Down the YouTube?

IT HAS been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential “new-media” companies, own any of the content that they organise so well.
Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.
Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.
The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.
All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.
The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.
Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.

Europe, a Moment to Ponder

IT is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the new Spain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.”
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. The European Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr. Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but not always of those who are part of large-scale Muslim immigration. The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among the European peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power has lagged.

Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a country whose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985, 90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorship seems utterly remote.
“The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been powerful in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, with universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become a tenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity.
It is also open politically: How much of a federation should Europe be?
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”

City in Florida Fires Official Who Planned to Change Sex

The longtime city manager here was fired early Saturday, one month after he disclosed his plans to seek a sex change.
The City Commission voted 5 to 2 to dismiss the man, Steven B. Stanton, after a six-hour hearing in which he and his supporters argued that he could do his job just as well once he became a woman. Some commissioners said they had voted to fire Mr. Stanton not because he wanted to become a woman, but because he had violated their trust and caused a major disruption.
Several transgender people spoke on Mr. Stanton’s behalf, including a former deputy mayor of St. Paul, as did a few dozen people from Largo and throughout the state. A smaller number spoke in favor of firing him, including one man who said Mr. Stanton had made Largo “the laughingstock of the whole country.”
Mr. Stanton’s wish to become a woman named Susan came to light last month, after The St. Petersburg Times learned of it, got him to confirm it and published an article. Before that, Mr. Stanton said, he planned to announce his decision later this year, when his son would be out of town.
The City Commission had generally praised Mr. Stanton in performance reviews, and it gave him a raise last year. But within a week of the newspaper’s report, the commission voted to begin the process of firing him. Mr. Stanton filed an appeal on March 8 in hopes of keeping his job of 14 years, which paid $140,000 a year.

Federal Judge Blocks Online Pornography Law

background
A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to access material deemed “harmful.”
Under the law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

pros
Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. He added that there are far less restrictive methods, including software filters, that parents can use to control their children’s Internet use.
“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”
“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “All Internet would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet.”

cons:
But others were disappointed.
“It’s a very frustrating decision. We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”
In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain federal money to use software filters. The high court upheld that law in 2003.
Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University, said the case decided today indicates the shifting stances that civil libertarians have taken regarding controls placed on the Internet.
“Civil libertarians have long had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with filters,” he said, adding that while the A.C.L.U. argued in this case that filters are preferable, the organization has also voiced concerns about them.
“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said. “The result is to reinforce this infrastructure of filters.” That, he said, may lead to “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”
Mr. Hansen said that his organization has only opposed the mandatory use of filters, not filters themselves.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web publishers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law would have a chilling effect on free speech.
“We know from experience that putting up any barrier in front of your content, whether its an advertisement or a subscription wall or anything that delays someone’s access, has a big impact on traffic,” said Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com.
In a post-trial brief, Peter D. Keisler, a government lawyer, argued that depending solely on filters was insufficient. “It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” he wrote.

China Scrambles for Stability as Its Workers Age

The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees.
That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age.
By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
Obviously, raising the retirement ages would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But there are no plans to do so, and raising the retirement ages would present another set of problems for the government, experts here say.
Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed. Unemployment is high among those who are not university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.
The bind that China finds itself in takes form in an often-posed question: Can the country grow rich before it grows old? Increasingly, experts here say the answer, which also has huge implications for the global economy, appears doubtful.
Already, experts say the large financing gap resulting from the early retirement of public sector workers has repeatedly caused the state to improvise to keep the system afloat. Receipts from lottery ticket sales and from foreign initial private offerings of stocks, for example, have been drawn upon to finance the system.
Most troubling to financial experts, the government has used payroll taxes paid by the current generation of workers, who in theory are paying into their individual retirement accounts, to pay pensions for the previous generation.
China’s relatively young private life insurance industry is one of the sectors that stands to benefit most from the growing uncertainty over aging and pensions, but even within the industry, analysts express worry.
“If we continue to have sound and healthy development in the economy we might get through this, but what if we cannot?” said Jiang Shihua, a senior official of the Pingan Life Insurance Company, who spoke of a time when China would have 400 to 500 million old people who “only consume and don’t produce at all.”

F.D.A. Rule Limits Role of Advisers Tied to Industry

Expert advisers to the government who receive money from a drug or device maker would be barred for the first time from voting on whether to approve that company’s products under new rules announced Wednesday for the F.D.A.’s powerful advisory committees.
Indeed, such doctors who receive more than $50,000 from a company or a competitor whose product is being discussed would no longer be allowed to serve on the committees, though those who receive less than that amount in the prior year can join a committee and participate in its discussions.
A “significant number” of the agency’s present advisers would be affected by the new policy, said the F.D.A. acting deputy commissioner, Randall W. Lutter, though he would not say how many. The rules are among the first major changes made by Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach since he was confirmed as commissioner of food and drugs late last year.
Advisory boards recommend drugs for approval and, in rare cases, removal, and their votes can have enormous influence on drug company fortunes.
“The $50,000 threshold is something that we think strikes an appropriate balance between” getting smart advisers and reassuring the public that their advice is not tainted, Dr. Lutter said.
The changes are intended to respond to a growing chorus of critics who contend that drug and device makers have hijacked the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process by paying those who serve on the agency’s advisory panels.
In one famous example, 10 of the 32 advisers who voted in 2005 to allow the painkiller Bextra to remain on the market and the painkiller Vioxx to return to the market despite safety worries had taken money from the drug makers. Under the new rules, their votes would not have counted and the committee would have voted to keep both drugs off the market.
In the end, the F.D.A. removed Bextra from the market anyway, and Vioxx has never returned. But the controversy surrounding that panel’s vote, and similar ones, tarnished the process and provided new fodder for critics in Congress.
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, said he was delighted with the change, which will not become final until the end of a 60-day comment period.
“So many lives have been lost as a result of the failure of the F.D.A. to review drugs properly,” said Mr. Hinchey, who for two years has proposed legislation to ban agency advisers from having financial conflicts of interest. “The F.D.A. is now moving back to where it was supposed to be, a principled agency that protects the people.”
“F.D.A. is trying to strike a balance here,” Mr. Troy said, “and they would rather strike it themselves than have it struck for them.”
Drug makers routinely hire doctors as consultants for marketing and research. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that records in Minnesota show that at least 20 percent of licensed physicians in the state received money from drug makers between 1997 and 2005 — an average of $10,000.
Some conservatives were not happy with the new rule.
“I think it’s likely to improve the quality of the recommendations, remove the taint of the recommendations and improve the credibility of the recommendations,” Dr. Lurie said.
Advisory panels are important to the F.D.A. not so much because they provide the agency with expert advice — the F.D.A. can get that privately any time — but because they serve to increase public confidence in the agency’s decisions.

EU's emission restriction

Standard and Poor's is warning that the EU's stricter emissions rules will put its carmakers at serious competitive disadvantage, and could adversely affect their credit quality. This is just one of many such challenges that the EU will face as it tries to control emissions; it remains to be seen how much economic pressure the commission is prepared to withstand.

Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils

British authorities proposed new rules on Tuesday to allow schools to forbid Muslim students to wear full-face veils in class, reflecting a wider debate over Britain’s relationship with its Muslim minority.
The recommendation was the latest episode in a saga of rancorous discussion of the full-face veil, known as the niqab. Last October, Prime Minister Tony Blair described the niqab as a “mark of separation” that made “other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable.”
The Department of Education published the new guidelines after a court in Buckinghamshire rejected a 12-year-old Muslim girl’s demand to wear the niqab in class last month.
The proposed regulations, which have yet to be formally adopted, said the individual right to “manifest a religion or belief” did not bestow a right to demonstrate faith “at any time, in any place or in any particular manner.”
School principals should be allowed to order pupils to show their faces because otherwise “the teacher may not be able to judge their engagement in class,” the proposed regulations said. Moreover, they said, “schools need to be able to identify individual pupils in order to maintain good order and identify intruders easily.”
The issue of Islamic dress in schools has been contentious in many parts of Europe, sometimes pitting secularist ideologies against the religious beliefs of growing Islamic minorities.
But Islamic dress made headlines in Britain for another reason recently, when a trial of terrorism suspects included surveillance television footage of a male suspect at a bus station as he fled London in what appeared to be an all-covering burqa-style dress.
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said Tuesday that schools should consult with parents when setting their regulations on permissible uniforms. “While they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence,” he said in a statement.
The government’s position drew angry responses from some Muslim groups, including the Islamic Human Rights Commission, whose chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, said it was “simply shocking” for the government to “issue guidance against Muslim communities.”
“Successive ministers dealing with education issues have failed to give proper guidance when requested by human rights campaigners about schools’ obligations regarding religious dress, including the head scarf,” he said.
Others sought to defuse the debate by insisting that disagreements over dress codes could be resolved within schools. “The vast majority of schools are able to solve these issues locally, and that should continue to be the case,” said Tahir Alam, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.
The proposed dress regulations also included recommendations enjoining school principals not to discriminate indirectly against minorities by banning hair styles “more likely to be adopted by specific racial groups.”
The rules urged school authorities to outlaw forms of dress “associated with gangs,” but said students should not be expelled for refusing to wear standard school uniforms except in the event of “persistent and defiant” transgressions.

LOGICAL ENDINGS

Computers may soon be better than kin at predicting the wishes of the dying
When machines trespass into the area of medical ethics, though, hackles rise. Here it is not the doctor that is being second-guessed, but the patient's relatives. The question is, if you were in a coma, whom would you more trust to come to the conclusion that you would want: your spouse or a machine?
David Wendler, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have looked into this question. Their answer, just published in the Public Library of Science Medicine, is surprising. At the moment, both are equally reliable—but only the machines are likely to get better at it.
Dr Wendler's study began last year, when his team reviewed all the experiments they could find that had attempted to test how well people predict the wishes of patients with life-threatening conditions. Some of these studies used real patients whose conditions might have led them to fall into a coma—when, obviously, they could not make the decision for themselves. Others employed surrogates who were asked to make “living wills” outlining their preferences for treatment (or the lack of it) in various hypothetical circumstances. The desires expressed by these patients, whether real or surrogate, were then compared with what those patients' kin predicted the patients would want, and also with the predictions of unrelated people (doctors, for example) who might be called on to make the decision if kin could not be found.
Dr Wendler found 16 published reports containing almost 20,000 pairs of decisions. His analysis showed that kin and patient agreed only 68% of the time. When they did not agree, kin were more likely to recommend treatment when the patient wanted treatment withdrawn rather than mistakenly to recommend withdrawal. Surprisingly, the bias towards treatment was equally strong when the decision was made by an unrelated person such as a doctor.
Other research has suggested that the variable most reliably governing whether a patient would want the machine turned off is the “1% rule”. This is that people seem to want life-saving interventions if there is at least a 1% chance they will recover the ability to reason, remember and communicate. Less than 1%, and it is time to pull the plug.
Calculating will
Using that rule of thumb, Dr Wendler and his colleagues wrote a computer program that assesses the prognosis for a patient, based on the sort of clinical criteria that the studies had described to both patients and predictors. Only 12 of the 16 original studies contained sufficient detail to be used, but the result was remarkable. In these 12 studies, human predictors guessed the patient's wishes rather more accurately than was true when all 16 were lumped together—getting them right 78.4% of the time. Dr Wendler's program achieved an almost identical result—78.5%.
At the moment, such data do not exist. No one has yet had a reason to collect them. But they do have a reason now. The decision about when to pull the plug on a patient who is not expected to recover is unlikely ever to be handed over completely to a machine. But when no kin can be found, the program's opinion might help. And even when a dying patient is surrounded by people who care about him, those people may welcome some guidance about what his wishes were likely to have been. Individuals are, indeed, individual. But that does not mean their dying wishes are all that different.

THE GLOBAL GLASS CEILING

The highest percentage of women in senior management can be found in the Philippines, according to a report by Grant Thornton International, a consultancy. This reflects a tradition of wide participation in society there. Similarly, the egalitarian legacy of communism could explain the high proportion of women near the top of companies in China and Russia.