[The First Part of this series was <<A: Open Source. The second installment of the Stop Usage Based Billing alphabet series was <<B: Packets and the Internet. The third installment was <a href="<<C: Deep Packet Inspection, and the final installment will be E: Open Source Deep Packet Inspection]

What is BitTorrent Anyway??

“BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounts for approximately 27-55% of all Internet traffic (depending on geographical location) as of February 2009.”

– Wikipedia on BitTorrent

BitTorrent is an extremely fast and efficient means of uploading and downloading. BitTorrent is an excellent way to distribute large materials to many people via the internet.

Radical Ideas

Like so many of the radical new ways to do things that technology and the internet have made possible, BitTorrent can only work through co-operation. BitTorrent requires a network of “peers”, or other people’s computers who are willing to share the file. This is referred to as “peer to peer” or “p2p.

If I have a large file I want to transfer, the first step is to “seed” the file, transferring portions of the file to multiple members of the p2p network.

Diagram 1: Seeding

It only takes a small fraction of the file to be passed along before the process speeds up enormously.

Diagram 2: Seeding and Sharing

Once I have a small portion, i pass it along at the same time as I’m receiving new bits of the same file, either from the original seed source of another peer.

Diagram 3: Upload + Download = Speed

With many participants (peers) uploading and downloading at the same time, large files can be distributed very quickly indeed.

Diagram 4: Finish Fast

Bell Canada “Throttles” BitTorrent

Bell Canada

When Bell Canada was first caught “throttling” internet traffic to the Independent ISP customers, Bell Canada’s justification to the CRTC was that the internet was too crowded, and that it was necessary to “manage” the traffic. Bell claimed that they needed to employ Deep Packet Inspection to identify BitTorrent Traffic so that they can “throttle” it.

Mandate:
“The CRTC’s mandate is to ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public. ”

—CRTC Role, CRTC Website

Amazingly, the CRTC had nothing to say about Bell Canada’s plans to discriminate against particular Canadian internet users.

The CRTC has accepted Bell’s unsubstantiated contention that this discrimination was necessary, and in approving it they have allowed Bell Canada to think that this discrimination is acceptable. In no way does this serve the Canadian public.

You might almost think that the CRTC mandate was to suppress Canadian creativity and the creation of Canadian movies and music. The availability of the technologies that exist to make it easy to create our own movies and music should be welcomed as an opportunity to add to and help grow our Canadian Culture.

Why single out BitTorrent traffic for throttling if it is an efficient use of the available bandwidth?

One of Bell Canada’s arguments for implementation of Usage Based Billing is that Canadian internet bandwidth is in short supply, making it necessary for them to “manage” bandwidth by penalizing heavy users.

So how could anything as efficient as BitTorrent possibly be seen as a bad thing if the Internet is so crowded?

It doesn’t make sense to discriminate against BitTorrent use. There is nothing inherently bad about BitTorrent use or BitTorrent internet traffic. But Bell Canada’s contention is that BitTorrent is bad because people use it to download movies and music.

Which begs the question: how does that make BitTorrent bad?

The Copyright Red Herring

The “Copyright Lobby”, which consists of large media producers and distributors (like Disney), and corporations and organizations (like MPAA), who distribute commercial movies and music, want us to believe that this is a bad thing.

This corporate special interest group has spent a great deal of time, energy and cash trying to promote the “pravda” that any digital copying of copyright works is bad. Making no distinction between commercial bootleggers who distribute illegal copies for profit and legal purchasers who seek to make a back-up copy or digital format shift for personal use, the Copyright Lobby has been pressuring governments the world over to criminalize personal use copying.

The problem for ordinary citizens is that these corporate interests have vast quantities of money to spend and a great deal of media power. This makes it incredibly difficult for governments to stand up to their onslaught. In some parts of the world this persistent advocacy has paid off for the Copyright Lobby, as lawmakers knuckle under and legislate to the detriment of their own citizens by making it illegal even to copy or download movies or music for personal use.

Here in Canada the Copyright Lobby is seeking to influence our lawmakers to criminalize personal use copying. They are trying to make Canadians think that people who make copies for personal use are performing criminal acts, and should be penalized the same as a a bootlegger who films the latest theatrical release off a theatre screen and proceeds to sell hundreds of thousands of bootleg DVDs.

Once again, Channel Four’s hilarious I.T. Crowd puts this question in perspective with this send-up of a video piracy commercial I found on YouTube.

Strong and free?

Canadian Law says

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, personal use copying is simply not illegal.

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, use of the BitTorrent file transfer protocol is also perfectly legal.

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, peer to peer (p2p) file sharing is legal; Canadians break no laws simply by joining in a p2p network.

The Copyright Lobby’s smear tactics have gone a long way toward making the world believe that BitTorrent is inherently bad.

Bell Canada has convinced the CRTC that it is acceptable to “throttle” BitTorrent, because of BitTorrent’s reputed connection with possible copyright infringement. So although BitTorrent is perfectly legal, Canadian internet users are paying the price for the success of this Copyright Lobby propaganda.

Myth: All BitTorrent/p2p internet traffic consists of copyright movies and music

The Corporate world doesn’t understand radical ideas like Open Source software and p2p file sharing because these concepts are so different from anything appearing in the old business models. Even more incomprehensible to the outdated business models is the fact that it may or may not generate a direct monetary profit.

The classic example of corporate myopia is:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. ”

—attributed to Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines, circa 1943

For many years IBM has taken the rap for this quote whether or not Mr. Watson really did say it. (Most likely not.) Maybe proving it wrong is part of why IBM is such a going concern in the 21st Century. Having weathered the storms of fortune today’s IBM is a world leader by continuing to innovate and adapt alongside evolving attitudes and technologies. IBM has been steadily increasing their participation and involvement with Open Source software in this new century.

The reality is that IBM not only understands the importance of open source, the corporation has actively supported and promoted adoption of Linux and Open Office in the corporate world. And naturally BitTorrent is a part of the equation because it is such an efficient means to distribute large files (like for instance, Canonical’s Ubuntu.)

“Think.”

—Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines

Seems IBM actually does heed their most enduring slogan (which definitely was coined by Mr. Watson). Sadly, this type of foresight is uncommon. Because BitTorrent is such a radical idea, most entrenched corporations simply aren’t capable of understanding it.

There are other uses for BitTorrent that are not only legal, but even perfectly acceptable in polite society.

Probably my favorite use of BitTorrent is the amazing Project Gutenberg. This organization has been digitizing books in the public domain and distributing them freely… via BitTorrent, since this is such an efficient method of digital distribution. After all, BitTorrent is used for transferring very large files like music and movies because it is very efficient.

BitTorrent file sharing is not all movies and music. Like IBM, many people actually use p2p to help distribute open source software like OpenOffice via p2p. There is a growing body of open source software available, for instance my favorite web browser is Mozilla’s Firefox.

In fact, there the awesome SourceForge website which provides a place to find all manner of open source software, or where you can release your own.

When a new distribution of Ubuntu is released, people around the world gather together and have Ubuntu Release Parties making more good use of BitTorrent

And of course the Pirate Party of Canada has established Captain: the Canadian Pirate Tracker, their own BitTorrent site where Recording Artists and Filmmakers (and I imagine novelists, and software creators as well would be welcome to utilize this) to freely distribute their work.

Every bit of music and every movie transferred is not a copyright infringement. If I get to the point where my home made movies may prove marketable, I would certainly be looking at BitTorrent Distribution. In fact it would probably be easier to distribute home movies to family via BitTorrent than it would be to try to burn DVDs. (DRM makes the two commercial movie making software packages I’ve purchased almost unusable. Of course it doesn’t slow down the bootleggers.) If YouTube is an indicator, I’m not the only person who wants to transfer music and movies freely … not as copyright infringements. I have paid levies to the music industry for home movies I have made and burrned to CD for distribution to friends and family. If I choose to transfer them via BitTorrent now I can avoid the levy but instead suffer the added expense of Bell Canada’s deliberate throttling inflation?

Another really good legal use of BitTorrents are the actual commercial websites where people can go to to purchase downloads of music. So far no one seems to have found anything wrong with this practice.

But that’s not all. Canada’s own CBC Television Network tried their own experiment by releasing an episode of their program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister via BitTorrent. Unfortunately the BitTorrent didn’t work so well because of Bell Canada’s CRTC approved BitTorrent “throttling”.

Geist tweets about the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

Which is not to say it wasn’t a good idea. Not too long ago Michael Geist tweeted about the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s foray into BitTorrent use. All accounts indicate that their experiment was very successful indeed, which is having a big impact in the way they do business.

Ink Poster

The sad tale of a pirated Independent film can be found in this TorrentFreak article Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy.

I guess it isn’t such a sad story after all.  

Thanks to piracy this Indie film called INK was has been achieving a distribution level that the filmmakers had never dreamed of.  They are of course extraordinarily pleased.

I think what is being called piracy here is BitTorrent p2p personal use sharing. Friends sharing with friends is one of the most effective ways to achieve recognition. They used to call it a “grass roots” movement. This is one of the major issues for the large movie studios. This is the place where they complain of being ripped off. What they don’t seem to realize is that this is a good thing. Exposure garners fans, makes a “name”. Fans buy stuff.

BitTorrent Traffic is not the only thing Bell Canada is Throttling

Rumour has it that there are people who actually work from home.

Time was the government encouraged the idea of people working from home. There are all sorts of advantages to society, like reduced congestion on actual highways, less wear and tear on our roads, a decrease in commuting based pollutants in our environment, a reduction of human depletion of fossil fuels.

But if you work from home, you are probably going to have to transfer files back and forth between your home and workplace. Chances are good that you are going to encrypt this type of traffic for security reasons. Although Bell Canada says they are only “throttling” BitTorrent traffic, in fact there have been instances of Bell throttling encrypted internet traffic on the assumption that if it’s encrypted, it must be BitTorrent traffic.

Bell places the onus on the customer to prove their “innocence” before they will consider stopping throttling.

Since the CRTC gave Bell Canada permission to use Deep Packet Inspection to inspect our packets, the only way to ensure that our private information remains private is through encryption. And in Canada any encrypted internet traffic will most likely to be throttled.

Canadian Copyright Consultation

The Canadian Government is looking at updating Canadian copyright law. They held a copyright consultation process this year, traveling around Canada soliciting opinions of stakeholders. Even better, they set up a website where they accepted submissions from any Canadian who wished to contribute. This website was flooded with thousands of submissions. Some are simply a few lines, some are extensive essays covering all sorts of topics, but all I’ve read are heartfelt. Because of the overwhelming response it took a long time to get all the submissions posted. (My own submission finally made online.)

This process led a lot of Canadians, including me, to believe that the copycon process might actually mean that our elected representatives were listening to us.

Unfortunately there is currently a lot of pressure on our government to make copying movies, software and music for personal use illegal. The secret ACTA meetings have caused a feeling of dread to settle over most Canadians. There has been deprecating talk about weak Canadian copyright law.

Except it isn’t true.

If anything, Canadian copyright law is probably more robust than is good for us.

The essential problem that the copyright lobby is attempting to overcome the problem of suing their own customers for what they imagine are infringements. They have noticed that fighting personal use copying garners bad publicity. This problem can be neatly solved by passing the responsibility for finding and prosecuting copyright infringement to governments. And of course the only was to get government to take ob the responsibility is to convince them that the copyright infringement is a criminal offense.

Regardless, currently copyright law is imprecise as regards personal use copying. So we’ll just have to wait for an actual law to be passed before it becomes illegal. (This pressure is actually largely from foreign owned interests– like Disney. It will be interesting to see if our government caves to this outside pressure.)

mixed messages

The government mandated levy we pay every time we purchase a blank CD is a tacit governmental admission that it is legal to burn CDs of our own music.

In the pre-Tivo era, Canadian cable networks actively encouraged Canadians to videotape the movies that they showed so we could watch them when it was convenient. They called it “time shifting” in their massive advertising campaigns. But no media giants took our cable companies to court back then. For the same reason artists will lend or give away their work for free when they’re starting out (because they need to build and audience– exactly like the INK producers mentioned above), back then even Disney didn’t have a channel in Canada. So Disney didn’t kick up a fuss even though they had to have known this was happening. They let it go because it was in their best interests to allow time shifting (i.e personal use copying). Disney knew this was in their best interests because it would help the Canadian cable companies build their market.

Of course now Disney doesn’t want us to record their movies for personal use. Disney would be happy if our government decided personal use copying was illegal. They would be happier still if our government spent time and energy searching out and charging people who download Disney movies.

Disney would be happy they no longer had to expend time and energy chasing down copyright infringements. They would be ecstatic if our Mounties were to do it for them. Gratis.

But this precedent indicates copying movies for personal use is also legal in Canada

So even though p2p networks or copying movies and music are not actually illegal in Canada, our friends the CRTC gave Bell Canada permission to “throttle” anyone using BitTorrent transfers. Because the assumption is that even if you’re not technically performing criminal acts, per se, anyone who uses BitTorrent can’t be very nice.

The CRTC, the government body that is supposed to safeguard Canadian telecommunication consumers, gave Bell Canada legal permission to mess with BitTorrent traffic. Its discriminatory for one thing. If there are copyright infringements happening, there are laws to handle them. It isn’t any of Bell Canada’s business. Or the CRTC’s.

[More on copyright in my other blog-- in the wind: Personal Use Copying vs. Bootlegging]

Dudley Do-Right?

Eirik Solheim's metaphorical image of the internet is the best I've seen: The internet is a series of tubes

Even if it were true that Canadian consumers were downloading music or movies, and even if it had been made illegal under Canadian Law, it should not make a whit of difference.

Because Internet Service Providers or Internet Carriers are NOT branches of Canadian law enforcement. They have not been deputized to enforce the law by the RCMP. If Bell Canada was in fact a Law Enforcement entity they would not be allowed to peek in any citizen’s packets without first acquiring a search warrant. Corporations don’t exist to uphold laws, they exist to make money.

The internet has been called dumb pipes, or a series of tubes, or a highway. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, what is most important is access for all.  
The people who control the pipes should not be allowed to discriminate against particular users for ANY reason. Net Neutrality is so important: the internet should be accessible to all.

revolutionary ideas

In the United Kingdom The Times Online Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? article looked at the benefits of personal use copying applied as peer to peer file sharing with some dramatic results.

Canada’s own ThisMagazine presented this thought provoking article Pay indie artists and break the music monopoly — Legalize Music Piracy which advocates making the law serve the artists and consumers rather than just the corporations.

Further rumblings about changing the way we look at this issue were reported recently by the The Globe and Mail blogs article NDP, Billy Bragg make case for free music

STOP Usage Based Billing

Volgens Times Online hebben Britse artiesten niet minder inkomsten sinds de opkomst van illegaal downloaden. De platenmaatschappijen verliezen wél geld, maar tegelijk wordt er meer verdiend met optredens.

→ View Original Article

Check out this article from The Sunday Times Magazine on Mariah Carey. Very well-written by John Arlidge and very interesting.

Mariah Carey: The gloves are off

The singer drops the sugar-coated simpering and shoots from the lip about the music industry and her new business model to save it — which could make her the world’s richest recording artist

“Would you like a drink? I’d get you one myself but it’s a little hard for me to get up right now.” Mariah Carey isn’t kidding. She’s lying on her back in a darkened room in the basement of the TV Asahi studios in Tokyo, dressed in a black miniskirt, a leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana trench coat and 8in Gucci bitch stacks. Her stylist, Blair, is “jujjing” her hair to make sure each lock falls “just so” over lashes that are as lacquered as a coffee table. “Go ahead, ruin it,” she says when Blair tugs too hard. “Wait ’til I’m done speaking, dahling,” the singer scolds when her manager, Louise, interrupts to ask what diet she’s on today. The singer is surrounded by Hello Kitty dolls that her fans have customised to look like her, complete with breasts so big the toys look like they’ve got footballs stuffed down their crop tops.

What’s on Carey’s mind? Not whether she can hit the metal-piercing high notes in her version of I Want to Know What Love Is. She’s covering the Foreigner ballad on Music Station, Japan’s Top of the Pops, in a few minutes’ time. No, she is — bless — thinking about puppies. “My dog is having babies,” she says. “Two or three puppies. Can you put that in your magazine?” Well, welcome to planet Mariah, the glittery, kittenish, snowflake place where a girl can do just what she wants, however infantile. In a city where teenage girls — dammit, grown women — dress up as schoolgirls, Carey has never looked more at home.

But then something remarkable happens. Carey sits forward, takes a sip of bitter pomegranate juice and frowns. “Frickin’ idiots! Big, powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake, and now we’re all paying the price. Frickin’ idiots!” The 12-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom worrying about boys, make-up and simpering over “ickle” animals is gone. In her place is a steely 39-year-old who has just flown in from Seoul, has been working since 6.30am and whose voice is suddenly so hoarse and sardonic she sounds like Alan Sugar at the end of a bad day. “Those stupid executives may have given up on the music business but I haven’t. It’s bleak out there for musicians. We have to do something.”

There are many things you expect from an encounter with Mariah Carey — ear-drum-endangering squeaks, emotional fragility, an unshiftingly winsome gaze, and bowls of M&M’s — just the blue ones. A reasoned critique of the state of the music industry is not one of them. But under the skin of this twittering popsicle is a businesswoman who has sold more singles, albums and downloads in the US than any other female artist, even Madonna. The multi-Grammy-award-winner has had more US No 1 hits than any other soloist dead or alive. Her first five singles each went to No1 — another record — and she has more platinum singles than any other female artist. Three more Billboard 100 No 1s and she will overhaul the 29-year-old record held by the Beatles for the most US No 1s ever.

She’s also one of the few people successfully to screw a major record label. Virgin wanted to buy her out of a multi-album $100m contract after her 2001 semi-autobiographical film, Glitter, and companion album of the same name flopped. She took the label for a cool $49m, put the Glitter away and came back with a critically lauded album, The Emancipation of Mimi, that put her back on the hot list. And if that weren’t enough, she might now — just might — have stumbled upon the secret formula to save the music industry from financial fade-out.

Carey is pioneering a new business model for music. She’s cutting deals with the kind of partners musicians have traditionally shunned, pushing herself into new areas such as publishing, tourism and food and drink. She’s partnering with the biggest retailers in the world. And she’s harnessing the power of the internet, not just to sell music via iTunes, Napster or Spotify, but to market herself using social-networking sites, notably Facebook and Twitter. Simon Cowell, a man who knows a thing or two about making money in the modern music world, believes diversification is the future. He and his close friend, the BHS billionaire Sir Philip Green, are creating a giant music and merchandising company dubbed “Britain’s answer to Disney”.

Carey’s new album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, is released here tomorrow. She has been in London publicising it. Artists always fly into the world’s biggest cities to sing for their sales but Carey is doing it in a new way. Take her recent trip to Tokyo. There are endless TV spots — TV drives sales; TV means fans. But how to get the right kind of fans; who will look good on TV? And how to get the right number outside every venue where she’s appearing, to make her look like a megastar, but not so many that she is mobbed? If only they could be handpicked.

They can. Online. Carey’s itinerary, which is supposed to be top secret but which an aide has helpfully left lying on a table, reveals that she uses the internet to leak details of each appearance to favoured bloggers and Facebook groups shortly beforehand. This way, only the most devoted fans turn up, and freaks and weirdos are weeded out. The selective leaks also help to make sure there are enough paparazzi but not so many that there’s a scrum. Just before she is due to arrive at the Asahi studios to appear on Music Station, Carey’s aides “leaked the time she will appear at entrance through social online sites, blogs, etc. We are expecting to have 100 fans and some paparazzi”, the schedule reveals. The cybertrickery works to script. Just after 6pm, Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

That week, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel is released in Japan. When you buy the CD in key markets you get the usual pictures of Carey in the white dress, in the black dress and in the gold boob-tube to sex up the silver disk. But you also get something else: a copy of Elle magazine. This is no ordinary edition of the glossy; this is “Elle for Mariah”. It’s full of the usual fashion, beauty and relationships stuff but it’s all about Carey. There’s everything you need to “Mariah up your life!” An additional 500,000 copies have been distributed in the US edition of Elle.

It’s marketing, of course, but with the all-important Elle seal of approval. Elle writers wrote it all and Elle photographers took the pictures. Brand analysts say getting an established, credible media partner such as Elle to do Carey’s marketing for her is priceless. Rita Clifton, the chairman of London’s leading brand consultancy, Interbrand, says: “Elle is fashionable and extremely professional. If Mariah Carey is to succeed in marketing products beyond music, it’s critical that she gets stylish associations and polished presentation. Elle can bring those.”

There are ads in the magazine, too, for Angel Champagne, upscale Le Métier de Beauté cosmetics, Forever perfume, Carmen Steffens shoes and the Bahamas tourist board. You can even win a trip to Mariah’s favourite island in the Bahamas by logging on to her official website. Carey is behind those, too. She and her record company, Island Def Jam, part of Universal Music Group, sold the ads for up to $100,000 a page, making far more than the peppercorn Elle was paid to produce the magazine. “I can’t tell you how little money we made on this,” says Carol Smith, the chief brand officer of Elle, ruefully.

Some ads are for Carey’s own products, such as her signature perfume, Forever. Some are for products produced by companies in which she has a stake, notably Angel champagne. Some are for firms in which Universal Music has a stake, such as Le Métier de Beauté. Some are for brands for which she acts as an ambassador, notably the Bahamas. Every time one of Carey’s fans buys one of the products she’s marketing, she gets a cut.

The “product integration” deal has covered most of the cost of recording Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, estimated at £4m. It has also created new partnerships and strengthened existing ones. And, of course, it gives fans something tangible and unique — but only if they buy the physical CD, where margins are often better than for online downloads. The physical magazine is not available online. Other artists are looking to exploit the advertorial-meets-ads model on forthcoming albums, including the Killers, Rihanna, Duffy and Bon Jovi. Rihanna, for instance, is in talks with brands and advertisers, including Gucci, Nike, Clinique, CoverGirl and the Barbados Tourism Authority. It’s not hard to see why. Merchandising is a huge business. In the US, Disney franchises, including the popular Hannah Montana and High School Musical, raked in $2.7 billion in retail sales last year alone.

Carey knows she is the last person anyone would look to for business acumen. “People look at my image and they see, oh, the curly hair and the little tight black dress. Tra-la-la,” she grins. What’s more, she herself used to revile the very marketing she is now taking to new levels. “When I was starting my career I’d look at certain people who worked with, say, Pepsi, and I was like, ‘Why do they need to do that?’ I had an offer from a soda company when I first began. They wanted me to hit a high note and then the glass bottle would break. I told them, ‘I think it’s stupid. It’s tacky. I don’t want to do it.’ ”

What changed her mind? The traditional business model for the recorded music industry is bust. Has been for years. CD sales are down again this year, by 13%, as online downloads grow, according to the ratings agency Nielsen. The Big Four record companies — Universal, Sony, Warner and the ailing EMI — sell two-thirds fewer albums than they did in 2000. Carey is furious that music-industry executives failed to realise how the internet would change the way fans consume music. And when the penny finally dropped, they let the computer, not the music, industry corner the market. Over time, many more copies of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will be downloaded online than bought in stores. Buyers will go to sites such as iTunes or Napster to do so, not to Carey’s own website, nor that of Island Def Jam. The iTunes music store passed six billion sales earlier this year and has also driven sales of Apple’s iPod and iPhone.

“A lot of big powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake,” she says. “They gave the music business away on the internet. If they had just sat back and said, ‘Maybe let’s figure this internet thing out, it could be something cool,’ we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else’s. Prince had already shown them the way. He was so far ahead of the curve, putting out his own records on the web. Everyone else was stupid.”

Musicians have long promoted non-music products. The Rolling Stones marketed Windows 95 with Start Me Up. Michael Jackson did endless Pepsi promos. And rappers such as P Diddy and Jay-Z have moved on from name-checking other people’s fashion and luxury-goods brands in their songs to create their own brands, usually in partnership with their record labels, and promote them instead. But Carey is breaking new ground in three areas.

First, she is turning on its head the traditional model of endorsement. With Elle, for example, she is not endorsing the magazine; the magazine is endorsing her. Yet it is Carey, not the magazine, who is trousering most of the cash generated by ad sales. The way she pulled off such a lucrative deal is nifty. Elle and the US cosmetics giant Elizabeth Arden had fallen out. Arden makes Carey’s perfume, Forever. What better way to bring the two back together — and get Arden ads back in Elle — than in a one-off special magazine celebrating an Arden product and an Arden ambassador? “I’m just trying to share the love,” she says. And corner the market.

Second, when Carey is endorsing a non-music product, she does not simply want to do deals through her record label; she personally wants to own all or part of the company that makes the product. You make a whole lot more cash that way. She is forming so many new companies to leverage her brand equity in make-up, clothing and other new areas that her New York lawyers are fast running out of names. “I set up a new business for every project,” she says. “The businesses are called things like Mirage and Maroon Entertainment. They’re based on silly names that I made up in high school.”

Third, she sees ways to make money with partners that others have overlooked. She has a house in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. She won’t say if she is paid by the Bahamas tourist board to talk about how great the place is but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is, given the amount of time she spends doing so. And even if she isn’t, she probably soon will be. She’s building a recording studio on Eleuthera and plans to shoot videos there with the director Brett Ratner. It’s the kind of publicity a small country dreams of and it would scarcely be surprising if the government there helped out. Carey also plans to team up with the New York tourist board to attract visitors to her adopted home town. When she had her 18th No1, the city authorities lit up the Empire State Building in her favourite colours: pink and lavender. It was good publicity for Carey and for New York. Expect to see “Mariah in New York” advertisements soon. “There are no limits to what we can do,” she says. “The process of creating something should have no boundaries.”

So far, so entrepreneurial. But is it really Carey doing the work? And even if she is, is she any good, or is there someone there to hold her hand? The day after she arrives in Tokyo, she’s sitting in the boardroom of the Park Hyatt. The hotel is best known for failing relationships, principally Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s: much of Lost in Translation was filmed here. But Carey is trying to forge a new relationship. She’s meeting a leading cosmetics manufacturer to discuss plans to launch a Mariah Carey beauty line in a top US supermarket chain.

Okay, there may be wine on the table — this is still rock’n’roll — but Carey is focused. She’s brought with her two of her own cosmetics bags, a glittery Chanel number and an acid-pink vanity case, to illustrate what she wants the packaging for her line to look like. She’s also brought an interesting new mini MP3 player she found in Korea that she wants to customise, so that it can be sold as an accessory to the make-up. She benchmarks her proposed line against others: Bobbi Brown, Anna Sui, Laura Mercier. But she listens too. “You tell me,” she says when discussing the colours for the cosmetics. “I don’t want to mess it up by liking what I like and enforcing that because that would be a stupid thing to do. I don’t want to screw up.”

The more you see her at work, the more you realise that Carey has grasped not just how her industry must move from a recorded-music business model to a brand-based model, but also that she is the best person to do it. Ask what her “brand” is, and she replies as well as any Madison Avenue advertising executive: “Optimistic, accessible, universal.” It’s true. Her music is the kind of upbeat, bubblegum pop that appeals as much to teenagers in Tokyo as in Tooting. “It’s R&B but not too R&B. It’s poppy but not too poppy. Hardcore but not too hardcore,” she says. She dresses trendy “but not too trendy. I never want people to think I just wear ‘this’ or ‘that’ designer and that they cannot afford my stuff.” Her team work remorselessly to make sure fans get what they want. “We try very hard to answer everything we get sent,” says Carey. “We mustn’t get remote or ever give people the chance to think I think I’m better than them.”

And then there is her killer app: her image. The daughter of a black father and an Irish-American mother — a classically trained opera singer who studied at Juilliard — she’s black enough to appeal to a black audience. She was one of only two black female soloists asked to sing at Michael Jackson’s memorial. But she’s not so black that she alienates a white audience. She’s also a little Latina. Her father was half-African-American, half-Venezuelan, so she can exploit that market, too. She deliberately plays with her ethnicity, changing her hair to be a little bit more white or a little bit more black, according to what she’s doing and where. “I change ethnically according to where I am in the world. I can be a spokesperson for black, white and Latina. MC could stand for multicultural.”

Being every kind of woman makes her the right person to sell, well, just about anything. But however powerful her name and image may be, Carey is also savvy enough to realise that, if she’s really going to cash in, she must appeal to those who might like her products but don’t like her. That’s why she’s working on a second line of beauty products, clothes and accessories using her nickname, Mimi, as the brand and the logo. “Mimi is an iteration of Mariah Carey. Any girl can be Mimi. If someone is not a complete fan, they don’t have to worry,” she says.

There is a problem with all this, of course. Carey is an artist, and whether you like her music or not, she’s undeniably a successful one. “I’m a studio rat. I love writing and collaborating. The music comes first.” Unlike sports stars, who are not considered cultural figures and who have a very short career to make the money they need for a lifetime, musicians have always had problems moving out of music and into new areas. Even those, notably U2’s Bono, who have tried to harness their music and celebrity for good causes, have been condemned as opportunists. Surely, for her to plaster her name over $3 lipgloss in Macy’s department stores is the quickest way to be labelled — oh, what’s the right expression? — a big, cheesy sellout?

Carey concedes that filling supermarket shelves with anything other than CDs “is not ideal”. Nor does she enjoy working as hard as she is. “Do I want to do 50 things a day that have little or nothing to do with the music itself? No.” But she says the economics of recorded music means she has no choice. The time is right personally, too. Knocking on 40 and just married to the TV executive Nick Cannon, she’s not quite so determined to strive for perfection in her professional and personal life, an attitude summed up in the title of her new album and her new film, Precious, which has just been released in the US and is out here soon.

It tells the harrowing story of a 350lb illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother. Carey is unrecognisable as a welfare caseworker, in no small part because she is seen, for the first time, without any make-up — a bold move for a woman who wants to save the music industry one eyeliner at a time. The film’s director, Lee Daniels, offered Carey the part on condition that she show up at the set alone (no entourage) in a taxi (no limo) and freshly scrubbed (no make-up). The film received a standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes and went on to win three awards at the Sundance film festival.

Carey knows her new business model is controversial, so, just in case Coldplay’s Chris Martin or Radiohead’s Thom Yorke accuse her of cashing in when the first copies of her new album are opened here this week, she’s getting her retaliation in first. “I don’t care if the rock-band person thinks, ‘Oh, I’m a sellout’. Well, guess what? They’re a sellout anyway for going to a record company. I’m sorry — you are. You want to just play in bands in bars? Then do that. Or play on the streets. And if someone throws you some dollars, then you can go get a soda. But you could also help somehow merge the soda business with the music business in a way that is creative.”

At which moment Louise, the manager, turns up at the door with the not-so-secret schedule. “We have another meeting back at the hotel,” Carey says, “9pm and still working. And we’re off to LA tomorrow.” She hoists herself up slowly from her chaise longue, asks whether there are any stairs on the way to the limo — walking in 8in heels ain’t easy — and tells a flunky to round up the gaudy Hello Kitty dolls and take them to the limo. “I have to have my little toys,” she gushes. The 12-year-old girl is back. It’s what her emotionally incontinent Japanese fans demand. But don’t be fooled. The woman tottering off down the corridor, putting on her bug-eyed sunglasses before stepping out into the latest perfectly formed instacrowd of fans and paparazzi, is

the music industry’s next top model.

By Gemma Haigh, Fiona Gardner & Lauren Redpath for Edinburgh Napier News

Everyone remembers their favourite sweet from their childhood and it was revealed today that retro sweet shops are making a comeback.  With more and more vintage sweet shops springing up on little cobbled streets, it’s becoming easier for people to take a trip down memory lane and let their taste buds take them back to their younger years.

And it seems the economic downturn is causing more people to turn to comfort foods to give them that much-needed lift and retailers have been left shocked at the sudden demand for sugary treats.

Traditional sweets such as soor plooms, chocolate limes, chelsea whoppers and rhubarb and custards are returning and are proving a hit with everyone with a sweet tooth.

Lickety Splits, a vintage confectionary shop on Jeffery Street, has been in business since July and owner Jude Ross says it is surprising how many adults come through the door to feed their sugary addiction.

With business booming, Lickety Splits is hitting the high street, with House of Fraser in talks with them about supplying retro delights to be sold alongside their fashion collections.

Edinburgh Napier News went to see what the all the fuss was about.

According to TimesOnline, market research analyst, Mintel are predicting a 9% rise in sweets sales within the next five years.

Speaking to these people on the streets of Edinburgh it seems the desire for sweets hasn’t turned sour.

Here’s a trip down memory lane!  Remember these sugary treats?

• foiled ice cups
• sweet tobacco
• cola cubes
• pear drops
• floral gums
• aniseed twists
• gob-stoppers
• coltsfoot rock
• parma violets

By Gemma Haigh, Fiona Gardner and Lauren Redpath

Everyone remembers their favourite sweet from their childhood and it was revealed today that retro sweet shops are making a comeback.  With more and more vintage sweet shops springing up on little cobbled streets, it’s becoming easier for people to take a trip down memory lane and let their taste buds take them back to their younger years.

And it seems the economic downturn is causing more people to turn to comfort foods to give them that much-needed lift and retailers have been left shocked at the sudden demand for sugary treats.

Traditional sweets such as soor plooms, chocolate limes, chelsea whoppers and rhubarb and custards are returning and are proving a hit with everyone with a sweet tooth.

Lickety Splits, a vintage confectionary shop on Jeffery Street, has been in business since July and owner Jude Ross says it is surprising how many adults come through the door to feed their sugary addiction.

With business booming, Lickety Splits is hitting the high street, with House of Fraser in talks with them about supplying retro delights to be sold alongside their fashion collections.

Edinburgh Napier News went to see what the all the fuss was about.

According to TimesOnline, market research analyst, Mintel are predicting a 9% rise in sweets sales within the next five years.

Speaking to these people on the streets of Edinburgh it seems the desire for sweets hasn’t turned sour.

Here’s a trip down memory lane!  Remember these sugary treats?

• foiled ice cups
• sweet tobacco
• cola cubes
• pear drops
• floral gums
• aniseed twists
• gob-stoppers
• coltsfoot rock
• parma violets

From TimesOnline

President Obama Won’t Talk Climate Change in Copenhagen

Did he have a change of heart? That just sounds weird that Obama won’t talk climate change. Not to worry:

From Ace of Spades HQ>>>>

Fortunately, plans for global wealth redistribution (enrobed in phony environmentalism) are foundering on the objections of India and China. So it looks like there won’t be anything for Obama to sign, anyway.

Apparently, the Indians and Chinese recognize the direct connection between carbon emissions and standard of living. Having had more recent experience in that condition, they understand how living in a less-industrialized state is major suckage and misery. Not some Rousseauian fantasy that persists among the Birkenstocked crowd.

We dodged the bullet this time America thanks to India and China. This gives us more time. Thank you Lord Monckton for waking us up!

This article highlights the difficulties in pledging money to food aid in Africa. Shocking statistics about the amount of people starving are often misleading. No one is suggesting that people are not suffering, but the ways in which the situation can be improved are open for debate. 

“Kenya is having a terrible time. But it would not be doing so if the breadbasket in the west of the country had not been torn apart by ethnic violence. If the agricultural outreach programmes, which helped farmers to improve productivity through the 1960s and 1970s, had not collapsed, if the Government’s milk and beef marketing system was not ruined by corruption, and if people had not been settled on marginal land that can never sustain them, then Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought”  Sam Kiley, TimesOnline

…for what?  Ah, well, the jury’s still out on that one.

Not everyone (internationally even) thinks this was the brightest idea or even deserved.  Michael Tomasky over at the Guardian UK opens his piece with, “If Obama and his people try to act like the Nobel peace prize was really deserved, he could damage himself politically.”  Further, according to this Guardian UK poll, at this time, 69% of people polled believe it was far to early to have awarded the NPP to Obama.  The TimesOnline reports the decision to award Obama the NPP as being “absurd.”  Amen to that. The Press Trust of India also reports that many are not too happy with Obama having been awarded the NPP.

The awarding of the NPP to Obama is, frankly, ludicrous.  What has he done?  Add to this the fact that Obama was first nominated for the NPP a mere two weeks into his presidential term, the award becomes even more preposterous.  What is clear is that the motivations behind awarding the NPP to Obama stem from a pacifist agenda, orchestrated to make it more difficult for Obama to handle affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as with North Korea and Iran (something he has already been unable to address to begin with) - see here and here.

a much younger Gore Vidal

… America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

“Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

“Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”

from the London TimesOnline.

Two bits of exciting “writing” news:

1) The Times are going to publish my piece on friendship on one of their timesonline blogs.  It’ll be on their Alpha Mummy blog (if you know me you will know how amusing this idea is, child-sceptic as I am), I’m not sure when, I will whack the link up when they put it up!

2) The amazing Skeptic Magazine UK (Editorial Advisory board inc. Stephen Fry, Derren Brown, Richard Wiseman, Robin Ince, Richard Dawkins, Simon Singh, Tim Minchin) are going to publish my piece on sleep paralysis in their online articles. ACTUAL squee (even though I still can’t abide the sk- spelling as opposed to sc-). They’ve asked me to not put it up here til it’s up there, which should be in October sometime, to coincide with the editor Prof. Chris French’s appearance on The One Show to talk about the phenomenon (note to self, watch on iPlayer).

Summary: All things considered, being a freelance “writer” is going okay!

Début juin, j’étais tombé sur un article de The Atlantic, « Is Google making us stupid? » Le texte, fort intéressant, bien construit et assez exhaustif avait attiré peu de commentaires de mes amis quand je l’avais posté sur mon profil Facebook. Pourtant, il parlait d’un inquiétant phénomène : notre dépendance à Internet et la manière dont cela altère notre mode de penser, de fonctionner, d’agir. Voire…de vivre!

J’avoue que ce texte, aussi inquiétant soit-il, ne m’a pas fait changer mes habitudes. Pour être honnête, j’avoue également que je ne les changerai sans doute pas drastiquement. Toutefois, il y a eu un déclic. Une prise de conscience. Internet est un outil formidable. Mais son utilisation intempestive.

Le fait de rester connecté en permanence et pour rien. De verifier son mail ou poster sur facebook à partir de son téléphone portable juste avant de se mettre au lit le soir. Tout cela est symptomatique!

Au bureau, nous journalistes, sommes devenus ultra-dépendants de l’Internet. Certes, pour s’informer, effectuer des recherches et se documenter. Mais aussi pour se distraire, consommer, s’évader. Je me rends compte de notre ultra-dépendance à Internet à chaque fois que le réseau saute ou qu’un important problème technique survient chez Mauritius Telecom.

Il suffit alors de voir la tête des journalistes. On dirait qu’ils (moi compris) ont perdu un bras ou une jambe. Qu’ils sont devenus infirmes. A chacune de ces occasions, nous nous amusons à poser la question: « Comment faisait-on avant, quand on n’avait pas de réseau, pas d’Internet, pas de sursaturation en infos? » Les plus jeunes, c’est mon cas, n’avons jamais appris à travailler sans ordi, sans Internet. Le journal au sein duquel j’avais débuté en 1996 avait une connexion internet, des ordinateurs…

Puisque les jeunes ne savent pas répondre à la question, je me tourne donc vers les anciens. Et stupeur, mes collègues plus âgés; ceux qui tapaient encore sur des machines Olivetti il y a 20 ans sont tout aussi perdus. Ils n’arrivent pas à expliquer clairement ce qui a changé. « L’AVANT » est devenu un vague souvenir. Ils se contentent alors de répondre: « avant, on faisait différemment.» Je dois également me satisfaire de cette description!

Cette semaine la rédaction web du journal Le Monde a tenté l’expérience du « Sans Internet.» Il en est ressorti quatre articles intéressants. Voici les liens

Un grand sabordage professionel

Internet m’a-t-il rendue plus bête?

Le spleen digital

Etre ou ne pas être cyberdépendante?

Bonne lecture!

ps: je ne suis pas du genre à inonder les boites mails de mes amis et connaissances d’emails pleins de bons sentiments sur l’amitié, le vrai sens des relations etc etc etc. Toutefois, je suis tombé sur un article du Times (Ten ancient Greek tips for coping with our high-tech world) qui mérite largement d’être partagé !

Just a few of our chosen sites

As you would expect we advertise our clients properties on ‘Rightmove and FindaProperty’, we even feature our properties on ‘PrimeLocation’ - ‘Big deal’ you may be thinking…  But, these are very interesting times for us as the local property experts, because many of the major web portals are buying each other up now in the race to grow ever larger, and take on the might of Rightmove!

This is great news for our clients as we get a wider spread of advertising. Most people do not realise for example, that PrimeLocation are also owned by Findaproperty.  There are many other examples of this, so, we at Castles Estate Agents in Harringay go out of our way to keep up to speed with who is who in the ever changing property portal world. We have to stay one-step ahead in order to gain the advantage – adjusting our web marketing in order to offer our clients wider advertising coverage for their property.

Search engines too!

In addition to this, we have recently signed a two year contract with PropertyFinder.com to feature all of our properties in an enhanced style listing. Just to demonstrate how effective this approach is… Here is a list of property related websites that also feature our properties:

Hotproperty.co.uk Globrix.com Evening Standard Homes & Properties  PropertyOwl.co.uk  TheLondonPaper  PropertyLive.co.uk  Fish4Homes  TimesOnline  H0me.co.uk  MyVillage.com  UkPropertyShop.co.uk  Virgin Media  Google  MSN  Yahoo  AOL  Tiscali  Sky  Kelkoo

At Castles Estate Agents, we have houses and flats for sale in the Harringay, Hornsey, Crouch End, Turnpike Lane, Wood Green and the Alexandra Park areas. Our Turnpike Lane branch covers N8, N4, N22, N15 postcodes and we particularly specialise in selling property on the Harringay Ladder and the Noel Park.

Final thought…Who catches more flies – The biggest spider, or, the smarter spider that has spun the biggest WEB?

Call now for your free valuation 020 8341 6262

www.castles.uk.com

OK, I’m a very proud dad–proud of all three of my grown children. But today is a special day with the Timesonline featuring an interview of my daughter Ashley Rodriguez talking about her now famous food blog Not Without Salt.

I’d like to think she got some of her interest in and writing abilities from me, but she has far surpassed me in that area now. I do know for certain that she got her talent and passion for food and beauty from my beautiful and talented wife.

Congrats, Ash! Keep it up!

Ah well that is fucking annoying. I had just spent ages writing a blog, and then safari died and the draft apprently saved a minute before it crashed was empty.

So thats pissed me off. Here is the last bit of the post anyway:
Times online funny signs around the world:

Skiing ‘roo

Niin se on, että brittimedian pitää sanoa kovat väitteet ääneen ja selvällä otsikolla. Timesonlinen eilinen kirjoittelu ei ole niinkään spekulaatiota kuin selvää väitettä. Väitteen perustana ovat erilliset lähteet sekä Venäjältä että Israelista. Toimittajat ovat operatiivisesti paikan päällä, Mark Frachetti Moskovassa ja Uzi Mahnaimi Tel Avivissa. Toki olisi mielenkiintoista lukea todellisen supertoimittajan raporttia pääkallopaikalta jonkun superpaparazzin ottamien (vaikka sitten vähän rakeistenkin) kuvien kera. Sellaista luksusta ei kuitenkaan tarjoa kukaan.

Miksi? Kukaan ei uskalla. Totuutta pelätään niin paljon, että luodaan mieluummin rinnakkaistarinoita Itämeren historiallisista merirosvouksista, haastatellaan professoreita ja tutkijoita, hyvä ettei kaiveta Rosvo-Roopea esiin. Lähimpänä journalismia on ollut HS:n tekemä satamavalvoja Kari Niemen haastattelu.

Edes ärhäkät ruotsalaismediat eivät ole oikein syttyneet. Eikö Stig Larssoneita rakastava, dekkareita ja salajuonia ahmiva svensson-yleisö muka olisi kiinnostunut siitä, että mansikkapaikkojen ohi kuskataan aseita, ydinkärkiä tai kaikkea mahdollista kuolemanviljaa. Ai niin, mutta ruotsalaisethan ovatkin asekauppiaitten aatelia.

Suomessa Supo ja KRP ovat tehokkaasti hiljaa. Tietoa on, pommin… pikemminkin ohjuksenvarmasti. Parempi kai sitten että se jätetään kertomatta. Alkaa vaikuttaa siltä, että Arctic Sean lastina on ollutkin suomalaista erikoispuuta, ajopuuta.