Top 10 movies of 2005

OK, here's the problem I found when putting this list together: There have in fact been quite a lot of good movies I've seen over the past year. The trouble is, I'm finding it hard to place any of these movies in the Top Three slots. In other words, there are no movies that are slam dunk Number One candidates. Lots of B's and B+'s, but not too many solid A's or even A-'s (IMHO, of course). I suppose I got too spoiled in recent years by one brilliant Lord of the Rings movie after another. So into that vacuum I've decided to go for Joss Whedon's Serenity as number one, because a.) I'm a Joss Whedon/Buffy fan; b.) I need to make up for being so late getting into the whole Firefly thing (which I love); and c.) there will be no more Firefly or Serenity on either big or little screen; and d.) I had to put something in the top slot. As for no. 2: No-one in America's talking about the Brit gangster flick Layer Cake, but I loved it! And The Constant Gardener deserves a Top Three spot: Why not?

Anyway, here are 2005 films I've seen in the past year, and I've liked.

#1. Joss Whedon's Serenity (Culver Ridge, 10/02/05)
#2. Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake (The Cinema, 6/27/05)
#3. Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (Pittsford Plaza, 9/12/05)
#4. Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside (The Cinema, 3/26/05)
#5. David Dobkins' Wedding Crashers (Pittsford Plaza, 7/18/05)
#6. Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Pittsford Plaza, 9/2/05)
#7. Steve Box and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Greece Ridge Center, 10/06/05)
#8. George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (The Little Theatre, 11/04/05)
#9. Terry George's Hotel Rwanda (The Little Theatre, 3/3/05)
#10. Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (Pittsford Plaza, 2/2/05)

Honorable mentions:

Yimou Zhang's House of Flying Daggers (The Little Theatre, 1/14/05)
Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (The Cinema, 1/29/05)
Danny Boyle's Millions (The Little Theatre, 4/5/05)
Frank Miller's Sin City (The Little Theatre, 4/11/05)
Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (The Little Theatre, 4/14/05)
Garth Jennings' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Pittsford Plaza, 5/4/05)
Paul Haggis' Crash (The Cinema, 8/29/05)
Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Tinseltown, 11/18/05)
Andrew Adamson's Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (Pittsford Plaza, 12/10/05)
Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (Pittsford Plaza, 12/11/05)
David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (Movies 10, 12/13/05)
Peter Jackson's King Kong (Tinseltown, 12/14/05)
Chris Columbus's Rent (The Cinema, 12/29/05)

LA Times gets it right on digital handover; WSJ misses the point

Two quick examples of where the press is getting it right and getting it wrong over the pending transfer from analog to digital television--now scheduled for Feb. 17, 2009 (the date that federal lawmakers have set for "the last broadcast of conventional television.") In other words, notes the LA Times, that's the date "when analog TV signals will be turned off in favor of digital broadcasts, which offer improved pictures and more programming choices". (See here for a wikipedia backgrounder.)

The LA Times gets it (more or less) right. Even though the Tribune-owned paper might be having some financial problems these days, the paper is still able to come up with some useful and insightful editorial comments from time to time. An LA Times editorial from just before Christmas focuses on the downside of the Feb. 2009 deadline for the transition, especially for poor people. It reminds readers--most of whom who probably still haven't completely grasped this--"that tuning in the new signals requires either a digital TV, which the vast majority of homes don't have, or a converter box (possibly from a cable or satellite TV service) to translate the digital broadcasts into analog pictures." What's more, "with an estimated 73 million TVs in more than 30 million homes tuning in analog signals through antennas today, a lot of viewers are likely to be caught unprepared when those signals vanish."

But the Times notes that, although Congress has enacted legislation granting vouchers to help with the purchase of set-top converters, lawmakers are generally less concerned with helping poorer, unprepared citizens than with raking in the $10 billion to $30 billion of revenue that the auction of the analog spectrum could provide the U.S. Treasury. The editorial goes on:

Washington should not let the quest for revenue override a more fundamental goal: If the high bidders in the auctions are affiliated with the local telephone and cable companies that already offer high-speed Internet service, they're not likely to use the airwaves for a cheaper version of broadband. Similarly, the high bidders might be more interested in offering movies to cellphones than a fat pipe to the Web. That's why Washington should leave some of the reclaimed frequencies open to the public without need for lease or license. With the right technologies and rules to guard against interference, these airwaves could not only enable community-based high-speed Internet services, but provide a laboratory for wireless innovation. By opening a few slivers of the spectrum to unlicensed wireless data services in 1986, the FCC made possible an explosion in Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, communication gear and services that continues to this day. The reclaimed analog TV frequencies hold even more promise. Rather than mining every bit for auction revenue, lawmakers should reserve some of the airwaves for whatever services and applications that innovative technologists and community groups can squeeze into them.

While the LA Times editorial staff makes some sensible points on digital handover, the Wall Street Journal, misses the point (at least in this case), choosing instead to carp about government handouts to the poor. The WSJ piece (which requires a subscription, so you can't read the original unless you pay), points out that

In the best government giveaway since cheese handouts from the Reagan Administration, Congress has voted to provide consumers $40 vouchers to buy digital-to-analog converter boxes. Essentially, Congress is budgeting $1.5 billion for millions of Americans who don't need the money -- so that they can keep using obsolete technology. Moreover, most people won't notice a change in 2009. They will already have digital TVs (all new sets sold after mid-2007 must be digital), or they will still be subscribing to cable or satellite services that can send digital signals even to analog TVs. One universally acknowledged truth -- even in Congress -- is that the people who gobble up many of those vouchers will not be needy. Millions of households with satellite dishes and new big-screen TVs also have at least one old analog set lying around, and each family is entitled to two $40 vouchers. As we learned when many of the non-poor joined long queues for Reagan cheese, Americans would stand in line for marmoset pelts if they were labeled "free." To encourage such grabbiness in 2009, Congress has earmarked $5 million for voucher advertising. Mark your calendars.

Nice one, Wall Street Journal editorial board! It's comments such as these that makes me want to put that lot in the stocks so that the poor people can throw rotten fruit at them all day.

Christmas 2005, or, What Would Mr. Blobby Do?

Well, it's another Christmas over at the rellies in Levittown, PA. A pleasant day of opening pressies, watching football, and eating and drinking too much. Last night my good woman and I got to watch once again--our little Xmas tradition--the Christmas Eve broadcast, on WHYY, of the Alastair Sim version of Scrooge/A Christmas Carol (though, to be honest, we fell asleep before it finished. But that's OK--we know how it ends).

As I wrote last year, Christmas bugs me rotten--at least up till Christmas Eve. Before that, I can't be bothered. There I am, all through late November and December, trying to be (ahem!) a serious media scholar, grading papers and getting my manuscripts published so they can be read by six or seven like-minded scholars who give a damn . . . and Christmas keeps butting in with its lights and ads and jingles and shiny baubles . . . you just can't ignore it! I'm forced to align myself with comedian Lewis Black's exasperation. Black, as a very lapsed Jew (I'm a very lapsed Presbyterian), has been heard to exclaim, in one of his Comedy Central specials: "How long does it take you people to shop!?"

This past year has seen some pretty significant media developments. There's been the developments over the media coverage of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the Valerie Plame leak case, among others. Media consolidation continued, with moves by Sony to take over MGM and Viacom's year-end acquisition of Dreamworks. NPR chair Ken Tomlinson tried to interfere in the CPB's activities and overreached. The Bush administration made ever more pernicious efforts to undermine the country's independent media. I'll do the end-of-year wrap-up properly sometime later, but suffice to say for now it's been an interesting (and excruciating!) year.

Last year I was pontificating on the general tackiness of Christmas--both in the States and especially in Britain (and we must never forget how mystifying it is that Americans associate Christmas in England with Dickensian snow, frosted windows, happy carollers, cherubic children, chestnuts on an open fire, all that. But of course it's not like that at all! That's all bollocks, really! Brits open their pressies, eat Christmas Dinner, maybe watch the Queen, then sit round the telly and drink till they pass out. Then it's Boxing Day and no-one knows what the hell to do with that day . . . well OK, they eat Christmas leftovers, sit round the telly and drink till they pass out. Maybe there's football on). Anyway, where was I . . . oh yes, this year I'm just resigned to wallowing in the tackiness. Too tired to do otherwise.

If I had more energy I'd go off on all the rubbish I've been reading by those on the right complaining about how "Merry Christmas" is being squashed by those evildoers proclaiming "Happy Holidays" to all. But as I say, right now I can't be arsed. Merry Christmas, all--let's just leave it at that, shall we? That's what Mr. Blobby would do.

Cable indecency, Indian style

The United States is not the only country whose cable industry is under fire for allowing "indecency". India is taking its own action to ban "adult" shows on its domestic cable system. Alcohol and tobacco ads are also to be purged under amendments to the Indian government's Cable Network Act, which comes into force in the next few days. "All programmes will now have to be in conformity with the code prescribing norms of decency, morality and national security," according to a government spokesman quoted by the BBC. The BBC also notes that the changes come only two months after the Indian government "allowed foreign television countries to broadcast to India via cable for the first time." The changes seem to be part of a raft of measures to tighten up regulation of India's famously ramshackle cable industry, as foreign cable and satellite broadcasters are allowed into India for the first time. Copyright enforcement is also being pushed by the the central government. It seems to be that, from India's point of view, trade liberalization, copyright enforcement and regulation of morality go hand in hand!

A dangerous culture at the Bush White House

Warning! This blog post is uncommonly partisan in nature.

I have of course been following with great interest the latest developments in President Bush's attempts to maintain absolute control over his War on Terror. His shenanigans over torture and domestic spying are, I believe, part of a pattern of extra-legal activities that shows Bush's imperial and unConstitutional instincts clearly on display. And now a number of conservatives are saying the same thing, or at least exhibiting grave concerns at the President's actions. Their number includes Sen. Arlen Spector and Sen. John McCain; and, in media-land, David Brooks and George Will. And I was stunned to hear three prominent conservatives on NPR's Diane Rehm Show all excoriate Bush for his recent activities. I'm glad to hear this, because it shows that the rising tide of criticism against this warped presidency isn't simply a matter of whinging lefties.

Thank God for that. It's about time. I hope that a critical mass of all Americans are starting to realize just how dangerous to democracy this presidency - and this president - has become. And this danger manifested itself first in Bush's clear disregard for the media and its proper function in a democracy. And that's what the rest of this post is about. Ever since September 11, 2001, I've been increasingly concerned by the attempts by the Bush administration to control what passes for "news" in the American media. Of course, presidents have attempted to "spin" the press for generations. Theodore Roosevelt famously used his "bully pullpit" to cajole the press. (He also sought to gain favor among journalists in other ways; it was Roosevelt who set up the first White House press room, to give reporters a warm place to work, shielded from the elements, while interviewing officials and writing up their articles.) Other presidents have tried to go over the heads of the White House Press Corps to appeal directly to the American people. TR's later namesake, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated his radio "fireside chats" to achieve just such a goal. All 20th century presidents have tried to some extent to set the agenda and spin the news in ways that are favorable to them. Especially in recent years, all administrations have engaged ever more heavily in what Penn Annenberg professor Oscar Gandy called an information subsidy. (As I've written before, massive information subsidies allow journalists to look like they're doing a whole lot of work while in reality much of the content they present under their byline is actually "borrowed" from spin doctors and PR professionals pushing a particular point of view.)

But George W. Bush's presidency is qualitatively different from most that have preceded him. A recent piece in Slate.com ("Beyond Spin: The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush") by Jacob Weisberg points to the "familiar litany" of the Bush administration's disinformation campaigns within the United States. In the past year-plus there has plenty of evidence of wrongdoing. The adminstration's use of VNRs (Video News Releases) to promote Medicare "reform," first reported by the New York Times, was bad. Then there was the Department of Education's dodgy relationship with Armstrong Williams. USA Today early in 2005 reported that the Education Department, through a contract with the Ketchum public relations firm, apparently paid $240,000 to Williams, a conservative African-American print, radio and television pundit, to help promote Bush's No Child Left Behind program to minority audiences on his news radio show. USA Today also noted back in Jaunary that, as of early 2005, the Bush administration had paid PR firms $250 million to help push their ideas and proposals. That's double what the Clinton administration spent on all P.R. from 1997 to 2000.

Just weeks after the Williams revelation earlier this year, Eric Boehlert in Salon uncovered government-funded activities by Michael McManus, "a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, Ethics & Religion,' appears in 50 newspapers. Briefly, McManus "was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services (the same agency that had paid for and distributed the prepackaged VNRs) to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed." Horn's move came on the heels of a contemporary report in the Washington Post that HHS had paid syndicated columnist and marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher $21,000 to write brochures and essays and to brief government employees on the president's marriage initiative.

Noted Boehlert a couple of weeks ago: "Any of of these incidents might be excused as an episode of poor judgment by an underling. In combination and accompanied by various presidential comments about not reading the newspaper, preferring to get his news from aides, and so on, they suggest a propaganda ethic."

More recent developments, both at home and abroad, suggest that this might be an understatement - don't forget the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby/Dick Cheney revelations, and the recent news that the U.S. government paid for planted propaganda in the free Iraq media (here's the original piece that broke the story in the Los Angeles Times). The latest New York Times revelations about the administration's covert, extralegal spying on the American people, and Bush's reaction to that story, leaves no doubt: There is a something serious going on here, and it is very dangerous and deeply corrosive to democracy.

Yes indeedy.

a la carte and family values (cont.)

As I mentioned the other day, the cable industry suddenly finds itself under government pressure to offer some kind of a la carte basic cable service, all in the name of "family values". And big cable MSOs (Multiple System Operators) such as Time Warner and Comcast find themselves having to scramble to head off any possible regulatory moves. Maybe they are so quick to cave because they know their business model exploits consumers. Suddenly the MSOs are talking about "family tiers" that subscribers can add to their basic cable package -- not exactly what consumers have in mind. And any moves of this kind almost certainly wouldn't save subscribers any money, and may even end up costing them more. But then again, nothing in this so-called debate really addresses the needs and concerns of the average consumer. Some evidence for this comes from Broadcasting & Cable, which notes another interesting twist in this debate: It's been done before, with negligible impact.

For several years, the DBS service [DirectTV] offered a Family Pack of channels deemed inoffensive, such as VH1 Classic, Hallmark Channel and a pair of splinters of Discovery Channel.

Hardly anyone was interested. SEC filings indicate that Family Pack accounted for fewer than 1 million of DirecTV's 10 million subscribers in 2001. In 2002, Hallmark was so eager to escape the family-tier pigeonhole that it paid DirecTV $80 million in stock, or $11 per subscriber, to escape and get onto its more widely distributed Total Choice package.

It makes you wonder just who's pushing this agenda, and why. It's certainly not the broad mainstream of consumers. In fact, it seems, there are no "good guys" out there, looking out for the regular guy/gal who just wants to save some money and avoid having to pay for all these channels s/he never watches.

Lastly, it's interesting to see how this debate mixes up the ideological debate over free choice, consumer rights, regulation/deregulation, and the public interest. Those on both the left and the right seem to be divided over whether a la carte - and government moves to mandate and regulate a move to a la carte - would be a good thing. The more interesting debate, if only because it involves the people who are actually in charge of everything these days, is within the right - between, on the one hand, social-cultural conservatives operating from an indeceny-morality frame, and on the other, economic conservatives who favor leaving the market alone. The latter position is summed up by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins (thanks to a faculty colleague for pointing me to this), who notes in a WSJ commentary piece (taken from the Benton Foundation Comm Policy listserv - original requires subscription):

What about this "à la carte" debate? Supporters prattle about consumer rights, but consumers don't have a right to anything except that which somebody is willing to sell to them (without force or fraud). And everything we buy is really a package deal. Buy a garden hose at Wal-Mart and you're purchasing both a manufactured good and a service (Wal-Mart's logistics chain). Don't listen to any ninny who tells you that, because you're entitled to buy ketchup without buying mayonnaise, you should be entitled to buy ESPN without buying CNN. You can buy ketchup without mayonnaise because somebody is willing to sell it to you. In turn, you've demonstrated a willingness to make it worth his while. Today's basic cable package represents a complex set of bargains involving not just cable providers and subscribers, but two other parties: advertisers (who help pay your cable bill) and programming suppliers (who use the bargaining clout of their popular networks to get their niche networks on the air too). It's a solution that works: Everybody pays the same basic rate for channels they mostly don't watch, which is no different from saying they pay the same basic rate for the few channels they do watch -- but a lot more tastes are satisfied.

As I say, this is an interesting wrinkle on the traditional left-right bun fight over free choice, consumer rights, etc. The "solution that works" referred to above sounds surprisingly communitarian to me (at least insofar as it dovetails with commercial interests). But it doesn't help individual consumers who are paying over the odds for basic cable. In any contest between what individual consumers and groups want and need, and what big business wants, it's clear where Jenkins' loyalties lie. But there is one thing that Jenkins says that is likely to find more general agreement: "Technology is likely to render the whole issue moot. The concept of a 'channel' is an eroding one. Internet TV will be more akin to a library, in which you order up for instant viewing the fare you care to receive."

And wait till you see how much the MSOs want to charge you for that!

Viacom-Paramount snaps up Dreamworks

Well, it's happened - and it came out of the blue. U.S. media giant Viacom is buying Dreamworks SKG. The deal, according to the Wall Street Journal is worth a total of $1.6 billion. Viacom outbid competitor GE-NBC-Universal for the studio, which was set up 11 years ago by Steven Spielberg, former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen (hence the "SKG" in the company's name). Although the deal does not apparently include the animation component of the company, Dreamworks Animation SKG, it will give Viacom-Paramount the rights to distributing that company's products. Over the years Dreamworks has produced hit movies such as "The Peacemaker" (its first release, in 1997), "Saving Private Ryan," and "American Beauty" and "Gladiator" (which, consecutively, won DreamWorks two best picture Oscars, in 1999 and 2000). But recent years have been more problematic, and the last year in particular has seen Dreamworks bomb with products such as "The Island" and "Just Like Heaven."

The development shows - again - how hard it is for movie studios to operate independently of the big TransNational Corporations that dominate global media today. The move follows on from Sony's deal earlier this year to buy up MGM for $5 billion.

Addressing what ails the press

Here's a post I've had sitting around in draft form for more than a week, waiting for a moment to write it up. It's about the problems that have been assailing the newspaper business. I spotted this intruiging piece in The New York Review of Books ("The Press: The Enemy Within" by Michael Massing). It's a lengthy piece, and I only have time to give the briefest plug for it, but it does a good job of summing up many of the points I've raised in this blog about the inadequacies of the press in its coverage of many of the biggest stories of recent years - from the 2004 election to Iraq War to the Plame Affair to Hurricane Katrina. It includes some serious criticism of the country's most prestigious news organizations, from journalists who worked on the inside, such as Nancy Cleeland and Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times, and Tom Fenton at CBS (who has also written his own damning indictment of that network: Bad News).

Although Massing concedes that, since Katrina, "journalists have been asking more pointed questions at press conferences, attempting to investigate cronyism and corruption in the White House and Congress, and doing more to document the plight of people without jobs or a place to live," he wonders:

Will such changes prove lasting? In a previous article, I described many of the external pressures besetting journalists today, including a hostile White House, aggressive conservative critics, and greedy corporate owners. [2] Here, I will concentrate on the press's internal problems - not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful. To some extent, these problems consist of professional practices and proclivities that inhibit reporting - a reliance on "access," an excessive striving for "balance," an uncritical fascination with celebrities. Equally important is the increasing isolation of much of the profession from disadvantaged Americans and the difficulties they face. Finally, and most significantly, there's the political climate in which journalists work. Today's political pressures too often breed in journalists a tendency toward self-censorship, toward shying away from the pursuit of truths that might prove unpopular, whether with official authorities or the public.

This is a busy time for everyone in higher education. But I'd definitely recommend this article to those of you interested in trying to understand why the press is at an all-time low in terms of public trust and confidence.

Fair use in the digital era

I spotted an interesting piece in the Benton Foundation Comm Policy news service this week, concerning issues of copyright and intellectual property rights. It relates to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice ("Will Fair Use Survive?", authored by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles and available in downloadable PDF format.).

The report was "the product of more than a year of research - including many firsthand stories from artists, scholars, bloggers, and others," and "paints a striking picture of an intellectual property system that is perilously out of balance." The core of the report is a call for the legal doctrine of fair use to be reaffirmed and strengthened in the digital age "so that it can be an effective tool for anyone who contributes to culture and democratic discourse."

Fair use is a long-standing concept in American law that allows people to use copyrighted material, in certain limited circumstances, without the permission of the copyright holder. As the Stanford University Libraries website notes, "Most fair use analysis falls into two categories: commentary and criticism; or parody." Traditionally, there has been a fair amount of flexibility granted under the umbrella of fair use. But, the Brennan report holds, this flexibility is fast disappearing. The Benton service notes the report's following key findings:

• 1) Artists, writers, historians, and filmmakers are burdened by a "clearance culture" that ignores fair use and forces them to seek permission (which may be denied) and pay high license fees in order to use even small amounts of copyrighted or trademarked material.
  
• 2) The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) is being used by copyright owners to pressure Internet service providers to take down material from their servers on the mere assertion that it is infringing, with no legal judgment and no consideration of fair use.
  
• 3) An analysis of 320 letters on the Chilling Effects website, an online repository of threatening cease and desist and "take down" letters, showed that nearly 50% of the letters had the potential to stifle protected speech.

In response to these challenges to fair use,

The report recommends: A) creating a clearinghouse for information, including sample replies to cease and desist and "take down" letters; B) outreach to Internet service providers who are instructed by companies to take down sites with material they claim as copyright-protected; C) changes in the law to reduce the penalty for guessing wrong about fair use; and D) the creation of a national pro bono legal support network.

Certainly something needs to be done to protect fair use. Otherwise, it will become very difficlut or even impossible for people to use any digital matrial for any purpose without having to ask permission and/or pay someone for the privilege. And that would be deleterious to robust democratic debate. Remember, copyright law is supposed to find a balance between, on the one hand, enabling creators of original material to make a reasonable profit from their works for a fixed period of time, and on the other, enabling creative works to enter the public realm in order to spark new creative and democratic output.

The balance is shifting very much against the public realm. Another major strike in favor of the copyright holders came last June, when the Supreme Court, in MGM v. Grokster, ruled that Internet file-sharing services, such as Grokster (a service run by StreamCast Networks Inc) and Morpheus can "be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally." In a surprise move, the justices also unanimously rejected "warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod." The BBC characterized the ruling as making clear that the "file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software." It seems clear from the ruling that the Court believed Grokster could be facilitating illegal activity, i.e., copyright infringement.

The case had been "brought by 28 movie and music makers who claimed that rampant piracy was denting profits." Even though the Supreme Court justices had been expected to rule in favor of the file-sharers - because of legal precedents such as a 1984 case involving Sony's Betamax VCR (Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios), they didn't do that. Instead the Court has set aside the precedent (and lower court decisions) because they determined that "the makers of a technology have to answer for what people do with it if they use it to break the law." Notes the BBC:

In the ruling Justice David Souter wrote: "The question is under what circumstances the distributor of a product capable of both lawful and unlawful use is liable for acts of copyright infringement by third parties using the product."

He added: "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright ... is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

The BBC also noted at the time that the decision could "have an impact on any technology firm developing gadgets or devices that let people enjoy media on the move. If strictly interpreted the ruling means that these hi-tech firms will have to try to predict the ways people can use these devices to pirate copyrighted media and install controls to stop this infringement." And indeed, this does seem to have happened. According to Wikipedia, Grokster - which "was forced to pay $50 million to the music and recording industries" - announced in November that it would cease its P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing service. Furthermore:

Fearing lawsuits similar to MGM v. Grokster, Mark Gorton, the chief executive officer of the firm that produces LimeWire, has said that he plans to stop distributing his file sharing program. He explained this by saying

"Some people are saying that as long as I don't actively induce infringement, I'm O.K. I don't think it will work out that way...[the Court] has handed a tool to judges that they can declare inducement whenever they want to."

In order to download the free LimeWire client, users must now first agree to the statement "I will not use LimeWire BASIC for copyright infringement.

Philly gets closer to wireless

Just before Thanksgiving, PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer included a segment (by media correspondent Terence Smith) on Philadelphia's ambitious (for the U.S.) plans to connect up the entire city for wi-fi, or wireless internet access. Since I was staying with my wife's family in the Philly suburbs over Turkey Day--and I sort of consider Philadelphia to be my "home" city in the U.S.--I'm particularly interested in seeing how this pans out.

"Wireless Philadelphia" is the name of a project to build a wi-fi (wireless) system for the entire city "within a year". The system follows a universal access model, based on 3,000 small antennae distributed throughout 135 square miles of the city. When complete, you'll be able to get stable wireless access anywhere in the city, indoors or out. The project, which is being pushed hard by Mayor John Street, would make Philly the first "city of its size in the nation to have wireless broadband access available to everyone, regardless of income, at below- market prices." Mayor Street sees wi-fi as an essential utility that needs to be available at affordable rates--like water or electricity. The PBS piece notes that the plan is to offer the service to all of Philadelphia's 560,000 homes and 1.5 million inhabitants, at rates between $10 and $20 per month. The goal is to erase the so-called "digital divide," which separates poor Philadelphians from their richer and middle-class counterparts, the majority of whom now have wireless internet access at home. The city took a major step forward back in early October when it tapped Earthlink to complete the network. Wireless Philadelphia is thus a public-private partnership.

Of course, other private internet providers such as Comcast and Verizon are not happy about this. These companies (and Time Warner Cable, which provides my home wi fi access in Rochester) prefer to hook people up home by home rather than provide a broad-based, public system. These companies also prefer to charge $40-50 per month rather than $10-20 per month.

A battle is shaping up between these ISPs, who see a huge revenue generator being removed from them, and cities, who see cheap and universal wireless internet access to all citizens as an essential precondition for economic growth. A recent Washington Post piece quoted Ben Scott, a policy director of Free Press, "a nonprofit group that favors the development of municipal wireless," as follows:

Increasingly, city officials view broadband in the 21st century the same way they viewed electricity 100 years ago and telephone service 50 years ago. It's falling into the category of a necessary and essential social service. . . . Cities see this as a way to spur economic growth: on the one hand to put tools in the hands of the underprivileged and give them a leg up, and on the other to provide incentives to small businesses to locate in these cities and to expand their operations.

Meanwhile, other countries, especially in Asia, push ahead with much more ambitious national wireless access plans. The U.S. strategy of leaving braodband access in the sole hands of private commercial interests has already seriously impeded growth in this sector. The result, according to a recent study reported in Slate.com ("The Fight Over Wireless"), is that "the United States has dropped to 16th in the percentage of citizens with access to broadband, trailing South Korea, Canada, Israel, and Japan, among others. There is consensus across the political spectrum that we need to go wireless—and fast." The trouble is, the federal government isn't doing much to push universal access. Most of the government impetus is coming from cities and states.

"Wireless Philadelphia" is a good start. But it's only a start. Let's hope it and programs like it don't get stymied by big cable companies and their friends in state legislatures and in Congress.

One Year On!

I've been so busy this past week that I let pass the one-year anniversary of this blog. So to celebrate(?) I'm reprinting my first substantive post, from Nov. 29, 2004.

Election advertising boondoggle

It looks like we finally know the full cost of the recent election, and it’s a hell of a lot! The Alliance for Better Campaigns points out that more than $1.6 billion was spent in the hundred largest media markets on electioneering by parties, candidates and — most prominently this year — independent groups such as MoveOn.org (the so-called “527s”). This tally, is, unfortunately, at the upper end of a spectrum of pre-election estimates that ran from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. It's also more than double what was spent in 2000. These findings, also covered in TVWeek (registration required) are more or less in line with other investigations into campaign TV advertising, such as those conducted by the Lear Center Local News Archive, as well as Nielsen Monitor Plus, and the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The Lear Center points out that almost two million political spots were aired on 615 stations in the top 100 TV markets — equivalent to 677 full days of advertising! So what, you might ask, is this doing to our democracy?

The worst part of all this, of course, is that local TV stations, where most Americans now get their news and where most of this $1.6 billion was spent, have largely abrogated their public service responsibility to provide comprehensive coverage of national, and especially local, elections. The election-related pieces local stations did air tended to be pretty flimsy, to say the least. Strategy and horserace stories outnumbered issues stories by a ratio of 3:2; ad watch stories, meanwhile, made up less than one percent of all campaign stories (according to the Lear Center). I could go on about this — and in time I will — but for now, check out NOW with Bill Moyers’ piece on local elections coverage — or lack thereof.

The battle for a la carte cable is resumed

Perhaps the most interesting media development this week is the resumption of the debate over cable pricing. FCC chair Kevin J. Martin has come out in favor of a la carte pricing on cable systems. In other words, cable subscribers would be allowed to pick and choose which individual channels they would like to pay for (beyond a basic tier of broadcast and cable networks). This is a sharp reversal of the FCC's previous position, which was to support the cable industry's desire to retain the current system of bundling channels into ever larger cable packages (this is of course very profitable for the cable operators). The motive for this new initiative is, as ever with the federal government, a desire to protect children from indecency and violence on television. It seems that many viewers would prefer to block--and not have to pay for--"edgier" basic cable offerings such as Comedy Central and MTV. Martin now seems to have concluded that the best way to protect the children is to allow subscribers to pick and choose their own channels. Cable operators argue that if this was mandated by the government, consumers would end up paying more for fewer channels.

The FCC has no power to mandate a switch to a la carte pricing--that power is left to Congress. But Martin is certainly in an influential position to get the debate moving. As for the cable industry, it has little public support for its current strategy, that could be construed as price-gouging unhappy cable consumers. For years the cable industry has been adding more and more channels to their cable lineups. Most viewers only watch a fraction of these channels--typically 17 channels out of an averagge of 88 available to subscribers, according to a 2004 FCC report (cited in USA Today on Nov 30). Yet since cable was deregulated in the mid-1990s, cable subscription rates have increased at well in excess of the rate of inflation. Many subscribers wonder why they're paying so much for scores of channels they never watch.

And now AT&T is backing the move to a la carte pricing. AT&T was for a while one of the biggest MSOs (Multiple System Operators); it got out of the business in 2001 when its cable operations were bought up by rival Comcast; but the company is now looking to get back into the game through promoting its own a la carte programming services.

(For a fuller insight into both sides of the argument, USA Today runs a pro- and con debate over a la carte pricing in its Dec 1 edition -- see here for the pro-pick and choose position and here for the leave-things-as-they-are argument.)