It's a world of code names out there, and final products rarely ever inherit the name given to them during the development process. It appears that Microsoft doesn't plan to buck the trend with the client version of Windows Blue, an OS refresh that Mary Jo Foley says is destined to become Windows 8.1. The screenshot you see above of Build 9375 was leaked on WinForum.eu and Foley has confirmed it with her sources; apparently Blue is poised to be kept under the Windows 8 umbrella instead of Win9, so the 8.x naming scheme would fit. Additionally, her sources have indicated that the Blue update for RT will simply be known as Windows RT 8.1. While we wait for official word from Microsoft, check out our screenshot tour of a recently leaked build of the update -- after all, its functionality is a bit more important than whatever it gets named.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? North Korea vowed Tuesday to restart a nuclear reactor that can make one bomb's worth of plutonium a year, escalating tensions already raised by near daily warlike threats against the United States and South Korea.
The North's plutonium reactor was shut down in 2007 as part of international nuclear disarmament talks that have since stalled. The declaration of a resumption of plutonium production ? the most common fuel in nuclear weapons ? and other facilities at the main Nyongbyon nuclear complex will boost fears in Washington and among its allies about North Korea's timetable for building a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach the United States, technology it is not currently believed to have.
A spokesman for the North's General Department of Atomic Energy said that scientists will begin work at a uranium enrichment plant and a graphite-moderated 5 megawatt reactor, which generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium and is the core of the Nyongbyon nuclear complex.
The unidentified spokesman said the measure is part of efforts to resolve the country's acute electricity shortage but also for "bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity," according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting a new round of U.N. sanctions that have infuriated its leaders and led to a torrent of threatening rhetoric. The United States has sent nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets to participate in annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that the allies call routine but that Pyongyang claims are invasion preparations.
North Korea has declared that the armistice ending the Korean War in 1953 is void, threatened to launch nuclear and rocket strikes on the United States and, most recently, declared at a high-level government assembly that making nuclear arms and a stronger economy are the nation's top priorities.
The threats are seen as efforts to force policy changes in Seoul and Washington and increase domestic loyalty to young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by portraying him as a powerful military force.
"North Korea is keeping tension and crisis alive to raise stakes ahead of possible future talks with the United States," said Hwang Jihwan, a North Korea expert at the University of Seoul. "North Korea is asking the world, 'What are you going to do about this?'"
North Korea added the 5-megawatt, graphite-moderated reactor to its nuclear complex at Nyongbyon in 1986 after seven years of construction. The country began building a 50-megawatt and a 200 megawatt reactor in 1984, but construction was suspended under a 1994 nuclear deal with Washington.
North Korea says the facility is aimed at generating electricity. It takes about 8,000 fuel rods to run the reactor. Reprocessing the spent fuel rods after a year of reactor operation could yield about 7 kilograms of plutonium ? enough to make at least one nuclear bomb, experts say.
Nuclear bombs can be produced with highly enriched uranium or with plutonium. North Korea is believed to have exploded plutonium devices in its first two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009.
In 2010, the North unveiled a long-suspected uranium enrichment program, which would give it another potential route to make bomb fuel. Uranium worries outsiders because the technology needed to make highly enriched uranium bombs is much easier to hide than huge plutonium facilities.
But experts say plutonium is considered better for building small warheads, which North Korea needs if it is going to put them on missiles. Analysts say they don't believe North Korea currently has mastered such miniaturization technology.
Scientist and nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker has estimated that Pyongyang has 24 to 42 kilograms of plutonium ? enough for perhaps four to eight rudimentary bombs similar to the plutonium weapon used on Nagasaki in World War II.
It's not known whether the North's latest atomic test, in February, used highly enriched uranium or plutonium stockpiles. South Korea and other countries have so far failed to detect radioactive elements that may have leaked from the test and which could determine what kind of device was used.
"North Korea is dispelling any remaining uncertainties about its intention for developing nuclear arms. It is making it clear that its nuclear arms program is the essence of its national security and that it's not negotiable," said Sohn Yong-woo, a professor at the Graduate School of National Defense Strategy of Hannam University in South Korea.
"North Korea is more confident about itself than ever after the third nuclear test," Sohn said. "That confidence is driving the leadership toward more aggressive nuclear development."
__
Associated Press writer Sam Kim contributed to this report.
He has served on the board of directors of fifteen public and private companies, including Line6, Avnera, Dash Navigation, Zing Systems, and Pandora. Peter has a BA degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is member of the Board of Trustees at the Berklee College of Music.
The interview starts by looking back at Gotcher?s earlier achievements but quickly turns to the current juncture and his direct involvement with Pandora and Topsin. Gotcher also touches on Daisy, a new streaming service that will launch later this year and which we write about at more length later in this issue.
MBJ: How did ProTools become the standard for recording and music production??
Peter Gotcher: I started Digidesign with Evan Brooks in 1983 and we were not into recording systems. Our products were digitized drum and percussion sounds on chips that could be put into drum computers to make them sound better. When digital sampling keyboards and the Macintosh came along, things took off. The Mac was the first personal computer that could display a waveform, and our sound editing capabilities evolved dramatically. Today, ProTools has many components: the main application, different audio interfaces, and a universe of third party plugins.
But it all goes back to having a visual waveform that you can edit and a traditional mixer element; to this day most of the work in ProTools happens there. There doesn?t seem to be a new paradigm to rethink how we record, edit, and process audio yet. Still, much innovation is happening in the world of virtual instruments and plugins.
MBJ:How do you remember the transition into Wall Street?
PG: Digidesign went public in 1993. I was in my early thirties and pretty terrified because I was the youngest CEO of a public company at the time we went public. I would argue that there was a short transitional period of time where I kind of dropped the ball. Going public really limited the amount of time I could stay focused on the product side of the company. I was in effect its Senior Product Manager, although I didn?t necessarily write code or design the hardware. Now there were many new activities to spend time on, and investor relations needed work early on. The IPO roadshow itself was about fifty meetings and fifty presentations over a couple of weeks. Fortunately, I had mentors among my board members; one of them was a CEO of a publicly traded company and there were several with deep business experience.
MBJ: You are also known as the founder of Topspin, a software-marketing company, especially for new artists.
PG: I was on the board of a company named MusicMatch whose software was bundled with the iPod for Windows before Apple came out with a Windows version of iTunes. The company had about twenty million users but its search engine tended to recommend artists that were already popular. I was wrestling with a question: how does a new artist get traction with a search engine and get recommended sooner rather than later?
I had spent time and brainstormed this topic with Shamal Ranasinghe, so I hired him. MusicMatch went with it, and we spun an early version of Topspin there. But Yahoo later acquired MusicMatch and did not follow through. At the time, the concept was based around targeted marketing for new artists, including the identification of strong correlations with symbiotic artists for purposes of reaching more fans. But we were now free from Yahoo and could get behind a broader mission, and this became ?let?s just let artists go direct to fans and offer an alternative to the traditional label structure.? Shamal really deserves credit for keeping the idea going and restarting the new Topsin. I provided some seed funding with him as a co-founder. After that, we hired a small team of about five or six people. We ended up raising several rounds of venture capital and the company is doing well.
MBJ: Can you tell us a little bit about Topspin since CEO Ian Roger?s departure?
PG: Ian is going to run a project called Daisy, which is a new on demand music service. He?s staying involved with Topspin and has become the chairman of the board. He?s actually taking my place in that role. He has been a fantastic evangelist for the company and we feel that in his role at Daisy he is going to have so much artist interaction ? and Topspin will be integrated into Daisy ? that it will probably continue to promote Topspin?s interests as well.
I would defer to Ian to give you the full story, but what they are trying to do differently with Daisy is to both allow artists to manage their presence and profile pages, and to make offers directly within the service. Today, if you are on another music service and you click on the artist?s bio, you typically get some pretty stale info that they?ve licensed from the All Music Guide or one of those other data sources. Many of the postings are old. A better alternative is to let artists claim their space on the service by uploading pictures and videos, making comments, and placing their own Topspin offers as well.
MBJ: Daisy will be a streaming service. Are you bullish about the medium?
PG: Yes. I?m a believer that streaming is the way of the future and that downloads are probably just a transitional format, and probably won?t last a full thirty-year cycle like others have. Streaming is where the big audiences are; think about terrestrial radio: its audience went out to the record stores and bought CDs and even with a fairly low conversion rate it made a difference.
The economics of streaming are, of course, challenging. Look at Pandora being basically break-even and Spotify losing many tens of millions of dollars; artists, on the other hand, complain about the size of their payouts from such services. But also, expectations of how much, when and if you pay for music have just really changed dramatically. The root of all this is the unbundling of the album and the establishment of the single song economy. In my view, fighting piracy is like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube.
The challenge for artists and services like Daisy is what to do with these very large audiences they will be creating. I think of Pandora: we had over 10,000 artists that were played for more than 250,000 uniques last year. Radio never had that kind of reach. The problem now is closing that loop. We should let artists get head-to-head with that listening activity, make offers to acquire more fans, and exchange a free track for an email address. All of that classic direct to fan stuff works much better when you have large-scale exposure. With that many impressions, fan acquisition is easy and you don?t need to convert many to generate transactions. (Editor?s note: Gotcher is a Round B investor in Pandora.)
MBJ: Do you think there is room for both Pandora and Daisy?
PG: Yes, I think they are fairly complementary services. It will be interesting to see what Daisy does in terms of a ?radio offering?. When Spotify came out people thought it would cannibalize Pandora and that hasn?t happened at all. Pandora?s market share of U.S. Internet radio is about 72% now. Ironically, the high royalties stifle competition and innovation from other streaming radio services
MBJ:Please compare Pandora and Spotify for us. Are Pandora?s programming methods more reliant on the human touch?
PG: Well it?s a mix. There?s the Music Genome Project, which is made of trained music analysts who listen to the music and capture all kinds of ?genes? as we call them, i.e. the traits of the music. That?s the starting point. Then, we also have so many users that we have billions of these ?thumbs up? and ?thumbs down? events. So we use that as well. And Pandora?s primary focus is ?let?s build the best possible playlists for you.? That?s where a lot of our R&D goes. The user interface of Pandora hasn?t really changed all that much. We want to keep it simple. But a lot of the innovation is happening under the hood ? trying to make the playlists better and better. That seems to trump everything else in terms of driving user engagement and satisfaction.
Besides, the services are different. Spotify is an on-demand service. Pandora can?t do on-demand under the terms of its statutory license. When you look at music-listening habits, about 80% of music listening is passive meaning it?s radio and you?re not picking every track. In the case of Spotify, you can do that. And there are a lot of passionate music fans that want to have a completely active experience and pick every track they hear. But that?s really only about 20% of listening. A lot of people have asked, ?well why don?t you just have a subscription ad-on that is a track-on-demand product?? And we just feel like that?s been done fairly well and that we really do access a large enough market.
MBJ:Pandora is offered in the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. Why does it seem to be running into problems elsewhere?
PG: Almost none of the countries outside the U.S. have statutory licenses for Internet radio, although Canada may get there soon. From day #1, Pandora could play any artist. We just had to pay the statutory royalties to SoundExchange. Like terrestrial radio, no artist can tell us that we can?t play their songs. The royalties are fixed. We tried very hard, for example, to launch in the U.K. and we had to do direct deals with every label and every publisher; they are incredibly fragmented. It really is very challenging to pull off something like Pandora unless you can operate under a statutory license. We?re hoping that the way we do business in the U.S will be the logical evolutionary path for these other countries because it makes sense, but it?s an element that we don?t control.
MBJ:If licensing costs continue to be as high as they are, is Pandora?s business model viable?
PG: Well, increases are kicking in. We had one in January and we will have another one next year. At the end of the day, Pandora will survive if we do a really great job of selling advertising ? primarily mobile ? and we continue to make our subscription offerings better. I don?t think we?re waving the flag that ?Pandora?s going out of business if we don?t get lower royalties?. We did that three or four years ago because royalties then would have put us out of business in pretty short order. Fortunately, that changed, but the revisions are still tough for us to take.
Pandora?s survival is not at risk. We?re a much less valuable business with high royalties but that?s not the end of the world. I believe that the high royalty rates are stifling innovation and preventing Pandora?s competitors from being funded.
MBJ: Could you please elaborate?
Most V.C.s that understand the online space look at Pandora?s cost of content and say, ?we can?t build a business at that level.? You can?t do subscription-only radio and get more than a few hundred thousand subscribers. That?s been tried. I think the reality of it is that radio, as it has been for many decades, needs to be free and ad-supported. Or at least have free and ad-supported components. And these royalty rates and the challenges of scaling an ad-sales organization make it an un-investable area.
David Pakman, the former CEO of eMusic, is a person who has a ton of domain expertise, experience and knowledge. Pakman was pretty articulately at the arbitration hearings. He knows the music-licensing world very well and went on to become a V.C. He made a very clear case about why new Internet radio companies are un-investable. I suppose you could look through one lens and say, ?maybe that?s good for Pandora ? keeping competition out of the market,? but I think it?s just bad for fans, artists, and innovation. More participants make a healthier market.
Now if the rates actually went up in 2015, that could be catastrophic but I don?t think anybody is predicting that.
MBJ:How do you see the market for new music business startups? What are you looking for as an investor?
PG: The truth is that the category is becoming overcrowded and generally less attractive from a financial investment standpoint. There?s no shortage of entrepreneurial creativity. People are coming up with a lot of interesting ideas. But, there are all the content licensing issues, whether it is statutory royalties or the realities of having to do content deals directly with the labels. That?s a tremendous risk factor in starting a new digital music service.
Now in the case of Daisy, they are very well funded by a very successful business, Beats. They are going to try to take a different tack. And they are going to have all the benefits of the celebrity marketing muscle that Beats can bring to the game. They are not funded by traditional V.C.s.
My advice is, if you want to do a fundable music startup, the key is to stay away from requiring direct content licenses from labels. The whole transition of this industry to direct-to-fan is happening more slowly than any of us would like but I?m still a firm believer that it will happen. There will be continuing opportunities for companies that facilitate that transition.
There are some new music startups that I consider particularly interesting. For instance, Chromatik is a music education network and system for music teachers to interact with their students remotely. But what I?m most excited about in the online space is the stuff we?re doing at Berklee Music and the Coursera courses. (Editor?s note: Gotcher is also a Berklee Trustee). Berklee obviously has some credible faculty and curricula being developed all over the world. At Coursera, we?re able to give that away for free. I think there are 125,000 people signed up right now for those classes. And that?s good business, because it will be a driver for both the online and the brick and mortar school.
MBJ:What about music and the venture capital market?
Gotcher: There?s sort of a climate of ?haves? and have-nots? in a lot of venture-funded companies today. V.C.s and angels are doing more seed investing, with many companies getting some level of early stage funding. But there?s always been a high mortality rate of companies going from seed funding to doing a real series A financing. And it seems that today, especially, there will not be enough series A rounds for most of them.
But at the other end of the spectrum, you see a company like Spotify, which has obviously generated a fair amount of market traction while losing a substantial amount of money ? they reputably raised another $100 million dollars at a $3 billion valuation.
It?s almost as if there a few hot companies that get very high valuations but it?s a struggle for everybody else. Series B and series C financing rounds are not as buoyant as they have been in the past.
MBJ:You recently joined the board at Trion. Why did you choose to invest in a video game company?
PG: Yes, that one was a little bit off the beaten path for me. I?ll tell you why: I have four sons and they range in ages from seventeen to twenty-two; they all played video games to a greater or lesser degree?including some shooting games which made me think that ?I?m definitely going to limit the amount of time you spend doing this.?
But as I look back over the last few years, a couple of my boys have become interested in massive multi-player strategy games. In these games an ad-hoc team is formed with people from all over the world. They collaborate to solve pretty complicated problems. So a light went off in my mind. I think I also heard a TED talk on the topic. I now believe this collaborative game dynamic is going to be ingrained in the behavior and culture of their generation, and inform problem solving moving forward.
When the V.C. investors at Trion approached me and asked me to join their board, my first reaction was ?well, I don?t know anything about the gaming industry, I?m not a gamer, you don?t want me.? Their response was ?well, we have a lot of gaming experts and you have had success in other entertainment and media related businesses, and we think we could benefit from those perspectives.? We talked about it for a long time and I finally joined. I?m learning a ton about this industry. It?s living up to my expectations that it?s going to be a fascinating area to watch.
Have you been wanting to get into meditation but found the whole thing a little bit intimidating? You?re not alone! Here are a few things I?ve learned as I faced my fears and dipped my toes into the meditation pool.
Remember that free meditation tool I shared here a while back? After making my way through the free portions of Andy Puddicombe?s program, I decided to invest in the paid service, too. You know, for research purposes. The free meditations are a set of ten guided ten-minute meditations, and the paid service includes longer sessions that I?m excited to explore! I?m working on the series of 15 minute meditations now and loving it.
Related Reading: 3 Breathing Techniques for Relaxation
Meditation is more than just relaxing. It?s actually physically beneficial. From your central nervous system to improving heart health and promoting better sleep, there are a ton of benefits to working meditation into your day.
What?s so scary about meditation?
Before I decided to jump in and try meditation, I had a few misconceptions about how it works, and I?m betting that I?m not the only one. I thought meditation was strict and difficult. I thought it was kind of uncomfortable ? sitting cross-legged on the floor for long periods of time sounded like a recipe for back pain, for example. And turning off your brain? How impossible does that sound?
The truth about meditation is that it?s not about fighting anything, and it?s not about how or where you?re sitting. On the next page, I?ll bust a few of the myths? about meditation that might be roadblocks for you.
Owing to the fact that I use the Google Chrome extension to do all my Web searching, I rarely have occasion to visit Google's main page, and consequently, I miss out on all of the fun and whimsical Google "doodles" the search company regularly places there. Unless, of course, those doodles "make news." And over the Easter holiday, one of those doodles did, diddling the domes of conservative Twitter trawlers, outraged that the Easter Sunday doodle celebrated the birthday of labor leader Cesar Chavez, as opposed to, I guess, something Eastery.
And so now we have this whole "Google's War on Christianity" thing, even though as far as I can tell, everyone who visited the Google home page was mere seconds from being able to visit, you know ... the Bible.
The whole kerfuffle was like an early version of the annual "War On Christmas," in which we are led to believe that faithful Christians are somehow being attacked or maligned during the Yuletide season. It really does a disservice to people around the world -- including many Christians -- who suffer at the hands of actual persecutors. In reality, those who are privileged enough to live in America get a month of celebration in which every piece of media -- from television shows, to the music at the coffee shop, to the lights on the street -- inevitably leads back to the Gospels and their telling of the birth of Jesus Christ. This includes an enormously popular children's cartoon called "A Charlie Brown Christmas," in which the Gospel of Luke is recited aloud on network television.
If there's one thing that the Christmas season demonstrates, it's that American Christians enjoy top cultural standing among their peers in other faith traditions. And yet, the central notion that governs the so-called "War On Christmas" is that this seemingly unshakeable firmament of religious privilege can be destroyed utterly the moment a single clerk working the Target checkout line utters the words "Happy Holidays," instead of "Merry Christmas." Given that Christmas is the most successful branding campaign in the history of the universe, I find all of this deeply puzzling.
But I'm doubly puzzled about this whole Easter Sunday Google-doodle contretemps, because all of those angry at Google seem to be implying that Google is specifically obligated to provide Christians with a helping of validation that they shouldn't actually need. Don't get me wrong! It's a really interesting irony -- Google is, first and foremost, an instant-gratification engine. We are literally trained to expect it to provide us with "The Answers," and to do so in a way that's not laborious or time-intensive. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are trawlable by Google's search spiders, folks. And as near as I can tell, churches were open on Easter Sunday, providing a venue for that sort of contemplation. So why on earth did a drawing of Cesar Chavez anger people so much? What did it matter?
Well, the truth is that it didn't matter to 99.9999999999999999999 percent of Christianity's 2.2 billion adherents. Rather, it seems to have mattered most to those who worship at the altar of Tribal Political B.S., the great Golden Calf of our civic discourse. And to that flock, Google's sin was not actually ruining the Easter holiday (the Easter holiday was not ruined, after all), but honoring the birthday of a labor rights activist traditionally associated with the left. (At least, that was the second round of braying, after they all realized that the doodle was not, in fact, of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, a matter that took more time than was otherwise necessary to sort out, given that they could have Googled it right then and there.)
I'll give the complainants this: it's entirely possible that they were victimized by a neat bit of "trollgaze" -- something on the Internet designed to engineer outrage. But the more realistic possibility is that Google opted to celebrate Chavez's birthday ... on Chavez's birthday. It's a weird concept, I know! Naturally, I am open to suggestions as to alternate days on which Google could have run the "Happy Birthday Cesar Chavez" doodle, but I have this strange feeling we're just going to keep on coming back to March 31 as the ideal date.
When you get right down to it, what Google did has nothing at all to do with a drawing that they ran on a religious holiday (that didn't end up interfering with the holiday in any material way for its celebrants). This is simply a debate in which you either believe that Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, is worthy of some tribute in the public sphere (even one as fleeting as a Google doodle) or you believe otherwise. In all likelihood, if you oppose Chavez's labor activism out of a sense of political tribalism, you're going to lower the boom on Google, even if Easter isn't somehow implicated.
But it's a pity that the Doodle Rage has, in this instance, accorded Google more power in the public sphere than it actually has. Google is, God knows, a powerful corporation. I've no doubt that there are people on its campus with messianic pretensions. But the company isn't a countervailing force, rising in opposition to religion, any more than the Target checkout clerks at Christmastime.
And it's deeply weird to suggest that Google is. The whole concept of "faith" involves a firm, indefatigable belief in matters beyond the material sphere. And faith communities give those faith muscles regular workouts, by offering adherents the opportunity to pursue rigorous spiritual contemplation, participate in meaningful sacraments and traditions, and participate in fun and rewarding fellowship with other believers. The bottom line, I think, is that when you invest in these practices, it's supposed to prevent you from completely falling to pieces when fate occasions a moment where you do not receive immediate, perfect validation of your beliefs.
Look, Cesar Chavez was about as perfect a human being as the rest of us, which is to say, not at all. His embrace of the Marcos regime in the Philippines caused a rift within the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and latter-day immigration reformers may not find his legacy entirely suited to the forging of alliances. Nevertheless, at the root of Chavez's career as a civil rights activist, imperfect as it may have been, is a guiding principle that anyone who has spent any time in deep contemplation of the Christian faith may be familiar with -- Matthew 25:40 -- which reads in part, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
So when you really think about it, for Christians on Easter Sunday, everything eventually led back to the Gospels. Even Google's doodle.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]
NEW YORK (AP) ? An Internet company offering inexpensive live broadcast television online doesn't violate U.S. copyright law, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday.
The 2-to-1 ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Aereo Inc.'s expansion of a service that had been limited to New York City until this year. The company has announced plans to expand to Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and 18 other U.S. markets. Broadcasters including Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC and others had sued, saying Aereo copies and retransmits their programs as they are first aired without permission.
The ruling came in a preliminary stage of the case in federal court in Manhattan. More evidence must be presented to a lower court judge before she issues a final decision. Other legal challenges have been filed elsewhere against a budding industry that stands to challenge the dominance of cable or satellite companies that offer their licensed programming to consumers.
The appeals court agreed the service does not appear to violate copyright law because subscribers are assigned to their own tiny antennas at Aereo's Brooklyn data center. The antennas grab free over-the-air broadcasts and Aereo streams the video to subscribers over the Internet.
The appeals court relied in part on an earlier court case in which judges found that Cablevision System Corp.'s digital video recorder did not violate copyright law by copying and storing programs for each customer's use. The majority said to rule against Aereo would conflict with its earlier decision in the Cablevision case.
In a forcefully written dissent, Judge Denny Chin said Aereo violates the Copyright Act and called the company's individual tiny antennas a "sham." He said the company's system was a "Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law."
Chin said the company is able to broadcast things like the Super Bowl live to tens of thousands of subscribers because each subscriber has an individual antenna and a unique copy of the broadcast, thus enabling it to be considered by some in the eyes of the law as a private performance rather than a public one.
"Of course, the argument makes no sense. These are very much public performances," he wrote.
Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, said the group was disappointed by the ruling.
"We agree with Judge Chin's vigorous dissent and, along with our members, will be evaluating the opinions and options going forward," he said.
Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said he was grateful for the ruling, which he said "validates that Aereo's technology falls squarely within the law."
"We may be a small startup, but we've always believed in standing up and fighting for our consumers," Kanojia said. He added that the decision "sends a powerful message that consumer access to free-to-air broadcast television is still meaningful in this country."
Nairobi, Kenya: Civil society leaders want a comprehensive audit of how the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) conducted the March 4 election.
They said Kenyans were still wondering why key systems failed and the audit would pinpoint how to avoid the same in future polls.
Leaders from the Constitution and Reform Education Consortium (Creco), a coalition of civil society organisations, said yesterday the glaring failure of the Electronic Voter Identification Devices and the Results Transmission Systems in majority of the polling stations needs to be thoroughly investigated and answers provided to Kenyans.
?The comprehensive audit of the entire electoral process needs to be done urgently and a report of the same shared widely with Kenyans. This will ensure that future elections are carried out in ways that are above reproach and does not end up in legal challenges,? said Creco?s Programme Coordinator Florence Opondo.
Probe needed
She said despite the Supreme Court ruling that the elections were conducted in a free and fair manner and that Kenyans should respect that ruling, more investigations were needed in anomalies noted in election results, including ten polling stations that were re-tallied, which missed Forms 34.
Executive Director of Rights Promotion and Protection Centre Odhiambo Oyoko said should the audit reveal willful wrongdoing on the part of IEBC officials, they should be prosecuted and brought to justice to prevent a repeat of the same in future.
?Kenyans invested billions of shillings in the technological systems of registering voters as well as transmission and tallying of results. The massive failure of those systems is totally unacceptable and thorough investigations are inevitable,? he said.
The IEBC has promised to conduct an audit of the entire process soon.
Creco has also asked the Inspector General of Police David Kimaiyo and the National Security Advisory Committee to lift its ban on public rallies and assemblies, saying the constitutional rights of all Kenyans to freedom of assembly and expression need to be respected, upheld and promoted.
