Comcast, the giant cable operator, has convinced five of the six major studios to participate in a test that could turn pay-per-view movies from a nothing revenue stream into a profit-generating bonanza. As part of an unballyhooed experiment that kicked off 10 weeks ago, people who subscribe to Comcast’s digital service in Denver and Pittsburgh [...]

Universal Music Group is poised to win a small battle in its war to claim royalties from sites that allow users to upload videos that contain its music. Universal, the country’s largest music label, is in the final stages of negotiating a settlement with Bolt.com, an online community that it sued last November over copyright [...]

A group of major media companies has accused Google Inc. of benefiting from the sale of pirated movies and providing business support to two Web sites suspected of offering access to illegal film downloads, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday. The media companies, which the paper said include News Corp., Viacom Inc., Sony Corp., [...]

“A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel.” The BBC is reporting today about the unveiling by Intel of a new high speed processor with 80 processing cores and that is capable of performing more than a trillion calculations per second [...]

“OscarTorrents is the Oscars as it should be — everyone can download the year’s nominations using the popular BitTorrent service, watch the movies, then use our rating system to choose their favorites. Why restrict the voting to a few bought-off jurors when the whole world can have their say?”. There’s a ingenious new site called [...]

Last week, Walmart launched their online video download service. Immediately there were posts that the service did not work with the Firefox or Safari browsers. There was a collective, “WTF” when this happened as this is 2007, not 1997. Back then it was “accepted” for applications to work with only a specific browser or platform. [...]

Unable to define memory as a “recording medium,” Canada’s Private Copyright Collective goes directly after portable music player devices, memory cards, and anything else that can be used to make private copies. Canada’s Private Copyright Collective hasn’t given up in their efforts to get a bigger cut from anything and everything people use to copy, [...]

We don’t wanna say we told you so, but, ya know, we did. On Monday, Microsoft filed a mystery application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. Sounds like a VoiP device, right? Not really. The device is described as being used for “consumer broadband [...]

One of the biggest upcoming policy battles will be about “net neutrality”—whether network operators must provide equal service for all packets moving across their networks as part of their Internet access offerings. It’s not clear that operators will have to carry Internet traffic they consider undesirable, that competes with their own applications or content, or [...]

The DRM walls are crumbling. Earlier this week, Steve Jobs called on the major record labels to allow online music sales unfettered by digital rights management restrictions. Today, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that EMI is in negotiations with several digital music services to sell unprotected MP3s of its catalogue. Jobs was motivated at least [...]

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”. Could Wikipedia shut it’s doors? Tthe site alone would [...]

Hollywood, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars making movies, is determined to protect its business. The sale of pirated digital content rakes in many millions of dollars. Many bright minds are at work cracking codes meant to secure DVDs. Paul Kocher is taking the wraps off a project that he and his team have [...]

A combined team of police personnel and members of the anti-piracy task force of the Ghana Association of Phonographic Industry (GAPI) and Musicians Association of Ghana (MUSIGA) have arrested 20 music retailers and pirates in a swoop at Berekum. The arrested persons included owners of the Blessed Assurance Music Shop, Mutari, Wujah-Bless, France Night Club, [...]

Planex loves ‘em some BitTorrent so they’re bringing us another network attached storage device with that copyright stompin’ preload. The NAS-01G can be configured with up to 750GB of hot Seagate ‘cuda 7200.10 disk (model NAS-01G750) or shipped as a shell for you to slot in any 3.5-inch SATA spinner of your choosing. Need more? [...]

Warner Music Group posted dire numbers Thursday as profit plunged 74% to $18 million USD last quarter on fewer releases and soft CD sales. Music sales continued to take a beating this last fiscal quarter as Warner Music Group said that its fiscal fourth quarter profits plunged 74% to $18 million USD due to fewer [...]

Drop up to 42 hours worth of video on it, run uTorrent, Azureus, etc, and take it with you to use anywhere on the go. This little bad boy is perfect for anybody who likes to use BitTorrent and download stuff on the go, or even just to have content available to watch elsewhere. Called [...]

“A number of Swedish file sharers have been reported to police for breach of copyright by the Swedish branch of record industry association IFPI.” According to the Swedish news site The Local, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has stepped up its efforts to crack down on european Direct Connect Hubs as of [...]

It’s no secret that media companies have started to hire companies such as BayTSP to automatically find file sharers and send letters to their ISPs. The goal of this is to use fear to persuade people to use legal methods of getting digital content. Many ISP’s, especially universities, trust the good faith of these companies [...]

A world without digital handcuffs on downloaded music sounds pretty good to Eston Bond, a 21-year old senior at the University of Michigan. Bond, a self-proclaimed music lover, is sick of the anti-piracy software that limits how he can listen to music downloaded from Apple Inc.’s iTunes and other online stores. If it weren’t for [...]

Despite success in suing people who download music illegally and in reaching deals with personal networking sites like YouTube, the music industry is still bleeding millions of dollars in sales to online piracy. It is a major issue for an industry that is desperately trying to boost revenue from legal downloads to make up for [...]