THE faces of some bootleg DVD pirates hit with 10-year-long ASBOs have been plastered on posters in a Hackney supermarket.

CMC Magnetics, the largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, saw a small net profit of NT$301 million (US$9.05 million) in 2006 after suffering net losses consecutively in 2004 and 2005. The company's board of directors decided not to distribute any dividend for operations in 2006.

Linux users may be happy to know that Nero has released the latest Linux version of its software suite, NeroLINUX v3.0.0.0 Beta.

The next user to download a song from a peer-to-peer file-sharing service like LimeWire could be in for a surprise. Not a recording industry lawsuit, but a pop-up asking him to look at an ad - either text or video - in return for a free and legal copy of the music.

A lorry driver who earned thousands of pounds selling counterfeit CDs and DVDs has been jailed for three months.

If you share copyrighted files on peer-to-peer networks, it's almost certain that the RIAA and/or MPAA is monitoring your actions, according to a new study, meaning that it's only a matter of time or luck until The Man comes a-knockin'.

Dell is offering a 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks as an alternative to hard disk drives.

Xbox 360 games will shortly include a color barcode system, developed by Microsoft, which has four and eight-color geometric patterns.

As if the US wasn't already angry enough over widespread piracy in China, it's being reported that the country's infamous movie pirates have unleashed a $1 (50p) bootleg copy of Spiderman 3, a movie which is reported to have cost over $500 million dollars to make -- the most expensive movie ever made.

US supermarket giant Wal-Mart has delivered a blow to the Blu-Ray standard by buying more than two million HD-DVD units from Taiwan.

Panasonic have announced that the company will globally introduce Blu-ray discs with 4x writing speed this summer to coincide with its 4x BD drive launch.

Blu-ray Disc (BD) has become the first high definition format to sell more than one million discs, and the format accounted for 70% of high-definition movies sold during the first quarter of this year, according to sales figures from Home Media Research (HMR).

Sony DADC says that it will replace copy-protected DVDs that are incompatible with a small number of DVD players, caused by Sony's ARccOS copy protection on the discs.

HP will launch in total three new 20x DVD burners. The dvd1040i, and its external equivalent dvd1040e, are new, high-speed drives with DVD±R/±RW and DVD-RAM read/write, ±R double-layer capability, and LightScribe direct disc labeling.

Jon Lech Johansen, known as "DVD Jon" for his notoriety for breaking anti-piracy code on DVDs, has posted on his blog a want ad for a couple of coders interested in working for DoubleTwist Ventures. The company is noteworthy for having reverse engineered Apple's FairPlay digital rights management system.

Fastmac have begun shipping the first and only Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade for Apple's PowerBook, iBook, and MacBook Pro notebook systems.

With a week to go before its dual-format high-def release, pre-orders for 'Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series' have broken new ground on Amazon's top sellers list. Meanwhile, recent Amazon rankings appear to indicate a turnaround in HD DVD sales.

The short era of small internet radio stations is over after the Copyright Royalty Board have given the thumbs up to new fees to broadcast copyrighted material.

Google is ready to introduce a copyright protection tool that helps media owners to automatically report acts of piracy on its YouTube video site, according to Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Nero have announced it will release of the stand alone version of BackItUp 2, a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution.