USA

BETonSPORTS In US Gambling Probe
The gambling industry is today reeling from the news that the chief executive of one of the UK’s largest betting websites, BetonSports, has been arrested in the States on an US indictment “alleging various criminal acts against multiple defendants.”
David Carruthers, the British CEO of BetonSports, was arrested at Dallas, Fort Worth as he tried to change planes and was held overnight in the airport clink.
The company’s shares were suspended in London today, with Carruthers charged under racketeering laws in connection with a US probe of online gambling.
In addition to the criminal charges, the US has filed a civil case in St. Louis federal court, asking that Betonsports be ordered to stop taking sports bets in the US and to return any money held by US customers in their gaming accounts.
US District Judge Catherine Perry responded by issuing a temporary restraining order granting the request, with a hearing scheduled within 10 days.
Other gambling sites responded by going into freefall, with PartyGaming dropping 7.5 pence (7.3 percent), to 95.5 pence early this morning.
It was the same story with Sportingbet, owners of Paradise Poker, who saw their stock slide 54 pence (19 percent) to 228 pence, while 888 Holdings, the biggest of the online casino companies, crashed 17.5 pence ( 9.1 percent) to 175.5 pence.
Early this morning, BetOnSports PLC issued a statement which included the following:
“The Board have in the meantime been reviewing with their lawyers the impact of the indictment and are considering the serious business impact of the temporary restraining order on its business and that review is continuing. Given the issues and uncertainties involved, until the review is complete and a fuller announcement can be made resolving the uncertainties concerning the future of the Company, the Board has requested the London Stock Exchange to suspend trading in the company’s shares.”
Today’s actions are part of a continuing campaign by US lawmakers to crack down on online gambling, a business which rakes in a mighty $12 billion-a-year.
BetOnSports
18 July, 2006
MovieLink To Burn to DVD?
Movielink, a service which delivers films over the Internet, will soon be offering the ability to burn the downloaded films to DVD, complete with DRM protection, reports ZDNet.
It is understood that Sonic Solutions has been working with Movielink to provide the last link in the chain that has held many consumers back from using the service.
People like the idea of being able to take the films down, but as very few people have the PC in their lounge, don’t cherish sitting in front of the PC for 2+ hours to watch the film. As the films are delivered now, it’s not possible to transfer the films DVD, for fear that those naught consumers might copy the disc.
Being able to burn films to DVD is second nature for anyone using file sharing services, you know, the ones where the film companies don’t make any money from the films being downloaded, so it would seem quite reasonable to offer the same service to the people who are willing to pay for the films, wouldn’t it.
Sonic Solutions signed a similar deal with video CoDec company DivX back on 20 June to use Sonic’s AuthorScript disc-burning engine, although it was unclear if DRM would be transfered to the burnt disc.
The Movielink service, is limited to only US user, who own Windows-based machine and is a joint venture between Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Brothers.
MovieLink If you’re outside the US, don’t bother clicking, you won’t see anything of interest.
17 July, 2006
US Democratic Party Adopt Net Neutrality
The US Democratic party has adopted net-neutrality as a party-political issue following the rejection of a second pro-neutrality amendment in a vote late last week.
Previously we reported on the demise of the first pro-neutrality amendment as part of the ongoing review of US telecommunications law.
The Senate Commerce Committee were tied at 11 for and 11 against, with Republican members voting against the amendment and Democrats for it. A majority vote is necessary for a bill to pass. Afterwards, Republican Senator for Alaska, Ted Stevens, gave his reasons for voting against the bill as well as displaying his obviously comprehensive grasp of the technicalities of the Web, “It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
The Democratic party subsequently took up the issue with the slogan “Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.”
Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry commented, “This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.” Another Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, placed a ‘hold’ on the bill which temporarily stops further progress but a decision is inevitable and both sides are marshaling forces behind their cause.
Lawrence Lessig greeted news of Democratic support with caution, “Good for the Dems that they got it. Bad that the issue is now within the grips of party politics.” He acknowledged that, give the amount of money involved, political involvement was inevitable.
Many fear that the loss of net-neutrality will signal virtual civil war on the Internet and that commercial interests are having too much effect on the US Legislature. Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union offered a concise summary, “The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.”
6 July, 2006
Net Neutrality Matters
Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create.
The debate centres around the ongoing review of the US Telecommunications Act and the concept of network neutrality (net-neutrality). The telcos have been lobbying congress to allow them to introduce priority services ensuring that the fastest data transfers and best download speeds are sold at a premium rate. The telcos position is widely seen to be in conflict with the most fundamental assumptions about what the Internet actually is.
To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?
The debate was kick-started in November 2005 when AT&T CEO, Ed Whitacre commented, “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
Whitacre’s argument boils down to the assumption that services such as Google and Yahoo are somehow freeloading on the infrastructure owned by the telcos. Cory Doctorow points out a fundamental flaw in his reasoning, “Internet companies already are paying for bandwidth from their providers, often the same companies that want to charge them yet again under their new proposals.”
As Doctorow and other commentators have observed, Internet users and businesses already pay proportionally for their use of the net, allowing the owners of the infrastructure to take a further cut distorts the market in favour of those with the deepest pockets and threatens innovation and the development of new services.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, weighed in to the argument saying “Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.”
The debate in the US is split largely along partisan lines with Republicans favouring the telcos and Democrats siding with the pro-neutrality lobby. Since Whitacre started the debate, the telcos have promoted their case heavily using extensive television advertising and lobby groups. The pro-neutrality group (comprising the bulk of the industry) has organised itself with activist Websites such as save the internet and has signed up over a million individuals to its petition, but the campaign is not going well. On May 8th the House of Representatives passed the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006,” or COPE Act while defeating an amendment (the so-called Internet Platform for Innovation Act of 2006) that would have provided protection for neutrality. The next opportunity for progress comes this week when the Senate votes on Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006 which also carries a neutrality friendly amendment.
Today, the legal Website Outlaw reported that two US Attorney Generals (Eliot Spitzer and Bill Lockyer) have backed the pro-neutrality cause. Spitzer wrote a letter stating that “Congress must not permit the ongoing consolidation of the telecommunications industry to work radical and perhaps irrevocable change in the free and neutral nature of the Internet”.
Whatever Spitzer and Lockyer’s influence, many commentators believe this kind of corporate influence on communications can only lead to economic censorship. As law professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig said in 2004 “The Internet was designed to allow competition and let the best products and content rise to the top. Without a policy of network neutrality, some of those products could be blocked by broadband providers”.
28 June, 2006
NSA To Harvest Social Networks?
Think carefully the next time you edit your Flickr or Myspace profile. New Scientist reported last week that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” For many the move is hardly surprising given the ongoing erosion of personal privacy as a result of 9/11 and makes George Orwell and Philip K Dick’s dark imaginings about the workings of big government (they gave us the concepts of thought-crime and pre-crime respectively) a depressing reality.
Many are saying that it bears all the hallmarks of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program or the “blueprint for the total surveillance society” as it was dubbed by Lee Tien of the EFF. The program aimed to gather digital information from a variety of sources to aid in the tracking and capture of terrorists but was suspended in 2002 after a public outcry over privacy.
The New Scientist report speculates that the NSA plans to use semantic-web tools to plot connections between individuals. A paper promoting just such a process was delivered at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh last month. The paper, titled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, described how conflict of interest in the scientific peer review process could be avoided by plotting the relationships between individuals, by analyzing the RDF tags of data from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social software service and the computer science bibliography website DBLP. New Scientist noted that the research was part-funded by Advanced Research Development Activity who spend the NSA’s research cash.
This news follows the report by USA Today on June 1st that the FBI had asked companies including Google, Microsoft and AOL (amongst others) to store Web usage histories for up to two years to assist with the investigations into child pornography and terrorism. Lee Tien observed that the Justice Department was “asking ISP’s to really become an arm of the government”.
In Europe, the adoption of similar approaches has been attempted with less success. In 2003 the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that the government abandon plans to get ISP’s to store usage data for six years but should still ask the companies to keep data as and when law enforcers required.
The APIG report (PDF), which was delivered ahead of the consultation process for the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) Part 2, made the specific recommendation that
“a specific prohibition should be put into RIPA to prevent access to communications traffic data for ‘predictive use’. If particular patterns of behaviour were highly correlated to criminal behaviour then it might become possible for ‘fishing expeditions’ to detect these patterns to be seen a proportionate action. We agree that this type of access to traffic data raises considerable concern and do not believe it should be permitted under an ‘internal authorisation’ regime.
In September 2005 the European Commission adopted a proposal that would see telecommunications data held for one year and Internet data for six months and, last month, the European Court annulled the agreement which compelled airlines to submit private data on passengers flying to the US.
It’s not just us that thinks that the Global War on Terror has been used by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to infringe personal liberty with precious little evidence of positive results. Privacy groups have warned about the dangers of “automated intelligence profiling” citing the potential for inaccuracies, misuse and abuse.
Governments have hardly proven themselves capable custodians so far. In the UK recent blunders at the Home Office have seen thousands of individuals wrongly branded as criminals due to inefficient manual administration systems. Add government fecklessness to the huge quantity of incomplete, exaggerated and plain wrong data entered by ourselves about ourselves on social software sites and you could have the ingredients for a totalitarian, bureaucratic hell, worthy of Kafka.
12 June, 2006
Anti-DRM FlashMobs Hit Apple Stores
Saturday saw anti-DRM protests at eight Apple stores across the USA organised by DefectiveByDesign, who are running an on-going ‘Campaign to Eliminate DRM.’
The protests took place between 10am and noon, where those involved got dressed up in brightly coloured HazMat (hazardous material) suits, stood outside the shops carrying placards and handing out leaflets.
They argue that it is unreasonable, among other things, that purchasers of music tracks on iTunes are not able to resell their music once they have finished with it – a right they previously had when they used to buy physical media.
Where as to most people DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, Defective By Design label it ‘Digital Restrictions Management.’ Their particular beef with Apple is that, because of the use of DRM, Apple are locking-in people who buy music tracks at the iTunes store.
It’s the first time we’ve heard to a flashmob being used for anything approaching useful.
Being online-types there’s loads of media to look at whether is be photos and a number of videos from Chicago and San Francisco.

List of Apple stores affected
Apple Store – 1 Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Apple Store – 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
Apple Store – 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105
Apple Store – 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141
Apple Store – 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153
Apple Store – 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h
Apple Store – 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093
Apple Store – 189 The Grove Drive Los Angeles, CA 90036
DefectiveByDesign call to arms
12 June, 2006
Disney to Sell Movies Over Internet
Purveyor of fluffy, family-friendly feature films, Walt Disney has become the latest Hollywood studio to offer movies for sale on the Internet, with a new service offering films via the CinemaNow online service.
CinemaNow, based in sunny Santa Monica, California, has announced that Buena Vista Home Entertainment – Disney’s home video division – will be offering movies on a download-to-own basis for PCs/portable devices on the same day they are available on DVD.
Starting from today, Disney will be offering both new and back catalogue fillums via CinemaNow, with pricing set around the same price as DVDs (roughly $20 for a new release, and $10 for older films.)
Of course, studios tend to have a different concept of ‘ownership’ than the rest of us when it comes to all things digital, and in this case punters still won’t be able to do what they actually want to do, and that’s to burn their downloaded copies onto DVDs.
Instead, the movies can only be copied to a total of three other devices (including laptop PCs and handheld electronic devices) supporting CinemaNow’s copyright-protection technology.
Disney’s shuffle into the world of online film flogging follows a 3rd April announcement by rival studios to offer movies for sale via Movielink, a joint venture owned by big-league competitors Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures.
Visibly purring with satisfaction, Bruce Eisen, president of CinemaNow, rubbed up against the mic, saying, “The main thing is Disney chose us to be first for them to go out with electronic sell-through.”
“We take that as a real nice vote of confidence,” he added, before trotting off to the litter tray.
A Disney spokesman said their deal with CinemaNow is a non-exclusive one, so they’re free to make similar deals with other online services in the future.
CinemaNow
Disney
6 June, 2006
MTV and Microsoft Take On iTunes With ‘Urge’
Apple’s hugely popular iTunes music download service looks set to face some mighty competition in the coming months.
Although many contenders have tried to take on Apple’s market leading music download business, all of have left with a bloody nose – but the arrival of a new service by a powerful pair of rivals could be Apple’s biggest battle yet.
The new ‘Urge’ service sees industry titans Microsoft and music video monsters MTV Networks teaming up to offer a heavyweight contender to iTunes.
Unlimited downloads
Like Apple’s service, buyers will be charged 99-cents per song download, but there’s an added twist: users subscribing $9.95 a month will be able to download unlimited songs from Urge’s 2-million-song catalogue to their personal PCs.
Users wanting to transfer songs onto portable music players can subscribe to the $14.95 service, with tunes protected by anticopying software from Microsoft.
Hoping to succeed where Napster, Yahoo, RealNetworks’s Rhapsody and even Microsoft’s own MSN service have failed, the partnership of the world’s biggest software company and the marketing might and ‘cool’ of MTV could prove a formidable challenge to iTunes.
“They are probably the strongest contender to come into the market for some time,” commented Phil Leigh, a senior analyst for Inside Digital Media, in Florida.
Geoff Harris, product unit manager for Windows Media Player at Microsoft, pointed out that although that other music subscription services have millions of songs on tap, that didn’t help listeners discover new tunes that they might like.
Noting that consumers have embraced satellite radio because it features dozens of channels with music chosen by experts, Harris reckoned that this could prove a real advantage to the Urge service.”You’ve got the experts in music here from MTV doing programming across a whole bunch of genres,” he commented.
As well as music files, subscribers to Urge will be able to download video streams of MTV Network programs, including shows from MTV, VH1, and CMT, a country music video channel. Yee-hi!
Sod the iPod
But there is a serious fly in the MP3 ointment for the new Urge service: crazily, its music downloads won’t be playable on the Apple iPod, despite the player hogging around 70 percent of the market for portable music players. Instead, users will have to invest in rival players like those from Creative Technology.
Although Harris admitted that the iPod incompatibility issue was “a hurdle that we have to get over” (an understatement, we reckon!), he added that, “there’s a long way to go in this market,” pointing out that the zillions of iPods sold still represent a fraction of the potential audience for music downloads.
Jason Hirschhorn, MTV Networks’ chief digital officer, insisted that Urge wasn’t interested in taking on Apple.’It’s not about beating Apple, it’s not about beating Rhapsody,” he said, pointing out that MTV has already teamed up with Apple elsewhere to flog some of its TV shows as downloads on the iTunes site.
We believe you, Jason.
Windows Media Player 11 beta
Although Urge is wholly owned by MTV Networks, Microsoft has committed ample resources to the service, embedding the software in its new Windows Media Player 11 beta, a spruced up upgrade to its media software offering iTunes-like integration.
The new player adds browsing by album cover and a search box to find media as well as offering improved content management, with less clicks needed to burn a CD, for example.
Urge will only be available initially in the United States, with the beta player linked to US-only music stores until the final version of Windows Media Player 11 is released.
Jonathan Arber, a research analyst with Ovum in London has high hopes for the service, “I think there’s a real chance we will see them become the top of the second tier below Apple.”
Assuming the thing is stable and doesn’t come with a zoo-full of bugs, of course.
Urge
Windows Media Player 11
17 May, 2006
Judge Harry Edwards Attacks FCC Broadband Wire-Tap
EFF-fans and electronic freedom groupies have a new poster boy who comes from an unlikely profession. They’re normally attracted to open-source code-a-holics, or white hat hacker, but this one’s a judge.
On Friday, Judge Harry Edwards tore a few strips off the associate general counsel, Jacob Lewis, representing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He was one of three judges at a hearing of the federal appeals court, investigating whether the US government have the same right to tap VoIP phone conversations as they currently have with ‘normal’ phone lines.
The quotes that Reuters are reporting are pretty choice. In a response to hearing their arguments, he replied, “This is totally ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re making this argument.”
He didn’t stop there, later letting them have it with both barrels.
“Your argument makes no sense,” Edwards told Jacob Lewis, an associate general counsel with the FCC.
“I’m sorry I’m not making myself clear,” Lewis said.
“You’re making yourself very clear. That’s the problem,” Edwards replied.
Wow, that is cutting.
The ride wasn’t so rough from the other two judges, with the second, David Sentelle, appearing to side with the FCC, especially for Internet phone services. The last, Janice Brown kept her thoughts to herself.
We await the T-shirts flooding the market.
FCC
EFF
8 May, 2006
Pixar And Disney Wed
A quick catchup. We’ve been covering the Pixar/Disney, will they/won’t they get together for a while now and see that it’s finally come to pass that the Pixar board have voted to join Disney.
In the all-stock transaction, 2.3 Disney shares will be issued for each Pixar share. The most senior Pixar people will be taking interesting, senior roles at Disney reporting directly to Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer Disney. Jobs will be joining the Disney’s Board of Directors as a non-independent member.
As we’re sure you know, Pixar has been providing Disney with computer-generated (CG) masterpieces for 11 year.
It all got going when Steve Jobs, after getting kicked out of Apple by John Sculley, the man he brought in to ‘take Apple to the next level’ (who in fact nearly killed it), bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilms in 1986 for a cool $10m.
Initially Pixar survived by making adverts such as the boxing Listerine bottle, picking up a hamper of awards in the world of CG.
Big things started to happen in 1995 when Pixar simultaneously went public in the US, raising $140m, and their first film with Disney, Toy Story, hit the cinema. It became the highest grossing film of 1995 taking $362m worldwide at box office alone. We’re sure you all remember the masses of merchandising, making Disney huge amounts of extra income.
In 1998 A Bug’s Life came along also bringing $362m in worldwide ticket sales, 1999 saw Toy Story 2 ($485m). The following years saw Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles all do very well, sealing Pixar as _the_ CG animation stuido.
Pixar and Disney had a very public spat where Pixar said that they wouldn’t supply their films to Disney exclusively. Disney played it all cool, effectively saying ‘see if I care?’ We can plainly see from the purchase that they did actually care quite a lot.
Pixar
Disney
8 May, 2006