Hash: Business iMakeContent

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 22:09:09 GMT

A splice of mice: Mickey isn't the only mouse trying to wriggle out of the clutches of the masters of code. [Animation World Network].

Canada last week refused to grant a patent for a genetically modified mouse.

Unlike the US, EU and Japan, Canada denies that Harvard's scientists invented anything when they manipulated mouse genes. Its Supreme Court says the university doesn't deserve a patent - at least not until the politicians have had a chance to think the ethics of biotech over. [National Post].

As with Mickey, business concerns slam into public concerns here.

It doesn't make much business sense for patented genes to be freely accessible. After all, you don't want your rivals rummaging through your research work.

This isn't just a standard big business line. As biotech develops, smaller firms, entrepreneurial boffins often, universities even, are entering the market as niche developers. Like artists, writers, coders and other intellectual property creators, they want to safeguard their work so they can be properly rewarded.

Fine, but when it comes to biotech, sole ownership of this kind of information isn't in the public interest. Charging for access is likely to discourage research. Ideas develop most rapidly, most fruitfully through free exchanges of information. And it goes against common sense, moral sense, for private groups to have monopolies over such fundamental knowledge.

Think eugenics here. Think perfect blue-eyed, blond-haired babies. Think the Boys from Brazil.

Scientists as scientists tend to agree that science should be open to all, should be open source. According to Michael Morgan, formerly executive director of research at the Wellcome Trust, research and competition were enhanced when the results of the Human Genome Project were immediately made public - for free - over the Internet. [Globe and Mail].

Business argues, however, that open source can sit alongside proprietary code. An academic institution, like Harvard, can apply its expertise to become a business and generate wealth for the good of its staff and students, for the greater good.

Perhaps. But GM mice, unlike Mickey or Windows XP, scamper through the real world. Clicking through standard intellectual property arguments when faced with invention at such a fundamental level, at a time when the news is one long brave new nightmare, isn't enough.

Corporations are exercising property rights over their biotech creations. How morally right is this? To enclose a creature's genetic code? To turn such fundamental information, the stuff of life, into something that can be bought and sold?

Like much else in life, as the public debate over patenting life splutters on in parliaments and in the media, the business of business happens quietly in the background. The corporations are shaping the biotech agenda. In universities even.

Canada's politicians may ponder long and hard. They won't be able to ignore the pressure from corporate lobbyists. Canada has to play the same free trade rules as the rest of the world. Patent law there, as everywhere else, will be reinvented for the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, challenging the idea of minting money out of minting life is left to the scientists. The Canadian decision came the day after the publication of the draft complete mouse genome. Scientists from 27 institutions in six countries took part in the £87m Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium. [Independent].

The consortium is in the public sector. All its data is in the public domain.

Real or cartoon, mice or men, code of all sorts will cheer loudly.

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 10:10:55 GMT

No joke: Lawyers acting on behalf of Dow Chemicals have shut down the Dow Toxic spoof site set up to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Bhopal gas accident.

Verio, the site's ISP, received a note from Dow's lawyers citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Verio pulled the plug late Wednesday evening.

The Yes Men, the politico pranksters behind the site, say they wish Dow would put as much energy into cleaning up the mess in Bhopal as it's spent on closing down their site.

'It's really funny, but also really awful how Dow. . . and Verio can just put sooooo much energy and creativity into making sure this little image problem gets minimized, whereas they can't possibly be bothered to do something about the basic problem they're faced with: DEAD PEOPLE. SICK PEOPLE. TOXIC MESS.' [Yes Men].

The Dow Toxic site is still being mirrored at:
bhopal.doesntexist.com
dow.is.dreaming.org
dow-chemical.va.com.au

It's not only Dow that doesn't get the joke. The Yes Men's spoof sites specialise in stretching free trade logic until it reaches breaking point. But, mistaken for the real WTO, they regularly get invitations to give speeches at business conferences.

Even when they turn up and deliver their extreme trade-uber-alles message, the Yes Men don't always get rumbled.

The US civil war was a bad idea because the market would eventually have cleaned up slavery; Gandhi's ideal of village self-sufficiency was an inefficient protectionist measure; the Italian siesta is an unfair barrier to trade; Hitler's economic model had a lot going for it. . .

Mike Yes Man explains: 'The idea is that at some stage among your audience there’ll be some moment of realisation.

'Trouble is, there isn’t always. That’s what we’re realising – how much crap people will take if it comes from a person in a suit representing something official like the WTO.' [Ecologist].

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 14:09:24 GMT

Soft touch: The gap between business rhetoric and reality is causing problems at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

The 'left-leaning' think tank's latest report, based on a survey of 500 UK company directors, finds that while there's plenty of business chatter about the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR), most companies fail to implement effective social or environmental policies.

This hasn't gone down too well at the Institute of Directors (IoD) which commissioned the report.

The IoD disagrees with the IPPR's interpretation of the results so much that it's published its own summary. Unlike the IPPR, it regards the results as another opportunity for yet another CSR good news story.

Ella Joseph, who wrote the IPPR report, told Newsnight's Stephanie Flanders yesterday:

'I was really surprised by the IoD's response. We'd be the first to praise, promote, endorse positive company behaviour and we're absolutely delighted by some of the findings around workforce policy.

'However we do think that where companies say they have a policy but don't actually evaluate whether that policy is effective, we need to change that situation.' [BBC Newsnight].

It sounds as though the IPPR is tired of greenwash: corporate PR designed to pre-empt any broad critique of business practice.

Pushing for 'soft' regulation, it wants CSR company audits standardised and published widely to all interested parties - workers, consumers, the community and shareholders. [Observer].

Meanwhile, the government sticks to the voluntary approach. Business - Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Tyco, Arthur Andersen, Martha Stewart, Enron - gets to decide its own code of conduct.

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 17:11:24 GMT

Moving pictures: Without copyright term extensions, old films wouldn't get distributed, argues the entertainment industry. 'Indiscriminate exploitation' by public domain copyists would reduce the flow of cash to Big Media and hence the motivation Big Media needs to 'publish' films. [CS Monitor].

Intellectual property lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Jason Schultz say that's so much baloney. Digging around the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Schultz finds that out of the 37,000 or so movies released between 1927 and 1946, only 2,480, 6.8%, are commercially available. [Lessig Blog].

So, why not place the whole lot in the public domain and see what happens?

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 22:13:22 GMT

Remembering Bhopal: Corporate responsibility means never having to do much more than hire a PR company and say: sorry, we won't do that again; we've changed, we really have; we care.

Unfair?

Hajra Bi remembers waking up just after midnight on 3 December 1984. A strange smell was making it difficult to breath. She ran outside with her family:

'People were running blindly. Many were falling down. By then my eyes had become so swollen that I could hardly open them. I had my dupatta covering my eyes.

'I was carrying four year old Nazma and my husband was carrying Shareef who was six and Iqbal who was two years old. I had gone a little distance when Nazma started making gurgling and choking sounds. I pried my eye lids open and saw there was froth coming out of her mouth.'

Shareef died after three months. Yosouf, born six months after the leak, died when he was a year old. Shahbano, born later, also died.

Hajra Bi received Rs 15,000, just under £200, in compensation from Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the world's worst industrial accident. [Bhopal.org].

Yesterday, protestors dumped toxic waste at the headquarters of Dow Chemical in Bombay to mark the 18th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak.

Women from Bhopal delivered brooms to Dow with the message: 'Dow, clean up your mess'.

Some 20,000 people have died since the leak of 40 tonnes of deadly gases at the pesticide factory in 1984.

At least one person a day still dies from diseases related to the leak. [Greenpeace].

Dow Chemical, which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, denies responsibility for cleaning up the site or for paying out any compensation.

In 1989, the Indian government settled out of court with Union Carbide for $470m. It seems unwilling to press the Bhopal victims' case, possibly for fear of putting off potential US investors.

What if a gas leak had occurred in New York or London?

Anne Karpf pointed out last year that the 25,000 families of those bereaved by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre received on average $25,000 each.

This contrasts with the average $1,300 compensation for each of the 14,824 Indians killed immediately in Bhopal. For the hundreds of thousands of people disabled by the leak, the average payout has been $580. [Guardian].

For more about the Bhopal campaign for justice, see Bhopal.net.

For more insight into the ways in which corporations like Dow play merry with the truth, see the pranksters (quickly, before they attract the attention of Dow's lawyers) at Dow Toxic:

'We don't want people to think "chemicals" when they hear "Dow" -- we want them to hear "Living. Improved Daily." We don't want them to think of a corporation striving to maximize profits, we want them to think of a good neighbor. . .

'. . . unless we're frequently and visibly expressing a deep concern about Sustainable Development, we're missing opportunities to position Dow as the caring, concerned global citizen our customers must believe us to be. . .

'Setting corporate targets and judging ourselves against them is an important part of our strategy to ensure that we remain free of the fetters of over-regulation by government.' [Dow-Chemicals].

Looking for corporate responsibility, corporate honesty even?

Joking aside, the truth is now so much PR.

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 17:34:57 GMT

Copy this: It's the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly, argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that there's been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying.

Big media's next step will be to employ hacking techniques against peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Then, as consumer PR hits rock bottom, the corporates will introduce their own pretty peer-to-peer systems.

With corporate peer-to-peer - two incompatible ideas - likely to fail, big media will increasingly concentrate on media projects, like blockbuster films, requiring large amounts of cash. Text and music will come from individual writers and artists operating outside the old media loop.

If the corporates don't accommodate this new media, they may find their game is over. [Cringely's Pulpit].

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 12:06:03 GMT

Bye Buy: And they're off. In the US, the day after Thanksgiving traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. This year, to avoid a double-dip recession, consumers have been told to spend, spend, spend. It's nothing less than their patriotic duty.

Like lemmings with credit cards, let's say a quick prayer before throwing ourselves down those aisles.

Not me.

Today is also Buy Nothing Day. Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day in the UK.

Bah humbug? Only in the minds of the most brainwashed. You don't need to be the Pope to realise that the advertisers and the corporations turn Christmas into a deeply profane celebration.

The original Christmas message had nothing to do with consumerism. There's nothing in the New Testament about colluding in the exploitation of people around the world so your child can have whatever the ad companies are promoting most heavily this year. It says nothing about working overtime to buy more food than your family can possibly eat while millions around the world suffer from malnutrition.

If retailers depend so heavily on Christmas that governments encourage consumption at any cost, there's something deeply wrong with the way the economy is being run.

Buy nothing today and tomorrow.

Even better, make this a Buy Nothing Christmas.

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 22:53:18 GMT

Belushi, Hegel and you: It's sharing ideas that leads to innovation. The Romantic idea of the artist as a lonely genius? It's more like Newton and Oasis and the rest of us jostling for position on the shoulders of giants.

According to Malcolm 'Tipping Point' Gladwell, innovation happens when people egg each other on. Group social interaction results in radical ideas.
He looks at how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, how Darwin, Watt and Priestley, how TV comedians Saturday Night Live got together and got down - in John Belushi's case to coke snorting and everybody's wife - to produce, in the end, pure genius.

Of course, innovation needs heads-down time too. The trick is to 'combine the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity' and create an environment that's safe and yet stimulating. [New Yorker].

Glib? Sure, everybody nowadays loves innovation, creativity and thinking out of the rectangular container. Just needs a little singing from the same hymnbook. Buzzword bingo!

But Gladwell has a point. Creativity requires collaboration. It also requires the ability to rework ideas taken from a common stock.

What should send us scurrying to the law books at this point, Gladwell's tipping or even, judging by the number of newspaper stories around about copyright issues, tipped point, is that not everyone thinks the creative process should happen freely - not in the sense of 'free beer' and not, sometimes, in the sense of 'free speech'.

Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says we're at the start of a culture war.

It sounds dramatic, but he's right. As a result of the ease with which files can be shared across the internet, the informal common sense approach to sharing ideas, to innovating, is crashing against the corporate belief in the sanctity of copyright.

Business is ready to accept innovation, is ready to let us make content, is ready to give us access to walled gardens where collaboration can happen - but only at a price, if it can be costed, worked into a business plan.

Zittrain says we need a compromise between the profit motive and the urge to create. Given the current political climate, that's unlikely unless there's a general recognition of what we stand to lose. Zittrain ends: 'freedom of trade must not trump freedom of mind'. [Boston Globe].

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 22:25:44 GMT

Microsoft targets India: Bill Gates' charitable foundation is giving $100 million to fight AIDS in India. It's not an altogether altruistic move. The Alpha geek is on a tour to drum up public sector business and see off the threat from Linux. Embracing and extending as usual, Microsoft plans to invest $400 million in its Indian operations over the next three years. [NY Times].

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 21:44:45 GMT

Economic with the truth: Naomi Klein provides interesting background to an Economist article that does a pretty unconvincing job of ridiculing her, 'why an article so personal and childish was allowed to go to press in a publication that prides itself on being a cool voice of reason and authority on all matters economic.' She then pulls the argument in the Economist apart using facts drawn from the Economist. [No Logo].

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 20:41:52 GMT

The rights of Pooh: There was once a corporation called Disney and a corporation called Slesinger and they didn't know how to share. They argued and they argued over who owned the rights to a fat and oh-so juicy piece of intellectual property called Winnie-the-Pooh. Despite their differences, however, they both agreed on one fundamental point. Pooh should never ever be allowed to wander off into the great big public domain by himself. If that happened, who would enjoy all the lovely, sticky, runny revenue that Pooh was so good at generating? [CNN].

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 13:13:37 GMT

Away from the war: Over half of Americans say President Bush is more interested in protecting the interests of big corporations than ordinary Americans, according to a new CBS/New York Times poll. Some 56% say the national economy is in bad shape. [CBS].

And, perhaps not surprisingly, following a summer of revelations about corporate sleaze, executives are turning to private security companies and James Bond-style gadgets to keep angry ex-employees and stockholders at bay. [Yahoo].

Former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow did do the corporate 'perp walk' last week, was taken in handcuffs to the courthouse. But, say legal experts, people want more than a simple application of the law; they want justice. [NY Times].

Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times cites two recent reports that show that the corporations are still run by the business-as-usual crowd.

According to analysis by the Investor Responsibility Research Center, accountancy firms continue to earn more from consultancy than auditing work. Given that they often provide both services to their clients, it's sometimes difficult for them to ask questions about unusual accounting practices.

According to Weiss Ratings, analysts continue to give favourable recommendations on companies doing business with their firms. Again, there's a conflict of interests.

Morgenson says: 'If corporate executives and Wall Street sharpies want investors' respect, they must prove they are doing something to make dubious practices a thing of the past. They should stop denying the problem and quit trying to circumvent change by calling in chits from their friends in Washington.' [NY Times].

Meanwhile, a US Senate report finds that Enron collapsed because of failure on the part of the body charged with ensuring that US corporations behave.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) failed to review Enron's financial statements. It gave the energy giant a special accounting waiver. It exempted it from federal accounting requirements. [Forbes].

Ralph Nader, former Green Party presidential candidate, spoke to angry investors near the New York Stock Exchange last week.

'We're gathered here because we're concerned that not enough is being done about the most gigantic grand larceny episode in American history.'

According to Nader, millions of Americans have been robbed of billions of dollars in stock and pension savings.

Corporate scandals have cost American workers over $175bn in retirement savings. Pension losses from the Enron bankruptcy to February comes to $1.69bn.

He wants a 12-step corporate reform programme. It includes a crackdown on corporate corruption, better protection for workers and investors and an end to corporate deregulation. [BBC].

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 23:54:01 GMT

Sweet taste of success: Thanks to campaigning by local people, Hershey Foods won't be sold.

Shirley Reale, a Hershey resident, said: 'All I can say is hooray. The only thing I could see was the deterioration of the town if the company was sold.' [Boston.com]; [iMakeContent].

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 23:54:17 GMT

Weight watcher: Professor Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, says that EU governments are 'too scared' of business to tackle the problem of childhood obesity:

'Officials are pretty terrified around the whole of Europe about how to confront some of these huge vested interests.

'The fast food and soft drink industries have enormous turnovers, there is enormous vested interests which we need to confront.' [BBC].

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 16:05:02 GMT

The sweetest thing: For anyone who thinks that the main effect of neoliberal globalisation occurs far away, in Asia and Africa, and in blue-collar industrial cul-de-sacs, and, whatever, it's just an inevitable part of the development process, here's a salutary lesson.

You might think that democracy means that those with power are compelled by those in power, our political representatives, after due discussion and debate, after hearing all the points of view available, to bow to the people's will. Isn't that the whole point of democracy? With adequate safeguards for minorities, what's good for the majority prevails.

Not in Chocolate Town, USA. The good citizens of Hershey, Philadelphia are firmly against the sale of Hershey's Foods. The US chocolate giant employs about a quarter of them. It created the town. It's been good to them.

But a trust set up by Hershey's founder to benefit the local community, the town's disadvantaged children, couldn't care less what they think. Keen to maximise the value of its portfolio, to do the neolibralism thing, it plans to sell up its majority stock in Hershey's by selling out to the likes of Cadbury Schweppes or Nestle. [Guardian].

Following petitions and demonstrations organised through the Friends of Hershey Foods website, the local community and politicians have succeeded in halting the sale until a court has examined its economic and social impact.

Marge Panettieri, a member of the Friends of Hershey Foods, says that the campaign has been a 'great experience in grassroots democracy'. [Hershey Chronicle].

It's inspiring to see concerned citizens in action on the Friends' bulletin board.

However, the trust, which says that it needs to diversify its stock, is appealing against the injunction. It's likely to win the appeal this Wednesday on the grounds that it's an unfair violation of its right to do business. [Financial Times].

Matthew G Solovey, editor of the Hershey Chronicle, says that promises that Hershey's new owners will continue to put the town first amount to zero.

'Corporate America can't make assurances. They can't promise anything. Executives at corporations want to do one thing: make money. They don't care about the impact on a community - they care about the bottom line. Hey, that's America, and they have the right.

'But the Hershey Trust is not a corporation. It's a trust. It's here to provide. Its members certainly should not be looking at the bottom line, but should be looking at the moral thing to do.' [Hershey Chronicle].

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:33:52 GMT

Copyright wrangling: It's ironic that both these articles, first in early June in Salon and then yesterday in the Washington Post examine the illegal copying of music, the stealing of intellectual property. Compare and contrast the two articles. Is the similarity in the pieces just a coincidence? Is David Segal guilty of stealing Dan Levine's ideas or is he creating something new from them? Segal adds facts and figures to Levine's more subtle piece. Does that put him in the clear? I think it does. . .

My take on the Post article: having finished off Napster through the courts, the music industry is now going guerilla. It's planting spoof files on p2p networks like Kazaa and Morpheus to stop what it considers is the theft of over two billion songs a month.

There's an increase in CD-R sales as new releases reach the shops and this reveals the extent of music piracy, it claims.

But Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company that measures online file-sharing traffic, says what the industry is doing smacks of desperation.

'When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, "I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it," it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it.' [Washington Post].

Thu, 15 Aug 2002 23:50:59 GMT

Sign here: US Corporations had until yesterday afternoon to sign off company accounts under new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Hoping to restore investor confidence, senior executives pulled out their Montblancs and scribbled signatures on statements for the SEC.

Together with tough new penalties, this may constrain some corporate wrongdoing, says the Economist. However, we need 'eternal vigilance':

'The ends of bull markets regularly produce waves of corporate scandals, followed by periods of clean-ups. Some of the rule changes in those earlier episodes seem to have had an effect, others have been dead letters. And when markets begin to roar again, and there seem to be myriad opportunities for making money fast, clever people find new ways to bend or evade rules, no matter how carefully they have been crafted, and to mislead stampeding investors.' [Economist].

Thu, 15 Aug 2002 21:37:27 GMT

Beggaring belief: Fortune magazine lists the 'greed' merchants, the top US tech executives who became 'immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy' by selling stock at inflated prices while investors were being told to buy.

The top three: between January 1999 and May 2002, executives at Qwest Communications made $2.26 billion through selling company stock; executives at Broadcom made $2.08 billion; executives at AOL Time Warner made $1.79 billion.

'Executives and directors of the 1,035 corporations that met our criteria took out, by our estimate, roughly $66 billion. Of that amount, a total haul of $23 billion went to 466 insiders at the 25 corporations where the executives cashed out the most.' [Fortune].

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 18:16:20 GMT

I'll buy that: Full of shiny gadgets, Gizmodo is an experiment by Nick Denton to see if weblogs can make money.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:39:46 GMT

End of an error: The editor of Business Ethics magazine celebrates its 15th anniversary by admitting that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a smokescreen for the excesses of the 'financial elite'.

As the 'Watergate of Wall Street unfolds', Marjorie Kelly - with all the zeal of the converted - tells the MBA class that power structures need to be made democratic. 'We’ve been like homeowners chopping down nuisance trees which continually spring back, because we have failed to eradicate the roots.' [Business Ethics].

Peter Carlson says: 'Duh!'

'The idea that corporations will shaft workers, shareholders and Mother Nature in pursuit of the almighty dollar should be obvious to anyone who has ever glanced at an American history textbook. And the fact that corporate executives might utter pious platitudes about ethics while stealing like gangsters would surprise no one familiar with the tale of Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, who delivered a famous speech titled "Business Honesty" shortly before he was sent to Sing Sing for theft in 1938.

'But it's not nice to gloat over the naivete of disillusioned idealists. The folks at Business Ethics are not all that different from the rest of us. In the last several decades, politicians, think tanks and the media have convinced the American public that corporations are warm, fuzzy creatures, that CEOs are American heroes and that government regulation of business is meddlesome and unnecessary. Now we know -- or ought to know -- that it was a lot of baloney.' [Washington Post].

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:38:46 GMT

Net gains: Scott Rosenberg on why the internet matters even after the pop of the tech stock bubble: 'Hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to bend it to their own ends, in chaotic, unstable and unpredictable ways. As a generator of instant wealth, the Net may now be a big bust; as a generator of instant ideas, it keeps thrumming along.' [Salon].

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:38:12 GMT

iMicropayments: To complement The End of Free, here comes The Start of Fee.

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:58:14 GMT

Live forever: Forbes on the year's top-earning dead celebs. In 2001, Elvis Presley earned $37m; Charles Schulz, $28m; John Lennon, $20m. Its advice to wannabe stars: 'Live fast, die young and leave your heirs the name of an aggressive licensing agent.' [Forbes].

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:57:36 GMT

Live virtually: No need to protest about income disparity gaps, corporate sleaze or Bush's foreign policy misadventures. Click the icon on the screen and you too can build yourself a better, brighter tomorrow.

As computers get more powerful and broadband becomes standard, virtual spaces like EverQuest are expected to turn into boom worlds for the companies that own them.

EverQuest has 433,000 players who pay $12.95 a month. Creating relationships and societies out of the EverQuest virtual playground, subscribers generate $5m a month for Sony.

The typical player spends 20 hours a week living in EverQuest. According to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at California State University at Fullerton, one-third of adult players spend more time in the game world than in their paying jobs.

Not surprisingly, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Vivendi-Universal and Disney are pouring millions into developing online worlds.

In December, LucusArts and Sony release Star Wars Galaxies. Next year, Sony releases PlanetSide: a first-person action game set in an online world.

Consultancy Themis Group says that by 2003, revenue from online games will double to $635m. That's more than the revenue expected from the latest Star Wars film. [Business 2.0].

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 23:18:27 GMT

Rebel yell?: According to John Densmore of the Doors, when Jim Morrison found out that Buick had paid $75,000 to use Light My Fire in an advert, he threatened to go on stage and smash up one of its cars with a sledgehammer. Buick decided not to run the advert.

Despite pressure from Doors' keyboard player Ray Manzarek, Denmore stays loyal to the Lizard King's outsider pose.

Apple recently offered $1.5m for When the Music's Over. An internet company offered $3m for Break on Through. An exercise company offered $1m for a Doors' celebrity endorsement. But Denmore, worried about bad 'karma', continues to say no to the corporations. [Guardian].

With the 25th anniversary this Friday of the Big King's death, Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE) continues to say yes. Run by Elvis' daughter, Lisa Marie Presley (congratulations), it's pumping the Elvis estate for joint ventures.

When you're not humming along to the Nike advert, you can catch the Disney film, the McDonald's meal, the AOL CD-rom. All while relaxing in Elvis Furniture. [BBC].