Nielsen ratings for CBS' "Great Skate Debate," which aired Friday, suggest a boom in interactive TV watching. The agency reports that the special, which encouraged home viewers to vote on each skater's performance using the Internet, generated a total of 1.4 million votes from about 200,000 at-home judges.
Excite Inc., which managed the "Debate" Web site, estimated at least a third more voters attempted to log on but couldn't get through due to the volume of activity. The company said it was the biggest single-event surge in Internet activity in that company's experience.
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Mishima judgment: Letters from Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, which were liberally excerpted in an biography by a disciple of the author, were judged by a Tokyo District court to be protected by copyright. According to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun, the court ordered the publisher of Mishima Yukio - Ken to Kanbeni (Yukio Mishima - The Sword and the Red Pigment of Winter) to stop selling the book and recall all unsold copies.
Although the work's author, Jiro Fukushima, is the legitimate owner of the letters, Mishima's family argued succesfully that the right to publish and duplicate them belonged to Mishima's estate, because neither the publisher nor Fukushima had Mishima's permission to print them.
The attorney representing the family said it was the first time a Japanese court had recognized a letter quoted in a publication as copyrighted material.
