RIAA Sues 717 More File Sharers
"The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Thursday that it had filed 717 new lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including 68 unnamed people at universities."
John Borland. RIAA Sues 717 File-Swappers. News.com. Jan. 26, 2005.
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Yahoo! Seeks Star Power
"Yahoo has set up stakes in Southern California, forming a media group to house various entertainment properties and to court Hollywood, according to an internal company document.
"According to the e-mail, Yahoo has asked numerous employees from its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters and New York office to join an already established team in the Los Angeles area. The move reinforces Yahoo’s ambitions to be an Internet entertainment powerhouse."
Stefanie Olsen. Yahoo! Heads for Hollywood. News.com. Jan. 25, 2004.
See also:
Chris Gaither. Yahoo Seeks Spotlight in Hollywood. LA Times. Feb. 8, 2005.
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Online Advertising Forecast to Grow
"A Goldman Sachs report says online ads are becoming a ‘permanent component’ of major ad campaigns — a distressing development for older media. "The online market could have phenomenal growth doing nothing more than taking revenue from newspapers and TV," says Royal Farros, CEO of MessageCast, a developer of online news alerts.
"Demand for online video ads by Ford Motor, Colgate-Palmolive and others will contribute to a breakout year for online advertising in 2005 — and spell trouble for newspapers and TV, financial analysts say.
"A surge in text ads on search sites Google Latest News about Google and Yahoo Latest News about Yahoo — combined with more high-speed Internet users — also will help push online ad spending over US$10 billion for the first time, analysts say."
Jon Swartz. Growth of Online Ads Hits High Speed. TechNewsWorld. Jan. 22, 2005.
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Napster Mulls Movie Downloads
"Digital-music service Napster is considering remaking itself to offer movie downloads too.
"Speaking at the Midem music conference in Cannes this week, Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is considering offering movies alongside its current catalog of some 1 million music tracks.
"’We are currently considering moving into video, particularly to tap the younger video game generation,’ the Financial Times quoted him as saying. ‘I do think that while there are huge players in the delivery of movies like Sky, there could be a role for Napster.’"
Jo Best. Napster Eyes Movie Downloads. News.com. Jan. 24, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Entertainment Industry Files Arguments in P2P Case
"The Bush administration’s top lawyer and the Christian Coalition threw their weight behind the entertainment industry Monday in a closely watched Supreme Court fight over file swapping.
"Monday was the deadline for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and their supporters to file their arguments with the nation’s top court, in their efforts to reverse previous rulings that imposed only minimal legal restrictions on peer-to-peer software companies.
"The entertainment companies have argued strongly in lower courts that Grokster and other file-swapping software companies should be held liable for the widespread copyright infringement of their users. In a lengthy brief, the U.S. Solicitor General’s office agreed."
John Borland. Conservatives Back Hollywood. News.com. Jan. 24, 2005.
See also:
U.S. Supreme Court. On Writ of Certiorari: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Ltd.. (.pdf) Jan. 24, 2005.
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Open Source DRM?
“The leading vendors in consumer electronics have banded together to create a Community Source Program for digital rights management and will license the whole kit and caboodle, the patents, copyrights, compliance logo and source code to anyone that wants it.
“Effectively CE DRM is going open source (to the extent that Community Source is the same as Open Source) in order to flood the market with DRM systems and route the threat offered by Microsoft in consumer electronics.
“The move comes from the leading lights in the October announced Coral Consortium, and the DRMs that can be created with the new development tools will all be compliant with and ready to interoperate through the Coral interoperability standard.”
Faultline. CE Giants Open DRM to the Community. The Register. Jan. 24, 2005.
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RIM Pleads Canadian In Patent Lawsuit
"Having lost a recent patent case in Virginia, Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry device, has turned to a peculiar appeal strategy: We’re not based in the United States, so you can’t touch us.
"More surprisingly, the Canadian government and the Internet service provider EarthLink are now formally supporting that argument.
"R.I.M., which has its headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, has become Canada’s technology success story, with a soaring stock price and two million subscribers, most of them in the United States. But hovering over the company is a patent infringement suit brought in 2002 by NTP, a patent-holding company based in Annandale, Va."
Ian Austen. In Suit, BlackBerry Maker Pleads Canadian. The New York Times. Jan. 24, 2005.
See also:
Associated Press. Canada Steps in on Blackberry Patent Row. MarketWatch. Jan. 25, 2005.
(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)
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