA executives. Some of the information filed with the court was obscured, including names. Rothken said the names of Anderson and MPAA executives can be found on the original contract. The purported contract includes a paragraph calling for the gathering of information on other peer-to-peer companies and torrent directories at odds with the MPAA, including The Pirate Bay, eXeem and Mininova. Importantly, the contract specifies that the MPAA expected information to be obtained through legal means. Such statements won't save the MPAA from liability in this case, argued Rothken. "There's an irony that they could put a clause into a contact and that would allow them to turn a blind eye to hiring a hacker," Rothken said. "There's no magical term that lets them off the hook." Valence Media's latest filing, which asks for unspecified damages, comes after the company and the MPAA met over a 10-day period to discuss turning over whatever Anderson had provided the trade association, according to the lawsuit. The talks were unsuccessful, Rothken said. It's unclear what prompted Anderson to cooperate with Torrentspy and risk possible criminal prosecution. "The only person that would know the precise answer to that is him," Rothken said. "We believe that he broke the law in a serious manner...we're encouraged that after making a big mistake he's now mitigating his wrongdoing by providing information about things he did so we can take remedial action against the MPAA." http://news.com.com/Torrentspy+names...3-6087146.html The Pirates Hold a Party Eli Milchman A fledgling new political movement calling itself The Pirate Party of the United States has emerged from the dust of last month's police raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden. Six days after the May 31 seizure of BitTorrent servers, the new organization's website, was up and running. Organizers claim the newly launched site drew over 100,000 hits in a little over a week. The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws. Piratpartiet was launched January 1, and by the end of that first day had gathered the 1,500 signatures it needed to participate in Sweden's upcoming parliamentary elections in September. Wired News interviewed the founder of The Pirate Party of the United States, Brent Allison, 30, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, and his provisional co-chair David Segal, 20, a computer science major at the University of California Santa Barbara. They shared their thoughts on the stormy seas ahead. WN: When did the party start, and who started it? Allison: The party started on June 6, 2006 with two members, myself and my friend Alex English. A couple of days later, I received around 300 e-mails from people I didn't know expressing interest in joining and helping out. This was thanks to publicity from the original Swedish party, Piratpartiet, who found out about it when I edited their Wikipedia entry to include mention of the U.S. version I founded. On June 9, faced with not being able to finish a dissertation, hold down a job and lead a rapidly growing party at the same time, I handed control of the party to Joshua Cowles and he appointed David Sigal as co-chairman. WN: What sparked you to form the U.S. version of the Pirate Party, or in David's case, to get involved? Allison: I have always been concerned that trends in intellectual property policies have been going too far in favor of entertainment conglomerates and major pharmaceutical firms at the expense of ordinary citizens and patients. The passage of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in 1998 first awakened me to this trend. The RIAA's and MPAA's interference in P2P-sharing networks, through lawsuits, political lobbying and flooding them with bogus files, seemed to threaten one of the most democratic institutions in the digital sphere. A friend of mine on LiveJournal had talked about the Swedish Piratpartiet in a journal entries on June 2. I had heard about the raid on The Pirate Bay earlier, but hearing that not only was a political party's server affected by the raid, but that this party addressed these issues that I cared about made me ask, "Why don't we have a party like that here?" I was frustrated that no third party in the United States, let alone the Democrats or Republicans, was making file sharing, medical patents and overextensions of law enforcement's power top agenda items. So, I thought it was time that a party here actually did that, and if I had to be the one who started it, so be it. Sigal: It started when Slashdot covered the raid on the Pirate Party. I got into contact with the founders … every point they made I found myself agreeing with. Then I took a step back -- we needed something not quite like the Swedish party, but something along those lines. WN: What do you hope to accomplish? Allison: Now that I'm no longer in a leadership position, I can't speak for the Pirate Party U.S. as a whole. However, I started the party so it could nominate candidates for public office that would get people thinking about intellectual property and privacy, and confront other candidates head-on about these issues. Iintellectual property is such an esoteric topic that lawyers, academics and lobbyists have had dominion over it, even though it intimately affects all of us. The public should be informed about and have concrete ideas about IP. Other political parties and public officials should take active stances on intellectual property so voters can associate (the position) with them as they do with taxes and foreign policy. This party is all about raising awareness of issues that only geeks and lawyers have cared about until now. With enough hard work, we can not only put these issues on the table, but, dare I say it, even win positions in public office for ourselves or other candidates sympathetic to our causes. Sigal: We're basically trying to take control of the internet. Net neutrality was rejected in the house and there's no one to speak out -- they're trying to make laws about it, when they have no experience in that culture. WN: What kind of challenges are you faced with? Sigal: The biggest one facing us right now is getting everything formed.... There's so much support, and everyone wants to go in different directions. Also, getting support from organizations such as the EFF, and getting someone elected into office -- that's going to prove difficult too, but we're up for the challenge. WN: Is that significantly different from what the Swedish version of the party faced? Allison: Sweden's political culture is much more hostile to companies trying to smear pro-consumer initiatives as "anti-business," which I expect intellectual property-dependent conglomerates will try to do here against us. While most Americans don't want the NSA to snoop on their telephone calls, their overall lack of awareness of copyright and patent-dependent businesses entrenching themselves in political circles puts us at a disadvantage on that front. Nevertheless, if we don't try to at least organize and make these issues known, we'll continue to suffer unacceptable indignities online, in the doctor's office and at the hands of overzealous law enforcers. WN: What kind of response have you received so far? Allison: The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many have asked me why a party like this hasn't existed by now. Others are worried about naming ourselves the "Pirate" Party, because file sharing has been demonized as piracy in the press. More people than I ever thought possible have offered help, including expertise in public relations, programming and organization on the ground. There's a lot of excitement in the air that these concerns that have rarely gone outside of the geek community will go straight into the political arena. WN: How did the raid in Sweden affect you? Sigal: I think the raid is what brought this whole thing to my attention, and to the attention of people around the world. The raid in Sweden could turn out to be the best thing that happened to the internet community. I think it backfired on the MPAA. They wanted to take down a site they thought was illegal, but everyone noticed that the MPAA is terrorizing the people. WN: Do you believe that artists should be paid for their work? Allison: Indeed I do, and it would be nice if the conglomerates that make up the RIAA would actually pay most of their contract artists what they're worth. Artists should really welcome file sharing as a method to promote their work and their touring events, and to escape the clutches of Big Music that they sign away their lives to. No one has ever gone broke and homeless or ever will because of file sharing, but the RIAA has not been averse to suing penniless 12-year-olds living in public housing for sharing files. WN: Do you currently download software illegally? Sigal: I'm not going to answer that one. But I support the downloading of music, movies and software for trial use, or to gain knowledge in the pursuit of development. Allison: No. Not at all. WN: Are you worried about the RIAA and MPAA deploying resources against you? Allison: For now, the Pirate Party U.S. is a small undertaking that will probably exist under the MPAA's and RIAA's radar for some time. When they do notice us, I doubt they'll openly confront the party itself. Plus, they can't dismiss us as scofflaws like they do the people they sue since we want to change the laws rather than break them. So if they confront us openly, it rightfully puts their own motives to keep the status quo into question. Therefore, I expect they'll attack us through a proxy, perhaps through funding a pseudo-activist group or by influencing election officials to keep us off the ballot. Sigal: Worried? Not at all. These fear tactics and scare tactics are doing the exact opposite -- yeah, they've busted a lot of people, good for them. But you've also seen a huge increase in the amount of illegal downloads. I think it's hurting them. The RIAA and MPAA need to wake up and see that they're doing something wrong and we're doing something right. WN: What about RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol's statement last week that "we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business and file-trading is flat?" Allison: Bainwol should talk to Weird Al Yankovic about that. On the same day Bainwol said that, The Digital Music Weblog posted an article where Al said he gets more money from CD sales than from downloads, ironically enough. Getting his music sold through iTunes, the most well-recognized music download business, Al actually faces an 85 percent reduction in income compared to CD sales. The savings from not having to produce a CD or open up a brick-and-mortar record store are passed to Al's RIAA-affiliated label and Apple, not to Al himself. Therefore, the companies that make up Bainwol's RIAA and Apple are benefiting from a "growing, thriving business," but not the artists. Big surprise, given this industry's history. File-sharing, on the other hand, allows an artist to professionally record from their own studio, get their music out there to a wider audience by using the fans' bandwidth rather than their own, and reap financial benefits through touring and selling physical property that music lovers want in the form of a CD in a jewel case with liner notes, as well as related merchandise -- all without the RIAA siphoning off their hard-earned money via one-sided recording contracts, be it through CD sales or iTunes. Sigal: I don't think that they've contained anything, and BitTorrent is all the proof you need. It sounds to me like they're conceding but they're just trying to do it politely. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0...=wn_politics_1 News From The North The TankGirl Diaries  19.6.2006 Pirate Fleet Organizing For The Battle Ahead The Swedish parliamentary election is only three months ahead, and the Pirates are tuning up their field organization - or rather their fleet organization - for the crucial political battle ahead. Rather than using the dry conventional terms like 'region', 'electroral district' etc. the Pirates have decided to use in their election work marine terminology fitting better to the pirate theme. So for the Pirates, Sweden is divided into five 'fleets', each having several 'squadrons' (electoral districts), and each squadron in turn consisting of a number of 'ships' (local voting districts). The membership of Pirate Party has now exceeded 7000 members, and the statistics are already starting to favor the party's aspirations for a parliamentary breakthrough. In previous parliamentary elections a registered party member in Sweden has statistically been worth of 30-34 votes in the election. To reach the 4 % voting thresold the Pirates will need each of their present members to be able to generate about 30.3 votes. The structurally most comparable party is the Green Party who managed to generate 30.8 votes per registered member in the previous election in 2002. 20.6.2006 Swedish Economist: "Time To Get Rid Of Copyright Law" "It is time to get rid of copyright law", writes Karl-Henrik Pettersson, an economist and author, in Swedish newspaper Expressen. "The thought of not having a copyright law may sound unrealistic. But it is not. A copyright law that is already ignored by millions of young people is in practice already half-gone. And it may very well be in society's best interest to get rid of the law also formally." He goes on to clarify the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, demanding that the right to make copies is legally clearly separated from the ownership of the artists to their works. "Making this distinction between ownership right and copyright leads to an important insight - that the ownership can remain even if the copyright is taken away. For example, as a creator of music I would always have ownership to my works so I could keep on selling them to companies just like today, and they could keep selling them to the market just like today. There would only be this one important difference: copyrights being removed, the company could not set limits to how many copies of the work are being made, how it is further distributed etc." He emphasizes common good as the correct basis for legislation. "Naturally we cannot let only media industry and their economical interests to determine whether we should have copyrights or not. An increased benefit for the society must be the basis for a copyright law, just like it is the basis for other laws. Why should we maintain laws that do not give citizens back real value for what they are paying for. I have serious doubts whether today's copyright laws bring any increased benefits for the society at all." The public debate on filesharing is active in Sweden - and it will probably just heat up as the September election gets closer - with many authors, artists and culture workers coming out with their opinions. The overall response of the Swedish culture community to the filesharing issue favors legalization as proposed by the Pirate Party in its election agenda. There are naturally opposing voices as well but they seem to be in clear minority among artists and culture workers. Many artists express their economical worries about the changes ahead but at the same they time give their support to the legalization as the sensible thing to do. On the political front only Christian Democrats have taken a definite anti-p2p position while all other parties have either bent to support legal filesharing or at least keep a door open for negotiations. 20.6.2006 Swedish Publisher Joins The Debate: "Share More Files!" Johan Ehrenberg, an author of eight books and the CEO of Swedish culture magazine ETC, joins the filesharing debate in newspaper Kristianstadsbladet with a suggestion for filesharers to share even more files. "So we got broadband into our country. What was impossible just a few years ago is suddenly possible today. The same old funny copper wires and weather-beaten telephone poles carry now a flow of information from the entire world to our computers. But how shall we use these 6 megabits per second? To share information of course. Music, including our own music, movies, books, thoughts... think what fantastic freedom this actually implies. What I am reading, you can read too, and we can discuss about it, even if we are located on different sides of the globe. There is only one problem. This new freedom is being obstructed and opposed by a strange club whose membership consists of multinational media companies, Swedish officials and restless culture workers. These are the forces that fight against free downloading of books, texts, music and movies. That the police is following the laws made by politicians is one thing. Worse is that those laws were shaped according to the wishes of large companies. As a result, the laws are all about the profits of those corporations, and nothing else. The artists, writers, musicians, photographers are all fooled by something called 'copyright'. There is this dream that you can write a hugely popular song and live the rest of your life on its profits. This is insane because the overwhelming majority of Swedish culture workers will never get paid for what they are doing. Take for example an author. When you buy a 200 kr (20 USD) book, the author will get about 20 kr (2 USD) from it. If it is a paperback, the author will get maybe 2-3 kr (20-30 cents). The big money will land on companies and on bookshop chains. As the books in Sweden typically sell under 2,000 copies, you understand easily that almost no authors live on their work but instead on paid presentations, grants, second jobs. Same with the musicians. Copyrights simply do not protect the poor. They protect only the rich." Ehrenberg goes on to describe how filesharing has effectively created a gigantic digital library. The politicians and media corporations oppose the library idea fiercely as it would diminish a large part of their present power over what is distributed and to whom. "But naturally you should keep downloading more with your broadband during the summer", he concludes. "In the election we can demand that the parties organize a simple compensation system to those who have done the work. The fine thing about Internet is that we can easily establish counting methods for how many times various books and songs are being downloaded. It is the will to do so that has been missing. Both from the media corporations and - so far - also from the politicians." 20.6.2006 Wikinews has published today this extensive interview with Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. A couple of samples from the interview: Quote:
Quote:
Swedish TV to Present Today Proof Of US Pressure Behind Pirate Bay Raid According to advance information the Swedish Television will present today proof of government-level US threats behind the May 31 Pirate Bay raid. According to available information US threatened Sweden with WIPO sanctions unless they shut down Pirate Bay. In an earlier TV interview following the raid Justice Minister Thomas Bodström denied strongly any foreign influences behind the raid, so the Swedes will get today public proof of his lying in that interview. This will be politically potentially very explosive information and may lead to an another big backslash against both the Justice Minister himself and the political forces behind him. The Swedes as a proudly independent nation despise the idea of foreign powers being able to influence their justice officials and police forces. The filesharing debate is bound to get even more publicity in the Swedish media after tonight's revelations, to be aired in Rapport program an hour from now. 21.6.2006 US Threats Revealed By Swedish TV Make Headlines As soon as Swedish TV's Rapport program had revealed that the US government had threatened Sweden with WTO sanctions unless they shut down Pirate Bay website, the news made it to the top headlines of several major Swedish newspapers. "US threatened Sweden with commerce sanctions", captions Svenska Dagbladet. "US threat behind filesharing raid", shouts Aftonbladet's front page with big letters; Dagens Nyheter uses precisely same wording. "US threatened with sanctions", puts Sydsvenskan it. And so on. That every headline mentions words 'US' and 'threat' together is descriptive of the response of the Swedish press. The press is taking a clear national stand, treating the officials that allowed the MPAA and the US government to have an influence on the Swedish Police as traitors. US has not enjoyed much public sympathy in Sweden in recent years, and particularly the Iraq War has damaged its public image seriously in the eyes of the Swedes. So the press does not hesitate to put even more pressure on Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodström and his right hand man, state secretary Dan Eliasson, both pointed out by the Swedish TV program as key persons in causing the raid to happen. This may well be the beginning of a second major backslash to the MPAA in Sweden, with some collateral damage to the Swedish-US political relations as well. The actions of Justice Minister Bodström will be subjected to a special parliamentary inquiry demanded by several parliament members. The Swedish law is strict about not allowing ministers and other public officials to intervene into the specifics of any particular law enforcement operations. Should the inquiry find that Bodström had overstepped his limits and pressured the Swedish Police to particularly attack Pirate Bay in its general copyright law enforcement work, he might be forced to leave his job. The inquiry will take place after the September election though, so until that Bodström can hold his seat. 22.6.2006 Dagens Nyheter: "First Step: Cancel The New Copyright Law!" Dagens Nyheter, one of the major Swedish newspapers, joins the hot Swedish filesharing debate with a critical editorial where they demand a thorough re-evaluation of copyright laws on several grounds. "Much too long the question of copyrights has been left to the side lines of the political debate. What we need now is a proper time-out to discuss whether there exists other and better ways to protect intellectual creations." For starters, the newspaper proposes shorter rather than longer protection times for copyrighted works and warns of the privatization of the common culture. Further they demand that the needs and interests of libraries, universities, archives and museums are secured in copyright legislation. These institutions are created to spread culture effectively to the people, so copyright laws should help rather than hinder their work. The editorial also points out the important differences between material products built of limited material resources and intellectual property built of virtually unlimited resources. "To try to stop the technical development with dragonic copyright is a wrong way. As a first corrective step Sweden should go back to the copyright law we had before 1. July 2005", concludes Dagens Nyheter. 22.6.2006 Dagens Nyheter: "Bodström Becoming A Risk For Social Democrats" The growing popularity of the Pirates is not the only thing that worries established political parties in Sweden with 86 days to the election. Dagens Nyheter reports how Social Democrats - by far the largest party in Sweden - are worried about their Justice Minister Thomas Bodström, once a popular political figure, becoming a risk to party's success in the September election. "The debate on filesharing has raised onto a new level with the revelation of US threatening Sweden with trade sanctions. It will hardly be a vote winner in the election to be perceived as a lap-dog to George Bush and Hollywood's entertainment industry." Pirate Party: "Chasing of Filesharers Corrupts The Justice System" In its recent press release the Pirate Party blasts hard criticism on the Swedish officials in the light of Swedish Television's revelations. One of the hottest pieces of evidence published in the Rapport program was a message from state prosecutor Håkan Roswall where he states how "it causes particular irritation among copyright holders how the persons behind website Pirate Bay openly propagate free filesharing and how they have set up a political organization Piratbyrån to spread the idea that we should get rid of copyright laws." Piratbyrån's own server was also taken down in the May 31 raid and is still being held by the Swedish police. Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge comments: "The Swedish government has made an active effort to disturb political opinion forming in Sweden following a request from a foreign power. This is a scandal of major proportions. It means that not only Thomas Bodström has lied about the American pressure, but also the police and the prosecutor have lied about it. Corruption goes both wide and deep. Therefore I don't believe that the inquiries by Justice Ombudsman and Constitutional Committee will be enough. More than ever we need a parliamentary party that can drive through laws that are in line with the sense of justice of the Swedish citizens." Swedish TV's Revelations on YouTube Swedish TV's politically explosive Rapport program revealing US pressure behind the Pirate Bay raid is now available with English subs on YouTube: SVT1 Rapport video 23.6.2006 Prosecutor: "Charges Against Pirate Bay Operators Earliest Next Summer" Sydsvenskan reports that possible charges against Pirate Bay operators based on material captured in the May 31 raid will be delayed at least to next summer, according to Håkan Roswall, the prosecutor in the case. In the police strike against Pirate Bay and its service provider PRQ the police confiscated 186 servers. The raid hit also a number of innocent third party businesses who had rented server space from PRQ. Of the 186 seized servers so far only 45 have been returned, "as they contain no relevant information to the inquiry". The police still holds 140 servers and claims that mere copying of information from these servers for further investigations will take 3-4 months. The three Pirate Bay activists who were briefly arrested during the raid might be later charged for copyright crimes, hints prosecutor Roswell. Pirate Bay Servers Not In Sweden? Sydsvenskan's story also brings up an interesting piece of technical information. The Swedish police has seemingly gone and checked Pirate Bays present server arrangements and they have found out that the site has only a single computer running at their Swedish host, apparently acting as a proxy to the real operational servers located totally elsewhere. The police does not have any idea where the servers might really be located, and they suspect Pirate Bay playing hide-and-seek game with them, trying to lure them into another raid that would cause yet another PR backslash for both the police and the Justice Ministery. Peter Sunde, one of the activists behind Pirate Bay, admits Roswall being partly right. "That's also what we have. But we really have several different solutions for the site. We are setting up a number of different systems to have more alternatives." 23.6.2006 New Insurance For Filesharers The Swedish Net War took yet another curious turn yesterday. Aftonbladet reports how a new insurance service has been launched by Magnus Bråth from Uppsala to protect Swedish filesharers from possible fines in case they get caught. By paying 140 Swedish crowns (about 1,5 USD) to Magnus, he will pay your fines in case you run out of luck in your online culture sharing activities. "So far the fines from filesharing verdicts have been around 18,000 crowns (1,800 USD). With some 1,000 paying customers this will work fine", says 29-year old Magnus who operates his insurance company under name tankafritt.nu (translating to 'ThinkFreely.Now'). "I got worried when I realized that record and film companies can dictate our laws. This is my contribution to the debate." The insurance will cover only the fines passed by Swedish courts - should movie or record companies demand extra compensations for their economical losses, those will not be covered. Insurances against fines are not a new idea in Sweden. So far there have been similar services available for drivers to insure against possible speeding tickets and also for people using public transport services for free to cover for 'control payments' should they get caught for freeriding. The existing insurances have worked well so far, and many students and other low-income citizens have opted to pay a small annual insurance fee instead of paying repeatedly for the fairly expensive bus, train and metro tickets. Whenever they get caught in a random ticket check, they will routinely mail the control payment ticket to the insurance company and forget about it. Antipiracy organization Antipiratbyrån's lawyer Henrik Pontén is perhaps surprisingly supporting the new insurance idea. "We welcome the idea. One of our big problems so far has been that those being punished for filesharing have not had the money to pay their fines. Hopefully this will bring a change to that. I don't see though how this would cover the filesharers against the much bigger compensation costs set by courts." The new insurance company does not intend to expand its coverage beyond fines. Magnus Bråth consulted lawyers before starting the operation and found out that the company's business model is legal in Sweden. He himself is not a filesharer but sympathizes filesharers enough to protect them with his service. So far four Swedes have been sentenced to fines for filesharing; none of them has so far had to pay any extra compensations to the content industry. http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/ http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...959#post246959 MP3 Player Sales Risk Copyright Breach Richard Scott MP3 players, such as iPods, have enjoyed huge success in recent years. The ability to condense an entire record collection into a player you can hold in the palm of your hand has proved a big attraction. But as they become more widespread, the inevitable second-hand market grows too - and that could cause a problem. A trawl of online auction sites reveals thousands of players for sale. Many are second-hand, and many come still loaded with the current owner's music collection. Lawbreaking And that is where the trouble starts. The record industry is warning people selling their MP3 players that they could be unwittingly breaking the law by leaving their music on the player. Some listings on the auction websites actually advertise the fact that the player comes with hundreds, or even thousands, of songs. The industry says this could mean that members of the public are - intentionally or otherwise - entering the world of commercial music piracy. Different rules The difficulty lies with the music's copyright. It is perfectly legal to sell on a CD with which you've become bored and which you just do not want any more, But doing the same with downloaded music is against the law - even if you've bought it legitimately. The law in the UK and the US gives greater protection to the music rights owner in the case of a music download than in the case of CDs or old vinyl. Online auction sites, such as eBay, say they know about the problem and want people or companies to tell them about auctions that break the law. But the record industry wants more to be done to educate people before there's a problem. People today might be innocently selling their players full of music without getting prosecuted. But over time that could change, as the players become more popular and the issue becomes more serious. The advice for now is to play it safe - and delete the music first. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/5083790.stm Weekly Digital Music Sales in Decline Thomas Mennecke RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol delivered several powerful statements quoted by USA Today on Monday. Mr. Bainwol declared victory over piracy, stating the problem had been “contained.” Furthermore, Mr. Bainwol credited digital downloads as reinvigorating the music industry and stunting the growth of file-sharing. "The problem has not been eliminated…But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat." Both these contentions are now under attack. A recent publication by P2P tracking firm Big Champagne found the P2P population had increased by 12.4% from May 2005 to May 2006. This brings the current P2P population to just over 9.7 million simultaneous individuals (this number does not include the ~3-6 million BitTorrent users.) Additionally, a new study published by Pali Capital with statistics provided by Neilson/Soundscan has found that weekly digital music sales are, for the first time, in decline and below the yearly average. Already six weeks into the second quarter, if digital sales continue their current slide it will be the first time the music industry doesn’t see a least an 8% growth over the previous quarter. Neilson/Soundscan and Billboard.com have found that digital music sales have grown at least this rate for the last nine quarters. It seems this rapid pace of growth has become tempered. While it’s true that digital sales have doubled and grown expansively over last year, the market may have hit a brick wall – lessening the significance of rapid digital sales. Without the same explosive rate of growth as witnessed in 2005, the offset digital sales provide the music industry may not carry over to 2006 or 2007. Neilson/Soundscan’s calculations partially validate the music industry’s argument for variable pricing. With a flat rate of growth or even a moderate decline in sales, the music industry will have to find additional ways to pick up the slack. Unless it’s willing to adopt a more liberal “AllofMp3” type policy, variable pricing may once again find traction in an effort to inflate revenue. This may only provide a band-aid approach however, as it does little to encourage new customers. According to Neilson/Soundscan’s statistics, in January ’06, 17.56 million tracks were sold. This number fell to 16.68 million in April. Although this decline is modest, it’s a direction few in the music industry want to see. By comparing the trend lines of digital sales in 2005 and 2006, the two appear precariously destined to collide in early 2007. The study suggests the digital market has reached a “glass ceiling”, while the buzz and hype surrounding it has “run its course.” Demand for digital music however, remains stronger than ever. So where have all the cowboy’s gone? With millions of tracks (whether from iTunes, iPod, P2P, or CD) already adrift in the global population, the need to download additional music for the authorized customer has abated. A recent study found that iPod users fill their MP3 players by various methods, including play list swapping, iTunes, CD ripping and traditional P2P. It’s an unrealistic expectation to assume iPod owners will spend many thousands of dollars to fill a 30 gig hard drive with digital purchases – perhaps explaining why the populace is placing less emphasis on authorized music. Authorized digital sales faced a similar condition last year; however sales were more flat during mid-2005 rather than the current ominous decline. The industry revived itself during the winter months, as Tunes gift cards and iPod MP3 players found themselves perfect gifts for the holiday season. Whether or not the authorized music industry can replicate last year’s good fortune – or more importantly continue to make up for lost physical sales – remains to be seen. http://slyck.com/news.php?story=1222 Coke to Close UK Music Download Site Coca-Cola says it will close its British online music service mycokemusic.com on July 31, after losing market share to Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store. Mycokemusic launched in Britain in January 2004 and quickly became the biggest online music download service there in brand recognition and sales. But it was overtaken later in the year by iTunes, which launched a dedicated UK site in June 2004. Mycokemusic posted notice of the closure on its Web site. Mycokemusic also sent e-mails to music fans who had registered with the site. Coca-Cola had positioned the site as a mix of brand promotion and music store. "In 2004, the digital music scene was just developing and the only way for Coke to offer access to music downloads was to open our own store. That's not true today and there is no need for Coke to continue to run a store," said the statement. Officials at mycokemusic were not immediately available for comment. According to data from UK market research company XTN, iTunes held a 54 per cent share of the British online music market in November 2005. Mycokemusic was in fourth place with a six per cent share, behind Napster and Wippit.com. Mycokemusic is powered by digital music technology company Loudeye's European unit OD2, a company co-founded by rock star Peter Gabriel in the late 1990s. The concept was to let fans use credits, gained via Coke promotions or bought with their credit cards, to purchase songs online from a wide range of artists from both major and independent record labels. The majority of the songs on the service are in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio file format, which is not compatible with the most popular digital music player, Apple's iPod. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=107721 P2P Population Continues Climb Thomas Mennecke The online copyright war has expanded over the years to cover much more than suppressing P2P or file-sharing networks. It’s also become a war or words, where both sides use the media to influence public opinion. Although the entertainment industry’s public relations capabilities exceeded P2P’s influence several years back, the rapidly changing face of mass media has altered this notion. This change is largely due to the empowerment of the Internet. It has allowed individuals with minimal resources to reach a maximum audience. Smaller news organizations such as TorrentFreak.com can easily rival the mass media ability of large organization such as the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America.) News aggregators such as Digg.com or SlashDot.org also help reach this end, which often times help smaller sites achieve their wide scale publication potential. Especially noteworthy is the mass media capability of The Pirate Bay, which completely undermined the entertainment industry’s public relations attempts earlier this month. Smaller online news organizations often provide an alternative perspective compared to more traditional or mainstream publications. In the P2P news community, often dissenting opinion to the entertainment industry’s public relations campaign has gained traction and credence, and indeed has tempered the mainstream media’s rush to republish press releases. The latest media canon from the RIAA’s CEO Mitch Bainwol provides the latest example. The USAToday published an article Monday quoting Mr. Bainwol as stating that online piracy has been “contained.” "The problem has not been eliminated," says association CEO Mitch Bainwol. "But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat." Perhaps several years back, such an assertion would have been accepted more easily. However the substantial logistical infrastructure that accommodates P2P and file-sharing, such as various forums, blogs, news sites, etc., is of such magnitude that alternative viewpoints are no longer ignored. Reflecting this change in mass media, virtually every publication that published an article on Mr. Bainwol’s decree was met with varying degrees of skepticism, including some of outright ridicule. It’s possible the RIAA had little choice but to make a public statement in support of their lawsuit and anti-piracy campaign. Their efforts recently received a black eye from two unexpected sources – Sony America vice president of Digital Media Technology Strategy, Albhy Galuten and ex-RIAA chairperson Hilary Rosen. Albhy Galuten’s take on the online copyright conflict is the polar opposite of Mr. Bainwols, stating the music industry is not "winning the battle against pirating.” The statement was made last Wednesday at the Digital Media Summit in Los Angeles. It didn’t help the RIAA’s case either when ex-chairwoman Hilary Rosen criticized the idea of suing alleged P2P pirates, and the entire concept of DRM (Digital Rights Management.) In an article published on the liberal blog site The Huffington Post, Mrs. Rosen shared her skepticism of the RIAA’s current legal strategy. “But for the record, I do share a concern that the lawsuits have outlived most of their usefulness and that the record companies need to work harder to implement a strategy that legitimizes more p2p sites and expands the download and subscription pool by working harder with the tech community to get devices and music services to work better together. That is how their business will expand most quickly. The iPod is still too small a part of the overall potential of the market and its proprietary DRM just bugs me. Speaking of DRM, it is time to rethink that strategy as well.” The latest statistics from P2P tracking firm Big Champagne further diminishes the RIAA’s contention. According to Big Champagne’s latest figures, the P2P population has continued its overall climb. At 9,735,661 in May 2006, the P2P population is at its second highest, down slightly from its peak of 9,992,298 in March. There was an increase of 138,253 from the month of April however. The May 2006 statistic represents a population increase of 12.4% over May 2005, or an increase of 1,070,342 individuals. The most significant aspect of these calculations is they do not represent the entire file-sharing picture – primary that of the BitTorrent community. Because of BitTorrent’s decentralized protocol, it is difficult to obtain an exact number of participants. What is known however is the massive amount of bandwidth this protocol consumes, which greatly outweighs all other P2P networks combined. If we were to only judge BitTorrent on the amount of unique individuals traveling The Pirate Bay, there would be an addition of at least 1 million individuals. Some estimates are much greater, and easily double the number published by Big Champagne. So has piracy and unauthorized file-sharing been contained? We’ll know for sure if another next round of lawsuits is announced. http://slyck.com/news.php?story=1220 Fahrenheit -451 Researchers Say New Chip Breaks Speed Record Laurie J. Flynn Researchers at I.B.M. and the Georgia Institute of Technology are set to announce today that they have broken the speed record for silicon-based chips with a semiconductor that operates 250 times faster than chips commonly used today. The achievement is a major step in the evolution of computer semiconductor technology that could eventually lead to faster networks and more powerful electronics at lower prices, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist in I.B.M.'s systems and technology group. He said developments like this one typically found their way into commercial products in 12 to 24 months. The researchers, using a cryogenic test station, achieved the speed milestone by "freezing" the chip to 451 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, using liquid helium. That temperature, normally found only in outer space, is just nine degrees above absolute zero, or the temperature at which all movement is thought to cease. At 500 gigahertz, the technology is 250 times faster than chips in today's cellphones, which operate at 2 gigahertz. At room temperature, the chips operate at 350 gigahertz, far faster than other chips in commercial use today. Mr. Meyerson compared the achievement to the development of the chips used in Wi-Fi networks. It was not until the semiconductor technology used in those networks was produced with silicon that wireless networking become affordable for consumer applications. Dan Olds, a principal at the Gabriel Consulting Group, a technology consulting firm in Portland, Ore., said the development was significant because it showed that the chip industry had not yet reached its upper limits. "There's been talk that we've started to hit the physical limitations of chip performance," he said. "The news here is that we're not coming anywhere near the end in what processors are capable of." Mr. Olds cautioned, however, that the technology was far from finding its way into commercial products any time soon, considering the performance leap it represents. Today's performance-hungry computer buyers, for example, are buying machines operating at about three gigahertz, he said. John D. Cressler, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a researcher at the Georgia Electronic Design Center, said the work "redefines the upper bounds of what is possible" using silicon-germanium. The research group included students from Georgia Tech and Korea University in South Korea, and researchers from I.B.M. Microelectronics. The results will be reported in the July issue of the technical journal IEEE Electron Device Letters. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/te...gy/20chip.html Major Web Browsers Getting Facelifts Anick Jesdanun The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet rather than simply displaying Web sites. The upgrades are the latest skirmish in the browser war that started in the mid-1990s and led to Microsoft's triumph over Netscape. The battles reignited in 2004, when Mozilla's Firefox launched and revealed new avenues of development. On Tuesday, Opera Software ASA is releasing its Opera 9 browser, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Firefox are in line for major overhauls later this year. The most anticipated update comes from Microsoft Corp., whose 5-year-old, market-leading Internet Explorer 6 browser, or IE6, shows signs of aging. The software company, which has seen IE slowly losing market share to Firefox, hopes version 7 will bring the browser to parity with its rivals, while adding features to thwart "phishing" scams and make browsing more secure. "IE6 was easily the best browser available in 2001," said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager for IE. "The challenge is people use the Web a lot of differently now. Search engine usage, there's a lot more of that now. Safety, there's a lot more malicious intent on the Web right now." Today, e-mail, maps, word processing and other traditionally standalone applications are migrating online. Major Internet companies such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and even Microsoft are devoting tremendous resources developing these Web applications - and browser developers want them to run well. Opera 9 sports "widgets" - Web-based applications that run off its browser but appear detached as standalone tools. Anyone knowing Web coding can develop widgets for Opera to check weather, soccer results or the status of eBay Inc. auctions; others can download existing ones. "Most end-user applications being developed today have at least part of their functionality running on the browser, which is completely different from the way it used to be 10 or 15 years ago," said Christen Krogh, Opera's vice president of engineering. "In the old days, browsers were like printing presses" - displays for static pages. The new Opera, making its debut in Seattle to invoke images of Opera Chief Executive Jon S. von Tetzchner landing in Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's backyard, also formally supports a file-sharing mechanism called BitTorrent and lets users customize preferences - such as whether to allow JavaScript - on a site-by-site basis. With version 7, IE will have its first search box in which users could type queries without visiting a search engine's home page. Firefox and Opera have long had that feature in response to the growing use of search engines to find Web sites. IE7 also will join its rivals in supporting domain names that use non-English characters. And it will play catch-up by sporting tabbed browsing - the ability to open several Web pages at once without creating separate windows. Although Opera and Firefox have had it for years, Hachamovitch said IE7 will go further with Quick Tabs, in which users can view small, thumbnail versions of all open pages at a glance. Hachamovitch also said IE, a frequent target of hackers, will in version 7 go beyond the security enhancements IE6 received in 2004 as part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 upgrade. A version shipping with Vista computers, due out for consumers early next year, will come with parental controls and a "protected mode" so hackers can't easily to gain access to the rest of the machine even if the browser is hit. The regular version, scheduled to leave the "beta" test phase in the second half of the year, will block or warn about scam sites, while its address bar will turn green when an e-commerce site has gone through additional background checks to receive a so-called high-assurance digital certificate. Firefox 2, a "beta" version for which is planned this summer and a full version by September, will also include anti-phishing features, along with tools to automatically restore Web pages should the browser suddenly crash or require a restart. Other features in the Mozilla browser include a search box that can suggest queries as users type. And Mozilla already has its sights on Firefox 3 next year, with plans to let users run online applications even when there is no live Internet connection. Meanwhile, Flock Inc. released last week a test version of its Firefox-based Flock browser. Tapping into the recent wave of sites that encourage users to share content, Flock makes it easy to drag and drop images to MySpace.com and automatically notifies users when friends add items to selected photo sites. IE7 will require later versions of Windows, including Service Pack 2 of XP, while Opera, Firefox and Flock will run on Macintosh, Linux and older Windows machines as well. Already, IE has seen its U.S. market share on Windows computers drop to 90 percent from 97 percent two years ago, according to tracking by WebSideStory. Firefox's share has steadily increased to 9 percent, with Opera's negligible despite its innovations. WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston said Firefox must continue to improve just to maintain its share. Because IE automatically ships with Windows, he said, users satisfied with IE7 may not find enough reasons to download and install Firefox when they buy a new computer. "It takes a lot of energy to switch technology," Johnston said. "You really have to care. It comes down to the `If it ain't broke, don't fix it' mentality." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT Opera users, please visit the forums before attempting an install over 8. – Jack Maxthon: China's Hip Browser Stefanie Olsen Web surfers in China frustrated by censorship in search engines are increasingly turning to a little-known Internet browser with a big following in the Middle Kingdom. Maxthon, a browser made by a tiny Beijing company of the same name, has attracted millions of users in China for functionality that can funnel traffic through a Web proxy and circumvent government controls on information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu.com and other popular sites or Internet service providers in that country. From China, the browser has caught on in Europe, and now somewhat in the United States thanks to an appearance with Microsoft at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year--though it's still largely unknown stateside. So far, about 60 million people have downloaded the browser since its launch in 2003. According to Maxthon research, about 14 percent of the Chinese Web population has used the browser and 17 percent employs it for Web search. "It's exploding there," said Netanel Jacobsson, a Maxthon senior vice president and partner who's based in Israel. Of course, Maxthon does not promote the proxy feature openly--it's merely a shortcut that has spread virally among Chinese Web surfers. People who download the browser must be fairly technically savvy to activate it, but according to Jacobsson, various bulletin boards in Chinese instruct people how to do it. "The capability is there for people who know," Jacobsson said in a recent interview with CNET News.com. In fact, Maxthon executives and investors downplay the feature for obvious reasons. Web censorship in China has become a hot-button issue as U.S companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have entered the market and complied with the communist regime's standards to restrict thousands of Web sites from public access. Yahoo has even turned over information on dissidents to the Chinese government. The search giants' practices in the country have come under fire by everyone from free-speech advocates to the U.S. government. Still, Maxthon has a grassroots following for other reasons. It includes filters to zap all Web ads, including pop-ups--a valuable feature for the typically cluttered environments of Chinese Web pages. It's highly customizable with hundreds of "skins," and it includes tabbed browsing, baked-in RSS detection and readers, and remote-file access in partnership with software company Avvenu. It also has a development platform for plug-ins that inspires hundreds of techies to create add-ons for the browser. Maxthon gaining fans fast This summer, Maxthon will release a new version, Maxthon 2.0, that will include parallel browsing, similar to the picture-in-picture feature on TVs, in which surfers can browse several sites in parallel. They'll also be able to copy and paste text from one page to another without switching screens. The future of Maxthon is allowing people to customize it into their own information portal, Jacobsson said. Maxthon's millions of fans and rising popularity point to the fact--yet again--that innovation in the Web browser market is not dead, nor is it ignored, despite a seeming end long ago to the browser wars, said analysts. Though Microsoft's Internet Explorer has close to 60 percent share in the United States browser market, according to Forrester Research, and as much as 85 percent globally, according to various estimates, there's still plenty of fight left in the browser market. As Michael Gartenberg, a veteran browser analyst and vice president of research at Jupiter Media, put it: "It's the most important space that no one really cares about." In the last year, Firefox, Netscape's legacy, made inroads on IE's dominance, drawing more than 130 million downloads in less than two years. Opera, Netscape, Flock and Apple Computer's Safari have lured strong followings of their own, but none enough to overthrow IE. Firefox's threat and popularity has spurred a recommitment from Microsoft, however, with its introduction of IE 7. "The browser wars continue, yet these days they're more border skirmishes than global conflict because there's just no money to be made selling the browser," Gartenberg said. Some tech investors say people shouldn't forget that the browser is fundamental to the future of the Internet, giving people better access to information on the Web and the desktop if done right. "The advent of broadband, and technologies like AJAX and RSS are redefining the role of the browser from a dumb reader to a single point of customization for users," said William Tai, a venture capitalist with Charles River Ventures and an investor in Maxthon. "The first click is the browser, it's the instrument panel to the Web," he added. Still, most of the money to be made on Web browsers today is through search advertisements. Firefox, for example, makes money on fees from search ads from Google, which is its default search engine. Within China, Maxthon's default search function is served by Baidu, one of the biggest services in that country. Outside of China, Yahoo and Ask.com power its search features. Maxthon turned a profit beginning in 2004. Roughly 80 percent of its revenue comes from search-related ads, collected from partners. Despite not seeking funding, the company took on an investor, Charles River Ventures, in recent months. That deal was largely because of great interest on the part of Tai, according to both Tai and Jacobsson. The investment adds to early funding from Morten Lund, a seed investor in Skype. The company plans to use venture funding to add to its development team of about 15 in Beijing. Still, a plus and minus for Maxthon is its rendering engine, which is actually Internet Explorer. Maxthon is built on top of the IE engine, removing it from direct competition with the software giant. Executives say that lets it add value to the browser through features like tabbed and parallel browsing. But that can be a double-edged sword, too, turning off people who dislike Microsoft. "We make them look good," he said. He added that Maxthon has tweaked IE to make it faster, and people can choose to render Maxthon with Gecko, Mozilla's original underlying engine. "Browsers are very much like a car," said Jacobsson. "Most people don't care what engine is inside, (they) choose which type fits, with the right shape and color." http://news.com.com/Maxthon+Chinas+h...3-6086632.html Click for rock-hard abs Personal Trainers Available by the Download Bob Tedeschi WHY hire a personal fitness trainer to bark at you for $50 an hour when you can download one online for a fraction of the price — and spare yourself the embarrassment of having someone watch as you never quite get in shape? That is the question an increasing number of would-be fitness buffs are asking, as more trainers package their services in audio or video files that can be downloaded into an iPod or P.D.A. for a quick trip to the gym. The idea dovetails with the suddenly voracious appetite for downloadable media among online consumers and the long success the fitness industry has enjoyed in selling home video products like workout tapes. And while this trend is too nascent to be judged a success (there are no Tae Bo sessions for the iPod yet), it does hold great potential for the personal training business, which has historically been marginalized by high prices. "Downloaded workouts are absolutely here to stay," said John Spencer Ellis, president of the National Exercise and Sports Trainers Association, an industry group serving fitness professionals. "For trainers, it's becoming a new way to acquire customers or generate money 24/7, or both." Mr. Ellis said that since the start of the year, he had seen a sharp rise in the number of trainers who had posted audio clips online of recorded workouts with clients or studio productions replicating those workouts. On clips sold on the trainers' own Web sites, or on sites like Podfitness.com, iTrain.com, and iAmplify.com, trainers coax listeners through a multitude of workouts. When not reminding runners to breathe deeply and relax their arms, for instance, trainers also guide listeners through weight-training routines or Pilates exercises. For cardiovascular exercises like running or aerobics, trainers say, video is of little use. But for weight-training, yoga and other routines, visual cues can be much more helpful. Four months ago, Kimberly Fowler, who owns the YAS Yoga and Spinning Studio in Venice, Calif., uploaded a 53-minute workout video to iAmplify.com, the first of what she said would be a video series that could be viewed online or on devices like iPods. "It's hard to just listen to a yoga class or a fitness class," Ms. Fowler said. "Sometimes you need to see it, and some people are just very visual anyway." "And yes, my voice is one thing," Ms. Fowler added. "But with video they get to see you and they get more involved with you, so it's a more personal connection." Better connection with remote clients, Ms. Fowler said, leads to better workout results and more repeat sales. "I get, quote, 'a lot of money' for private sessions, but there are only so many hours in a day to do them," she said. "I'm trying to make money while I sleep." Ms. Fowler sells downloads of her video for $20, compared with $25 for the DVD, and although she would not give specific sales figures, she said the downloadable format was going well, particularly in cultivating foreign audiences. "Shipping a DVD to Japan costs more than the DVD itself," Ms. Fowler said. "This can be a huge avenue for me." Perhaps it will eventually. But industry executives and analysts noted that while there are hundreds of millions of digital audio players in the hands of consumers, video iPods and other potentially workout-friendly devices have only recently begun to penetrate the mass market. "Video is much newer, but it's a transition that will definitely happen," said Murray Hidary, chief executive of iAmplify, which is based in New York. Mr. Hidary's business arose from the idea that personal trainers would need an easy way to offer and sell workout clips online, but the site has since expanded to include self-help advice, walking tours narrated by celebrities and poker tutorials, among other topics. The company currently recruits specialists from various categories to star in the clips, but Mr. Hidary said he might expand the service in the future to allow anyone to upload videos or audio files and start charging subscriptions or fees for individual downloads. (iAmplify keeps at least half the revenue from each sale on the site.) As Web sites catering to the online fitness category wait for a significant market to materialize, some are taking small steps to help insure profitability in the short term. ITrain, for one, is relying on a so-called micropayments company to help it sell downloads for around $1, without having credit card processing companies eat too much of the revenue from each sale. The company, Peppercoin, processes iTrain's payments in batches, according to Sebastien Reant, iTrain's chief executive. "So I end up keeping 50 percent of what I would give up through the other process," Mr. Reant said. "With small payments, that's a huge savings." Web sites like iTrain and others may need to watch their pennies in the future, because health clubs could start competing heavily with independent fitness trainers. According to Pamela Kufahl, editor of Club Industry's Fitness Business Pro, a trade publication, in-house personal trainers generate more income for clubs than any other add-on service. Clubs could distribute multimedia workout clips as a way to keep members from straying to the online workout sites, Ms. Kufahl said, or they could see online workout clips as an opportunity to get more people interested in their services. Just 14 percent of the United States population belongs to a club, she said. "A lot of people could be turning to these iPod workouts because clubs seem intimidating," Ms. Kufahl said. "But once people purchased a video and became familiar with the personal trainer, maybe they'd come in. It's probably still too new for a lot of clubs to be doing, but it's something they're going to have to look at in the near future." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/te...gy/19ecom.html iTunes Protesters Crank Up the Volume Arik Hesseldahl It remains to be seen whether concerns over Apple's technology are strong enough to result in much, if any, uproar in the U.S. They appear to be on the rise on the other side of the Atlantic, however. Regulators in Norway and Britain are renewing calls for Apple to revise the rules that consumers agree to when they begin using the iTunes store. Dismay over how Apple Computer sells music downloads is deepening. Consumer regulators in Europe say the company places too many restrictions on consumers who buy songs from the online iTunes store -- and the consternation is spreading west. A group called the Free Software Foundation carried out protests on June 10 at seven Apple retail stores in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. The foundation is focusing its ire on so-called digital rights management technology (DRM). Used in an array of digital entertainment products including Apple's iTunes, DRM limits what consumers can do with purchased content. 'Eliminate DRM' The "Defective by Design" protests are not aimed at Apple in particular, but at what the Free Software Foundation sees as a growing trend toward legal restrictions that bind digital content to particular playing devices. "This isn't intended to attack Apple and its innovations, but really to draw attention to the existence of DRM technologies, and how they restrict what consumers can do with their music," says Ted Teah, who maintains a directory of free software for the Free Software Foundation in Cambridge Mass. In San Francisco, about 10 people dressed in neon yellow biohazard suits descended upon Apple's high-profile store on Stockton St. They carried signs that read "Eliminate DRM" and other placards that mocked Apple's stylized iPod ads, with the profile of a person whose wrists have been tied by white iPod earphone cords against a colored background. In a 30-minute flurry of activitiy, they handed out pamphlets to people passing by, and sought to talk to people going into the store. Forging Links Another five people not wearing biohazard suits handed out leaflets quoting Apple CEO Steve Jobs as saying, "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own" -- attempting to portray that statement as hypocritical in light of Apple's use of DRM technology. Similar protests were carried out at Apple stores in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Cambridge, Mass., and in Plano, Texas, among others. Henri Poole, an organizer of the San Francisco event, said the Defective by Design group has only existed three weeks but has already garnered the support of 2,000 people. He said the group has been in talks to cooperate with other activist organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation. He also said more protests like this are planned, but he declined to elaborate. Too Many Targets Sony BMG's use of DRM sparked a firestorm last year after the company programmed CDs with a hidden code that secretly installed itself on users' hard drives, relayed information back to Sony, and left computers vulnerable to viruses. That episode resulted in the recall of some 5 million CDs, and customer boycotts and class action lawsuits. The content protection technology used by Apple and other companies isn't nearly as invasive, nor has it elicited as much outcry. Over time, however, Teah says those restrictions may become more onerous. They may be used as a springboard for legal attacks against consumers by such organizations as the Recording Industry Association of America , which has sued consumers found to have downloaded pirated songs from the Internet. Says Teah: "A teenage girl making a mix tape for a boy she has a crush on could become a target for an expensive lawsuit in the future." JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg dismisses concerns that the iTunes DRM system is overly restrictive. "It's fairly innocuous," he says. "You can easily get around the restrictions by burning your songs to a CD, and then reimporting them as an MP3 or any other format you wish." Foreign Frenzy He says other services, such at MTV's Urge online music download service, created by Viacom's MTV Networks in partnership with Microsoft and the privately held MusicNet, sells song downloads for 99 US cents per track, similar to Apple. "They're following what Apple does because the market has shown that it works," Gartenberg says. Apple isn't the only company targeted by the organizers of Defective By Design. In May, the group staged a surprise protest at a speech by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at Microsoft's WinHEC conference in Seattle. Protesters wore hazardous material protection suits at the entrance to the venue where Gates was set to demonstrate Windows Vista, the next version of Microsoft's PC operating system. An Apple spokesperson said the company would have no comment on the upcoming protests. It remains to be seen whether concerns over Apple's technology are strong enough to result in much, if any, uproar in the U.S. They appear to be on the rise on the other side of the Atlantic, however. Regulators in Norway and Britain are renewing calls for Apple to revise the rules that consumers agree to when they begin using the iTunes store. The Fights Continue Norway's Consumer Ombudsman, at the request of the country's Consumer Council, ruled that certain provisions of Apple's usage agreement violate Norwegian law. The company has been given until June 21 to amend the rules. It also has been asked to defend its DRM scheme known as "Fairplay," which restricts songs purchased from the iTunes store from being played on portable players other than the iPod. Similar calls are coming from regulators in Sweden and Denmark. Additionally, in England, a recording trade association has told legislators that iTunes music should be made compatible with other portable players. This follows inquiries by European Union regulators into Apple's pricing structure for songs sold on iTunes in Britain, where users are charged 79 pence, or about $1.45, vs. 99 euro cents (about $1.25) in other European countries. The latest flurry of activity follows a row between Apple and French legislators allied with a consumer advocacy group. This group wanted the company to make the music sold through its online music store compatible with portable players other than its popular iPod device. At the time, Apple branded the effort "state-sponsored piracy," and suggested that it was more likely to shut down the French outpost of its iTunes store than comply with the legislation. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/51158.html Apple Eyes Labor Conditions at iPod Plant Elaine Kurtenbach Apple Computer Inc. is investigating claims of poor working conditions at a Chinese iPod factory, the company said Friday, vowing not to tolerate any labor violations. The company was responding to a report by a British newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, that alleged workers at an unnamed iPod factory were paid as little as $50 to work 15-hour shifts making the devices. The Mail's report did not provide many details about the location or ownership of the factory, but its allegations provoked a vigorous response from Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif. "Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible," said a statement from Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. "We are currently investigating the allegations regarding working conditions in the iPod manufacturing plant in China. We do not tolerate any violations of our supplier code of conduct," it said. Apple's iconic iPod players are made abroad, mainly in China. The company has sold more than 50 million iPods since its debut in 2001. Staff at Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that reportedly assembles the iPods and products of many other major manufacturers in China, refused comment when contacted Friday at the company's China headquarters in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong. Foxconn is the trade name for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which claims many big name customers including Intel Corp., Dell Inc. and Sony Corp. In a report in the state-run newspaper Beijing Times, a company spokeswoman, identified only by the surname He, denied there were any labor violations at its factories. "The labor department can come to our factory and investigate," He was quoted as saying. Apple adopted a code of conduct for its suppliers last November, saying it was modeled after the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct and other labor standards. The code bans child labor and sets a maximum of 60-hour work weeks, including overtime. The provisions also require suppliers to comply with applicable laws on minimum wages and to keep worker dormitories clean and safe. Allegations of poor working conditions are rife in China and workers often are housed in rudimentary dormitories, fed poorly and subjected to poor pay, unsafe working conditions and other maltreatment. Although $50 monthly would be relatively low pay, wages can run even lower for some jobs. However, the official minimum wage in Shenzhen, where Foxconn has some of its factories, is about twice that amount. ___ AP Technology Writer May Wong in San Jose, Calif. contributed to this report. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060616/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg- Apple plants seeds for pic downloads iTunes Going To The Movies Ben Fritz After conquering the digital music biz and taking the lead with TV shows online, Apple is looking to feature films. The computer company is in active negotiations with most major studios to add movies to its iTunes Music Store, most likely by the end of the year, numerous sources confirm. The main sticking point is price. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been personally involved in the talks, initially proposed selling all films at a flat price of $9.99 -- an offer the studios flatly rejected. "We can't be put in a position where we lose the ability to price our most popular content higher than less popular stuff," said a studio exec close to the negotiations. Apple has traditionally sold digital content at a single price: 99¢ for songs, $1.99 for TV shows and musicvideos. It has recently experimented with some longer video content, however, selling the Disney Channel telepic "High School Musical" for $9.99 and the "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries for $14.99. Apple gives TV and music companies a 70% wholesale rate and is offering the same to film providers. When it came to songs and TV shows, Apple was largely defining a new market, as they hadn't been sold individually before. But feature films already are sold on DVD at varying wholesale prices depending on whether they're new releases or library titles. While the homevideo market is slumping -- leading many studios to focus on the Internet as the next growth market -- it still generated $23 billion in the U.S. last year, and studios don't want to risk angering major retailers like Wal-Mart or Best Buy by giving better terms to Apple. Online retailers Movielink and CinemaNow are paying DVD wholesale prices to get digital copies. There are signs Apple may bend, insiders say, and allow price points ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 in order to differentiate older titles from new releases. During negotiations to extend their deal with Apple last year, music labels tried to persuade Jobs to allow variable pricing for songs. But thanks to iTunes' 80%-plus market share in U.S. digital music, he had the leverage to stand his ground. When TV shows were added to iTunes last year, ABC/Disney was the only provider, with others such as NBC Universal and MTV Networks coming later. But sources at most major studios confirmed they are in some stage of negotiations with Apple, indicating pics from numerous providers could debut together. Studio sources expect an iTunes moviestore to debut by the end of the year at the latest. ITunes was the first etailer to start selling songs and TV shows online, but when it adds movies, it will enter a competitive market. Movielink and CinemaNow already sell permanent downloads of films. BitTorrent has a deal in place with Warner Bros. and is in talks with other studios. Amazon.com also will start selling movies online soon, possibly through its IMDb Web site. But a deal with Apple is key for many studios hoping to grow the digital distribution biz because of the huge iTunes install base and the popularity of video iPods. Apple has sold more than 22.5 million iPods since the video version launched in October. (It's unclear how many are video iPods and how many are the smaller Nano or Shuffle.) Since Apple does not license its antipiracy software, other online retailers can't sell music or video that works on an iPod, and other manufacturers can't make players that work with iTunes content. "Every studio wants to have broad distribution in digital, and we all know that having Apple as part of that is very, very important," a studio exec said. Many predict feature films will bow on iTunes at the same time the video iPod with a bigger screen more appropriate for films is launched. But Apple is remaining tight-lipped, not even telling potential studio partners about its hardware plans. A rep for Apple declined to comment. Company typically doesn't announce any initiatives until the day they launch. http://www.variety.com/VR1117945507.html A Coming Attraction: Movies on iTunes Laura M. Holson and Eduardo Porter Consumers have been willing to spend 99 cents to buy Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" or $1.99 for an episode of "Desperate Housewives" from iTunes. Now Steven P. Jobs is betting they will also pay $9.99 to download "The Godfather" to play on their iPods. For weeks, Apple Computer has been talking with executives at all the major studios — including the Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios — about adding movies to its popular iTunes music store, several people involved in the negotiations said. Mr. Jobs, who is Apple's chief executive, has been participating in the negotiations and telling studio executives in Los Angeles that he wants to have a deal in place by the fall, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney, which was the first studio to put some TV shows (like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives") on iTunes, is also expected to be the first to put some movies on Apple's online service, the people involved in the talks said. Moreover, Mr. Jobs will attend his first Disney board meeting later this month. He became a director when the company acquired Pixar Animation Studios, where he had been a founder and chief executive. An Apple spokeswoman said that the company would not comment on what she called rumors. The individuals asked not to be identified because the negotiations were confidential. News of a possible deal was reported yesterday in Daily Variety. It is not the first time the studios and Mr. Jobs have discussed selling movies online. But the recent talks are more serious. While Mr. Jobs is getting resistance from some studios, they are more open to the idea since most now offer their television shows on iTunes. "Steve wants to get this done, and the studios want to reach an agreement, too," said one person apprised of the negotiations. But people involved in the negotiations said there were several potential snags, including fears about piracy and Mr. Jobs's proposal to charge a flat price of $9.99 for movies already sold on DVD. Studios are concerned about preserving relationships with traditional partners, including theaters and retailers. In particular, one person involved said, a price of $9.99 for a movie would undercut the price Wal-Mart charges for DVD's. Under Mr. Jobs's proposed plan, there will be several prices for movies, depending on when they have their debut on iTunes. The prices have not yet been determined, but some studios are worried about releasing movies too close to their theatrical release dates. The current window for a DVD release is four months after a movie hits theaters. "Everyone is pushing back on this," said another person apprised of the talks. The reports of Apple's discussions with movie studios have renewed speculation that Apple is preparing to offer a living room-oriented entertainment device later this year, in time for the Christmas season. The TV programs and music videos sold on iTunes are low-resolution videos appropriate for viewing on the iPod. But they offer inadequate display quality when viewed on a Macintosh computer. Apple has also introduced several hardware and software features over the past year, like an Apple hand-held remote control and a television-oriented on-screen control system called Front Row. The current Apple video system, which competes with Microsoft's Media Center PC software, is now oriented toward Apple's computers. There has been extensive industry speculation during the last year that Mr. Jobs is planning to use the Internet to deliver high-definition video directly to consumers on flat-screen televisions. John Markoff contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/te...y/20apple.html Friend or foe? Film Exex Want To Tap Into Jobs' Savvy But Worry About His Growing Clout Ben Fritz Five years ago, when Steve Jobs was in negotiations to sell songs on iTunes, he gave music execs a choice: Either work with me or get left in the dust. They worked with him. But even though the deals may have helped save their business from piracy, many in the music industry now call it a devil's bargain. Apple now commands more than 80% of the growing digital music market and has a huge influence on how much such music will cost. It's that type of clout that makes many in the film industry nervous as Jobs and Apple negotiate to extend iTunes to feature-length films, a natural step after the store added TV shows last fall. Film moguls are eager to get access to the huge base of customers, especially as an antidote to piracy. But Jobs' reputation as a brilliant yet arrogant executive used to getting what he wants has left many in Hollywood wondering whether the new-media titan will prove a friend or foe. It's an odd place for Jobs to be in, given that 30 years ago, he co-founded a computer company in a garage with a childhood friend. But thanks to business savvy and fortuitous circumstances, Jobs now finds himself one of the most powerful people in the media business, especially as it moves into the digital age. His clout comes, in large part, from the ascendance of Pixar to a position of such dominance in the animation business that it was acquired by Disney this year for $7.4 billion. The deal made him the Mouse House's largest single shareholder, with about $4 billion worth of stock, and gave him a seat on its board. He will undoubtedly be a key ally in CEO Bob Iger's push of the conglom into the digital age. But Apple, which he heads as CEO, also has extended Jobs' influence in Hollywood. Since 2001, when Apple introduced the iPod digital music player and iTunes software, followed by the iTunes Music Store, the company has undergone a radical transformation. In just five years, it has sold 1 billion songs, and since last October, 15 million TV shows and music- videos. For the holiday quarter, Apple made $3.4 billion in iPod and iTunes revenue, compared with just over $2 billion from PCs and software. In other words, it is now a digital media company that sells PCs and software on the side, a dramatic reversal from the company's first 25 years. The question is how much Hollywood will be willing to adjust to his style and his terms. The industry is famous for not tolerating brash outsiders, no matter how successful or astute their plans. "He came in with a lot of bravado and said, 'We set our mind to what we were going to do in the music business and revolutionized it, and now we want to do the same thing with film," recalls one studio person close to the talks for movie downloads. In many ways, Jobs stumbled into the entertainment business. The iPod was pitched to Apple by an outsider, Tony Fadell, currently senior VP of the iPod division. Even when Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1985, the small computer graphics unit was focused on selling its technology and creating special effects. The short films created by former Disney animator John Lasseter in the late '80s were made more to show off Pixar technology than to draw the attention of the entertainment industry. But an Oscar for 1989 short "Tin Toy" ultimately led to "Toy Story" and a revolution in the animation business. As both companies grew and led Jobs into more frequent contact with media moguls, however, insiders say he took the opportunity to learn more about the entertainment business. At one meeting with top execs at a major conglom hoping to distribute Pixar films when it looked like the Disney deal would fall apart, he spent much of the meeting curiously asking about other parts of the company's business. To those who know him through Apple, Jobs is famous for being hands-on, short-tempered and harsh. "He grades people," says one former employee. "After you make a presentation -- pitching a book, a film, hardware or a software program -- he will give you a grade: a B-plus, C-minus, a D, whatever. "Steve is always the smartest guy in the room and he knows it," he added. For those who cross Jobs, it's not a pleasant experience. He often has reduced people to tears with verbal abuse, says the former worker. "But he's not doing it for fun. He's doing it because he wants things better. He cares intensely and 95% of his comments are right." Those who worked at Pixar describe a somewhat different Jobs: very involved in negotiations with Disney, but relatively hands-off when it came to filmmaking. "We had all heard about this tyrant, but we never once saw that person at Pixar," recalls one longtime employee. "He was the guiding light in business affairs, but he had such confidence in John and seemed so amazed by the success we were having that he never did more than put his two cents in at meetings," says former Pixar animator Jorgen Klubien, who is now directing his own toon for Laika Entertainment. Recently treated for pancreatic cancer, co-workers say that the 51-year-old Jobs seems to have mellowed. "Though a 'mellowed Steve' is still a sight to behold," says one. "At every meeting, you are on pins and needles because someone will get their head handed to them, every time, and you just pray it is not you. It's like playing Russian roulette." Despite his immense wealth, estimated by Forbes at $4.4 billion, Jobs leads a relatively modest life, especially by Hollywood standards. Though he did take a Gulfstream jet from Apple, he draws a salary of just $1, the same he took at Pixar, and relies mainly on the value of his stock. Although he guards his privacy, his personal life often has drifted into the public realm. His sister Mona Simpson's novel "A Regular Guy" is loosely based on him. His Palo Alto house is modest by mogul standards, and he always appears in his trademark uniform of jeans and a black turtleneck. When it comes to his businesses, however, Jobs is obsessed with aesthetics and the consumer experience. When the first Apple stores were ready to open, he reportedly disliked the maple floors and had them ripped up and new floors installed. Though Jobs didn't come up with the idea of the iPod, it was he who insisted that engineers design the interface so that it would take no more than three clicks to get to a song. It reflects his approach in designing many products: Define what consumers will respond to, then task others to make that happen. That was why his insistence was so great that iTunes sell songs for 99¢ each. Recalls Phil Wiser, who was then chief technology officer of Sony Music: "Steve Jobs came to us and said, 'iTunes is going to be 99¢ per song. We'd really love for you to be part of it. Take it or leave it.' " With a dominant share of the digital music business, Jobs refused to budge from the flat 99¢-per-song fee in recent renegotiations with the diskeries. As for adding movies to iTunes, Jobs personally heads up most negotiations, although VP Eddie Cue has taken up some of the slack as competing studios are wary of doing business with a member of Disney's board. Studios have resisted Jobs' initial insistence that feature films be priced at the easy-to-remember $9.99. After all, library titles are typically sold to Wal-Mart and Best Buy significantly cheaper than new releases. Studios now are trying to convince Apple to sell similar content at multiple price points, something the company has never done. Also complicating the deals: The studios are working out terms with a host of other distributors, including Amazon, Movielink and BitTorrent, in part to make sure that one company does not dominate. It seems that none of the studios wants to be first in making a deal with Apple. Disney would be the logical leader, but even they are cautious, fearing it will look like in-house synergy rather than a business decision. Jobs would not comment, nor would an Apple spokesman on the status of the negotiations. But then, Pixar and Apple are tight-lipped when it comes to the press, making announcements only on their own terms and refusing to let their executives speak to the press in most cases, even on background. When he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, Jobs clamped down on leaks, to the point that those who work on new projects reportedly are not even allowed to tell their own families. "Now they're more secretive than a government agency," says Wired News editor Leander Kahney. Journalists who try to work around that wall often face retaliation. When Web site ThinkSecret broke news about a new Apple product in 2004, the company filed suit, alleging that it stole trade secrets. When Daily Variety broke the news that Pixar had hired writers for the pitch that became the 2007 release "Ratatouille," Jobs tracked the reporter down at the Sundance Film Festival, demanding to know her sources and threatening to fire the film's writers. He called her on the private line of a rented condo -- a number she had not given out to anyone. She still doesn't know how he found it. What remains to be seen is if such a closed-mouth policy can survive in a town that is run on rumors, leaks and emails. But then, much of the way Steve Jobs does business likely will be put to the test in Hollywood. Or will much of the way Hollywood does business be put to the test by Steve Jobs? http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=s...117945470&c=13 Netflix thinks inside the box Netco to Introduce Set-Top Box With Internet Connection Jennifer Netherby Netflix VP of original programming Eric Besner revealed on Friday some of the online rental service's thinking on the movie download biz, saying Netflix is planning to introduce a proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that can download movies overnight. Speaking at an Independent Film & Television Alliance production conference in Beverly Hills, Besner said the business model is still being worked out, but the download service likely would be offered in return for the subscription fee members pay for conventional DVD rentals. Service could launch as early as this year. Users would add movies they want to watch to their rental queue online as they do now, and those movies would then be downloaded to the boxes overnight rather than shipped through the mail. He said the set-top box is just one of the Internet plans Netflix is working on. Entertainment Studios chairman-CEO Byron Allen keynoted the half-day conference, telling indie producers that the shift to digital distribution is giving producers the upper hand for the first time because of the need for content and the ability to connect directly and immediately with viewers. "This tool of broadband is unlike anything ever before," said Allen, who has created broadband channels for all of the TV shows he advertises on TV to drive traffic. Larry Gerbrandt, senior VP and general manager of Nielsen Analytics, said during a panel that iTunes downloads of ABC TV shows have so far added to the audience for those shows rather than stealing viewers away. On a separate panel, Disney senior VP-general manager of pay TV Dan Cohen said the company clocked 11 million streams in May of the four ABC shows it put online for free as part of a two-month experiment. Users had to watch short commercials while viewing the ABC shows, but they also could pause and rewind through episodes, something that could give digital a bigger advantage in the coming years from an advertising perspective, Gerbrandt said. http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=s...117945486&c=18 Movie and Record Industry Piracy Figures Incendiary, But Not Fact. Richard Menta I caught this little item from the Washinton Post today quoting losses from online file sharing. "The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates, who swap digital copies of 'The DaVinci Code,' Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free." The 30GB iPod Video is available on Amazon $250 billion per year is a big number. It is also a fictional one.. Last year, the total worldwide box office revenues for the movie industry were $23 billion, of which the US generated 40% of that amount. Revenues were slightly down from the previous year, which is understandable since the movie industry had been setting box office records an unprecedented dozen or so years in a row. The record industry last year generated a total of $33.6 billion worldwide, down 2% from the previous year. That's a total of $56.6 billion. So how do these industries lose $250 billion per year when combined they only generated $56.6 billion last year? Even if you take these industries all time annual revenue records, $250 billion per year is almost five time more that they ever earned combined. The answer is simple. The $250 billion figure was simply made up. Why deliver such a fictional number? Because the bigger the number, the more incendiary it is. The more incendiary the number the more press it generates. In this case the Washington Post, a heralded paper if there ever was one, printed the number as if it were a fact. While we are at it why not print that 5,000 lives are lost each year to file sharing? How about file sharing leads to drug use or terrorist activity? Wait, the Department of Justice already used the one on terrorist activity. To accurately quote losses you need to isolate all of the potential causes, something that at times can be very difficult. For example, how can you truly measure the effects of bad PR acurately? If CD sales drop worldwide 2%, can you honestly say none of that loss came from sources other than file sharing? Even if you could prove it was all file sharing, 2% of $33.6 billion is still only $660 million. Throw in the 7.9% movie industry drop and you have another 1.8 billion for a total of almost $2.5 billion. But to quote five times these industries combined total worth? That's silly. The software industry did earn $189 billion last year, setting another record? Maybe they are throwing that figure in just for good measure? Even if they are, so what? Adding up total industry revenue and saying that is how much you lost is simply faulty judgement. Ask anyone on Wall Street. And you can't blame this all on the media lobbies. Their job is spin, spin that gets attention and spin motivates action in a direction that suits them. The Washington Post knows this. The paper should have done its homework. One more note, I originally titled this article "File Sharing Takes 5000 Lives Every Year", then decided not to. I was concerned someone might actually reprint it as a fact. http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=9677 Widespread Piracy Suspected At China-Related Web Sites Motoki Yotsukura A copyright-protection group said it plans to file criminal complaints against three Web sites geared for Chinese residents in Japan that offer the largest amount of pirated material seen in this country. Members of these Web sites, which are apparently operated in Tokyo, can freely watch movies on the Internet or download them for a charge. One of the sites boasts a collection of 3,000 titles, including new releases such as "The Da Vinci Code." According to the Japan and International Motion Picture Copyright Association (JIMCA), this is the largest case of suspected piracy so far in Japan. JIMCA said copyright-holders of movies rarely allow Web site operators to offer unlimited access to such films, and that the three Web sites in question are likely using pirated versions. "All the cases are no doubt illegal," said Masami Hagino, public relations officer of JIMCA. The managers' contact addresses and phone numbers are in Tokyo. The Internet Protocols for the sites also point to operations in the capital. One of the sites is run by an international telephone service company that offers discounts to Chinese living in Japan. Another is operated by a company that sells second--hand computers. They both have connections to companies in China. The other site is run by a Net shop that sells daily goods to Chinese residents in Japan. The Web site operators said they were unfamiliar with copyright issues, and that if violations were made, they would correct the problem. The three sites own thousands of movies and dramas produced in Europe, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea. The movies are all either dubbed in Chinese or contain subtitles. The Japanese works include Hayao Miyazaki's animated features, as well as episodes from the "Urutoraman (Ultra man)" series. One of the sites offered free viewings of "The Da Vinci Code" five days after it hit movie theaters. The site removed the movie from its list on June 14 after The Asahi Shimbun made an inquiry. The second-hand computer store in Tokyo's Sumida Ward runs three retail shops in Tokyo and Yokohama that sell membership cards for its site. The Net shop provides the same type of service. For a monthly fee of 2,500 yen, the member can access the Web site and watch or download movies after entering a number and a password printed on the card. "We started the company two years ago. Since then, we have been receiving video distribution from a Chinese company with which we have a contract," a Japanese employee of the computer store said. He said he wasn't aware the company was doing anything wrong. "We might have lacked a full understanding about copyrights," the employee said. The Chinese president of a company in Tokyo's Toshima Ward that allows users to watch movies for free also said he was not knowledgeable about copyright laws. "I don't know much about copyrights because I entrust the management of the site to a subsidiary in China," the president said. "But if it's a problem, I'll stop the operation." JIMCA plans to lodge criminal complaints against the managers of the sites and seek compensation. KDDI Corp. and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corp. also have connections to the Web sites in question. Two of the Web site operators are franchised dealers of the telecoms. One of those dealers and a Net shop have expanded their sales through an NTT affiliate's fee-settlement service that uses convenience store chains. The carriers both said they were unaware the dealers may have been engaged in piracy. "It's very disappointing that big companies like KDDI Corp. and NTT East have turned out to be lending a hand to the piracy business," JIMCA's Hagino said. "I demand they check on all their franchised dealers." Mo Bangfu, a Chinese journalist who has covered Chinese society in Japan, said: "In China, there has been a black market of pirated movies for several years. It has now landed in Japan." He said awareness of copyright issues is limited in China, and crackdowns by the authorities can't catch up with the bootleggers and pirates. "The need among the Chinese in Japan for Chinese-language versions remains high," he said. "From now on, such services might go underground and spread, which would make it difficult to grasp the true picture of the market." http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-...606170147.html China Piracy Costs Film Industry $2.7 Bln In 2005 Piracy in China cost film makers $2.7 billion last year, with domestic firms shouldering more than half those losses, according to a study commissioned by a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios. China's film industry lost about $1.5 billion in revenue to piracy last year, while the major U.S. studios lost $565 million, according to data released on Monday by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), whose members include the studio units of Time Warner, Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc.. The study was the first for China done by a third party, LEK Consulting, for the MPA, which previously did a similar annual study itself. The 2005 losses to U.S. studios were well above the MPA's own previous estimate of $178 million lost to piracy in 2003. Some 93 percent of all movie sales in China were of pirated versions of films, according to the latest study. "In terms of who's losing the most here in China, it's not the MPAs member companies. It's the local industry," said Mike Ellis, who heads the MPA's Asia Pacific division. The study also found that the Internet is becoming a growing source of piracy in China, though pirated discs still accounted for the majority of lost sales last year. According to the report, illegally downloaded films cost the industry $1.04 billion in China last year, while pirated video discs accounted for $1.63 billion in lost revenue. The MPA released its latest report along with another first-ever study on the impact of movie piracy on China's economy, which was also commissioned by the MPA and done by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. That study said that growth in China's box office slowed by nearly half to 30 percent last year, when the industry generated $247 million in receipts, from 58 percent in 2004. Piracy is a rampant problem in China, where bootleg versions of major films often appear on the street just days after their theatrical release. The MPA and its members also complain of highly restricted access to the market, with only 20 foreign films allowed into China each year on a revenue-sharing basis. Even when they are allowed in, films are often restricted in their runs. http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsAr...NA-FILM-DC.XML This Column May Be Illegal Danny Westneat The first casualty in the state's war on Internet gambling is a local Web site where nobody was actually doing any gambling. What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet casinos. He had links to them, and ran ads by them. He fancied himself a guide to an uncharted frontier, even compiling a list of "rogue casinos" that had bilked gamblers. All that, says the state — the ads, the linking, even the discussing — violates a new state law barring online wagering or using the Internet to transmit "gambling information." "It's what the feds would call 'aiding and abetting,' " says the director of the state's gambling commission, Rick Day. "Telling people how to gamble online, where to do it, giving a link to it — that's all obviously enabling something that is illegal." Uh-oh. This is starting to get a little creepy. I hadn't been all worked up about the state's crusade against Internet gambling, including the new law that makes most online betting a felony. Yes, it's insincere. This is the same state that's happy to enable your online wagering if you're playing the ponies. But mostly it seemed the law was unenforceable. And passé. A society steeped in televised Texas Hold'em and Indian casinos is suddenly supposed to recoil at the idea of placing bets with a mouse? I figured the law was a bluff. Then I heard about Todd Boutte. He's a former Wal-Mart worker in Bellingham who started a casino review called IntegrityCasinoGuide.com. He worried about the new law but figured he'd be OK because his site has no actual gambling. Not so, said the state. Writing about online gambling in a way that seems promotional can earn a cease-and-desist order, and potentially, a criminal charge. Boutte learned this when a Bellingham Herald article featured state officials saying his site was illegal. He later shut it down and is trying to sell it out of state. "1984 has finally arrived," Boutte says. "I can't believe this is happening in a liberal place like Washington." More may be on the way. The state plans to hire an investigator to enforce the new law. Gambling officials told me The Seattle Times may be afoul of the law because we print a poker how-to column, "Card Shark," by gambler Daniel Negreanu. He sometimes tells readers to hone their skills at online casinos. And at the end of each column is a Web address, fullcontactpoker.com, where readers can comment. If you type in that address, you whiz off to Negreanu's digital casino based in the Antilles. It's a tangled Web, isn't it? The state says we'd best do our part to untangle it. "My suggestion to you is to remove from your paper any advice about online gambling and any links to illegal sites," Day said. So even this column could be illegal? The state's gone from trying to control gambling, which is legit, to trying to control people speaking about gambling. It's hard to take coming from a state that bombards us with pitches for the biggest sucker's bet of all. You know, the one they call the lottery. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...6_danny15.html Patching WinMX Thomas Mennecke The battle against “false files” or flooding P2P networks with bogus material is a long and attritionous fight. In fact, it’s been fought with such ferocity that people are willing to protect long abandoned networks such as WinMX. In addition to no longer being developed and its population reduced, WinMX diehards continue to inflate the value of this P2P relic. WinMX’s day came to a screeching halt soon after the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) delivered ‘cease and desist’ letters to several leading commercial P2P developers in September of 2005. As a recipient of one of these letters, Frontcode Technologies, the talent behind WinMX, decided to abandon the project. The abandonment of this client also eliminated the WinMX.com domain, which hosted several network gateways. Network gateways, or cache servers, maintain the IP addresses of thousands of individuals connected to the WinMX network. The WinMX client communicates with this server during initial startup, obtaining and connecting to IP addresses of network members. Remove these servers and the network comes crumbling down. The collapse of the WinMX network proved temporary, as within days, fans of the network resurrected it by establishing rudimentary cache servers. Groups such as WinMXworld.com and Vladd44.com soon became more sophisticated with their resurrection techniques, and life on WinMX seemed whole again. Yet an old nemesis soon reared itself, as corrupt files once again began infiltrating the WinMX network. The flood of corrupt files threatened the resurrection effort, and indeed began driving participants away. Developers of subsequent WinMX patches incorporated blocking features to thwart some of the most prolific of flooders. WinMX patch developer “King Macro” of WinMxGroup.com told Slyck.com that Macrovision and its Hawkeye technology are especially notorious in this respect. “There are several methods we use for detecting them but the simplest way to spot most of them (at least for now) is that within WinMX all search results contain the IP address of the origin user that is sharing the file - so it is relatively simple to spot that if the same IP address is sending out hundreds of copies of the same file under many different usernames then it is a flooder.” Once the IP address is obtained, it’s a simple matter of tracing the address’ origins. “Smokeblower is of course a subsidiary of Macrovision - some of the ranges used are actually allocated under the name Macrovision but most is done under the Smokeblower name.” Although blocking Macrovision and similar organizations from the WinMX network is an important goal for developers, there are limitations. In response, “King Macro” has taken the additional step of preventing such bogus files from appearing on the WinMX client in the first place. Since WinMX readily identifies the IP address of file-sharers – including flooders – the new patch blocks corrupt files from ever being displayed from WinMX. Considering Frontcode dismantled WinMX without releasing the source code, the patch plays an important intermediary between the network and the client. If the source were released, the changes could be made to the WinMX code itself; however patch developers were not afforded this benefit “By manipulating the calls to Winsock the patch is able to receive data instead of WinMX, and then pass along only the data that it chooses to,” King Macro tells Slyck.com. “That way it receives the search results before WinMX, and is able to then only send "good" search results to WinMX (and of course any other non search data gets passed on to WinMX as well.)” The blocking feature is dependent on the maintenance of known “bad” IP addresses – or IP addresses from known contaminators of the network. In the ongoing file-sharing technological arms race, it’s a near certainty organizations that actively flood networks with corrupt files will adapt to this new technique. In the mean time however, public reaction to this updated WinMX patch has been positive. The most immediate and visible effect of this patch is the reduction of bogus files. This in turn leads to fewer downloads of such files, and the subsequent decline in their proliferation. http://slyck.com/news.php?story=1214 Louisiana Violent Game Bill Signed Into Law According to a new report from website GamePolitics.com, Democratic Representative Roy Burrell's HB1381 bill, covering violent video games, has been signed in law by Governor Kathleen Blanco, and takes effect immediately. The measure proposed by HB 1381, which was drafted with the help of controversial Florida attorney and anti-game activist Jack Thompson, allows a judge to rule on whether or not a video game meets established criteria for being inappropriate for minors and be subsequently pulled from store shelves. A person found guilty of selling such a game to a minor would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000, plus a prison term of up to one year. In a statement released by Jack Thompson when the Louisiana Senate passed the bill, the lawyer commented: "The corrupted and corrupting video game industry will, of course, challenge this law once it is signed by Governor Blanco. The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers' lobbyist, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers' lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children." Also at that time, ESA president Doug Lowenstein commented of the bill: "We oppose HB 1381, which would add video games containing violent content to the State's 'Harmful to Minors' statute, and is no different from other laws already stricken by the courts." Now that the bill is passed, it is extremely likely that the ESA will announce a legal challenge to the Louisiana bill in the near future - Gamasutra will update this story if and when such a statement occurs. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...php?story=9745 Judge Blocks Louisiana Violent Games Law No sooner than the ESA and EMA decided to file suit against Louisiana over the violent games law did the court halt the legislation. A temporary injunction has been issued, barring enforcement of the law, and a hearing for a permanent injunction is expected next week. A Baton Rouge federal judge has today issued a temporary injunction against Louisiana's violent games law that Governor Kathleen Blanco just signed last week. According to local newspaper The Advocate, U.S. District Judge James Brady issued the injunction just hours after the Entertainment Software Association and Entertainment Merchants Association filed the lawsuit in Louisiana. Unlike similar violent games legislation, the Louisiana law was to have taken effect immediately, but now authorities are barred from enforcing it. Another hearing for a permanent injunction against the law has been set for June 27. As with other violent games bills, the video game industry believes HB1381, which was drafted by anti-game lawyer Jack Thompson, is "unconstitutionally vague." According to New Orleans attorney James A. Brown, the Louisiana law could lead to "arbitrary and discriminatory" enforcement. "Video games contain extensive storylines and character development, comparable to that of books and movies," he says in the lawsuit. "Like the best of literature, the storylines often involve familiar themes such as good versus evil, triumph over adversity, struggle against corrupt governments and rulers and/or quest for adventure. "How would a person assess whether a particular video game appeals to a minor's 'morbid interest in violence'? And what constitutes a 'patently offensive' depiction of violence? Persons of ordinary intelligence are forced to guess at the meaning and scope of the act." http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/fe...id=13012&rp=49 Video Game Makers Are Battling Sinking Stock Prices Matt Richtel The video game industry has been taking a beating. While air has seeped steadily from the stock market, it has poured from the four major publicly traded game publishers. Since May 1, they have lost a collective $6 billion in market capitalization, about a 25 percent drop, compared to declines of 8.3 percent for the Nasdaq and 4.2 percent for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. The sharp decline reflects a realization by investors that the game industry will recover considerably more slowly than expected from the transition to a new generation of consoles, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. So, too, analysts said, the game publishing industry is being disrupted by the growing cost of development, as well as uncertainty and opportunity created by the growing popularity of online game play. "There are more industry concerns than ever, and that's what you're seeing in the stock prices," said Justin Post, an industry analyst with Merrill Lynch. And yet, underscoring the complexities of assessing the industry, Mr. Post has a buy rating on shares of two of the major publishers, Electronic Arts and Activision. Like many stock analysts, he argues that given long-term trends, the game business is destined to boom, and that the only question is when. Evidence of trouble started growing last November after Microsoft introduced the Xbox 360, marking the transition to a new generation of game consoles more powerful and graphics-rich than previous models. Production delays left Microsoft unable to meet demand, leaving some customers unable to buy an Xbox and, in turn, the publishers' games. Highlighting the troubles, Electronic Arts said in early May that its 2007 fiscal earnings could be as much as 70 percent lower than analysts had projected. Several days later, the industry convened in Los Angeles for its annual convention, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a neon-lighted extravaganza of self-promotion. But rather than providing momentum, it seemed only to complicate matters. Sony said it would release its own next-generation console, the PlayStation 3, in November and sell it for $499, the highest price ever for a console. Since January, Wall Street analysts have dropped their estimates of the industry's total revenues for 2006 by 60 percent, said Daniel Ernst, an analyst with Soleil-Hudson Square Research. Many analysts now say that publishers will not see significant growth until well into 2007. Mr. Ernst said the most optimistic view is that by the end of this year, consumers will own 15 million consoles of the new generation — 12 million Xbox 360 consoles and the rest PlayStation 3 and Wii machines. There are about 150 million machines of the preceding generation. Past transitions have been painful, too; consumers, awaiting new systems, tend to hold off on purchases of games for the old systems. The video game industry is highly unusual in that every three or four years, in sync with new consoles, publishers hit a trough of earnings but one historically followed by a boom. That is what the game executives are expecting this time. "More people are playing games than ever before," said Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision, whose franchises have included Doom, Quake and Tony Hawk. "People who were in their teens in the 80's are now playing games with their kids. When I look at the next 10 years as compared to the past 10 years, I just see better prospects." He said that the powerful new consoles and richer games would attract consumers, that publishers had a chance to profit by making games for a range of different machines (not just consoles, but also hand-held devices, like the Sony PSP), and that a consolidation of smaller publishers in recent years could leave greater shares for those remaining. But Mr. Kotick acknowledged that there were challenges, including a growing need to produce games more efficiently. He said the industry would probably also focus more narrowly on games with hit potential (selling several million copies) as opposed to a scattershot approach of creating numerous games that sell one million copies or less. What is becoming clear to analysts, they said, is that this transition includes some particular facets complicating how soon the industry rebounds and how far. One aggravating factor is a 30 percent to 50 percent increase in the cost of making top-tier games — now $10 million to $15 million to make games for the new consoles and their more powerful processors. The expense is expected to cut into profit margins, which may have hit their peak at some companies, notably at Electronic Arts, analysts said. A potentially counterbalancing force is the emergence of revenue from gamers playing over the Internet — which the Xbox 360 allows and the PlayStation 3 is also expected to allow — and using the consoles to download games. If so, that could allow publishers to markedly cut the cost of distribution. On the other hand, that prospect may be one reason for the fall in the share price of GameStop, a game retailer, analysts said. Since early May its stock has fallen to $39.43, from above $48. Mr. Kotick, for one, says he does not think that players will be routinely downloading games any time soon, given bandwidth and hard-drive limitations. "The idea of full downloadable games is so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible as an opportunity," Mr. Kotick said. But he added that there were more immediately plausible revenue opportunities from selling downloads of supplemental game levels or "characters, new weapons, new missions, or auctioning off places" in a virtual world. The wariness of game industry investors is heightened by concerns that inflation will drive up interest rates, cutting into consumer spending. "People go to Wal-Mart less, and fewer video games are sold," said Evan Wilson, a video game industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. "There's a pall cast over every stock that touches consumer spending." But Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, says that a retrenchment in consumer spending could assist game makers if people abandon higher-cost entertainment in favor of stay-at-home entertainment. "A bad economy is good for video games," he said. Over the long term, analysts said they were bullish, citing the increasing popularity of games and the growing ranks of adults who have been playing video games for years. "I would be buying these stocks with both hands," Mr. Wilson said. Within the industry, he ranks Activision and THQ as the better current opportunities, seeing them as having a chance of winning market share away from rivals like Take-Two Interactive and Electronic Arts. To be sure, the analysts see these stocks as a group only to a point, advising that investors look at the long-term prospects for each company. Since May, Electronic Arts' shares have fallen to $42.30, from $56.80; Activision to $11.58, from $14.19; THQ to $21.49, from $25.63; and Take-Two to $13.10, from $17.05. Particularly rough news came two weeks ago for Take-Two, which announced that in its second quarter it had losses of $50 million, compared with a loss of $8 million in the same period a year earlier. Mr. Pachter of Wedbush Morgan said some analysts continued to be skeptical of the company as possibly a "one-hit wonder" supported by its wildly successful Grand Theft Auto franchise. The publishers' stocks were up slightly on Thursday and Friday, but analysts did not see the beginnings of a turnaround. "The move the last two days doesn't do anything to offset the material decline of the stocks," Mr. Wilson said. "Relative to the total move that's happened since the beginning of May, it's not that big." Mr. Ernst, from Soleil-Hudson, said there might be one upside to continued investor disappointment this year. "If 2006 stinks, 2007 on a comparable basis is going to look pretty incredible," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/te...gy/19game.html Now, Free Ways to Do Desktop Work on the Web Damon Darlin The biggest expense in buying a new computer is not always the computer. After all, you can buy a new Dell desktop, and a good one at that, for $300 and get a monitor in the bargain. The software to make a PC do anything useful can cost you as much as the computer. To accomplish even the most basic functions on the computer, like writing, you could pay $400 for the standard edition of Microsoft's Office suite that includes Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets, Outlook for e-mail and PowerPoint for boring everyone with slideshow presentations. You can find software that is cheaper. Yet a stripped-down student and teacher edition of Word still costs $150 and even Microsoft Works 8.0, a really basic version of Word and Excel, is $50. There is another way to do almost everything these programs can do — some would say you can actually do more — and you can do it free. A number of smart programmers have developed word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and other software that you operate while in a Web browser. No one is saying they are a direct substitute for Word or Excel, but they do have a distinct advantage. The programs can be used by several people at different computers to collaborate on a document. "It's solving an actual real problem," said Sam Schillace, a founder of Upstartle, which makes the Writely software for word processing. Google bought the company for that software this year. Google is the biggest and best-financed company putting such software online. It is gradually opening to the public the Spreadsheets program it announced last week, and it plans to release a version of a word processing program soon. A number of smaller software companies are doing similar things. Where is Microsoft, the software giant, in all this? Interesting question. It is expected that Microsoft will offer a similar product via its Net-centric Office Live and Windows Live initiatives, which convert the desktop to the Web top. It may be a tough choice for the company, because it faces the dilemma of cannibalizing its own products or letting someone else take a bite out of them. Microsoft, which carved a near monopoly in word processing and spreadsheet software, has up to now been able to protect its high prices. But a monopoly, a few laissez-faire economists argue, will eventually succumb to competition. This could become a textbook example: innovators are attracted by the profit pool and undermine the monopoly with something different. You have always had the ability to edit a document in a browser, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, by opening the file in HTML format. You can still do that in a pinch, but no one recommends it because that method is pretty bare-bones. You can not automatically check the spelling or easily change to unusual fonts, for example. The new programs take word processing a step further. If you have already been using a free e-mail program like Yahoo Mail or Google Gmail, you have some experience with substituting tools on the Web for programs residing on the hard drive of your computer. Of course, to take advantage of them, you have to get over two hurdles. One, you can use them only if you are connected to the Internet. And you must be comfortable with the idea that your addresses, your correspondence and your documents don't reside on your hard drive in your computer in your home. They are stored at sites controlled by a giant company. The new online applications add functions to that basic browser ability by using a set of software tools known among developers as Ajax. These tools enable a host of so-called Web 2.0, or Web services, applications like Google maps posted in Web sites or photos displayed on Flickr.com. Google Spreadsheets is a good example. (You can find the program at Google Labs, labs.google.com, but to use it you have to sign up for a Google account first. No one said free meant easy.) An alternative is Jotspot (www.jot.com), though its products are aimed more at business users. Google Spreadsheets has many of the features you use in Excel, like the ability to sort, change typefaces or color and insert a variety of set formulas. The developers plan to add other features like auto fill. You can save the document to your hard drive or to the Google servers. Once it is there, you can access the spreadsheet from any computer, which means you no longer have to load it onto a disk or flash drive to carry it home or to another office, or send it there by e-mail. Because the document is stored on the Google servers, you can give permission for other people with Google accounts to open and work on it. A team can work on it together to make changes. The file can also be opened in Excel. Jonathan Rochelle, product manager for Spreadsheets, said people were using it to create lists and share them with groups, like a soccer team or fellow students. Wedding planning becomes a little easier as couples use the multiple pages of the spreadsheet to track guests, accommodations and menu selection. He used it himself to help his father with a budget while the two were in different cities. Google's word processing software will work the same way. It has not been released yet, but an early version of the browser tool had every necessary function of Word except auto correct, where misspellings are changed on the fly. That feature is coming, Mr. Schillace said. "We haven't been able to do it smoothly." He said one early tester of Writely was the daughter of a divorced couple who have joint custody. The father told Mr. Schillace that she had been able to do her homework at either house and never had to worry about forgetting an assignment at one house or the other. If you don't want to wait for Google, a similar browser application is already available called Zoho Writer at www.zohowriter.com. (I wrote most of this article on Zoho with as much ease as writing with Microsoft Word.) Writeboard (www.writeboard.com) is a competitor. Another program, called Ajax Write (www.ajaxwrite.com), lacks the spell checking and word count functions that Word has taught us to rely upon. But you need not stop there. Applications for coordinating calendars among friends and family is another popular application that replaces some of the functions of Microsoft's Outlook program. Yahoo and Google have some, but there are others, including one from a start-up named 30Boxes (www.30boxes.com) that is very easy to use. Microsoft is also beginning to offer collaborative Web tools. If you like the idea of making your Web browser do more work, you might also download the Firefox browser, made by another competitor nipping at Microsoft's heels (at www.mozilla.com/firefox). Then you can start using any of the hundreds of add-ons, called extensions, that independent programmers have created to add functions to the browser, for example, the ability to synchronize bookmarks between computers, block ads or download video faster. Google Labs offers some of them. One of the most useful is Notebook. It puts a little button on the frame of your browser that organizes snippets of information you find on the Web into folders that are then accessible from any computer. When you are on a Web site and you see something you want to save, you highlight it, right-click your mouse, click on "Note this" in the dropdown menu, and your search is saved. Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) adds an element of the social networking that you find on Facebook or MySpace. A more fully featured alternative to Google Notebook is coming soon from Plum Ventures, a small start-up company based in San Francisco. You can join the waiting list at www.plum.com. With the application you can collect information, whether Web sites, photos, music or text files, and then annotate it and share it with others. You can also make your lists public, to share with strangers. A founder, Hans Peter Brondmo, said, "People like to watch what others are doing." He calls this "info-voyeurism." That you can do it free only makes it better. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/te...y/17money.html Microsoft Confirms Excel Zero-Day Attack Under Way Ryan Naraine Microsoft June 15 confirmed that a new, undocumented flaw in its widely used Excel spreadsheet program was being used in an attack against an unnamed target. The company's warning comes less than a month after a code-execution hole in Microsoft Word was exploited in what is described as a "super, super targeted attack" against business interests overseas. The back-to-back zero-day attacks closely resemble each other and suggest that well-organized criminals are conducting corporate espionage using critical flaws purchased from underground hackers. In an entry posted to the MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center) blog, Microsoft Operations Manager Mike Reavey said the company is investigating "a single report from a customer being impacted" by the latest attack. "Here's what we know: In order for this attack to be carried out, a user must first open a malicious Excel document that is sent as an email attachment or otherwise provided to them by an attacker," Reavey said. "Remember remember to be very careful opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown sources," he added. Microsoft has activated its security response process, which means a formal security advisory will be issued within 24 hours to suggest mitigation guidance and possible pre-patch workarounds. "We've got the Office team engaged of course, and they are hard at work investigating the vulnerability," Reavey said. According to security alerts aggregator Secunia, the Excel flaw has been confirmed on a fully updated Windows XP SP (Service Pack) 2 system with Microsoft Excel 2003 SP2. Anti-virus vendor Symantec said Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT and Windows 2000 computers are also at risk. Symantec was the first to raise a red flag about the attack, which includes the use of a Trojan horse program called Trojan.Mdropper.J. The Trojan arrives as a Microsoft Excel file attachment to a spoofed e-mail with the following name: "okN.xls." When the Trojan is executed, it exploits the Excel flaw to drop and execute a second piece of malware called Downloader.Booli.A. It then silently closes Microsoft Excel, much like that way the Microsoft Word attack worked. Downloader.Booli.A attempts to run Internet Explorer and inject its code into the browser to bypass firewalls. It then connects to a remote Web site hosted in Hong Kong to download another unknown file. Symantec, McAfee and others have added signature detections to remove malicious software that attempts to exploit the vulnerability. Microsoft's Windows Live Safety Center has also been updated, but security experts say the attack can easily be modified to bypass signatures. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1977588,00.asp Office Hit By Another Security Problem Joris Evers A weakness in how Office applications handle Macromedia Flash files exposes Microsoft customers to cyberattacks, experts have warned. Flash files embedded in Office documents could run and execute code without any warning, Symantec said in an alert sent to customers on Thursday. The security issue is the third problem reported within a week that affects Microsoft Office users. "A successful attack may allow attackers to access sensitive information and potentially execute malicious commands on a vulnerable computer," Symantec said in the alert, which was sent to users of its DeepSight security intelligence. The vulnerability was reported by researcher Debasis Mohanty. The issue relates to the ability to load ActiveX controls in an Office document and is not a vulnerability but an Office feature, a Microsoft representative said. "This behavior is by design and by itself does not represent a security risk to customers," he said. An ActiveX control is a small application typically used to make Web sites more interactive. However, Microsoft acknowledged, this functionality could be abused by an attacker to automatically load an ActiveX control on a user's system through an Office document. Currently, Microsoft is not aware of any ActiveX controls that could allow an attacker to hijack a vulnerable PC in this way, the representative said. "Microsoft will continue to investigate the public reports to help provide additional guidance for customers as necessary," he said. If any vulnerable ActiveX controls are found, it is possible to prevent execution in recent versions of Office by setting a so-called "killbit" for these controls, according to Microsoft. The ActiveX issue is the third security problem related to Office to surface within in a week. On Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that a flaw related to a Windows component called "hlink.dll" could be exploited by crafting a malicious Excel file. Late last week, Microsoft said a flaw in Excel was being exploited in at least one targeted cyberattack. To exploit either one of the new security issues, an attacker would need to craft a malicious file and host that file on a Web site, send it via e-mail, or otherwise provide it to the intended victim. The attempt can be successful only if the file is opened on a vulnerable PC. The problems come on the heels of Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" batch of security updates. Last week, Microsoft released 12 patches that addressed 21 vulnerabilities in various products, including Office applications. The company has said it is working on a patch for the first new Excel flaw. http://news.com.com/Office+hit+by+an...3-6087161.html Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office Press Release Microsoft and Creative Commons have teamed up to release the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office, a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licenses to works created in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint to easily select Creative Commons licenses from directly within the application they are working in. The first document to be CC-licensed using this tool is the text of Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil's iSummit keynote speech in English and Portugese. http://creativecommons.org/ Microsoft Antipiracy Tool Still Irks Users Elizabeth Montalbano Microsoft's program for testing whether a PC is running a genuine copy of Windows, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), has drawn considerable fire from users since it was launched last July. This week Microsoft gave users another reason to complain when the company confirmed the version of the program it is delivering as a "high priority" automatic update for Windows PCs is a test version. Usually, Microsoft distributes test versions of software separately from updates and users are given the opportunity to sign up for the software before test versions are downloaded. Microsoft said users still can opt out of downloading the update, called WGA Notifications, and that its user license makes it clear it is pre-release software. However, many users don't read an entire license agreement, which can be lengthy, before they download software to their computers. And some download all Windows updates without looking too hard at the fine print. Microsoft has mounted an aggressive program to eliminate counterfeit and pirated versions of Windows, and WGA is a part of that. The program was first distributed not as an automatic update but to users of Microsoft's download services who wanted to install add-on software, excluding security releases, for Windows. Since WGA's release, users have complained of bugs in the program. Problems Persist One of those problems, in which the software identifies a genuine copy of Windows as pirated or counterfeit, apparently persists, according to comments sent by e-mail to IDG News Service from one Windows user. "I bought my PC with a legitimate XP license, which I have registered, and now my machine keeps telling me I have pirated software," said Windows XP user Doug Fleming. "I paid good money for legitimate software and now my PC locks up whenever I get a message telling me my software isn't genuine. To make matters worse, there is no contact information to get the problem rectified." According to Microsoft, validation failure is "almost always caused by the use of a non-genuine Windows license." "In many cases, customers don't know they have received a counterfeit copy," the company said in an e-mail statement through its public relations firm Waggener Edstrom. Another Windows user said in an e-mail that the WGA Notifications service, which has to send information about a user's PC over the Internet back to Microsoft, could pose a security risk. Microsoft last week defended itself against charges that this aspect of the program was acting like spyware, which is software that gathers users' information through their Internet connection without users' knowledge. "The process seems to open a door for hackers to exploit," Windows user James Slotter said in an e-mail. "It might also open a door for another vendor to provide a more secure set of programs than Microsoft is willing to provide." "We understand customers? concern about installing a program that could possibly impact their systems," Microsoft said in a statement through Waggener Edstrom. "WGA Notifications has gone through a thorough testing period. We are confident that the software can be installed and used safely." WGA Notifications will be rolled out worldwide by the end of the year, Microsoft said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2006...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1 Microsoft Lieutenants Look Ahead, Hoping to Avoid Other Companies' Mistakes John Markoff Microsoft stands astride the computing world much as another corporate giant, I.B.M., once did. Now its task is to avoid repeating I.B.M.'s mistakes. As the PC era wanes and the Internet era gathers force, Microsoft's revenues have never been higher and its quarterly profits remain in the billions. But it has yet to find profitability in an array of businesses that it has entered beyond those it has dominated, operating systems and office applications. Finding the company's way in the new era will largely fall to the successors to Bill Gates, who announced on Thursday that he would leave his day-to-day role at Microsoft in two years. But in an interview on Friday in his office on the Microsoft campus, Mr. Gates said he was confident that the company was positioning itself for success in its fourth decade and beyond. "I don't think there's any period that's not a transitional period in computing," he said. "Somebody's always driving change." Referring to the relentless increase in computing power, he added, "When you have Moore's Law creating these exponentially new capabilities, we're always in a time of utter change, maybe even accelerating change." And he insisted that Microsoft was closely focused on adapting to that change — and learning from the legacy of companies that failed to do so. "We're all students of why didn't Wang make the change," Mr. Gates said. "Why didn't Digital Equipment, which was my favorite company, make the change?" A more fitting lesson may come from I.B.M., which dominated the mainframe computing era just as Microsoft has ruled the PC age. I.B.M. remained highly profitable in the 1980's even after the advent of the PC produced a growing array of challengers. But by the early 1990's, the eclipse of the mainframe and I.B.M.'s inability to find its way in the PC era forced the company to go through a sweeping makeover in management and culture; it has never regained its previous influence. Now it is the age of high-speed Internet connections and new digital devices that threaten the formula that established Microsoft's primacy. But Mr. Gates argued that the rapidly increasing availability of computing power, which undid his competitors, will ultimately save Microsoft. As the cost of computing falls, giving rise to new uses and appliances, Microsoft will find new markets and grow, he said. In that sense, technical advances have a different impact on computing than on other businesses, increasing rather than decreasing demand. "When they invented radial tires, they should have shot the guy," he said. "The whole industry went through a crisis, because it took nine years to squeeze out the extra factory capacity, because the tires lasted longer." Microsoft's future, he said, lies in applications that will offer new capabilities. He cited an announcement planned for later this month that is intended to extend the Microsoft Office business into the telecommunications world by more tightly linking the power of PC's and telephones. Even as he pulls back from day-to-day activities, Mr. Gates will play a prominent role as chairman as well as the company's largest shareholder. But on Thursday he said the company's technical leadership would continue to report to him for only another year before shifting to work for Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive. It is at that point that the unusual chemistry that the two men have refined over a quarter-century — with Mr. Gates as the technical visionary and Mr. Ballmer as the sales leader — will be most thoroughly tested. Whether Mr. Ballmer can change his role to take responsibility for both sides of the equation remains to be seen, but there is little doubt that he has the commitment to carry on as Microsoft's chief executive far into the future. Even six years ago, when Mr. Gates first said that he agreed with Mr. Ballmer to remain committed to Microsoft until he was 50 — the age they have now reached — Mr. Ballmer said he often felt that he would leave only by being carried out of the company. His immediate challenge is to convince Wall Street that he is still the right man for the job, something that is certain to take several successful products. At a news conference on Thursday at a Microsoft corporate television studio, he and Mr. Gates took pains to stress continuity in the company's leadership — what Mr. Ballmer referred to as the "relentless patience" underlying the company's strategy and long-term planning approach. In the front row facing the two executives were Ray Ozzie, the veteran computer industry executive to whom Mr. Gates is handing the role of chief software architect, and Craig Mundie, a second veteran who has been the designer of the company's government and international strategy, and who will now formally head research and strategy. At the back of the room sat the company's three divisional presidents, Jeff Raikes, Robert J. Bach and Kevin Johnson, as well as a handful of key lieutenants, including Rick Rashid, the head of research; Steven Sinofsky, now leading the technical effort in the operating systems business; and J Allard, the original designer of the Xbox video game system, who is now leading an effort to extend the software technology underlying the company's entertainment business. The collection of executive talent represents the breadth of Microsoft's ambition. Mr. Ozzie, whose résumé includes the conception of Lotus Notes in the 1980's, has risen rapidly to his position of technical leader since he came to Microsoft last year when it acquired his company, Groove Networks. Mr. Ozzie's ascent is interpreted by some industry executives as an acknowledgment by Mr. Gates that it is time for Microsoft to build a new foundation on the Internet. Brad Silverberg, a previous technical leader at Microsoft, left the company in the 1990's when he became convinced that Mr. Gates was not willing to move quickly enough in breaking with the past. "Ray is the real DNA in terms of the future of Microsoft's software path," said Mark R. Anderson, an analyst at Strategic News Service, a technology consulting firm. Mr. Gates, he said, has been a "fast follower" who has been able to repeatedly change Microsoft's strategy to rapidly pursue and then overtake competitors with new technologies. Mr. Ozzie, in contrast, has a record of innovation, first with Notes and then with Groove, a PC-based software system that allows groups of workers to collaborate — a product that is now being integrated into the next version of Office. "It's easy when you're following the taillights," Mr. Anderson said. "It's a lot harder when you have to invent the car." One crucial aspect of Mr. Gates's legacy at Microsoft will be its ability to salvage its Windows Vista operating system. The program has entered its second test version and is scheduled to be commercially available early next year. In interviews during the last two days, Microsoft executives almost universally expressed caution about whether the program, the most complex software undertaking in the company's history, is certain to be on schedule for January shipment — more than five years after the current version, Windows XP. "We're looking at these incoming bug arrival rates and feeling pretty good," Mr. Gates said. "They're working really hard, they believe they're going to make those dates, but the dates are not a sacrosanct thing." A number of researchers who follow the company say Vista, a project born under the code name Longhorn, has left psychic wounds from which the company is still trying to recover. "It is clear to me that Gates lost touch with the core of the company several years ago, as evidenced by the collapse of the Longhorn project and the abyss the Windows group fell into," said Michael A. Cusumano, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "so this announcement is really just recognizing what already exists — his mind is elsewhere." On Friday, Mr. Gates acknowledged that he was not following Vista on a daily basis. That job belongs to another executive, Jim Allchin, who has announced that he will leave once the troubled program is shipped successfully. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/te...gy/17soft.html Porn-surfing Oregon Worker Exposes 2,200 Taxpayer IDs Gregg Keizer More than 2,200 Oregon taxpayers' identities were stolen by a keylogging Trojan horse that infected a state PC after an Oregon Department of Revenue worker browsed porn sites, officials admitted this week. The identities included Social Security numbers, names, and addresses, and were transmitted to an unknown hacker by the keylogger, said the Department of Revenue in an online FAQ. According to the DOR, its anti-malware filters didn't pick up the Trojan because it was so new that anti-virus vendors hadn't yet created detecting signatures. No taxpayer financial data was lost to the keylogger, the DOR claimed. Although the part-time worker's PC was infected in early January, the keylogger went undetected until May 15, when an audit of its hard drive was conducted after the employee was found downloading pornography during work hours and fired. Monday, Oregon's DOR began notifying taxpayers whose identities were exposed, and on Wednesday Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) promised that the state would pick up the tab for credit monitoring and other protective services. "I want the citizens of Oregon to know that we are taking every possible action to ensure that the people affected by this breech receive immediate notification, and that the State of Oregon will do everything possible to guard against any further compromise of their personal information," Kulongoski said in a statement. http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/18940172... lYmhvBHNlYwM- How to Boycott the Music Industry and Still Enjoy Music Andreas Viklund The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection. The only one who is really affected is the one who is buying CDs and DVDs. Releasing copy proctected media is not enough of course, the MI influences governments as well to outlaw people who copy CDs with copy protection or download them from the internet. They want you to purchase the same media three or four times if you want to listen to it at home, at your notebook, in your car and in your mp3 player. Some companies try to even get more control over the consumers computer by adding additional controlling software to the media. Sony for instance decided it would be a good idea to install a rootkit on the clients computer to ensure no media would be copied. Again only real consumers experienced this measure. People who downloaded them from the internet had no problem with this at all. I think it is time to boycott the Music Industry and find other ways to enjoy music from bands and companies that are not part of this MI. My article tries to list alternatives without paying a dime to the MI. Don´t get me wrong. Artists deserve money for their work, I do not advocate to do something illegal to get the music you like. I only present a different approach. Here we go.. 1. Buy used CDs and trade CDs You find thousands of used music CDs at online shops like Ebay or Amazon Marketplace. The media has been purchased before and everything you pay will reach the person who is selling the media. (with a small amount for the company who provides the plattform). I have no experience in trading CDs but a google search reveals lots of interesting results on the topic. Maybe you already have experience with such a service and would like to comment on it. Let us know if this is a working alternative. 2. Borrow CDs. This might work in some countries while others do not allow this at all. Borrow CDs from friends and listen to those CDs, it´s legal in some countries to copy the content for a friend as well. Check your local laws. 3. Support local bands / bands without major contracts Many local bands manage everything themselves. They produce their own CDs, they create T-Shirts and play in local clubs and bars. The majority of the earnings will reach the band and the people working with the band. This is a great way to support a band directly. 4. Listen to (internet) radio and record it Listening to internet radio is free. Websites like shoutcast, di.fm and xiph.org offer links to streams of thousands of free radio stations. You will find radio stations for mainstream music as well as stations that play stuff like gospel and swing. It is legal in some countries to record those radio streams using so called streamrippers that download the stream while you listen to it. (There are actually some tools out there that are able to record more than one stream). Take a look at my guide to streamripping if you are interested in this. Streamer-Radio is another freeware tool that can record streams. Pandora offers a unique service but is still considered an internet radio station. You enter a song or artist name and it tries to find matching artists that play in the same style. You need to register to hear more than a few songs though. Read this article if you want to find out how to save pandora streams. 5. Audio Blogs / Podcasts Audio Blogs provide their visitors with audio content. This could be in the form of downloadable mp3 files or music streams. Many encourage their visitors to download the mp3 files, some offer options to buy a CD if you like the music. Visit monkeyfilter.com for a large list of audio blogs. 75 Minutes is a great podcast site that links to free music. Podsafe Music Network offers many songs as well. 6. Download free music Thousands of websites exist that offer free mp3 downloads. It could be that a musician offers (part of) his music on a website for free or that a company who sells music is offering free sample songs. The following list contains only sites that offers many songs for free, some demand a registration before you can download songs but that should be ok in my opinion. Altsounds Alternative Music Online (no registration) Amazon Free Music Downloads (registration required) Archive.org (no registration) Artistlaunch (no registration) Audiostreet (registration required) Audiri (no registration) CD Baby (no registration) DMusic (no registration) Download.com (registration required) Epitonic (no registration) Etree (registration required) Garageband (no registration) Oddio Overplay (no registration) Oggle (no registration) Pure Volume (no registration) Singing Fish (no registration) Soundlife (no registration) http://www.ghacks.net/2006/06/16/how...l-enjoy-music/ Not Going Anywhere For A Few Months? Jack Winamp has always been my first choice for desktop music streaming. It’s small, fast and it sounds good. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t turn down any genuine improvements however. The copywriters, I mean writers at techspot have attempted just that with their tweak system for Winamp. One caveat however: it’s a typically near endless piece of run-on pages, designed to expose you to as much spam as you can possibly stand. They found my limit. It’s more than I could stand so I stayed just long enough to grab the link. I’ll pass it along in case you’re masochistic. Note to techspot: I wish you’d stop treating your readers like they’re captives. They’re not you know, and this business of page after page after irritating page of advertising eventually leads to less hits, not more. DSL Strikes A Chord With Frugal Shoppers Marguerite Reardon A new kind of digital divide is emerging in the U.S. broadband market. On one side are middle-income and price-sensitive households, which tend to favor DSL service offered by phone companies. On the other are more affluent families, which gravitate toward higher-speed cable modem services. According to a recent report published by Leichtman Research Group, about 21 percent of households earning an annual income of between $30,000 and $75,000 a year subscribe to DSL. About 18 percent of these households subscribe to cable. By contrast, 37 percent of all households with annual household incomes over $75,000 subscribe to cable broadband and 27 percent subscribe to DSL. "Clearly price is much more important at this point in the game," said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group. "Middle-income families making the jump from dial-up to broadband are much more price-sensitive, and clearly the phone companies' messaging on low-priced DSL has gotten through loud and clear." A year-and-a-half ago, pricing of DSL and cable modem service was roughly the same. But over the past year, the phone companies have launched an aggressive assault by dropping prices. At the end of 2005, the average price of DSL service was about $32 per month, roughly $9 less than cable, according to research firm IDC. AT&T has twice lowered the price of its DSL service and now offers its 1.5Mbps service for $12.99 for the first year. Since AT&T's prices are promotional, after the first year, the price of the service jumps to the company's regular pricing model, which is $29.99 per month. Verizon created a new tier of service, which includes 768Kbps downloads, for $14.95 per month. Price pressure Regardless of household income, the promise of lower prices has also convinced some cable subscribers to switch to DSL. Dan Spencer, 38, of Norristown, Pa., had been a Comcast broadband subscriber for over three years. But after he realized his family was paying over $100 per month for high-speed Internet access and TV service, he decided to abandon Comcast for EchoStar's satellite TV and Verizon's DSL service. "My wife usually pays our bills," he said. "But one day, when I saw how much we were paying Comcast for our cable TV and broadband, I was shocked. It was outrageous." Spencer said he now pays about $75 per month for TV and Internet access, and he estimates he is saving roughly $45 per month over what he was paying for the Comcast service. The low cost of DSL has kick-started DSL subscription rates, helping DSL providers increase their total customer base by 39 percent in 2005, according to Forrester Research. Verizon alone signed up 613,000 new high-speed Internet subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2005, a record for the company. It continued the strong growth in 2006, having signed up 541,000 new subscribers in the first quarter. But the phone companies' success hasn't meant the demise of cable, which in total saw broadband subscriptions grow 21 percent in 2005. In fact, cable companies have also set new records in recent quarters for the number of subscribers they've acquired. Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., added 436,000 new subscribers in the first quarter of 2006, the largest number of new subscribers the company has ever signed up in a first quarter. And Time Warner, the second-biggest cable company in the nation, had its best quarter ever for broadband subscriptions, winning 343,000 new subscribers in the first quarter. "Our competitors attempted to start a price war last year," said Keith Cocozza, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "While some broadband providers lowered prices, we didn't, outside our standard promotional pricing. And over the last few quarters, we've seen some of the strongest growth in new subscribers." Mining dial-up users Growth in broadband for cable and DSL isn't expected to slow anytime soon, as dial-up users and people who have never subscribed to a broadband service come online. Nearly 30 percent of all Americans don't have any Internet access, according to the Leichtman Research Group. And of the 69 percent or so who do have access to the Internet, about 40 percent are still using dial-up. Cable and phone providers see these untapped markets as ripe for new business. "Everyone wants to make it a horse race between cable and DSL," said Leichtman. "The truth is, there is plenty of opportunity for both sides to win." But he added that he sees a growing division between consumers subscribing to cable and those choosing DSL. Cable is perceived as the leader in speed and performance, whereas DSL is seen as the economical choice, he said. Not surprisingly, neither the cable operators nor the phone companies like being pigeonholed into these categories. John Wimsatt, senior vice president of broadband solutions for Verizon, downplayed the impact of price on the company's strong subscriber growth. Instead, he said consumers are drawn to the carrier because they are looking for more choices, which he said cable doesn't offer. "We've learned that one size doesn't fit all," he said. "Even with our 768Kbps product for $14.95, we still see strong demand for our 3Mbps service and even our Fios fiber-to-the-home service, where it's available." Cable operators, who tout their faster speeds any chance they get, also say they haven't given up on price-sensitive consumers. They plan to address the cost issue by pushing packages of service, which include high-speed Internet access, TV and phone service. For example, Comcast offers a triple-play package for $99 for the first year. "This is a bundle that is about value," said Jeanne Russo, a spokeswoman for Comcast. "And we think it appeals very much to middle-income households. You can see from our sales numbers that consumers are responding. We are seeing are greatest penetration in places where we offer the triple-play package." http://news.com.com/DSL+strikes+a+ch...3-6084717.html House Passes Subscription-TV Legislation Bill seeks to open cable-TV markets to more competition AP Legislation to open cable TV markets to more competition, possibly saving consumers hundreds of dollars a year, passed the House Thursday. The biggest telecommunications legislation in a decade, approved 321-101, would make it easier for telephone companies to enter the subscription television market. A national franchise process would replace the current system where potential providers must negotiate contracts municipality by municipality, sometimes taking months and years. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., co-sponsored the bill. The vote came shortly after the House rejected a Democratic-backed amendment aimed at better protecting Internet users from pricing or access discrimination that Internet providers might apply. The issue of "net neutrality" dominated debate on the bill. "This legislation can increase competition not only for cable services, but also unleash a race for who can supply the fastest, most sophisticated broadband connections that will provide video, voice and data services," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas. He noted that because of the impediments created by the local franchising system, the United States doesn't even rank in the top 10 worldwide in broadband deployment. "This bill should change that statistic." Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich, who heads the telecommunications subcommittee, estimated that people could save $30 to $40 each month if given a choice in video services. But many Democrats said the measure did too little to ensure that broadband services would be extended to lower income and rural areas. They also said the bill does not adequately address "net neutrality," preventing companies from discriminating against competitors or less affluent consumers by restricting access or charging higher fees. The telephone and cable companies that provide the service say further regulation is unnecessary and would hamper efforts to expand high speed services. Demanding assurances of net neutrality are content providers such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo! Inc., and Internet users ranging from the Christian Coalition to rock musicians. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., offered an amendment stating that broadband network providers must not discriminate against or interfere with users' ability to access or offer lawful content. Without that amendment, said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, "telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway. This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the Internet." It was defeated 269-152. "You can call an amendment net neutrality," said Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio. "But it's still government regulation." "Tilting the cost burden onto end users, which would be the inevitable result of neutrality regulations, will only delay much-needed broadband deployment," said Mike McCurry, co-chair of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telephone, business and small government groups. Barton's bill would give the Federal Communications Commission authority to enforce net neutrality principles and set fines of up to $500,000 for violations. The White House said in a statement that it supported the bill and its language on video franchising. But on net neutrality, the administration said the FCC has the power to address potential abuses. "Creating a new legislative framework for regulation in this area is premature," the statement said. Rush, a black lawmaker who represents the South Side of Chicago, said he was co-sponsoring the bill because it would make it easier for minority entrepreneurs to get access to the telecommunications industry. Rush said his constituents want relief from the high cost of cable. "We pay more for video services, for high premium packages, than any other group in America. And why is that? Because only on cable do we see people who look like us, speak like us, and who understand us. That is why we pay more for cable." The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee is to vote on its version of the bill later this month. The Senate debate also has focused on how best to ensure net neutrality. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13218791/ Local news AT&T Announces $336 Million Video TV plan, Other Upgrades Stephanie Reitz AT&T plans to start offering television service over Connecticut phone lines by the end of the year, company officials said Thursday. The service should be available within three years to at least half of the areas in the state that AT&T serves. The company plans to spend $336 million for the new service and other technology improvements in Connecticut. "Consumers here have waited way too long for new choices in the video market," said Michele Macauda, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Connecticut. The state Department of Public Utility Control ruled earlier this month that AT&T can offer the service without securing a cable franchise. DPUC commissioners said AT&T's video product is a packet of data streamed over a network, making it "fundamentally different" from cable TV. "Now that we have the regulatory clarity we need, we will begin building our network," said Ramona Carlow, vice president for regulatory and external affairs for AT&T Connecticut. A day after the DPUC's June 7 ruling in favor of AT&T, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would require video service providers such as AT&T to obtain cable franchises from the Federal Communications Commission. Similar proposals are pending in the Senate. Several Connecticut cable companies and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said the DPUC should stay its decision on AT&T's service so commissioners can review those developments. They argue that exempting AT&T from cable franchise requirements gives it more rights than cable companies and offers fewer protections to consumers. As of Thursday, the DPUC had not decided on the companies' request for a stay. AT&T officials said they are going ahead with their service, which will offer more than 200 channels. Subscribers will also have access to a library of on-demand movies and other video and the ability to immediately check information such as stock quotes and sport scores, they said. The service includes picture-in-picture technology, caller ID displayed on screen, and sports matches with perspectives from multiple camera angles and real-time statistics, the officials said. They declined to discuss how much the service will cost, saying they do not want competitors to learn those details yet. The $336 million project announced Thursday is part of a $4.6 billion system that is expected to reach about 19 million households in Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin by 2008. http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Business AT&T Rewrites Rules: Your Data Isn't Yours David Lazarus AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers' personal data with government officials. The new policy says that AT&T -- not customers -- owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process." The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service -- something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing. Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service -- a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers' recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others. The company's policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration's war on terror. "They're obviously trying to avoid a hornet's nest of consumer-protection lawsuits," said Chris Hoofnagle, a San Francisco privacy consultant and former senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "They've written this new policy so broadly that they've given themselves maximum flexibility when it comes to disclosing customers' records," he said. AT&T is being sued by San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation for allegedly allowing the NSA to tap into the company's data network, providing warrantless access to customers' e-mails and Web browsing. AT&T is also believed to have participated in President Bush's acknowledged domestic spying program, in which the NSA was given warrantless access to U.S. citizens' phone calls. AT&T said in a statement last month that it "has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy" and that "our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy." But the company also asserted that it has "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare, whether it be an individual or the security interests of the entire nation." Under its former privacy policy, introduced in September 2004, AT&T said it might use customer's data "to respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law." The new version, which is specifically for Internet and video customers, is much more explicit about the company's right to cooperate with government agencies in any security-related matters -- and AT&T's belief that customers' data belongs to the company, not customers. "While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T," the new policy declares. "As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process." It says the company "may disclose your information in response to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process," omitting the earlier language about such processes being "required and/or permitted by law." The new policy states that AT&T "may also use your information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud (or) situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person" -- conditions that would appear to embrace any terror-related circumstance. Ray Everett-Church, a Silicon Valley privacy consultant, said it seems clear that AT&T has substantially modified its privacy policy in light of revelations about the government's domestic spying program. "It's obvious that they are trying to stretch their blanket pretty tightly to cover as many exposed bits as possible," he said. Gail Hillebrand, a staff attorney at Consumers Union in San Francisco, said the declaration that AT&T owns customers' data represents the most significant departure from the company's previous policy. "It creates the impression that they can do whatever they want," she said. "This is the real heart of AT&T's new policy and is a pretty fundamental difference from how most customers probably see things." John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, denied that the updated privacy policy marks a shift in the company's approach to customers' info. "We don't see this as anything new," he said. "Our goal was to make the policy easier to read and easier for customers to understand." He acknowledged that there was no explicit requirement in the past that customers accept the privacy policy as a condition for service. And he acknowledged that the 2004 policy said nothing about customers' data being owned by AT&T. But Britton insisted that these elements essentially could be found between the lines of the former policy. "There were many things that were implied in the last policy." He said. "We're just clarifying the last policy." AT&T's new privacy policy is the first to include the company's video service. AT&T says it's spending $4.6 billion to roll out TV programming to 19 million homes nationwide. The policy refers to two AT&T video services -- Homezone and U-verse. Homezone is AT&T's satellite TV service, offered in conjunction with Dish Network, and U-verse is the new cablelike video service delivered over phone lines. In a section on "usage information," the privacy policy says AT&T will collect "information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services." The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 stipulates that cable and satellite companies can't collect or disclose information about customers' viewing habits. The law is silent on video services offered by phone companies via the Internet, basically because legislators never anticipated such technology would be available. AT&T's Britton said the 1984 law doesn't apply to his company's video service because AT&T isn't a cable provider. "We are not building a cable TV network," he said. "We're building an Internet protocol television network." But Andrew Johnson, a spokesman for cable heavyweight Comcast, disputed this perspective. "Video is video is video," he said. "If you're delivering programming over a telecommunications network to a TV set, all rules need to be the same." AT&T's new and former privacy policies both state that "conducting business ethically and ensuring privacy is critical to maintaining the public's trust and achieving success in a dynamic and competitive business climate." Both also state that "privacy responsibility" extends "to the privacy of conversations and to the flow of information in data form." As such, both say that "the trust of our customers necessitates vigilant, responsible privacy protections." The 2004 policy, though, went one step further. It said AT&T realizes "that privacy is an important issue for our customers and members." The new policy makes no such acknowledgment. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...UG9VJHB9C1.DTL Stonehenge's Day In The Sun  Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images A man stands on top of Stonehenge as the sun rises on June 21, 2006, in Amesbury, England. An estimated 19,000 people celebrated the start of the longest day of the year at the 5,000-year-old stone circle. Reportedly, only four arrests were made at the all-night party. http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6086...ne.gall.latest Web Firm Tries To Create Safe Haven For Tweens Stefanie Olsen Younger kids now have their own online club for blogging, sharing photos and socializing--without the privacy hazards parents worry about in connection to hip communities like MySpace, where children under 14 aren't welcome but often sneak in anyway. On Thursday, Industrious Kids, a privately held company in Emeryville, Calif., introduced Imbee.com, one of the first social networks for kids aged 8 to 14, and one that promotes security and parental controls. The network requires parents to authorize a child's membership with a valid credit card, by first authenticating their own identity. Information posted to the site by children is viewable only to invited friends and family, and not available for indexing by search engines like Google. For a membership with a personal blog, Imbee costs $3.95 a month (for two kids and one adult). It's free for members who want just to e-mail. Industrious Kids said this summer that it will promote Imbee in partnership with Paramount Parks. It plans visits to three Paramount amusement parks, including Great America in San Jose, Calif., to sign up kids and parents and give away prizes. With Imbee, Industrious is aiming to appeal to "tweens"--a booming portion of the population, with an estimated 30 million kids between the ages of 8 and 14--while also attracting parents with a viable safe haven on the Web. Awareness of the perils the Internet can present to impressionable minds has heightened with the rising popularity of sites like MySpace and YouTube, and the knowledge that ever-younger kids are attracted to them. Despite enforcing decency standards, sites like MySpace have had trouble with risque material being posted, predators taking advantage of children's personal information, and underage children masquerading as adults in order to join. Take Olivia, a 13-year-old from Seattle--she spends one to two hours a day online during the week and between four and five hours a day online on the weekends. "Most of the time I spend working on my own page and commenting on other people's pages" on MySpace, Olivia said this week at the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in Laguna Beach, Calif. There's a question as to whether kids like Olivia would be attracted to a secure, parent-authenticated community. With Imbee, parents can have an active or passive role in their child's membership, meaning they can choose to be notified of, and retain approval power over, new-friend invitations, e-mails and blog posts. Or, by maintaining the default setting, they can choose to just monitor the activity in the background, via a daily Imbee e-mail. In the intermediary role, parents must decide to approve or disapprove blog posts, for example, before they go up on the site. If the child doesn't like a parent's decision, it could be what Tim Donovan, a founding member of Imbee, called a "teachable moment." "It becomes a tool for parents to engage in dialogue with the child about online etiquette, like what to post and who to talk to, so that when they've grown out of it, they go out of it with some real fundamental skill sets," said Donovan. "To some degree, parents have been hands-off to their kids online, probably because they don't know when things happen. This makes it immediate," he added. Like many social networks, Imbee's benefits include libraries of graphics such as avatars and "skins" kids can choose from to personalize their pages. Children can also upload their own graphics, as well as pictures, and the site will eventually host motion graphics and instant messaging. The site also lets members print personalized cards to hand out to friends, and even earn "points" for blogging, which can add up to prizes like limited-edition skins or skateboards. Video frenzy In related news, TiVo introduced its Kidzone feature, software controls that act as a digital nanny for TV viewing. Parents can program their TiVo digital video recorder to block certain channels or programs. Or parents can choose the specific programs their kids are allowed to watch, like those recommended in TiVo's specialized kid-friendly menus. The software controls are now covered by TiVo's standard service fees. Meanwhile, more organizations are warning parents about the dangers that popular video-upload sites can present to kids. This week, the New York State Consumer Protection Board issued a statement about how simple it is for kids to find and watch racy videos on Google Video, which hosts video submitted by users, entertainment companies and others. Despite policies against violent or pornographic clips, such material still ends up on Google Video, according to the Consumer Protection Board. One video it described, labeled as "funny," depicted a man setting himself on fire. "It may surprise parents that Google openly presents videos--with many containing strong sexual content and violence--without a child having to first search for these videos," Teresa Santiago, executive director of the board, said in a statement. According to Santiago, Google had said it would restrict its "Top 100" list and its most-popular video section to only family-friendly videos. And Google said it is working on a safe-search feature for videos that would restrict viewing by kids, if parents applied the filtering tools. The concerns are real. But judging from this week's Global Internet Summit, many older kids say they aren't watching much at Google Video. Zach, a 17-year-old from Newport Beach, Calif., said he largely visits YouTube and wasn't even aware of Google Video. What's more, Yasmin, an 18-year-old from the area, called sites like MySpace "overrated," indicating that MySpace could be a fad for younger kids. So what's the latest fad for college-bound kids? Ravelinks.com, according to CK, a 17-year-old headed to Chapman University next fall. "That's where I find out about parties," he said. http://news.com.com/Web+firm+tries+t...ag=st.txt.caro Kids Outsmart Web Filters Stefanie Olsen Last November, Ryan, a high-school sophomore, figured out a way to outsmart the Web filters on a school PC in order to visit the off-limits MySpace.com while doing "homework" in the computer lab. A teacher eventually spotted the social network on the screen in front of "Ryan," a fictitious name for a real student attending school in Phoenix, Ore., a small town with a population of about 5,000. The teacher flagged the activity for the school's technology expert, who then followed Ryan's tracks online through the school network. Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that allow users to access other sites through them.) "I eventually tracked down the (Internet Protocol) address, so that it doesn't work for him anymore," said Don Wolff, tech coordinator in the Phoenix-Talent School District, adding that Ryan didn't face disciplinary action. "It's against our acceptable-use policy, but he's not going to quit trying, (and this way) we can keep learning." "This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said. Web proxies are almost as old as the Internet itself as a means to route Web traffic through an anonymous domain name or circumvent content-filters, and they've long been the territory of corporate networks and the tech savvy seeking privacy. Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering technology providers. Proxies are just one of many tricks that kids use to break locks put on forbidden material--a pursuit of almost any young generation. As more schools place tight controls on PCs to stop kids from file-sharing, instant messaging, social networking or looking at undesirable material online, the kids are getting more clever, tech experts say. Google, by far the most popular search site, has a "safe search" feature, for example, that filters out adult material. But kids can circumvent those filters by viewing "cached" links or thumbnail images to look at inappropriate material, experts say. Teens also trick filters by typing in misspelled words or modern slang to retrieve links to racy material. Translation sites Babelfish or Google Translate can deliver sites like Playboy.com translated from another language. "It's going to be the constant battle. No matter what you put up, kids are going to work around it," said Lynn Beebe, a school counselor in Scotts Valley, Calif. Her school, for example, uses filters to block all sites with the word or subject "blog," in addition to other sites. But there's no foolproof solution. Beebe said that a small population of boys at the school use their free time to play games online. Sometimes they've shared with her that when they mistakenly type in a URL, an undesirable site appears, she said. A more popular avenue for teens on school PCs is to visit any one of thousands of Web proxy sites such as Proxify, Guardster.com and Proxy.org to call up banned sites without notice, according to filtering companies. Kevin Sanders, senior software engineer at Lightspeed Systems, maker of a content-filtering system called Total Traffic Control, said he targets such proxy sites in a master database of thousands of barred sites for school clients. Proxies can get trickier. "A far more difficult problem to deal with is when they download a piece of software on their home computer, using a CGI script to (access content). Our product doesn't recognize it as a known domain, because it's just going through their home computer," said Sanders. Web sites like Freeproxy point visitors to many free downloadable applications like "Hidemyass.com" that let kids work around content filters in a more surreptitious way. Teen blogs can also be found that point kids to proxies for school filters. How to deal with it? "We block all requests going to unknown sites," Sanders said. Lightspeed keeps a database of roughly 2 million recognized sites categorized in groups like News, Adult or Violence. School clients or administrators of the product can limit access so kids can access only acceptable categories such as News or Education. For Sanders, if a site goes unrecognized, he simply bans it. "We also have a new feature coming out very soon which will allow us to dynamically detect the use of CGI-based proxies and block that session and send a notification to the network administrator," said Sanders. http://news.com.com/Kids+outsmart+We...48.html?tag=nl Millions in unpaid royalties CyberHome DVD Recorders Seized A task force of local, state and federal agencies seized more than 20,000 CyberHome-brand DVD recorders that allegedly use Philips patents without a license. CyberHome U.S.A. of Fremont, Calif., markets DVD players, DVD recorders, portable DVD players and a handful of LCD TVs. Its customers include Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry’s, Target and Wal-Mart. The task force, whose lead agency is the FBI, obtained a search warrant to enter the warehouse as “part of an ongoing investigation into the illegal manufacture and sale of products bearing counterfeit trademarks,” the task force said. California law provides for imprisonment up to three years and fines up to $500,000 for the manufacture, possession, or sale of more than 1,000 items bearing a counterfeit mark, the task force said. Eight tractor-trailer loads of infringing DVD recorders were seized with an estimated retail value of more than $2 million. The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office called CyberHome “one of the world’s largest manufacturers and importers of DVD devices.” The company’s Web site said its products are also sold in Europe. The task force, called REACT, was tipped of by Philips, said a spokesman for Philips Electronics North America in New York. “CyberHome has been using Philips DVD technology in its DVD players and recorders for a very long time now without paying royalties,” the spokesman said. “Their debts currently are a multimillion amount of dollars. At this moment, CyberHome is not licensed at all, so they infringe upon our patents. This is illegal, and it also creates unfair competition in the market, as many other companies are licensed. We always want to find solutions in a peaceful way, but if companies do not respect our IP, we are forced to take legal steps.” http://www.twice.com/article/CA6344162.html Rolling Stones Guitarist in Rehab Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood checked into a London rehabilitation clinic this week for treatment of alcohol abuse, but he will join the band for the start of its European tour next month as planned, a spokeswoman said on Friday. The European leg of the Stones' "Bigger Bang" tour, already delayed once after bandmate Keith Richards' mysterious accident in Fiji, will re-launch as scheduled on July 11 in Milan, Italy, publicist Fran Curtis said. She confirmed reports that Wood, 59, had checked into an alcohol rehabilitation facility in South London this week but insisted he would be on stage and ready to perform with the band for the opening show in Milan. She said a spokesman for Wood was accurately quoted on Wednesday by the Sun newspaper as saying, "He (Wood) needs some rest, but he will definitely be fit for the first night of the European tour." Wood, who has long battled drinking problems and was in rehab last year, was reportedly with Richards, 62, and their wives on vacation in Fiji in late April when Richards suffered a head injury that forced the Stones to postpone the first 15 dates of their European tour. Details of Richards' accident, and his subsequent medical treatment in New Zealand, have never been disclosed, but he was reported to have fallen out of a palm tree. The band announced earlier this month that he had made a "complete recovery." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061601241.html Smithsonian Removes Electric-Car Exhibit AP Just weeks before the release of a movie about the death of the electric car from the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has removed its EV1 electric sedan from display. The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise. The upcoming film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th. GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display. A museum spokeswoman says the museum simply needed the space to display another vehicle, a high-tech SUV. The Smithsonian has no plans to bring the electric car back on view. It will remain in a Suitland storage facility. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061601241.html Payola Déjà vu Leon And that makes it four! In a deal to get out of jail, EMI has agreed to pay $3.75 million to a music charity after being accused of paying (read: bribing) radio programmers to play specific songs by the likes of Coldplay, Norah Jones and the Rolling Stones. EMI is the last of the four big music companies to reach a settlement as part of an investigation by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. The New York Times reports that EMI had acknowledged that certain employees had "engaged in some promotional activities that were wrong and inappropriate." "Wrong and inappropriate"? Guys, try illegal. US and New York state laws ban broadcasters from accepting payments of cash or anything of value unless the arrangement is disclosed to listeners. EMI executives not only showed that they care about such technicalities. The email trail they left showed they were pretty dumb too. Welcome to the music business. To check the incriminating evidence, check the attorney-general's website. The thing that struck me about this case is that payola, the practice that earned notoriety in the early 60s when DJ Alan Freed was pinged for accepting bribes to play particular records, still seems alive and well. So what's changed? Well may we ask. http://www.soxfirst.com/50226711/payola_deja_vu.php And You're So Funny? Write My Script Warren St. John IT is a thought that has surely raced through the mind of almost every performer who has ever been heckled, booed, mocked or made to feel unappreciated by an audience: "Let's see you do better." Now a Brooklyn entertainer named Ze Frank is doing something about it. Like a lot of young adults, Mr. Frank, 34, has a Web site, zefrank.com. There, he documents elaborate and often ridiculous stunts of his own creation, like having two people on opposite sides of the world simultaneously place pieces of bread on the ground, creating what he calls an "earth sandwich." Since mid-March, Mr. Frank has also been producing daily video shorts for his site, starring himself. The shorts typically feature a bug-eyed Mr. Frank talking directly into the camera about subjects like MySpace, government wiretapping and Iraq. He also indulges in the occasional stunt, like pouring chocolate milk all over himself. His site draws around 10,000 viewers a day, and many of them use the site's comments section to praise, argue over or eviscerate his abilities as an entertainer. So Mr. Frank turned the tables. With help from a programmer friend, he set up the comedy-writing equivalent of a Wikipedia page — an online site where anyone could write a joke and edit or even delete the jokes of others — and told his viewing public that if they were so brilliant, they could collaborate to write a script for his show. If they did so, Mr. Frank promised, he would faithfully execute it, no matter how absurd, and post the resulting video on his site. He called the event "Fabuloso Friday," and gave it a slogan: "Where you think so I don't have to." Much has been written lately about "the wisdom of crowds." The idea, promoted by the author James Surowiecki in his book of that title, is that large numbers of loosely connected strangers are better at solving problems and predicting the future than a few elites. But what about the wit of crowds? Could a vast network of volunteer writers from around the globe be funnier than a lone comedy writer in a one-bedroom apartment in Cobble Hill? Mr. Frank thought that farming out his script would provide some answers. Which explains why at 11 a.m. on Friday, June 9, he was sitting before a video camera with freshly dyed red hair, wearing a fake mustache, puffing a fake pipe and stroking a stuffed cat, sitting in an armchair next to a globe, a rubber duck, two pieces of white bread and a framed portrait of Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice — an absurd array of props mandated by the script. "The meta joke here is, 'See how hard you can shake the marionette,' " Mr. Frank said between takes. "There's a violence to it." Mr. Frank (he pronounces his first name "zay," derived from his real name, Hosea) is an interesting point man for the nascent craft of Wikicomedy. He grew up in Albany and got a degree from Brown University, where he studied neuroscience. In 2001, he whipped up an online montage of silly dance moves called "How to Dance Properly," and sent it to 17 friends. They in turn forwarded it to others, and it became an Internet phenomenon: Within a week it had been viewed more than a million times, a huge number for a personal Web page. Mr. Frank said he felt an incredible rush from all that Web traffic. "I became so obsessed with popularity," he said. Over the next few years, Mr. Frank said, he tried all sorts of different gags on his site, including videos on how to act convincingly and how to impress a date. Though he never quite recaptured the traffic of that initial video, Mr. Frank built a loyal audience of readers and viewers. This year, Mr. Frank made a pledge to produce a three-minute show for his Web site every weekday for a year. Exactly what that would entail, Mr. Frank said, he had no idea. But on March 17, he began what he called "The Show." Mr. Frank starts each day's show from scratch. He begins the morning by riffing to himself on the news, his life and anything else that comes to mind. "There's a lot of real, raw angst in the morning," he said. "And a lot of pacing." Sometime around midmorning, Mr. Frank begins taping. He sometimes puts his thoughts to music, but usually he delivers his material with the zeal of a radio pitchman. His signature gag is to repeat some bit of news he finds absurd and to cut quickly to a shot of himself in an exaggerated Three Stooges-style expression of confusion. He posts "The Show" around 1 in the afternoon, and for the rest of the day, goes about cobbling together a living, doing speaking engagements, consulting for technology companies, and doing anything else he can think of to earn a dollar. "Last year I filed 40 different 1099's," Mr. Frank said. Meanwhile, comments start pouring in. Most are simple congratulations, or questions for Mr. Frank, which he sometimes answers on later episodes, much as David Letterman does. Occasionally, viewers will offer suggestions or lament that Mr. Frank has abandoned a gag they enjoyed. And some comments are simply brutal critiques, like the one by a man who posted that his 7-year-old son's MySpace page made for better viewing. "It hurts," Mr. Frank said. All the feedback started Mr. Frank thinking, and he decided to turn his show over to his viewers. He offered them no guidance, and promised to perform their script faithfully, so long as it was under three minutes long, and required no nudity. Mr. Frank announced his challenge on Friday, June 2, and soon had the first contribution to the script, which required him to call himself a vulgarity repeatedly at the start of the show. "People were playing with the irony of a user-generated show," Mr. Frank said. "Having me insult myself plays on the idea that I'm a puppet." Quickly, the script began to get out of hand. Jokes became tediously long. There were arguments over the content of the material, and over who had the authority to approve or delete it, with some writers taking a dominant role and deleting the work of others at will. Through it all Mr. Frank kept his distance, even as he began receiving what he called "sad puppy" e-mail messages from writers whose feelings were hurt when their contributions were cut. Aaron St. John, 22, a software developer in Washington State, said he spent about 15 hours working on the script, but little of his material made the final draft. He wasn't sure about what he called "comedy by consensus." "Things are either really funny or really stupid to someone," he said. "And if people take out the parts they find really stupid, they're also taking out the parts that are really funny to others." Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University's interactive telecommunications program and another writer for Fabuloso Friday, said the script began to reflect what he called the two truths of comedy writing: "Most people aren't funny, and most funny people are not funny most of the time." Nevertheless, over the course of a week, a script emerged. Some 220 or so writers made more than 2,000 revisions to what turned out to be a 4-minute-40-second comedy script touching on the World Cup, gay marriage and NASA. It also included, perhaps inevitably, some good old-fashioned bathroom humor. On the day of the big performance, Mr. Frank ran around his neighborhood in a last-minute dash for props. He downloaded a color image of Clarence Thomas. He borrowed a globe from a neighbor, and found that if he inverted a candle snuffer, it could pass as a pipe. For a smoking jacket, Mr. Frank wore a blazer and used computerized special effects to make it look as if it were smoking — a simple but hard-to-resist gag. Mr. Frank's performance was true to the script, and if that is any guide, it is doubtful that any "Saturday Night Live" writers will soon lose their jobs to the vast networks of volunteer comedy writers on the Web. Nevertheless, Mr. Frank's audience seemed pleased with the result. Within an hour of his posting the show, he had more than a hundred comments on the site, most of them complimentary. The show has been viewed 21,000 times. Mr. Frank, who plans to experiment further with the Wiki-script-writing concept, said he didn't take compliments too seriously. "People always praise their own work," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fa...yles/18ze.html Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy Katie Hafner Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera. Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs. At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism. Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries) While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site. "Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation." From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view. The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site. "A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community." The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles. Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers. Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex. To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion. "As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's beginning to look more and more like an editorial structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that great work can be created by an army of amateurs with very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia really is." But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had always been protections and filters on the site. Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat. "A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a company called Socialtext that is based on the same editing technology that Wikipedia uses. Full protection often results from a "revert war," in which users madly change the wording back and forth. In such cases, an administrator usually steps in and freezes the page until the warring parties can settle their differences in another venue, usually the talk page for the entry. The Christina Aguilera entry was frozen this week after after fans of the singer fought back against one user's efforts to streamline it. Much discussion of Wikipedia has focused on its accuracy. Last year, an article in the journal Nature concluded that the incidence of errors in Wikipedia was only slightly higher than in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Officials at Britannica angrily disputed the findings. "To be able to do an encyclopedia without having the ability to differentiate between experts and the general public is very, very difficult," said Jorge Cauz, the president of Britannica, whose subscription-based online version receives a small fraction of the traffic that Wikipedia gets. Intentional mischief can go undetected for long periods. In the article about John Seigenthaler Sr., who served in the Kennedy administration, a suggestion that he was involved in the assassinations of both John F. and Robert Kennedy was on the site for more than four months before Mr. Seigenthaler discovered it. He wrote an op-ed article in USA Today about the incident, calling Wikipedia "a flawed and irresponsible research tool." Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, "everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article becomes increasingly accurate. Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon. "I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly." Ms. Walsh is an administrator, a post that others nominated her for in recognition of her contributions to the site. She monitors a list of newly created pages, half of which, she said, end up being good candidates for deletion. Many are "nonsense pages created by kids, like 'Michael is a big dork,' " she said. Ms. Walsh also serves on the 14-member arbitration committee, which she describes as "the last resort" for disputes on Wikipedia. Like so many Web-based successes, Wikipedia started more or less by accident. Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com, with content to be written by experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles, Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew exponentially. For the first year or so, Mr. Wales paid the expenses out of his own pocket. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, is financed primarily through donations, most in the $50 to $100 range. As the donations have risen, so have the costs. The foundation's annual budget doubled in the last year, to $1.5 million, and traffic has grown sharply. Search engines like Google, which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their results, are a big contributor to the site's traffic, but it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers. Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the administrators and four paid employees of the foundation. Although many decisions are made by consensus within the community, Mr. Wales steps in when an issue is especially contentious. "It's not always obvious when something becomes policy," he said. "One way is when I say it is." Mr. Wales is a true believer in the power of wiki page-editing technology, which predates Wikipedia. In late 2004, Mr. Wales started Wikia, a commercial start-up financed by venture capital that lets people build Web sites based around a community of interest. Wiki 24, for instance, is an unofficial encyclopedia for the television show "24." Unlike Wikipedia, the site carries advertising. Mr. Wales, 39, lives with his wife and daughter in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the foundation is based. But Mr. Wales's main habitat these days, he said, is the inside of airplanes. He travels constantly, giving speeches to reverential audiences and visiting Wikipedians around the world. Wikipedia has inspired its share of imitators. A group of scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of Earth, and Congresspedia is a new encyclopedia with an article about each member of Congress. But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web. "It can tell us a lot about the future of knowledge creation, which will depend much less on individual heroism and more on collaboration," said Mitchell Kapor, a computer industry pioneer who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation. Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer in Burlington, Vt., who is involved with Congresspedia, said Wikipedia was reminiscent of old-fashioned civic groups like the Grange, whose members took individual responsibility for the organization's livelihood. "It blows open what's possible," said Ms. Teachout. "What I hope is that these kinds of things lead to thousands of other experiments like this encyclopedia, which we never imagined could be produced in this way." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/te... tner=homepage CBS News Says Dan Rather Is Leaving AP Former anchorman Dan Rather has agreed to leave CBS after 44 years, the network announced Tuesday. The 74-year-old Rather has complained of being virtually forgotten at CBS Corp. since his exit as anchor last year, six months after a discredited story on President Bush's military service. He has said he is considering an offer to do a weekly show at the HDNet high-definition network. ''There will always be a part of Dan Rather at CBS News,'' said Sean McManus, CBS News president. ''He is truly a `reporter's reporter,' and he has helped to train several generations of broadcast journalists. His legacy cannot be replicated.'' Rather, whose final CBS News report aired on ''CBS Sunday Morning'' this weekend, will be the subject of a prime-time special on his career this fall, CBS said. The network also said it had made a contribution to Rather's alma mater, Sam Houston State University. The Texan has worked at CBS News since 1962, covering stories ranging from the Kennedy assassination to the 2001 terrorist attacks. He was the ''CBS Evening News'' anchor who replaced Walter Cronkite in 1981 until signing off with the admonition ''courage'' on March 9, 2005. Rather apparently hadn't even seen the report questioning Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service before introducing it on the air in September 2004. When CBS News couldn't substantiate the story following questions about its sources, Rather became a symbol of the incident even as he escaped official blame. Since then, Rather's on-air appearances have been infrequent. He contributed eight stories to ''60 Minutes'' this season, about half the airtime of most full-time correspondents there. His most recent ''60 Minutes'' story, a profile of Whole Foods Market, aired June 4. In interviews last week, Rather made clear the professional divorce was imminent. He told The New York Times that he wanted to stay with ''60 Minutes,'' but that CBS News had offered him a contract with no specific affiliation to any program. For more than two decades, Rather dominated broadcast news along with NBC's Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings of ABC. They were the faces seen every evening and whenever big news broke. Rather always considered himself a reporter first, and the habit of news anchors to travel to the scenes of big stories is largely his legacy. His interview with Saddam Hussein in 2003 was the last given by the Iraqi leader before he was toppled. With his intense on-air demeanor, Rather also had his detractors, and his broadcast was a distant third in the evening news ratings at the time he stepped down. CBS News' ratings have rebounded under short-term successor Bob Schieffer; Katie Couric will take over the broadcast in September. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts... tner=homepage Moving Ahead, Rather Throws Sad Look Back Jacques Steinberg The 74-year-old man with the Mets cap pulled far down on his forehead slid into a booth at a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and ordered a glass of milk without so much as turning a head — so quietly, in fact, that it was hard to believe it was Dan Rather. In place of the swagger that had served him so well throughout his 44-year career at CBS News was an obvious sadness that his tenure at the network was ticking down to an inglorious end. Mr. Rather complained that since stepping down as anchor of the " CBS Evening News" last year, in the aftermath of a reporting scandal, he had been ill used as a correspondent on "60 Minutes" and had been given virtually nothing at all to do for the previous six weeks. Among the places he had sought solace, he said on a recent afternoon, was in "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's homage to Edward R. Murrow and the CBS News of old, a film that Mr. Rather said he had seen five times in theaters, most recently alone. Mr. Rather's contract with CBS, and "60 Minutes," is not scheduled to expire until late November. But he said yesterday that he and the network were close to an agreement that would end his tenure early, and that he was seriously mulling a new venture that, at least initially, relatively few viewers would be able to see: he would develop and be the host of a weekly interview program on a high-definition television channel known as HDNet. The offer, he said, had come directly from Mark Cuban, the unbridled owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, who was a co-founder of HDNet in 2001. Mr. Rather said he had been weighing several other offers for work, including two from what he described as major broadcast or cable networks. But as of yesterday, Mr. Rather said, "what I expect to do, what I hope to do, is bring this HDNet thing to fruition." Mr. Rather, who was anchor of the "CBS Evening News" for nearly a quarter-century and who, at one point also served as a correspondent on the news magazines "60 Minutes II" and "48 Hours," acknowledged that it would "take some adjustment" for him to get used to being seen by perhaps tens of thousands of viewers in a week, as opposed to millions. But he added that "the opportunity to build something from the ground up, I think, will have its own satisfactions." Mr. Rather also said that in April, in anticipation of what seemed to be his imminent departure from CBS, he had formed a company — he named it News and Guts, in a nod to what he considers the pillars of his professional life — through which he plans to create several other journalism ventures, including, perhaps, a blog. (Though he has not yet settled on a title, he says he has ruled out one: "I'd Rather Say This.") Mr. Rather said he first met earlier this year with Mr. Cuban, who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the high-tech boom of the 1990's. Mr. Cuban's team is now tied, two games to two, with the Miami Heat in the National Basketball Association finals. When a reporter joked about whether Mr. Rather would also weigh in on the management of the Mavericks, Mr. Rather responded, seriously, that he had already provided Mr. Cuban some unsolicited advice during the team's recent playoff run, suggesting that one particular player be given more minutes on the court. "I'm not going to tell you who he is," Mr. Rather said. "But they're using him more." Mr. Rather also recounted that Mr. Cuban, a producer of "Good Night, and Good Luck," had told him that as part of the deal he expected to ask Mr. Rather for informal advice on future film projects. There, too, Mr. Rather said he was game. In addition to the one-hour interview program, which could eventually include "60 Minutes"-style investigative reports that he would prepare, Mr. Rather said he had been asked to commit to deliver at least two documentaries a year to HDNet. The channel is available to subscribers with high-definition access — it was available in about three million homes last year, according to Kagan Research, an independent firm — either on a handful of cable systems, including Time Warner, or through satellite operators, including DirecTV and Dish. The channel currently carries both original news and music programming, as well as reruns of series like "Hogan's Heroes" and "Charlie's Angels." Asked in an e-mail message yesterday to confirm Mr. Rather's description of the offer, Mr. Cuban sent back the following response last night: "All I can tell you is that we have had some conversations to do some very exciting things. Unshackled from the talking head world where earnings per share mean more than finding the truth, the opportunities for HDNet and Dan are unlimited." Mr. Rather said he had been given assurances by Mr. Cuban, should he accept the offer, that he would have complete, unfettered control of his program. "It's a situation," he said, "where there are not very large — let me put it this way — corporate and political complexities." In those comments, and others, Mr. Rather was referring, however obliquely, to his displeasure with the leadership of CBS. He appeared, for example, to fault the network for eventually withdrawing its support for the "60 Minutes II" report that would, in turn, unravel his career. In the segment, he had sought to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, using memorandums that the network, and later a panel of outside investigators, said they could not authenticate. Asked yesterday about Mr. Rather and his status at the network, a CBS News spokeswoman, Sandra Genelius, said she had no comment. Mr. Rather expressed some disappointment with Leslie Moonves, the president and chief executive of CBS. In late 2004, Mr. Rather announced he would step down as anchor in March 2005. In the interim, Mr. Moonves told a gathering of television critics in California that he hoped to blow up the program's "voice of God, single anchor" format. (After exploring the notion of an ensemble, CBS announced this spring that it was hiring Katie Couric as the program's sole anchor.) Asked in the interview about Mr. Moonves's remarks, Mr. Rather said, "My problem with the 'voice of God' thing was that it was meant disrespectfully." "They talk about wanting a break with the past," he added. "Look at the Murrow film. I don't want to break with that past." Mr. Rather said that the 15 months since he had left the evening news, and joined "60 Minutes," had been among the most frustrating periods of his career. To an outsider, the eight segments he had had broadcast on the program since November — including reports that had taken him to North Korea, China and Beirut — would appear to represent a good year's work.But Mr. Rather said that other correspondents had more than twice as many reports appear on the program, and that two reports he had been particularly proud of (those originating in Beirut and China) had been effectively buried, on the program's Christmas and New Year's Day telecasts.Of being kept idle these last two months, Mr. Rather said, "Anybody who knows me knows that's not the way I like to work." Asked if the network had sought to marginalize him over his role in the disputed Guard report — including his spirited defense of the segment, for more than a week after it was broadcast — Mr. Rather said, "There's a lot I have yet to figure out." Mr. Rather, who has been employed by CBS since he was 30, said that his first choice would have been to remain a correspondent on "60 Minutes." But the network, he said, was uninterested, offering him only a contract that would have entitled him to an office and assistant, but no affiliation with any CBS program. "I am as hungry for important stories as I've ever been," he said. "In fact, I think my hunger might be, if anything, greater. I guess I'd like to think that's saying something." Once it was made clear to him that there was no longer a role for him, he said, he began to warm to the idea of working for someone seeking to explore television's next frontier, in much the way William S. Paley had blazed the trail of the modern CBS, and as Ted Turner had done for CNN. "I may not have found them," Mr. Rather said of Mr. Cuban and a partner, Todd Wagner. "But I found as close as I think anyone is likely to find. And I like the chances." It was not possible yesterday to determine which other outlets may have had conversations with Mr. Rather about future work. Representatives from Fox News, CNN and NBC said their organizations had made no offers to him, and an ABC executive said he knew of no discussions with Mr. Rather. When asked if there was any advice he would give to Katie Couric — who, in September, succeeds Bob Schieffer, the interim anchor of the "Evening News" since Mr. Rather stepped down — Mr. Rather said: "If she comes to CBS and demonstrates that she loves the news, and demonstrates leadership skills — and I do think both those things are true — then I think she will do well." Asked if he might be tempted to change the channel and root for one of Ms. Couric's chief competitors, Charles Gibson on ABC and Brian Williams on NBC, Mr. Rather was unequivocal in his response. "I'm always pulling for CBS News," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/bu...ia/17rath.html |
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