Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 1st, '10

[JackSpratts]

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"The content industry's claimed numbers are completely baseless." – CCIA


"The Internet’s very function is to make and disseminate copies of information -- it couldn’t exist without limitations in copyright." – Derek Slater



































May 1st, 2010




FBI, DoJ Suit-Up 35 New Agents; Lawyers for Intellectual Property Battle

Intellectual property crime gets FBI, DoJ attention
Layer 8

The FBI and Department of Justice said they were going to go hard after intellectual property crimes this year and so far they seem to be keeping their word as today the agencies appointed 15 new Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) positions and 20 FBI Special Agents dedicated to fighting domestic and international IP crimes.

The 15 new AUSA's will work closely with the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section to aggressively pursue high tech crime, including computer crime and intellectual property offenses. The new positions will be located in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, the DoJ stated.

FBI details most difficult Internet scams

The 20 FBI Special Agents will be deployed to specifically boost four geographic areas with intellectual property squads, and increase investigative capacity in other locations around the country where intellectual property crimes are of particular concern, the FBI said. The four squads will be located in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. The squads will allow for more focused efforts in particular hot spot areas and increased contact and coordination with our state and local law enforcement partners. The 20 new agents will join 31 agents already devoted to investigating intellectual property crimes, the FBI stated.

The additional personnel bolster the DoJ's newly minted Task Force on Intellectual Property set up earlier this year to focus on battling US and international intellectual property crimes.

The Task Force works across a number of agencies including the FBI and will focus on bolstering efforts to combat intellectual property crimes through close coordination with state and local law enforcement partners as well as international counterparts, the DoJ stated. It will also monitor and coordinate overall intellectual property enforcement efforts at the DoJ, with an increased focus on the international IP enforcement, including the links between IP crime and international organized crime. The Task Force will also develop policies to address what the DoJ called evolving technological and legal landscape of this area of law enforcement.

Critics have long said the US needs to do something to put a crimp in the over $200 billion counterfeit and pirated goods industry with better enforcement and increased penalties for violations.

The Government Accountability Office noted that a broad range of IP-protected products are subject to being counterfeited or pirated, from luxury goods and brand name apparel to computer software and digital media to food and medicine. Evidence of counterfeiting in industries whose products have a public health or safety component, such as auto and airline parts; electrical, health, and beauty products; batteries; pharmaceuticals; and infant formula, presents a significant concern. The World Health Organization estimates that as much as 10% of medicines sold worldwide are believed to be counterfeit.

Industries that rely on IP protection-including the aerospace, automotive, computer, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, motion picture, and recording industries-are estimated to have accounted for 26% of the annual gross domestic product growth rate during this period and about 40% of U.S. exports of goods and services in 2003 through 2004. Further, they are among the highest-paying employers in the country, representing an estimated 18 million workers or 13% of the labor force, as of 2008, according to the GAO.

The GAO issued another report in intellectual property recently and found a number of interesting facts:

* According to Customs and Border Protection data from 2004 through 2009, China accounted for about 77% of the aggregate value of goods seized in the United States. Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan followed China, accounting for 7, 2, and 1% of the seized value, respectively. CBP data indicate certain concentrations of counterfeit production among these countries: in 2009, about 58 % of the seized goods from China were footwear and handbags; 69% of the seized goods from Hong Kong were consumer electronics and watch parts; 91% of the seized goods from India were pharmaceuticals and perfume; and 85% of seized goods from Taiwan were computers and consumer electronics.
* Digital products can be reproduced at very low cost, and have the potential for immediate delivery through the Internet across virtually unlimited geographic markets. Digital piracy impacts most the music, motion picture, television, publishing, and software industries. Piracy of these products over the Internet can occur through methods including peer-to-peer networks, streaming sites, and one-click hosting services. There is no government agency that systematically collects or tracks data on the extent of digital copyright piracy.
* According to a recent Commerce department report, counterfeit electronics parts have infiltrated U.S. defense and industrial supply chains and almost 40 % of companies and organizations-including the Department of Defense-surveyed for the report have encountered counterfeit electronics.
* Commerce reported that the infiltration of counterfeit parts into the supply chain was exacerbated by weaknesses in inventory management, procurement procedures, and inspection protocols, among other factors. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) tracks and posts notifications of incidents of counterfeit or improperly maintained parts entering airline industry supply chains through its Suspected Unapproved Parts Program in an effort to improve flight safety. The FAA program has identified instances of counterfeit aviation parts, as well as fake data plates and history cards to make old parts look new. FAA's program highlights the risks that counterfeit parts pose to the safety of commercial aircraft.
* Counterfeit or pirated software may threaten consumers' computer security. The illegitimate software, for example, may contain malicious programming code that could interfere with computers' operations or violates users' privacy.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/60517





Court OKs Unmasking Identities of Copyright Scofflaws
David Kravets

A federal appeals court is blessing the legal process by which the recording industry and other content owners unmask the identities of alleged peer-to-peer copyright infringers.

The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is believed to be the first appellate court to sanction a process that has ultimately hauled tens of thousands of alleged P2P infringers into court, (.pdf) many at the request of the Recording Industry Association of America.

“They have upheld the RIAA’s legal strategy,” said Richard A. Altman, the New York attorney who brought the court challenge.

Thursday’s decision comes as Indie filmmakers are using the same process to acquire the identities of thousands of BitTorrent users accused of copyright infringement.

The legal action was brought by a State University of New York at Albany student accused of using Gnutella to download and make songs available on the internet.

The RIAA detected what it claimed to be infringing activity on an IP address the university linked to the student. The unidentified student moved to quash a federal judge’s order that the university forward the student’s identity to the RIAA.

The student asserted a First Amendment right of privacy on the internet, in addition to a fair-use right to the six music tracks in question.

The appeals court ruled in the RIAA’s favor after balancing a constitutional right to remain anonymous against a copyright owner’s right to disclosure of the identity of a possible “trespasser of its intellectual property interest.”

“To the extent that anonymity is used to mask copyright infringement or to facilitate such infringement by other persons, it is unprotected by the First Amendment,” the appeals court wrote.

And even if a defendant claims a fair-use right to the material in question, content owners have a right to learn the identities to commence a lawsuit, the court wrote.

“And although Doe 3 indicates that he ‘may’ have had a permissible purpose for copying and sharing the music found in his file-sharing folder,” the court wrote, “any assertion of such a purpose raises questions of credibility and plausibility that cannot be resolved while Doe 3 avoids suit by hiding behind a shield of anonymity.”

The RIAA, in snaring thousands of file sharers, has used an undercover detection process wherein investigators comb P2P networks, download songs and obtain IP addresses from P2P users’ open share folders.

With that IP address and evidence, the RIAA and other content owners file so-called John Doe federal lawsuits. As part of the process, they request a judge to require the ISP to turn over the name of the account holder connected to the ISP.

Until 2003, the RIAA and others generally did not need to file lawsuits to obtain a subpoena to unmask an alleged peer-to-peer infringer. That year, however, a different federal appeals court ruled (.pdf) a lawsuit was necessary as a precursor to unmask P2P infringers because the content in question did not reside on an internet service provider’s server.

Still, copyright owners do not need to file a lawsuit to unmask the identity of alleged infringers in which the content in question is stored on an ISP’s servers — for example, YouTube, said Ben Sheffner, a Los Angeles copyright attorney who publishes the Copyrights & Campaigns blog.

The Copyright Act carries penalties of up to $150,000 per violation.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ight-scofflaws





Rudd Retreats on Web Filter Legislation
Nicola Berkovic

KEVIN Rudd has put another election promise on the backburner with his controversial internet filtering legislation set to be shelved until after the next election.

A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month's or the June sittings of parliament.

With parliament not sitting again until the last week of August, the laws are unlikely to be passed before the election.

Labor promised before the last election it would force internet service providers to block access to illegal content such as child pornography and X-rated images.

But the US government, Google and free speech advocates have said any efforts to censor the internet would slow download speeds, stop the free flow of information and be ineffective.

Senator Conroy's spokeswoman said the government was not deterred by this criticism.

The government was still consulting with internet service providers and considering public submissions; once that process was complete, it would introduce the legislation into parliament, the spokeswoman said.

Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace was disappointed.

"The minister has done an excellent job on this . . . and I would like to see it legislated because it was an election promise," he said.

Opposition communications spokesman Tony Smith said Senator Conroy should come clean on when he would release the legislation.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/aust...-1225859630452





Small and Mobile ISPs May Avoid New Filesharing Laws

Rumours of the death of public Wi-Fi exaggerated
Chris Williams

Exclusive Regulators are considering creating loopholes in the implementation of the Digital Economy Act to allow small, mobile and Wi-Fi ISPs to avoid its copyright enforcement regime.

A suggested threshold system would take into account an ISP's size and the costs of compliance before imposing the Act's provisions against unlawful filesharing.

The new law allows ISPs who are not considered large carriers of copyright infringing material to be exempted, and gives Ofcom scope to define the considerations.

A threshold would mean dozens of small fixed-line ISPs would be likely to avoid sending warning letters to customers on behalf of rights holders, as the extra staff required would represent a large cost to them.

Many smaller outfits would also need to purchase new equipment if, as is widely expected, after a year the written warnings have not significantly cut copyright infringement by filesharers and ISPs are required to apply technical measures. These are likely to include restricting the bandwidth or protocols available to those repeatedly accused of unlawful filesharing.

Similarly, mobile broadband providers would find retrieving customer details to send a warning letter request for music or film industry monitoring teams an expensive task. They typically serve all their internet users from a tiny pool of shared IP addresses and are not set up to easily discover who was responsible for a connection to a BitTorrent swarm at a particular time.

Claims by digital rights activists during the Act's passage through Parliament that public Wi-Fi hotspots will be closed down could also be undermined by the threshold. Since users typically use them for short periods, Wi-Fi ISPs are unlikely to be considered a major source of copyright infringement.

Ofcom is considering the system during a series of hastily-convened meetings with major ISPs and rights holder organisations after the Digital Economy Act became law on 9 April. The communications regulator is tasked with completing or approving a Code of Practice within eight months, including three months waiting for approval from the European Commission.

The discussions raise the possibility that only the largest consumer ISPs, who dominate the market, would be affected. Between them, BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Sky, Orange and O2 provide more than 95 per cent of the home broadband connections and filesharing that rights holders plan to target.

Smaller ISPs have not been invited to the meetings, which has prompted some consternation, but also hope that this is a sign that regulators plan to exclude them from the most controversial parts of the Digital Economy Act.

Sources who have been to the meetings say a threshold has not yet been set, but there is seemingly no desire from the music and film industries to impose the Act on small ISPs.

An Ofcom spokeswoman denied smaller ISPs had been excluded from discussions, which she said were ongoing.

"We need to consider a number of different options before setting out some formal proposals in our consultation – nothing is decided before then," she said, declining to comment on where a threshold for compliance with the Act could be set.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04..._dea_meetings/





UK ISP Spots a File-Sharing Loophole, Implements It

As well as taking an active part in OFCOM's code of obligations in regards to the ill-conceived Digital Economy Act (the UK three-strikes law for filesharers), niche ISP Andrews & Arnold have identified various loopholes in the law, the main one being that a customer can be classified as a communications provider. They have now implemented measures so in your control panel you may register your legal status and be classed as such.

Another of the loopholes this inventive ISP sussed out: "Operating more than one retail arm selling to customers and allowing customers to migrate freely with no change to service between those retail arms, thus bypassing copyright notice counting and any blocking orders."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/...-Implements-It





Unanimous Support for New Zealand’s 3-Strikes (Section 92a) at First Reading
Simon Power

A bill that puts in place a three-notice regime to deter illegal file sharing unanimously passed its first reading in Parliament today.

"The Copyright (Infringement File Sharing) Amendment Bill sets up a fair and balanced process to deal with online copyright infringements," Commerce Minister Simon Power said.

"The three-notice process ensures that file sharers are given adequate warnings that unauthorised sharing of copyright works is illegal, at the same time as providing effective methods for copyright owners to enforce their rights.

"The bill also extends the jurisdiction of the Copyright Tribunal, enabling it to hear complaints and award penalties of up to $15,000.

"Copyright owners may also seek suspension of an internet account for up to six months through the District Court."

"Online copyright infringement has been especially damaging for the creative industry, which has experienced significant declines in revenue as file sharing has become more prevalent.

"The issue is a complex one and this bill is the result of extensive consultation to get it right."

The bill has been referred to the Commerce Select Committee for report back to Parliament in six months.
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/u...+first+reading





Bluebear: Exploring Privacy Threats in BitTorrent

BitTorrent is arguably the most efficient peer-to-peer protocol for content replication. However, BitTorrent has not been designed with privacy in mind and its popularity could threaten the privacy of millions of users. Surprisingly, privacy threats due to BitTorrent have been overlooked because BitTorrent popularity gives its users the illusion that finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The goal of this project is to explore the severity of the privacy threats faced by BitTorrent users.

We argue that it is possible to continuously monitor from a single machine most BitTorrent users and to identify the content providers (also called initial seeds). This is a major privacy threat as it is possible for anybody in the Internet to reconstruct all the download and upload history of most BitTorrent users.

To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.

Links to papers below.
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Arna.../bluebear.html





Pirates Rewrite Script for Apple's China iPad Launch
Pomfret and Lee

Just three weeks after the global launch, bootleg versions of Apple Inc's hot-selling iPad tablet PCs have begun showing up on the shelves of online and real-world shops in piracy-prone China.

Apple recently delayed the iPad's international launch after huge demand in the United States caught the maker of trendy iPhones and MacBooks off guard. But Chinese consumers looking for knock-offs of the company's latest must-have product need look no further than this teeming electronics mall in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown near the border with Hong Kong.

Here, tiny shops are stuffed with pirated versions of everything: from Microsoft's newest Windows 7 operating system, a steal at $2 each, to a range of Apple products, from iPhones to MacBooks and the lightweight MacBook Air.

After extensive queries with multiple shopkeepers, one surnamed Lin offered the sought-after item in a dark backroom on the market's fifth floor away from the hustle and bustle.

Hefty and thickset with three USB ports and a more rectangular shape than the original, this knock-off with iPad aspirations, which runs a Windows operating system, looks more like a giant iPhone. It costs 2,800 yuan ($410), making it slightly cheaper than the iPad's $499-$699 price tag.

"This is just the first rough version," says Lin a crew-cut agent speaking in bursts of quick-fire Cantonese.

"While the shape isn't quite the same, the external appearance is very similar to the iPad, so we don't think it will affect our sales that much," he added, explaining the difference was due to the difficulty sourcing matching parts because of the quick two-month turnaround time for the first version's development.

Hard-working Chinese bootleggers are rushing to fill a vacuum that won't last for long, created by unexpectedly strong demand for the iPad in its first weeks on the market.

The 10-inch entertainment device, on which one can read books, play music and videos and surf the Internet, sold more than 500,000 in its first week alone, and continued strong U.S. demand has led Apple to delay the product's international launch to the end of April.

Chinese counterfeiters have rushed to fill the iPad gap.

Taobao, China's largest online marketplace, contains hundreds of listings for the coveted product, many real but some dubiously labeled as "China goods," with claims to have even better features than the real deal.

Like the models in the Shenzhen market, these fake iPads also retail for around 2800 yuan each, compared with 4,000-6,000 yuan for those marketed as real.

Analysts and gadget fanatics expect the iPad to do well in Asia given Apple's strong branding and the rising number of affluent middle class consumers. But few are surprised by the quick appearance of a counterfeit version in a country where pirated movies often appear in markets in the same week of their theatrical release.

"China is basically a market that has the ability to clone everything, so it's really not surprising," said Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based researcher Analysys International.

"I don't think piracy is a bad thing for the iPad given that China has a huge population, maybe the clone iPads will give more of the potential users a look and feel."

Back in Shenzhen, Lin said factories around China's Pearl River Delta -- the country's biggest export manufacturing hub -- were working hard on an updated version of the pirated iPads to feed strong demand.

"This is just the first rough version," Lin said. "Eventually, the factories will be able to make a much better copy."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P0B620100426





China Seeks to Step Up Communication Monitoring
Sharon LaFraniere

China is on the verge of requiring telecommunications and Internet companies to detect, stop and report leaks of state secrets by their customers, the latest in a string of moves designed to strengthen the government’s control over private communications.

The proposed amendment to the state secrets law, reported Tuesday by state media, loosely defines a state secret as information that, if disclosed, would damage China’s security or interests in political, economic, defense and other realms.

The wording of the amendment as cited by the state-run media suggested that Internet providers and telecommunications companies would have to take a more active stance in checking e-mails or text messages for leaked information. But it was not clear from the reports what, if any, penalties would be imposed on companies that failed to comply.

State-run media outlets characterized the new measure as part of a drive to further engage businesses in protecting state security.

But several analysts suggested it would have limited effect. Internet and telecommunications companies are already expected to cooperate fully with state security investigations.

In one well-known case, a Chinese journalist was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison for violating the state secrecy law after the authorities obtained information from Yahoo about an e-mail message he sent regarding a confidential government document. Yahoo was later severely criticized in the United States for its role in the case, and the company’s founder, Jerry Yang, eventually apologized to the journalist’s family.

“Obviously, it adds another tool that authorities would have to snoop on people,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, publisher of Danwei.org, a Web site about Chinese media and the Internet. “But I don’t think anybody thinks that their communications are safe from the prying eyes of the government.”

Some Chinese legal experts, however, described the amendment as both a contradiction of the government’s pledge to be more open and a violation of China’s constitutional guarantees of privacy and freedom of communication.

Kan Kaili, a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said, “If the government insists on doing that, I would suggest they rewrite the Constitution. Otherwise, it is clearly illegal.”

China’s determination to control mobile phone and Internet communications has been increasingly obvious in recent months. A new bureau has been set up to help the authorities monitor social networking sites and other user-driven forums on the Internet. Other measures have been taken to step up surveillance of cellphone text messages, individual Web sites, chat rooms, blogs and other venues.

The amendment was submitted Monday to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, for a third reading, the final step before being signed into law. Few measures reach that point in China without being adopted.

China has issued rules calling on its state-owned companies to strengthen protection of their commercial secrets, which it defined broadly to include information including acquisitions and technologies, Bloomberg News reported from Shanghai.

The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees more than 120 companies, defined commercial secrets as any practical information that is not publicly available and may potentially bring economic benefit to enterprises.

China’s definition of commercial secrets has fueled concern among foreign companies after a Rio Tinto employee and Australian citizen was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month for taking bribes and industrial espionage.

“It’s broad enough to cover every bit of business and technical information,” Nicolas Groffman, a partner at the law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques who is based in Beijing, said of the new rules. “We don’t know more about the definition of commercial secrets, really.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Zhang Jing contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/te...28secrets.html





In Shanghai, Hiding Bootlegs Before the World Visits
David Barboza

The latest mystery in Shanghai, complete with sliding bookshelves, secret passageways and contraband goods, is this: Why are all the popular DVDs and CDs missing from this city’s shops?

But it’s a mystery easily solved. In China, embarrassments are usually hidden from sight when the world comes visiting, and that is what has happened to a large supply of bootleg DVDs and CDs as Shanghai prepares for the World Expo, which is expected to attract 70 million visitors.

A few weeks ago, government inspectors fanned out across the city and ordered shops selling pirated music and movies to stash away their illegal goods during the expo, a six-month extravaganza that opens May 1.

But shop owners found a novel way to comply — they simply chopped their stores in half.

In a remarkable display of uniformity, nearly every DVD shop in central Shanghai has built a partition that divides the store into two sections: one that sells legal DVDs (often films no one is interested in buying), and a hidden one that sells the illegal titles that everyone wants — Hollywood blockbusters like “Avatar” (for a dollar), Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” and even Lady Gaga’s latest CD “The Fame.”

Customers entering these shops are now routinely directed toward a slide-away bookshelf that reveals a secret corridor. And to chants of “movie inside, movie inside,” a young sales clerk will lead them past a series of empty spaces before entering a room stocked with thousands of bootleg copies of popular films, music and television programs.

“This is where everything is now,” said a clerk at Movie World. “We have to do it this way because of the expo.”

The situation is even more bizarre at Oscars Club, a centrally located DVD shop where city officials recently tacked up a large poster showing the expo mascot — a blue Gumby-like character named Haibao — stomping on an illegal DVD. The poster’s slogan reads: “Fight Against Piracy!”

But store clerks don’t hesitate to steer customers into the back room to find illegal copies of “Sherlock Holmes,” “Up in the Air” and HBO’s new series “The Pacific” in Blu-ray disc format.

Intellectual property rights experts say they are outraged by what looks to be a sham crackdown. And the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents some of Hollywood’s biggest studios, calls the situation troubling.

“Although various senior Chinese officials have made numerous statements in support of intellectual property protection and the fight against piracy, their talk has not been followed by sufficient action,” Mike Ellis, president of the Asia Pacific division, said in a statement last week in response to a reporter’s question.

City officials, however, insist that the recent crackdown has been effective. Since March, more than 3,000 shops have been closed for selling pirated music and movies, they say.

They also strongly deny encouraging stores to build secret rooms.

“That is impossible,” says Zhou Weimin, director of the city’s cultural market administrative enforcement team. “No inspector dares to say that to the store operator. Hinting like that is definitely illegal.”

Mr. Zhou acknowledged that “some stores have adopted a more covert way to run their business,” but he said that this was not a new phenomenon and that they would not get away with it.

As for DVD shop workers, they seem as divided as their stores.

When asked last week what was going on, clerks at Even Better Than Movie World (across the street from its rival Movie World) readily acknowledged to a visitor that they had been told to hide the illegal goods, and that inspectors would pretend not to notice the clandestine backroom operation.

After a few months, they say, the wall will come down and the store will go back to selling illegal DVDs out in the open.

But later, when the same visitor returned, identified himself as a journalist and asked the same question, the clerks pretended there were no secret rooms.

“I don’t know about the existence of that small room,” a clerk at Movie World said last week. Pressed, she said: “I’m not the boss.”

Douglas Clark, a lawyer at Lovells and a specialist in intellectual property rights law in its Shanghai office, says counterfeiting here is rampant. He says the sophistication of the system and the public nature of it are mind-boggling.

“These are not fly-by-night operations,” Mr. Clark said by telephone. “The only way these guys can get away with this is if they’re protected.”

The stores, which are even frequented by American and European customers, are brightly lighted with rows of neatly stocked shelves. And they often brag of a selection that is superior to that found at Blockbuster or on Netflix.

The growing sophistication of the stores — and the speed with which they release new titles (you can already get last year’s complete TV series of “Lost,” “CSI: New York” and “Grey’s Anatomy”) — suggests the pirates have enormous financial influence.

The Chinese government appeared to acknowledge the piracy problem late last week when its National Copyright Administration issued a statement saying many licensed video and audio companies, which include state companies, were making or selling bootleg goods in China. Still, few here believe there will be a serious crackdown anytime soon.

But there is one development that may at least cut down on the sale of bootleg DVDs. Many young people say the search for pirated music and movies has moved online to countless Web sites that offer free downloads.

“I don’t even buy DVDs anymore,” said Qi Wen, a 24-year-old travel agent. “I usually watch the movies online or download them to my computer; it’s fast and simple.”

Bao Beibei contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/bu.../28piracy.html





7,000 Fake Rolex Watches are Steamrolled in Philly
AP

A steamroller has crushed about 7,000 fake Rolex watches in Philadelphia under the orders of federal authorities seeking to deter would-be counterfeiters.

Customs officials staged the destruction Monday to highlight law enforcement's role in protecting intellectual property rights.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the watches were seized from Binh Cam Tran, who pleaded guilty last year to charges including trafficking in counterfeit goods.

Tran is serving six years in federal prison. He has been ordered to pay more than $2.2 million to the Rolex Co.

Authorities say Tran fabricated hundreds of thousands of fake Rolex watches in his home near Philadelphia. Officials seized about 24,000 counterfeit watches and enough parts to create 1 million more.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...lly-464319.php





Police Seize Jason Chen's Computers

Last Friday night, California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen's home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

Here is all the documentation (Jason Chen's personal details are pixelated).
http://gizmodo.com/5524843/police-se...hens-computers





iPhonegate: Q.&A. With Mark D. Rasch, Computer Security Expert
Nick Bilton

The iPhone-lost-in-a-bar story raises all sorts of legal questions. To explore them further, I spoke with Mark D. Rasch who is the former head of the United States Department of Justice computer crime unit, and helped develop the department’s guidelines for computer crimes related to investigations, forensics and evidence gathering. Mr. Rasch is currently a principal with Secure IT Experts, a consulting company that specializes in computer security. The Q.&A. below is an edited version of our discussion.

Q. Is this case about a stolen phone or about the intellectual property inside the phone?

A. One of the problems that people keep focusing on is the fact that the phone was stolen and let’s be frank here, if this had been the third-generation iPhone as opposed to a fourth-generation iPhone that had been found in the bar and given or even sold to Gizmodo and then Gizmodo returned it back to Apple, no one would have cared. What was important in this case, the thing that was either stolen or misappropriated was not the device itself, it’s the intellectual property in the device.

Q. And what about the theft component of the case?

There’s the issue as to what extent these theft laws apply to theft of intellectual property as opposed to physical property. And to the application of trade secret law to journalists. If a journalist learns of a trade secret from a source and publishes that, is a journalist and the publication liable for prosecution for theft.

Q. Can’t Gizmodo say they didn’t know the phone belonged to Apple?

There is the entire issue of whether or not this was a real phone. You can go to China and buy hundreds of computers or phones with Apple logos on them.

Q. So can Gizmodo use that as a defense?

Gizmodo has lots of defenses. The phone wasn’t stolen in the traditional sense. If there was property misappropriated, Apple didn’t claim it at first. And the big one, when Apple asked for it, Gizmodo gave it back to them. Even putting aside the journalistic issues, Gizmodo has lots of defenses.

Q. Is Gizmodo wrong for publishing images of the phone?

The job of a journalist is to find information that companies and people don’t want published.

Q. What’s the next step?

What will happen is they’ll have a hearing before a judge and the judge will decide whether or not the warrant and the seizure the valid based upon the shield law. Or, they will work out a compromise with Gizmodo.

Q. Will Gizmodo try to get its computers back?

Jason Chen or Gizmodo will file a motion to suppress or motion for return of illegally seized property. They can then use the shield law, both the federal shield law and the California shield law as well as the California equivalent of the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution for grounds to return the property. They can claim that the search was illegal. The court could rule that a middle ground can look through the computers.

Q. You mean a third person could look through the computers?

They are called a special master, and this is someone who can only examine certain records or documents. You have to understand that one of the reasons for the shield law is not just to shield journalists from giving the name of their sources but to protect all the journalistic activity that might be contained in the news office. With Chen, the police have potentially seized the entire news office. That’s why we have this shield law.

Q. What do you think the judge is going to say?

Based on California law, it’s a coin toss. It’s going to depend on how sympathetic the court’s going to be to the shield law.

Q. Could this case end up in the Supreme Court?

Yes. First of all, the Supreme Court this year, this term, has been hearing a lot of First Amendment cases. Second, The Supreme Court has not touched on journalist shield laws in 20 years, 25 years. There are a number of issues that would be right for the Supreme Court to decide, one of which is the extent to which bloggers and even Twitterers are protected by the First Amendment. The third factor is really the scope of protection under journalist shield laws which have never really been decided by the Supreme Court because it’s one of statutory interpretation as opposed to constitutional law.

Q. How solid is the defense of the individual who found the phone?

A prosecution of the guy who found the phone is going to be really tough because he apparently did make efforts to return the phone. Theft is failing to try to return it. It’s going to be difficult to decide how much effort he made and whether that was sufficient. Right now, he’s both more guilty and more innocent.

Q. And if someone is found guilty, what is the likely outcome?

I don’t know what the sentence could be, but it could be significant as they’re going to say what he stole wasn’t something worth $150 or $400, it wasn’t even worth $5,000, but they’re going to say it’s worth the entire development cost of the iPhone prototype, which could cost tens of millions of dollars.

Q. Could there be a legal resolution to this story where the parties involved can walk away satisfied?

It’s going to be difficult. The train has left the station. You can’t put the trade secret back in the bottle. Though I am sure people involved would like to.

Q. Have you ever worked on a similar case?

There was a case I worked on many years ago in which a Soviet pilot defected to Tokyo and under the law he was granted asylum. The Soviets wanted their Mig25 plane back, but we had never seen a Mig25 before. So we and the Japanese had to return it because it was the property of the Soviet Union. But before it was sent back, it was taken apart, every piece measured, every piece replicated and put back together and then returned. Did we steal it? No. We returned it.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...curity-expert/





Backdoor Malware Targets Apple iPad
Phil Muncaster

Apple iPad users are being warned of an email-borne threat which could give hackers unauthorised access to the device.

Sabina Datcu, technology writer for anti-virus firm BitDefender, wrote in a blog post today that the threat arrives via an unsolicited email urging the recipient to download the latest version of iTunes as a prelude to updating their iPad software.

"A direct link to the download location is conveniently provided. As a proof of cyber crime finesse, the web page the users are directed to is a perfect imitation of the one they would use for legitimate iTunes software downloads," Datcu said.

"Unfortunately for these users, following the malicious link means opening up a direct line to their sensitive data, as instead of the promised iTunes update they get malware on their systems."

The Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY malware opens up a backdoor which could let the perpetrator gain unauthorised access to the device, warned Datcu.

It also tries to read the keys and serial numbers of the software installed on the device, and logs the passwords to any webmail, IM or protected storage accounts.

Mac users are unaffected by the malware, according to Datcu.
http://www.crn.com.au/News/173074,ba...pple-ipad.aspx





Apple Buys Intrinsity, a Maker of Fast Chips
Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone

Apple wants the fastest chip for its mobile devices and has bought another chip maker to gain an edge over its competitors.

Apple has acquired a small Austin, Tex., company called Intrinsity, known for making zippy versions of a computer chip often found in mobile devices. The deal, which closed late last month and was confirmed by Apple on Tuesday, shows the company continuing to try to gain an edge in the mobile device market by purchasing technology and chip experts.

It is the second time in two years that Apple has purchased a small chip company to gain critical technology for making a faster processor that uses less energy.

“This adds another arrow to their quiver,” said Tom R. Halfhill, a well-known chip analyst for Microprocessor Report. Mr. Halfhill said his industry contacts put Apple’s acquisition price for Intrinsity at $121 million. Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment on that figure.

“The purchase price is like pocket change to Apple, and they get a lot of benefit,” said Mr. Halfhill. Apple’s products should handle tough jobs like playing video better than competing gear while devouring less battery life, analysts said.

Ever since Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, unveiled the iPad in February, analysts in the technology industry have been obsessed with its innards. Chip analysts, in particular, zeroed in on the A4 chip that Apple credited with giving the iPad better battery life and more speed than similar devices.

The widespread speculation has been that the A4 chip relied on technology from Intrinsity to get its added processing power.

The speed of mobile device chips are typically measured in megahertz, and one of the more popular chips on the market usually runs at about 650 megahertz. Intrinsity’s engineers found a way to crank that speed up to 1000 megahertz, which happens to be the same speed as the A4 in the iPad.

Intrinsity has been working with a division of Samsung that manufactures chips on this speedy product. The same division of Samsung built the A4 chip for Apple, according to Chipworks, a firm that reverse-engineers and analyzes technology products.

By acquiring Intrinsity, Apple would be able to keep that 350 megahertz edge to itself.

Word of the acquisition began to leak out after technology trade publications noticed earlier this month that a number of Intrinsity employees had started to list Apple as their employer on the social networking Web site LinkedIn. Neither company, however, would discuss their relationship.

The people familiar with Apple’s situation say that efforts to create a new chip for mobile devices from the ground up are stalling. In 2008, Apple purchased another chip maker, called PA Semi, for $278 million. That start-up also specialized in making fast, low-power chips.

But a number of the PA Semi employees have left Apple — many of them disgruntled about their compensation, according to people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly. Google, in fact, bought a start-up called Agnilux earlier this month filled with PA Semi engineers.

The Intrinsity purchase was seen as a way to help Apple maintain a lead over other device makers while it deals with these issues.

Mr. Halfhill said Apple appeared to be building its own version of the ARM chip favored by makers of mobile devices. Other chip companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm and Marvell have made their own versions of ARM, in some cases spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

Apple’s strategy of creating a custom chip for mobile devices runs counter to its approach in computers in which it purchases chips from Intel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/te...y/28apple.html





Apple's Jobs Slams Adobe's Flash Technology
Gabriel Madway

Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs on Thursday sharply criticized Adobe Systems popular Flash multimedia software, calling it unreliable and ill-suited for mobile devices, escalating a pitched battle between the two companies.

Analysts said Jobs' pointed, nearly 1,700-word manifesto -- which Apple posted on its website -- helped push Adobe's shares down more than 1 percent, as it highlighted concerns about the future of Flash.

In an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash," Jobs laid out a laundry list of complaints about the technology, raising questions about its security, "technical drawbacks," and power-management. Click here to read the letter: here

"Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs," he said. "But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short."

Jobs said Flash is "closed" because it is a proprietary system from Adobe, which controls everything from its features to its pricing. Similar charges are routinely lobbed at Apple's products and services, such as the App Store and iTunes.

Flash-based video and games are found on many Internet sites, but Apple has not allowed Flash on its iPhone and iPad.

"Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven -- they say we want to protect our App Store -- but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true," Jobs said.

Adobe declined to comment. But in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen called the technology problems noted by Jobs "a smokescreen."

He also denied Flash is a closed platform and said Apple's restrictiveness makes it difficult for developers who create applications for multiple devices.

According to the Journal's website, Narayen labeled Jobs' letter an "extraordinary attack."

The hostility between Apple and Adobe has been brewing for months. Apple has criticized Flash as a buggy battery hog, while Adobe has accused Apple of exerting tyrannical control over developers creating programs for the iPhone and iPad.

The rhetoric has grown ever more heated. Earlier this month, Flash "platform evangelist" Lee Brimelow ended a blog post by saying, "Go screw yourself Apple."

Jefferies & Co analyst Ross MacMillan said the letter from Apple's CEO didn't raise any new criticisms about Flash, but simply put them on a very public pedestal.

"It's not positive in the sense that what Jobs is outlining is that Flash is in effect yesterday's technology and we shouldn't consider it as go-forward technology."

Jobs said he was concerned that allowing Flash-based applications on Apple's mobile devices would leave it "at the mercy" of a third party.

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform," he said.

Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall said Apple clearly wanted to fire back to critics who have complained about the lack of Flash on its mobile devices.

And he said Apple also wanted to make clear that it doesn't plan to cede an inch of control on its fast-growing mobile platform, which now boasts more than 200,000 apps.

Jobs Goes Public Again

Jobs has taken on an increasingly public role over the past few months, sitting down for magazine profiles and responding frequently to emails from Apple customers.

The enigmatic Apple CEO has a history of issuing public treatises on hot-button issues. In 2007, Jobs posted two such essays, "Thoughts on Music" -- where he urged for the abolition of the digital rights management system for music -- and "A Greener Apple," where he responded to criticism from environmental groups.

In his essay on Flash, Jobs said that while Apple's operating system for iPhone and iPad is proprietary, the company prefers open standards for the Web and favors technologies such HTML5 for creating multimedia programs.

Adobe has said 75 percent of all video on the web are Flash-based. Popular Flash-based sites such as Hulu can't run on the iPhone or iPad. But sites like YouTube have worked around this by specially designing non-Flash apps for those devices.

Jobs noted that outlets such as Netflix, ESPN, newspapers and TV networks have all designed offerings that can be played on its devices.

Shares of San Jose, California-based Adobe fell 1.4 percent to close at $34.96 on the Nasdaq. Shares of Cupertino, California-base Apple rose 2.7 percent to $268.64.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; additional reporting by Jim Christie; Editing by Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63S3DS20100429





HTML5 Video

There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view.

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g. a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.

Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/201...ml5-video.aspx





Microsoft Signs Android Patent Deal with HTC

Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday it struck a licensing deal with phone handset maker HTC Corp, under which it will get royalty payments on HTC phones running Google Inc's Android operating system.

Microsoft, which holds a wide range of software patents, did not say exactly what technology in the phones the agreement concerns.

The deal comes as smartphones using Google's new operating system -- which Google allows phone makers to use for free -- gain in popularity. Microsoft charges handset makers like HTC and others to use its Windows phone software.

The smartphone market is riven with legal disputes as software companies and handset makers wrangle over who deserves compensation for technology behind new devices which go well beyond traditional mobile phones.

In March, Apple Inc sued HTC over its Android phones, accusing it of infringing 20 hardware and software patents related to the iPhone. HTC makes a number of Android-powered phones, including the Google-branded Nexus One.

Tuesday's deal signals that Microsoft is not likely to start a similar legal patent dispute with HTC over Android phones. Licensing arrangements are standard procedure for Microsoft, which has similar deals with more than 600 companies.

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; editing by Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63R0WX20100428





Your Phone Is Locked. Just Drive.
David Pogue

The statistics on distracted driving are pretty scary. Just making cellphone calls increases your chances of crashing by four times; sending text messages increases the risk 23 times.

We know this, we get this, but we keep doing it. About half of all teenagers admit to texting while driving, for example, no matter how many statistics and horror stories we pass along to them.

If you’re a concerned parent or employer, therefore, you may want to consider fighting technology with technology. There’s a new category of cellphone apps made just for this purpose: text blockers like iZup, tXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer. When your car is in motion, they lock up your phone so you can’t text, call, e-mail or surf the Web.

How do they know when you’re driving? They rely on your phone’s GPS to calculate your speed. If it’s more than five or 10 miles an hour, it’s pretty clear that you’re no longer walking. (You could be riding your bicycle, of course. But come to think of it, that’s probably not a great time to be texting, either.)

You’ll know when the software is in effect: your screen is covered by a “MESSAGES BLOCKED” screen. Incoming calls go directly to voice mail; incoming text messages don’t appear until you stop driving.

They all let you dial 911, and they all let you set up certain phone numbers in advance (like your parents’) that work even when everything else is blocked. But otherwise, you quickly realize that you’re wasting your time trying to bypass the blockade, and you focus on getting where you’re going so you can get back to your phone. Which, of course, is the whole idea.

The four apps are very similar — they all drain your battery faster, they all take a couple of minutes to “notice” that you’re moving. But there are some differences, in features, philosophy and the Passenger Problem. (Which is, How can I bypass the block if I’m not the one driving?)

TXTBLOCKER If you, O parent, were born with a dominant Big Brother gene, this is the app for you. It prevents texting, calling, e-mailing or Web surfing when the phone is in motion. It also lets you pinpoint the phone’s location on a map online, so you can track your child’s comings and goings.

You can set it up so that you get a text message every time the phone’s owner exceeds, say, 65 miles an hour. (An unlimited texting plan might be useful.)

You can also define a “no phone” zone, like your young hellion’s school; the phone stops working inside this area.

As for the Passenger Problem, you can temporarily unblock the phone by solving a timed puzzle.

In the blessing/curse department, note that tXtBlocker “pings” your phone’s GPS only once every several minutes. As a result, it’s slow to block and unblock the phone — but it doesn’t burn through your phone’s battery as fast as its rivals. (Price: $25, plus $10 a month or $100 a year; family plan available; for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Android and iPhone versions coming soon.)

CELLSAFETY This app blocks everything bad — text, e-mail, Web, chat, Facebook — except actual phone calls. Weird.

Like tXtBlocker, CellSafety offers location tracking and speed monitoring features, and lets you define certain geographic zones. When your teenager enters or exits that area, you’re notified by text message, and, at your option, no texting is allowed. CellSafety also blocks pornographic Web sites.

The Passenger Problem: if you click Request Permission on the blockade screen, your parent or boss gets a text message. If your overlord approves of your request by replying with “unblock,” you can use the phone. (Price: $10 a month, on Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones.)

IZUP If CellSafety is a friendly babysitter, iZup is the distraction Nazi. Once you’re in motion, iZup turns your phone into a brick. You don’t have access to a single feature (except one single designated app, intended for your GPS navigation program).

“IZUP does not allow a user to select some distractions and stop others,” says the company. “We believe that is key in the fight against distracted driving. We are purists in our approach here.”

You can’t even whip out your phone at a red light or stop sign; to guard against that sort of sneakiness, iZup doesn’t reactivate for several minutes after you stop.

You can’t make any calls except to 911 or one of three preapproved phone numbers. Only the parent or boss can unlock the blocking — by entering a password before you start to drive. If you’re a passenger, tough rocks.

One more note: maybe these apps are young, or maybe the technology gods had a rough week — but in my testing, three of the four apps stopped working at one point or another. TXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer each worked intermittently until company reps walked me through reinstalling them. Only iZup worked every time, all the time, solid as a rock.(Price: $5 a month or $50 a year; family plan available; BlackBerry, some Android, LG and Samsung phones.)

ZOOMSAFER When ZoomSafer kicks in, the phone makes a little sound. You can replace that sound with one you’ve recorded yourself; your toddler saying, “Stay alive, mommy!” or “Come home soon, daddy!” makes a particularly effective choice.

On your Web-based account page, you can specify all kinds of options. You can permit or block incoming calls, permit or block numbers that you dial by voice, permit a passenger to open a timed interval of phone freedom or set up an automatic reply to unanswered texts and e-mail messages (“I’m driving right now; I’ll get back to you”).

In other words, you can set up ZoomSafer to be either an unfeeling obelisk like iZup or a lenient pal like CellSafety.

The company also offers another app that lets you listen and respond to e-mail by voice as you drive. (Wait a sec — isn’t the whole idea to eliminate distractions? Whose side is this company on, anyway?)

Maybe the best thing about ZoomSafer, though, is that instead of paying its monthly $3 fee, you can pay a one-time $25. The other apps here require a monthly fee forever, which is borderline outrageous. (ZoomSafer is for BlackBerry and some Windows Mobile phones.)

Even ZoomSafer, however, is not the perfect solution to the distracted-driving problem.

For starters, these apps also lock up your phone when you’re on a train or bus, which is a tad unnecessary.

Furthermore, they work only on GPS-equipped smartphones, mainly BlackBerrys and Android phones. (Why not the iPhone? Because the current iPhone software doesn’t permit a program to run in the background. This summer’s 4.0 software will presumably solve that problem.)

In other words, text blockers won’t run on the hundreds of millions of regular dumbphones.

There are apps, like one called Cell Control, that don’t rely on the phone’s GPS. Instead, they communicate with a small transmitter that you plug into your car’s OBDII jack. (This jack is usually under the driver-side dashboard.)

These programs work with many nonsmartphones and even laptops, and can control several phones in the same car. And they don’t eat up your battery as fast as the software-only versions.

Unfortunately, Cell Control is also much more expensive, because you have to buy a transmitter ($90) and the app ($25) and pay a monthly fee ($8). And, of course, this kind of system has no effect on your phone when you’re in someone else’s car.

In any case, it might be worth considering a text-blocking app for your teenager — or even for yourself, if only to make your phone so inconvenient while driving that you won’t bother with it. Because the world already has enough horrifying driving-distraction statistics; you should avoid becoming one yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/te...h/29pogue.html





Groups Make Last Pitches on Net Neutrality
Grant Gross

Net neutrality rules proposed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could upset a complex mobile telecom marketplace and lead to fewer handset choices and fewer smartphone applications, a mobile trade group said Monday.

Net neutrality rules could upset a "virtuous cycle" of mobile development and innovation in the U.S., said officials with CTIA, which represents several mobile carriers. CTIA was one of several groups making a last pitch to the FCC about net neutrality on Monday, the deadline for reply comments in the agency's net neutrality rulemaking proceeding.

"To us, it's a completely interdependent ecosystem," said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, CTIA's vice president for regulatory affairs. "You can't touch one [segment of the mobile industry] without impacting the others."

The FCC asked whether it should extend proposed net neutrality rules to mobile broadband networks in its notice of proposed rulemaking, released in October. CTIA opposes formal net neutrality rules for wireline carriers, and is even more concerned about new regulations in the mobile industry, where bandwidth limitations are more pronounced.

There have been no complaints of mobile broadband carriers selectively blocking or slowing Internet content, said Steve Largent, CTIA's president and CEO. "We're kind of wondering, where's the harm?" he said. "There are no customers coming to the FCC saying, 'the wireless industry has wronged us.'"

Others planning to file comments Monday called for net neutrality rules. The FCC rules, as proposed, would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing legal Web content or applications. The rules would also require broadband providers to tell customers about their network management practices.

The FCC moved to formalize a set of net neutrality principles about a year after it prohibited Comcast from slowing its subscribers' access to peer-to-peer services and other applications. Comcast appealed the FCC's enforcement of its 2005 net neutrality principles, and earlier this month, a U.S. appeals court threw out the FCC's Comcast decision.

While opponents of new net neutrality rules have argued there have been few examples of problems, in recent weeks DSL (digital subscriber line) provider Windstream was accused of hijacking subscriber search queries, and cable-based broadband provider RCN settled a lawsuit accusing it of blocking peer-to-peer traffic, noted Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a media reform group and net neutrality advocate.

"It's clear that violations of the open Internet are ongoing and kept secret from consumers," Turner said in an e-mail. "If the FCC fails to establish basic rules of the road, we can expect much more of the same from broadband providers. The fundamental question before policymakers is: Who should be trusted with the future of the Internet, these companies that have repeatedly violated open Internet principles, or consumers?"

The question about net neutrality rules is not whether they're needed, but when the FCC will act, said the Center for Media Justice, the New America Foundation, Consumers Union and Media Access Project in a joint filing Monday.

"The public interest groups submitting these comments maintain that the Federal Communications Commission must act to preserve the open Internet, and that it should do so now," the groups said. "The record developed during this proceeding is clear, and the need for the rules proposed by the commission becomes even more clear with each disclosure of additional broadband Internet access service provider misconduct."

Content discrimination by broadband providers threatens the "structure and functioning" of the Internet, the groups added. Net neutrality rules are "essential to promoting free expression, economic opportunity, civic participation, civil rights, and social equality online and in society at large," they wrote.

But broadband providers are working to provide subscribers with the best service they can, countered Bright House Networks, a broadband provider based in Orlando, Florida.

"Proponents of broadband Internet regulation claim that every form of network management and every claim of 'discrimination' in handling traffic may be challenged and must be presumed unlawful unless the network operator proves a public benefit and a management technique as narrowly drawn as possible," the company said in its filing Monday. "There is no record to support such a rule or such presumptions. Instead, the record is that subscribers are being given better and better access to the Internet."

Supporters of new net neutrality rules haven't showed the need for new regulations, added James Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs at broadband provider AT&T. Backers of significant new regulations have a special burden to prove their case, Cicconi wrote on AT&T's public policy blog.

"Yet, after six months in the FCC's comment process, and nearly six years of arguing the issue, proponents of extreme net neutrality regulation have failed utterly when it comes to making their case," he said. "To be sure, they've used fear masterfully to create the impression of a crisis, and hyperbole to manufacture a threat. But when the time has come to put-up-or-shut-up, those same groups have failed to identify any existing problem they are trying to solve, or indeed any specific conduct the government must act to correct."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19501...eutrality.html





Net Neutrality Numbers Don't Add Up
Robert X. Cringely

Have you heard the news? Passing Net neutrality rules will result in the loss of 340,000 jobs in the broadband industry and up to 1.5 million jobs overall by 2020. If you don't believe it, I have a fancy-schmancy report that says as much. Per IDG News' Grant Gross:

“If the FCC adopts the net neutrality rules it is now considering, close to 1.5 million jobs across the U.S. economy could be put in jeopardy by 2020, and revenue growth in the broadband industry would slow by about one-sixth during that time frame, said the study, by Coleman Bazelon, a telecom economist with The Brattle Group.

Bazelon predicted that spending in the broadband industry would decrease by US$5 billion in 2011 if the FCC passes formal net neutrality rules, with the number growing in subsequent years.”

Who paid for this report? A telecom lobbying firm called Mobile Future [5], which sports a weird hodgepodge of member organizations, including Alligator Planet, Climate Cartoons, Goomzee, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. But the most recognizable name on the list is AT&T. Color me surprised.

Networking Deep Dive

You can tell the report is going to be a bit slanted when it declares U.S. broadband "a success story," parroting the same lines Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg put out a few weeks ago and conveniently ignoring multiple reports that conclude U.S. broadband is both slower on average than that of more than a dozen other developed nations and more expensive.

It gets worse. That 23-page report [PDF], filled with impressive-looking charts and dire projections, is based entirely on a single assumption: Regulating U.S. telecoms in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt them to the tune of about 15 percent per quarter, relative to the cable companies. Thus, Bazelon's conclusion that broadband revenues would slow by one-sixth, slashing revenues and jobs by a proportionate amount.

What exactly was this onerous government regulation? It was a requirement, written into the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that the Baby Bells had to open their Central Offices to competitors like Covad and Northpoint who wanted to provide high-speed Internet access over the Bells' own copper lines. Congress passed this legislation in part because the Bells were dragging their heels bringing broadband to the masses.

Not that they did this willingly -- in fact, the Bells seemed to do everything in their power to avoid complying. In 1999 and 2000, Covad filed antitrust suits against Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and BellSouth (now part of AT&T) for practices relating to this runaround.

There are many reasons why DSL languished compared to cable in the early years of broadband. Delivering DSL over copper lines involves more variables and more barriers -- including a customer's proximity to a central office, the quality of their phone service, the amount of non-DSL-compatible fiber in the ground, and the Baby Bells' own bureaucratic intransigence. This process was widely known as "DSL hell," and it's why the DSL Reports site was created and continues to flourish.

In any case, it's hard to see how government regulation was the problem when the Bells largely refused to comply with it. You'd think being forced to share aging copper lines with startups would have encouraged the Bells to invest in better, higher-speed networks, not the opposite. Extrapolating from that regulatory situation to Net neutrality is like taking laws regulating manure production by draft horses to make projections about the future of the space shuttle.

Meanwhile, Brett Glass, who for many years had a popular column in InfoWorld (and now runs a small ISP in Wyoming), begs to differ with me on several key issues around Net neutrality.

His main point: Net neutrality rules as currently written are not actually neutral. They benefit Google in particular because it owns its own backbone and, thus, can prioritize and manage its own traffic at will, free from any government constraint.

Glass has published his own set of Net principles [PDF] -- which to my mind aren't that much different than the FCC's. They include the notions that freedom of speech should be guaranteed and anti-competitive behavior by network providers prohibited, but ISPs should be free to manage traffic as they see fit, including banning bandwidth-hogging P2P networks. He writes:

“In any event, the key point to make about "network neutrality" is that it's really a battle of the titans: Google against all ISPs. And the stakes are huge: small, competitive ISPs such as the one that I am now operating wouldn't be able to survive under those regulations. I'd have to sell (if I could) or fold. And my customers would be very disappointed if I did either.”

There's lots more to say on this topic, but I've exhausted this space for now. Several Cringesters wrote me detailed, highly cogent emails on this subject, which I'll get to in a future post.

Bottom line: If we could trust network providers to self-regulate and play by rules we can all agree upon, that would be a better way to go than government regulation. But history tells us we cannot.
http://infoworld.com/d/adventures-in...s-dont-add-804





Denial of Service

Don't believe the telecoms. Broadband access in the United States is even worse than you think.
Sascha Meinrath and James Losey

Given the dismal state of broadband connections in America, it was illuminating recently to hear a major telecom executive paint a rosy picture of where the country stands. When Wall Street Journal Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray asked how the United States ranks in broadband, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg didn't hesitate: "One. Not even close."

To support his statement, Seidenberg claimed that "in the U.S., there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe." Compare that with what Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski recently told a Senate committee: "Our record shows roughly 65 percent adoption in the U.S. compared to significantly higher adoption percentages—up to 90 percent or more—for some countries in Asia and Western Europe."

How can two people arrive at such radically different assessments? Seidenberg is deliberately conflating "access" and "adoption"—the difference between who has the option of buying broadband service and who has actually done so. Using Seidenberg's logic, Americans also have universal access to health care, college, and employment. Dispelling this sort of misinformation, however, isn't always easy. One of the big problems in this debate is that the data about broadband are as spotty and unreliable as the connections themselves. And, taking a page from the playbook of big oil and tobacco, the telecom companies are spending millions to further confuse the issue, spending about $100 million in 2009 alone in lobbying fees. With all the bogus information out there, hucksters like Seidenberg can lie through their teeth and get away with it.

Here's what we do know: If you simply look at broadband "penetration"—a measure of broadband subscribers relative to the population—the U.S. is ranked 15th by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with 27 broadband subscribers per 100 people (check out Table 1d). And another key organization, the International Telecommunications Union, ranks the United States 16th. Just one decade ago, the United States was at the top of the list.

But penetration doesn't tell the whole story. To get an up-to-date picture of where we actually stand, the New America Foundation—where we both work—recently took a very close look at both speeds and prices in more than a dozen leading broadband countries. As it turns out, U.S. residents paid more for bandwidth than nearly every other country surveyed. Typically, the lowest price for broadband in the United States, not counting promotions and bundled deals, costs an average of $35 a month for a measly 1 megabit per second connection. Twice this speed is available in Denmark and Canada for lower prices; more strikingly, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden have broadband available for under $20 a month. Additionally, the fastest speeds in the United States are comparatively slow. The common top speed available for residential services in the Unites States is 50 Mbps (and costs $145 a month), while several nations have speeds available that are up to four times faster, for less than $60 a month.

According to the FCC's National Broadband Plan, the no. 1 reason that those without broadband cite for not having broadband is cost. Given that broadband is more expensive here than abroad, it's no surprise the United States lags behind a growing list of other countries. Subscribers in the United States pay more per megabit of bandwidth than countries across both our oceans. To remedy this, the FCC has a plan that's the equivalent of the United States entering the Grand Prix with the goal of finishing last. The National Broadband Plan wants all Americans to have access to 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds by 2020. In that same time frame, the plan also proposes a neatly framed 100 Mbps download, 50 Mbps upload connection for 100 million homes.

By way of comparison, Taiwan already has near-universal access to 10 Mbps and South Korea achieved 1 Mbps universal access in 2008. By the end of 2010, Germany and Ireland both plan to reach universal 1 Mbps while Sweden, Denmark, and the U.K. are working to 2 Mbps to everyone by the end of the year. In essence, many nations expect to achieve goals by the end of 2010 that will rival what we hope to achieve in 2020. Furthermore, the 100 million households that will get 100 Mbps speeds represent only 75 percent of the population. By comparison, South Korea plans to have 50 Mbps available for 95 percent of the population in 2013, Sweden's goal is 100 Mbps for 90 percent of the population by 2020, and Finland is striving for universal 100 Mbps availability by 2015.

Many commentators have pointed out that competition is sorely lacking among broadband providers. As the FCC noted in its national plan, 96 percent of all households are served by two or fewer providers. But even when some choice is present, precious little information is available for customers to make informed decisions about their broadband service offerings. Speeds are advertised as "up to"—even though systematic testing documents that customers usually receive only half this advertised speed. And advertised prices almost always exclude hidden fees and additional costs, often require bundling with additional services that customers neither want nor need, are usually only good for short promotional periods, and come with a mountain of caveats and other fine print allowing providers to sever connections, manipulate customers' Internet traffic, and even spy on your online activities.

The FCC's plan falls far short of providing the meaningful information customers need. In two detailed examples, the plan suggests that ISPs provide the average speed—a far more useful comparison than max speed—but not a guaranteed minimum speed. We'd never buy a package of "up to a dozen eggs" at the supermarket, so why are broadband providers allowed to systematically promise more than they deliver?

In the same way that it's useful to know the processor speed, screen size, amount of RAM, and hard drive space of a computer before you buy it, broadband measures such as latency, jitter, and uptime are key pieces of information needed to know whether you can run a growing number of online applications, even if they sound complicated at first. For example, if you use Skype, stream NetFlix movies, play World of Warcraft, or use any other of the countless real-time applications, metrics like latency and jitter affect your quality of service.

What can we do to fix these problems? First, the FCC can mandate that all ISPs provide a "broadband nutrition label" that clearly lays out the details of what's actually being offered so that customers can make informed decisions about which service to buy. Second, the FCC should systematically collect information on the speeds, pricing, and adoption of broadband across the country—especially in un- and underserved areas. Third, the commission needs to address the duopoly in the United States and formulate a competition policy that will bring back a meaningfully competitive market. If we don't put these solutions in place, the United States could end up on the wrong side of the international digital divide.
http://www.slate.com/id/2252141





Calling for Time: Why the Supremes Will Consider Costco v. Omega
Joe Mullin

At first blush, Costco Wholesale Corp v. Omega, S.A., which the U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear, doesn't involve the kind of cutting-edge issues that copyright lawyers usually grapple with in the digital age. So why is the Court willing to consider a dispute between a company that makes fancy watches and a company that imports and resells them? It sounds like the kind of lawsuit that should have been resolved 200 years ago.

But this lawsuit—and many others that hinge on its outcome—is very much a product of the Internet-driven global economy. Just ask John Mitchell, a Washington D.C. attorney who's engaged in a fight with textbook-makers over whether his client, Ganghua Liu, has the right to resell English-language textbooks that were imported from China. In September, a New York federal court denied Mitchell's motion to dismiss the suit, brought by textbook makers John Wiley and Sons, Inc. and Pearson Education, but Mitchell has appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A second suit that addresses what's called the "parallel importation" of textbooks is set to be argued before a Second Circuit panel on May 19.

What's at stake in these disputes is the ability of resellers large (Costco) and small (Liu) to offer legitimate, non-pirated versions of copyrighted goods to U.S. consumers at prices that undercut those charged by the copyright holders—something that's possible thanks to the robust secondary markets provided by major Internet retailers such as eBay and Amazon. Mitchell says that the business model that supports such reselling may be new for modern entrepreneurs, but it's protected by very old law. "Essentially for 150 years, the courts have recognized that the distribution right of copyright owners ends once they sell their copy," says Mitchell. "But in recent years more and more copyright owners are trying to exert control. They're saying, 'We made these copies outside the U.S. and therefore the law of the land doesn't apply to our copies.'"

However the Supreme Court ultimately decides Costco v. Omega, the opinion is sure to have an impact on the textbook suits and other such cases. The issue before the Court is a narrow but important one: Can copyright owners assert rights over imported goods that have already been sold once? Consumer rights advocates say no, and argue that luxury goods makers especially are trying to use what amounts to an importation loophole to avoid the "first sale" doctrine that protects consumers as well as businesses that profit from so-called secondary markets. (Under first sale doctrine, a copyright or patent holder can't use intellectual property rights to control resold or used goods in secondary markets.)

Costco lawyers at Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck & Untereiner write in their brief that in 2003, Omega began to stamp its Seamaster watches with a small globe design, less than 5 millimeters across, "for the express purpose of invoking the Copyright Act to restrict the resale of its products." At the time, Costco was already selling Omega watches at prices well below the company's suggested retail prices after buying them from foreign importers who had purchased the watches. For instance, Omega sold batches of Seamaster watches to distributors in Egypt and Paraguay, and Costco bought 117 of those watches in 2004. The retail chain then began selling the Seamasters for $1,299—$700 less than Omega's suggested U.S. retail price.

Omega then sued Costco for copyright infringement, saying it hadn't authorized the sale of those watches, which were also "copies" of its copyrighted globe design. After losing in district court, Omega scored a win at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where a panel of judges agreed that by importing the watches, Costco had violated Omega's exclusive right to distribute and sell its copyrighted goods as outlined in a section of the U.S. copyright code dealing with importation rules. In its decision, the appellate panel cited a 1991 case in which BMG Music was able to use copyright to put a halt to a reseller's business, BMG Music v. Perez.

Costco had argued that the controlling precedent should actually be a 1998 Supreme Court case, Quality King Distributors v. L'Anza Research International, which ruled that copyright holders don't have any say over the market for U.S. copyrighted goods that are imported and re-sold. Costco's lawyers argued "that dichotomy has no basis in law or logic, yet carries severe consequences... for manufacturers, retailers, and consumers in the U.S." Two IP-savvy consumer rights groups, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, weighed in with an amicus brief supporting Costco's petition. Omega, represented by Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, says that the Quality King decision doesn't apply to its Swiss-made watches, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.

Fred Von Lohmann, a senior attorney at EFF, maintains Omega is just embracing a strategy of using copyright law as a pretext for a form of price discrimination that the Supreme Court banned in the Quality King case. The watch maker, he argues, may not like Costco's business of importing Omega watches and undercutting the prices charged by high-end jewelry shops, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed to use copyright law to shut down the resales. "If it's all right for Omega to put a copyrighted logo on the back of a watch and trump the first sale doctrine, it gives manufacturers the ability to use copyright law to block secondary markets of all kinds," says Von Lohmann.

In the consumer groups' brief, attorneys argue that if the Ninth Circuit ruling is allowed to stand, countless resellers—from used bookstores to neighborhood yard sales—would be "barred from the simplest transaction" if the copies they're reselling were made outside the U.S. And, Von Lohmann says, if Omega's intepretation of the copyright-importation laws and the first sale laws hold—and copyright holders are allowed to control the price of imported goods they've already sold once—then copyright owners will have a huge incentive to move their manufacturing offshore, something that Congress most likely never intended.
http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticle...em_v_emOmegaem





Filesharing from Carter to Obama
Kirby Fields

1. I got my first tape recorder during the Carter Administration. It was black and flat, about the size of a shoebox. With its stubby buttons at one end, and its speaker stretching nearly the full length in the opposite direction, it resembled nothing as much as a large robotic paw. My friends carried around lucky rabbits feet. I lugged around my tape recorder.

I have no idea where it came from. Did my dad pass it down? Was it a gift? I really don’t remember. I have a vague recollection of one of those microphones you could plug into the side. Not the ball-on-the-top-of-a-large-stick variety, the flimsy kind preferred by game-show hosts that looked as if you could break them like uncooked spaghetti. This was a hearty microphone. Thick-cabled. The microphone itself was long enough for me to wrap one fist on top of the other, like I was gripping a bat. This was the model that presidents used to record their memoirs.

The microphone was my dad’s. That I’m sure of. When I wanted to record something, and didn’t feel like dealing with the external mic, I had to place the recorder’s built-in microphone as close as I could to my source. My source was always some other kind of audio/visual machine. I wasn’t the kid who would secretly record around the house and then play the embarrassing footage for company. Nor was I a budding investigative reporter, trying to figure out how my sister climbed out of her crib or where the cat went at night.

I would use my recorder to capture audio versions of my favorite movies from the TV.

Instead, I’d turn the volume down to reduce the ambient noise and then put the speaker of the recorder as close as I could to the speaker of the television. I’d hush people when they came through. “I’m recording”, I would mouth. They’d mouth back “Sorry” and then tiptoe away.

I had two cassettes filled front to back with Grease. It was in heavy rotation at the time on the then fledgling Home Box Office network. Save for the few seconds that I missed when I had to turn the tape over every 30 minutes, I used to know every word of that movie. Pop it on right now and I’ll still know most of them. I didn’t understand why someone would just want the songs. I wanted it all.

* * *

Around this time we had a competition at school. I was in whatever grade at the time, and in order to keep us all tuned in to current events we were encouraged to bring in clippings from the paper about recent goings on. These were political times, even in Richmond, Kentucky, where a classmate, T.J. Mansfeld, would walk around singing “Because Jimmy Carter has a way of mucking up the U-S-A” to the Oscar Mayer wiener song.

Bad things were going down in Iran. I don’t remember why, but American hostages were being held there. Someone called the Eye-a-tola kept me up at night, with his long beard and skin as pale as a canvas. One of the prisoners launched a hunger strike, which happened to coincide with our current-events project. It was down to me and some other kid. That Friday—the last day of the project—my mom wouldn’t let me take in the clipping about the hunger strike because she hadn’t read the paper yet. I never remember her reading the paper once before that day. Apparently, my classmate’s parents either got up earlier or didn’t care about what was going on in the world because he brought in the winning clip from that morning’s edition. I lost. He was gracious in victory. The teacher told me “Good job” in front of the whole class.

That night we were at (I want to say) Target and my mom could tell I was still smarting from the day’s defeat. She took me to what was surely the scant music department—though it felt like a city block at the time—and told me I could pick out any tape I wanted. I chose Hall and Oates’ H2O. I wanted “Maneater”, though “Family Man” eventually became my favorite song.

On the way home, I asked my mom, “Do you know what ‘H2O’ means?” She said, “Water”. I said, “No”. She said, “It doesn’t?” I said, “It means ‘Hall and Oates’”.

H2O added a whole new layer of mystery to my tape recorder. Unlike the safe models that included completely separate “play” and “record” buttons, my recorder featured a small red “record” button that was embedded in the “play”. This design was intended to make it easier to record, but the last thing my inexpert hands needed was to be able to record more easily. With the “play” and “record” buttons fused, I ran the risk of over eagerly hitting them both when I only meant to hit the one. The splayed “play/record” feature would have forced me to make a concentrated effort. But even that wouldn’t have solved all of my problems. Too easily I fell victim to accidental interruptions with my homemade soundtracks. John Travolta would be in the middle of scolding his dance partner in Saturday Night Fever, and then whoosh, my brother would come storming in. “Ryan!” I’d whine. “I told you I was…” and then by the time I had shuttled him out I had missed half a Bee Gees song.

But H2O was different. Even if I tried to push the record button it wouldn’t go down. One of the older kids on the block, Todd Something (he had a brother named Tad Something), told me it wouldn’t record because of the two hollow spots on the top of the cassette. He said if you put tape over them it would record just like any other tape. I didn’t believe him, but that didn’t prevent me from trying. That night, I covered the hollows with tape, found some extra space at the end of Side 1, and sure enough I was able to push both buttons all the way down.

This freaked me out, so I pushed “stop” pretty much immediately, but not before my sense of wonder had crashed this otherwise professionally recorded tape, the tape for which my mom had paid six whole dollars. I hit “rewind”. I hit “play”. “Cool”, I said back to myself.

It was my own RCA dog moment. I was ten years old.

2.

The black-box style recorder served me well all the way through the beginning of Reagan’s second term. By this point, we had moved cross-country from Richmond to San Diego. It was fall. My birthday was coming up. It was bound to be a good one on account of the guilt my parents felt for moving us so far away from our friends. I was not disappointed. The guilt paid off.

For my birthday that year I got what was then known as a “box”, which was short for a “boom box”, which was another name for “ghetto blaster”, a term that always had more than a hint of racism for me, or maybe it was that the people who used it were more than a hint racist. The box set my parents back $60. Even now, this seems like a lot to me.

Not that it wasn’t worth it. This bad boy was silver, with a tape deck that was flanked by two speakers that gave the mutha wheels, I tell you. The range of radio frequencies stretched along the top. A switch let me choose between AM, FM, or cassette, but best of all, if a rad song came on the radio, I could hit record and have the song for all time. The record feature was of the splayed variety, but I only had to push down the “record” button and the “play” would magically follow. What’s more, if I hit “pause” (!) after hitting record, I could suspend the recording process. Three buttons would be depressed until I hit “pause” again and released them all. This enabled me to record songs with only the slightest touch. I would listen to 103.5 (five songs, 103 times a day!) and wait for “Mr. Roboto” or “She Works Hard for the Money” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (still a favorite) and in as much time as it would take my hand to react I would be recording. The quality was light years beyond my recording-from-the-television method. I was creating my very own Now That’s What I Call Music.

The box loomed large in my room. It was the biggest thing I owned. There was no room for it anywhere other than on my windowsill. On days when I was listening to music and Dad was in the yard he would holler “turn that thing down, you think people want to hear that when they’re trying to relax outside?”. It was the aural equivalent of “shut that window we don’t need to air condition the whole neighborhood”.

My ghetto blaster was not allowed to blast.

In those days, I mistook what was popular with what was good.

In those days, I mistook what was popular with what was good. I had a paper route by now, and that $40 per week funded a music-buying addiction that would rival the intensity of any drug fiend. I would ride my bike to Gemco and buy whatever was at the top of the charts. I figured if it went to #1 with a bullet it must be good. This is how I ended up with Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, the Footloose soundtrack, the Flashdance soundtrack, Don Henley, and Prince. If I liked it well enough, I would chase down the other albums of certain artists—1999, for example—but for the most part I stayed strictly with contemporary Top 40.

Then I met Dwight.

Dwight’s apartment was at the end of the alley that provided a shortcut for our cul-de-sac. His dad drove a Frito-Lay truck. He parked the truck on the street in front of his house on weekends and holidays. He was in Vietnam, Dwight’s dad was, and one Christmas my brother and I were riding our new bikes when we drove by Dwight’s place. He was sitting in the driveway. We asked him what was up. He told us that he had gotten his dad Billy Joel’s greatest hits for Christmas and that he, his dad, was listening to “Goodnight, Saigon” over and over again and crying.

I didn’t know what to say to this, so I told Dwight that I didn’t have the greatest hits but that I liked The Nylon Curtain a lot. My dad played The Nylon Curtain around the house. It had registered with me because one of the songs was called “Laura”, which happened to be the name of a girl I had a crush on in fifth grade. Dwight didn’t know that one, but it got us to talking about music, and the next thing I knew he was pressing into my hand a dubbed off copy of the Cure’s The Head on the Door.

This was the first piece of music that I acquired without the radio or the charts telling me to do so.

I still remember listening to “Push” for the first time. I don’t remember what I expected, but whatever it was, it wasn’t that. It was jangly. It took a long time for Robert Smith to start singing. I had never heard of the Cure before, but somehow I knew their lead singer was named “Robert Smith”. When Smith finally did sing, the lyrics were repetitious and without clear meaning. His voice was at once softer and more aggressive than I expected. But most of all the structure. The songs on the radio all had a very specific way that they were constructed. Verse, chorus, verse. They were carbon copies of one another, manufactured. But nothing about what I heard on the radio had trained me for this. I couldn’t get my bearings. At no point was I sure of where I was in the song. It could have gone on forever, and I would have been just as happy if it had.

Around this time I met Dana, who has been my best friend ever since. We have plenty in common, but ours was a relationship forged through music. His tastes also trended toward the mainstream when we first met, but he too was soon to undergo an awakening. He always claimed that music sounded better at my place; I always claimed it sounded better at his. We weren’t talking about acoustics. We were talking about discovery. We’d stay up all night listening to music together, playing tracks for one another. XTC, the Godfathers, Siouxie Sioux, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Subhumans, Beastie Boys, ABC, Howard Jones, Sonic Youth, Depeche Mode, Violent Femmes, and mostly Public Image Ltd.

I was introduced to PiL by Mike, a guy who lived up the street. He knew I liked the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols had become an early favorite. My adolescent mind was unable to resist the combination of lasciviousness and violence that their name suggested. I was drawn to their neon album cover, the random-note style font. Mike thought that the transition from the Pistols to PiL would be natural. But that chasm is wide. I remember nothing else about Mike other than he gave me a dubbed cassette and that he stayed on his bike when he rang my doorbell. The quality of the cassette he passed along was shit. You could hear the tape hiss between songs; you could hear it hiss during songs if you listened carefully enough.

When he gave me the tape he said, “This is wild stuff. It’s jungle music”. He was right. If I thought the Cure was strange, this was downright exotic. On the most out-there songs, the beats were tribal. Johnny’s voice cut through them in such a way that I couldn’t tell if he was the one being sacrificed or if he was doing the sacrificing. Even the most straightforward songs were hard to like. PiL filtered their audience. I liked that. The tape had half of the album title written on side 1, the other half written on side 2. In Mike’s boy scrawl, Side 1 said “This Is What You Want”; Side 2 said “This Is What You Get”.

* * *

Dana and I would spend all night listening to music. My mom would stagger into the kitchen the next morning. Teepees of plastic cassette casings littered the countertop. Thin paper sleeves with lyrics and credits un-accordioned. “You’re up early,” she’d say, and then she’d wonder why we slept all day.

We weren’t made to feel like criminals. We didn’t think we were depriving anyone of their livelihood.

We feared not that the RIAA was going to burst down the door. Hell, we didn’t even know that such an entity as the RIAA even existed.

Yet, make no mistake about it: stealing Grease and Saturday Night Fever from the TV, discovering how to overdub a store-bought tape, recording my favorite songs off of the radio, Dwight, Mike, Dana—this was the beginning of my life as a file sharer, even if back then the files came in spools.

3.

Bush I, Clinton, Clinton, Bush II, Bush II.

I’m in New York now, the home of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, the New York Dolls, Run DMC, Blondie, the Ramones, Television, Yoko Ono, and the Strokes, among hundreds of other artists who have shaped my life. Why wouldn’t I want to be here?

Oh, yeah. Because my wife of 10 years is still in Pittsburgh. It’s the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. She’s there with the house, the cat, the job, and the insurance. I’m here trying to make it as a playwright (how’s that working out for you?). I’m sharing a place with a professor of mine from school. He divides his time between here and Pittsburgh. I’m paying a pittance but it’s still too much for what I have to endure. The apartment is in a building in a neighborhood I could never afford otherwise. I sleep on the couch. I cling to a coffee cup I can call my own. When he’s in town I can’t even watch the World Series. I’m miserable. I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. Everything feels wrong. But I have tens of thousands of songs in my pocket, and at least I can walk to work.

The apartment is in Chelsea. My part-time proofreading job is near Central Park. It’s four stops on the subway but only a 30-minute walk. No matter how cold, hot, windy, or wet, I choose to walk. One of the great joys of my life continues to be uninterrupted time to listen to music. In the Midwest, I would take drives that were long enough to complete a full album. I’d create detours if necessary, take the long way around, less ideally sit at an abandoned four-way stop until a car that was going my way appeared, then wave him on by and sit a little longer. Here I have no car. Here I walk.

Pittsburgh had a fantastic public radio station, WYEP, that introduced me to a crop of singer-songwriters who were emerging at the time: Josh Rouse, Josh Ritter, Ray LaMontagne. Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born had recently been released. The Shins were new enough. Patti Smith’s Trampin’ was at the top of their year-end list. Morose stuff, I know. But what can I say? I was hundreds of miles from everything I loved, in a new city, questioning every decision I had ever made. These were morose days. I indulged it.

Only the city wouldn’t let me indulge it for long.

My friend Dan says that he knew he was acclimated to New York when he was telling a story to an out-of-town friend and he paid no attention to the jackhammer pounding away across the street. You just don’t realize how noisy the city is until you try to make a three-minute phone call. I dare you to get through it without being interrupted by sirens, horns, and construction. It’s a fool’s bet. You can’t do it. Just imagine what Chutes Too Narrow sounds like through earbuds on these streets. Here’s a hint: It doesn’t. You can’t hear it. The cacophony of the street swallows all melody. In the elevator, I’d settle on one of my mopey albums. By the time I was two blocks uptown, I had forgotten what I was listening to.

As I pinwheeled through my music collection, I soon realized what kind of music did play well on the street: rap. The Bomb Squad, the production team behind the all-out assault that was Public Enemy’s early recordings, famously included street sounds into the mix. Man-on-the-street style commentary would fill the space between the verses. Vocals would run through speakers that might as well have been perched atop police cars or campaign vans. Whole songs were built around air-raid sirens. I didn’t know whether to raise the roof or duck for cover.

I always thought that this was rap's genius: taking the sounds of the street and turning them into art.

I always thought that this was rap’s genius: taking the sounds of the street and turning them into art (says the white boy from the Heartland). While walking the streets of New York, however, albeit Manhattan, I realized that the relationship between the sound and the city was more complicated than that. These sounds were less to be incorporated and more to be overcome. Strumming your gee-tar is one thing if your audience is the well behaved and attentive bunch that frequents coffee shops, but if your audience uses the street corner as their living room (with a nod toward The Wire for crystallizing the point), then your sound better rise above. Strumming isn’t going to cut it.

This is how in those grid-walking days I found myself consumed with Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, Jay Z, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Clipse, Ludacris, the Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. Curiously, I eschewed the West Coast rap I had grown up with. I wanted no part of Dre or Snoop or Ice Cube. Fairly or not, I associated that with car culture. Impalas and hydraulics. Dragging Crenshaw. I mean, I saw Boyz n the Hood. I understood the scene. What I wanted was city music. Nothing smooth. Big beats. Something to cut through all of the shit.

I thought about my boom box abandoned years ago I know not where. It’s state-of-the-artnesss stubbornly refusing to decompose somewhere. I realized that, as bombastic and overwhelming as it seemed to me at the time, it was really just a tame version of the beasts that roamed the street. Beasts/beats. The box’s ancestors are the sound of community. The version in my room a stunted incarnation of the original, damned to record the filler between commercials. If it was a Pixar movie, the story of my boom box would have been its escape from the confines of my bedroom and the freedom it felt back on the streets where it belonged. I was ashamed of myself for not defying my dad. The least I could have done was turn it around in the window.

The irony, of course, was that now that I was closer than ever to the source of the beats that gave purpose to stereos across the land, I was listening to them through earbuds. Here I was drawing grand conclusions about the symbiotic relationship between the city, the technology, and the music, and I was bypassing the streets themselves in favor of pumping the music directly into my own ears. This social experience monopolized. Those irrepressible beats domesticated.

I’m a house party of one.

4.

I’m loathe to admit where I’ve gone from there and in such a short amount of time. Earbuds for me are already as much a part of the past as those Walkman that would let you play side two without even flipping the tape over. In their place are these headphones that make me feel like I have two pillows strapped to my head. They’re Bose. Padded with the first locks of a newborn’s hair. Silver like a car James Bond would drive. Together with my 80 gig iPod Classic, they are the sexiest things I own. What can I say? Even Nation of Millions grows stale when it’s been out too long.

The wife got the headphones for me for my birthday a couple of years ago. She’s in the city now, after only a year of that other ridiculousness. When she gave them to me she said, “If you get hit by a car because of these I’ll kill you.” Her logic is a little faulty, but her point is well taken. These things void the city completely. I no longer miss a word of “This American Life” when the train pulls into the station. What’s more, I wear them constantly. I’m the asshole who keeps them on when he steps onto the elevator. If I was on the elevator and I saw me get on, I’d hate myself.

* * *
In the same way that the ghetto blaster and rap were married in the ‘80’s, so too do I see the iPod and the hipster headphones (as my friend Emily calls them) influencing the music being created for the past several years.

Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes. Sensitive boys with guitars and beards. What breakthrough story have you heard in the last year that didn’t start with “Well, we just took a bunch of songs with us to a cabin in the woods and when we came back out we had a record”? I guess you could listen to this stuff in the car, but not with the windows rolled down. I guess you could listen to it in the living room, but not if you wanted to talk about it. I love that new album by the Antlers, but unless I’m mainlining, I can’t hear half of what that fucker says, and even then it’s only every fifth word. In all of those nights listening to music together, Dana and I never once said, “Hush!”

These bands demand that the listener matches their introspection. They don’t want to sing to you as much as they want to whisper into your ear.

* * *

As if this isn’t bad enough, I’ve also recently been told that my disappointment with a number of high-profile recordings is the result of me not listening carefully enough through my headphones. As if the headphones are a prerequisite for truly enjoying the album. I’m as bad as the people who saw Avatar in 2D.

When I dare balk at the genius of Animal Collective or the Dirty Projectors or the new Flaming Lips, I’m told, “You really have to listen to it through a good pair of headphones. It sounds so much better that way.” The sad thing is that they’re right. Embryonic is a perfectly fine listen coming through my speakers at home, but it’s downright symphonic when I get it one-on-one. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a fair amount of intense headphone scrutiny during last year’s mono vs. stereo debate with the Beatles re-issues (the audiophiles are right, the mono is better).

Yet I still can’t shake this sense of loss. Unless I go to a show, I don’t listen to music with people anymore. My 18-month-old son and I usually do a slow dance before bed—“Tender”, by Blur, is as soporific as any lullaby—and my wife and I will crack a bottle of red with the latest Dylan or Andrew Bird release, but otherwise it’s just me and the music.

The word “pod” has never been more apropos.

The cruelest part of all is that music has never been more available. I have bands on my iPod that I’ve never heard of. I don’t even know how they got there. I land on them twice a year, consider deleting them, then think No, what if I like them, and then forget about them until I discover them again six months later and start the whole process over. But can you blame me if stuff gets oozed ached over and then forgotten? There’s scarcely time to digest the Next Big Thing Before the Next Bigger Thing comes along.

But there’s a difference between sharing files and sharing music, a difference that had never been starker for me than it was last Thanksgiving.

My wife and I took our son out to San Diego. Dana had never met Jonah. I had never met the second of his two boys. Simply put, it had been too long.

We were there for five days. The time was packed with family, yard work, preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, going to the park, playing Wiki. One night we did get out to Soma for some live music, which was cool. Every time we sat down to listen to some music, however, we were interrupted or it just didn’t take for one reason or another.

Then, on the last day, my bags were packed and by the door. Dana fires up the computer and says, “Here”. He accesses an external hard drive, scrolls through, and tells me what’s worth it, what’s not, and what he hasn’t heard yet. The volume is astounding. Everything the Rolling Stones ever recorded. Everything by the Kinks, the Ramones, the Beatles, Metallica, AC/DC, Zeppelin, the Cure. Albums by Holly Golightly, the Muslims, Preston School of Industry, Daft Punk, the Jam, A Tribe Called Quest. He’s into this ‘70’s rock thing right now, so there was some Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ted Nugent, Boston, Seals and Croft. I can’t tell if he’s being ironic or earnest. I think earnest. He’s embraced his role as a family man, and I think it’s of a piece. Family man. Somehow in the end it all comes back to Hall and Oates.

As I faced all of that music, I couldn’t help but think about those all-nighters from before. What we wouldn’t have given for such access. Back then, victory was hearing your favorite song on the radio. We’d coerce our parents to drive us 20 miles for a rare recording, an import. And now it was all here, right in front of me. Just a click away.

A click and a drag.

Then I could listen to all of this music all by myself.
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature...rter-to-obama/





Global Music Sales Fell 7 Percent in 2009, Boyle Tops Chart
Kate Holton

Global recorded music sales fell 7 percent to $17 billion in 2009, hit by a fall in the world's two biggest markets of the United States and Japan, the industry's trade body said on Wednesday.

The IFPI said the 2009 figures -- which compared with an 8 percent drop in 2008 -- showed a mixed picture, with a return to growth in 13 markets and digital music sales growing strongly, although rampant music piracy continued to eat in to revenues.

Susan Boyle, who shot to fame on Simon Cowell's "Britain's Got Talent" show, had the best selling album of the year with "I Dreamed a Dream," which sold 8.3 million units.

Other top selling artists included the Black Eyed Peas, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. Five of the top 10 best sellers were signed to Vivendi's Universal, with the others on Sony and Warner Music Group.

Global recorded sales have been hit in recent years by piracy and the move to cheaper digital tracks.

"The global music business is continuing to fight its corner, investing in talent and developing new business models despite the problems of a market rigged by piracy," IFPI Chairman and Chief Executive John Kennedy said in a statement.

"Music companies are investing over $5 billion a year in developing and marketing artists, licensing hundreds of services and adapting their distribution channels to meet changing consumer demand."

The United States and Japan made up 80 percent of the overall market decline, the IFPI said, while the worldwide fall in revenue outside those two markets was 3.2 percent.

Physical sales of music such as CDs fell by 12.7 percent globally, while digital music sales rose by 9.2 percent to $4.3 billion.

Outside of the recorded business, the broader music industry which includes areas such as radio advertising and live performance sales fell 8 percent to an estimated $140 billion.

Growth in live music revenue, which reached 4 percent, has slowed significantly in the last three years.

(Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63R1K220100428





iTunes Takes Over a Quarter of 2009 US Music Sales

Digital grows within context of industry decline

The iTunes Store was the source of more than a quarter of US music sales during 2009, even when squared off against combined digital and retail competition, figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry show. Apple contributed to a modest 1.1 percent growth in domestic digital sales, and a 9.2 percent increase for digital internationally, pushing the sector to $4.3 billion. The music industry as whole has continued to decline however, falling 7.2 percent to be worth $17 billion.

Sales have been slipping every year since 1999. The IFPI cites piracy as one of music's "biggest obstacles," and suggests that local government clampdowns could help restore the industry to profit. 2009 sales dropped the most, proportionately, in the United States and Japan, which together accounted for 80 percent of the $1.3 billion in global losses.

Apple has few challengers in the digital arena; even Amazon and Microsoft are believed to have just fractions of Apple's share. Microsoft has not published much data from the Zune Marketplace, making it difficult to do an accurate comparison. At the same time though, iTunes is estimated to account for 69 percent of online music sales.
http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/10/04...ustry.decline/





Terra Firma Wants $550 Million To Save EMI
FMQB

In an attempt to save debt-riddled EMI, its owner Terra Firma may ask clients for triple the amount of money it initially sought to help the label meet its debt obligations until 2015. Terra Firma plans to raise 360 million pounds ($551 million) by the middle of June, which would allow the company to comply with its debt covenants with lender Citigroup over the next five years, according to Bloomberg. The record label had previously considered seeking 120 million pounds, which would have covered them only until 2011. Terra Firma’s management will reportedly contribute about 36 million pounds (10 percent) of the total it's seeking from investors, and the firm will approach existing clients for money before extending an offer to third-party investors.

As part of the planned capital raising, Terra Firma may consider the sale of its Japan unit, EMI Music Japan. Other possible disposals include the classics or jazz division, according to a Reuters report. The company also has tried to license its catalog in North America to a rival label in order to raise cash, although its previous efforts to do so have failed.

As reported yesterday, EMI chief executive Charles Allen has drawn up a five-year business plan which has been presented to Terra Firma and will be taken to investors to persuade them to pour more money into the company. That plan could include shedding hundreds of employees and making a fresh attempt to lease its music catalog.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1777191





Jeff Beck Says Beatles “as Good as George Martin Allowed Them to be”

The Beatles probably would have gone down in history as a pretty good bar band had it not been for their producer George Martin, according to Jeff Beck. The guitar virtuoso, who worked with the studio wizard on a pair of acclaimed albums in the 1970s, said on Thursday the Beatles were “as good as George Martin allowed them to be.”

“To my ears I wasn’t hearing much,” Beck said during a Q&A at the Grammy Museum. “George put (in) all these chords and these fantastic sounds, and all the experimentation was afforded by George. He enabled it. Up to that point they were singing the Star Club (in) Hamburg and doing Gene Vincent songs.

“When we got later the psychedelic stuff, George put all that together. So without George, I don’t know. But of course the songwriting’s there, the melodies are there, marvelous. But they would be much more crude and raw, I think.”

Beck said Martin even had a great deal to do with embellishing John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting, as evidenced by the sixth chord on the “Yeah Yeah” part of “She Loves You.” “I don’t think they were doing that then,” Beck said. “George said, ‘You put that note there, boy, and that’ll be a hit.’ That’s the way I see it.”

Beck is on the promotional trail for his new album “Emotion & Commotion,” which debuted on the U.S. pop chart this week at No. 11. Only the Martin-produced “Blow By Blow” opened higher, at No. 4 in 1975.

As part of his visit to the Grammy Museum, he performed an eclectic eight-song set of instrumentals, including his Grammy-winning take on Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” “Nessun Dorma,” “Over the Rainbow” and Les Paul’s “How High the Moon.” At Q&A host Jim Ladd’s prompting, he surprised fans with a version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” which was a hit for Beck and Rod Stewart in 1985.
http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/201...ed-them-to-be/





They’re Calling Almost Everyone’s Tune
David Segal

“It’s tough to handle this fortune and fame.

Everybody’s so different; I haven’t changed.”

— Joe Walsh, “Life’s Been Good”

FOR a man who sits atop one of the most feared corporations in the music business, Irving Azoff seems surprisingly proud of his middle finger. Images of it, raised high and defiant, are hard to avoid in his home, a 12,000-square-foot mansion in one of the richest neighborhoods in this city.

There he is, the chairman of the newly merged Ticketmaster and Live Nation, staring from behind his digit of choice in a photograph on his stationery. And there he is again, grinning from the same vantage point in an image on a sweatshirt that he wears one afternoon when he offers a tour of his estate.

Somehow, when deployed by Mr. Azoff, this obscene gesture seems less a profanity than a very succinct statement of personal philosophy. At roughly 5-foot-3 and at the age of 62 — imagine an accountant who used to be a jockey — he has a teenager’s sense of humor and a rascally, triumphant style that has been the bane of his enemies and the delight of his allies for four decades.

“He who dies with the most toys wins,” read the front of a T-shirt that he once had made for employees of his artist management firm, which has handled acts like the Eagles, Steely Dan, and the Go-Gos. The back of the shirt read, “Irving wins!”

He has won often over the years, but his biggest victory might well have come on Jan. 25. That day, the Justice Department blessed a merger between Ticketmaster, the ticketing giant that Mr. Azoff has led since 2008, and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company.

Live Nation Entertainment, as the new company is called, is a colossus unlike anything the industry has ever seen. Ticketmaster has roughly 70 percent of the concert ticket market in the United States and is known for the ever-rising cost of an assortment of tacked-on fees, now as much a part of concert experience as sticky floors and shoving. Live Nation, led by Michael Rapino, 43, is a roll-up of regional promoters that now runs more than 22,000 events a year, many in the 127 amphitheaters and clubs that the company owns or operates. Total annual attendance is more than 50 million.

Then there’s the company’s not-so-secret weapon, Front Line Management, a consortium of artist management agencies that Mr. Azoff started cobbling together in 2005. Front Line shepherds the careers of roughly 200 marquee solo artists and bands, ranging in age from Miley Cyrus to Willie Nelson and including Van Halen, Neil Diamond, Christina Aguilera, Kid Rock, Maroon 5 and the Kings of Leon.

To say this new conglomerate has inspired fear in the live-concert business doesn’t capture the extent of the quaking. A coalition of consumer groups and independent promoters lobbied hard against the merger, warning that Live Nation Entertainment could quietly threaten venue owners by hinting that if they dropped Ticketmaster, they would have a hard time booking Live Nation tours or Front Line talent. The coalition also said the new company would have something close to a monopolist’s hand when it came to setting ticket fees.

“Now that it’s united with Ticketmaster, the sky will be the limit when it comes to fees,” says Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League. “It’s not enough to say ‘If you don’t like the high prices, don’t go to the show.’ We need a concert market that has real and robust competition.”

In their first interviews since the merger was completed, Mr. Azoff and Mr. Rapino denied having much weight to throw around, saying that it’s established artists who are really in charge.

They say they are still trying to figure out new ways to generate revenue, and the two men acknowledged that if their companies weren’t allowed to merge, Live Nation in particular would have been in awful financial shape.

“There’s an old saying, ‘It’s easier to kill a business than to change,’ ” says Mr. Rapino, now Live Nation Entertainment’s C.E.O. “We wanted to make sure we got married before we spent four years too long saying, ‘God, we should have put these companies together.’ ”

That the Justice Department went along with this marriage surprised many who were expecting the Obama administration to pursue possible antitrust questions more aggressively and take the companies to court. But department officials contend that they extracted real concessions in a consent decree that prohibits an assortment of bullying tactics by the new company. The department also tried to gin up some competition in the ticketing market by, among other moves, forcing Ticketmaster to sell off a subsidiary called Paciolan in the hopes that it would become a serious competitor.

Maybe that will happen, but for now, Mr. Azoff is as close to a commissioner for live music as this country has ever had. And he occupies this job at a time when labels, as a force in the market, are withering and bands are making the bulk of their income from concerts. Which is to say, more power than ever is concentrated in the live-music side of the business, and the business of live music is more concentrated than ever.

Other executives in this industry have made greater fortunes, but Mr. Azoff is arguably the most powerful man in the history of pop music.

“This business has always had a lot of guys who wield a lot of decision-making power,” he says, in a tone that suggests he doesn’t have more influence than the music titans before him.

IRVING AZOFF has never broken through as that staple of pop culture, the nationally known mogul. But it is not for lack of charisma, money or a flair for the outlandish. On occasions when he has found a restaurant’s service slow, he has lit the menu on fire. He once had a gift-wrapped boa constrictor delivered to a manager whose wife he considered a bit treacherous.

The accompanying happy-birthday note said: “Now you have two of them!”

“My wife was involved in that one,” says Mr. Azoff, chuckling. “But it was a baby boa constrictor, in a cage. It actually was kind of a nice gift.”

In music circles, he’s been known as a savvy negotiator and a ferocious advocate for his artists, capable of sonorous shouting jags. “Let’s just say you had a ringing in your ears for a few days after he yelled at you,” says Dave Lucas, a former concert promoter now with Live-360, which consults with music venues. “You waited a while before you called back unless you wanted more.”

Mr. Azoff is also known for bending the truth when it suits his purposes or those of his clients, a propensity that long ago earned him the nickname Swerving Irving. He has been surprisingly honest about his penchant for dissembling — even saying so under oath, in a deposition in a lawsuit over the band Boston. After calling two music executives liars, he said, “Come to think of it, you can’t believe much of what I say, either.”

“That’s Irving,” says Don Engel, a lawyer who has worked both for and against Mr. Azoff. “His game is, ‘I say whatever I want, and if I change my mind, that’s the new truth.’ ”

It’s all part of the game, Mr. Azoff says: “Various jobs that I’ve had require me to stand behind the curtain and — what’s the word? — create an illusion. This is a business that requires different tactics at different times.”

One recent afternoon, Mr. Azoff was sitting in his office, recovering from strep throat. He was about to hit the phones for a few hours of the quick conversations and messages that consume most of his waking life. First, however, he wanted to listen to Ms. Aguilera’s newest single, “Not Myself Tonight,” which had just been uploaded to her Web site. It takes a minute or two to find the play button on the right Web page — Internet-proficient, the man is not — and suddenly the tune is blasting out of a pair of speakers at concert volume.

“It’s dance-y,” he yells over the din.

During this three-hour visit, Mr. Azoff is flip, funny and kind of cuddly, at least when he talks to his musician clients. His wife, Shelli, is home and visiting with a few friends, but the house is so large that we won’t cross paths. His 12-year-old son is in the backyard getting a tennis lesson. There’s also a guest cottage here that’s been turned into a gym and a separate building for a pool table and a Ping-Pong table.

His favorite toy, though, is a gleaming $110,000 black Tesla, an electric car he says is the fastest car he’s ever owned. (“And I’ve owned Ferraris. I’ve owned Porsches.”) He offers a demonstration and we inch down his driveway, past his koi pond, through a set of slowly opening gates. When Mr. Azoff reaches the street, he punches the accelerator, and the car lunges to about 70 m.p.h. in under four seconds.

“Need I say more?” he cackles, barely braking in time for a stop sign. “It’s insane!”

As he drives, he narrates a tour of the neighborhood. That’s David Geffen’s house, that’s where Lucille Ball lived, Michael Jackson died in a house over there. He points to land beside his. “This is an old widow, who’s 86 years old,” he says. “I’ve got an option to buy this when she kicks.”

Mr. Azoff is the last of a generation of rock entrepreneurs who started as young men in the early ’70s, when rock transitioned out of its hippie, anti-establishment phase and into its professional, stadium-tour era. Some of his contemporaries retired rich. Most were flattened by trends and competition they never saw coming. For those without the instincts of a survivor, this is an industry with few happy endings. Its nearest analog isn’t an industry at all; it’s politics. Alliances shift, backs are stabbed and most people have at least three agendas, only one of which they will discuss candidly.

Consider the saga of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

IN the years before their courtship, these companies were on the verge of war.

For a long time, Live Nation had been Ticketmaster’s biggest customer: if you wanted a ticket to a Live Nation site, Ticketmaster sold it to you. But Mr. Rapino looked enviously at Ticketmaster’s balance sheet, which showed a steadier business with higher margins and less agita. Today, if you buy a ticket to a Lady Gaga concert, you’ll need to hand over a $2.50 “facility charge,” as well as a $15.45 “convenience charge” and $2.50 if you want to print your ticket at home.

Some of that money goes back to promoters as rebates — a practice that Ticketmaster pioneered — but Ticketmaster keeps most of it. So, in 2007, Live Nation told Ticketmaster that it would not renew its contract and began developing a ticketing platform of its own.

For a fleeting moment, it looked as if price competition was coming to the concert business.

But ticketing technology is notoriously tricky, and Live Nation’s ran into a rather infamous glitch in February 2009, when Phish fans briefly overwhelmed the system. Even so, Live Nation’s ticketing ambitions helped persuade Ticketmaster to merge, in part because Live Nation was starting to make overtures to venues with Ticketmaster clients. Ticketmaster had a choice: it could either merge with the company that had once provided about 15 percent of its revenue, or compete against it.

For Live Nation, there were plenty of reasons to join Ticketmaster. Live Nation was saddled with so much debt — about $800 million, much of it for maintaining venues and for upfront fees for artists — that Mr. Rapino worried about becoming a takeover target. In March 2009, its stock traded for less than $3 a share.

To Mr. Rapino, it was either an all-out battle, which could have devastated his company, or a merger he regards as win-win for everyone. Certainly, Live Nation Entertainment has benefited. When Ticketmaster and Live Nation announced the merger in February 2009, as Wall Street neared its bear-market low, they said the new company would be worth $816 million. It’s now worth $2.8 billion.

But Mr. Rapino says that fans and artists will come out ahead, too. His goal is to turn Ticketmaster’s Web site into live music’s answer to Amazon.com, allowing him to sell merchandise, fan club memberships and so on. “Now,” he says, “I’m not just a guy with the stage who puts on the show.”

Mr. Rapino is sipping a Fresca in Live Nation’s office in a sleek, modern building in Beverly Hills. He has a closely trimmed beard and black hair in what could be described as a mulletlike cut. He was raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and started his own promotion company after college, which was bought by Clear Channel Communications, the radio and concert giant. He went to work there and became known for assembling facts for snazzy presentations. He was also regarded as a ruthless infighter and a shameless, if slightly tin-eared, self-promoter.

On this particular afternoon, he has just come from a meeting with Dave Stewart, best known as the male half of the Eurythmics. Before Mr. Stewart leaves, he drops by Mr. Rapino’s office to say goodbye.

What was he doing there?

“When the Internet came about,” Mr. Stewart replies, “the artist realized, well hang on, you can’t steal a ticket for a seat, so we started to lean more toward, I don’t really want a record deal, I want to be aligned with somebody who can help me sell tickets. But then I want a company that can use that music and that seat to get ancillary revenues” — from things like food, beverages and sponsorships — “to help me survive.”

Mr. Rapino nods through all this. “He said it better than I can,” he says, sounding awed.

The relationship between Mr. Rapino and artists is complicated. On the one hand, he must be deferential and accommodating, because without a regular caravan of acts, he has nothing but empty seats and red ink. At the same time, some artists are exasperating, though Mr. Rapino is far too diplomatic to say so.

Instead, he’ll simply note that artists — at least the famous ones — are in a position these days to define their own destiny. And without question, that destiny includes higher ticket prices. The average price of a ticket to one of the top 100 tours soared to $62.57 last year from $25.81 in 1996, according to Pollstar, far outpacing inflation. The interesting question is why.

Mr. Rapino’s theory is that musicians are just benefiting from the same trends that have enriched other superstars, like athletes and actors.

“The ticket was underpriced 40 years ago,” he says.

Rival promoters see another culprit in high ticket prices: Live Nation. The company, they say, represents a consolidation of regional promoters that didn’t just coincide with rising ticket prices but also helped cause them. Ticket prices, in this telling, have gone up because the largest promoter has been paying whatever-it-takes sums to get bands in the door — both to drive out competitors and to bring in desperately needed revenue to cover fixed overhead costs and to fill up seats. The company’s biggest outlays include “360 deals” with Jay-Z, Madonna, U2 and others, giving the company a stake in tours, recording and merchandise profits in exchange for nine-figure paydays. Jay-Z’s deal was reportedly worth more than $150 million.

“Look at what has happened to ticket prices, and the price of everything else at a concert, over the last 10 years, right when consolidation was happening,” says John Scher, who books shows in Madison Square Garden, at Radio City Music Hall and elsewhere in New York. “I talk to college kids all the time and they tell me that going to a show at an arena or an amphitheater is just beyond what they can afford. And it’s because Live Nation has been paying the acts these outrageous sums, which is just alienating the fan base.”

Mr. Rapino denies overpaying for bands, and says that the price of tickets often triples when they’re sold by scalpers, which suggests that they were actually underpriced.

Then again, when Mr. Rapino was describing the parlous condition of the concert business in front of Congress last year, he noted that 40 percent of concert tickets go unsold, a statistic that he offered as a symptom of an industry in distress but that might just be evidence that Live Nation and its rivals don’t know how to price and sell their products. Today, as high as ticket prices are, Live Nation earns none of its profit from ticket revenue. The artists get nearly all of that. Live Nation’s earnings come from stuff sold on site, like beer, parking and advertising.

While there is plenty of argument about what combination of forces caused ticket prices to go up as Live Nation’s share of ticket money went down, there is a broad consensus about one of those forces.

The force is named Irving Azoff.

MR. AZOFF started by booking rock concerts in high school and later dropped out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to work as an artist manager. The folk rocker Dan Fogelberg, whom he met in college, was his first client, and then came REO Speedwagon, an unknown at the time. Next was the future Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh.

“We met one night at the Whiskey a Go Go,” says Mr. Walsh, referring to a club on the Sunset Strip. Mr. Walsh says his solo career was in a rut, and he was broke. “So I said: ‘You can manage me. But first you have to help me trash this dressing room.’ And we threw everything everywhere.”

This was one of the secrets to Mr. Azoff’s career: He didn’t just join the juvenile behavior of his acts. He encouraged and led it. He started food fights on planes. He reveled in pranks. He assumed that there was no amount of mayhem that a few $100 bills couldn’t fix. When Mr. Walsh wanted a room that connected to Mr. Azoff’s and a hotel had none to offer, Mr. Azoff dispatched an underling to a hardware store to buy a chain saw, which Mr. Walsh used to cut a makeshift door.

“Then he bought me a case so I could bring the chain saw on the road,” Mr. Walsh says. “Just having a chain saw when you’re on the road, you can accomplish an awful lot. You don’t even need to start it.”

For all his frat-boy shenanigans, Mr. Azoff had a Doberman’s instincts about protecting his clients. Plenty of managers at the time became rich by keeping clients in the dark about their finances, arguing that mixing commerce and art was bad for the music. He did the opposite.

“Irving basically said, ‘I’ll bring you into the negotiation,’ ” says Cameron Crowe, who wrote a profile of Mr. Azoff for Rolling Stone and became a friend. “You’d go to his office and Dan Fogelberg would be sitting across from Irving, just watching the show.”

Mr. Azoff was part of the defiant counterculture but was fluent in the language of contracts and comfortable mixing it up in corporate suites. He also had great intuition about how to psychologically size up both foes and friends, and he could sweet-talk and charm as convincingly as he could erupt in rage.

“We met him in 1975 right when my partner Walter Becker and I had decided to give up touring,” says Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. “We expected him to say, ‘You guys have to tour if you expect a career.’ Instead, he said, ‘I’m going to triple your album sales without you touring.’ Maybe he kind of guessed at what we wanted to hear, which is a kind of business genius itself.”

But the place where Mr. Azoff’s style would have the widest and most lasting impact was on the road.

The concert business was regional at the time, and many promoters had rather creative ways of divvying up the spoils. Some would subtract fictional overhead costs from the band’s share — for replacing the hockey ice under the stage, for instance, even if the ice was intact through the entire show. In the movie “Almost Famous,” a slick new manager pitches his services to a band by asking, “Do you know to keep from getting charged for the ice below the floorboards at Chicago Stadium?”

That was an Irving Azoff line, says Mr. Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie.

“He’d come out of Urbana-Champaign with a knowledge of where the bodies were buried because he was a booking agent in his previous life, and he’d buried them,” Mr. Crowe says. “At the time, there was a lot of mystery about promoting concerts and a lot of promoters had a wonderful ride until Irving came to town.”

His expertise was determining exactly how much money the promoter stood to pocket from a show, always a closely guarded secret. He’d send an employee into the parking lot to count the number of cars paying parking fees. He’d call the food concession and ask for sales data. What he couldn’t sleuth out on his own, he would coax from one of the promoter’s underlings, who were often eager to curry favor with the great Irving Azoff.

“Every guy working at the lower level in this business dreams of moving up,” says Mr. Azoff, shrugging as though this particular idea didn’t take a genius.

He added up all the numbers and argued that when it came time to split the proceeds, this revenue should be considered, too. Why not? Without the talent, there were no fans to pay for food and parking. Knowing how much the promoter was earning on a given night, Mr. Azoff could ask for a larger cut of ticket revenue.

The promoters, he’d say, could keep the money earned at the venue, but in exchange they’d have to give Mr. Azoff and his acts a greater cut of ticket revenue than they typically handed over. Ninety percent, to be precise. It became known as “the Irving deal.”

THE Irving deal pinched the margins of every promoter. But none were pinched quite like those of an entrepreneur named Robert F. X. Sillerman, who began a buying spree of regional promoters in late 1996, ultimately spending more than $1 billion, most of it borrowed. How would Mr. Sillerman turn a profit? By selling more ads and sponsorships, he said. Great, replied Mr. Azoff. His bands will take 90 percent of that income.

“I said, ‘Of course you’re going to give me 90 percent of the money, Bob,’ ” says Mr. Azoff, remembering a contentious phone call. “‘That’s our standard split or we’re not going to play. How many people do you think will pay to see Robert Sillerman at the Boston Garden?”

This was posturing, to a degree — Mr. Azoff didn’t really expect 90 cents of every ad dollar. But he was reminding Mr. Sillerman of a simple principle. If a promoter was going to earn money from some new source, he’d have to share some of it with Mr. Azoff’s bands.

Ultimately, Mr. Sillerman didn’t even try to make his conglomeration, SFX, a viable long-term venture. Instead, in 2000, he sold the company to Clear Channel for $3.3 billion in stock and the assumption of $1.1 billion in SFX debt, a sum that seemed preposterously high to many in the industry. Five years later, as Clear Channel stock languished, the concert business was spun off — and Live Nation was born.

That same year, Mr. Azoff decided to “fight clout with clout,” as he puts it. He started consolidating management firms, reportedly with more than $100 million raised from sources including the Warner Music Group and a private equity firm, Thomas H. Lee Partners. Many of the management firms took a lump-sum check against a share of future profits.

“His pitch was, ‘Let’s create a big company that gives the artists a power base,’ ” says Clint Higham, a manager at Morris Artist Management in Nashville, whose clients include Kenny Chesney.

In 2008, Ticketmaster, which had owned a piece of Front Line, bought Warner Music’s minority stake for $123 million. As part of that deal, Mr. Azoff became the C.E.O. of both companies.

A year later, Mr. Azoff set aside his ambition to “fight clout with clout,” and Live Nation and Ticketmaster unveiled the mother of all music industry mergers.

THE Justice Department considered the merger, and negotiated with the parties, for just under a year. Ultimately, officials approved the deal after what they described as significant changes.

First, there is an attempt in the consent decree to jump-start two ticketing competitors — Paciolan, the aforementioned subsidiary, which was sold to Comcast; and the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which was granted the right to sell tickets using Ticketmaster’s technology for the next five years, in exchange for a royalty fee to Live Nation Entertainment. A.E.G., Live Nation’s closest rival in the promotion business, has the option after five years to build its own platform or buy Ticketmaster’s source code.

“Our hope is that there will be competitive choice for venues,” Christine Varney, the department’s antitrust chief, said in a phone interview. “Whether that’ll mean lower prices for fans, we’ll see, but we think that the more competitors there are in this field, the more likely it is that prices will go down.”

To many, the government’s effort to nurse a couple of Ticketmaster rivals into fighting shape seems a long shot at best. But the government also won from Live Nation Entertainment a promise that it would not engage in certain anticompetitive behavior. The company’s ticketing side, for instance, is barred from sharing data with the promotion side.

That reflects the worry of promoters with Ticketmaster contracts that the hugely valuable information collected through ticket sales — the e-mail addresses and the musical appetites of customers — will be quietly exploited by Live Nation. There are penalties for violating the consent decree that Ms. Varney described as $10,000 a ticket, but a lot of promoters worry that the company could break the rules and that nobody would know.

“There is supposed to be this Chinese wall at the company,” says Mitchell Frank, who books shows for a Los Angeles club, Echoplex. “But really, what is to stop them from mining all the data that I collect?”

If the merger presents so many potential hazards, why did the Justice Department approve it?

Several people familiar with the negotiations inside the department said that officials didn’t think they had much choice. According to Jim Hurwitz, a former Federal Trade Commission lawyer who wrote a paper for the American Antitrust Institute arguing against the merger, Live Nation told the government that it was going to exit the ticketing market no matter what happened with this deal and that it would enter an informal alliance with Ticketmaster if it wasn’t allowed to merge. On the other hand, if it was allowed to merge, the government could exert some control through a consent decree.

In other words, Mr. Hurwitz explained, the choice presented to the Justice Department was this: either let us get married and have a say in our union or try to stop us — in which case, we’re just going to start seriously dating. “My sense also is that Justice was worried about its prospects if it went to court, and it didn’t want to lose its first major case,” Mr. Hurwitz says.

Ms. Varney of the Justice Department has disputed that notion, saying that it would have litigated if it hadn’t won the concessions it wanted.

NOW that Live Nation Entertainment is a reality, how does it intend to grow? Mr. Azoff and Mr. Rapino are still coming up with answers. They want to improve Ticketmaster’s e-commerce site and look for ways to sell merchandise, fan club memberships and so forth to people buying tickets. The two executives talk about new pricing models and a better fan experience.

Potentially, these changes are revolutionary. For years, neither promoter nor ticketer has considered fans as the first priority. Ticketmaster’s most important clients are venue owners. The promoter, of course, worries foremost about the artist. If you’ve ever attended a concert and felt treated like an afterthought, now you know why.

But as Live Nation Entertainment tries to create this fan-friendly concert experience and improve its margins, it has tough trends to fight. The number of new bands with arena-packing power is dwindling. The company has made few inroads in hip-hop and rap. We live in a world of downloadable singles, but albums and artists’ repertoires are what traditionally sell big tours.

Then there is the problem that Mr. Azoff can blame only on himself. No matter what ideas Live Nation Entertainment conjures to generate more cash, artists are likely to demand part of the upside. They’ll want the Irving deal. And why wouldn’t they?

“We’ve squeezed every drop that there is to squeeze,” Mr. Azoff replies, using “we” to refer to artists and managers. “We’ve probably squeezed too much. But we’re not going backward,” and here the “we” switches to Live Nation Entertainment, “so with this merger we’re going to form new businesses through e-commerce so we don’t have to go to artists and say ‘We want to take back some ground.’ ”

When it comes time to negotiate the deals between artists and promoters, Mr. Azoff in many instances will have a seat on both sides of the table, a potential conflict of interest that he dismisses — because he’s been at this a long time, he says, and because everyone trusts him to do what it is fair for everyone.

Does that group include fans? We are about to find out. Much about the concert business is now an open question, but what’s clear is how much of the future resides in Mr. Azoff’s impish little hands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/bu.../25ticket.html





You Can Judge a Book by Its Movie
Manohla Dargis

LAST Sunday the film historian David Bordwell watched movies from Spain, Denmark and Romania at the Wisconsin Film Festival here in Madison, where he has lived if rarely stayed still for four decades. He had just returned from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, after which he drove some 400 miles (and back) from Madison to Bloomington, Ind., to deliver a lecture. In between all this flying, driving and watching, he also posted some 14,000 words on his blog, davidbordwell.net. Then it was off to Ebertfest in Champaign, Ill., a film festival programmed by Roger Ebert, who has called Mr. Bordwell “our best writer on the cinema.”

He might be retired, and you might never have heard of him, but at 62 Mr. Bordwell remains extraordinarily prolific and perhaps more influential than ever. His blog is read by academics but also routinely featured on aggregate sites like moviecitynews.com next to industry dispatches from Variety. “Minding Movies,” an anthology of blog posts by him and Kristin Thompson, his wife and frequent collaborator, is due next spring. And new editions of their textbooks “Film Art” (ninth) and “Film History” (third) were issued last year. If an undergraduate takes a single film class, it’s a good bet that one of these books will be on the syllabus.

Outside of the academy (and sometimes in it too) film studies have long generated degrees of mirth, bafflement and hostility, which can happen when you mix polysyllabic words like intertextuality with high-concept producers like Jerry Bruckheimer. In 2003 The Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover article, “Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology,” by David Weddle, who was aghast at what his daughter, a film-studies major, was studying in her department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was the kind of freak-out that film studies people were used to (then and now) — after all, it’s only a movie.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in cinema studies, psychoanalytic and feminist film theory, with their emphasis on the male gaze and female bodies (never as sexy as it might seem), were the rage. I read a lot of work influenced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and while it was intellectually stimulating, I later decided that this wasn’t a fruitful approach for me. At the time it felt as if everyone was writing variations on the same issues (visual pleasure blah blah blah) while using the same almost ritualistically recycled theories with the same types of films that conveniently fit those theories. (Mr. Bordwell would later take direct aim at theory with a capital T, making a lot of people unhappy.)

That’s one reason why the 1985 publication of “The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960” — by him, Ms. Thompson and Janet Staiger, who read chapters aloud to one another during the writing — was so welcome. Dedicated to the actor Ralph Bellamy, the writer Anita Loos “and their many co-workers in the Hollywood cinema,” this magisterial work uses 300 movies from 1915 to 1960 (and a bit beyond) to trace changes in Hollywood’s production practices and in its technologies through, for instance, a history of cameras. It also identifies the conventions that helped constitute the classical style through devices like continuity editing; explaining how these devices work to create systems of cinematic narrative, time and space; and examining how these systems work together.

This was history with a vengeance: detailed, rigorous, monumental. Though well received, the book had its detractors and continues to draw criticism for, among other things, its cut-off dates and insistence on the coherence of the Hollywood style. The book alone certainly didn’t reintroduce history back into film studies, but its insistence on the historical conditions that control and shape “textual processes,” along with the depth and breadth it brought to writing film history, has been profound. The discipline’s new emphasis on cinema’s past has been rewarding, but it also suggests that film studies has entered a nostalgic, even elegiac stage: many scholars have turned back the clock to write about early and silent cinema at the very moment that others are theorizing about the end of cinema in the digital age.

The boundlessly enthusiastic Mr. Bordwell doesn’t come off as nostalgic, either in his writing or in person. He grew up on a farm outside the upstate New York town of Penn Yan, where there was only one movie theater. So he fed his cinephilia through early film books like Arthur Knight’s “Liveliest Art” and late-night television. By the time he started teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he was committed to the serious study of film. (“No soft arguments,” as he puts it.) Madison was an ideal spot partly because it housed a trove of research material, including the United Artists collection of more than 5,000 films, and more than 2,000 boxes of paper material. And the school was hopping, with 22 film societies and the influential journal The Velvet Light Trap. He got to work.

During a recent visit to Wisconsin I found him indefatigably energetic, fast talking and walking, as he ricocheted from idea to idea, film to film. It’s no wonder he titled one recent blog post “The Omnivoyeur’s dilemma.” (The equally prolific Ms. Thompson was in Egypt studying Amarna-period sculpture.) Unlike some film academics, who sometimes seem less interested in actual movies than the peripheries, he remains an enthusiast who likes to sit in the first row center. He was toting the book “Why We Cooperate,” in which the psychologist Michael Tomasello looks at why children are naturally cooperative. A practitioner of cognitive film theory, Mr. Bordwell is interested in the process of knowing through perception as when, for instance, we watch actors blinking in movies.

Why should anyone care, other than a Visine executive? As it happens, actors are often taught not to blink, and filmmakers will cut away from a scene before an actor blinks because it’s distracting. Eyes are an important expressive tool, imparting valuable information (joy, sorrow) that we register perceptually: blinking, in other words, is part of how a movie makes meaning. In “Jerry Maguire,” Mr. Bordwell writes in his 2005 book “Figures Traced in Light,” there are “fewer than 30 blinks among three characters in a passage of nearly three minutes,” which exaggerates and amplifies the interpersonal cues. Some filmmakers guide our attention to faces; others direct our attention to postures and gestures or even away from faces toward other expressive elements.

Eye blinks are part of a film’s expressive style, and movies are about style, not just stories. “Why should we inquire into style at all?” he asks rhetorically in “Figures Traced in Light.” Because “without performance and framing, lens length and lighting, composition and cutting, dialogue and music, we could not grasp the world of the story.” But Mr. Bordwell doesn’t just count eye blinks, he also discusses human physiology, specifically the region of the eye that has critical focus. Our eyes scan our environment through “visual search” (“active, fast and indebted to our biological heritage”), something intuited by the English painter Hogarth and that scene-stealer Katharine Hepburn, who wore a scarlet cardigan in “On Golden Pond” because, as the cinematographer said, “your eye goes straight to it.”

Counting blinks is just one of Mr. Bordwell’s strategies for understanding movies, the fundamental goal of the critic. Rather than just gassing on about his interpretations (as reviewers can do) or starting with a theory and finding a set of movies that support that theory (as scholars will do), he looks to the movies first, analyzing what is happening at the level of sight and sound, then extrapolating meaning. In his books and on his blog he also generously employs images taken from the movies, so that you can follow his line of reasoning and trace along with him how German Expressionist cinema influenced William Cameron Menzies, the production designer for “Gone With the Wind.”

You can see for yourself on that blog, which he started after he retired from teaching in 2004. He isn’t the only high-profile academic with a Web site — Henry Jenkins (henryjenkins.org), Yuri Tsivian (cinemetrics.lv\) — but the accessibility of his writing as well as his output make him a noteworthy contributor to our brave new world of moving-image discourse. (Mind you, discourse has its limits: the blog is closed to comments to keep out the noise.) It has recently become axiomatic that film criticism is in crisis. The truth is that outside of the mainstream media world, where reviewers are increasingly disposable, film criticism is doing fine. Academic programs continue to churn out professors who continue to assign books by Bordwell and Thompson that open eyes, ears and minds, and sometimes rock worlds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/movies/25dargis.html





'How to Train Your Dragon' Claws its Way Back to the Top of the Box Office
AP

"How to Train Your Dragon" scratched and clawed its way back to the top of the box office, earning about $15.4 million in its fifth week of release.

The family adventure from DreamWorks Animation opened at No. 1 in March, then fell back for a few weeks before returning to first place, according to final studio numbers Monday. It topped new releases including "The Back-up Plan," the Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy from CBS Films, which opened weakly at No. 2 with just over $12 million.

The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:

1. "How to Train Your Dragon," Paramount-DreamWorks Animation, $15,350,213, 3,665 locations, $4,188 average, $178,345,927, five weeks.

2. "The Back-up Plan," CBS Films, $12,201,710, 3,280 locations, $3,720 average, $12,201,710, one week.

3. "Date Night," Fox, $10,461,223, 3,294 locations, $3,176 average, $63,332,819, three weeks.

4. "The Losers," Warner Bros., $9,406,348, 2,936 locations, $3,204 average, $9,406,348, one week.

5. "Kick-Ass," Lionsgate, $9,342,398, 3,065 locations, $3,048 average, $34,708,222, two weeks.

6. "Clash of the Titans," Warner Bros., $8,924,180, 3,271 locations, $2,728 average, $145,563,557, four weeks.

7. "Death at a Funeral," Sony Screen Gems, $8,022,762, 2,459 locations, $3,263 average, $28,471,939, two weeks.

8. "Oceans," Disneynature, $6,058,958, 1,206 locations, $5,024 average, $8,525,488, one week.

9. "The Last Song," Disney, $3,760,816, 2,794 locations, $1,346 average, $55,459,487, four weeks.

10. "Alice in Wonderland," Disney, $2,264,097, 1,385 locations, $1,635 average, $327,537,023, eight weeks.

11. "Hot Tub Time Machine," MGM, $2,007,125, 1,787 locations, $1,123 average, $45,730,500, five weeks.

12. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," Fox, $1,886,464, 1,605 locations, $1,175 average, $59,628,408, six weeks.

13. "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too?," Lionsgate, $1,727,505, 1,251 locations, $1,381 average, $57,484,421, four weeks.

14. "The Bounty Hunter," Sony, $1,570,695, 1,581 locations, $993 average, $62,742,023, six weeks.

15. "Avatar," Fox, $920,204, 438 locations, $2,101 average, $746,365,137, 19 weeks.

16. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," Music Box Films , $621,749, 181 locations, $3,435 average, $3,886,128, six weeks.

17. "The Ghost Writer," Summit, $497,257, 445 locations, $1,117 average, $13,984,486, 10 weeks.

18. "Hubble 3D," Warner Bros., $394,977, 47 locations, $8,404 average, $3,928,045, six weeks.

19. "The Secret in Their Eyes" Sony Pictures Classics, $360,056, 33 locations, $10,911 average, $592,864, two weeks.

20. "City Island," Anchor Bay, $314,007, 77 locations, $4,078 average, $1,240,311, six weeks.

___

On the Net:

http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice

___

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.; Rogue Pictures is owned by Relativity Media LLC; Overture Films is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,3770507.story





Can You Disappear in Surveillance Britain?

David Bond wanted to see if it’s possible to vanish so one day he packed his bag, got into his car and kissed his wife goodbye
Jean-Paul Flintoff

Back in January last year, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going – he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was this: “I’m going to leave my life behind and disappear,” he said.

A 38-year-old Oxford graduate with a solid if unspectacular career in media, Bond wasn’t your typical runaway. But then, you might have said the same about Will Smith in Enemy of the State, or Robert Donat in The 39 Steps – two of Bond’s favourite films. For Katie, left alone with a toddler, his disappearance could not have come at a worse time. “I had to juggle the childcare and work,” she says, “and I was seven and a half months pregnant.”

Bond might never have thought of running away if he’d not received a letter, some months earlier, informing him that his daughter was among 25 million Britons whose records had been lost by the Child Benefit Office, along with bank details and other private information.

He “became obsessed”, Katie remembers, about the amount of information on him and his family that was already out there. As he looked into it, he found that the UK, once a bastion of freedom and civil liberties, is now one of the most advanced surveillance societies in the world, ranked third after Russia and China. The average UK adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day by nearly five million CCTV cameras. Increasingly monitored, citizens are being turned into suspects. Within 100 yards of Bond’s home, he discovered, there were no fewer than 200 cameras.

Before going on the run, he made 80 formal requests to government and commercial organisations for the information they held on him. He piled the replies on his floor, appalled by the level of detail. The owners of the databases knew who his friends were, which websites he’d been looking at, and where he had driven his car. One commercial organisation was even able to inform him that, on a particular day in November 2006, he had “sounded angry”. It was more than he knew himself.

Many people believe that, if you have nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear from all this scrutiny. But if you resist the urge to pick your nose while others are present, or close the door when you go to the toilet, you are a privacy advocate. “When you realise that your whole life is under view,” says the Tory MP David Davis, “it’s inhibiting.”

And what if the information about us is wrong? Bond found that the DVLA still keeps on record a youthful driving offence that should have been expunged years ago. He waved it grimly at his uncomprehending daughter: “This is Daddy’s drink-driving record.” Worse was the case of a woman he met, falsely identified by the Criminal Records Bureau as a convicted shoplifter, who’d taken a year to prove her innocence. Or the man who, after someone pinched his credit card details and used them to pay for porn, was arrested, then sacked without notice; when Bond met him, he still hadn’t been able to clear his name.

As Bond became more obsessed, Katie became increasingly annoyed. They argued over filling in a form for Ivy’s nursery. “They can use this data for God knows what!” Bond yelled. “I thought, for God’s sake, no one else worries about this,” Katie remembers. “Why do we have to?” She tried to reassure him: “It’s fine. They’re not going to do anything weird with our data. If some kind of weird government comes in, we’ll opt out.” He wasn’t convinced.

In the days that followed his disappearance, Katie heard from him occasionally, using pay-as-you-go phones he’d bought specially. But he didn’t tell her where he was, because he was being followed by detectives.

What he didn’t know was that Katie was being watched, too. Hoping to use her to find him, the detectives had leapt over the garden wall one night to fit a tracking device to her car.

They also worked out where she was due to give birth and phoned the hospital, pretending to be Bond, to get details of her appointments.

As it happens, Bond had left the country, travelling to the continent on Eurostar. The investigators had guessed he might do this and impersonated Bond to phone ferry, train and airline companies that might have bookings in his name. But they missed him because he’d booked his ticket using a friend’s credit card, and changed the passenger name at the last minute.

In Belgium, Bond met a man who filmed their encounter and put the film online. Soon afterwards, the detectives found it: they knew Bond was in Belgium.

Next, he travelled to Germany. As much as possible, he paid his way with cash, and – wary of ATMs – took money out only moments before travelling. If he thought he was being followed, he got off the train.

After meeting contacts in Germany, he returned to Britain on a ferry. Soon afterwards he picked up a message on his BlackBerry from the detectives, telling him they knew he’d been to Belgium and Germany. They were goading him, hoping to get him to reply so they could trace the route of his e-mail. They did that several times, often sending messages that appeared to come from his closest friends. The messages brought him out in a sweat, but he didn’t reply.

In Kent, Bond went to his father’s house. The strain was starting to tell. He stayed in his old bedroom, dismantling all his possessions lest they concealed some kind of bugging device. The next morning there was a knock on the door. Bond told his father to keep the callers talking so he had time to jump out of the window and over the back wall. He went to some friends, borrowed a car and drove to Wales to hide in the woods – where he grew gradually more and more paranoid.

But the funny thing is this: it was Bond who persuaded the detectives to follow him. “I told them I was making a film about privacy and surveillance, and wanted to be hunted,” he tells me a year later, over cups of tea in his East London home, amid the clutter of a young family – toy bricks on the floor, mashed banana on the table. He wondered if it was possible, in surveillance Britain, to keep himself to himself for a month. “I promised I wouldn’t sue them, whatever they did, as long as they didn’t cause my family any distress. ‘We’ll have you in four days,’ they laughed.”

Bond spent a long time finding the right detectives for his project, talking to countless retired coppers before he found Duncan Mee and Cameron Gowlett of Cerberus. Ordinarily, they work as investigators for major companies and law firms, scrupulously following the letter of the law as they trail organised gangs, often in unstable parts of the world. (If they broke the law, courts would throw out their findings.) The work requires them to penetrate layer upon layer of shell companies and false identities. How hard could it be to find Bond? After all, they’re often asked to find people who might be beneficiaries of a will, and that rarely takes more than a few hours.

After Bond phoned them, the arrangements were finalised by his friend and business partner, Ashley Jones – producer of the film. All the detectives were given was a photo, and the name, David Bond.

To begin, they gathered data about him on the internet. He’d deleted his Facebook page, but they retrieved it and much more. This helped them piece together yet more information from public records that require elementary details such as addresses and dates of birth.

Pretending to be Bond, they set up a new Facebook page, using the alias Phileas Fogg, and sent messages to his friends, suggesting that this was a way to keep in touch now that he was on the run. Two thirds of them got in contact. As a result, the investigators were able to crash parties and find out more about Bond in conversation. Mee explains: “At the party, we’d say, ‘How do we know you are who you say you are? How do you know David?’ One guy said he’d been in a band with him, but we pretended to be sceptical and said, ‘Oh yeah? What instrument does he play?’”

They also went through his bins, and later his father’s. From this they were able to piece together huge amounts of detail about Bond. For instance, they guessed that he was vaguely “green” because he printed on the back of documents Katie brought home from her office.

Everything they learnt went up on a wall in their office, forming what they call Bond’s “data wake”. Then they used techniques that would not have been unfamiliar to Sherlock Holmes.

“We looked at what kind of person he was,” says Gowlett, “so we could second-guess what he might do. His family, his education, the films he’s made. He’s a literate guy so we thought of George Orwell and Jura, the island where Orwell wrote 1984. That might be somewhere David would go. We put a pin in the map.”

By this time, Bond was steadily going bonkers, looking more than ever like Kevin Spacey playing some kind of psycho. Unable to sleep for fear of the detectives, and painfully lonely, he addressed his handheld camera in the dark: “I’m really f***ing freaked out… If I don’t come back, I love you, Katie.”

But then she phoned and told him there was a problem with her pregnancy. Nothing too serious, but she needed him to come with her to the hospital. So he returned to London, booked into a cheap hotel and the next day, avoiding the main entrance, smuggled himself into the hospital. When he found Katie at the clinic they were both overjoyed.

They hadn’t guessed that the detectives knew Katie’s hospital appointments, and certainly didn’t suspect that one of the other couples in the waiting room had been planted there. Bond remembers noticing them: “I thought, ‘She doesn’t look very pregnant. I hope there’s nothing wrong with her kid.’”

Tipped off by their colleagues, Mee and Gowlett were waiting for Bond outside the hospital. He’d been on the run for 18 days.

Immediately afterwards, Bond had what he calls a “weird psychic wobble”. He accused his great friend Jones of conniving with the detectives. “I became potty, behaved in a way I’ve never behaved before.” The next day, at the debrief, Bond had difficulty hugging the detectives. “I was still in a role that felt angry towards them. They seemed smug, happy to have got their man, and I was the idiot who had lost.”

He was appalled to see how much they knew about him, amassed on that wall. “There were huge bulldog clips holding together separate parts of my life – mother, father, schooling and so on. All obvious stuff, but it was more than the sum of its parts. The weirdest thing was the pictures of my mother they’d found in a church. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. I wanted to leave the room.”

On the run, Bond had been maddened by the thought that the best way to elude the detectives was to do the last thing they would expect him to do – which also meant the last thing he would expect himself. He went round and round in circles thinking that if ideas occurred to him – no matter how outlandish – he had to reject them, because the person who had thought of them was him. He hated to admit it, but he had indeed planned a trip to Jura.

Leaving the detectives’ office, Bond used a term to describe his feelings that he’s since concluded is inappropriate, but it gives an idea how strongly he felt at the time. He called it data-rape.

The journalist and privacy campaigner Henry Porter told Bond that privacy is like eyesight, or touch: “It’s that important.” Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of the campaign No2ID, broadly agrees. “Privacy is not something that people feel, except in its absence. Remove it and you destroy something at the heart of being human.”

You might think that the detectives, having made such impressive use of information that is publicly available, would disagree. In fact, it’s precisely because they know how information can be misused that they make the best possible advocates for privacy. “We’re often asked to do TV projects and we say no,” Mee says, when I meet them in Soho. “But we liked the fact that this project was going to take the lid off the massive amount of data on us all. That’s something that bothers us personally.”

“A lot of people are giving information away voluntarily,” says Gowlett. “Look how many young children are giving up their whole lives on Facebook and Twitter – everything, their date of birth, the names of relatives and friends, where they live, when they’re going on holiday and what their political views are.

“People should think carefully how data is going to be used. Some are careful enough to opt out of the electoral roll, but when they have a baby and a nappy company comes round they give every piece of information they’re asked for. And that will be used to tie up with other databases.” Databases such as Tesco’s, which holds information on virtually every adult in the country, regardless of where they shop.

The National Health Service is unrolling a multibillion-pound IT project that will upload millions of patients’ medical records on to a database, freely accessed by 250,000 NHS staff and, to a lesser degree, by private health companies, council workers, commercial researchers and ambulance staff. Letters are going out now, strongly urging us all to allow this and making it as hard as possible to opt out.

The detectives are appalled. “That will have all your medical history on it, your date of birth and everything that has happened to you,” says Gowlett. “It’s vulnerable, and people will be able to get all that information on you in one go.”

In the film, Gowlett demonstrated how easy it already was to pretend to be Bond and get information about Katie’s antenatal arrangements. For Katie, this totally overturned her previous complacency. “I was a bit freaked out that the NHS gave away our appointments,” she says. “I know what David meant about being data-raped.”

But in the end, David Bond concludes, it’s not enough to blame politicians or corporations. “We are all partly to blame. There is no baddie, no evil genius in Whitehall stroking a white cat.” He pauses. “At least, I hope not.”

Erasing David is in cinemas nationwide from April 29, and is being broadcast on More4 in May
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/l...cle7096105.ece





Amid Calls for Transparency, Pope Describes Dangers of Digital Age
Margaret Warner

We've come to Rome for a week to explore how the new wave in the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal is being seen and dealt with by the Vatican, the power center of worldwide Catholicism. Pope Benedict XVI is coming under increasing pressure, as hundreds of charges of alleged priest abuse of minors explode throughout Europe -- so we were eager to see him at the earliest possible opportunity.

Hence our attendance Saturday morning at a conference on digital media at the cavernous Paul VI hall in the Vatican. We were ushered to the nosebleed balcony reserved for the "stampa" (press), where we could look out over an 8,000-person sea of the Italian Catholic media -- journalists and editors of newspapers, Web sites, radio and television, and teachers, professors and cultural figures, and webmasters of Catholic organizations of all types. Anticipating the noontime arrival of the pope himself, many had brought their families and children, too.

It was the last morning of a three-day conference on how the church should use and deal with the digital media of today. "Have they talked about the sex abuse scandal?" I whispered to a young reporter for Avvenire, the country's dominant Catholic newspaper. She smiled and shook her head: "Not a chance."

But then, the silence was broken. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, took his turn at the microphone. "The situation in which we are living is extremely exacting, and we are asked to be absolutely truthful and credible," he said. The last couple of months have been very difficult, he went on, with so many questions being raised about things that happened long ago. But he said, "This is the time for truth, transparency and credibility. Secrecy and discretion are not values that are in fashion at the moment. We must be in a condition of having nothing to hide." The crowd applauded.

What did he mean? Just how open is the Vatican prepared to be about the spreading web of allegations of clerical cover-up of abusive priests' cases in decades past? As the panel was cleared away to install a gilded tapestry-upholstered chair on a platform atop an oriental carpet was readied, we hoped Pope Benedict would fill out the picture. Suddenly the scene transported us back in time. Two Swiss Guards in medieval dress, grasping halberds (a two-handed pole weapon last used to battle effect in the 15th century) stood flanking it. Bugles sounded a herald, but the pope didn't appear. The audience waited, and waited ... for 30 minutes.

Finally, a cry rose up as he was glimpsed walking in from stage right -- arms out in the familiar pose of benediction. "Papa! Papa!" the crowd cried. He made his way to the throne, sat for a fulsome introduction by the head bishop of the Italian church, then began to speak. What he said did not sound overly encouraging to devotees of the new digital age.

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age.

So where does this Vatican stand on being more transparent about how it has handled priest abuse cases in decades past? Will it respond to the call for greater openness that we have heard from so many Catholics here, in our two brief days so far? It was hard to glimpse the truth from our Vatican encounter Saturday. We can only hope to be able to shed greater light on the question by week's end.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/...gital-age.html





Abusers 'SWAP 2m Child Porn Pics'
BBC

More than two million images of child sex abuse had been circulated by 100 offenders who went on to be convicted in the last 20 months, the NSPCC says.

In a sample created by analysing media reports of court cases, the charity found that nearly 50,000 of the photographs were in the worst category.

One in four offenders had held positions of trust, including as teachers, clergymen, medics and police.

A third of those involved were reported to have used peer-to-peer file-sharing.

The children's charity said sex offenders were using the software - which eliminates the need for a server or host - to stay "under the radar" and called on the next government to help combat it.

The two million photographs seized by police - some of which could be repeats of the same image - showed the "battle was far from won" on the issue, said the NSPCC's Diana Sutton.

All the cases examined for the snapshot had resulted in criminal convictions.

Ten per cent of those convicted had been hoarding child abuse images for five years or more before they were caught.

One in six of the 100 offenders involved had a conviction for sexually assaulting or grooming a child for sex, researchers found.

Ms Sutton added: "The scale of graphic child sex abuse pictures and videos over the internet is very alarming.

"The number of images seized in these cases is enough to cover the pitch at Wembley Stadium twice over - and this is just a sample.

"Many more people were convicted for possessing, making and distributing indecent images of children online during the same period.

"Children and babies are being seriously sexually assaulted to feed the demand for these photos and videos.

"And each time they are viewed, more degradation is heaped on the young victims."

'Disgusting industry'

In the year 2008-09 the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) received a total of 5,411 reports from members of the public and sources including industry, children's charities and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Each report "can relate to a single individual or allegation or hundreds, sometimes thousands of suspects," it says.

Ceop says the "vast majority of trading" of images takes place on various peer-to-peer platforms.

The NSPCC said there had been welcome measures in recent years to drive child abuse images from the internet, but there was still much to do.

"Making the internet safer for children should be a priority for all Parliamentary candidates during the general election campaign.

"In particular, we are calling on party leaders to show their commitment now to putting this disgusting industry out of business."

Last month probation officers' union Napo said sentencing for online sex offenders was too lenient and that many were failing to undergo proper treatment.

It warned that high risk paedophiles were not being locked up long enough to take part in rehabilitation courses.

The maximum prison term for web paedophiles at crown court is 10 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/8647011.stm





“Child Pornography Is Great,” Anti-Pirates Say
Ernesto

It is no secret that pro-copyright lobbyists are exploiting child pornography to get file-sharing sites pulled offline. They have done so for years. Their ultimate goal is to use child porn as an excuse to impose a global Internet filter, and with a new directive being presented in the EU their strategy seems to be paying off.

In 2007, a year after the Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s servers in Stockholm, there was a seminar in the same city titled ”Sweden — A Safe Haven for Pirates?” There, in a room filled with like-minded souls, Johan Schlüter of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group took the stage with the ultimate plan to curb piracy.

”Child pornography is great,” he said enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites.”

Where one would have expected an averse reaction from the public, cheers started to fill the entire room instead. For years the music and movie industries have tried to convince politicians that piracy was killing their businesses, without much result. Using child porn as an excuse could just be what they needed for an extra push.

”One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand,” Johan Schlüter told his fellow attendees.

In the months and years that followed, the pro-copyright lobby continued to put pressure on local governments and courts to disarm The Pirate Bay. In Denmark, they had some success in court as a local ISP was ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay.

Increasingly, the child porn argument is used all around the world to get governments to implement state run Internet filters. “The big film and record companies want censorship of the net, and they are perfectly willing to cynically use child porn as an excuse to get it,” Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom writes in brilliant a blog post discussing the issue.

Engstrom’s comments are a response to the plans of Swedish EU commissioner Cecilia Malmström to build a European Internet filter. As Engstrom also notes, a filter is only going to hide the real problem while the real offenders can easily bypass the restrictions. Wouldn’t it be much better to track down the sources spreading the material and throw them in jail?

Wouldn’t that be great?
http://torrentfreak.com/%E2%80%9Dchi...es-say-100429/





Craigslist Faces New Scrutiny Over Sex Ads

Craigslist, the San Francisco-based community and peer-to-peer advertising site, is facing increased scrutiny for the sex ads that form a major part of the site's revenue.

A New York Times story on Monday quoted revenue projections from a third party suggesting sex ads would generate $36 million for Craigslist this year — more than 20 percent of its revenue.

The newspaper noted that the FBI last week charged 14 members of the Gambino crime family with selling sexual services of girls 15 to 19 on Craigslist.

James Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO, told the Times that Craiglist is not doing anything wrong.

"Of the thousands of U.S. venues that carry adult service ads," the Times quoted Buckmaster as saying, "Craigslist has done the best and most responsible job of combating child exploitation and human trafficking."
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranci...ml?t=printable





Fake Anti-Virus Peddlers Outmaneuvering Legitimate AV
Brian Krebs

Purveyors of fake anti-virus or “scareware” programs have aggressively stepped up their game to evade detection by legitimate anti-virus programs, according to new data from Google.

In a report being released today, Google said that between January 2009 and the end of January 2010, its malware detection infrastructure found some 11,000 malicious or hacked Web pages that attempted to foist fake anti-virus on visitors. The search giant discovered that as 2009 wore on, scareware peddlers dramatically increased both the number of unique strains of malware designed to install fake anti-virus as well as the frequency with which they deployed hacked or malicious sites set up to force the software on visitors.

Fake anti-virus attacks use misleading pop-ups and videos to scare users into thinking their computers are infected and offer a free download to scan for malware. The bogus scanning programs then claim to find oodles of infected files, and victims who fall for the ruse often are compelled to register the fake anti-virus software for a fee in order to make the incessant malware warnings disappear. Worse still, fake anti-virus programs frequently are bundled with other malware. What’s more, victims end up handing their credit or debit card information over to the people most likely to defraud them.

Google found that miscreants spreading fake anti-virus have over the last six months taken aggressive steps to evade the two most prevalent countermeasures against scareware: The daily updates shipped by the legitimate anti-virus makers designed to detect scareware installers; and programs like Google’s which scan millions of Web pages for malicious software and flag search results that lead to malware.

Google’s automated system scanned each potentially malicious page in real time using a number of licensed anti-virus engines, and all of the files were rescanned again at the end of the study. Beginning in June 2009, Google charted a massive increase in the number of unique fake anti-virus installer programs, a spike that Google security experts posit was a bid to overwhelm the ability of legitimate anti-virus programs to detect the programs. Indeed, the company discovered that during that time frame, the number of unique installer programs increased from an average of 300 to 1,462 per day, causing the detection rate to plummet to below 20 percent.

“We found that if you have anti-virus protection installed on your computer but the [malware detection] signatures for it are out-of-date by just a couple of days, this can drastically reduce the detection rates,” said Niels Provos, principal software engineer for Google’s infrastructure group. “It turns out that the closer you get to now, the commercial anti-virus programs were doing a much worse job at detecting pages that were hosting fake anti-virus payloads.”

In addition, Google determined that the average lifetime of sites that redirect users to Web pages that try to install scareware decreased over time, with the median lifetime dropping below 100 hours around April 2009, below 10 hours around September 2009, and below one hour since January 2010.

“These trends point to domain rotation, a technique that allows attackers to drive traffic to a fixed number of [Internet] addresses through multiple domains,” the company said in its report. “This is typically accomplished by setting up a number of landing domains, either as dedicated sites or by infecting legitimate sites, that redirect browsers to an intermediary under the attacker’s control. The intermediary is set up to redirect traffic to a set of active domains, which point to fake anti-virus distribution servers.”

Provos said the the domain rotation technique appears to be an extension of a “malware arms race” engineered to evade domain-based malware detection techniques.

“In fact, we noticed a distinct correlation between our improved ability to detect fake anti-virus, and the observed lifetime of each domain,” Provos said.

Last year, after a rogue ad on the New York Times Web site lead to massive numbers of people being attacked by rogue anti-virus, I wrote a tutorial for The Washington Post called “What To Do When Scareware Strikes,” which details how to deal with these ambushes. The key is remain calm and avoid clicking on any prompts generated by the scareware. Check out that tutorial here.

In a separate report released Monday, Microsoft said its security products cleaned fake anti-virus related malware from 7.8 million computers in the second half of 2009, up from 5.3 million computers in the first six months of the year —an increase of 46.5 percent.

A copy of the Google report is available here (PDF).
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/04/f...legitimate-av/





Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed II is Cracked
Marcus Yam

The hackers have found a way around Ubisoft's DRM.

In the ongoing effort to protect the hard work of the developers, Ubisoft created a DRM scheme that required a constant internet connection for all gameplay, be it single player or multiplayer. Without a constant connection to Ubisoft's master servers, the game cannot be played.

This form of protection caused great inconveniences for buyers of the game, be it on the internet connection end or a takedown of the Ubisoft servers. While the DRM was causing grief for real buyers of the game, it did keep the pirates at bay for far longer than the usual PC game. But the game hackers have finally cracked it.

Cracking group known as Skid Row claims to have created a crack that removes the required internet connectivity from Assassin's Creed II. Some other cracks emulated Ubisoft's servers, fooling the game into thinking it was authenticated. Skid Row, however, said in its nfo notes that its crack cannot be compared to other emulation cracks, as "does not construct any program deviation or any kind of host file paradox solutions."

Skid Row also left a note for Ubisoft, which read, "Thank you Ubisoft, this was quiete [sic] a challenge for us, but nothing stops the leading force from doing what we do. Next time focus on the game and not on the DRM. It was probably horrible for all legit users. We just make their lifes [sic] easier."

While we do not condone piracy in any fashion, solutions such as this one created by hacking groups ensure that Assassin's Creed II will still be playable years from now, or in the event of a connection outage.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ass...ac2,10260.html





Ripper of the Week







CCIA Report: Fair Use Generates $4.7 Trillion in Revenue
Kim Hart

Companies that rely on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue, according to a study released today by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

That's about a quarter of the U.S. economic growth. The report concludes that fair use -- an exception to the copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted materials -- is crucial to new innovation.

CCIA came out with the study a day after Intellectual Property Day, during which content companies, including Hollywood and music studios, said more protections against piracy are needed.

A report released yesterday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concluded that more aggressive protections for copyrighted and patented work is necessary to spur economic growth and job creation.

The Government Accountability Office recently reported that some studies and statistics used by content industry advocates exaggerate and overstate piracy levels. CCIA took out a full-page ad in Politico today to point out the problems with the data.

"The content industry's claimed numbers are completely baseless..." read the ad. "Unfortunately, damage has been done. These false numbers have been used to justify the DMCA, ACTA and other efforts to restrict new technologies."

Rep. Zoe Loffgren (D-Calif.), serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved. Otherwise, content owners will control access to movies, music and art that will no longer be available for schools, research or web browsing.

She tied the copyright issue with net neutrality, which is up in the air as the FCC decides how to move forward.

Without net neutrality, she said, "content owners will completely control and lock down content....We're going to be sorry characters when we actually don't see fair use rights on the Web."

Fair use is a matter of Internet freedom, she said. "If we allow our freedom to be taken for commercial purposes, we will have some explaining to do to our founding fathers and those who died for our freedom."

Fair use is what makes search engines possible. Without the fair use doctrine in the law, indexing the Web would be illegal because it requires creating copies of Web sites.

iPods, DVD players, Tivos and other devices that allow copies to be made depend on fair use, as well as sites like Facebook, YouTube and Craigslist, Google said.

"The Internet’s very function is to make and disseminate copies of information -- it couldn’t exist without limitations in copyright," said Derek Slater, Google policy analyst, in a company blog post.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...ion-in-revenue

















Until next week,

- js.



















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