Multiple sources are confirming that the Chinese/Israeli startup behind the Maxthon Browser has sold a minority stake to Google. The total investment size is rumored to be around $1 million. We are also hearing that this investment is part of a “much larger strategic deal” between the two companies. Maxthon has had over 80 million [...]

Cablevision isn’t ready to throw in the towel on the “networked DVR”: the company has decided to appeal a District Court ruling barring it from deploying the device. Known as the RS-DVR, the service would perform all of the same functions as a DVR, but the DVR’s physical storage would be located in a Cablevision [...]

A few years ago, EFF debunked an anti-P2P packet filtering technology sold by Audible Magic. Twice. The notion that universities can just buy a piece of software to end file sharing on their networks forever is false. But it keeps coming back. The latest product of this sort is from a company called SafeMedia. Its [...]

The problem with running a Web video startup is that if a show gets too popular, the bandwidth costs of streaming it to people’s browsers or sending them big files through iTunes eats up a lot of cash. That’s why peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent or Joost are so appealing. They shift the bandwidth costs to [...]

Napster started the digital revolution. Across the country, millions of people, from college kids utilizing fast T-1 connections to unluckier lots with slow 56K modems, logged onto the site and shared entire music collections. With a click of the mouse, it seemed like an entire record store was at your finger tips. The most alluring [...]

The Bush administration, ratcheting up trade tensions with China, announced today that it was starting a formal international proceeding against that nation for failure to protect movies, music and other intellectual property. “Piracy and counterfeiting levels in China remain unacceptably high,” said U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab. “Inadequate protection of intellectual property rights in China [...]

Jon over at P2Pnet is conducting a survey on the practices of the RIAA and its effect on the music industry, file-sharing, and individuals as a whole. The survey only takes but a few minutes and I think we all can agree that the results will be interesting for us all to take a look [...]

Following digital music pioneer Apple Inc.’s lead, Microsoft Corp. said it will soon sell digital music online without digital rights management (DRM) protection. Microsoft’s apparent change of heart on selling DRM-free music came in response to Apple’s deal earlier in the week to sell unprotected content from recording company EMI Group PLC. The company previously [...]

When movies shifted from videocassettes to DVD, retailers simply cleared the tapes off the shelves to make room for discs. That’s not so easy now that movies appear poised to follow music onto the Internet. The shift of music online has hurt stores such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Circuit City, and some retailers are [...]

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan. No [...]

POPULAR BEAT combo Nine Inch Nails is having trouble with the RIAA over the online promotion of its new album, “Year Zero”. The outfit released an Internet scavenger hunt where fans look for MP3 singles. The idea started out in February when Web-savvy fans discovered that highlighted letters inside words on a Nine Inch Nails [...]

The recent spate of legal threats from the music industry against the UW campus community apparently has convinced few students to change their file swapping habit, but they’re also using a slew of other tools to find new music. A stroll down State Street is all one needs to see the pervasiveness of the digital [...]

A day after the government confirmed its telephone deregulation plan over the objection of a Parliamentary committee and moved forward on plans to create a new, independent telecommunications consumer agency, it is worth pointing to a necessary complaint once that agency is operational (and to the CRTC in the meantime). For the past 18 months, [...]

Apple Inc is a ship that leaks from the top, and its PR department is generally careful not to give anything away without a very good and self-serving reason. So it was a bit of a surprise yesterday when someone at Apple went on record to tell Engadget that the company was not using backdoors [...]

The uTorrent BitTorrent client server has released a new BETA version which now supports Windows Vista. For all you that have brave enough to upgrade from XP, uTorent has just released version 1.7 BETA 1085. It’s been a while since the last BETA release, no doubt due in large part to the fact that it [...]

Microsoft plans to follow Apple in selling unprotected songs from EMI, though the company won’t say just when such tracks will appear on the Zune Marketplace store. When CEO Steve Jobs issued his open letter calling for an end to DRM, Microsoft said the total abolition of such protections would be irresponsible, since they are [...]

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has struck a deal with content aggregator Global Music International to distribute the company’s music videos, full track songs and ringtones to mobile subscribers in China. Global Music will be distributing the Sony content through China Unicom, allowing subscribers to buy and download songs, music videos and ringtones onto their handsets. [...]

World of Warcraft players are being targeted by hackers exploiting flaws in how Windows handles animated cursors. The flaw came to light in late March and lets attackers take over vulnerable PCs via booby-trapped websites. Warcraft players seem to be one of the targets because accounts for the game are potentially worth significant sums of [...]

The Carmel Group, a California consulting firm with expertise in satellite radio, has issued a brief white paper (PDF) regarding the proposed merger between Sirius and XM. The paper did not mince words: “with all due respect, this proposed merger should not be approved—under any conditions—by the US government,” it concluded. Who funded the study? [...]

Broadcasters, movie producers and media publishers of all types have access to a new search technology that can scan the Internet to discover Web sites that are illegally distributing copyrighted video and images. ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection), developed by the Virage division of Autonomy, can detect illegally posted rich media in any format wherever [...]