A patent application has been filed for a disc that would play two competing high-definition DVD formats. If successful, the disc could help resolve a battle that has divided Hollywood and confounded consumers. The patent application was filed by three Warner Bros. employees, two of whom are engineers for the company. The “multilayer dual optical [...]

We thought we’d seen everything when it comes to lawsuits over hip-hop samples, but this one takes the cake: Twenty years after the release of Run-DMC’s “It’s Tricky,” the Knack are suing over that “My Sharona” riff. A few thoughts: 1) It was a different world back in the Eighties when it came to clearing [...]

The Commerce Department said Wednesday that it would extend its oversight of the Marina del Rey- based organization that handles Internet domain name policies, while finding ways to improve the group’s accountability and transparency. John Kneuer, the department’s acting assistant secretary for communications and information, said the government’s agreement with the Internet Corp. for Assigned [...]

The White House is distributing government-produced, anti-drug videos on YouTube, the trendy Internet service that features clips of wacky, drug-induced behavior and step-by-step instructions for growing marijuana plants. The decision to distribute public service announcements and other videos over YouTube represents the first concerted effort by the U.S. government to influence customers of the popular [...]

Value is what consumers expect most when they make a purchase. Violate that sense of value and they will walk away every time. As Digital Music News editor Paul Resnikoff pointed out a few months ago there are people who spend $50,000 on a car and half-a-million on a house, but won’t spend $20 for [...]

Chico Bongalar is a tubby twenty-something guy – real name Grant – and he likes making videos. At the moment Chico is the No 1 attraction on Trouble Homegrown, the UK television channel’s attempt to mirror the runaway success of web sites like MySpace and YouTube. Chico talks about his life, getting a suntan and [...]

CRIA is currently leading a coalition that includes Apple, Bell, Rogers, and Napster in opposing an application for a new tariff for online downloads (I briefly posted on Graham Henderson’s appearance before the Copyright Board last week and his startling claim that he had not read Nielson SoundScan data months after he referenced that data [...]

For many years now people have been telling us how much the media world is changing. And it is. Faster than we ever imagined. I downloaded my first Torrent this week. It took me about 20 minutes to download and install the software and get an album called Wu Orleans – a mash-up of Old [...]

A report from the British Academy, launched on 18 September, expresses fears that the copyright system may in important respects be impeding, rather than stimulating, the production of new ideas and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. It is in the nature of creative activity and scholarship that original material builds on what [...]

Users want more control over the content they watch on their television sets according to an Accenture report released this morning. Over 10,000 Internet users were surveyed in China, South Korea, Italy, Canada, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Germany, United States and Japan—with 1,609 being from the United States—to get a feeling for what consumers want in [...]

Zune’s digital rights management (DRM) scheme will not add its own DRM to unprotected files, Ars Technica has learned. Trusted sources tell us that Zune’s wireless sharing feature, which requires Zune’s DRM to function, will only monitor the presence of shared songs for the purposes of controlling playback. Files themselves will not be modified, either [...]

Online privacy continues to be an important issue for many Internet citizens, as awareness of spyware threats and the danger of identity theft increases. Personal privacy is also a growing concern. Ars recently reported on a browser based on Internet Explorer called Browzar that claimed to make it easy to hide one’s online tracks. Now, [...]

If you’re looking to break the hold Microsoft has on you computer, a new software-sharing group called the Linux Users Group might have the solution. Users should have the right to modify your software and not have it confined to corporate development, said Carl Caum, Linux Systems Administrator for the computer sciences department. “One reason [...]

The first “indie” label has hooked up with SprialFrog to offer ad supported P2P’esque music downloads. KOCH Records (Public Enemy, Master P, X-hibit, Bone Thugs in Harmony, Judas Preist) is a big fish among the indie sea, and brings a stack of content to the table. Something from the press release bothers me: “With this [...]

Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible. While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first [...]

A generation ago, a teenager in search of adult content needed to be resourceful. At the very least they’d have to rummage around under dad’s bed for the girlie mag stashed there. Now access to adult content is infinitely easier, thanks to that global pornography network politely known as the internet. According to the Internet [...]

The Recording Industry Association of America’s request for college administrators to curb the use of LAN file-sharing programs, combined with Ithaca College students formally warned for downloading, serves as an alert to a problem that has been ignored by the college. Since 2003, more than 250 students were warned when the college began addressing this [...]

Sensing that perhaps consumers really hate it when they are sold a product that never really becomes theirs, Yahoo! has decided to see if removing usage restrictions will help to increase music download sales. Hollywood Record’s senior VP of marketing, Ken Bunt, in a rare mea culpa noted the futility of fighting progress and technological [...]

On January 26 this year, Daniel Nagy was defending his PhD on lossless data compression at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. By February 1 he was back home in Hungary. And on February 10, “my apartment was being searched by the police because I was the contact person for a server that runs a [...]

Internet media company Yahoo Inc and Current TV, a television channel founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, on Wednesday said they had teamed up on a Web video service aimed at young adults. The service, named the Yahoo Current Network, will feature both professionally produced video and material from viewers. No financial terms [...]