Sony have announced yet another attempt to displace the iPod from the top of the digital music hardware charts. But unlike the clunky-looking players launched in the Japanese market, the European model appears a serious challenger for Apple's market leadership.

Dell wants your old iPod and is willing to pay to get it. The PC maker will give US consumers a $100 rebate on its Digital Jukebox if they surrender their iPod.

Australia's main record industry group says it is not opposed to a certain amount of copying by consumers, as long as it can be controlled.

Japanese consumer electronics behemoth Panasonic has said it has released the DMR-E700BD, which it claims as the first DVD recorder to support dual layer single side Blu-ray disks with a capacity of 50GB.

The Beastie Boys website claims that the copy-control mechanism on the DRM-crippled CD "To the 5 Boroughs" does not install any files on the victim's computer.

Linux software makers Red Hat and Novell have said that they will begin offering RealNetworks' open-source media player with their operating system products.

Lite-On IT will begin volume production of its DVD recorder with a 40-120GB built-in hard drive at the end of July. The company will be the first Taiwanese optical disc drive manufacturer to ship HDD+DVD recorders in volume.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) official chart for downloaded singles is going live from the 1 September. The chart is compiled from the downloads from paid-for music download services. It counts singles sold to UK consumers and takes information from 7 Digital Media, iTunes, Metacharge, OD2 and Playlouder.com. The BPI will be looking for more partners in future.

Sony Music International is deciding whether to test-launch DualDisc DVD/CD hybrids in the UK following a successful trial in the US and the formal approval of the format by the DVD Forum.

In apparent defiance of color theory -- that dark surfaces absorb light and white surfaces reflect it -- Sony have unveiled a black screen that allows a regular digital projector to vividly display TV images and business presentations in a brightly lit room.

Sony will update its PSX personal video recorder/Playstation 2 combo device family on 1 July following the company's move to suspend production of the original models earlier this year.

DVD duplication software maker 321 Studios has admitted that it is considering going bankrupt in order to fend off lawsuits from the music, movie and games industries.

Universal Music's UK wing is to bring the 8cm CD back from the dead later this month, in a desperate bid to revive the singles market. The 'new' format will be called Pocket CD, but is essentially the compact CD developed in the mid-1980s as the format for CD singles.

NEC have announced a chipset for rewritable DVD drives that supports a 16x recording speed in the DVD-R and DVD+R formats.

Sharp have announced the release of five new DVD video recorders. Set to hit the market July 30, the DV-HRD200 features a 400GB hard drive that is capable of recording up to 34 hours of high-quality digital video.

An analyst firm has warned that the price of the future Playstation 3 console could be as high as $500 (£275), due to its expected added media features. Industry analysts Michael Pachter and Edward Woo, who authored the Wedbrush Morgan Securities report, reckon that Sony will try to flog the PS3 off with way more functionality than current consoles, including among others digital video recorder, or DVR and a DVD burner.

Matsushita, better known by its Panasonic brand name, will unveil its first Blu-ray Disc recorder next week, the Osaka, Japan-based company have announced.

Specs rumoured for Xbox's successor, codenamed Xenon, have allegedly been leaked to an Xbox-fanatic website. An anonymous e-mailer supplied the supposed hardware specifications for the Xenon CPU as being powered by a 3.5 GHz IBM PowerPC processor, and a 500+Mhz ATI graphics processor. Apparently, "Xenon" runs an operating system based on Windows NT, very similar to the Xbox operating system. A superset of Microsoft's Direct3D 9.0 runs the graphics interface, apparently.

Philips has launched the world's first 16-speed DVD writer, which can burn a disc in less than six minutes, according to the Dutch company. U.S. computer maker Dell will be the first customer for the new DVD burner, sources familiar with the Philips activity have said. Philips and Dell have a partnership to supply each other with products.

Press Release: Alera have announced that it is launching its new DVD/CD Shredder Plus, a destruction device that cuts DVDs, CDs, Floppy Disks and Credit Cards into small unusable strips, permanently preventing unauthorized use. With carbon steel blades and 1/2 horsepower motor, this industrial strength product is designed specifically for shredding DVDs, CDs and Floppy's.