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Old 19-09-07, 11:38 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 22nd, '07

Since 2002


































"That's alright, let me answer his question." – John Kerry


"In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, 'This is not a work of art unless I say so.'" – Roberta Smith


"I steal music too, I'm not gonna say I don't." – Trent Reznor


"I'm guessing that 'asstunnel' is what you get when a European whose first language isn't English tries to say 'asshole.' It seemed awkward when I first read the response, but the expression has since grown on me." – Ryan Paul


"So far the story has only been on techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us." – Jay Mairs


"If they want to get their revenue up they should slash their prices." – Jarret A. Zafran


"MediaDefender's entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats." – Ryan Paul


"I realized, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here, I'm a fat 50-year-old mom and I've managed to scoop al-Qaida. It gets really challenging when you're trying to do that and cook spaghetti at the same time." – Laura Mansfield


"He's probably thinking something like, 'I wish they'd stop tasering this guy so I could go home and watch this guy getting tasered on YouTube.'" – Stephen Colbert


"You’re not Jesus, are you?" – Rainey


"Want a nut! Want a nut! Nnn ... uh ... tuh." – Alex



































September 22nd, 2007





Tor Anonymity Server Admin Arrested
Chris Soghoian

In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Although he was released shortly afterwards, information about the arrest had been kept quiet until his lawyers were able to get the charges dropped.

Tor is a privacy tool designed to allow users to communicate and browse anonymously on the Internet. It's endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists. Tor provides anonymous Web-browsing software to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, according to its developers. The largest numbers of users are in the United States, the European Union and China.

The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers. The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the IP address for Janssen's server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen's Tor server carried more than 40GB of random strangers' Internet traffic each day.

Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shutdown the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a different city, more than 500km away.

Janssen's attempts to explain what Tor is to the police officers initially fell on deaf ears. After being interrogated for hours, someone from the city of Düsseldorf's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security showed up and admitted to Janssen that they'd made a mistake. He was released shortly after.

Germany is clearly not going out of its way to make computer security researchers and activists feel too welcome. Germany recently passed a law that "renders the creation and distribution of software illegal that could be used by someone to break into a computer system or could be used to prepare a break in. This includes port scanners like nmap, security scanners like nessus [as well as] proof of concept exploits."

Back in summer 2006, German authorities conducted a simultaneous raid of seven different data centers, seizing 10 Tor servers in the process. Agents took the servers believing them to be related to a child porn investigation. Furthermore, in 2003 a German court ordered the developers of the Jap anonymity system, a completely different project than Tor, to create a back-door in their system to be used in national security investigations.

This event does raise some interesting legal questions. If 40GB of other people's Internet traffic flows through your own home network, can authorities, be they the RIAA or FBI, reasonably link anything that has been tracked to your computer's IP address to you?

Does setting up a Tor server give you the ultimate plausible deniability card? "No officer, that BitTorrent download wasn't mine. It was from one of the thousands of people who route their Internet traffic through the anonymizing sever on my home network."

The ability to have a believable claim to plausible deniability is something that some of us have been attempting to get for a while by having an open wireless access point at home. And 40GB of Internet traffic from perfect strangers may be more significant in the eyes of a court than the possibility of one or two of your neighbors connecting to your wireless network. All of this, for now, remains theoretical. No Tor-related case has made it to the courts.. but it's just a matter of time until one does.
http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-sta...79225-46.html?





Copying of DVDs, CDs Verboten

Digital copies of TV programs banned
Erik Kirschbaum

Germany's upper house of parliament on Friday approved a controversial copyright law, which makes it all but illegal for individuals to make copies of films and music, even for their own use.

The Bundesrat pushed aside criticism from consumer protection groups and passed the law, which makes it illegal for anyone to store DVDs and CDs without permission. The law also covers digital copies from IPTV and TV broadcasts.

Consumer groups and the Green Party had campaigned in vain to include a "bagatelle exemption," so that the measure would not "criminalize" youths and other private users. The law is set to take effect in 2008.

The law goes beyond previous legislation brought in by the German government to help the entertainment industry. Germany's federal justice minister Brigitte Zypris claimed that the legislative reform brought German law into line with European Union codes.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117972434.html





German "Anti-Hacker" Law Forces Hacker Sites to Relocate
Nate Anderson

Germany isn't the place to go if you're 1) a Scientologist or 2) a computer security researcher with a penchant for writing code. We reported earlier on Germany's new "anti-hacker" law, but now that the law has gone into effect, we're starting to see the results. Already a number of security projects have relocated or shut down to avoid any possibility of prosecution under the broadly-worded statute.

The new law, dubbed "202c" after the section of the German legal code it occupies, bans the distribution and possession of software which has as its primary goal the circumvention of security measures. The Chaos Computer Club, one of the oldest and largest hacker groups in the country, denounced the law, saying, "Forbidding this software is about as helpful as forbidding the sale and production of hammers because sometimes they also cause damage."

It's not fully clear how the new law will be applied, but several developers are taking a cautious approach. KisMAC, a wireless sniffer and encryption cracker for Mac OS, went dark in late July; now, the KisMAC web site has a politically-charged message for visitors. "One of the major exporters in the world prohibits production and distribution of security software (StGB §202c)," it reads. "From a nation of poets and thinkers to a nation of bureaucrats and ignoramuses."

Still, KisMAC will live on. The site promises a move to a Dutch server soon, and relocating to servers outside the country appears to be a popular option. Phenoelit, a group that publishes securty exploits and maintains a large list of default passwords, has moved its material to a US server because "of the new law that makes possessing 'hacker tools' illegal."

The Chaos Computer Club, not pleased with the law or its effects, has turned its home page into a message, but there's no sign that modifications to the law might be coming. Fortunately for bored hackers, file-swapping remains only a "petty offense" in Germany.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-relocate.html





German Music Industry Gets eDonkey Nodes Removed from the Web

Following the granting of a number of interim injunctions by regional courts in Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Frankfurt, one operator has removed its eDonkey servers from the internet. This is according to a press release from the Deutsche Phonoverbände (IFPI). Because the nodes removed are the major global nodes, this had had a "considerable adverse impact on usage of file-sharing applications." Further interim injunctions against operators of file-sharing application servers for alleged breaches of copyright are to be served in the next few days.

The IPFI also obtained interim injunctions against server operators in July. Because eDonkey servers do not themselves offer files for sharing, the copyright owners bringing the action have based their argument on the legal construct of liability for impediment.

According to IFPI spokesperson Stefan Michalk, these injunctions are indeed again based on liability for impediment. "Donkey Server No. 1" to "Donkey Server No. 6" have been taken off the web.

The host of the server considers itself to have been forced to shut down the servers in order to avoid further injunctions, for the costs of which it would have been liable, because of the, in its opinion, artificially high value of the litigation for the seven interim injunctions so far granted, averaging 195,000 euros. It has "emphatically" told heise online that it had added the filter requested by the opposing party's lawyers immediately upon being made aware of this, and thus long before interim injunctions were obtained. Shutting down the servers did not represent acceptance of any legal obligation.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/96264





Turkey Blocks Pirate Bay
Smaran

Turkey has banned what’s arguably the most well known BitTorrent site in existence. Since about a week, The Pirate Bay has become inaccessible in the country. According to a reader from Turkey and the site’s admins, a recent ruling might have caused TPB to be banned.

If it’s any consolation, The Pirate Bay is not alone in being blocked. In March, YouTube was banned for hosting videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey. To the relief of many Turks, the ban only lasted two days, as Google promptly pulled down the videos. And last month, WordPress.com was blocked because some of its users were charged with defamation of a Turkish author.

The first we heard of the Pirate Bay block was two days ago, when Cenk, a long-time reader of TorrentFreak from Turkey, e-mailed in to let us know that The Pirate Bay was no longer accessible in his country. Cenk states that since last Monday, government has shut down all access to thepiratebay.org. However, the press has said nothing on the matter. “I did not hear about thepiratebay.org getting sued or anything and even there was no news on the newspaper or anywhere,” he wrote.

We asked the TPB guys if they knew anything about this. According to them, it has been blocked “for over a year.” They’re “not sure if it’s the whole country or just the major ISPs,” but “there was some court ruling over it.” That court ruling, we’ve discovered, has ordered Türk Telekom, Turkey’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, though why exactly is still unknown to both the site’s admins and users of the site in Turkey.

There is a comical irony to this all, given that Turkey is the home of some of the most famous real life pirates history has seen, those of the Barbary coast. One can only guess that they have yet to set sail in the intertubes.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...ked-in-turkey/





Iran Blocks Access to Google

Iran has blocked access to the Google search engine and its Gmail email service as part of a clampdown on material deemed to be offensive, the Mehr news agency reported on Monday.

"I can confirm these sites have been filtered," said Hamid Shahriari, the secretary of Iran's National Council of Information.

He did not explain why the sites were being blocked. Google, Gmail and several other foreign sites appeared to be inaccessible to Iranian users from Monday morning.

Iran has tough censorship on cultural products and internet access, banning thousands of websites and blogs containing sexual and politically critical material as well as women's rights and social networking sites.

The rules are applied by Internet Service Providers who use filtering programmes to prevent access to the banned sites.

The programmes work by honing in on key words which trigger the blocking of a site, which means that some perfectly anodyne sites are inaccessible as well as more sensitive ones.

The filtering aims to prevent Iranians from accessing decadent material posted abroad, a similar goal to the ban on satellite dishes which are subject to period crackdowns.

Iran is in the midst of one of its toughest moral crackdowns in years, which has already seen thousands of women warned for failing to obey Islamic dress rules.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070917...kVj vhewjtBAF





Australia Seeks to Censor the Web

THE Federal Police commissioner will have the power to block and ban websites believed to be crime or terrorism related under an internet censorship amendment bill introduced into Parliament today.

The bombshell web ban bill was tabled in the Senate at 9:58am, without prior notice.

Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan proposes to expand the "black list" of internet addresses (URLs) currently maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to include terrorism and cyber-crime sites.

At present, ACMA has the power to act against websites containing pornography or offensive content.

Under the proposed amendment, Federal Police will inform ACMA of websites to be blocked, and the agency must then notify the relevant internet service providers. ISPs will be required to "take reasonable steps" to prevent users accessing the website or content.

Australian Privacy Foundation chair Roger Clarke expressed disbelief that "the government of any country in the free world could table a Bill of this kind".

"Without warning, the Government, through Senator Coonan, is proposing to provide Federal Police with powers to censor the internet," Dr Clarke said.

"Even worse, ISPs throughout the country are to be the vehicle for censorship, by being required to block internet content."

Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said the Bill would give the Police Commissioner "enormous power over what political content Australians can look at" on the web.

"This gives the Commissioner sweeping powers which could potentially be applied to millions of websites," she said. "The Government has dropped the Bill into the Senate on the eve of an election with virtually no explanation."

Senator Nettle said environmental organisations such as Greenpeace had been accused of crime or terrorism-related actions. "Will the Police Commissioner call for Greenpeace's website to be shut down?"

The requirement to filter or block content would impose another enormous burden on local ISPs at a time when the IT industry faced growing costs related to other national security legislation, she said.

Meanwhile, Senator Coonan today extended the Government's $189 million NetAlert - Protecting Australian Families Online program to agencies such as Medicare, Centrelink, Child Support and the Tax Office.

Information about internet filtering and the free content filters from NetAlert will be promoted through the agency shopfronts as part of the plan to prevent children accessing inappropriate material online.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15318,00.html





Thailand Seeks to Block YouTube Videos Again

Thailand is seeking to block clips on video-sharing Web site YouTube that accuse the chief royal adviser of masterminding last year's bloodless coup, a top Justice Ministry official said on Friday.

The government, which lifted a five-month ban on YouTube in August after it agreed to block clips deemed offensive to revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, was seeking a court order to block two video clips posted recently on www.youtube.com.

"In the next couple of days, we will seek a court order to block those links deemed to cause public confusion and threaten national security," Yanaphon Youngyuen, head of the Justice Ministry's Internet crimes unit, told Reuters.

"While awaiting the court order, we are seeking cooperation from Internet service providers to block those links," he said.

The two-part postings, entitled "The Crisis of Siam," and running 10:42 minutes and 6:06 minutes, accuse former Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda of plotting the September 2006 coup, not the generals who took credit.

Such allegations against Prem, now Privy Council chief, have been made by supporters of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra during demonstrations and denied repeatedly by the generals and the government they appointed.

"Pa has been through such allegations many times and everyone knows what the truth is," Prem's spokesman, Vice Admiral Prajun Tampratheep, said of the 87-year-old former leader.

Last month, the Communications Ministry lifted a ban on YouTube after its owner, Google, installed filters to stop Thais from accessing clips deemed to insult 79-year-old King Bhumibol, a serious offence in Thailand.

YouTube said in May it had decided, after an agreement with the Thai government, to block some offending clips but took several months to implement it.

Thailand sent YouTube's management a list of 12 video clips it deemed offensive. Six of the clips were removed by their creators or because they violated YouTube's "code of service", YouTube said in a statement.

The first king-bashing clip appeared a few days after a 57-year-old Swiss man received a 10-year jail sentence for spraying graffiti on pictures of the King on his birthday in December -- a rare conviction of a foreigner.

Bhumibol, the world's longest-reigning monarch who has been on the throne for more than 60 years, granted a pardon and the Swiss man was deported.

YouTube was not available for immediate comment on Thailand's latest attempt to block access to some of its clips.
http://www.reuters.com/article/media...24089220070921





China Leads Asia in Malicious Online Activity
Victoria Ho

China leads Asia in malicious online activity, racking up 42 percent of the action in the first half of 2007, up from 39 percent last year.

According to Symantec's biannual Internet security threat report released on Wednesday, China topped the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, in malicious activity, producing the most malicious code, spam zombies, bots and attacks between January 1 and June 30.

China's bot-infected computers made up 78 percent of those in the region. Taiwan had the next highest number of bots, but only at 7 percent.

China's high level of malicious activity can be attributed to its high rate of counterfeit software.

Noting that the majority of China's Windows users use counterfeit versions, Ooi Szu Khiam, a senior security consultant at Symantec Singapore, said during a press briefing: "If you don't have a genuine version, you can't register for patches, and those who don't patch their systems are open to a growing number of exploits."

Ooi added that users become "sitting ducks" as they leave themselves open to malicious attacks by not applying security patches.

Offering another reason for China's vulnerability, Ooi said: "Resources to build infrastructure is finite, so not enough spending may be directed to securing the networks."

Building a proper security system requires a "multiple and mutually supportive defensive system," Ooi said. A security system needs to be secured at all points, including the ISP, network and device.

The amount of spam originating from China, which makes up 25 percent of APJ-originating spam, puts China at the top of the list, Ooi said, noting that this volume is driven largely by the vast number of botnets and spam zombies.

"All you need to do is install a spam plug-in for your botnet, and the botnet is in action," he said. "Many bots are designed to be used mainly to send spam."

Victoria Ho of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.
http://www.news.com/China-leads-Asia...3-6209172.html





China Claims Man Dies After Three-Day Internet Session

A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.

The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.

"Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide," the newspaper said, adding that exhaustion was the most likely cause of death. It did not say what game he was playing.

China, worried about the spread of pornography and politically incorrect content, has banned the opening of new cybercafes this year and issued orders limiting the time Internet users can spend playing online.

In April, President Hu Jintao launched a campaign to rid the Internet of "unhealthy" content and make it a platform for Communist Party doctrine.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070917/...8aCQkYNQqOOrgF





Poll Shows Support for Banning Items from China
Rob Varnon

American companies that have been profiting by slapping their brands on Chinese-made goods might want to institute some quality control -- or find some factories in the United States -- fast.

A Sacred Heart University national poll of consumer sentiment about imported goods showed more than 80 percent of people surveyed agreed with suspending Chinese imports of food and other products until they meet U.S. standards.

In the survey, released Tuesday, even more people said they "have confidence in American-made and distributed products and food."

Shoppers at Stop & Shop Supermarket on the King's Highway in Fairfield and at Kmart on Route 1 in Milford mostly agreed with the survey's findings.

John Davis of Bridgeport came out of Kmart empty-handed Tuesday and said he understands the way his fellow Americans feel, especially after problems were discovered with toothpaste from China. But it's difficult to boycott the goods, he said.

"Everything you see is made in China," Davis noted.

He also said there's a human price on Chinese products that people should be thinking about, because many of those goods were once made here.

"They're putting people out of work every day," he said.

SHU International Business professor Balbir Bhasin said the real danger for companies is if people like Davis act on their feelings. Bhasin did not conduct the poll.

The key question, Bhasin said, is "How much risk are they likely to see while lowering the cost to the consumer and raising profits?"

At this point, according to Bhasin, companies need to take action. He said they should probably try to enforce quality control abroad, but if the problems continue, it might create enough momentum to make it worthwhile for companies to bring production back to this country.

There are two basic assumptions in going offshore, he said. "It's cheaper" and "others can do it better."

But the major recall of Chinese-made toys by Mattel shows foreign-made products might not be better after all.

The poll also asked about food items and whether people were checking labels for the country of origin. The survey said a year ago only 52 percent of Americans checked the labels on food, but today more than 68 percent do.

Most people coming out of the Stop & Shop in Fairfield agreed with Kristen Masterson, who said, "It's important to know what you're putting in your body."

Masterson said her concern is nutrition, not country of origin.

She isn't willing to abandon foreign-made goods just yet, noting it's the quality of the individual product that counts. Masterson said she drives a Japanese car because it is a quality vehicle.

Todd Martin, an economic consultant to Bridgeport-based People's United Bank, said despite the high support in the poll for bans and buying American, it's unlikely to lead to real changes in where things are made.

He said consumers just haven't shown a willingness to boycott those goods in the past.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...&source=tabbox





Brits Mull Broadband Help

The UK government is considering intervening in the way broadband is rolled out, in an effort to speed up the deployment of super-fast services.

Stephen Timms, Minister for Competitiveness, ordered a summit to look at the role of government in providing next-generation broadband.

While other countries are investing in new ways to deliver higher bandwidth, the UK is seen as lagging behind.

Mr Timms said broadband infrastructure was one of his "personal priorities".

"Today we face a new challenge. Other countries are starting to invest in new, fibre-based infrastructure, delivering considerably higher bandwidth than is available in the UK today," Mr Timms told the Broadband Stakeholder Group and others attending a meeting on Tuesday evening.

"I have decided to chair a high level summit later this year to consider the circumstances that might trigger public sector intervention and the form that intervention might take," he said.

Huge costs

The event was organised by the Broadband Stakeholder Group to outline its own plans to improve the way next-generation broadband is rolled out in the UK.

According to Richard Allan, a member of the Broadband Stakeholder Group and director of government affairs at Cisco, the UK needs to act now in order to keep its place in the top 25% of broadband nations.

"That should be one of the targets that the government sets if it wants to stay economically competitive," he said.

Mr Allan believes that the UK should have 40% of its citizens connected to fibre that can deliver broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second) by 2012.

"The current copper-based system is limited by ADSL which means 24 megabits under very good conditions," he said.

It is estimated that upgrading the whole of the UK to a fibre-based network could cost £10-15bn.

While other countries, including France, Germany and Italy are already looking at ways of improving the so-called access or last-mile network which connects to people's homes, there is so far little investment in the UK.

According to Mr Allan, the reasons for this are part-historical.

"There is evidence that the cost of civil engineering work in the UK is particularly high," he said.

He believes government intervention in lowering these costs as well as help with planning laws and providing the necessary ducting for fibre would be a step in the right direction.

In some countries ducts for fibre have been made available via municipal sewers although Mr Allan is not sure this is the solution in the UK.

"Traditionally UK sewers are deeper and they are not municipally owned but there are other ways to keep the disruption of digging up roads to a minimum, for example with micro ducts which sees fibre blown through long runs," he said.

The BSG is also calling on Ofcom to provide a regulatory framework to support investment in next-generation networks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7001413.stm





Virgin Mobile Sued Over Ad
Andrew D. Smith

What would you do if a company grabbed a goofy picture of your kid off the Internet, slapped some snarky text on it and used it to sell mobile phone service half a world away?

Susan Chang decided to sue.

Attorneys for Ms. Chang, who lives in Bedford with her 16-year-old daughter Alison, have filed a state court case against Virgin Mobile USA, Virgin Mobile Australia and Creative Commons Corp., a nonprofit organization that licenses the sharing of photographs from the Web site Flickr.com.

Alison was washing cars for a church fundraiser in April when a youth counselor snapped a picture of her flashing a "peace" sign. The counselor posted the picture on Flickr, where it came to the attention of ad execs working for Virgin Mobile Australia.

According to Ms. Chang's attorneys, VMA's "Are You With Us or What?" campaign features edgy captions written over more than 100 public photos from Flickr.

"The caption 'Monks are Boring' is superimposed over a group of monks," their filing reads. In another ad, " 'People who talk in lifts have bad breath' appears above an image of six adults in an elevator."

The photo of Alison, which the counselor had posted on Flickr, appeared on at least one bus shelter in Adelaide, Australia, with the caption "Dump your pen friend." Her mom's attorneys suspect it was used in other places, including on one of VMA's Web sites.

The team has asked courts here to let them examine VMA's books to determine that ad's distribution and its effectiveness. Such information, they say, will determine the size of the requested damages.

"If a company uses your face in its ads without your consent, then you're entitled to whatever money those ads generate for the company," said Ryan Zehl, an attorney for Ms. Chang and a partner at the Houston firm Fitts Zehl LLC. "It's Texas law."

However, the relevance of Texas law remains in question. Unless Virgin Mobile Australia posted the photo of Alison on its Web site, the picture may never have appeared commercially in the U.S.

But Mr. Zehl insists both on the relevance of Texas law and the culpability of Virgin Mobile's American affiliate.

Virgin Mobile Australia could not be reached for comment; their counterparts at Virgin Mobile USA insist the case has nothing to do with them.

"We are an entirely separate company with no say whatsoever in any advertisement run in Australia," spokeswoman Jayne Wallace said. "Each company with the Virgin Mobile name is entirely autonomous."

Whoever bears the blame, Mr. Zehl claims that Alison's age makes them particularly culpable.

The complaint says the ad caused Alison "to experience and suffer humiliation, severe embarrassment, frustration, grief and general mental anguish damages, all of which, in reasonable probability, will subsist in the future.

"Furthermore," it continues, "Alison has sustained damage and injury to her reputation and good name in the community, which exposes her to contempt and ridicule among her peers, neighbors, relatives and friends, and impairs, among other things, her ability to gain acceptance to the universities of her choice."

Asked why he was taking such an embarrassing matter to Alison's hometown newspaper, a move that will only increase the ad's exposure, Mr. Zehl said that both news reports and the suit itself would dispel any notions that Alison had sold her dignity by consenting to appear in an insulting ad.

"It's about clearing her name," Mr. Zehl said of the girl, who is currently running for student council at Trinity High School in Euless.

Mr. Zehl did not make his clients available for comment, but Alison's feelings are on view at Flickr.com, where she kicked off a three-month discussion of privacy and copyright law with a post below a picture of the ad that reads, "Hey that's me! No joke. I think I'm being insulted."

The Changs' suit demonstrates how privacy issues force companies to exercise caution about using images, said Paula Bruening of law firm Hunton & Williams. She also serves as the deputy director of the Center for Information Policy Leadership, which was started by the firm and studies privacy issues around the globe.

"There's going to be a lot of sensitivity about any images of children," she said, though the suit seems to hinge on copyright law, which is very nuanced and difficult to speculate about. "As a company, I'd think it would be more important to be extra careful when the image is of a child."

Photographers also must think carefully about sharing images online, she said. In this case, the counselor has joined the Changs' lawsuit against Virgin Mobile.

The risk to companies extends beyond lawsuits, said Martin Abrams, executive director of the center.

"Marketers need to be much more careful about how they acquire and what they do with images and digital data," he said. "There are risks today we didn't even imagine 10 years ago."


Staff writer Eric Torbenson contributed to this report.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.35bdb09.html





Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy
Micheal Mullen

A few downloads and a marathon WoW session won't end your high-speed days with Comcast.

Earlier this week, we heard a radio report that talked about a few people who were losing their high-speed Internet access through Comcast. The company cited that these users went above and beyond the average use of most users and branded the former customers as "excessive users." In what appeared fishy, the report said that Comcast would not define how the company defined the term.

Now that the three current next gen consoles offer online connectivity for downloads, competition and system updates, we were worried that our own personal "download every demo that will fit on the Xbox 360 hard drive" might get us banned too.

Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation, called back to clarify what "excessive usage" means and why the company's actions to end its relationship with these customers is good for gamers. First, Douglas defines Comcast's "excessive use" as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.

In short, even if you played a marathon World of Warcraft session for weeks while downloading the massive amount of demos on Xbox 360 and sprinkled with the not so massive amount of demos on the PlayStation Network, you are still not close to getting banned.

Douglas said that Comcast's actions to cut ties with excessive users is a "great benefit to games and helps protect gamers and their game experience" due to their overuse of the network and thus "degrading the experience."

Comcast has been a big supporter of gaming for years with its Game Invasion news, information and game purchasing web site and its well-known G4 TV network, which televises some of gaming's biggest events.
http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/news/?id=17434





Web Users Could Slash Cost of Putting Video Online
Tom Simonite

Internet users may have to help distribute online video clips to combat the growing costs delivering such content. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Microsoft who have studied how peer-to-peer networks could reduce costs for sites like YouTube that spend millions every month to make videos available over the web.

Cheng Huang and Jin Li from Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, US, worked with Keith Ross of Polytechnic University in New York, US. They used nine months' worth of records from the MSN video site servers to work out how to reduce the costs of meeting around 60 million requests for clips every month.

"The current model is not really sustainable," Ross told New Scientist, "Microsoft is certainly interested in the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies, where users distribute video amongst themselves."

Video sharing sites currently pay for bandwidth on a "per bit" basis. So the more popular they are, they more they pay for bandwidth. Canadian researchers estimate that Google-owned YouTube pays out around 2 million US dollars a month distributing clips, in addition to other costs such as servers and staffing costs.

Small sacrifice

The MSN video data spanned a period from April to December 2006 when users made over 520 million requests for more 59,000 videos. The Microsoft team used it to simulate how web users could share the video they were watching with each other, perhaps using a plug-in for a conventional browser such as Internet Explorer.

Instead of downloading the clip they wanted from an MSN server, they would receive it from other users who were already watching it. The data showed that each user would only need to donate a small part of their upload capacity for the network perform as well as the current setup.

Switching to a peer-to-peer technology could cut the costs of distributing video by more than 95 per cent, say the researchers. MSN's servers would only need to provide new clips for the first time, or when making up any shortfalls.

Costs halved

The team also suggest a way to prevent Internet Service Providers' costs jumping when their users start uploading much more data. The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free.

That restriction would cut the pool of sharers into smaller groups, meaning MSN’s servers would have to do more to fill any gaps in the service. But costs could still fall by more than half, simulations showed.

Comcast, one of the largest US ISPs, already limits users of peer-to-peer network BitTorrent in this way, says Cameron Dale, from Simon Fraser University, Canada. "It's an interesting idea and one that is not hard to implement," he says.

The Microsoft research was presented at the SIGCOMM 2007 conference in Kyoto, Japan, in August.
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...eo-online.html





Microsoft Suffers Decisive EU Antitrust Defeat
David Lawsky and Michele Sinner

Microsoft suffered a decisive antitrust defeat in Europe on Monday, sending its shares down 2 percent in pre-market trade.

A European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, illegally abused its market power to crush competitors.

Europe's top competition regulator said the ruling could lead to a "significant drop" in Microsoft's 95 percent market share.

Shares in the U.S. software giant fell before the opening bell in New York on the Luxembourg-based court's ruling. The stock was down 2.2 percent at $28.40 in pre-market trading.

"Its clearly a major defeat for Microsoft. There is no doubt it will spur the Commission on to regulate Microsoft much more significantly," said Chris Bright, a British competition lawyer. They will find that future innovation by Microsoft will be hampered quite significantly."

The second-highest EU court dismissed the company's appeal on all substantive points of the 2004 antitrust ruling and upheld a record 497 million euro ($689.9 million) fine.

A jubilant Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the EU executive now expected to see a "significant drop" in Microsoft's overwhelming market share.

The court said Microsoft was unjustified in tying new applications to its Windows operating system in a way that squeezed out rivals and harmed consumer choice.

The verdict may be appealed only on points of law and not of fact and may force Microsoft to change its business practices.

The ruling also gives Kroes a green light to pursue other antitrust cases and complaints involving Intel, Qualcomm and Rambus, and to issue draft new antitrust guidelines that were put on ice pending the ruling.

"Microsoft must now comply fully with its legal obligations to desist from engaging in anti-competitive conduct," Kroes said in a statement.

Asked how the Commission would assess the result, she told a news conference: "A market level of much less than 95 percent would be a way of measuring success ... You can't draw a line and say exactly 50 (percent) is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see."

Her spokesman later clarified that a fall in market share would be a logical consequence of fairer competition.

Downbeat

The court endorsed Commission sanctions against Microsoft's tying together of software and refusal to give rival makers of office servers information to enable their products to work smoothly with Windows. It annulled only the EU regulator's imposition of a Microsoft-funded trustee to monitor compliance.

"The Court of First Instance essentially upholds the Commission's decision finding that Microsoft abused its dominant position," a court statement said.

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith was downbeat at the courtroom, promising the company would obey the ruling in full. He told reporters there was no decision yet on whether to appeal to the European Court of Justice.

"It is clearly very important to us as a company that we comply with our obligations under European law," Smith said. "We will study this decision carefully and if there additional steps we need to take in order to comply with it, we will take them."

Microsoft, which had argued that it was entitled to protect is intellectual property from rivals, has used every recourse in every case brought against it by governments and regulators.

The company has weathered a series of defeats in antitrust cases in the last decade and sees legal setbacks as almost part of its business model and a price for its near-monopoly.

Microsoft has already moved to new battlegrounds such as seeking to set technical standards across the industry, while bundling more new features into its new Vista desktop software.

Kroes declined to discuss the implications of the ruling for a pending complaint against Vista but said the Commission would have something to say soon.

Rivals welcomed the EU court decision as a signal that authorities do not intend to allow Microsoft to pursue anti-competitive practices with impunity.

The Commission ordered the company to sell a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player application used for video and music, which few have bought, and to share information allowing rivals' office servers to work smoothly with Windows.

A spokesman for Microsoft opponents, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, said the ruling confirmed Microsoft had abused its near-monopoly in computer operating systems and set ground rules for the company's behavior.

Another winner was the Free Software Foundation, which makes free, open software for work group servers. "Microsoft can consider itself above the law no longer," said Georg Greve, president of the FSF Europe.

The judges ordered Microsoft to pay the lion's share of the costs of the Commission and of business rivals.

Since the original decision, the Commission has fined Microsoft a further 280.5 million euros, saying it had failed to comply with the interoperability sanction. The EU regulator is considering a further fine for non-compliance.

(additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan in Frankfurt, Jonathan Cable in London, Mark John in Luxembourg, Sabina Zawadzki and William Schomberg in Brussels)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNe...39839820070917





EU Official Lambasts U.S. Justice Dept on Microsoft
David Lawsky

European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Wednesday that a top U.S. Justice Department official's criticism of an EU court decision against Microsoft was "totally unacceptable".

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett said after the Court of First Instance (CFI) ruled against the world's biggest software maker on Monday that its decision could chill innovation and discourage competition.

"It is totally unacceptable that a representative of the U.S. administration criticized an independent court of law outside its jurisdiction," Kroes told reporters.

"The European Commission does not pass judgment on rulings by U.S. courts, and we expect the same degree of respect."

Kroes's statement raised the stakes in a split over the Microsoft case between the Bush administration and the European Commission.

The Commission has a history of cooperation with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department since patching up differences over an EU decision in 2001 to block General Electric's takeover of Honeywell.

On Monday, the CFI in Luxembourg upheld a landmark 2004 Commission decision that the U.S. giant abused the near-monopoly power of its Windows operating system to damage competitors, along with a 497 million euro ($695 million) fine.

Kroes has defended the order by her predecessor, Mario Monti, that Microsoft sell a version of Windows without its Media Player audiovisual software, and share information to enable rival makers of servers to operate smoothly with Windows.

Barnett, the Justice Department's top antitrust official, disparaged the EU's policy.

"We are ... concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the CFI, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition," he said in a written statement on Monday.

Barnett said the United States protects competition, not competitors.

Some of Microsoft's main U.S. competitors complained to the European Commission. Other U.S. rivals sparked a similar antitrust case against Microsoft in the United States by complaining to the Justice Department in the 1990s.

A U.S. Court of Appeals found in 2001 that Microsoft violated the Sherman Act antitrust law. Since then, some states have criticized the Justice Department for backing off.

Kroes said Microsoft may appeal against the EU decision.

"If the parties to a case are unhappy with the Court of First Instance ruling, they can appeal to the Court of Justice, and that is well known by those parties," she said.

Microsoft has not said if it will do so.
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...26927820070919





MediaDefender Phone Call and Gnutella Tracking Database Leaked
Ernesto

The leak of MediaDefender’s emails caused quite some controversy, Ironically, in a recently leaked phone call, a New York attorney and MediaDefender discuss the security of their email-server. Whilst there is some initial confusion as to where the leak may have originated, they eventually write it off as some technical problem.

The leaked phone call shows that they are unsure about their network protection, their IDS etc. One of the parties is on a VOIP connection which may explain how the leak was obtained.

Similar to the e-mail leak, a group called “MediaDefender-Defenders” released the file, and in the .nfo file we read:

MediaDefender-Defenders proudly presents some more internal MediaDefender stuff… more will follow when time is ready. MediaDefender thinks they’ve shut out their internals from us. Thats what they think.

The subject of the call is rather serious. MediaDefender is apparently involved in an ongoing Child Porn investigation. Their job is to identify child-porn images and report the IPs of the offending computers back to the government. A tricky project since it would mean that they actually have to download and rate the illegal content.

This wont be the end of the leaks according to the “MediaDefender-Defenders”, they claim that more will follow when time is ready.

In addition the the phone call, a huge MySQL database dump from a MediaDefender server was leaked on BitTorrent as well. The database shows tracking and decoy file information for the Gnutella network which is used by P2P clients such as LimeWire.

All this leaked information is a huge blow for MediaDefender, and it will undoubtedly cost them a lot of time and money to clean this up. Interestingly, no evidence can be found that MediaDefender is actually involved in prosecuting or gathering evidence against filesharers (as we reported earlier). Their core business is releasing fake files and polluting the filesharing networks.
http://torrentfreak.com/more-mediade...-leaks-070916/





Tiny Security Update, MediaDefender Blocked and Banned!
Bogaa

As most of you guys know, yesterday 6621 emails were leaked from MediaDefender. Although we haven't read all of those emails we did make a discovery, it seems that they were using auto-submit tools to upload fake torrents. From now on everybody has to type in a security text (captcha) before we accept any submission. We also came across a large list of ip's (box-banned) and fake trackers (will be removed soon as we need to create a script) (special thanks to Brokep from TPB for the other list).

Stay tuned for updates

Update:
We managed to remove all fake trackers from our database, a total of 5000 torrents were removed, we will run the scripts on a hourly cronjob to make sure the database stays clean. For those of you interested in the fakes, we have a export file with all removed and reported torrents: http://www.meganova.org/fakefile.php

Update:
For those of you who dont know how to find real torrents, read our previous post with a few good tips on how to detect fakes: 10 Greatest tips for finding real torrents

Greets,

Bogaa

http://www.meganova.org/sitenews/article/17.html





MiiVi Admit They Will Report Pirates to ‘Proper Authorities’
enigmax

Buried away in the leaked MediaDefender emails is the End User License Agreement for MiiVi. Like most EULAs it’s long and boring but this one has a sting in its tail. If MediaDefender catch you engaging in copyright infringement with the MiiVi app, they state in black and white that they will report you to the relevant authorities.

According to Wikipedia, a EULA or ‘End User License Agreement’ is a software license agreement which ‘indicates the terms under which an end-user may utilize the licensed software’.

The EULA usually comes either in paper form (with some software, game etc )and can be recognized as a booklet with tiny dense type with mostly legal terms only lawyers understand, or the digital type that appears when you install some software. Most PC users will be familiar with the box where you have to select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to declare that you have read the mountains of legalese, understood it and are prepared to adhere to the rules.

It can be presumed that most people who are presented with EULAs don’t read them and it’s a safe bet that the people who installed MiiVi didn’t read its EULA either. Some may have - but most eyes would’ve glazed over after the first paragraph:

Miivi desktop application - License Agreement & Terms of Use

THIS VERSION OF MIIVI SOFTWARE AND ANY OTHER RELATED SOFTWARE, UPGRADES OR UPDATES AND ALL RELATED SERVICES (THE “PRODUCT”), ARE LICENSED TO YOU BY MIIVI INC. (”MIIVI”) SUBJECT TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT & TERMS OF USE (THE “AGREEMENT”).
PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE AGREEMENT CAREFULLY. BY CHECKING THE “I HAVE READ AND I ACCEPT THE MIIVI SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT & TERMS OF USE” CHECK BOX, OR BY INSTALLING OR USING THIS PRODUCT YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, PLEASE DO NOT ACCESS/USE THE PRODUCT, DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THE PRODUCT AND IMMEDIATELY DELETE ANY COPY OF IT FROM ALL STORAGE MEDIA.

Boring….but not if you skip through a little to a section in the ‘User Conduct’ section:

User Conduct. You agree to abide by all applicable local, state, national and foreign laws, treaties and regulations in connection with the Product, and your use thereto. You agree not to use, endorse, or in any other way allow use of the Product to:

[edited to remove non-relevant section]

(d) copy, reproduce, store, transmit, post, submit, publicly display or manage any material that may infringe the intellectual property rights or other rights of third parties, including trademark, copyright, patent or right of publicity;

In itself, this section is no big deal. After the ‘Grokster Decision‘, anyone getting involved with the marketing of media distribution software needs to be very careful that they are not seen to be encouraging piracy.

However, it’s a part of the ‘Measures and Enforcement’ section (in conjunction with the above) which grabs the attention:

Your failure to comply with any of the provisions mentioned under the User Conduct section or any other provision of this Agreement, automatically nullifies any obligation Miivi may have to contact you or provide you with any notice required by this Agreement or by law. You hereby agree, that if Miivi believes, in its own discretion, that you directly may be connected with such activities, Miivi may be required to disclose such a conduct and the suspected infringing user’s (i.e., your) Data or Information to the proper authorities.

So in it’s own words, if MiiVi believes ‘in its own discretion’ that a MiiVi user infringed copyrights of a third party - a civil offense even in the copyright-tough United States - the company would take it upon themselves to seek out the copyright holder and provide them with the MiiVi user’s information, presumably so that action could be taken against them. The fact that MiiVi would’ve been able to monitor for copyright infringements at all would be quite a surprise to the majority of its users. The rest would understand it would be easy - if an anti-piracy company was running the project.

Although there still appears to be no hard evidence that entrapping pirates was the sole purpose of the project, the fact that MiiVi is presenting itself as the copyright equivalent of judge-and-jury does not sit well.

If the wording said that MiiVi would take action if required by law (such as with a DMCA take-down request) it would be an irritant, but would probably be accepted as a necessary evil. However, this pro-active stance where one is reported to ‘proper authorities’ at the discretion of an unconnected 3rd party (over a civil issue), is something else entirely. Holding private data is a very serious business, so much so that handing over such information to a 3rd party in the UK and EU would probably constitute a criminal breach of data protection laws.

Finally, a statement in the EULA that is likely to raise a wry smile or two:

…..You agree not to use, endorse, or in any other way allow use of the Product to:

[edited to remove non-relevant section]

(b) harvest, collect, gather or assemble information or data regarding other users, including e-mail addresses, without their consent;

It seems that EULAs might be worth reading after all.
http://torrentfreak.com/miivi-admit-...rities-070918/





Ahem

MediaDefender Damage Control: Cease and Desist!
Markus

After the big leak of last week, today mediadefender is desperately trying to establish some level of damage control. This morning we received an email from their lawyers stating that the domain registrar should hand over our personal information. So here is an open letter to MediaDefender.


Dearest little asstunnels,

Let me start of by thanking you for your pitiful attempt to have your emails removed from the entire internet (the thing that says www.). In no way we feel obligated to fulfill your request, as a matter of fact any organization that tries to harm this site and the bittorrent user in general can expect nothing more from us but a big fuck you!

In case you haven't noticed, this site is located in Europe (I hope you can point it out on a map) where your stupid copyright claims have no base. But fair is fair you guys did suffer over the past week so here's bit of advice to you guys:

Fuck you!
Fuck you again!
Fuck you again and again and again!
Fuck you again and again and again && again!

There is no way you can stop this, your emails have been published on more then a centillion websites. And if there is anyone who is going to start a lawsuit it will be us suing you for attempts to sabotage the integrity of this site and many others.

Update:
We just launched MiiVi

Have a very nice day,


Markus

http://www.meganova.org/sitenews/article/18.html





Lesson From Tor Hack: Anonymity and Privacy Aren't the Same
Bruce Schneier

As the name implies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are anonymous. You don't have to sign anything, show ID or even reveal your real name. But the meetings are not private. Anyone is free to attend. And anyone is free to recognize you: by your face, by your voice, by the stories you tell. Anonymity is not the same as privacy.

That's obvious and uninteresting, but many of us seem to forget it when we're on a computer. We think "it's secure," and forget that secure can mean many different things.

Tor is a free tool that allows people to use the internet anonymously. Basically, by joining Tor you join a network of computers around the world that pass internet traffic randomly amongst each other before sending it out to wherever it is going. Imagine a tight huddle of people passing letters around. Once in a while a letter leaves the huddle, sent off to some destination. If you can't see what's going on inside the huddle, you can't tell who sent what letter based on watching letters leave the huddle.
I've left out a lot of details, but that's basically how Tor works. It's called "onion routing," and it was first developed at the Naval Research Laboratory. The communications between Tor nodes are encrypted in a layered protocol -- hence the onion analogy -- but the traffic that leaves the Tor network is in the clear. It has to be.

If you want your Tor traffic to be private, you need to encrypt it. If you want it to be authenticated, you need to sign it as well. The Tor website even says:
Yes, the guy running the exit node can read the bytes that come in and out there. Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it makes sure to encrypt everything inside the Tor network, but it does not magically encrypt all traffic throughout the internet.

Tor anonymizes, nothing more.

Dan Egerstad is a Swedish security researcher; he ran five Tor nodes. Last month, he posted a list of 100 e-mail credentials -- server IP addresses, e-mail accounts and the corresponding passwords -- for embassies and government ministries around the globe, all obtained by sniffing exit traffic for usernames and passwords of e-mail servers.

The list contains mostly third-world embassies: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India, Iran, Mongolia -- but there's a Japanese embassy on the list, as well as the UK Visa Application Center in Nepal, the Russian Embassy in Sweden, the Office of the Dalai Lama and several Hong Kong Human Rights Groups. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; Egerstad sniffed more than 1,000 corporate accounts this way, too. Scary stuff, indeed.

Presumably, most of these organizations are using Tor to hide their network traffic from their host countries' spies. But because anyone can join the Tor network, Tor users necessarily pass their traffic to organizations they might not trust: various intelligence agencies, hacker groups, criminal organizations and so on.

It's simply inconceivable that Egerstad is the first person to do this sort of eavesdropping; Len Sassaman published a paper on this attack earlier this year. The price you pay for anonymity is exposing your traffic to shady people.

We don't really know whether the Tor users were the accounts' legitimate owners, or if they were hackers who had broken into the accounts by other means and were now using Tor to avoid being caught. But certainly most of these users didn't realize that anonymity doesn't mean privacy. The fact that most of the accounts listed by Egerstad were from small nations is no surprise; that's where you'd expect weaker security practices.

True anonymity is hard. Just as you could be recognized at an AA meeting, you can be recognized on the internet as well. There's a lot of research on breaking anonymity in general -- and Tor specifically -- but sometimes it doesn't even take much. Last year, AOL made 20,000 anonymous search queries public as a research tool. It wasn't very hard to identify people from the data.

A research project called Dark Web, funded by the National Science Foundation, even tried to identify anonymous writers by their style:
One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past.

And if your name or other identifying information is in just one of those writings, you can be identified.

Like all security tools, Tor is used by both good guys and bad guys. And perversely, the very fact that something is on the Tor network means that someone -- for some reason -- wants to hide the fact he's doing it.

As long as Tor is a magnet for "interesting" traffic, Tor will also be a magnet for those who want to eavesdrop on that traffic -- especially because more than 90 percent of Tor users don't encrypt.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...y_matters_0920





Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye
Jack Kapica

Do you use your computer to download music from Apple’s iTunes or Napster? Use Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks to protect your computer? Watch a film, say Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean or Ray, the Ray Charles bio pic?

If so, and if you live in Canada, your privacy might have been violated.

Music download services, e-books and software, says the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, use digital rights management technologies, or DRM, to protect their intellectual property. And some of them violate federal law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

The practice, CIPPIC says, is “widespread.”

CIPPIC has just released a study called Digital Rights Management and Consumer Privacy: An Assessment of DRM Applications Under Canadian Privacy Law, which looked at the DRM technologies used in 16 digital products and services. CIPPIC found that that many mechanisms to protect intellectual property sold here actually pose threats to your privacy.

CIPPIC stopped short of recommending that software and entertainment using these DRM technologies be banned from Canada. In carefully chosen words, CIPPIC staff counsel and chief investigator David Fewer said the organization “found non-compliance with even basic requirements of PIPEDA, Canada’s federal private sector privacy law.”

CIPPIC’s study, financed by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, observed DRM mechanisms tracking usage habits, surfing habits and technical data. Even e-book software was guilty of profiling individuals (one Ottawa library audio book included software from DoubleClick, an online marketing company).

Apparently many software makers have decided that your IP address is public information, which it can collect, use and disclose to anyone they wish. Or to anyone willing to pay for it.

And why are we not aware of this? Because companies using DRM to deliver content often don’t tell you what they are collecting and what they will do with the information once they get it. This is a violation of the basic requirements of PIPEDA.

How can you tell if your private information is being harvested? It depends on whether you’re using “autonomous” or “Net-dependent” DRM. Autonomous protection is often in the form of inserting a CD key to unblock the program or content, and it doesn’t have to connect to any one outside the user’s location. Most autonomous protection doesn’t.

But Net-dependent DRM is a growing practice involving Internet authentication — such as Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage system (though CIPPIC did not test Microsoft programs in its study).

Not all the autonomous protection schemes communicate with external computers during the course of the operation of the DRM, but all of the Net-dependent ones do. Worse, many of the Net-dependent digital products CIPPIC looked at involved companies such as Akamai Technologies and DoubleClick, companies that process information, deliver content, offer Web analysis or deliver advertising. In one nasty discovery, Napster, the music-purchasing company, says it monitors its customers’ communications to “check for obscenity, defamation or other types of abusive language, as well as for content that may infringe our rights or the rights of others.” CIPPIC notes dryly that “is clearly not information that the individual provides to Napster.”

In the case of Volume 2 of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, CIPPIC found it had to install the Interactual Player, software that plays DVDs on computers, when it inserted the movie to play. The software’s configuration window offered a tab marked “Privacy.” CIPPIC cancelled all agreements to information transfers, but still found that communications had been set up with InterActual’s servers, the results of a cookie placed in the computer, and InterActual might have discovered the computer’s IP address, Web browser and operating system information.

And you thought you were talking only to sweet Uncle Walt.

Under PIPEDA, companies that demand personal information must tell the customer what personal information they collected, how they intend to use it and reveal who would see that information. Most organizations either ignore PIPEDA restrictions such as these, or phrase their small print in such a way as to be extremely vague.

Or they use a sneaky method of dealing with the matter. If you install Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks, you are offered a look at Symantec’s privacy policy covering SystemWorks. But an important part of SystemWorks is another program called LiveUpdate, which updates the software and virus data files on a daily basis. LiveUpdate has a separate privacy policy, CIPPIC says, but it’s not visible to anyone who installs the program.

I hope CIPPIC keeps up this monitoring of DRM systems. We need to ask such upstanding companies such as Symantec and Disney just what the heck they think they’re doing to Canadians.

Perhaps the Privacy Commissioner, who financed the study, can put some pressure on these companies.

After all, our privacy is as important to us as their intellectual property is to them.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...tory/WBcyberia





Big Brother is Watching Us All
Humphrey Hawksley

The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.

"Five nine, five ten," said the research student, pushing down a laptop button to seal the measurement. "That's your height."

"Spot on," I said.

"OK, we're freezing you now," interjected another student, studying his computer screen. "So we have height and tracking and your gait DNA".

"Gait DNA?" I interrupted, raising my head, so inadvertently my full face was caught on a video camera.

"Have we got that?" asked their teacher Professor Rama Challapa. "We rely on just 30 frames - about one second - to get a picture we can work with," he explained.

Tracking individuals

I was at Maryland University just outside Washington DC, where Professor Challapa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance.

They had pushed back furniture in the conference room for me to walk back and forth and set up cameras to feed my individual data back to their laptops.

Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are.

"As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual."

Since 9/11, some of the best scientific minds in the defence industry have switched their concentration from tracking nuclear missiles to tracking individuals such as suicide bombers.

Surveillance society

My next stop was a Pentagon agency whose headquarters is a drab suburban building in Virginia. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) had one specific mission - to ensure that when it comes to technology America is always ahead of the game.

Its track record is impressive. Back in the 70s, while we were working with typewriters and carbon paper, Darpa was developing the internet. In the 90s, while we pored over maps, Darpa invented satellite navigation that many of us now have in our cars.

"We ask the top people what keeps them awake at night," said its enthusiastic and forthright director Dr Tony Tether, "what problems they see long after they have left their posts."

"And what are they?" I asked.

He paused, hand on chin. "I'd prefer not to say. It's classified."

"All right then, can you say what you're actually working on now."

"Oh, language," he answered enthusiastically, clasping his fingers together. "Unless we're going to train every American citizen and soldier in 16 different languages we have to develop a technology that allows them to understand - whatever country they are in - what's going on around them.

"I hope in the future we'll be able to have conversations, if say you're speaking in French and I'm speaking in English, and it will be natural."

"And the computer will do the translation?"

"Yep. All by computer," he said.

"And this idea about a total surveillance society," I asked. "Is that science fiction?"

"No, that's not science fiction. We're developing an unmanned airplane - a UAV - which may be able to stay up five years with cameras on it, constantly being cued to look here and there. This is done today to a limited amount in Baghdad. But it's the way to go."

Smarter technology

Interestingly, we, the public, don't seem to mind. Opinion polls, both in the US and Britain, say that about 75% of us want more, not less, surveillance. Some American cities like New York and Chicago are thinking of taking a lead from Britain where our movements are monitored round the clock by four million CCTV cameras.

So far there is no gadget that can actually see inside our houses, but even that's about to change.

Ian Kitajima flew to Washington from his laboratories in Hawaii to show me sense-through-the-wall technology.

"Each individual has a characteristic profile," explained Ian, holding a green rectangular box that looked like a TV remote control.

Using radio waves, you point it a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. His company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

"First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield," said Ian.

"But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We'll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they're actually thinking."

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that's what's ahead."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/6995061.stm





'Virtual Fence' in Arizona Remains Unworkable Because of Glitch
AP

Three months after its scheduled debut, the first high-tech virtual fence at the nation's borders remains unused because of a continuing software glitch.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says more testing is expected in October.

Nine 98-foot towers with radar, sensors and sophisticated cameras have been built across 28 miles close to the Mexican border near Sasabe, southwest of Tucson.

It's an area heavily used by illegal immigrant and drug smugglers. Arizona remains the busiest border point for illegal crossings from Mexico.

The towers, each a few miles apart, are intended to deter or detect border-crossers and potential terrorists and help Border Patrol agents catch them.

Chertoff says he's withholding a remaining payment to the contractor, Boeing Company, until the pilot project works.

A company spokeswoman says Boeing is working to solve some remaining technical issues.
http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=7100636&nav=HMO6





Tens of Thousands of CCTV Cameras, Yet 80% of Crime Unsolved
Justin Davenport

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

The figures were obtained by the Liberal Democrats on the London Assembly using the Freedom of Information Act.

Dee Doocey, the Lib-Dems' policing spokeswoman, said: "These figures suggest there is no link between a high number of CCTV cameras and a better crime clear-up rate.

"We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it's not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

"Although CCTV has its place, it is not the only solution in preventing or detecting crime.

"Too often calls for CCTV cameras come as a knee-jerk reaction. It is time we engaged in an open debate about the role of cameras in London today."

The figures show:

• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.

• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.

• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.

• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.

• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.

• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras.

The figures appear to confirm earlier studies which have thrown doubt on the effectiveness of CCTV cameras.

A report by the criminal justice charity Nacro in 2002 concluded that the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent.

Scotland Yard is trying to improve its track record on the use of CCTV and has set up a special unit which collects and circulates CCTV images of criminals.

A pilot project is running in Southwark and Lambeth and is expected to be rolled out across the capital.

The figures only include state-funded cameras.

The true number, once privately run units and CCTV at rail and London Underground stations are taken into account, will be significantly higher.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/a...ved/article.do





Video Leads to Firing of Mo. Officer
AP

A police sergeant whose berating of a driver was captured on videotape has been fired.

Aldermen in the town of St. George, a St. Louis suburb, voted 5-0 in a closed meeting Monday to fire Sgt. James Kuehnlein. Notice of the firing was posted Wednesday at City Hall.

Kuehnlein's attorney, Travis L. Noble, said the officer received a letter Thursday detailing the reasons for his firing. Noble said he would review the letter with Kuehnlein before deciding on a course of action.

Brett Darrow, 20, had a video recorder inside his car when Kuehnlein approached him in a commuter lot in the early hours of Sept. 7.

In a video that was widely viewed on the Internet, Kuehnlein is heard taunting and threatening Darrow, sometimes shouting and using profanity.

"It's what I wanted the whole time," Darrow told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The conduct was not forgivable."

Police Chief Scott Uhrig said he recommended that Kuehnlein be fired based both on his language in the tape and because he violated department policy when he failed to tape the encounter himself with his police car's camera.
http://www.charlotte.com/nation/story/287167.html





Report: Insiders Cause More Computer Security Problems Than Viruses
Nate Anderson

The Computer Security Institute has just released the 2007 edition of its long-running "Computer Crime and Security Survey," and it offers some dreary news for overworked computer security admins: average losses from attacks have surged this year. More surprising is the finding that the single biggest security threat faced by corporate networks doesn't come from virus writers any more; instead, it comes from company insiders.

CSI has been running this survey for over a decade and has seen average losses from security breaches drop every year from 2002 to 2006. Investments in security seemed to be paying off; in 2006, the average breach cost companies an estimated $168,000, way down from five years earlier. But in 2007, the numbers skyrocketed. Each breach this year costs an estimated $350,454 to repair.

Financial fraud and viruses caused most of the monetary losses, but both have fallen in frequency over the last few years. Only 12 percent of all respondents reported financial fraud at their institutions. Viruses, which used to plague 90 percent of all companies in 2001, now affect only 52 percent.

It's internal users who are now causing the greatest number of problems, though they may also cause minimal damage. Hiding porn on an office PC, using unlicensed software, and abusing e-mail all count as security incidents, though all pale in comparison to one successful phishing trip. These sorts of internal incidents can be pesky, though, and 59 percent of all respondents had to deal with them in the last year.

The CSI study has a major weakness: it's an "informal" study distributed to CSI members and conference-goers. The estimates of money lost to damages are, in one author's own words, "estimates." "Some of them," in fact, "are probably altogether approximate guesses."

Still, the study has been sampling this group of computer security people for a decade, so the report's conclusions seem to accurately track their perceptions of security; whether they represent reality is another question. But as the report notes correctly that "when a group of professionals reports a significant reversal in a five-year trend of diminishing losses, we should be inclined to perk up our ears."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...n-viruses.html





Theft of Information… and Why KRIPOS Fucks it Up.
Kate Goriar

Recently, quite a lot of information about individuals have been aloft in Norway. The government seems to ignore the problem, and just silence the people complaining and uncovering the problem.

Traditionally, identity theft has not been much of a problem in Norway, but this has changed the last few years, and this incident could pave the road for really large scale identity theft.

A short time-line of the events so far

Here’s a short time-line, since most foreigners probably ain’t familiar the background of the case. It is accurate as far as I know.
November 2006
Norwegian government agency Datatilsynet informs several Norwegian telephone operators of security holes in the operators websites.
Middle of June, 2007
Holes still unpatched. First attack against Talkmore takes place. Roughly 20000 names and birth numbers is leaked.
July 28., 2007
A proof-of-concept (PoC) code snippet is released to the public. This PoC-code utilises a security hole in Tele2’s web pages. The PoC was written by a 16 year old Norwegian.
July, 29.
Major Norwegian newspaper, dagbladet, covers it
July, 30.
Tele2 patches hole. Still not patched by at least two other phone operators.
July, 30-31.
4500 names are fetched from other operators in Norway.
August, 3-4.
63000 names are leaked from GoBergen, a subsidiary of Combitel
August, 8.
Tele2 Norway sends letters to 60000 Norwegians, informing about the leak. In this letter, Tele2 claims they were cracked. Tele2 reports the incident to KRIPOS, Norwegian criminal police.
September, 13.
KRIPOS, Norwegian criminal police branch, raids 52 persons across Norway. Common denominator for these 52 cases is that they have tried the PoC code, or in some other way fetched data from phone operators

The last incident is quite interesting. Notable persons, like Gisle Hannemyr maintains that nothing illegal is being done.
What birth numbers means in Norway

In Norway, each individual is identified by his birth-date, noted in the form ddmmyy. In addition, 5 digit personnummer is tacked on at the end, to uniquely identify persons. This is not quite the Norwegian version of the American Social Security Numbers, but it’s the best analogy I can think of.

The purpose of the birth number is to identify a individual. It has historically been treated as a secret, although the laws clearly says it is not sensitive or secret information.

For example, one can:

• Order mail readdressing from Norwegian postal service.
• Order mobile phone service from operators.
• Start bank accounts in f.ex. SkandiaBanken.

The security hole

The algorithm for generating/checking birth numbers is public. There’s no reason for why not, since it would be trivial to reverse engineer, and a quite useful tool to (legitimately) check if a birth number is entered correctly.

By starting off with a date of birth you’re interested in, you can quickly generate all valid birth numbers for that date, using the algorithm. Then, you feed the generated numbers into altinn.no, the website for reporting income and alike to the Norwegian government. Altinn has security hole #1: they confirm whatever you have a real number, assigned to a living person, or simply a number not in use. Security 101 says that a system should respond in exactly the same way whatever the user-name/credentials is incorrect or not.

Then, you take the validated numbers over to a website like Tele2’s, and feed them into the order form there. To make it easy, it was enough to enter ones birth number, and the system fetched your name and address from the central Norwegian Registry Office, maintaining records of all living and dead people. This is security hole #2, and by far the biggest: by assuming that a birth number is enough to authenticate a person, you let everyone with access to other peoples birth numbers authenticate as that person.

The core problem is indeed that a birth number is a identificator, not a authenticator. In short: no cracking was done. In reality, the PoC-code only automated what you could have done with a normal calculator and a web browser!

The core problem

The really sad part about this story is that the core of the problem gets no attention. You can still steal one persons identity with just the social security number. Tele2 and the other companies has clearly broken Norwegian law (paragraph §13, part 1 of Personopplysningsloven, law about handling of information on individuals, for those interested), they have been reported to the police but the case got rejected.

In Norway, you need a permit from Datatilsynet to store sensitive information about individuals and plan to use them in a business/organisation-related setting. You don’t need any kind of permit to compose a database over individuals for your own, private use. However, Kripos don’t buy that. Any serious hacker cracking a site(!) must be harmful, and must be raided, even if he only got away with maybe a few hundred of the total hundred thousands.

Another scary part is that some bloggers that have have covered the case, and spoken in favor of the people that have used the program has been brought in for questioning by the police. They probably want to know their sources and to harass them.

And again: The funny thing is that the program just automated something you could do with your web browser and a bit of patience… So KRIPOS decides to go after those who have used it, and probably (according to several people) not broken a single law. However, Tele2 and other operators, which have clearly broken Personopplysningslove, §13, part 1, has got no reaction so far. POL §13.1 places the burden of protection on the owner of the database in question.

(Lars, 16, the author of the program has not yet been caught.)
http://bitsex.net/2007/09/norwegian-police-fucks-up/





ChiliRec - Cool New Swedish Netradio Aggregator Service
TankGirl

Do you like to listen to netradio channels and sometimes streamrip tracks from them? If so, do not miss this cool new Swedish site ChiliRec. It's like 80 streamrippers working on parallel and collecting all the stuff for you to pick from. It keeps recording even when you close your browser and remembers you with just a cookie, no registration needed. And you don't have to waste any HD space for all that ripping, they save all the tracks (after a few hours there are already thousands of them!) and your playlists for you. If you want to download any single tracks to your own HD, it takes just a click. This is probably way too good to be legal, but on the other hand it hasn't been declared illegal yet...
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...072#post258072





Get Paid to Stick it to the Man

EFF Seeks Staff Intellectual Property Attorney
Cindy Cohn

We're hiring!

EFF is seeking an intellectual property staff attorney for its legal team. Responsibilities will include litigation, public speaking, media outreach, plus legislative and regulatory advocacy, all in connection with a variety of intellectual property and high technology matters.

Qualified candidates should have at least four years of legal experience, with knowledge in patent law and at least one other IP specialty (copyright, trademark, trade secret). Litigation experience is preferred, including significant experience managing cases, both overall case strategy and day-to-day projects and deadlines. Candidates should have good communication skills and interest in working with a team of highly motivated lawyers and activists in a hard-working nonprofit environment. Strong writing and analytical skills as well as the ability to be self-motivated and focused are essential. Tech savviness and familiarity with Internet civil liberties and high tech public interest issues preferred. This position is based in San Francisco.

Interested applicants should submit a resume, writing sample, and references to ipjob@eff.org.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005441.php#005441





RIAA Sends Another Wave Of Settlement Letters
Susan Butler

The RIAA sent a new wave of 403 pre-litigation settlement letters on behalf of the major record companies to 22 universities today. The labels also filed 24 copyright infringement lawsuits against individuals who previously received letters but did not settle the claims.

The letters are part of the education and deterrence campaign the RIAA launched earlier this year, which focuses on illegal file sharing on college campuses. The program gives students the opportunity to resolve infringement claims against them at a discounted rate before a formal lawsuit is filed. Each letter informs the school of the forthcoming infringement suit against one of its students or personnel who used the school's computer network, and then requests the university administrators to forward the letter to the appropriate user.

Today's lawsuits were filed in federal courts against individuals who allegedly shared unauthorized music files on the computer networks of the University of California Santa Cruz; Florida International University; University of South Florida; Cornell University; Morehead State University; University of Maryland College Park; North Carolina State University; North Dakota State University; Syracuse University; Ithaca College; University of Massachusetts Amherst; Columbia University; Ohio University; Kent State University; and Marshall University.

The RIAA is also resuming its university advertising campaign, placing full-page ads that were created by college students in college newspapers across the country. With the ads, the trade group hopes to encourage fans to enjoy online music legally while reminding students of the legal, privacy and security risks associated with illegal downloading.

The eighth wave of letters were sent in the following quantities to 22 schools including: Arizona State University (35 pre-litigation settlement letters), Carnegie Mellon University (13), Cornell University (19), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (30), Michigan State University (16), North Dakota State University (17), Purdue University - West Lafayette and Calumet campuses (49), University of California - Santa Barbara (13), University of Connecticut (17), University of Maryland - College Park (23), University of Massachusetts - Amherst and Boston campuses (52), University of Nebraska - Lincoln (13), University of Pennsylvania (31), University of Pittsburgh (14), University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, Stevens Point, Stout and Whitewater campuses (62).
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...aafd53d458f14b





Rae J Schwartz Moves to Dismiss Complaint in Elektra v. Schwartz
Ray Beckerman

In Elektra v. Schwartz, the Brooklyn case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis, the defendant is making a motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim for relief (technically a motion for judgment on the pleadings pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c)), based upon the recent decision in Interscope v. Rodriguez.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...o-dismiss.html





Coop Discourages Notetaking in Bookstore
Gabriel J. Daly

Taking notes in class may be encouraged, but apparently it can get you kicked out of the Coop.

Jarret A. Zafran ’09 said he was asked to leave the Coop after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial he hopes to take.

“I’m a junior and every semester I do the same thing. I go and look up the author and the cost and order the ones that are cheaper online and then go back to the Coop to get the rest,” Zafran said.

“I’m not a rival bookstore, I’m a student with an I.D.,” he added.

Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.”

The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site.

Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.

Crimson Reading disagrees. “We don’t think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,” said Tom D. Hadfield ’08, a co-creator of the site.

According to UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08, discussions with an intellectual property lawyer have confirmed Crimson Reading’s position.

ISBN data is similar to phone book listings, which are not protected by intellectual property law, Petersen added. Every book title has a unique ISBN number, short for “international standard book number.”

The alleged new rule is just the latest hurdle for Crimsonreading.org.

During a meeting of the Committee on Undergraduate Education last March, Petersen proposed creating a centralized database of ISBN numbers for all courses, streamlining the process for professors and cutting the costs for the Coop. The proposal, which could have also made it easier for Crimson Reading to collect information, was nixed.

“There’s a very lucrative and sensitive relationship between the Coop and University Hall that is stopping students from saving money on textbooks,” Hadfield said.

Zafran, after his altercation with the Coop, does not feel much sympathy for the store. “If they want to get their revenue up they should slash their prices,” Zafran said. “I think if anything, this policy will have the reverse effect because if students aren’t allowed to comparison-shop, students will just get all their books online,” he said.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519564





MPAA Head Wants Deeper Relationship (Read: Content Filtering) with ISPs
Nate Anderson

It's no secret that US content owners want the "middlemen" of the Internet economy to better police their networks and services for material that infringes copyright. The problem, from a legal perspective, is that ISPs like AT&T and Comcast and content hosts like YouTube have the explicit legal go-ahead not to do this; they operate in a tranquil Caribbean "safe harbor" that exempts them from the crushing responsibility to filter and analyze every bit of content passing through their control.

But some companies have expressed interest in doing such filtering voluntarily, and MPAA boss Dan Glickman praised them for it at a conference in Washington yesterday. "Their revenue bases depend on legitimate operations of their networks and more and more they're finding their networks crowded with infringed material, bandwidth space being crowded out," Glickman said."Many of them are actually getting into the content business directly or indirectly. This is not an us-versus-them issue."

He went on to say that the movie business wants to "deepen our relationship" with ISPs.

NBC Universal has been one of the big drivers behind this push to outsource the work of filtering to the ISPs. NBC's general counsel Rick Cotton recently told the FCC that ISPs should be forced to "use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content." Otherwise, corn farmers could be harmed.

An exec at GE, which owns NBC Universal, later praised the idea in a keynote speech to the telecommunications industry and indicated that his company was quite serious about it.

Rather amazingly, given the money and time that will be required to implement such a system, AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future. Other ISPs could well follow suit, as most of the major networks are owned by or affiliated with companies that also have a voracious need for content (just think of how both cable companies and telcos like AT&T and Verizon need access to channels for their various TV offerings, if you need an example). The companies want to keep on good terms with content owners, but there may also be some legitimate concern about the impact illicit traffic has on their networks. Cracking down on illegal file-sharing—should that prove to be technically possible—could help with both of these issues.

Net neutrality rules, if passed, might throw up some roadblocks. It's no wonder, then, that NBC and the MPAA as a whole are opposed to such rules.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...with-isps.html





One Anti-Piracy System to Rule Them All
Brad Stone

Hollywood appears to have a preliminary winner in its bake-off of anti-piracy technologies.

For the last year, the film industry, through its Palo Alto-based R&D joint venture MovieLabs, has been testing a dozen so-called “digital fingerprinting” technologies. The technology purports to scan file sharing sites, Internet providers and peer-to-peer networks to identify copyrighted material.
“Fingerprinting Performance” (Leonard Kleinrock, 2007)

Yesterday in Los Angeles, people affiliated with the Motion Picture Association of America talked about the ongoing tests at a day-long anti-piracy workshop that the MPAA co-hosted with the University of California. In his introductory keynote at the event, UCLA professor and Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock showed a single slide that suggested that one of the anti-piracy filtering companies had outperformed the other 11, with the highest number of matches of infringing content and lowest number of false-positives. But professor Kleinrock and MPAA execs declined to name the participating companies or who had scored best on the test, saying that secrecy was a precondition for their participation in the tests.

Nevertheless, afterwards, executives from Santa Clara, Calif-based Vobile were crowing in the hallways of the Universal Hilton Hotel.

The two-year old company’s technology, called Video DNA, has apparently bested others from the Royal Philips Electronics, Thomson Software & Technology, and the highest profile digital fingerprinting company, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic, which has deals to filter video sharing sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox.

The MPAA told Business Week in the spring that Vobile was doing “very well” on the tests.

Movie Labs stress-tested the anti-piracy systems by loading hundreds of hours of copyrighted video content into the databases of the various filters, and then by flooding them with thousands of video files, some distorted, darkened and cropped, to try to scuttle their ability to find matches.

In the next phase of the ongoing tests, MovieLabs will see if the systems can handle ever larger quantities of copyrighted works. Theoretically, adding more songs, TV shows and movies in their databases could slow down these systems—and the Internet video sites that use them— since it could take longer to find possible matches.

MovieLabs has been sharing tests results with its member movie studios since the summer. MovieLabs chief executive Steve Weinstein says the technology is ready for prime time. “In a year you’re going to see many Internet companies using it. This technology has shown its viability.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/0.../index.html?hp





Foster, Thornton Stumble at Box Office
Dean Goodman

Jodie Foster blew away the box office competition with her vigilante thriller "The Brave One," but the poorly reviewed film's performance paled against her recent efforts.

According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, the "Death Wish"-style movie sold about $14 million worth of tickets across the United States and Canada during its first three days of release.

Among her recent headlining releases, "Flightplan" opened to $25 million in 2005, while "The Panic Room" debuted with a career-best $30 million in 2002.

Foster was not the only Oscar laureate to underwhelm moviegoers. Billy Bob Thornton opened at No. 3 with the comedy "Mr. Woodcock," another film rooted in revenge. Garnering even worse reviews than "The Brave One," it earned $9.1 million.

"The Brave One" was released by Warner Bros. Pictures, and "Mr. Woodcock" by New Line Cinema. In a climate of diminished expectations, the Time Warner Inc.-owned studios said they were satisfied with their respective films.

Hollywood studios take advantage of the traditional post-summer lull in September to dump unheralded product on the market so that they can then focus on their year-end Oscar hopefuls.

Last weekend's champion, the Western remake "3:10 to Yuma," slipped to No. 2 with $9.2 million. After 10 days, the Russell Crowe-Christian Bale vehicle has earned a modest $28.6 million, having cost about $55 million to make. It was distributed by Lionsgate, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. Rankings could change when final data are issued on Monday.

The top 10 contained one other new release, the South Korean monster movie "Dragon Wars," which failed to scare up business with a $5.4 million opening at No. 4.

"Pretentious Fantasy"

"The Brave One" stars Foster as a New York radio journalist who is seriously beaten in Central Park, and decides to clean up the city one thug at a time. Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan directed, and Terrence Howard plays a cop on her trail. The Baltimore Sun described it as a "pretentious payback fantasy."

As is usually the case with Foster movies, women made up the majority of the audience (55 percent). Almost three-quarters were aged over 30, and 80 percent of viewers termed the film "excellent" or "very good," the studio said.

Foster, 44, who averages a headlining role in a major studio release about once every two years, won Oscars for "The Accused" and "The Silence of the Lambs."

"Mr. Woodcock," in which Thornton plays a sadistic gym coach engaged to marry the mother (Susan Sarandon) of one of his former victims (Seann William Scott), was originally shot by Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie more than two years ago. The release was delayed by reshoots, and then a decision to hold it back for Thornton's New Line film "The Astronaut Farmer," which opened to $4.5 million in February.

Critics almost unanimously ripped "Woodcock," with the nation's best-known reviewer, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the rare exceptions, according to the Rotten Tomatoes movie site (http://www.rottentomatoes.com)

It becomes the third consecutive box office disappointment for New Line, following "Rush Hour 3" and "Shoot 'Em Up."

Among other recent Thornton releases, "School for Scoundrels" opened to $8.6 million last year, "The Bad News Bears" $11.5 million in 2005, and "Friday Night Lights" $20 million in 2004. Thornton won an Oscar for writing "Sling Blade," while Sarandon was honored for "Dead Man Walking."
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...39825420070916





Red Carpet Meets Harsh War
David Carr

At the beginning of the month, an eager crowd gathered in Midtown Manhattan at the Morgan Library to see “Alive Day Memories,” an HBO documentary that featured interviews of grievously wounded veterans conducted by James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos.”

People were sipping cocktails in the sumptuous surroundings when suddenly one of the guests — a veteran with brain injuries in a wheelchair who was in the documentary — began screaming profanely. Guests looked at one another nervously, frozen with hors d’oeuvres in hands, as they waited for the shouting to subside. (The veteran was quickly comforted by his friends.)

But that shocking bit of human theater does raise a question: Are audiences ready for the steady stream of movies and documentaries that bring a faraway war very close?

“In the Valley of Elah,” a mystery about a returning veteran who disappears, starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Paul Haggis, opened last Friday. It will be followed into theaters over the course of the fall and winter by “Grace Is Gone,” “Stop Loss,” “Nothing Is Private,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Redacted.” They all take as their central concern the price of America’s military and security activities since the attacks of Sept. 11. HBO, which has already waded into bloody waters with “Baghdad ER” and “Alive Day,” has commissioned “Generation Kill,” written by David Simon, creator of “The Wire.”

All of this is undoubtedly well intended, but will it be well attended?

“I have no idea,” Mr. Haggis said last week after a screening of “In the Valley of Elah.” “We all certainly hope so. When I first started working on this in 2003, I thought I would be in for the fight of my life.” He added that he went through more than a dozen “War Is Not the Answer” signs on his lawn in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica, Calif., because they were stolen or defaced. “But the tide seems to be turning.”

That tide is bringing a wave of films about a war that most Americans wish would go away. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll this month, 62 percent of the respondents said the war was a mistake. When the CBS News anchor Katie Couric recently went to Iraq, even landing an interview with President Bush, the evening broadcast clocked record low ratings for the week. A study released last week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism comparing the mainstream news agenda with user-news sites like Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us found that when citizens did the editing, war news made up just 1 percent of the content.

Hollywood, which is bringing a reflexively liberal, antiwar agenda to most of these projects, has some assets, most notably stars like Mr. Jones for “In the Valley of Elah,” Tom Cruise in “Lions for Lambs” and Tom Hanks in “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

These are not small bets from tiny indie companies. Many of the war-themed works include A-list actors and directors, budgets in the $25 million range, and major studios including Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Clearly, media companies are hoping that asking questions about the war is good for business, in addition to being good for the republic.

These movies may land with some impact during the Oscar season as the academy loves citing important films. But historically, audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to reality. They’d generally prefer to see Meryl Streep inhabiting Anna Wintour in “The Devil Wears Prada” rather than playing a seasoned reporter who covers a country that seems to be in the midst of melting down, as she does in “Lions for Lambs.” And these films have to compete not only with one another, but also with the drumbeat of the news media’s daily coverage of the Iraq war. Another I.E.D., another four Americans dead. Now, who wants popcorn with that?

“These movies have a chance to work because the American public hasn’t been able to see anything from this war like they did during Vietnam,” said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is behind “Standard Operating Procedure,” a documentary being made by Errol Morris. “People have no idea what the texture of life is like over there, and these films can give them that look.”

Mr. Bernard argues that because of embedding rules for journalists and the dangers of covering the conflict, the visual context of the war has been lost, although citizens who have seen the photographs from Abu Ghraib or the checkpoint stops that have gone terribly awry would say they have seen plenty.

The first numbers are in for “Alive Day,” and Sheila Nevins of HBO said the audience of a bit more than a million was a robust one for a documentary. But she said a documentary brought with it an expectation that reality would not only intrude, but also serve as a focal point.

“They are extensions of news reports, really,” she said. “Paying money at the door of a movie theater to see the suffering of others is different than watching it on television. It is a much tougher sell in a theater.”

The Vietnam War, another American conflict that divided the country and shattered many young lives, produced some important films that people saw in droves. But “Coming Home,” “Platoon,” “Apocalypse Now” and “The Deer Hunter” came years after the fact. Moviegoers will pay money to stare at the raw externalities of war, but they seem less willing to look if the wounds are too fresh.

At the HBO event, people lined up to get a word with the injured vets, thanking them for their service and willingness to share their stories. But as those stories become alarmingly commonplace, the line at the theater may not be so robust.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/bu...ia/17carr.html





Kid Nation Debuts with Tough Choice for its Stars: a TV or Toilet

After howls of protest by parental psychologists and allegations that it was prime-time child abuse, Kid Nation premiered in the US last night, the new reality show in which 40 children are abandoned in a ghost town for 40 days without parental supervision.

The show had drawn heavy criticism for using child performers – some even accused the series of breaching child labour laws – with one mother claiming that her daughter suffered burns to her face and four other children treated for accidentally drinking bleach.

That was until last night, when television critics and Americans watched episode one for the first time.

If you discount the camera crews, producers, doctors, psychologists (all off camera) in this mocked-up pioneer ghost town in the New Mexico desert, there was hardly an adult in sight.

The programme’s creator, Tom Foreman, acknowledged last month that William Golding's Lord of the Flies was part of its creative inspiration. But on last night's evidence, Piggy would have had a ball in "Bonanza City". It was deeply controlled and sanitised.

The children, aged 8 to 15, are dropped in the desert and told to drag wagons filled with provisions to Bonanza City. It had one latrine.

After a competition to pump water (this is on day three, when the man in charge returns and suggests they divide into colour-coded teams, red, blue and green, bandannas provided), they are rewarded with a choice: seven more outhouses or a television. They choose the toilets. Cheers all round.

The community has been assigned four team leaders – the "town council" – who were told in secret that after the first week they must decide who should be awarded a $20,000 solid-gold star.

The winner at a communal meeting is Sophie, 14, who has single-handedly shown everyone else how to cook pasta and stop grumbling. She is given a special key to the one telephone in Bonanza City to phone her parents and break the news. They scream with delight.

The pumping competition has also divided the four teams into classes. The winners are "upper class", and don't have to do anything. Second place created a "merchant" team. They get to run the candy shop and dry-goods store. The third-place team became the town's cooks. Fourth were the labourers who had to clean the toilets. They were also paid the least. They seemed to take it with good grace but a washing-up war seemed to be brewing for episode two.

The most far-sighted child was the youngest, Jimmy, 8. He hated it from the start. He spotted Greg, the eldest at 15 – and therefore revered by most – as the nasty brute that he was. "Greg thinks he's cool but he isn't," Jimmy said on day one.

On day four the children were allowed to leave if they wanted. All stayed, except Jimmy. "I think I'm way to young for this," he said. He was wasn't. Just the most sensible.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle2495670.ece





Reading, Writing and Raunch: Mean Girls Rule Prep School
Alessandra Stanley

It seems preposterous even to type the following sentence: The television version of “Gossip Girl” on CW tonight does not quite live up to the novels.

Some will be relieved, since this series of young-adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar — about rich Upper East Side teenagers who drink martinis, smoke marijuana, shop and shoplift and cut class to have sex in Park Avenue penthouses — is “Reefer Madness” for parents. It is possibly the scariest tableau of prep school privilege since Robert Chambers requested another round at Dorrian’s Red Hand in 1986.

It’s not what the show is missing that misses the point of the books; it’s what it adds — namely parents.

Josh Schwartz, creator of “The OC,” is an executive producer and writer of “Gossip Girl,” and helped turn it into an East Coast version of that other show: “The EC.” It’s a sleek, glossy, musically enhanced soap opera centered on wealthy, gorgeous high school students who connive and cavort to the sound of Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Peter Bjorn and John, Angels & Airwaves, and Timbaland.

The television version does not violate the books’ basic principles: The anonymous Gossip Girl is an unseen narrator (Kristen Bell, “Veronica Mars”) who blogs about the movements and misdeeds of Serena (Blake Lively), her B.F.F. Blair (Leighton Meester) and other friends as they drink, smoke pot and hook up at trendy clubs.

But the CW adaptation pumps up the importance of parents, particularly Rufus, father to Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny (Taylor Momsen), middle-class Brooklyn kids who chafe beneath the scorn of their more glamorous classmates. In the novels Rufus is a minor figure, a scraggily failed poet with bad hygiene; here he is played by Matthew Settle as a former rock musician with romantic problems of his own, including a history with Serena’s snobby mother.

The blending of adult and teenage story lines was crucial to “The OC,” but here it is a glaring violation of the genre.

“Gossip Girl,” along with similar series like “The A-List” and “The Clique,” is Mean Girl lit, mass-market paperbacks that put “Sex and the City” in a teenage context, with lots of sex and erotic brand names like Prada, Absolut and St. Barts.

And while these works are often criticized as a devolution from Judy Blume’s coming-of-age novels, they are actually closer to children’s literature. Like “Peter Pan,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” or the “Harry Potter” series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil.

Even the characters’ names — Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen — are as fancifully evocative as those found in children’s books, like Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” or the candy magnate Lord Skrumshus in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” Ian Fleming’s novel for children. (Fleming, whose spy James Bond met up with one Pussy Galore, never quite outgrew that name game.)

Parents matter on “Gossip Girl,” and their negligence veins the narrative as if to explain their children’s excesses. CW specializes in young-adult television, and certain public-trust habits are hard to break, like enriching spoiled, bratty characters with poignant back stories to make them more sympathetic — or justifiable to media monitoring groups like the Parents Television Council.

Oh, and also, Serena and Blair don’t smoke cigarettes. It is an odd crick in our culture that a show geared toward younger viewers will depict minors drinking alcohol and doing illegal drugs, but draw the line at cigarettes. Good citizens complain about the power of the tobacco lobby in Washington, but in Hollywood it seems that the anti-tobacco lobby is stronger, and even more intimidating to industry executives than Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or for that matter, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

The show even assigns Serena, back from boarding school under mysterious circumstances, a younger brother who attempted suicide and is misunderstood by all but his caring, if troubled, sister. (In the novels he is older, at Yale and an object of female lust, not psychotherapy.)

Children’s book protagonists skirt past private wounds; they are too busy exploring Narnia or Neverland and fending off witches, pirates and Indian chiefs — or hostile saleswomen at Bendel’s.

Only adult fiction indulges the grown-up delusion that children are interested in their parents’ personal lives.

The mothers and fathers in “Gossip Girl” novels like “Because I’m Worth It” and “Nothing Can Keep Us Together” are peripheral figures, shallow socialites, divorcées and Wall Street tycoons who provide credit cards, neglect and a few bare-bones plot points, much the way Mr. Darling’s decision to chain Nana, the nanny watchdog, in the yard gave Peter Pan his chance to fly away with Wendy and the boys.

That “Gossip Girl” novels have no underlying moral lesson is exactly the point; the tale of Hansel and Gretel has no redeeming social message either, except perhaps to beware of candy.
http://nytimes.com/2007/09/19/arts/t...goss.html?8dpc





'Brady Bunch' Star Reveals All About Lesbian Fling With TV Sister?


Jan, Jan, Jan!

Wholesome former The Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick is set to reveal the beloved 70s TV series' most shocking secret in a new book - she and her on-screen sister had a lesbian fling.

McCormick's tell-all, "Here's The Story," won't hit bookstores until 2008, but publishers are already buzzing about the big reveal.

As well as talking candidly about her well-documented eating disorder and drug problems in the book, TV's Marcia Brady will come clean about a romance she had with co-star Eve Plumb, who played her sister Jan on the hit show.

A source tells the National Enquirer, "The most explosive comments will be how the then-blonde, blue-eyed cutie developed a crush on Eve Plumb, which led to some sexual play. This book will certainly come as a shocker. While Maureen is not a lesbian, she reveals there were some sexual hijinks going on behind the scenes. It's bizarre because she played such a virginal character on the show."
http://www.starpulse.com/news/index....ll_about_lesbi





Who says it only takes three minutes?

Yale Student Faces Voyeurism Charges Over Sex Tape
AP

A Yale sophomore is facing criminal charges, including voyeurism, for allegedly showing his four roommates a video of himself and his then-girlfriend having sex.

Casper Desfeux, a Copenhagen, Denmark native, told police he recorded the incident without the woman's knowledge using a camera on his Apple MacBook, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.

The woman, who is also a Yale student, found out about the video from one of Desfeux's roommates, according to police.

Desfeux, 20, a sophomore residing in Davenport College, told police he activated the camera because he just "wanted to see if it worked."

Police say the woman brought the charges to prevent the sexually explicit video footage from being disseminated around the university or on the Internet.

The arrest warrant states she was "very emotionally upset" over the incident.

Desfeux was to be arraigned Thursday in Superior Court on voyeurism and dissemination of voyeuristic materials.

Desfeux told Yale police he never sent the video to anyone because, at 45 minutes, it was too lengthy to process. He also said he did not make any still photos from it.

Police have seized the laptop, camera and other items, which are being held in the evidence room of the Yale Police Department until they can be delivered to the state police forensic laboratory for examination, according to the affidavit.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...?id=1186571494





"Not Tonight, Honey, I'm On the Internet"
Jacqui Cheng

Americans of all ages can't go very long without the Internet—in fact, they prefer the Internet over everything else, including their friends and one of nature's most primal instincts. The world's fourth-largest advertising agency, JWT, made the findings in a survey of 1,011 American adults, and discovered that the Internet has become such an integral part of our lives that some of us are willing to make major sacrifices for it.

Survey respondents were asked how long they could go without an Internet connection and still feel "OK." 15 percent of the group admitted to being weak-willed and said that they would only be able to last a day or less without feeling isolated and disconnected from the world. Another 21 percent didn't do much better, saying they could only go a couple of days, with 19 percent saying they could go "a few days." Only about 18 percent of the group said that they could go a week or more without being connected, according to the results seen by Ars Technica. Notably, respondents over the age of 55 were just as likely to say that they live part of their lives online as those under 35 (43 and 44 percent, respectively), and roughly half of both age groups said that they feel like "something is missing" if they cannot access the Internet.

But that's not the juicy part. The old adage that sex is on people's minds x times per second may still be true, but that apparently didn't outweigh the desire for the Internet in 20 percent of the survey's respondents. Members of this group said that they knowingly spent less time having sex as a result of Internet use, and another 28 percent of the group acknowledged that they spent less time with their friends because of the amount of time spent online or playing with gadgets. "Sorry, I can't go out tonight. I've got a killer new iPod to check out." (Wait, I think I might have actually said that to someone once...)

That said, young people were much more likely to integrate Internet access into their everyday lives so that they could actually leave the house and face the daystar every so often—that is, they were much more mobile with the help of laptops and other connected gadgets. "Older Americans are happy to sit in the same place to go online, while younger people expect to be able to connect anywhere at any time, without being tethered to a particular location or time frame," said JWT executive VP Marian Salzman in a statement sent to Ars. "Mobility represents the next big shift. Consumers who have integrated digital technologies into their life now want to move into connectivity whenever they feel like it."

With both wired and wireless broadband becoming more ubiquitous throughout the US, it truly is hard for some of us to imagine our lives without constant connectivity. With Americans admitting to being addicted to e-mail and data that BlackBerry users are increasingly chained to work, it's clear that finding a balance between being connected and still having a life has become a new challenge for many of us.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-internet.html





Yikes

Chris Crocker Close To Getting TV Deal
TomZ

The "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!" guy has signed a production deal. And I am this close to moving to Canada.

The 19-year old Crocker signed with the production company 44 Blue, which plans to develop a "docusoap" focusing on "the Chris Crocker experience."

Crocker, who lives with his grandmother in Tennessee, had already developed a strong following on the Internet -- mainly via MySpace -- before he broke out last week with the now-infamous "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!!" video. The clip has been viewed over 8 million times on YouTube in just one week.

"Chris first got on our radar a year ago," said Rasha Drachkovitch, President of 44 Blue. "[The show] is going to pretty much be the 'Chris Crocker experience.' We consider him a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star."
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...etting_TV_Deal





Suit Seeks "A La Carte" Channel Choices
Alex Veiga

The U.S. pay-TV industry amounts to a cartel because it maintains profits by offering channels in prepackaged tiers rather than "a la carte," according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles.

The federal lawsuit names every major cable and satellite television system operator as well as every major cable and broadcast television network.

"The antitrust laws protect the right of choice," antitrust lawyer Maxwell M. Blecher said. "Here the customer is denied that choice."

The complex web of contractual arrangements among service providers and networks amounts to a monopoly or cartel that has "deprived consumers of choice, caused them to pay inflated prices for cable television and forced them to pay for cable channels they do not want and do not watch," Blecher wrote in the complaint filed on behalf of cable subscribers in several states.

The complaint, which alleges a conspiracy to monopolize as well as violations of federal antitrust laws, names nine plaintiffs, but Blecher wants the U.S. District Court to certify it as a class action.

Calls to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group for the U.S. cable television industry, were not immediately returned.

Blecher contends cable and satellite television subscribers should be able to pay only for the channels they actually want to watch.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has said such a system would require federal legislation.

The cable TV industry has argued that such an a la carte system would lead to higher prices, less programming diversity and fewer channels in part because advertising revenue would fall. Such a system also would require more customer service representatives and raise the costs of billing and marketing, the industry has said.

Blecher's lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and wants the court to force cable operators to tell subscribers they can purchase channels individually.

Blecher estimated as many as 80 million people receive bundled cable or satellite television packages and could be a party to the case should it receive class-action status.

The companies named in the suit are NBC Universal Inc., Viacom Inc., The Walt Disney Co., Fox Entertainment Group Inc., Time Warner Inc., Comcast Cable Communications Inc., Cox Communications Inc., The DirecTV Group Inc., Echostar Satellite LLC, Charter Communications Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp.

___

Associated Press Writer John Dunbar in Washington contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070920/...ble_tv_lawsuit





CBS Is Sued by Rather Over Ouster
Jacques Steinberg

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a lawsuit yesterday against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors, including Sumner M. Redstone, the executive chairman of CBS.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005.

He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed National Guard broadcast in order to “pacify the White House.”

Asked yesterday in his lawyer’s office why he was taking such action now, Mr. Rather said he had been unable to let go of numerous lingering questions about the Guard report and CBS’s handling of its fallout. In recent months, he said he had even assembled “a team” of associates at his own expense — he declined to say whether it included private investigators — that had turned up new information. Among his findings, he said, was that a private investigator hired by CBS after the report’s broadcast had unearthed evidence that might exonerate him, at least in part.

“I’d like to know what really happened,” he said, his eyes red and watering. “Let’s get under oath. Let’s get e-mails. Let’s get who said what to whom, when and for what purpose.”

The suit, which seeks $70 million in damages, names as defendants CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Mr. Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News. In a statement CBS said, “These complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit.” Mr. Heyward said he would not comment beyond the CBS statement. A Viacom spokesman said he had no comment.

In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt placate the Bush administration, though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect.
To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio as telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ” Mr. Rather also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush, as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.

For both Mr. Rather and CBS, the filing of the suit threatens to once again focus attention on one of the darker chapters in the history of the network and its storied news division, at a moment when its flagship evening news program continues to lag. Mr. Rather’s permanent successor as evening news anchor, Katie Couric, has remained stuck in third place in the network news ratings since taking over the broadcast a year ago. She has not only attracted fewer viewers than Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC, but has thus far failed to bring in the new viewers that were part of her mandate.

The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to his image as a hard-charging newsman.

By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS concluded that the report had been based on documents that could not be authenticated. Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

The panel led by Mr. Thornburgh, as well as Louis Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, did not single out Mr. Rather for the broadcast’s failures, but did fault several producers and executives for rushing the report to broadcast without sufficient vetting. Mr. Rather now leads a weekly news program on HDNet, an obscure cable channel in which he is seen by a small fraction of the millions of viewers who once turned to him in his heyday.

Mr. Rather’s suit seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages. Among the pivotal points of contention in his complaint are the definitions of the words “full-time” and “regular.” As quoted in the filing, Mr. Rather’s contract — which he signed in 2002, and which stipulated he be paid a base salary of $6 million a year as anchor — entitled him to a job as a “full-time correspondent” with “first billing” on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes,” should he leave the anchor chair before March 2006.

As it turned out, Mr. Rather did leave the anchor chair a year early, and was indeed reassigned to “60 Minutes II.” When that broadcast was canceled a few months later, Mr. Rather’s contract called for him to move to the main “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday evening, where he would “perform services on a regular basis as a correspondent.”

During the 2005-6 television season, Mr. Rather had eight segments broadcast on the main “60 Minutes,” half that of other correspondents.

“He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the filing contends.

Theodore O. Rogers, the head of the labor and employment group for the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, said that this could be the strongest of Mr. Rather’s arguments.

“Potentially, if he could point to evidence that when they negotiated, there was an established meaning of ‘regular’ that was breached, there could be a claim,” said Mr. Rogers, who is not involved in the case. Among the most egregious indignities he suffered, Mr. Rather says, was the network’s response to his request to be sent as a correspondent to the scene of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005.

“Mr. Rather is the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes,” his lawyers write in the suit. “CBS refused to send him,” thus “furthering its desire to keep Mr. Rather off the air.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/bu.../20cbs.html?hp





Rather Expected to Report Boeing 787 Unsafe

Boeing Co's new carbon-composite 787 Dreamliner plane may turn out to be unsafe and could lead to more deaths in crashes, according to a report by veteran journalist Dan Rather to be broadcast in the United States on Tuesday.

The new plane, which is mostly made from brittle carbon compounds rather than flexible aluminum, is more likely to shatter on impact and may emit poisonous chemicals when ignited, Rather will report based on interviews with a former Boeing engineer and various industry experts, according to a transcript of the show.

"The problem is all the unknowns that are being introduced and then explained away as if there is no problem," said Vince Weldon, a former Boeing engineer, in an interview to be broadcast as part of Rather's report.

Weldon compares a recent crash in a standard aluminum plane where the dented but intact fuselage kept fire at bay and allowed the passengers to leave the plane alive.

"With a composite airframe, the fuselage would not crumple, it would shatter ... that shattered hole would be there for the fire that's going into the airplane," Weldon says in the interview. "Instead of everyone getting out, it would be a far less positive result."

Weldon says he was fired by Boeing after a 46-year career because of his persistent complaints about the design of the 787. He claims he represents the view of others at Boeing who were afraid to speak out.

Boeing, which did not provide officials for on-camera interviews in Rather's report, said on Tuesday Weldon's claims were not valid and the plane would not fly if it is not safe.

"We've looked at Mr. Weldon's claims. We've had technical committees review them. We do an exceptional amount of testing," said Lori Gunter, a spokeswoman for Boeing's commercial plane unit. "Absolutely, these materials are safe. They are tested, they will be certified."

She said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must find the 787 to be as crashworthy as aluminum planes, and the plane was doing well in those tests so far. She declined to comment on the circumstances of Weldon's departure from Boeing.

First Flight Delayed

Boeing's lightweight, fuel-efficient 787, which has become its most successful plane launch ever, is set for its first test flight between mid-November and mid-December after a three month delay due to a shortage of bolts and problems programming the flight control software.

The first 787 is due to be delivered to Japan's All Nippon Airways in May next year, meaning it will have at most six months of flight tests, much shorter than previous jetliner programs.

Boeing's rival Airbus, owned by European aerospace company EADS, is also working on a composite fuselage for its new A350 jet, but it is some years behind Boeing in the design and production process.

In Rather's report, Weldon and other experts also argue that the carbon-composite fuselage would not survive a lightning strike as well as aluminum, would emit toxic fumes when burning, and could easily be damaged without any visible sign.

Weldon says Boeing was misrepresenting to airlines the ease of maintenance on carbon fuselage planes. The report cites experts referring to Airbus planes that had carbon parts with problems that were not easily visible.

Rather's report also includes aviation experts who see little or no problem with the 787.

"I'm excited to ride on the 787. I'm excited to fly in composite aircraft," says Joseph Rakow, an engineer at consulting company Exponent Inc, in an interview in the report.

Todd Wissing, a commercial pilot, says he would fly the 787 as long as the composite materials are rigorously tested.

"We put safety as our top priority," says Wissing in the report. "We use the 21st Century inspection methods with these new materials. Then we have complete confidence that we can get in that airplane with our passengers and go fly because that's what we can do."

The report by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is the latest edition of "Dan Rather Reports", broadcast on HDNet, a subscription-only television channel that about 4 million Americans are able to view.

Last year Rather left CBS after a scandal over his reporting on President George W. Bush's military record.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297248,00.html





NBC to Offer Downloads of Its Shows
Bill Carter

NBC Universal said yesterday that it would soon permit consumers to download many of NBC’s most popular programs free to personal computers and other devices for one week immediately after their broadcasts.

The service, which is set to start in November after a test period in October, comes less than three weeks after NBC Universal said it was pulling its programs out of the highly successful iTunes service of Apple Inc. That partnership fell apart because of a dispute over Apple’s iTunes pricing policies and what NBC executives said were concerns about lack of piracy protection.

NBC’s move comes as companies throughout the television business search for new economic models in the face of enormous changes in the business. Networks continue to lose audience share, and viewers — especially many of the highly prized viewers under 30 years old — are increasingly demanding control of their program choices, insisting on being able to watch shows when, where and how they want.

At the same time viewers are finding more and more ways, like TiVo machines, to avoid watching the commercials that have long provided the bulk of television revenue.

Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, said, “The shift from programmer to consumer controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years.”

NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

In a second phase of the NBC rollout, customers would pay a fee for downloads of episodes that they would then own, and the files would be transferable to other devices. NBC hopes to offer this service by mid-2008, depending on how quickly the company can put in place the secure software necessary to allow payment by credit card.

The latter system is what is already available through iTunes.

Chris Crotty, an analyst for iSuppli, an independent firm that specializes in analysis of new electronic media, said of the NBC move, “I think it’s a stretch.” He argued that consumers have shown they are extremely happy with the iTunes service and that it would not be attractive to consumers to have to range far and wide over a number of services to find the programs they want to download.

“It’s not just a shift from a supermarket to a mom-and-pop story, it’s a shift to one store that only sells bread, another store that only sells dairy products. The consumers have decided they want to get their content from iTunes.”

Mr. Crotty said NBC had come across to consumers as “highly greedy” in its dispute with Apple. Apple reported that NBC was insisting it raise the price of some downloads on NBC shows to $4.99 from the $1.99 iTunes charges for all programs.

NBC hotly denied that, saying that the disagreement was over what Mr. Gaspin termed the wholesale price that Apple was charging, not the retail price. NBC wanted a better wholesale price for its heavily downloaded shows, like “The Office,” the biggest seller on iTunes.

But, Mr. Gaspin said, “piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.” He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes.

Apple representatives did not respond to requests for comment last night.

Mr. Gaspin said that one important attraction of the NBC service was the option it would offer consumers to receive programs on a temporary basis free, but including commercials, as well as the choice to pay a fee for episodes without commercials and own the programs.

NBC hopes to extract significant revenue both ways, though it is not estimating what kind of money the service may generate. Nor did NBC Universal project what the service would cost.

Mr. Gaspin noted that none of this meant that NBC was moving away from its traditional model of a nightly schedule of programs supported by advertising. He pointed to sales of television sets, driven by high-definition equipment, which are soaring to levels, he said, that surpass those of the biggest booms in color set sales.

"Our research shows that 83 per cent of the viewers would still rather watch on a TV than a PC," Mr. Gaspin said. But he acknowledged that the numbers were different for younger viewers, a trend stirring much of the concern about the business’s future.

"What we don’t know is if habits will change when people get to their 40s," Mr. Gaspin said.

But he added, "I don’t think anyone would argue with the idea that the customer is going to be in control."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/bu.../20nbc.html?hp





ABC's AOL Pact Marks Web's Growing TV Allure
Rebecca Dana

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC became the latest major network to strike a deal with AOL allowing its full-length prime-time shows to be available free on the Time Warner Inc.-owned portal.

ABC shows will be available on AOL starting today, a few weeks before NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Fox are expected to launch their jointly owned online venture Hulu, which will make NBC and Fox programs available on several major Web portals including AOL. CBS shows are already available on AOL. CBS is a unit of CBS Corp.; NBC is a unit of General Electric Co.

ABC's deal highlights how the online strategy of the major TV networks has evolved over the past 18 months, reflecting rapid growth in the number of people watching online video and increasing advertiser interest. In May of last year, ABC became the first of the major networks to offer its most popular shows in full and free on the Web. Most of the other networks followed.

Initially the networks' focus was to stream shows on their own Web sites, but media companies have changed tack this year, striking deals with major portals to ensure that as broad an audience as possible sees the show. Hulu, for instance, will allow viewers to watch NBC and Fox shows on AOL, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, News Corp.'s MySpace and Yahoo Inc. Hulu is expected to start offering programs in October, although a precise date hasn't been announced. NBC yesterday announced an additional online service for its TV shows called NBC Direct, enabling viewers to download ad-supported episodes free from NBC.com.

ABC's agreement goes into effect days before the networks' fall season kicks off, ensuring ABC fans will be able to watch some of the network's new shows, such as "Pushing Daisies," as well as older shows such as "Grey's Anatomy." The shows will be available one day after they air on broadcast television, and approximately four episodes of every show will be available for viewing at one time.

ABC and AOL will share revenue from the arrangement under terms neither company would discuss.

Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said the deal with AOL marks a new phase in the network's digital strategy: opening up ABC programming to as large an audience as possible, but in a way that would protect the network's shows from piracy and appeal to both advertisers and affiliates.

As part of the deal, ABC will use "geo-targeting" to embed one local ad appropriate for each viewer alongside three national ads in each hour of programming. The deal is a welcome one for affiliates, which have feared being on the losing end as networks move their content online.

"The single most significant impediment to stations being able to take good advantage of this opportunity has been the inability to target the viewing that occurs in their markets," said Ray Cole, chairman of the ABC Television Affiliates Association.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024219680633034.html





Fox To Offer Free Shows On Apple iTunes
Douglas A. McIntyre

Not to one to be out-flanked by NBC or ABC, News Corp's Fox unit will offer some of its most popular shows free on Apple iTunes.

According to the LA Times, it is "a move that highlights the TV industry's race to harness the Internet and try out potential business partners."

The new effort by Fox seems a bit misguided. The ability to watch first run TV on an iPod could actually pull audience away from TV viewership and put pressure on ad rates. The idea of charging some nominal fee, like $.99, would at least put a level of value on the shows.

Fox may be gambling that allowing the free downloads will promote TV viewership, by adding "buzz". But, what consumer is going to check out the show on an iPod and then watch it on home television as well?
http://www.247wallst.com/2007/09/news-corps-fox-.html





FOX Censors the Flying Nun
Amil Niazi

Sally Field won a Primetime Emmy recently, and she took the opportunity to get sanctimonious. Her acceptance speech was vaguely anti-war and she tripped her way through the words in a way both touching and deluded. If you watched in Canada, you caught the end of her speech where she boldly claimed “if mothers ruled the world, there would be no more goddamn wars.” So what, right? She’s no Hanoi Jane. But for Americans, the Big Brotherly FOX Network found Sally’s words disgraceful and censored out the end of her speech, displacing it with a very awkward cut away and dead air. Prompting many to think, holy shit what a weird thing to do. Kathy Griffin was another victim of unnecessary censorship, when her joke about Jesus at the Creative Emmy fell flat on the ears of the Catholic League and resulted in the entire bit being removed from re-broadcasts.

FOX censors are claiming they cut away from Fields because of the word goddamn, but that seems a rather thin excuse considering their programming generally displays more vulgar behaviour and language than an old-timey whorehouse. Not to mention that a majority of the shows nominated for awards that night regularly feature a barrage of cussing, sexing and mob-style shooting. All things considered, it would appear that FOX installed its version of fair and balanced coverage, and vetoed the musings of an aging actress because she was speaking out against an already unpopular war.

Her words came on the heels of a trying week for anyone still deluded enough to think there were any positives remaining in the battle against terrorism. For a beleaguered network that had long ago embraced a shady administration, FOX was merely taking orders, albeit standing orders that at this point don’t necessarily need to be voiced.

Blathering though Fields may be, and as frequently unfunny as Griffin generally is, both have every right to speak their minds. Celebrities are a distraction for the masses, but also serve as a kind of retarded megaphone for those who don’t have access to a soapbox. Through their well-meaning diatribes many people are able to relate their long-standing frustration at having been punished for too long by pro-war pundits and mega-Christian talking heads.

As painful as it is to side with a woman like Kathy Griffin, it’s more painful to see the vitriol so many ruddy-faced Catholics have spewed against her. Considering the countless years we have endured alcoholic, narcissistic and promiscuous celebrities and politicians thanking God for their success, it seems only fair that someone come out with an opposing view. Just as there’s no harm in Gidget speaking out, not against wars, but for mothers. Are her neutered sentiments really going to cause children to start worshiping Satan, or whatever it is the censors are trying to prevent when they bleep otherwise harmless words?

But truly the most deplorable fact in this whole mess is that the so-called guardian of America’s purity is also the same network that picked up The Simple Life when it was slated for cancellation. For shame FOX, for shame.
http://onlymagazine.ca/Mental-Health/1403/hanoi-sally





BitTorrent 6 Released with uTorrent Capabilities
Kristen Nicole

BitTorrent, which acquired uTorrent late last year, has just released BitTorrent 6, the first version that combines the two services, incorporating uTorrent functionality with BitTorrent’s open-source base (uTorrent was a closed-source service). With BitTorrent 6, you’ll see that the user interface now resembles that of uTorrent’s, including the menu bar. Its system resources now run with uTorrent capability, which is faster and takes up less space than BitTorrent.

BitTorrent 6 is a complete overhaul from its previous incarnation. The interface is the same as µTorrent’s, except for three toolbar icon changes that look more like variations than outright differences. The contents of the menus in the menubar are now identical to µTorrent as well, which means that advanced functionality like tweaking your Web UI has finally come to the BitTorrent client.

Despite the obvious changes and integration with BitTorrent 6, the end goals of BitTorrent in regards to uTorrent still are unclear. Some speculate that the two will remain separate, and BitTorrent could be promoted as a destkop program while uTorrent could continue to be a lightweight, portable option. In other uTorrent news, the service has recently launched an iPhone option.
http://mashable.com/2007/09/21/bittorrent-utorrent/





EMusic, a Song-Download Site, to Offer Audiobooks
Andrew Adam Newman

The company that has given Apple’s iTunes the most competition in the song-download arena will now compete with it in selling audiobooks, too.

Beginning tomorrow, eMusic, which is second to iTunes in music download sales, will offer more than a thousand books for download, with many of them costing far less than on iTunes. For example, “The Audacity of Hope,” read by author Barack Obama, will cost $9.99 on eMusic compared with $18.95 on iTunes. The retail price for a five-CD version of the same book is $29.95.

The biggest selling point for eMusic is also its biggest point of controversy: the site uses the MP3 format, which works on any digital player but lacks the technology, known as digital rights management, that protects copyrighted material from unlimited duplication.

By contrast, iTunes only works on an iPod, and songs downloaded from the service can be burned onto a CD only once and cannot be transmitted over the Internet.

EMusic’s lack of piracy protection is the reason no major music label has signed on with it, and why only a few audiobook publishers have so far. But the site is enormously popular: although dwarfed by Apple, which has 71 percent of the music-download market, eMusic, which has 10 percent, still sells more than twice as many songs as competitors like Napster, Rhapsody and WalMart.com. It is owned by Dimensional Associates, an arm of JDS Capital Management.

Some publishers are just dipping in a toe. Random House Audio, for example, will be selling about 500 titles, roughly 20 percent of its catalog, through eMusic. “We’re very interested in testing this, but we didn’t think it was appropriate to put all of our titles in a test program,” said Madeline McIntosh, the group’s publisher.

Like her counterparts in the music business, Ms. McIntosh is concerned about piracy, but doubts it will be as big an issue for audiobooks, which draw an older audience and are unwieldy to circulate. Unabridged audiobooks sold in stores often comprise more than a dozen CDs, and, in digital format, the enormous files cannot be e-mailed as easily as single songs.

“If we see that piracy of our products is increasing, we would stop,” Ms. McIntosh said, adding that her company monitors file-sharing networks and that there will be a “watermark” on eMusic files. “But I don’t expect that working with eMusic would lead to an increase.”

“Our customers don’t steal music,” said David Pakman, chief of eMusic, of the company’s 300,000 subscribers, who pay from $9.99 (for 30 songs) to $19.99 (for 75 songs). “A lot of them are technically sophisticated, but they’re not prone to piracy.”

Nevertheless, some publishers have no interest in signing on with eMusic.

“I think it’s a mistake,” said Brian Downing, publisher of Recorded Books, which is more than 25 years old and whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult. “I think our obligation to protect the files and protect the authors is a big one.”

Hachette Audio will start by selling only about 15 titles on the site, but that includes bestsellers like “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction” by Jon Stewart.

At the other end of the spectrum is Penguin Audio, which will sell on eMusic all the audiobooks it currently makes available in a digital format on iTunes, about 150 titles. “Publishers have been waiting for other companies to play ball,” said Patti Pirooz, the executive producer.

Most publishers have been playing ball with Audible Inc., which pioneered downloadable audiobooks 12 years ago and sells its wares through iTunes and its own Web site, audible.com. Audible sells about 15,000 audiobooks and another 20,000 recordings of public radio shows and periodicals like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Audible has its own proprietary digital format, which plays on both iPods and non-Apple devices, but still cannot be duplicated except to copy onto CDs just once. Spokesmen from Audible and Apple declined to comment on eMusic.

Since it was founded in 1995, Audible has grown steadily. It went public in 1999, and its 2006 revenues of $82.2 million were up 30 percent over the previous year. But this growth has not translated into profit: Audible has lost money in seven of the last eight years, including $8.4 million last year.

In 2006, Audible earned 24 percent of its income selling content on iTunes, compared with 11 percent in 2004. While eMusic will offer fewer titles than Audible sells on its site or through iTunes, it will do better on price. A one-book-a-month subscription to eMusic is $9.99; the same on Audible is $14.94, while a two-books-a-month subscription is $22.95.

As for the issue of intellectual property, Mr. Pakman of eMusic said that his company’s expansion into audiobooks signaled growing acceptance of the easy-to-copy MP3 format in general.

“Here you have Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., taking part in this,” Mr. Pakman said, noting that Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann, also owns BMG Music. “What they’re doing is prioritizing the need for sales and growing the market share over copy protection. It speaks to the larger trend that media companies are now getting comfortable with something they probably should have done seven or eight years ago.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/bu...audiobook.html





Apple’s Ringtones and Copyright Law

Apple's iTunes ringtones and the complex world of copyright law
Daniel Eran Dilger

While I’m no huge fan of the “all singing, all dancing” mobiles that announce every incoming call by belting out a section of a song--particularly since they tend to use songs that I don’t want stuck in my mind for the next hour--ringtones are extremely popular and a big money business, so they’re not going away anytime soon.

The latest version of iTunes now allows users to select from a half million songs in the iTunes Store that can be “upgraded” from a regular 99 cent track to a ringtone by paying another 99 cents to carve out a user-defined, 30 second clip as a ringtone that can be synced to the iPhone.

Suddenly, everyone who was cool with Verizon Wireless charging $2.50 and up for individual ringtones came out of the woodwork to castigate Apple for selling ringtones as a 99 cent upgrade, and only for songs it sold within iTunes; by default, you can’t make a ringtone from songs ripped from your own CDs using iTunes.

Of course, you actually can do this by changing the filetype of the song and assigning it a metadata tag, but Apple doesn’t tell you this, and doesn’t really want users to exploit this because it will send it back into negotiations with the labels again.
The Ringtone Circus.

Remember that Apple appeared poised to deliver a ringtone sync function in iTunes back in January, but then pulled the feature and later backed away further by adding new legalese to the iTunes terms of service that excluded downloads from being used as ringtones.

Clearly, the record companies jumped on ringtones as a whole of stack of potential profits that could not be allowed to go without remuneration. Apple makes very little from sales of music in iTunes; the vast majority of revenues are funneled back to the record companies, which then devise how to avoid paying their talent and keep as much as they can.

At stake are the complex copyright laws involving derivative works, performing rights, and reproduction rights. Apple’s iTunes breaks open a whole can of worms because it is changing the market for music and video.

The Complex World of Copyright.

Copyrights were designed to make sure that the creator of an original work would be compensated for copies, whether they be exact copies or derivative works based on their original. For example, a movie based on a play or a novel has to respect the copyrights held by the original work, because much of the value of that derivative work comes from the original.

In the music industry, groups like ASCAP license performing rights of music created by composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers.

Bands playing their music have to pay royalties, which are commonly split between the writer of the song and the author of its lyrics. In addition to live bands, any commercial playback of music also requires performing rights licensing. Music played during a TV show, over the radio, or even in a restaurant requires obtaining a license and paying fees.

Publishing music requires a different set of permissions referred to as mechanical rights. CD and record manufacturers pay music owners fees to create copies of a given work. When musicians perform and their work is captured as a “master recording,” the reuse of that work must be licensed under master use rights. There are also synchronization rights involved in incorporating a music recording into a film or video performance or a commercial, and grand rights for using recordings as part of a dramatic performance such as a musical, opera or ballet.

The music business is therefore based upon a series of complex legal relationships between writers, performers, distributors, and the groups that represent each of their rights and their legal obligations.

Consumers Left Mystified; Fair Use Left Undefined.

Outside of the complex world that funds artists and their work, the idea of paying a license to play or use a song in different contexts is hard to grasp. Laws to define protections for producers were worked out long ago to make sure artists would get paid, but the rights of consumers haven’t been so carefully defined.

Consumers’ rights are based on the general idea of “fair use,” which isn’t a right defined in law. Instead, it’s a general defense against claims of copyright infringement. If the recording industry were to sue an individual for copying music from their CDs onto their iPod, they would likely lose because the idea of fair use generally determines that consumers can use their own music in reasonable ways.

Unfortunately, fair use has not been upheld in clear court precedents or in law to the point where it can really be called a right. This leaves things enshrouded in a grey fog where consumers assume that anything they can do with “their music” is fine, while the music industry seeks to find new ways to sell its products.

Ask Not For Whom the Ring Tones.

Writing about Apple’s iTunes ringtones, John Gruber of the Daring Fireball cited Engadget, which reported that “the RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren’t ‘derivative works,’ meaning they didn’t infringe on the copyright of the songwriter.”

Engadget, known for shooting from the hip rather than the brain, didn’t really understand whole story. From its report, Gruber concluded, “So if you have the right to play a song, you have the right to use it as a ringtone on your phone.”

Gruber blamed a “complicated, confusing mess of a ringtone policy” on Apple, and suggested the company should have simply handed out tools to create ringtones from any users. Incidentally, that’s apparently what Apple was going to do back in January.

Derk Nek of Epplegacks explained that--unfortunately--what the RIAA actually won in the case cited by Engadget was instead the right to collect money for ringtones without distributing those fees to the artists they represent. There was no establishing that ringtones are not protected intellectual property, so the RIAA will continue collecting royalty fees, because distributing songs or portions of songs requires mechanical rights. Playing a ringtone might also--in the mind of the RIAA and the letter of the law--require performing rights.

Ringtone Performing Rights.

Nek added, “I produce porn for a smattering of online websites. In one of our scenes, a ‘talent agent’ gets a phone call on his cell saying the girl will be right up, and of course the scene continues as expected. We put this file online and no complaints... until we went to release it on DVD.

“With the internet if there's a complaint, you simply pull the file like it never existed, or re-edit it like it never existed in it's previous form. With a DVD there's a hard copy that's on retail shelves, which means a retailer, distributor, production company and owner of the content is liable. We were told the ringtone had to go because we didn't have the rights to have to redistributed in our DVD release. Dumb, but understandable.”

“The thing about studios, networks, and labels, is they'd like nothing better but to track every pair of eyes and ears that views or hears their content, and charge based on that rather than unit. They consider a ringtone, which could be heard in a crowded cafe, subway, or street corner, something that would be a public performance of the work, and thus feel they need to be compensated. Dumb, but the truth as far as I can deduce.”

Do You Have A License for that Ringtone?

In addition to carefully watching every performance in order to catch any playback of any bit of music that was not paid for with the appropriate license, music industry also monitors Apple to make sure it does not confer any suggestion that users might use the labels’ music in ways that might leave money on the table. When they saw that Apple might allow users to put songs on phones, they flipped a nut and sent in lawyers to iron out a contract covering iPhone ringtones.

Apple negotiated a far lower price than any other ringtone distributor, but the labels are worried that consumers might figure out how to create their own ringtones, just as they were able to figure out how to put music from CDs onto computers and MP3 players, a practice that got out of hand and resulted in more music being handed around for free than legally paid for.

Nek added, “The iPhone is a hardware product which Apple derives substantial profits from, ringtones are something people want but the current state of copyright law in the states makes much more unfair than it should be.”

The Wrestling Between Apple and the Labels and Studios.

Nek also outlined another example of the distribution skirmish between Apple and its content producers: the fight over TV downloads from NBC/Universal.

“NBC just demanded of Apple that to get Heroes for the iTS, they'd need to buy two episodes of those shows no one downloads like Passions or Friday Night Lights. Apple says that this would force them to sell Heroes at $4.99 not because NBC wants that much for each episode, but because Apple isn't in the business of losing money selling a popular show for $1.99 when they had to buy two very unpopular shows at $1.49 each on which they won't make back their investment. So instead of going ahead and selling video files of less resolution than are available at no cost on torrent sites for that $4.99 price to keep them in the black, Apple told NBC to walk.

“NBC also expressed that they wanted Apple to crack down on their customer base who were walking around with devices full of stolen content, read: ‘iPods can play unprotected AAC and MP3, MPEG-4 and H.264 video files and we want you to switch to only DRM'd content so we know that every track and video file on those devices was paid for’. Again, Apple told them to walk. If all Apple was concerned with was profit, then they would've accepted the terms because it costs them nothing to keep files on the iTunes Store and a certain percentage would keep on buying TV Shows at the inflated price, which in turn would keep selling iPods and Apple TVs so people could view them. But Apple saw in these terms from NBC a very anti-consumer agenda, and made their stance on any such terms by NBC or other studios plain.

“For Apple to put a ringtone editor into iTunes and have it work with the user's existing library would be in a consumers best interest definitely, but it would also be illegal as far as I understand the mickey mouse laws. Apple didn't become number three in music sales by pursuing illegal business plans, they did it by offering a better product at a competitive price. They competed against piracy with the iTunes Music Store and won. They're now competing against current mobile service providers ringtone products and are going to win.”

A Legal Problem Your Representatives Don’t Care About.

It is fortunate that it is in Apple’s own interests to defend the rights of consumer. The reality of copyright law isn’t going to go away however. Its complexity is seldom discussed in the simpleton arguments that suggest that the RIAA should vanish and that “the artists” are somehow magically going earn a living without a complex system to funnel money back to them as their work is copied and performed, particularly when most music is traded around for free.

If the government had any interest in representing the rights of citizens as consumers, we’d have clear and fair consumer rights spelled out in law, and the music industry would have to respect them. Instead, the government is working for the industry, setting up a police state of criminal codes designed to enforce the anti-consumer laws already on the books.

It doesn't help that they’re also distracted by efforts to legislate morality and criminalize free speech. Until citizens start to care about what their government is doing, these problems won’t be solved, and we’ll be stuck having to sweat copyright infringement when our mobiles ring. Of course, that should really be the least of our worries when our government is serving the moneyed interests of industry before the rights and protections of its citizens.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Tec...gh t_Law.html





RIAA Abandons "Making Available" in Amended Complaint in Rodriguez Case
Ray Beckerman

Here are some further developments relating to Interscope v. Rodriguez, the San Diego, California, default judgment case in which the RIAA's complaint was dismissed for failure to state a claim.

Interscope v. Rodriguez
On August 23, 2007, the RIAA filed an amended complaint. Interestingly, the amended complaint (a) leaves out the phrase "making available", (b) adds a phrase that plaintiffs "identified an individual" distributing files, even though their expert witness's deposition testimony in UMG v. Lindor specifically negated any claim that "an individual" was detected, and (c) adds a curious phrase that the defendant was "the individual responsible for that IP address at that date and time", a phrase which would be of dubious significance in a copyright infringement context.
On August 30, 2007, the case was reassigned to Judge Hayes, due to Judge Brewster's impending retirement.
Amended Complaint*
August 30, 2007, Order of Reassignment*

Elektra v. Barker
Ms. Barker's attorneys wrote to Judge Karas, before whom is pending Ms. Barker's own motion to dismiss complaint, notifying him about the August 17, 2007, decision in Rodriguez.
September 8, 2007, Letter of Ray Beckerman to Hon. Kenneth M. Karas Enclosing Copy of Interscope v. Rodriguez*

Warner v. Cassin
Ms. Cassin's attorneys wrote to Judge Robinson, before whom is pending Ms. Cassin's own motion to dismiss complaint, notifying him about the August 17, 2007, decision in Rodriguez.
September 8, 2007, Letter of Ray Beckerman to Hon. Stephen C. Robinson Enclosing Copy of Interscope v. Rodriguez*
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...lating-to.html





Practice Tip: I recommend that defendants' lawyers consider making motions to dismiss complaint or motions for judgment on pleadings
Ray Beckerman

In May of this year, the United States Supreme Court came down with the decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, --US --, 127 S. Ct. 1955 (May 21, 2007) which established a "plausibility" standard for federal pleadings.

In Interscope v. Rodriguez, it was held that the RIAA's boilerplate complaint, which it has been using in all of its cases for the past 4 years, and which robotically alleges only the magic incantation of "downloading, distributing and/or making available for distribution", is insufficient under the Twombly standard, and the Court dismissed the complaint.

Thereafter the highly predictable RIAA lawyers, who handle these cases "programatically" (to use their leader Matthew Oppenheim's terminology), filed an amended complaint which gives us a valuable insight into how they intend to negotiate the post-Twombly, post-Rodriguez era. The amended complaint robotically inserts -- where the magic incantation used to be -- new boilerplate which is taken mostly word for word from the RIAA's boilerplate form of interrogatory answers (See e.g. page 5 of interrogatory answers in UMG v. Lindor). The new boilerplate abandons the "making available" language, and says that at a certain date and time they "detected" an individual downloading and 'distributing' files, who was doing so continually.

Clearly, the new boilerplate complaint is "implausible" on its face, since (a) it is fundamental that they did NOT detect an individual (their own expert has admitted as much under oath), (b) they cannot point to a SINGLE instance of the defendant actually copying anything or actually distributing anything to someone else, (c) it is impossible for any individual to do anything "continually", and (d) distributing is a term of art under 17 USC 106(3), the elements of which are not spelled out factually as they are required to be under Twombly.

Accordingly I urge all practitioners who have a "making available" complaint to move to dismiss pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), or, if the time to do so has passed, to move for judgment on the pleadings pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c), on the basis of Twombly and Rodgriguez.

If the RIAA counters by filing an amended complaint with the new "detecting an individual" boilerplate, that, too, is clearly the type of "formulaic" and implausible pleading that Twombly forbids, and should be dismissed as well.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...mend-that.html





NPR’s Long, Hard Look at the RIAA

p2pnet news | RIAA News:- “I don’t think we’ve suddenly had a massive morality shift, where tens of millions of Americans who wouldn’t shoplift a CD in a store have suddenly lost their moral compass and are rampaging out there, eager to break the law.”

Or …..

“There are tools, in terms of, uh, uh, authentication here, and, uh, uh, I’m not a technician so I’m, I’m, I really can’t go into that in great detail.”

The first remark came from leading EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) lawyer Fred von Lohmann in a documentary on American Public Media’s Marketplace.

The second was from RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) spin-doctor-in-chief Mitch Bainwol, both of whom were interviewed for a three-part American Public Media Marketplace series which kicks off:

The recording industry has gotten serious about illegal file sharing. In the last four years it has filed thousands of lawsuits. But, as Bob Moon reports in a special series, even those targeted by mistake, like Tanya Andersen, get no reprieve.

It takes a long, hard - and commendably objective - look at Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s bitter and relentless assault on the men, women and children who keep the money rolling in and whom the Big 4 are calling criminals and thieves. But even as the major labels desperately try to sue them into once again becoming the compliant cash-cow ‘consumers’ of the physical 1970s, the technically intelligent customers of the 21st digital century are dangerously determined to exercise their rights to choose freely.

Part I, No pause in music industry’s tough play, aired on Monday, Part II, Free? Illegal? … What’s the difference? Music biz’s future rests on key changes, was broadcast on Tuesday, and Part III, Music biz’s future rests on key changes, was heard yesterday afternoon, wrapping the three-part series.

Featured, in addition to von Lohmann, are:
» Tanya Andersen, the disabled Oregon mother who’s looking for class-action status in a case she wants to bring against the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) .
» Lory Lybeck, Andersen’s lawyer, a deft hand who’s consistently challenging the Big 4 enforcement organisation’s legal teams
» Ray Beckerman, the New York attorney who was one of the first to act for RIAA victims and who today runs Recording Industry vs The People, a blog caring detailed reports of cases, together with links to stories and commentaries covering them
» Bainwol
» Peter Jenner, the former Pink Floyd manager who currently represents an artists’ coalition in London
» Felix Oberholtzer from the Harvard University Business School, who, with colleague Koleman Strumpf from the University of Kansas School of Business, first firmly gave the lie to corporate music industry claims that files shared equal sales lost. Their paper, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, remains a milestone

“It was challenging to try to sort through a lot of seemingly contradictory angles to all of this, coming from different directions, frankly,” the series presemnter, Bob Moon, told p2pnet shortly after the final segment aired.

“One example is something we just didn’t end up with enough time to explain as we were heading into production,” he said, going on:

As we know, the recording companies have now stipulated - and a judge has ruled “with prejudice” - that there was no case against her. It just adds yet another confusing layer if you try to explain that they’re now arguing their motion to have her countersuit thrown out, at least in part, on the idea that she really was an online pirate who should have had no expectation of privacy.

It really raises the problem of how detailed can a story be before your listener starts losing track of everything.

The answer to that is probably: as detailed as necessary, and that’s exactly how it’s starting to be, thanks entirely to the Net which gives online citizen media and reporters the space and the freedom to be as verbose is they need to be.

In Part I, No pause in music industry’s tough play

—- Tanya Andersen relates how she reacted to a letter, “warning that she had breached undisclosed copyrights and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars” which she initially believed was a scam, “until she phoned someone at what the industry calls its “settlement support center’,” says Marketplace, going on:

ANDERSEN: You know, I told them, “Look, take my computer. Look at that. I can prove to you I didn’t do this.” And he said, “What do you guys expect us to look at everyone’s computers that says they’re innocent?”

The first lawyer she consulted offered some advice that turned her stomach:

ANDERSEN: “Just let ‘em take a judgment against you and file bankruptcy.” And I told him, “Why should I have to do that? That’s not fair.” And he said, “I didn’t say it was fair. It’s how you have to deal with those people.”

So it was back on the phone to the “settlement center,” where she says a support rep listened sympathetically.

ANDERSEN: He ended up telling me, “Well, you can write a letter to my bosses, but no guarantee. Once they start a lawsuit, they just don’t back off.”

LORY LYBECK: And that’s when her life went down the rabbit hole.

That’s Lory Lybeck. Andersen’s lawyer:

LYBECK: Lo and behold, somebody shows up at her door with a federal lawsuit, saying “We’re going to ruin you. We’re going to sue you for over a million dollars.”

He bases that on the industry’s past demands for up to $750 per song. He says Andersen was accused of trading 1,046 music files.

Lybeck responded with a counterclaim in the fall of 2005, and Andersen says after that things really got ugly. It was right around the time she moved to a new home, and her apartment manager got a call:

ANDERSEN: He told them he couldn’t release my personal information. They told him that he would either give it to them or he was going to get in a lot of trouble. It terrified me. Come to find out, they were trying to serve Kylee.

Her daughter, who was just 7 years old when the file-sharing supposedly happened. Andersen’s lawyer says he was able to confirm that call came from the recording industry’s law firm. What remains a mystery is something else that he says happened around the same time:

LYBECK: Calls were made to Kylee’s elementary school, under the pretext of somebody calling saying they were Kylee’s grandmother, and was she there that day? I haven’t tracked that call directly back to the law firm, but it was most disturbing, especially since Tanya checked, and grandma made no such calls.

The head of the Recording Industry Association of America refused to comment on any specific case, but Mitch Bainwol did tell us this.

MITCH BAINWOL: I would remind you that folks, when they have a legal dispute, often can be creative with the way they portray the facts.

In Part II, Free? Illegal? … What’s the difference?

“I often run into musicians and artists who say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing,” states Bainwol. ” ‘We know you take hits for this, but it’s about my future, it’s about my dream. And I know that our property has to be respected’.”

Says Jenner:

It’s the same way that when you see lots of civilians being killed in a war, you know that’s bad for your war. And I think it’s the same if you’re harming individuals randomly.

No one disputes that millions around the world continue to engage in unauthorized sharing of music. But critics complain the industry is using desperation tactics that haven’t solved the problem and, they charge, are both legally and morally dubious.

Say Beckerman:

The RIAA doesn’t conduct an investigation to find out whether someone committed a copyright infringement. It conducts an investigation to find out who paid the bill for an Internet-access account. And that’s where their investigation should begin, but in their weak minds that’s where it ends.

Lybeck picks up the thread:

Parents are falsely accused of downloading music and are sued inappropriately for downloading music every day.

MOON: Aren’t they responsible for what their kids do?

LYBECK: No, the law certainly doesn’t support that, unless they’re benefitting from it in some way.

When parents do decide to fight, he says, lawyers show no shame training their legal guns on the children. Lybeck points out the industry has sued kids as young as 12 — nevermind something the head of Warner Music, Edgar Bronfman, told an interviewer.

LYBECK: He was being questioned as to whether his children had downloaded music, and he frankly admitted they had. “But don’t worry, I’ve had some very stern conversations with them, and they’re not going to do it anymore.” Which, out of fairness, a lot of parents would like to have that opportunity, rather than being pestered and abused and threatened with financial ruin with a federal lawsuit.

The industry might actually be tempting youngsters, and even adult fans, to try out the very file-sharing sites it’s battled for years to shut down.

You can hear this confusion as the head of the RIAA lays out his case for us. Initially, he argues flatly that “free” means “illegal.”

BAINWOL: The reality is, almost everybody understands that the practice of taking copyrighted works for free is illegal.

But what about when the industry is giving away its own free songs? . . . This summer, a deal was announced to flood file-sharing sites with 16 million free downloads, reportedly from the popular rapper Plies.

Trouble is, fans were left guessing exactly which track would be legally free. And until the file is actually downloaded, there’s no way to be sure that it’s the “authorized” version that includes an embedded ad. Sprint pays for its logo to appear whenever the song is played.

The label that’s reportedly offering these free songs is one of the same companies that’s been suing to discourage file sharing. Question the head of the RIAA on this haziness and — listen closely — Mitch Bainwol starts making subtle exceptions.

BAINWOL: Teenagers today understand that if you get something for free, in all probability, unless it’s explicitly legal, it’s not.

FRED VON LOHMANN: How’s the fan supposed to know?

That’s Fred Von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He complains the moving lines could lure unsuspecting fans into being sued. And it’s not just the file-sharing sites that leave him confused. Some online bulletin boards also offer free MP3 music files, seemingly with the industry’s blessing:

VON LOHMANN: Promotional CDs get sent to these MP3 bloggers all the time, really encouraging people to post some stuff on the Internet, get some buzz going. There are some independent artists who take a much more open-minded view to file sharing. Many fans have no idea whether their favorite artist is on an independent label or on a major label. This is just an area of continuing confusion.

We tried asking the industry’s top representative how the average law-abiding teenager — or even his own organization — might tell the difference between what’s legal and what’s not. But even Mitch Bainwol didn’t seem to know clearly:

BAINWOL: There are tools, in terms of, uh, uh, authentication here, and, uh, uh, I’m not a technician so I’m, I’m, I really can’t go into that in great detail. I’d be happy to get you somebody who can.

Check the press release http://investor.news.com/cnet?GUID=2...er&Ticker=ARTD announcing those free ad-supported downloads we mentioned and it simply says, “The tracks are indistinguishable from illegal, pirated content.”

Despite this left-hand, right-hand confusion, and questions about his industry’s tactics, Bainwol told us he’s convinced the ongoing lawsuit campaign against music fans continues to be a valuable educational tool.

In Part III, Music biz’s future rests on key changes,

—- the recording industry’s “top lobbyist, Mitch Bainwol,” insists his organisation is trying to adapt and support the technologies fans have embraced, “even in the face of ridicule that it’s too little, too late”:

Mitch Bainwol: We are seeking to monetize all sorts of distribution channels. I find it ironic when we do what critics want us to do, we get criticized for that.

Online sales are steadily rising, and Bainwol sees that as a reason to keep on suing unauthorized file-sharing fans. He says that legal pressure helps give legitimate Internet sales what he calls “the traction they need.” He’s convinced history will record his industry’s tactics as pivotal.

Bainwol: It took some pretty gutsy actions by the music industry and others to establish that, in fact, intellectual property is worthy of protection.

‘Cowardly’ might be a better word than ‘gutsy’, and meanwhile, Von Lohmann sums in an opinion Bainwol and the people who pay his salary will do well to consider deeply:

I think 10 years from now, everyone will look back at this entire episode with shame. I can’t believe it ever got so bad and we were so unimaginative, unable to transition to a new model, that we actually started treating our customers - our fans - as the enemy.

If nothing else, the series will sensitise people who may never have heard of the bizarre RIAA sue ‘em all marketing campaign to some of the issues.

Each segment attracted the largest number of listeners as Marketplace aired them and this morning, all three were at the top of the online lists.

Moon says flagship afternoon show Marketplace and the early Marketplace Morning Report are heard by an audience of more than 8.1 million unique listeners during the week, and on more than 330 public radio stations nationwide.

The program is also distributed worldwide by American Forces Radio and also has the largest audience of any business program in the United States, on radio or television, says American Public Media.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13371





User-News Sites Offer Diverse Stories, Some Questionable Sources
Joe Garofoli

During a week this summer when the mainstream press focused on the immigration debate in Congress and a failed terrorism plot in the United Kingdom, the most popular stories on news sites where the users rank their favorites, like San Francisco's Digg, was - aside from chatter about Apple's new iPhone - not dominated by any one news story.

And that's part of their allure. The 24-hour news cycle doesn't exist on rapidly growing user-news sites like Digg, Del.icio.us or San Francisco-based Reddit. Neither do the small cabal of editors who decide what news readers and viewers should see on traditional print and broadcast outlets.

Instead, the readers of these user-news sites collectively and continuously contribute to the creation of a digital "front page" of their favorite stories - pushing to prominence news that may get scant airing on traditional print, broadcast or cable outlets, where space and airtime is finite and, they say, risk-taking is more rare.

This changing approach to news consumption is highlighted in a study released today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington, D.C., think tank. It compared the stories on the above three leading user-news sites, along with Yahoo News' Most Recommended, Most Viewed and Most E-mailed stories, with the project's daily content audit of 48 print, cable, online, network TV and radio news outlets.

The study, a snapshot of a week's worth of news consumption, shows the growing interdependence between traditional news outlets and online user-news sites.

It also illustrates how the news looks a lot different when audience members pick what story they want to read or recommend, as opposed to a professional journalist.

"The traditional news outlet wants to put a lot of gravitas on their front page. They want the readers to eat their spinach," said Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, which owns Reddit. Technology allows users to create their own news "agenda" from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly "irrelevant," he said.

Instead, on these growing sites - Digg welcomed 19.5 million unique visitors last month - consumers rely on the "wisdom of crowds" (other readers) to figure out what are the top stories of the day.

The study found that the news items on these sites are "more diverse, more transitory and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources." It found that 40 percent of the stories on user-news sites originated on blogs and 24 percent came from mainstream sites like BBC News. Only 5 percent came from wire services.

So the immigration debate never was a top-10 story on Digg or Del.icio.us during the week of June 24, the study's focus period. It appeared just once that week among the top stories on Reddit.

"The best way to get a sense of trend among these sites is not to look at specific news events, but at broad topic areas such as politics, crime and foreign affairs," the study found. And the focus on user-news sites is a lot different than editor-chosen news sites. The study found roughly 40 percent of the stories on Digg and Del.icio.us were devoted to technology and science. Lifestyle stories were the second most popular on user-news sites.

While the war in Iraq accounted for 10 percent of the stories from the nation's top mainstream news outlets, it was only 1 percent of the stories on the three user-news sites.

At traditional outlets, the top-10 list of stories that week - topics like Iraq, the Supreme Court decisions and a major fire near Lake Tahoe - accounted for 51 percent of all the stories. "What it hints at is that the range of topics are broader and more varied (on user-news sites)," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

However, Rosenstiel said, it also shows that "more sources may or may not be completely dependable." On these user-news sites, items may be posted from a blog or other online source that doesn't come with the "assurance of a professional journalist saying, 'I made seven calls on this, and it's legitimate.' Or, 'It's a scam.' "

And while traditional journalists often concentrate on ongoing coverage of the same issue, the variety of stories turning up on user-news sites may show that "maybe a lot of readers aren't as interested in those turn-of-the-screw type of stories," Rosenstiel said.

But the study doesn't portend the end to traditional journalism, said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. On his site, its 2 million registered users submit and vote on content, "digging" the stories they prefer and "burying" those they don't. Stories with the most "diggs" go to the top of the page, creating a constantly evolving news source.

"In the current form, it is a very symbiotic relationship" between user-news sites and traditional media, he said. "What this study shows is that the online news consumer consumes news differently."

Instead of cuddling up to one newspaper or checking out the evening news, today's consumer is checking out 15 to 20 sources - from the New York Times and The Chronicle to ABC to a blog, said Reddit's Karimkhany.

Indeed, many traditional news outlets mark their stories with one or more user-news icons, inviting their readers to "Digg" that story.

"It's not so much that people are shunning news. I think people are reading more," said Karimkhany, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and a former reporter for mainstream outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg News. "What Reddit does is much what a traditional newsroom does. Except that instead of having four or five men in their 40s and 50s decide what goes on the front page, thousands of people do."

But while this changing environment has brought many more news outlets into the picture, it has also cut into revenues for traditional outlets - which traditionally have been the home of most investigative reporting, because they had the resources to do so.

Said Adelson: "What I wonder about is what is going to happen to investigative journalism."
Online resources

Project for Excellence in Journalism study

www.journalism.org

User-news sites in the survey

Digg.com

Begun in December 2004, Digg's audience is more male (57 percent) than female. It is also had the youngest audience of the three user-news sites in the study, with just under half (47 percent) of all users between ages 18 and 34.

The content is entirely user-driven. Registered users submit and vote on content, "digging" those they like and "burying" those they don't. The stories with the most "diggs" move to the top of the page, with the order changing almost every minute.

Del.icio.us

Founded in late 2003, Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005. It has more female (55 percent) users than male (45 percent) users. It also skews the oldest, with the lowest percentage (35) of users under 35. Del.icio.us is also 100 percent user-driven, but works a little differently than Digg. Del.icio.us is a social "bookmarking" Web site, which lets users "tag" content they find most interesting. So when users find a piece of content (or an entire Web site) that they want to share - whether they find it on Del.icio.us or on an outside news outlet - they "tag" it and add a list of keywords to describe the story.

Reddit.com

Founded in 2005 and later acquired by Conde Nast Publications last October, it is the newest of the three user-news sites. It had the highest percentage (64) of men and almost as many users (45 percent) 18 to 34 as Digg did during the week the study conducted its research.

Its content selection is based on user submissions followed by "up" or "down" votes. Next to each of the 25 stories on Reddit's home page there is an up and a down arrow for users to vote for or against the content. Stories with the most "up" votes rise to the top.

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../MNPDS3RE6.DTL





Does Social Media Make You Dumb?
Nick Gonzalez

The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”. Journalists have bemoaned blogging on several occasions, stating simply that “Journalism requires journalists”. Once again journalists are gracing us with another study linking the success of the social news sites to the downfall of society.

The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the mainstream media’s headlines for one week against those of a host of user-news sites. Specifically:

“PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.”

The comparison looked at the top stories (by percentage) from their news index compared to the top headlines (by percentage) for the social sites.

The study found that while the mainstream media talked about important issues like immigration (10%) and Iraq (6%), the only story gaining traction on social news sites was the iPhone. No surprise there. The study does concede that these user generated newsfeeds may not mirror the important news of the day because they may serve has an auxiliary source. However, it ignores the sheer volume of news that passes across their front pages. While mainstream news sites have a limited staff of journalists and real estate to highlight the days news, Digg and its cohorts can link to these stories with plenty of room for LOL Cats photos. For example, Putin’s dissolution of the Russian government made the top 10 of Digg today. So did the iPhone unlock.

Moreover, the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing. Much of that “hard-hitting” journalism may not be getting the readership the coverage suggests. Where PEJ sees this as a clean stream of news, I see an echo chamber.

Similar to when the music industry went online, users are no longer forced to buy in a bundle. Instead they can select the stories/tracks that appeal to them without subsidizing the content they don’t want.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/12...make-you-dumb/





Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site
Richard Pérez-Peña

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.

Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

In addition, he said, The Times has been especially effective at using information it collects about its online readers to aim ads specifically to them, increasing their value to advertisers.

Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of The Times — as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.

Experts say that opinion columns are unlikely to generate much ad revenue, but that they can drive a lot of reader traffic to other, more lucrative parts of The Times site, like topic pages devoted to health and technology.

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

The Financial Times charges for access to selected material online, much as The New York Times has.

The Los Angeles Times tried that model in 2005, charging for access to its arts section, but quickly dropped it after experiencing a sharp decline in Web traffic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/bu...a/18times.html





AOL Moving Headquarters to New York
Louise Story

AOL will move its headquarters from its sprawling campus in Dulles, Va., to New York next spring as the online company tries to retool itself as an advertising company that competes with the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The move, announced today, speaks to how much the online world has changed around AOL, which became a high-flying Internet stock in the 1990s by providing dial-up Internet connections in millions of American households.

AOL, which is part of Time Warner, will base all of its advertising sales out of New York through a group the company is calling Platform A. That group will be lead by Curtis G. Viebranz, the former chief executive of Tacoda, an advertising targeting company that AOL acquired in July for a reported $275 million.

AOL also said in a memo to company employees today that Mike Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks and a longtime Time Warner executive, will leave AOL after the transition. He was brought in to head ad sales at AOL in 2004.

As with most of AOL’s recent history, the move to New York symbolizes a shift away from the company’s roots, and analysts said it could portend coming job layoffs of some of the company’s 4,000 employees based in northern Virginia.

A year ago, executives announced the company would make its Web portal and e-mail services free and generate money through advertising rather than by providing those services and Internet connections to subscribers. Since then, AOL has acquired a string of online advertising technology companies, including Tacoda, and revamped its Web content to try to attract more visitors.

“AOL’s leadership in this space was theirs to lose years ago, and they did lose it,” said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research. “This move is a great one, but my concern is: is it too little, too late?”

AOL executives put a good face on the move, which is certain to be disruptive in Virginia. AOL executives did not say how many employees would move from Virginia to the new 152,000-square-foot office, leased at 770 Broadway, just south of Union Square. Time Warner’s corporate headquarters is about three miles uptown, at Columbus Circle.

“If you’re going to be in the advertising business, you have to be in New York because that’s where all the agencies are, that’s where all of the media money is controlled, on Madison Avenue,” said Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL.

In an interview, AOL executives explained that they see the company’s advertising revenues coming more in the future not only from its branded Web site but also from thousands of publishers’ sites across the Internet that let AOL sell ads on their pages.
AOL will use targeting technology from Tacoda to capture data about consumers’ Web surfing and translate that information into a road map for delivering different ads to different people each time they log on. AOL will also use that data to sell ads in its Advertising.com unit, which delivers ads to its own network of outside publisher sites.

“There’s really been a shift in advertising to the network business,” said Ron Grant, AOL’s chief operating officer. “Portals aren’t really big enough to meet the needs of advertisers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/te...7cnd-adco.html





MySpace to Discuss Latest Effort to Customize Ads for Members
Brad Stone

Members of the booming social network Web sites treat their individual profile pages as a creative canvas for personal expression.

The social networking companies see those pages as a lush target for advertisers — if only they could customize the ads. Although Internet companies have talked about specifically aiming their ads since the inception of the Web, so far advertising on social networks has been characterized by mass-marketed pitches for mortgages and online dating sites.

But MySpace, the Web’s largest social network and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, says that after experimenting with technology over the last six months it can tailor ads to the personal information that its 110 million active users leave on their profile pages.

Executives at Fox Interactive Media, the News Corporation unit that owns MySpace, will begin speaking about the results of that program this week. They say the tailoring technology has improved the likelihood that members will click on an ad by 80 percent on average.

“We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users,” said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, who will talk about the program at an address to investors and analysts at a Merrill Lynch conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.”

MySpace’s rival, Facebook, also says it is experimenting with ad customization with the help of Microsoft, which signed with the up-and-coming social network last year to provide display ads on the service. To the consternation of privacy advocates, who say Internet users are unaware of such activity, the social networks regard these detail-stocked profile pages as a kind of “digital gold,” as one Fox executive put it last year.

The companies hope that customizing ads to their members’ stated enthusiasms will improve the effectiveness of the ads and recruit new advertisers who want to pitch their messages to refined slices of the online audience. Fox executives also hope the technology can help MySpace recapture some of the momentum and attention that has recently gone to Facebook.

Richard Greenfield, the managing director of Pali Research, predicts that MySpace’s fledgling program will help increase MySpace’s current revenue to $70 million a month from $40 million a month by next year.

“This is a critical evolution of the MySpace business model envisioned from the day News Corporation bought it,” Mr. Greenfield said.

A 100-employee team inside the Fox Interactive Media offices in Beverly Hills, called the “monetization technology group,” has designed computer algorithms to scour MySpace pages. In the first phase of the program, which the company calls “interest-based targeting,” the algorithms assigned members to one of 10 categories that represents their primary interest, like sports, fashion, finance, video games, autos and health.

The algorithms make their judgments partly on certain keywords in the profile. A member might be obvious by describing himself as a financial information enthusiast, for example. But more than likely the clues are more subtle. He might qualify for that category by listing Donald Trump as a hero, Fortune magazine as a favorite publication or “Wall Street” as a favorite movie.

The system also looks at the groups members belong to, who their friends are, their age and gender, and what ads they have responded to in the past. “Our targeting is a balance of what users say, what they do and what they say they do,” said Adam Bain, the chief technology officer at Fox Interactive.

MySpace evidently does not completely trust the technology. Every two weeks, 200 temporary workers, which the company calls “relevance testers,” come to Fox Interactive’s offices to manually check member profiles against the categories they have been assigned to.

The company said that several national advertisers are trying out the service, though they declined to name them. Fox Interactive executives say that some kinds of ads benefited more than others. Clicks on tailored auto ads more than doubled and clicks on music ads jumped by 70 percent.

For the last two months, Fox Interactive has also experimented with the second phase of its targeting program, called “hyper targeting,” in which it further divides the 10 enthusiast categories into hundreds of subcategories. For example, sports fans are divided into subgroups like basketball, college football and skiing, while film enthusiasts are further classified by their interest in genres like comedies, dramas and independent films, and even particular actors and actresses.

For now, Fox’s advertising sales representatives are selling the new kinds of ad abilities. In November, according to Michael Barrett, Fox Interactive Media’s chief revenue officer, the company will set up an automated online system to allow smaller companies to aim at MySpace users with their ads without ever talking to a human being at Fox.

A punk band performing in Seattle, for example, could publicize a performance by looking up all the people on MySpace who live in that area who are punk fans.

MySpace also plans to give its advertisers information about what kind of people its ads have attracted. “We want them to leave knowing more about their audience then when they came into the door,” Arnie Gullov-Singh, a senior director at Fox Interactive.

That is precisely the goal that worries some privacy advocates. They argue that users of social networks like MySpace and Facebook are not aware they are being monitored and that current ad-targeting is only the first step in what has become a huge arms race to collect revealing data on Internet users.

“People should be able to congregate online with their friends without thinking that big brother, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg, are stealthily peering in,” said Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

His organization will ask the Federal Trade Commission, during a planned hearing on Internet privacy in November, to investigate social networks for unfair and deceptive practices, he said.

MySpace and Facebook executives argue that they are harming no one. They say that they are using information their members make publicly available, and contrast their ad targeting with efforts by Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft, whose advertising technologies follow people around the Web and try to deduce what they are interested in based on what sites they are looking at.

Fox executives also say they are planning on letting users opt-out of the ad-targeting program on MySpace, though it means those members will see fewer relevant ads.

At least one MySpace member has no problems with the new technology. Mark Gong, a 26-year-old photojournalist from Washington, runs the 3,000-member Wanderlust group on MySpace and on his profile expresses an interest for foreign films like “Lost in Translation” and “The Spanish Apartment.” Not surprisingly, that has defined him as a prime target for travel ads on MySpace from companies like ShermansTravel.com, a travel deal site. “I’m not opposed to advertising,” Mr. Gong said. “They have got to make money.”

But he also says he hopes MySpace spends the extra cash on making the site more reliable and fending off the Facebook threat. He says many members of his group have flocked to Facebook in the last two months and that even he is logging into Facebook more often.

“Everybody I know is switching to Facebook,” he said. “MySpace has its work cut out for it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/te...18myspace.html





Review: MySpace Phenom Colbie Caillat Sells Out the Fillmore
Aidin Vaziri

MySpace has proven itself a great place to meet perverts and catch up with people you hated in high school, but its value as a music-marketing tool remains largely up in the air. Yes, Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys supposedly sprang to life thanks to the behemoth social-networking site, but the fact that 98 percent of the people reading this right now just saw those names for the first time kind of negates their success.

Colbie Caillat may prove to be an exception. The 22-year-old Malibu native was working at a tanning salon last year when a friend helped her post a couple songs, including "Bubbly" and "Tailor Made," on her MySpace page, where she quickly racked up more than 10 million plays and acquired nearly 200,000 new friends.

In July, Caillat's first full-length album, "Coco" (Universal), was released on an old-fashioned record label, making a Top 5 premiere on the Billboard charts.

While Kanye West and 50 Cent were battling it out on the cover of Rolling Stone and at the MTV Video Music Awards last week, Caillat quietly slipped ahead of both to top the iTunes download chart. Of course, it may all come down to the fact that she looks just like Rachel from "Friends" on the album cover. But playing a sold-out show at the Fillmore on Saturday sure seemed like a good place to get a running start on a career.

Wearing a simple brown dress and low pump sandals, Caillat looked as if she had just strolled into the venue after a shopping trip a few blocks up Fillmore Street. Meanwhile, the only sizable group of guys hanging out in the lobby before the show ended up being her backing band. Their casual confidence probably had a lot to do with her voice, an incredibly earthy and rich instrument that's impossible to dismiss. Naturally, the producers of "American Idol" passed on it, not once but repeatedly.

Caillat claims that her interest in music ignited at age 11 after hearing Lauryn Hill's take on "Killing Me Softly." But her education started much earlier - her father Ken Caillat ran his own label and co-produced Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" and "Tusk." His professionalism clearly made a bigger impression than Hill's raw soul. The songs on "Coco" deal mostly in familiar emotional hang-ups, sentiments that are so ordinary that everyone in the room could latch onto them: Love hurts; pregnant women glow; dreams are dreamy.

Her love-struck hit "Bubbly" is an unmistakable descendant of Jack Johnson's "Bubble Toes," built around breezy acoustic guitars, shuffling rhythms and an easy-to-swallow seaside melody. Whether about downing alcohol to overcome depression ("Midnight Bottle") or grappling with a relationship that's falling apart ("Battle"), Caillat's songs all sound like different strains of the same thing, impossible to tell apart.

Tellingly, Caillat's fans never stopped chattering during her set, even as they paused to sing along to their favorite lines from the album. When she talked, Caillat came across just like them, a casual acquaintance from the dorm room down the hall: "This is a song about wishing someone felt the same way as you." When she moved, she didn't dance so much as sway with the people at the foot of the stage.

But the rapturous reception she got from the girls in the crowd - some possibly just excited to be attending their first concert - confirmed her emergence as a real-life Internet phenomenon. Even when she bravely threw out "Bubbly" before the encore and then struggled to fill the hourlong set with what sounded like a bloodless cover of Bob Marley's "One Drop" ("This song has an island beat, reggae feel to it," she said), they loudly cheered her on just as they would any other friend in their Top 8.


To see a video clip of Colbie Caillat performing at the Knitting Factory, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvpX3QvzLg
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../DDEIS7E2K.DTL





Kenny Chesney Charts Every Song on New Album
DirtySouthMouth

Every single song from Kenny Chesney's brand new album, Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates, has charted, according to the Nielsen numbers.

At the same time, the first two actual singles from the album, "Never Wanted Nothing More" and "Don't Blink," are both in the top 15 of Billboard's country singles chart.

With the rest of the tracks on the album, Kenny also holds the No. 37, 43, 44, 53, 55, 56, 58, 65 and 73 spots on the chart. Someone is making bank.

On top of all of this, Kenny also holds the No. 1 spot, as he wrote Rascal Flatts' current No. 1 single, "Take Me There." Pretty funny when you consider the fact that he didn't land a single writing credit on Just Who I Am.

Maybe he didn't beat Kanye West or 50 Cent on the Billboard 200, but dude's certainly got something to shout about.

In other Kenny Chesney news, the Detroit Free Press reported today that two police officers from the area have been accused of stealing cowboy hats from a KC concert.

The two officers, Gregg Richard Anderson and Frank Cazazos where charged with larceny between $200-1000. Both men were fired from the city of Wayne Police Department.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/Nas_Challenges_Bill_O'Reilly_to_a_Debate





Making a Career After a Monster Hit
Ben Sisario

Many songwriters would kill for the predicament that James Blunt is in: famous for one song, and only one.

That hit, “You’re Beautiful,” is a dewy ballad about catching a glimpse of a former girlfriend in the subway. Critics loathed it, but it reached No. 1 from Latvia to Latin America and helped Mr. Blunt’s debut album, “Back to Bedlam,” sell 11 million copies around the world. As last year’s combination wedding song, television soundtrack song and supermarket background music, “You’re Beautiful” was more than popular — it was ubiquitous.

This kind of success can be an albatross for a new artist, and even Mr. Blunt, who yesterday released his second album, “All the Lost Souls” (Custard/Atlantic), and has sold out shows at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea tonight and tomorrow night, doubts that he can ever score such a hit again.

“I sold a hell of a lot the first album,” he said recently over steak frites at a trendy meatpacking district restaurant, where every female head seemed to turn as he walked in. “I can’t possibly compete with that on the second album. It’s impossible to do.”

Mr. Blunt, 33, a throwback to the 1970s soft-rock golden age, says he is uncomfortable with the marketing of one song at the expense of all others. But given the industry’s sales slump, it has become even more crucial for record labels to promote singles relentlessly and to gain maximum exposure by licensing them for television shows, commercials and ringtones. All of which poses a quandary for Mr. Blunt’s label in its post-“You’re Beautiful” campaign: Is it better to play it slow and steady to groom Mr. Blunt as a career artist or to shoot for another smash?

That first smash came relatively easily. “Back to Bedlam,” released in Mr. Blunt’s native Britain in 2004 and in the United States the next year, had a whiff of Coldplay in its big, swelling refrains and earnest falsetto vocals. And Mr. Blunt had stubbly good looks and an intriguing back story. A former British Army officer in Kosovo who was once one of Queen Elizabeth’s personal guards, he was picked by the songwriter and producer Linda Perry (Christina Aguilera, Pink) to be the first artist on her label, Custard.

In Britain two singles preceded “You’re Beautiful.” But Atlantic Records, which issues Mr. Blunt’s music in America in partnership with Custard, released that song first. Though it stalled on the charts at the beginning, a flurry of commercial licensing made it inescapable on television. It was used in a Sprint ad campaign, in prime-time dramas like “Smallville” and “ER,” on daytime soaps, in promo spots for “Extreme Home Makeover” and even in the 2006 Winter Olympics. That exposure helped its popularity on radio, and after seven months it hit No. 1. To date the album has sold 2.6 million copies in the United States.

As Ms. Perry sees it, all that licensing backfired: “You’re Beautiful” became as hated as it was loved.

“When you have a really big song and you want to see some legs on a record,” she said, “you don’t start putting that song in commercials and on TV shows and keep oversaturating it. Because that’s when people get sick of it.”

The backlash was harsh. Mr. Blunt became a tabloid regular — his tendency to be photographed alongside scantily clad young women didn’t help — and was ruthlessly jeered in the music press. (His album was named worst of the year by the British music magazine NME.) And in a sign of true notoriety, his name entered the lexicon of Cockney rhyming slang as a particularly crude insult.

Mr. Blunt professes a cool equanimity about his treatment by the news media, but doesn’t deny his playboy reputation. During the interview he received a text message from his friend and fellow bon vivant Kid Rock. (“We spent some good times in Cannes this year,” Mr. Blunt said.) And he lives on the Spanish island of Ibiza, famous for its huge, wild dance clubs.

“We’d have dinner at midnight,” he said of his life there, “and I’d be thinking about going to a bar at 2 in the morning. And then we’d think about hitting a club between 3:30 and 4, and the club would close at 8. I’d come back at 9 in the morning and I’d write songs.”

If “All the Lost Souls” is any indication, the popular ridicule has had little effect on him. It sticks closely to the formula that made “Back to Bedlam” such a big seller: gentle guitars and piano, breathy vocals, melodramatic sweep, a slight tinge of morbidity.

“The person who has to live with this album is me,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how far up the charts it gets. It doesn’t matter if it sells. I really like it.”

But his business representatives differ on the promotional plan. Ms. Perry says that the gradual roll-out in Europe saved him from being considered a one-hit-wonder there. Mr. Blunt made an appeal to Lyor Cohen, the domestic chairman of Atlantic’s parent company, the Warner Music Group, asking him to avoid pushing any single too hard and to emphasize the new album as a whole.

Mr. Cohen was sympathetic, but only to a point. “Ultimately we’re not as romantic,” he said. “You need to get the impressions at radio to bring attention to it.”

The entire album can be streamed free, or purchased for $9.99, on Mr. Blunt’s MySpace page.

And Mr. Blunt is not above shooting for big hits. One of the stronger new songs, “Carry You Home,” was written with Max Martin, the Swedish pop maestro behind blockbusters by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Kelly Clarkson.

Mr. Cohen said fears of piracy kept him from sending out the songs on “All the Lost Souls” for licensing in advance of the album’s release. But now that the album is out, the saturation can begin.

“We will license these records, in movies, TV and commercials,” he said. “Trust me, you will hear these records.”
http://nytimes.com/2007/09/19/arts/m...blun.html?8dpc





Q & A with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails lets rip at ignorant record companies to NEALA JOHNSON
From May

ON stage at the Metro on Monday night, it seemed you're enjoying being a rock star again. True?

It's funny you'd say that 'cos that was not one of my favourite shows.

It went downhill at one point.

Yeah. I enjoy playing these days. I try to make the most of it and sometimes it's great fun and sometimes, like Monday night when it was crippled with technical problems, it made it not fun. I couldn't hear what was going on, s--- was breaking . . .

Fools in the crowd were yelling . . .

Yeah, mixed feelings about that.

I mean, if you want me to go off on a tangent . . . I'm kind of in a weird space right now. I'm not real centred. We've been touring for a long time. I went from the record right into the tour, nine weeks in Europe in winter, which I don't recommend in any circumstance for anybody. I'm moving. There's some stuff in my personal life that's up.

It must be an odd time then to have a new album, Year Zero, out?

It's a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there's so much resentment towards the record industry that it's hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don't look like a greedy asshole. But at the same time, when our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago

I would think "Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I'm not relevant". But on this record, I know people have it and I know it's on everybody's iPods, but the climate is such that people don't buy it because it's easier to steal it.

You're a bit of a computer geek. You must have been there, too?

Oh, I understand that -- I steal music too, I'm not gonna say I don't. But it's tough not to resent people for doing it when you're the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off. I created a little issue down here because the first thing I did when I got to Sydney is I walk into HMV, the week the record's out, and I see it on the rack with a bunch of other releases. And every release I see: $21.99, $22.99, $24.99. And ours doesn't have a sticker on it. I look close and 'Oh, it's $34.99'. So I walk over to see our live DVD Beside You in Time, and I see that it's also priced six, seven, eight dollars more than every other disc on there. And I can't figure out why that would be.

Did you have a word to anyone?

Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say "Why is this the case?" He goes "Because your packaging is a lot more expensive". I know how much the packaging costs -- it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I'm taking the hit on that, not them. So I said "Well, it doesn't cost $10 more". "Ah, well, you're right, it doesn't. Basically it's because we know you've got a core audience that's gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever". And I just said "That's the most insulting thing I've heard. I've garnered a core audience that you feel it's OK to rip off? F--- you'. That's also why you don't see any label people here, 'cos I said 'F--- you people. Stay out of my f---ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F--- you guys". They're thieves. I don't blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s--- that they pull off.

Where does that extra $10 on your album go?

That money's not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It's just these guys who have f---ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I've got a battle where I'm trying to put out quality material that matters and I've got fans that feel it's their right to steal it and I've got a company that's so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don't know what to do, so they rip the people off.

Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?

I've have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it's done in the studio, not this "Let's wait three months" bulls---.

When your US label, Interscope, discovered the web-based alternate reality game (ARG) you'd built around Year Zero, were they happy for the free marketing or angry you hadn't let them in on it?

I chose to do this on my own, at great financial expense to myself, because I knew they wouldn't understand what it is, for one. And secondly, I didn't want it coming from a place of marketing, I wanted it coming from a place that was pure to the project. It's a way to present the story and the backdrop, something I would be excited to find as a fan. I knew the minute I talked to someone at the record label about it, they would be looking at it in terms of "How can we tie this in with a mobile provider?" That's what they do. If something lent itself to that, OK, I'm not opposed to the idea of not losing a lot of money (laughs). But it would only be if it made sense. I've had to position myself as the irrational, stubborn, crazy artist. At the end of the day, I'm not out to sabotage my career, but quality matters, and integrity matters. Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.

Is the Year Zero ARG something labels will copy now?

Well, their response, when they saw that it did catch on like wildfire, was "Look how smart we are the way we marketed this record". That's the feedback I've gotten -- other artists who've met with that label ask 'em about it: "Yeah, you like what we did for Trent? Look what we did for Trent". They've then gone on to try to buy the company that did it to apply it to all their other acts. So, glad I could help them out. I'm sure they still don't understand what it is that we did or why it worked. But I will look forward to the Black Eyed Peas ARG, that should be amazing.

Year Zero (Universal) out now.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sto...006024,00.html





Catching Up With The Latest Pop Songs
TomZ

Between radio, TV and the Internet, there's a ton of new music coming out these days. Unless you're paying constant attention, chances are some of it has slipped under your radar.

For all you pop music fans with no time on your hands, I've compiled some of the latest pop hits to help keep you up-to-date. And for those of you who despise pop music, well, I've tried to make fun of the songs, too. Hopefully there's a little something for everyone.

The Hits

Timbaland f/ Keri Hilson "The Way I Are"

You often hear about recluses, a.k.a. people who don't go out in public. Generally this classification is used for people of generations past, like famous reclusive author J.D. Salinger, or for psychos like the Unabomber. But these are the extreme cases. What really makes a person a recluse?

I'm gonna throw this out there, and you can either take it or throw it right back: If you have never heard this song, not even once, then I would say that you are officially a recluse.

Pink "Who Knew"

Pink made a video about a carnival and didn't include fried dough, people with missing teeth, or a shirt that says "The Man (Up Arrow), The Legend (Down Arrow)." What's next, a video about baseball that doesn't include bats?

Kat DeLuna "Whine Up"

This is probably my favorite song about whining up. Kat of the Moon deserves a lot of credit for her breakthrough summer.

The Up-and-Comers

Backstreet Boys "Inconsolable"

When this song came out I was bracing myself for a billion lame "Backstreet's Back" jokes from every media outlet in the country. It hasn't happened. I'm both shocked and proud. Good work, America.

Nickelback "Rockstar"

Earlier this year, the Shop Boyz had a hit rap song called "Party Like a Rockstar." R. Kelly's latest album has a song called "Rock Star." Hannah Montana, Prima J, Everclear, Ja Rule, N.E.R.D. and Yellowcard have all released songs with "Rock Star" in the title, as have several others.

The point? Two things, actually.

First off, we as a society need to get together and decide whether Rockstar is one word or two. I'm voting for one word, and here's why. Two words ("Rock Star") implies that you are both play rock, and are a star. This wouldn't apply to rappers or pop stars, even though some of them are just as deserving of the title. On the other hand, the singular "Rockstar" takes on a meaning all its own. What makes someone a Rockstar? Well, that's a discussion for another time. But regardless, in my opinion, the phrase "Rock Star" focuses more on the rock, while "Rockstar" focuses more on the star.

The second issue is -- and all you young artists listen up -- that the word "Rockstar" is ridiculously overused. Once that girl from "Real World Denver" started using the phrase constantly, it should have been banned for at least 5 years. Since the government won't step in, I'm telling you. No more calling yourself a "Rockstar" (or a "Rock Star") until 2012. If you do, we will automatically assume that you aren't a Rockstar. If you are a repeat offender, we will be forced to assume you suck. You can refer to others as Rockstars, just not yourself. In 2012, you can use the phrase again, but only in moderation. In the meantime, feel free to start popularizing the term "Rapstar."

(I can't believe I get paid to think about stuff like this.)

Maroon 5 "Wake Up Call"

The girl in this video looks like a sluttier version of Anne Hathaway, which is funny, because I'm pretty sure Adam Levine is wearing Prada. I actually like this song, which means it'll never be big (historically speaking, my approval of a song is equivalent to the Kiss of Death).

Plies f/ T-Pain "Shawty"

On the flip side, I can't stand this song, so you know it'll be a huge hit.

Does T-Pain have a clause in his contract that says any song he's involved with has to be about strippers or shawty's? And is "Shawty" the lyrical compliment of "Rockstar?" Will "Pimps "& Ho's" parties be replaced by "Rockstars & Shawties" parties?

Vanessa Carlton "Nolita Fairytale"

At first I thought "Nolita" referred to a young girl who wasn't a slut. Like, it was the 2007 equivalent of a "Hollaback Girl." I ain't no Lolita... I'm a NO-Lita! Turns out it's a neighborhood in New York City. Oh well.

The Brand New

Fall Out Boy "I'm Like A Lawyer With The Way I'm Always Trying To Get You Off (Me & You)"

Great title. Sadly, the director of this video committed one of the cardinal sins of video-making. Never, EVER stop the song in the middle of the video, unless your name is Hype Williams (and even then, try to avoid it). You are not making a movie. You are making a 4-minute visual clip to entertain our eyes and counteract our ADD while we listen to a song. A video should be an accompaniment to a song. It shouldn't override the song.

This song will be a massive, massive hit.* All they needed to do was show the band playing in some abandoned warehouse with the singer looking out a window next to a candlelit box of letters from a mysterious ex-girlfriend before posing on a mountaintop, like every other rock video, and they would've been fine. Instead, we've got a drum circle breakdown. Too bad.

*See Maroon 5 for more info on this prediction

Kanye West f/ T-Pain "Good Life"

Welcome to the Good Life, where we sip champagne and wear pink sweaters! I can't say enough about Kanye's new album and this song in particular. T-Pain even broke his contract for this one. This is my pick of the week, although I'm not sure what that means.

Gwen Stefani f/ Damian Marley "Now That You Got It"

One of the main reasons I got hired at Shoutmouth was because of an article I had written about Gwen's song "Hollaback Girl." The whole point of the article was that the song was incredibly awful, and yet I couldn't help but love it. I compared it to a car that went over 100,000 miles and was back at zero; it was so terrible that it was amazing.

I feel the same way about this song, to a slightly lesser degree. Embrace it now or be annoyed for the next 6 months.

Token Rock Pick

Finger Eleven "Falling On"

A great rock song with crossover potential.

Token Indie Pick

Rilo Kiley "Moneymaker"

A lot is made over singer Jenny Lewis' looks, but the band is actually pretty decent too. Even if this chorus does sound a little like "Jukebox Hero."

The Classic Rock Song of the Week

The Eagles "The Long Run"

Videos from the ‘70s are funny.

The Classic Hip Hop Song of the Week

Wreckx-N-Effect "Rumpshaker"

In 2022, will people hold the same admiration for MIMS' "This Is Why I'm Hot" as people my age hold for Wreckx-N-Effect? I think it could happen, and that's scary.

And finally,

The Classic Pop Song of the Week

Britney Spears "I'm a Slave 4 U"

After seeing Britney's VMA disaster, I feel like we all need to revisit the glory days.

Also, you may have heard the rumors that Britney will be apologizing for her VMA performance during the Emmy's tomorrow night. I've gone ahead and prepared an apology speech for her. Hopefully she'll use this...

Hello, American public. Many of you witnessed my unfortunate performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last weekend. I would like to issue an apology to all of you, and everyone else who has been following my recent hardships.

Sorry.

Sorry for giving you ten years of hit songs. Sorry for making every girl in America stop wearing flannel shirts and start dressing like a stripper. Sorry for providing millions of Internet pages for dudes in their basements to beat off to. Sorry for paving the way so that Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, and every other hot singer of the 2000s could be famous. Sorry for giving everyone at TMZ.com a job. Sorry for having two kids, still maintaining 6% body fat, then wearing underwear and dancing on national TV.

Then, she can rip off her face John Travolta-style, reveal that she's actually Jesus Christ come back to Earth, give some speech about remembering what's truly important in life, and then turn Susan Lucci into a giant bottle of wine and get the party started. Her popularity would be greater than ever before.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/..._(9/15_Edition)





Radio Listeners May Want Less of "Gimme More"
Susan Visakowitz

Britney Spears' new single, "Gimme More," came roaring out of the gates on CHR (contemporary hit radio)/top 40 radio, debuting at No. 25 on Billboard sister publication Radio & Records' format chart for the week ending September 2 and endowing Spears with the second-best start of her career. But that was before MTV's Video Music Awards (VMAs).

"Gimme" scored Most Increased Plays on the format during its first week out, racking up 1,062 spins. Day by day, the song climbed from 225 plays on CHR/top 40 on September 5 to 269 on September 7.

Then came Spears' awkward and generally panned performance September 9 on the VMAs. The following day, "Gimme" got a jolt, jumping to 336 spins as talk of Spears' VMAs showing made the water cooler rounds. But on September 11, "Gimme" took its first spill on radio, falling to 331 spins.

Will Spears' VMAs rendition ultimately undermine any momentum that her first single in three years was building?

A Zomba label rep said radio is getting both negative and positive calls about the song since the telecast, but some programmers expect the latter won't last.

"After the hilarious performance at the VMAs, there has been even more buzz about the song," KRQQ Tucson, Ariz., DJ Seth O'Brien said. "But I think this performance will be the running joke of Britney's attempt at a comeback. I bet we will see a drop in interest (in "Gimme") after a few days."
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...22585920070916





iProof

Universal Jumps to SpiralFrog's Free Downloads: iPods Not Welcome
Jason Mick

Universal and SpiralFrog are dancing to a different tune...and it's not playing on an iPod (Source: elsevier.nl)
Spiralfrog.com launched its free ad-supported download service today, and there's some interesting quirks

Spiralfrog.com launched today, providing music fans with a legal avenue to download some free music. The only catch -- the music is supported by the site's advertising revenues, so your clicks keep those tracks downloading.

Chairman and founder of New York-based SpiralFrog Inc., Joe Mohen announced "We believe [SpiralFrog] will be a very powerful alternative to the pirate sites, with SpiralFrog you know what you're getting ... there's no threat of viruses, adware or spyware."

The site, which has been beta tested for months, currently carries about 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos available for free download. You must sign up for a free account and provide demographic information in order to gain access to the media. You must also use your account each month in order to keep it active, which is intended to prevent users from simply downloading and not returning to the site.

The site intends to have over 2 million tracks available within the next several months.

Most of the media on the site is from Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, the largest record company in the world, and the only music label to currently have jumped at SpiralFrog's business plan.

In July DailyTech reported that Vivendi had jumped ship from Apple's iTunes service, declining to renew their contract, deciding to seek revenue from alternative sources. Now it appears that one such alternative source is SpiralFrog.

An interesting detail has emerged. Files from SpiralFrog are digitally protected and can be played on mp3 players, but cannot be burned to CDs. There is another minor detail, though -- the files cannot be played on Apple's wildly popular iPod MP3 players.

The move to not allow its content to be played on iPod's appears to be a clear snub by the Universal Music Group, similar to NBC's recent move of its television content from iTunes to Amazon.com. Apple has not commented on this development.

For many, though, SpiralFrog.com presents an intriguing new business model that may present a legal alternative to file sharing or spending large amounts of money on CDs or paid download services, such as iTunes.
http://www.dailytech.com/Universal+J...rticle8905.htm





iPod Classic Will Be Supported

As recently reported on Slashdot, Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has added a checksum to the iPod database apparently to restrict non-iTunes products (like Amarok via libgpod) from having the ability to add music. To me this sounds pretty familiar. This is the same thing they did to iTunes 4.5 to make it harder for other apps to read off their DAAP shares, they changed it again in iTunes 7; open source apps are still unable to read iTunes 7 DAAP shares.

But there's better news on this iPod front.
From #gtkpod today:
<wtbw> okay guys
<wtbw> i think we're done.
<wtbw> let me code something just to check
[30 minutes later]
<wtbw> can i hear a fuck yeah?
<wtbw> works for both mine and xamphears :>

wtbw suggested donations from thankful users go to Cancer Research UK.

Really the only "correct" solution is for folks to stop using Apple products. The iPod might have its own version of DAAP's iTunes 7 which has a checksum more difficult (apparently) to crack. But for the time being, things are fine.
http://www.monroe.nu/archives/110-iP...Supported.html





Apple Blacklisting Hacked iPhones?
Jason D. O'Grady

I received the following email from a colleague:

Speaking of hacks, Today I went into an Apple store with a less than two week old iPhone that had the green tint camera problem.

Because it had been “hacked” with some 3rd party apps and was running T-Mobile they refused to service it, said the warranty was voided and “blacklisted” the phone against future service, or return!

Only after asking for the manager and having several conversations with her, did they finally allow me to return it, but charged me a 10% restocking fee…

Pretty Scary! Didn’t Steve and Woz get their start in college by selling a device that would “hack” pay phones and give people free long distance?

So while he eventually got Apple to return the iPhone (after paying the restocking fee, that is), the lesson here is to do a restore of your iPhone and re-install the factory AT&T SIM before bringing into an Apple Store for service. That’s the beauty of software-only hacks, after all!
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=882
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