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Liangzhu Culture Museum in east China’s Zhejiang Province, which will showcase early Chinese civilization, will open to the public on October 1, 2008, after four years of construction at the helm of a British architect.

The museum, in Liangzhu Cultural Village in a suburb of the provincial capital Hangzhou, abuts a park characterized by water and marsh.

“The discovery of relics of ancient villages, nobles’ tombs with exquisite jade burial artifacts, imperial graveyards, sacrificial altars and large-scale mountain structures in Liangzhu Town marks essential evidence of China’s 5,000 years of history,” said Zhang Zhongpei, ex-curator of the Forbidden City Museum in Beijing.

Zhongpei hopes that the museum would become a major tourist attraction as well as a catalyst for local relic protection.

The museum, composed of four blocks all with a width of 18 meters but of different heights, emerges as a toy-brick-like sculpture that is visible from a fair distance.

The courtyards in each block are a part of a tour route that links the four exhibition halls.

The museum was designed by David Chipper Field.

The Englishman’s works include the glass-skinned Figge Art Museum in the United States and the award-winning National River and Rowing Museum on the banks of the River Thames in Great Britain, among others.

Field refers to his first museum piece in China as a “creature happily bringing visitors into the retrospective world of Liangzhu culture dating back about 5,000 years.”

To him, the Liangzhu Culture Museum is “neither shocking nor extravagant,” with its main body wrapped up by yellow travertine stones, a kind of rock material rarely found in China, but looking rather “quiet, subliminal and low-profile.”

According to Deputy curator Guo Qinglin, the museum would house a collection of archaeological findings from the Liangzhu cultural site.

Among the highlights were unearthed jade wares featuring beautiful patterns, lacquer ware and other objects such as linen products and elephant tusk ornaments.

This demonstrated the advanced social productive force and handicraft-making level of the times.

This prehistoric civilization that can trace back 4,000 to 5,300 years ago received its name from the local Liangzhu Town in 1936.

According to Guo, it is an important sect of ancient culture in the area of Taihu Lake, at the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.

Videogamers, your glasses to transport you into three dimensional space.

Visual computing technology company Nvidia has unveiled the first mainstream 3D gaming technology at the inaugural NVISION 08 conference in San Jose, which focused on the convergence of technology with Hollywood, games and business.

With Hollywood migrating to 3D for event movies like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and next year’s “Avatar” from James Cameron, the electronics and gaming industries have created new technology that lets home systems and PCs also deliver true 3D.

This technology uses clear 3D glasses similar to those used at an IMAX theater.

On the show floor, games like upcoming Spore and Call of Duty: World at War and recent releases like Race Driver Grid, Devil May Cry 4, and Unreal Tournament 3 were playable on 73-inch Mitsubishi 3D Ready 1080p DLP TVs and Viewsonic 3D Ready 120Hz LCD displays.

Publishers like Ubisoft, which is developing the game based on “Avatar,” are already taking advantage of this new technology for new gameplay experiences to be released next year.

“Stereoscopic technology will have gamers going back two or three years and playing older games just to see how they look in 3D,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia.

A packed theater of thousands of engineers, designers, developers, gamers and business professionals from around the world put on 3D glasses and watched a spectacular castle siege in Microsoft’s 2005 PC strategy game, Age of Empires III.

Huang also focused on the future of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. There are currently over 100 million active global gamers playing MMO games like World of Warcraft, EverQuest II and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.

“We believe the notion of an MMO and a social network will converge and create a new type of virtual world where people can meet and hang out and just chat with their friends,” said Huang.

Korean developer Nurien showed off its Nurien Social Network, a hybrid game world that allows players to create and dress their avatar and then design their home.

This home serves as a 3D homepage for web browsing, watching videos and playing games like a dancing competition.

Tricia Helfer, who starred virtually last year as General Kilian Qatar in Electronic Arts’ Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars game, showed how 3D technology is influencing Hollywood and her Sci-Fi Channel show, “Battlestar Galactica.”

“What they’re doing with visual computing is transforming a lot of industries,” said Helfer. “I see on the set in Hollywood every day what computer technology is doing for entertainment.”

Acclaimed game creator Lorne Lanning told the conference how game technology is opening up new opportunities for filmmakers.

“Videogame engines provide an entirely different logic to how we’re thinking about making films,” said Lanning.

“The game design industry grasps this easily. The filmmakers are taking some time to figure this out, but eventually they’re going to get it. Hollywood loves it because using a game engine brings the budget down.”

The only golfing Tiger Woods is doing these days is in video games

“I do play quite a bit,” Woods said. “A heck of a lot more now.”

The world’s top-ranked golfer has been sidelined since winning the U.S. Open in June, recovering from surgery on his left knee to repair a torn ligament.

Woods said in a telephone interview that he plays friends in tournaments on EA Sports’ Tiger Woods PGA Tour game. He plays as self-created characters: “One’s a really buffed-out dude,” another is pudgy.

EA Sports launched the ‘09 version of the game this week, and also announced a partnership with Gillette. Woods is one of the “Gillette Champions” in marketing for the shaver maker.

Woods said he actually learns from playing the virtual courses.

“I’ve had certain putts I had in real-life competition break the same way and by the same amount,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

He expects to be out swinging real golf clubs in January, but said it’s too soon to know when he’ll be able to compete again.

“It’s frustrating. I really have no idea,” he said.

In a first-of-its kind decision, a California federal court has dismissed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against online video-sharing site Veoh Networks. IO Group, an adult entertainment company, filed the suit against Veoh, alleging the site displayed its content in violation of copyright laws. But Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court in San Jose ruled against the gay-porn distributor on Wednesday.

IO Group’s suit is not unlike Viacom’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube. In fact, MySpace, MP3tunes, Hi5, Stage6 and several other sites are facing similar battles over user-generated content.

Could this ruling be a boon for these sites? Or is the ruling merely an isolated incident in a California trial court? Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are betting on the former.

Web 2.0 Required Reading

EFF Legal Analyst Fred von Lohman said the ruling should be required reading for the executives of every Web 2.0 business that relies on user-generated content. The key to Veoh’s victory, he said, was its scrupulous attention to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors.

“Veoh responded to compliant DMCA takedown notices on a same-day basis, it notified users of its policies against copyright infringement, it registered a copyright agent with the copyright office, it terminated users who were repeat infringers and blocked new registrations from the same e-mail addresses, it used hashes to stop the same infringing videos from being uploaded by other users,” von Lohman wrote in the EFF blog.

As von Lohman sees it, Judge Lloyd’s ruling debunks some of the favorite arguments of entertainment-industry lawyers and gives YouTube a boost in its billion-dollar battle against Viacom.

YouTube’s Repeat Infringer Dilemma

But the Google case is a little different. While the California court did spell out that there is no affirmative obligation for service providers to track users or police their sites, the context of that quote was based on tracking down repeat infringers.

To qualify for safe harbor, Web sites are required to cancel the accounts of users who repeatedly submit infringing content. The court did not address to what level a Web site is required to affirmatively look for repeat infringers.

User-generated content sites could terminate a user’s ID, but that user can simply register under a different screen name. Untangling the issue can be difficult, according to Mary Jane Frisby, a partner in the Indianapolis, Ind., office of Barnes & Thornburg LLP and a member of the firm’s intellectual property department.

But there is a dividing line in safe-harbor provisions.

“If infringement is rampant right and left and anyone ought to be able to see it, but you don’t do anything about it, then maybe you don’t have safe harbor,” Frisby said. “These clips on YouTube are from ‘South Park‘ and ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Things that one can simply look at and say ‘that must belong to somebody’.”

Jeremy Zweig, Viacom’s vice president, commented, “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners. Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement — conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.”

Chinese online gaming stocks traded lower Thursday after Giant Interactive Group Inc. reported second-quarter profit that met Wall Street views but was downgraded by one analyst after failing to issue third-quarter guidance.

American Depositary Shares of the Shanghai-based company fell 41 cents, or 4.3 percent, to $9.24. The stock has traded between $20.46 and $8.46 since Giant began trading publicly in November.

Late Wednesday, Giant said it earned 20 cents per ADS, which analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected.

The company cited changes it made in July to the revenue model for its flagship game, “ZT Online,” as the reason for not giving guidance.

In a client note, Roth Capital Partners analyst Adam Krejcik downgraded the stock to “Hold” from “Buy” and lowered his 2008 and 2009 estimates for Giant.

“While we think Giant has the ability to ‘right the ship,’ given our expectations for a challenging 2H08 and lackluster pipeline we no longer feel comfortable recommending shares of Giant,” he said.

Meanwhile, U.S. shares of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., which is also based in Shanghai, dipped 8 cents to $26.55.

In a client note, Goldman Sachs analyst Leah Hao predicted the company’s second-quarter results will be in line with its outlook for up to 5 percent sales growth quarter-over-quarter and an operating margin of 37 percent to 40 percent. Shanda is slated to report on Wednesday.

The analyst thinks Shanda’s third-quarter guidance will be seasonal and higher than in the second quarter but accounting for a negative impact from the Beijing Olympics.

Hao rates the stock “Neutral” with a $41 price target.

Elsewhere in the sector, U.S. shares of The9 Ltd., which is located in Shanghai and operates the popular game “World of Warcraft” in China, fell 23 cents to $18.40.

Beijing-based Netease.com Inc.’s U.S. shares fell 16 cents to $26.39.

Microsoft has agreed to buy Greenfield Online, owner of European price comparison website ciao.com, for about $486 million to boost its Internet search and e-commerce business in Europe.

Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo earlier this year failed after a protracted battle, said on Friday the acquisition should benefit its Live Search platform.

Internet search is dominated by Google, which has 62 percent of the global search market and 79 percent in Europe, according to the most recent data published by Web usage tracker ComScore.

Microsoft has a 2 percent market share in Europe and 9 percent worldwide, behind both Google and Yahoo. In Europe, Microsoft is also outranked by online auction site eBay and Russia’s Yandex.

“The team at Ciao has built a passionate consumer community based on intuitive technology and extensive merchant relationships that we believe will deliver incremental benefit to the Microsoft Live Search platform,” said Microsoft’s vice president for Windows and online services, Tami Reller.

Ciao.com offers advice on purchases, mainly of consumer electronics, and encourages users to join a network of shopping experts to share opinions. It makes its revenues from e-commerce, merchant referrals and advertising sales.

Microsoft’s offer of $17.50 per share betters an earlier proposal by media-focused U.S. buyout firm Quadrangle Group to acquire the company for $15.50 a share, and represents a slight premium to Greenfield’s closing price of $17.25 on Thursday.

On August 26, Greenfield had said it had received a $17.50 per share offer but did not reveal from whom. The latest offer represents a premium of about 10 percent over Greenfield’s closing share price on August 25.

Microsoft said it had agreed to sell off Greenfield Online’s main business, which surveys consumer opinion online and sells the results to market researchers, to an unnamed financial buyer.

The companies expect both deals to close during the fourth quarter of 2008. Completion of the Greenfield sale to Microsoft does not depend on Microsoft’s disposal of the online survey business, the two companies said.

The number of people lacking health insurance dropped by more than 1 million in 2007, the first annual decline since the Bush administration took office, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

The poverty rate held steady at 12.5 percent, not statistically different from the 12.3 percent registered in 2006. The median — or midpoint — household income rose slightly to $50,233. And the number of uninsured dropped to 45.7 million, down from 47 million in 2007.

The numbers represent a kind of scorecard on President Bush’s stewardship of the economy at the kitchen-table level. However, they only go as far as the end of last year, before the current economic downturn started gathering force. Indeed, they could come to be seen as a snapshot taken at the high point of the administration’s tenure.

The picture is mixed.

“The gains that occurred last year were welcome, but unfortunately, they are too little, too late,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The median household is no better off now than they were back in 2000, despite their deep contribution to the nation’s economic growth during this period.”

For example, after adjusting for inflation, last year’s median household income of $50,233 was not significantly different from the figure for the year 2000, which was $50,557. “The American work force is baking a bigger economic pie, but the slices haven’t grown at all,” said Bernstein.

The welcome news on health insurance coverage was tempered by the fact that private coverage continued to erode. Government programs — such as Medicaid for the poor — picked up the slack, resulting in the overall reduction in people without health insurance. The uninsured rate also fell to 15.3 percent, down from 15.8 percent in 2006.

“A lot of the fall is due to the increase in public coverage,” said David Johnson, who oversees the Census division that produced the statistics. The number of uninsured children also fell in 2007, after an increase in 2006 that had interrupted years of progress in getting more kids covered.

But seen over a longer period of time, the health insurance numbers are not reassuring. The number of uninsured — and the rate — are higher today than they were at the outset of the Bush administration in 2001. That year, 39.8 million people, or 14.1 percent, were uninsured.

A U.S. judge has thrown out a copyright infringement case against Veoh Networks Inc, an Internet video start-up with high-profile Hollywood backers, ruling that video-sharing companies are not solely responsible for policing piracy that may take place on their sites.

The California court dismissed a copyright infringement suit by adult entertainment company Io Group Inc against Veoh and granted summary judgment to the defendants. The complaint argued Veoh had not done enough to stop site users of its site from uploading unauthorized clips of 10 Io adult sex films.

Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that Veoh worked actively to protect copyright owners and so qualified for “safe harbor” protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce, not squelch it,” the judge said in siding with Veoh.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limits liability for Internet service providers that act quickly to block access to pirated online materials, once the copyright holder notifies a Web site of specific acts of infringement.

The ruling draws a line between Napster, the music-sharing service that enabled a wave of music piracy early this decade, and the new crop of video-sharing services that take steps to protect against piracy of copyrighted materials.

Io had argued that Veoh should be required to prescreen videos to prevent copyright infringement. “The court finds no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file would be feasible,” the judge wrote.

The court rejected a technical argument used in many Internet copyright cases in which Io claimed Veoh infringed its copyrights by automatically converting user-submitted videos into easy-to-watch Flash videos, a process called transcoding.

But Lloyd stressed that he does not intend his decision to open the flood gates to Internet video piracy.

“The decision rendered here is confined to the particular combination of facts in this case and is not intended to push the bounds of the safe harbor so wide that less than scrupulous service providers may claim its protection,” Lloyd wrote.

Among other issues with Io’s lawsuit, the judge noted that Io had filed a lawsuit against Veoh instead of first providing the video company with notification of infringement.

Veoh had decided to bar all adult sexual content from its site and taken down the infringing Io videos before the suit was filed, Lloyd noted.

“We are very happy that the judge in this case recognized our compliance with the DMCA and our efforts to respect copyrights,” Veoh spokesman Gaude Lydia Paez said.

The Io-Veoh case featured similar arguments to those used in two high-profile cases against Google Inc unit YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing site.

Viacom Inc filed a $1 billion lawsuit in 2007 against YouTube calling it a site for “massive intentional copyright infringement” that had enabled hundreds of thousands of Viacom video clips to be pirated. A second suit filed against YouTube by English soccer’s Premier League and more than a dozen sports, entertainment and media plaintiffs is running in parallel in a New York federal court.

YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine hailed the Veoh ruling in a statement, saying that: “It is great to see the court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights.”

Veoh ranked last week as the 17th most visited U.S. multimedia entertainment site according to Web measurement firm Hitwise Inc.

Financial backers include former Walt Disney Co Chief Executive Michael Eisner, former Viacom and MTV Networks Chief Executive Tom Freston, former Viacom Entertainment Group Chief Executive Jonathan Dolgen and investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Two actors unions and the U.S. advertising industry said Monday they agreed to extend a contract covering commercials on TV, radio, the Internet and other new media by six months through March.

The extension gives the Screen Actors Guild extra time to finished stalled talks with Hollywood studios over a contract covering prime-time TV shows and movies that expired in June. Actors continue to work under the terms of the old deal.

Both the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists held a six-month commercials strike in 2000 that drove work overseas.

The extension comes on top of a two-year extension agreed to in 2006.

At that time, the advertising industry and the unions commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton to study new compensation models for performers to deal with the shift of ads to the Internet and other new media. The study was completed early this year.

In March, SAG and AFTRA acrimoniously ended 27 years of joint negotiations with studios over movies and prime-time TV shows in a spat over jurisdiction and the makeup of the bargaining team.

SAG and AFTRA have yet to decide formally whether to jointly bargain on the commercials contract.

The ad industry is represented by a joint committee of the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Traditional Ayurvedic medicines manufactured in the United States and India and sold via the Internet may contain unacceptable levels of lead, mercury or arsenic, researchers warn in a report released Tuesday.

Ayurvedic medicines are used by most of India’s 1.1 billion people and worldwide by people from South Asia and other regions. “However, since 1978 more than 80 cases of lead poisoning associated with Ayurvedic medicine use have been reported worldwide,” Dr. Robert B. Saper, from Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues note in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

There are two major types of Ayurvedic medicines: herbal-only and rasa shastra, which is an ancient practice of deliberately combining herbs with metals (e.g., mercury, lead, iron, zinc), minerals (e.g., mica) and gems (e.g., pearl). Rasa shastra experts claim that these medicines are safe and therapeutic when properly prepared and administered.

Among 193 Ayurvedic medicines analyzed by Saper’s team, the prevalence of metal-containing products was 20.7 percent. The prevalence of metals in American-made Ayurvedic medicines was 21.7 percent, compared with 19.5 percent in Indian-made products.

Rasa shastra medicines were more than twice as likely as non-rasa shastra products to contain detectable metals (40.5 percent vs 17.1 percent) and had higher concentrations of lead and mercury.

“Several Indian-manufactured rasa shastra medicines could result in lead and/or mercury ingestions 100 to 10,000 times greater than acceptable limits,” the investigators report.

“Among the metal-containing products, 95 percent were sold by U.S. Web sites and 75 percent claimed Good Manufacturing Practices,” the researchers note.

“Current regulations governing the quality of herbal supplements made and sold in the US and India are inadequate,” Saper told Reuters Health. “We recommend strictly enforced government-mandated daily dose limits for toxic metals in all dietary supplements. Manufacturers should have to demonstrate compliance with these standards through independent third-party laboratory testing.”

“Although the current study focused on Ayurvedic medicines, reports of similar problems with toxic metals in other traditional medicines (e.g. Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern) and Western herbal supplements have been reported, Saper noted.

He and his colleagues recommend that Ayurvedic medicine users avoid rasa shastra medicines.

“Products made by members of the American Herbal Product Assn; capsules/liquids/pastes; are less likely to contain toxic metals,” Saper said. “Products that have obtained seals of quality approval from Consumer Lab.com and the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) can be assumed to be free of significant levels of toxic metals,” he added.