CBS 46: News and Weather for Atlanta, GA, WGCL, CBS46.com | Copyright office issues 6 new rights, including cell phone reuse

CBS 46: News and Weather for Atlanta, GA, WGCL, CBS46.com | Copyright office issues 6 new rights, including cell phone reuse:Copyright office issues 6 new rights, including cell phone reuse

Nov 23, 2006 01:13 PM

Associated Press photo

NEW YORK (AP) -- Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.

Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making exemptions difficult to justify.

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted."

But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other portable players.

The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.

In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs.

Providers of prepaid phone services, in particular, have been trying to stop entrepreneurs from buying subsidized handsets to resell at a profit. But even customers of regular plans generally can't bring their phones to another carrier, even after their contracts run out.

Billington noted that at least one company has filed lawsuits claiming that breaking the software locks violates copyright law, which makes it illegal for people to circumvent copy-protection technologies without an exemption from the Copyright Office. He said the locks appeared in place not to protect the developer of the cell phone software but for third-party interests.

Officials with the industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association did not return phone calls for comment Wednesday.

The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.

The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes -- for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under "fair use" provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.

Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.

"The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors," Billington wrote.

Billington also authorized the breaking of locks on electronic books so that blind people can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

He granted two exemptions dealing with computer obsolescence. For computer software and video games that require machines no longer available, copy-protection controls may be circumvented for archival purposes. Locks on computer programs also may be broken if they require dongles -- small computer attachments -- that are damaged and can't be replaced.

The final exemption lets researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities. Researchers had cited Sony BMG Music Entertainment's use of copy-protection systems that installed themselves on personal computers to limit copying. In doing so, critics say, Sony BMG exposed the computers to hacking, and the company has acknowledged problems with one of the technologies used on some 5.7 million CDs.

Article written by Associated Press writer Anick Jesdanum.

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: The hate factory

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: The hate factory:

The hate factory

N-word outburst adds to the denigration that passes as entertainment

When "Seinfeld" comedian Michael Richards lost his cool and began a racist rant at some noisy customers in a Hollywood comedy club, it seemed to surprise a number of people. It shouldn't. What is actually surprising is that it has taken this long for some airhead made famous by a very popular but insipid television series to flip out within the context of today's minstrel entertainments. Naturally, a lawyer representing the affronted audience members did not feel that it was enough for Richards to apologize on television; he still needs to pay them some money for what they had to suffer at his hands. The question, however, is what exactly did the patrons suffer? What they actually suffered, if anything, was an unintended caricature of a redneck in heated rage, expressing conventional disdain for black people. Richards said that 50 years ago, the black members of the noisy group of comedy club customers would have been hanged, and stabbed in the backside with a pitchfork. Before leaving the stage, Richards reminded the assembled that when it was all over, he would still be wealthy and the black people would still be, well, N-words. The painfully unfunny comedian Paul Rodriguez performed on the same stage that evening and told the press that if one uses the N-word and is not African-American, a lot of explaining will have to be made. In the interest of equality, no black comedian should get a pass when using insulting and denigrating words in the middle of an act. It all seems very simple to me. We do not need to accept the conventions of insult and denigration that have been established by black comedians and rappers. And I do not feel that there should be a freedom of speech issue raised either. Nor do I feel that any laws need to be passed. This was another moment to question what the ongoing vulgarization of our popular culture has actually come to mean. Two groups - women and black people - are disdainfully addressed and demeaned constantly. Only one has made any protest against being the constant butt of overstated vulgarity. White women have stood up against the misogyny in popular entertainment, but black people have not had much to say about the denigration. Rap producers and others in the business of selling anything that gives a little spice to the minstrel content of our popular culture have been known to claim that the N-word has become a common means of expression and has taken on a universal understanding through rap. We can now be treated to young people of all ethnic groups referring to each other when using the word. Does that prove anything? I think not. When Richard Pryor first made liberal use of the N-word, he could not have imagined what emerged in the wake of his performances. But when Pryor himself took a position against minstrel updates, no one listened to him. He had passed out the right of irresponsibility and could not take it back. So what remains before us is the issue of coming to terms with a popular culture in which the N-word, bitches and hos have become no more than condiments in a particularly unappetizing meal. We need not ban their use, but we do need to face the fact that we have been hustled far more often than not. Originally published on November 23, 2006

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My Way News - Bush Leads King Groundbreaking Ceremony

My Way News - Bush Leads King Groundbreaking Ceremony Bush Leads King Groundbreaking Ceremony
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Nov 13, 11:23 PM (ET)

By STEPHEN MANNING

(AP) National Council of Negro Women President Dorothy Height, center, is assisted by former Amb. Andrew... Full Image

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Martin Luther King Jr. belongs among American icons like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, national leaders said Monday at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a King memorial.

"We give Martin Luther King his rightful place among the many Americans honored on the National Mall," President Bush told a crowd of about 5,000.

King's memorial, he said, "will unite the men who declared the promise of America and defended the promise of America with the man who redeemed the promise of America."

The King memorial, slated to open in the spring of 2008, will be the first monument for a civilian and black leader on the large park at Washington's core. It is also probably among the last monuments on the Mall following a 2003 vote in Congress to sharply limit development of the parkland.

(AP) Yoland King, left, and Martin Luther King III, right, children of Martin Luther King Jr., arrive on... Full Image

The stage in front of the crowd was filled with King's fellow civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, politicians including Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and three of King's children. A gospel choir sang, and Maya Angelou read poetry. Children read essays they had written about King.

Clinton, who signed legislation in 1996 authorizing the memorial, received a standing ovation from the largely black crowd. He told the crowd of King's commitment to nonviolence and social justice causes such as ending poverty, saying those goals still have not yet been achieved.

"If he were here, he would remind us that the time to do right remains," Clinton said.

The memorial will occupy a four-acre plot on the banks of the Tidal Basin, near the Potomac River. The Jefferson Memorial is across the Tidal Basin, while the Lincoln Memorial lies to the northwest, near the river.

The design is based in part on King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Before repeating the "Let freedom ring" refrain, King told the crowd, "We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."

(AP) Entertainer Nick Cannon smiles as he arrives on the red carpet for the National Dream Dinner Gala... Full Image

Visitors will pass through an entryway cut through a massive stone symbolizing the mountain of despair and once inside, will come upon the missing section marking the stone of hope, bearing a carved profile of King. It will be ringed with walls chiseled with King's words that may eventually be the base for a waterfall.

Obama, who has said he is considering a presidential run in 2008, spoke shortly after Bush. He imagined bringing his two young children to the memorial when it is completed and passing through the mountain of despair.

"He never did live to see the promised land from that mountaintop," Obama said. "But he pointed the way for us."

Winfrey credited King and other civil rights leaders with making it possible for her to build her talk show empire.

"It's because of them that I can be heard," she said. "I do not take that for granted, not for one breath."

(AP) Singer Michael Bolton smiles as he poses upon arriving on the red carpet for the National Dream... Full Image

The memorial was first conceived in 1983 by members of King's fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. But it has been beset by delays and fundraising issues - the memorial's foundation still has only $70 million of the estimated $100 million construction cost.

Eugene Williams, a Washington resident and an Alpha Phi Alpha member, said he believed the rest of the money will be found now that people know the memorial will be built.

"Absolutely, it's coming forth," he said of funding. "This is a monument to the fact that no other person in history has done what King has done."

In a seat nearby, Carolyn Jackson of Philadelphia recalled how as an 18-year-old in 1963 she was among the vast crowd who heard King's "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington. With much of the civil rights struggle still ahead, Jackson didn't imagine at the time she would be back on the National Mall again because of King.

But she was back despite the cold and rainy weather, and this time not at a memorial borrowed from another leader.

"It's a full circle for black people in this country," Jackson said.

Race & The Political Race:

Race & The Political Race

Observant Americans have noticed it. Newspapers around the country are mentioning it. "It" being the subtle way in which race has become the latest weapon of choice in an increasingly destructive arsenal designed to support dirty political race tactics.

I don't know about you, but I'm sick of these political ads, the thousands of dollars they represent, wasted on slander, on below-the-belt attacks, on bashing. "This is how you should think," they tell us. "Vote for the lesser evil," is ultimately the message that comes across to me. I refuse to watch them. Particularly, when race becomes yet another offensive tool.

For example, White Massachusetts Republican Kerry Healey, running against black Democrat Patrick Deval for governor, has approved a commercial that capitalizes on Deval's earlier defense of a rapist that he believed was innocent until DNA tests proved him wrong. The commercial shows a nervous white woman being stalked. The commercial's message? "Deval Patrick, he should be ashamed — not governor." White woman being stalked, black man running for governor. These are the images emblazoned on the American voter's mind. Are we really to believe race is not a factor?

An LATimes article emphasizes the importance of context in determining the weight these images and messages carry: "Context provides the moral thicket. Consider that when South Carolina finally repealed its Constitution's ban on interracial marriage in 1998 — 31 years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such laws — almost half of white voters voted to keep it in place. These ads and commercials themselves may not be overtly racist, they just hope you are."

Monday October 30, 2006 |

Ed Bradley, TV Correspondent, Dies at 65 - New York Times

Ed Bradley, TV Correspondent, Dies at 65 - New York Times

November 10, 2006

Ed Bradley, TV Correspondent, Dies at 65

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Ed Bradley, a fixture in American living rooms on Sunday nights for a quarter century as a correspondent on “60 Minutes” and one of the first black journalists prominently featured on network television, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 65.

Mr. Bradley died at Mount Sinai Medical Center of complications from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, said Dr. Valentin Fuster, his cardiologist and the director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai. Mr. Bradley, who underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery in 2003, learned he had leukemia “many years ago,” Dr. Fuster said, but it had not posed a threat to his life until recently, when he was overtaken by an infection.

Even some close colleagues, including Mike Wallace, did not know that Mr. Bradley had leukemia or that his health had precipitously deteriorated over the last few weeks. His most recent segments on “60 Minutes” were on Oct. 15 (on the rape allegations against three Duke University lacrosse players, whom he interviewed) and on Oct. 29 (an investigation of an oil refinery explosion in Texas City, Tex.). On the day that that last segment was broadcast, he was admitted to Mount Sinai and remained there until his death.

Though Mr. Bradley had largely concealed his illness, he and his wife, Patricia Blanchet, had reached out in recent days to some of his closest friends — including Charlayne Hunter-Gault of National Public Radio (who traveled to his bedside from her home in South Africa) and the singer Jimmy Buffett (who rushed to New York to be with him following a concert in Hawaii).

Mr. Buffett said he told Mr. Bradley on Wednesday that “the Knicks and the Democrats won,” eliciting a smile from Mr. Bradley, who by that point could barely speak. Mr. Buffett and Ms. Hunter-Gault were part of a close-knit circle gathered at Mr. Bradley’s hospital room at the time of his death.

“This has been a long battle which he fought silently and courageously,” Ms. Hunter-Gault said. “He didn’t want people to know that this was a part of his struggle. He didn’t want people feeling sorry for him. And for a good part of his life, he managed it.”

To generations of television viewers, Mr. Bradley was a sober presence — albeit one with salt-and-pepper stubble and a stud in one ear — whose reporting for CBS across four decades ranged from the Vietnam War and Cambodian refugee crisis to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the Columbine High School shooting. His most prominent interviews over the years included those with Timothy McVeigh and the convicted killer (and author) Jack Henry Abbott, and with the performers Michael Jackson, Robin Williams and Lena Horne. He won 19 Emmy awards, according to CBS, including one for lifetime achievement in 2003.

In the three years since his bypass operation, Mr. Bradley had more than 60 segments broadcast on “60 Minutes” — more than any other correspondent. “And he kept track,” said Jeff Fager, the program’s executive producer.

But Mr. Bradley’s life off camera was often as rich and compelling as his life in the studio. Having begun his broadcast career as a disc jockey in Philadelphia, Mr. Bradley was an enormous fan of many forms of music — particularly jazz and gospel. He counted the musicians Wynton Marsalis, Aaron Neville and George Wein among his friends and made regular pilgrimages to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. At his death, he was also the host of “Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio With Ed Bradley,” broadcast weekly on 240 public radio stations.

“I made the mistake once of letting him get onstage with my band, and he never stopped doing it,” said Mr. Buffett, who was introduced to Mr. Bradley 30 years ago in Key West, Fla., by a mutual friend, Hunter S. Thompson.

Mr. Bradley had many nicknames throughout his life, including Big Daddy, when he played defensive end and offensive tackle in the 1960s at Cheyney State College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania); but his favorite, Ms. Hunter-Gault and Mr. Buffett said, was Teddy Badly, which Mr. Buffett bestowed on him onstage the first time Mr. Bradley played tambourine at his side.

“Everybody in my opinion needs a little Mardi Gras in their life,” Mr. Buffett said, “and he liked to have a little more than the average person on occasion.”

“He was such a great journalist,” Mr. Buffett added, “but he still knew how to have a good time.”

Edward Rudolph Bradley Jr. was born June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia. His father was a businessman and his mother a homemaker. After his parents divorced, he spent summers with his father at his home in Detroit, said Marie Dutton Brown, a literary agent and Philadelphia native.

Ms. Dutton Brown said she met Mr. Bradley in the mid-1960s, after he graduated from Cheyney State with a degree in education, when both worked for the Philadelphia schools. Mr. Bradley, she said, taught elementary school.

At the time, she said, his dream was to attend the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. But on the strength of his work in his other job at the time — at WDAS radio, where he was a news reporter and host of a jazz show — he was hired as a reporter at WCBS radio in New York. “And that was that,” Ms. Dutton Brown said.

In 1971, after four years at WCBS, he joined CBS News, as a stringer in its Paris bureau. The next year, he was reassigned to the network’s Saigon bureau, where he stayed until 1974, when he moved to its Washington office. Mr. Bradley, who was wounded on assignment in Cambodia, had become a full-fledged correspondent while in Southeast Asia. In 1975, he volunteered to return to the region to cover the fall of Saigon.

His reporting on Cambodian refugees, as broadcast on the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” and “CBS News Sunday Morning,” won a George Polk Award. After covering Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, he covered the Carter White House from 1976 to 1978. He was also anchor of the “CBS Sunday Night News” from 1976 to 1981.

It was in 1981 that Don Hewitt, the founding executive producer of “60 Minutes,” hired Mr. Bradley for the program, the most prestigious (and arguably the most competitive) news magazine on television.

And yet, despite having to jockey for airtime with heavyweights like Mr. Wallace and Morley Safer, Mr. Bradley stood out — in no small measure because of the competence and decency he conveyed, said Mr. Fager, a longtime producer on the program who succeeded Mr. Hewitt last year.

“Not only was he just a natural broadcaster and storyteller, but he was filled with integrity and credibility, in the way Cronkite was as an anchorman,” Mr. Fager said yesterday. “He had no pretensions. He was a remarkable, likeable, wonderful man you just wanted to be around.”

He also had a wicked sense of humor. At one point, Mr. Fager said, Mr. Bradley tried to convince Mr. Hewitt that he wished to change his name to Shahib Shahab, and thus the opening of the “60 Minutes” broadcast to: “I’m Mike Wallace. I’m Morley Safer. I’m Shahib Shahab.”

“He let the gag run for quite some time,” Mr. Fager said. “Don was quite concerned.”

Mr. Bradley, who had no children, is survived by Ms. Blanchet, whom he married two years ago at his home in Aspen, Colo., said Ms. Hunter-Gault. His two previous marriages, to Diane Jefferson and Priscilla Coolidge, ended in divorce, Ms. Hunter-Gault said.

For Ms. Hunter-Gault, who left The New York Times for the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” on PBS in 1978, Mr. Bradley was more than just someone who helped clear an early path to national television for herself and other black journalists — a distinction he shared with, among others, Max Robinson and Lem Tucker.

“I think people might want to characterize him as a trailblazer for black journalists,” she said yesterday, by cellphone from outside Mr. Bradley’s hospital room just after his death. “I think he’d be proud of that. But I think Ed was a trailblazer for good journalism. Period.”

In the weeks before his final hospitalization, Mr. Bradley had been scrambling to finish the Duke report in particular, while fending off what would become the early stages of pneumonia.

“He just kept hitting the road,” Ms. Hunter-Gault said. “Every time I talked to him, he was tired. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you go home and rest?’ He’d say, ‘I just want to get this piece done.’ ”

“He was proud of what he did,” she said. “But he never allowed that pride to turn him into a star in his own head.”

“In his own head,” she added, “he was always Teddy.”

I am Not Teaching This Fall Semester 2006

Do to political forces beyond my control I am not teaching at Clark Atlanta University this Fall Semester 2006. Please feel free to contact me by email or by cell phone if you need to reach me. Please give me forty-eight hours to return your contact. I will be in the Mass Communication Department each and every Saturday evening from 9PM-1AM hosting my radio show "The Hard Core Jazz Cafe" in the studios of WCLK.