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Old 27-02-08, 11:28 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 1st, '08

Since 2002


































"What is going to stop people stealing content is not the law — these people already know it is illegal; what will stop people is a technical solution that adequately protects both people's rights and copyrighted material. But we do not have one." – Alex Brown


"It should also be noted that some of the most valuable and significant intellectual property and creative works can't be copyrighted. For example, Mickey Mouse is copyrighted, but E=MC2 could not have been. Which was truly the more significant creative work?" – Dallas Weaver


"We’re covering a candidate who’s lost 11 straight primaries. They’re covering a candidate who has won 11 straight primaries." – Mike Glover


"Maybe that’s just the reality of the world that we live in. When this genie gets out of the bottle, that’s it." – Judge White


"We will reinsert the DNS settings." – Wikileaks domain registrar Dynadot


























Yankee Ingenuity

Interesting things happening in the Connecticut courts like a judge who stands up to the copyright cartels.

Janet Bond Arterton, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut, had the boldness to insist the RIAA show some files were actually swapped before they could sue somebody for actually swapping some files. Seems the least they should do, but it’s not the way things usually work with these robo suits. Believe it or not most judges accept screenshots of “share folders” as proof of violation – regardless if any sharing has truly occurred, or indeed if the so-called titles represented on screen relate in any fashion to material owned by the plaintiff. Sometimes neither is true so common sense scored a victory in New Haven this week.

There’s been an additional bit of undisguised optimism – mostly on the bulletin boards – that the judge was also saying distribution had to be active in order to rise to the level of infringement, that even if the files in the share folder were real, and the files had been downloaded, it wasn’t a copyright violation until an uploader actively pushed them out to a downloader, the equivalent say of going down to the post office and mailing a copy of a file to a friend. That without “active participation” one can’t be liable for distribution any more than one would be if after having left a music library unattended during a party, a guest wandered in and cloned some CDs. Sound judgment and years of legal precedent dictate responsibility lays with the one who did the copying, not the library owner, and while some file-sharing programs do allow the active sending of files, like WASTE for instance, most do not. A full reading of the judge’s order however shows her avoiding this aspect of the argument, but it will eventually come up for review and someday someone will rule on it. It may even be Arterton.

Still I think file-sharers might hold off popping the champagne corks, at least until a few more cases make it through the courts. The Elm City judge's concern was more about facts than philosophy, and whether or not so-called passive distribution breaches copyright law wasn’t directly at issue here. Instead her order was targeted at record companies who demand to sue swappers after merely presenting to the courts alleged screen shots of defendants’ share folders or other such ephemera. No small thing that but this cautious Connecticut jurist didn’t insist an upload had to be actively commenced in order for infringement to occur, she said that in this particular case at least the plaintiff hadn't shown that an upload occurred at all. That other judges routinely ignore such fundamental principals exposes a dangerous lack of essential legal competence, but it doesn’t offer insights about any particular aspect of the law. That’s one we’ll have to wait on.














Enjoy,

Jack













March 1st, 2008





RIAA rip-off redux

INFRINGEMENT!

Artists say they want their music site dough
Peter Lauria

Artist managers are girding for battle with their music overlords over when their clients are going to see some of the dough negotiated last year in copyright-infringement settlements with a host of Web sites.

Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI - either collectively or individually - settled claims with Napster, Kazaa and Bolt.com. Napster alone had to cough up $270 million.

The fourth major label, SonyBMG, was not part of the suit because Napster was owned by BMG parent company Bertelsmann.

All four struck separate deals with YouTube that included revenue participation.

A contingent of prominent artist managers claims that little to none of that money has trickled down to their clients. They are now considering legal action.

"Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for," said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others.

"Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don't get paid soon."

Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.

What's more, these sources said that after the labels recouped their legal expenses, there wasn't much left to pass along to the artists.

But a source on the artists' side said that is an argument heard all too often in the music business.

Getting money out of the major labels is never easy, but given the industry's downward financial spiral it is exponentially more difficult now, the source said.

"The record labels are experts at transferring money around and putting the onus on artists managers to find it."

Irving Azoff, the legendary talent manager for The Eagles and Jewel, among others, echoed that sentiment.

"They will play hide and seek, but eventually will be forced to pay something," Azoff said. "The record companies have even tried to credit unrecouped accounts. It's never easy for an artist to get paid their fair share."

Reps for the three labels dispute the notion that they are withholding settlement money.

A spokeswoman for EMI said the label has started the process of "sharing proceeds from the Napster and Kazaa settlements with artists and writers whose work was infringed upon."

Warner Music's representative said the label "is sharing the Napster settlement with its recording artists and songwriters and at this stage nearly all settlement monies have been disbursed."

A Universal Music spokesman said the label's policy "is to share its portion of various settlements with its artists, regardless of whether their contracts require it."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02272008...ent__99428.htm





Filesharing Law 'Unworkable'

The UK government's plan to fight online piracy is doomed to fail, according to experts
Richard Wray

The BBC's iPlayer allows the legal download of programmes

Any move by the government to introduce legislation that forces the UK's broadband providers to police the internet by clamping down on illegal sharing of copyrighted music and movies would be technologically unworkable and create a legal minefield, experts have warned.

In a wide ranging review of the UK's £60bn creative industry, culture secretary Andy Burnham this week called on internet service providers (ISPs) to come up with a workable plan to stop music and movie piracy, or the government will bring in its own laws next year.

The industry's trade body, the ISPA, has spent months in discussions with music and movie companies about ways of preventing illegal filesharing, but buoyed by recent success in France, the major record labels and Hollywood studios have lobbied the government hard for faster action.

One senior internet industry executive, who did not wish to be named, said this intensive political lobbying has "given the government a completely false idea of what is possible with current technology".

Legal experts, meanwhile, pointed out that if the government does opt for new legislation it will need not only to rip up parts of the current legislation and amend data protection laws, but its plans could fall foul of wider human rights laws that entitle people to a degree of privacy in their communications.

"The big issue, frankly, is the impossibility of the internet service providers getting in amongst it and monitoring what goes on on their networks," warned Alex Brown, internet law specialist at Simmons & Simmons.

"Technically speaking, it's near impossible to do. The sheer volume of traffic means it just cannot be done fast enough. And this is a technical problem, not a legal problem. What is going to stop people stealing content is not the law — these people already know it is illegal; what will stop people is a technical solution that adequately protects both people's rights and copyrighted material. But we do not have one."

The sheer scale of online piracy in the UK has been highlighted by new research from price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com today, which shows that nearly one in five British internet users admit to having illegally downloaded copyright material.

Rob Barnes, head of broadband and mobiles at moneysupermarket.com, said many internet users do not actually know that the content they are downloading is illegal when they access it.

"The government is trying to prevent this growing problem, but it's clear people are not always aware they have infringed on copyright law," he said. "Perhaps the government should focus on educating people on the penalties of copyright [violation], as well as what actually constitutes piracy."

Among the 26 commitments made by the government to help the creative industries is a pledge to "promote better understanding of the value and importance of intellectual property" through school education programmes. It also wants to increase the fine that magistrates can impose on "pirates" from its current limit of £5,000.

The music and film industries welcomed the government's backing in the fight against piracy, which they claim lost them £460m in 2006, but the government's Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy document provided little detail of how the ISPs are supposed to stop the online pirates.

The music labels and Hollywood studios, however, believe recent plans announced in France could provide a blueprint for the UK market. Last year French president Nicolas Sarkozy backed an industry proposal that would see the country's ISPs monitor all their traffic for illegal filesharing.

British internet technology experts, however, believe the lack of detail in the French proposal shows the sheer complexity — and expense — of any system that requires service providers to check out every bit of data that travels across their networks.

Data traversing the internet is split into "packets", around which is wrapped information about where that piece of information is going. Like the address on an envelope, that data can easily be read, and initially it provided information to suggest the contents of the packet might be illegally copied copyrighted material. But peer-to-peer filesharing technology has evolved and now merely reading the so-called "packet header" will give no clue as to what's inside.

Inspecting the actual contents of the packet is much more difficult. It is also currently illegal. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) the UK's ISPs are not allowed to inspect the contents of packets without proper authority and only when such action is necessary and proportionate in the context of the issue being investigated.

These powers are used by the police to intercept and copy email and other traffic in terrorism investigations. Legal experts doubt that snooping on everyone's internet traffic just to protect the commercial interests of the music and film industries would be allowed under the current legislation. In addition, the police do not translate their intercepted material in "real time", as would be necessary in any UK-wide piracy clampdown.

Experts also warn that even if the technology evolved to make real-time, so-called "deep packet" monitoring — or "sniffing" — easy and cheap to do, the serious filesharers would simply start encrypting their content. As a result, only first-time or inexperienced filesharers would end up being caught.

Already there are several programs that use the popular bittorrent filesharing technology — such as Azureus, which can encrypt files so they are harder to spot.

One suggestion mooted by the music and film industry is for the ISPs to flag up as potential filesharers any customer with high data usage. But the booming popularity of legitimate broadband TV services such as the BBC's iPlayer and ITV.com, as well as the arrival of downloadable film rental services from sites such as Amazon, means that being a heavy consumer of bandwidth will increasingly be no indication of wrongdoing.

One voluntary way of dealing with major filesharers might be for the ISPs to prevent their users accessing the "tracker" websites that help filesharers set up the peer-to-peer connections they need in order to swap content.

A similar voluntary system of website blocking already exists for sites known to contain child pornography. But such a blacklist of sites risks wiping out all trackers, some of which do not signpost copyrighted material.

Forcing the ISPs to start monitoring what their customers do also ends their legal protection as a so-called mere conduit, leaving them open to lawsuits if they cut off a user who has not been doing anything illegal.

The ISPA warned today that any forced monitoring of internet traffic could lead to the collapse of many of the country's smaller ISPs.

Getting a workable system in France is easier as the country has less than a dozen ISPs. In the UK there are more than 140, and if they have to start spending millions of pounds installing new equipment, many of the smaller players could go bust without support from the hugely profitable music and film industry.

"Internet service providers are not law enforcement officers," said a spokesman for the ISPA. "And rights holders such as film and music companies already secure their rights in other formats, so it's only right for an industry to help pay to protect its intellectual property."

A spokesman for the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said: "We would of course prefer a voluntary solution and we are certainly not pretending it will be easy."

The government intends to consult the internet industry about possible steps it can take after Easter, but if the industry cannot come up with a solution then the government will look at legislative solutions in 2009.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...22/filesharing





Tennessee Eyes Bill to Make Colleges Stop Online File Sharing
Andrea L. Foster

The U.S. House of Representatives is not the only legislative group that is trying to force colleges to be aggressive in stopping students who swap music and video files illegally online. A bill introduced last month in the Tennessee State Senate, SB 3974, would force public colleges in the state to police their networks to prevent illegal file sharing.

The bill would require colleges to have a policy that prohibits infringement of copyrighted works via the institutions’ networks, and to analyze their networks to determine whether they are being used “to transmit copyrighted works.” The legislation would also demand that colleges either certify to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission that their networks are not used to transmit copyrighted material, or take steps to prevent the online infringement of such works. A companion bill has been introduced in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

The Senate Education Committee is scheduled to discuss the bill Wednesday.

Last year the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America named the University of Tennessee among the campuses with the worst records of online copyright infringement.

Update: Committee has deferred taking up the bill until March 5.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/art...e-file-sharing





Filesharing is a Virtue

An entertainment industry that doesn't understand its audience is pushing illiberal, unworkable plans to monitor downloads
Jamie King

Filesharing is the favourite whipping-boy of an entertainment industry refusing to update its business models for the P2P generation.

The latest result of its pressure on the UK government is a Green Paper on the creative industries, published today, recommending internet service providers be required to take action against users suspected of downloading copyrighted material without permission. Should they fail to mend their ways, such users face termination of their internet access.

There's no mystery about how this will work. Bargain-basement host Tiscali have already been operating a similar scheme in co-operation with the British Phonographic Industry. The ISP has been monitoring filesharing "swarms" dedicated to a copyrighted work, and seeing how many in the swarm are their own customers. (Tiscali knows this because of the unique sets of IP numbers handed out to each ISP and passed on to all their users.) Embarrassingly for the government, the system is already in disarray over arguments about who should pay for sending written warnings and shutting down customers' access.

British citizens should object strongly to these proposals. In Europe, any database of electronic information traceable to individuals is properly regarded as a threat to the fundamental right to private life. A recent European Court ruling requires specifically that member states deciding to make ISPs disclose personal information about suspected file sharers should do so with due respect for privacy. In addition, there are two Europe-wide sets of standards applying to the kind of activity proposed here: Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights on private life and the Council of Europe's Convention 108 on Personal Data Processing. They require that the purpose of the interference with privacy be "legitimate" and "proportional".

"Proportional" means that a government wishing to force ISPs to take this kind of action has to be able to show it can achieve its stated purpose. These proposals are hopelessly inadequate in this respect, as any basic diligence should have shown. It is impossible to monitor even a small proportion of potentially infringing BitTorrent files available, and even then BitTorrent traffic is only one filesharing protocol among many. Moreover, those for whom downloading has become their primary way of consuming media will simply protect themselves by using other systems, or already available encryption. These proposals therefore represent, at best, a spectacularly expensive way of inflicting symbolic punishments on an unlucky few. Proportional they are not.

Language like "national security" and "public safety" is often used to describe what counts as "legitimate". Incursions on our privacy are permitted under EU law, but only in cases that "satisfy a pressing social need" - not, as is the case here, merely to comply with the wishes of a powerful business lobby. ISPs will resist this because they know that acquiescing will be expensive and expose their businesses to massive liability. We citizens must resist it on the grounds that is unacceptable to sell our privacy to support an outmoded industry. Enough of our civil liberties have been eroded under the shibboleth of terror - let's not have them further eroded under that of piracy.

Interestingly, ISPs complying with the proposed requirements might face an unexpected cost. The world's larger Bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay - on which almost all torrents are be hosted - has an acceptable use policy which is being violated by the kinds of things Tiscali is doing. "They are not legitimate users on our system," says The Bay's Peter Sunde, "and we do not accept their harvesting of IPs, since it's not productive. Breaking into our system when you're not invited is a violation of our terms of use. This means these ISPs have to pay a basic fee of five thousand Euros, plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation."

With the government's proposals looking technically and legally suspect and increasingly expensive for ISPs, perhaps it is time to investigate new business models for the entertainment industries? P2P distribution represents an unprecedented opportunity for creators to distribute their work cheaply and efficiently to people who want it. All we need now is a progressive business model that can again recognise sharing as a virtue, not a vice.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/..._a_virtue.html





Appeals Court Attorneys' Fees Ruling Could Impact P2P Suits
Eric Bangeman

One of the risks involved in bringing a copyright infringement lawsuit is that you might be forced to pay the defendant's attorneys' fees if you decide to back out of the case and dismiss the lawsuit voluntarily. It has happened twice to the RIAA so far, but it may become more commonplace now that an Appeals Court has overturned a lower court's denial of attorneys' fees in a copyright infringement case.

Riviera Distributors v. Midwest Electronic Specialties involved a pair of companies that sell video poker machines. Riviera sued Midwest for copyright infringement in 2006, accusing its competitor of infringing its copyrights for software used in its Stars and Stripes video poker game.

Riviera eventually moved to dismiss the case without prejudice (meaning that it could be refiled at a future time) after concluding that it lacked sufficient evidence to win at trial, but still thought it might be able prove its case at a future point. The judge decided to dismiss the case with prejudice, making Midwest the prevailing party. Midwest subsequently asked for attorneys' fees, a request that the District Court denied.

In overturning the lower court's ruling, the Appeals Court judges cited a 2001 Supreme Court decision which says that a party prevails "when it obtains a 'material alteration of the legal relationship of the parties,'" not simply because the judge has sustained the position of one of the parties on the merits of the case. "Midwest obtained a favorable judgment. That this came about when Riviera threw in the towel does not make Midwest less the victor than it would have been had the judge granted summary judgment or a jury returned a verdict in its favor. Riviera sued; Midwest won; no more is required," wrote the judges in their opinion.

The Seventh Circuit opinion stands in contrast to one handed down by the Fifth Circuit last month involving a San Antonio resident sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement. Virgin Records v. Cliff Thompson was dismissed by the RIAA with prejudice after the defendant revealed that his adult daughter was responsible for the KaZaA account detected by MediaSentry. The RIAA then dismissed the case against him and sued his daughter.

Thompson requested an attorneys' fees award, but it was denied by the District Court and again on appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit ruled that recovery of attorneys' fees is "not automatic," citing a 1997 Supreme Court ruling. "The Supreme Court listed several non-exclusive factors that a court may consider in exercising its discretion: 'frivolousness, motivation, objective unreasonableness... and the need in particular circumstances to advance considerations of compensation and deterrence," wrote the Fifth Circuit judges in their opinion.

They noted the lower court's finding that the RIAA's lawsuit was neither frivolous nor "objectively unreasonable," and the RIAA's efforts to contact Thompson to "resolve this matter for six months prior to filing this lawsuit."

With two appeals courts issuing contradictory decisions, the issue is likely headed to the Supreme Court, which usually steps in when appeals courts disagree on a matter of law. If the Seventh Circuit interpretation of the Copyright Act becomes the law of the land, the RIAA will face an increased risk of having to pay attorneys' fees in cases where it targets the wrong person—even if the person(s) responsible for the P2P activity live in the same household. Given the record industry's willingness to spend millions of dollars on legal fees, that may not prove to be much of a deterrent. Should the Fifth Circuit ruling prevail, then the decision would be left to the discretion of individual judges.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...p2p-suits.html





Lawyers For ‘Imposter’ P2P Software Threaten Open-Source Team
enigmax

A company trying to pass itself off as vendors of the open-source file-sharing software Shareaza, has set the legal dogs on the real Shareaza forum. Discordia Ltd, who earlier turned Bearshare and iMesh into pay services, demanded action after a member of the real Shareaza forum suggested a DOS attack on the site.

When the news started to break in December last year, it looked bleak for the real Shareaza project. A company had somehow gained control of Shareaza.com, the domain name used previously for the real, open-source Shareaza P2P client, and was now passing its own pay service client off as the real thing. Something was seriously wrong, with many putting the pieces together into what could only be described as a conspiracy.

Now, lawyers for the “fake” or “imposter” Shareaza are threatening the real Shareaza team for a comment made by a user on their forum - things are getting out of hand. So how did this begin?

Last year a company associated with the French RIAA somehow obtained the Shareaza.com domain name from its owner, Mr Jonathan Nilson, who was given the domain in the belief he would keep it safe. Nilson would neither confirm nor deny that he had sold the domain, but speculation suggests that he may have sold it to avoid legal action. Others suggest the domain expired. Either way, the original owners of the domain (the Shareaza creators) don’t have it anymore.

Now the owners of the ‘fake’ Shareaza had control of the domain name previously associated with the real product (shareaza.com), it became easy to pretend to be them. There are two screenshots below - one is the ‘fake’ domain and one is the real thing. Can you spot the imposter?

The real, open source client is represented by the bottom graphic. The ‘fake‘ is at the top and according to Neglacio ;

Quote:
ShareazaV4, is totally fake. It violates the open-source license, GPL (Version 2) in many ways. Also, it isn’t free nor open source. It requires a subscription and installs a suspicious toolbar. You can read what happened from this reference list: http://tinyurl.com/2cx7ff

Please, update your Shareaza version to Shareaza 2.3.1.0, and change the site from Shareaza.com to the new official site at Sourceforge: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net .
Understandably, the real Shareaza team and users are really upset that this outfit has effectively stolen their brand name from under their noses in a hostile takeover, and is actively ruining their reputation. It’s no surprise that emotions run high when people are ripped off so when a new signup to the real Shareaza forums suggested a small way to get back at the people doing this to them, it wasn’t anything so special. A user called Red Squirrel posted (quote courtesy of Google.com):

Quote:
Make it so the real shareaza program queries their site [shareaza.com] every couple of seconds. As an individual user this won’t take much personal bandwidth. But all shareaza users worldwide put together should be enough to kill their server and they won’t really be able to do much since it will be coming from so many different IPs.
Even though a moderator outlined that this behavior might be considered illegal, that wasn’t enough for Meister Seelig & Fein, lawyers representing the company that took over Shareaza.com. Despite now passing themselves off as the real Shareaza, the ‘imposter’ outfit clearly thinks they have the law on their side too. In correspondence sent to the ‘real’ Shareaza team:

Quote:
This law firm represents Discordia, Ltd., the operator of the website Shareaza.com and owner of the rights in the Shareaza branded software distributed from that domain. Please be advised, that your forum contains a string of posts under the title: “suggestion to kill Shareaza.com.” Under the string, the poster, RedSquirrel offers directions for users of Shareaza software to implement a DoS that would have the effect of destroying or seriously impairing our client’s application and network. The poster OldDeath also offers a manner to illegally attack our client’s business.

Despite whatever complaints your forum’s users may have with our client’s proper and legal business activities, the type of activity promoted on your forum is illegal. Therefore, we request that you immediately remove this string of posts and any future strings of this nature. My client respects your users’ rights to express their points of view. However, the line is crossed when users begin to promote the destruction of a legitimate business (evidently based on out some misguided belief that artists and others who create music should not be fairly compensated for their efforts) via illegal or other predatory means.

If the above cited illegal activity on your site does not immediately cease and desist, our client will take all necessary action to vigorously and relentlessly protect its rights. To be clear, if this action is not immediately taken and, as result, our client’s business is harmed, we will not only pursue, locate and hold fully responsible each and every one of those who have implemented this, or any similar DoS, but also those responsible for maintaining your site and the forums.

Please confirm that the requested action is being taken immediately.

Jeffrey A. Kimmel

Meister Seelig & Fein, LLP
140 E. 45th St., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10017
(212) 655-3578
Meister Seelig & Fein is the same law firm that struck the distribution deal between iMesh and SonyBMG, so their involvement in this issue is no surprise.

Shareaza.com is offering a pay client that no file sharer wants, for many reasons, including keeping all hashes, downloaded files and chat logs in a database. We certainly don’t recommend it.

Those who prefer the real, free, open-source Shareaza experience should get along to Sourceforge or to this thread where all the genuine domains point.

On the one hand, The Pirate Bay lose a domain they bought legitimately because the IFPI doesn’t like it, but when a music industry outfit attempts the destruction of a completely legal piece of open source software by passing itself off as the real thing, no-one blinks. Sign of the times?
http://torrentfreak.com/shareaza-imp...-forum-080225/





Judge Rejects RIAA 'Making Available' Theory
NewYorkCountryLawyer

A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's "making available" theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove "actual distribution of copies", and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were "available". This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/25/1952222.shtml





Law Students Provide Counseling to Individuals Targeted by Recording Industry
Press release

The U.S. recording industry sends hundreds of letters each month to college students across the country accusing them of illegally downloading music from the Internet. The letters offer a simple option: settle for $3,000 or $4,000 or be sued for hundreds of thousands.

Professor Robert Talbot and students in the Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Project are providing research, writing, and counseling assistance in cases involving the Recording Industry Association of America's letters to college students concerning music piracy.

While many--if not most--of the students targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America's "pre-litigation settlement letters" may have in fact illegally downloaded music, not all are guilty. But frightened by the threatening letters and lacking the resources to obtain legal advice, most students opt to hand over their credit cards and settle.

A new undertaking by the Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Project at the USF School of Law aims to provide college students with the legal counseling they need to make an informed decision on how to respond to the RIAA letters. Law students in the class, led by Professor Robert Talbot, are available to counsel students accused of music piracy. They are also researching complex legal issues for attorneys including Ray Beckerman, a key player who represents individuals targeted by the RIAA.

"The RIAA is using heavy-handed tactics that some of the law students feel border on extortion," Talbot said. "The cases involve complex legal and technical issues. We can review a students' case, explain their rights, and determine whether they have a good defense or not."

There are many scenarios that can lead the RIAA to target the wrong person, said Jonathan Jaffe, a law student who also works in the technology industry.

"Many may not be guilty," Jaffe said. "Their roommates could be using their computer, or they could be connecting over a wireless network where it is hard to determine which user is downloading the files. The RIAA tactics seem like a racket."

In addition, a student could have made a simple mistake, it could be sabotage, or the RIAA could simply have the wrong person, Talbot said.

The class is currently assisting Beckerman on the case of a 60-year-old Haitian woman who speaks broken English, works six days a week for $8.50 an hour, and has never used a computer who is defending herself against charges that she is an "online media distributor."

"There are a great number of important legal issues of first impression being decided in these cases, the resolution of which will have enormous implications for the Internet, for our society," Beckerman said. "The opportunity for the law students to be a part of real world cases of first impression, working side-by-side with experienced practitioners motivated by principle rather than by money, on behalf of real life, suffering clients, is a priceless asset for the law school."

The Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Clinic was established by the USF School of Law to provide legal services to individuals who need assistance with a variety of intellectual property matters. The clinic is a partner of the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF), assisting in domain name disputes. The Project is also a partner in "Chilling Effects," a joint project of the EFF and law school clinics at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Maine. Chilling effects helps the public understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws provide for online activities.

For information on the USF School of Law's Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Clinic, call (415) 422-6752 or email clinic@internetjustice.org.
http://www.usfca.edu/law/news/stories/riaa.html





Chinese Music Industry Groups File Suit Against Baidu

Two industry groups representing China's local musicians and songwriters have filed a lawsuit against the country's Web search leader, Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of copyright violation.

The move signalled that domestic artists as well as international firms are disgruntled at the firm's free music search service.

Baidu, whose search engine allows users to listen to and search for song files for free, is taking advantage of China's relatively unsophisticated music industry to boost its advertising income, Music Copyright Society of China and digital music distributor R2G said in a statement.

The firms had filed a suit in Beijing in January, and are calling for Baidu to immediately halt copyright violations and offer compensation, the statement added but did not give further details.

"This lawsuit is just the beginning," the statement quoted Music Copyright Society executive Qu Jingming of China as saying.

A spokesperson for Baidu could not be reached for comment.

Baidu led China's 946.6 million yuan (67 million pound) search engine market in last year's fourth quarter with a 60.1 percent share, according to research firm Analysys International.

Google Inc came second with a 25.9 percent share, followed by Yahoo China with 9.6 percent.

Earlier this month, three global record companies have launched legal proceedings against Baidu, accusing it of violating copyright by giving access to music files.

Universal Music Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd have asked a court to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to tracks that they own the rights to, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said.

IFPI has said that more than 99 percent of all music files distributed in China are pirated, and the country's total legitimate music market, at $76 million (38 million pounds), accounts for less than 1 percent of global recorded music sales.

(Reporting by Sophie Taylor; editing by Ken Wills)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...A8649720080228





Judge Makes Lawyers Pay for Frivolity

With the verdict overturned, two attorneys must pay the others' fees.
Mike McPhee

A federal judge recently got so infuriated by the conduct of two highly regarded trial attorneys that he overturned a jury's $51 million verdict, then ordered the lawyers to pay the fees and costs of the opposing lawyers, a sum that could total several million dollars.

U.S. District Senior Judge Richard P. Matsch sanctioned attorneys Terrance McMahon and Vera Elson of the firm McDermott, Will and Emery, of Chicago and San Francisco, for "cavalier and abusive" misconduct and for having a "what can I get away with?" attitude during a 13-day patent infringement trial in Denver.

He ruled that the entire trial was "frivolous" and the case filed solely to stifle competition rather than to protect a patent.

Neither McMahon nor Elson returned phone calls. But their firm defended them by stating it "believes in vigorous and ethical advocacy on behalf of our clients. While we respect Judge Matsch, we disagree with the conclusions of the opinion and believe that it will be reversed on appeal."

The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals saw it differently and affirmed Matsch's decision to overturn the verdict.

News of Matsch's ruling swept through the legal community.

"In 42 years of litigation, I've never seen a judge set aside a verdict, then award fees to opposing counsel," said local attorney Robert Miller, of Perkins Coie LLP. "There are times when a verdict is set aside, and times when lawyers are sanctioned. But I've never heard of them happening in one case.

"Judge Matsch does some things that are out there, but he's usually right. Very infrequently is he reversed on appeal."

The case began in 1999, when Medtronic Navigation Inc., a Minnesota-based firm with a manufacturing facility in Louisville, sued its competitor, BrainLab Inc., a multinational German company, claiming it had lost more than $100 million because of patent infringement. Both companies manufacture surgical instruments that guide a surgeon's scalpel very precisely in difficult situations such as the removal of a brain tumor. The guidance technology was the core of the case.

For three years, the two companies couldn't negotiate a settlement. Medtronics even tried to buy BrainLab but was rebuffed. So Medtronics fired its lawyers and hired McDermott, Will and Emery to take the case to trial.

After presiding over the 13-day trial, Matsch wrote that McDermott's lawyers not only disregarded his instructions during the trial but argued "with full awareness that their case was without merit."

BrainLab's lead attorney, Jay Campbell, said, "We're very pleased with the decision. The judge wrote eloquently about the improprieties, that they had litigated to end competition rather than to enforce the patent."

Campbell has until March 12 to present his bill.
http://www.denverpost.com/popular/ci_8354619





Real money

EU Hits Microsoft with Record 899 Million Euro Antitrust Fine
AFP

EU competition regulators dealt a new blow to Microsoft on Wednesday, fining the US software giant a record 899 million euros for defying a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling.

The fine, worth 1.4 billion dollars, is the biggest ever levelled against a single company in an EU antitrust case and brings the total penalties against Microsoft to just shy of 1.7 billion euros.

"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

"I hope that today's decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft's record of non-compliance with the commission's March 2004 decision," she added.

The European Commission, Europe's top competition watchdog, fined Microsoft 497 million euros in March 2004 and ordered the company to open some key software to rivals so they could make compatible products.

In July 2006, the commission fined the company a further 280 million euros after determining that it was not respecting its original ruling.

The commission hit Microsoft with the new penalty, the sum of daily fines running from June 21, 2006 to October 21, 2007, because it said Microsoft had failed to charge rivals reasonable prices for access to key information about its work-group or back-office servers in contravention of the 2004 ruling.

"Microsoft continued to abuse its powerful market position after the commission's March 2004 decision requiring it to change its practices," Kroes told journalists.

"Microsoft continued to stifle innovation by charging other companies prohibitive royalty rates for the essential information they needed to offer software products to computer users around the world," she added.

In reaction, Microsoft said it was "reviewing the commission's action" and highlighted that the latest EU action targeted "past issues."

"The commission announced in October 2007 that Microsoft was in full compliance with the 2004 decision, so these fines are about the past issues that have been resolved," the company said.

After a five-year investigation, the commission ruled then that Microsoft had abused its share of the market for operating systems running personal computers thanks to its ubiquitous Windows programme.

In particular, it accused Microsoft of using its stranglehold on PC operating systems to elbow rivals out of the more competitive markets for media players that play music and videos, and operating systems running back-office servers.

Microsoft fought the decision tooth-and-nail until last September when an EU court threw out the company's appeal against the ruling, significantly strengthening the commission's hand in the long-running standoff.

Despite the court ruling, Microsoft's troubles with EU competition regulators are far from over.

Since its court victory, the European Commission has launched a new investigation targeting the interoperability of a broad range of software, including Microsoft's popular Office package, with rival products.

Last week Microsoft said it was making "broad-reaching changes" to its technology and business practices to enhance the ease with which its software interacts with partners, customers, and competitors.

However the commission gave the move a lukewarm response, saying that it had seen similar promises from Microsoft in the past.

"As we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are focusing on steps that will improve things for the future," Microsoft said.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...Mx_SwmtKvi7C-w





Geek Wins Copyright Lawsuit Against Corporation
Chris Gregerson

I work as a stock photographer/web developer. I saw a photo of mine used in Vilana Financial's full-page phone book ad. They wouldn't pay the licensing fee, and I wrote about it online. They sued me for defamation, producing a sales agreement signed by one "Michael Zubitskiy" (who they said took the photo and sold the rights to them). I sued them for copyright infringement, and they added claims against me for trademark infringement, deceptive trade practices, and tortuous interference. There was a trial I'll long remember on the 5th of November, and the judge recently issued her verdict. She ruled Vilana Financial forged the sales agreement and willfully infringed my photos, and awarded me $19,462. All claims against me were denied. I represented myself during the litigation.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/25/0159250.shtml





Nuvio Sues Garmin Over Nuviphone
David Twiddy

Internet telephone provider Nuvio Corp. said Wednesday it has sued navigational device marker Garmin Ltd. over the name of Garmin's new wireless phone.

Nuvio, which is based in Overland Park, Kan., filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Kansas, saying Garmin's proposed Nuviphone name infringes on its own Nuvio trademark.

"While we would have preferred to settle this without resorting to a lawsuit, we felt it was important to ensure that our customers and potential customers are not confused by someone abusing our legally protected trademark," said Jason P. Talley, the company's chief executive officer. "Our customers commonly refer to our service as the Nuvio phone."

Talley wouldn't disclose the number of customers that Nuvio has but said it generated between $5 million and $10 million in revenue in 2007.

Garmin, which is based in the Cayman Islands with operational headquarters in Olathe, said earlier this month it will introduce the Nuviphone by the end of the year. The phone would include many of the standard features of Garmin's Nuvi line of GPS devices now used in cars and trucks and help the company compete with wireless carriers now including navigation aids in their phones.

Besides preventing Garmin from using the Nuviphone name, Nuvio said it also wants to bar the company from using the Nuvi name on any of its regular GPS devices. It also has demanded damages from past infringement.

Garmin spokesman Ted Gartner said the company doesn't comment on pending litigation. He said Garmin first introduced the Nuvi line in North America in early 2006 and had sold Nuvi products in Europe before then.

Shares of the company, which have sold in a 52-week range of $50.01 to $125.68, lost 59 cents to close at $61.19 in trading Wednesday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...022702374.html





NY Subpoenas Comcast on Broadband
AP

The New York attorney general's office has requested information from Comcast Corp. on the company's handling of Internet traffic.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is the subject of several complaints to the Federal Communications Commission and has been sued by customers over its throttling of file-sharing traffic on its cable-modem service.

"We have requested information from the company via subpoena," Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, said Tuesday.

Comcast said it was cooperating with the AG's office.

The Philadelphia-based company has repeatedly said that its traffic management practices are necessary to keep other Internet traffic, like Web content, flowing smoothly.

On Monday, the FCC held a public hearing on the issue in Cambridge, Mass. Commissioners signaled that they were looking for greater openness from Internet providers about their traffic management practices, and were ready to step in to enforce the agency's "open Internet" policies.

Comcast has a minimal presence in New York state, mostly along the Connecticut border. Less than half of one percent of its subscribers are in New York, spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said.

Dow Jones Newswires reported on New York AG's investigation on Monday.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...M9q0AD8V27AD00





Grassroots Support? Or Astroturf?

Comcast acknowledges that it hired people to take up room at an F.C.C. hearing into its practices.
Sam Gustin

How big are the stakes in the so-called network neutrality debate now raging before Congress and federal regulators?

Consider this: One side in the debate actually went to the trouble of hiring people off the street to pack a Federal Communications Commission meeting yesterday—and effectively keep some of its opponents out of the room.

Broadband giant Comcast—the subject of the F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—acknowledged that it did exactly that.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Khoury said that the company didn't intend to block anyone from attending the hearing. "Comcast informed our local employees about the hearing and invited them to attend," she said. "Some employees did attend, along with many members of the general public."

That was not enough to satisfy Comcast's critics.

Craig Aaron, a spokesman for Free Press, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Comcast, denounced the company's tactics.

"The sad thing about this is that literally hundreds of people who were not paid to stand in line, or paid by their employer to attend, were prevented from even entering the building," Aaron said.

Such tactics are not unheard of at congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., but Comcast's critics said that they were inappropriate for a public hearing on a college campus.

Free Press campaign director Timothy Karr said that he showed up at the hearing 90 minutes early, only to find the room "75 percent full."

"The only reason these people were in the room, it seemed to me, was to keep seats warm and exclude others," Karr said.

Some audience members appeared to sleep through the proceedings, according to photos taken during the hearing. Other applauded enthusiastically when Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen delivered key points in his presentation.

A number of people in the audience wore yellow highlighter marking pens on their shirts or jackets; Karr said that was to identify them to Comcast employees coordinating the company's appearance at the event. Khoury acknowledged that Comcast coordinated the employees that it brought to the hearing.

The revelation that Comcast paid nonemployees to stand in line at the hearing comes against the backdrop of a bitter public relations war between Comcast and its critics, including the public interest groups Free Press and Public Knowledge.

"For the past week, Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf," Khoury said.

The hearing was held to address complaints leveled by Free Press, Public Knowledge, the web-video company Vuze, and others, that Comcast is trying to stifle competition by blocking the delivery of rival video-on-demand services over its cable system.

For weeks, Free Press had been trying to organize supporters to attend the hearing by issuing press releases and circulating flyers advertising the event.

Unlike Comcast, Free Press did not pay anyone to stand in line, Aaron said, nor did it provide transportation to any of its supporters.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-market...aring-Strategy





McNealy: Telcos Falling Behind in Internet Race
Agam Shah

Telecommunication companies need to go beyond just providing bandwidth and look into acquiring Internet destination sites that are heavily trafficked, Sun Chairman Scott McNealy said on Friday.

"I have explained to every telco that either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco," McNealy said at a news conference at Sun's Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Internet destination sites are already gaining on telecommunication companies, McNealy said, giving as examples eBay integrating Skype's VoIP technology and Google trying to buy wireless spectrum and help build cables across the Pacific Ocean. Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Yahoo would create another behemoth that could compete with carriers, such as by combining Microsoft's technology with Yahoo's existing VoIP and messaging services.

"I think the telcos have to make sure they don't get marginalized to being just bit providers and bandwidth providers," he said. On the other hand, carriers may be able to head off Internet sites by limiting the bandwidth available to them, so destination sites may need to affiliate with the carriers, he added.

While the future relationship between telecommunication providers and destination sites is unclear, both are looking at the Internet space to reach more users and generate advertising revenue, McNealy said. "There will be some very interesting challenges of who owns the subscriber and who owns the financial and advertising rights to those individuals."

"Stay tuned, the landscape's going to change enormously here in the next 10 years," McNealy said.

While a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo would have an impact on the Internet and telecommunications industry, one thing it wouldn't affect is the open-source community, McNealy said.

"I'm not sure Yahoo is a great driver on open-source technology. Certainly Microsoft hasn't been on the leading edge of that, so I'm not sure that will impact open source," he said.

During a speech earlier in the day, McNealy slammed the U.S. government for not being interested in adopting open-source software. McNealy said the farther he goes from Washington, the more governments get interested in open source.

Sun on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Ministry of Education to give university students access to a set of open-source chip designs called OpenSparc. The OpenSparc designs are based on the company's UltraSparc server chips. Sun will provide the designs to universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University so those schools can develop teaching materials.

Sun is already incorporating OpenSparc in the curricula of U.S. universities including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas. Sun's efforts to promote open-source technology are succeeding, McNealy said, claiming there have been 50 million downloads of Sun's open-source Java Runtime Environment per month, McNealy said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...behind-in.html





Researchers Transmit Optical Data at 16.4 Tbps
W. David Gardner

The goal of 100 Gbps Ethernet transmission is closer to reality with the announcement Wednesday that Alcatel-Lucent researchers have recorded an optical transmission record along with three photonic integrated circuits..

In papers presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), Alcatel-Lucent researchers disclosed research that they believe will likely pave the way to successful implementation of the very high speed transmissions. "Several new technologies were used," the firm said in a statement, "including a highly linear, balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver and an ultra-compact, temperature-insensitive coherent mixer."

Carried out by researchers in Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, the successful transmission of 16.4 Tbps of optical data over 2,550 km was assisted by Alcatel's Thales' III-V Lab and Kylia, an optical solution company. The researchers utilized 164 wavelength-division multiplexed channels modulated at 100-Gbps in the effort.

Also accepted at the OFC/NFOEC conference were three papers from researchers at Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J. The three papers describe the development of three photonic integrated circuits designed to achieve 100 Gbps with high spectral efficiency.

The three papers described the development of different components useful in achieving 100 Gbps, including an integrated high-speed receiver, a dual-polarization modulator, and another modulator used for systems with extremely high spectral efficiency.

"These breakthroughs highlight the depth and breadth of the work done by Bell Labs researchers in optical networking and physical technologies around the world, and show how they must constantly improve and innovate across various technical areas to pave the way to the future of communications," George Rittenhouse, Bell Labs research VP, said in a statement.
http://www.itnews.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=104514





IBM Optical Chip Zips Huge Files Using Little Power
Layer 8

IBM today announced it had developed a prototype chip that could transmit up to 8 terabit/sec of information -- equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams -- using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.

The applications for the technology IBM is calling its “green optical link” range from cell phones to supercomputers. The optically-enabled circuit boards, or "Optocards," employ an array of low-loss polymer optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitters and receivers, IBM said.

The complete databus constructed with these Optocards incorporates a large number of high-speed channels and closely packs them to achieve huge densities: each waveguide channel is smaller in size than a human hair, IBM said. In addition to the optical data bus, IBM said it developed a parallel optical transceiver module with a higher number of channels and an increased speed of operation: 24 transmitters and 24 receivers that each operate at 12.5 Gb/s.

The resulting total bi-directional data transfer rate is 300 Gb/s, nearly doubling the performance of a version IBM introduced last year. Compared to current commercial optical modules the transceiver provides 10-fold greater bandwidth in 1/10 the volume while consuming comparable power, IBM said.

Big Blue said perhaps the new optical technology’s most important benefit will be saving massive amounts of power in supercomputers. For a typical 328ft long link, the power consumed by the optical technology is 100 times less than today's electrical interconnects, and offers a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules, IBM claims.

Other applications include:

• Video: This technology will enable widespread high definition video sharing and video on-demand by increasing the bandwidth of video servers. Web-serving sites that host videos could use the technology to access libraries with millions of high-definition movies and video clips in seconds, speeding up access for users. By incorporating an optical data port in laptops, HD video recorders, personal mp3 and video players, cell phones, or PDAs, HD video content could be stored and displayed on high-resolution screens.

• Healthcare: Physicians and researchers could send large files such as MRIs and heart scans for real-time analysis and 3-D visualization.

• Electronics: "Scaled-down" versions of the optical interconnect technology may find applications in cell phones, one chip could sit in the base of the phone and the other could sit in the display, letting large files, even high-definition content move from one to the other. The advantage is that optics eliminate wires.

This increased bandwidth is the result of two specific advances, Big Blue said. First, the new transceiver includes 24 channels for sending and receiving data compared to 16 such channels in the previous device. Second, the modulation rate of each of the transceiver's vertical cavity surface emitting lasers has been increased by 25% to 12.5 billion bits per second. In an effort to speed commercialization efforts, IBM has incorporated lasers and detectors that operate at the industry-standard wavelength of 850 nanometers (nm) instead of the proprietary 985-nn technology used in IBM’s earlier transceiver.

The device was produced as part of an ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program to speed up chip-to-chip communications for supercomputers.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25514





Global Consortium to Construct New Cable System Linking US and Japan to Meet Increasing Bandwidth Demands
Press release

Construction underway to build 10,000 km linear cable system with a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps to enhance Trans–Pacific connectivity

TOKYO, Japan (February 26, 2008) – A consortium of six international companies announced they have executed agreements to build a high–bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans–Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.

The new cable system — named Unity — will address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans–Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

According to the TeleGeography Global Bandwidth Report, 2007, Trans–Pacific bandwidth demand has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 63.7 percent between 2002 and 2007. It is expected to continue to grow strongly from 2008 to 2013, with total demand for capacity doubling roughly every two years.

"The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online, giving users faster and more reliable connectivity,” said Unity spokesperson Jayne Stowell.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs.

This new 10,000 kilometer (km) Trans–Pacific cable will provide connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points of presence. At Chikura, Unity will be seamlessly connected to other cable systems, further enhancing connectivity into Asia.

The Unity consortium selected NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system during a signing ceremony held in Tokyo on February 23, 2008. Construction will begin immediately, with initial capacity targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010.

The new five fiber pair cable system can be expanded up to eight fiber pairs, with each fiber pair capable of carrying up to 960 Gigabits per second (Gbps). By having a high fiber count, Unity is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/...blesystem.html





Cablevision Swings to Profit in 4Q
AP

Cablevision Systems Corp. says it swung to a profit in the fourth quarter from a loss a year ago as it added more Internet and phone customers.

Cablevision earned $6.6 million in the quarter, or 2 cents per share, compared with a loss of $23.9 million, or 8 cents per share, a year ago.

Revenues rose 10.8 percent to $1.84 billion from $1.66 billion.

Operating income, a measure that excludes interest expenses from Cablevision's large debt load as well as gains and losses from investments, jumped 62.9 percent to $330.3 million from $202.8 million.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,5274260.story





Lessig Decides Against Run for Congress at Internet Speed
Mike Nizza

Just like any good Web story, this one took just five days to go from tantalizing to nothing more than that. Silicon Valley will not be represented by an Internet icon in the House of Representatives, not for a couple of years anyway.

Lawrence Lessig announced today that he would not open a campaign for the seat formerly held by Representative Tom Lantos of California, who died earlier in the month.

The decision was explained not in a news release or appearance on a political talk show, but in an E-mailable, embeddable online video combining his remarks played over words and other illustrations.

The most pertinent phrase printed on the screen was “No possible way,” which was his conclusion based on problems that every politician faces:

– Political Unknown: He may be famous on the Web, but the district’s voters “never heard of me,” he said, citing recent polling.

– Message Problems: The voters were unfamiliar with his agenda, which was explained in another video last week. His political organization, Change Congress, seeks to fill Congress with those against lobbying and earmarks, and for public financing of elections.

– Popular Opponent: Within the district, the popularity of the leading candidate, Jackie Speier, made it certain “that we would lose this race in a big way,” he frankly told supporters. Ms. Speier spent years in the State Senate and was endorsed by Mr. Lantos. Her positive polling numbers “rank even above Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,” he said.

All of the above was exacerbated by one more factor: An excruciatingly short campaign cycle. Mr. Lessig would have to complete the uphill climb by the April 8 special election.

“My running and losing big would do more harm than good” for his new political push, he said today in the video. Mr. Lessig raised the possibility of running on his personal blog last Wednesday, and he had until the end of the month to decide.

The rise and fall of Lessig ‘08 came at Internet speed, and with Internet snark. Of Ms. Speier, his would-have-been opponent, he offered compliment after compliment, with a bit of sarcasm for good measure. Her public service, he said, was “so extraordinary that she’s had a train named after her.”
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





On the Press Bus, Some Questions Over Favoritism
Jacques Steinberg

On the bus ferrying a group of reporters to an appearance by Senator Barack Obama at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Lee Cowan, the NBC reporter assigned to the campaign, was asked the media question of the week: Had journalists like himself been going easier on Mr. Obama than his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?

“I don’t think that it’s kind treatment versus unkind treatment,” Mr. Cowan began, taking issue with the depiction of journalists fawning over Mr. Obama in a “Saturday Night Live” skit last Saturday, a characterization stoked nearly every day since by Mrs. Clinton and her aides.

And yet, Mr. Cowan then described several advantages that he saw Mr. Obama as having over his rival. “He hasn’t been around as long, so there isn’t as much to pick at,” Mr. Cowan said. “He plays everything very cool. He’s not as much of a lightning rod. His personality just doesn’t seem to draw that kind of coverage.”

“Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid,” Mr. Cowan added. “It’s so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies.”

As the two Democratic candidates shuttled between Ohio and Texas this week before Tuesday’s potentially decisive nominating contests, questions over whether reporters were giving each candidate an equally fair shake were thrust into the center of the campaign itself. There were already indications that Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates were finding traction in casting the news media as a conflicted umpire, while also prompting some soul-searching among the reporters themselves.

The night after Mrs. Clinton reprimanded Tim Russert and Brian Williams during the Cleveland debate on MSNBC for asking her a disproportionate number of “first” questions, she appeared Wednesday at a rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio. When someone stood to castigate the news media for being unfair to her, the audience cheered, with some even turning to cast a collective evil eye on the reporters in the high school gymnasium.

In a New York Times/CBS News telephone poll conducted Feb. 20-24 and released Tuesday, nearly half of those respondents who described themselves as voters in Democratic primaries or caucuses said the news media had been “harder” on Mrs. Clinton than other candidates. (Only about 1 in 10 suggested the news media had been harder on Mr. Obama.)

Meanwhile, relations between the candidates and their chroniclers have shown signs of wear, as the Democratic contest has moved into its second year.

On Tuesday, Carrie Budoff Brown, a correspondent for the Web site Politico who has been covering the Obama campaign, posted an article in which she complained about the candidate’s setting aside little time for questions from the national press and about the metal barriers that now prevented reporters from mingling with spectators at rallies. (David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said the barriers were at the behest of the Secret Service.)

In an interview on the Obama campaign’s flight from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio, Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Sun-Times, voiced a more basic lament: that the candidate’s aides omitted seemingly newsworthy gatherings from his publicly released schedule. As an example, she cited the lack of previous notice about a meeting he had with about 100 Jewish leaders in a Cleveland suburb last Sunday.

“The main issue is not whether he comes back here and shmoozes,” Ms. Sweet said of Mr. Obama, her hand tracing the middle and rear of the cabin. “First, tell me what you’re doing. Then we can argue if I can have access.”

Asked about Ms. Sweet’s concerns, Mr. Axelrod said that a transcript and video of the meeting had been released to her and others. “Occasionally, people in politics have private meetings,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign, which only a few weeks ago released a letter signed by Mrs. Clinton calling on MSNBC to fire a reporter who had made an off-color reference to her daughter, Chelsea, provided a letter to The Huffington Post this week taking issue with The Times. The letter, signed by 503 staff members and volunteers, disputed the central point in an article on Sunday’s front page: that the campaign was rapidly losing hope.

At the same time, as Mr. Obama racked up a string of victories in recent weeks, Mrs. Clinton has begun appearing more frequently in the press section of her plane for on-the-record conversations. On Valentine’s Day, she wandered back to call the girlfriends of several journalists, to apologize for keeping them on the campaign trail.

But to some reporters, those attempts at making nice have come late.

“Part of it is her campaign’s fault,” Andrea Mitchell, the longtime NBC political correspondent, said backstage at the MSNBC debate in Cleveland in Tuesday. “They started with this notion of inevitability. And they were very arrogant.”

It would be difficult to analyze systematically whether the mountain of articles, blog postings and video segments tilts toward one candidate or the other. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute that compiles a weekly index of campaign coverage by 48 news outlets, said that by one measure Mr. Obama had outpaced Mrs. Clinton beginning in mid-February — prominent mentions in that coverage.

Some Clinton aides and even reporters pointed this week to articles that could, at least anecdotally and in isolation, be construed as favorable to Mr. Obama. Among those cited were a front-page article in The Times last June that focused on Mr. Obama’s pickup basketball prowess, and another Tuesday on the front of The Washington Post that extolled his oratorical virtues.

Others marshaled clippings indicating that Mr. Obama had been subject to more serious scrutiny than the Clintons would acknowledge. These include articles from Ms. Sweet of The Sun-Times examining Mr. Obama’s flights on corporate jets early in his Senate career and the literary license he took on his first memoir. They also noted articles in the Chicago papers (as well as in The Times, and others) about Mr. Obama’s relationship with Antoin Rezko, a former fund-raiser soon to be tried on federal charges of fraud and influence peddling.

Which is not to say that there is not much more scouring to be done.

“The number of questions that we don’t know the answers to about the relationship between Mr. Rezko and Mr. Obama is staggering,” Howard Wolfson, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.

Still, others have noted that with the exception of a mention by Mr. Russert in Tuesday’s debate, Mrs. Clinton has largely escaped serious journalistic vetting over matters like when or whether her campaign will release her tax returns or her calendar from her years as first lady, or detail the origins of the $5 million she has contributed to her own campaign.

Jonathan Alter, the veteran Newsweek columnist who traveled with the Obama campaign to Dallas on Wednesday, said that the attempt by the Clinton camp to weigh various stories represented a kind of “silly, even-Steven-itis.”

“People got it into their head that if you say something good about a candidate, you have to say something bad about him, and if you don’t, that’s not fair,” Mr. Alter said. “What the Clinton partisans wanted was for us to create a phony balance that was at odds with what our eyes were telling us. That’s not the job of a journalist.”

The most significant element of the coverage that has so rankled the Clinton campaign may be one that cannot responsibly be omitted: her recent win-loss record in nominating contests.

“My role model and mentor at The A.P. was Walter Mears, who recently retired, and he used to say that who wins is part of the story,” said Mike Glover, an Associated Press reporter, as he flew on Mrs. Clinton’s plane on Thursday from Hanging Rock, Ohio, to Houston. “We’re covering a candidate who’s lost 11 straight primaries. They’re covering a candidate who has won 11 straight primaries.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/us...1press.html?hp





Bush Aide Resigns Over Plagiarism
Sheryl Gay Stolberg

A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers.

The White House called his actions unacceptable.

The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s political base. Mr. Goeglein was influential in decisions on a range of questions important to that constituency, including stem cell research, abortion and faith-based initiatives.

A blogger in Mr. Goeglein’s hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., found the plagiarism.

“This is not acceptable, and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said Friday morning, hours before Mr. Goeglein resigned. “He is offering no excuses, and he agrees it was wrong.”

Mr. Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. He is a familiar figure to conservatives and evangelical Christians, who knew him as a spokesman for Gary L. Bauer, the conservative who ran for president in 2000.

When Mr. Bauer dropped out of the race, Mr. Goeglein signed on with Mr. Bush, eventually becoming a top aide to Karl Rove, the chief political strategist. He was the eyes and ears of the White House in the world of religious conservatives and an emissary to that world for Mr. Rove and the president.

Mr. Goeglein was often credited with turning out the evangelical vote that helped re-elect Mr. Bush in 2004.

With Mr. Bush traveling to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the weekend, the White House issued a statement late Friday saying that the president was disappointed and saddened for Mr. Goeglein and his family.

“He has long appreciated Tim’s service,” the statement said. “And he knows him to be a good person who is committed to his country.”

Mr. Goeglein had been publishing guest columns on the opinion page of The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne for more than a decade, according to the paper’s editor, Kerry Hubartt.

Nancy Nall, a former columnist for the paper, often used her Web site, www.nancynall.com, to poke fun at his writings, which she called “drippy and awful.”

Ms. Nall said she was struck by Mr. Goeglein’s most recent column, on Thursday, which included a reference to a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth,” Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey. Curious, she searched the Internet, and found that Mr. Goeglein had lifted major chunks of the column from an article published 10 years ago in The Dartmouth Review.

“It is true,” Mr. Goeglein wrote in an e-mail message to another Fort Wayne newspaper, The Journal-Gazette. “I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses.”

He said he had apologized to the author of The Dartmouth Review article.

By day’s end, more examples of plagiarism had turned up, including a column about John Wayne copied in part from an article in The New York Sun and passages from a column that tracked, almost verbatim, an article by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post.

A review by The News-Sentinel found that of the 38 columns Mr. Goeglein published since 2000, 19 included plagiarized material, according to Mr. Hubartt. He said the paper would no longer publish work by Mr. Goeglein, whom he described as “well respected here by a lot of people.”

“There was no reason for it that I can see,” Mr. Hubartt said, noting that Mr. Goeglein had submitted columns voluntarily and had no deadlines to meet. “He was not under any pressure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/us/01aide.html





Judge is Asked to Rescind Shutdown of Website

Media and public interest organizations tell the jurist that his order violates constitutional provisions against prior restraint of free speech.
Henry Weinstein

A coalition of media and public interest organizations went to federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday urging a judge to reconsider his order to shut down a muckraking website that publishes leaked documents from businesses and government agencies worldwide.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White that two orders he issued last week against wikileaks.org were prior restraints that violated the 1st Amendment.

Laura Handman, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the news organizations, said White's order was so expansive that the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article.

"I can't think of another injunction that was so broad," said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that focuses on digital issues.

White acted in response to a lawsuit filed Feb. 6 by Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank, alleging that a disgruntled former employee had posted internal documents alleging money-laundering and tax evasion schemes at its Cayman Islands branch.

Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage "unethical behavior" by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Julius Baer, represented by the Century City firm Lavely & Singer, past lawyers for several celebrities in battles with news organizations, alleged that the postings violated privacy and bank secrecy laws of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands and posed a serious threat of identity theft.

Judge White issued a temporary restraining order, barring Wikileaks from posting the bank documents on the Internet. White has scheduled a Friday hearing on whether to make the injunction permanent.

White also issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot of San Mateo, Wikileak's domain name registrar, to disable the website's domain name.

That blocks access to the site through its principal entrance, although the content remains available on mirror sites and through its numerical address.

Dynadot did not contest the judge's actions. "The only agreement by Dynadot was to comply with the court's . . . order to preserve evidence," said the company's attorney, Garrett D. Murai.

Zimmerman, whose organization filed a motion seeking to intervene in the case, said he was disappointed in Dynadot's action. He said that a specific provision of the Communications Decency Act providing immunity for an "interactive computer service" protects the company against the bank's claims.

On a broader level, attorney Thomas Burke and colleagues Handman and Kelli Sager, representing 12 media groups that filed a friend-of-the-court brief, cited the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers dispute as authority for their position.

In that case, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration's bid to bar publication of a secret government history of the Vietnam War.

"The 1st Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and even when the source unlawfully obtained the documents," said the attorneys, whose clients include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, The Times, Gannett Co. and Hearst.

Public Citizen and the California First Amendment Coalition filed a separate brief contending that the case did not come under U.S. jurisdiction because the parties include subjects of foreign states -- the Swiss bank and Wikileaks, many of whose members are abroad.

"In shutting down this website through an unlawful prior restraint, the court has muzzled a very important voice in the fight against corporate and government misdeeds," said Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.

Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen's health policy wing, filed a declaration saying that the organization frequently uses leaked government documents to bring attention to important public issues, such as the Food and Drug Administration's consideration of "a drug company plan to conduct research on its new drug in Latin America using a design that the agency acknowledged would be unacceptable in the United States." After the plan was exposed, the company redesigned its study, Lurie said.

"If Wikileaks is shut down," Lurie said, "the ability of Public Citizen and its members to access" information from whistle-blowers "will be significantly impaired."

Attorney William Briggs, who represents Julius Baer, said his firm was preparing a response to the briefs lodged Tuesday. "This is a case that presents a conflict between an individual's right of privacy versus the press' ability to publish private information about private individuals," he said.

"I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft. If financial industry customers do not think their information is protected, those institutions could go out of business."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...ck=2&cset=true





Bank Drags Facebook into Wikileaks Case, Which Takes a Late-Day Turn for the Better
Paul McNamara

The Wikileaks outrage has just gotten ever more so ridiculous ... and at the same time deliciously ironic.

(Friday evening update: Looks like the judge has reconsidered and Wikileaks.org should be back soon. ... More detail here.)

If I'm reading these documents correctly - always a dicey proposition, given that I have a degree in journalism not law - it appears as though the Swiss bank that bamboozled a U.S. judge into pulling the plug on Wikileaks.org has dragged into this morass a human rights activist and Stanford graduate student who has no earthly connection to Wikileaks other than that he vetted some documents the whistleblower haven hosted (completely unrelated to the bank case) and also moderated a Facebook discussion group about the site - on Facebook.

The fellow, Daniel Mathews, tried explaining to attorneys for Bank Julius Baer that they were twisting an arm unattached to their target - to no avail - so Mathews actually had to lawyer up, which as Wikileaks notes in a press release "will likely be of keen interest to the very large Facebook community." ... Or anyone who contributes to any wiki or discussion board about any controversial topic.

From the Wikileaks release:

Quote:
The following excerpt demonstrates the type of abuse of process used by Bank Julius Baer & Trust's (law firm) Lavely & Singer to bring about a hearing at which Wikileaks was not represented:

Plaintiff's counsel responded: "Wikileaks lists you as an officer of the company on its Facebook page. As an officer of a defendant in this action, my client is entitled to serve you a copy of the summons and complaint pursuant to Rule 4(h)(1)(B) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure." Facebook is a website created for college students (and now used by others) as a social networking site. The Wikileaks website had invited people to start discussion groups on Facebook and other websites. The Facebook page at issue had identified (Mathews) as the "Stanford rep." of the discussion group, and the Facebook term "officer" has no significance; the fact that I am an "admim" merely indicates that I was a moderator of that discussion group.

I responded to Plaintiff's counsel: "I am an officer of a Facebook group, which is essentially a message board for discussion of issues relating to Wikileaks. I am not, and never have been, an officer of Wikileaks, and I request you not to represent that I am." Nevertheless, on February 22, 2008, Plaintiffs counsel declared to this Court that "Plaintiffs served a copy of the TRO and OSC on the Wikileaks Defendants via e-mail, per the Court's prior order, to the personal e-mail address for a listed officer of Wikileaks."
In other words, tough cookies, Mr. Mathews, you're the best we've got for a Wikileaks officer at the moment, so you're our man and here's your subpoena.

That's the ridiculous part.

Now for the delicious irony.

Mathews and his attorney, Joshua Kolten, have decided to make lemonade out of lemons: Since the bank insists Mathews has standing in the case, Mathews is asking the judge to consider the harm that the court's earlier injunction against Wikileaks has done to him; namely that it has prevented readers from accessing on Wikileaks the material he has written about subjects completely unrelated to the bank and its business.

Hopefully the judge will appreciate the point, get Wikileaks back online ... and let Mathews get back to Stanford and Facebook.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25540





Judge Says Wikileaks Site Can Have Its Web Address Back
Jonathan D. Glater

A federal judge in San Francisco said on Friday that he would withdraw an order that shut down the Web address for Wikileaks.org, a site that allows anonymous posting of documents to assist “peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”

At a hearing, United States District Judge Jeffrey S. White appeared at times visibly frustrated that technology might have outrun the law and that, as a result, the court might not be able to rein in information disclosed online.

“We live in an age when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law,” Judge White said.

The underlying case was brought by Bank Julius Baer & Co., a Swiss banking company, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, charging that Wikileaks had posted confidential, personally identifiable information about some of the bank’s customers.

The judge in February signed an order requiring that a company called Dynadot, a domain registrar, disable the Wikileaks.org address, making it more difficult for people to reach the site. Registrars provide Web addresses to site operators for a monthly fee.

The judge’s action drew criticism – and court filings – from numerous organizations concerned that the order violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. And because Wikileaks maintains copies of its site at several other Web addresses, the documents were and still are widely available, both from the United States and elsewhere. The main site, which is housed on a server in Sweden, remains accessible to those who know its less human-friendly numerical address.

“There are serious concerns that the court has, and serious questions raised, about the effectiveness of any order that this court might issue given the current state of affairs,” Judge White said, lamenting the fact that constitutional law might not be able to keep up with technological change.

A lawyer for Dynadot, Garret D. Murai, said that within an hour after the judge issued a written order outlining his decision, the Wikileaks.org domain name would be re-enabled.

“We will reinsert the DNS settings,” Mr. Murai said, using the acronym for Domain Name System. “Once I see the order, the call goes in to the client.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ack/index.html






Wikileaks Ruling Leaves Big Questions Unanswered
Jonathan D. Glater

Free speech advocates immediately hailed as a victory the decision on Friday of a federal judge to withdraw a prior order turning off the Web address of the site Wikileaks.org. But the reasoning of United States District Judge Jeffrey S. White also means that the court may dodge having to grapple with some of the meaty First Amendment questions posed by the case and touched on repeatedly at a lengthy hearing in San Francisco.

The lawsuit, brought by a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary against Wikileaks and Dynadot, the San Mateo, Calif., company that is the registrar for the domain name Wikileaks.org, became a cause célèbre for organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Such organizations responded with a barrage of court filings in the wake of an order signed by Judge White last month that required Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks.org address, making it more difficult – but far from impossible – for Internet users to get to materials published by Wikileaks.

The bank, Bank Julius Baer & Co., claimed that Wikileaks had displayed confidential, personally identifiable account information of its customers, as a result of possibly criminal actions by a former employee. Lawyers for the bank on Friday repeatedly told Judge White that Julius Baer clients had a right to keep their account information private and that there was no compelling interest to justify their disclosure. In this way lawyers for the bank set up a conflict between freedom of speech and the right to personal privacy.

“All of this is private info that is not newsworthy,” said William J. Briggs, one of the lawyers for the bank. If one of the affected customers had been Ken Lay, the late, disgraced former chief executive of Enron, then perhaps there would be news value, Mr. Briggs continued, but that was not the case here.

“Here there have been absolutely no targeted individuals identified,” Mr. Briggs said. “There’s just been wholesale leaking of private banking information.”

Judge White questioned lawyers about the possibility of redacting names from the documents. But Joshua Koltun, a lawyer for a graduate student whom the bank said was an “officer” of Wikileaks, warned that the names could prove to be essential information.
“That’s how you identify who’s been salting away money in accounts,” Mr. Koltun said, drawing laughter from reporters in the courtroom. (The laugher in turn drew a rebuke from Judge White, who said sternly, “I won’t tolerate that.”)

The judge and the lawyers also struggled mightily to define Wikileaks, which defines itself as an organization “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.”

Traditional entities, like companies and individuals, have citizenship status that can determine when they are subject to a particular court’s jurisdiction. But what is Wikileaks, which has not been represented by a lawyer throughout these proceedings?

“Whatever this entity is, it has not filed a response,” Judge White observed.

Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer for Public Citizen in Washington, argued that the bank had brought more publicity to the documents on Wikileaks than ever by filing its lawsuit and obtaining the order affecting the site’s domain name. Under such circumstances, Mr. Levy asked the judge, “Should you give them any relief to help them unring the bell?” The question implicitly was whether the victims of public disclosure on the Web have any shot at redress.

After hours of discussion that suggested the judge’s level of concern with reaching the correct outcome, Judge White looked unhappy that he could not think of a way to help the bank customers affected by the release of the documents. But he said that he feared the initial order suspending Wikileaks.org raised serious questions of unjustified prior restraint on free speech, and that in any event, once the documents were online, the court might well be powerless.

“Maybe that’s just the reality of the world that we live in,” Judge White said. “When this genie gets out of the bottle, that’s it.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0.../index.html?hp





Mayor of Florence Sues Wikipedia

Leonardo Domenici and his assessor Graziano Cioni against web Encyclopedia: "There slander"

The mayor of Florence, Leonardo Domenici, and the municipal assessor Graziano Cioni gave mandate to sue for defamation and slander the web encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The accused - The reason is explained in a note, it's because the "voice" of Leonardo Domenici site charge to the first citizen and his junta some measures and decisions, so it says, "have provoked criticism from citizenship "citing in particular" the trust of citizens in the parking company "Florence parking" for the cda are part of the wives of Domenici and Cioni.

A glimpse of the "critical" to Domenici reported from Wikipedia: The third point is that "Florence Parking"

The INVESTIGATION - In the note, please note that this "slander." Had already circulated in the past and that in 2004 the Public Prosecutor of the Republic of Florence had opened an investigation which led to a conviction in a trial. The voice but (when reporting this story) has not changed and is still in the form contested by Domenici. Hence the decision to proceed with the lawsuit.

The above is a Google translation of an original article in Italian.





Studios Are Trying to Stop DVDs From Fading to Black
Brooks Barnes and Matt Richtel

A winner has finally been declared in Hollywood’s high-definition DVD war. So why isn’t there more cheering?

In the 1980s, the triumph of VHS over Betamax helped develop the lucrative home entertainment market. DVDs, introduced in the 1990s, turned into an even bigger gold mine, accounting for roughly 60 percent of studio profits in recent years, analysts say. The entertainment giants have positioned high-definition DVDs as yet another blockbuster business.

But the victory of Sony’s new Blu-ray high-definition disc over a rival format, Toshiba’s HD DVD, masks a problem facing the studios: the overall decline of the DVD market. Domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research, the first annual drop in the medium’s history. Adams projects another decline in 2008, to $15.4 billion, and a similar dip for 2009.

So instead of celebrating the Blu-ray format — which remains a nascent business — the studios are scrambling to introduce an array of initiatives aimed at propping up the broader market. Some efforts, like the addition of new interactive features and changes in how DVDs are packaged and promoted, are intended to prevent further market erosion while nurturing Blu-ray.

But media companies are also introducing technology that they hope will solve the more difficult tasks of generating growth and delaying the obsolescence of DVD altogether.

DVD sales are sagging for various reasons, including a flooded marketplace and competition for leisure time. But the Internet is perhaps the biggest enemy.

Technology companies have watered down the DVD market by aggressively pushing Internet downloads. Apple’s iTunes now offers downloads of 500 movies and last month started renting titles like “Spider-Man 3.” Meanwhile, telecommunications providers like Time Warner and Comcast are pushing their faster broadband lines by promoting them as capable of delivering fast downloads.

Movie studios are fighting back by taking a page from the Internet playbook. Indeed, the centerpiece of the market rejuvenation effort is something 20th Century Fox calls “digital copy.” Fox DVDs, starting last month, now come with an additional disc holding a digital file of the title. Consumers can download the file to a computer in about five minutes — far less time than via the Internet — and then watch the movie there or transfer it to their iPod.

“This puts the DVD at the center of the digital revolution and returns the business to a growth trajectory,” said Mike Dunn, the president of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Walt Disney and Warner Brothers are all pursuing their own versions of the idea.

Most technology consultants, while not as optimistic about the DVD’s future as Mr. Dunn, are greeting studio efforts with enthusiasm. Tom Adams, the founder of Adams Media Research, said the packaging of digital files with standard DVDs “has the real potential to steal the thunder from the Internet delivery of movies.”

But John Freeman, an industry analyst, sees the effort as a stall tactic. Although digital copies are “a step forward,” he said, that step is tantamount to Hollywood admitting that its lucrative hard-goods business is growing obsolete. Today, digital files on discs; tomorrow, mass downloading straight from the Internet.

Troubles big and small started buffeting the DVD business in 2005. First, overall sales of television shows on disc started to slip as releases lost their freshness — New to DVD! “Murder She Wrote: The Complete Eighth Season” — and consumers realized they were devoting a lot of living room space to bulky boxed sets they never watched.

Next, prices started to plummet as overall demand weakened and retailers and grocery stores turned to DVDs as loss leaders. DVDs sold for an average retail price of $15.01 last year, compared with $21.95 in 2000, according to Adams.

“Wal-Mart has indicated it is getting bored with older library titles,” said Stephen Prough, the co-founder of Salem Partners, a small investment bank that specializes in film catalogs. “When there is little to no consumer demand at a $6 price point, you’ve got problems.”

And a lingering battle among various participants in DVD marketing — hardware makers, studios and retailers — over which of two competing high-definition technologies would replace standard DVDs left consumers in limbo, analysts say. Last week, Sony’s Blu-ray finally won the battle after Toshiba threw in the towel on HD DVD.

Media companies, aware of investor concerns about the future of their cash cow, say the problems are overblown. Their position in part: DVDs will continue as a giant profit center because the Internet — despite the “marketing hocus pocus” of the telecommunications industry, in the words of one Fox executive — will remain too slow for widespread downloading to catch on for the foreseeable future.

International DVD sales are still growing, studios add, and some players do not concede that domestic growth is over. Bob Chapek, president of the home entertainment unit of Walt Disney, said that blockbusters like “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” achieve large numbers even if lesser titles are struggling. He said sales of Blu-ray discs would contribute to “a vibrant growth pattern” for the category by decade’s end.

“There is nobody worried about the consumer suddenly fleeing,” said Ronald J. Sanders, president of Warner Home Video.

Blu-ray DVDs, which sell for a 25 percent premium, will without question restore momentum to the DVD market, but there is disagreement over how much and how soon. “There is still plenty of concern at Sony, Best Buy and Blockbuster that this isn’t going to achieve the same level of success that the DVD has,” said Robert Heiblim, an industry consultant with RH Associates.

Microsoft said this weekend it would stop making HD DVD players for its Xbox 360 game system. Toshiba, reflecting on its failure with HD DVD, said the industry might be overestimating interest in a new format. Jodi Sally, Toshiba America’s vice president for DVD marketing, said consumers en masse do not feel a nagging need to upgrade.

“Our biggest competitor was that consumers seem to be satisfied” with DVDs, she said.

Studio executives dismiss that view as sour grapes, pointing to their own research. Fox, for instance, estimates that sales of Blu-ray discs will soar to nearly $1 billion in 2008, from $170 million last year. “Blu-ray growth will more than replace losses from the mature business,” said Mr. Chapek of Disney.

Disney is leaving nothing to chance, mounting an aggressive campaign to persuade consumers to upgrade to Blu-ray. Among its efforts: a Blu-ray exhibit, built to look like the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland, that tours shopping malls; Blu-ray previews on its DVDs; and a $10 rebate when consumers buy certain Blu-ray movies.

Still, the studios are hedging their bets. Home video executives are racing to “refresh” the traditional DVD to raise sales.

Some, like Warner Brothers, are getting results through more marketing. Mr. Sanders said the studio was releasing more movies on DVD and on video-on-demand services at the same time; typically the two are separated to prevent undercutting either revenue stream. “By pairing up the marketing, V.O.D. and DVD both do a lot better,” he said.

Sony is trying to milk obscure titles from its library that it previously considered unsustainable on DVD, said David Bishop, president of Sony’s home entertainment unit. Last month, it said it would make certain niche movies available to consumers through Hewlett-Packard’s manufactured-on-demand service. “It allows us to sell some of the deeper catalog that retailers would not normally carry,” said Mr. Bishop.

Over-the-top packaging stunts are also helping buoy sales. “We are trying harder to create very handsome, collectible packaging that retailers are proud to put on their shelves,” said Ken Ross, general manager of CBS Home Entertainment. CBS and its distribution partner, Paramount, recently had success with a 34-disc set, priced at $199, of the entire run of “I Love Lucy.”

Mr. Ross sees no weakness in TV shows on DVD — CBS will release 15 percent more titles this year than last — but he said the company was trying to make exclusive agreements with retailers, like a recent deal with Borders for Showtime titles.

“This business certainly isn’t as easy as it used to be,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/bu...dia/25dvd.html





Blu-Ray Wins, the Internet Doesn't Care
Thomas Mennecke

Last week Toshiba, developer of the HD DVD format, finally acquiesced in the lengthy high definition format war. Sony, and its high definition Blu-Ray format, emerged victorious. Many heralded this event as not only a victory for Sony, but one for the consumer as well. The consumer, apparently befuddled by the multiple HD formats, can now rest easy as Blu-Ray is the heir apparent in the high definition war.

But those who survived the high definition format war will live only to face a new conflict, the war against online distribution.

Long before anyone knew the emerging party in the HD format war, both standard and high definition movies and TV shows were already traded online. Not too long after the advent of Napster, other P2P networks liberated their trading policies and allowed users to trade movies and TV shows. The earliest incarnations of these types of networks were Scour Exchange, iMesh, and Gnutella. Later protocols such as eMule and eventually BitTorrent took over the role of trading larger files.

Only recently, however, have high definition movies made their way online. The next generation of optical disc encryption failed to hold back individuals like Muslix64, who discovered a means to bypass the copy protection. Once this encryption was bypassed, it was only a matter of days before HD movies started showing up online. Because high definition content contains significantly more information than a standard XviD movie, many people were shocked to learn that a full length action movie might easily consume 25 gigabytes or more.

The difference in size has much to do with the actual definition of a movie file. True high definition is defined as 1,080 vertical lines of progressive scan resolution. Hybrid HD/computer monitors are slightly better than this standard, and have 1,200 lines of progressive scan resolution; however only PCs, Macs some game consoles can advantage of this higher definition format.

From there, the smaller the file size, the less “high def” the movie is. 1080i, or 1,080 vertical lines of interlaced resolution, is a lesser standard than 1080p. To save bandwidth, cable companies and TV stations interlace their broadcast. In other words, your TV or HD monitor only refreshes every other vertical line of resolution. The bandwidth hungry progressive scan format refreshes every line. Although the human eye generally can’t decipher interlace from progressive scan, it becomes more of an issue with larger screens. Interlacing is a short cut, and like a stretched HD image, small faults like this become magnified.

There’s a more manageable version of HD known as 720i and 720p. The resolution isn’t nearly a superb as 1080i/p, however it’s a dramatic step forward from standard definition television. In North America, NTSC standard definition is 320 lines of resolution. Most hour long HDTV shows are in the 720i format, which equates a file size between 1 and 2 gigabytes. This file size is generally small enough to make for a tolerable download time wise. Since Muslix64’s accomplishments, HD has become one of fastest growing facets of the file-sharing landscape. To gauge the growing popularity of HD sharing, one only needs to visit MiniNova’s statistics page to see that the NBC sci-fi drama “Heroes” in 720p HD format is the most downloaded torrent.

Remarkably enough, despite the lack of a standardized format and the astronomical price tag associated with Blu-Ray recording media, HD content delivery and trading has become an established niche in the file-sharing world. Like the digital music revolution, the activities of file-sharing community often predict the future of content distribution. In the late 90s, file-sharers renounced their dependency on the CD. Napster, and the P2P networks that came after it, forced the establishment of authorized music stores such as iTunes. Today, the importance of the CD is waning, and digital distribution is becoming the industry standard.

File-sharers today are predicting the future of HD content distribution as well. The ever useful USB flash drive is becoming the de facto transference method, and with their ample capacity, can store several 720i HDTV shows. The more expensive and capable flash drives can store 1080i/p content. However, not everything is cohesive and organized at the moment, as the technological limitations associated with USB and flash memory technology make these methods acceptable to only the more computer savvy crowd.

In fact, most people can’t take advantage of true HD content. With the average broadband speeds in the United States at a disgraceful 2 Mbits/sec, downloading and transferring HD content can take enormous periods of time. And worse yet, unless you’re running a dual core or quad core system, expecting that legacy Pentium 4 to play 1080p HD content is a pipe dream.

Technological limitations will, for now, keep the HD content revolution simmering. The average USB flash drive, broadband, and processor speed inventory is simply too slow to accommodate a market on the scale of iTunes or LimeWire. This is changing fast, and with the upcoming arrival of USB 3.0 with its fiber optic transfer rate of 4.5 Gbits/sec and dropping dual and quad core prices, consumer thirst for HD delivery will only expand.

The demand for HD content will accomplish many things. Perhaps most importantly, it will propel the US’ disgraceful broadband average from the depths of mediocrity and launch it into competition with the rest of the industrialized world. At an average speed of 2 MBits/sec, it would take at least overnight to download a 1080i/p movie - way beyond the patience of the average consumer. Until this improves, a stop-gap technology, in this instance Blu-Ray, is required in order to buy time.

The burgeoning HD content delivery mechanism is already having a noticeable impact on the consumer market. For perhaps the first time, the duration between format shifts (VHS to DVD, DVD to Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray to Internet/Flash Memory) has shrunk so much, the smart consumer can afford to wait on the sidelines. Many consumers, particularly the file-sharing community, already have the hardware infrastructure in place: a 1200p monitor, fast dual/quad core, and a fast broadband connection. This type of consumer placed little importance on the victor in the HD format war, and knows in the end, the Internet always wins.
http://www.slyck.com/story1668_BluRa...et_Doesnt_Care





Bank’s Suit May Hurt Deal for Clear Channel Unit
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced

Another buyout is in danger of collapsing — but this time because one of the banks involved is suing its own client, the private equity firm trying to do the deal.

The deal in jeopardy is Clear Channel’s $1.2 billion sale of its television unit to Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused buyout firm. Providence began to balk at the price, citing deterioration in the business and the economy, prompting a lawsuit by Clear Channel. Yet by late last week, the two sides had struck a deal in principle to lower the price by $100 million.

But now comes a new bombshell. Wachovia, one of the three banks financing the deal, is now refusing to commit. It even sued its client, Providence, in a North Carolina state court on Friday, contending that the new agreement has voided its previous commitment. Goldman Sachs and UBS, the two other banks, have committed to finance the new transaction, which now calls for Providence to borrow less money at a higher interest rate.

The lawsuit offers a new peek inside the tense negotiations between corporate America, Wall Street banks and private equity firms as they try to cope with a worsening economy and stormy credit markets.

Wachovia has an unusual role in Clear Channel, which is based in San Antonio and is the largest owner of radio stations in the United States. Even as it seeks to sell its television unit, Clear Channel is busy trying to close an even larger $25 billion buyout of the rest of the company. Wachovia, based in Charlotte, N.C., had committed to financing both deals.

Wachovia’s jitteriness is not unique, as Wall Street banks fear worsening problems in loans to private equity firms. Over the last two years, banks including Wachovia had queued up to lend hundreds of billions of dollars for buyouts, reaping lucrative fees along the way.

But the near-freeze in the credit markets has made it almost impossible for banks to resell those loans, which now trade at about 85 cents on the dollar. Banks fear that they will have to take large write-downs if they are forced to keep those loans on their books, at a time when many have already taken sizable hits from their bets on subprime mortgages.

Still, while some lenders have refused to finance already announced deals — the buyout of the mortgage lender PHH fell through last month after JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers backed away — it is rare to see a bank turn around and sue its own client.

In the case of the Providence deal, Wachovia has committed to loan $450 million of the $1.2 billion purchase price. If Wachovia causes the deal to collapse, it would be held responsible for a $45 million breakup fee.

Some people inside the deal speculate that Wachovia may be seeking to create an escape hatch from the larger buyout. But it is unclear how Wachovia will accomplish that: The $25 billion deal is not contingent on the sale of the television stations.

Wachovia runs a high risk by suing its own client and killing the television stations deal. As part of financing the larger $25 billion deal, it also agreed to help finance a bridge loan if the smaller deal fell apart.

It may also risk damage to its reputation by turning on its own client. Never one of the biggest players in the leveraged loan market, Wachovia may see its business dry up if potential clients see the bank as a potential turncoat when things go bad.

A hearing on the Wachovia lawsuit is scheduled on Tuesday. Wachovia has hired Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, a Charlotte, N.C. firm, as its legal counsel.

Providence and Clear Channel are still hoping to strike a new deal for the television stations as soon as Monday, with UBS and Goldman Sachs still providing financing. But it is unclear whether the deal can close without Wachovia’s support.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/bu...ia/25deal.html





Judge on Privacy: Computer Code Trumps the Law
Liam Tung

Australian High Court Judge Justice Kirby says computer code is more potent than the law--and that legislators are powerless to do anything about it.

Technology has outpaced the legal system's ability to regulate its use in matters of privacy and fair use rights, said Kirby, speaking Thursday night at an Internet Industry Association (IIA) event.

Kirby said the judicial system has faced difficulties in coping with changes the Internet and computing have brought.

While the soon-to-be-reviewed Privacy Act has incorporated key privacy principles such as "usage limitation"--which states that data collected about an individual cannot be used for other purposes, except by the approval of the law or the person's consent--Google and Yahoo have rendered that principle defunct, Kirby said.

"It was a good moral and ethical principle to keep people's control over the usage that was made of the information...And then along came Google and Yahoo," said Kirby.

"And when the new technology came, there was a massive capacity to range through vast amounts of information. The notion that you could control this was a conundrum," he said, adding that because the technology is considered so useful, privacy concerns have been cast aside.

The challenges that technology present continue to beat even the best legal minds in the world, Kirby said.

Despite this, lawmakers should attempt to implement checks and balances. Without them, corporations pose an even graver problem for humanity.

"To do nothing is to make a decision to let others go and take technology where they will. There are even more acute questions arising in biotechnology and informatics, such as the hybridization of the human species and other species. Points of no return can be reached," he said.

However, technology has already allowed corporations to beat the legal system, said Kirby, citing the case Sony brought against Australian businessman, Eddy Stevens, in 2005 for modifying Sony PlayStations.

Despite the High Court ruling in favor of Stevens, the decision was later overturned by the government after the U.S. government pressed it to make legislative amendments to protect Sony's right to restrict where consumers buy its software from.

"We are moving to a point in the world where more and more law will be expressed in its effective way, not in terms of statutes solidly enacted by the parliament...but in the technology itself--code," said Kirby.
http://www.news.com/Judge-on-privacy...3-6231713.html





Yahoo CEO Yang Seeks Release OF 2 Jailed Pro-Democracy Journalists
John Boudreau

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang is asking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to help win the release of two jailed pro-democracy journalists who accused the Sunnyvale search giant of handing over e-mail records to Chinese authorities that led to their imprisonment.

In a letter to Rice, who is traveling to China next week, Yang asked that she "actively pursue" the freedom of Shi Tao, a business journalist who was arrested in November 2004, and Wang Xiaoning, an editor who was arrested in September 2002.

In his letter, dated Thursday, Yang wrote, "I am writing to urge your assistance in alleviating the plight of political dissidents who have expressed their views over the Internet in China, and in addressing the related challenges confronting U.S. companies like Yahoo that invest in global markets."

In November, Yahoo settled a lawsuit against it by the two imprisoned Chinese journalists, who were each given 10-year prison sentences. The company also said it would work to free the two. It set up a human rights fund that will provide humanitarian and legal aid to dissidents who have been arrested for expressing their views online.

Yang, who co-founded Yahoo but was not CEO at the time of the arrests of Shi and Wang, was personally involved with the settlement. He apologized to the journalists' families during a November congressional hearing, at which he and his company came under withering criticism.

"Yahoo deeply regrets the circumstances

that led to the imprisonment of individuals in China - including Mr. Shi Tao and Mr. Wang Xiaoning - simply due to the exercise of their right to free expression," the Taiwan-born Yang said in the letter.

Colin Maclay, managing director for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, called Yang's letter "very genuine."

"They went to China early and didn't think it through," he said. Now, Maclay added, "I believe the CEO, and the organization, is committed to doing the right thing."

He and other academics, as well as human rights activists, are working with Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, United Kingdom-based mobile phone company Vodafone Group and investment groups to develop a code of conduct for operating in countries that censor Internet activity.

While Yang said Yahoo is talking with high-level Chinese officials, their influence can never approach that of the State Department, Maclay said.

"The U.S. government has a very big stick," he said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





EU May Begin Treating 'Net Censorship as a Trade Barrier
Eric Bangeman

The European Parliament recently passed a proposal to treat Internet censorship by repressive regimes as a trade barrier. The proposal, submitted by Jules Maaten of the rightist Dutch VVD party, passed on a 571-38 vote. Maaten describes it as an "unusual, but effective way" to promote freedom of expression on the Internet.

The initiative targets countries that have enacted heavy restrictions what their citizens can do and see online. First and foremost on the list is China and its "great firewall." The Chinese government is well known for blocking certain phrases and web sites from view within its borders, and has also turned its attention to RSS feeds. The country also "encourages" bloggers to register with the government.

"The 'Great Chinese Firewall' should be seen as an international trade barrier," Maaten said according to Livre. "In addition to American companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, European Internet companies like Wanadoo, Telecom Italia, and France Telecom have to unwillingly censor their services in authoritarian states."

The American companies named by Maaten have been criticized for their willingness to go along with the Chinese government's censorship requirements. In early 2006, executives from those companies were hauled before Congress to answer questions about their business practices in China, while Yahoo has apologized for withholding information from congressional investigators looking into the company's disclosure of dissident e-mails. Amnesty International has also been critical of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo's dealings in China.

If adopted, Maaten's proposal would require the EU to classify any Internet censorship as a barrier to trade, and would require that the issue be raised in any trade negotiations. Economic sanctions and trade restrictions have been used in the past as means of getting countries to change their policies, but this is one of the first proposals to tie trade to 'Net censorship.

The measure will now go to the European Council for consideration. The Council can either adopt the proposal as passed by Parliament or send it back with further amendments.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...e-barrier.html





Teachers Strike Back at Students' Online Pranks

Students are increasingly facing lawsuits and expulsions for targeting their teachers online.
Patrik Jonsson

Tech-savvy teenagers are increasingly paying a heavy price – including criminal arrest – for parodying their teachers on the Internet.

Tired of fat jokes and false accusations of teacher-lounge partying or worse, teachers and principals are fighting back against digital ridicule and slander by their students – often with civil lawsuits and long-term suspensions or permanent expulsions.

A National School Boards Association (NSBA) study says that as many as one-third of American teens regularly post inappropriate language or manipulated images on the Web. Most online pranks deride other students. But a NSBA November 2006 survey reported 26 percent of teachers and principals being targeted.

"Kids have been pulling pranks on teachers and principals since there have been schools in the US, but now there's an edge to it – the tone and tenor of some of these attacks cross the line," says Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina.

In the growing backlash against these cybergoofs, however, real-world norms of propriety are being pitted against the uncertain jurisdictions of the Digital Age. A new test may be emerging on how far online lampooning can go, say First Amendment experts – and to what extent schools can control off-campus pranks.

Cracking down on online bullying

Currently, 45 states have so-called cyberstalking laws and 11 prohibit cyberbullying. Until now, the concern has largely been for students, 80 percent of whom reported Internet bullying in 2006, according to NBTA.

After the suicide of a Missouri girl who was bullied online by an adult, even small towns have begun to crack down. Dardenne Prairie, Mo., where the girl lived, raised the penalty for cyberharassment to a misdemeanor – the highest municipal charge allowed by state law.

"[W]e're starting to look at [bullying] from a whole other angle," says Bob Menichino, a Dardennes Prairie alderman in a phone interview. "People can't just say, 'Sorry, it was a joke,' anymore."

But teachers can be particularly vulnerable to online attacks, too, because they are in positions of authority. Legally, they are not usually considered public persons, however, and are thus not fair game under US libel laws, says Regina Bartholomew, the general counsel for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools.

Still, in many cases, "the damage is already done by the time the teacher hears about it," says Eddie Davis, president of the North Carolina teachers' association.

In the so-called "Teacher Sux" case in Pennsylvania, for example, a high school student put up a website about a teacher with threats and comments such as "she shows off her fat ... legs."

The lawsuit against the student said that after viewing the web page, the teacher felt unable "to go out of the house and mingle with crowds."

Few cities have gone as far as Charlotte, N.C., in cracking down on online attacks against teachers. Last August, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools hired cyber-crimes expert Det. Kenny Lynch to deal with the growing number of complaints.

In one case, a teacher reported receiving a large number of propositional phone calls and e-mails from gay men after a student posted the teacher's name and contact information on a gay website.

Another incident involved a parent filming a teacher's backside during a class skit and then posting the clip on the Internet to the strains of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." The site was removed and no charges were filed.

Last month, Charlotte became the second North Carolina school district to criminally charge a student for creating a website that accused a teacher of criminal behavior including pedophilia. Last year, Mooresville, N.C., authorities had arrested two students for making threats and racial slurs online about a principal.

"The days of girls keeping things in a diary are over," says Detective Lynch. "Do I think these kids had any intent to cause harm to the teacher? No, I don't think so. But there's been teachers that have left the profession or lost their jobs because of lies that have been told about them."

Laws may hurt free speech rights

North Carolina's cyberstalking law makes it illegal to electronically communicate false statements about "indecent conduct or criminal conduct ... with the intent to abuse, annoy, threaten, terrify, harass or embarrass."

Critics, however, contend that words like "annoy" and "embarrass" are too broad and may infringe upon First Amendment protections of parody.

"What I'm not seeing is school officials approaching this in an adult manner," says Vic Walczak, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Pennsylvania. "They're approaching it in an authoritarian fashion...."

Critics also note that courts have ruled that students are culpable for off-campus expression if it disrupts the teacher's ability to teach. In a Connecticut case where a disgruntled student council member called the principal a vulgarity on her blog, the student's speech may have offended, but showed no evidence of causing disruption at school, says Nancy Willard, author of "Cyber-bullying and Cyber Threats." Still, the principal barred the student from running the next year.

Sometimes, the students are "clearly engaging in irresponsible behavior, but other times it's pretty darn clear that they have either an incompetent staff member or a staff member who has been bullying them," says Ms. Willard.

Are schools overstepping legal bounds when they punish students for online pranks? "That's a difficult question that the US Supreme Court has never directly answered," says David Hudson, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C.

The distinction is likely to become more important as state legislatures try to figure out how to protect students and teachers from cruel online buffoonery, while respecting free speech. Says Lamar Bailey, a research analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, "On the surface, it seems simple. But it can get a little dicey."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0225/p01s02-usgn.html





Photo Tech Complicates Child-Porn Cases
Anick Jesdanun

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins' office.

They are sent by police and prosecutors who hope Collins and her 11 analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children can verify that the graphic pictures are real, not computer-generated. When they can't, officials sometimes turn to outside experts.

All this is being done - at an annual cost in the millions of dollars collectively in child-pornography cases alone - as software like Photoshop makes it easier to fake photos and as juries become more skeptical about what they see.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors' minds about the images' authenticity.

Prosecutors still generally prevail, but "this has certainly created an additional burden," said Thomas Kerle of the Massachusetts State Police. "I can say that unequivocally, it has made the prosecution of these types of cases more difficult. It takes ... resources I think could be better applied to investigating" more cases.

Drew Oosterbaan, who heads the U.S. Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, said prosecutors sometimes submit only photos they can easily verify because outside experts can be expensive - with travel, hotels and consulting fees, along with possible delays.

"This can affect the sentence the defendant gets," he said. "Before (the 2002 ruling) we would generally charge all the images."

Oosterbaan added that although defense lawyers have the right - and duty - to challenge evidence, they are doing so without "any shred of evidence there are wholly computer-generated images being generally circulated and passed off as real children out there."

And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one.

"I feel that pretty much we can tell the difference right now," said Karl Youngblood of the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. "How much longer that's going to last, I don't know with the technology going at the rate it's going."

Of course, there's a cost to defendants as well - sometimes more so because federal law limits where and when the defense may review images to restrict their distribution, meaning experts must often travel with expensive equipment to a police lab in another city.

"If something becomes more difficult for the government to prove, so be it. They have the burden of proof," said First Amendment lawyer Louis Sirkin, lead counsel in the challenge that led to the 2002 Supreme Court ruling.

Child pornography is illegal in the United States, but the Supreme Court in 2002 struck down on free-speech grounds a 1996 federal ban on material that "appears to be" a child in a sexually explicit situation. That ruling covers computer-generated images, though morphing - such as the grafting of a child's school picture onto a naked body - remains illegal.

Collins' Child Victim Identification Program in Alexandria, Va., grew out of that ruling. After officials submit seized photos, the center uses software and visual inspections to look for matches. It can usually verify that children in some or all of the images are known and real.

The program, which costs about $1 million a year to run, now has about 1,300 children in its database, up from 20 in 2002. Staff grew from just Collins then to 11 full-time analysts who now work under her. The program reviewed 5 million images last year, up from about 450,000 in 2003, the program's first full year.

Because of the graphic nature of the images, a psychologist visits each week, and analysts must undergo counseling at least quarterly.

"Not everybody can do it," said Raymond Smith, a longtime investigator who oversees child-exploitation cases at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. "You have to be able to come to grips with seeing children be victimized and abused. It can tear you up, (but) through your efforts you are identifying the people that hurt these children."

When the center cannot make a match, prosecutors can turn to outside experts. Sometimes, it's a pediatrician who can say a real child has characteristics matching those seen in the photo. Other times it's a computer expert who can talk about how difficult it is to produce images and video of that quality.

Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College professor who has testified for the prosecution in some cases, said he has been getting more inquiries about authenticity - not only for child-pornography cases but also civil lawsuits questioning medical images in malpractice cases or signatures in contract disputes. News organizations have also looking for ways to authenticate photos.

"Because so many people get photographic fakes in their (electronic) mailboxes, to the average juror it resonates," he said.

The challenges can be costly, even if a case never goes to trial - the majority end in plea agreements.

Farid said he charges up to $25,000 a year for software he produced to look for signs of tampering, such as inconsistencies in shadows. He also charges as much as tens of thousands of dollars to work on a case.

Even when there is a match and an expert isn't needed, a prosecutor must seek out the detective who initially identified a child for the center. That detective must often be flown in and be ready to testify if the defense raises a challenge. In one case in Portland, Maine, a Russian detective couldn't be reached, so the prosecutor had to spend $5,000 on an expert anyway. Trials get postponed if a key witness has a scheduling conflict.

Sam Guiberson, a defense attorney who specializes in technology and digital evidence, said challenges to evidence are to be expected, digital or not.

"Every good trial lawyer is always going to subject every part of his adversary's exhibits to that sort of scrutiny," Guiberson said.

Kebin Haller, deputy director of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, said that in most cases, a large quantity of images are seized such that enough hold up.

How much proof a prosecutor needs in child-pornography cases can vary from region to region and even from judge to judge. Recent federal appellate rulings have eased the burden on prosecutors, essentially saying that in lieu of definitive evidence, they can let jurors make up their own minds about whether an image is real or computer-generated.

Many prosecutors, though, don't want to take that chance and would rather submit proof.

"It's difficult to prove these are real children," said Mary Leary, a Catholic University law professor who previously worked on child-abuse and child-pornography cases. "Is the defense exploiting this? Absolutely they are."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Spot the 'Invisible' Men and Women in Artist's Amazing Photographs

In the natural world, the chameleon blends in perfectly with its background.

In the urban jungle, Desiree Palmen decided to attempt the same visual deception.

And as these pictures show, the effect is amazing.

Miss Palmen, a 44-year-old Dutch artist, uses a method that requires a huge amount of effort and attention to detail.

She makes cotton suits and paints the camouflage on by hand, painstakingly matching it to the chosen background. Either she or a model then poses in the suit in the chosen place.

The scenes are photographed and filmed and then put on display.

"People always react strongly when they see my work," she said.

"They have mixed reactions: confusion, surprise and interest."

She added: "Mostly people like the idea of wearing garments that make them invisible."

It takes hours for her to paint the suits. First she takes photographs of the scene then, back in the studio, she meticulously transfers the detail on to the cotton suit with acrylic paints.

The match of colour, texture, light and hue is extraordinarily accurate but the artist remains modest.

"It's never perfect," she said. "But when it works that's enough for me. I like the fact people can see it's a real person in a suit and not a fake digital image."

She regularly displays her works on the streets of Jerusalem, Rotterdam and Berlin.

She has produced exterior and interior shots - in the latter she blends in with a bookcase, a desk and a flight of stairs.

She got the idea for her unusual art from the increasing use of "Big Brother" surveillance.

She said: "I'd like people to consider what it means to let the government control our daily lives.

"When we are controlled we hand over our individual responsibilities to the state. I wanted to make a suit for the non-criminal citizen whose house is being watched 24 hours by street surveillance cameras. I'm also responding to a wish to disappear."

Miss Palmen, who studied sculpture at The Academy of Art in Maastricht, sells her pictures for around £1,500.

She has enjoyed success at dozens of exhibitions around Europe but has yet to bring her work to Britain.

She finds that children are often fascinated by her work.

"There was one little boy in Jerusalem who kept coming back to the camouflaged figure over and over again," she said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770





Did Adolf Hitler Draw Disney Characters?

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany.

He found coloured cartoons of the characters Bashful and Doc from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio as he appeared in the 1940 Disney film.

Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power. While there was no independent confirmation yesterday that the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White, the classic animated adaptation of a German fairy tale, and to have viewed it in his private cinema.

Mr Hakvaag, who said he had performed tests on the paintings which suggested that they dated from 1940, said: "I am 100 per cent sure that these are drawings by Hitler. If one wanted to make a forgery, one would never hide it in the back of a picture, where it might never be discovered."

The initials on the sketches, and the signature on the painting, matched other copies of Hitler's handwriting, he claimed.

"Hitler had a copy of Snow White," he said. "He thought this was one of the best movies ever made."

Discoveries of Nazi-era memorabilia have repeatedly turned out to be mistaken or the result of a hoax. However, art attributed to Hitler continues to sell at auction, even if its provenance is far from complete.

Nineteen watercolours and two sketches said to be by Hitler were sold in Britain two years ago for a total of £118,000.

The auction firm Jefferys said the seller did everything possible to authenticate the works.

The pictures of cottages and rural scenes were found in a farmhouse in Belgium and were believed to have been painted while Hitler was a young soldier in the country during the First World War.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...whitler123.xml





In Los Angeles, Oscar Statues Become a Popular Export
David Carr

The morning after the Academy Awards dawned here with a realization: There will be a lot of gold leaving Los Angeles in the next few days.

Javier Bardem, Marion Cotillard, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton are each taking statues across the Atlantic. Oscars for art direction, makeup and costume design all went to people for whom the United States is a passport stamp.

And even some of the Americans were from far away: Joel and Ethan Coen, who generally come here only under duress, will be going back to their home in New York with three Oscars for their “No Country for Old Men,” which won for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. So will one of the movie’s producers, Scott Rudin, who joined them for his own victory lap onstage.

The libretto for Sunday night’s Academy Awards was written in many tongues, and even the melody that went with it carried a faraway tone. The lustrous industrial pedigree of Alan Mencken and Disney had three songs from “Enchanted” in the running, but all were trumped by a pair of footloose buskers, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, one Irish, one Czech, for “Falling Slowly” from “Once,” an Irish film that was made on a budget that might pay the craft services bill on a studio picture for a week.

On Monday, as it watched all the loot leave town, the industry that bestows it could not be blamed for asking the same question that Butch Cassidy put to the Sundance Kid about their relentless pursuers: “Who are these guys?” It was a decent-to-good evening inside the Kodak Theater: the academy and Jon Stewart shook off the conflict of the writers’ strike and were game to put on a conservative show. But a huge, throbbing mechanism of Los Angeles agents, producers, and corner-office folk went mostly unthanked and unrewarded.

For the last couple of years, Hollywood has managed to fend off several attempted kidnappings. Two years ago it looked as if a posse of small movies from the East Coast would leave town with their hands full, but “Crash” passed them all on the freeway: a Hollywood movie about Angeleno concerns. Last year, same thing: “The Departed” did exactly what you’d expect of a movie with Big Stars and Big Box Office, winning four Oscars, including best picture.

Not so this year. For the first time since 1964, when Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova captured all four best actor slots, American actors couldn’t get a seat at their own table. In a more curious twist — from which Ms. Cotillard was exempt in her twirl as Édith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” — foreigners were awarded for inhabiting particularly American archetypes. Mr. Day-Lewis did not portray just a rising titan in “There Will Be Blood,” after all: his role was early American capitalism itself. Ms. Swinton was more contemporary in “Michael Clayton,” but it was an equally dark-hearted version of same. And Mr. Bardem won for a role in a movie based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the Boswell of the American soul.

American actresses who were raised to think that impossible glamour and demure comportment were the surest routes to the top must have watched in amazement as Ms. Swinton was handed the crown. With a shock of spiky red hair; a rich, complicated private life; and a heavy dress that looked snipped from the stage curtain, Ms. Swinton, a consistently brilliant actress, seemed more like an ancient Druid than a movie star.

“It was a huge victory for the Celts,” she said, cradling her statue at the Governors Ball after the ceremony. “Spain, France, England, we all served as a reminder that it was Europeans that invented Hollywood in the first place.”

The Governors Ball after the Oscars ceremony is a gigantic industry tree house. No one comes for the food, although it was lavish and abundant. You show up, instead, to claim a place in the hierarchy and to check status. A quick walk around the room showed a democratic dispersal of hardware and congratulations given and received in all manner of accents and idioms.

Some of that international hegemony — or absence of parochialism, depending on your perspective — goes all the way to the top. Daniel Battsek, chief executive of Miramax, and Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, are both British and both in the thick of things. This year Miramax had a piece of “No Country,” “There Will Be Blood,” and “Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” And Fox Searchlight may not have won the ultimate prize, but in each of the last two years it came up with movies — “Juno” and “Little Miss Sunshine” — that have made a lot of money and were also around for the Oscar dance.

At the Governors Ball, Sid Ganis, the president of the academy, seemed thrilled that he and his crew had acquitted themselves against the tough circumstance of a recently settled writers’ strike. He said he wasn’t about to overanalyze the results.

“It was a great reminder that we are an international organization, that we want to reflect the best in cinema from all over the world,” he said. “It would be nice to have a few Americans in there, but we are extremely proud of the academy’s choices.”

Which is interesting in itself. The academy has long been accused of a provincialism woven with leaden taste, but its members proved this year that they will vote for what they perceive to be great work, regardless of its lineage or commercial impact.

(Indeed, major studios really only hit it big in the tech categories, with “The Bourne Ultimatum” winning for sound editing and mixing, and film editing.)

The version of Hollywood that we all think of when we think of the Oscar show was mostly relegated to those who served as presenters. George Clooney — crown prince and class clown alike — was up for best actor but focused on his presenter duties, presenting 80 years of Oscar glory.

“I’m not going up there for an award today,” Mr. Clooney said on the red carpet before the show. “This is Daniel’s year.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/mo...on/26bagg.html





Pakistan Blocks YouTube for 'Blasphemous' Content: Officials
AFP

Pakistan has ordered all Internet service providers to block the YouTube website for containing "blasphemous" content and material considered offensive to Islam, officials said Sunday. An inter-ministerial committee has decided to block YouTube because it contained "blasphemous content, videos and documents," a government official told AFP.

"The site will remain blocked till further orders," he said.

Other officials said the site had been blocked because it contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month.

One major service provider, Micronet, said in an email to subscribers that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority had directed all ISPs to block access to YouTube "for containing blasphemous web content/movies."

"Meanwhile Internet users can write to YouTube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this website," the email said.

At least 17 Danish newspapers republished the controversial drawing, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after Danish police said they had foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.

In the latest in a series of demonstrations over the cartoons in Pakistan, hundreds of hardline Islamists in the southern city of Karachi torched effigies of the Danish prime minister and the cartoonist on Sunday, witnesses said.

"Death to cartoonist," the demonstrators chanted before burning the effigies, as well as US and Danish flags, outside a mosque.

Supporters of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan's small opposition party also staged a small protest in Karachi.

In the southwestern city of Quetta, activists from a hardline Islamic organisation burned a Danish flag. Witnesses said they also demanded the government close Danish missions in Islamabad and end diplomatic relations.

"It is a deliberate attempt to malign Islam and hurt the feelings of Muslims," Habib Shah Kerani told the protesters from the Anjman-e-Islam (Organisation of Islam) group.

Some 12 cartoons published in September 2005 by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper sparked bloody riots in the Islamic world.

Five people died in Pakistan in February 2006 during protests against the cartoons, while a Pakistani cleric offered a reward of one million dollars and a new car for anyone who killed any of the cartoonists.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/08022...ternet_youtube





Insecure Routing Redirects YouTube to Pakistan
Iljitsch van Beijnum

On Sunday, YouTube became unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. No "sorry we're down" or cutesy kitten-with-screwdriver page, nothing. What happened was that packets sent to YouTube were flowing to Pakistan. Which was curious, because the Pakistan government had just instituted a ban on the popular video sharing site. What apparently happened is that Pakistan Telecom routed the address block that YouTube's servers are into a "black hole" as a simple measure to filter access to the service. However, this routing information escaped from Pakistan Telecom to its ISP PCCW in Hong Kong, which propagated the route to the rest of the world. So any packets for YouTube would end up in Pakistan Telecom's black hole instead.

On the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list, where many engineers in charge of Internet routing hang out, the consensus is that this was an accident. Only one or two people suggest that it may be a malicious act, possibly a trial of something bigger. So why was this incident so devastating to YouTube's reachability?

Originally, IP addressing was set up for three different classes of users: classes A, B, and C. Class A users, such as the original ARPANET, got an address block of 16777216 addresses so they could connect millions of systems to the Internet. Class B users, such as universities, got 65536 addresses. Class C users, such as businesses with only a small number of Internet-connected systems, got 256 addresses. Obviously, these classes often didn't fit well with the number of addresses needed, which led to a lot of waste. So in the early 1990s, a new system called Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) was created so that IP addresses could be used much more efficiently.

CIDR allows address blocks to be given out in power of two blocks, such as 256 (/24), 512 (/23), 1024 (/22), and so on. The number after the slash indicates how many of the 32 address bits are "network" bits, the remaining bits are used to number hosts. So /24 is 24 network bits and 8 bits to number hosts, which allows for 256 addresses. An interesting side effect of CIDR is that a particular IP address can now fall within multiple address ranges. For instance, a router could have both 10.0.0.0/8 and 10.10.0.0/16 in its routing table. Then, if a packet for 10.10.10.10 arrives, how should it be forwarded? The answer is: longest match first. The smallest address block, with the largest number after the slash, takes precedence.

In the case of YouTube and Pakistan Telecom, YouTube injected the address block 208.65.152.0/22 (208.65.152.0 - 208.65.155.255) in the Internet's routing tables, while Pakistan Telecom advertised the 208.65.153.0/24 (208.65.153.0 - 208.65.153.255) block. So even though YouTube's routing information was still there, packets would flow towards Pakistan Telecom because of the longest match first rule.

This vulnerability has been known for a long time, and smaller-scale accidents of this nature happen at regular intervals. But so far, efforts within the IETF to make the Border Gateway Protocol, which governs Internet routing, more robust against this type of accident (or attack) haven't produced any results yet. There are routing databases around the world where network operators can register their IP address blocks for the purpose of generating filters automatically, but since everyone has to register their own address blocks, and many people don't, the filters generated from these databases often do more harm than good. This means that the only thing that prevents things like this from happening are the filters that everyone sets up for their own address blocks, and filters that ISPs apply to their BGP-capable customers manually.

A likely result of this incident is that more network operators will start to announce their IP address blocks as a collection of /24 blocks. /24 is the smallest address range that is widely accepted between ISPs, so announcing the /24 yourself provides some protection against others doing the same. However, the problem with that is that it increases the routing tables in routers, which exacerbates problems from global routing table growth that already exist.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-pakistan.html





Pakistan Lifts Curbs on YouTube, Says 'Blasphemous' Video Clip has Been Removed
AP

Pakistan's telecommunications regulator said Tuesday that it had lifted restrictions imposed on YouTube over an anti-Islamic video clip, but rejected blame for a cut in access to the Web site in many countries over the weekend.

The authority told Pakistani Internet service providers to restore access to the site on Tuesday afternoon after the removal of a video featuring a Dutch lawmaker who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

Officials here have described the YouTube clip as "very blasphemous" and warned that it could fan religious fanaticism and hatred of the West in Pakistan, where the government already faces a growing Islamic insurgency.

But Pakistan says it did not want to interfere with access to YouTube outside Pakistan.

"We are not hackers. Why would we do that?" Shahzada Alam Malik, head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told AP Television News. YouTube's wider problem were likely caused by a "malfunction" elsewhere, he said.

The lawmaker said his film criticizing the Quran will be completed this week and criticized Pakistan for its moves to block the clip.

"It's far from a true democracy," the lawmaker, Geert Wilders, told The Associated Press. "A real democracy must be able to bear some criticism."

He said in a telephone interview with that his short film is in the final stages of

Telecommunication Authority spokeswoman Nabiha Mahmood said attempts to access the offending clip on Tuesday afternoon brought up only a message explaining that it had been removed on ethical grounds.

She said the telecom regulator had posted a complaint through the Web site - a facility open to any registered user - but had not been in contact with the administrators of YouTube.com, which is owned by Google, Inc.

The authority wanted to restrict the site only in Pakistan but the move inadvertently cut access for most of the world's Internet users for up to two hours on Sunday, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet.

Spokesman Ricardo Reyes said YouTube was pleased to confirm that the site was again accessible in Pakistan. YouTube said Monday that the cut was caused by a network in Pakistan. Reyes would not comment further on the cause of the global outage, but said the company is continuing to look at ways to prevent recurrences.

Todd Underwood, a senior manager at Renesys Corp, a U.S. company that tracks the pathways of the Internet, said a Pakistani telecommunications company complied with the block by directing requests for YouTube videos to a "black hole."

The problem was that the company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube, leading requests from across the Internet to same dead end, Underwood said.

"This I would say could be an accident, or could be some technical defect or malfunction," Malik said. "We never wanted to do that and I don't think our technical people have done it."

Pakistani officials want to prevent a repeat of the violent anti-Western protests in early 2006 after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad regarded by many Muslims as offensive.

The upper house of Pakistan's parliament on Tuesday passed a resolution condemning the reprinting of the cartoons this month in Danish newspapers.

On Tuesday, some 300 students rallied at a university in the central city of Multan, carrying banners denouncing Denmark, the United States and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf - the latest in a series of small protests held by Islamic students in Pakistan.

While a raft of other videos featuring Wilders would remain visible to Pakistani Internet surfers, Mahmood said the one which was removed had been "totally anti-Quranic ... very blasphemous."

She said it promoted Wilders' upcoming movie, but provided no detail of its content.

Abdullah Riar, Pakistan's minister for information technology and telecommunications, said authorities worried that Islamic hard-liners would seize on the clip.

He said the cause of protecting free speech in Pakistan was better served by preventing confrontation between Muslims and the West than allowing the clip to be shown, despite the publicity generated by the temporary ban.

"We are already in the spotlight on the issue of intolerance and extremism and terrorism and this is something that somebody is doing by design to excite and insinuate Islamic sentiments," Riar said.

He said the unintended effects were "very unfortunate. We have nothing against the YouTube site itself."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Struggling to Squelch an Internet Rumor
Samuel G. Freedman

Prof. Jeremy D. Popkin returned to his office at the University of Kentucky on Feb. 19 after teaching a lesson about Vichy France in his course on the Holocaust. During its 30 years on the curriculum, the class has grown perpetually popular, with 60 applicants vying for half as many seats. The university has even created a Judaic Studies program.

Yet, when Professor Popkin opened his e-mail that day, he was informed that his class did not exist. “This week, the University of Kentucky removed the Holocaust from its school curriculum,” the message stated, “because it offended the Muslim population, which claims it never occurred.” All faculty members’ e-mail addresses from the history department were listed among the message’s recipients.

Over the past year, faculty members and administrators at the university’s main campus in Lexington have collectively received thousands of e-mail messages like this one, repeating the same baseless accusation — that pressure from Muslims had led the university to drop its Holocaust course. Like many who have sent these messages, the writer added her own preface to the one that appeared in Professor Popkin’s mailbox, writing in part: “I cannot see how you faculty can go to work each day and face a generation of young adults that will be lied to even more than my generation. What next? Are we going to rewrite the facts of 9/11 so that they fit the Middle Eastern beliefs? This is simply shameful, and I am disgusted by it.”

Any university trades on its reputation, and in recent years, Kentucky has been trying to improve its own. It has vigorously deepened its academic programs and added to its faculty, in hopes of raising its national standing and proving itself to be more than just a perennial basketball powerhouse. The last thing it needs, university officials say, is this smear on its good name.

“Initially, you get a couple of e-mails that on the face of it are ludicrous,” said Jay Blanton, executive director of public relations and marketing for the university. “We thought, surely people aren’t going to take this preposterous rumor seriously. And then you see it doesn’t die, it persists.”

The university’s president, Lee T. Todd Jr., expressed similar consternation.

“I understand quite well the power of the Internet,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Information flows instantaneously without respect to somewhat arbitrary borders of geography or nation state. That’s a positive. In this instance, though, the University of Kentucky is experiencing the flip side of that power — the negative impact of an unfounded rumor that flows across a world seemingly without check. It’s disconcerting, although perhaps understandable in that context, that so many people would be the victim of a rumor so patently and obviously without merit.”

The false e-mail messages began in late April last year. A few weeks earlier, The Daily Telegraph in London had published an article online about a national commission in Britain recommending the best ways to teach difficult subject matter like the Holocaust. A subsequent article, also in The Telegraph, mentioned a school in Birmingham, England, that had dropped the Holocaust from study for fear that it would incite anti-Semitic comments from Muslim students.

As those news reports made the e-mail rounds, one or several or many readers apparently mistook the suffix for British e-mail addresses, “uk,” not to mean “United Kingdom,” but the “University of Kentucky.” The first version of the diatribe against the university began coursing through cyberspace, urging recipients to keep forwarding it until it reached “40 million people worldwide.” And the message began pouring into various computers at Kentucky, including those of the president, provost and dean of arts and sciences.

A rumor like this, said Kumble R. Subbaswamy, a physicist who is provost of the university, “can cause great problems.”

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he continued. “It’s Kafkaesque. Just when you think you’ve tamped it down, it shows up on another Listserv.”

THE initial deluge of e-mail messages subsided by early last summer. By November, however, a slightly different incarnation began arriving in ever greater numbers. At that point, Mr. Blanton drafted a press release refuting the rumor and sent it throughout the educational and general media, as well as to individuals who had sent in complaints.

A few significant media outlets did their own coverage of the rumor. Yet despite articles in The Jerusalem Post and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and an especially thorough investigation by the Web site snopes.com — and even despite a statement of Kentucky’s innocence from the Anti-Defamation League — people kept on forwarding the message.

One can only speculate why. Mr. Blanton said he wondered if “people buy into stereotypes,” that Kentuckians are a bunch of ignorant hicks who would believe any rumor.

Professor Popkin suggested that the international visibility of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who has called the Holocaust a “myth” and sponsored a conference of people who denied the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime — may have somehow given undeserved authenticity to the idea that the university would stop teaching the course. And among some advocates of Jewish American causes, mostly but not entirely on the political right, there is a common view of universities as being inherently hostile to Israel and Jews, again making it seem possible that Kentucky would have dropped the class.

Meanwhile, the e-mail messages put blame for something that never happened on people like Yahya Ahmed, a senior at Kentucky and president of the school’s chapter of the Muslim Student Association. “Something of this nature is not in our nature,” he said. “We’ve tried to promote unity on this campus, and this is detrimental.”

Mr. Ahmed has not taken Professor Popkin’s course. Then again, he has found other ways to educate himself. Last month, he went on a study trip to Israel. While in Jerusalem, he visited Yad Vashem, the memorial museum of the Holocaust.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/ed...education.html





The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required
Carl Zimmer

Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.

It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.

While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. “It’s going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along,” said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.

Other experts not involved in the project hail it as tremendously promising. “I certainly think it is a great idea,” said Jody Hey, a biologist at Rutgers University.

Yet a number of researchers wonder if it will reach its final goal. The encyclopedia is not the first attempt to catalog every species on the planet, and previous efforts have failed. “I have seen 20 years of good ideas go nowhere,” said Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto biologist.

Dr. Wilson has been involved with some of those failed attempts. But in the past few years major advances in databases have made the goal more realistic. Today biologists can consult databases that hold DNA sequences from hundreds of thousands of species, for example. There are also more detailed databases about groups of species, like mammals, fungi and parasites. In 2003, Dr. Wilson wrote a paper in which he called for all that information to be available in one place.

He and his colleagues then persuaded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to contribute money to a consortium of universities, museums and scientific institutions. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and some of the partners are adding money as well. The encyclopedia will have a budget of about $50 million in its first five years.

When Dr. Wilson and his colleagues announced the start of the Encyclopedia of Life last May, their site was little more than a few mocked-up pages. Behind the scenes, designers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were busy building a system for getting scientific information online fast.

“If we had sat down at a blank screen and started to write, word by word, preparing the encyclopedia would have been virtually impossible,” said James Edwards, the project’s executive director.

The designers wrote software that could automatically draw information — maps, DNA sequences, bird songs, photographs, evolutionary trees, and so on — from many sources and organize them in one place in one standard format. Ten of the biggest natural history libraries in the world are scanning millions of pages of scientific literature, which computers are text-mining to add more information to species pages.

“The actual development has astonished me,” Dr. Wilson said. “I thought we’d be talking about it and pushing it for a long time.”

The version of the encyclopedia to be introduced Thursday is far from the finished product, Dr. Edwards warned. “It’s going to be rough,” he said. “We’re releasing early to get feedback from people.”

The 30,000 species in the first version will come mainly from databases of fish, amphibians and plants. Experts also created 24 detailed “exemplar” pages, to show just how much information the encyclopedia can handle. Those pages include well-studied species like the yellow fever mosquito, the eastern white pine and the death-cap mushroom.

The researchers wanted to make the site useful to scientists and nonscientists, so they created a sliding button that readers can move to choose how much detail they want. They are also developing ways of manipulating the information to make it useful in many ways.

“You’ll be able to download a personalized field guide,” Dr. Edwards said. “You can say, ‘I’m going to go to this preserve in Thailand — what do we know about what might be there?’ ”

Scientists, meanwhile, will be able to use the Encyclopedia of Life to do original research. One team of scientists is already planning to compare how different species grow old in order to understand the biology of aging.

Experts on biodiversity are generally excited about the site. “The Encyclopedia of Life is a fantastic and long overdue project,” said Quentin D. Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. But, he said, “my concern is about the content, and where the content will come from.”

The ranks of taxonomists — the scientists who describe species and revise old descriptions — have been shrinking steadily for decades.

“We have not given enough thought to the people who provide the information on which the Encyclopedia of Life is built,” Dr. Edwards acknowledged. “We are looking into ways to keep that community going.”

Dr. Wilson hopes the Encyclopedia of Life will foster the growth of that group. For the past 60 years, he has been studying ants, and in May he and other ant experts will be meeting at Harvard to plan how they can take advantage of the Encyclopedia of Life.

The goal he would like them to set would be to add all 14,000 known species of ants to the encyclopedia, and then add all the unknown ones — perhaps an additional 15,000 to 25,000 species. “It’s going to be a fun adventure for the next few decades,” Dr. Wilson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html





Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
Chris Anderson

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

Scenario 1: Low-cost digital distribution will make the summer blockbuster free. Theaters will make their money from concessions — and by selling the premium moviegoing experience at a high price.

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. Technology sure doesn't feel free when you're buying it by the gross. Yet if you look at it from the other side of the fat pipe, the economics change. That expensive bank of hard drives (fixed costs) can serve tens of thousands of users (marginal costs). The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

Digital technology benefits from these dynamics and from something else even more powerful: the 20th-century shift from Newtonian to quantum machines. We're still just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in revolutionary new materials — semiconductors (processing power), ferromagnetic compounds (storage), and fiber optics (bandwidth). In the arc of history, all three substances are still new, and we have a lot to learn about them. We are just a few decades into the discovery of a new world.

What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's "unlimited" as in "infinite." So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero (see "Webmail Windfall"). And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.

For good reason: It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

One of the old jokes from the late-'90s bubble was that there are only two numbers on the Internet: infinity and zero. The first, at least as it applied to stock market valuations, proved false. But the second is alive and well. The Web has become the land of the free.

The result is that we now have not one but two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy. The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross-subsidy to more and more industries. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set. Ryanair, for instance, has disrupted its industry by defining itself more as a full-service travel agency than a seller of airline seats (see "How Can Air Travel Be Free?").

The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination.

WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN
Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel's latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors.

Scenario 2: Ads on the subway? That's so 20th century. By sponsoring the whole line and making trips free, the local merchants association brings grateful commuters to neighborhood shops.

Waste is a dirty word, and that was especially true in the IT world of the 1970s. An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. In the glass-walled facilities of the mainframe era, these systems operators exercised their power by choosing whose programs should be allowed to run on the costly computing machines. Their role was to conserve transistors, and they not only decided what was worthy but also encouraged programmers to make the most economical use of their computer time. As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface. This was the era of the command line, and the only conceivable reason someone might have wanted to use a computer at home was to organize recipe files. In fact, the world's first personal computer, a stylish kitchen appliance offered by Honeywell in 1969, came with integrated counter space.

And here was Mead, telling programmers to embrace waste. They scratched their heads — how do you waste computer power? It took Alan Kay, an engineer working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, to show them. Rather than conserve transistors for core processing functions, he developed a computer concept — the Dynabook — that would frivolously deploy silicon to do silly things: draw icons, windows, pointers, and even animations on the screen. The purpose of this profligate eye candy? Ease of use for regular folks, including children. Kay's work on the graphical user interface became the inspiration for the Xerox Alto, and then the Apple Macintosh, which changed the world by opening computing to the rest of us. (We, in turn, found no shortage of things to do with it; tellingly, organizing recipes was not high on the list.)

Of course, computers were not free then, and they are not free today. But what Mead and Kay understood was that the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they'd be close enough to costless that they might as well be free. That meant software writers, liberated from worrying about scarce computational resources like memory and CPU cycles, could become more and more ambitious, focusing on higher-order functions such as user interfaces and new markets such as entertainment. And that meant software of broader appeal, which brought in more users, who in turn found even more uses for computers. Thanks to that wasteful throwing of transistors against the wall, the world was changed.

What's interesting is that transistors (or storage, or bandwidth) don't have to be completely free to invoke this effect. At a certain point, they're cheap enough to be safely disregarded. The Greek philosopher Zeno wrestled with this concept in a slightly different context. In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, you run toward a wall. As you run, you halve the distance to the wall, then halve it again, and so on. But if you continue to subdivide space forever, how can you ever actually reach the wall? (The answer is that you can't: Once you're within a few nanometers, atomic repulsion forces become too strong for you to get any closer.)

In economics, the parallel is this: If the unitary cost of technology ("per megabyte" or "per megabit per second" or "per thousand floating-point operations per second") is halving every 18 months, when does it come close enough to zero to say that you've arrived and can safely round down to nothing? The answer: almost always sooner than you think.

What Mead understood is that a psychological switch should flip as things head toward zero. Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them.

From the consumer's perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.

The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year.

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

A TAXONOMY OF FREE
Between new ways companies have found to subsidize products and the falling cost of doing business in a digital age, the opportunities to adopt a free business model of some sort have never been greater. But which one? And how many are there? Probably hundreds, but the priceless economy can be broken down into six broad categories:

• "Freemium"
What's free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.

This term, coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, is the basis of the subscription model of media and is one of the most common Web business models. It can take a range of forms: varying tiers of content, from free to expensive, or a premium "pro" version of some site or software with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).

Again, this sounds familiar. Isn't it just the free sample model found everywhere from perfume counters to street corners? Yes, but with a pretty significant twist. The traditional free sample is the promotional candy bar handout or the diapers mailed to a new mother. Since these samples have real costs, the manufacturer gives away only a tiny quantity — hoping to hook consumers and stimulate demand for many more.

But for digital products, this ratio of free to paid is reversed. A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

• Advertising
What's free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.

Broadcast commercials and print display ads have given way to a blizzard of new Web-based ad formats: Yahoo's pay-per-pageview banners, Google's pay-per-click text ads, Amazon's pay-per-transaction "affiliate ads," and site sponsorships were just the start. Then came the next wave: paid inclusion in search results, paid listing in information services, and lead generation, where a third party pays for the names of people interested in a certain subject. Now companies are trying everything from product placement (PayPerPost) to pay-per-connection on social networks like Facebook. All of these approaches are based on the principle that free offerings build audiences with distinct interests and expressed needs that advertisers will pay to reach.

• Cross-subsidies
What's free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.

Scenario 3: It's a free second-gen Wiii! But only if you buy the deluxe version of Rock Band.

When Wal-Mart charges $15 for a new hit DVD, it's a loss leader. The company is offering the DVD below cost to lure you into the store, where it hopes to sell you a washing machine at a profit. Expensive wine subsidizes food in a restaurant, and the original "free lunch" was a gratis meal for anyone who ordered at least one beer in San Francisco saloons in the late 1800s. In any package of products and services, from banking to mobile calling plans, the price of each individual component is often determined by psychology, not cost. Your cell phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that's the first thing you look at when picking a carrier — but your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit.

On a busy corner in São Paulo, Brazil, street vendors pitch the latest "tecnobrega" CDs, including one by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That's OK, because selling discs isn't Calypso's main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet.

The vendors generate literal street cred in each town Calypso visits, and its omnipresence in the urban soundscape means that it gets huge crowds to its rave/dj/concert events. Free music is just publicity for a far more lucrative tour business. Nobody thinks of this as piracy.

• Zero marginal cost
What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.

This describes nothing so well as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare. But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway.

• Labor exchange
What's free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.

You can get free porn if you solve a few captchas, those scrambled text boxes used to block bots. What you're actually doing is giving answers to a bot used by spammers to gain access to other sites — which is worth more to them than the bandwidth you'll consume browsing images. Likewise for rating stories on Digg, voting on Yahoo Answers, or using Google's 411 service (see "How Can Directory Assistance Be Free?"). In each case, the act of using the service creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.

• Gift economy
What's free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn't the only motivator. Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact. In a sense, zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry. In the monetary economy it all looks free — indeed, in the monetary economy it looks like unfair competition — but that says more about our shortsighted ways of measuring value than it does about the worth of what's created.

THE ECONOMICS OF ABUNDANCE
Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it's likely to define economics as "the social science of choice under scarcity." The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they're made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that "there's no such thing as a free lunch.

"But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn't necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you'll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we've seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It's as if the restaurant suddenly didn't have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

Surely economics has something to say about that?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be "too cheap to meter." Needless to say, that didn't happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he'd been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we'd use electricity for as many things as we could — we'd waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.

All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We'd all be driving electric cars (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it). Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, irrigating vast inland swaths and turning deserts into fertile acres, many of them making biofuels as a cheaper store of energy than batteries. Relative to free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet. The phrase "global warming" would have never entered the language.

Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get.

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/maga...urrentPage=all





Democratic Bill Could Force Apple, AT&T to Unlock iPhone
Anne Broache

When T-Mobile began selling Apple's iPhone in Germany last fall, a legal skirmish ensued, forcing the wireless carrier to sell it untethered to a contract--at $1,460, no less. T-Mobile eventually persuaded a court that the two-year contract was legal.

Now that same kind of European rule would be imported into the United States--meaning AT&T would be legally required to sell a contract-free iPhone--if a new Democratic proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives becomes law.

Sponsored by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a congressman who serves as chairman of a House telecommunications and Internet panel, it's similar to but somewhat more sweeping than a bill proposed in the Senate last year. His subcommittee has scheduled a hearing on the plan for Wednesday morning.

The draft legislation says every mobile provider "shall offer to consumers the opportunity to purchase subsidy-free wireless customer equipment."

The emergence of the 27-page draft bill (PDF), called the Wireless Consumer Protection and Community Broadband Empowerment Act, underscores what is apparently growing concern among congressional Democrats during this session with what they seem to view as insufficiently flexible, forthcoming dealings among wireless carriers and their customers.

Both bills would direct the Federal Communications Commission to establish a number of new rules for wireless carriers. Among other things, those companies would have to give abundant disclosure to their customers about their rate plans in a "clear, plain, and conspicuous manner," breaking out the cost of everything from early termination fees to state and local taxes for the customer.

Carriers would also be obligated to devise more detailed maps of their network coverage areas. And they'd have to permit customers to cancel a contract for any reason without penalty within the first 30 days and to prorate any fees associated with leaving a contract early.

Unlike the Senate bill, Markey's proposal would also dictate that wireless carriers offer customers the choice of buying a wireless service plan with no early termination fee.

Wireless carriers say they charge early termination fees because they've subsidized the cost of the wireless handset used with it, but Markey's draft bill would also require them to offer consumers the ability to buy "subsidy-free" equipment without a long-term service plan--and at the same price as comparable service for a plan with subsidized equipment.

That's where the potential implications for the iPhone and similar devices come in. Right now, signing up for iPhone service is a two-year commitment on top of the price of the gadget itself. But, assuming that AT&T subsidizes at least some of the cost of the phone--one estimate says the subsidy is around $400--Markey's bill would apparently force AT&T to sell it at an unsubsidized price and for a contract length of the customer's choosing.

To be sure, such an option may not even be in some consumers' best financial interests. iPhone unlocking has become a popular pastime, with thousands of consumers buying them without pledging allegiance to AT&T in the first place. But Markey's bill, in the interest of consumer protection, would force carriers to offer such a choice anyway.

The wireless industry has long been lobbying for a uniform set of rules governing its operations from the federal level, complaining that states have imposed a patchwork of obligations for billing and other practices that don't mesh well with the national nature of wireless service. But if its less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the Senate bill is any indication, the House's prescriptive approach likely isn't what it had in mind.

A lobbyist for CTIA-The Wireless Association, which represents the major wireless carriers, is scheduled to speak about the bill at a hearing Wednesday, but the organization declined to speak further about the proposal beforehand.

"Generally, we're looking forward to the hearing and the opportunity to talk about the many consumer benefits that accompany a uniform set of standards for wireless policy in America," CTIA spokesman Joe Farren said Tuesday.

The wireless industry is likely to point out some of the steps it has already undertaken in the absence of regulations in an apparent effort to be more consumer-friendly. Most of the major carriers have announced plans to prorate the early termination fees for their contracts, for instance.

Markey's proposal doesn't stop at wireless issues. It also includes a section that would reserve the right of municipalities to offer their own broadband services--a trend that has encountered mixed success thus far. The bill says such networks "serve the public interest" and that states should not be allowed to make laws thwarting their creation.

Passing federal legislation to promote such offerings isn't new. The idea grew out of attempts by state legislatures, often pressured by major Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast, to enact laws restricting city governments from getting into the same game. But so far, despite support in both chambers of Congress, no such measure has been made into law yet.

A group of major trade associations representing telephone companies both large and small said in a Tuesday letter to Markey that they're concerned his proposal will create "unintended consequences" that undermine his stated goal of getting affordable broadband to more places.

"We still believe federal municipal broadband legislation would chill private investment in existing and future broadband networks," wrote the association executives. "This ultimately leads to less, not more, broadband deployment as the investment risk for private entities is unnecessarily increased and private capital is displaced with public funds, needlessly burdening taxpayers."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9879554-7.html





'Beautiful Children' is Latest Novel Offered Free Online
AP

Charles Bock's "Beautiful Children, a best-selling debut novel about characters adrift in Las Vegas, is the latest book to be offered for free online.

Starting Wednesday, Bock's novel can be downloaded from the Web site www.beautifulchildren.net/read. The free electronic edition will also be available from such leading retailers as Amazon.com. and Barnes & Noble.com.

"I want people to read the book," Bock said in a statement issued Tuesday by the Random House Publishing Group. "If that means giving it away for free online, great."

"The book really struck a chord with readers as bookstore sales have demonstrated," Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for Random House, said in a statement. "We believe it has even more potential readers out there, and the best way to reach them is online, with this unrestricted access."

Publishers have worried about Internet piracy and whether online text could hurt traditional sales. But lately the trend has been to make more books available on the Internet and hope that interest in all formats will be increased.

HarperCollins recently announced that books by Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman and a handful of others would be posted online (although not for printing or downloading). In mid-February, financial advice writer Suze Orman said on Oprah Winfrey's television show that "Women &
Advertisement

Money," published in 2007, could be downloaded from Winfrey's Web site over a period of 33 hours. More than 1 million copies of the book were downloaded and the paper edition jumped into the top 10 on Amazon.com.

"We're willing to sacrifice a few sales in the expectation that a wider sampling opportunity will build consumer awareness and more business for our booksellers and our authors," said Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House, Inc., which publishes both Orman and Bock.

"Historically, book publishers have relied on sampling and giveaways. Previously, we've had printouts of first chapters or sections of a book available. This takes the sample to a larger and more technologically sophisticated form."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8369160





The Wisdom of the Chaperones

Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
Chris Wilson

It's getting harder to be a Wikipedia-hater. The user-generated and -edited online encyclopedia—which doesn't even require contributors to register—somehow holds its own against the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy, a Nature study concluded, and has many times more entries. But even though people are catching up to the idea that Wikipedia is a force for good, there are still huge misconceptions about what makes the encyclopedia tick. While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it's a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

The same undemocratic underpinnings of Web 2.0 are on display at Digg.com. Digg is a social-bookmarking hub where people submit stories and rate others' submissions; the most popular links gravitate to the site's front page. The site's founders have never hidden that they use a "secret sauce"—a confidential algorithm that's tweaked regularly—to determine which submissions make it to the front page. Historically, this algorithm appears to have favored the site's most active participants. Last year, the top 100 Diggers submitted 44 percent of the site's top stories. In 2006, they were responsible for 56 percent.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Digg—a site meant to "collectively determine the value of content"—is largely run by 100 people. The influence of these members was particularly apparent last month. After Digg tweaked its secret sauce, top contributors noticed a decline in influence—fewer of their submissions became top stories. The super Diggers published an open letter of grievances and threatened to boycott the site. The changes in the algorithm, the Digg execs said, were meant to bring a more diverse set of stories to the site, and they begged for patience from the top Digg contributors. (Thus far, a shaky truce has endured.) The takeaway: Digg's brass believe that the site, which purports to be the product of a broad-based community, will cease to run smoothly if a microscopic percentage of its user base stops participating.

At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority. In the case of Wikipedia, this authority is both organic and institutionalized. A small segment of highly active users author the majority of the site's content; there are also elected site administrators who have the power to protect pages, block the IP addresses of problem users, and otherwise regulate Wikipedia's operations. At Digg, active users have more of a de facto authority over the site's goings-on (though there are persistent rumors that the site has "secret moderators" who delete content). But officially speaking, while the site's algorithm seems to favor devoted users, no individual Digger has the power to unilaterally delete a post.

While both sites effectively function as oligarchies, they are still democratic in one important sense. Digg and Wikipedia's elite users aren't chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They're the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it's curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they've sought to supplant.

This top-heavy structure of social-media sites isn't news to researchers and technophiles. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has acknowledged that what he expected to be an "80-20" rule—a system where 20 percent of people control 80 percent of the resources—in fact understates the site's top-heaviness. Palo Alto Research Center's Ed Chi, the scientist who determined that 1 percent of Wikipedians author half of the content, told me he originally hypothesized that the site's most energetic editors were acting as custodians. Chi guessed that these users mostly cleaned up after the people who provided the bulk of the encyclopedia's facts. In reality, he found the opposite was true. People who've made more than 10,000 edits add nearly twice as many words to Wikipedia as they delete. By contrast, those who've made fewer than 100 edits are the only group that deletes more words than it adds. A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing.

This isn't the kind of people-working-together image that Digg and Wikipedia promote. Of course, Wikipedia requires some level of administration—otherwise, the site would crash under the weight of additions and deletions to the George W. Bush page. But that doesn't explain the kind of territorialism—the authorial domination by 1 percent of contributors—on the site's pages. Is this a necessary artifact of operating an open-access site? Or is it possible to build a clearinghouse for high-quality, user-generated content without giving too much power to elite users and secret sauces?

The moderation system at the tech blog Slashdot is perhaps the best example on the Web of a middle way. Slashdot, which draws on links submitted by readers, ordains active contributors with limited power to regulate comments and contributions from other users. Compared with Wikipedia, which requires supreme devotion from its smaller core of administrators, Slashdot makes it easy to become a moderator. Giving large numbers of people small chunks of responsibility has proven effective in eliminating trolls and flame wars in the comment section. Still, the authority any one moderator commands is small, and the site's official poobahs maintain control over which stories are featured at the top of the site. "These things are far from utopian," says founder Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco. "Slashdot tends to have a lot of 'Microsoft does something bad' stories. If I let the community run the whole thing, we'd have a lot more. But I don't want Slashdot to be the 'Microsoft Sucks' page. It's just one of many subjects."

Another compelling model comes from Helium.com, a Wikipedia-like repository of articles and editorials. Its founder, Silicon Valley veteran Mark Ranalli, compares his site to a capitalist version of Wikipedia. On Helium, contributors compete to have the top-ranked article on a given subject. As soon as you write an article, you're invited to pick your favorite of two articles on a similar subject. Requiring someone to write before he or she rates creates a more stable system: Rather than create a caste of creators and a caste of peons, Helium encourages everyone to do everything.

Every model has its drawbacks. Unlike Wikipedia, Helium doesn't lend itself to comprehensive articles drawing on many sources. Nor is Slashdot free of moron commenters, though its quotient is significantly lower than on any unmoderated message board. It's refreshing, though, that these sites acknowledge that Web 2.0 isn't a fairy-tale democracy without letting themselves become dictatorships. Digg and Wikipedia would do well to stop pretending they're operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few.
http://www.slate.com/id/2184487/





I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.
Mark Bittman

I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off. I was fully disconnected for 24 hours.

The reason for this change was a natural and predictable back-breaking straw. Flying home from Europe a few months ago, I swiped a credit card through the slot of the in-seat phone, checked my e-mail and robbed myself of one of my two last sanctuaries.

At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.

In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.

Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?

Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?

As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we’ve always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.

Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. “What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)

“Who,” he then asked, “would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?”

THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.

For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.

“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”

Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like “the voice of the new,” I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.

On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.

I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.

GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.

But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can’t run five miles if you’ve never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.

Now it’s up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there’s little encouragement. “One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy,” he said.

But what’s wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn’t seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn’t get it all done in either, it certainly wasn’t because I was taking too much time off.

I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.

I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/fa...02sabbath.html
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