The TV industry has been lobbying against consumer freedom since the first VCR made its way into the first home. To its credit, the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that people were perfectly within their rights to tape programs off the air and watch them whenever they wanted to. (The music industry hasn’t quite heard the news yet, but that’s a rant for another day.)

In the last few years, the tape in some VCRs has been replaced with a hard drive, giving rise to the TiVO and Replay products. The improvements are essentially three-fold. The new DVRs (digital video recorders) let you pause live TV, provide an enhanced program guide, and can automatically recommend and record programs based on your viewing habits. Like a VCR, you can zip forward and back through a program, skipping whatever part you might want to skip. Like opening credits. Like commercials.

As does anyone who makes his living in the media, I am perfectly aware that my salary is paid by commercials. I even like commercials, because they are (sometimes) entertaining and (sometimes) provide interesting information that I would not ordinarily know. In a magazine, I can turn the page when I want. In the TV business, that prospect makes networks and broadcasters nuts.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, a federal magistrage in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue, which makes Replay, to write software that will track the every click of every user’s remote control. Why? Because Replay is getting sued. There’s a button on the Replay remote that lets its customers instantly jump over commercials (it’s a little harder to do this with TiVO), and the networks and broadcasters say that’s costing them money. They’ve persuaded the good judge that the way people use Replay products is germane, and the only way to track that is to invade the privacy of Replay’s customers.

(I would say that Replay’s hands are not entirely clean here. The Replay 4000 includes an Ethernet port that lets users transmit programming to other people over the Net. This strikes me as just begging for trouble.)

There’s a federal law that says video store rental records must be kept confidential. The law was passed after the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who had some interesting viewing habits. Anyone know if Mr. Justice Thomas is a Replay customer?

The French company Vivendi Universal is one of the Big Six global entertainment companies. It’s been having some trouble of late; among other things, the firing of the CEO of Canal Plus sparked demonstrations and protests, and shareholders have had their doubts about the French company buying the U.S.-based Universal Studios and its associated record labels.

Well, Vivendi held its annual meeting last week, and not everything went as planned. Two management proposals, including a lucrative stock option plan for management, were unexpectedly defeated.

Wait — we’re just getting to the techie part.

Management says that surely was a mistake of science fiction proportions, and has a science fiction reason: the company is blaming hackers for breaking into its wireless voting system and making mischief. Other experts are not so sure.

In any event, a French court today bought the excuse, and is allowing the company to re-run the annual meeting. All except the dividend vote; the dividend will be paid as agreed at the meeting, hackers or no hackers.

The National Research Council has released a study about protecting children from online pornography. As a congressionally chartered organization, one might expect the usual flaming about the evils of the Internet. Happily, one apparently would be wrong.

The full report — 420 pages, so you probably won’t want to read it all online — is here. (You can buy it in print, too.) A New York Times story about it is here.

The nut grafs:

“Though some might wish otherwise, no single approach — technical, legal, economic, or educational — will be sufficient,” wrote the authors of the report, “Youth, Pornography and the Internet,” which was released Thursday by the National Research Council. “Rather, an effective framework for protecting our children from inappropriate materials and experiences on the Internet will require a balanced composite of all of these elements, and real progress will require forward movement on all of these fronts.”

What might seem to a rather bland conclusion to a massive effort of research and discussions with policymakers, educators, librarians, parents and children and others in visits to schools and libraries around the nation is actually a surprising stand, said Alan Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech policy organization in Washington.

“The report dares to be un-sexy,” he said. “It does not call for legislation to solve this problem,” despite a strong push in Congress to pass laws requring such technology tools as pornography filters in schools and libraries. One such law, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, is currently being challenged in federal court by a coalition of librarians and civil liberties groups; a decision in that case is expected this month.

Recommending a broad approach “is not nearly as satisfying as passing a law or pointing to a technology,” Mr. Davidson said, “but it is probably, in the long run, the most effective way to protect children online.”

In other words, filters won’t do the trick. Congress should take note.

There’s some good news and not-so-good news today from Ziff Davis.

Ziff is the publisher of — among other things — PC Magazine, Yahoo Internet Life, and a bunch of gaming titles. I used to work there twice. I don’t anymore. A lot of friends still do. It was a financial pawn for a few years during the boom, and it again (or maybe still) in deep financial trouble. In plain English, it’s borrowed so much money — $250 million at 12 percent — and business is so bad that it doesn’t have the cash to both make its payments and run the business. (Just to put the 12 percent in perspective, you probably are carrying credit cards that have a lower interest rate, though your credit line is probably less than $250 million. If it isn’t, please call me ASAP to discuss some business dealings.)

The company made a fairly big deal yesterday out of saying that the holders of 60 percent of that $250 million in notes  have agreed to a deal. Willis Stein, the investment bank that Ziff’s majority owner, is kicking in another $80 million in cash to Ziff. Of that, $30 million will go to bondholders. The bondholders are also being offered $95 million in what amounts to stock in the company. The theory, I guess, is that $95 million in equity is better than $250 million in debt that wouldn’t be paid if the company goes belly-up.

All this moving around of deck chairs will free up $30 million a year in money that otherwise would have been interest payments.

There are a few rubs. First, the deal requires that 95 percent of the bondholders agree. Sixty percent is nice, but not nearly enough. And second, the company’s banks have to agree to this scheme, and Ziff is already in default to them.

The stakes are high. In Ziff’s SEC filing yesterday, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said that the company may not be able to continue as a going concern unless the finances are straightened out. And even after that $250 million goes away, Ziff still owes another $175 million-plus.

Lyndon B. Johnson. “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” [Quotes of the Day]

There’s a piece in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, wherein J.D. Lasica interviews John Battelle (former publisher of The Industry Standard), David Talbot (founding editor of Salon) and Josh Quittner (former editor of The Netly News and current editor of Business 2.0). The subject at hand: how anything interesting in the media is happening a) on the West Coast and b) online.

The thing reeks of the attitude, “Well, we went bust but we were right, gosh darn it.” Yeah right.

Lasica makes the perfect point: although the weight of the Internet Media World was in San Francisco, the subject of most of the media was technology itself. This may come as a shock, but most people don’t care about technology. It’s true that many people with computers care about technology, and that the proportion of people on the Net to people with computers is remarkably high. But in many ways, what the West Coast Internet Revolution produced was a Golden Age of Trade Journalism.

What’s worse, they never demonstrated that anyone was willing to pay for it. Some commercial revolution.

 What did Battelle take away from the flame-out of The Standard? Stay small, stay focussed, stay personal. Pretty good advice, actually. Just not exactly new advice, if you get my drift.

So it turns out that the poor schlep at the nursing home didn’t have the winning ticket after all. He bought tickets for the pool, then was out sick for three days after the drawing. Nice friends this guy’s got, huh? Add a bunch of lawyers and a some reporters, and stir well.

After all that, the nurses did actually win some money. Two dollars. Don’t spend it all in one place, OK?

The real winners came forward today: a restaurant manager and his wife of 20 years. The couple had filed for bankruptcy last year, owing nearly $600,000 — including $48,000 to the humor-deprived IRS — but the petition was never finalized so they still owe the money. I think they’ll be able to pay.

Now — no more lottery stories. Unless I win.

I just came across this CNN story from January, but I don’t think it’s gotten the play that it merits.

You probably know that the Internet has its roots in the  Defense Department’s old Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The guy in charge of information processing for ARPA — what became known as ARPANet — was Lawrence Roberts. Roberts said some interesting things in January. Among them:

• Tech slowdown or no tech slowdown, Net traffic has consistently been doubling every year.


• In January, the Net handled 55 petabytes of data. For you English system mavens, that’s 55 quadrillion, or 55,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In one month.


• The pace will continue to grow for another 10 years, at which point growth will slow. But doubling traffic every year for 10 years means that there will be three more zeros at the end of that already very long number above.

My question: will that kind of traffic allow all the dark fiber that was installed in the 1990s to be turned on?

A couple of years ago, my friend Cia Romano introduced me to Susan Kitchens, whose excellent weblog I check out pretty frequently. Susan has a piece today about the LA Times’s coverage of the entertainment industry’s lobbying of Congress; in short, the entertainment guys want to put some pretty severe restrictions on how consumers use and view their products. Nothing like treating your customers like criminals, guys.

Some of you know that there’s a company — E.Ink — making small quantities of an extremely thin, extremely flexible computer display. The Wall Street Journal carries a story today about the company’s prediction that within five years, people will buy a booklet of this stuff and download a copy of the day’s newspaper to it.

Color me skeptical. This might be fine (for some small value of “fine”) if you’re a subscriber to the paper, but it does kind of kill the newsstand purchase. “That’ll be 50 cents for today’s paper and $1000 for the reader, buddy.”

And like most bad ideas of this ilk, the impetus seems to be publishers’ desire to cut cost, not reader demand for a new service or gadget. Check this quote:

“Delivery and printing makes up well over half the expenses at any newspaper,” says Ken Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media. (Parent Hearst [an investor in E.Ink] publishes the San Francisco Chronicle and other dailies.) “The idea of eliminating that cost, to a degree, is a dream for any company. It’s a big, big idea.”

Remember: publishers were attracted to the Net because they saw it as a way to cut their distribution costs. No one told them that servers, software and bandwidth were expensive, too. Nice to know they were paying attention…