Chinese Internet video firms tussle over copyright (Reuters)

SHANGHAI (Reuters) ? China's top online video firm, Youku.com, said on Friday it has initiated legal proceedings against rival Tudou Holdings for allegedly infringing on the copyright of its videos.

Tudou also said late on Thursday that it would take legal action against Youku for allegedly reposting episodes of a popular variety program on Youku's platform.

Cti TV, the legal copyright holder of "Kangxi is Coming," signed an exclusive agreement with Tudou in November to distribute the episodes of the program on its platform, Tudou said in an emailed statement.

Tudou and Cti TV allege that the episodes were then copied by Youku and uploaded onto Youku's platform.

Youku subsequently countered on Friday that Tudou had allegedly pirated more than 60 television serials from Youku and that the firm had initiated court proceedings against Tudou in Shanghai.

Youku said in a statement that legal mediation between the two sides had failed.

The battle for content in China's online video space has heated up this year with costs for programs rising significantly as online video players scramble for eyeballs to lure advertisers.

Advertising revenue in the domestic online video market, which was virtually non-existent five years ago, is now estimated to be worth 1 billion yuan ($156.90 million). This is expected to grow at a double-digit rate.

Many online video players have also signed deals with Hollywood studios to boost viewership.

Shares of Tudou closed 2.51 percent lower on the Nasdaq on Thursday, while Youku fell 3.75 percent on the New York Stock Exchange.

($1 = 6.3735 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Matt Driskill)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111216/wr_nm/us_tudou_youku

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'SNL' boss makes merry with annual holiday show (AP)

NEW YORK ? It's a holly, jolly Christmas for "Saturday Night Live" chief Lorne Michaels as he marks another holiday edition of the show he created 36 years ago, and as he welcomes back "SNL" alum Jimmy Fallon as guest host for this special yuletide bash.

Boasting singer Michael Buble as its musical guest, the program airs, of course, Saturday on NBC at 11:30 p.m. EST.

But on Thursday night, as Michaels welcomed a reporter to his Rockefeller Center office ? overlooking Studio 8H, from where "SNL" originates ? the clock was ticking: little more than two days until show time.

In the studio, a sketch was being blocked for the cameras: Denver Broncos quarterback (and famously devout Christian) Tim Tebow confronts Jesus in the locker room.

"It's been rewritten since last night when we read it," Michaels said. "We read 40-some-odd sketches yesterday, and narrowed them down to the pieces over there" ? he pointed to a board with a tentative rundown ? "and that's about 15 minutes (too) long. By the time `(Weekend) Update' gets done, the show will be maybe 25 minutes long, which is what we'll go into dress rehearsal with."

Dress rehearsal takes place in front of a live audience on Saturday evening, after which, according to the audience's response, the show is rearranged, cut and otherwise revamped during a crash session to whip it into shape to perform a couple hours later for the world.

For Michaels, dress brings pain every week.

"Things you were certain would work, don't," he sighed. "Things that were really bright flatten and fall apart."

So does this mean that, even after all these years of executive-producing "SNL," Michaels, the old hand at 67, is still caught by surprise at how an audience reacts?

"Every week," he nodded. "I think it's why I'm still here. It's not a thing you ever master."

Or do you?

"Lorne has done this for 36 years, and he knows what will work," Fallon had insisted during an interview earlier in the week. "He's a pro. He's a Beatle."

Fallon was an "SNL" cast member for six seasons before leaving in 2004. Then, in 2009, he was tapped by Michaels, who also executive-produces NBC's "Late Night," to fill its hosting job when Conan O'Brien graduated to "The Tonight Show."

Now, for the first time, Fallon has been invited back by Michaels to his old haunts at "SNL" to serve as host.

"There will be holiday-themed sketches for different religions," said Fallon, who said he arrived with "about 300 ideas" on Monday. "I'm working on some impressions that I haven't done before. I've got some surprises: Some old friends might be coming back for a cameo or two. And then I want to see if can dust off my `Update' suit."

Fallon was asked if any of the special demands of "SNL" had been hard to face again.

"Staying up late," he instantly replied. "I don't do that anymore. I have a 9-to-5 job now with `Late Night.' I got to work on keeping my energy up, so I'm ready to go on Saturday. Which I will be."

Once he steps onstage at the top of the show, "it's going to be an adrenaline rush," he predicted. It will also be an emotional rush to be back, in a proud guest-host role on the show he has loved all his life.

"I just hope I don't break down and cry," he said. "My mom and dad are going to be there. I got to make sure I don't make eye contact with them. I'd be a mess, a blubbering mess."

"I was down in Jimmy's dressing room a half-hour ago," Michaels said Thursday night, relaxing for a moment on a sofa in his office. "We were going over the monologue, and I could see he looked anxious about it. He's putting so much pressure on himself for this to be the greatest show of all time!

"I found myself saying, `You know, it's Thursday. It's NOT Friday. That means there's the rest of tonight and all day tomorrow for that missing piece to be written.'"

It's the step-by-step, day-by-day "SNL" process, a week-long evolution that's hard to keep in mind when you're in the middle of the stampede for Saturday.

"For a returning cast member or past host, the very last memory of having done the show is the party," Michaels said, "and, before that, how the show felt on the air, and the goodnights when it's ending.

"But you don't remember that on Monday there was nothing: `Really?! THOSE are the ideas?!' And then came the writing, and choosing which pieces, and the rewrites. It's rare that you're excited about the show on Tuesday, or even Thursday. But the process is all about it getting better.

"By the time Jimmy leaves here tomorrow night at 1 or 2 in the morning," Michaels said, "we'll know kind of what's looking good."

It's that process that keeps Michaels challenged, and fired up, and still very much in love with the job he said he has no thoughts of ever leaving.

"There's no other way to do it," he declared, and smiled resolutely as Saturday night loomed. "If there was, I would have figured it out. Trust me."

___

Online:

http://www.nbc.com

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111216/ap_en_ot/us_ap_on_tv_lorne_michaels

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Summary Box: FedEx 2Q nearly doubles (AP)

HOLIDAY CHEER: FedEx Corp. said Thursday its net income nearly doubled in its fiscal second-quarter, driven by online holiday sales.

THE NUMBERS: The Memphis, Tenn., company earned $497 million, or $1.57 per share, compared with $283 million, or 89 cents per share a year earlier. Last year's quarter included 27 cents in charges related to a business unit combination and legal reserve. FedEx's revenue rose 10 percent to $10.59 billion in the recent quarter.

IN WITH THE NEW: FedEx Corp. also said Thursday that it signed a deal to buy 27 new Boeing 767-300 aircraft, with the first three set to arrive in 2014. They will replace planes that are as much as 40 years old.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111215/ap_on_bi_ge/us_earns_fedex_summary_box

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Meet the 25 Most Viral People on the Internet [Interenet]

Sometimes a story or idea goes viral because it's too big to be ignored. But more often it's because a single human being passes it along to an audience that's either massive, highly influential, or both. There aren't too many people who can do that. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/_yYytjgyb58/

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Dutch pot sales to foreigners go up in smoke (Reuters)

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) ? The reputation of the Netherlands as the go-to country for a legal joint will begin to vanish like a puff of smoke next year as sales to foreigners of cannabis and hashish in coffee shops are banned.

The Dutch government has been clamping down on the sale of soft drugs since 2007 because of gang-related crime and concern about the risk to health, particularly as stronger forms of cannabis have been introduced.

"The Dutch drugs policy's appeal to foreign users has to be reduced," Dutch Security and Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten said in a letter to parliament.

"Drug use by minors will be strongly discouraged and in particular, vulnerable young people will be protected against drug use," the minister added.

The new rules, which will first take effect in the south and gradually be extended countrywide, limit sales of cannabis to residents of the Netherlands who must enroll as members of a coffee shop, the minister said.

The rules will come into effect from January 1, 2012, but will not be enforced until May 1, starting in the three southern provinces where drug tourism is most common and regarded as a problem by many local residents.

The rest of the country, including Amsterdam, whose drugs scene is a tourist magnet, will enforce the new rules from January 1, 2013.

From that year onwards, a coffee shop can have a maximum of 2,000 members.

The Dutch government, whose push for a stricter drugs policy is led by the Christian Democrats party, will forbid any coffee shops within 350 m (yards) of a school, with effect from 2014.

The government in October launched a plan to ban what it considered to be highly potent forms of cannabis -- known as "skunk" -- placing these in the same category as hard drugs such as heroin or cocaine.

(Reporting by Gilbert Kreijger)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oddlyenough/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111216/od_nm/us_dutch_cannabis

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Planet Likely to Become Increasingly Hostile to Agriculture

Young man in a field in eastern Africa Image: Kimberly Flowers/USAID

SAN FRANCISCO - To get a glimpse of the future, look to East Africa today.

The Horn of Africa is in the midst of its worst drought in 60 years: Crop failures have left up to 10 million at risk of famine; social order has broken down in Somalia, with thousands of refugees streaming into Kenya; British Aid alone is feeding 2.4 million people across the region.

That's a taste of what's to come, say scientists mapping the impact of a warming planet on agriculture and civilization.

"We think we're going to have continued dryness, at least for the next 10 or 15 years, over East Africa," said Chris Funk, a geographer at the U.S. Geological Society and founding member of the Climate Hazard Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Funk and other experts at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco cautioned that East Africa is just one example. Many recent events - discoveries from sediment cores in New York, drought in Australia and the western United States, data from increasingly sophisticated computer models - lead to a conclusion that the weather driving many of the globe's great breadbaskets will become hotter, drier and more unpredictable.

Even the northeastern United States - a region normally omitted from any serious talk about domestic drought - is at risk, said Dorothy Peteet, a senior research scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

A series of sediment cores drilled from New York marshes confirm that mega droughts can grip the region: One spanned from 850 to 1350 A.D., Peteet said. And shorter, more intense droughts have driven sea water far up the Hudson River, past towns such as Poughkeepsie that depend on the river for drinking supplies. ?

"We're just beginning to map the extent, but we know it was pervasive," she said. "There are hints of drought all the way up to Maine."

Of course, climate change can't be blamed for all the food shortages and social unrest, several researchers cautioned. Landscape changes such as deforestation can trigger droughts, while policy choices exacerbate impacts.

Some hard-hit African countries have the highest growth rates on the planet, and gains in agricultural productivity simply have not kept up with those extra mouths. Per capita cereal production, for instance, peaked worldwide in the mid-1980s, Funk said, and is decreasing everywhere. But no place on the globe is decreasing faster than East Africa.

Simple policy decisions can blunt a crisis. Malawi, in southeastern Africa, gave farmers bags of seed and fertilizer and saw food prices fall and the percentage of its population classified as undernourished drop by almost half over a decade, Funk added. Kenya, in contrast, saw its policies stagnate; prices and malnourishment rates both rose.

Meanwhile, researchers probing the climate in pre-Columbian Central America figure that widespread deforestation had a hand in the droughts thought to have toppled the Mayan, Toltec and Aztec civilizations.

More than 1,000 years ago, "significant deforestation" throughout Central America suppressed rainfall upwards of 20 percent and warmed the region 0.5?C, said Benjamin Cook, a NASA climatologist.

The forest - and local moisture - rebounded with the population crash that followed European contact, he added. But today the region is even more denuded than during its pre-Colombian peak.

But with the frequency of droughts expected to triple in the next 100 years, researchers fear the resulting variability and stress to agriculture and civilization could prove destabilizing for many regions.

"We should take it seriously," Peteet said.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=de632bd258a7852bdc8fc43bf1527548

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Fed must act now to boost economy, Evans says (Reuters)

MUNCIE, Indiana (Reuters) ? The Federal Reserve must take immediate action to inject new life into a moribund U.S. recovery or risk letting the nation settle into a permanently lower growth path, a top Fed official said on Monday.

"There is simply too much at stake for us to be excessively complacent while the economy is in such dire shape," Chicago Fed President Charles Evans told the Ball State University Center for Business and Economic Research. "It is imperative to undertake action now."

Evans' renewed call for monetary policy easing came even as the U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a two-and-a-half-year low, and a variety of economic data suggest that U.S. economic growth may rise sharply this quarter, topping a 3 percent annual rate.

Known for his dovish views on inflation, Evans was the only Fed policy maker to dissent last month on the central bank's decision to leave monetary policy unchanged. Then, as today, he called for further easing to boost the recovery.

Since then, the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from 9 percent to 8.6 percent, and data from manufacturing to retail sales suggest the pace of U.S. economic growth pace could accelerate from the second quarter's 2-percent annual rate.

Worries over a potential shock from the European debt crisis and likely fiscal tightening next year threaten that outlook, but Evans mentioned neither scenario in his speech.

Instead, he kept his focus on domestic monetary policy.

The U.S. central bank has "clearly" missed on its mandate to foster maximum employment and is in danger of undershooting its 2 percent inflation goal for the foreseeable future, Evans said.

Without new monetary stimulus, Evans warned, the U.S. could become mired in a 1930s-like depression, impairing economic growth permanently as the skills of the unemployed atrophy and businesses defer new investment.

To avoid such a scenario, Evans argued, the Fed should promise to keep interest rates near zero as long as unemployment remains "somewhat above its natural rate," so long as inflation does not threaten to rise above 3 percent.

While 3-percent inflation may sound "shocking," he said, research shows that central banks should fight liquidity traps by allowing inflation to run above target over the medium term.

Since high U.S. unemployment is probably due to the effect of a liquidity trap rather than a structural shift in the economy, Evans said, added monetary stimulus is justified.

And if it turns out, he said, that the real problem was indeed structural and easier monetary policy sparks a rise in inflation, the Fed can simply tighten policy before it threatens to reach the hyperinflationary levels of the 1970s.

"We would also know that we had made our best effort," he said.

Unemployment fell to 8.6 percent in November, and most estimates of the natural rate of unemployment hover around 5 percent to 6 percent.

The audience of several hundred entered the large convention center where Evans spoke under the watchful eyes of half a dozen armed members of the county sheriff's department, who were on site because of a threatened demonstration by Occupy Muncie.

Evans had previously suggested setting the unemployment trigger for monetary policy tightening at 7 percent but did not mention any specific figure in his prepared remarks on Monday.

The Fed's policy-setting panel meets next week to discuss what, if any, action to take to boost the economy. While many Fed officials appear to support some change in Fed communications, only a few have said they would support Evans' proposal.

Next week will be the last time Evans votes on the panel until 2013.

(Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Padraic Cassidy)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111205/ts_nm/us_usa_fed_evans

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