Forbes, Oct 28, 2013

choi

(1) Joanne Muller, Detroit’s Happy Home Wrecker. The Pulte family made billions buiding houses across the US. Now, Bill Pulte is tearing them down to save the nation’s most blighted city.
www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Quote:

“If there’s one thing Pulte Group has mastered over 60 years, it’s building homes efficiently. * * * [Bill Pulte is now, however,] razing them, clearing out blighted neighborhoods with an efficiency that has astonished this bankrupt city.
“Detroit * * * has lost a quarter of its population in the past decade
“There are at least 78,000 abandoned and blighted structures in Detroit, nearly half of which are considered “dangerous” because of fire damage or criminal activity. * * * So far about 5,000 have been torn down, one at a time, at a cost of some $72 million [on average $14,400 apiece].

“Using the same economies of scale that apply when erecting houses, Pulte figures, the [Detroit] Blight Authority[, Pulte’s nonprofit,] can demolish homes for less than $5,000 each–even less if Detroit would reform its cumbersome regulations. Instead of hiring a single contractor to tear down one house, the Blight Authority brings in an army of specialized laborers and equipment to rid an entire neighborhood of its empty houses, haul away the debris, clear out overgrown brush and regrade the property. * * * Now the area is transformed into green space

choi

(2) Simon Montlake, China’s Black Box. China’s answer to Apple TV is full of pirated content. Hollywood can’t sue because the government owns a piece of the action.
www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontla ... es-riles-hollywood/
(“Tencent signed a licensing deal in September with Disney to stream movies on its video-on-demand service. [Kristian] Kender[, a media consultant in Beijing,] puts the total market for nontheatrical content (everything but box office) at $60 million to $70 million a year, a pittance compared with what it could be. One studio said it makes more from home viewing in Indonesia than it does in China, whose economy is ten times the size”)

My comment:
(a) The “black box” in the title alludes to the set-top box, a picture of which is shown both in print and online. It is called a set-top box, because the box sits atop a television set.
(b) Future TV  中广互联
www.sarft.net
(c) There is little doubt that pirated material is distributed at Future TV: The same writer had a Oct 11, 2013 Forbes piece titled "China's Youku Sues Xiaomi Over 'Black Box' Piracy."
But I have doubts about the central theme of the report: A major stockholder of Future TV is state-owned and thus, both CCTV and China are untouchable. Once a government (in US or foreign) is engaged a commercial activity, the activity opens them to civil actions on US soil. This is a long-established principle in American jurisprudence. See
Recent Developments in Suits Against Foreign Governments and Corporations Doing Business Abroad. Jones Day, May 2013.
www.jonesday.com/recent_developm ... ng_business_abroad/