Music is neck-deep into a new era in which convenience is paramount. Artists are creating music at increasingly lower costs in their own homes and distributing it over the Internet, while consumers are listening to that music anywhere, anytime on wireless portable devices.   Cell phones are no longer just cell phones, they are becoming [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with two leading national class action law firms, today filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG, demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs. EFF is pleased that Sony BMG has taken steps in [...]

A Sydney court has given file-sharing network Kazaa until December 5 to either filter copyrighted music from its system or shut down, music industry officials say. The imposition of the deadline follows a court ruling in September that Kazaa users were breaching copyright and that the network’s owners had to modify the software. Other global [...]

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced yesterday that it has reached an agreement with Bram Cohen, the designer of peer-to-peer (P2P) software Bit Torrent, to remove links to video content owned by the seven member studios of the MPAA from Bittorrent.com. Bit Torrent has reportedly been a popular source for downloading pirated movies [...]

The Apple-owned computer store made the top 10 US record sales list for the first time, said NPD, which tracks downloads and people’s buying habits.   NPD compared 12 iTunes separate song downloads to one album purchase at an ordinary retail store.   iTunes beat Tower Records, Borders, and Sam Goody, the survey said.   [...]

According to the lawsuit filed in Travis County, several of the company’s music compact discs require customers to download Sony’s media players if they want to listen to the CDs on a computer.   Software included with that media player "remains hidden and active" after installation and makes users vulnerable to security risks and possible [...]

America’s 16 players won two gold medals and one silver to top the national rankings at the gaming event.   Coming in second was South Korea and third Brazil. Britain could only manage joint 18th position as players struggled to cope with the strength of skills on display.   UK pro-gaming clan Four-Kings had some [...]

Time to punch out. Another hard day at work.   Welcome to the basement lair of the 24-year-old Wendel, the man known and feared by aficionados of multiplayer games across the globe as "Fatal1ty."   If you deign to think of video games as simply a childish pastime, consider this professional game player. He collects [...]

Labelled Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 3, the new installment of the Web browsing software claims many of the same types of improvements as the last several test versions of the application.   Those additions include faster navigation, with upgrades to back and forward button performance, as well as drag-and-drop reordering for browser tabs, and improvements [...]

Some experts "have recorded a startling increase in the quantity of viruses plaguing the p2p community," it says.   But, "What makes you think Sony BMG or its cohorts aren’t behind them, building distrust among users for p2p file sharing? "   A month ago, we would have brushed off the very idea as nuts. [...]

The offer has been made in an e-mail sent to Amazon customers known to have bought one of the 52 Sony CDs which contained the XCP software. Customers can get the refund by sending back the CD, even if they have not used the disc in their computers. At the same time Sony BMG has [...]

Under the agreement, Peer Impact users will be able to download "Ray," and "Meet the Fockers," among other films, and TV specials such as "Jerry Springer: Uncensored," and "5th Wheel," Saratoga Springs, N.Y.-based Wurld Media Inc. said.   Once downloaded, the content will be available for viewing for only 24 hours.   Peer Impact, which [...]

In September, a federal court found Kazaa’s owners and distributors, led by Sydney-based Sharman Networks Ltd., guilty of copyright infringement for failing to rein in illegal file sharing on their popular peer-to-peer network.   A hearing to set damages is expected sometime next year.   After months of legal wrangling, federal judge Michael Moore on [...]

A tutorial how to make a external winamp control using the COM port in your computer, the tutorial features photos and diagrams. "Nowadays, winamp have full support to keyboard shortcuts. But some time, when winamp didn’t have this feature, I was thinking in some way to make a easy way to change music by simply [...]

The current cost of console games development is between $3m (£1.7m) and $6m (£3.4m) per title. This could rise to $10m (£5.7m) for games for forthcoming games consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, according to a report from research firm Screen Digest.   In some cases costs could even rise as high as $20m (£11.5m), [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) today officially christened the panel, which will have jurisdiction over copyright, trademark and patent law, as well as treaties intended to protect American intellectual property overseas. T   he mounting dangers that piracy poses to the U.S. economy helped spur the move, Specter said after the announcement. "It’s [...]

The immunization tool should disable CodeSupport if it is already on your system, and it should prevent any future reinstallation or reactivation of CodeSupport.   You can test whether the vulnerable CodeSupport component is installed on your system using this CodeSupport detector web page .   To install the tool, download this file to a [...]

I came across an interesting link to a Linux based program that allows users to play raw .AVI files on their iPOD nano, the first I’ve heard of such a capability.   Try it out and tell me what you think. For the easy on the fly way way to test drive before even checking [...]

Seven out of ten Swedish file sharers are men and three out of four of the most active are aged between 18 and 25. That is the conclusion of report which forms part of an EU-funded research project.       Analysts from Stockholm’s Kungliga tekniska högskolan (KTH) and Uppsala University participated. Every tenth internet [...]

The music industry inadvertently sent mixed signals on Wednesday with an international industry association filing more than 2,000 file-sharing lawsuits at the same time that EMI, one of the world’s largest music publishers, posted robust numbers with its own digital sales, growing 142 percent.   The out-of-tune juxtaposition certainly lends credibility to those who say [...]