Topic: News

The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged.

In yet another example of tenacity over public relations, the Recording Industry of America has decided to chase a dead man's kids for his acts of file-sharing.

Microsoft will launch external HD-DVD drives for its Xbox 360 at a retail price of US$200 by Christmas of this year, and Taiwanese games developers and gaming services providers indicated this this is a smart marketing strategy as compared with Sony's adoption of built-in BD drives for its PlayStation 3 (PS3).

The battle between two hyped formats for high-definition DVD will confuse shoppers and turn many of them off the whole technology, a London-based research firm has predicted.

The first Blu-ray (BD) disc drive for desktop PCs is here, but be warned -- it won't play commercial BD movies.

Up till now, the very idea of burning a movie legitimately downloaded was considered to be a big “no-no”, as Hollywood moguls feared this would increase piracy. However, the emerging market of online distribution has left them with no choice but accept it.

CMC Magnetics, the largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, began marketing its CD-R and DVD+R/-R discs under its own brand, Mr. Data, in the China market.

BookMooch is like BitTorrent for books. Not eBooks, but real physical dead-tree books. The website, which formally opened this week, offers you a limitless supply of books, for free.

In a recent poll taken among teens aged 12 to 17, 69 percent said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21 percent said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music for free.

Sainsbury's is dumping its online DVD rental service. The website will be hauled down tomorrow, with punters redirected to Sainsbury's erstwhile partner in the venture, Lovefilm.

While Microsoft's HD-DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360 was briefly unveiled earlier this year, Microsoft's senior program manager Kevin Collins officially demonstrated the device before a DVD Forum in Los Angeles yesterday, confirming that the peripheral will ship in time for Christmas.

Nvidia has unveiled a graphics card that can only fairly be described as the ultimate, being priced a staggering $18,000 (£9,450) - the Quadro Plex 1000.

All sorts of rumours are doing the rounds regarding both the Microsoft Zune and the next incarnation of the Apple ipod.

Mitsubishi Chemical Media Ltd. announced that the first 8cm DVD+R DL for video cameras will be available in the end of August.

Verbatim said it will start selling a dual layer mini DVD-R disk at the end of the month which will hold 2.66GB of data on a single side.

Hitachi-Maxell will reportedly ship the first holographic storage media by Christmas, according to executives of the Japanese company.

EMI is to license its digital music catalog to former P2P felon Mashboxx - a sign that the major labels are blessing a "try before you buy" approach to digital music. But it also leaves the door open to other approaches.

A group of US record labels agreed to drop a music piracy case in the US after the alleged file-sharer argued that it could not be proved that she downloaded any illegal music. The case may set a precedent that undermines scores of other music piracy cases.

The first reviews of Samsung and Toshiba's next-generation DVD players have been published by leading US financial magazines. And while opinions vary on the Blu-ray format adopted by Samsung, and the rival HD-DVD format pushed by Toshiba, columnists at BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune all agree that a dearth of content could hold back the take-off of either technology.

AOL will unveil a revamped video portal this week, the latest move by a major Internet company to strengthen its position in this very competitive market.