An unusual ruling in Finnish courts appears to have declared that it’s open season for hacking DRM’d media. In an unanimous decision, the Helsinki District Court ruled that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is “ineffective”. The decision is the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments that ban the circumvention […]

The movie industry is considering changes to HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc licensing agreements that would formally give consumers the right to make several legal copies of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies they’ve purchased. The agreement would let buyers make a backup copy in case their original disc is damaged and another copy for […]

SoundExchange, the group that collects performance fees on behalf of hundreds of major and independent record companies, said Tuesday that it would give “small” Webcasters the option of paying “below market” royalty rates on the songs they play. Their offer would keep royalty rates essentially the same as they are under a 2002 law called […]

Maharashtra-based bloggers Debashish Chakrabarty and Shashi Singh have announced the launch of Podbharti, India‚Äôs “first pure Hindi podcast.”¬† Their podcast is targeted toward the Hindi audience in India and abroad.¬† The duo aim to provide a comprehensive coverage of news and opinion about Indian-language blogging, technology, news and current affairs and the entertainment industry. Podbharti.com […]

The UK Podcasters Association, a non-profit organization promoting podcasting, has announced that it has come to an agreement with AIM, the UK-based Association of Independent Music, which allows members preferential access to AIM’s podcast license. The AIM podcast license covers over 30,000 tracks licensed by the UK independent music industry and includes labels such as […]

The New York Times has an interesting article today about how the CW network plans to offer advertisers two more ways to try holding the attention of viewers during commercial breaks. One idea is to run quickie commercials of only five seconds each. The other is to schedule a series with no commercial breaks at […]

YouTube’s co-founders on Thursday challenged the Pentagon’s assertion that soldiers overseas were sapping too much bandwidth by watching online videos, the military’s principal reason for blocking YouTube and other popular Web sites from Defense Department computers. “They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the […]

Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels, including EMI. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon’s […]

Microsoft is now offering the Zune – Halo 3 Edition, which comes preloaded with a collection of Halo-related music, videos and artwork: Videos: Halo 3 ‚ÄúStarry Night‚Äù advertisement Halo 3 E3 2006 announcement trailer Halo 2 theatrical teaser trailer Three Halo 3 ‚Äúmaking of‚Äù documentary videos A custom episode of Red vs. Blue ‚Äì just […]

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pushing Congress to enact a sweeping new intellectual property bill, the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy where no actual copyright infringement occurs. “To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be […]