The global recordable DVD drive market will become volatile in the fourth quarter of 2003 as makers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are ramping up outputs aimed at grabbing a bigger share in the world market amid the improvement in the supply of pick-up heads—a major part of the optical storage drive, according to sources at Taiwanese makers in the line.

Microsoft started selling an updated version of its Plus Digital Media Edition entertainment software on Tuesday that now lets people create digital-photo slideshows on the PC and watch them on a DVD player. The software, which sells for $19.95 (£12), is designed for people using Windows XP who want more features for editing and playing media files such as digital photos, music and home movies.

U.S. consumers are planning to buy plenty of electronic gadgets this holiday season. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. households said they are likely to buy at least one consumer electronics product as a gift this holiday season, according to a survey the Consumer Electronics Association and for the third consecutive year, DVD players topped the list. Thirty-one percent of consumers who responded to the survey said they will probably purchase DVD players, the association said.

While FastTrack-based file sharing applications like KaZaA continue to dominate in North America, Europeans are evincing their own unique patterns and preferences, both in terms of their favorite peer-to-peer (P2P) clients and the types of content they choose to share. A new study by Sandvine Incorporated shows that P2P is now a multi-application reality, debunking the presumed dominance of FastTrack across the globe.

Twelve million historic photographs from British newsreel archives have been posted online for free download. The images, which date back to the turn of the 20th century, have been captured from the archives of the British Pathe newsreel, which is a cinema news service that pre-dated television.

Press Release: Offering a rainbow of colours that go beyond traditional computer color tones, Plextor, a leading developer and manufacturer of DVD and CD recording equipment, today announced that the new Spectrum DVD+/-R/RW drive is available in 12 vibrant colours.

K3b, which for many is the best GUI app for burning CDs in Linux, has now added DVD burning support. Users familiar with the Nero Burning Rom software will not be unfamiliar with how this open source software goes about backing up CDs and DVDs.

The cat and mouse game played between computer games companies and software pirates has seen a bold move by the establishment. In a new gambit, games companies will using piracy to hook users. A protection system from Macrovision and British games developer Codemasters ensures that pirated copies of games slowly degenerate to the point where they become unusable. The idea behind the technology called Fade, is to lure players into buying genuine games via the unreal thing.

Apple, a longtime supporter of the DVD-R format, confirmed Monday that it is adding support for DVD+R and DVD+RW into the Macintosh operating system with Panther, the new version of Mac OS X that ships next week. Apple is only adding support for backing up data and has not yet added support for the format into its media applications, such as iDVD and iTunes.

According to the website for IfoEdit, CopyiesAnything.com is offering a bundle of otherwise freely available freeware tools for download at the new and improved price of $49.95. The bundle has been produced without the permission of all authors of the software.

In an abrupt reversal, SunnComm Technologies said Friday that it will not sue a Princeton University graduate student who published a paper that describes how to bypass CD copy-protection technology simply by pressing the Shift key.

Hard disk-drive company Maxtor says it has reached a milestone in devising cost-effective platters for a next-generation recording technology called perpendicular recording. The company plans to announce that its subsidiary, MMC Technology, has demonstrated a method of making disk-drive media for the new technology at roughly the same cost as media used in today's disk drives. With the new media and perpendicular recording technology, Maxtor said it is possible to more than double the amount of data that can be crammed onto a typical disk, from the standard 80GB per 3.5-inch platter to 175GB.

Microsoft may have failed to occupy the stand it booked at this year's Linux Expo in London's Olympia conference centre, but some of the company's products did make a showing, even if the company might rather they had not. On the stand of a multimedia-oriented Linux distribution called dyne:bolic, operating system author and maintainer Jardmil -- the moniker he prefers to be known by -- was demonstrating a hacked Xbox that can be used to offload processing tasks from a mixed cluster of PCs and Xboxes.

Alvin A. Davis, 42, from New York was sentenced to six months in jail after being convicted of using the Internet to sell hundreds of CDs that were loaded with unauthorized copies of songs. Earlier this year, Davis admitted in court to using his site, EmpireRecords.com, to market more than 100 different CDs and cassette tapes featuring compilations of copyrighted materials from various musical artists. Davis was arrested by an undercover FBI agent who purchased more than 200 of the illegal CDs and had them shipped from New York to Washington. The Web site has since been shut down.

SunnComm has threatened Princeton PhD student Alex Halderman with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for exposing a key weakness in the company's latest CD copy protection technology, MediaMax CD3. The company said today it will take legal action against Halderman for revealing how MediaMax CD3 can be bypassed by holding down a Windows PC's Shift key when a protected disc is inserted.

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.