Thoughts on Clutter and Junk

Thoughts on Clutter and Junk

Posted on 5th Jun 2011 at 11:50 by Joe Martin with 29 comments

I?ve been playing Star Wars: Jedi Academy lately. I didn?t play it when it first came out, but good word of mouth and a budget Steam price proved hard to resist. Overall, it?s a pretty good game too, although I?ll never be as effusive about it as my pals. One thing I can?t get over, though, is how incredibly dated the game looks.

It?s been hard for me to pin down exactly why Jedi Academy feels so dated, as the graphics actually hold up very well for a seven year old game using the twelve year old id Tech 3 engine. Lately, I?ve come to think that it?s the sparseness of the levels that makes it feel archaic. There are too many empty desks in the cantinas, too many barren walls; there?s not enough clutter in the world.



The effect that level clutter has on the feel of a game can be significant. One of the other games I?ve been dipping in and out of lately has been the original SiN, which manages to feel a lot more contemporary than even Jedi Outcast, despite having been released years earlier and using the previous id Tech engine. Why? Because the world seems more populated and involving; there are mugs on tables, books on shelves and posters on walls. It doesn?t change the action at all, but it fundamentally alters your impression of the world.

The importance of clutter isn?t new. I still remember when my young friends and I got our hands on the original Quake shareware. We loved it and played it to death once we overcame our fear of its murky, gothic castles. The only game that bested it was Duke Nukem 3D which, despite being uglier on a pure technical level, was set in a place far more engaging to lazy young minds.

Carmack and Co. may be able to make gorgeous 3D castles, but only 3D Realms would think to stand suits of armour and hang tapestries in the hallways. That was how I used to think of it, as a kid.


Nowadays, nearly all games seed their levels with an appropriate level of junk. It?s one of the forgotten benefits of the more powerful technology in modern computers. We?re used to smashing bits of furniture with stray bullets in Modern Warfare or scouring through medicine cabinets for painkillers in Left 4 Dead. Even relatively modern games can get this wrong, however.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is one of the worst games I can recall in this regard. It was a good game and I have many fond memories of it, but when I look back I don?t immediately recall high points such as the Brush With Death quest. Instead, the first memory that comes to mind is that I must have spent hours of my life just picking up and selling ladles, clay plates and cloth-covered pots. None of these items were good for anything at all and Oblivion wouldn?t have lost anything by not featuring them, yet Bethesda seemed ready to drown players in this junk.

A lack of clutter may make a game feel outdated, but too much of it can get in the way so much that it ends up defining your game. Surely there?s got to be a happy medium?

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Gingrich Aides Quit en Masse Over Conflicts

Mr. Gingrich vowed to carry on, saying that he was ?committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring.?

But the departure of nearly two dozen aides, including his entire Iowa operation, left him, for now at least, crippled in his ability to do much more than appear at debates or other public forums at a time when his main rivals were busy raising money and building organizations in crucial states. And it injected fresh uncertainty into the Republican nominating contest amid continued talk that further candidates might jump in.

Mr. Gingrich?s senior strategists confronted him on Thursday after he returned from a two-week vacation with his wife, Callista, which included a cruise through the Greek isles. Mr. Gingrich defended his holiday as a chance to ?get away and think,? but aides chastised him, they said, for lacking the discipline to run a focused presidential campaign that could overcome rising doubts about his candidacy.

?The professional team came to the realization that the direction of the campaign they sought and Newt?s vision for the campaign were incompatible,? said David Carney, a senior strategist who was among those who submitted resignations on Thursday afternoon.

Many Republicans had long seen Mr. Gingrich as something of a vanity candidate ? not really expecting to win the party?s nomination, but viewing the race as an opportunity to draw attention to his policy ideas, books and documentaries. His aides described him and Mrs. Gingrich as not doing enough to dedicate themselves to the hard work and the unglamorous aspects of running for president.

For some candidates, the departure of an entrenched team of advisers could provide an opportunity to regroup, but Mr. Gingrich could face tougher going after these setbacks. His aides said that he was struggling to raise money, recruit staff and be seen as a top-tier candidate.

Former Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia, a national co-chairman of the Gingrich campaign, withdrew his endorsement and said he would support Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota.

The repositioning in the Republican contest unfolded on several fronts Thursday. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said he would not compete in the Iowa Straw Poll, a traditional test of strength, which he won four years ago.

The shakeup surrounding Mr. Gingrich shined a new light on the intentions of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who is taking a serious look at joining the Republican presidential race. Two of the strategists who parted ways with Mr. Gingrich ? Mr. Carney and Rob Johnson, the campaign manager ? have also worked for Mr. Perry and could now play a key role in his decision.

Mr. Perry is scheduled to appear before Republican audiences next week in California, New York and Louisiana, all of which offer an opportunity for him to explore the fund-raising potential should he decide to move forward with a candidacy.

His spokesman, Mark Miner, said the resignation by Mr. Gingrich?s aides would not affect Mr. Perry?s choice.

The breakup of the Gingrich team, which included a top-to-bottom slate of aides in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Washington and Georgia, provided one of the biggest jolts yet to the 2012 Republican presidential campaign.

During a conference call on Wednesday, top strategists confronted Mr. Gingrich over what they believed was a lack of focus. They demanded that he spend 90 percent of his time in three early-voting states and curtail distractions like screenings of his documentaries.

To underscore their complaint, Mr. Gingrich was taking the call from New Hampshire, where he was not introducing himself to voters who will take part in the nation?s first primary next year, but rather promoting a documentary on Pope John Paul II that he made with his wife.

Jeff Zeleny reported from Washington, and Trip Gabriel from Plaistow, N.H. Michael D. Shear contributed from Washington.

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Ex-N.S.A. Aide Gains Plea Deal in Leak Case; Setback to U.S.

The National Security Agency official, Thomas A. Drake, had faced a possible 35 years in prison if convicted on felony charges under the Espionage Act. Instead, he agreed to admit to a misdemeanor of misusing the agency?s computer system by providing ?official N.S.A. information? to an unauthorized person, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Prosecutors said in the written plea agreement that they would not oppose a sentence under which Mr. Drake would serve no time.

A formal plea hearing was set for Friday morning in Baltimore. The presiding judge, Richard D. Bennett of the district court, could impose a sentence of up to a year in prison. But legal experts said it would be highly unusual to impose a prison term when the Justice Department was not seeking incarceration.

The deal represented the almost complete collapse of the government?s effort to make an example of Mr. Drake, who was charged last year in a 10-count indictment that accused him of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. It is uncertain whether the outcome will influence the handling of three pending leak cases or others still under investigation.

The case against Mr. Drake is among five such prosecutions for disclosures to the news media brought since President Obama took office in 2009: one each against defendants from the National Security Agency, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the military and the State Department. In the past, such prosecutions have been extremely rare ? three or four in history, depending on how they are counted, and never more than one under any other president.

Officials say they have been prompted by a bipartisan belief in Congress and in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations that leaks were getting out of hand.

The flurry of criminal cases has led to both praise and criticism for Mr. Obama, who entered office promising unprecedented transparency but in less than three years in office has far outdone the security-minded Bush administration in pursuing leaks. Some political analysts say Mr. Obama?s liberal credentials may give him political cover for the crackdown.

The Drake case was seen as a test of the tougher line against unauthorized disclosures. But news media coverage of the charges against Mr. Drake, 54, an introspective computer specialist, has highlighted his motivation for sharing information about N.S.A. technology with a reporter for The Baltimore Sun in 2006 and 2007: the agency was rejecting a $3 million in-house program called ThinThread in favor of a $1-billion-plus contractor-run program called Trailblazer. His supporters have portrayed him as a diligent public servant who was trying to save taxpayers? money and strengthen national security, not damage it.

To make it easier to convict him, prosecutors shifted strategies last year and decided to charge him not with giving information to the Sun reporter, Siobhan Gorman, now at The Wall Street Journal, but with illegally holding classified documents at home.

But after Judge Bennett ruled last week that the government would have to show some of the allegedly classified material to the jury, prosecutors on Sunday withdrew four of the documents and redacted information from two others about ?N.S.A.?s targeting of a particular telecommunications technology.?

That undermined much of the case, leading prosecutors to make a series of last-minute plea offers. Friends said Mr. Drake resisted during long hours of negotiations because he did not want to admit to a crime, however minor, that he believed he had not committed.

Mr. Drake?s lawyers, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman of the federal public defender?s office, declined to comment. But Jesselyn A. Radack, a lawyer for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project who had rallied support for Mr. Drake, hailed the outcome.

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Trove of Palin E-Mails Draws Press to Alaska

Yet nearly two years after she resigned as governor and nearly three since Senator John McCain chose her as his running mate, Ms. Palin is steering still another wave of national news media attention toward Juneau. On Friday, more than 24,000 pages of e-mails Ms. Palin sent as governor, mostly using private accounts, are to be released in response to public records requests first made in 2008.

After all the delay ? and after Ms. Palin?s past and personal life have since been scoured in depth by news outlets (and exposed through leaked e-mails, investigative reports and tell-all books) ? the relevance of the e-mails and what they might reveal is unclear. But that has not diminished many efforts to obtain them, or the challenge of digesting what the Alaska official in charge of their release suggested in an interview would be ?six boxes now, not five? of hard-copy documents.

The news media have descended here en masse to sift through the trove, with many organizations sending teams of reporters and database specialists to comb the documents and post them online. All that effort for a cache whose contents remain unknown ? as do Ms. Palin?s presidential aspirations ? was testament to her singular ability to command attention.

Even as Ms. Palin orchestrates much of her communication through digital media ? one moment she tweaks President Obama via Twitter, then she elaborates on Facebook, all from wherever she might be at that moment ? her old e-mails are being released by the pound, not the pixel, in six boxes, a total of about 250 pounds at a printing cost of $725 per set. And at least initially, the documents can be had only by either picking them up here, in remote Juneau ? a city accessible only by plane or boat ? or having them shipped, at considerable cost, to newsrooms across the country.

In addition, more than 2,000 pages of the e-mails have been withheld for various reasons, including executive privilege and privacy, according to Gov. Sean Parnell?s office. Details in many of the documents that are being released have been redacted by state lawyers.

?Why has your staff only implemented taxing ways to disclose these (redacted) public documents? What about scanning them?? Andree McLeod, a critic of Ms. Palin who was among those who pushed for the release, wrote to Mr. Parnell recently. In an interview here, Ms. McLeod, who had been among the most active in filing complaints against Ms. Palin, said even she did not know entirely what to expect from the e-mails.

Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for Governor Parnell ? and previously for Governor Palin ? said ?the process was fair, we followed the law? in releasing the documents. She said a lawyer for Ms. Palin had reviewed the e-mails and did not request any redactions or that any of the documents be withheld from release.

The documents are to be released at 9 a.m. Alaska time on Friday ? 1 p.m. in New York ? and some news organizations are setting up elaborate systems for scanning them and inviting the public to help search them online.

MSNBC.com, ProPublica and Mother Jones magazine are working with a research company to create an online database of the documents. The company, Crivella West, created a similar database last year when the state released a much smaller set of documents related to the involvement of Ms. Palin?s husband, Todd, with state government.

The company has not said when exactly its new database will be ready. ?But it?ll be as fast as anybody can do it,? said Richard Ekstrom, the company?s chief operating officer.

The New York Times and other news organizations intend to assemble their own searchable online databases of the documents, and some, including The Times, were asking readers Thursday to help reporters sift through the voluminous correspondence in the coming days.

The e-mails being released come from the beginning of Ms. Palin?s administration, from December 2006 through September 2008, about a month after she joined Mr. McCain on the campaign trail and as national scrutiny of her tumultuous time as governor became increasingly intense. Ms. Palin frequently used her personal e-mail account to discuss state business, including with her husband, and those e-mails have been determined to be public record.

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Sony PlayStation Vita will be region-free

The Sony PlayStation Vita (PS Vita) (PCH-1000 series) will be region-free. During a PlayStation Vita session for European and Australian press at E3, Michael Denny, Sony's Vice President of Sony Worldwide Studios Europe, confirmed the tidbit to IGN. He did say that it was according to the best of his knowledge, but at this point we really don't think Sony would decide to backpedal.

Region-free simply means that you can purchase a game and system from any two different regions and they will be compatible. This is particularly important for hardcore gamers who want to buy games that are released in niche markets. The PlayStation 3 is region-free, but the Nintendo 3DS, which will be Vita's prime competitor, is not.

If you've got questions about the PS Vita, check out the recently posted FAQs. The most important information, including pricing, is below.

Sony is promising that the PS Vita will have give a PS3-level experience with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a multi-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 graphics chip four times faster than the PSP's. The device will come with a 5-inch OLED screen (950 x 544 resolution), two micro-analog sticks to simulate the Dual Shock experience, front and rear facing cameras, and two-finger multitouch pad on the back of the machine. Sony is hoping the front and rear touch screens will offer new three dimension-like motion gameplay experiences never before seen on any device through "touch, grab, trace, push and pull" finger motions. A Sixaxis equivalent with a gyroscope and accelerometer is also available to let players control games by moving and tilting the system itself.

In terms of connectivity you can expect built-in 3G in addition to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, as well as GPS support. The PS Vita will come with a pre-installed app called Party, which lets you use voice chat or text chat when gaming, using other apps, or browsing the Internet. Another app, called Near, will let you share your game information with other users and add them as friends.

The Wi-Fi model will be available for 25,000 yen (including tax) in Japan, $250.00 in the US, and ?250.00 in Europe, while the 3G/Wi-Fi model will be available for 30,000 yen (including tax) in Japan, $300.00 in the US and ?300.00 in Europe. Exact release dates are still unknown, all Sony has said is that the PS Vita will launch globally at the end of this year.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44188-sony-playstation-vita-will-be-region-free.html

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Lutebox: a social entertainment hub for premium content

At The Inspire Conference in London this week, The Next Web met quite a few cool new startups. And one of them was Lutebox, a social entertainment hub.

So ? what exactly is a social entertainment hub? In the case of Lutebox, it?s an online hangout where users can instantly stream, play and discover premium entertainment content. Friends can link-up to enjoy movies, music, games etc in real-time, anywhere in the world.

I spoke with S. Ali Ahmed, Founder and Managing Director of Lutebox, to explain a little more about Lutebox and how it differs from existing platforms:

The problem, according to Lutebox, is that people don?t have a central, single point online where they can consume instant on-demand premium entertainment whilst interacting in real-time with their friends. And that?s where Lutebox comes into play.

Social Slider

Users purchase Lutes (virtual credits/currency) which can be allocated towards premium content. And the beauty of this is that users can club together to pay for a movie ? just as though they are hiring a DVD and watching together in the same room. Lutebox takes a fixed commission fee off every transaction, while returning the remainder to the original content owner/facilitator

Of course, Facebook already offers movie streaming, you can share songs and playlists, and Facebook already has almost 700m users. How can Lutebox compete with this? Ahmed says:

?The way Facebook has built entertainment around itself, it?s a very cluttered experience. You have to dig through various apps, approve the apps, you then have to click through to the Warner Brothers website, and then purchase a movie to stream it. And you don?t really have a social experience with your friends. With Lutebox, the social interaction is all in real-time ? as you?re watching a movie or playing a game.?

And Ahmed also noted that for Facebook to compete with what Lutebox has ? a dedicated social entertainment hub ? it would have to completely destroy its user interface and start again from the bottom up. So how far along is Lutebox and who?s interested so far?

?We?ve finalized a deal with one of the major record labels, we?re speaking to a few film studios, and we?ve spoken to a few independents who?ve agreed to come on board. It?s a long process though.?

The interface also has localized features built-in too, such as the ability to order food and drink from local delivery outlets. And even tickets for new movies in local cinemas can be purchased directly through the interface:

Play Screen

Lutebox is still in alpha mode, but Ahmed hopes to go public with it within a few months once it has developed enough content no the platform. You could be seeing a lot more of Lutebox in the future, so keep an eye on this one.

Meanwhile, take a look at Lutebox?s official promo video:

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/video/2011/06/10/lutebox-a-social-entertainment-hub-for-premium-content/

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Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Posted on 8th Jun 2011 at 07:28 by Clive Webster with 63 comments

While it?s good news for customers that Intel is aiming to make superportable laptops that rival the MacBook Air affordable for many, via its ?ultrabook? project, it shows a slightly outdated mode of thinking. When asked what would make superportable laptops successful, Intel?s executive vice-president Sean Maloney replied that a low price would do it. Low price = more sales = more profit, the conventional wisdom goes. Or does it?

The problem with the equation above is that low price = low margin, and you therefore rely on huge sales to make significant profits. And the drive to lower prices can lead to design compromises ? plastic rather than aluminium shells, steel rather than magnesium alloy skeletons, cheap components that fail more quickly or are louder or slower. This is the PC industry for the last 30 years.

But it?s a flawed business model ? just look at UK box-shifter Mesh, which ceased trading recently. Equally, look at Acer. For years it has been trimming its costs to be ultra-efficient while also climbing the league tables in terms of units sold. All this effort was in many ways the pinnacle of the low-price philosophy of making money from computers. And it failed: Apple is more profitable.

That?s the shift that we?re seeing: so far, we?ve made do with stuff that kind of works, does a job and doesn?t cost too much. Now we want technology that?s cool, that looks like it could be from the future and that we?re not embarrassed to leave out on the coffee table. Make something desirable and it will sell, even if you whack on a decent margin. And from that decent margin you can invest in customer support (how many negative stories have you heard about Apple customer support? How many positive ones?) and into the creation of new, even more desirable kit.

Of course, the Apple success story doesn?t end at merely charging extra for desirability, there?s the fact that it takes a 30 per cent skim of any software sold for that desirable item. However, the point that it?s desirability and not cheapness that really makes money these days doesn?t crumble in light of the App Store levy caveat. Hopefully superportable laptop makers won?t forget this fact, despite Intel?s out-of-date thinking about them; certainly if preview shots from Computex 2011 are anything to go by, Asus hasn?t with its UX21. Could we see desirably light laptops without a prohibitive price? Possibly, but I?m hoping that the latter doesn?t undermine the former.

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Trove of Palin E-Mails Draws Press to Alaska

Yet nearly two years after she resigned as governor and nearly three since Senator John McCain chose her as his running mate, Ms. Palin is steering still another wave of national news media attention toward Juneau. On Friday, more than 24,000 pages of e-mails Ms. Palin sent as governor, mostly using private accounts, are to be released in response to public records requests first made in 2008.

After all the delay ? and after Ms. Palin?s past and personal life have since been scoured in depth by news outlets (and exposed through leaked e-mails, investigative reports and tell-all books) ? the relevance of the e-mails and what they might reveal is unclear. But that has not diminished many efforts to obtain them, or the challenge of digesting what the Alaska official in charge of their release suggested in an interview would be ?six boxes now, not five? of hard-copy documents.

The news media have descended here en masse to sift through the trove, with many organizations sending teams of reporters and database specialists to comb the documents and post them online. All that effort for a cache whose contents remain unknown ? as do Ms. Palin?s presidential aspirations ? was testament to her singular ability to command attention.

Even as Ms. Palin orchestrates much of her communication through digital media ? one moment she tweaks President Obama via Twitter, then she elaborates on Facebook, all from wherever she might be at that moment ? her old e-mails are being released by the pound, not the pixel, in six boxes, a total of about 250 pounds at a printing cost of $725 per set. And at least initially, the documents can be had only by either picking them up here, in remote Juneau ? a city accessible only by plane or boat ? or having them shipped, at considerable cost, to newsrooms across the country.

In addition, more than 2,000 pages of the e-mails have been withheld for various reasons, including executive privilege and privacy, according to Gov. Sean Parnell?s office. Details in many of the documents that are being released have been redacted by state lawyers.

?Why has your staff only implemented taxing ways to disclose these (redacted) public documents? What about scanning them?? Andree McLeod, a critic of Ms. Palin who was among those who pushed for the release, wrote to Mr. Parnell recently. In an interview here, Ms. McLeod, who had been among the most active in filing complaints against Ms. Palin, said even she did not know entirely what to expect from the e-mails.

Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for Governor Parnell ? and previously for Governor Palin ? said ?the process was fair, we followed the law? in releasing the documents. She said a lawyer for Ms. Palin had reviewed the e-mails and did not request any redactions or that any of the documents be withheld from release.

The documents are to be released at 9 a.m. Alaska time on Friday ? 1 p.m. in New York ? and some news organizations are setting up elaborate systems for scanning them and inviting the public to help search them online.

MSNBC.com, ProPublica and Mother Jones magazine are working with a research company to create an online database of the documents. The company, Crivella West, created a similar database last year when the state released a much smaller set of documents related to the involvement of Ms. Palin?s husband, Todd, with state government.

The company has not said when exactly its new database will be ready. ?But it?ll be as fast as anybody can do it,? said Richard Ekstrom, the company?s chief operating officer.

The New York Times and other news organizations intend to assemble their own searchable online databases of the documents, and some, including The Times, were asking readers Thursday to help reporters sift through the voluminous correspondence in the coming days.

The e-mails being released come from the beginning of Ms. Palin?s administration, from December 2006 through September 2008, about a month after she joined Mr. McCain on the campaign trail and as national scrutiny of her tumultuous time as governor became increasingly intense. Ms. Palin frequently used her personal e-mail account to discuss state business, including with her husband, and those e-mails have been determined to be public record.

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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Team Up to Advance Semantic Web

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have teamed up to encourage Web page operators to make the meaning of their pages understandable to search engines.

The move may finally encourage widespread use of technology that makes online information as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans. If the effort works, the result will be not only better search results, but also a wave of other intelligent apps and services able to understand online information almost as well as we do.

The three big Web companies launched the initiative, known as Schema.org, last week. It defines an interconnected vocabulary of terms that can be added to the HTML markup of a Web page to communicate the meaning of concepts on the page. A location referred to in text could be defined as a courthouse, which Schema.org understands as being a specific type of government building. People and events can also be defined, as can attributes like distance, mass, or duration. This data will allow search engines to better understand how useful a page may be for a given search query?for example, by making it clear that a page is about the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, not five-sided regular shapes.

The move represents a major advance in a campaign initiated in 2001 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, to enable software to access the meaning of online content?a vision known as the "semantic Web." Although the technology to do so exists, progress has been slow because there have been few reasons for Web page operators to add the extra markup.

Schema.org  may change that, says Dennis McCleod, who works on semantic Web technology at the University of Southern California. By tagging information, Web page owners could improve the position of their site in search results?an  important source of traffic. "This will motivate people to actually add semantic data to their pages," says McCleod. "It's always hard to predict what will be adopted, but generally, unless there's something in it for people, they won't do it. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have given people a strong reason."

The Schema.org approach is modeled on one of the more straightforward methods of describing the meaning of a Web page's contents. "The trouble with many of these techniques is, they are really hard to use," says McCleod. "One of the encouraging things about Schema.org is that they are pursuing this at a level that is quite usable, so it is much easier to mark up your website."

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China forms association of Internet music operators to combat piracy

Xinhua News reports that China has established its very first association of Internet music operators and Internet music content providers in a bid to promote legal music online, according the country?s Ministry of Culture.

Dubbed the Internet Music Industry Development Consortium, the Beijing-based coalition aims to promote a healthy development of the country?s Internet music industry ? from the production, distribution and marketing of legal music content. It also offers guidance on intra-industry competition and dispute settlement, the report said.

Among the founding members of the association include Internet giants Tencent, Sina, and Baidu; record labels such as China Record Corporation, Ocean Butterflies Music; as well as the three major telecom operators in the country: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom.

Baidu took flak earlier this month for its leniency towards pirated content but recently has revamped its online music service, Baidu Ting. The new platform no longer links to pirated music and will abide by the regulations set by the Music Copyright Society of China to benefit the music industry at large.

Li Xiong, director of the Ministry?s cultural market department, highlights China?s fast-growing Internet music market, which grew 14.4 percent year-on-year to $355 million as of 2010. He said that despite the steady development in the recent years, the industry is still faced with critical challenges such as piracy.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/06/10/china-forms-association-of-internet-music-operators-to-combat-piracy/

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