MySpace should set aside some of its revenues into a pool to compensate musicians, says an industry group. “We think they should pay,” a spokesman for British Music Rights, a group representing songwriters, publishers and performers, told us today. Click here to find out more! At a MusicAlly music industry seminar this week, MySpace’s European [...]

Just a week ago, Gamespot journalist Guy Cocker, who works in the same building as Crave, was mugged ten minutes away from the CNET offices here in central London. His assailants held what felt like a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker’s head and told him, “we’re taking all your stuff”. They then took [...]

Bloggers in India can rest easy now. According to the Department of Telecommunications, blogs which were blacked out three days after the Mumbai blasts will soon be restored. Post 7/11, the Government decided to block sites without saying why and the ISPs decided to go ahead, do one better and block all blogs. The Centre [...]

Since the inception of the Sling Media’s Slingbox, the company has been at odds with content owners who aren’t comfortable with flexibility that place shifting offers consumers. Now Sling Media has found itself in the position of battling with another company selling a product that extends the functionality of the Slingbox. A company called Applian [...]

As digital music players grow in popularity, so do the number of Americans who download music from the Internet, Solutions Research Group says. Nearly half of all American Internet users (45%) downloaded music at some point in the past from pay sites or p2p sources, up from 31% only a year ago. Number of Americans [...]

As video advertising on the Web has proliferated, the best marketers have found what works and what doesn’t, said Bruce Kasanoff, president of interactive marketing firm Now Possible. Traditional 30-second spots that drive home a strong message fall short, while short film-like clips that entertain get strong traction and often draw their own audiences, he [...]

A US court has dismissed a record industry lawsuit over p2p file sharing, a significant defeat for the industry which has had few setbacks among several thousand attempts to win ‘compensation’ from alleged file sharers. A federal court in Oklahoma granted the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) permission to withdraw its case against a [...]

ONLINE MAGAZINE Techrepublic thinks that it has found proof that the software giant Microsoft has been using pirated .wav files in Windows XP. Hacks went through Wav files on XP using an editor and found in the Windows help files nine WAV files which provide background sound during the Windows Media Player Tour. When these [...]

After one and a half month of absence, Piratbyråns website is now back online with full functionality. When the Swedish police got the order from prosecutor Roswall, he himself haven gotten subtle hints from the government working under MPAA pressure, to raid the Pirate Bay, Swedish tax payers were blessed with the chance to finance [...]

Yahoo announced Wednesday that it is selling Jessica Simpson’s latest single in MP3 format–in other words, with none of the usual copyright protection coding. Because the song, a party-pop track called “A Public Affair,” has no digital rights management (DRM) protection coded into it, it will be compatible with just about every type of digital [...]

Fed up with continued piracy of DVDs and software, a Chinese city is offering retailers the chance to swap fake discs for real ones, a state newspaper said on Thursday. For every three pirated discs handed in, a company based in the eastern city of Nanjing would hand over one real one, the China Daily [...]

The WTO on Wednesday set up a panel to investigate whether U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling comply with international trade rules. The Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda had asked for the World Trade Organization to set up the panel after consultations with the United States failed to yield a solution. The dispute centers on [...]

Everyone who has been following the tech scene knows that the first company to offer mainstream music in unrestricted MP3 format will see a huge spike in their business and may garner lasting dominance. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the draconian DRM that the mainstream online music providers (iTunes, Napster, Yahoo! Music, etc) have been [...]

Amnesty International accused Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on Thursday of violating human rights principles by cooperating with China’s efforts to censor the Web and called on them to lobby for the release of jailed cyber-dissidents. The London-based human rights group also called on the Internet companies to publicly oppose Chinese government requests that violate human [...]

Last autumn, Napster launched a striking advertising campaign. It drew inspiration from, of all places, the stoic philosophers. The most memorable slogan was “Have Everything, Own Nothing”, and we asked the company about it at the time. Did Napster mean what it said? Yes, insisted Alan Cohen, Napster’s chief marketing officer. “In today’s world, everything [...]

More than 110 million people in China use the internet regularly. The country is going through a digital revolution as it seeks to capitalise on the online world while at the same time enforcing strict censorship measures. But what does the internet mean to people in China? BBC News spoke to a dissident, a film-maker [...]

NBC has partnered with online DVD rental service Netflix on a promotional campaign for its fall lineup that will make the inaugural episodes of two new NBC programs, entertainment-industry drama “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and serial thriller “Kidnapped,” available through Netflix six weeks before their broadcast premieres. As with any selection offered by [...]

There was an interesting Q& A Session on Washingtonpost.com this morning about the recording industry’s battle against XM Satellite Radio over its “Inno” handheld recorder. The most interesting comment was when someone who allegedly works at the RIAA chimes in with his opinion about the case. The session’s pretty straightforward and covers all the important [...]

Earlier this week, Movielink, the movie-download site that’s owned by a number of movie studios, said it had licensed technology to allow users to burn downloaded movies to DVDs, but couldn’t yet offer the service as it still needed to license some encryption software as well as get approval from the studios that their movies [...]

It’s the Holy Grail of the movie download business. Movies straight from the Internet to your TV, none of that watching the flick in your straight-back chair while peering at your computer monitor. Now, for those who want to watch movies the way they should be enjoyed—that is, while curled up on your couch—comes the [...]