A filing from the Sun-Times opposing a motion for its reporter, Jim DeRogatis, to testify in the R. Kelly sex-tape case contains a tidbit that has not yet been mentioned in connection with the case, the Daily Swarm is reporting:

The subpoenas evidence a pernicious patterns of intimidation and harassment. Respondents newspaper has been threatened with legal action. Immediately after respondent published his news report, a slug was fired through the front door of respondent’s home. Now, to further inhibit adverse reporting, Defendant coupled spurious subpoenas with baseless accusations of criminality solely to induce respondent to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

You’ll recall that the other battle going on at the R. Kelly trial is about a witness, who has still not yet testified, who it has been reported will say that she had had group sex with Kelly and the under-aged girl at the center of the case. Also, she supposedly had a videotape of that encounter, which Kelly or his associates are supposed to have pressured her to destroy.

Both instances are potential evidence of the Kelly camp’s awareness of his vulnerability on the sex charges.

You don’t see blurbs like this in ads, for some reason:

“Vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow—the pits!”— Manohla Dargis, the New York Times

“Plotless…pointless!”—Ella Taylor, the Village Voice

“You can’t tell where the drama ends and the product placement begins!”—Richard Corliss, Time

“Flabby!”—the Hollywood Reporter

“Aimless…bland…a decreasingly aimless meander!”—Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal

“A 145-minute movie with one (1) line of … witty dialogue!”— Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times

And then you have, sigh, the San Francisco Chronicle:

Those who know these characters will, of course, pick up on nuances and associations that novices will miss. Yet even viewers coming in cold will appreciate “Sex and the City” as the best American movie about women so far this year, and probably the best that will be made this year.
[…]
There’s certainly no artistic reason “Sex and the City” can’t be the women’s equivalent of “Star Trek,” with human emotion being the final frontier. Like outer space, that frontier is infinite.

More details on the R. Kelly/Jim DeRogatis ruling. The two local papers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, offer somewhat inconsistent accounts of the proceedings. The Sun-Times, in its report coverage, said this:

Sun-Times attorney Damon Dunn argued Friday morning that DeRogatis should be protected from testifying by the Illinois reporter’s privilege and the First Amendment. Kelly’s attorneys were attempting to create a “chilling effect” against reporters covering Kelly by bringing DeRogatis in to testify, he said.

Anything DeRogatis could say in court would be “irrelevant” to Kelly’s defense, he added.

But Gaughan sided with Kelly’s attorney Marc Martin, saying that the reporter’s privilege only protects journalists from identifying their sources. Gaughan said he would not allow Kelly’s team to question DeRogatis about his sources, or to ask him how he got the tape, or to ask DeRogatis if he made a copy of the tape.

Emphasis added. The judge apparently will, however, make DeRogatis testify about a meeting he had with Stephanie Edwards, a former protégé of R. Kelly’s who sings under the professional name of Sparkle. Edwards was one of the people who identified the participants in the sex tape at the center of the case to DeRogatis and was quoted in his original story on the case:

The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.

The names of the girl and her aunt are being withheld by the Sun-Times to protect the family’s privacy, although they are known to police.

The judge even went further, according to the Sun-Times story today:

Gaughan also said DeRogatis would have to turn over any notes relating to that meeting with Sparkle, saying that he did not believe that would reveal anything about DeRogatis’s sources.

The distinction between not questioning the reporter about his sources but forcing him to talk about a meeting with a source is one that isn’t explained. And trying to force DeRogatis to turn over notes opens up a whole new can of legal worms. The justification seems to be an attempt to impeach the testimony of Edwards, who has already told jurors she recognized Kelly and her niece on the tape. But the papers aren’t making it clear why the judge thinks any of this is relevant to the crime being tried, which is Kelly’s allegedly having brought a 13- or 14-year-old girl back to his suburban Chicago house, had sex with her and then urinated on her, all on videotape and all years before any of the participants actually saw the tape.

Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s version of events, with a first sentence, emphasis added, that contradicts what the ST said:

The defense intends to question DeRogatis about whether he manipulated, morphed or copied the video after receiving it. The singer’s attorneys contend the music critic–who spent years chronicling the R&B superstar’s relationships with young women–has a personal vendetta against Kelly.

“The bias was so strong it compelled the reporter to break the law,” said Kelly’s attorney, Marc Martin.

Last week, Kelly’s team suggested that DeRogatis copied the sex tape and showed it to Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, a relative of the video’s alleged female participant. If that happened, it’s possible he might have broken the state’s laws against reproduction, possession and dissemination of child pornography, the defense says.

Again, this contention seems to be detrimental to the defense’s case, since his client, many witnesses have said, was the guy who made and starred in it. It’s hard to see the logical point to this, other than as a way to delay the trial by forcing the Sun-Times to fight the issue. But some of what the Trib said doesn’t gibe with what the ST wrote, particularly the issue of asking DeRogatis if he copied the videotape he received.

The story does, however, clarify the “possession of child porn” angle:

Both the judge and the defense, however, acknowledge the statute of limitations ran out on any copying or screening of the tape in 2002. If [DeRogatis] still has a copy–or had it within the past three years–it’s possible he may have broken the law, Gaughan said.

The judge’s ruling in the R. Kelly case that reporter Jim DeRogatis must testify creates problems for him, his paper, and the prosecution in several ways. For those just coming to the story, DeRogatis was delivered, anonymously, the 27-minute sex tape that is at the center of pop superstar R. Kelly’s current trial. The paper turned the tape over to police.

DeRogatis, who works for the Chicago Sun-Times, first wrote about R. Kelly’s legal problems a year before the tape came to light. Without his adventuresome reporting, the tape might not have come to notice and an alleged child molester like Kelly wouldn’t be on trial right now.

Kelly’s defense wants to get the writer on the stand for a couple of reasons. The one with a remote legal justification involves what exactly happened to a key piece of evidence. The others are dicier:

The defense also says it wants to establish whether DeRogatis bore a grudge against Kelly; whom he showed the tape to; and if he made a copy.

(Hitsville is an old friend of DeRogatis and used to host a talk-show with him; while we’ve talked in recent weeks I’ve avoided asking him these questions and I don’t know the answers myself, save for the grudge issue, which strikes me as specious.)

The R. Kelly tape, showing, as it is alleged to, child pornography, is legally radioactive. Being questioned puts the reporter in a difficult position. Was watching the tape a crime? Was showing it to someone else a crime? If he did copy it, was copying it a crime? At what time did he know/suspect/decide that an under-age girl was involved? Since he’d written about Kelly’s issues in this area before, didn’t he suspect from the outset an under-aged girl was involved?

I wouldn’t want to answer any of those questions.

There’s of course the central irony, as well, that he would be being questioned by a lawyer for the guy who, nearly a dozen witnesses have testified, made the thing. Hitsville still doesn’t understand the logic of the defense’s position.

It leaves DeRogatis and the paper with uncomfortable choices. He could be made legally liable for doing his job. (Irony would not be the word for a situation in which the reporter suffers some legal penalty and Kelly gets off.) Once on the stand, the judge could allow the defense to ask all sorts of questions about his reporting and reporting methods. Taking the Fifth Amendment would be inappropriate for a reporter.

The least unappealing option would be, uh, appealing, which the paper is doing. I have no inside knowledge on this at all, but let’s not forget that the Sun-Times is not the New York Times. It’s a struggling newspaper—it’s the number two paper, remember, in Chicago, after the Tribune. It’s been abused by Murdoch and looted by Conrad Black and doesn’t have unlimited financial resources. One assumes that, given the paper’s strong journalistic history, there is the internal corporate fortitude to defend DeRogatis, but that of course has yet to be seen.

Finally, this is exhibit number one for the R. Kelly CircusWatch™; the defense is doing anything it can to distract attention from the trial’s testimony thus far, which has essentially been a parade of people saying “Yes, that’s him,” “Yes, that’s her,” and “Yes, that’s his house.”

From the Daily Swarm:

Well, it’s official: Judge Gaughan ruled this morning that Sun Times reporter Jim DeRogatis must testify in R. Kelly’s child pornography trial. While he will not be compelled to reveal his sources, DeRogatis will have to submit to questioning about his reporting and the videotape that is at the center of the trial.

An immediate appeal will be filed by the Sun Times’ attorneys.

The prosecution put a video expert on the stand yesteday, who pointed out that the figure police an nearly a dozen witnesses say is R. Kelly on a sex tape does indeed sport a mole on his lawer back.

During opening arguments of the trial, the defense told jurors that R. Kelly had a mole on his lower back, and that the figure in the sex video—who’s seen abusing a girl police say was a young about 14—didn’t.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

“Robert Kelly is not on that tape,” defense lawyer Sam Adam Jr. said last week in opening statements. On the tape, the man’s “back is illuminated, and there is no mole.”

But when video expert Grant Fredericks played the sex tape in slow motion on a giant screen Thursday, a 17-frame clip of the tape showed the man with his back turned, a dark spot clearly visible.

Comparing the video with police photos of Kelly’s unclothed back, Fredericks said, “There’s something dark there on his back in that position.”

The location of the dark spot appeared to match the location of the mole on Kelly’s back — to the left of the spine, a few inches above the waist.

It is Hitsville’s oft-stated assumption that Kelly has the best lawyering money can buy, but perhaps a guy dumb enough to film himself having sex with an under-aged girl is too dumb to represent.

Here’s another interesting R. Kelly trial question: Does the defense have a copy of the tape? One would think they would need one to craft a decent defense, but it’s hard to believe that his attorney would have made such a strong statement at the beginning of the trial if they had a copy of it to inspect.

What the jury sees and thinks is different from what we see, as of course, but this seems a particularly risible moment.

… by allowing HBO to charge $2.99 an episode for those of its shows that just joined the iTunes Store lineup, the Hollywood Reporter says:

NBC took The Office, Heroes and all the rest of its shows out of the iTunes Store last year, mostly because Steve Jobs wouldn’t let the company charge more than $1.99 for an episode. Or so it seemed at the time. The HR story has a lot of new information on the dispute:

[…S]ources also suggest that it wasn’t Apple but NBC Uni that was being stubborn in their previous negotiation stalemate. Not only was NBC Uni pushing to test a $4.99 price point—suddenly, “Sopranos” doesn’t seem that expensive—but it also wanted to institute dynamic pricing, an experimental new technology that recalibrates price based on consumer demand. NBC Uni declined comment on dynamic pricing, which is being tested by Warner Music Group.

The story also details more of the complex dynamics behind the scenes as companies try to balance competing revenue streams—and the implacable Jobs:

Even if a program’s popularity was key to setting its price, “Sopranos” hasn’t proved particularly popular in its first few weeks on iTunes — perhaps because of the elevated price point. It is ranked 24th among season packages on iTunes; among individual episodes, “Sopranos” didn’t even crack the top 100.

No doubt Showtime might want to test the $2.99 waters not only because it shares HBO’s premium status but also because its series “Dexter” is currently the most popular full-season order on iTunes.

If sales ends up driving pricing, shows that aren’t necessarily big on-air hits but are iTunes darlings could command higher prices, including the CW’s “Gossip Girl.”

However, one conglomerate exec believes that Apple might have its own opinions on programming value. “When you get into that conversation, it’s a slippery slope,” the exec says. “Because we’ll differ with them on what content is worth what.”

If anything is indicative of a show’s iTunes price, look at the digits appearing on its DVD price tag. HBO in particular has a massive DVD business, and with that comes the need to maintain a higher price in order to afford some protection from cannibalizing DVD sales.

But variable pricing is only part of what content companies want from iTunes. What one might call variable packaging is high on the wish list as well, which means the ability to bundle multiple titles in creative ways—for instance, selling a film and its soundtrack together for one discounted price.

Another question altogether is whether Apple also will adjust revenue splits—known to be in the neighborhood of 70-30 with the content companies—once pricing changes. Not likely, most say, and beside the point for Apple. Content isn’t seen as much as a revenue driver in and of itself as it a catalyst for more significant dollars that come from sales of iPods and AppleTV devices.

The Hollywood Reporter takes a slapper to Wim Wenders; the subhed to the review is “Rarely has a film this silly been inflicted on the Cannes Competition:

Wenders has reached a new low with “Palermo Shooting,” a film of startling and embarrassing banality and, yes, even silliness. One is hard-pressed to imagine any commercial future whatsoever for this film, and a pickup by a U.S. distribution company seems virtually impossible.
[…]
Every time the film goes philosophical on us, the resultant dialogue is sententious and banal. We learn, among other things, that people during the time of the fresco that [the hero’s friend] Flavia is restoring were afraid of death, and that they still are, and that, to live life to the fullest, we should do everything as though it were for the last time. He speaks meaningfully of “absurd freedom” and “desperate futility.” Finn also is repeatedly warned that doing this “fashion crap” is hurting his reputation in the art world, another not-exactly-fresh theme.
[…]
For most viewers, the question of the meaning of it all will come down to this: Where does Wenders find people to continue to invest in his films?

The Smoking Gun says Bill Murray’s wife is suing him for divorce, on the grounds of adultery and abuse:

Murray contends that the comedian physically abused her on several occasions during their marriage (they were wed in 1997) and that the star hit her in the face during a November 2007 confrontation in her home. During that incident, the May 12 complaint alleges, the 57-year-old performer “told her she was ‘lucky he didn’t kill her.’” Jennifer Murray charges that the actor would often leave town without telling her, and sometimes “travels overseas where he engages in public and private altercations and sexual liaisons.” She also claims that he “repeatedly…left threatening voice messages on the home telephone which the minor children have heard.”

I don’t have an opinion about the suit, but it reminded me of Lost in Translation, whose script was based on a willful misrepresentation of the lives of movie stars. The subtext of the film bears some interest—an aimless woman alienated from her photographer husband and drawn to an older man in the movie industry, all of it quite redolent in the context of the life of its writer, Sofia Coppola, then-wife of director Spike Jonze and, of course, daughter of Francis Ford.

And certainly the film is handled with some skill. But the premise of it was crazy, and its success in terms of creating audience suspension of disbelief was based on the heavily romanticized image of its star. Movie stars aren’t alone when they travel. If they want to be, they bring someone along to make sure they do get left alone.

In the film, Murray’s character pouts about his hardship posting in a Tokyo luxury hotel. He’s so lonely he goes to the bar—and then rolls his eyes when, surprise of surprises, someone recognizes him. If he’s famous enough to be useful in a liquor ad in Tokyo, it means he’s a star there, and presumably has been there before. Do you think when Bill Murray personally goes to a foreign country he has no contacts?

And yet we’re supposed to believe the character really just wants to be home with his wife, who doesn’t seem to have time for him. I don’t think most movie stars have to endure that relationship dynamic.

Todd McCarthy in Variety is merciless:

No doubt it will be back to the drawing board for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he’s portrayed here.
[…]
The demanding running time also forces comparison to such rare works as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Reds” and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, “Che” doesn’t feel epic—just long.

The harshest graf:

Oddly, “Che” seems more about denial of audience expectations and pleasure than it does about providing the intellectual and historical heft that would serve as a good alternative. Soderbergh withholds much in addition to dramatic modulation, narrative thrust and psychological insight: A feeling of revolutionary zeal, the literal transformation of Ernesto into Che, his marriages and family life, the depiction of the entry into Havana, Che’s oversight of many executions after victory, the Cuban missile crisis and Che’s wish that nuclear missiles be immediately fired at the U.S., his mounting distaste for Russians, his obsessive diary writing, his “lost year” as a failed revolutionary sparkplug in Africa before heading for his fatal misadventure in Bolivia, and even the famous photograph.

The super-secret witness described below is on the verge of getting himself in a heap o’ trouble, the Sun-Times reports:

The mystery witness dramatically flown in from out of state last night by R. Kelly’s attorneys has refused to give his social security number to the prosecution, further delaying the testimony of a potentially crucial state’s witness.

Kelly’s attorney’s talked to the guy last night; prosecutors aren’t done with the guy yet, having gotten hung up on one of those legal technicalities:

[…P]rosecutor Robert Heilingoetter this morning told Judge Gaughan that he needed more time to finish questioning the man. The mystery witness had refused to give prosecutors his social security number, Heilingoetter said. Without it, the state can’t confirm that he is who he says he is.

Judge Gaughan told Heilingoetter, “If he doesn’t give you his social security number, he’s going to be in major trouble. All right?”

—————

The Chicago Sun-Times says the R. Kelly trial came to a halt today when the defense, Perry Mason style, told the court it had a super surprise witness—so surprising that the defense itself didn’t know about it until this morning.

The implication seems to be that the mystery person might have something to say about the testimony of the witness who was supposed to talk today, someone the defense was probably dreading to hear from.

Gaughan told the courtroom, out of the jurors’ presence, that defense lawyer Sam Adam Sr. informed him that morning of a new witness—not previously on the defense’s witness list—who had just come to light.

“I have no idea what’s going on. But it might be impeachment of this witness” scheduled for this afternoon, Gaughan said, apparently referring to the Atlanta woman.

“The Atlanta woman” is the original witness, who, the Sun-Times has reported, is supposedly going to testify that, while under-age, she’s not only had a threesome with Kelly and the alegedly under-aged girl on the sex tape at the center of the case, but had a film of it.

The defense sounded excited:

Adam told Gaughan the new defense witness is scheduled to arrive this evening at 6 p.m. on a flight into Midway.

“However long it takes, we’ll interview him,” Adam said. “If the state has a fax number, we’ll fax it to them at 2 a.m.”

“We never knew about this witness until approximately 9 o’clock this morning, when the witness called us,” Adam said.

Gaughan said he wanted to give prosecutors time to take the witness’ deposition—a formal interview done under oath before a court reporter.

“I don’t care if the deposition takes place at 7 a.m.,” the judge said.

A local Chicago TV station is reporting that the new character in the trial “might” be an ex-boyfriend of the Atlanta woman.

—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

It’s hard to say the coverage of the R. Kelly trial provided by the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune has been stellar. While some of the material has been fun to read, the quality varies wildly; the web presentations are confusing; and overall it’s not particularly comprehensive or particularly thoughtful or helpful if you’re trying to follow the case not from the courtroom … which, of course, all of the coverage’s readers are.

So Hitsville’s been trying to go through it and make sense of what’s happened so far. There seems to be three threads to keep an eye on:

1. For one, there’s the R. Kelly CircusWatch™—how tough Judge Vincent Gaughan is going to be on both parties. Thus far, signs are good; he’s been running a tight ship from the beginning; he threw a bystander in jail for yelling at the jurors; and Tuesday he chastised prosecutors for coming in late from lunch. At the same time, trouble is a-brewing: the defense has been making noises about trying to charge some state’s witnesses with a crime—apparently for being in contact with child porn. The defense is also trying to subpoena Jim DeRogatis, the Sun Times reporter who was anonymously delivered, back in 2002, the sex tape at the center of the case.

Kelly deserves a fair trial and his defense should of course try to take the case where it best benefits its client. And I’m not a lawyer. All that said, it seems pretty plain that what happened to the tape after it came to light is irrelevant in the context of charging Kelly with having made the tape in the first place. (“Yes, Your Honor, but after my client killed the son of a bitch this man stole his wallet!”)

The defense is hanging this line of inquiry on the contention that the tape was mysteriously doctored. Even this doesn’t make much sense. The tape might have conceivably been fabricated. (Dark deeds indeed! Given the defense’s lines of contention in the case thus far, the doctoring would have had to include taking some pretty stomach-churning stock sex footage and then stitching it together with similarly lit tape of the girl [who the defense says is not on the tape], Kelly [ditto] … and blending it into some surreptitiously taken footage of Kelly’s basement playroom! Kinda makes you wonder what Industrial Light and Magic was doing on the night of the 23rd.) But the chances of that happening after it was given to the Sun-Times are a little remote. (That would be a journalism story to rival anything in the Ben Hecht storybook.)

Gaughan gave the Sun-Times a week to respond to the motion, which means he might rule tomorrow. Where he goes on this matter may be an indicator of how successful the defense will be in its attempts to distract the forward movement of the trial.

2. Speaking of dark deeds, the more I think about it, the more I wonder what happened to the other R. Kelly sex tapes. The tape that mysteriously appeared in 2002 was actually just one of a triptych of tell-tale tawdriness: There was the film that is being tried right now; there was additional footage of Kelly with an adult woman, which has already been the subject of a civil suit against Kelly from the woman, who claims she did not know she was being videotaped; and another tape of what people who have seen it have said is footage of Kelly having sex with a different under-aged-looking girl. That third portion has not yet come back to light and no mention has been made of it in the case thus far. Wouldn’t the other two tapes have some sort of value in the case? (Kelly’s propensity to film himself, Kelly’s propensity to film himself with very young women….)

3. The running total of how many people have identified Kelly and the girl on the tape. Earlier news stories have said the police have “dozens” of identifying witnesses; there’s been no word on how many will end up testifying. It’s hard, from the coverage I’ve read, to keep exact track of who has testified, but here is at least a partial list of the key testimony this far:

• A Chicago Police investigator testified that he recognized the girl on the tape from talking to her in his ongoing investigation into Kelly’s involvement with young girls.
• Delores Gibson, a Chicago cop who was said to be married to a relative of the girl allegedly on the tape, ID’ed both Kelly and the girl as being on the tape.
• Simha Jamison, was a friend of the girl police say is on the tape; she said she and the girl met Kelly when they were about 12, and that her friend called Kelly “Godfather.” (She was identified that way on one of Kelly’s albums, as well.) She ID’ed Kelly and the girl on the tape.
• Jamison’s guardian, Peter Thomas, identified the girl as well.
• Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, the aunt of the girl allegedly on the tape, ID’ed the girl and Kelly.
• Bennie Edwards, Stephanie Edwards’ husband, ID’ed both.
• Tjada Burnett, a neighbor, identified the girl as being on the tape.
• Raven Gengler, a junior high classmate of the alleged girl on the tape, ID’ed the girl and Kelly.
• Lindsey Perryman, at the time Kelly’s personal assistant, ID’ed Kelly and the girl as being on the tape.
• Jacques Conway, a pastor, a retired police sergeant, and a neighbor of the girl alleged to be on the tape, ID’ed the girl.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

Blockbuster yesterday unveiled a device with which customers can download movies in two minutes …

… onto a portable device they bring into the store.

Cnet offers the ridicule you’d expect here.

Reasoning this out, you have to figure Blockbuster did some research and either found that or is just hoping that there is a market for people without broadband in their homes who wanted, for some reason or other, to enjoy the novel experience of quote-unquote downloading a movie …

… and in theory, if the device catches and became familiar, the company could conceivably have them everywhere—7-Elevens and so forth—with lots and lots of movies available. (The company said it was aiming for a thirty-second download time.)

The troubles with this line of reasoning, however, are legion. For the first, if you don’t have broadband, are  you going to be the type of person who feels comfortable toting around a hard drive and repeatedly hooking it up to and dehooking it from your TV?

Second, if you’re already schlepping to the video store, who wants to carry along an electronic device? Isn’t it easier to just, you know, rent a DVD?

And that brings up the real motivation for the service. It’s a way to make it easier for Blockbuster and the studios; no running out of discs (even though they cost pennies to make), and one assumes the devices would be DRM’ed within an inch of their usefullness.

Convenience for corporations versus convenience for customers. In this day and age, what could possibly go wrong?

The buzz word in the music industry is branding, which is a nice way of saying “selling out.” If you have a brand, you of course monetize it.

Latest candidate: Sonic Youth, with the help of Starbucks and a host of hipster celebs not above lending their names to a cheesy collection of product for the coffee checkout line.

From a press release I just got:

Sonic Youth’s Hits Are For Squares

Beck, Dave Eggers, Chloe Sevigny, Eddie Vedder, Gus Van Sant and More Choose Their Favorite Sonic Youth Songs For Starbucks Compilation

The limited-edition CD will be available exclusively at select Starbucks locations in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C.

New York, May 27, 2008 – On June 10, 2008, Universal Special Markets and Starbucks Entertainment will co-release Sonic Youth’s Hits Are For Squares. The limited-edition CD features Sonic Youth fans from music, film and literature selecting their favorite recordings from the band’s voluminous body of work that dates to 1981. It also includes a new, exclusive track from Sonic Youth, “Slow Revolution” recorded last year with longtime producer John Agnello.

Hmmm… A limited edition available in limited cities. I can’t imagine why this won’t be available in Des Moines. The celebs involved include everyone from the folks listed above to Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and (collectively, one assumes) Radiohead and the Flaming Lips.

In Juno, you’ll recall, the Justin Bateman character, a jingle writer named Mark Loring who lived in a bland suburban manse, used to play in a band that opened for the Melvins and loved Sonic Youth, though young Juno, a Stooges fan, didn’t know who they were.

Those distinctions made no sense in the movie. (So as not to confuse viewers, the Sonic Youth song you heard in the movie was … a Carpenters cover!) This CD should be called “The Mark Loring Collection,” to capture the sheer implausibility of the yuppie embrace of a noise band that never sold any records but is in the process of cashing out its name in the twilight of its career.

The full track list, according to the press release:

1. “Bull in the Heather” selected by Catherine Keener
2. “100%” selected by Mike D
3. “Sugar Kane” selected by Beck
4. “Kool Thing” selected by Radiohead
5. “Disappearer” selected by Portia De Rossi
6. “Superstar” selected by Diablo Cody
7. “Stones” selected by Allison Anders
8. “Tuff Gnarl” selected by Dave Eggers and Mike Watt
9. “Teenage Riot” selected by Eddie Vedder
10. “Shadow of a Doubt” selected by Michelle Williams
11. “Rain on Tin” selected by Flea
12. “Tom Violence” selected by Gus Van Zant
13. “Mary-Christ” selected by David Cross
14. “World Looks Red” selected by Chloe Sevigny
15. “Expressway to Yr Skull” selected by Flaming Lips
16. “Slow Revolution” exclusive new Sonic Youth recording

The Motley Fool calls on Microsoft to kill the Zune:

I get why Microsoft wants to bury the iPod. The player’s success created a halo effect, winning over Mac converts. They’re using Mac’s operating system over Windows, surfing on Safari instead of Explorer, and not necessarily relying on Microsoft Office, even though it’s popular and available for the Mac.
[…]
Unfortunately, there comes a point when persistence becomes embarrassment. No one laughs at SanDisk or Creative for taking up slings and stones against the Apple Goliath, but Microsoft is too big to settle for being a niche player. The whole social sharing distinction of the Zune becomes a joke when there are too few Zune owners around to share tunes with.

A couple of things I didn’t know:

Critics can point out that Apple commanded a whopping 76% of the market two years ago. [As opposed to the company’s 70 % share today.] However, what about the brisk-selling Apple iPhones, which also double as iPods? Apple is looking to move five times as many of its pricey iPhones this year than all the Zunes Microsoft has sold to date. Even [RIM’s] new BlackBerry Bold smartphone syncs up to Apple’s iTunes, further entrenching Apple as the digital-delivery standard.

Isn’t that Blackberry news (emphasis added) odd? It would seem that if Apple licenses iTunes for every Tom, Dick and Harry of a cell phone, demand would go down to iPods. Apple doesn’t care about being “the digital-delivery standard” except to the extent it builds up iPod sales.

The Blackberry item is particularly strange in that the Apple iPhone is aimed squarely at the Blackberry market. Why is Steve Jobs allowing Blackberry users a iTunes workaround?

Also:

There’s little reason to get excited about the Zune, especially since the second million units have sold slower than the first million, despite their generational enhancements and Microsoft’s costly marketing campaigns.

It’s time for the summer-touring-season package, fine. So the magazine puts on the cover … the Eagles, fine. The cover hedline is “Bitter Feud, Big Comeback.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the Eagles, but I didn’t know that the band had had a new internal feud.

The group has of course had a famously long internal feud, which ended when the members got back together for the successful “Hell Freezes Over” Tour. That was in the mid-1990s. Then the group got into a fight with Don Felder—the guy who co-wrote “Hotel California”—but he left years and years ago.

I thought it would be funny to read about the latest feud. Except … there wasn’t one. It was just a rehash of the old feuds. The band tours a lot, these days, too, so here’s no big “comeback,” either. (They finally put out another studio album, Long Road Out of Eden, but that was last year.)

So anyway, I was about to toss the thing aside when I noticed it was kind of a good story. Then I noticed it was written by Charles M. Young. Young was one of the greatest Rolling Stone writers in the 1970s, which is to say he was one of the greatest magazine writers of all time. Fearless and hilarious, he was possessed of an unshakable rectitude and bottomless self-doubt; if nothing else, his writing on the Ramones and the Sex Pistols helped keep the magazine relevant when the punk generation threatened the mag’s old standbys.

Anyway, the story, though entirely lacking a news peg, is a pretty good look back at how the Eagles functioned as a band during its glory years. The band’s leaders, Don Henley and Glen Frey, are of course greedy, hypocritical assholes. But they also displayed a work ethic and a pretty steely discipline during a chaotic era, and for their troubles can still lay claim to the best-selling album of all time, their greatest hits set. But it’s fun to read Felder and the rest talk about what jerks they were.

Unlike most of the magazine’s cover stories, the writing isn’t attitudinal, flatulent or vaporous in its assessments. Young has a story to tell and some judgments to make and does it well. For example, he lets Henley gas on about not having had enough time to complete Eden, which was a 20 (!)-track double-album … and then lets Joe Walsh tell the real story: If Henley had had more time “We would have had a triple album!”

The story also reveals the details about the group’s cheap-ass deal with Wal-Mart. (You’ll recall they released the album exclusively through it: They made four bucks on each $12 CD sold.) And it has this quote from their longtime manager, Irving Azoff, about the gilt financial realities of the heritage touring act: “We make more money in 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

Unfortunately, there’s but a grubby little excerpt from the story at rollingstone.com here.

From a Canadian news service, a story that says the Canadian government is secretly participating in “negotiations”—apparently with the U.S. and the E.U.—to create a copyright trade union:

The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

Read down and the story says that the agreement will probably be “tabled” at an upcoming G8 summit, but the implications are disturbing. It’s not an exclusively Canadian story; the report, which it says was based on “leaked documents,” seems to indicate that the agreement, if completed, will subject any traveler between the U.S., Canada, and the E.U., to this sort of scrutiny.

Since there’s no easy way to determine whether a particular song or movie has or hasn’t been ripped legally, the opportunities for abuse aren’t just legion; they would be inherent in any enforcement at all.

At the R. Kelly trial today, a police inspector is testifying that it is a room in Kelly’s house that appears in the child-sex video that is the center of the case.

There’s been no word on the defense motion to subpoena Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis, who was anonymously delivered the tape in 2002. The judge gave the paper a week to respond.

Yesterday, during which the court was not in session because of the holiday, the Sun-Times reported that a certain controversial witness will take the stand tomorrow, Wednesday.

This is the woman whose potential testimony caused a week or so of closed-door hearings before the trial opened.

According to the paper, the witness is a woman who will testify that she personally had group sex with Kelly and the girl who is allegedly on the sex tape. Again according to the paper, she will also testify that she personally owned a different videotape of the three of them in the act, which Kelly’s associates pressured her to destroy—and then made her take a polygraph test to put to rest their suspicions that she made a copy.

Hitsville doesn’t follow the legal world of child-sex-tape prosecutions closely, but he suspects this is a first.

It’s hard to keep an exact count, but as far as I can tell eight separate people have thus far identified either Kelly or a local Chicago girl or both as being in the video. According to local reporting on the case, the girl has denied to police that it is she; accounts conflict as to whether she will testify.

———–

In case you missed it, the trial concluded its first week with arguments from the defense that some of the government witnesses who have testified about possessing the tape in question be charged with possession of child pornography. The defense’s contentions thus far are: A) It’s not Kelly on the tape and B) It’s not the girl in question on the tape but it is C) Child pornography and anyone who has seen it should be charged except D) R. Kelly, who is not on the tape.

Kelly has the money to buy whatever legal representation he needs to get himself out of the fix he’s in; if you’re considering the odds on the case, you have to wager on the side of the rich guy. Once he gets off, however, given the concern expressed about this issue by his lawyer, we can look forward to an OJ-style anouncement from Kelly, that he won’t rest until he finds the brutes who not only filmed child porn in his basement rec room, but also enlisted some special young friends of Kelly’s to participate.

———–

As Hitsville noted before in regard to the witness who is supposed to take the stand on Wednesday, her testimony will bring to four the number of instances of alleged filmed evidence of Kelly having sex with under-aged girls. (There are approximately a dozen alleged instances of his having sex with girls total; there are just the filmed ones. I’m sorry—allegedly filmed ones.)

The first is the video that resulted in the 14 child-porn charges against Kelly. The second is another filmed sex act with what people who have seen it say was another girl, who has never been identified, which was circulated on street corners as part of the original Kelly sex tape.* The third are the images on a digital camera police confiscated from Kelly’s home in Florida, but which were later ruled inadmissible in court by a judge. The new threesome tape which will reportedly be the focus of the testimony tomorrow is the fourth.

* It would be nice if one of the folks covering the trial tried to find out what happened to that tape. Did the state ever try to introduce it as evidence?

American Idol alum Chris Daughtry, quoted in Billboard on the subject of Simon Fuller:

“He’s a lot like the Wizard of Oz. You keep hearing about all these great things going on that he’s involved in and you think, ‘Does this guy even exist?’ But then you go and meet him and he’s the real deal. I felt there was no reason to go anywhere else for management.”

Not a good week for Microsoft.

First, Yahoo and Google are being cliquish and won’t let the Borg play with them on the internets.

And now there’s more bad news from the Zune division. (Team colors: Poopy brown.) The WSJ ($) reports:

Videogame retailer GameStop Corp. plans to stop selling Microsoft Corp.’s Zune media player due to insufficient demand.

GameStop’s already pulled its stock of Zunes from its stores. The media players will be available via GameStop’s Web site until supplies are exhausted. The Zune “didn’t have the appeal” that GameStop expected, a spokesman said.

Adam Sohn, Microsoft’s Zune marketing manager, said in response that Zune sales “have seen good momentum” during the last few months, and that there’s been a “great response to our spring release.”

This didn’t look like that big of a deal until I noticed that GameStop had 4500 retail outlets. Who knew? (EB Games stores are part of the same company, it turns out.) Microsoft has allegedly sold two million Zunes since its debut a year and a half ago. If GameStop had fifteen percent of the Zune market (I’m pulling that figure out of a hat) it would mean the company averaged about one sale per store per week. (Apple, by contrast, is selling iPods at the rate of nearly a million per week.)

Meanwhile, tucked away in the Times today was a story about how Microsoft has quietly stopped scanning books for its Live Search service. In the modern world of search, book scanning is one of the brave new frontiers, and Google, of course, has encountered all sorts of heat for its attempts to scan everything it can get its hands on. The Times:

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Nadella said Microsoft will focus on ”verticals with high commercial intent.”

“Verticals with high commercial intent.” And Microsoft wonders why consumers aren’t connecting with its products.

It seems like only yesterday I was reading all those full-page ads for Microsoft’s big plans for “Live Search.” It was in fact just 18 months ago, or right about the time the company started rolling out the Zune.

If I recall correctly, the ads said, “We’re in this for the long haul, or until we decide instead to focus more on verticals with high commercial intent.”

The company’s interest in those verticals, incidentally, will soon come back to bite hapless Zune owners in the ass. Recently, we saw what happened to customers of Microsoft’s previous music service, the MSN Store, when it was shut down last month. (The MSN Store sold music, like the iTunes Store.) The company could have easily transported its customers there to the new “Zune Marketplace.” Instead, it’s basically disconnecting the service. The songs you bought on it, tied up in digital rights management, will work as long as you keep your current computer. But when you upgrade, you’re screwed, and they disappear.

I don’t think too many people will be re-buying the songs from the Zune Marketplace, but I suppose the company could be a little more aggressive in trying to market their way out of this mess.

(Confidential to B.G.: Try to convince folks that “MSN” had nothing to do with the operation that suddenly repossessed all their music. It was the “Store” part, and the new Zune operation isn’t a “store,” it’s a “marketplace.”)

(By the way, Apple uses DRM, too, and it should be noted that, in theory, the company could pull the same sleazy trick.)

Once the Zune, inevitably, gets 86′ed by the company for its poor verticals, no doubt the company will again forgo allowing their customers to move the songs they paid for to a new computer. For that operation, the customers, far from being verticals, will be horizontals, and not face up, either.