Topic: News

Popular file-sharing site WinMX.com ceased operating and the New York office of another, eDonkey.com, appeared to be closed, in the continuing legal fallout among underworld peer-to-peer music services, industry sources and users said on Wednesday.

The bassist of Switchfoot is teaching fans how to disable the copy protection measures in the San Diego rock band's own CDs, presumably upsetting Sony and perhaps unwittingly testing the anti-circumvention rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today claimed the world's biggest recording companies have begun to demand the iTunes Music Store raise its prices. But the Mac maker is responding with the spectre of a return to the days of mass online music piracy.

Lite-On IT plans to begin production of 16x Super-Multi DVD burners next month, the second such maker in Taiwan, following BenQ, which started shipping such burners in August, according to local industry, sources.

A startup US company called Peerflix is a trading platform that asks users to make lists of DVDs they want and DVDs they want to get rid of, then matches "wants" with "haves" for 99 cents a trade.

In the second in his series of tests on 16x DVD media, DVD guiding light Flash has set RiVision versus Titanium Hub Printable 16x DVD-R. Which disc will be crowned King of 16x Hub Printables? Find out here.

Resident DVD burning guru Flash has started a campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he compares RiDisc 16x DVD-R - the RiDisc 16x Blue Top (TTH02 mid by CMC) versus the Ridisc Xtreme Red Top (RITEKF1 mid by Ritek). You can find the review here.

As Hollywood movie studios and consumer electronics manufacturers consider how to protect high-definition video entertainment from piracy, the Blu-Ray and HD DVD camps plan to adopt partially similar and comprehensive content management schemes.

Today is the day that once a year celebration of all things good and free, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yes, that one day where you can walk up to a co-worker and yell 'Aaaaarh!' at the top of your lungs and not get fired, mutter 'shiver me timbers' in an elevator, and talk about poopdecks in straight bars without much problem.

A US-based retailer who sold illegally modified Xbox consoles pre-loaded with pirate games has been sentenced to 5 months in prison and fined almost $250,000 (£140,000).

In a bid to cut costs for local electronics makers, Chinese researchers plan to develop a version of the next-generation HD-DVD optical disc format specifically for China that will include support for a locally developed video compression technology, called AVS (Audio Video Coding Standard), according to a researcher involved with the project.

At the Tokyo Game Show 2005 Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox 360 will be region locked for both games and DVD movie playback. This means thatusers will not be able to play games or watch DVD movies from another region other than the the one their Xbox 360 is locked to.

Ted Sugano, a representative from Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), arrived in Taiwan on September 15 in an attempt to win support for the DVD-RAM format from major makers of optical disc drives (ODDs) and optical discs.

Microsoft has confirmed the official release date of the Xbox 360, which is due to be released in America two days before the traditional Thanksgiving consumer rush on November 22nd. The console will be rolled out from there to the UK on Friday, December 2nd and in Japan Saturday December 10th.

Leading producers of DVD discs in Japan, including Maxell, TDK and Mitsubishi Chemical, are under pressure to cut costs and will sooner or later outsource production to OEM makers in Taiwan and India-based MBI, according to the Japanese Nikkei News.

The DVD Forum has published the latest resolutions announced in the 31st meeting of its most significant organization, the Steering Committee. The specifications of the forthcoming dual-layer recordable HD DVD (HD DVD-R DL) format as well as the 6/8-X recording speed for DVD-R DL and 16x for DVD-RAM were approved.

A huge haul of fake DVDs with a street value of about £1m has been seized in a raid at a house in west London. Police said the operation in Park Lane, Southall was the largest uncovered in Western Europe and was capable of producing 50,000 fake DVDs a day.

Both the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA, and Hollywood lobby group the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the MPAA, have signed up to the Internet2 project which is exploring high-bandwidth DRM.

Sony is recalling 3.5m faulty power adaptors which were sold with the black PlayStation 2 slimline version between August and December 2004.

Although Toshiba has recently admitted that it may delay its HD DVD launch until 2006, Mark Knox, an HD DVD advisor for Toshiba, was quoted as saying that reports of the format's delay are greatly exaggerated and that a 2005 launch is still a possibility, according to Ultimate AV.