Evening Standard: Media - Hachette vs Emap over Elle

By David Rowan

IN the glossy world of women's magazines, it is the bitter divorce that everyone is bitching about. After a beautiful 10-year relationship, the couple behind Elle magazine are separating amid angry recriminations, a nasty custody battle and the curious satisfaction of a vengeful ex. It is a riveting tale of high-fashion love gone sour that could easily make the cover of a women's magazine - although you will not be reading it in any of those published by Emap or Hachette.

For it is these two giants of the publishing world that are currently at war over the future of their joint venture, the UK edition of Elle. Alongside Vogue and Marie Claire, Elle has long been one of fashion journalism's biggest success stories. Since Emap became an equal partner in the magazine with the French publishing house Hachette a decade ago, profits have rolled in, new titles such as Elle Girl have been born and - at least to the readers of "the world's biggest-selling fashion magazine" - the relationship has generated only beauty and health. But last week, Emap announced that it was seeking an "amicable and efficient break-up" for the deal. It would be giving up its stake in Elle, its flagship women's monthly, and would develop its own rival publication.

The crisis was triggered by Hachette's purchase of another publisher, Attic Futura, which competes with Emap over some of its younger women's titles. But those familiar with the break-up suggest that the split has been engineered by Emap's former chief executive, Kevin Hand, who resigned last year after leading the company into a disastrous foray into buying a group of American magazines. His departure earned Hand a "compensation package" of £662,396, but that, it seems, was not enough. So when Hand found a new job last January as special adviser to Hachette's president, Gerald de Roquemaurel, it is said that he encouraged the Attic Futura purchase in order to poison the marriage.

Hachette denies he played a role in the purchase. "The gut feeling within the industry is that Kevin has been angling to do this for some time, and now he's getting his own back," according to one well-placed insider. "Kevin was ousted by Emap, and he knows that Elle is very important to it. So he encouraged Hachette to buy Attic Futura purely as a place to publish Elle."

It is difficult to overestimate Elle's importance to Emap. Before FHM, it was the company's biggest revenue earner, making around £4 million profit a year - a margin of about 30 per cent, and second only to the US edition. But according to former staff, Emap then centralised the way advertising was sold, which appears to have hit revenue. Today, according to Emap, the magazine makes around £2.5 million - not a bad sum, but apparently not enough to keep Hachette happy. Although Hachette says it was Emap's decision to quit, informed sources say that Hachette, concerned at falling profits, gave notice last year that it wanted to retain full control.

"It was still a steady profit provider, and you need a few titles like that in your stable to let you launch new things, which typically take three to five years to make profits," explains Elaine Foran, Elle's publisher for seven years and now IPC's fashion and international group publishing director. "It also gave Emap quite a lot of credibility." More importantly, it gave the publisher an influential title that brought in advertisers. "Flagships are a very good way to launch other things off the parent brand, such as the Elle Style Awards."

"This is extremely bad news for Emap," agrees Tim Brooks, former director of Emap Digital and now the MD responsible for Marie Claire and InStyle. "Its portfolio is very male biased. Elle got its foot in the door with the big glossy advertising clients. Now Emap is left with a lopsided portfolio - lacking a true fashion magazine when fashion and beauty advertising is very important."

Brooks also sees another problem. "There's a stable of stylists, photographers and models who'll happily work for Elle," he explains. "It will be more difficult for Emap to attract the same top-class individuals to their other titles, such as New Woman, if they don't have the magnetic attraction of Elle."

In the original deal, Emap gave Hachette a 50 per cent stake in New Woman, and it launched Red as a similar joint operation. Red is thought to be about to go into profit, and Hachette is no doubt seeking a payback on some of the £4 million invested in the launch.

But even now the two sides cannot agree. According to Hachette, it will gain full control of all the Elle titles, including Elle Decoration and Elle Girl, and other jointly owned titles that were originally part of Emap will revert to their former home. "We have no problem that Emap will keep New Woman and Top Sant," says Marie Muzard, a spokeswoman from Hachette's Paris headquarters. "The only debate is about Red, another of our joint ventures, which we're still discussing."

Emap disputes this, and says that the ownership of Elle Girl has not yet been settled. It also claims that New Woman "has a much more profitable track record" than Elle, and that the publisher can live without its former leading title. "I don't buy the flagship argument," a senior source at Emap says. "It's a good magazine, but its performance doesn't take your breath away. Like Elle, New Woman also makes around £2.5 million profit, but that's from a lower cost base."

He adds that the fashion and beauty world "is merging with the celebrity world, and Emap's other titles, such as heat, are strong performers there".

The company says that a new glossy monthly is "very actively being discussed, planned and is in a fairly advanced development stage".

Kevin Hand was unavailable yesterday, but Emap is in no doubt that he was behind Hachette's "very, very surprising decision" to buy Attic Futura. "Our reading of it is it's very personal," a senior insider says. "It reminds us that his disastrous foray into the States lost £500 million for Emap."

Those involved in the split say the divorce should be complete by the end of October, and the first "solo" Hachette issue will be dated December or January. Readers may not notice any immediate differences, but in the publishing boardrooms there will certainly be some further scores to settle.

(Evening Standard, August 28 2002)

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The Times: Can Warren Borsje really make you a property millionaire?

Believe me, I can make you a millionaire: Warren Borsje promises to make you rich - if you pay him £2,500. It's worked for him, but will his disciples prosper? David Rowan reports

This is how to make £25,000 in two hours from a room of strangers people who, in many cases, have recently lost their jobs or savings and need a place to pin their hopes. People like Terry, a 48-year-old currently "between opportunities" who lost £15,000 in a rogue charity-collecting franchise; or Ted, just made redundant in his early fifties by an IT firm and now concerned about his diminishing pension.

They and around 200 other opportunity-seekers have been enticed to a London hotel suite by a newspaper advertisement headed "From nothing to millionaire in three years!" It promises to reveal for free the "simple formula" to wealth. Two hours later, many of them will have been queuing to hand cheques to the sharp-suited guru sprinting on to the stage.

"I've been looking for this all my life, and am very excited," Terry later exclaims, buttonholing fellow wealth-seekers to discuss whether this really is the answer. Ted goes a step further, giving thousands of £to the charismatic Australian at the podium who pledges the knowledge they will need to stop working forever.

The man responsible for this awakening is not a preacher, although he can move a crowd as skilfully as the sharpest televangelist. Warren Borsje's sermon, in fact, celebrates Mammon, and the magic formula that will bring his believers true financial freedom. Borsje starts by explaining that he will share with his flock the secret of becoming a millionaire within three years using other people's money. Today, however, the only clear winners are Borsje and his assistants preparing to swipe credit cards.

First, though, comes the patter. Borsje, well-built in a black suit and with gelled hair, says that he almost went bankrupt five years ago, but now has homes in Brighton, Melbourne and the French Riviera, 68 rental properties, three businesses and extensive stock investments. He retired last year at 27 but soon grew bored with endless golf and surfing, and now spends a week each month educating the rest of us.

Five thousand prospective millionaires have already attended his London workshops, in addition to 9,000 overseas, and now Borsje plans to expand across the UK.

The disproportionately black and Asian audience - comprising young women, retired couples, sharp-suited executives and labourers in overalls - listens intensely as Borsje explains that he will teach them a new way to think about money. He asks who among them are novice investors (almost all), and then makes them fold their arms counter-intuitively, just to show how hard it is to unlearn established patterns. They sit gripped as Borsje recounts how he left school almost illiterate at 13 and, after completing a carpentry apprenticeship, fell deeper into debt. Then came his own awakening, on New Year's Day 1997, when he had reached rock bottom emotionally, physically and financially. "I could either accept it or re-educate myself," he intones.

Naturally, he chose the latter path, studying the investment world and working for a property millionaire until he developed his "concept". The problem, as he explains it, is that the global money-control system inevitably rewards the rich, while the tax system squeezes those who work.

So why choose a job when by following his simple "Entrepreneurial Formula" we can all choose to be rich? "Absolutely anyone can do what I did if they are prepared to learn and act," he pledges. "But most of us simply don't find the time."

Scattered throughout Borsje's disquisition are references to "the course" -a valuable opportunity to study his ideas in more depth over a weekend. "You have to pay," he assures us in passing, "but there's no pressure."

At a mere £2,490 a person - a price disclosed only at the end - the course could certainly change the immediate circumstances of some of those showing interest. But by now, many in the audience are mesmerised by Borsje's charm. Some 17 of them pay right away, enticed by a discount for "investing" immediately. The sales pitch clearly works: according to his company, New World Education, around 500 have paid to attend the weekend courses since April.

And the secret formula? In a nutshell, borrowing money to buy rental properties. The buy-to-let market may be collapsing in much of Britain, but Borsje has no time for doubters: he promises that his followers can make millions. Borrow as much as you can to buy, he advises, and then further remortgage after carrying out basic cosmetic improvements. Then use the additional cash to buy other properties or simply as an income, as he has done with his vast portfolio. "Living on equity, my friends, is the only way to fly -it's tax free, and you just watch the rent money pop into your account every month."

With landlord's insurance there is no risk of tenant trouble, he insists, and a new breed of "mortgage packer" - less discerning than brokers - will arrange loans for course "graduates" with few questions asked. They will even lend to those with poor credit records, though Borsje cannot go into detail now. "We don't tell you today how to generate the capital," he says, "but on our course we go through the 14 ways."

Ted, the former IT worker, queues to sign up with his wife Lois. The couple, from West Sussex, are typical of the believers, many of whom have suffered financial setbacks. "I've just been made redundant, and pensions these days are worth toilet paper," he says. "We'd been thinking about investing in property with our own money, but Warren said not to. The question is finding a lender - presumably all that will be on the course."

Terry, a big man in a rather loud suit, is openly debating whether to sign up now. "It sounds fantastic for people who don't have the knowhow," he says. "But there are a lot of cowboys out there. I'm wondering, if everyone was going to make the sort of money they promise, why aren't there thousands of companies doing this?"

The answer, according to property experts, is because the market is far more troubled than Borsje's formula will admit. "This will work only if property prices continue to rise, and that's just not going to happen," says John Wriglesworth, housing economist with Hometrack. "It sounds like he's appealing to desperate people. There's no fast-track solution to wealth in the property market, and getting yourself into debt at this stage, when rental yields are falling and interest rates may rise, is very dangerous. I'd advise people to steer well clear."

At the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, spokesman Ray Barrowdale is also suspicious. "It would be very dodgy now to invest in property for short-term gain -you could lose money, or at least not make as much as you expected. The buy-to-let market is saturated. Novices in the market could find they can't get tenants."

But Borsje, talking to The Times later, is undaunted. "I'd agree that there's definitely a risk in buy-to-let -but not for people who come on our course. We tell our graduates to build a cash buffer of 10 or 20 per cent as security. It just needs more research now before buying. If you crunch your numbers, fix your interest rate, and have your finance in place, you're fine."

What of some economists' fears that the market is overvalued? Again, Borsje is quick with an answer. "Your profit is made when you buy, not when you sell, so just buy under the market value. We've just bought 65 apartments in Manchester, at £11 million -£4 million less than the developers wanted. And if the market does go down, historically it's unlikely to fall by 10 per cent. No, nothing can go wrong.

"If things don't work out for someone, I'll simply say, show me what you did. They will have done something wrong -maybe they didn't do the research. If they follow the formula, I can guarantee that there should not be a problem."

A guarantee, in the present economic climate, that is enticing avowedly novice investors to risk thousands of pounds on their dream.

(The Times, August 28, 2002)

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Evening Standard: How safe are London's art galleries and museums?

By David Rowan

If we had any doubts that we had found the right man to test the security of London's museums, they evaporated when a mobile phone rang as he led me through the National Gallery's central concourse. "Hello?" said Charles Hill, a 56-year-old former Scotland Yard detective who now spends his days tracking stolen artworks and helping owners prevent thefts. "So we're definitely on? Right. I'll be there tomorrow."

A day later, Mr Hill collected an £8 million painting by Titian which the caller had arranged to be left in a plastic bag next to a Richmond bus stop. The masterpiece, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, had been stoIen in 1995 from Lord Bath's Longleat estate, and it was only now, thanks to a deal struck by Mr Hill with a crime-world contact, that it was finally on its way home.

Living much of his life in this shadowy underworld, Mr Hill, a former head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad, who also engineered the return of Munch's The Scream in 1994 after it was stolen, would describe the middleman only as "a cross between Arthur Daley and Lovejoy". For identities are closely guarded in this murky world - which is why Mr Hill, for his own part, refuses to be photographed.

He is, however, keen to use his detective skills to expose the security weaknesses at some of London's leading museums and galleries. As one of Britain's leading experts on museum security, he knows how vulnerable some of them are to organised art gangs and opportunist thieves, and he seeks to encourage greater vigilance.

As it became clear while spending a day with him in a variety of galleries and museums, it would take only a screwdriver, a diamond-tipped glasscutter or a 50p hacksaw blade to capture artworks worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Had I been so disposed, I could have returned home that evening with a small Greek statue worth perhaps £50,000, a delicate Pre-Raphaelite painting that might fetch £200,000 if it could be sold and a set of handwritten letters by some of the great Victorian authors that might raise £100,000 at auction.

As Mr Hill's investigation made clear, art collections across London are ignoring the most basic security precautions and placing countless valuable works at risk, from second-century Roman statuettes to silver-pIated cigar cases - imperilling a wide range of our cultural heritage.

In the past month, the cash-strapped British Museum has lost a 2,500-year-old marble statue from an unguarded gallery while packed with summer tourists. Then last week, the Dickens House Museum in Holborn, one of London's more delightful historic treasure-troves, announced the daytime theft of three copies of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The first editions, each worth between £20,000 and £30,000, were removed after a glasscutter cut open a locked display cabinet.

Thefts from museums and galleries are rare, thankfully, but for the determined art thief the riches on display can prove irresistible. In recent years the British Museum the V&A and the Dulwich Picture Gallery have all reported losses from open displays or storage vaults. These, at least, were all publicised thefts.

What concerns some art-world experts is the painful lesson drawn from the case of Stephane Breitwieser, the French waiter who stole 239 artworks from smaller museums across Europe in a six-year spree that ended last November. Many organisations did not even report their losses, fearful for their reputations or their insurability.

"People don't generally steal things because of a sudden whim — it's calculated and intended," explains Mr Hill, a jovial, well~built man in a white suit, who stays in contact with half a dozen underworld informants.
"Either you're dealing with professionally dishonest people, or the opportunists, who think they can knock an artwork out in some street market. But it's rare for a masterpiece to be taken - normally the criminals go for something they can run with."

First on our itinerary is Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn, an extraordinarily richly furnished building which the great architect insisted be left "as nearly as possible" untouched after his death in 1837. Today it is guarded by around a dozen women and men.

This, Mr Hill says, is the goldmine many of his contacts mention as an "easy target": thousands of works are on open display, from masterpieces by Turner, Canaletto and Hogarth to ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. The front-hallway still displays the bullet-hole from a failed raid 15 years ago when Dennis Bergin, 26, was shot dead by police after bursting in with a shortened 410 shotgun.

"This place is a cornucopia," Mr Hill says. "It's particularly vulnerable, as it's so exposed. It's very genteel, but if a thief from the streets of Harlesden came in, can you imagine any of the ladies here doing anything but screaming and running for the police?

"It doesn't make any sense why someone would risk their life to come in and steal a Canaletto that they couldn't sell, but they might look at a small, ancient statue on display and decide they could get £20 for it in the East End. Thankfully, it doesn't happen as often as it could, as these guys feel slightly awkward in a place like this."

Mr Hill says that security has improved since the 1987 raid, "when the average age of the attendants was about 104 and the burglar alarm had been the one on the Ark".

"They have put in infrared detectors and improved the alarm system, and have cleverly wired down items. But there are no visible video cameras, and in the basement you can see that almost anything could go to a determined amateur."

Although the museum asks that bags be left at the entrance, American tourists walk through its artefact-filled rooms carrying large holdalls. I am able to touch a number of small exhibits undisturbed.

At the British Museum, Mr Hill is more impressed, although he warns that its financial problem and poor staff morale will increase the risks: a valuable Greek statue was stolen only this month.

The museum's high-security display cases score well. "That's good, tough glass, and they've clearly spent a lot of money on these cases to good effect," says Mr Hill. But he worries about the risks of losses from storage areas: "I've been downstairs to the great vaults, and they're not so safe. You also have to worry when you have contractors in."

Mr Hill suggests more visible security cameras to deter casual thieves. He also finds specific problems in galleries where items are mounted on the walls. "Look at that beautiful piece held down by screws," he says. "It wouldn't take long to prise that away with a screwdriver and it would fit neatly into a backpack."

He also explains how a thief might remove a 2,000-year-old marble head from its stand. "They'd have a lookout, do a bit of cutting with a hacksaw blade, and keep coming back. They wouldn't hang around."

On to the National Gallery, which Mr Hill believes has some of the best security measures in London. The gallery has learned from past mistakes. In 1961 Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen after a man stayed in the downstairs lavatory until closing time and then emerged when the coast was clear to remove the newspaper-sized painting and escape with it through the lavatory window.

The thief, an unemployed bus driver, attempted to ransom the portrait to buy television licences for the poor. Today the lavatories close 10 minutes before the gallery.

At times, sheer luck has prevented worse potential losses. "The last bunch that tried to break in here came out of a nearby pub to discover that their car had been clamped," Mr Hill recalls. "In the back of the car, police found crowbars, screwdrivers, the works. It shows that traffic wardens can be useful."

Today, he says, thieves would target the smaller paintings that are not well-enough known to be unsaleable. "The gallery has covered over the screws to make them hard to remove, which is good, but a thief would just need to get the guard running in the other direction to get his chance."

But it is the smaller London galleries, often with limited security budgets, that face the greatest threats. Some, like the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, are also "unlucky" in being based in London's rougher quarters.

In 1995, a mentally disturbed man attacked artworks there, and the previous year burglars stole paintings and china worth about £250,000. Today, visitors are left alone in darkened rooms. Some paintings are held down with unsecured open screws, and there appear to be blind spots below the black-and-white video cameras.

The Dickens House Museum, the Georgian former residence of Charles Dickens, which preserves the writer's furniture and possessions, continues to display weaknesses.

Museum security has to be a balance of weighing up vulnerability to fire, damage and theft, manageability - working with what you've got in terms of people, technical security equipment and money — and having the wit, strength of character and imagination to anticipate problems, Mr Hill says. "But you have to keep these things in proportion — you can't create a fortress."

At Sir John Soane's Museum, the curator, Margaret Richardson, was furious to learn of the Standard's findings. "I'm staggered that Mr Hill should say such things," she said. "It's absolutely appalling for him to come in here and conduct an audit."

Mrs Richardson believed that Mr Hill was out of touch. "We've spent a tremendous amount on security in the last 10 years, and I think it's absolutely up to standard. We have a high warder ratio and a lot of items are fastened down pretty securely. Yes, someone could come and yank things off — but I don't think it's that easy."

The keeper of the William Morris Gallery, Norah Gillow, took a more positive view. "I don't want to be complacent, and reminders like this show that you never can be too vigilant," she said.

Iain Slessor, national security adviser for Resource, which advises Britain's museums, said: "When you think of the number of museums in London and the number of items on display, the level of crime is very small. London's commercial galleries suffer perhaps 50 times the losses from a national or public gallery But to be absolutely sure that nothing would be lost or damaged you just wouldn't show anything."

(Evening Standard, August 28 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Spam wars/Machinima/Hypertext patents

By David Rowan

MICHAEL MARTIN, Speaker of the House of Commons, has received a fair amount of unsolicited abuse this year, but nothing to compare with the pornographic images sent to him by the Labour MP Derek Wyatt, who wants the Speaker to schedule a Commons debate on unsolicited e-mail porn that makes no distinction between adult recipients and children.

About a third of unsolicited e-mails promote porn sites, and Wyatt's solution is to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for the spam received by their customers. Now Wyatt is normally one of the more internet-literate MPs, but his response betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. It is rather like blaming the postman for delivering a fraudulent mailshot.

The real culprits are the spammers. They should be Wyatt's targets, not the networks they use as their unpaid conduits. The ISPs know this, which is why most of them already spend money to filter out spam and disconnect the bad guys. After all, it is not in the ISPs' interests to have junk e-mails clogging their bandwidth and undermining their reputations. But there is only a limited amount that they can do if their customers let their e-mail addresses become widely known, or if they (unwisely) respond to spam asking that no further mailings be sent, which merely confirms that their account is active. Some ISPs use commercially available filtering software to block e-mails containing the spammers' favourite words such as "Viagra" and "porn". But there can be unintended consequences, such as innocent e-mails being blocked for containing words such as "Cockney" or even "cherry". One musician found himself banned from discussing Bach's "fugue".

The best anti-spam resource at the moment is the Spamhaus Project, a non profit body run by volunteers from London which tracks known spammers and publishes their internet addresses so that ISPs can block anything sent from them. Its website, spamhaus.org, takes delight in publishing death threats received and warnings that it will be sued for "deformation" (an indication of the types we are dealing with). Its database protects about 80 million e-mail addresses, and any ISP not using it should do so.

The other solution would be to sue the spammers themselves. I am greatly inspired by a California businessman, Steve Kirsch, who last week sued a junk-fax company for $2.2 trillion. Yes, trillion - based on $500 for each of the three million daily faxes that Fax.com has sent since 1998. Time for a fact-finding trip to California?

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There is an exciting new film genre of which you will be hearing more. It requires neither actors nor cameras, and its leading directors do not even bother to leave their bedrooms. Called "machinima", it relies on video-game software to produce short action-filled movies on a standard home PC. Machinima - think "machine" and "cinema" - grew out of games software such as Quake and Unreal Tournament, and it has become so popular among amateur Spielbergs that the first Machinima Film Festival has just taken place in Texas.

It can take just a few minutes to produce a one-minute action movie, and the best of those shown in Texas are little artistic masterpieces. It might take a year or two to go mainstream, but Hollywood should watch out.

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NOW that a US federal judge has thrown out BT's absurd claim to own the patent on hypertext linking, perhaps other corporations will realise that the web is built on freely linked pages. From Disney to KPMG, companies keep trying to control who links to their websites while web users continue to question their control-freakery. So concerned is David Sorkin, a Chicago law professor, that he has set up Don't Link To Us (dontlink.com), which highlights the worst. His hall of shame includes Crossrail and Mars, which "ban" links beyond their front pages, as well as Nikon Precision, which claims that unwanted links may cause "irreparable injury". And Sorkin's answer? To link prominently to the offending pages, of course.

(The Times, August 28 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - EU copyright directive/Nasa brain scans/Mobile-phone bans

By David Rowan

Last week David Bowie declared that copyright will be dead within ten years the result of a pervasive digital culture that will inevitably kill "all authorship whatsoever" in a torrent of file-swaps and unauthorised downloads. Such a prospect comes as no surprise to the terrified entertainment and software industries, which explains the stream of ever more desperate and ill-thought-out laws being rushed through the US Congress. But what you might not realise is that Britain, too, is about to enact its own highly restrictive new copyright law. It will be our own version of America's notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - yet, worryingly, barely a word about it has been debated in the UK press.

Maybe the law's name just isn't sexy enough: after all, "EC Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright" will hardly get headline-writers excited. But a few days ago the Patent Office and the DTI published a weighty consultation paper stating how the Government believes that this European directive should be incorporated into UK law. Take a look, if you have the patience, at www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/index.htm: you have two months to make your views known as the Government intends to rush a new copyright law in place by Christmas.

The law, among other things, will redefine "fair dealing" involving intellectual property - giving copyright owners new powers to limit what can be quoted in academic reviews, and potentially restricting the electronic information the public can access through libraries, and it will let copyright holders track the use of their data online. Some copyright breaches will also now become criminal rather than civil offences - such as any attempts to protect yourself from this third-party surveillance while online.

Although campaigners for digital rights are still examining the proposed law's implications, the early consensus is that it does not go as far as the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under that flawed legislation, researchers have been prevented from publicising flaws in commercial software, and organisations such as the Church of Scientology have forced search engines to remove links to web pages critical of them.

It is too late to influence the European copyright directive itself, but there is still time to encourage the UK's legislators to maximise the exemptions in its interpretation of this worrying law. For as Bowie could attest, even a bad law such as the DMCA has not prevented rising music piracy.

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WE'VE had the airport scanner that can examine what's under your clothes, and the scanner that can match your face against a database of security risks. But now Nasa is claiming the ultimate weapon in the war against terrorism: a sophisticated sensor that can monitor your thought patterns.

The space agency says that it is developing a "non-invasive neuro-electric sensor" that will sit in airport gates and monitor passengers' brainwaves and heart rhythms. Computers would then use complex algorithms to determine which passengers might pose a threat - on the presumption that genuine baddies would be given away by stress-filled brain patterns. Nice idea, but after a couple of hours at Gatwick you can just see the poor machine exploding.

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HERE, though, is a great US law that we really should copy. Philip Reed, a New York City politician, has just introduced a Bill to force people to switch off their mobile phones in "places of public performance". Any New Yorker whose phone rings in a cinema, art gallery or auditorium will face an instant fine - an idea that will appeal to anyone who has ever sat through the death scene of la Traviata, only to have it interrupted by a tinny Star Trek theme.

The mobile-phone industry is none too happy, but artistes such as Kevin Spacey should love it. When interrupted during a recent Broadway performance, he turned to the offending member of the audience and shouted: "Tell them you're busy!"

(The Times, August 21 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - PC Toseland's urban legend/Owning workers' thoughts

By David Rowan

POOR Paul Toseland - one minute he was just another Northamptonshire community police officer, the next, he was a notorious peddler of junk e-mail.

All PC Toseland wanted to do was warn local businesses of a new telephone scam that could potentially cost them "a lot of money". So in his capacity as Corby Business Anti-Crime Network Administrator, PC Toseland thoughtfully sent a few contacts an e-mail, and unwittingly propagated the summer's wildest urban legend.

Indispensable as e-mail has become in our daily communications, it has also proved the most effective medium for modern myths. For PC Toseland, the trouble began with the request that anyone reading his warning, about a woman pretending to be in distress so that she could call her own premium-rate phone line, should "please pass it on to friends and colleagues".

By this weekend, the e-mail had been received by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people across Britain, to the growing embarrassment of Northamptonshire Police. For despite PC Toseland's claim that the scam in question had been reported "five times in the last couple of weeks", his superiors this week had to accept the uncomfortable truth. They said: "Information which is being circulated electronically to businesses by the force is not correct."

The e-mail, headed "Message from Northamptonshire Police", gives a warning of a woman who has been calling on homes claiming that her car has broken down and asking to call her husband. Her fictitious five-minute conversation costs the bill-payer £250. The warning is spoilt by only one detail: according to ICSTIS, the body that regulates premium-rate phone lines, the highest tariff charged in Britain is £1.50 a minute, rather than £50.

The regulator told local trading standards officers that no one had been able to produce a phone bill to support the story. But the damage was done. Rob Dwight, media officer for the regulator, said: "For the best part of three months, we've been getting dozens of calls a day about it. It's just not true. You simply can't set that tariff in this country."

Students of urban legends would have seen the warning signs: the lack of detail about the victims, little description for the woman, the combination of breathless anecdote and official police report.

Since e-mail replaced the chain letter as the preferred means of spreading popular myth, it has spread everything from false virus alerts to dubious promises of Nigerian riches. But when Northamptonshire Police began receiving inquiries on June 17, the force initially issued a statement insisting "to the best of our knowledge it is not an urban legend as some people have been suggesting".

Last week it had to accept the inevitable. A spokeswoman admitted that it was not true. "We do want this to go to bed now. Unfortunately the e-mail was sent out in good faith and the facts weren't checked out at the start."

PC Toseland was unavailable for comment. At least he was not first to tell the story: The Times has traced the myth back to early May, when it began circulating among local Neighbourhood Watch groups.

The National Neighbourhood Watch Association, to its credit, decided not to forward the warning. Martin Burrekoven-Kalve, the association's communications director, said: "You feel it in your waters that something's not right, and this seemed a bit far-fetched. It doesn't take an awful lot of research to find out it's not true." But in Northamptonshire, the local Chamber of Commerce did pass on the warning in its e-mail bulletin, in part encouraged by an employee's belief that she had almost fallen victim herself. The woman had apparently become suspicious after receiving a knock on her door at home to find a stranger asking to make an emergency call on a mobile phone. The householder refused, although when The Times attempted to contact the intended victim, she proved unavailable.

So did the Chamber of Commerce now believe that the scam PC Toseland had described was genuine? "It's difficult, isn't it?" a spokeswoman replied after a pause. "I just don't know."

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BE careful the next time you have a thought - your boss might own it. That's the conclusion of a five-year court battle between the telecoms firm Alcatel and Evan Brown, a former employee who had an idea for some software that would update old computer code. The idea remained in Brown's head and was not written down, but when he mentioned it at work, his boss demanded that he hand it over. He refused - claiming that he had been developing it since 1975, partly in his own time and was fired. Now a judge in Texas has decided that the company is entitled to the idea, as Brown's contract stated that it owned his "inventions", as well as $332,000 in costs. Brown insists that his brain has been stolen - so keep quiet the next time you're chatting with the boss.

(The Times, August 17 2002)

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Interview: Jo Elvin, Glamour (Evening Standard)

IT'S the latest round in the battle between a mature, well-endowed sex bomb and a petite, bubbly newcomer. Tomorrow, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reveals the all-important January-to-June sales figures, we will learn if Condé Nast's Glamour has finally displaced Cosmopolitan as the biggest-selling women's magazine. Amid intense industry speculation, Glamour's editor Jo Elvin is letting it be known that she is "very, very, very excited" about her magazine's latest circulation rise - while Cosmo, now into its thirties, is brushing off suggestions that its orgasm-rich formula has finally been beaten.

Already Glamour sells 5,431 more copies than Cosmo in the UK and Ireland, although Cosmo maintained its overall lead last time through higher overseas sales, making a total of 463,010 to Glamour's 436,579. Still, in just 18 months, Glamour has jumped ahead of Marie Claire, Company, New Woman and Good Housekeeping - all once giants, now laid low by a handbag-sized upstart. This format, too, has been imitated by a range of other titles, from Bliss to Jack, and even Hello! has investigated producing an A5 version. The advantages are clear: as well as saving paper costs and distribution bills, the smaller pages - which still cost advertisers up to £43,400 - appeal to women in a way Elvin insists men would not understand.

"There's no way of explaining the intimate relationship women have with their handbags," she says (a Prada handbag, in her case). "I fully expect there to be more imitators, and I've noticed that New Woman's Celebrity Spy section has just gone small. But the content has to be right too - B magazine in Australia went small for six months, but then went back, which made me smile." The £1.80 cover price - compared with £2.90 for Marie Claire and £2.80 for Cosmo - may also have something to do with Glamour's success, although Elvin points out that Company, at the same price, has failed to match its rise. The only downside is that she wishes she had room for an extra four cover lines.

The Glamour formula relies on an unchallenging blend of celebrity, accessible fashion, beauty, plus what Condé Nast's MD, Nicholas Coleridge, calls "an unseedy weave of sex and relationships". The Glamour reader is "15 per cent less grubby than the Cosmo girl, 15 per cent less earnest than Marie Claire", and, on average, is an affluent 26-year-old career woman, more educated than most, who prefers to watch Friends and drink vodka.

"They're very urban thinking, very knowledgeable about everything from L'Oréal's range of shampoos to catwalk fashions, but they'll pick one catwalk item to spend money on and buy the rest at Topshop," Elvin says. So it is her job - "one of the best jobs in the world", as she reminds readers this month - to produce "the glossiest, most stylish mass-appeal product" that somehow manages to be "different".

For Elvin, an unaffected 32-year-old Australian who arrived in London 10 years ago, this difference can be found in its demanding if complimentary celebrity interviews by Chrissy Iley or Emma Forrest, who tend to produce copy for the national press. After early criticism that the magazine lacked substance, Elvin has recently discovered a news sense and stresses that Glamour is "more cerebral" than many of its rivals.

"We were the first women's magazine to go to Afghanistan, and next month we'll carry the only interview in the world with [murdered US intern] Chandra Levy's parents, which not even Oprah could get," she says between sips of Panna mineral water. "That's not to deny we're the magazine that also looks at what Britney's thinking."

It is Britney rather than reportage that defines Glamour. Covers tend to feature the American superstars such as Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry; the Appleton sisters make it this month, but Elvin finds the British star pool, dominated by the likes of EastEnders actors, not really her sort of people. Kate Beckinsale may one day work, but she "still has a long way to go".

At least the Hollywood stars do not demand copy approval - an ill-advised strategy favoured by a number of "British B-list actors" and invariably refused, even if that means losing the interview. Only once has a model featured on the cover, but that hit the newsstands on 12 September last year, hardly the moment to test its impact. In January, Elvin will risk a non-celebrity for a second time - a cover is the prize in the Channel 4 series Model Behaviour, which Elvin has been helping judge, and believes will boost the profile of her "brand".

Glamour has been published in the US since 1937 - it sells around 2.2 million - and today Condé Nast also owns versions in Germany, Greece and in Italy, where the small format was first tested. But in its Old Bond Street office, surrounded by Gucci and Prada stores, Elvin and her publisher, Simon Kippin, run the show autonomously - only taking the occasional photograph from the US edition. Kippin had been running Cosmopolitan's business, Elvin had successfully set up Sugar and B and was editing New Woman, and within months of the launch they were winning industry awards - and calls from prospective advertisers.

"We see no sign of a recession," Elvin says, an observation notably absent from many of her publishing rivals over the past year, particularly at Woman's Journal, Nova, Bare and other recent closures.

At 298 pages this month, up from 262 in July, she sees Glamour building even further to its "natural size" - with as little use as possible of cover-mounted gifts. "I want to be one of the fat ones," Elvin says. "Short and fat - now that's a most attractive look for a woman's magazine."

(Evening Standard, August 14 2002)

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The Times: Comment - Media panics and regulating the net

Media panics make bad law, especially in relation to curbing paedophiles on the web, says David Rowan

LAWS rushed through amid media panics are often very bad laws. So let's pause awhile before celebrating the Government's plan to criminalise paedophile approaches to children on the internet, which The Times reported on Saturday. No one doubts that online "grooming" is a real and growing menace: since 2000, at least a dozen men have been jailed in England and Wales for sex offences involving children enticed into chat-rooms, and last weekend's newspapers showed how simple it is for men to misrepresent themselves to arrange meetings with 12-year-olds. But a law against "grooming" is not the answer. Far more urgent is the need for internet service providers, and especially parents, to remove their heads from the sand and take responsibility for monitoring children's internet use.

For a start, under such a law how would police gather evidence of criminal intent? If a suspect has lied about his age in arranging an encounter, would that be adequate proof of nefarious purposes? Or would any sort of sexual discussion preceding an invitation to meet be enough to convict? Would mere e-mail contact between adult and child justify police involvement - or would persuasion need to be involved, and if so, to what degree? Child-protection agencies seem to believe that the courts will provide adequate answers, but such a law, however well-intentioned, places impossible-to-define limits.

Please don't think that I am underestimating the threat. The case of Patrick Green, jailed in 2000 for sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl he met online, offers a chilling example of how easily sex offenders use false personae to gain their victims' confidence. Green, a 33-year-old clerk from Buckinghamshire, posed as a 15-year-old boy in a US Yahoo chat-room called Younger Girls for Older Men. For two months he exchanged messages with the girl, at one stage sending her photographs of himself naked, which he said had been taken by his 13-year-old girlfriend. Before arranging to meet the girl at Sutton railway station, he flattered her with a series of intimate messages. "I don't want you to be afraid of me," he wrote. "If you decide to meet me, we will meet in a public place to be safe."

Green manifested all the telltale signs of the classic paedophile predator, yet Yahoo failed to intervene - after all, ISPs merely provide the resources for chats to take place, and tend to respond only to complaints. Since then, Yahoo UK has taken a range of steps to minimise the risks to children, from publishing warning pages and parents' guides to displaying users' internet protocol addresses, which identify a specific PC. "We have taken a lot of measures to ensure that Yahoo is not an attractive place for paedophiles to be, and we will assist in any prosecution," a spokesman says. "But the internet mirrors society at large just as there are criminals out in the streets, so are they present on the net."

The ISPs need to go further and more actively monitor their chat-rooms for abuse, and quickly block news groups and discussion forums whose titles or content may encourage such activity. More importantly, parents should be taking a deep interest in their children's internet activities. It is no longer a valid defence for them to remain ignorant of their children's online world.

(The Times, August 14 2002)

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The Times: The rise in internet 'grooming'

By David Rowan

BY EXAMINING the computers used by Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells before their disappearance, police have drawn attention to a growth area in child-related crime. Paedophiles are using the internet to "groom" and then make contact with their victims.

Although detectives say that the computers represent only one of a number of lines of inquiry in the Soham case, child protection charities wasted no time in alerting parents to the potential dangers of strangers befriending children in internet chat rooms.

The dangers are real: in the past two years at least a dozen men have been jailed in England and Wales for sex offences involving children whom they met in chat rooms, according to the charity NCH Action For Children. This is why the Government has been considering whether to create a criminal offence of "grooming" children on the internet for sexual purposes, alongside a new civil protection order that would restrain named individuals from contacting children online. The recommendations came from the Home Office Taskforce on Child Protection, created in March last year to bring together the internet industry, the police and child welfare organisations.

The Government is aware, however, of the difficulties in determining what might constitute criminal activity. "We are prepared to update legislation where appropriate to keep up with new technology, and are considering the taskforce's proposals and working out how to take them further," a Home Office spokesman said. "There's a balance to be struck between adults making legitimate contact with children, and those with a harmful or illegal sexual purpose, and it is important to educate parents of the risks. But we don't want children not making use of this huge resource of information and knowledge that the net throws up."

The Government has so far preferred to work with the industry to publicise the risks. Last year it launched a £1.5 million public-awareness campaign and set up websites wiseuptothenet.co.uk and thinkyouknow.co.uk, aimed respectively at adults and children.

There are thousands of chat rooms, which allow people to "meet", usually through typed conversations. Although most discussions are held in public areas, private messages may be sent to individuals, a process known as "whispering", and one-to-one conversations may develop. What worries child safety campaigners is the ability of strangers to engage a child in conversation with little risk of third-party knowledge. "The dangers are pretty major," according to Matt Loney, editor of ZDNet UK, a technology website that campaigns for internet companies to take more responsibility for policing their chat rooms.

"There are no controls in place, and companies offering chat room services tend only to respond to complaints, rather than actively policing. So a kid can enter a chat room with an innocent title using any instant-messaging software, and within a couple of clicks they could be talking to paedophiles. A little smiley face on your screen signalling someone is online won't provoke the danger warnings that some old drunk in the street would trigger."

According to surveys, one in five children has visited chat rooms, and of those one in ten has met someone in person as a result.

It is not just chat rooms that worry police. The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, the police body that focuses on internet-related crime, is currently examining a worrying new trend among British schoolgirls. Dozens of girls as young as 13 are creating personal websites, where they publish galleries of photographs and encourage visitors to buy them gifts from "wishlists" in various online stores. The police are concerned that paedophiles are targeting these schoolgirl sites, initially by offering gifts.

"It's a very worrying trend, and clearly something we should be getting a more accurate picture of," said Detective Chief Superintendent Len Hynds, who heads the unit. "Paedophiles are very good at grooming children in chat rooms, and I'd be very surprised if paedophiles weren't aware of these sites."

The schoolgirls call themselves "webcam girls" or "camgirls", and in most cases their parents remain ignorant of their activities. One of the sites seen by The Times is designed around a 14-year-old Lancashire schoolgirl's diary entries and 56 photographs of her striking poses in skimpy tops.

Kerry regularly receives gifts from her amazon.com wishlist. Men she has never met send her CDs and books.

"I can't tell you much about the people who buy me things, because I don't know who any of them are, or haven't as yet," she said. "I guess they're just people who enjoy the live webcam, my writing or whatever." Kerry said that she was regularly offered money by strangers to pose on her webcam.

Alexa, a 15-year-old camgirl from Northamptonshire who funds her site by advertising pornography galleries, explained that she would not tell her parents about her site, as it would make her "hold back" in her online diary.

"The whole stalker thing does worry me," she admitted. "Especially one guy who took pleasure in relaying to me my home address and such, and details about the weather, which I took to mean he was there that day."

(The Times, August 10 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Janis Ian's battle/Hotspot boom/Dot-com hubris

By David Rowan

IN HER day, Janis Ian was the chart-topper with a conscience - the outspoken singer-songwriter whose hits Society's Child and At Seventeen spoke up for interracial love and lamented the despair of "ugly duckling" schoolgirls.

Now, three decades on, Janis Ian is back - and this time her target is the ugly music industry. In a single heroic diatribe against the record labels, she has injected more common sense into the digital-copyright debate than a thousand legal judgments could.

In May, Ian wrote a lucid article for the small-circulation Performing Songwriter Magazine in defence of free file-swapping networks. Rather than fight to ban music downloads, she argued, the record companies and the artists they represent should positively encourage them as a fantastic sampling opportunity that would entice spending customers in the long term. Coming from an influential insider - Ian has won nine Grammy nominations - the article was soon picked up by 1,000 websites and has drawn 2,200 e-mails to Ian's inbox in the past three weeks alone. "Quite frankly, I was not planning to become part of a 'cause'," she said this week. Yet this one piece has emerged as a devastating counter-blow to the huge lobbying power of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Her main contention is based on her own experience that satisfied visitors who download free tracks from her website (janisian.com) often return to buy a CD. She believes that, rather than spending $45 million last year lobbying to protect "the artists" against Napster and its successors, the RIAA should be rejoicing at the new technologies. "Here is a foolproof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise never buy a CD in a store," she points out. "The cross marketing opportunities are unbelievable."

Instead, the record companies - which, she believes, would also benefit from the networks' ability to showcase new talent - are trying to destroy the technology and punish the consumer. Their mindset remains set in the 1930s, when they last developed a successful business model. That explains their similar crusades against reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VHS and even MTV - which they eventually had to accept, just as file-swapping will surely defeat the legislators and lawyers.

Janis Ian wants the record companies to conduct an experiment in which the labels would jointly build a single giant website and, for a year, offer for downloading everything in their catalogues that is currently out of print. The download fee should be reasonable - say, 15p a song - and the test ought not to cost anyone money, as the tracks would not otherwise be on sale. If her thesis is correct, consumers would return to buy their favourite artists' CDs. Now, do any of the labels care to sign up?

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SLOWLY we are becoming a nation of "hotspots" - local wireless networks that allow internet use away from a phone line. Last week BT joined the so-called WiFi revolution, offering wireless net access in 20 locations from Heathrow airport to the Bluewater shopping centre. By next summer the company aims to have 400 hot spots, connected via the 2.4GHz radio frequency that has been linking local non-commercial networks. But unlike these, which tend to be available free of charge, BT's Openzone service charges up to £85 a month and hopes to make £30 million a year by 2005. That will not be easy if the free WiFi movement continues to grow. You need merely to key your postcode into www.consume.net to find your nearest node - and all without boosting BT's share price.

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Hubris from the dot-com era (an occasional series): Two years ago Naveen Jain, CEO of the "wireless and internet services" company InfoSpace, made this prediction: "There are two kinds of people in this world...those who don't believe in God, and those who believe in God and InfoSpace. That's OK - the non-believers will be converted when we become a trillion-dollar company." Then, InfoSpace shares were close to their $130 peak; this week they were below 40 cents, and Jain was "stepping down" from his post. God, where were you?

(The Times, August 7 2002)

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