Whether this is a godsend depends upon your point of view, but a Website aimed at promoting the coming film, Godsend, seems to have whipped up a little storm around those who oppose human cloning and think the site is only too real - especially since the site doesn't even mention the film.
What the site does present, say opponents, is what purports to be Richard Wells' fertility clinic, billing the good doctor as the top genetic engineering researcher in the U.S., while Wells seems to have more than a passing resemblance to Robert De Niro, who stars in Godsend.
Says Lion's Gate Entertainment president for releasing Tom Ortenberg: "Almost everyone who goes to the site thinks it's real, but by the time they leave, most have figured it's fiction. Some even applaud it." Says at least one poster at petitionstop.com, "The work being done by the Godsend Institute... is out of control and needs to be stopped." The film is said to be about people looking to clone a deceased loved one, but Ortenberg insisted that no one visiting the Godsend Institute online have called the fake's toll-free number asking for anything of the sort regarding their own freshly-deceased loved ones.
NetFlix isn't into realistic-looking dummy movie sites, but they are looking to deliver next year what their name has pretty much suggested: a movie by way of the Internet. "Our strategy is to get huge in DVDs and then expand into downloads," chief executive Reed Hastings says. "When we get to 5 million or 10 million subscribers, eventually what we spend on postage becomes a prize for the movie studios." And NetFlix thinks the money saved by sending the movies right to your computer could be put back into buying more DVD titles for more customer orders.
Maybe they hope to change the way we look at movies the way iTunes changed the way a lot of people looked at the online music business. A year after it launched, the Apple online music store seems to have helped even the music business - which otherwise fought the Internet tooth, fang, claw, and munitions when it came to music in cyberspace - begin to think of the Internet as a possible friend rather than a guaranteed enemy, even if the battles against the peer-to-peer crowd continue rather vibrantly.
"iTunes has been incredibly valuable," Universal Music's eLabs division president Larry Kenswil told ZDNet News. "It has changed the debate, changed the buzz, changed people talking about record companies putting up a wall" against digital music. Unfortunately, Apple has also set up a few unpleasant market realities - like iTunes being integrated so securely to its hardware side that what you buy on iTunes is playable only on an iPod for now.
"Although Apple has taken a largely proprietary approach to iTunes, it made one major concession by making its software compatible with Microsoft's Windows operating system, effectively untying the iPod from the Mac in hopes of tapping into the much larger market for Windows PC users," ZDNet said. "The company has also struck a deal under which Hewlett-Packard will sell PCs with iTunes preloaded and also sell HP-branded iPods."
Funny thing about show business and cyberspace. Two years ago, they were screaming bloody murder at each other across a Senate hearing floor. That was then, this is now, says the New York Times: "The combatants went home. The rhetoric died down. And lately they have started working together. Why? With growth slowing in both entertainment and technology, players on both sides started to accept an uncomfortable reality: they simply could not afford to go on fighting. The ability to deliver movies and music over the Internet in a pirate-proof format could mean big money for movie and record companies, which have long complained about the expenses of manufacturing and distributing their wares."
Meanwhile, back at the raunch, there is said to be a syndicate manufacturing and distributing such wares as porn screensavers for cellular telephones, according to the Chinese-language daily newspaper Nanyang Siang Pau. One 21-year-old old syndicate member and a 26-year-old customer were caught during a police "operation" in Penang last week, with a laptop full of nudes from various Asian and Western countries seized and the syndicator fined following his guilty plea in court last week.
A Cambridge, U.K. man was caught with child porn on a computer disk and sent to the cage for eight months after he pleaded guilty in court April 26. Alaric Fitch admitted to 15 charges of "photographs or pseudo-photographs" of a child and one charge of having 349 "indecent images" of children, after his wife - looking for mortgage documents while preparing for their divorce proceedings - found the disk in his desk and told the police.
A Republican city councilman in Cincinnati wants the city to prepare and pass a new law controlling porn on the backseat DVD players cruising down the road, but he's getting no endorsement from one of the Queen City's two major newspapers. "Council should think this through before trying to regulate in-car movies," said an editorial by the Cincinnati Enquirer. "State law already makes pandering obscenity a fifth-degree felony. The best council could do is enact a misdemeanor ordinance. Do traffic cops really need to be looking out for community values violations as well as speeders?... [R]ather than write a new law, can't the Cincinnati police pull such people over for creating a dangerous nuisance or causing a traffic hazard?"
Some might call that kind of lawmaking the blind leading the blind. But when it comes to bringing the blind into cyberspace, the Brunei Darus-salam National Association of the Blind isn't playing anything except serious business, like a computer course for eight visually-impaired members who have learned basic Microsoft Word and Excel skills as well as networking internationally with other blind or sight-impaired Netizens around the world. The course was launched last week by Borneo's Ministry of Culture's special duties officer, Awg Hj Khalid Ghazali, with Standard Chartered Bank contributing financial help and the St. Nicholas Home for the Blind sponsored by Royal Brunei Airlines in contributing two instructors.
