January 5, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Lionsgate agreed to buy TV Guide and TV Guide Network, seen by 83 million homes, for $255 million, from Macrovision Solutions Corp, the companies announced on Monday. At the same time, Macrovision ended an agreement made last month to sell the properties to Allen Shapiro and One Equity Partners for the same price. "On the surface it's the same price," said Alan Davis, an analyst with D.A. Davidson& Co., of Lake Oswego, Oregon. But he said the deal with Lionsgate was better because it has a closing date of February 28, sooner than the other deal, and fewer contingencies. "Those deals are tenuous to begin with considering the credit market," Davis said. Lionsgate said it would pay with existing cash and available funds.

"The closing is not subject to financial performance requirements," the companies said in a joint statement. Macrovision sells digital entertainment technology, and Lionsgate is a producer of movie and television programs. The companies said that TV Guide Network is the 19th most distributed channel. "This is tremendous real estate, rarely available, that fits extremely well with our strategy of combining content creation, distribution and direct access to the consumer," Lionsgate Co-Chairman and Chief ExecutiveOfficer Jon Feltheimer said in the statement. Macrovision will continue to be able to license its online guide to other portals. Lionsgate's television business includes many television shows, such as MadMen for AMC, South Park and Family Feud.

UPDATING TUESDAY'S STORY:

Viacom and Time Warner Cable have now reached an "Agreement In Principle." Less than an hour before TWC's 13.3 million subscribers were going to lose 19 Viacom channels at 12:01 AM today, the two Big Media companies came to an agreement. Here was their joint statement:



TIME WARNER CABLE, VIACOM REACH AGREEMENT IN PRINCIPLE
Networks Will Continue to Be Available On All Time Warner Cable Systems

New York, NY - Jan. 1, 2009 — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) and Viacom (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) jointly announced this morning that they have reached an agreement in principle to renew carriage for Viacom’s MTV Networks. The companies expect to finalize the details of the agreement over the next several days.

Glenn Britt, President and CEO of Time Warner Cable said, "We are pleased that our customers will continue to be able to watch the programming they enjoy on MTV Networks. We are sorry they had to endure a day of public disagreement as we worked through this negotiation."

Philippe Dauman, President and CEO of Viacom said, "We’ve been partners with Time Warner Cable for a long time, and we’re happy to be renewing that partnership for the benefit of their customers and our loyal viewers. It’s gratifying that we could reach an agreement that benefits not only our audiences but that is also in the best interest of both of our companies."

What an awful way to ring in 2009. It turns out that Viacom has been trying to negotiate what it claims is a "fair" renewal of its prized cable channels for months and months, but reputedly Time Warner has been unresponsive an "unreasonable". So now the fight between the two Big Media giants will hurt cable viewers. What the hell? At 12:01 AM on January 1st, just after the ball drops in Time Square, gazillions of Time Warner Cable subscribers will lose 19 Viacom channels. The howling starts here, especially by parents home for the holidays with children who won't have access to their favorite shows like SpongeBob Squarepants and Dora The Explorer, and tweens/teens wanting to see new episodes of those new unreality Reality TV series The City and Bromance, and twentysomethings and older who get their news from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report.

This affects all U.S. Time Warner cable subscribers including those in New York and Los Angeles. Such fights have happened before and lasted a mere 39 hours. So this one will either end fast or go on forever. It probably will depend on how many subscribers start flooding Time Warner Cable with obscene calls. This is Viacom's just issued statement (note how the bigwigs don't know MTV's The Hills has been replaced by The City):

Statement from Viacom: This move by Time Warner Cable to force such channels as Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL and MTV off the air is another example of a cable company overreaching for profit at the expense of its viewers. The renewal we are seeking is reasonable and modest relative to the profits TWC enjoys from our networks. We have asked for an increase of less than 25 cents per month, per subscriber, which adds up to less than a penny per day for all 19 of MTV Networks’ channels. We make this request because TWC has so greatly undervalued our channels for so long. Americans spend more than 20% of their TV viewing time watching our networks, yet our fees amount to less than 2.5% of what Time Warner generates from their average customer.Throughout the country, we have negotiated equitable license agreement renewals, or are in the final stages of renewals, with virtually every cable and satellite carrier. Nevertheless, Time Warner Cable has dismissed our efforts at a fair compromise and has effectively chosen to deny its customers some of the most popular TV shows on the air.

As a result, we are sorry to say that for Time Warner Cable customers our networks will go dark as of 12:01 on January 1st , denying Time Warner customers shows like Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and The Hills. Ultimately, however, if Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL, MTV and the rest of our programming is discontinued – over less than a penny per day - we believe viewers will see this behavior by their cable company as outrageous. Time Warner Cable subscribers who are being handed a January 1st $3 monthly increase in Raleigh, Orange County, Los Angeles, and New York City are simultaneously facing the removal of beloved shows across 19 channels. We find it a shame that Time Warner Cable remains unreasonable at this time. We hope its leadership will have a change of heart and will seek to negotiate a fair renewal agreement.

By Nick Farrell
30 December 2008, 10:57

THE ONLY successful Recording Industry Association of America conviction against a file-sharer will go to retrial despite the music industry's best efforts. The RIAA appealed an earlier decision to grant a retrial of the copyright infringement case against Jammie Thomas.

A jury found Jammie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement by illegally sharing more than 1,700 songs and said that she needed to pay $220,000 to six of the top music labels. However the Judge in charge of the chase US District Judge Michael Davis ordered a retrial after he found that he misguided the jury by telling them that the act of making a copyrighted song available for sharing amounts to infringement. He ordered a new trial for March. But the RIAA really does not want another trial, particularly if the Judge is going to tell the jury that making a copyrighted file available is not infringement.

The RIAA has already admitted that proving that songs have been downloaded from services like Kazaa is nearly impossible. The music industry stands to lose countless cases if it loses this particularly high profile one. So the RIAA appealed the judge's decision to declare a mistrial. Unfortunately, Davis just chucked it out without commenting.

By Charlie Demerjian
29 December 2008, 19:19

SLYSOFT HAS DONE IT again with their highly recommended AnyDVD HD product. The new version 6.5.0.2, announced today, breaks the new revision of the unbreakable BD+.

For those of you not following this one-sided fight, Blu-Ray movies do a lot of very unfortunate things, like stripping your fair use rights, preventing backups (no one has kids or pets that maul disks), being incompatible with boatloads of hardware, and transmitting every viewing, every click, and every thing you do back to who-knows-where to be used against you.

Really, they do that, why do you think net access is mandatory? Slysoft was the first to fully crack the old encryption scheme over a year ago. A few weeks ago however, a new revision of BD+ came out that was not crackable with the current schemes. A fix was estimated at a few months, but never doubt the good folk at Slysoft, they did it in a few weeks.

Order is restored in the universe, and you can watch your legally purchased BDs on your legally purchased equipment, even if the DRM schemes don't like each other. No more black screens with AnyDVD HD. If you are looking to pirate, this is not your product - it is much easier to download pre-cracked files. In any case, you can read all about the program.

24 December 2008, 09:24

SEX SELLS, as the saying goes. US media group Friendfinder Networks apparently thinks the stock of its stable of web sites that flog romance and sex will go up in the midst of winter even during a recession, as it has filed with the SEC for an initial public offering yesterday.

Formerly known as the Penthouse Media Group, Friendfinder Networks operates a number of Internet properties including Penthouse, Friendfinder for friendship and romance, sex hookup network Adult Friendfinder, BigChurch.com, Senior Friendfinder and a number of ethnically-oriented Friendfinder websites. Built by the paraplegic US free speech crusader Larry Flynt, the company hopes to raise up to $460 million with its IPO, which is being underwritten by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank.

Penthouse says it is "one of the largest adult entertainment companies, providing content that spans a wide range of media including TV, video, magazines, and Internet." It's major operation online is Adult Friendfinder, "the world’s largest sex [and] swinger personals community." Penthouse bought Adult Friendfinder a year ago for about $400 million. It racked up $244 million in revenue for the first three quarters of 2008 and claims that it has nearly a million subscribers to its adult services.

Most of the stock sale proceeds will be used to retire nearly a half-billion dollars in debts.

By Ryan Nakashima
Friday December 19, 11:09 pm ET

The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers' access if they ignore repeated warnings. The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association's legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in. The association said Friday that it stopped sending out new lawsuits and warnings in August, and then agreed with several leading U.S. Internet service providers, without naming which ones, to notify alleged illegal file-sharers and cut off service if they failed to stop.

It credited the lawsuit campaign with raising awareness of piracy and keeping the number of illegal file-sharers in check while the legal market for digital music took off. With two weeks left in the year, legitimate sales of digital music tracks soared for the first time past the 1 billion mark, up 28 percent over all of last year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. "We're at a point where there's a sense of comfort that we can replace one form of deterrent with another form of deterrent," said RIAA Chairman and Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol. "Filing lawsuits as a strategy to deal with a big problem was not our first choice five years ago." The new notification program is also more efficient, he said, having sent out more notices in the few months since it started than in the five years of the lawsuit campaign.

"It's much easier to send notices than it is to file lawsuits," Bainwol said. The decision to scrap the legal attack was first reported in The Wall Street Journal. The group says it will still continue to litigate outstanding cases, most of which are in the pre-lawsuit warning stage, but some of which are before the courts. The decision to press on with existing cases drew the ire of Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, who is defending a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. "If it's a bad idea, it's a bad idea," said Nesson.

He is challenging the constitutionality of the suits, which, based on the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, can impose damages of $150,000 per infringement, far in excess of the actual damage caused. Nesson's client, Joel Tenenbaum, faces the possibility of more than $1 million in damages for allegedly downloading seven songs illegally, which Nesson called "cruel and unusual punishment." The case is set to go to trial in district court in Massachusetts on Jan. 22. Brian Toder, a lawyer with Chestnut & Cambronne in Minneapolis, who defended single mother Jammie Thomas in a copyright suit filed by the RIAA, said he is also set to retry the case March 9 after a judge threw out a $222,000 decision against her. "I think it's a good thing that they've ended this campaign of going after people," Toder said. "But they need to change how people spend money on records," he said. "People like to share music. The Internet makes it so easy. They have to do something to change this business model of theirs."

By Ryan Paul
October 22, 2008 - 01:23PM CT

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon has released Denied by Reign, his much-anticipated (at least in open source circles—and my basement) metal album, under a creative commons license. The album is part of his solo project, called Severed Fifth, which he intends to use as a springboard for testing music economics and promoting awareness of open content distribution models.

The metal album, which consists of eight tracks, is available for free in OGG and MP3 formats from the Severed Fifth web site. The tracks can be downloaded individually or together in a compressed archive and are also being distributed via BitTorrent. For his project, Bacon selected the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CCSA) license, which will enable users to share and modify the content as long as they properly attribute it and make derivatives available under the same license.

Open sesame - Music enthusiasts are growing impatient with problematic copy-protection schemes and DRM server shenanigans. As copyright law becomes increasingly draconian and the content industry pushes for even more ludicrous constraints on fair use to the extreme detriment of honest consumers, the calls for reform are becoming louder. Open licensing and unconventional business models could create new opportunities for the music industry and open the business up to some creativity.

The CCSA license empowers users by giving them the ability to repurpose content and build new things using the material. This transforms music into an inclusive and participatory medium—a shared community space instead of a walled garden. It also facilitates unencumbered experimentation by making it possible to adapt the music for use in a variety of other practical and artistic contexts.

By John Timmer
September 05, 2008 - 05:10AM CT

The RIAA's campaign against filesharers follows a standard procedure: find a computer offering files for download, get a court to force the ISP or organization that provided the computer's IP address to reveal the computer's owner, and then sue the owner.

The group has contracted with MediaSentry to do the work of identifying the infringing computers, but that company's methods have been called into question in a number of states that have licensing requirements for private investigators that include the computer-based snooping required to gather the data.

Michigan was one such state and, if there was any doubt about the licensing issue there, it's gone now: the state passed a law that specifically calls for computer forensics groups to be licensed. To an extent, the law is somewhat redundant. Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth is responsible for licensing private investigators and, in February, it determined that the company was acting as an unlicensed private investigator.

The Department recommended that the anonymous state resident that filed the complaint contact his local prosecutor if he/she wanted to press the matter. Despite this ominous warning flag, the RIAA's lawsuits in the state have continued apace. But, if MediaSentry felt it could successfully challenge the Department of Labor's decision if called on it, its chances of doing so dropped precipitously.

THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL has axed an episode of its popular show Mythbusters which revealed how easy it was to stuff up Radio Frequency Indentification (RFID) technology after a call from the nice people who make the gear.

The show's co-host Adam Savage claimed that he set out to do an episode on the vulnerabilities of RFID but encountered some very powerful resistance.

A conference call was arranged between co-host Tory Belleci and Texas Instruments to talk about the RFID vulnerabilities. Texas Instruments showed up with the chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else.

Apparently the combined legal might made it really clear to the folks at Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about RFID hacks.

The Inquirer

Saturday, August 09, 2008

CHICAGO — Bernie Mac, an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor and comedian, died suddenly Saturday at age 50 of complications from pneumonia. The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005.

He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease. "Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital," his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles. She said no other details were available and asked that his family's privacy be respected.

Mac worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago's South Side. Recently, Mac's brand of comedy caught him flack when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama. Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.

The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama's campaign. But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer. "Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show." Mac started his comedy career at age 8, with a standup performance at a church dinner. In 1977, at age 20, he took that act to comedy clubs in Chicago.

August 10, 2008 @ 3:31 CST

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Isaac Hayes, the pioneering singer, songwriter and musician whose relentless "Theme From Shaft" won Academy and Grammy awards, has been found dead at home. He was 65. The Shelby County Sheriff's Office says a family member found Hayes unresponsive near a treadmill on Sunday. He was pronounced dead about an hour later at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis.

The cause of death was not immediately known. In the early 1970s, Hayes laid the groundwork for disco, for what became known as urban-contemporary music and for romantic crooners like Barry White. And he was rapping before there was rap. His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show "South Park."

By Nate Anderson
July 22, 2008 - 12:06PM CT

Now that the EU plan to retroactively add 45 years of copyright protection to old sound recordings looks set to keep the work of the 50s and 60s locked up for another half century, resistance is solidifying. Yesterday, a group of independent academics from across Western Europe signed a letter to the Times arguing that the new plan would only pad the pockets of "record companies, aging rock stars or, increasingly, artists' estates.

It does nothing for innovation and creativity." And that's one of the more pleasant things being said about the idea. The academics are all experts in intellectual property or copyright law, and they trash the EU's assertion that no outside expertise was needed before formulating the plan. That's ludicrous, say the learned doctors, since the data filed with the EU came in large part from the recording industry.

Not surprisingly, the data showed that prices wouldn't rise, that artists would make more money, and "that the record industry will invest in discovering new talents, as if exclusive rights for 50 years had not provided an opportunity to earn returns." The professors questioned these assertions. They point out that independent outside evidence against the plan already exists major forms like the UK's Gowers review of intellectual property, but the EU seems to have ignored much of this in favor of Big Content's far-reaching claims.

If the goal is to make sure that artists have enough money to live on, the solution shouldn't be extending copyright but going after "unreasonably exploitative contracts during the existing term" and taking a look at "remuneration during the performer’s lifetime, not 95 years." The UK's Open Rights Group has some strong words of its own for the plan, which it sees as more of a rights grab than an attempt to help poverty-stricken musicians.

by Greg Sandoval
July 21, 2008 12:14 PM PDT

Hollywood can celebrate that pirated copies of this year's hit films aren't showing up on major Internet sites. Too bad for the studios' enforcement efforts that some can still be found on smaller sites. At the same time that the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, was drawing record audiences (the movie is estimated to have earned more than $155 million over the weekend), several copies of the film was available online.

A half hour after returning home from watching the film on Saturday night, I got home to find my colleague, Elinor Mills, has sent me a link that apparently originated at VideoEmbedder.com. Sure enough, a grainy and dark copy of the hit film was available for viewing and for download. It was still up on Sunday but could not be accessed on Monday. Finding newly released movies is nothing new. In the past, it was easy to find them at Google Video and other video-sharing sites.

Michael Moore's documentary, Sicko, was posted to the Web even before it had debuted in theaters. Following the appearance of Sicko on the Web, some argued that movies posted to the Internet can help boost interest in a film. Back then, Google Video was loaded with full-length films and TV shows. The site is now focused more on shorter videos even while there is no limit on duration.

What this illustrates is the coming storm bearing down on the film industry. The size of movie files used to be too large to allow them to be streamed or downloaded easily. That's changing rapidly. The time to download big movie files is speeding up and streaming technology has also improved. The simple fact is it's getting easier to share movie files.

By Nate Anderson
July 18, 2008 - 06:00AM CT

Dutch academic Dr. Johan Pouwelse knows BitTorrent well, having spent a year of his life examining its inner workings. Now, as part of the EU-funded P2P-Next team, Pouwelse and his researchers have been entrusted with €19 million, and what the EU wants in return is nothing less than a "4th-generation" peer-to-peer system that will one day be tasked with replacing over-the-air television broadcasts.

P2P-Next is the largest publicly-funded team in the world working on such technology (though plenty of researchers at Microsoft, IBM, and countless tiny startups are also racing to deliver a better P2P experience), and today the team launched a trial program designed to test its progress to date. What sets the project apart from the traditional BitTorrent architecture is its focus not on downloadable video, but on live streaming.

Current BitTorrent implementations, focused as they are on offering easy access to downloadable content, aren't well suited to delivering live streaming TV across the Internet, but Pouwelse is convinced that this is the future. There's "no doubt that TV will come through the Internet in a few years," he told Ars earlier this week. Obviously, deployment of such a system depends on consumer electronics firms and broadcasters, but Pouwelse's job is to make sure that the technology is ready when they are.

Currently, streaming solutions like YouTube and Hulu are generally based on a server model; this doesn't scale well without inflicting massive bandwidth costs on the broadcaster. Downloadable video, already being experimented with by the BBC and NBC, can use P2P for distribution, but is only suited to after-the-fact viewing.