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A joint venture featuring heavyweight Hollywood studios is looking to fall 2009 to launch a premium television channel and video-on-demand service that will offer feature films and original television series.

The unnamed venture, and the unnamed channel it will produce, has the backing of Viacom and its Paramount Pictures unit; MGM Studios; and Lionsgate. Films to be offered will include new titles from Paramount and Paramount Vantage released in theaters after January 1, 2008, and new titles from MGM, United Artists, and Lionsgate released after January 1, 2009, according to a statement from the companies on Sunday.

The studios will also make available many older titles, including Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and The Blair Witch Project, along with titles from the Godfather, Star Trek, and James Bond franchises.

In addition, the venture will feature new, original television series.

The companies made no specific mention of an online component for the venture, but did make reference to "the digital marketplace of the future," and offered this rather generic promise: "We are building an innovative service that will use traditional and new digital distribution technologies to bring great film and television entertainment directly to the consumer."

Every once in a while we say goodbye to a technology that has been replaced by a demonstrably superior successor, yet we still hold onto a bit of nostagia for the old way. One of those about to go extinct is Polariod instant film. Even though I hadn't used it for years, I was sad to hear on NPR's All Things Considered that the film is going out of production.

Digital photography is our efficient, truly instantaneous modern standard, but there was something magical about a Polaroid picture. Even if the final prints were not as good as standard film, Polaroid had its own mystique.

The whole process had a satisfying, ritualized nature to it. You composed the photo, clicked the shutter and heard that distinctive whirr. The seemingly blank film shot out. You'd fight to see who got to grab it, shake it (for no real reason--it just seemed like it needed to be shaken like a mercury thermometer), and watch as the image teasingly developed before your eyes. The film was expensive; about a dollar a shot if I remember correctly. You'd have to carefully parcel out the ten shots in a pack to make it last through a whole party.

A few artists had clung to the medium for their work. They are mourning the end of the Polaroid era, saying that for some applications, nothing compares to the look they could get from this film.

For me, it is strange to see something that I remember as cutting-edge technology as a kid become so thoroughly obsolete. So while digital photography may be superior in almost every way, let's say one final "click, whirr" farewell to Polariod.

Eastman Kodak didn't really miss the digital wave.

In fact, it dipped its toes into digital relatively early on. One of the issues with Kodak's Photo CD effort wasn't that it was late to the digital photography game, but that the market wasn't ready to widely embrace photos in a digital form yet.

One can, of course, fairly fault Kodak for allowing itself to be pushed further and further toward the periphery of the photographic ecosystem as digital imaging grew in importance. However, as I've discussed previously, the bigger issue is that digital photography has vastly eroded Kodak's consumables business. You sell a camera once. You sell film and processing week in and week out.

Thus, this piece by Claudia H. Deutsch in the New York Times caught my eye. It discusses some of Kodak President and COO Philip Faraci's growth strategies.

Kodak is benefiting from the moves that some publishers are making to recoup at least some of those lost advertising dollars. He notes that the Chicago Tribune and some others are trying "microzoning"--printing several versions of the paper in the same city, each with ads aimed at a specific neighborhood. And, he said, newspapers all over are using more color.

All of that, he said, promises to yield increased sales of Kodak's high-speed production printers--particularly of the 1,600-page-per-minute printer Kodak is about to introduce. And far more important to the company, the trend can yield a steady stream of orders for inks and other highly profitable consumables.

Faraci was named president and COO last fall; he joined the company in 2004.

What's really interesting here is that Faraci was at Hewlett-Packard for 22 years where, among other roles, he was senior vice president and general manager for the Inkjet Imaging Solutions Group. This is someone who knows consumables.

Maybe Kodak is starting to find a revenue and profit replacement for film, which is what it's always really needed rather than more amorphous "digital imaging products."

John Heidemann was skeptical about what the movie industry was saying about campus piracy.

A researcher in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Heidemann had heard the film studios' claim that college students downloading movies on campus were responsible for 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses to piracy.

That added up to about $572 million. So, working with a team of researchers last summer--the famous Hollywood sign on the mountain clearly visible from his workplace--Heidemann and the group came up with a way to track file-sharing use on USC's network. Following a 14-hour monitoring of the system, the team concluded that between 3 and 13 percent of those on the school's network (PDF) were using peer-sharing technology and accounted for between 21 and 33 percent of overall traffic, he said.

There was no way for Heidemann to discern whether the information being transferred was pirated. But even in a worst case scenario, 13 percent indicated that only a small minority of USC students were engaged in illegal file sharing. Heidemann's research flew in the face of the MPAA's claims.

This was an example of a university not relying on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to tell it what was happening on its network. But USC is the exception rather than the rule.

For two years, the film industry has relied on an erroneous figure to persuade the public that college students are thieves. The MPAA acknowledged Tuesday that a survey it released in 2005 overstated the damage caused by piracy at the nation's universities. The MPAA now says that instead of 44 percent, students account for 15 percent of domestic losses, or about $195 million.

But how did the error go unchallenged for so long? Why weren't network managers from UCLA to Harvard the ones to sound the alarm? Observers say that many schools were probably afraid to do their own studies.

"Look at them, the universities were running scared," said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a company that tracks peer-to-peer traffic. "They probably didn't do the research because they were afraid about what they would find. (Colleges) have been singled out as the enclave of the most egregious piracy."

If Tuesday's revelation from the MPAA did nothing else, it should serve to teach college presidents that they shouldn't rely on the word of a third-party to say what its students are up to--especially one that has spent the past two years telling Congress that college students are responsible for almost half of all movie piracy in the U.S.

Mark Luker, vice president Educause, an organization representing college information technology departments, said plenty of people were skeptical and asked to see the data. But the schools "did not run their own surveys," Luker acknowledged. He added that college administrators should have at least "insisted that we see the study."

The MPAA has backed proposed legislation that would require universities participating in federal student financial-aid programs to consider offering "alternatives" to illegal downloading or "technology-based deterrents" to piracy.

MPAA Washington general counsel Fritz Attaway told reporters last November: "I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, 'Wait a minute. If we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright.' "

Just what impact the MPAA's goof will have on the proposed legislation remains unclear. A spokeswoman for the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, which has already passed the higher-education bill backed by the MPAA, said Wednesday that the committee has asked the MPAA for more information and "we plan to review it."

In the meantime, perhaps college presidents should chat with their IT chiefs to see what's going on.

Had anyone at the University of California at Berkeley ever asked Vanessa DeGuzman, a technology support manager for a 7,000-person campus dorm, about the MPAA's estimates, she would have told them, "It definitely seemed like their numbers were high."

DeGuzman acknowledges that all she has is anecdotal information, but she's noticed that the number of "takedown" notices she has received from entertainment companies has been falling significantly. The notices are legal documents that typically notify the school that someone on their network is pirating content.

She credits a greater emphasis on educating incoming students about copyright infringement. UC Berkeley has programs called "Learn Before You Burn," and "Think Before You Click." Students who receive a takedown notice are immediately booted from the network for a week. A second notice and the student must appear before a peer-review board before getting their Web privileges back.

In the future, perhaps the universities can add their own notice: learn the truth before you cower.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this story.

Amazon.com is delving even deeper into the film industry, with subsidiary Internet Movie Database signing a deal to acquire Withoutabox.

Withoutabox develops online tools and operates a service to aid independent filmmakers in submitting their work to festivals worldwide and in promoting their films.

Withoutabox, based in Los Angeles, said it has worked with 150,000 filmmakers since its founding in 2000. The Internet Movie Database draws more than 50 million unique visitors each month with its searchable database of movies, TV, and entertainment programs.

The definitive agreement, announced Thursday, is designed to offer a wider selection of films to Internet Movie Database users and to vastly broaden the audience for filmmakers that use Withoutabox.

"For eight years, Withoutabox has enabled filmmakers and festivals to reach the widest audience possible," David Straus, Withoutabox's CEO, said in a statement. "Now, they will be able to connect directly with the 50 million film lovers who visit (IMDB.com) each month."

Amazon itself has been dabbling with Hollywood content for years, including selling and renting downloads of movies and TV shows via Unbox.

Under the agreement, the Internet Movie Database will operate Withoutabox as a standalone entity.

The terms and timing of when the deal might close were not disclosed. As the saying in Hollywood goes, it's "hush, hush."

Quickly filling up Netflix's rearview mirror is a sight that no tech company wants to see: Apple.

Apple announced on Tuesday that the company has cut licensing deals with every top film studio--deals that will enable iTunes to offer first-run movies a month after they are released on DVD.

This means that Apple has won a major advantage in the Web movie-rental business. One of the biggest complaints customers have with online movie services is that none offer first-run features. The same is true with some of the video-on-demand services operated by the cable companies.

Moreover, Netflix offerings don't work on anything but computers running Microsoft's operating system.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience during his Macworld 2008 keynote address on Tuesday that movies offered by the service, iTunes Movie Rentals, will play on PCs, Macs, iPods, and iPhones.

Apple also one-upped most competitors by offering films in high definition (HD). Jobs told the Macworld audience that customers can watch the streaming movies instantly. They will have 30 days to start watching the moves and once they begin streaming the film and will then be allowed 24 hours to finish viewing.

Apple will charge $3.99 for newer releases and $2.99 for older titles. Customers can pay $1 extra to obtain movies in HD. The company expects to offer 1,000 films by the end of February.

"The big surprise is that they're doing HD," said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Apple nailed this because HD is what consumers want."

Apple's new rental service isn't likely to threaten Netflix's core mail-order business, according to McQuivey. Apple is charging on a per-film basis while Netflix business allows users to watch what they want for a monthly fee.

But the future of movie rentals is supposed to be providing customers access to any film with a push of a button. Nobody offers that--yet. But in the race to deliver instant gratification, Apple just zoomed past Netflix.

Still, the Web rental business as a whole has many shortcomings. Some are technological and some are the annoying restrictions imposed by the studios.

Transmitting movies over the Web, especially in massive HD-quality files, is known for taking multiple hours. The viewing experience, meanwhile, is often marked by stalling and jerky video.

Among Apple's competitors is Microsoft's Xbox. The company launched a movie and TV download store for Net-connected Xbox 360s in November and some users have complained about hours-long delays in getting their films. What Apple fans will be interested to see is what kind of viewing experience Apple can deliver.

One thing that is bound to annoy them is the viewing deadline. That isn't Apple's fault, according to McQuivey.

The reason for the deadline, he said, is that the studios insist on it because they don't want movies sitting on people's hard drives for too long.

"Their worry is that this would discourage people from picking up the DVD at Wal-Mart," McQuivey said. "The DVD market is $23 billion a year, twice as big as the annual box office revenue. The studios don't want to mess with that if they can help it. At least for now."

To avoid having to turn over user information to the motion picture industry, the BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy cut off access to its site in the United States. Apparently, that wasn't enough to satisfy Hollywood.

According to documents filed with the court last week and reviewed by CNET News.com on Wednesday, the studios still want information on the site's visitors. Lawyers representing the studios--armed with a court order--say TorrentSpy has refused to hand over the data. Because of that, the movie sector wants the judge to throw the book at the company.

"(TorrentSpy) took steps to make the Server Log Data unavailable for the express purpose of avoiding compliance with the (court) order," the movie studios said in documents filed with the court last week. "This claim should be seen for what it is: another illegitimate attempt by defendants to evade authority of this court and the May 29 order."

TorrentSpy was ordered in May to begin tracking visitors' activity and collect information, such as what BitTorrent files users requested as well as the time and date of those requests. This would show whether TorrentSpy users were on the site for legal purposes or whether the service existed to enable piracy.

During the time a judge was reviewing TorrentSpy's appeal to overturn the order, company executives made some adjustments to the site.

Sometime in July, TorrentSpy stopped providing users with cached downloads of BitTorrent files, the technology favored by many for distributing large files over the Web and a favorite of the file-sharing community, according to court documents. This meant that searches for BitTorrent files at TorrentSpy would return only links to third-party sites.

Clicking on those links wouldn't ping TorrentSpy's servers, and as a result, none of the data that the film companies sought would be stored on TorrentSpy's RAM.

Was this an attempt by the company to evade the judge's order?

"The primary reason for the changes was to protect end-user privacy worldwide," said Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney. "Web sites are allowed to evolve their technology during litigation especially if they evolve to protect user privacy. The irony here is that studios are blowing hot and cold. On one hand they asked in their lawsuit for TorrentSpy in essence to shut down U.S. traffic. When the company did, the plaintiffs complained that TorrentSpy is in violation for not supplying information under the log file order. They're never satisfied."

The studios first filed their copyright lawsuit against TorrentSpy last year.

On May 29, Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal magistrate judge in Los Angeles, ordered TorrentSpy to hand over information about user activity.

TorrentSpy executives told the judge that they never tracked visitors' activity. She responded by telling them to retrieve the information from their servers' random-access memory, or RAM.

In an unprecedented decision, the judge ruled that data found in RAM is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in civil litigation. TorrentSpy argued that RAM is far too ephemeral to be considered "stored data."

In August, TorrentSpy appealed the decision but lost. The company then shut down access to U.S. residents. If TorrentSpy had no U.S. users, then there wouldn't be any information stored in the company's RAM under the judge's purview, legal experts said. Only data on International users would be logged and U.S. courts don't have authority over them.

But the studios didn't go away.

For not complying with the court order, Hollywood has asked the judge to impose evidentiary sanctions against the company, documents show. As part of the sanctions, the studios want the judge to rule that the movies belonging to the studios found on TorrentSpy's site infringed on their copyright. They also want the judge to find that the site has no "substantial noninfringing uses."

This would effectively label TorrentSpy a pirate site and make it very difficult for the company to prevail in its civil trial against the film industry.

Just how long it will take for the judge to rule on the studios' application for sanctions is unclear. Rothken said he expects that she will call for more briefings soon.

A federal judge issued a decision on Monday that would have required TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent search engine, to hand over information about its users had the company not ceased operating in the U.S. a day earlier.

TorrentSpy, accused of encouraging movie piracy in a lawsuit filed by the film industry last year, was ordered in June to provide the studios with user information found in the company's computer RAM. The site, which is often used by file sharers to find bootleg films, had long promised to protect the anonymity of visitors.

TorrentSpy filed an appeal and argued that data in a computer's RAM was too temporary to be considered "stored information," and that it was impractical for companies to produce such material as part of a civil suit. According to court documents, the judge on Monday denied TorrentSpy's appeal.

"The court holds that data stored in RAM, however temporarily, is electronically stored information," wrote U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in her 18-page decision.

Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney, said that as far as the court order goes, if the company isn't doing business in the U.S. there isn't any U.S. records to turn over. Nonetheless, Rothken said TorrentSpy plans to continue the court fight by filing a new appeal with the 9th Circuit.

A spokeswoman with the Motion Picture Assoc. of America (MPAA), the trade group representing the six largest film studios, could not be reached for comment.

While the court's decision may have little impact on TorrentSpy--now that the company has ceased doing business in the U.S.--it could mean a great deal to scores of other companies, according to some experts.

Ken Withers, a legal scholar with the think tank, Sedona Conference, said shortly after TorrentSpy was ordered to turn over user information in June that he feared court's were creating "weapons of mass discovery" and expanding the scope of discovery too far.

But in her decision, Cooper wrote that discovery rules already allow parties in a civil suit to ask for data from "any medium from which information can be obtained." She noted that the rules did not exclude mediums that store information temporarily.

"RAM itself is defined as a storage unit," the judge wrote in her decision. "It is undisputed that the server log data (the movie studios) seek can be copied from RAM in defendant's computers and produced."

Glaskowsky taking a picture of himself, his camera, and an unnamed woman at SeaWorld

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

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