Shooting allegedly linked to ‘Grand Theft Auto’ KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A $246 million lawsuit was filed against the designer, marketer and a retailer of the video game series “Grand Theft Auto” by the families of two people shot by teenagers apparently inspired by the game. THE SUIT CLAIMS marketer Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc., designers [...]

What is it? NapShare is a fully automated Gnutella P2P client made to run 24/7 unattended. Searching and automatic downloading happen without any user intervention. You supply a list of keywords and filters for the file types you want and it downloads overnight, automatically, also sharing whatever it gets. The automated “brain” tries to simulate [...]

In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the world, the Australian music industry has listed an Internet service provider (ISP) as a respondent in a court case involving alleged music piracy.  View the story

From Yahoo.com News: The good news: the MPAA and Hollywood’s major studios are about to revoke the Oscar screener ban. The bad news: Academy members will be the only ones to receive tapes, to the exclusion of the directors, writers and actors guilds, members of the press and your hipster friend Bob, who knew a [...]

Hollywood ‘need not fear piracy’ Hollywood has little to fear from internet piracy, according to a business research group. File-sharing and CD/DVD piracy will only have a limited impact on digital film sales, said Informa Media. Instead Hollywood will actually thrive on the internet through legitimate online sales, the group’s report adds. Although the study [...]

Congress is moving quickly to beat a Nov. 1 deadline for renewing a ban on taxes for getting online, but the push has sparked a furor over how broadly Internet services should be taxed and whether cash-strapped state and local governments might lose billions of dollars in revenue per year. For proponents, the issue is [...]

Here’s the lengthy list of new features for LimeWire 3.6.6 over the current 3.5.8 release.- The major improvement in 3.6.6 is the use of “out-of-band” replies to your searches. Out-of-band replies means that you will get your search results more quickly and more efficiently, particularly on searches for rare content. – Several pro-only improvements that [...]

Unexpected and insidious, the earworm slinks its way into the brain and refuses to leave. Symptoms vary, although high levels of annoyance and frustration are common. There are numerous potential treatments, but no cure. “Earworm” is the term coined by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris for the usually unwelcome songs that get stuck [...]

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has canceled its 2003 awards to protest an industry ban on sending special DVDs and videos to award voters. The association voted Saturday not to hand out the awards, which can boost interest in a film and predict its Oscar chances. Members said they would consider [...]

Nearly a year after Microsoft Corp. agreed to end its anticompetitive conduct, the government is raising concerns the world’s largest software maker is trying to use its dominant Windows operating system to influence where customers buy their music online. If the dispute isn’t resolved by week’s end, it could become the first test of Microsoft’s [...]

Washingtonpost.com: Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) was online to talk about his efforts to rein in the recording industry’s aggressive legal war against people who illegally trade music online. Piracy is wrong, Coleman agrees, but so too are some of the industry’s tactics. ________________________________________________ washingtonpost.com: Good morning Senator Coleman, thanks for joining us today. The war [...]

Steve Jobs explains why it’s better to own your tunes Oct. 27 issue — Apple’s charismatic CEO sat down with NEWSWEEK’s Steven Levy—after introducing the Windows version of iTunes and the upgraded iTunes Music Store last week—to discuss the world of digital music. LEVY: You say that that the online music retail competition will boil [...]

The number of Web sites signed up for the Stop RIAA Lawsuits Coalition has now reached 122 and is still climbing. And the Action Site is now also officially online. Click here for the kick-off page, here for the list of members and here for the press release officially announcing the boycott. The Stop RIAA [...]

When Steve Jobs was dismissed from Apple, the company he cofounded, by the then CEO John Sculley 18 years ago, the blow was particularly brutal because Jobs himself had wooed Sculley from his post as head of Pepsi. His challenge to Sculley had been, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of [...]

The subpoenas are flying, and we’re naming names. Are you on the list? The recording industry has launched a sweeping effort to identify and shut down individual song swappers, making good on recent threats to expand its legal battle against copyright theft. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now issued more than 911 [...]

As a trading nation, Canadians have considerable experience with negotiating trade agreements. From the Auto Pact in the 1960s, to the U.S.—Canada Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s, we have relied on trade deals to facilitate economic growth and to encourage exports of everything from cars to forestry.In recent months, the world has been witness [...]

Dinner tables the country over have become sites for conversations about the RIAA and its clampdown on file sharers. Television sound bites and short newspaper items are making a lot of noise about the lawsuits, but their occasional abridgement and misstatement of the facts have made people more confused than enlightened–and, in some cases, downright [...]

On the eve of the ITunes Music Store introduction for Windows-based PCs, Microsoft’s general manager for the Windows Digital Media division, Dave Fester, posted his thoughts on ITunes for Windows. In his comments, Fester concludes that ITunes is too limited for Windows users. “Unless Apple decides to make radical changes to their service model, a [...]

Apple’s successful music download service iTunes faces a new threat of misuse now that it has been extended to include users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, say experts. The threat comes from the combination of the relatively light copy protection iTunes uses and the big increase of potential hackers that comes with opening up to [...]

An enhanced transatlantic link and some experimental internet routers has enabled an international research group to more than double the world speed record for internet data transfer. Researchers at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland sent the equivalent of a DVD movie to the California Institute of Technology in just seven seconds. The total [...]