Topic: News

UK file swappers face up to two years' imprisonment under new copyright regulations, which implement the provisions of a European directive, that are expected to take effect in the UK this month.

With its relaunch on October 29th, Napster, the most notorious name in music downloads, will collide with the hottest music player on the market, the iPod. That's because music downloaded from Napster will not be playable on Apple's insanely popular iPod. The newly legal Napster service and the iPod use incompatible file formats.

Disabling new anti-copying features from record company BMG is as easy as holding down the shift key, according to a paper by a university student. A Princeton University student has published instructions for disabling the new anti-copying measures being tested on CDs by BMG -- and they couldn't be much simpler.

A forum backed by Kazaa's parent company wants to eliminate piracy from file-swapping networks by wrapping any downloads on their networks in digital-rights-management tools that would require listeners to pay to unwrap them.

The Campaign for Digital Rights will be distributing leaflets across major cities in the UK on Saturday to alert people to the issue of the growing use of copy-protection mechanisms on CDs. Volunteers will be gathering in various cities around the UK at the weekend, to distribute leaflets entitled "Will this CD really play on my equipment?" It will alert people to the recent move by record companies to modify CDs so that they are not playable on PC CD-ROM drives.

Sony will launch its PSX entertainment system, which combines a satellite TV tuner, a DVD recorder and a PlayStation 2 game player, in Japan later this year at a minimum price equivalent to $719 (£433).

A massive rise in the production of plasma displays during the second quarter of this year holds out the promise of falling prices and greater availability, according to a market research company.

Sony today reiterated its view that it has prevailed in its attempt to force the European Commission (EC) to treat the PlayStation 2 as a computer and not a games console for the purpose of calculating import duty on the machine.

Software makers are getting smarter, but no less insistent, about product activation in the face of noisy customer protests, according to software executives gathered here. Product activation, an increasingly common antipiracy technique that links a piece of software to a specific PC, was one of the main topics at SoftSummit. The two-day symposium was sponsored by Macrovision, a leading supplier of tools for enabling activation, preventing copying of CDs and handling other rights management tasks.

Elaborate Bytes has just released an update of their CloneDVD software. CloneDVD allows you to copy existing DVD titles with just a few mouse clicks. Natively, CloneDVD cannot back-up copy protected DVDs but with some help of the AnyDVD software this problem is easily solved.

DVD mastering facilities such as Cinram, Deluxe, Sonopress, Technicolor and Warner Bros' WAMO have been working for months with the Hollywood movie studios to develop and implement forensically trackable DVD technologies specifically for the upcoming awards season.

Contract manufacturing prices for 4x recordable DVD drives have fallen by 30-40% in the last three to four months, according to sources at Taiwanese optical storage drive makers. The companies optimistically project that prices will drop just 10% in the fourth quarter of 2003.

Accesstek, a Taiwan-based optical drive manufacturer, will start mass-production of an 8x DVD-Dual drive this month, according to company officials.

Philips will demonstrate its new dual-layer DVD recordable technology at the DVD+RW Alliance booth at the CEATEC 2003 exhibition in Japan. Developed by Philips Research in cooperation with MKM (Mitsubishi Kagaku Media)/Verbatim, the technology virtually doubles data storage capacity on DVD recordable discs from 4.7 Gbyte to 8.5 Gbyte while remaining compatible with existing DVD Video players and DVD-ROM drives.

'Trusted computing', as promoted by Microsoft, IBM and others, represents a threat to users' privacy, says a prominent digital civil liberties group. The paper, which was set to be released late on Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, analyses the promised features of several different trusted computing initiatives. The efforts aim to develop next-generation hardware and software that can better protect data from attackers, viruses and digital pirates.

A research paper highlighting security weaknesses in a popular internet file-sharing network has raised concerns that innocent users could in theory be wrongly accused of sharing copyrighted music.

Two interesting new products are set to be previewed at Tokyo's giant Ceatec exhibition next week. Toshiba will show a prototype blue-laser diode for optical disc systems. It is expected to hit the market around 2006. The new technology is several times more powerful than current commercial models, and has what Toshiba claims is the lowest noise of any such laser diode yet developed. Sony, likewise, look set to unveil its all-in-one PSX game device to the public next week.

Frustrated by the lack of a copy protection standard that might help the digital content business reach the mainstream, a high-profile digital media group is taking matters into its own hands. MPEG LA (MPEG Licensing Association), a group of companies that hold patent rights that are related to the MPEG 4 audio and video standard, has created its own description of what features it thinks that digital rights management (DRM) technology should include.

Toshiba has announced it will start selling the RD-Style RD-XS41, a DVD recorder that comes equipped with a 160GB hard disk. The new recorder can record up to 208 hours of video on the disk. The personal video recorder features Toshiba's 4x DVD-R-enabled DVD Multi drive that supports DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW formats.

The reconstituted Napster music service will be unveiled on Oct. 9, according to CD and DVD software company Roxio, its new corporate parent. Roxio has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past year to position itself in the increasingly crowded online music distribution business.