Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – June 2nd, '07

[JackSpratts]

Established 2002


































"If you are a file-sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid." – Mark Mulligan


"I can take any machine and make it look guilty, or not guilty. Whatever I want." – Vincent Liu



"There's no extortion going on. They're not demanding to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Agriculture, 'Pay us $50 million, or we keep this up.' They're not trying to disrupt e-commerce--they're making a political statement." – Jose Nazario


"A billion customers in the world are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house." – Dr. Paul Polak


"I noticed he has a purse, but I didn't realize he's a boy." – Ewa Sowinska


"They’re famous, pretty and all the boys like them." – Arielle Urvater


"The barrier to get into the industry is so low: you need a video camera and a couple of people who will have sex." – Paul Fishbein


"Azerbaijan comes out on top." – The Economist


"Tear gas, pot and patchouli were the scents of the 1960s." – Holland Cotter



































June 2nd, 2007






Why I'm File-Sharing, Again
Lauren Patrizi

I started with Napster, moved to Gnutella, and now I'm operating on ITunes. Our generation certainly was the most feared by the music industry as we sat in our dorm rooms endlessly downloading every song from old school Salt 'N Pepa to random bootlegs of the Grateful Dead. Whether we liked it or not, we were downloading illegally.

Well I've stopped downloading illegally--momentarily, anyways--and I'm now paying a dollar for each song. Today I joined PodFitness, which is a website that takes your MP3s and records a personal trainers' directions (faster! one more crunch!) with my music. Well, I learned something quite distasteful after having downloaded the program. Apparently I have more access to the songs I possess illegally than the songs I actually paid for!

Because of a controversial practice by the music industry called Digital Rights Management, I can basically do little to nothing with the music I purchased via ITunes. The program will not allow me to incorporate the music I own with my PodFitness. I also learned that I cannot take my songs and mix them into videos I made for personal use.

The record companies should realize that making videos, mixing our songs, and transferring them to our mp3 players is what we do. If they still want our business they should allow us to do what we want with the music we own.

I'm about to download LimeWire so that I may use the songs as I wish. This works out doubly well. I'm again no longer paying for my music and if I wish to mix my music I can do so. I may need bail money and after which I'll be accepting any monies through PayPal.
http://www.campusprogress.org/page/c...roup/main/C2D7





DRM-Free iTunes Set This Week?

Apple is prepared to launch its DRM-free catalog of music from EMI this week, according to French sources familiar with negotiations for multiple online music stores. The seeming delay for introducing the new tier of content has been primarily attributed to a desire to offer the entire catalog at once in the unprotected format rather than a gradual rollout. The companies' technicians are simply in the later stages of encoding and hosting the files before they go live, the contact says.

Apple's terms will require that whole albums be offered as a second tier of 256Kbps AAC files without the iTunes-only FairPlay copy protection scheme, necessitating that the company revisit existing master copies on an individual basis. The iTunes Store itself was not described as an issue with the upgrade.

Legal issues may also have contributed to the relatively late debut, with Apple and EMI having reportedly signed a final deal only last week following negotiations of similar contracts with both the just-announced Amazon store and Europe's VirginMega service. Both Apple and EMI are nevertheless hoping to "ideally" have the change implemented before the end of the month, the report says. Whether or not this will meet Apple's regular Tuesday update schedule is currently unknown.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/...nes.this.week/





TUAW Tip: Don't Torrent That Song...
Erica Sadun



Sure, you can now download music from the iTunes store without DRM but that doesn't mean you should just willy nilly start sharing that music with your friends. For one thing, it's illegal. For another, your account information is embedded into that m4a music file. Don't believe me? Try this yourself.

1. Launch Terminal. You'll need to be comfortable at the command line to perform this check.

2. Navigate to one of your iTunes plus downloads. If you have a US iTunes account, you can download the iTunes plus "Ooh La" single of the week.

3. Use the UNIX "strings" command to look at the text in your data and grep to search for your name. e.g.
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | grep name
Alternatively, open all the strings in TextEdit:
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | open -f.

Bottom line: DRM-free doesn't mean that Apple suddenly supports piracy.
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/30/tuaw-...ent-that-song/





Qnext 3.0

Publisher: Qnext Corp
Size: 34.8 MB
OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Linux Mac OS X
License: Freeware
Price: Free
Updated: 2007-05-27

Qnext is the easiest way to share all of your music, photos, and files with anyone, instantly. You can also use it to talk to IM and Email contacts from a single list. And now you can talk and share with anyone, even if they don't have Qnext. In seconds, you can broadcast and share an unlimited amount of your music, photos, and files to your friends and family.
http://www.mp3cdsoftware.com/qnext--...oad-33091.html





Good advice

Dance Music Trends
Mizz Dragon

Music has been popular for centuries, but the styles, technology and manner in which people find music has changed. Music can now be accessed more easily by a wider group of people than ever before.

Downloadable Music

Thanks to the increasing popularity of the internet, dance music is now easier than ever to find online. With just a computer and a modem, you can conduct an internet search and find your favorite artists or song in a few minutes. Many sites offer songs or albums for a set fee. You could spend hours just perusing their extensive list of artists.

Peer To Peer Programs

You might also want to consider downloading a P2P or Peer To Peer program to find new sources of music. After installing a program such as eMule, LimeWire or Gnutella, you can share your vast collection of music with other users. You can search for a specific artist, album title or song and download music from connected users all over the world.

Internet Radio

More and more radio stations now offer online programs. If you search for online stations, you may be very surprised at the wide variety of musical genres and stations available worldwide. You can find your favorite station from Chicago, Brazil or Spain and listen to it from the comfort of your own home. This is a great way to discover new world music that is popular in other countries.

Music Technology

People still listen to dance music on their car or home radio and at clubs, concerts and festivals. However, technology has expanded the availability and portability of music. Music lovers can now download music in a condensed format to their portable MP3 players. Thousands of songs will fit on a device smaller than a stick of gum so you can listen to music while exercising or commuting. Many of the latest cell phones also allow owners to download and listen to music. In fact, you can even watch music videos on some of the newer models! Another current trend is to download your favorite music and use it as a ringtone for your cell phone.
http://www.dragonsofsound.com/2007/0...-music-trends/





France Tightens Noose on P2P Music

Telecom Paper (subscription), Netherlands

French government legal body Conseil d'Etat has tightened the noose on Peer to Peer music. It overturned the national commission on IT and liberties' (CNIL) ...
http://www.telecom.paper.nl/site/new...ract&id=169656





File Sharers Auto-Tracked in France
p2pnet.net

In France, record companies can now automatically track p2p users who share more than 50 files within 24 hours, "and keep their records for further legal proceedings," says the country's Council of State.

"The decision comes as a blow to the French National Commission for Data protection and the Liberties who ruled in the fall of 2005 that automatic surveillance of P2P networks violates local privacy laws," says P2P Blog.

But French file sharers aren't taking it lying down. They've launched 51 fichiers (51 files) as a protest against the "systematic criminalisation of the Peer-to-peer networks and their users".

French Net users who want to speak against the ruling should, "share at least 51 files that are freely distributable (e.g.: published under a Creative Commons license, or that are public domain) and keep them on the P2P system until 'something happens'," says the site.

Following an article on Scoopeo, and comments from "other channels," it looks like the auto-monitoring would be based on entries on a list of 10,000 files, Clubic states on the protest page.

"That means that, most probably, if you are fan of Johnny Halliday and that you download his music, you have more chance ... than if you are fan of a dark regional group of rock'n'roll-garage," says the post.

Only files which can be shared and distributed legally should be used, emphasises 51 files, also pointing out the limit can easily be circumvented because p2p file sharing applications can be pre-set to automatically limit files to 49.

Meanwhile, there are all kinds of questions relating to the auto-monitoring process, 51 files points out. Exactly what's included on the list? - for example. By what means are files checked? By name or by some kind of signature?
http://p2pnet.net/story/12371





P2P Sites Partner For Online Broadcast
Hattie Lee

Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming media provider PPStream announced a partnership with download accelerator and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software Xunlei (Thunder) to jointly broadcast the new movie "Ming Ming" on May 29. Users can watch the movie on PPStream for free or download the movie from Xunlei for two Yuan. Ming Ming is directed by Hong Kong director Susie Au. Beijing Poly-Bona Film Publishing Company Limited owns the exclusive online publishing rights to the movie. Xunlei told Pacific Epoch that it has received permission from Poly-Bona to offer the film.
http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/98010_0_5_0_M/





IFPI: Ten "Inconvenient Truths" About File-Swapping
Nate Anderson

The EU has just released its latest figures about counterfeit products seized at European borders in 2006, and the music industry's international trade group (IFPI) has jumped on those numbers to call for increased action against Chinese pirates. Of the 23 million counterfeit CDs and DVDs seized by police last year, 93 percent of them originated in China. The EU is worried enough about the numbers that it is contributing to a US-led WTO case against China over the matter.

But does purchasing one of these discs mean that you could be supporting terrorism? According to the IFPI, it does. The group yesterday released a list of 10 "inconvenient truths" about music, and it makes for interesting reading. Here they are:

1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment "free music" rhetoric.
2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.
3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.
4. Illegal file-sharers don’t care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.
5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on "underground" artists and more inclination to invest in "bankers" like American Idol stars.
6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.
7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth–it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.
8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.
9. Most people know it is wrong to file-share copyright infringing material but won't stop till the law makes them, according to a recent study by the Australian anti-piracy group MIPI.
10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.

It's a strange mix of the obvious and the bizarre. Point four, for instance, is probably true, and it won't come as a surprise to anyone who reads point eight that impoverished Chinese farmers are not the ones doing most of that country's illegal downloading.

Point three is an odd one; certainly, somewhere in the world, someone with terrorist intentions has made a few bucks from the sale of counterfeit discs. But every other point on the list concerns digital file-swapping, not the purchasing of counterfeit CDs on Parisian street corners. It looks like a subtle attempt to elide the distinctions between the two.

Point five is an attempt to turn the "innovation" argument on its head. For years, pundits outside the music industry have accused labels of pandering to teens through boy bands and "manufactured" celebrities instead of being concerned with finding, producing, and releasing art. The IFPI suggests that the labels could (and would) be doing exactly that if file-swapping went away.

And then there's point seven, which isn't an "inconvenient truth" at all but more of a rant against those who prefer giving copyright holders less than absolute control over reproduction rights. An "anti-copyright movement" does exist, but most of the critical voices in the debate recognize the value of copyright—and actually produce copyrighted works themselves (Lawrence Lessig, etc.). The second part of the accusation ("pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little") is hardly a statement of fact; it comes across as angry retort to those outside the music business who would dare to criticize its methods and goals.

It's too bad that groups like the IFPI resort to such dubious statements to make their point. Unauthorized file-swapping of copyrighted works is already illegal in most countries; if people are continuing to engage in it, they are unlikely to be swayed by broadsides against "anti-copyright" crusaders or accusations of funding terrorists.

When it comes to stopping commercial piracy, we applaud the IFPI for its work. When it comes to disparaging those who favor a softer copyright policy, Ars has an inconvenient truth of our own to share with the music industry: these are the sort of tactics that only entrench consumer opposition.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-swapping.html





Lazy Western pirates not even on list



Free Loaders

TECH firms constantly moan about software piracy and no wonder. Last year it accounted for 35% of the worldwide market and cost the industry $39.6 billion according to the Business Software Alliance, a trade body. America and China lead the world in terms of total losses from piracy at $7.2 billion and $5.4 billion respectively. But when calculated according to the number of computers in each country a different picture emerges. Cash-strapped countries dominate the leader board. In Azerbaijan, which comes out on top, computers are loaded with $262-worth of pirated software on average. But Iceland is the surprise second-placed nation: although software to the tune of $32m is pirated it is spread over only a few computers.
http://www.economist.com/research/ar...ory_id=9248524





P2P Writer's Block
Thomas Mennecke

There was a time when it seemed there were dozens upon dozens of P2P networks floating about. Scour Exchange, iMesh, Napster, CuteMX, WinMX, FileShare, Gnutella, QtraxMax, eDonkey2000, FastTrack, EarthStation5, and the list goes on. Many of these networks have either died out or succumbed to the pressures of commercialization. Some are still alive, and surprisingly, still producing new versions of their software.

P2P development, for the most part, has suffered from an incredible case of writer's block for the better part of two years. This isn't to say that P2P development has ceased - far from it. However, in terms of diversity, P2P creativity has been virtually non-existent. Instead, most development has concentrated around the de facto representative of file-sharing, BitTorrent. If a new client or version of an existing client crops up, chances are it has something to do with BitTorrent technology.

While BitTorrent is an incredible technology, some are uneasy with this protocol replacing all need for other forms of file-sharing. In the last two years, there hasn't been a viable, widespread, or mainstream P2P network developed that comes close to the ubiquity of BitTorrent. Is this good news or bad?

In many ways, BitTorrent's dominance as the premier file-sharing program is perhaps the very reason that file-sharing still exists. Its dual role as both the people's P2P protocol and a tool the music/movie industry can take advantage of has most likely helped maintain its longevity and fostered innovation. Others have not been so lucky.

Take FastTrack, for example. If a diehard Kazaa fan of 2007 were to be transposed by some file-sharing/time-space vortex to the height of FastTrack's dominance in 2003-2004, the end-user experience would not be exceptionally different. Plagued by a barrage of legal difficulties, declining reputation, and a 100 million dollar judgment, Sharman Networks has been dormant in the P2P innovation field. Yet the client and network still exist and are being used by an untold number of people - a testament to the viability of decentralized P2P. The same can't be said about its brethren Grokster, who was made an example out of by the US entertainment industry.

Moving onto Gnutella, this network once had a multitude of viable clients connecting to this community. The juggernauts of this venture were BearShare and Limewire. Gnucleus was also an important player, as were many other smaller developers. Yet the legal climate in the United States has had a chilling effect on Gnutella development for most programmers. Backed by the wealthy Lime Group umbrella, LimeWire has been the exception and has been able to stave off attacks by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America.)

BearShare's future wasn't as fortunate as LimeWire's. Like many P2P applications, they too were forced to settle for an astronomical pricetag. With BearShare out of the picture, and the lack of a Gnucleus update since June of 2004, LimeWire is the only Gnutella application keeping this network afloat. A truly revolutionary change, however, is eagerly awaited.

eDonkey2000 was once a dual client network - a much larger portion run by the open source project eMule, and the other run by the official eDonkey client developed by MetaMachine. eMule is still developing clients; however, the eDonkey2000 network, like FastTrack, has remained virtually unchanged save for the introduction of the Kademlia overlay several years ago. Regardless, eDonkey2000 remains an important force in the P2P world, and by some estimates is the protocol of choice in some countries.

The Manolito P2P network, accessible via the Blubster and Piolet clients, was at one point surging to file-sharing stardom. Developer Pablo Soto's time was deferred from these projects however, and the population remained stagnant at ~250,000 individuals. Yet interestingly enough, not all is lost. Pablo's work may be considered the exception to the P2P writer's block rule, as he has been feverishly working on his latest project, OMEMO (Ownership Masquerading Explorable Metadata Overlay). If the beta testing proves successful, this virtual hard drive project may be the first innovative network in some time.

Ares Galaxy, created by Alberto Treves, nearly achieved divine status after his decision to release the client's source code in September of 2005. This decision was made instead of capitulating to the RIAA's cease and desist demand. Although updates are still being produced, the Ares Galaxy of today is much like its predecessors. It is unknown whether Alberto will reinvigorate his client in the near future.

The list of P2P clients that have remained virtually unchanged goes on. Is DC++ much different today than it was 5 years ago? Has KCeasy knocked anyone off their feet recently? Where are the great anonymous P2P networks? The only network where one can objectively notice substantial changes over the course of time is BitTorrent. From DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) to uTorrent to browser integration to advances in tracker technology, BitTorrent is a different animal than it was three years ago. Perhaps consolidation has led developers to simply give up on other proposed ideas or projects. Or perhaps because of this, it may stimulate creativity and innovation for the next great leap forward in P2P technology.
http://www.slyck.com/story1475.html





Peer-to-Peer Networks Co-Opted for DOS Attacks
Robert Lemos

A flaw in the design of a popular peer-to-peer network software has given attackers the ability to create massive denial-of-service attacks that can easily overwhelm corporate websites, a security firm warned last week.

Over the past three months, more than 40 companies have endured attacks emanating from hundreds of thousands of Internet Protocol addresses (IPs), with many of the attacks producing more than a gigabit of junk data every second, according to security solutions provider Prolexic Technologies.

The sheer number of internet addresses has caused problems for routers and firewalls, burying solutions that rely on some form of blacklisting, said Paul Sop, chief technology officer for the firm.

"It's like asking how fast can you bail your boat?" Sop said. "If you stop for a minute you get overwhelmed."

Unlike past attacks, which use tens of thousands of compromised computers to deluge a web server (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/195) or network with data, the latest attacks came from a collection of computers running peer-to-peer software known as DC++ (http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/). The software is based on Direct Connect, a protocol which allows the exchange of files between instant messaging clients.

While the file-sharing network is distributed, the directories of where to find certain files resides in a few servers, known as hubs. Older versions of the hub server software have a flaw that allows an attacker to direct clients to get information from another server, said Fredrik Ullner, a developer for the DC++ project and an computer-science undergraduate at Sweden's Lund Institute of Technology (http://www.es.lth.se/). Maliciously redirecting those client results in a large number of computers continuously demanding data from the victim's web server, overwhelming it with requests.

The attacks were used against DC++ own developers and hub directories as early as 2005. The first attacks targeted the project's directory of hubs, known as Hublist.org. Rogue DC++ users had created tools to flood a hub, and when Hublist.org removed the rogue users' servers, the group responded by attacking Hublist.org, Ullner said. The site is no longer accessible. The rogue group also hit DCPP.net, the project's main site, forcing the developers to move to SourceForge.

"These attacks are, unfortunately, getting more common," Ullner stated in an email interview with SecurityFocus.

The technique proved so effective that attackers have turned it on other companies.

In March, companies started seeking out Prolexic to help them stave off some devastating denial-of-service attacks. In many of the attacks, more than 150,000 computers would open a handful of connections each, burying the Web server in a avalanche of network data. The largest attacks seen by the company involved more than 300,000 computers, said Prolexic's Sop.

"We had millions and millions of connections in. We could identify the attacks with zero difficulty but new IPs were hitting us faster than we could block them."

While many of the attacks were part of an extortion attempt - a common way in the past to turn denial-of-service capabilities into cash - about three quarters of the attacks were motivated by industrial espionage, Sop said.

"The amount of money involved is pretty large," Sop said. "If you have a good internet business in Europe, and you can knock out your competitor, why spend money on marketing?"

The firm announced on Wednesday that it had developed a way to defend against the attacks.

A general solution is unlikely to appear from the DC++ project. While the problem has already been fixed in the DC++ hub software, it's hard to force everyone to adopt the fix, said developer Ullner.

"The attackers take advantage of people's reluctance to upgrade."

Moreover, even if all the hub administrators upgraded their systems, the attackers could run their own hubs until they commanded enough DC++ clients to attack a target.

"It's difficult to impossible to restrict this," said Ullner.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11466





Six State File-Sharing Cases Tossed
Amy Dalrymple

Lawsuits against six North Dakota college students accused of illegally sharing music online have been dismissed.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean all the students are off the hook.

The Recording Industry Association of America filed a civil complaint in April against six students within the North Dakota University System, accusing each of copyright infringement.

The RIAA identified the students as John Doe and subpoenaed university officials for the students’ names.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Webb granted the RIAA’s request on Tuesday to dismiss the cases without prejudice.

Jonathan Lamy, a senior vice president for communications for the RIAA, said he could not comment on the North Dakota cases.

Generally, a case is dismissed after the university responds to a subpoena and provides the student’s name, or the case is settled, Lamy said.

Once receiving each student’s name and address, the RIAA sent each a letter offering another settlement opportunity, Lamy said.

If a settlement offer is rejected, the RIAA will file a new lawsuit against the student by name, Lamy said.

Rick Johnson, general counsel for North Dakota State University, said he heard at least some of the students settled, but he didn’t know about all of them.

Three students are from NDSU. North Dakota State College of Science, Mayville State University and Valley City State University each have one student involved.

NDSU, which provides computer administration services to five other campuses, acted as a facilitator by responding to the subpoena, Johnson said.

Beyond that, NDSU is not involved with the lawsuit and hadn’t been informed about the request for dismissal, Johnson said.

William Harrie, a Fargo attorney representing the RIAA, said he’s not allowed to comment on the case.

In February, the RIAA sent about 20 letters to North Dakota college students offering them a chance to avoid a lawsuit and settle. Nationally, the settlements averaged about $4,000.

The students who didn’t settle at that point were targeted with the John Doe lawsuits.

Lamy would not comment on the size of settlement the North Dakota students could pay, but he said settlement rates typically go up as the process moves forward.

The lawsuits are part of a crackdown by the RIAA against music piracy on campus, affecting hundreds of college students across the country.
http://www.in-forum.com/News/articles/167081





Illinois Raids Welfare to Pay for Failed Video Game Violence Legislation
Ken Fisher

When the State of Illinois was tardy in paying its legal bills after attempting to defend a law that regulated the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games, the Entertainment Software Association wondered about the reasons for the delay. Now they know: the state was scouring department budgets, looking for the $1 million it cost to defend the unconstitutional legislation in court. Yes, you read that right—the State of Illinois spent one meeeellion dollars of taxpayer money on the litigation even as the state budget was starved for cash in other, more pressing areas. And worse yet, they spent it on a bill which, when introduced, was plainly unconstitutional.

The grand total was reported this week in a Quad Cities Online article which revealed that "the governor raided funds throughout state government to pay for the litigation. Some of the areas money was taken from included the public health department, the state's welfare agency and even the economic development department." A state representative who attended recent hearings on the issue said that Gov. Blagojevich's staff simply spread the legal bills around by sticking them to agencies which had funds left in their budgets—even if the agencies had nothing to do with the issue or the litigation.

The Illinois law in question was struck down by both a federal court and an appeals court. In the final decision on the case, the justices noted that the law used a set of simplistic criteria to evaluate video games. They even used God of War as an example of the law's failings.

"Because the (Illinois law) potentially criminalizes the sale of any game that features exposed breasts, without concern for the game considered in its entirety or for the game’s social value for minors, distribution of God of War is potentially illegal, in spite of the fact that the game tracks the Homeric epics in content and theme," the judges wrote.

Spending this sort of money on important causes is one thing; spending it on video game regulation approaches that have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional in other states is quite another. The situation might be more understandable were it not for the fact that Illinois could have easily seen this coming, either by paying attention to what other states are encountering or by opening a dialogue with the likes of the ESA. Instead of taking that cautious approach, the Governor decided to press on, and now the taxpayers will bear that burden. The fact that some of the money was pulled from public health and welfare only makes the situation worse.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...gislation.html





Wayne Crookes Reportedly Sues Me Over My Blogroll
Michael Geist

There are several reports that Wayne Crookes, who previously launched suits against a wide range of parties including Wikipedia, Yahoo, and a domain name registrar, has sued me in B.C. courts for defamation. I have not been served with the suit, but the reports indicate that I am being sued for an allegedly defamatory third party comment on my site that I took down and for writing about, and linking to, P2PNet.net, which in turn linked to another site that allegedly contained a defamatory posting. In other words, I'm reportedly being sued for maintaining a blogroll that links to a site that links to a site that contains some allegedly defamatory third party comments.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1987/125/





Parking Tunes Online Illegal: Japanese Court
Translated by Google

Music retention service: As for storage utilization infringement of copyright Tokyo district court

The conceptual drawing of the music service which utilizes the portable telephone

　The data is retained making use of “storage”, the user retains the music data of its own CD and the like on Internet, with anytime downloads in the portable telephone and whether or not offer of the service which can be heard undertakes infringement of copyright with decision of the lawsuit which is disputed, Tokyo district court (the high section Makiko President of the Court) judgment was shown that on the 25th, it undertakes infringement of copyright.

　As for service of problem, information communication company “image city” (the Tokyo Taito Ku) it began from November of 05, “MYUTA”. The user from the personal computer retains the music data in the server of the same company, can download to the portable telephone only main person of the user.

　Vis-a-vis this service, the Japanese music copyright association (JASRAC) it points out that it is infringement of copyright. The same company after discontinuing service, seeking the verification of the thing which does not undertake infringement of copyright in the partner had sued the same association.

　With lawsuit as for the same company “as for substantially doing data duplication and transmission user itself. Transmission to many and unspecified persons had not done, insisted copyright that it does not infringe”, but “the server who is center of the system the same company having owned and managing decision, for the same company as for the user the unspecific person. Duplication and the public (many and unspecified persons) to behavior subject of transmission is the same company”, that it judges. If permission of association is not received, when copyright is infringed, it recognized.
http://translate.google.com/translat...language_tools





Research Shows Illegal File-Sharing Directly Hits Music Sales

A third of Italian illegal file-sharers have cutback on their purchase of physical music products. Three-quarters of all Italians who download music have used copyright infringing peer-to-peer networks.

eMule is most used illegal file-sharing network in Italy.

Italy’s Luigi Einaudi Foundation (1) has published new research about the illegal file-sharing of digital content that shows how the habit reduces consumers’ purchasing of physical music products (2).

The research shows that nearly a third of illegal file-sharers (30%) have cutback on the amount of physical music products, such as CDs and DVDs, they buy. Only six per cent of those surveyed said that illegal file-sharing increased their propensity to buy CDs, while 64 per cent of respondents said their habit did not change their music buying habits.

A massive 77 per cent of all those who said they download music have used illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to obtain music, while only 23 per cent have used a legal online service.

The research showed that 31 per cent of those questioned had downloaded music or video from the internet in the last month. Nine-in-ten of the tracks downloaded were singles (91%), predominantly current chart hits. The most popular device for playing this material was a music player (84%), followed by hi-fis and MP3 players (39%).

The ability to obtain music for free was the main attraction for people who illegally file-shared music, followed by the ease of searching and availability of catalogue.

eMule is P2P software most used in Italy by illegal file-sharers (51%), followed by WinMX (25%) and Kazaa (13%). Only 2.7 per cent of illegal file-sharers said they use BitTorrent.

Three-in-five of those interviewed (61%) said the bought less than one CD a month and more than 30 per cent of this group buy no physical copies of
recorded music at all.

1) http://www.fondazione-einaudi.it/Pagine/Default.asp

2) The full study is available from this link: http://www.libercom.it/

Researchers interviewed wide cross-section of Italians, with 50 per cent of respondents aged between 15 and 34 years old, 25 per cent between 35 and 44 years old and 25 per cent between 44 and 54 years old. Nearly a third of those interviewed were office workers (29%), a quarter were students (25%) and the remainder were blue collar workers, managers, sole traders and retired people.

Most of those interviewed use internet at home (84%) and 77 per cent of respondents had used the internet for at least two years. Despite this, 68 per cent of the internet users questioned said they had only a basic ability in the “technology world”.
http://www.assodigitale.it/news_sito...0070 5248651/





Plunge in CD Sales Shakes Up Big Labels
Jeff Leeds

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album often cited as the greatest pop recording in music history, received a thoroughly modern 40th-anniversary salute last week when singers on “American Idol” belted out their own versions of its songs live on the show’s season finale.

But off stage, in a sign of the recording industry’s declining fortunes, shareholders of EMI, the music conglomerate that markets “Sgt. Pepper” and a vast trove of other recordings, were weighing a plan to sell the company as its financial performance was weakening.

It’s a maddening juxtaposition for more than one top record-label executive. Music may still be a big force in pop culture — from “Idol” to the iPod — but the music business’s own comeback attempt is falling flat.

Even pop’s pioneers are rethinking their approach. As it happens, one of the performers on “Sgt. Pepper,” Paul McCartney, is releasing a new album on June 5. But Mr. McCartney is not betting on the traditional record-label methods: He elected to sidestep EMI, his longtime home, and release the album through a new arrangement with Starbucks.

It’s too soon to tell if Starbucks’ new label (a partnership with the established Concord label) will have much success in marketing CDs. But not many other players are.

Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital sales at iTunes and similar services. Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”

It’s been four years since the last big shuffle in ownership of the major record labels. But now, with the sales plunge dimming hopes for a recovery any time soon, there is a new game of corporate musical chairs afoot that could shake up the industry hierarchy.

Under the deal that awaits shareholder approval, London-based EMI agreed last week to be purchased for more than $4.7 billion by a private equity investor, Terra Firma Capital Partners, whose diverse holdings include a European waste-conversion business. Rival bids could yet surface — though the higher the ultimate price, the more pressure the owners will face to make dramatic cuts or sell the company in pieces in order to recoup their investment.

For the companies that choose to plow ahead, the question is how to weather the worsening storm. One answer: diversify into businesses that do not rely directly on CD sales or downloads. The biggest one is music publishing, which represents songwriters (who may or may not also be performers) and earns money when their songs are used in TV commercials, video games or other media. Universal Music Group, already the biggest label, became the world’s biggest music publisher on Friday after closing its purchase of BMG Music, publisher of songs by artists like Keane, for more than $2 billion.

Now both Universal and Warner Music Group are said to be kicking the tires of Sanctuary, an independent British music and artist management company whose roster includes Iron Maiden and Elton John. The owners of all four of the major record companies also recently have chewed over deals to diversify into merchandise sales, concert tickets, advertising and other fields that are not part of their traditional business.

Even as the industry tries to branch out, though, there is no promise of an answer to a potentially more profound predicament: a creative drought and a corresponding lack of artists who ignite consumers’ interest in buying music. Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (And the marquee star 50 Cent just delayed his forthcoming album, “Curtis.”)

In other genres the picture is not much brighter. Fans do still turn out (at least initially) for artists that have managed to build loyal followings. The biggest debut of the year came just last week from the rock band Linkin Park, whose third studio album, “Minutes to Midnight,” sold an estimated 623,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But very few albums have gained traction. And that is compounded by the industry’s core structural problem: Its main product is widely available free. More than half of all music acquired by fans last year came from unpaid sources including Internet file sharing and CD burning, according to the market research company NPD Group. The “social” ripping and burning of CDs among friends — which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts — accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said.

The industry had long pinned its hopes on making up some of the business lost to piracy with licensed digital sales. But those prospects have dimmed as the rapid CD decline has overshadowed the rise in sales at services like Apple’s iTunes. Even as music executives fret that iTunes has not generated enough sales, though, they gripe that it unfairly dominates the sale of digital music.

Partly out of frustration with Apple, some of the music companies have been slowly retreating from their longtime insistence on selling music online with digital locks that prevent unlimited copying. Their aim is to sell more music that can be played on Apple’s wildly popular iPod device, which is not compatible with the protection software used by most other digital music services. EMI led the reversal, striking a deal with Apple to offer its music catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format.

Some music executives say that dropping copy-restriction software, also known as digital-rights management, would stoke business at iTunes’ competitors and generate a surge in sales. Others predict it would have little impact, though they add that the labels squandered years on failed attempts to restrict digital music instead of converting more fans into paying consumers.

“They were so slow to react, and let things get totally out of hand,” said Russ Crupnick, a senior entertainment industry analyst at NPD, the research company. “They just missed the boat.”

Perhaps there is little to lose, then, in experimentation. Mr. McCartney, for example, may not have made it to the “American Idol” finale, but he too is employing thoroughly modern techniques to reach his audience.

Starbucks will be selling his album “Memory Almost Full” through regular music retail shops but will also be playing it repeatedly in thousands of its coffee shops in more than two dozen countries on the day of release. And the first music video from the new album had it premiere on YouTube. Mr. McCartney, in announcing his deal with Starbucks, described his rationale simply: “It’s a new world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/ar...ic/28musi.html





Record Companies Win £41m Damages

Online retailer CD-Wow must pay £41m to British record companies after breaking a deal to stop selling illegally imported cheap albums in the UK.

The High Court in London ruled in March that the site's owners, Music Trading Online, were "in substantial breach" of a 2004 agreement to stop importing CDs.

It has now ordered Hong Kong-based CD-Wow to pay £37m plus interest to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

CD-Wow says it will still sell cheap CDs and may appeal against the ruling.

"Other bigger sites doing the same thing have been left alone."

"CD-Wow is no consumer champion," countered the BPI's chief executive, Geoff Taylor, who said the company had undermined "the legitimate businesses of UK retailers and record companies".

"The vibrancy of British music depends on a fair return on the investments that allow British talent to shine.

"This decision is an important step in ensuring that British music has a bright future."

The Entertainment Retailers' Association (Era), which represents companies like HMV, Fopp and Amazon, also welcomed the ruling.

"It is vital that all retailers compete on a level playing field," said director general Kim Bayley. "Illegal imports threaten that level playing field and threaten British jobs."

Frozen assets

With retail sales of £21.7m in the UK in 2005, CD-Wow was the third largest online music retailer in the UK after Amazon and Play.

The company denied deliberately breaking its 2004 court undertaking to stop buying CDs in places like Hong Kong and passing them on to consumers in the UK at discounted prices.

It put any breach of copyright down to human error, but the High Court rejected its argument.

The BPI, which represents the major record labels in the UK, said the ruling was a "significant legal victory" for the music industry.

It said it had already obtained a freezing order against CD-Wow, meaning that all of its assets and bank accounts are frozen.

'Brute force'

"The courts have lost patience," said BPI lawyer Roz Groome, who added the body would use the ruling to pursue other retailers which exploit parallel imports.

In a statement, CD-Wow said the British courts had set a "dangerous precedent".

"I fear what is happening is an attempt to use the combined brute force of the record industry to force the retailers and, in turn, our clients, to keep lining the pockets of the fat cat executives," said Mr Wesslen.

"It shouldn't matter whether we are buying from an official distributor in the UK, Europe or the Far East, what is important is that we are buying legitimate products from the record companies themselves."

The retailer is now calling for a full review of copyright law.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/6700639.stm




Studies: Music Industry Overstating Threat of P2P Piracy
Nate Anderson

Unauthorized sharing of digital music remains a huge issue for the global music business, but is most of that sharing taking place on peer-to-peer networks? For years, peer-to-peer was the bogeyman, the red Communist music monster than was going to devour the industry's revenues. But new research suggests that sneakernets may be as big a problem as darknets.

A recent study from the NPD Group found that legal music downloads surged in 2006, and the company predicts that legal services will have more users than peer-to-peer networks by the end of 2007. But that doesn't mean the music industry isn't threatened. "Unfortunately for the music labels," said Russ Crupnick, vice president and entertainment industry analyst for the NPD Group, "the volume of music files purchased legally is swamped by the sheer volume of files being traded illegally, whether on P2P or burned CDs sourced from borrowed files."

Note the reference to "burned CDs." The EFF points out that NPD thinks this sort of old-fashioned sharing is actually a massive threat. According to NPD, "The 'social' ripping and burning of CDs among friends—which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing effort—accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing."

If true, that's a huge number. So why aren't we hearing more about CD swapping from the RIAA? For one thing, lending a CD to a friend is not illegal, and it's all but impossible to keep people from ripping borrowed CDs. Hence, the RIAA's focus has largely been on peer-to-peer sharing instead, with the music industry going so far as to pressure colleges to cut off all peer-to-peer access. This level of attention to peer-to-peer networks makes less sense if CD swapping and ripping is actually a bigger issue.

Regular readers might remember our coverage of Media Rights Technologies, which threatened Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Real in early May, claiming that the companies were not using enough DRM. MRT claims that, based on internal studies, streamripping (saving the bitsream from Internet radio or other streaming services) is actually the number one source of infringing copies. I spoke with MRT CEO Hank Risan last week, and he confirmed the claim, saying that streamripping was also one of the reasons behind the recent decision to raise rates on Internet webcasters. (The company has said that it would file lawsuits against Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Real within 10 days if they did not license MRT technology; 20 days later, there has been no announcement).

If streamripping truly is a bigger threat than CD-swapping and P2P use, it must account for at least 38 percent of all music consumption, leaving only a maximum of 25 percent for both legal and P2P acquisition of music. If true, it seems downright amazing that the music industry has spent so much time focused on peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Or perhaps it's not all that amazing. A more likely explanation is that the numbers aren't even right. As Canadian law professor Michael Geist showed a few weeks ago, claims about piracy rates can be wildly variable and downright fictional. High numbers are often used to support legal threats or calls for Congressional action, as in the MRT case. MRT has a lot to gain by overstating the threat of streamripping and, so far, has not showed its numbers. Both MRT and NPD agree, though, that P2P is hardly the music industry's biggest problem.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...2p-piracy.html





Contact Information For 50 Politicians Who Take Campaign Money From The RIAA

When you voted the RIAA the worst company in America you gave us an assignment. But how can we improve the customer service of a recording industry trade group? It's not an easy task. Couldn't you have voted for Home Depot? U-Haul? Anyway...

One of the ways the RIAA operates is by donating money to politicians who then enact favorable legislation on their behalf. Don't let the optimist in you believe that this doesn't work. It does.

But wait, aren't these representatives supposed to work for you? Sure. That's why we've compiled a list of 50 congresspeople who took campaign contributions from the RIAA in the last election cycle. We've linked their contact information so that you, as their constituents, can inform them that they're taking money from the "Worst Company in America," and that's going to cost them your vote.

If your congressperson isn't on the list, try writing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom are running for President and have national interest.

Don't be afraid to tell your representatives how you feel. How else are they going to know? Good luck.

Congressperson Receiving Contributions From The RIAA Amount Contact Information (Hotlinks at parent – Jack.)

Dist 19-FL WEXLER, ROBERT DEM
$9,000 Click Here
Dist 21-TX SMITH, LAMAR REP
$7,500 Click Here
Senate-UT HATCH, ORRIN G REP
$6,000 Click Here
Senate-PA SPECTER, ARLEN REP
$5,000 Click Here
Senate-AK STEVENS, THEODORE F REP
$5,000 Click Here
Senate-NE NELSON, E BENJAMIN DEM
$5,000 Click Here
Senate-CA FEINSTEIN, DIANNE DEM
$4,000 Click Here
Dist 45-CA BONO, MARY REP
$4,000 Click Here
Senate-FL NELSON, BILL DEM
$4,500 Click Here
Dist 08-FL KELLER, RICHARD A REP
$4,054 Click Here
Dist 07-NJ FERGUSON, MIKE REP
$4,000 Click Here
Dist 28-CA BERMAN, HOWARD L DEM
$3,500 Click Here
Dist 29-CA SCHIFF, ADAM DEM
$3,000 Click Here
Dist 30-CA WAXMAN, HENRY A. DEM
$3,000 Click Here
Dist 07-MO BLUNT, ROY REP
$3,100 Click Here
Dist 06-TN GORDON, BARTON JENNINGS DEM
$3,000 Click Here
Dist 06-VA GOODLATTE, ROBERT W. REP
$3,500 Click Here
Senate-IL OBAMA, BARACK DEM
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 14-IL HASTERT, DENNIS J. REP
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 07-MA MARKEY, EDWARD J MR. DEM
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 05-MD HOYER, STENY HAMILTON DEM
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 14-MI CONYERS, JOHN JR. DEM
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 03-MS PICKERING, CHARLES W REP
$2,000 Click Here
Senate-NY CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM DEM
$2,000 Click Here
Senate-TN CORKER, ROBERT P JR REP
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 07-TN BLACKBURN, MARSHA REP
$2,000 Click Here
Dist 06-TX BARTON, JOE LINUS REP
$2,000 Click Here
Senate-AL SHELBY, RICHARD C REP
$1,000 senator@shelby.senate.gov Click Here
Senate- AR PRYOR, MARK LUNSFORD DEM
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 10- CA TAUSCHER, ELLEN O DEM
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 22- CA MCCARTHY, KEVIN REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 49-CA ISSA, DARRELL EDWARD REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 14-FL MACK, CONNIE REP
$1,500 Click Here
Dist 05-IL EMANUEL, RAHM DEM
$1,000 Click Here
Senate-LA VITTER, DAVID REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 06-MI UPTON, FREDERICK STEPHEN REP
$1,000 Click Here
Senate-MS LOTT, TRENT REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 06-NC COBLE, JOHN HOWARD REP
$1,000 howard.coble@mail.house.gov Click Here
Dist 09-NC MYRICK, SUE REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 02-NE TERRY, LEE REP
$1,811 Click Here
Dist 07-NY CROWLEY, JOSEPH DEM
$1,000 write2joecrowley@mail.house.gov Click Here
Dist 10-NY TOWNS, EDOLPHUS DEM
$1,500 Click Here
Dist 28-NY SLAUGHTER, LOUISE M DEM
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 05-OH GILLMOR, PAUL E REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 01-OK SULLIVAN, JOHN REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 02-OR WALDEN, GREGORY PAUL REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 01-WA INSLEE, JAY R DEM
$1,000 Click Here
Senate-SD THUNE, JOHN REP
$1,000 Click Here
Dist 05-TN COOPER, JAMES H. S. DEM
$1,500 Click Here

http://consumerist.com/consumer/wors...iaa-264638.php





Through Rose-Colored Granny Glasses
Holland Cotter



Tear gas, pot and patchouli were the scents of the 1960s. You can almost detect the last two, spicy and pungent, wafting through “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

But tear gas, with its weird-sweet burn, is missing in a show that remembers a lot, but forgets much more, about what was happening 40 years ago, when America was losing its mind to save, some would say, its soul.

The so-called Summer of Love was a local event with national repercussions. Word spread that a “Human Be-In” would convene at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in January 1967. Young people from across the country poured into the city, and by the summer they had filled the hippie neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury and were crashing in parks and streets.

The party went off as planned, and you can revisit it at the Whitney in Jerry Abrams’s “Be-In, 1967,” a funny, hopped-up film with a jamming soundtrack by Blue Cheer. The news media were all over the photogenic counterculture, with its jangly music, exotic drugs and outlandish mores. This was the Flower Power instant, and it was over in a flash. But for many people it is what the ’60s were all about. The Whitney show, which is great fun and half-baked history, will not persuade them otherwise.

The decade was the furthest thing from laid back. It was wired, confused and confusing, with constant clashes around race, class, gender and politics, idealism and ideology. That’s why, for anyone who wasn’t around then, the period is all but impossible to know. And for anyone who was around, it’s hard to describe without sounding either nostalgic or bitter.

Music still gives the best sense of it all. Say you were a middle-class American white kid in 1964. What were you listening to? Jan and Dean, the Shangri-Las. Surfers and bikers. Then you and some friends see the Beatles on their first American tour. They’re so new: four skinny, pale, dandyish guys with femme haircuts singing “Love me do.” The girls in the audience scream. The boys cheer. Ringo shakes his mop and the boys scream too. Hysteria. It’s a high.

Four years later the Beatles are in India, and you’re in college, at a concert, smoking grass and this truly unusual woman named Janis is swinging her hair across the stage. She’s commanding you to take a little piece of her heart. She’s white but sounds black, and she’s reckless, eyes closed, right at the edge of the stage. She’ll fall! Does she care? Outside there’s a war, and the world feels weird, but not in here, tonight.

Then you’re tripping, and Jimi Hendrix is up there on some other stage with this tremendous light show cued to the pulse of the cosmos exploding behind him. No flowers now. No mellow. He strangles the national anthem, then ignites his guitar. Someone behind or beside you whispers: Detroit is on fire. A Buddhist monk torched himself in Saigon. People are making draft-card bonfires. Flames are spilling out of the music, spreading off the stage and into life. You don’t know where acid stops and reality starts.

The Whitney show has a fair amount of music, most of it emanating from recreated light shows. One flashes out at you when you step off the third-floor elevator, a projection of seething, bubbling color, like primordial ooze on the boil or a brain being fried. The original design was by the Joshua Light Show, one of many light teams hired by concert halls or clubs, even by individual bands; Jefferson Airplane had a team of its own.

Light shows were an intriguing medium, organic but programmed, like Abstract Expressionism done by machine. They had a passive-aggressive energy of so much 1960s art and music. Like the wrong drug at the wrong time, they could make you crazy. But basically they were for pleasure, for entertainment. Timothy Leary, among others, pontificated about how we should change the world by changing our heads. But as drugs became widely available, the activist dimension of getting high faded. Tripping was something you did on Saturday night.

Most of the art in the show — mass-produced posters, broadsides, book covers, magazine graphics, record album jackets — also comes under the entertainment category. It wasn’t made to be framed and revered. It was stuff people bought cheap, and lived with for a while, and that museums rarely show.

It makes sense that the predominating ’60s pop aesthetic was distilled from art and artists distained by High Modernism: decorative styles like Jugendstil and Art Nouveau; decadent artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha; riffs from Victorian fairy-tale illustration or Saturday morning TV. Kitsch, in other words, but hallucinated kitsch.

The result was a crisp but sensuous look, intricate and curvy, easy to see but hard to read and adaptable to any context or use, from the covers of potboiler novels (“Sin Street Hippie”) to architecture (the visionary drawings of the Archigram collective) to home design (Verner Panton’s rainbow-colored sit-in foam-rubber environment of undulating curves).

“Summer of Love” is stuck on the style, or rather stuck on the effort to make one style the whole ’60s story. It pushes hard, covering wall after Whitney wall with posters for concerts at rock emporiums like the Fillmore West and East, or British clubs like UFO and the Fifth Dimension. (The show has a substantial British section; it was organized by Christoph Grunenberg, director of the exhibition’s originating museum, the Tate Liverpool.)

But the net effect is less to reveal a depth and variety of creativity than to demonstrate that the main function of alternative art was advertising, that the counterculture started as a commercial venture, which soon became a new mainstream and ended up an Austin Powers joke.

Possibly this view represents the show’s critical edge, but if so, it is sharpened at the expense of accuracy. To many people who came of age between 1963 to 1972 political intensity was the defining feature of the period and its most interesting art. It never let up.

In 1965 antiwar protests started — 25,000 students marched on Washington that year — and they grew larger and more frequent. By 1967, more than 400,000 troops have been sent to Vietnam. Che Guevara was killed that year; the Black Panthers had formed the year before. In 1968 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Racial uprisings spread across the country. The Democratic convention brought the war home to the Chicago streets. In 1969: university takeovers, Altamont. In 1970: Jimi dead. Janis dead. Cambodia. Kent State.

You will learn almost nothing about any of this from the show. Or about the gay liberation movement. Or about the gathering women’s movement, although militant feminism makes total sense given the relentless sexism of psychedelic art, in which all women are young, nude, available “chicks,” and very rarely artists.

Nor would you have any inkling that, for Americans at least, pop culture during these years meant black culture. Apart from Hendrix’s presence, the show is overwhelmingly white. Aretha Franklin’s first big hits — “Respect,” “Chain of Fools” and “Natural Woman” — were all 1967. You won’t find her here. Nor will you find Marvin, or Smokey, or Otis, or Fontella or Ray. Again, take one style for the whole picture, you leave most of the picture out.

Hints of what’s missing come through in a handful of works, most of them added by Henriette Huldisch, an assistant curator at the Whitney in charge of the New York installation. They include one of Robert Rauschenberg’s news-collages that compresses images of racism, war and the conquest of space into an everything-is-connected time capsule.

Ronald L. Haeberle’s much-reproduced print of the My Lai massacre is here, with its two-phrase overlay of text: “Q: And babies? A: And babies.” The outstanding addition, though, is from the Whitney’s permanent collection, a blistering 1967 painting by Peter Saul. Titled “Saigon,” it’s a flame-red, half-abstract, bad-trip vision of mass sexual violation.

So, we discover in 40-year retrospect, love was never all you needed; in the 1960s, in fact, it was barely there. “Summer of Love” doesn’t feel like a particularly loving show, and the ’60s, as seen through its lens, isn’t a loving time, unless by love you mean sex, which was plentiful, as it tends to be in youth movements.

But altruism, selflessness? Young people are by definition narcissistic, all clammy ego. They want what they want. There is no past that matters; the future isn’t yet real. Some might say — I would say — that American culture in general is like this, though not all of it. And if the kids in “Summer of Love” are stoned on self-adoration, there were also an extraordinary number of young people during the Vietnam era who engaged in sustained acts of social generosity. And they made art.

I mention this in light of the Flower Power revivalism of the past few years, in contemporary art and elsewhere. Psychedelia and collectivity are back (and already on their way out again). But the revival is highly edited; a surface scraping; artificial, like a bottled fragrance. No one these days is thinking, “Turn on, drop out.” Everyone is thinking, “How can I get into the game?”

The Whitney show, maybe without intending to, suggests that this was always true, and makes such an attitude seem inevitable and comprehensible. So, let’s have another ’60s show, an incomprehensible one, messier, stylistically hybrid, filled with different countercultures, and with many kinds of music and art, a show that makes the “Summer of Love” what it really was: a brief interlude in a decade-long winter of creative discontent.

“Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” remains at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, through Sept. 16.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/ar...gn/25love.html





Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor
Donald G. McNeil Jr.

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

For example, one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

“Most of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers, so they need a business model that lets them make money in three to six months, which is one growing season,” he said. KickStart accepts grants to support its advertising and find networks of sellers supplied with spare parts, for example. His prospective customers, Dr. Fisher explained, “don’t do market research.”

“Many of them have never left their villages,” he said
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/sc...826&ei=5087%0A





The Known World
Steven Pinker

THE CANON
A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

By Natalie Angier.

293 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $27.

A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation’s energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that have genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.

These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

The costs of an ignorance of science are not just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff it’s made of, the origin of living things and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of, like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

In “The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science,” Natalie Angier aims to do her part for scientific literacy. Though Angier is a regular contributor to the Science Times section of this newspaper, “The Canon” departs from the usual treatment of science by journalists, who typically cover the “news,” the finding that upsets the apple cart, rather than the consensus. Though one can understand why journalists tend to report the latest word from the front — editors’ demand for news rather than pedagogy, and the desire to show that science is a fractious human activity rather than priestly revelation — this approach doesn’t always serve a widespread understanding of science. The results of isolated experiments are more ephemeral than conclusions from literature reviews (which usually don’t fit into a press release), and the discovery-du-jour approach can whipsaw readers between contradictory claims and leave them thinking, “Whatever.”

Angier’s goals are summed up in two words in her subtitle: beautiful basics. “The Canon” presents the fundamentals of science: numbers and probability, matter and energy, the origins and structure of living things, and the natural history of our planet, solar system, galaxy and universe. These are, she judges, the basics that every educated person should master, and a prerequisite to a genuine understanding of the material in any newspaper’s science coverage. And she presents these basics as beautiful: worthy of knowing for their own sake, even if they won’t help us save the planet, age successfully or compete with the Chinese.

“The Canon” begins on an engaging note, lamenting what is one of my pet peeves as well — the idea that science is something for kids. When their children turn 13, Angier notes, many parents abandon their memberships in zoos and science museums for more “mature” institutions like theaters and art museums. And who can blame them, when visiting a modern science museum, in her priceless description, consists of a “mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton’s laws in motion, or something like that; who bothers to read the explanatory placards anyway? And, oops, hmm, hey, Mom, this thing seems to have stopped working!” Many new science museums seem to be built on the dubious theory that a person’s life interests are formed in childhood — that “just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” Instead they may be conveying the message “When I was a child ... I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Angier’s first chapter, “Thinking Scientifically,” makes the case for scientific literacy and portrays the mind-set of scientists. Anyone who knows a boffin (as the British affectionately call the women and men in white coats) will recognize the passionate and irreverent voices of her subjects. (“Most of the time,” one of them tells her, “when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you screwed up the experiment.”) Thankfully, she does not try to render something called “the scientific method” (a phrase that never passes the lips of a real scientist) but conveys the idea that science is just the attempt to understand the world with a special effort to ensuring that the things you say about it are true.

The remaining chapters cover probability, large and small numbers, physics, chemistry, evolutionary and molecular biology, geology and astronomy. Though the material is up-to-date, Angier stays clear of cutting-edge discoveries and in-house controversies. She also wisely avoids the dreary peace-and-ecology sermon with which so many scientists feel they must conclude their popular books.

Every author of a book on science faces the challenge of how to enliven material that is not part of people’s day-to-day concerns. The solutions include the detective story, the suspenseful race to a discovery, the profile of a colorful practitioner, the reportage of a raging controversy and the use of a hook from history, art or current affairs. The lure that Angier deploys is verbal ornamentation: her prose is a blooming, buzzing profusion of puns, rhymes, wordplay, wisecracks and Erma-Bombeckian quips about the indignities of everyday life. Angier’s language is always clever, and sometimes witty, but “The Canon” would have been better served if her Inner Editor had cut the verbal gimmickry by a factor of three. It’s not just the groaners, like “Einstein made the pi wider,” or the clutter, like “So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope’s nose?” The deeper problem is a misapplication of the power of the verbal analogy in scientific exposition.

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things. When Richard Dawkins, discussing the evolution of aggressive standoffs between animals in “The Selfish Gene,” wanted to explain that any signal of a wavering will should be disfavored by natural selection, he wrote, “The poker face would evolve.” Dawkins intends the poker face not simply as a metaphor that conveys a visual image (say, like the one a writer might use to depict a sphinx), but as an allusion to a deeper principle, an allusion that allows one to understand the phenomenon. Just as a poker player actively tries to hide his reactions, natural selection may select against features of an organism that would otherwise divulge its internal state. And just as it would do no good for the poker player to lie about his hand (because the other players would learn to ignore the lie), selection would not favor an animal giving a false signal about its intentions (because its adversaries would evolve to ignore the signal). Moreover, the analogy allows one to make a prediction: that just as an adversary in poker will develop increasingly sensitive radar for any twitch or body language that leaks through — the “tell” — animals may evolve increasingly sensitive radar for any tells in their rivals. A good analogy helps you think: the more you ponder it, the better you understand the phenomenon.

But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally. (Trust me: I’ve graded exams.)

Still, “The Canon” is never dull or obscure, and despite the distracting wordplay, most of Angier’s explanations are anything but superficial. She conveys the real substance of field after field, without distortion or dumbing down, and often her sensual descriptions (of the interior of a cell, a star or the Earth, for instance) leave the reader with images both vivid and useful. “The Canon” is an excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read. It could make the country smarter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/bo.../Pinker-t.html





CBS Buys Music Network Last.fm

CBS on Wednesday said it has paid $280 million in cash for music social network Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement that the online service has more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries and would fit well with its plans to attract younger viewers and transform it from a content company to an audience company.

The Last team will continue to run the online network under the terms of the deal and work with CBS to apply its community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online, the media conglomerate said.

Last has earned glowing praise for its system, which recommends songs by tracking listeners' music-playing habits and linking them to fans with similar tastes.

The group, based in London, has also recently signed deals with music majors Warner Music Group and EMI Group to play their music. Last launched in 2002 and has its largest concentration of users in the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Brazil and Japan.

"Last.fm is one of the most well-established, fastest-growing online community networks out there," said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief executive of CBS.

"Their demographics play perfectly to CBS' goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses," Moonves said. "Last.fm adds a terrific interactive extension to all of our properties and also is a huge step in CBS Corporation's overall strategy of expanding our reach online to transition from a content company into an audience company."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6187408.html





Take Note: Computing Takes Up Pen, Again
Miguel Helft

For more than two decades, the dream of controlling a computer with a pen has seduced and, more often than not, frustrated some of the biggest luminaries in the technology pantheon, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Now Jim Marggraff, an entrepreneur with a long string of successful innovations, say he thinks he has figured out the secret of pen computing — and he has done it by playing with toys.

Mr. Marggraff, a longtime executive at the toy maker LeapFrog, is the inventor behind a string of talking books, smart pens and other educational toys that have made their way into millions of American homes.

His new company, Livescribe, which he plans to introduce today at the D: All Things Digital technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., has taken some of those technologies several steps further. It has created an ambitious new type of pen-based computer system that, if successful, could bridge the gap between paper and the digital world and perhaps even change the way millions of people interact with the Internet.

“I think there is tremendous potential,” said Rodney Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T. Mr. Brooks is not affiliated with Livescribe but said he might become a consultant for the company. “The challenge, like with all technologies, is to package it in a way that people will want to use,” he said.

History suggests that the challenge will not be easily overcome. The promise of computing with a pen has led to some of the best-known failures in Silicon Valley’s history, including Apple’s hand-held Newton, and the Go Corporation. Go was a pioneering pen computer company that attracted some of the technology industry’s most famous executives, spent $75 million of the investors’ money and ended up with little to show for it.

And while pen computing has finally gained a degree of acceptance with consumers through devices like the Palm line of personal digital assistants and tablet PCs, those remain niche products, not the general-purpose machines that some pen computer pioneers envisioned.

Mr. Gates, for instance, predicted five years ago that 2007 would be the year when tablet PCs became the most popular form of PC sold in America, yet they still represent less than 1 percent of the market, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

Mr. Marggraff is familiar with this history, and that, in part, is why he has turned the very notion of pen computing on its head.

Instead of forcing users to write with a stylus on a computer’s slippery display, Livescribe put the computer inside a plump ballpoint pen that is used on paper imprinted with nearly invisible miniature dots. As a user writes, a tiny camera near the pen’s tip watches those dots go by, recording what is being written.

Mr. Marggraff said calling it pen computing is a misnomer. “We are creating paper-based computing,” he said.

In addition to the camera, the pen, which is about the size and weight of a fat Montblanc pen, has two microphones to record sound, a speaker for playback, a small display that Mr. Marggraff calls a pixel bar, and, of course, a hidden computer chip and other sophisticated electronics. It fits into a docking station, where it can upload or download programs and data files to and from a PC.

The Livescribe pen is a more advanced version of the LeapFrog Fly Pentop Computer, which itself has some impressive abilities, even if it is intended for children. Fly users can draw a calculator on paper and make it work by tapping the keys with the pen; a speaker in the pen plays back the results. Users can also draw a piano keyboard on a piece of paper and play a tune on it.

The same technology, which is licensed by Anoto, a Swedish company, has made its way into pens that can be used to write notes and upload them onto a PC, but not much else, and hence has failed to become popular.

But Mr. Marggraff, who left LeapFrog to form Livescribe when the Fly hit store shelves during the 2005 holiday shopping season, has taken the technology several steps further. He also plans to open up the technology to others, in hopes that Livescribe will attract content creators and third-party programmers who will develop many new uses for it, including some not yet envisioned by Livescribe’s team of about 45 employees.

For now, Mr. Marggraff plans to market the pen, which will be available in the fall for less than $200, to college students, and he has some very specific ideas for how they will use it.

The pen, he said, will revolutionize the way millions of students take notes. To demonstrate, Mr. Marggraff jots down some notes while talking with a visitor. As he speaks, the digital recorder inside the pen captures his voice. Once done, he taps the pen on a word he scribbled halfway down the page. The pen immediately begins to replay the conversation, starting from the point in time when Mr. Marggraff had written that word. He then skips back and forth in the audio simply by tapping the pen on different places on the page.

Finally, he docks the pen, and uploads the notes and the audio to his laptop computer. From there, Mr. Marggraff said, he can organize the notes, search through them, play them back and send them to others. Additional software can translate the written notes into text.

Mr. Marggraff said these features could also be useful to professionals like journalists, doctors, job interviewers or lawyers who want to share with associates notes of a business negotiation.

“Anyone that is writing notes on paper, wants to capture the information, they want to access the information,” Mr. Marggraff said. “We are giving a way for people to essentially forget about forgetting.”

Mr. Marggraff said the pen could also provide a powerful new way for people to upload words, pictures and audio to their Web sites, blogs or social networking pages.

To generate excitement about the future potential of the Livescribe technology, Mr. Marggraff performs a nifty stunt: he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his business card and hands it to someone saying that if the person jots down a note on the back of it with a Livescribe pen, the note could soon land in Mr. Marggraff’s e-mail in-box.

“It’s the first interactive business card printed on self-addressing paper,” Mr. Marggraff said.

By the end of the year, he said, similar paper with unique dot patterns associated with particular e-mail addresses will be available. Once notes written on such paper are uploaded to a PC, they will automatically forward to the address, opening many business applications. A drug company, for example, could use the technology to gather data from patients during late-phase clinical trials.

For Mr. Marggraff, this is as close as he has been to fulfilling a 10-year quest to make paper interactive.

It began even before he joined LeapFrog in the late 1990s, when his company, Explore, built a globe, which at the touch of a stylus, would call out capitals. After LeapFrog bought Explore, Mr. Marggraff helped create the LeapPad, a touch-sensitive plastic surface that with the help of a stylus, turns paper books into talking books that can help kids learn to read and write. The LeapPad became the best-selling toy in America in 2000 and 2001, a first for an educational toy.

After a series of other hits, Mr. Marggraff helped conceive the Fly. LeapFrog will not say how many Flys it has sold, but Mr. Marggraff said it had been the company’s best-selling product. Mr. Marggraff, who said he was about to get $22 million in financing from a group of venture capitalists led by Vantage Point Venture Partners, has even bigger plans for Livescribe, based in Oakland, Calif. He will not talk about them in detail now. But in the past, Mr. Marggraff has described a vision for what he calls “the paper Internet.” In it, many of the things currently done on a computer, say, buying a book or sending an e-mail message, could be done with Livescribe’s pen. Write the words “shop,” “Amazon.com” and the name of a book on a piece of paper, then dock the pen, and the computer would take care of the rest.

Few people have seen the Livescribe so far, but veterans of the pen computing world say that while the technology sounds impressive, success is far from guaranteed.

“I hope the product matches the hype,” said Jerrold Kaplan, a co-founder of the pen computing pioneer Go in 1987. “It has to work really well. It’s such a new concept, and often the execution of new concepts requires several iterations before the quality is acceptable.”

Another challenge is that Livescribe is being introduced into a world where young people are spending more time typing text messages on cellphone keypads and writing less in longhand.

Paul Saffo, a longtime technology forecaster who teaches at Stanford’s School of Engineering, said, “Ironically, the big behavior change may be to get this younger generation to pick up this unfamiliar instrument called the pen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/technology/30pen.html





Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, Encased in Glass
Nicolai Ouroussoff



It’s almost daunting to note how many young architectural talents are flourishing today in the Netherlands. If Rem Koolhaas, the profession’s reigning intellectual prince, casts a long shadow, it’s clear that plenty of emerging architects have managed to assert strong creative voices of their own.

Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk stand out from the usual Koolhaas clones. Still relatively unknown in the United States, their firm has steadily built a reputation in Europe for bold designs that draw on everything from primitive temples to comic-book illustration and the decorative ephemera of Andy Warhol. They also have something as rare in architectural circles as raw talent: a sense of humor.

The completion of their Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision here can only elevate their status. Wrapped in a luxurious skin of colorful cast-glass panels, it is their most gorgeous work to date. Yet beneath the glittering surfaces they have fashioned a serious critique of a world saturated in advertising and marketing images, and reaffirmed architecture’s heroic stature.

A leafy suburban hamlet southeast of Amsterdam, Hilversum is best known as the center of the Dutch television industry. Yet it has quietly amassed an impressive array of architectural works. The folded concrete forms of the Villa VPRO, the offices of a private broadcast authority designed by the Dutch firm MVRDV, are visible from a distance; Willem Marinus Dudok’s low, graceful brick town hall, a landmark of early-20th-century Modernism, is a short drive away.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the home of the national broadcasting archives, was conceived as a perfect cube, half of it buried underground. In addition to the archives and offices, it houses a museum, making it a new cultural focal point for the city.

Standing on an isolated lot flanked by a small garden, its glowing glass shell recalls the translucent exterior of Gordon Bunshaft’s 1963 Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale . Like many architects of their generation, Mr. Neutelings and Mr. Riedijk have been heavily influenced by postwar architects like Bunshaft: the brutal directness of his buildings carries particular appeal when so much architecture is corrupted by fairy-tale images straight from Disney. Both buildings are taut, confident structures. But Mr. Neutelings and Mr. Riedijk’s building is rooted in pop culture rather than in the ethos of postwar corporate America.

Conceived in collaboration with the 65-year-old artist Jaap Drupsteen, the structure’s panels are imprinted with famous images from Dutch television: the justice minister riding his bicycle, say, or Johan Cruyff scoring a goal. Using computer technology, Mr. Drupsteen ran the images together and baked them into the glass.

The effect is mesmerizing. The images are only barely discernible from certain angles, as if the building were imprinted with the faint traces of shared memories. But the exterior facades are also a sly critique of contemporary culture. The blur of images conveys the daily bombardment from the Internet, television, movies and newspapers, yet here they seem frozen in time, as if temporarily tamed.

Inside the building that tranquillity gives way to a comic-book version of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” with strict divisions between various worlds. Visitors enter via an internal bridge that crosses over an underground atrium. From here, a vast hall conceived on the scale of a piazza leads to a cafeteria overlooking the calm surface of a reflecting pool. On one side of the hall looms the ziggurat form of the museum; on the other, a wall of glass-enclosed offices. Here the spectral glow of the interior of the cast-glass skin evokes the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral.

It’s a stunning space whose power lies in the contrast between the various architectural experiences within. Clad in cold gray slate, for instance, the underground atrium is a striking counterpoint to the heavenly glass walls above. Mr. Neutelings and Mr. Riedijk call the atrium their “inferno.” It also evokes a tomb: big, square openings are cut through the atrium’s walls, revealing a series of corridors painted a hellish red. The archives are tucked behind these corridors, where researchers and scholars, you suppose, toil away with the concentration of monks.

Neither fiery nor blissful, the offices are something closer to purgatory. Arranged in neat little rows, they open onto long, narrow corridors that overlook the bustling main hall. The office interiors are more contemplative, the colored cast-glass panels alternating with more conventional strip windows. The colored glass emits a soft glow that is strangely soothing.

But the true inferno, in visual terms, is the museum. Mr. Neutelings and Mr. Riedijk set the entry stairs off to one side of the main hall, as if they were trying to avoid it. There are hints of the architects’ presence inside: the walls of the museum auditorium are covered in an elegant, diamond-shaped pattern, and two small openings pierce the darkness at the top of the stairs to the museum’s upper floors, offering sudden glimpses of the colorful glass skin.

But the architects had no control over the design of the exhibitions, and what little architecture there is here is completely overwhelmed by a nauseating mix of interactive installations, reproductions of stage sets and tchotchkes from old Dutch television shows. The effect is cringe-inducing.

Like many architects, Mr. Neutelings and Mr. Riedijk are struggling to come to terms with a society that is on the verge of being completely consumed by global advertising and marketing images. More often than not, architecture is becoming a tool of those interests.

By sealing off these competing forces in distinct worlds and then juxtaposing them, the architects have subtly reasserted the dignity of the public realm, while providing a potent commentary on where our culture is heading.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/ar...26visi.html?hp





Beware of DMCA Scammer
Tyler Cruz

I’ve written many important and useful articles in the past, but this will be one of the most important ones I’ve ever written, so I highly suggest you read it in it’s entirity.

This evening was interesting. I received a DMCA, followed later by harassment and even death threats. Let me start at the beginning.

Several days ago I had contacted the owner of Starcraft2.net to try to purchase the domain. After a couple days of declining my increasing offers, Eric, the previous owner, contacted me again and said he would, after all, agree to my offer. It turned out that his previous declinations were stemmed from the fact that he had received a very authentic-looking DMCA and didn’t want to sell the domain to me as it’d under false pretenses.

However, Eric had done the smart thing and contacted Blizzard to inquire on the matter more. Blizzard responded by basically stating to ignore the e-mail as it didn’t come from them. And this would make sense, since the e-mail came from the address: howardgspinks@gmail.com and not a Blizzard or even attorney’s office.

So, Eric had informed me of his incounter and had warned me that the scammer may try to contact me when the WHOIS information passed to my name.

Several hours ago, I received a DMCA from howardgspinks@gmail.com. Even though I had been warned by Eric about this, it was still very uncomfortable.

Even with the suspicious Gmail e-mail account, the DMCA is as authentic looking as you’re going to get; in fact, it probably is authentic, only Blizzard never sent it; the scammer “Howard G Spinks” did.

Here is a copy of the DMCA e-mail sent to me: dmca email

A few minutes after receiving the e-mail, Howard G Spinks (Alfred E. Neuman?) added me to MSN. Here is a copy of the entire chat transcript with him. It’s a very entertaining read so I highly recommend reading it: piratereports.rtf

As you can see, I was very strong and held my ground from the beginning. This guy really does try hard to scare people into giving them their domains, or perhaps he is hired by competitors to try to thwart competition; that thought did cross my mind, but I think he really just tries to score good domains and probably sells them quickly thereafter.

You see that I ask the gentleman for his phone number, and he responds with “1-800-kiss my ass”. I guess he’s too afraid to continue his scam over the phone. I was also ready to record it for the police. I can’t believe he threw so many threats at me, I think he did this because I held my ground so well and his scam didn’t phase me. In the chat transcript, you can see the longer it goes on, the more his immaturity comes out, such as the use of the word “owned”.

It’s lucky that I had talked to Eric first, as that did help prepare me for this enslaught, which is partly why I wrote this article: BE AWARE OF SUCH SCAMMERS. If you ever receive a DMCA , C&D, or similar type of e-mail or even phone call, don’t immediately hand your domain over and surrender.

While it’s very important to comply with such legal matters, make sure first that they are authentic legal entities. You may even want to contact a lawyer if you don’t already have one on speed-dial and have them handle it for you.

You’ll notice that Howard G. Spinks states he is from PirateReports.com. Well, if you visit the Contact Us page on their site you’ll notice they clearly states: “If you receive an email purporting to be from any member of Pirate Reports and a digital signature is not included please forward a copy to us for a response and not our ISP. It is very likely a “spoof” from a pirate to damage our reputation.”

Guess what. I never received any such digital signature in my e-mail from him.

A Google search of “Howard G Spinks” returns a lot of results of people who have had similar problems with this scammer.

Now, for a bit of revenge. While notifying the public of his scams will undoubtedly be revenge enough, here are a couple of his contact details

MSN: piratereport@hotmail.com
E-mail: howardgspinks@gmail.com

So feel free to give him a hard time.
http://www.tylercruz.com/beware-of-dmca-scammer/





Arnie to Automakers: 'Get Off Your Butts'
CBC News

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought his environmental message of "active optimism" to Ontario Wednesday, along with a thinly veiled warning to the province's automakers to prepare for the "green, clean" revolution.

And along with trading hockey sweaters with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he secured a pledge that Ottawa will crackdown on movie piracy.

Earlier in the day, speaking at the Toronto Economic Club luncheon, the former movie star turned leading voice on combating climate change said he had no doubts America would become the "best chance" to solve global warming.

"I came to say to you, do not be discouraged," he told the crowd. "Your neighbour may be late in coming to the front, but we are coming."

He joked that before he took office in 2003, he was vilified by environmentalists for his extensive use of private jets and love of huge Hummer vehicles, only to be later dubbed the "Green Giant" for his anti-climate change initiatives in office.

"I had five," he said in reference to the notorious gas-guzzlers, noting that one of his Hummers now runs on biodiesel and another runs on hydrogen.

During his speech, Schwarzenegger issued a warning to automakers spreading "doom and gloom" messages over California's tail-pipe emissions standards, citing a billboard in Michigan that read, "Arnold to Michigan: 'Drop dead.' "

"What I am really saying to them is, 'Arnold to Michigan: Get off your butts,' " Schwarzenegger said to the Ontario audience, whose province's auto sector has been the No. 1 auto producer in North America for three years running.

"We're pushing them to make the changes necessary so they can sell cars that can be driven in our state. If they don't, someone will."
'Governator' meets with Harper

Earlier Wednesday, Schwarzenegger and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty signed an agreement that includes low-carbon fuel standards for vehicles.

The deal requires cars in Ontario to have 10 per cent fewer emissions by 2020, equivalent to a reduction of 700,000 cars, the province said.

Schwarzenegger said he was "very, very happy" to sign the deal, even though it stopped short of California's tough new tail-pipe emission standards.

"We're all partners," he said, adding that the agreement would create "additional momentum" for tougher standards across North America.

Schwarzenegger is in Canada for a three-day trade mission to promote tourism in his state. He said the purpose of his trip was not only to promote Californian exports in Ontario, but also to discover Canadian goods.

He later met with Harper at his office on Parliament Hill. In public, they only discussed the Stanley Cup, and who would end up wearing the other team's colours. Harper gave Schwarzenegger an Ottawa Senators' jersey, and the governor returned the favour with an Anaheim Ducks sweater.

But sources on both sides of the border told the Canadian Press Harper raised the issue of movie piracy in a closed-door meeting. One U.S. official said Schwarzenegger was pleased to hear Canada address a problem plaguing his state's film industry.

"We think it's a good first step," said one American official.

The government said it will introduce legislation that helps police charge people who use camcorders in theatres to tape movies, which are later distributed on the internet or sold as DVDs.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/...ger-green.html





Why Hollywood Is Getting Serious About 3-D
Richard Siklos

IT’S kind of fitting that the first live-action 3-D movie expected to find its way to the modern multiplex after a preview at the Cannes Film Festival last week is a U2 concert film. The band’s lead singer, Bono, is known for wearing shades, so it might seem downright participatory for the audience to don 3-D spectacles in order to have, as The Times’s Sharon Waxman put it last week, “the palpable experience of being present” while U2 rocks out.

In a more mainstream way, Hollywood bigwigs like James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis all have new 3-D projects in the works and are proclaiming the beginning of a bold new era for cinema.

Obviously, 3-D is not exactly a post-modern idea, and for most people it first brings to mind thoughts of wacky, red-lens-blue-lens cardboard glasses —or even of the headgear that Imax offered when it started showing 3-D flicks on its giant screens in the 1980s. But 3-D is clearly coming into its own, and its cinematic aspect is just one element of technology’s broader march toward a new era of make-believe super-realism.

Part of the enthusiasm for 3-D is what it will mean for creative expression and story-telling. And part of it is Hollywood’s response to changing technologies — you can be sure that James Cameron’s aptly named feature “Avatar,” scheduled for release in 2009, will look a whole better in a movie theater than it will on a laptop or iPod.

Last week, I sat in a nearly empty Times Square theater and watched “Meet the Robinsons,” the animated, 3-D Walt Disney feature that has taken in a solid $150 million since its premiere on March 30. Like many other 3-D offerings that studios are bringing to the screen, it was projected on a digital system called Real D that a growing number of theaters are installing.

It’s doubtful that even the current generation of glasses —simple black plastic frames with clear lenses — would satisfy Bono’s tastes. But they are fairly unobtrusive and, without them, the image on the screen is a blur. With them, the 3-D illusion enhances the experience, making a robot’s head seem to extend to the seatback in front of you, and streams of peanut butter and jelly fly past your face.

It’s more than a gimmick, but to my eyes it’s hardly a revolution, either — it’s a device that can make a good story better, but can’t make a dull story good. (The same goes for high-definition, the current rage of home video and television programming: watching LeBron James live in HD is spectacular; it’s less exhilarating when Tony Soprano is biting into a cannoli.)

Whether it is the savior of the cinema-going experience or a nice add-on like surround sound and comfy chairs is yet to be seen, but there is palpable excitement around 3-D.

Equally intriguing, 3-D is coming not just to the theater, but also to the living room and potentially to anywhere your eyeballs might happen to wander. In addition to retooling his “Star Wars” series in 3-D, George Lucas is working on a new 3-D television show. All sorts of TV and display companies, including Philips, are working on a next generation of 3-D HD monitors that might not even require viewers to wear glasses.

If you believe the theory that TVs and computers will merge into one utility, 3-D offers intriguing interactive possibilities — especially the use of avatars in everything from PlayStations and Xboxes to virtual worlds for grown-ups like Second Life and virtual playgrounds for children like Club Penguin.

For the uninitiated, avatars are digital representations of yourself in video games or as alter egos in the online world. At first blush, they may seem like something for geeks and under-30s, but a lot of people are trying to figure out ways of bringing avatars into the mainstream — the idea being that a virtual world like Second Life is just a three-dimensional version of the Internet.

There are already longstanding and impressive avatar applications for people with disabilities and, of course, the military. Instead of going to a typical two-dimensional Web site like, say, Yahoo, maybe one day there will be a 3-D version where you and your friends can hang out, or visit online shopping malls, cooking classes, foreign lands and just about anything else that exists in the real (or imaginary) world.

Just as the U2 film gives audiences a front-row experience without going to the live show, much of the online excitement around 3-D involves letting people explore the real world in an immersive way.

By now, for instance, many people have already had the fleeting thrill of using a piece of software known as Google Earth. It uses automated satellite imagery to give an up-to-date rendering of the world, through which users can zoom in on their blocks, homes or any other landmark.

But one of the more interesting tangents that Google is pursuing is the use of 3-D modeling to attach buildings and structures to satellite maps so that landscapes can eventually be viewed (and explored) from any perspective.

Google uses a software it acquired last year, SketchUp, to allow people to create digital renderings of objects, their homes or entire city blocks, which are then kept in something called the 3D Warehouse — from which the most accurate renderings are grafted onto the Google Earth database.

JOHN V. HANKE, who runs Google Earth, told me a few months ago that Google’s approach to recreating the world in 3-D was initially for “purely utilitarian” uses like real estate searches and finding the nearest Wal-Mart, whereas the 3-D tack that Hollywood and video game companies are taking is born out of “pure fun.” But he acknowledged that the two were destined to intersect.

In one interesting educational use, the cable-channel operator Discovery Communications has been providing streaming video to Google Earth since last year: when you visit Yellowstone Park using the service, you can view documentary footage that Discovery provides.

The accelerating blurring of real and artificial is sure to raise warning flags about how we interact. One hopes that such activities as “going outside to play” and “talking face to face” would still hold some appeal in our 3-D future. And it doesn’t take mathematical genius to calculate that 3-D + porn = $$$. But Hollywood’s 3-D foray also demonstrates that the idea is to improve existing media experiences like going to the pictures (or doing research), rather than replacing real-life endeavors.

While there’s no question that the entertainment and information industries are destined for some kind of 3-D future, Mr. Hanke said, “there’s no master plan sitting on the shelf on how it’s all going to happen.”

For now, we just have to slide on the specs or click the mouse and enjoy the show.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...g/frenzy28.php





Gassing Off

Apparently 150 billion cubic metres of gas are burnt off every year - enough gas to power the United States for three months. Even worse - the 390 million tonnes of carbon dioxide released while doing this is more than the reduction of CO2 emissions from many of the carbon offseting projects of the Koyoto protocol. Nigeria alone burns off enough gas to power half of Africa for a year.

Writer, producer and director (and co-author of the first funding book), Caroline Hancock, has just completed a documentary on the subject and apparently almost got shot when shooting in Nigeria. While the screening on BBC World has passed it may well appear online at some point or be replayed on the channel - and either way sounds like a pretty important contribution to an ever more urgent problem.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1202/182/





Life in the Sprawling Suburbs, if You Can Really Call It Living
Matt Zoller Seitz

“In some ways a suburban city can be understood as an intolerant city.” If that loaded quotation from the Calgary-based architect Marc Boutin doesn’t tell you exactly where “Radiant City” stands on the issue of suburban sprawl, the filmmakers have plenty more just like it.

Blending documentary elements and some dramatic material (you don’t realize which is which until the movie springs its best surprise), “Radiant City” is an acerbic position paper on the cultural damage done by postwar architectural fads. The film unfavorably contrasts early-20th-century suburbs, which were built around shared public spaces and more conducive to pedestrian life, with their postwar successors, which lured inhabitants by promising huge amounts of space and no obligation to care about what happened beyond your property line.

The directors, Gary Burns (who has plumbed this territory many times, most notably in the comedy “Waydowntown”) and Jim Brown, depict sprawling, antiseptic housing developments and the culture of long commutes as a recipe for alienation and an impediment toward building a real sense of community and, especially, consensus.

The cast of characters mixes academic experts and supposedly regular citizens. Their ranks include a theater troupe working on a musical about suburban life, a tightly wound mother who micromanages each day on a refrigerator scheduling board, and a young teenager who observes the vastness of his personality-free exurb from the top of a cellphone tower. (He says he’s careful not to stay up there longer than a few minutes because he doesn’t want to get a brain tumor.)

James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbanization, appears throughout “Radiant City” and helps define its tone, which could be described as one of incredulous lament. The cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin’s eerie, sometimes monumental images italicize the experts’ statements, making the suburbs seem like an asphalt-and-Sheetrock dreamscape where democracy goes to die.

RADIANT CITY

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Gary Burns and Jim Brown; director of photography, Patrick McLaughlin; edited by Jonathan Baltrusaitis; music by Joey Santiago; produced by Shirley Vercruysse; released by the National Film Board of Canada. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 85 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Daniel Jeffery (Nick Moss), Bob Legare (Evan Moss), Jane Macfarlane (Anne Moss), Ashleigh Fidyk (Jennifer Moss), Curt McKinstry (Ken) and Karen Jeffery (Karen).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/05/3...es/30radi.html





Local news

Yo, Vermont, What Up? These 3 Dudes, for Starters
Katie Zezima

Vermont has long been a muse for poets and painters, but rappers have never been known to draw inspiration from its bucolic landscapes and postcard-perfect small towns.

Until now.

The quiet streets and low crime rates of Vermont have worked their way into the hip-hop world, thanks to a rap video called “802,” made by three students at Montpelier High School.

“Up in Vermont, this is how we do, we got one area code, and it’s 802,” rap Colin Arisman and Luke Martin, who wear white polo shirts and start the video by hopping out of a white Toyota Scion.

The rap, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL7uW4TYqbs, pokes fun at Vermont institutions and stereotypes like dairy products and snowplows.

“Green Mountain State, where we roll on skis, don’t mess with our cows or we’ll break your knees,” go the rappers, who perform under the name X10.

Colin, Luke and their main man Kevin Hartmann wrote “802” in September after tossing around verses with a group of friends after school. They shot the video in the fall but did not post it on the Internet until early May. It has been viewed more than 55,000 times since then.

“It went crazier than we ever thought,” said Kevin, 16, who shot, produced and posted the video, and calls himself Dr. K.

The boys had planned to pen a rap only about Montpelier, the state capital, where just a handful of establishments are open past 10 p.m., cars stop for pedestrians along clean streets, and teenage loitering on Main Street is the only thing that comes even close to outward flouting of the law.

Instead, they decided to rap about all of Vermont, having concluded that the state could not get by on street cred alone. They included lines about Cabot cheese (they like cheddar “extra sharp,” which they rhymed with “roof tarp”), local pizza places and the Vermont State House, where, along with the streets of Montpelier, most of the video was shot.

“Our state capitol might be 200 years old, but our dome is so blingin’ that it’s plated with gold,” goes “802,” which is set to the beat of a Mobb Deep rap.

The most prominent employee in the building, Gov. Jim Douglas, has seen the video.

“We’re down with that,” said Jason Gibbs, a spokesman for Mr. Douglas.

X10 plans to make a political statement with its next rap, in support of a global warming bill currently before the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature. Mr. Douglas, a third-term Republican, may not enjoy that video as much; he has said he will veto the measure.

Colin, 17, whose moniker is C$ (pronounced C money), likened the creating of “802” to writing a term paper. The rappers, who are all in the midst of SAT preparation, said they had taken something of an intellectual turn in their video, using words like “fustigating” and avoiding profanity.

“I don’t think a big SAT vocabulary is what a lot of rappers are looking for,” Colin said, “but if it enhances your writing, that’s good.”

In any case, the goal was to show that Vermonters can poke fun at themselves.

“We’re small, we might be a little boring, but we can have fun,” Kevin said. “We have a sense of humor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02vermont.html?hp





Anyone for a Gathering of Introverts?
Tammy La Gorce

ALEX ROSENZWEIG, 41, has a problem: People are tired of hearing him talk about “Star Trek.”

“At work they complain incessantly,” said Mr. Rosenzweig, 41, an editor at an environmental consulting firm who is wearing a polo shirt with spaceship insignia. His colleagues give him guff about the 2-foot-by-3-foot “Star Trek” poster he displays prominently. And at home in North Brunswick, he knows better than to greet neighbors with a Vulcan salute.

But once a month, Mr. Rosenzweig feels free to indulge his passion, when he gets together with other members of the Morris County New Jersey Star Trek Meetup at the Empire Diner in Parsippany. The group, which now has 39 members, gathers to talk TV and dissect its own home-produced “Star Trek” series.

Mr. Rosenzweig and his friends found each other on the Web site Meetup.com, which has helped create about 2,000 social groups in the suburbs of New York City in the last five years, according to Andres Glusman, a spokesman for the site.

The size of the groups ranges from a handful of people to hundreds, Mr. Glusman said. Many meet monthly.

In Trumbull, Conn., 30 pug owners come together to walk and talk. Over in Fairfield, a handful of vegetarians swap recipes at a meat-free restaurant. A dozen proud Subaru owners gather to talk engines and bodywork in Paramus, N.J. And a couple of amateur golfers who stash six-packs of beer in their carts hope to add to their number in White Plains.

Judging by the 3,500 topics currently represented on the five-year-old site, no interest is too narrow. Mah-jongg enthusiasts have found one another on the site, and so have marriage arrangers.

Meetup.com was credited with playing a huge role in helping to transform Howard Dean from a little-known governor to an early front-runner for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential campaign, when groups organized by his supporters proliferated on the site.

Over all, the more than 22,000 Meetup groups bring together 3 million people worldwide, Mr. Glusman said.

Other Web sites, including Craigslist, offer similar opportunities for people to get together, but Meetup’s strength is its focus on club-forming. Unlike dating sites, it unites broad clusters of people. And unlike MySpace and Friendster, it emphasizes the rewards of meeting in real time, face to face.

“You could try to accomplish something similar with Yahoo! Groups, but that’s primarily a mailing list,” Mr. Glusman said. “It doesn’t provide the local people, tools and training to organize an offline community group.”

In suburbs across the region, much of the Meetup activity revolves around singles mingling and stay-at-home moms arranging playgroups. The site indicates the number of members in each meetup, and the region’s largest, with 744 members, is the NJ Over 30, Over 40, Over 50, Sexy and Sassy group. It meets monthly at different restaurants and bars around the state.

“My hunch is that in large cities like New York, there are more established institutions helping people meet each other,” Mr. Glusman said. “In the suburbs, with the sprawl, you can see people every day in the grocery store but never know that they’re extremely passionate about flying or want to practice their Spanish. We’re probably more useful to people in the suburbs.”

Suzie Calo, 40, a bookkeeper and a former party planner from Eastchester, N.Y., has helped organize two Westchester County-based meetups: a ghost-tracking group, with 81 members; and a divorce support group, which has 86 members. Ms. Calo said many people formally join groups by posting personal profiles but don’t necessarily show up at gatherings. The divorce group has about a dozen core members, she said, and the ghost trackers about half a dozen.

Meetup groups don’t cost anything to join, but organizers pay the site $12 to $19 a month, based on their specific Web needs. Ms. Calo said the value of the groups is the opportunity they offer to meet people with similar interests and in similar situations.

“In the divorce group, we’re there recommending lawyers and listening to each other’s Jerry Springer nightmares,” she said. “And the ghost trackers — I’ve had experiences with paranormal phenomenon, and so have the others. We get together at a diner, and we talk.”

Some organizers say the site has helped them promote causes.

“I was anxious to do something to elect a candidate,” said William Kransdorf, a 49-year-old lawyer who heads an 18-member group, the Essex County Barack Obama Meetup, which gathers monthly.

On a recent Tuesday night, 11 people showed up at the Goat Cafe in South Orange, N.J., to discuss Mr. Obama’s presidential chances. A couple of students from Seton Hall University and several men and women in their 30s and 40s attended.

“I had to get involved in this campaign,” Mr. Kransdorf said. “This meetup is just my way of doing it.”

On Long Island, the Web site has helped reinvent the potluck dinner. Pat Maiti, 54, who produces a cable television show called “A Taste of New York,” recently organized a gathering at her Syosset home for the Long Island Social Chef Dinner Party Meetup. Of the group’s 113 members, about 40 showed up with different dishes to share.

“I came tonight because I wanted to meet people and make connections,” said Gail Giunta, 37, the owner of a reiki massage studio. Ms. Giunta had traveled to Ms. Maiti’s house from her home in East Hampton.

Larry Katz, 42, an administrator at a medical imaging center from Fort Salonga, said the group draws a diverse crowd. “The food is great, but it’s also a very good way to meet interesting people,” he said.

The allure of simple friendship motivates many participants.

Every other week, 3 to 10 members of Andrea Berman’s New Haven French-language group meet over crepes at a cafe. “I’ve always been interested in language and culture, but this is also a way to socialize,” said Ms. Berman, a 36-year-old engineer. “For the people who come regularly, it’s a really nice feeling.”

One worth building on, by Meetup’s reckoning. On June 9 at a still-undisclosed field near White Plains, the Web site plans to hold its first NYC Suburb Meetup Olympics and barbecue.

“The idea is to pit Meetup groups against each other in fun and games,” Mr. Glusman said. “It’s going to be a big, fun picnic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/ny...27Rmeetup.html





The Many Tribes of YouTube
Virginia Heffernan

WHAT do you think of the latest video on YouTube? Wait. Don’t answer that, or at least don’t answer with words. Because almost the instant you start to talk about one of the beautiful, puzzling videos that pervade the site that Google acquired last fall for $1.65 billion, you reveal that you’re missing the point. Really the only authentic response to a YouTube video is another YouTube video — the so-called “video response.”

YouTube appeared in February 2005, when it was modestly billed as a site on which people could swap personal videos. Since then, however, its video-response feature, which essentially allows users to converse through video, has managed to convene partisans of almost every field of human endeavor, creating video clusters that begin with an opening video, and snowball as fans and detractors are moved to respond with videos of their own. In answer to a lousy, stammering video, say, a real YouTuber doesn’t just comment, “You idiot — I could do that blindfolded!” He blindfolds himself, gets out his video-capable Canon PowerShot and uploads the results.

There are music-making videos about music, dance videos about dance, and architecture videos about architecture. Music people respond to musical performances by filming a musical performance of their own. The same principle holds for dancers, athletes, pundits, pedants, comedians, film editors, poets, stunt people, propagandists and showoffs of every stripe.

What’s more, YouTube’s interface allows users to track the history of anything they watch, as well as to pursue video responses to it. As a further inducement to stay on the site, YouTube proposes a half-dozen works that might interest you whenever you’re streaming a video.

When you enter the site, then, be warned: before you know it, you’ve entered one of YouTube’s great unmarked communities — the shred guitarists, the torch singers, the Christopher Walken impersonators. Each community is filled with so many small obsessive pursuits colliding and colluding with one another that it’s awfully tempting to skip your lunch break — or take the day off — and watch them all.

What follows, then, is not a list of the top videos on YouTube. That would be too simple, too old-Web. Instead, here are five of the most fascinating worlds to get lost in on YouTube. Every single one of them is worth a detour.

1. PETER OAKLEY, A K A GERIATRIC1927

Last August Peter Oakley, a British pensioner, posted a video that he promised would contain grumbling and griping under the screen name geriatric1927. In fact, it was a love letter to YouTube, and an expression of hope that the video blogs he was planning to post regularly would interest users of the site. In record time the entries, which tell the story of a widower, blues fanatic and former radar technician in the British Army, inspired a tribute video from a hipster admirer, who dubbed Mr. Oakley “The OG of Blogging” — that’s original gangsta.

A grandpa who knows about radar? What techie kid doesn’t dream of that? Then came the imitators: Right, I’ll have a go myself, resolved jimsan1, another YouTuber who appeared close to Mr. Oakley’s own age. (Mr. Oakley turns 80 in August.) Before long, Mr. Oakley’s videos were attracting a million views and more, and his series of videos are among YouTube’s 10 most heavily subscribed to. Now the senior-citizenry of YouTube regularly posts video oral histories in serial form, talking straight into the camera without pyrotechnics or theatricality in tribute to the understated style of the master.

Mr. Oakley can now be heard singing with the Zimmers, a vast rock group formed of elderly retirees and overseen by Mike Hedges, the U2 producer. The band releases its first album, “My Generation,” on Monday, but its first music video — a performance of the Who’s “My Generation” with Pete Townshend — was uploaded to YouTube last month.

2. TIME-LAPSE PAINTING

Just as YouTube has made room for producers and consumers like Mr. Oakley who have been shut out of earlier pop-culture revolutions, it also accommodates art forms that other media have threatened for years to make obsolete; witness the many origami how-to videos on the site, as well as lute and gamelan recitals, polka dancing and happenings of the Dada-Yoko Ono kind.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the august art of portrait painting has made modest inroads into the consciousnesses of the MySpace generation. Of course, painting is typically appreciated face-to-face, but painters on YouTube have added drama by creating time-lapse films of themselves at their easels. The videos, which move too fast to be instructive, nonetheless address both the most childlike questions we have for realist painters (How did you do that?) and the most suspicious (Did you do it yourself?). They also exude infectious bravado, as the painter accomplishes a day’s work in three or four minutes, without anxiety or second thoughts.

Laura Karetzky, a figurative painter in New York, was drawn to the time-lapse portraits because she thought they might provide a window into the private agonies and ecstasies of other painters. They did. In one video, titled “Heather Paints Melissa,” a hobbyist paints and repaints a child’s face, each time unintentionally deepening the portrait’s flaws. “I find myself hanging on the edge of my seat clasping my hand to my forehead,” said Ms. Karetzky. “I’m actually rooting for her in the end not to make the same mistakes she just painted out three or four times earlier.”

3. PARKOUR

Speaking of performance art and mysterious spectacles, parkour — a form of extreme gymnastics invented in France — thrives on YouTube. What good, after all, is scaling buildings, leaping down staircases and jogging over cars if no one is around to see you pull it off? That’s where videos, and their international dissemination, come in.

Some parkour videos are professionally made programs about the art of movement, in which the whole world is an obstacle course and no structure is insurmountable. These gorgeous minifilms feature muscled figures, often shirtless, looking like jewel thieves or Spiderman, atop buildings where they skip and leap with such death-defiance and frank grace that it’s hard to keep from calling their sport dance.

But no: parkour is meant to be martial, efficient and tough. Amateurs from all over the world have also shared their stunts on YouTube. The homemade spinoffs mimic professional ones in that they strew together scenes from disparate places and times, cherry-picking only the players’ best stunts and supplying no clear course trajectories. But many of the participants in the amateur videos look like teenagers, their jangly movements plainly influenced by hip-hop and skateboarding as much as by dance, circus art and gymnastics. And unlike the pros — who really appear to risk their lives — the copycats wisely use jungle gyms and rubber surfaces for soft landings. After a pileup of decidedly self-serious parkour offerings, a comedy team called the Suggestibles posted a parody response, “Pour Quoi,” in which two Englishman (naturally) talk in phony French accents and struggle to get through a revolving door.

4. BLASPHEMY

Individual religious testimony abounds on YouTube, as do sermons from miscellaneous (and sometimes extinct) religious institutions, but these are posted to fire up discussion, not to lay down any laws. Versions of the last sermon of the prophet Muhammad are posted — one runs “Star Wars”-style with the words receding into outer space — as are Christian sermons on sexual purity and Palestinian sermons that contain anti-Semitic slurs.

Viewers are urged to discuss them, and they do. Curiously, the religious group that makes the most imaginative and despotic use of YouTube are atheists. The Rational Response Squad, a furtive organization devoted to curing theism, has challenged YouTubers to post videos of themselves denying the existence of the Holy Spirit and thereby — in the group’s reading of Mark 3:29 — damn themselves for eternity.

More than 1,200 people have posted blasphemy videos as of this writing. In each one, a single person speaks the line, “I deny the Holy Spirit.” Sometimes he or she adds more: a name, a speech, a further denial of Easter Bunny-like entities.

Some blasphemers are jaunty, some are insolent, some are scary, some are nervous. But all of them (young and old, mostly English-speakers, but with a range of accents and ethnicities) seem to believe they are making a statement of some gravitas — issuing a reproof to doctrine, possibly risking their salvation. On the face of each participant is both a wonderful purity of purpose — the mandate is so simple, the one-line script so unforgettable — and a clear vulnerability.

Will anyone regret taking the so-called Blasphemy Challenge? If so, can they retract their videos?

5. FAT RANTS

Joy Nash became this spring’s latest YouTube star for her Fat Rant, in which she flaunted her plus size, bashed retail chains for not stocking XXL and ran down her fellow Americans for their hypocrisy about weight. Ms. Nash performed much of this rant in various costumes with a high-spirited stage manner that suggested self-confidence, humor and a refined sense of glamour.

Ms. Nash, who gave her weight at 224 pounds, said that she ate what she wanted, watched her health and had stopped considering her weight the prime mover of every event in her life. YouTubers loved it.

Watch “A Fat Rant” these days and thumbnail images from response videos run down the middle of the page. A typical one is called YES!!!!!!!!!!! Unlike the glossily produced original, the responses to “A Fat Rant” are ad-libbed solo soundoffs with minimal stagecraft.

They are new fat rants, then, delivered by Ms. Nashs fans and semi-fans, people with equally piquant opinions about obesity, appearance and American doublespeak about weight. Though each video pretends to particular clarity to on the subject, many run into versions of the same conundrum: being fat is O.K., except when its unhealthy. But when is that, again? And should fat people try to be skinny? Or be happy with how they are?

The video responders are less ideologically resolute than Ms. Nash, with some resolving to diet; still others manage to outdo Ms. Nash in fat-power-speak. In general, the video-responders are profoundly moved by “A Fat Rant,” and take Ms. Nash’s video as an occasion, paradoxically, to expose their bodies, as if inviting comment. This being YouTube, with its emphasis on responses, both taunts and catcalls arrive, ready for worldwide consumption, right on cue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/ar...on/27heff.html





Pretty Faces With Plenty of Troubles, and Secrets
Ginia Bellafante

“Hidden Palms,” the new series from Kevin Williamson making its debut tonight on CW, may be the first teenage soap opera visually dedicated to mid-20th-century Modernism. Remove the sex, sociopathology and possible filicide, and you will still be left with a quite inspiring home design show.

Set in Palm Springs, the last patch of Southern California this genre hasn’t yet trammeled, the look is all Eames benches, Barcelona chairs and geometric patterns. The mood is severe, but the colors are happy. Mr. Williamson has created a sick world, but one for which you wouldn’t mind having the swatches.

The clichéd aesthetic choice of so many single art directors, midcentury Modern isn’t necessarily the easiest signifier of typical American family life, and that is precisely the point. The families on “Hidden Palms” don’t convene at the table or watch movies together or talk about SAT scores or college admissions. The show is set during the summer, but still there is no evidence that any of the 17-year-olds in it actually go to school.

What kind of people decide to bring up children in Palm Springs anyway? As the resident satanic charmer explains to the newcomer in town, “It’s all retired grays, gays and streets named after dead people,” he says. “People come here to die.”

The charmer is a high school junior named Cliff Wiatt, played by Michael Cassidy, an actor so good at conveying sham authenticity that even when he sniffs, it doesn’t quite feel as if he means it. His mission is to keep at bay the new arrival, the economically named Johnny Miller (Taylor Handley, who, like Mr. Cassidy, is a veteran of “The OC.”)

Johnny begins to suspect that Cliff might have had a hand in the death of Eddie, a teenager who once lived in Johnny’s new house. And it isn’t as if Johnny doesn’t have a whole big pasta bowl of problems already. In another life he wore crew-neck sweaters and his hair neatly combed back. He cared about math and lived someplace where it rained. But then his sweaty, gin-drinking father killed himself, sending Johnny down the road to addiction, then rehab, then unbuttoned shirts and a coiffure in the mode of Jarvis Cocker.

“Hidden Palms” is high soap opera, a kind of “Masterpiece Theater” of unjustifiable television, which means that there won’t be anything quite so much fun to watch all summer. It takes its suspense seriously. It doesn’t tease your attentions so much as kidnap them, with many of the tropes of Mr. Williamson’s auteurism: the love triangles, suspicious deaths, bloody Halloween costumes and nods to gag horror. For the uninitiated, Mr. Williamson created the “Scream” films and “Dawson’s Creek,” and “Hidden Palms” seems the inevitable hybrid of his opposing impulses toward satire and sincerity.

“How does it look?” Cliff’s mother asks him when he’s removing the bandages from her plastic surgery. “It’s bruised,” he responds. “But it looks like the noses two noses ago.”

If I were watching “Hidden Palms” as a 16-year-old, I’d be grateful for whatever parents nature gave me, their refusal to let me drive the Jeep Cherokee be damned. It is hard to think of another television show of this kind that has portrayed mothers and fathers so perversely.

Ultimately, “Hidden Palms” derives its creepy tension from the question of how morally debased the show’s parents will actually prove themselves to be. At best they are dangerously attached or uncommunicative; at worst, criminal, lecherous and pedophilic.

It is a good thing, then, that they haven’t aggressively reproduced. The show is certainly true to the demographic realities of Palm Springs: not a single one of the young people appears to have a sibling. In some sense, “Hidden Palms” marks a radical departure in popular culture’s depiction of only children, who for the better part of the last two decades have been depicted as self-reliant superstars or geniuses (Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Rory Gilmore.)

The teenagers on “Hidden Palms” make a strong case for benighted arguments that only children are socially maladjusted, neurotic, disturbed. It seems fairly certain that “Hidden Palms” received no subsidies from the Population Council.

HIDDEN PALMS

CW, tonight at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Kevin Williamson and Scott Winant, executive producers. A Lionsgate Televison production in association with Outerbanks Entertainment.

WITH: Taylor Handley (Johnny Miller), Gail O’Grady (Karen Hardy), Sharon Lawrence (Tess Wiatt), D. W. Moffett (Bob Hardy), Amber Heard (Greta Matthews), Michael Cassidy (Cliff Wiatt), Ellary Porterfield (Liza Witter), Tessa Thompson (Nikki Barnes) and J. R. Cacia (Travis).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/ar...on/30bell.html




For Lohan, a Cocktail of Sympathy and Scorn
Sharon Waxman

It’s already fairly clear which image of Lindsay Lohan will be most indelible in the summer of 2007, and it’s not a promotional still from her new movie, “Georgia Rule.”

Instead it’s a paparazzi photograph of this flame-haired actress passed out in a car in the wee hours of Sunday morning, sprawled across the passenger seat, her hair peeking out from a gray hooded sweatshirt, her mouth slack-jawed.

That image shouted from the cover of tabloid newspapers on Monday as if to herald the umpteenth public wipeout for the 20-year-old actress, who was arrested here Saturday for driving under the influence after she crashed her Mercedes into a tree along the residential strip of Sunset Boulevard. On Monday she checked into a Malibu rehabilitation facility called Promises.

And quick as a shot (no, not that kind), all of Hollywood was a-clatter with the sound of clucking tongues over advice not taken. So sad, everyone said, such a waste: so pretty, so talented — so uninsurable. Like Britney Spears before her, and Marilyn Monroe too, the spectacle of a young woman’s self-destruction seemed to demand expressions of sympathy along with the requisite scorn.

But hard reality was also quickly setting in. Across this close-knit town, decision makers were mentally wiping Ms. Lohan from their short lists. One studio chief who has worked with Ms. Lohan said that he would not hire her until she proved herself healthy and reliable. (Confident at least of this possibility, he would only comment anonymously.)

“My hope for her would be that her growing pains get sorted out,” said Valerie Van Galder, president for marketing for Columbia Tristar. “The wild child used to be a phase you grew out of. This feels different. I think now there’s more attention to minutiae, and you’re stalked everywhere you go.”

To be hired again, some said, Ms. Lohan might have to be more than sober. She would need perhaps to post her salary as bond, or pay for her own insurance, even on an independent film.

Ms. Lohan was meant to start a new movie this week, an independent production titled “Poor Things,” about two female con artists, also starring Shirley MacLaine. The film’s producers met on Wednesday to decide whether to replace Ms. Lohan or hold off while she spent a month under wraps.

Many could say they saw this coming. Ms. Lohan has already worn out her welcome at Disney, where she made four films, including the hits “Parent Trap,” when she was a precocious 11-year-old, and “Freaky Friday,” in 2003, in which she played a thoroughly credible middle-aged mom.

But by the time she starred in “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” in 2005, she was already a paparazzi fixture, and Disney was worried enough to sit her down for a talking-to.

“I told her before the movie began, ‘This is the moment in your career where you either become Kristy McNichol or Jodie Foster,” recalled Nina Jacobson, who ran the studio at the time and is now a producer at DreamWorks.

And while filming went fine, Ms. Lohan went missing during the international press junket in Europe.

“The image issue aside, professionalism-wise we were disappointed,” Ms. Jacobson said. “And I was sad, because she’s so charismatic and appealing on screen. It’s a very sad thing to see it go to waste this way.”

Those in Ms. Lohan’s camp find all this hand wringing to be disingenuous. One person close to Ms. Lohan pointed out that Disney handed the actress a $1 million bonus check for “Freaky Friday,” an invitation for her , then a 16-year-old, to indulge irresponsible impulses.

And James G. Robinson, a producer of “Georgia Rule” who had a letter sent to Ms. Lohan at her Chateau Marmont hotel room last year calling her “a spoiled child” for failing to show up for her scheduled call times (the letter was conveniently leaked to the news media even as it was delivered), later invited the actress to be his date to a George Clooney tribute.

At Sony the hope was that Ms. Lohan would right herself, and soon. The studio has a thriller starring Ms. Lohan, “I Know Who Killed Me,” out in late July.

Ms. Lohan’s publicist, Leslie Sloane-Zelnick, said her client intended to do the publicity for the film, but admitted that things were in limbo.

“She will work for that film, she wants to work for that film,” Ms. Sloane-Zelnick said. “But we’re waiting on her situation, in general. At the end of the day, her talent will prevail. Someone will take a chance on her.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/movies/31loha.html





Grade-School Girls, Grown-Up Gossip
Stephanie Rosenbloom



WHEN Britney Spears shaved off her signature blond locks, Alexis Gursky, 9, found herself wondering not why Ms. Spears picked up a razor in the first place, but why she did not do more with the hair she shaved off.

“I just thought it was a little weird to just do it and not to give it to people who have cancer,” said Alexis, a third grader in Manhattan.

And while scores of people were petitioning Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California to keep Paris Hilton from having to report to jail on June 5, Jessie Urvater, 8, could not muster any sympathy.

“I don’t like Paris,” said Jessie, of Manhattan, who was quick to point out that hotel heiresses are not above the law. “I think she should go to jail.”

Well before they experience puberty, children today are deeply immersed in the dirty laundry of celebrities — their eating disorders, bouts with drinking and drugs, and run-ins with the law (and one another). The gritty details are all around them: on the Web, on cable, at the top of the network news and splashed across the covers of magazines.

The prevailing wisdom is that exposure to vast amounts of gossip, particularly about Hollywood’s so-called bad girls — Ms. Hilton, Ms. Spears and Lindsay Lohan, to name the most frequently chastised — is leading America’s impressionable 8-to-12-year-old girls into the gutter. But the reality is more complex.

In interviews, tweens tend to be highly judgmental of the much-publicized antics, turning them into age-appropriate morality tales that would make their parents proud and bring comfort to those who fear the next generation will be made up of pantyless party girls known more for their D.W.I.s than their G.P.A.s.

Ms. Hilton, said Jamie Barton, 10, of Mobile, Ala.: “spends all this time acting like everyone else doesn’t mean anything. It’s just me, me, me.”

Said Diamond Martin, 12, of Parlin, N.J.: “I don’t see her as a role model. I’m not sure what she’s really ever done, actually.”

That tweens are not traipsing after the drunken pied pipers who erupt in the gossip headlines is not surprising to child behavior experts.

“I would be shocked if they did,” said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, a professor and chairman of the human development department at Cornell University. After all, he said, 8- to 12-year-olds are by and large “really heavily under the influence of their parents.”

That does not mean, though, that gossip culture is harmless. “There may be a delayed effect,” said Dr. Richard Gallagher, the director of the Parenting Institute at the Child Study Center of New York University. “When kids know that some behavior is possible and that it doesn’t lead to total ruination of your life, they may, as they get older, be willing to entertain that.”

But until then, many children view the unseemly behavior through a lens of common sense that some celebrities themselves appear to lack.

“They should really do good things that they want other people to do,” said Rachel Steir, 11, of Manhattan, “not smoking, taking drugs, thinking that they need to lose so much weight.”

That children today are exposed to much more scandal than those of previous generations is not in dispute. Like many girls, Courtney Barton, 12, of Mobile, Ala., said she does not seek out celebrity gossip, but encounters it everywhere: “I hear these things about all of them on the radio, Internet and TV.”

According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the death of Anna Nicole Smith, on Feb. 8, constituted 9 percent of news coverage the week she died (she died midweek). That same week, 8 percent was devoted to the 2008 campaign and 3 percent to the Super Bowl. Pew also found that in the two days following Ms. Smith’s death, “nearly a quarter of the news from all sectors (24 percent) was devoted to this story, and fully half of cable news.”

Of course, Ms. Smith’s accidental drug overdose is old news by now. Children have moved on to Us magazine, where they can read about Ms. Lohan reportedly snorting cocaine, or to People.com, where they are informed that the estranged husband of Anne Heche, the actress, “craves porn, poker and money.”

Gone are the days when children who wanted to learn the meaning of a naughty word or slang term had to find a dictionary or a more worldly pal. Today, Wikipedia can explain in a matter of seconds that badonkadonk is a term for a woman’s buttocks.

Michelle Dale, a second-grade teacher in Brooklyn who works with the youngest of the tweens, said she is “always blown away” by all the things her students know about. “The movies that these little second graders have come in and watched,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ ”

In interviews, children expressed their detailed knowledge of Angelina Jolie’s penchant for adoption (though they never mentioned her previous marriage to Billy Bob Thornton or the vial of his blood she wore around her neck). They knew about Ms. Hilton’s sex tape, Ms. Lohan’s dramatic weight loss and Ms. Spears’s underwear-free club outing. Saturated with such gossip, they had formed some very strong opinions about what is good, bad and just plain weird.

Caroline Lee, 11, of Greenwich, Conn., pointed out Ms. Spears’s public parenting blunders, including driving with a baby in her lap: “I feel kind of like she’s a little young and she’s not the right kind of mom,” Caroline said.

But Ms. Jolie, Caroline said, is “a good mother. She takes care of her kids.”

“She’s not as strange and bad as Britney and Paris and Lindsay,” she said, adding that “she adopted so many kids and she also helped places that needed help.”

Of Ms. Lohan, Sophia Ambrosino, 12 , of Manhattan, lamented the passing of the young actress’s red-haired, reproach-free “Parent Trap” days. Now, she said: “There are things that she does just to be on the cover of something. I liked her when she was little.”

Arielle Urvater, 11, also said while once she was a fan of Ms. Lohan and Ms. Spears, she is no longer. “We’re well educated,” she said. “We know that drugs aren’t good and that smoking isn’t good.”

Tweens often think in moralistic terms, especially if they have a solid family support system or role models, Dr. Savin-Williams said.

But around 12 or 13, it is not unusual for a child’s individual values to give way to peer pressure, some child experts said, and children may be influenced by what they perceive to be cool, not what they instinctively know to be right.

“The younger kids are a little freaked out by Paris,” said Susan Schulz, editor in chief of CosmoGirl. “For the most part they’re still very good kids at that age.”

But, said Ms. Schulz, when they are teenagers, “every kid is trying to have a Paris Hilton kind of night at their prom.”

And that is exactly what some adults fear.

“I don’t think there’s any question that kids are getting more and more information at a younger and younger age,” said Dr. David Walsh, a psychologist and the founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family. “And there are very few filters available.” The result, he said, is the “adultification of youth.”

“Kids have information but not necessarily the emotional maturity to absorb the information,” he said. “We’ve got kids who are at the simple arithmetic phase in terms of their emotional maturity dealing with quadratic material.”

Dr. Gallagher of N.Y.U. suggested parents discuss celebrity misbehavior with their children. “You have to talk about it before someone else does,” he said. “That helps the kids digest it more effectively.”

Most of those conversations will likely be with and about girls.

“The bad boys have been replaced by the bad girls,” said Ted Harbert, the president and chief executive of the Comcast Entertainment Group, which includes E! Entertainment Television, Style Network and G4. “You just don’t hear as much of these guys who get in trouble as much as we used to in the ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ generation.”

“The girls don’t want to just leave it to the boys to get in trouble,” he said. “They want their fair share of time in the principal’s office.”

But what about all those thoughtful things tweens say about celebrities’ bad behavior and their embrace of good clean role models?

Dr. Walsh said: “A kid can write a well-thought-out essay about why a behavior is not good, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to carry over to their behavior. Thinking ability is right on track but emotionally ability lags.”

Yet the girls interviewed cited wholesome-seeming celebrities as their favorites: Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale, Hilary Duff, Dakota Fanning, Anne Hathaway and Ms. Spears’s younger, scrubbed sister, Jamie Lynn. Is it possible that today’s tweens have seen enough to inoculate them against the pressures of their teenage years?

“As I grow older I see more and more how bad they are,” Arielle Urvater said. And yet kids her age cannot help but be interested, she said.

“They’re famous, pretty and all the boys like them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/fashion/27gossip.html





OMG! Cute Boys, Kissing Tips and Lots of Pics, as Magazines Find a Niche
Elizabeth Olson

Above the neon-orange lettering that promotes the issue’s “love blogs” and other content, Zac, Corbin and Miley smile winningly on the cover for the May/June issue of J-14.

No need for the preteen magazine to spell out that they are Zac Efron, Corbin Bleu and Miley Cyrus because its devoted readership already knows this from watching the Disney Channel. Disney and Nickelodeon have been pumping out youthful stars whose careers, outfits and “faves” are dissected by every issue of J-14 and its brethren, which include Twist, M, Tiger Beat, Bop and Popstar.

With a faithful audience in the millions, these magazines for the early teenage years are in overdrive, bolstered by last year’s enthusiasm for new stars from the Disney Channel’s hit “High School Musical,” which made household names not only of Zac Efron and Corbin Bleu, but also of Ashley Tisdale and Vanessa Anne Hudgens. Miley Cyrus, the daughter of the singer Billy Ray Cyrus, is the star of the Disney series “Hannah Montana.”

Some tween magazines say they have seen circulation rise by as much as 25 percent on the strength of “High School Musical,” and another increase in demand is coming soon. “High School Musical 2” is scheduled to begin in August, and is eagerly being awaited by the flavored lip gloss and fuzzy pencil set.

“It’s the synergy,” said Molly MacDermot, the editor in chief of Twist and M, which along with J-14 are published by privately owned Bauer Publishing. “It’s ‘High School Musical’ and what continues from it that drives the interest. For example, Corbin Bleu stars in the musical, then he comes out with a music album and then a video. So the interest is sustained.

“And it really hits these girls on an emotional level,” she said of her readers, who are nearly all female and younger than 15.

After the boy bands from the 1990s like ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys grew up, the tween fan magazines saw some drop in readership. But the genre — which commands impressive shelf space on newsstands and in checkout aisles — seems to have made a strong comeback, which contrasts with the retrenchment at more mainstream titles like TeenPeople, YM and ElleGirl. None of those magazines are still in print.

For girls from 8 and 14, J-14 and M are two of the country’s best-read magazines, according to an annual survey by Experian Simmons Research of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Last year’s survey found that J-14 tied with Nickelodeon magazine, with 32 percent of preteens reading or looking at each magazine and 30 percent reading or looking at M magazine. Nickelodeon has elements of a fan magazine, but also runs features and comics related to shows on the network, like SpongeBob SquarePants.

“I love reading about celebrities that are my age,” said Mallory D. Levy, 15, of Boynton Beach, Fla., a Popstar subscriber for four years. She said that she takes four or five such magazines to school every day.

But the Paris Hiltons of celebrityville do not regularly appear in these fan magazines. Nor do Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan now that they have exhibited less-than-exemplary behavior.

“Our content is 100 percent positive,” explained Matthew Rettenmund, the editor in chief of Popstar, published by Leisure Publishing.

“We do not pick apart girls’ appearances and clothing choices,” he said. “We do not make fun of stars who are out of favor. We believe in keeping kids kids.”

Mr. Rettenmund said that Popstar, which began publishing in 1998, experienced a 25 percent rise in audited circulation to 217,183 an issue last year, helped by the “High School Musical” craze. The magazine expects to top 300,000 readers for each of its monthly summer issues.

Ms. MacDermot of Twist said that her magazine also is expecting a big circulation uptick this summer because of “High School Musical 2,” the new Harry Potter book and movie, and the latest sequel to “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Twist, Popstar and their counterparts have been closely tracking the activities of the six “High School Musical” actors as well as Miley Cyrus, who plans to release her first CD in June.

The universe of stars the magazines cover is somewhat larger — it includes singers like Avril Lavigne and the “American Idol” finalists — but largely dominated by people who made their names in television, like Hilary Duff (formerly of “Lizzie McGuire”).
As stars like Ms. Duff graduate to more adult markets, younger performers hit adolescence and turn into heartthrobs. Two of the latest are the twins Dylan and Cole Sprouse, who star on Disney’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” and have become usual suspects on the magazine covers. Their show, which has the brothers living in a fancy hotel in Boston, gave Ashley Tisdale of “High School Musical” her start.

Nickelodeon Channel has its hits like “Unfabulous,” “Drake and Josh” and “Zoey 101,” but the Disney juggernaut is a prime driver of the current crush on the young stars. Disney invites the magazines to visit movie sets and gives them access for interviews, photo shoots and brief videos that the magazines post on their Web sites.

The magazines say that they are attracting readers by posting celebrity videos on social networking sites. Some of the publications, like J-14, have sites on MySpace; Twist and others keep their own Web sites fresh with daily quizzes, games and sweepstakes.

Ms. MacDermot said that she receives instant feedback from blogging. Like competing publications, Twist posts videos on MySpace from “interviews with stars, from photo shoots or wherever the stars sit down with us.”

Several magazines, including Popstar, also are on YouTube, with videos, Mr. Rettenmund said, “that are short, but they get our name out there.”

Even with television, computers and iPods competing for their time, tweens are still reading magazines because they “tell them what’s hot, give them fashion looks and tell them stories,” said Jane Buckingham, the president of the Intelligence Group, a market research firm based in New York that tracks the age group.

“And portability is important,” said Michael Wood, a vice president of TRU, a market research group in Northbrook, Ill. “You can throw a magazine in a backpack, take it on the bus, pull it out in study hall and share it anywhere with your friends.”

Still, it is not all unalloyed sweetness on the teenager magazine scene. Longstanding magazines like TeenPeople, YM and ElleGirl pulled the plug on their print editions in the last two years. TeenPeople, which Time Inc. began in 1998, ended its print version last summer, and, like YM and ElleGirl, went solely online. TeenPeople’s electronic effort was merged on April 26 into People.com.

The print version of TeenPeople, part of the 1990s wave of teenage magazine start-ups, had a slip in circulation with the arrival of entertainment weeklies, because readers did not have to wait a month to find out the latest doings of Ms. Spears or ’N Sync. Mark Golin, the editor of People.com, said that the larger site drew more traffic so “why duplicate efforts?”

Magazines for early teenagers rely overwhelmingly on newsstand sales, and their $2.99 or $3.49 price makes them an easy impulse buy. According to Mediamark Research Inc.’s annual readership survey of youths from 12 to 19, called MRI Teenmark 2006, there were 22.7 million readers of J-14 last year along with 17 million readers of M and almost 9 million readers of Twist, all of which are published by Bauer Publishing.

Bauer, which is based in New York, said its 2006 revenues were $13.7 million, compared with $11.9 million in 2005. Privately held Leisure Publishing and Laufer Media of Glendale, Calif., publisher of Tiger Beat and Bop, do not disclose revenues.

With the advent of MySpace and celebrity gossip sites like tmz.com, and the shift of advertising spending from video-game makers and cosmetic companies to the Internet and away from magazines, analysts say teenager magazines face new challenges.

“Gossip is available online immediately,” said Barry Parr, an analyst at of Jupiter Research, which surveys teenage Internet usage. “It makes you wonder about the long-term viability of some of these magazines.”

Tinkering with the tween formula can be a tricky business, as the popular Sprouse twins discovered last summer. A new magazine aimed at boys in the preteen age group — the Sprouse Bros. Code — closed after the first issue.

“Tween boys are a totally separate audience,” said Mr. Rettenmund of Popstar, who oversaw the test magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/bu...28fanzine.html





The Lost Beach Boy

Band's original member tells his side of story
Robert Miller

David Marks was one of the first Beach Boys and was instrumental in developing their early sound. A book has been written about his years with the group.

For two years, David Marks got to ride on the rock 'n' roll express. He was present at the creation of the Beach Boys, playing and singing on their first slew of surf-and-muscle-car hits -- everything from "Surfin' USA" to "Little Deuce Coupe" and "Fun, Fun, Fun."

At their best, they were as good -- and as American -- a rock band as the country has ever produced.

Because he was so young when he got off the ride -- all of 15 years old -- he admits he didn't always understand what it meant or that those heady days would never come again.

For a long time, he denied it even mattered.

"I spent 30 years or more disassociating myself from the Beach Boys so I could make it on my own," Marks, 58, said at his home in North Salem, N.Y. "But one day, I realized I'd never get away from it. I decided to embrace it."

Embracing doesn't mean just retelling the old stories that surround the band. In his new book "The Lost Beach Boy" written with Jon Stebbins -- to be released by Virgin Press Tuesday -- Marks talks at great length about how the group actually came to be.

"It's the most truthful account of the early days of the band that's ever been written," said Stebbins, who has written extensively about the Beach Boys. "You get a really good sense of the of the band."

But the book also clears away some of the junky myths that surround the group, including the tale that the three Wilson brothers rented instruments on vacation and, somehow, miraculously came up with the Beach Boys sound.

It also establishes Marks as one of the founders of the group -- the kid who started trading twangy electric guitar licks with Carl Wilson when they were still in grade school.

It also tries to tells how Murry Wilson, the Wilsons' domineering father and business manager, played an instrumental part in getting Marks to leave the band, to cut him out of the band's profits, and then successfully misled the press about the part Marks played with the band. Hence the book's name.

Murry Wilson's influence lives on. In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's synopsis of the Beach Boys' history, Marks is mentioned once in a parenthesis, as a temporary replacement for band member Al Jardine.

"Murry did a really good PR job," Stebbins said. "He wanted to slam the door shut on Dave and he did."

But, in fact, it was Jardine who left the band for two years, from 1961 to 1963, to go to college. When he returned, there were six Beach Boys -- five who toured, including Marks, and Brian Wilson, the group's leader, songwriter, arranger and all-round genius, who stayed home and wrote the song book.

Both Marks and Stebbins said that Brian Wilson's current persona -- as a troubled, drug-addled, somewhat reclusive artist -- bears little relationship to the Brian Wilson of the early 1960s.

"He was a normal kid," Marks said. "He was bright and focused and very interesting. He organized us, and sometimes bullied us. But he got a bunch of unruly kids to perform our music."

"Brian was totally the leader -- everybody wanted to be around him," Stebbins said. "But he had stage fright. He was very funny and charming, but that all melted away when he got before a crowd."

What's so remarkable about the Beach Boys was how young they were. When they started, Mike Love, the oldest member of the band and the man who now owns the rights to tour as the Beach Boys, was just 21. The rest were in their teens. Marks was 13.

"We had no idea what was happening," he said. "I was old enough to know we were popular. But I was too young to understand that being a Beach Boy would be a big business deal and that the band would be worth millions."

Marks actually started playing electric guitars with next-door neighbor Carl Wilson around 1958. Their idols were Chuck Berry, Richie Valens and instrumental surf bands like the Ventures and Dick Dale and the Deltones.

While Brian Wilson was already thinking of a group with tight vocal harmonies, his first attempts to create a group were more like folk music.

"Brian got interested in what we were doing, and that was what did it -- the combination of electric guitars and Four Freshmen harmonies," Marks said.

"How much did Dave contribute to the Beach Boys sound? Five percent? Ten percent? Twenty percent?" Stebbins asked. "I don't know. But he was there."

While the surfing songs put the Beach Boys on the top of charts, Marks said it was the car songs -- "409,""Shut Down,""Little Deuce Coupe" -- that really made them a great American band.

"Surfing was a coast thing," he said. "But every little town in the United States had kids with cars. I think the car songs are what really took the Beach Boys to the top of the country."

But Marks said there was little glamour to the band's early days of touring. "There were no groupies, no four-star hotels, no limos."

Added to that was Murry Wilson's animosity toward Marks -- in large part, Marks said, because Wilson wanted to confine the band's fortunes to the Wilson family (the three Wilson brothers and Mike Love, their cousin).

"He knew how to push all my teenage buttons," Marks said.

In 1964, at age 15, after two years of playing rhythm guitar, singing background harmonies and getting harassed by Murry Wilson, he quit.

"I was a 15-year-old punk," he said of his heedless, arrogant youth.

When Marks signed his original contract with Capitol Records, it made him a one-fifth partner in the band until 1967, getting 20 percent of the proceeds.

When he quit, Murry Wilson had him sign away his future royalties to the band he helped created. Marks gets royalties on the songs from the Beach Boys' first four albums. But between 1964 and 1967 -- using hired studio musicians to play and sing Marks' parts -- they recorded 14 more albums, with many, many more hits He's estimated that if he had kept his 20 percent rights, those songs would have earned him $10 million over the years.

"Murry gave me a piece of paper to sign," he said of his leaving. "What I didn't know was that a 15-year-old's signature isn't legally binding. It was totally bogus."

After the Beach Boys, Marks started his own band -- Dave and the Marksmen -- which played, he said, "a bizarre combination of British invasion and surf music."

Although the band signed with a major label, A&M, it went nowhere.

Instead of becoming a teen star, Marks became a highly respected, albeit anonymous, guitarist in the Los Angeles studio scene. He played with other groups -- The Moon and Dot -- and toured with disc jockey Casey Kasem.

He became a full-time father, raising daughter Jennifer alone when the girl's mother left him.

Along the way, he got the Beach Boys organization to pay him royalties on hit records he performed on. He never saw his one-fifth share. He kept in touch with the band members and finally rejoined Mike Love's touring Beach Boys band from 1997 to 1999 at Love's urging.

It was on on tour with the band that he met his wife, Carrie. Because her family lived in North Salem, the couple decided to settle there.

Marks has recorded CDs of his own music. He performs regularly with the Surf City All-Stars, along with former Beach Boys member Al Jardine and Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean fame.

That's forced him to relearn a lot of the Beach Boys' repertoire and made him more aware than ever of the verve and complexity of Brian Wilson's songs.

He's become an outspoken advocate of better care and research for people with hepatitis C -- the chronic liver disease Marks was diagnosed with in 1999. After treatment in 2004, he's now virus-free.

He looks back on his two years of fame with a certain amount of philosophical rue.

"All I can say today is 'Oh, nuts,'" Marks said of the lost fame and money. "But I have a beautiful wife, a beautiful daughter and a great life. All I can do is look back and be grateful."

When he's on tour, he gets a full appreciation of what the Beach Boys' music still means to people.

"I've played in Germany and New Zealand before crowds of 150,000 people," Marks said. "I've had people come up and tell me they sang their babies to sleep with 'Surfer Girl.'

"I had no idea that the music would sustain itself and still be so popular. It's universal, from generation to generation.

"That's one of the things I've learned -- what it means to be part of something that big. It's mind-blowing."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...&source=tabbox





Will ISPs Spoil the Online Video Party?
Steve O'Hear

With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There’s a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype — see our review) would all but use up this monthly allowance, it’s clear that lots of Internet users aren’t invited to the party.

But what about those who (like me) pay more for ‘unlimited’ broadband access? There shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong.

Unlimited doesn’t always mean unlimited, as many ISPs impose a ‘fair use’ policy which masks a monthly cap. Others employ bandwidth throttling, where under certain circumstances download speeds are reduced significantly. The intent, the ISPs claim, is to stop users who exhibit ‘abnormal’ behavior — industry-speak for accessing illegal peer-to-peer file sharing networks — from degrading the service at the expense of others. Even if we take ISPs at their word, and presume they’re not being disingenuous in the reasons given for bandwidth throttling, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between illegal and legitimate use of peer-to-peer technology — particularly when it comes to online video.

Last week, in an article titled ‘Channel 4’s 4oD hamstrung by UK ISPs‘, CNet reported on the problems faced by the UK television channel’s new on-demand video service, which, along with Joost (and a number of other services), uses peer-to-peer technology similar to that used by ‘illegal’ file sharing networks.

In an attempt to restrict how much illegal sharing can be done on their network, ISPs use a technique called ‘packet shaping’. Packet shaping examines what you’re downloading — or more specifically, how you’re downloading — and restricts your download speed by up to 500 per cent…

The problem is that packet shaping technology can’t easily tell the difference between different kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

… if you’re planning on using Channel 4’s 4oD service to download your favorite shows while you travel home from work, make sure you’re not on an ISP that treats you like dirty rotten thieving scum. Video on-demand is the way of the future, so it’s important that legitimate, efficient technology can make it happen.

A recent new policy introduced by my ISP, UK cable company Virgin Media (previously NTL/Telewest), goes one step further. Instead of trying to distinguish between different kinds of traffic, throttling is employed during peak times (between 4pm and midnight) for individual users after they’ve consumed a set amount of bandwidth. So for example, customers paying for the top package (approx. $70 per month) will see their download speeds halved — from 10Mb/s to 5Mb/s — after they’ve consumed just 3GB. Which, The Register notes, could theoretically take as little as 20 minutes.

Overall, things are likely to get worse before they get better (while we wait for Telcos or companies like Google to build out the next-generation networks). In the meantime, there’s nothing like the online video revolution to reignite the net neutrality debate.
http://www.last100.com/2007/05/28/wi...e-video-party/





Apple’s Lesson for Sony’s Stores: Just Connect
Randall Stross

RETAIL is supposed to be hard. Apple has made it seem ridiculously easy. And yet it must be harder than it appears, or why hasn’t the Windows side of the personal computer business figured it out?

Of the many predictions in the world of technology that have turned out to be spectacularly wrong, a prominent place should be made for what the pundits said in 2001 when Apple opened its first retail store in Tysons Corner, Va. “It’s completely flawed,” one analyst said, and that was the conventional wisdom. Commercial rent and furnishings would be expensive, inventory tricky and margins slim. Experienced computer resellers were struggling, and no computer manufacturer had ever found success operating its own branded stores. Analysts predicted at the time that Apple would shut down the stores and write off the huge losses in two years.

That assuredly would have been the Apple store’s fate had Steve Jobs permitted aesthetic and design considerations to trump all else. But while guiding the planning for the stores in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Jobs took on a more ambitious challenge than building freestanding museums of design that would show the Apple flag and do little else. He set out to create the conditions most likely to convert museum visitors into actual customers, and then to make those customers feel that they were being pampered long after the sale was consummated.

At the time, retail stores seemed passé. Gateway Country Stores were trying to make a go of a combination of old and new, inviting customers to come in, touch, order — and then go home and wait patiently, because the stores did not carry any inventory. Dell’s build-on-demand model dispensed with stores altogether and seemed to embody the future.

Mr. Jobs understood, however, that his stores would sell not merely products but also gratification. He told the trade magazine Chain Store Age Executive in 2001: “When I bring something home to the kids, I want to get the smile. I don’t want the U.P.S. guy to get the smile.”

The stores were born fully formed and have not required any fundamental changes. The best innovation was present on Day One: the “Genius Bar,” with a staff of diagnostic wizards whose expertise is available in one-on-one consultations — free. Pure genius. More than half of the retail store’s staff is assigned to post-sales service.

Customer response is told in the numbers. Last month, Apple released results for the quarter ended March 31. More than 21.5 million people visited its stores, which now number more than 180. Store sales were $855 million, up 34 percent from the quarter a year earlier, and they contributed more than $200 million in profits.

For perspective, look at the parallel story of Sony, which in 2004 began its attempt to create a branded retail chain. That was the same year Gateway closed the remnants of its 188-store chain. Today, Sony has 39 Sony Style stores, built out from the flagship stores in New York and San Francisco. The company’s breadth of product lines in consumer electronics and related accessories, as well as computers, would seem to give it a significant advantage over Apple. But because Sony does not release data on the stores’ sales or profits, it is hard to assess how its retail venture is doing.

Last Sunday, I set out to have a look for myself. I began at Sony’s flagship in San Francisco, at the Metreon Center, the shopping and entertainment complex. The mall was crowded, but Sony’s store, measuring an enormous 20,000 square feet, was all but deserted. The two uniformed members of the store security staff matched the number of customers I could see browsing the store’s wares.

Then I headed for the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, where I could see a Sony Style store compete almost directly across from an Apple retail store. The weather was gorgeous, drawing the usual weekend throng to the shopping center.

Sony’s mall store was long and large — 6,000 square feet — and filled with curvy panels and chirpy taglines like “My Style” on the walls and plush theater nooks. Here, too, the sales staff seemed to outnumber customers.

A group of five young salesmen and saleswomen who stood near the door when I entered were so engaged in a private, and apparently amusing, discussion that my imploring presence failed to draw anyone’s attention. The only other customers in the store were at the far other end, near the PlayStations. I suppose that the employees near me had become accustomed to busying themselves with their own entertainments.

A few yards away was the Apple store, which is one of Apple’s newer “mini” stores, introduced in 2004 and only about an eighth the size of Sony’s Stanford store. It was simplicity itself: a rectangular space with products lining the two sides, laptops placed on a small table, open space taking up most of the room, and, of course, the Genius Bar. The store was packed, yet the sales people were alert and attentive.

Last week, I shared these impressions with Dennis Syracuse, senior vice president for Sony Retail, who assured me that Sony’s stores drew an average of 350,000 visitors annually per store. Mr. Syracuse rejected the idea that his store concept could be compared to Apple’s. His stores were conceived, he said, as a “fashion boutique for women and children” that incidentally happened to carry electronics instead of clothing.

When describing how Sony had entered a new retail world as “fashion merchants,” he pointed with pride to the choice spot he had secured for the first store, next to Gucci and across from Versace. Indeed, if you would like to accessorize an outfit with a color-coordinated laptop, the Sony Style store offers models in pink, violet, champagne and many more.

But Sony’s offerings have not impressed retail consultants with whom I spoke. Willard Ander, a senior partner at McMillan Doolittle in Chicago, was unsparing in his assessment: “Sony doesn’t get retail. The stores are not energized and not shop-able.” Apple stores extend an “emotional connection” to their customers that Sony’s do not, Mr. Ander said. The absence of such a connection, he said, was a common failing of manufacturers who venture into retail on their own. (Dell, meanwhile, announced last week that it would soon begin selling its computers in stores — but not its own. It will offer its machines in 3,000 Wal-Mart stores.)

Wendy Liebman, the founder of WSL Strategic Retail in New York, was equally critical of the Sony Style store, which she faulted as being merely “a place of stuff.” She said that a successful brand excites a passionate attachment, the way Starbucks or Target do, and that Apple’s stores exemplify “emotional connection.”

“People can just walk in, absorb the fumes and feel like the smartest technophile in the world,” she said. Let’s add that there is only one place to buy computers that features Geniuses at all times.

IT may be that as long as personal computer makers stick with Windows, no amount of merchandiser ingenuity will be able to gin up passion matching a Mac enthusiast’s. But the proposition really has not been put to a fair test in a store. Imagine having the opportunity to test-drive a high-performance Windows machine made by a boutique manufacturer like Voodoo, based in Calgary, Alberta. Voodoo offers a variety of configurations for different kinds of uses and varying performance levels that it labels as medium, high, extreme and insane. What’s “insane”? A Voodoo Omen, configured for serious graphics work — two dual-core processors, liquid cooling, four 15,000-RPM hard drives — costs more than $16,000. No Apple retail store carries anything like it.

Then again, no store selling Windows machines does, either. You have to go online to order it. Hewlett-Packard acquired Voodoo last year but has not expanded distribution channels to allow customers to test-drive these babies out on the road. I don’t think I can point my spousal unit to the Voodoo Web site and persuade her that a $5,563 Voodoo configured for the home office is just what we need: “You see, dear, we’ll actually be saving $3,500 by going ‘extreme’ rather than ‘insane.’ ” Come to think of it, I’m not ready to make the purchase, either. That’s a sale that has no chance without a family visit to a store for a hands-on trial.

Sony already has the stores. What it lacks among its offerings is a machine so extraordinary that people would come just to gawk at it, and then, perhaps, would notice surrounding products that shine in the reflected light.

Mr. Ander says he believes that any company, if clever enough, can use intangibles to attract retail customers. “If Payless ShoeSource can reposition itself as a place that markets ‘cool,’ ” he asked, “then why can’t Sony?”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...erg/digi28.php




Apple Now Valued at Over $100 Billion
Slash Lane

Apple Inc.'s market capitalization broke the $100 billion barrier for the first time on Wednesday, as shares of the company surged above $116 following a bullish research report from investment bank Morgan Stanley.

That puts the Cupertino-based company's perceived market value at nearly twice that of long-time rival Dell, which was valued at $59.8 billion as of noon eastern time, and approximately a third of that of Microsoft, which has been teetering around $295 billion.

Coincidentally, it will be ten years this October since Dell founder Michael Dell weighed in with his thoughts on how he would fix the then beleaguered Mac maker.

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," he told a crowd of several thousand IT executives at the time.

Shares of Apple were helped Wednesday by a research report from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, which asserted that the Mac maker's operating leverage remained underappreciated by investors.

In the report, Huberty raised her price target on shares of the company by more than 35 percent, from $110 to $150, but also laid out a "bull case" scenario that could see shares rising as high as $225 over the next twelve months.

Under that best case, the analyst said, U.S.-based Mac market share would need to appreciate to 5 percent in 2007 and 6 percent in 2008, while iPhone would need to see strong global penetration to 24 million units in 2008.

The bull case scenario would also hinge on Apple introducing an ultraportable Mac device by next January that would sell 3 million units within its first year, the analyst said.

Shares of Apple were trading up $2.62 (or 2.29 percent) to $116.97 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq stock market.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...0_billion.html





Peer-To-Peer Maverick Takes On Tune Biz

Mark Gorton is drawing a line in the sand. The trained engineer and financial services entrepreneur is calling out the music business to a fistfight over the issue of peer-to-peer (P2P) music distribution via the Internet. In this month's online story "The Music Industry Wants to Kill LimeWire" from our entertainment industry columnist David Kushner, we meet the man who wants personal sharing of music to be a right for consumers—not a criminal offense.

Kushner explains that Gorton originally studied at Stanford and Yale to become an electrical engineer but figured he couldn't go wrong by returning to school at Harvard to earn an MBA. Armed with his business degree, though, he soon heard the siren song of Wall Street calling and ended up working for Credit Suisse First Boston. In 1998, he ventured out on his own and founded Tower Research Capital, which conducts trades based on statistical analysis. As a sideline, he dabbled in the software that was making a big buzz in New York in the late '90s, P2P distributed file sharing, figuring that it could help facilitate financial transaction decision-making.

By 2000, Gorton had a new tool in hand called LimeWire, a free software client that could be used over the open-source Gnutella file-sharing network. However, he soon noticed that subscribers weren't using the free service to trade advice on trades. They were trading tunes. While he was still making money offering a robust fee-based version of his P2P client, he didn't see anything wrong with allowing the free service to continue unfettered. Then, as Kushner notes, the lawyers showed up at his door.

Following the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005 known as MGM v. Grokster, attorneys for the big recording companies descended on the online P2P services to either get their consent in creating royalty schemes for songs shared among users or shut down their operations altogether. The result has been a social phenomenon—pitting millions of consumers against a handful of music monoliths—that continues to unfold to this day.

All the while, Gorton has continued to keep his powder dry and fight for his users. He believes that the lawyers for the big media companies don't understand the realities of the Internet age. After meeting with a group of them in his Manhattan offices, Kushner writes, he came away thinking, "[T]hese people are all on drugs." Even after offering to set up his own file-sharing royalty system, the lawyers sued him anyway.

So last September, Gorton got his own attorneys to sue them back. His complaint alleges that the goal of the music business is: "to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them on exclusive and/or other anticompetitive terms so as to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers."

Today, Kushner states Gorton is considered to be the most prominent holdout in the record labels' ongoing battle against online piracy. For his part, though, we learn, Gorton still wants to compromise, to find a solution that balances the old business model of the music companies and a new model of engaging his "customers" in an open and "productive way."

"The core focus of the music industry has been shutting down individual file-sharing programs, and that has proven to be a failure," Gorton told Kushner.

His legal battle is still in the discovery phase, so it will be quite a while before the fists start flying, with plenty of time in between for cooler heads to prevail. But Gorton seems committed to finding an alternative that could lead to a new era for consumers purchasing and sharing their favorite songs.

It's a test case that will have a lot of people in the new media and old media worlds tuning in.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may07/comments/1820





StreamCast Adds Joost to Lawsuit Over Peer-to-Peer Technology
Mark Hefflinger

San Francisco - Joost, the ad-supported, peer-to-peer streaming TV service created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, has been added as a defendant to a year-old lawsuit filed by StreamCast Networks over the rights to the service's underlying FastTrack peer-to-peer technology, CNET News.com reported.

StreamCast, which developed the Morpheus file-sharing application, says in the suit that Skype/Joost developers Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstromm improperly transferred technology rights from StreamCast in a breach of contract.

The StreamCast suit also names eBay -- which acquired Skype in 2005 -- as a defendant, along with 21 other parties.

"We are taking action because we believe the rights to the Skype and FastTrack technologies were swept out from under our feet, and our 28 million Morpheus users were stolen from us," Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, said in a statement at the time the original lawsuit was filed last May.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction against the sale and marketing of Skype, as well as "billions of dollars" in unspecified damages.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/05...eer-technology





Cellphone Raid Roils Manhattan School
Julie Bosman

The authorities confiscated hundreds of cellphones and other electronic devices yesterday in an unannounced sweep, with metal detectors, at Middle School 54 in Manhattan.

Few subjects have stirred up New York City public school parents more than the ban on cellphones in schools that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is determined to enforce.

Yesterday morning brought another random sweep with metal detectors, this time at Middle School 54, which yielded an unusually heavy load of contraband.

The cellphone-to-student ratio at this Upper West Side school was particularly high: 961 students are currently enrolled, according to the Education Department, and 404 cellphones were confiscated. (Along with 69 iPods, 23 assorted electronic devices, two knives and one imitation gun.)

After the closing bell at M.S. 54 yesterday, parents confronted administrators about the surprise cellphone check, while students milled around and gossiped.

Students whose cellphones had been confiscated were given quarters to call home at the end of the day, one parent said — a foreign concept to some cellphone users. “A teacher gave one of the boys a quarter to use a pay phone, and he was like, ‘What do I do with this?’” the parent said.

Despite a full year of parent complaints and a lawsuit, Mr. Bloomberg is not backing down from the cellphone ban, sticking to his position that the phones are disruptive to learning.
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/...hattan-school/





Manitoba Chiefs Want Cellphone Revenue
CBC News

Manitoba First Nations are seeking compensation from Manitoba Telecom Services for every cellphone signal that passes through First Nations land, saying the airspace should be considered a resource like land and water.

At a recent economic development summit, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs resolved to negotiate revenue sharing with MTS for transmissions signals that cross the land, water and air space of their reserves and traditional territories.

"[The request is] based on the understanding that we do have some fundamental rights as indigenous people to land, water and airspace," said Chief Ovide Mercredi of the Grand Rapids First Nation.

"When it comes to using airspace, it's like using our water and simply because there's no precedent doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to do," he said.

Mercredi says that signals over a significant area of the province would be affected, noting that the Cree Nations claim rights to a large portion of the north.
Proposal may inspire more negotiations

Anna Hunter, a University of Saskatchewan professor of political studies specializing in aboriginal governance, says the AMC's request is unique but she says other First Nations groups across the country will likely follow suit.
Continue Article

"On a provincewide basis, this is definitely an innovative approach but I think it's an approach that other provinces' First Nations groups will probably take forward," she said.

MTS officials have declined to comment on the issue until they see the group's proposal.
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/200...cellphone.html





Pirates Of Caribbean Sequel Sets New World Record

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End has smashed the record for the biggest worldwide opening in history - the movie raked in a massive $401 million (£200.5 million) in its first six days of release.

The second sequel in the Walt Disney-made series has already broken box office records in the U.S. for the best Memorial Day weekend debut, after making $142.1 million (£71.05 million).

At World's End beat the previous record for best opening set by the release of Spider-Man 3 earlier this year (07), which made a total of $382 million (£191 million) in its first few days.

Walt Disney Studios spokesman Mark Zoradi says, "We knew that audiences all over the world were excited to see Johnny Depp and the rest of the fantastic Pirates cast in this latest adventure.

"But this record-setting response at the global box office has been nothing short of incredible.

"Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End now has the biggest opening in movie history, and we're extremely proud of that achievement."
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/en...21283530.shtml





Sony: Disney 'Pirates' Figures are Wrong
Dave West

Sony has accused Disney of "irregularities" in its claims for Pirates of the Caribbean 3's opening-week box office performance.

The movie house has called into question its rival's claims to have set a new record in its first six days release on the world box office.

Disney said it had made $251 million (£126.9 million) outside North America and $404 million (£204.4 million) overall.

However, Steve Elzer, corporate communications chief at Sony, rejected the claim in an unusual release to the media.

He began: "While Disney and the filmmakers of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End deserve their due on a remarkable opening worldwide, there are some irregularities in their claim regarding record-setting.

"There are at least two territories - Italy and France - where Buena Vista International opened the film on Tuesday - in essence adding a seventh day of grosses into Pirates' 'six day record.'"

Elzer appeared to claim that, on a similar measure, its recently-released Spider-Man 3 did better than Pirates.

"For the record, Spider-Man 3 grossed $418.1 million in its first seven days of release worldwide with $256.7 million generated from territories overseas."

Disney has so far offered no comment and official figures are due to be released in coming days.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/a...are-wrong.html





The Top 20 Movies at U.S. and Canadian Theaters Friday Through Monday:

1. "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," Disney, $139,802,190,

2. "Shrek the Third," DreamWorks Animation-Paramount, $67,010,012,

3. "Spider-Man 3," Sony, $18,112,261,

4. "Bug," Lionsgate, $4,015,846,

5. "Waitress," Fox Searchlight, $4,005,008, 510 locations,

6. "28 Weeks Later," Fox Atomic, $3,280,306,

7. "Disturbia," DreamWorks-Paramount, $2,433,028,

8. "Georgia Rule," Universal, $2,407,910,

9. "Fracture," New Line, $1,646,761,

10. "Wild Hogs," Disney, $1,586,929,

11. "The Invisible," Disney, $1,102,840, 457 locations,

12. "Away From Her," Lionsgate, $947,459,

13. "Delta Farce," Lionsgate, $649,713,

14. "Blades of Glory," DreamWorks-Paramount, $643,146,

15. "Hot Fuzz," Focus, $636,457,

16. "Paris Je T'aime," First Look, $550,796,

17. "Once," Fox Searchlight, $435,958,

18. "300," Warner Bros., $435,414,

19. "Next," Paramount, $414,505,

20. "Black Book," Sony Pictures Classics, $411,891,
http://www.sohood.com/1/content/view/2015/66/





'Pirates' Outsells 'Matrix' in Blu-Ray, HD DVD Showdown

Last week's sales estimates are in, and in terms of sheer unit sales, Disney's Blu-ray-only release of the first two "Pirates of the Caribbean" flicks handily beat Warner's HD DVD-only release of the two "Matrix" box sets.

According to market research estimates from Home Media Magazine, the two "Pirates" films sold a combined total of a little less than 47,000 units, while the "Matrix" sets sold about 13,900 units.

Since the "Matrix" sets sold at an cost of nearly three times that of the "Pirates" flicks, there's slighly more parity in terms of gross sales, but even there (as Blu-ray supporters have been quick to point out), "Pirates" gets the edge.

In comments first published in The Hollywood Reporter, Bob Chapek, worldwide president of Buena Vista Home Entertainment, called the week's win by "Pirates" a "strong and significant trend toward consumer preference for the Blu-ray Disc format."

"We are thrilled by the critical and industry response to 'Pirates' on Blu-ray disc," Chapek said. "But more importantly, the consumer has spoken loud and clear. This is only the beginning, but it was certainly a significant and explosive indicator of things to come."
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/675





The Pirate Bay: One year After the Raid
Ernesto

Today it’s exactly one year since the controversial raid on The Pirate Bay. Unlike the MPAA would have wanted, TPB is still online, more poular than ever. Let’s look back at last years events.

First of all, the attack against The Pirate Bay was highly unsuccessful. The site was only offline for a couple of days before they were back in full force. Stronger than ever thanks to the widespread media attention.

Soon after the raid several sources reported that the MPAA initiated the attack. Apparently they directly influencing Swedish authorities to intervene in this specific case, which is considered illegal in Sweden (the term is “minister rule”).

To make it even worse, it turned out that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down. This threat should have have made the Swedish government move even quicker. It is assumed that Swedish authorities hinted to the prosecutor to take action, and even though the prosecutor wrote a PM a before the raid in which he stated that it was impossible to convict the Pirate Bay, the letters from the MPAA probably changed his mind.

It later became public that John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote (PDF) to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

Following the raid the Swedish pirate party got thousands of new members in a matter of weeks. Suddenly, they were the largest party without parliament seats. This success has also led to pirate parties forming in a number of other countries: France, Italy, USA, Belgium, Austria, and very recently also Germany, Spain and Russian. There is also one forming in the UK. Together, they have founded PP-International, which is an international collaboration forum/group to exchange experiences, ideas and such, and Sweden has a very important role here.

In August 2006, three months after the raid the documentary “Steal This Film” was published. This excellent documentary gives some more insight in the events that took place May 31, 2006, In this documentary The Piratebay admins tell how the raid went down, what happened after the raid, how the MPAA was involved, how the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list, the Pirate demonstration, and how they were harassed by police officers and more.

Up until now the servers of The Pirate Bay are still in custody, and prosecutor Håkan Roswall announced earlier this month that he will press charges against the Pirate Bay admins. However, The Pirate Bay said it’s not impressed by the announced prosecution, and according to a leak within the Swedish police, they don’t have much to be afraid of.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...fter-the-raid/