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A screenshot from the film We Live in Public.

Another top festival honor, the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. dramatic films, went to Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire, which was directed by Lee Daniels and blew audiences away with its dark storyline and surprising performances. (It also received the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic films.)

Push tells the redemptive story of Precious Jones, a young, overweight, awkward teen in Harlem who somehow musters the strength, despite all odds against her, to discover her own voice. The film is intense, hard to watch, and sticks with you. It has not yet been picked up for distribution.

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Sundance handout art)

Timoner, who also won the Grand Jury prize for her 2004 rock ‘n’ roll documentary, Dig!, had been hired by Harris to film the underground bunker project, called Quiet. She continued to follow him over the years, as she was drawn by his character, even if she didn’t quite understand his message.

The Audience Award for a U.S. documentary went to the buzz-generating The Cove, which this reporter was unable to see due to scheduling conflicts.

During the 1990s dot-com boom, Harris created the first Internet television network, Pseudo.com, and then an underground bunker in Manhattan where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days before getting shut down as a millennial cult by authorities on New Year’s Day 2000.

The film was directed by Ondi Timoner, who gave CNET an inside look last week at the life of a filmmaker about to screen her work to an audience for the very first time. It covers a tumultuous decade in the life of Josh Harris, whom Timoner refers to as “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

Never to be forgotten is a performance by Mo’Nique, who got a special jury prize for her for her portrayal of Precious’ mentally ill mother, who copes by mentally and emotionally abusing her daughter. The first audience question following Push’s first screening last week was directed toward Mo’Nique: “What are you planning on wearing to the Oscars?”

(Credit:
Michelle Meyers/CNET Networks)

It wasn’t until spring 2006, when she started noticing people walking around, oblivious to the world typing into their BlackBerrys, or posting their every thought and move on social-networking status feeds, that Timoner realized that Harris was a true visionary.

A screenshot from the dramatic, award-winning Sundance film Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire

We Live in Public, a sort of cautionary story about the Web’s impact on our lives, grabbed one of the Sundance Film Festival’s top honors Saturday, the Grand Jury Prize for documentary films.

Another impressive performance in the film was that of Mariah Carey, who plays a very plain and conflicted social worker.

There is no word yet on a distributor for the film, which skillfully culls more than 5,000 hours of footage, taking viewers on a crazy journey that leaves them with a lot to think about. Timoner has said she’s contemplating handling the distribution herself via the Web so she doesn’t have to give up creative rights.

Harris, for his part, said he doesn’t plan to watch the film but that he is supportive of Timoner’s mission. He was by her side for much of the festival.

One of many environmentally themed documentaries at the festival, The Cove is about the peril of dolphins in a secret cove nestled off a small coastal village in Japan. Its main character is Rick O’Barry, the dolphin trainer from the TV series Flipper. O’Barry leads a group of activists who reveal–using an array of covert cameras–the plight of the creatures after they are captured by the world’s largest dolphin supplier.

(Credit:
Sundance Film Festival)

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Sundance handout art)

Push filmmaker Lee Daniels, left, and stars Mariah Carey and Mo'Nique, take audience questions following their film's premiere last week at the Sundance Film Festival.

Ondi Timoner was awarded the Grand Jury prize Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, We Live in Public.

Here are a few other noteworthy Sundance awards: The World Cinema Jury prize for documentaries went to Rough Aunties, about women protecting and caring for the abused, neglected, and forgotten children of Durban, South Africa; the World Cinema Jury prize for dramatic films went to The Maid (La Nana), about a bitter and introverted maid who wreaks havoc on a Chilean household; the World Cinema Audience Award for documentaries went to Afghan Star, which is about the popularity of the Pop Idol TV show in Afghanistan and follows the stories of four contestants who risk their lives to sing; the World Cinema Audience Award for dramatic films went to An Education, in which a 16-year-old with sights set on Oxford University meets a handsome older man whose sophistication enraptures and sidetracks both her and her parents.

Harris’ next experiment, which led him to a mental breakdown, was a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour live surveillance online.

If Amazon believes those things, some will argue (certainly those in the anticopyright crowd) that the company should take a stand–if not for its own sake than on behalf of customers.

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David Carnoy/CBS Interactive)

Instead, Amazon sprung the feature on publishers and the retailer is now taking public-relations hits that it might have avoided if it hadn’t been so tight lipped.

Amazon chose to keep secret from much of the publishing sector the text-to-speech feature built into the Kindle 2.

For Amazon to be taking heat over this issue is silly. There’s not that much in it for the company. Next time, they should take a few more risks with media leaks and get some guidance.

Jeff Bezos and staff should have seen the text-to-speech controversy coming.

Hindsight is 20/20, sure. It’s easy to tweak Amazon for failing to see the problem coming. But how are execs handling the controversy now?

Amazon’s response has disappointed some customers, who are left with the impression that the retailer is unwilling to go to bat for them.

Following the debut of the Kindle 2, the 9,000-member Authors Guild claimed text-to-speech created a derivative work and violated copyright. Paul Aiken, the guild’s executive director said many publishers were also angered over the speech function, adding that Amazon never consulted beforehand with either of those groups. Amazon responded Friday by handing publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech feature on any title they choose.

Text-to-speech isn’t going to threaten audio books for a long time. That’s not my opinion. That’s the opinion of Andy Aaron, an IBM expert on text-to-speech and a self described “booster” of the technology.

“I don’t think at this point, or for the foreseeable future, (text-to-speech) is going to compete meaningfully with a professional book reader,” Aaron said last week. “Am I going to sit down and put my feet up and listen to text-to-speech read ‘War And Peace’ or ‘Harry Potter’ for six to eight hours? For someone who has the choice, I think they would rather get an audio book.”

The Kindle is a hit. The e-reader has been blessed by the doyenne of publishing herself: Oprah. A Citigroup analyst recently estimated that Amazon sold 500,000 units last year. He also predicted that the Kindle would generate $1.2 billion by 2010. That number didn’t include book sales.

This is exactly the kind of public relations blunder that Amazon can ill afford as it attempts to breathe life into the digital-book market. In this endeavor, who can argue that Amazon isn’t off to a great start?

Amazon might have avoided the controversy, had the company enlisted the counsel from important constituents in the publishing industry before launch. This way they could have a) learned about the objections quietly; b) done any haggling there and maybe come to a financial arrangement; c) scrapped the whole idea of text-to-speech if there was too much push back.

Fighting a potentially expensive and prolonged legal battle with suppliers is a lot to ask of Amazon or any other company. Perhaps if text-to-speech were a vital or much-loved feature, then Amazon would be more apt to hold the line. But it’s not.

“Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal,” Amazon said in a press release issued on Friday, announcing the company would give publishers the option of disabling text-to-speech on any title. “No copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.”

“If EMI is right, their argument indicts every single online storage service and ISP in the world,” Robertson said. “We didn’t invent this technology. That’s a default feature in every single storage system.”

It just wasn’t feasible to upload music this way, Robertson said. In order to speed up the process, MP3.com purchased $1 million worth of CDs and created software to scan a user’s hard drive. The software detected whether a user owned copies of songs found in MP3.com’s library. If they did, the service gave the user access to its copies.

Michael Robertson says corporations can't dictate what music buyers do with their legally purchased songs.

“Next to each Sideload song is a small “SL” icon,” EMI wrote in its complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York. “When users click that SL icon, MP3tunes makes a full permanent copy of the desired work and stores it in a locker assigned to that user at MP3tunes.com.”

Unauthorized performances

Let’s step back for a second. It’s incorrect to think of digital music lockers in the same way one thinks of a high school locker, says Robertson. Music uploaded into the site isn’t tucked neatly into some walled-off area. Songs from every customer are loaded onto the same hard drive, he said. But it’s important to note much of of the music is never actually stored, Robertson acknowledged. It would be inefficient and expensive to store numerous copies of, say, The Beatles’ classic “Yesterday” or AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”

(Credit:
Michael Robertson)

The label is also likely to compare MP3tunes to MP3.com and claim that in both cases Robertson operates a music data base without permission from the copyright owners. The only difference is that MP3tunes didn’t actually make any of the copies on the site.

“If EMI is right, their argument indicts every single online storage service and ISP in the world.” –Michael Robertson, MP3tunes founder

Robertson dismisses EMI’s claims and said Sideload is nothing but a search engine just like Google and Yahoo. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects service providers from responsibility for any crimes committed by users, Robertson said. He claims EMI’s lawsuit is designed to camouflage the record industry’s true goal, which is to prevent him and anyone else from storing music in digital lockers without first paying licensing fees.

Again, Robertson shrugs off EMI’s charges. He said his company is clean. Technology has improved and he doesn’t have to create a central music library. Users can create one for him by uploading their own songs. But wait. Is it legal to manage a central music library without permission from the copyright owners regardless of who stocked the library with songs?

Robertson has a point. How much sense does it make to store 10,000 copies of the 10,000 most popular songs? If the copies are exact, what’s the difference whether I’m listening to my bits or someone else’s as long as I legally purchased the music? Don’t I own the right to hear the song?

The labels zeroed in on this. Universal Music Group alleged in a copyright suit that MP3.com was unauthorized to use its songs as a data base. In a landmark decision, the judge agreed and MP3.com eventually paid UMG more than $53 million. Then the company, which had raised $370 million in a 1999 public offering, merged with Vivendi. Later, its domain name was sold to CNET, publisher of News.com.

For nearly a decade, Robertson, the often controversial cofounder of MP3.com and Linspire, has toiled to store music in the cloud, the term used to describe the seemingly limitless amount of data and services accessible with a Web browser. But in the past, Robertson’s efforts have led him into epic legal battles with the music industry. That’s where he finds himself once again. In November, EMI filed a copyright suit against him and his music service, MP3tunes.com.

“The court found that MP3.com had engaged in willful acts of copyright infringement,” EMI wrote in its latest lawsuit, adding that Robertson ultimately started MP3tunes.com as a “vehicle to achieve a comparable infringing purpose.”

More recently, Robertson has had to watch competitors generate headlines with an idea he helped pioneer. On Monday, Lala.com launched a service that enables customers to upload songs into digital music lockers (or the cloud) and then stream the tracks to Web-connected devices. Before launching, Lala obtained licenses from each of the top four recording companies. The differences between MP3tunes and Lala are many but chief among them is this: Robertson doesn’t believe services such as his are obligated to obtain licenses to help consumers store legally owned music.

A fitting anthem for Michael Robertson these days would be The Rolling Stones’ hit, Get Off of My Cloud.

To help prove that MP3tunes violates copyright law, EMI is focusing its legal attack on the way MP3tunes stores music, Robertson said. Before I get to that, there are some things about Robertson readers should know.

Is MP3tunes different than MP3.com?

First, this is certainly not his first court fight. He was one of the cofounders of MP3.com, which attracted a huge following in the late 1990s partly by doing what MP3tunes.com does now. MP3.com’s Beam-It program enabled users to load CDs into online lockers and access the songs from Web-enabled devices. The problem was 10 years ago many people were still limited by 56k connections.

EMI’s attorneys will almost certainly argue that a user purchases a set of bits and they only own the right to those bits.

EMI says issue is piracy

Little in EMI’s complaint indicates that the label objects to the storing of music in lockers, digital or otherwise. As a matter of fact, the document reads like a run-of-the-mill piracy complaint.

MP3tunes keeps a copy of a particular song and distributes that one to customers over and over again. This means, however, that the files users load onto the site are unlikely to be the same ones they hear when accessing their music. Every company handling digital information operates the exact same way, Robertson argues. Nonetheless, EMI claims that MP3tunes is not authorized to distribute music this way and is violating copyright law.

It will be interesting to see whether that’s enough of a distinction to satisfy the courts, especially when Robertson has acknowledged customers of MP3tunes, like those of MP3.com, aren’t listening to their own music files.

The record label accuses MP3tunes of then handing users the ability to share access to their music lockers with anybody. According to EMI, MP3tunes only requires customers to submit an e-mail and password to access their music. EMI lawyers argued that such lax security enables a locker to become a “virtual drop box for this illegal distribution.”

EMI, the smallest of the top labels, alleges that Robertson has set up his two operations, MP3tunes.com and Sideload.com, to deliver a one-two punch against copyright. According to EMI’s complaint, Sideload finds and organizes links to pilfered music files on the Web. MP3tunes then enables those pirated files to be stored, copied, and downloaded to devices without paying a dime to the music creators.

There’s potentially a lot at stake here–that is if you believe all our gadgets will one day connect to the Web, and that people will access music from celestial jukeboxes via whatever device is handiest. How Robertson’s legal case is decided could help determine who owns the keys to digital lockers.

“This is about what users are allowed to do with their music,” Robertson said. “Are they allowed to put it on their phone and their game devices or on multiple PCs without paying the labels each time? I say they are. Consumers don’t want a corporation deciding for them what they can do with their property.”

Microsoft has said a technical preview of the Web-based Office apps will come later this year. Microsoft hasn’t explicitly said there will be a free version, though executives have said the apps will be part of Office Live, which comes in both free and subscription flavors. Perez takes that to mean–as do I–that there will be both free and paid options.

In a blog posting on its Channel 10 site, a Microsoft blogger noted that, owing to support of
Firefox and
Safari, the forthcoming Office Web Applications will run on Linux and the
iPhone.

On the corporate side, Microsoft has said the Office Web Applications will be tied to SharePoint.

The blogger, Microsoft’s Sarah Perez, also noted that Microsoft won’t be mandating use of Silverlight, its rival to Adobe’s Flash.

A Microsoft blog reiterated this week that the Web-based version of Office won’t be tied to either Windows or Internet Explorer.

“Silverlight is not required,” Perez said in the Q-and-A posting. “Using Silverlight will enhance the user experience, resulting in sharper images and improved rendering. Also, the Office Live Workspace has integrated Silverlight technology into the multi-file upload function for a better experience.”

The forthcoming Web-based version of Microsoft Word, like online versions of Excel and PowerPoint, won’t be limited to the PC, Microsoft says.

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Microsoft)

A new feature called “Join the Discussion” was added Tuesday to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition Web site, Change.gov, making the site more interactive for visitors.

While the site still does not feature many user-driven elements, Obama’s advisers have indicated the president-elect is interested in embracing Web 2.0 ideas like wikis to help solve America’s problems. The transition team may be heading in that direction with the launch of the “Join the Discussion” page.

The new feature does not change that status much, as it simply allows people to post comments to the site. However, the page at least makes the comments viewable to other people. Other pages, such as “Share Your Story,” feature a submission form that is sent to the transition team. Some stories submitted via that page have been featured on the Change.gov blog.

Obama amassed a large following on multiple social-networking sites during his campaign, including his own social-networking site, MyBarackObama.com. By contrast, Change.gov appeared decidedly Web 1.0 at its launch.

The page “will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities,” the Change.gov blog says. “We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues–with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top.”

(Credit: Change.gov)

The new page allows people to post to comments on a specific topic deemed a top priority by Obama. The page’s first discussion focuses on health care and features a video from health care transition team members Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson. As of Wednesday morning, more than 1,100 comments had been posted.

“A critical part of our health reform efforts is making sure every American voice is heard,” Hughes says in the video. “We hope this is the beginning of a producitve and ongoing dialogue with Americans.”

The Jobs heart attack story was categorically denied by Apple but not before the company’s stock was already in a steep dive. Shares of Apple fell more than 9 percent before rebounding. Apple’s share price closed trading Friday at $97.07, down 3 percent.

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CNET News)

I’m working on a story in which I’ll try to answer some of the questions about how this happened. It should be posted soon.

Jennifer Martin, a CNN spokeswoman told CNET News that SEC investigators contacted the cable-news broadcaster seeking information on the person who posted the phony story to iReport.com. The CNN-owned site is dedicated to hosting news submitted by members of the public.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs

In order to submit a story on iReport, a person need only submit an e-mail address. Martin said that it clearly says on the site that most stories are not edited, filtered, or vetted. Those stories that have been checked out are labeled “On CNN.” This means that the cable network has verified the report and is using it on a CNN-branded TV show or Web site, she said. The Jobs heart attack story never got that label.

Some observers have speculated that someone may have posted the story to manipulate the stock market. A source close to the investigation said that CNN has attempted to contact the anonymous poster but hasn’t received a reply. Martin declined to say what kind of information the SEC has requested.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for the person who falsely reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack on Friday.

In these ways, open source offers proprietary vendors a way to enhance, rather than to replace, their offerings.

I hope not, but there are plenty of good reasons for Oracle to be looking at acquiring an open-source company like Red Hat, or to be contributing significantly to various open-source projects. Open-source companies like Pentaho, Digium, and others should be attractive buys and open-source projects should be compelling strategies right now, for a few different reasons:

It’s no surprise that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the prowl to acquire more companies, as reported by CNET, given that it gives him a chance to go shopping on the cheap.

commentary

Open source provides an efficient way to attract new customers. Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others spend huge piles of cash attracting new customers. Meanwhile, open source keeps making inroads at the departmental level of large companies and is using such beachheads to expand into enterprise-wide use. Sun is using a variant of this strategy with MySQL: MySQL gets the CIO’s phone number with a free download; Sun follows to get the CIO’s wallet with not-so-free systems.
Open source provides a clear up-sell opportunity for proprietary software vendors. IBM for years has been acquiring (e.g., Gluecode) or building (e.g., Linux) low-cost alternatives to its high-priced proprietary offerings, both to serve as “low-end” gateways to its higher-margin proprietary offerings like Websphere. Open source provides a way to maintain existing customers by offering low-cost alternatives in case a customer plans to replace his or her products. There will be a flight to value in this recession, as in others. By keeping that low-price, open-source rival in house, proprietary vendors can ensure that customers seeking lower-priced offerings will find them…on these same vendors’ price sheets.

Left to themselves, open-source vendors and projects will continue to eat away the revenue streams of proprietary competitors. It has boggled my mind lately to see proprietary vendors still hoping to compete with deficient software and price tags of $2 million or more for business problems worth $100,000 to $200,000, when the customer is fully aware of superior open-source solutions. It won’t continue.

.If times are tough, there are other opportunities…including making acquisitions that cost less… (A)cquisitions that we’ve been looking at for some time are less expensive for us.

An IBM may be impervious, but most proprietary vendors are not. Not for long, anyway.

Is Red Hat one of them?

The zeppelin NT (”new technology”), which is one of just three currently functioning zeppelins that exist in the world, and the biggest, at 246 feet, was named “Eureka,” a name that relates to the fact that the ship is based in California, as well as the fact that it is “rooted in scientific principles,” said Brian Bell, a co-founder of Airship Ventures, the ship’s owner, minutes before he revealed the new name.

But Alexandra Bell said that the Eureka may not end up being Airship Ventures’ only zeppelin (See video below of the first flight of the Eureka after its dedication).

At an event here to celebrate the two milestones, Alexandra Bell, also a co-founder of Airship Ventures, spoke of the experience of getting the zeppelin program off the ground. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), as well as Pete Worden, director of the NASA Ames Research Center, attended the event.

The co-founders of Airship Ventures pull back the cover on the name of their brand-new zeppelin, the largest in the world, at the event Friday. The zeppelin is called the Eureka.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

While the Eureka is the largest currently functioning zeppelin, the airships from the golden age of zeppelins were much, much larger. The Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin were about 800 feet long, and the Macon, which was based at Moffat for a couple of years in the 1930s, was 785 feet long.

“We decided we just have to get a couple more,” she said, “so we can name them with some of the other wonderful names” we got.

Airship Ventures is the first company in the United States to offer public access to zeppelins. And the company will be carrying paying passengers around the Bay Area, as well as helping NASA carry out scientific research.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.–NASA celebrated the 75th anniversary of this iconic airfield and research center on Friday by dedicating a brand-new zeppelin from a private company called Airship Ventures.

Brian Bell explained that Airship Ventures had a naming contest and received more than 1,500 submissions, five of which turned out to be “Eureka,” a name that those involved in the company had already been thinking about anyway.

The zeppelin, Eureka, sits on the tarmac at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. The airship was dedicated Friday at an event celebrating the 75h anniversary of Moffett Field.

“Although CEA certainly took price declines and weakness in consumer demand into consideration, the severity and the speed of declines in these unprecedented times caught everyone off guard,” Jason Oxman, CEA’s senior vice president of industry affairs, said in a statement. “Consumer sentiment is improving, but shopper unease this holiday season is creating challenges for all sectors of the economy, including consumer electronics.”

The Consumer Electronics Association says the money made from electronics shipments in the fourth quarter of this year will be basically on par as the same quarter a year ago.

That’s not good news for gadget makers. For the fourth quarter of this year, the revenue from products shipped will increase by a negligible 0.1 percent over the same quarter in 2007, according to the CEA’s revised forecast. The industry group had previously predicted electronics shipment revenue would grow 3.7 percent for the quarter.

Falling TV prices have hurt revenue, as has the increased interest in lower-priced laptops and Netbooks, according to the CEA. Cell phones should also be hit particularly hard during the final quarter of the year, when growth is now estimated to be just 5 percent, down from the previously expected 11 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the economy is being blamed for the stagnating growth.

A settlement was reached on September 8, under which Mygazines agreed to remove the publishers’ copyrighted content and review uploaded content for unauthorized material, according to Folio.

Mygazines still offers digital copies of magazines like Today’s Bride and Computer Graphics World.

Launched in late July, Mygazines allows users to upload and share magazines and originally offered clear, complete digital copies of popular magazines such as People, Esquire, and Allure. A number of publishers, including Time Inc., Hearst, and Newsweek, filed suit in a New York district court on August 21, asking the site to be shut down in the U.S.

Just months after its launch, the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com is largely cutting back on the free content it offers, after reaching a settlement agreement in a suit filed by a group of magazine publishers.

The suit was filed against Budd Salveo, run by a Canadian named Darren Budd, which registered the site in the Caribbean island of Anguilla. On September 9, a Toronto court issued an order to uphold the settlement.

(Credit: Mygazines.com)