Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 10th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Merely being aware of the possibility that the software could be abused does not constitute a crime of aiding violations of the law, and the court cannot accept that the defendant supplied the software solely to be used for copyright violations." – Judge Masazo Ogura


"We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization." – Jeffrey Michael, Horizon Realty Group


"The rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria." – Kevin Poulsen


"The Pirate Bay Relocates to a Nuclear Bunker." – TorrentFreak headline



































October 10th, 2009




House Bill Seeking Government P2P Ban Gets Boost

Tiversa gives House committee 200 new examples of P2P leaks of U.S. secret data
Jaikumar Vijayan

Security firm Tiversa Inc. has provided the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with more reasons to ban the use of peer-to-peer networks in government -- it recently accessed some 200 sensitive military documents via P2P technology.

The documents include personal data on U.S. troops based overseas, details on sensitive military projects and defense contracts and documents that violate International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules, according to a Tiversa executive. One document contained personal data on dozens of soldiers from the Third Special Forces Group based out of Fort Bragg, N.C., and included the names and ages of their spouses and children.

The House committee had asked Tiversa to try to access such data and submit the results of its efforts as evidence that could be used in the committee's debate on a proposed bill that would ban the use of P2P technology on government networks. The request stemmed from a House hearing in July during which Tiversa had disclosed that it found details on safe house locations for the family of President Barack Obama, presidential motorcade routes and other sensitive data on a government P2P network. That followed Tiversa's disclosure that it had unearthed details about the president's helicopter, Marine One, on a server located in Iran. Those details were apparently inadvertently leaked to the Iranian system from a P2P network.

"In an effort to understand the magnitude of P2P risks, and draft appropriate legislation, the committee asked us to provide additional examples following the hearing in July," said Scott Harrer, brand director at Cranberry Township, Pa.-based Tiversa. Over the past month, the company submitted more than 200 additional examples of P2P network data that it has accessed, Harrer said.

Most of the documents found by Tiversa were marked "secret" and appear to include information from all branches of the military, Harrer said. The company has reported on its findings to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Army Criminal Investigation Command and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, he added. "We have recently seen these files being downloaded in foreign countries, including China and Pakistan," Harrer said. "We have also seen user-issued searches for this type of sensitive data emanating from outside the U.S., so people are in fact actively looking for it."

Tiversa's latest disclosures will likely add to growing concerns about the security of P2P networks.

Numerous others have highlighted similar data leaks as well. In January, Eric Johnson, a professor of operations management at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business disclosed that he had found numerous health care documents on P2P networks. For example, Johnson said he found a 1,718-page document containing Social Security numbers, dates of birth, insurance information, treatment codes and other health care data belonging to about 9,000 patients at a medical testing laboratory.

Such leaks typically occur when a user installs a P2P client such as Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus or FastTrack on a computer for the purpose of sharing songs and other types of files with fellow network users. In many cases, the software is not installed properly and ends up exposing not just the files that the user wants to share, but also every other file on his computer.

A bill that would make it illegal for P2P developers to make software that causes files to be inadvertently shared over a P2P network without a user's knowledge was passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. The so-called Informed P2P User Act would also require developers to clearly inform users about files that are being made available for searching and sharing, and it would mandate that a user agree to the file-sharing first.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...axonomyId= 70





O2 Broadband Puts Brakes on BitTorrent

Party's over
Chris Williams

O2 has joined the ranks of fixed line broadband providers restricting peer-to-peer traffic as part of its network hits capacity during evening peak times.

The firm has installed specialist equipment to cut the amount of bandwidth available to BitTorrent, Gnutella and KaZaa users, as well as newsgroups*.

O2 launched its fixed line broadband service in late 2007 after buying start-up Be and its pioneering ADSL2+ network in 2005. An O2 spokeswoman said Be customers' connections (and O2 customers supplied via the Be network) will remain unrestricted.

The restriction will apply to O2 IPStream broadband (not LLU) customers between 8pm and 11pm. In a statement, O2 said: "From now on, we’ll give first priority to the things most of us want to do in the evening – things like emailing, looking at websites, watching video on sites such as BBC iPlayer or YouTube or using programs like Skype or Messenger."

Headline connection speeds won't be affected. The firm hasn't released details of how much slower peer-to-peer downloads will be at peak times.

The "traffic shaping" approach - targeting users of bandwidth-hungry applications - to squeeze the most out of its existing network capacity mirrors that of BT but contrasts with Virgin Media, which applies a simple speed restriction to its heaviest users at peak times.

Since its launch, O2 Broadband has attracted more than 400,000 subscribers and wide praise for its quality, unrestricted service. On the latter point, it will now partially fall into line with the other consumer ISPs.

*Full list of affected traffic here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/06/o2_shaping/





Pirates ! French Presidency Makes 400 Unauthorized Copies of DVD

The French satirical investigative journalism weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“ reveals that our holier-than-thou presidency is in fact a pirate’s lair. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the presidential audiovisual services produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52 minutes documentary “A visage découvert : Nicolas Sarkozy“.

The editor, Galaxie Press had only shipped 50 copies, but the propaganda plan required more so the Elysee went to work, going as far as modifying the cover and replacing the Galaxie Presse name and logos with “Service audiovisuel de la présidence de la République”.

Isn’t is deliciously ironic that the same executive power is the main force behind the latest disgusting bungled piece of French legislation regulating and controlling the usage of the Internet in order to enforce the compliance to the copyright law ?

It is even more appalling that we are dealing with repeat offenders : last spring, while the Hadopi law was discussed, U.S. music duo MGMT received €30,000 as a settlement for a copyright infringement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party who used one of its songs at a political rally without permission. Those who led the charge against Internet users are not the most respectful of copyright.

Hadopi is also known as the “three strikes” law because it after a certain number of warnings a copyright infringer’s Internet access would be cut off. Hadopi has just been adopted. Nicolas – one more of those antics and your Internet access is toast !
http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/ind...-copies-of-dvd





AFACT Claims 100K Copyright Breaches on iiNet
Ry Crozier

Day One: Discovered documents introduced.

Investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of iiNet users making available online unauthorised copies of films and TV programs from the film studio's catalogues, lawyers for the film industry said in court today.

At the much-anticipated opening of the iiNet versus the film industry case in the Federal Court, the film industry's lawyers said its investigators demonstrated 97,942 instances of unauthorised copies being made available by the ISP's customers to other internet users over a 59-week period.

Of those, just under one-third - 29,914 - related to a sample of 86 works named in the court proceedings.

The works included Batman Begins, Batman - Dark Knight, Happy Feet, Spiderman 3, The Simpsons and Family Guy.

Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, was "the most infringed title in the case" while Hancock was the "second most infringed title on evidence", film industry lawyers said. Infringements recorded by investigators numbered over 1,000 for each of the two titles.

"By making those films available in those 29,914 instances, iiNet customers invited any and every user of the freely available BitTorrent software program to download any and every part of those infringing copies," the industry's lawyers said in opening remarks.

"That represents 29,914 instances of free handouts of my clients' copyright.

"One would have to multiply by many times that figure of 29,914... to get any idea of the volume and frequency of films available from iiNet customers to others."

Lawyers for the film industry claimed iiNet had done "nothing" to discourage copyright infringement on its network.

They claimed that, "when caught between a rock and a hard place, when push comes to shove they [iiNet] will not enforce" terms and conditions in their standard customer agreement that enables the ISP to cut off the services of users who have infringed copyright.

iiNet has maintained throughout the lead-up to the case that the film industry's allegations of infringement needed to be proven in court for it to take action.

"If it is not going to enforce its own terms and conditions, it's lip service to any assertion it [iiNet] has taken reasonable steps," the lawyers said.

"iiNet does not want to enforce it because it fears losing those customers. [But it] will submit it bent over backwards to assist, that it has done more than any ISP would be expected to do."

The film industry claimed it had discovered documents that revealed "behind the scenes that [iiNet] has been moving in quite a contrary direction" to its public statements of cooperation.

The lawyers claimed one document showed iiNet reversed ISP Westnet's policy of passing infringement notices from AFACT to its customers.

"On receipt of notices informing customers of the problem, Westnet had a policy of taking up with the customer the fact the system [had] been used to infringe copyright.

"Upon hearing upon acquisition that was Westnet's policy, what did [iiNet chief Michael] Malone do? He prescribed the policy be abandoned in favour of iiNet's policy. That was the iiNet policy of doing nothing," the lawyers alleged.

The documents were expected to be detailed later in the case.

The film industry's lawyers also provided a detailed technical explanation of the BitTorrent system and a demonstration of its technical expert Nigel Carson accessing a torrented file.

The case continues.

For background on the case, see the iTnews timeline.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157555...-on-iinet.aspx





iiNet Says No Laws were Breached
Andrew Colley

IINET yesterday told the NSW Federal Court that movie studios accusing it of sanctioning illegal file sharing on the internet had vastly exaggerated the extent of copyright infringement carried out on its service.

Lawyers representing the internet firm said customers identified in a 59-week movie studio investigation into illegal file-sharing networks couldn’t have breached copyright laws to the extent suggested by the studios' lawyers.

As the landmark trial entered its second day of hearing, the ISP’s barrister, Richard Cobden SC, argued that it was technically impossible for the customers to have breached copyright laws in the volume the studios' lawyers claimed.

Yesterday lawyers for the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), which is representing the 34 movie and music content owners suing iiNet, said that the studios' investigators estimated that iiNet customers infringed copyright in 96,000 instances.

Mr Cobden conceded that the customers made unlicensed copies of movies and music available to the public. He argued, however, that they were only making the files available in one continuous instance and that further breaches were the responsibility of other internet users that requested “portions” of the music and movie files.

“Fetching” the portions, he argued, was the responsibility of those controlling software used to retrieve and assemble the files from a number of sources depending on which parts they most needed.

He further argued that internet users fetching the pieces were effectively transmitting the files to themselves and therefore the transmission of the files couldn’t be considered “to the public” within the meaning of the Copyright Act.

Mr Cobden said he was trying to bring “balance” to the case, which if won by AFACT would force all internet providers to drastically change their practices to avoid liability for copyright infringements carried out by their customers.

It’s understood that proving the extent of the infringement is crucial to AFACT’s case if they are to ensure iiNet cannot retreat to safe harbour provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should its main claims of secondary infringement succeed.

The central allegation iiNet is trying to defeat is that it engaged in secondary infringement when it failed to take “reasonable steps” to deter or block infringement on its network when notified of the alleged infringements by AFACT.

Mr Cobden summed up the case as a legal test of whether the notices changed the legal landscape for ISP liability in cases of internet copyright infringements.

Earlier in the day’s proceedings iiNet faced allegations that it played an “industry strategy game” to avoid liability rather than making genuine attempts to address copyright infringement on its network.

iiNet has argued that its maintenance of a substantial “freezone” -- where download metering is lifted for legal movie and TV content -- was evidence it sought to deter copyright infringement on its network.

However, AFACT’s barristers told the court that it believed that iiNet was more interested in “playing an industry strategy game” than observing and duty to discourage copyright breaches.

AFACT’s barrister Tony Bannon SC read to the court from a series of iiNet internal emails in support of the claim.

In one, iiNet chief Michael Malone directs Alan Ariti, a senior staffer at newly acquired WestNet to stop forwarding AFACT notices to customers.

Mr Ariti advised Mr Malone and another senior staff member that the ISP passed on notices to customers to qualify for provisions of the safe harbour act. Using firm language Mr Malone said: “Taking the opposing argument. A random third party is lodging an unsubstantiated accusation against a customer and you’re passing it on. You’re saying that’s a conscientious position, I argue that’s pretty objectionable!”

The staff member later agreed he did not “wear the WestNet’s current approach on his sleeve” and acquiesced to iiNet’s legal position.

In another, Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, wrote to iiNet providing advice that appeared in part to keep the ISP in line with a consistent industry legal position.

Mr Coroneos advised the company not to comply with an AFACT request to disconnect a customer and wait for a Federal Court position on the case.

The case continues today.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15317,00.html





Japanese High Court Overturns Guilty Ruling Against Developer of File-Sharing Software Winny

The Osaka High Court on Thursday overturned a lower court ruling that had convicted the developer of controversial file-sharing software Winny of assisting violations of the Copyright Law.

Isamu Kaneko, 39, a former research assistant at the University of Tokyo, was declared not guilty, and will not be required to pay a 1.5 million yen fine levied by a December 2006 Kyoto District Court ruling.

"Merely being aware of the possibility that the software could be abused does not constitute a crime of aiding violations of the law, and the court cannot accept that the defendant supplied the software solely to be used for copyright violations," Presiding Judge Masazo Ogura said.

The focus of the appeal was whether Kaneko had intended to violate the Copyright Law through the distribution of illegally copied software. Public prosecutors had argued that it was a premeditated crime in which he aided violations of the law. Lawyers argued that Kaneko was innocent, saying, "The purpose (of supplying the software) was purely to verify the technology. The crime of assisting violations by a large indefinite number of people whom he has never met does not stand."

Ogura ruled that Kaneko did not promote the software among users to be used for copyright violations, and said that the charge of assisting violations of the law couldn't be applied. The judge added that if the district court's decision stood, then Kaneko's culpability could stand as long as the software existed, and that caution should be exercised.

The district court had pointed out that Kaneko made Winny available to a large number of people. It accepted that he was guilty of assisting violations of the Copyright Law, realizing that the software would be abused, though it denied deliberate intention.

During the trial the technological aspects of the software and how it was used were also debated. The district court had accepted the neutrality of the technology itself, but prosecutors argued that it allowed a high level of anonymity and that its purpose was to violate copyrights. Lawyers, meanwhile, argued that the technology could be applied in various fields and was also beneficial for copyright holders.

The appeal ruling sided with the defense, saying: "Anonymity is not something to be looked on as illegal, and it is not something that applies specifically to copyright violations. The technical value of the software is neutral."

The lower court ruling said that Kaneko had released Winny on his own Web site in May 2002. He was accused of assisting two people in violating the Copyright Law by releasing video game software and other data over the Internet.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/...na016000c.html





BREIN Disconnects The Pirate Bay, For Now
Ernesto

Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB’s traffic. As a result the site is now down for most people.

Since The Pirate Bay found a new home in Ukraine last week, traffic to the site has been routed through Netherlands-based ISP NForce, which uses the services of Dutch carrier Leaseweb.

In a response to this new setup, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN asked Leaseweb to stop passing on traffic to the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

Although Leaseweb doesn’t allow torrent sites to be hosted on its network, they also said that they are not responsible for traffic they pass on to other parts of the Internet, and as such have no plans to disconnect The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay is hosted on a different autonomous system (AS). LeaseWeb is not the host, and our client [NForce] is not hosting The Pirate Bay either. We are only the IP Transit supplier, or carrier of Internet traffic for a company that uses our carrier services,” Alex de Joode, Security Officer of Leaseweb told ISPam.

BREIN of course disagreed with Leaseweb’s position and demanded that Leaseweb’s client NForce stopped routing traffic to The Pirate Bay. And they succeeded. A few hours ago NForce disconnected The Pirate Bay and at the time of writing the site is inaccessible in most parts of the world, if not all.

“We summoned NForce to stop the routing and they complied,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a response.

This case is a rather unique one that sets a disturbing precedent. In fact, it’s the first time that an ISP that merely routes traffic has decided to disable access to a BitTorrent site. In theory this could make it very easy for BREIN to shut down hundreds of other BitTorrent sites that are routed through Dutch networks, if they can strike enough fear into carriers.

There is no doubt that The Pirate Bay will resurface soon with a slightly altered setup, but if anti-piracy outfits such as BREIN start to go after data carriers it will become increasingly difficult to find alternatives.

Update: The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that the site will be back online with 4 new transits tomorrow. The current downtime is not (only) related to the routing issue, but rather with the new hosting company. Everything should be back to normal soon.
http://torrentfreak.com/brein-discon...or-now-091005/





The Pirate Bay Relocates to a Nuclear Bunker
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay is going on a road trip through Europe, one they hope to end today in a former NATO bunker. After a move from Sweden to the Ukraine, The Pirate Bay has now arrived at CyberBunker, an ISP that can provide them with a facility that can resist a nuclear attack as well as electromagnetic pulse bombs.

After being chased by various anti-piracy groups, The Pirate Bay returned a few hours ago. “Nobody puts The Pirate Bay in a corner,” they say on their frontpage, referencing Patrick Swayze’s famous line in Dirty Dancing. Not in a corner, no, but what about a bunker?

Last Friday we reported that The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside of Sweden, and that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker had found a new home in the Ukraine. Unfortunately this was a short-lived solution, with TPB now moving to Cyberbunker.

CyberBunker is located in a former military nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 50s to survive a nuclear war, but after the nuclear threats were over it was sold to its current owners. The bunker is now used as a webhosting data center.

The bunker is equipped with Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) shielding and Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) air filtration to guarantee that the servers they host stay up no matter what happens. As of this week it is also the new home of The Pirate Bay.

According to Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, there were some initial troubles with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location as several carriers refused to pass on the relay information after they received threats from the entertainment industry led by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Despite these troubles the site is now accessible again in most locations, and Cyberbunker will continue to host the site and does not intend to cave in to the threats of the entertainment industry.

“I don’t expect BREIN to do pretty much anything at this point. The last conversation we had with them was about some mp3 site they wanted to have shut down somewhere in 2001/2002. It took around 3 hours at 2am at night and the end result was that both parties agreed not to agree,” Kamphuis told TorrentFreak.

Whether The Pirate Bay is actually located in one of the server racks at the bunker or another hideout was not confirmed.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...bunker-091006/





Google: Pirate Bay Booted Off Search by Mistake
Greg Sandoval

Google said on Friday that an error caused the search engine to remove The Pirate Bay from its search pages.

"Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said in a statement. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon."

Later, Google updated it's statement: "The removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

Separately, The Pirate Bay's site appeared down Friday afternoon at 1:15 p.m. PT, at least in many U.S. areas.

Google didn't provide any details about what caused the error but at this point it doesn't seem to be some kind of orchestrated effort to bring down The Pirate Bay--at least on Google's part. According to Google, it was just a goof.

The DMCA's safe-harbor provision is designed to shield Internet service providers from being held liable for copyright infringement committed by users. But the provision has a certain set of requirements that ISPs must meet, and one of them includes promptly removing infringing material.

The case is a bit ironic, in that it's well-established that The Pirate Bay does not store any unauthorized copies of films, music, TV shows, or other content.

Indeed, the service can help people find pirated content, but so can a lot of search engines, including Google. The notion that the Pirate Bay would be pulled down because of a single copyright claim is sort of humorous.

If that's all that was needed to have the site kicked off, it would have happened years ago. The music and film industries, as well as other copyright owners, have complained about The Pirate Bay for years.

Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagblated that The Pirate Bay's attorney sent a letter to both Google and the companies that are suspected of being behind the allegations and demanded that the Pirate Bay be returned to Google's index. The Pirate Bay accused Google of censoring a competitor and of stifling free expression, the paper reported.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10366570-93.html





Four U.S. States Win First Broadband Mapping Grants

California and three other states were among the first recipients of more than $6.8 million in grants to map broadband use in U.S. homes, the Commerce Department said on Monday.

The mapping program is a small portion of a $7.2 billion program under the stimulus plan. It is being administered by the departments of Commerce and Agriculture to bring high speed Internet to more Americans, especially those in rural areas.

The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said the current and future recipients will collect and verify the availability, speed, and location of broadband in their states.

The broadband map is aimed at helping policymakers determine where services are needed the most and how to increase usage where it is already available.

The California Public Utilities Commission received $2.3 million in grants, North Carolina's Rural Economic Development Center Inc received $2 million, the Indiana Office of Technology was awarded about $1.3 million and the Vermont Center for Geographic Information got $1.2 million, NTIA said.

NTIA said it received applications from all 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia to participate in the mapping program. More grant recipients are expected to be announced soon.

"The four award recipients submitted well-formed proposals that are both fiscally prudent and serve as a model for others," NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said in a statement.

Last week the Federal Communications Commission, which is crafting a national broadband plan to be submitted to Congress in February estimated that total investment to expand access to all Americans and increase subscriptions could cost between $20 billion and $350 billion, depending on the quality of broadband service.

(Reporting by John Poirier; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100502743.html





U.N.: Mobile High-Speed Internet Overtaking Fixed-Line Online Access
Frank Jordans

More people are using cell phones and other portable devices for high-speed Web access than are signing up for fixed line subscriptions to the Net, according to U.N. figures published Tuesday.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are expected to reach 600 million, leapfrogging the estimated 500 million fixed line subscriptions by the end of this year, the International Telecommunication Union said.

"There was a 50 percent increase in mobile broadband subscriptions just over the past year," said Susan Teltscher of ITU's statistical bureau.

The agency expects growth to continue at this rate for several years, she said.

Most mobile broadband connections are still considerably slower than fixed line alternatives, and offer a more limited range of services at a higher price. Experts say that competitive advantage could soon tilt in mobile's favor, too.

Industry representatives at ITU's Telecom World trade show in Geneva this week are touting two next-generation technologies as potential nails in the coffin for fixed-line broadband.

The first is LTE, or long-term evolution, which cell phone companies are considering as the replacement for 3G some years down the line.

In the other corner is WiMax, a standard being pushed by the computer industry that works like Wi-Fi but over much greater distances.

Russia-based company Yota unveiled a dual-use phone Tuesday that runs on both WiMax and standard cell phone networks. Users can browse the Web at ultrahigh speeds in those Russian cities already covered by Yota, or connect at slower cell phone speeds elsewhere, chief executive Denis Sverdlov said.

U.S. rival Clearwire meanwhile announced a foray into the Spanish market with plans to provide citywide WiMax in Malaga and Seville. Clearwire's Barry West said the Kirkland, Wash., company will eventually offer voice services, a move that is likely to irk European cell carriers whose business still relies heavily on voice for the greater part of their income.

The biggest winners from the emergence of mobile broadband are likely to be poor countries. Fixed-line phones are still scarce in the developing world, forcing those who want high-speed data services to resort to mobile technology.

Voice-only mobile subscriptions already outstrip the number of regular phone connections in most poor countries: almost seven in 10 people around the world now have a cell phone subscription of some kind, the ITU report found.

Meanwhile, fixed line telephone subscriptions continue to decline and are expected to drop to about 1.1 billion — less than one for every five people on the planet — this year, the report said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





FCC Looks to Add to Airwaves for Wireless
Amy Schatz and Niraj Sheth

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said the agency was looking for ways to make more airwaves available for next-generation wireless networks, underscoring the expanding need sparked by the growing use of iPhones and similar devices.

Speaking Wednesday at an international wireless industry convention in San Diego, Mr. Genachowski called the lack of airwaves available for so-called 4G wireless networks "a looming crisis" that threatened American productivity. He said the FCC would look at how to reallocate airwaves for wireless Internet services and speed up paperwork so new networks could be built faster.

The announcement provided a carrot to the wireless industry, after the FCC announced a broad inquiry into the industry's business practices and its intention to introduce rules that would prevent carriers from deliberately slowing or blocking some traffic, such as video streaming, on wireless networks and devices. Wireless companies worry that this might affect their ability to manage increasing data traffic on the limited airwaves they control.

In his speech Wednesday, Mr. Genachowski said that as consumers increasingly rely on wireless devices for phone and Internet access, more airwaves must be set aside. Without more airwaves, it might be hard in the future for consumers to use wireless devices to their full extent.

"What happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour or whatever the next device is?" he said. "What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?"

The FCC has approved a threefold increase in available spectrum in recent years, but projections for data traffic show a 30-fold increase in demand, Mr. Genachowski said. "That's a 10-to-one gap," he said. "It's a very serious challenge."

The wireless industry has been calling for more spectrum to meet the growing demands on cellular networks, and executives at the convention applauded the move to free up more airwaves. But some said they remained wary of how new regulations could limit their ability to manage the data on their networks.

"There is no need to burden the mobile Internet with onerous new regulations," said Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T's wireless arm. New regulations "could have unforeseen consequences for jobs, investment, innovation, networks, and how the industry structures and prices services to customers," he said in remarks in San Diego following Mr. Genachowski's speech.

Most troubling for wireless carriers has been Mr. Genachowski's recently announced plan to impose open Internet rules -- which would prevent carriers from deliberately slowing or blocking some traffic in their efforts to manage their networks -- on wireless networks and devices. The FCC has proposed that any Internet provider -- whether wireless, cable or DSL -- be barred from blocking or slowing access to Internet services such as video or phone.

"I believe firmly in the need for the FCC to preserve Internet openness, whether a person accesses the Internet from a desktop computer or a wireless laptop or netbook," Mr. Genachowski said.

Wireless industry lobbyists have spent months trying to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation that would require the government to do an inventory of the U.S.'s airwaves and how they are being used. The U.S. government controls much of the available airwaves, which are set aside for military and other official uses. Rights to airwaves are auctioned off to companies to use exclusively.

Mr. Genachowski said the FCC would look at ways to promote secondary markets for airwaves, which would give people who hold licenses for airwave usage the right to lease those licenses to others. He said the agency would also try to clear obstacles for wireless companies trying to install new networks, including speeding up approvals for new cellphone tower construction, which often are met with community resistance.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1254...81671117.html#





AT&T Reverses Policy on iPhone Internet Calls
Saul Hansell

AT&T said on Tuesday that it would no longer prevent customers with the Apple iPhone from using Internet telephone services that bypass its own voice network.

Until now, AT&T would not let users of voice services like Skype connect over its wireless data network. The Skype application on the iPhone could make calls only when connected to a Wi-Fi network.

The issue of what sorts of services wireless carriers should allow has become the subject of scrutiny by the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering a proposal to formalize its network neutrality principles and extend them to cellphones. Those principles prohibit carriers from blocking competitors’ services and applications.

Skype, which eBay is selling, made a formal complaint to the commission two years ago, saying it was being blocked on AT&T’s iPhone. But the issue did not get much attention until Julius Genachowski was appointed commission chairman by President Obama.

After his appointment, the commission began looking at AT&T’s decision to block an application for the Google Voice service on the iPhone. Google Voice uses a customer’s wireless minutes to place calls over regular phone circuits rather than bypassing them as Skype does. But some of the policy issues are similar.

In response to the commission, AT&T filed a letter in August saying that it had not asked Apple to block Google Voice, but added that it had banned services like Skype, which use the voice-over-Internet protocol to place calls.

“IPhone is an innovative device that dramatically changed the game in wireless when it was introduced just two years ago,” Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T’s consumer and wireless unit, said in a statement. “Today’s decision was made after evaluating our customers’ expectations and use of the device compared to dozens of others we offer.”

AT&T does allow other smartphones, including those that use the Windows Mobile operating system, to use Internet voice services. Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint do not have policies that block Internet calling. Users of Android phones can also use Skype, but those calls use the customer’s voice minutes because Google’s Android operating system is not capable of making Internet calls.

Skype says that its application for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been downloaded six million times, adding that those devices represent 10 percent of its installed base.

Separately on Tuesday, Verizon Wireless said it did not plan to block Google Voice on two new handsets based on the Android operating system.

“Either you have an open device or not,” said Lowell C. McAdam, the chief executive of Verizon Wireless. “This will be open.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/te...s/07phone.html





Deal Struck Between Apple, Eminem's Music Publisher
Ed White

Apple and the music publisher for Eminem have settled a lawsuit over the digital downloading rights to many of the Detroit rapper's songs, a lawyer said Friday.

Eight Mile Style claimed that its contract with Aftermath Records did not authorize the record label to strike a download deal with Apple and the popular iTunes service.

Eight Mile and another plaintiff, Martin Affiliated, were seeking millions of dollars, alleging copyright violations on 93 songs, including Eminem's biggest hit, "Lose Yourself."

"The case was settled to the satisfaction of all parties," Eight Mile attorney Richard Busch said.

He said terms of the deal are confidential. The agreement was reached Thursday night after five days of trial in federal court here in the hip-hop star's hometown. A message seeking comment was left with Glenn Pomerantz, an attorney for Apple and Aftermath.

Eminem was not a witness and did not testify. Eight Mile is owned by brothers Mark and Jeff Bass, songwriters and producers who are credited with launching the rapper's career.

Eight Mile claimed Apple wrongfully gained at least $2.5 million through iTunes downloads, including $466,915 from "Lose Yourself," which was co-written by Jeff Bass.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Edwyn Collins Stopped from Sharing His Music Online

The Scottish star's manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn't own the copyright
Sean Michaels

Edwyn Collins has been barred from streaming his own song through MySpace. Management for the former Orange Juice frontman have been unable to convince the website that they own the rights to A Girl Like You, despite the fact that they, er, do.

"MySpace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major [label] can claim a copyright," complained Grace Maxwell, Collins's wife and manager. Maxwell made the unpleasant discovery after trying to upload A Girl Like You, the singer's 1994 hit, to his own MySpace page. "Lo and behold," she wrote in a blog, "it would not upload. I was told Edwyn was attempting to breach a copyright and he was sent to the Orwellian MySpace copyright re-education page. Quite chilling, actually."

The trouble with accusing Collins of copyright infringement is that he's not infringing. "He owns the copyright," Maxwell underlined, "as he does for most of the music he's recorded in his life (preferring to go it alone than have his music trapped 'in perpetuity' to use the contract language of the major record company)."

"I naturally blew my stack and wrote to MySpace on his behalf demanding to know who the hell was claiming copyright of Edwyn's track? ... Eventually, after HUGE difficulty, I was told Warner Music Group were claiming it. I found a nice lawyer guy at Warners, very apologetic, promised to get it sorted, but all these months later it isn't."

For Maxwell, this has been emblematic of everything that's wrong with the music industry. "[We are] aware of who the biggest bootleggers are," she said. "It's not the filesharers." While Collins has worked to make A Girl Like You freely available to his fans, she alleges that the same track is sold illegally "all over the internet". "Not by Edwyn, [but] by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him."

"Attempting to make them cease and desist would use up the rest of my life. Because this is what they do and what they've always done. And it's not just majors. If I had a fiver for all the dodgy indie labels we've been involved with I'd have £35 or thereabouts. (Exceptions: Heavenly and Domino)."

Maxwell, however, believes a different kind of digital music service could save the industry. "Now let's get on with working out a wonderful new way for music lovers to enjoy music for free or for a small subscription that makes it legal and easy to hear ANYTHING and allows the artist to reap the rewards of such freedom of access," she wrote. "Viva la revolucion!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009...-sharing-music





MySpace to Give Free Music a Spin
Mahesh Sharma

SOCIAL networking site MySpace has launched an advertiser-sponsored service that allows users to hear thousands of music tracks online for free.
The MySpace Music operation is at the heart of the site's plan to make money from its massive user base.

MySpace Music launched in Australia yesterday and provides free online access to thousands of songs from the catalogues of EMI Music, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, along with independent groups The Orchard and IODA.

If users want to download and store tracks, they can be bought from the iTunes digital music store. The service provides functions for MySpace users to hear and share music tracks.

The free tracks are being subsidised by advertising, which will run alongside the music players on the website.

MySpace will sell bigger advertising campaigns to be packaged for the site, and Toyota and KFC have signed on as launch sponsors.

MySpace International managing director Rebekah Horne says Australia is the first country outside the US to get the service. "Statistics of our users for music show Australia has one of the highest consumption of music on MySpace around the world, so it was a natural step."

Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become popular online platforms to communicate and share content, but have struggled to generate revenues from their massive audiences.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013040,00.html





Record Labels Sue Guns N' Roses for Copying Songs

Two independent record labels sued U.S. rock band Guns N' Roses for $1 million, claiming the group used portions of two songs by a German musician on their last album "Chinese Democracy."

Guns N' Roses and Universal Music Group's Interscope-Geffen A&M label were sued by British label Independiente and the U.S. arm of Domino Recording Company, who own the licensing rights to songs by German electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss.

Singer Axl Rose and Guns N' Roses band members and album producers copied portions of two of Schnauss' songs -- "Wherever You Are" and "A Strangely Isolated Place" -- for a song used on the band's last album called "Riad N' the Bedouins," according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday but made available on Monday, seeks $1 million in damages. A spokesperson for Interscope-Geffen A&M, owned by Vivendi's Universal Music Group, was not available for comment.

"Chinese Democracy," the band's first new album in 17 years that was released last November, resulted in disappointing sales.

Besides Rose, the only original member in the band, the other current and former band members named in the suit include guitarist Brian Carroll, better known as "Buckethead," bassist Tommy Stinson, and Robin Finck, who currently plays lead guitar with rock act Nine Inch Nails.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Philip Barbara)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5944WT20091005





Cinemas Must Warn Visitors Of ‘Anti-Pirate’ Goggles
Ernesto

Dozens of movie theaters worldwide have equipped their employees with night vision goggles to spy on customers, hoping to spot illegal recording devices. Following complaints alleging invasion of privacy, in Germany the local authorities ruled that theaters have to warn their customers if they use such equipment, rendering their piracy trap useless.

To prevent movie goers from sneaking in recording equipment, movie theaters nowadays have implemented all sorts of security measures. Employees are equipped with night-vision goggles so they can closely monitor the public and several theaters have metal detectors installed.

Despite all these expensive and invasive efforts to catch camcording pirates, nearly every new blockbuster still leaks onto the Internet, though often in poor quality. One unsecured theater is enough to pirate a film. Nevertheless, the film industry treats millions of paying movie goers as potential criminals and acts surprised when the public complains about it.

In Germany the local authorities decided to do something about this. The state administration office of Sachsen-Anhalt ruled that movie visitors must be informed about the use of night vision goggles before they buy their tickets. This advance notice allows them to decide if they want to be spied on or not.

The ruling came in response to a recent move by film distribution company Warner Bros. that had instructed theater personnel to use night vision devices to prevent the film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from being camcorded.

The use of night vision goggles and other security gadgets has led to a handful of arrests worldwide, but has ruined the pleasure of “a night at the movies” for untold others. The measures taken by the film industry to prevent illegal recordings from showing up online are similar to the use of DRM, they annoy honest customers while pirates circumvent them.
http://torrentfreak.com/cinemas-must...oggles-091003/





Buzz and Woody Add a Dimension
Mekado Murphy


Bob Whitehill (in 3-D glasses) of Pixar Animation Studios led a team of stereographers bringing two camera
views to each scene in "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2."

IMAGINE taking a Nintendo 64 game and getting it to play on a Wii. That technological task gives an idea of what the staff at Pixar Animation Studios faced in converting 1995’s “Toy Story,” Disney’s first entirely computer-animated feature, and its 1999 sequel into 3-D.

The double feature of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2,” which was released on Friday, not only offers another generation of children the chance to see both films in theaters. It also, conveniently, helps prime the promotional pump for next summer’s “Toy Story 3.” For Pixar and its owner, the Walt Disney Company (another new development since the originals appeared), 3-D innovation means the films can be seen as they should have been all along.

“I’ve always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early ’80s,” said John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and the director of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.” “Within the computer, we’ve created truly three-dimensional environments. We’ve only looked at them with one camera. Therefore it’s a two-dimensional view of that three-dimensional world.”

The production process for a 3-D movie requires the use of two cameras, positioned next to each other, shooting action at the same time to mimic each of the viewer’s eyes. A live-action film not originally shot with two cameras cannot be made into a 3-D film, but in the more malleable world of computer animation, the second camera view can be added. The process involves a bit of virtual time travel.

“We have every scene in ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Toy Story 2’ saved, and so we have this bit of action that is frozen in time, “ Mr. Lasseter said. “If we bring that up in our system, we’re going back in time into that moment.”

Without changing any of the film’s action, Pixar’s 3-D specialists, or stereographers, returned to each frame of the film and virtually placed a second camera next to the original, creating left-eye and right-eye views of the scene. Then all of the scenes were re-rendered in the computer with this additional perspective.

The process of taking the original files from the first two movies and getting them to a place where they could be enhanced was one that Mr. Lasseter called “digital archaeology.” “We had to have some very, very smart people at Pixar go back in and write some software and figure out a way to make it so that those files would render on our current computers,” he said.

It took four months to resurrect the old data and get it in working order. Then, adding 3-D to each of the films took six months per film. (Pixar and Disney declined to talk about the project’s cost.)

One person charged with that task was Bob Whitehill, the lead stereographer. And his role was not just technical; emotional impact also informed some of the changes. “When I would look at the films as a whole, I would search for story reasons to use 3-D in different ways,” he said. “In ‘Toy Story,’ for instance, when the toys were alone in their world, I wanted it to feel consistent to a safer world. And when they went out to the human world, that’s when I really blew out the 3-D to make it feel dangerous and deep and overwhelming.”

The distance Mr. Whitehill would position the second camera from the first would determine the degree of 3-D and which of three types: “in front of screen” (when an object seems to be in the theater with the audience), “at screen” (when the image looks 2-D) and “behind screen” (when the screen seems to be a window with objects in the distance).

But in creating various levels of 3-D, both Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Whitehill were concerned about not overdoing the effects. “We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story,” Mr. Lasseter said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/movies/04murp.html





Hollywood Hotels Are Hubs for Deal Making
Brooks Barnes

THE Sunset Tower Hotel, once a dilapidated dump but now a power-broker capital in Hollywood, recently hired a detective. After all, a crime had been committed — at least in the eyes of its owner, Jeff Klein.

When US Weekly reported in August that Renée Zellweger and her new beau had guzzled Champagne in a Sunset Tower suite, Mr. Klein had a meltdown. The detective was hired and, soon, a room-service waiter was fired.

“He claimed he only told his mother,” Mr. Klein says. “I didn’t care. Gone!”

A New York society brat turned serious hotelier and restaurateur, Mr. Klein, 39, bought the Sunset Tower in 2004 and has transformed it partly by throwing out the handbook of how entertainment industry haunts are managed, especially in Los Angeles. A ban on media leaks about boldface business deals or celebrity frolicking is strictly enforced. Mr. Klein is also very careful about curating a clientele. Celebrities deemed out of place, including the rapper Sean Combs and Britney Spears, have been — gasp — turned away.

Hollywood hotels have long played a role in how the gears of show business grind. They are where the moguls show off (Harvey Weinstein conducting multiple meetings simultaneously at the Peninsula), where publicists monitor interviews (the bar at the Four Seasons) and where pretty young things are discovered poolside (the plucking of Robert Evans decades ago from obscurity at the Beverly Hills Hotel).

“Hotels have the whole gamut of elements that people use to send signals in this business,” says Peter Guber, the former chairman of Sony Pictures, who is now a producer. “You don’t want to be seen unless nobody is looking — then you want to be seen.”

These deal-making hotbeds exist partly because the business culture of entertainment is transient: Most of the money to make movies comes from somewhere else, and hotels are neutral meeting spots. Or maybe Hollywood hotels became integral for another very simple reason. “It’s a casual place,” says Mr. Evans, who parlayed his tan into a long career as a producer of films like “Chinatown.” If you could do a deal by the pool, he asks, “wouldn’t you?”

But the polarity of hotel power is shifting here. Out: the snarly parking valet, the too-cool-to-notice-you hostess and the tipsy-hipster pool scene. That is all so pre-recession. In: old-Hollywood glamour, and an intense focus on privacy and service that warrants the price. Mr. Klein’s Sunset Strip hotel and its restaurant, Tower Bar, are popping against this understated backdrop.

“The Sunset Tower has made it impossible for me to ever stay anywhere else in Los Angeles again,” says Lauren Zalaznick, an NBC Universal president who is considered a cultural barometer. “Nice is the new mean.”

The Creative Artists Agency now holds an ultra-exclusive Golden Globes event at Mr. Klein’s hotel, and certain agents use the lounge and bar as a second office. (“They take nothing and no one for granted,” says Bryan Lourd, a Creative Artists partner.) Vanity Fair held its lavish Oscar party there in February and will be back next year. The art gallery that Larry Gagosian runs recently wined and dined clients on the terrace.

At the same time, other Hollywood hotels that cater to show-business types are wheezing amid the travel slump. The flashy SLS Hotel, with its Philippe Starck design and cotton candy machine, has posted monthly occupancy levels of about 65 percent — not horrible, but disappointing given its recent $130 million renovation.

Similarly, the Hollywood Roosevelt is struggling to maintain its initial buzz now that the pool party has died down.

One of Mr. Klein’s rivals, the Hotel Bel-Air — the grande dame of business-deal breakfasts — closed on Wednesday for a two-year renovation. His closest competition is the Chateau Marmont, famous as the place where John Belushi overdosed in 1982. The hotel, owned since 1990 by André Balazs, is still packed, with the crowd leaning toward music and fashion. Celebrities like the director Sofia Coppola and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been spotted there recently, but it has suffered a string of tabloid humiliations that has soured some of moviedom’s A-list. Lindsay Lohan has been a regular.

How has Mr. Klein done it? The Hollywood crowd recites the attention to detail and the privacy, but his New York connections have helped. The designer Tom Ford, for example, insisted that Mr. Klein hire what has become one of the Sunset Tower’s secret weapons: a Macedonian maître d’ named Dimitri Dimitrov, who formerly worked at a caviar bar, knows the producer pecking order, and is careful not to seat rivals next to one another.

“I was kind of annoyed actually — I don’t tell Tom Ford how to hire models — but I put my pride away and listened,” says Mr. Klein. “He was right.”

Catering to celebrities, including movie moguls, has long been a high-wire act. The mood could shift with one errant paparazzo. Mr. Klein attracts the big titles and the big stars in part by being blunt about the kind of clientele he is not looking for: what he calls celebrity “trash.”

In one incident that made Page Six of The New York Post, Mr. Klein blew up when he discovered that Ms. Spears had tried to book three rooms.

“She can’t come here with all my chic guests; she’ll ruin the place,” he was overheard yelling in the lobby. He refused to let Mr. Combs attend a Creative Artists event. (News reports quoted Mr. Combs as yelling “I’ll spend the rest of my life hunting you down,” but Mr. Klein says the rapper later called to apologize, and is not banned from the hotel. Representatives for Mr. Combs did not respond to requests for comment.)

Would Ms. Lohan receive a reservation? Mr. Klein shuddered and made a sour face, adding that he believes the hotel, to some degree, self-selects its clientele.

“C-list television actors walk into the hotel and see what it is — a classy place — and leave,” he says. “They don’t understand it. They say, ‘Eww, let’s go to the Chateau.’ And I’m truly fine with that.”

THE Sunset Tower, perched on the Sunset Strip, has oscillated between a well-heeled apartment building and a hotel — of various names — since opening in 1929. It was not an immediate hit in its latest form. People didn’t quite know how to take its quiet elegance. And by the way, who was this bubbly but neurotic New Yorker running it?

“It was really hard for me because I was ignoring a lot of advice,” says Mr. Klein. “Everyone told me I had to get a D.J. for the lobby. It had to be trendy. They told me I didn’t understand L.A.”

As Mr. Klein likes to say, the property has “good bones.” Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel have all called it home at various times. Legend has it that John Wayne kept a cow on his balcony.

But by the 1980s, the 15-story building had fallen into disrepair. Mr. Klein and a business partner, the developer Peter Krulewitch, bought it for $18.5 million and spent about $15 million redecorating. Mr. Klein, who opened the 64-room City Club hotel in Manhattan in 2001, was obsessive about details. The cocktail napkins had to be quilted. The walnut paneling in the restaurant had to perfectly match that Architectural Digest picture of Mr. Siegel’s room in the 1940s. And Mr. Klein spent $60,000 to replace window handles in the guest rooms.

“I almost had a coronary — window knobs?” Mr. Krulewitch says.

Still, the results were uneven. A 2006 review of the hotel in The New York Times was devastating, complaining about slow room service, inattentiveness at the restaurant (at least for regular folk) and a lack of warm water. “Would Sinatra put up with the half-baked details?” the review concluded.

The review stung, but Mr. Klein soldiered forward, making changes big and small. He overhauled room service. He discovered the importance of speedy parking, replacing the original contractor with one that sharply reduced his valet profits but was lightning fast. “It’s like creating a play or an artwork,” he says. “All of the details blend together to create an experience.”

Mr. Klein says the hotel is profitable, but he would not back that up with numbers. He acknowledges that it is struggling a bit in the recession; room rates are down and occupancy is about 75 percent, he says. Still, the power-broker scene in the lobby and restaurant has clicked in recent months.

He won’t talk about his clientele, but all you need to do is book a table at Tower Bar and look around. Regular customers include Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures; Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation; and Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning producer. Celebrity devotees include Jennifer Aniston, Sean Penn and Johnny Depp. Thrown in for good measure: Nancy Reagan and assorted British royals.

The clubby vibe, as described by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg, is “extremely friendly without ever being overly familiar.”

Even young Hollywood — James Franco, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pine — is flocking to the Tower, which has a decidedly old-school feel: There’s a bass player in the lobby. And where did Andy Samberg stay in August when he hosted the MTV Movie Awards? Not the Chateau Marmont. (Mr. Samberg is loyal to the Sunset Tower in part because his gig on “Saturday Night Live” started after Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, discovered him through a party there.)

Mr. Klein, who recently reopened the Monkey Bar in Manhattan with Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and another partner, is suddenly very popular around dinner time. As he tried to relax at home the other night, he received five frantic calls on his cellphone from a media titan (whom he wouldn’t name) who didn’t like his table. A displeased Mr. Klein finally had a manager reseat him.

Does he feel pressure to give free meals and rooms to the A-list, as is the practice at some rival hotels? “Oh, honey,” he says with a big, braying laugh, “I don’t comp anything.”

If one moment marked the hotel’s official arrival, it was the Vanity Fair party in February, before Mr. Klein and Mr. Carter moved forward with the Monkey Bar. Mr. Carter had become friendly with Mr. Klein after dining at the hotel. “I thought it had the requisite coziness and glamour,” says Mr. Carter.

Inside the party, Mr. Klein was sweating in a tuxedo next to a mirrored column. Waiters served In-N-Out burgers to the megawatt crowd while the disco tune “Ring My Bell” thundered from speakers overhead.

“I’m exhausted,” he said between air kisses at about midnight. “Is it too early to loosen my bow tie?”

Just then, Kate Winslet, holding the Academy Award she had just received, approached from behind. Mr. Klein was in her way. She tapped him on the arm with her Oscar, and he jumped aside. “Thank you, darling!” Ms. Winslet shouted over her shoulder.

HAVING conquered Hollywood, Mr. Klein is now trying to move into another echelon: the one inhabited by Mr. Balazs and Ian Schrager, who is credited with setting off the boutique hotel craze in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Mr. Klein regrets making snipes about his competition, such as the comment about C-list actors preferring the Chateau Marmont to the Tower. “It was completely wrong of me to say such a stupid thing and make such silly jokes,” he says. “The real truth is that I am jealous of André and I only wish I had the same level of success.”

Mr. Klein’s goal is to take advantage of the travel slump and snap up properties on the cheap. With Mr. Krulewitch’s help, he is working to put together a $100 million fund and has been looking at opportunities in Palm Springs, Miami and London.

It will be difficult. The hotel real estate market is still sorting itself out and many owners are unwilling to accept valuations that reflect the sour state of travel. And what is working for Sunset Tower — hyper-attention to detail — will be hard to replicate as Mr. Klein stretches himself further.

Mr. Klein, who graduated from Tulane University with a degree in 15th-century French literature, is also driven by a desire to be seen as a serious businessman. He is proud that his company is not overextended; some hoteliers are in trouble because their boom-time financing is coming due during this slump. But being seen as a hotel mogul would be a way to erase some of the frivolity of his past.

For example, there was that teddy-bear company he started before opening the City Club — people could send a bear holding a little horn to somebody for a birthday — that ultimately failed. And while his society upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has helped his career, his pedigree has caused some to see him as a spoiled rich kid.

Some of his other pursuits don’t exactly invoke Bill Gates. He has been known to throw lavish personal parties, including an infamous one a decade ago that involved Carmen Miranda impersonators, and to wear outlandish fashions (like the turban he once donned for a society gala).

THE continued success of the Sunset Tower, of course, plays the lead role in Mr. Klein’s makeover. He knows this, and continues to obsess over everything from the look of menus to the placement of stationery in guest rooms. Recently, he was preoccupied with the addition of a hot dog to the lunch menu, an idea he got from Nora Ephron.

Ms. Ephron, the writer and movie director, mentioned to him that one of her favorite things about Los Angeles was Nate’n Al, a deli that serves a great wiener. “I immediately called our chef, but she balked,” says Mr. Klein. Undeterred, he drove to the deli and bought a dozen to try.

Naming the new menu item was an ordeal, as is often the case when Mr. Klein gets excited. Menus were printed, for hundreds of dollars, that listed the item as “Nate’n Al’s Footlong Hot Dog.” He took one look and ordered them reprinted. Mr. Klein thought that just “Hot Dog” was funnier.

“The chef was not very happy about my attention to a hot dog, but I didn’t care,” he says. “By the way, it’s the best seller.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/business/04hotel.html





CBS Interactive Sued For Distributing China's Green Dam Filter

Internet filter maker Solid Oak Software has filed a lawsuit against CBS Interactive's ZDNet China for distributing China's Green Dam filtering software, which allegedly includes the company's code.
Thomas Claburn

Solid Oak Software, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based maker of Internet filter CYBERsitter, on Monday filed a $1.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS Interactive.

The lawsuit alleges that CBS Interactive's ZDNet China made the controversial Green Dam filtering software available for download on its Web site and that Green Dam included code copied from Solid Oak's CYBERsitter program.

The Chinese government earlier this year said that all PCs sold in China would have to come with Green Dam installed by July 1.

The government claimed that the software was necessary to protect young people from unhealthy Internet content -- mainly pornographic and violent material -- but human rights groups reported that the software blocked political and religious content too.

Following protests by Chinese academics and computer user, as well as rights groups, computer trade groups, and government officials from various countries, the Chinese government softened its stance.

In an August 13 news conference, Minister of Industrial and Information Technology Li Yizhong acknowledged that the government's mandate "not thoughtful enough," according to China Daily, and said the software would be optional.

Having recognized the problem with mandates that affect consumers directly, the Chinese government is now directing its orders at businesses.

Last month, the Chinese government began requiring Internet service providers and data centers to install "Blue Dam" on their servers, a combination of hardware and software filtering said to be 20 times more effective than Green Dam.

Solid Oak's lawsuit alleges that the developers of Green Dam copied almost 3,000 lines of code from CYBERsitting and incorporated it into Green Dam.

"A central component of the PRC's Green Dam initative was to convince and incentivize online providers to participate by offering the Green Dam software for free download on Internet sites," the lawsuit claims. "Defendant CBS willingly participated in the PRC's plan, offering Green Dam for free download on its Web site, ZDNet China."

The lawsuit claims that Green Dam was downloaded more than 31,000 times and that CBS has benefited by offering the software.

Solid Oak Software is seeking $1,238,450, the number of downloads times the $39.95 price charged for a legal copy of CYBERsitter.

CBS Interactive is not the only company involved in the distribution of Green Dam. Sony (NYSE: SNE), for example, began distributing PCs with Green Dam in late June.

Gregory A. Fayer, an attorney with Gipson Hoffman & Pancione who is representing Solid Oak, said that the company is still weighing its options with regard to additional lawsuits.

He said that the main goal of the lawsuit was to protect Solid Oak's rights, but acknowledged that the case has broader implications for the ability of smaller companies to protect their intellectual property from infringement overseas.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=220301359





US Court Says Software is Owned, Not Licensed
OUT-LAW News

Software company Autodesk has failed in its bid to prevent the second-hand sale of its software. In a long-running legal battle it has not been able to convince a court that its software is merely licensed and not sold.

Like many software publishers Autodesk claims that it sells only licences to use its software and that those who pay for it do not necessarily have the right to sell it on. It sued Timothy Vernor, who was selling legitimate copies of Autodesk software on eBay, for copyright infringement.

The US District Court for the Western District of Washington has backed Vernor, though, in his claim that he owned the software and had the right to sell it on.

The Court said that there were two cases to use as a precedent and that they clashed fundamentally. It had no choice, it said, but to follow the earlier precedent, which was a dispute over the ownership of prints of Hollywood films sold to film stars.

While many of the film copies were explicitly only licensed, the court had previously found that in one case, involving Vanessa Redgrave, the agreement had transferred ownership of the print to the actress. This is called the Wise case.

One major consideration in that was the fact that the studio did not have the right, as it did in other agreements, to demand the return of the print.

The Court said that though the issue was complicated, software agreements were similar enough to those film agreements to act as a precedent.

"The Autodesk License is a hodgepodge of terms that, standing alone, support both a transfer of ownership and a mere license," said the ruling. "Autodesk expressly retains title to the 'Software and accompanying materials,' but it has no right to regain possession of the software or the 'accompanying materials'. Licensees pay a single up-front price for the software. Autodesk can require the destruction of the software, but only as consideration in the later purchase of an upgrade."

"The court concludes that Wise leads to the conclusion that the transfer of AutoCAD copies via the License is a transfer of ownership," it said.

The Court said that it had to follow that case's precedent because it was older than another conflicting ruling, and that it could not choose a precedent based on the most desirable policy.

"The court’s decision today is not based on any policy judgment. Congress is both constitutionally and institutionally suited to render judgments on policy; courts generally are not," the Court ruled. "Precedent binds the court regardless of whether it would be good policy to ignore it."

The Court did say, though, that Autodesk's claims that Vernor's actions were likely to result in the creation and sale of illegal copies of its AutoCAD software were not well founded.

"Autodesk’s claim that Mr. Vernor promotes piracy is unconvincing," the ruling said. "Mr. Vernor’s sales of AutoCAD packages promote piracy no more so than Autodesk’s sales of the same packages. Piracy depends on the number of people willing to engage in piracy, and a pirate is presumably just as happy to unlawfully duplicate software purchased directly from Autodesk as he is to copy software purchased from a reseller like Mr. Vernor."

Vernor had tried to argue that Autodesk's behaviour in suing him amounted to a misuse of its copyrights. The Court rejected that claim.
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=10421





Craigslist Wins Preliminary Ruling in eBay Lawsuit
AP

Craigslist, the online classified ads company, has won the first salvo in a legal battle with Internet auctioneer eBay Inc.

A Delaware judge on Friday granted summary judgment to Craigslist on claims alleging that founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster improperly granted themselves broad indemnifications against legal liabilities in 2007.

The judge noted that Newmark and Buckmaster never signed the indemnification agreements and have said they have no intention of ever executing them. Craigslist has said the indemnification agreements were intended merely as a future recruitment tool.

A trial is expected to begin later this year on eBay's claims that Newmark and Buckmaster, the only two directors of Craigslist, improperly acted to dilute the minority interest of eBay, the company's only other shareholder.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100204360.html





Venezuela to Outlaw Violent Video Games, Toys
Christopher Toothaker

Shouts of "Kill him! Kill him!" ring out as the preteens train their virtual assault rifles on the last remaining terrorist and spray him with bullets. Blood splatters. The enemy collapses. And they cheerfully wrap up another game of "Counter-Strike."

The most popular video games among kids often imitate life outside this Internet cafe in San Augustin - one of the many crime-ridden slums in Venezuela's capital, where residents say too many of the young players easily trade joysticks for guns.

In a bid to curb that trend, Venezuela's National Assembly is on track to prohibit violent video games and toys. The proposed legislation, which received initial approval in September, is expected to get a final vote in the coming weeks.

Parents applaud the proposed ban. But critics argue the bill is little more than a public relations stunt by supporters of President Hugo Chavez to camouflage his government's inability to deal with Venezuela's rampant violent crime - the country's most pressing problem according to public opinion polls.

Chavez's government stopped releasing complete annual murder figures in 2005 amid rising concerns. But last year, the Justice Ministry said homicides averaged 152 a week, or roughly 7,900 for the year. That's more than five times the murder rate in Texas, which has roughly the same population as Venezuela.

As manager of the cafe in San Augustin, Jenny Rangel struggles with a moral dilemma as she stands beneath a "Scarface" movie poster and watches the virtual shoot-'em-up. Like many of her neighbors, Rangel rushes home at nightfall before gunshots begin echoing through the barrio.

"The message for them is that you must shoot and kill," Rangel said.

Across town from San Augustin, shopping mall arcades are packed with children and teenagers from mostly middle-class and wealthy families who wait in line to play "Dark Silhouette" - featuring a life-size assault rifle that players use to gun down opponents.

"Video games aren't the problem, criminals are the problem. Why don't they go after them?" asked Arny Gonzalez, a 17-year-old high school student.

Lawmaker Jose Albornoz concedes that fighting crime requires a multifaceted approach. But he's convinced that authorities can reduce the murder rate by breaking what he says is a direct link between video games and crime - though most studies find no evidence that such games prompt violent behavior in youngsters.

"Some believe they actually can serve as a substitute, kids get rid of their rage through the game instead of acting out," said criminologist Roberto Briceno, who tracks crime at the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, an academic think-tank in Caracas.

When the legislation first went to the floor in the predominantly pro-Chavez legislature, lawmakers watched images from the popular "Grand Theft Auto" game showing a man pulling people out of their cars and severely beating them before stealing the vehicles.

"That's what our children are learning from these games, and it cannot continue," Albornoz said from the podium, waving a plastic toy machine gun for emphasis.

Venezuela would be one of few countries to impose an all-out ban on the "manufacture, importation, distribution, sales and use of violent video games and bellicose toys." The proposed law would give Venezuela's consumer protection agency the discretion to define what products should be prohibited and impose fines as high as $128,000.

Similar concerns have prompted many countries, including Brazil, Germany and China, to prohibit the sale of specific video games. Most, including the United States, have opted for ratings systems to warn parents and users of violent or sexual content.

The Venezuelan bill would mandate crime prevention classes in public schools and force the media to "implement permanent campaigns" to warn against the dangers of violent games. Another provision requires the government "to promote the production, distribution, sales and use" of games that teach kids "respect for an adversary."

Some 2,000 people marched across Venezuela's capital Saturday to protest what they call widespread persecution of Chavez's opponents.

"It's a bit ironic that supporters of Chavez, who persecutes his political opponents, want to teach our children the need for respect," quipped Tomas Sanchez, an opposition lawmaker who broke ranks with Chavez.

The law could shutter some retailers, arcades and Internet cafes. But the country's thriving market for pirated video games will likely be untouched by the law - another irony pinpointed by Chavez critics. Most vendors of pirated goods are from the working class, Chavez's core constituency, and they ply their illegal yet tolerated trade on street corners in cities and towns across the country.

Albornoz said such vendors should start thinking about exchanging the likes of "Grand Theft Auto" for non-aggressive games, saying: "There are alternatives that can be just as fun."

At the same time, the understaffed consumer-protection agency would be hard pressed to effectively enforce the ban. Its 163 inspectors spend most of their time struggling to ensure that grocery stores don't flout food price controls aimed at stemming another huge Venezuelan problem - double-digit inflation.

"It's a facade that allows them to say they are doing something to lower the crime rate," Sanchez said, "while hiding the fact that existing policies have failed."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100401423.html





Spam Growth Surpasses 'Storm' Virus
Mike Swift

Internet security companies are seeing a surge in the volume of spam that can turn individual computers into "zombies" that join the spammer networks, or that steal personal information from users' computers.

Google's Postini, which provides Internet security to more than 15 million business users, said in a company blog post Thursday that the amount of spam carrying dangerous virus "payloads" grew so much in the second and third quarters of 2009 that it has surpassed the volume of the "Storm" virus that plagued computer networks in 2007.

"The spammers are basically reseeding their botnets; they are recruiting new computers to add to their (networks) to replace what they lost" when authorities shut down compromised Internet service providers last year, said Adam Swidler, a senior product marketing manager with Mountain View-based Postini. "Only this time, they are using the latest technology."

McAfee, the Santa Clara-based security and technology company that processes more than 2 billion pieces of e-mail a day, says spam volumes have increased 141 percent since the beginning of 2009.

"We're definitely seeing that surge," said Adam Wosotowsky, a McAfee Internet security researcher who expects spam volumes to grow even more toward the end of the year.

Wosotowsky said that many spam attacks may originate from ISPs in Russia and China, where government oversight is not as strict, but that the network of compromised individual computers is truly global. Spam originating from China often makes up 60 percent of today's global e-mail volume, McAfee said this month.

During the second quarter of 2009, 14 million computers were incorporated into spammer "botnets" when they were infected and taken over by malicious code, with the biggest jump in South Korea, McAfee said. A botnet is a collection of machines infected by malicious software used to send spam.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team released a warning this week about one of those spam attacks — an e-mail that purports to come from the IRS, which may contain a subject line that says, "Notice of Underreported Income." If users click on an attachment or link in the e-mail, their computer may be infected with the "Zeus Trojan" code.

"Zeus can then ransack infected computers for financial information which can be used to empty bank accounts," according to a company post from MX Logic, an Internet security company acquired by McAfee. "Some estimates place the financial losses from the Zeus Trojan at over $1 million a day."

One thing that has changed dramatically over the past year is how quickly spammers can recover when authorities take down an ISP they have been using, security experts said.

When authorities last November disconnected the spammer-compromised McColo, a San Jose Web-hosting company, there was a 70 percent drop in the volume of spam overnight, Swidler said.

"We were all looking at the charts the next day, going, 'Whoa, is this the end of spam?' " he said.

Nope. Postini said later takedowns of compromised ISPs, such the Aug. 1 disconnection of Real Host, a large Latvia-based ISP, provided a much smaller, and shorter, reduction in spam.

During the height of the most recent attack, Postini said, its data centers have been blocking more than 100 million viruses every day.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13473506





The FBI Cracks the ‘Largest Phishing Case Ever’

A 100 people face 20 years in jail following a two-year investigation.
Asavin Wattanajantra

US and Egyptian authorities have charged 100 people in what the director of the FBI has called “the largest international phishing case ever conducted”.

The US and Egyptian fraudsters were accused of using phishing scams to steal account details from hundreds and possibly thousands of people, and transferring about $1.5 million into fake accounts they controlled.

The group of fraudsters were accused of targeting American financial institutions and victimising a number of account holders by fraudulently using their personal financial information after they were successfully phished.

The arrests were the result of an investigation called ‘Operation Phish Phry’. Starting in 2007, FBI agents worked with US financial institutions to “identify and disrupt” criminal phishing gangs.

“This international phishing ring had a significant impact on two banks and caused huge headaches for hundreds, perhaps thousands of bank customers,” said Acting US Attorney George S. Cardona.

“Organised, international crime rings can only be confronted by an organised response by law enforcement across international borders, which we have seen in this case.”

American authorities charged 53 people, while Egypt charged 47, with offenses including conspiracy to commit bank fraud, computer fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The bank fraud alone could lead to jail sentences of 20 years.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/616069/the-fb...hing-case-ever





British Hacker Loses U.S. Extradition Case

A British "UFO eccentric," wanted in the United States for breaking into NASA and Pentagon computers in "the biggest military hack of all time," lost his latest battle to avoid extradition on Friday.

Gary McKinnon, 43, was refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, Britain's highest judicial body, as he continued his long battle to avoid being sent to the United States.

McKinnon, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, had challenged a refusal by Britain's chief prosecutor to allow him to be tried in Britain, which would have avoided any need for extradition.

However, London's High Court said his case did not raise "points of law of general public importance" which is necessary to pursue a case at the Supreme Court, the Press Association reported.

His lawyers said they would now consider applying to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In an earlier ruling, the High Court accepted that his extradition could have consequences for his health, but judges decided that the process of the law overruled those concerns.

"The effects of these proceedings on Gary have been devastating," said McKinnon's lawyer Karen Todner. "The legal team are now considering our position and we will exhaust every avenue to prevent Gary's extradition."

McKinnon, whose lawyers describe him as a "UFO eccentric" who used the Internet to search for alien life, is accused of causing the U.S. Army's entire network of more than 2,000 computers in Washington to be shut down for 24 hours. U.S. authorities called this "the biggest military hack of all time."

He was arrested in 2002 after U.S. prosecutors charged him with illegally accessing computers, including systems at the Pentagon and NASA, and causing $700,000 worth of damage.

If he is convicted by a U.S. court, McKinnon could face up to 70 years in prison.

McKinnon told Reuters in an interview that he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed. He became obsessed with trawling through large military data networks for any proof that they might be out there.

He had used his own computer with a 56K dial-up modem at his London home with no password protection and somehow managed to evade every security measure the U.S. military had adopted. While McKinnon admits hacking, he argues it was not malicious.

His cause has been backed by the Daily Mail newspaper and some British politicians.

"What Gary did was wrong, born of his compulsive and obsessive behavior. But it does not justify Gary's extradition, which would be a cruel and excessive punishment, particularly given his Aspergers," his mother Janis Sharp said. "I've fought for five years to protect my son and I am not about to give up now."

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by David Stamp)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...5981UC20091009





Nobel Prize Recognizes Communications Advances
AP

Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday.

Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said all three have American citizenship. Kao also holds British citizenship while Boyle is also Canadian.

The award's 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) purse will be split between the three with Kao taking half and Boyle and Smith each getting a fourth. The three also receive a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Kao, who was born in Shanghai and is a British citizen, was cited for his 1966 discovery that showed how to transmit light over long distances via fiber-optic cables, which became the backbone of modern communication networks that carry phone calls and high-speed Internet data around the world.

"With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers (62.14 miles), compared to only 20 meters (65.62 feet) for the fibers available in the 1960s," the citation said.

Boyle and Smith worked together to invent the charged-coupled device, or CCD, the eye of the digital camera found in everything from the cheapest point-and-shoot to high-speed, delicate surgical instruments.

In its citation, the Academy said that Boyle and Smith "invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD."

It said that technology builds on Albert Einstein's discovery of the photoelectric effect, for which he was awarded the Nobel physics prize in 1921.

The two men, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey, designed an image sensor that could transform light into a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.

"It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film," the Academy said.

"Without the CCD, the development of digital cameras would have taken a slower course. Without CCD we would not have seen the astonishing images of space taken by the Hubble space telescope, or the images of the red desert on our neighboring planet Mars," it said.

Boyle, in a phone call to the academy, said he is reminded of his work with Smith "when I go around these days and see everybody using our little digital cameras, everywhere. Although they don't use exactly our CCD, it started it all."

He added that the biggest achievement resulting from his work was when images of Mars were transmitted back to Earth using digital cameras.

"We saw for the first time the surface of Mars," Boyle said. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention."

The academy said digital image sensors are usually involved when photo, video or television are used for medical applications, such as taking images inside the body.

"It can reveal fine details in very distant and in extremely small objects," the academy said.

The physics award is the second of the 2009 Nobel Prizes to be announced.

On Monday, three American scientists shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, who also has Australian citizenship, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak were cited for their work in solving the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/science/07nobel.html





Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure
Tim Arango

FOR nearly three decades, the Federal Trade Commission’s rules regarding the relationships between advertisers and product reviewers and endorsers were deemed adequate. Then came the age of blogging and social media.

On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.

The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

“It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices at the F.T.C., said: “We were looking and seeing the significance of social media marketing in the 21st century and we thought it was time to explain the principles of transparency and truth in advertising and apply them to social media marketing. Which isn’t to say that we saw a huge problem out there that was imperative to address.”

Still, sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as blogs, have offered companies new opportunities to pitch products with endorsements that carry a veneer of authenticity because they seem to be straight from the mouth — or keyboard — of an individual consumer. In some cases, companies have set up product review blogs that appear to be independent. One such case involved Urban Nutrition, a seller of supplements, that ran Web sites like WeKnowDiets.com and GoogleDiets.com. The National Advertising Review Council, which governs the industry’s self-regulatory programs, said the sites were “formatted as independent product-review blogs.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “the rules are looking ahead to a quite possible future when there is a market to buy ‘authentic’ public endorsements.”

Some marketing groups fought the changes. “If a product is provided to bloggers, the F.T.C. will consider that, in most cases, to be a material connection even if the advertiser has no control over the content of the blogs,” said Linda Goldstein, a partner at Manatt Phelps & Phillips, a law firm that represents three marketing groups, the Electronic Retailing Association, the Promotion Marketing Association and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. “In terms of the real world blogging community, that’s a seismic shift.”

Ms. Goldstein added, “We would have preferred the F.T.C. to work closer with the industry to learn how viral marketing works.”

The new guidelines were not unexpected — the commission gave notice last November that it would take up the matter. They will affect scores of bloggers who began as hobbyists only to find that companies flocked to them in search of a new way to reach consumers.

About three-and-a-half years ago Christine Young, of Lincoln, Calif., began blogging about her adventures in home schooling. It led to her current blog, FromDatesToDiapers.com, about mothers and families. The free products soon started arriving, and now hardly a day goes by without a package from Federal Express or DHL arriving at her door, she said. Mostly they are children’s products, like Nintendo Wii games, but sometimes not. She said she recently received a free pair of women’s shoes from Timberland.

Ms. Young said she had always disclosed whether or not she received a free product when writing her reviews. But companies have nothing to lose when sending off goodies: if she doesn’t like a product, she simply won’t write about it.

“I think that bloggers definitely need to be held accountable,” said Ms. Young. “I think there is a certain level of trust that bloggers have with readers, and readers deserve to know the whole truth.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/bu...ia/06adco.html





Tweet if by land

Anarchist Arrested after Tweeting Out the Fuzz to Protesters

If you're the subversive type, you might want to reconsider tweeting the revolution. One Twitter user has been arrested and had his home raided after he allegedly used the service to help others commit crimes, though he may have just been directing them to be cautious during their protests.
Jacqui Cheng

When deciding how to organize activities of questionable legal nature, it's not always wise to choose a popular and widely available communications medium that even the police know about. When 41-year-old anarchist Elliot Madison got himself arrested in late September, he learned that lesson the hard way. Madison had been found using a police scanner and Twitter to help numerous protesters avoid police during the Group of 20 summit and has now been charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime.

Madison was found in a hotel room by Pennsylvania State Police on September 24, armed with police scanners and computers so that he could disperse critical information to protesters. According to the FBI, Madison was "directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse."

Though the FBI says so, it's not entirely clear from the complaint that Madison's tweets were actually illegal. Madison's lawyer told the New York Times on Saturday that he and a friend were merely "part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20." As implied through the Times piece, Madison's tweets merely directed protestors as to where the police were at any given time and to stay alert. "There’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability."

No matter: the FBI followed up on Madison's arrest by searching his home late last week for evidence of other violations, such as rioting laws and whatever else they could dig up. Not only did investigators seize his computers, they also took books, clothing, gas masks, and apparently a photo of Lenin. As a self-described anarchist, Madison's affiliations have undoubtedly contributed to police opinion of him and his activities, no matter how benign.

Twitter is increasingly grabbing the attention of law enforcement as both a way to monitor for potential criminal actions but also as a way to try and contact people. The British High Court recently gave the green light for a law firm to send an injunction over Twitter, though the effectiveness of such a method remains to be seen.

In cases like Madison's, it seems one of the only ways he could have avoided arrest would have been to either not tweet at all, or keep his account private and only accessible by approved parties. Still, if the police suspected him of criminal actions, they could have requested access to his tweets and possibly gotten it. Maybe it's time for protest organizers to start moving back to lower-tech, less trackable methods of communication.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...protesters.ars





The Criticism that Ralph Lauren Doesn't Want You to See!

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question.



This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn't.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, "Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that's different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I've rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter."

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.

Update: Looks like Photoshop Disaster's ISP caved to a similar notice.

DMCA Infringement Notification
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/06...sm-that-r.html





Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem
Laura M. Holson

TIMES are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd.

Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter.

A growing number of people have begun lashing out at their Twitter critics, challenging the not-quite rules of etiquette on a service where insults are lobbed in brief bursts, too short to include the social niceties. Some offended parties are suing. For others, extracting a public mea culpa will do. In some cases, the payback is extreme: Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, was fined $25,000 for criticizing a referee in a tweet after a game.

Blogs, of course, have long been rife with the discontented heaping abuse on foes. But academics and researchers who study online attitudes say that same behavior has been less common on Twitter, in part, because many people use their real names. Now it is migrating to the service, attracting lawsuits and leaving users to haggle among themselves about what will be tolerated.

Complicating matters, there are few prescribed social norms on Twitter like those in more closed communities like Facebook. The service has attained mass popularity without much time to develop an organic users’ culture. On top of that, with tweets limited to 140 characters, users come right to the point without context or nuance.

“It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something so let’s discuss it,’ ” said Josh Bernoff, a researcher and an author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” “You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”

The same laws of libel and defamation that apply to traditional media and the Internet also apply to Twitter, according to free speech experts. (Defamation is when someone knowingly says something false that causes harm.) What is likely to shift, said Floyd Abrams, the well-known First Amendment lawyer, is what language is considered acceptable and whether it is deemed harmful. In the 1950s, he explained, it was libelous to call someone a Communist; today it is not.

“The basic law will be the same, but I would think that a defendant might argue that the language used on Twitter is understood to not be taken as seriously as is the case in other forms of communication,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times. “We will have to wait and see how judges and juries figure out how to deal with this.”

Bryan Freedman is the lawyer in Los Angeles who is representing Dawn Simorangkir, a designer who markets clothes under the Boudoir Queen label, and who sued Ms. Love for libel in March. The lawsuit contends that Ms. Love “became infatuated” with the designer, asking her to create costumes using vintage material the singer owned.

When Ms. Simorangkir asked to be paid, Ms. Love balked at the price. Ms. Simorangkir, in return, refused to return Ms. Love’s vintage material, according to legal documents filed by Ms. Love’s lawyers. The singer accused the designer of being a liar and thief (among other things) in a number of rambling, misspelled tweets.

“You will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead,” read one tweet from Ms. Love in March.

Ms. Love and her lawyers, Keith Fink and Olaf Muller, declined to comment on the lawsuit. But in August Ms. Love’s lawyers sought to dismiss the case, saying it would violate and inhibit her right to free speech. Mr. Freedman maintains, however, that Ms. Simorangkir’s business has suffered because of Ms. Love. A hearing is set for this month. “I find with this kind of communication you will always end up saying something that will get you in trouble,” Mr. Freedman said.

Mr. Freedman’s perspective is interesting because he also represents Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger known for taunting celebrities with embarrassing posts. In September, Mr. Hilton got into a public spat with Demi Moore on Twitter after he posted a link on his Web site to a photo of Ms. Moore’s 15-year-old daughter in a low-cut blouse. In a series of tweets, Ms. Moore accused Mr. Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, of flouting child pornography laws. Mr. Hilton went on the attack, posting tweets that said Ms. Moore was an inept mother.

Both parties’ lawyers exchanged threatening letters. Through Mr. Freedman, Mr. Hilton accused Ms. Moore of defamation. On Sept. 4, Ms. Moore’s lawyer, Marty Singer, responded in a letter calling Mr. Hilton “regularly crude, insulting and cruel.”

No lawsuits were filed. As Stephen Huvane, Ms. Moore’s publicist, put it, “No one wins in these situations.”

In defense of Mr. Hilton, Mr. Freedman said that as long as his tweets reflect opinion, it doesn’t matter if his targets think he is cruel. But he conceded that much of the tension arises from the unthinking way that some people use Twitter. “I’m not saying it is right or wrong,” Mr. Freedman said, “but I think we are seeing a blurring of lines between nastiness and free speech.”

According to legal experts, much of what is said on Twitter is opinion — even nasty name-calling — which means it is protected speech. “When you look at a lot of the things people are complaining about it is not actual defamation, it is a statement of opinion,” said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. “In many cases, it’s about two people who had a breakdown in a relationship and took that online.”

Twitter has made a choice not to become involved in such disputes. “We don’t want to be a mediator,” said Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel. In June, though, the company began verifying accounts after complaints from celebrities about others falsely using their identities.

Some have settled disputes over their Twitter outbursts without lawyers. In June, the author Alice Hoffman apologized after tweeting that a Boston Globe book reviewer was a “moron.”

In the case of Mr. Cuban, the N.B.A. exercised its right to fine him for comments it deemed out of line. And it took matters one step further: it now bans players, coaches and other team personnel from tweeting or posting to other social media sites 45 minutes before a game through the end of post-game interviews.

Mr. Ardia said that a far more chilling scenario, in his view, is a case involving Horizon Realty Group, a real estate firm in Chicago that filed suit in July seeking $50,000 in damages from a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, who tweeted about mold in her apartment.

In an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, Jeffrey Michael, an executive at Horizon, said the tenant’s tweet was untrue, adding, “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization.” He later apologized for the comment and, in a press release, explained Horizon was involved in another legal matter involving Ms. Bonnen.

Neither Mr. Michael nor Ms. Bonnen return phone calls seeking comment. Mr. Ardia said that corporations who sue customers who post comments on Twitter may find that the strategy backfires as it sparks criticism of them.

“The old way of silencing someone doesn’t work” online, he said. “We as a society have to realize this type of behavior isn’t going to go away. We are not going to have civil conversation in all corners of the Internet. Part of that means we have to develop a thicker skin. We should not accept physical threats, of course. But what we recognize as upsetting and hurtful will diminish over time.”

It is anybody’s guess who will emerge as hallway monitor for the “have three drinks and tweet how much you hate your boss” set. Maybe it will be someone like Tyrone Schiff, a graduate of the University of Michigan who lives in suburban Chicago and who in August started the Web site Twaxed.com, whose slogan begins, “Beware of What You Share.” Mr. Schiff trolls Twitter to find the most obnoxious, embarrassing tweets and post them on his site.

So far it is a collection of tweets about sex, sexual organs and the occasional jab at an ex-girlfriend or co-worker. While Mr. Schiff seeks to entertain, he wants also to send a message. “You never know how your words are being used, or used against you,” he said. “We are living in a world where people don’t censor themselves; they don’t use their words carefully. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s reality.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/fa...08twitter.html





Court Hears Free-Speech Case on Dogfight Videos
Adam Liptak

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wanted to know if Congress could ban a “Human Sacrifice Channel” on cable television.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked about videos of cockfighting.

“What about hunting with a bow and arrow out of season?” Justice John Paul Stevens asked.

“What if I am an aficionado of bullfights,” Justice Antonin Scalia wondered, “and I think, contrary to the animal cruelty people, they ennoble both beast and man?”

And Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked about “stuffing geese for pâté de foie gras.”

The rapid-fire inquiries came in an exceptionally lively Supreme Court argument on Tuesday in the most important free speech case this term.

The case concerns the constitutionality of a 1999 federal law that bans commercial trafficking in “depictions of animal cruelty.” The number and variety of questions suggested that most of the justices thought the law was written too broadly and thus ran afoul of the First Amendment.

In defending the 1999 law, Neal K. Katyal, a deputy solicitor general, cautioned the justices against pursuing an “endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.”

Mr. Katyal reminded the justices that the case before them concerned videos of dogfights and that the law itself was mainly prompted by so-called crush videos, which cater to a sexual fetish. Those videos show women in high heels stepping on small animals.

But the 1999 law by its terms applies to audio and video depictions of all sorts of activities in which “a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed” if that conduct was illegal where the depiction was sold.

The case before the court, United States v. Stevens, No. 08-769, arose from the conviction of a Virginia man for selling videos of dogfights. The man, Robert J. Stevens, was sentenced to 37 months in prison. The federal appeals court in Philadelphia last year overturned Mr. Stevens’s conviction and struck down the law on First Amendment grounds.

Patricia A. Millett, a lawyer for Mr. Stevens, urged the justices to follow suit, saying the law could not be rendered constitutional by narrowing it through judicial interpretation.

“There is interpreting and then there is alchemy,” Ms. Millett said, “ and I think this statute requires alchemy.”

The law does exempt materials with “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.”

But several justices indicated a discomfort with the vagueness of that standard and with entrusting the question of a work’s “serious value” to prosecutors and juries.

“Could you tell me what the difference is between these videos and David Roma’s documentary on pit bulls?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Mr. Katyal, referring to “Off the Chain,” an exposé of dogfighting. “David Roma’s documentary had much, much more footage on the actual animal cruelty than the films at issue here.”

Mr. Katyal responded that “the line will sometimes be difficult to draw.”

Justice Scalia said the law violates the First Amendment by treating speech condemning depictions of animals fighting more favorably than speech celebrating the fighting. Mr. Stevens’s “message is that getting animals to fight is fun,” Justice Scalia said.

The hypothetical Human Sacrifice Channel came up late in the argument. Justice Alito described how it would work.

“Suppose that it is legally taking place someplace in the world,” he said. “I mean, people here would probably love to see it. Live, pay per view, you know, on the Human Sacrifice Channel.”

Ms. Millett haltingly said that Congress could not ban such a channel solely on the ground that it was offensive.

Mr. Katyal, to the apparent surprise of some of the justices, agreed, saying the First Amendment would not permit a law banning such a channel unless it could be shown that the depictions made the sacrifices more likely. The distastefulness of the depictions alone would not justify the ban.

The justices did not seem inclined to expand categories of speech outside the protection of the First Amendment, notably obscenity and child pornography, to encompass violent images unrelated to sex.

In child pornography, Justice Ginsburg said, “the very taking of the picture is the offense — that’s the abuse of the child.” In dogfighting, by contrast, she continued, “the abuse of the dog and the promotion of the fight is separate from the filming of it.”

Ms. Millett agreed. “If you throw away every dogfighting video in the country tomorrow,” Ms. Millett said, “dogfighting will continue.”

Justice Breyer suggested that Congress would be able to draft a more carefully tailored law focusing on crush videos and the kinds of animal cruelty that are illegal in all of the states.

“Why not do a simpler thing?” Justice Breyer asked. “Ask Congress to write a statute that actually aims at those frightful things it was trying to prohibit.”

“I am not giving Congress advice,” he added, “though I seem to be.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/us/07scotus.html





Child-Porn Arrests: `Shooting Fish in a Barrel'
Mitch Stacy

When a single Florida county arrested 45 men and boys from all walks of life last June on charges of downloading child pornography, some people worried the place had become a haven for deviants.

But top law enforcement officials and child welfare experts say the only thing unusual about Polk County is that its sheriff, Grady Judd, happens to pursue child-porn enthusiasts with more fervor and resources than most.

Child porn has grown so pervasive on the Internet, they say, that police agencies all over the country, using the latest file-tracking technology, could easily spend every day finding and arresting offenders.

"Today, it's truly like shooting fish in a barrel," said Judd, who has directed four child pornography roundups since 2006, resulting in at least 176 arrests in Polk County, a patchwork of orange groves, phosphate mines, modest towns and a half-million people between Tampa and Orlando. The biggest city is Lakeland, population 90,000.

Mike Phillips, chief of the computer crimes section at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said Polk's sheer number of child pornography arrests in recent years is almost unheard of nationally for a single agency.

Judd, whose sheriff's office houses the Internet Crimes Against Children task force for central Florida, has made sure his detectives have gotten the specialized training needed to identify and catch people who download the illegal material from the Internet. He notes that much of the legwork in the latest sweep was done by just two or three detectives, though more were required when deputies raided suspects' homes.

The popular and media-friendly Judd, who when he needs guidance is as likely to reach for the Bible on his desk as he is to go flipping through the Florida criminal code, said his crusade against child porn comes from his fervent commitment to protect children. An "old vice guy," he was arresting child pornographers when they were still trading in magazines and paper photographs.

"We are absolutely committed and send a clear message that if you engage in child pornography, if you're trying to lure children online, we are going to seek you out, chase you to the ends of the earth and put you in jail," the 55-year-old sheriff said.

Child pornography has exploded as Internet use has become commonplace. Experts say the images increasingly seem to feature younger children - infants and toddlers - being molested for the cameras in more violent and egregious ways. Most are abused and photographed by a parent, relative or someone else in a position of trust.

In this era of lean budgets, many law enforcement agencies don't have the time, resources or inclination to aggressively pursue such crimes, experts say.

"Once you get the training and the resources, it's very easy to pick these guys off, but law enforcement already has such problematic crimes competing for police resources," said Keith Durkin, an Ohio Northern University sociology professor and frequent witness for the federal Internet Crimes Against Children task force.

Harold Copus, a former FBI agent who has extensively investigated child pornography cases, took a harder line on law enforcement efforts.

"It is spotty and totally inconsistent," Copus said. "And it comes down to commitment and, quite frankly, laziness. There's no pressure" from the public.

Phillips, the Florida computer crimes chief, said that because of limited resources, the June roundup was aimed at some of the worst offenders - those trading the most images or suspected of abusing children. The 45 people arrested had amassed up to 15,000 images.

Those arrested included a 50-year-old car salesman, a 62-year-old retired teacher, a 34-year-old pilot, a 43-year-old truck driver and a 22-year-old Sea World employee. Some had long criminal records. Others had none. Three were high school students.

"We have looked at the enemy, and he is us," said Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Computer analysts at the center investigate about 2,000 reports a week of suspected child pornography that come in from the public and online service providers. Tips to the center rose from 3,160 in 1998 to 101,748 in 2008, mirroring the spread of everyday Internet use, and analysts there have documented millions of images online.

Child pornography arrests by the 59 federally funded Internet Crimes Against Children task forces topped 3,000 last year for the first time, nearly double the number reported just four years ago.

Authorities ultimately will have to do more than slap handcuffs on people who make and view child pornography, said Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.

"This is not just a law enforcement issue," he said. "This is not just about people doing something illegal and therefore we have to stop it. It's making people understand why this is more of a societal issue, why this is more of a public health issue."

Judd, who has battled adult bookstores and prostitution with similar zeal, gets angry just talking about the people who trade in the horrific images of child abuse.

He tells the story of one man caught in bed with a teen daughter when deputies barged in with a search warrant. Then there is the graphic online slideshow offering fathers step-by-step instructions for molesting their children.

"It is something we must wake up to," Judd said. "And we are asleep at the wheel as a nation."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100502221.html





CBS: FCC "Obsessed" With Janet Jackson Case
FMQB

CBS has filed comments with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on the FCC's recently-announced return to the infamous Janet Jackson-Super Bowl case, claiming the Commission is "obsessed" with the incident. In a reply brief filed on Friday, CBS said the FCC has now raised new issues with its recent brief defending the $550,000 indecency fine and claiming that the network opted not to censor the incident when they had the ability to.

"The issues the FCC now raises all have been thoroughly briefed, argued, and decided by this Court, following an exhaustive investigation and three rounds of pleadings at the agency," CBS said in its brief, according to Broadcasting & Cable. "The Commission’s supplemental brief fails even to address the purpose of this remand from the Supreme Court, but the agency’s Ahab-like obsession with this case does pose an important question: Just how many years can the FCC prolong a broadcast indecency probe of an unscripted and unintended event that lasted nine-sixteenths of one second?"

The brief continued, "The First Amendment costs to CBS and all broadcasters inherent in dragging out this proceeding – as the FCC here requests – far exceed just the legal fees and time consumed by the prolonged prosecution of the case. Regulatory agencies put pressure on regulated firms in numerous ways, 'some more subtle than others' and subjecting programming decisions to repeated government second-guessing is one of the least subtle of all."

CBS concluded that the court should consider the possibility that current indecency rules may be unconstitutional, saying, "This Court should embrace the Supreme Court’s invitation to assess the constitutionality of the indecency rules given current realities and find that most applications can no longer survive First Amendment scrutiny."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1531647





Marge Simpson Makes Cover of Playboy



"D'oh!" doesn't even start to cover it.

Marge Simpson -- the blue beehived matriarch of America's most loved dysfunctional family - is Playboy magazine's November cover, the magazine said on Friday.

Simpson, tastefully concealing her assets behind a signature Playboy Bunny chair, is the first cartoon character ever to front the glossy adult magazine, joining the ranks of sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford.

Playboy said the cover and a three-page picture spread inside was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the "The Simpsons" and part of a plan to appeal to a younger generation of readers.

Scott Flanders, the recently-hired chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, told the Chicago Sun-Times in an interview that the Marge Simpson cover and centerfold was "somewhat tongue-in-cheek."

"It had never been done, and we thought it would be kind of hip, cool and unusual," Flanders told the newspaper. He said the magazine hoped to attract readers in their 20s compared to the average Playboy reader's age of 35.

Playboy also promises a story inside called "The Devil in Marge Simpson". The issue arrives on newsstands on October 16.

Playboy magazine's circulation has slipped in recent years in the face of competition from the Internet, which offers free and plentiful pictures of naked women online.

The magazine's circulation fell 9 percent as of the end of June 2009, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

But Flanders told Reuters earlier this week that there were no plans to close the print edition. "Over my dead body will we quit producing the magazine in print," he said.

Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie have already been honored this year with a set of U.S. postal stamps marking the 20th anniversary of the longest-running comedy series on U.S. television.

Animated series "The Simpsons" debuted in December 1989 with a Christmas-themed episode called "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire." It has won 24 primetime Emmys and was renewed by Fox television earlier this year for two more seasons.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant: Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...5984FN20091009





Playboy Names President, Will Keep Print Magazine
Robert MacMillan

Playboy Enterprises Inc on Tuesday named an 11-year veteran of the adult entertainment company as president, while its chief executive vowed to keep printing its namesake magazine.

Alex Vaickus will serve as the company's president, a new position, and will oversee all of its businesses including print, television and digital media, Playboy said in a statement.

He will report to Playboy Chief Executive Scott Flanders, who joined the company earlier this year from Freedom Communications, publisher of U.S. newspapers including the Orange County Register in California.

Vaickus joined Playboy in 1998 as a vice president of strategic planning. He later became president of Playboy's global licensing business, which helps the company make money from its Bunny Ears logo and other aspects of the adult entertainment magazine's storied history.

Before Playboy, Vaickus was a vice president at ConAgra and held several jobs at Sara Lee Corp.

Playboy also named Scott Stephen as executive vice president of Playboy's print and digital group.

Flanders will remain involved in the company's operations, but will focus on a "strategic repositioning" of the company as well as "business model changes across every segment of our business," he told Reuters in an interview.

He declined to say what these changes would be, but said that the company likely would announce some of them before the end of the year. They do not include closing Playboy magazine's print edition, he said.

"Over my dead body will we quit producing the magazine in print," Flanders said.

Flanders' comments come a day after Conde Nast said it would stop publishing Gourmet magazine and several other titles after consulting firm McKinsey & Co recommended ways to cut costs.

Conde Nast, which publishes The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired and Vanity Fair, among other magazines, is suffering along with Playboy and other magazine publishers including Time Warner Inc from sharp declines in advertising revenue.

Some magazine and newspaper owners are cutting their print editions and trying to keep the titles alive on the Internet, a place where more people are getting news and entertainment.

Playboy's circulation has fallen with the rest, dropping 9 percent as of the end of June 2009 from the year before, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The magazine's photos of nude women and interviews with authors, actors and other celebrities are admired by fans and longtime subscribers, but similar material is available for free online, forcing Playboy to look for more revenue sources.

It also has cut jobs to narrow its costs and losses, and at the beginning of the year said it would be "willing to listen" to offers to buy the company.

Playboy shares were down 5 cents or 1.7 percent at $2.83 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday afternoon, off an earlier high at $2.97.

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan; Editing by Derek Caney and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...59552G20091006





Condé Nast to Close Gourmet, Cookie and Modern Bride
Stephanie Clifford

Condé Nast will close Gourmet magazine, a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world, it was announced on Monday. Gourmet has been published since January 1941. Also being shut down are the Condé Nast magazines Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, according to an internal company memo that also was sent to reporters on Monday.

Gourmet magazineGourmet magazine has been published since 1941.

The magazine has suffered a severe decline in ad pages, but the cut still comes as a shock. There was speculation that Condé Nast would close one of its food titles — Gourmet or Bon Appétit — but most bets were on the latter. Gourmet has a richer history than Bon Appétit, and its editor, Ruth Reichl, is powerful in the food world.

Cookie is a relatively new introduction, started in 2005, while the bridal magazines were seen as offshoots of the bigger Brides magazine, which Condé Nast also owns.

The cuts come at the conclusion of a three-month study by McKinsey & Company, which conducted analysis of Condé Nast’s costs, and told several magazines to cut about 25 percent from their budgets. These are the first closings announced by the company since the McKinsey study.

The moves are significant for the publisher. It has never been quick to close titles, and in the last year or so has closed only newer titles, Condé Nast Portfolio and Domino, along with folding Men’s Vogue into Vogue.

Condé Nast tends to hold tight to its prestigious titles, making the Gourmet closing all the more startling. In an interview in February, even Paul Jowdy, publisher of the in-house rival Bon Appétit, said that such a closing was unlikely. (To be fair to Mr. Jowdy, the economy has plummeted, and Condé Nast has been hit particularly hard since then. Its magazines have lost more than 8,000 ad pages, excluding its bridal titles, so far this year.)

“They would never do that,” Mr. Jowdy said in February. “They’re both very important magazines in the culinary world, and they’re very different magazines, and they’re both very healthy. So there’s all these rumors that are just ridiculous. I try not to pay attention to them, but you have to know — if you think of two of the most prestigious, credible, trusted magazines in the industry, you’re going to say Bon Appétit and Gourmet.”
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...t-magazine/?em





Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92
Andy Grundberg

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

His death was announced by Peter MacGill, his friend and representative.

Mr. Penn’s talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of readers of Vogue during his long association with the magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries and are prized by collectors.

His long career at Vogue spanned a number of radical transformations in fashion and its depiction, but his style remained remarkably constant. Imbued with calm and decorum, his photographs often seemed intent on defying fashion. His models and portrait subjects were never seen leaping or running or turning themselves into blurs. Even the rough-and-ready members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, photographed in San Francisco in 1967, were transformed within the quieting frame of his studio camera into the graphic equivalent of a Greek frieze.

Instead of spontaneity, Mr. Penn provided the illusion of a seance, his gaze precisely describing the profile of a Balenciaga coat or of a Moroccan jalaba in a way that could almost mesmerize the viewer. Nothing escaped the edges of his photographs unless he commanded it. Except for a series of close-up portraits that cut his subjects’ heads off at the forehead, and another, stranger suite of overripe nudes, his subjects were usually shown whole, apparently enjoying a splendid isolation from the real world.

He was probably most famous for photographing Parisian fashion models and the world’s great cultural figures, but he seemed equally at home photographing Peruvian peasants or bunion pads. Merry Foresta, co-organizer of a 1990 retrospective of his work at the National Museum of American Art, wrote that his pictures exhibited “the control of an art director fused with the process of an artist.”

A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Mr. Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs. Although schooled in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping his early canvases of paint so that they might serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.

He was also a refined conversationalist and a devoted husband and friend. His marriage to Lisa Fonssagrives, a beautiful model, artist and his sometime collaborator, lasted 42 years, ending with her death at the age of 80 in 1992. Mr. Penn’s photographs of Ms. Fonssagrives not only captured a slim woman of lofty sophistication and radiant good health; they also set the esthetic standard for the elegant fashion photography of the 1940s and ’50s.

Ms. Fonssagrives became a sculptor after her modeling career ended. In 1994, Mr. Penn and their son, Tom, a metal designer, arranged the printing of a book that reproduced his wife’s sculpture, prints and drawings. In addition to his son, Mr. Penn is survived by his stepdaughter, Mia Fonssagrives.Solow (who renders her name with a dot), a sculptor and jewelry designer; his younger brother, Arthur, the well-known director of such films as “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nine grandchildren.

Mr. Penn had the good fortune of working for and collaborating with two of the 20th century’s most inventive and influential magazine art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. He studied with Mr. Brodovitch in Philadelphia as a young man and came to New York in 1937 as his unpaid design assistant at Harper’s Bazaar, the most provocative fashion magazine of the day. But it was under Mr. Liberman, at Vogue, that Mr. Penn forged his career as a photographer.

In the book “Irving Penn: Passage” (1991), a compilation of the photographer’s career, Mr. Liberman wrote of meeting Mr. Penn for the first time in 1941: “Here was a young American who seemed unspoiled by European mannerisms or culture. I remember he wore sneakers and no tie. I was struck by his directness and a curious unworldliness, a clarity of purpose, and a freedom of decision. What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials.”

Irving Penn was also a consummate technician, known equally for the immaculate descriptive quality of his still-life arrangements of cosmetics and other consumer goods and for his masterly exploration of photographic materials. Not content with the conventions of the darkroom or with the standard appearance of commercial prints, he was willing to experiment. He resorted to bleaching the prints of his nudes series, eliminating skin tones and making female flesh appear harsh and unforgiving but nonetheless sexually charged.

At the height of the cultural convulsions of the 1960s Mr. Penn taught himself to print his own pictures using a turn-of-the-century process that relies on platinum instead of more conventional silver. The process produces beautiful, velvety tones in the image and is among the most permanent of photographic processes, although it requires time-consuming preparation and precise control in the darkroom.

Over the next 30 years Mr. Penn labored to print all his new work, as well as to reprint much of his earlier work, using this platinum process, which requires that a photographer mix a recipe of exotic chemicals and then hand-coat them onto a sheet of drawing paper. Mr. Penn, who almost single-handedly brought the process back into popularity among photographic artists, perfected a method of coating the paper with multiple layers of metallic salts, greatly increasing the depth and luminosity of the final print.

Mr. Penn’s concern with the longevity of his prints was one aspect of an enduring career. Not only was he the photographer with the longest tenure in the history of Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue; he also created timeless images of fashion and celebrity, two arenas characterized by constant change. At the same time, he took pains to acknowledge mortality and decay in his photographs, focusing his more personal work on cigarette butts, sidewalk detritus and, while in his 70s, on the skulls of wild animals.

In his catalog essay for a 1984 retrospective of Mr. Penn’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, then the museum’s director of photography, wrote, “The grace, wit, and inventiveness of his pattern-making, the lively and surprising elegance of his line, and his sensitivity to the character, the idiosyncratic humors, of light make Penn’s pictures, even the slighter ones, a pleasure for our eyes.”

Irving Penn was born June 16, 1917, in Plainfield, N. J. His father, Harry, was a watchmaker and his mother, Sonia, a nurse. As a student at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, later to be known as the Philadelphia College of Art (and now the University of the Arts), from 1934 to 1938, Mr. Penn studied drawing, painting and graphic and industrial design. His most influential teacher was the designer Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian émigré by way of Paris who was familiar with vanguard developments in European art and design.

Although Mr. Brodovitch worked in New York City for Harper’s Bazaar, he traveled to Philadelphia on Saturdays to meet with his students and to evaluate their work. Mr. Penn’s graphic talent impressed Mr. Brodovitch, and he chose him to be his unpaid assistant at Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and 1938.

After finishing school and moving to New York, Mr. Penn worked as a free-lance designer and illustrator for Bazaar and other clients. He also bought a camera and began to photograph storefronts and signs he saw in Manhattan. In 1940 he inherited Mr. Brodovitch’s position as director of advertising design for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store, but within a year he decided to travel to Mexico and attempt a career as a painter.

Before leaving for Mexico Mr. Penn, at Mr. Brodovitch’s suggestion, offered his position at Saks to another Russian émigré designer, Alexander Liberman. Mr. Liberman declined, but by the time Mr. Penn returned to New York in 1943, with his canvases scraped totally clean, Mr. Liberman was the art director of Vogue, and he returned the younger man’s favor by offering Mr. Penn a job as his assistant.

Mr. Penn’s first assignment was to supervise the design of Vogue’s covers, and he obliged by sketching out several possible photographic scenes. Unable to interest any of the staff photographers in taking them, he took to the photo studio himself, at Mr. Liberman’s suggestion. The first result of this opportunity was a color still-life photograph of a glove, belt and pocketbook, which was published as the cover of Vogue’s Oct. 1, 1943, issue. Mr. Penn’s photographs would appear on more than 150 Vogue covers over the next 50 years.

During World War II, Mr. Penn joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Italy, where he got a taste of European culture. Arriving in Rome in 1944, he spied the artist Giorgio de Chirico carrying a shopping bag of vegetables home from the market.

“I rushed up and embraced him,” Mr. Penn recalled in “Passage,” the 1991 compilation of his life’s work. “To me he was the heroic de Chirico; to him I was a total stranger, probably demented. Still, he was moved and said, come home and have lunch with us. For two days he showed me his Rome.”

During those two days Mr. Penn made his first black-and-white portraits, beginning what would become a celebrated archive of the leading artists, writers and performers of the second half of the 20th century.

Returning to Vogue in 1946 as a staff photographer, Mr. Penn went on to fill the magazine’s pages with portraits of cultural figures like Edmund Wilson and W. H. Auden, still lifes of accessories and graphic fashion photographs. His 1947 image “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period,” a group portrait, includes, at its center, Lisa Fonssagrives.

Ms. Fonssagrives would later appear in some of Mr. Penn’s most memorable fashion images, among them “Rochas ‘Mermaid Dress,’ Paris” and “Woman with Roses, Paris,” both taken in 1950, the year she became his wife.

Those pictures were made during Mr. Penn’s first assignment to photograph the Paris collections for Vogue. Using a discarded theater curtain for a backdrop and a borrowed studio filled with daylight, he choreographed some of the most spare and delicate fashion photographs yet produced, treating the clothes less as dresses to be worn than as shapes to be perceived in silhouette.

Unlike Richard Avedon, the other important new fashion photographer of the postwar period, Mr. Penn expressed himself and his subjects best through a Shaker-style restraint. In 1948, for example, he began to pose his portrait subjects by wedging them between two plain walls that met in a sharply angled vee, a scene offset only by a scrap of fraying carpet, on which subjects as prominent as Spencer Tracy, Joe Louis and the Duchess of Windsor stood, crouched or leaned.

The same year, while on assignment for Vogue in Peru, Mr. Penn ventured on his own to Cuzco and photographed the exotically dressed families who lived in the mountainous countryside, presenting them nonjudgmentally.

Two decades later he expanded on these portraits during trips to Dahomey (now called Benin), to Morocco, to New Guinea and elsewhere, using a portable studio to provide a textured but seamless background. The pictures, in color as well as black and white, were featured annually in Vogue. In 1974 they were published in a book, “Worlds in a Small Room,” which seemed to emphasize the perseverance of cultural diversity.

Mr. Penn was also capable of making Western culture seem strange and fascinating. In the early 1950s he made a series of portraits of small tradesmen (“Petit Métiers,” in French) working in Paris, London and New York. Again relying on his spare studio to separate his subjects from their surroundings, he nevertheless insisted that the tradesmen wear the clothes and tools of their work: two pastry chiefs in white aprons and toches hold rolling pins; a fishmonger carries a fish in one hand and a rag in the other.

In 1949 and 1950, Mr. Penn produced images of female nudes as a personal project, using fleshy artists’ models and focusing exclusively on their torsos. In the process of printing he attacked the light-sensitive paper with bleach and other chemicals to remove most of the skin tones, creating a rough chiaroscuro effect antithetical to then-prevailing notions of corporeal beauty. These unsettling pictures were not exhibited or published until 30 years later, in 1980, when the Marlborough Gallery mounted a show called “Earthly Bodies.” The critic Rosalind Krauss, writing in the catalog, called the nudes “a kind of privately launched and personally experienced kamikaze attack on his own public identity as a photographer of fashion.”

The quest to undercut fashion’s standards of perfection, and to find beauty in the disdained, overlooked or overripe, runs throughout Mr. Penn’s career. In an otherwise pristine still life of food, he included a house fly, and in a 1959 close-up, he placed a beetle in a model’s ear. From 1967 to 1973 he produced color essays of flowers, published each year in Vogue’s Christmas issue; in each case the blooms are past their prime, their leaves wilted, tinged with brown and falling.

Mr. Penn acquired a reputation for perfectionism at all costs. In the book “Passage,” Mr. Liberman recounts that when Mr. Penn was asked to take a picture of glasses falling from a serving tray, the photographer insisted that for authenticity’s sake Baccarat crystal be used. The art director ruefully remembered that several dozens of the glasses were shattered before the photograph was made to Mr. Penn’s standard.

In the mid-1960s, just as Mr. Penn began to be consumed by his experiments with platinum printing, fashion and fashion photography switched gears decisively. Neither his style nor his manner matched the era’s spirit of sexual liberation and spontaneous, sometimes drug-assisted creativity. The public image of a fashion photographer came to be exemplified by the anything-goes protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow Up,” played by David Hemming.

Mr. Penn observed the rebelliousness of the ’60s with a curious eye, even taking an assignment from Look magazine to photograph the “summer of love” scene in San Francisco. But his stylistic confidence seemed to falter when it came to portraying the minimally structured garments and ultra-thin models of the time. His photograph of the model Marisa Berenson, wearing a breast-plate-size peace sign and little else, suggests the photographer’s ambivalence about an era in which no clothes often seemed the preferable fashion. Not surprisingly, he concentrated on producing photographs intended to be viewed as art.

In 1975, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a small exhibition of his recent work printed using the platinum process: a series of greatly magnified images of cigarette butts. Transformed from gutter discards to iconic status, the mashed and bent cylinders again showed Mr. Penn’s penchant for straying far from the politesse of his fashion and portrait pictures. The cigarette butts were followed by a series focused on other forms of sidewalk debris, including flattened paper cups, deli containers and rags; these photographs, presented in platinum, were exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977 in a show called “Street Material.”

As a result of the two museum exhibitions, Mr. Penn’s work played a significant role in the rise of photography’s fortunes in the art world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s his pictures were exhibited several times at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. In 1984 a 160-print traveling retrospective of his career was organized by Szarkowski. Since 1987 his pictures have been exhibited on a regular basis at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, which now represents his work.

Passing the age of 65 without a thought of retirement, Mr. Penn devoted himself increasingly to still-lifes, on assignments for Vogue and for advertising clients like Clinique cosmetics, and in photographs for exhibition. On his own time he constructed arrangements of bones, steel blocks and bleached animal skulls. These table-top compositions recall Dutch vanitas still-lifes as well as Giorgio Morandi paintings. At the same time, Mr. Penn produced several memorable portraits for Vogue of older artists of his own generation, like Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi and Italo Calvino, and began contributing portraits to the fledgling Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair. In 1985 he began to draw and paint again, after a hiatus of 43 years.

A collection of many of his most important images, in a variety of genres, was acquired jointly by the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in 1990; the museums, both branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, also mounted an exhibition of the collection titled “Irving Penn: Master Images.” In its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York acquired 67 of Penn’s portraits in 2007 and exhibited them last year. Another major show opened in September at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles.

In 1996 Mr. Penn donated the bulk of his archives and 130 of his prints to the Chicago Art Institute. An exhibition of these prints, “Irving Penn: A Career in Photography,” organized by Colin Westerbeck, opened at the Art Institute the following year and subsequently toured the country. In 2005 the National Gallery in Washington mounted a smaller retrospective of Penn’s career that consisted entirely of his platinum prints.

The critic Richard Woodward, writing in 1990, argued that Mr. Penn would be best remembered for the work he did for the museum wall, not the printed page. “The steely unity of Irving Penn’s career, the severity and constructed rigor of his work can best be appreciated when he seems to break away from the dictates of fashion for magazines,” he wrote. “Only then is it clear how everything he photographs — or, at least, prints — is the product of a remarkably undivided conscience. There are no breaks; only different subjects.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/ar...gn/08penn.html





Rupert to Internet: It’s War!

Rupert Murdoch is going to battle against the Internet, bent on making readers actually pay for online newspaper journalism–beginning with his London Sunday Times. History suggests he won’t back down; the experts suggest he’s crazy. Is he also ignoring his industry’s biggest problem?
Michael Wolff

War is Rupert Murdoch’s natural state. When he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, in October 1986, he went to war against the hegemony of CBS, ABC, and NBC. With Fox News he crossed swords with CNN’s Ted Turner. At Sky, his satellite-TV system in the U.K., he went up against the BBC. He’s battled China, the F.C.C., the print unions in Great Britain, and, recently, most of the journalism community in his takeover of The Wall Street Journal. He relishes conflict and doesn’t back down—one reason why he’s won so many of his fights and so profoundly changed the nature of his industry.

Now he’s going to war with the Internet.

It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the Daily News, the Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.

And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.

After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.

I should say I am not a neutral party here. Two years ago, I helped found Newser, a news aggregator that summarizes the stories of other news providers, which, along with the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Google News, has become a focus of the print world’s antipathy. (When I tried to explain Newser to Murdoch, he said, “So you steal from me.”)

The current battle for how the Internet will “monetize” news divides pretty cleanly between managers of established media properties and people who spend their working lives in the new-media business.

Traditional media managers, who once rushed into the Internet hoping to establish new businesses as well as their new-media bona fides, have all now been chastened by its economic realities and want to take back their free content. “Obviously we will all be closely following Rupert’s efforts in this direction,” said John Huey, Time Inc.’s editor in chief, when I contacted him—a curious throwing up of the hands from Time Warner, the world’s largest magazine publisher and the world’s largest media company, which has tried more strategies on the Internet than any other traditional media company.

Almost all Internet professionals, on the other hand, think that charging for general-interest news online is fanciful—“Rubbish … bonkers … a crock … a form of madness,” in the description of Emily Bell, who has long run the Guardian newspaper’s Web site, one of the industry’s most successful—and, in fact, it has been tried before and failed. “It’s Groundhog Day,” adds Bell. The New York Times tried to levy a subscription charge for its columnists but reversed course and declared itself free again. Even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the model of subscription content online, has made more and more of its site free.

I have—in nine months of conversation with Murdoch, writing his biography after he bought the Journal, in 2007— often argued the nature of Internet culture with him to little avail. Murdoch can almost single-handedly take apart and re-assemble a complex printing press, but his digital-technology acumen and interest is practically zero. Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase—before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology—I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”

Internet business strategies are often an intractable issue for media companies because they involve turf wars among contrary skill sets, business models, and corporate cultures. The result is usually bureaucratic stasis.

But News Corp. isn’t like other media companies. Murdoch can cut through and level all bureaucratic confusion and inaction. If he says it will be paid, then all the voices, which in other companies would tell you why this, logically, might not work, go silent at News Corp. The logic of the situation is remade around Murdoch’s logic. Where, in another company, Internet responsibilities might reasonably be given to those most enthusiastic about the medium, London is ground zero in Murdoch’s Internet war because the executives there are the ones most devoted to newspapers. (His 36-year-old son, James, who seems determined to do even more of whatever his father would have done, is responsible for the London operation.)

There has been, as it happens, a significant turf war in London, which might have produced a classic stasis, but which became a solution. The Times of London and The Sunday Times, historically separate papers, have long shared a Web site, controlled, to the consternation of the Sunday editor, by the daily. The decision (after a long political tug-of-war) to separate the two suddenly became an opportunity in the new Murdoch logic of making people pay. Because The Sunday Times has not had a Web site before, it would not, if it launched one with a pay wall, lose any users. Everybody who subscribed would therefore be a plus.

In Murdoch-think, there is, too, the magic of the Sunday paper. Murdoch believes people can’t do without a Sunday paper. (Two years ago, he personally supervised the makeover of the Sunday New York Post.) Ipso facto, if people can’t live without their Sunday paper, then they’ll buy it on the newsstand or pay for it online—no matter that it comes out once a week and the Web is a minute-by-minute medium.

And then, Thelondonpaper. Three years ago, Associated Newspapers—publishers of the all-powerful Daily Mail—launched the free afternoon paper Standard Lite (later London Lite), forcing News Corp. to launch its own free sheet, Thelondonpaper, which undermined News Corp.’s other papers. Murdoch never shuts a paper and never backs down from a war. Except now, with his new war against free, there was suddenly the logic to do what everybody had been begging him to do: close the damn free thing—which he did, suddenly, in August.

Still, saying that when Murdoch speaks things happen does not mean that anyone in the company has quite figured out what exactly he wants to happen. Will Fox News charge for its online content and cede the online market to CNN and MSNBC? What happens to the New York Post, whose site, because of its outdated technology, is often hard to access—even for free? And whither MarketWatch, the free financial-news site bought by The Wall Street Journal’s parent company precisely because it wanted a free site?

It is difficult not to sound catty when discussing News Corporation’s adventures with the Internet. But the litany of its failures—even more extreme than those of most other media companies that have struggled unsuccessfully online—is, I think, relevant to understanding exactly what Murdoch might really be trying to do.

From the failure of Delphi, one of the first public-access Internet providers, in 1993, to iGuide, the precursor to Yahoo and Google, which closed within months of its launch, to his son James’s aborted Internet-investing spree in the late 90s, to the great promise of MySpace, which was shortly flattened by Facebook, to the second launch of Pagesix.com, which Murdoch closed this year, after four months of operation, Murdoch’s Internet starts and stops have engendered at News Corp., in the description of Peter Bale, who once ran the Web site of The Times of London and now runs MSN in the U.K., a relative “fear or abhorrence of technology.”

In one of my favorite Murdoch stories, his wife, Wendi, who had befriended the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, told me about how the “boys” had visited the Murdochs at their ranch in Carmel, California. When I marveled at this relative social mismatch and asked what they might have talked about, Wendi assured me that they had all gotten along very well.

“You know, Rupert,” Wendi said, “he’s always asking questions.”

“But what,” I prodded, “did he exactly ask?”

“He asked,” she said, hesitating only a beat before cracking herself up, “‘Why don’t you read newspapers?’”

Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud—married to Elisabeth Murdoch, and one of the most well-known P.R. men in the U.K.—explained to me what he believes is the essence of Murdoch’s approach to business: Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy. Curiously, his newspaper battles have most often involved cutting prices rather than, as he now proposes to do on the Internet, raising them. (Murdoch has contributed as much as anyone, with his low-priced papers, to the expectation that news is a de-valued commodity.)

But more than being about cost, his strategy is about pain. What he is always doing is demonstrating a level of strength and will and resolve against which the other guys, the weaker guys, cower. He can take more pain than anybody else. While others persist in the vanity of the Internet, he will endure the short- or medium-term pain necessary to build a profitable business.

He is also a scold who can intimidate the market into doing what he wants it to do. Part of his premise now is to invite and scare other publishers and content creators into a self-created monopoly. If everybody charges, consumers will have no choice but to pay. If all publishers have the opportunity to get paid, why wouldn’t they take the money?

In the Murdoch view, media only really works as a good business if it achieves significant control of the market—through pricing, through exclusive sports arrangements, through controlling distribution (he has spent 20 years trying to monopolize satellite distribution around the world).

And, indeed, by announcing his all-paid-content intentions, he has, almost single-handedly, not just made the paid model the main topic of digital strategy in other traditional publishing companies but imbued it with nearly the force of a fait accompli.

“It’s a done deal,” says a journalist I know who’s suffered in the downturn, arguing that Murdoch, for so long journalism’s great debaser, is now its last protector.

The Murdoch plan is, however, in the estimation of almost anybody whose full-time job is occupied with digital business strategies, not just cockamamy but head-scratching.

It seems that Murdoch has, in a fit of pique, made certain pronouncements which may have to be humored by the people who work for him, but which will be impossible to implement and will have no business consequences. Or that Murdoch, a man with something of a divine gift for acting in his own self-interest, has a plan not yet quite evident to other, mere media mortals.

The position of Internet professionals is straightforward: while it’s possible to charge for certain kinds of specialized information—specifically, information that helps you make money (and that you can, as with an online Wall Street Journal subscription, buy on your company expense account)—there are no significant examples of anyone being able to charge for general-interest information. Sites where pay walls have been erected have suffered cuts in user traffic of, in many cases, as much as 95 percent as audiences merely move on to other, free options.

“What Murdoch seems to be talking about only has a logic if you don’t introduce the behavior of the audience into the equation,” says Emily Bell.

There is, alternatively, the compounding and intoxicating effect of free. While there may not yet be a way to adequately monetize free traffic, it has opened up, for many publications, great new audiences. The million-circulation New York Times has an audience of more than 15 million online. The U.K. paper The Guardian, with its 350,000 circulation, has become, online, with 10 times its print readership, a significant international brand. One theory about the decline in the fortunes of The Wall Street Journal (which allowed Murdoch to buy it) is that, because of its paid wall, the Journal was not a factor in Google searches, causing a fundamental decline in its importance, impacting its brand and standing with advertisers.

Murdoch believes that The Sunday Times has certain franchises so valuable that he will surely be able to capture a paying audience. Jeremy Clarkson is one of News Corp.’s strongest cases. Clarkson, who writes a column about cars, is a veritable British institution—everybody consults Clarkson before buying a car. He is, according to in-house estimates at the Times, now responsible for 25 percent of timesonline.co.uk traffic. The thinking is that, even if a pay wall cuts Clarkson’s traffic, there are enough fanatical Clarkson readers who will pay enough to make a paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one. But the problem is for Clarkson: Murdoch’s potential gain is Clarkson’s loss. It’s an almost intolerable loss—most of your readers (and their constant and addictive feedback). “When we opened the Times site to free international traffic,” says Peter Bale, “suddenly our columnists were getting speaking engagements in Milwaukee.” At The New York Times, it was the op-ed columnists themselves who objected most of all when a paid wall choked their readership and notoriety.

Murdoch has a larger problem still. It is, after all, not the Internet that has made news free. News in penny-newspaper or broadcast (or bundled cable) form has always been either free or negligibly priced. In almost every commercial iteration, news has been supported by advertising. This is, more than the Internet, Murdoch’s (and every publisher’s) problem: the dramatic downturn in advertising.

Or, in a sense, the plethora of advertising created the online problem. When Time Warner’s Pathfinder launched the first ad-supported site, in 1994, it quickly created a juggernaut of wild advertising growth online. It was a simple proposition: more traffic, more advertising money—and a free site got vastly more traffic than a paid one.

But the recession has, at least temporarily, dimmed advertising’s promise, creating something of an end-of-the-world panic.

And no one’s panic seems to be greater than that of Rupert Murdoch, who has a habit of finding himself with his back to the wall during times of recession (in the early-90s recession, he almost lost his company because of its great debt load).

It’s Chicken Little panic.

It is hard to imagine that when advertising growth resumes there will not once again be a rush to encourage traffic growth, but right now, the news business, supported for a hundred years by advertising, whose core skill has been selling advertising, believes it must right away, this second, re-create itself with a new business model where advertising is just the cream on top and where it’s the consumer who pays the true cost of newsgathering.

But what if Rupert isn’t really interested in a new business model? There may be earnest men trying to unlock the secret balance between the expectation of free content and the exceptions and the methods that might allow for micro or other incremental payments. But what if that’s not Rupert?

“Rupert isn’t very nuanced about this,” says Merrill Brown, the former MSNBC news chief, who is now a consultant to a venture trying to promote an online charge system.

Murdoch, at 78, doesn’t, practically speaking, have the time to see the online world into maturity—nor the intellectual interest to want to be part of the effort. Rather, his strategic effort may more logically be to slow it down.

The mordant joke among journalists is that, with any luck, the older among us will make it to retirement before the business entirely collapses. This may be part of Rupert’s own thinking.

It is not so much that he wants people to pay to read Jeremy Clarkson online; he wants them, or a portion of them who might otherwise have read a free Clarkson online, to return to the newspaper.

It is not, what’s more, merely that Murdoch objects to people reading his news for free online; it’s that he objects to—or seems truly puzzled by—what newspapers have become online. You get a dreadful harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even simple linking to other sites. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t want it.

Every conversation I’ve had with him about the new news, about the fundamental change in how people get their news—that users go through Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper—earned me a walleyed stare.

The more he can choke off the Internet as a free news medium, the more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring back to his papers. It is not a war he can win in the long term, but a little Murdoch rearguard action might get him to his own retirement. Then it’s somebody else’s problem.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/f...l-wolff-200911





Waitrose Dumps Fox News in Protest Over Remarks About Barack Obama

The supermarket chain withdrew its advertising in response to comments made by Glenn Beck on his show. Photograph: Mike Mergen/Associated Press

His last-minute Olympic sprint to back Chicago may have come to nothing, the Afghan quagmire may be bubbling away and Sarah Palin may be topping the bestseller list, but Barack Obama can at least take comfort from the fact that Britain's most upmarket supermarket chain is on his side.

Waitrose, which prides itself more on its "quality food, honestly priced" than staring down rightwing attack dogs, has become the latest firm to pull its ads from Fox News after presenter Glenn Beck's remarks about the US president.

In July, Beck called Obama "a racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" after the president said that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had "acted stupidly" in arresting the distinguished professor Henry Louis Gates as he entered his own home.

Beck's outburst prompted dozens of companies – among them Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Travelocity – to withdraw their adverts from his show for fear that their businesses might become tainted by association.

Now Waitrose, which advertises on the channel carried by Sky in Britain, has followed suit after customers complained about the Glenn Beck Show.

An angry Waitrose shopper who emailed the chain to express his distaste over its decision "to be associated with this particular form of rightwing cant" received an apology last week.

"We take the placement of our ads in individual programmes very seriously, ensuring the content of these programmes is deemed appropriate for a brand with our values," said a customer services spokesman. "Since being notified of our presence within the Glenn Beck programme, we have withdrawn all Waitrose advertising from the Fox News channel with immediate effect and for all future TV advertising campaigns."

A spokesman for the supermarket, which is part of the John Lewis Partnership, could not tell the Guardian how many complaints had been received over the matter. "We believe it was the right thing to do," he said, adding: "We take the views of our customers seriously."

The Obama administration appears to be losing patience with the channel, which has been particularly scathing about the president's proposed healthcare reforms.

Proof of the mutual antipathy came two weeks ago when Obama gave a round of broadcast interviews but snubbed Fox News.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009...s-barack-obama





Two News Execs Cock the Gun in Content Fight
David Carr

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.” — Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation.

“”Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers. We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.” — Tom Curley, chief executive of The Associated Press

Decoder (the boldface is ours) read those gunshots across the bow in an A.P. story linked on Romenesko, natch. (The New York Times is a client of The Associated Press and we’re just using snippets, so we’re not picking anybody’s pocket here.) The pair was speaking in Beijing to representatives from 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting to investigate whether the Web is a platform full of promise or, perhaps, a gallows for professionally gathered content. The rhetoric is rather breathtaking, although getting content back into a (paid) bottle is going to be an onerous task. Google is obviously the gigantic aggregating elephant in the room, but when Eric Schmidt was asked about The A.P. on Wednesday in a meeting with reporters, he pointed out that Google already had an agreement with the wire service, albeit one that expired this year, and said that as a matter of practice, the company did not discuss renewal arrangements.

But speaking with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land last week in a far-ranging discussion about the production and dissemination of content, Mr. Schmidt said that Google was often indicted for offenses that really derived from the very existence of the Web.

“I think in this case Google is a proxy for the Internet as a whole. So the people would make the same statements about the Internet as they do about Google. Substitute the Internet for Google and you get that idea. And because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything. In some cases people don’t understand that we’re a conduit to other people doing things. They think Google did it when in fact somebody else did it and made it available.”

He added that the hot rhetoric currently emanating from The A.P. and others was really just a business negotiation writ large.

“I would rather not discuss a business negotiation. But you’re smart enough to understand that this is a business negotiation. I am sure we will come to a good deal for all parties. How’s that? I was rather humored by the public criticisms because – there was all this criticism – we have a deal with The Associated Press that’s in place today. So, and surely they’re aware of this.”

At some point here, the rhetoric will meet the road. The A.P. has plans for a news registry that will track content online and go after unlicensed uses. Nine newspaper will participate in the test, which will include a sports statistics provider run jointly by The A.P. and News Corp.

After years of circling each other and doing business sporadically, the giants who create content and the ones who aggregate it appear headed for a major throwdown. Perhaps all will be negotiated away, as Mr. Schmidt suggests, but big players like The A.P. and News Corp. are clearly not in the mood to make nice.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...content-fight/





Reinhard Mohn, 88, Dies; Built Bertelsmann Into a Giant
Carter Dougherty

Reinhard Mohn, the entrepreneur who transformed Bertelsmann from a provincial, war-shattered German publisher into a global media giant, died this weekend, the company said Sunday. He was 88 years old.

Mr. Mohn died on Saturday, said Andreas Grafemeyer, a Bertelsmann spokesman.

In a world that celebrates tough-minded businessmen and their achievements, Mr. Mohn represented a type that Germans hold in particular affection: the kind-hearted capitalist who proved that profit and humanity were not mutually exclusive. He was, employees liked to say, a frequent presence in the company cafeteria, eating lunch alongside everyone else.

A restless entrepreneur who gave his managers the freedom to follow their own instincts, Mr. Mohn built Bertelsmann from a publisher of literature for Nazi soldiers — a role that would come back to haunt it — into a book-club business that sold directly to readers.

By the 1960s, he was setting up affiliates outside Germany as a prelude to a global expansion. By 2003, Bertelsmann owned a large American publisher, Random House, myriad media services businesses, and RTL, one of Europe’s largest broadcasters. The company had sales of $23.5 billion in 2008.

“With his death, Germany and the world has lost a prominent personality who exerted a decisive influence on postwar economy and society,” said Gunter Thielen, the chairman of Bertelsmann.

An officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Mr. Mohn was briefly a prisoner of war in the hands of the United States Army before returning to help run his family’s publishing business in Gütersloh, a sleepy town in northeastern Germany. The company, C. Bertelsmann Verlag, was in ruins after the war.

According to company accounts, when he took over in 1946, he repeated what became a management mantra: “You have to persuade people.” In other words, ordering them was not enough.

As Bertelsmann grew, Mr. Mohn allowed the managers of individual business units to run things as they saw fit, an approach that makes the company less a well-oiled machine than a loose alliance of affiliated businesses. He later said the experience of rigidly authoritarian Nazi Germany, and his own stint in the military, convinced him that the top-down approach had serious shortcomings.

In the postwar years, Mr. Mohn was known as having few sympathies for the Nazi regime. One chief executive of Bertelsmann, Thomas Middelhoff, even repeated the company lore, during a 1998 speech in New York, that it was shut down in 1944 for printing banned books.

That later proved false. A commission of historians appointed by the company with Mr. Mohn’s approval established in 2002 that Bertelsmann had extensive dealings with the Nazi regime, and that Jewish slave labor was probably used in some of its plants. Heinrich Mohn, Mr. Mohn’s father, belonged to a group that donated money to the Nazi squadron SS.

By that time, Mr. Mohn, who actively ran Bertelsmann from 1947 to 1981, was close to withdrawing as the active manager of the Mohn family interests, which controlled Bertelsmann through a foundation set up in 1977. After 2003, his second wife, Liz Mohn, took the helm. Though increasingly infirm, Mr. Mohn frequently spent time at Bertelsmann’s headquarters.

He is survived by Mrs. Mohn and six children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/bu...ia/05mohn.html





New Amazon Kindle to Download Books Beyond U.S.
Brad Stone

Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device is going global.

The company announced on Tuesday evening that it would soon begin selling a new version of the Kindle that can wirelessly download books both in the United States as well as in more than 100 other countries.

The move pits Amazon.com, based in Seattle, against a range of other players in the growing global market for digital reading. The rivals include iRex, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch consumer electronics company; Sony; and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier, which said last month it would soon begin selling several kinds of electronic reading devices.

The new Kindle is physically identical to Amazon’s current Kindle, with its slender profile, six-inch black-and-gray screen and angular keyboard. The main difference: it will use the wireless networks of AT&T and its international roaming partners, instead of Amazon’s existing wireless partner for the Kindle, Sprint. Sprint’s network is incompatible with most mobile networks outside of North America.

The new Kindle will sell for $279. It begins shipping on Oct. 19.

“We regularly ship millions of English-language books to non-English speaking countries and people have to wait for the delivery,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. “Now they can get books in 60 seconds. That is a pretty exciting part of what we are announcing.”

In addition, Amazon also announced a price cut for the United States-only Kindle, which will continue to be sold alongside the new global Kindle. The domestic Kindle is now $259, down from $299. Amazon previously dropped the price in July, from $359, to stimulate demand and to match the prices of rivals like Sony, whose least expensive e-reader now costs $199. Amazon also sells the larger-screen Kindle DX for $489.

International users of the new Kindle will have a slightly smaller collection of around 200,000 English-language books to choose from, and their catalogs will be tailored to the country they purchased the device in. Amazon said it would sell books from a range of publishers including Bloomsbury, Hachette, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet and Simon & Schuster.

Among the apparent holdouts: Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, said the company’s “discussions with Amazon about this opportunity are ongoing, productive and private."

One challenge for publishers is navigating complex foreign rights issues: Books are often published by different companies and bear different prices in each country.

Though exact sales numbers are hard to come by, it appears electronic reading devices are having a breakout year. In a report being released on Wednesday by Forrester, the research firm revised its prediction for the industry, saying that three million e-reading devices would be sold in 2009, up from its previous estimate of two million.

Mr. Bezos declined to offer specific information about Kindle sales. But he said Kindle titles were now 48 percent of total book sales in instances where Amazon sold both a digital and physical copy of a book. That was up from 35 percent last May, an increase Mr. Bezos called “astonishing.”

“This has grown much faster than any of us ever anticipated,” Mr. Bezos said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/te.../07amazon.html





Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles
Kevin Poulsen

Imagine a world where Google sucks.

It might seem a stretch. The Google logo is practically an icon of functionality. Google’s search engine and other tools are the company’s strongest, if unstated, argument in favor of the Google Books Settlement, which would give the internet the largest and most comprehensive library in history, at the cost of granting Google a de facto monopoly. It’s hard to imagine any company better equipped to scan, catalog and index millions of books than Google.

But a few geeks with long memories remember the last time Google assembled a giant library that promised to rescue orphaned content for future generations. And the tattered remnants of that online archive are a cautionary tale in what happens when Google simply loses interest.

That library is Usenet, a vast internet- and dial-up-based message board system erected in 1980. Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995. It turned the archive into Google Groups, in a move that was cheered by net geeks who had seen Deja’s reliability declining, and were certain that the supremely competent Google would save it.

“Taking on Deja has to be considered an overwhelming accomplishment,” wrote one Slashdot commenter. “There is simply no way for any other party to supersede this. Essentially, Google has the Usenet Monopoly.”

Later that year, Google deepened its archive with millions of posts that had been saved on aging magtape by a veteran Unix guru named Marc Spencer. The combined archives gave Google a library of 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups, spanning two decades.

Salon hailed the accomplishment in an article headlined “The geeks who saved Usenet.” “Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early net accessible to anyone on the web, bringing the early history of Usenet to all.”

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.

On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.

Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive.

Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search - mosaic - did not match any documents.”

Flat searches of the entire archive still work, but they aren’t very useful: there are 1.42 million hits on “mosaic.” The rise of Microsoft, the first Usenet review of the IBM PC in 1981, early rumblings of a Y2K problem in 1985 — it’s all locked in Google Groups, virtually irretrievable if you don’t already have a direct link.

“The search results are extremely poor,” says network pioneer Brad Templeton. “Like nobody cares.”

Henry Spencer, whose Usenet archive forms much of Google Groups, is troubled by the company’s curatorship. “Google does get a lot of credit for putting it together and making it available,” Spencer says. “But search capabilities are important for such a large collection of data. The archive’s value to the community is considerably reduced if it’s not conveniently searchable.”

A year after Slashdot called attention to the bugs, the problems with the archive not only haven’t been fixed, but they aren’t reflected in the Google Groups “known issues” page.

Asked if the bugs are documented anywhere, or if Google planned on repairing its library, a company spokesman was noncommittal. “We’re aware of some problems with the way search is working in Google Groups,” said Jason Freidenfelds, in an e-mail. “We’re always working to improve our products.”

Templeton, who helped Google compile an index of historically significant Usenet articles when it first launched its archive, thinks Google’s neglect is a simple matter of economics.

“I presume they find that the volume of searches is too low for them to put people on it, or the ad revenue results are too poor,” Templeton says. “The ads don’t seem to match the pages well.”

In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/





YouTube: We’re Bigger Than You Thought
Miguel Helft

Pretty much everyone knows that YouTube is the king of online video. Indeed, comScore recently said that in August, YouTube surpassed 10 billion views in a single month in the United States for the first time. That made YouTube nearly 20 times more popular than its nearest rival in online video, Microsoft, which showed just 547 million videos.

But on the third anniversary of its $1.65 billion deal to sell itself to Google, YouTube is saying, in a sense, you may be underestimating us. The company released more precise viewing figures than it had in the past, saying it serves more than 1 billion videos a day, or roughly 30 billion in a month. Unlike the comScore numbers, which are for the United States only, the viewing data released by YouTube is global. But since Google gets roughly half of its business from overseas, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that roughly half of YouTube’s audience was overseas, putting its global viewing audience somewhere around 20 billion.

Actually, in a blog post penned by Chad Hurley, the co-founder and chief executive, the company said Friday that it was serving “well over 1 billion views a day,” so only it knows how many that is. Whatever it is, it is a big number. (Previously YouTube had said that hundreds of millions of people watch videos on its site every day.)

There isn’t much else of note in the middle-of-the-night blog post other than some patting on the back to YouTube and its audience.

So why did YouTube release these figures now? A company spokesman said in an e-mail that the anniversary of the deal was a good occasion to talk about growth.

That may be. But it seems to fit a pattern. For the last several months, Google, which typically says very little of substance about the numbers underlying its business, appears to have been trying to dispel the idea put forward by Wall Street analysts and some tech pundits that YouTube is a cash sinkhole.

In mid-July, for instance, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said that YouTube revenue was growing fast and that if the trend continued YouTube could become a profitable business. Later that month, YouTube published a blog post aimed at busting myths about its business. Among the myths: user videos, which are not monetized, could sink the site; that advertisers were afraid of YouTube; and that the site could only monetize between 3 percent and 5 percent of videos. The post appeared intended, in part, to rebut a much-quoted report by Spencer Wang, a Credit Suisse analyst, who predicted that YouTube would lose $470 million in 2009.

Now comes this disclosure of more than a billion views a day. It won’t help anyone outside the company know how soon YouTube may become profitable or how much revenue it brings in. But there is little doubt that analysts will be revising their financial projections for the site in the coming days.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...u-thought/?hpw





Babe Ruth Like You’ve Never Seen Him Before
John Branch

Babe Ruth has struck out looking. Displeased, he leans on his bat, right hand on his hip, and looks back at the umpire. He utters something that can only be imagined. Lou Gehrig, on deck, leans on his bat, too, as if he has seen this act before. Ruth finally shuffles away, head turned to the umpire, dragging his bat through the dirt.

The scene, along with eight seconds of footage of Ruth playing the outfield, was found by a New Hampshire man in his grandfather’s home movie collection. It provides a rare look at Ruth, a showman even in defeat.

No American sport has a past as deep and cherished as baseball’s. But precious little of the sport’s history is preserved in moving images. Much occurred before the television age, leaving only grainy, scattershot clips culled from newsreels and home movies — and rarely do the clips show a player of Ruth’s stature.

The newly arrived Ruth film is part of the video collection of Major League Baseball Productions, the league’s official archivist, which spans more than 100 years and includes about 150,000 hours of moving images. Most of the collection is stored in plastic cases that line metal shelves of a room labeled “Major League Baseball Film and Video Archive.” The overflow is stored a few miles away in Fort Lee.

Pieces of the collection receive wide circulation during baseball’s postseason each fall. Fans will see clips sprinkled through this year’s television broadcasts, including highlights of the 1959 World Series (won by the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Dodgers Manager Joe Torre playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, his team’s first-round opponent. Older clips will be seen repeatedly on commercials from the likes of Pepsi and Budweiser, which are corporate sponsors.

The latest Babe Ruth film, unseen publicly until now, is part of a 90-second clip shot from the first-base stands at Yankee Stadium. There is no sound. But there are sweeping views of the park. And there is Ruth, obvious by his shape and waddle.

He is shown in right field, hands on his knees, glove on his right hand. To a casual fan, it appears unremarkable. But it represents the archive’s only game action of Ruth playing in the outfield — where he spent more than 2,200 games — other than a between-innings game of catch.

Nick Trotta, baseball’s manager of library licensing, took a look at the newly arrived Ruth clip first. He realized it was something he had not seen before. When others saw it, it was “wow, wow, wow,” Mr. Trotta said.

The trick with the Ruth clip was to decipher when the film was shot and who else appears in it. That is where Major League Baseball’s video library turns into “CSI: Secaucus.” The archivists Joe Porciello and Frank Caputo — Yankees fans from Queens and Brooklyn — have starring roles.

Mr. Porciello, 47, began his baseball archivist career as a teenager 29 years ago. His main role is to fill the steady requests for clips, often for movies, television shows and commercials. (Varying fees are charged for such commercial requests.) Networks covering baseball often make last-minute requests — none more than MLB Network, which broadcasts from just down the hall.

Ask Mr. Porciello for a clip — say, of the Chicago White Sox wearing shorts for one game in 1976 — and he will have Chet Lemon, in shorts, on his screen moments later.

But to learn the names of every other player in the clip, ask Mr. Caputo.

“I probably know better how to find things,” Mr. Porciello said. “And he’s better at knowing what it is. He’s more the Rain Man.”

Mr. Caputo, 54, was a Wall Street credit analyst who hated his job but loved history. In 1995 he answered a call for a sports librarian, and got the job.

Now he mostly scrolls through forgotten film, perhaps found by a team in a ballpark closet somewhere or discovered by Mr. Caputo himself as he scrounges through the Fort Lee facility.

A 1970s-era regular-season game between the Cubs and the Giants was plopped into the machine to demonstrate how the video detectives work. Within 30 seconds they determined the game took place in 1975. The feat was even more amazing because the material was viewed on fast forward, a blur on the screen.

“Wait!” Mr. Caputo said. “That blond kid might be Nick Swisher’s father.”

Sure enough, in the dugout was Steve Swisher, then a 23-year-old catcher on his way to journeyman status. Five years later, in 1980, he became the father of Nick Swisher, now a member of the Yankees.

“We’ll use this for the playoffs,” Mr. Porciello said, making a mental note to pass it on to television producers.

It was not until 1998, when Major League Baseball took over the archives from a long string of licensees, that every pitch of every game was archived. Now, the collection grows annually by about 10,000 hours.

By comparison, all the well-worn images of Ruth — hitting home runs, trotting bases, mugging for cameras — fit onto an hourlong tape.

The latest Ruth clip requires further examination to understand more about that particular game. Mr. Porciello, Mr. Caputo and others have not investigated fully, but they believe, as does the film’s donor, that it was shot in 1928.

The players have no numbers on their backs; the Yankees began wearing them in 1929. (Most other teams started in 1932.) Gehrig took over as a starter (famously, from Wally Pipp) in 1925. Advertisements in the outfield, including on the fence, match photographs from 1928.

The seats are full and the shadows long, so archivists think it might be opening day or the World Series. The opposing team is not clear, so uniform designs will be studied and various team rosters will be examined for heights and weights of players at particular positions. Archivists sometimes will compare body language to other clips of the era.

To learn the game’s exact date, archivists will look at newspaper accounts, weather reports and box scores to see when Ruth struck out. They know that Ruth struck out in Games 1 and 2 of the 1928 World Series, both at Yankee Stadium, against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Whatever the final analysis, it eliminates another clip from the lengthy wish list of Mr. Porciello and Mr. Caputo.

“But we still have no footage of Babe pitching for the Red Sox,” Mr. Porciello said, referring to Ruth’s early years as an accomplished pitcher.

Mr. Caputo turned around. An argument ensued. Trips were made to the shelves. Black-and-white images whizzed by on monitors.

In the end, Mr. Porciello was right; Mr. Caputo was thinking of a clip showing Ruth pitching for a barnstorming team.

There is no film of Ruth pitching in a game for the Red Sox. Or, other than for some warm-up pitches, for the Yankees, either.

Not yet, at least.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/sp...l/09video.html





Coming Soon to a Theater Near You, If You Demand It
Claire Cain Miller

If you have not yet heard of the horror movie “Paranormal Activity,” you will soon. It is about to become the first major studio film to be released nationwide as the result of online requests from the public.

The film is about a young couple that becomes convinced that a demonic presence lurks in their bedroom at night, so they decide to set up a video camera to catch it. The movie was shot on an extremely low budget of $10,000 and opened at the end of September with midnight screenings in just 13 small college towns.

From there, it has become a Web sensation, with chatter about the movie bouncing from Twitter to Facebook, spurring an upcoming nationwide release.

The company behind the viral buzz is Eventful, a venture-backed start-up in San Diego hired by Paramount Pictures, the movie’s producer. Eventful provides a service that lets performers ask their fans where they should appear. For between $30,000 and $250,000, Eventful builds and hosts a Web page where people can vote by clicking on a button that says “Demand it!”

Paramount promised to release “Paranormal Activity” in cities where enough people demanded it and nationwide if a million people demanded it. As of Friday night, it was close, with 960,000 demands.

“Part of it is the movie genuinely terrified people,” said Jordan Glazier, Eventful’s chief executive. “But I think a lot of it has to do with, for the first time ever, fans are part of the process in bringing a movie into distribution. There is such a sense of ownership and loyalty engendered by being part of the process.”

Mr. Glazier said he had expected the “Paranormal Activity” campaign to achieve only a fraction of the buzz that it has. He credits its success in part to the way it has ricocheted around the Web. When fans demand the movie, they can also post the demand on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other sites. “Paranormal Activity” has been a trending topic on Twitter for the last few days.

Much has been made of the social Web’s ability to dim a movie’s prospects as disappointed moviegoers send out negative tweets on opening night. Bloggers have wondered whether Web comments drove people away from “Bruno,” for instance. The success of the Eventful campaign for “Paranormal Activity” suggests the same power can bring about a different result.

So far, Eventful has been most popular with musicians. Eighty thousand have used it. The rock band Kiss is on a North American tour that was scheduled entirely on Eventful. The pop singer Mandy Moore used Eventful to let high school students request that she perform at their graduation, and the country group Little Big Town let fans choose the opening act for shows in their towns.

Watch for more movies to be released this way. Mr. Glazier said he has been fielding calls this week from other movie studios curious about the success of “Paranormal Activity.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...demand-it/?hpw





Microsoft Plans Monster Patch Tuesday Next Week

Unlucky 13 sets record as biggest-ever patch day, includes first-ever for Windows 7 RTM
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft today said it will deliver its largest-ever number of security updates on Tuesday to fix flaws in every version of Windows, as well as Internet Explorer (IE), Office, SQL Server, important developer tools and the enterprise-grade Forefront Security client software.

Among the updates will be the first for the final, or release to manufacturing, code of Windows 7, Microsoft's newest operating system.

The company will ship a total of 13 updates next week, eight of them pegged "critical," the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system, beating the previous record of 12 updates shipped in February 2007 and again in October 2008.

"Thirteen is not a lucky number," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, reacting to the massive slate scheduled for Oct. 13. "They've been a busy bunch at Microsoft, that's for sure."

Storms was unable to parse today's advance notification -- Microsoft's way of forewarning customers with the barest of details, including the number of updates, their ranking and the software they impact -- to determine whether the company will patch the still-unfixed vulnerability in SMB 2. "There's just too much data here to use the deduction method," said Storms. "But with all that's here, you have to imagine that it's going to be patched."

The bug in SMB (Server Message Block) 2, a Microsoft-made network file- and print-sharing protocol that ships with Windows, was first revealed by Microsoft Sept. 7. Since then, attack code has gone public, although security researchers have not seen any in-the-wild attacks. The flaw affects Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and preview releases of Windows 7.

Of the 13 updates, Storms put the patches scheduled for SQL Server, Visual Studio and IE at the top of his list.

"The SQL Server update will affect a lot of people, especially those who use it as the back-end for their Web sites. And the Visual Studio update makes me wonder if it's another fix for ATL," Storms said, referring to the Active Template Library (ATL) bug that Microsoft itself introduced in its popular development platform.

Microsoft patched a number of bugs in the ATL code "library," which the company and others rely on to create their programs, in August.

"There's also the token IE update," added Storms. "Even IE8 is critical this month."

Windows 7 will receive its first official patches next week: Five of the 13 bulletins were marked today by Microsoft as affecting the new operating system. "At this point, Windows 7 is essentially released," said Storms.

Although Windows 7 won't reach retail or be available on new PCs until later this month, some customers -- primarily enterprises with volume licensing agreements -- have been able to obtain the OS for the last two months.

Both consumers and company administrators should gear up for a busy Tuesday, Storms warned. The latter will especially have a tough time with the monster update, since businesses typically try to test updates before they roll them out to their servers or client systems. "The problem for enterprises will be staying diligent with their patch management policies," said Storms. "But with this many updates, there should be places to cut corners to get the most critical updates out according to their own schedules."

Testing 13 updates may also give system administrators fits, he warned. "There are so many potential interactions with this many," Storms concluded. "It's going to be a full month of testing for some."

Microsoft will release the 13 updates at approximately 1 p.m. ET on Oct. 13.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...sday_next_week





Microsoft Leaks Details of Windows 8 and Windows 9
Barry Collins

Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department.

The discovery came to light after Microsoft Research employee, Robert Morgan, carelessly left details of his work on the social-networking site, LinkedIn.

Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan

The senior researcher's profile said he was: "Working in high security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and longterm projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP and IBM."

Morgan's LinkedIn profile has now been pulled down, but a version remains in the Google search cache.

A move to 128-bit support would be a bold move for Microsoft. Many, including PC Pro's own Jon Honeyball, were urging Microsoft to make Windows 7 64-bit only, but the company continues to offer a 32-bit version of the forthcoming OS.

Microsoft has said very little publicly about Windows 8, although on a visit to the UK earlier this week, CEO Steve Ballmer denied rumours that Windows 7 would be the last major client OS the company produced. Ballmer admitted that planning was underway on Windows 8, although it's highly unlikely that the OS will arrive until 2012 at the earliest.

Morgan's talk of planning for Windows 9 supports Ballmer's claim that the company thinks there is plenty of life left in Windows yet.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterpri...-and-windows-9





MoD 'How to Stop Leaks' Document is Leaked

A Ministry of Defence document giving advice on how to stop documents leaking onto the internet has been leaked onto the internet.
Tom Chivers

The Defence Manual of Security is intended to help MoD, armed forces and intelligence personnel maintain information security in the face of hackers, journalists, foreign spies and others.

But the 2,400-page restricted document has found its way on to Wikileaks, a website that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive information from organisations including governments, corporations and religions.

Known in the services as Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP 440), it was published in 2001. As Wikileaks notes, it is the document that is used as justification for the monitoring of certain websites, including Wikileaks itself.

Under the section “Leaks of Official Information", it says: "Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorised disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to either the UK Government or the Department concerned…

"The threat [of leakage] is less likely to arise from positive acts of counter-espionage, than from leakage of information through disaffected members of staff, or as a result of the attentions of an investigative journalist, or simply by accident or carelessness."

The document is particularly keen to avoid the attentions of journalists, noting them as "threats" alongside foreign intelligence services, criminals, terrorist groups and disaffected staff.

As far as traditional espionage and intelligence threats go, the document singles out the Chinese as having "a voracious appetite for all kinds of information; political, military, commercial, scientific and technical."

However, it is "very different to the portrayal of 'Moscow Rules' in the novels of John Le Carre". The Chinese agencies do not "run agents", but instead "make friends", as befits intelligence officers in the Facebook era.

Wikileaks was also behind the memorable leaks of the British National Party membership list, the operating procedures at Guantanamo Bay and the secret workings of the Church of Scientology.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...is-leaked.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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