Facebook Blocks Profile Removal Service

BBC News

Social network giant Facebook has blocked a website from accessing people's profiles in order to delete their online presence.

The site, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, offers to remove users from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace.

It does not delete their accounts but changes the passwords and removes "friend" connections.

Seppukoo.com, which offers a similar service, was issued with a "cease and desist" letter by Facebook in 2009.

Netherlands-based moddr, behind Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, says it believes that "everyone should have the right to disconnect".

However Facebook says that by collecting login credentials, the site violates its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).

"Facebook provides the ability for people who no longer want to use the site to either deactivate their account or delete it completely," the company said. "We're currently investigating and considering whether to take further action."

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine claims that it only stores the name, profile picture and "last words" of its clients, who can choose to watch their friend/follower connections disappear in real time as their profiles unlink from others.

"Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web 2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom," says a statement on its website.

The machine operates on an adjusted Linux server which runs open source software Apache 2.

Seppukoo.com, which offers to remove people from Facebook, received a letter from the social network site's lawyers in December 2009.

Once they have deleted their friends Seppukoo clients can choose an image instead of their profile picture to remain as a "memorial" .

The site is run by a group called Les Liens Invisibles, and describes itself as an artistic project. The name Seppukoo is taken from a Japanese ritual form of suicide known as Seppuku.

In November 2009 the group orchestrated the "virtual suicide" of a group of fictitious Facebook profiles set up in the names of deceased well-known figures including Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Virginia Woolf.

Netflix Envoy Pitches Online Films to Wary Studios

Bloomberg

Netflix Inc. Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos bypassed Hollywood to jump-start the company’s online film-rental business last year. Now he has to convince the studios the company is a friend and not a foe.

Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings is counting on Sarandos to cut deals with studios giving Netflix rights to show more films over the Web. Sarandos, 45, says he is willing to write big checks after Netflix went around Walt Disney Co. and Sony Corp. to gain access to movies from the Starz network.

“We have to fight against their fear that we’ll destroy the ecosystem,” Sarandos, a former video-store clerk, said at a Dec. 16 panel discussion. “We’re not destroying anything. We’re creating a new opportunity.”

Sarandos’s success is critical to Netflix as viewers move to the Web, endangering the mail-order DVD rental business that helped the company upend brick-and-mortar stores such as Blockbuster Inc. His challenge is to persuade studios to provide content as they explore their own digital options, including offering movies online themselves.

“The challenge for Netflix is what to do when the world migrates to digital distribution and whether it can obtain product from all the studios as that’s happening,” said Warren Lieberfarb, the former head of Warner Bros. DVD operations.

Netflix, the largest mail-order film-rental service, offers Web-based movie-viewing that’s used by 42 percent of its 11.1 million subscribers, according to the company. It has an online library of 17,000 films and TV shows.

DVDs Yes, Streaming No?

The studios, coping with a decline in DVD sales, are trying to avoid the fate of newspapers and music labels, which lost sales when their content went online. Hollywood executives view the Internet-based distribution as a threat to the traditional way money is made from movies.

“Everybody views it as a terminal career decision if you get it wrong,” said Frank Biondi, who has led Universal Studios, Time Warner Inc.’s HBO cable network and Viacom Inc., owner of Paramount Pictures.

Acquiring DVDs has rarely been a problem for Netflix, which charges $8.99 a month and up for its mail-order service. The company needs additional rights from the studios to stream films to PCs, game consoles and Web-linked TVs.

Netflix gained streaming rights to Disney and Sony movies including “Ratatouille” and “Spider-Man 3” last year by allying with Starz, the pay-TV network controlled by John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp., based in Englewood, Colorado. In the future, permission will have to come from the studios, Netflix said in its annual report.

Hollywood Breadbasket

The Starz partnership created animosity in Hollywood, according to Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, who recommends selling Netflix shares. The retailer will probably need to pay studios more or risk losing content, he said.

Paramount, based in Los Angeles, supplies older titles to Netflix for streaming, Thomas Lesinski, head of home entertainment, said in an e-mail. “But not new releases.”

Home entertainment executives at the other major studios declined to be interviewed.

DVDs rank as the most profitable part of Hollywood’s film business, with studios keeping about 80 percent of each purchase, according to Tom Adams, president of Monterey, California-based Adams Media Research. Sales will fall about 10 percent to $13 billion this year, according to Adams, who tracks the market. Rentals will total $8 billion, unchanged from 2008. Studios also will get about $2 billion from premium cable in the U.S. and $1 billion from basic cable and broadcast TV.

Market Share

Sarandos, based in Beverly Hills, California, and Hastings, 49, pledge to pay studios more as online viewing replaces the mail-order business. The company estimates it will spend $600 million next year shipping DVDs.

“We’ll become one of the networks’ and studios’ largest revenue generators,” Hastings said. He expects to be mailing DVDs until 2030.

Netflix’s DVD subscription service is projected by analysts to drive profit of $110.8 million this year on sales of $1.67 billion, a 22 percent gain from 2008. The shares, which have almost doubled this year, fell 36 cents to $56.98 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Through the first half of 2009, Netflix accounted for $803 million of the $4.14 billion U.S. rental market, trailing Blockbuster Inc.’s $986 million, according to Janney Montgomery, which cited Adams Media data.

The big studios -- Warner Bros., Disney, News Corp.’s Fox, Paramount, Sony and General Electric Co.’s Universal -- sell films in separate windows and times. Movies go from theaters to stores, for purchase or rental, to cable and satellite pay-per- view, to premium channels like HBO, then basic cable and broadcast, with studios collecting money at every step.

Existing Contracts

Hastings’s aim is to find a niche for streaming.

Netflix’s goal of streaming films to rental customers when DVDs arrive in stores or air on pay TV would violate studio agreements with cable networks, said Biondi who’s now senior managing director of WaterView Advisors LLC, a New York-based private-equity firm.

“Not that those can’t be reset,” Biondi said in an interview. “But you’re going to have big customer sets that are going to be very unhappy.”

Sarandos says Netflix is creating a business that didn’t exist before, partnering with Tokyo-based Sony, Microsoft Corp. and TiVo Inc. to stream films to game consoles and set-top boxes. It is also vying with cable operators such as Comcast Corp., which is introducing an online service, studios including New York-based Time Warner and Burbank, California-based Disney, as well as Apple Inc. and retailer Best Buy Co.

Sale-Only Window

Researcher iSuppli Corp. in El Segundo, California, estimates consumers worldwide will have 376.5 million devices that can receive Web video content by 2013, up from 94.8 million now. Netflix plans to expand internationally with a streaming- only service next year, Hastings said in October.

The studios have seen rental chains buckle under competition from Netflix and Bellevue, Washington-based Coinstar Inc., operator of Redbox kiosks that rent movies for $1 a day. Time Warner is seeking more money from Netflix, whose Web site no longer features the studio’s DVDs -- a possible “sign of strain,” Janney’s Wible said in a Dec. 17 research note.

To alleviate fears that its online service won’t cannibalize existing revenue, Netflix has suggested it may agree to a new sales-only window in which movies can’t be rented.

Sarandos often meets with Hollywood brass over breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

‘Trust and Relationships’

“Doing business in Hollywood is very much built on trust and relationships,” Sarandos said in an interview.

In May, Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., hosted Netflix executives for a demonstration of 3-D home movies. At the Video Hall of Fame dinner this month, Sarandos mingled with executives like Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. President Steve Beeks.

“If you could assume anybody’s position in the game right now you’d probably prefer Netflix’s,” said Kevin Landis, the founder of SiVest Group Inc., in Santa Clara, California, which owns 227,000 Netflix shares.

Craigslist Removes Brittany Murphy Video

Contact Music

Rocker CHRIS CORNELL is reportedly fuming after video footage showing tragic actress BRITTANY MURPHY partying at his wedding surfaced online.

Clips from the Soundgarden star's 2004 nuptials to his wife Vicky, whose maid of honour was the late Clueless star, were said to have been put up for sale on Craigslist.

Cornell, who alleges the video was stolen, has threatened to sue the online ad site and even asked its owners to hand over the details of the person selling the tape, according to the New York Post.

A source tells the newspaper, "The video features behind-the-scenes wedding moments, many of Brittany Murphy."

The ad has since been removed.

Murphy died after suffering a cardiac arrest early last month

Fox And Time Warner Cable Reach Agreement

LA Times

The first big media showdown of 2010, which threatened to break out in war, ended with a peace treaty.

After weeks of posturing and mudslinging media campaigns, an agreement was reached Friday afternoon that will keep News Corp.'s Fox television stations and several of its cable channels on Time Warner Cable systems in Los Angeles and nationwide.

The deal was struck less than a day after the previous contract expired, averting a potential public relations disaster for both companies. Otherwise, Time Warner Cable customers would have had to find alternative ways to watch the college bowl and National Football League games broadcast on Fox during one of the biggest sports weeks of the year.

News Corp. granted extensions to Time Warner Cable to keep the Fox signals on the air while talks continued, and viewers were spared having to wonder what happened to their programs.

Such standoffs between programmers and distributors, once rare, are becoming more commonplace. With advertising dollars tougher to come by and audiences fragmenting, broadcasters are seeing fees from cable and satellite operators to retransmit their signals as a crucial component of their financial health.

Washington lawmakers pressured News Corp. and Time Warner Cable not to drag consumers into their financial dispute by allowing the Fox signals to go dark just before the network started airing a series of popular bowl games.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communication, Technology and the Internet, and Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, praised the two companies for reaching the accord.

In addition to the Fox TV stations -- including KTTV-TV Channel 11 and KCOP-TV Channel 13 in Los Angeles -- several cable networks, including FX, Fuel and local sports channels Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, are covered by the new contract. Fox News has a separate deal with Time Warner Cable and was not part of the dispute.

News Corp. had been seeking a fee of $1 per subscriber, per month, to carry its Fox TV stations. Time Warner countered with an offer in the neighborhood of 30 cents. In pressing for the $1 fee, News Corp. argued that cable channel TNT gets about that amount with a smaller audience.

Time Warner Cable contended that Fox was trying to extract too high a price and bought advertisements in newspapers accusing it of trying to hold consumers "hostage."

Neither Time Warner nor News Corp. would provide details on the new agreement. In a statement, News Corp. President Chase Carey said the pact was "fair" and "recognizes the value of our programming." Time Warner Cable Chairman Glenn Britt called it a "reasonable deal."

Although News Corp.'s Carey had talked tough about sticking to Fox's demands, analysts viewed the $1 fee as a jumping-off point for negotiations. Typically, carriage deals last at least three years, and often five, with the fees paid by the cable operator rising over the period of the deal.

Though the Time Warner and Fox corporate slugfest ended without any signals being lost, fans of Food Network and Home & Garden Television were not so lucky.

Those cable channels, operated by Scripps Networks Interactive Inc., went off the cable systems of Cablevision Systems Corp., which serves parts of Long Island, New York City and Connecticut, because of a similar dispute.

Bobby Flay, a chef who has a show on Food Network, told his Twitter followers to "bang away at Cablevision."

Another retransmission fight is occurring between Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the nation's largest owners of TV stations, and Mediacomm Communications Corp., a cable operator with systems in 23 states.

Time Warner Cable, which is also negotiating with Food Network, may face another such scenario this year when it has to sign a new agreement to continue carrying Walt Disney Co.'s ABC stations, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles. Those two companies are no strangers to bitter fights. In 2000, the signals for ABC's stations went off of Time Warner for almost two days during a public battle.

Despite the public acrimony between News Corp. and Time Warner, the private negotiations were for the most part amicable, people close to the situation said.

The negotiations were held on the Fox lot in Century City. Mike Hopkins, who oversees distribution for Fox, and Melinda Witmer, Time Warner Cable's programming chief, would huddle with their respective teams in a conference room in a studio office building. Then each side would retreat to a war room and debrief their bosses and analyze the proposals.

That didn't mean there weren't some testy moments.

Early Friday morning Time Warner Cable ran an announcement on some of its East Coast systems that said it had "reached an agreement with Fox that protects our customers' pocketbooks." In fact, no deal had been reached, and the triumphant tone of the announcement irritated Fox executives.

Representatives of Time Warner Cable acknowledged the foul-up but declined to explain how it happened.

Digital Piracy Hits The E-Book Industry

CNN

When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

"It's fair to say that piracy of e-books is exploding," said Albert Greco, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more illegal downloads. But digital theft may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.

"Piracy is a serious issue for publishers," said Hachette Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular "Twilight" teen-vampire series says it "considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance."

Authors are concerned as well.

"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it's going to be to pirate them," said novelist and poet Sherman Alexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.

"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."

And it's not just bestsellers that are targeted by thieves.

"Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. "We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Piracy of digital music, thanks to Napster and other file-sharing sites, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat illegal downloading, from shutting down Web sites to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual file-sharers.

Although illegal file-sharing of music persists, Apple's online iTunes store is now the world's biggest seller of music.

To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat e-book piracy, and you'll get a wide range of opinions.

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated.

Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins, told CNN, "we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally."

E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.

"Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"

Disney Takeover Approved By Marvel Shareholders

NY Times

Shareholders of Marvel Entertainment, the publisher of Spider-Man and the Hulk comics, on Thursday approved the company’s acquisition by the Walt Disney Company, as expected.

Marvel said the $4.3 billion acquisition would close at the end of the day, bringing Spider-Man, Iron Man and 5,000 other comic-book characters under the same roof as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Approval of the deal was expected. The chief executive, Isaac Perlmutter, who owns 37 percent of Marvel stock, supported it. He will be overseeing the Marvel business after the acquisition.

Marvel shareholders will receive $30 a share in cash, and 0.745 Disney shares for every Marvel share they own. Disney shares closed at $32.25 on Thursday, down 3 cents. Marvel shares closed at $54.08, up 3 cents.

The deal is Disney’s largest since it acquired Pixar Animation Studios, the maker of “Up” and “Cars,” for $7.4 billion in stock in 2006.