Today Napster and AT&T announced that they had agreed to a deal to provide some of the top US phone company’s wireless and high-speed Internet customers with free digital music. Beginning Sunday, April 1, AT&T customers across the company’s nationwide wireless footprint with “qualifying plans,” as well as across the company’s traditional service footprint with [...]

This easy to use site lets you rip video from internet clips on sites like YouTube and MySpace without any of the usual hassles of software configuration, proper codecs, etc, and also lets you do the same with files already hosted on your own PC. Zamzar is a free online file conversion site that allows [...]

It will be a shame to invest RM 300 million in the infrastructure and then realize that 20% of their customers are utilizing 80% of their bandwidth, or it can be as ridiculous as one person eating up the entire state’s bandwidth. This is a no joke prediction, it will definitely happen. A couple of [...]

Nike Inc said last week that it plans to make its entire line of running shoes compatible with Apple Inc’s iPod nano line by the end of this year. The comment was made Nike president and chief executive Mark Parker on Thursday as the shoe maker released its third-quarter results, saying it had a soft [...]

After weeks of e-mails and bad press discrediting the District Attorney’s prosecution of the case, the tide may be turning for So-called porn pop-up teacher Julie Amero. According to Hartford Courant reporter Rick Green the DA may be thinking about backing down from his shameless attack on Amero, her character and her livelihood. District Attorney [...]

There’s nothing like a good P2P comic strip to start the week off right, and this one comes from Greg Dean over at RealLife. We’ve seen a number of BitTorrent related comics appear over the last year or so, perhaps due in large part to the way that BitTorrent Inc. has taken P2P mainstream, and [...]

With the future of industries such as online radio and peer-to-peer networking hanging in the balance, the pendulum of power is shifting from the hands of the suits at the RIAA into the hands of the public. Those who feel they have been wronged by the organization are collectively beginning to fight back. I’ve covered [...]

Mantra Films, makers of Girls Gone Wild, plans to offer its girls-baring-all franchise of videos on BitTorrent’s recently launched legal movie download service, company executives told Red Herring. The move will come soon after the Los Angeles-based company’s international expansion, which was announced Wednesday. GGW set up shop in the United Kingdom about a month [...]

I’m obviously a defender of copyrights. I’m also a defender of fair use. I also think that there is a time to sue, a time to compete and a time to use some sense. CableVision, a Long Island cable MSO, has created a very simple product. It’s a virtual DVR. Rather than having a DVR [...]

Yes, you can accept Apple’s logic that "it all just works" straight out of the packaging, but there are better reasons for moving to a Mac than a factor that’s just as true of modern PCs these days. Now there’s an x86-based PC sitting under the hood of every modern Mac, the old battle lines [...]

EFF is recruiting student programmers to do paid work on the onion router (TOR) this summer — this is a technology for anonymizing Internet connections. It’s intended for use by people living in surveillance societies like China, Syria, and the average American high-school. Thanks to Google Summer of Code, The Tor project in collaboration with [...]

The big telephone and cable companies have a secret. The leadership of the House of Delegates is perfectly willing to let them keep it, taking the side of the two companies which in recent days each raised their rates while supposedly competing against each other, rather than help consumers by taking an action to help [...]

News Corp and NBC have announced a deal to create a new video distribution site, dubbed the “YouTube killer” by many. The companies have also formed partnerships with a number of big players, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Time Warner/AOL to supply content and provide distribution channels. The service, which currently does not have a name, [...]

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music. The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for [...]

It seems a contract’s been put out on the MPAA’s Malaysian anti-piracy disc sniffing dogs, with “syndicate bosses” offering an undisclosed bounty for their heads. After a recent seizure of almost $3 million USD worth of pirated DVDs and VCDs, “syndicate bosses” have put a contract out on the 2 optical disc sniffer dogs the [...]

The case of Elektra v Santangelo has been one of the more closely followed cases in the RIAA’s crusade against suspected file sharers, due in no small part to the aggressiveness of Patti Santangelo’s defense. Ray Beckerman is reporting that Judge Colleen McMahon has denied the RIAA’s motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, ruling [...]

In a sign of things to come, nearly 123 million people in the US, some 70% of the total online population, watched an online video of some sort in the month of January. The duo behind Joost correctly surmised some time ago that the future of television will really be the internet via online streaming. [...]

Clickster is an easy to use program which searches and downloads MP3 files from the Internet and NOT from P2P or file-sharing networks. The real beauty of the program is that it provides a “comprehensive and credible alternative” to those who either can’t connect to P2P or file-sharing networks, say at home, work, or especially [...]

The EU is moving closer to adoption of a new law that makes many forms of intellectual property infringement criminal rather than civil offenses. The first version of the new IP law, IPRED, did not contain criminal penalties, but those penalties show up again in a new version of the legislation, commonly called IPRED2. Consumer [...]

When your company poisons peer-to-peer networks for a living, public relations usually takes a back seat to discretion; quiet is the rule in the P2P content-protection industry. That’s why Jonathan Lee, the company’s VP of business development, isn’t worried that the corporate web site is down when I reach him in his Santa Monica office. [...]