Audio/Video

Source: ZDNet

Australian police said on Thursday that they had closed down an Internet music piracy site and arrested three students in an alleged copyright scam that cost the music industry at least $37 million.

The three students--two Australians aged 19 and 20, and a 20-year-old Malaysian--are accused of running a dedicated Web site known as MP3 WMA Land at which visitors could download free music files and video clips.

Many of the music files and video clips were hosted on university computers.

Source: Business 2.0

Radio is in the doldrums. The dominant Clear Channel network of stations has enforced a bland sameness coast-to-coast, and the first of the large networks to announce quarterly results this week had bad news. Viacom (VIA) president Mel Karmazin had one word to describe how Infinity, his radio network, was doing: "Disappointing."

Bantam has announced that in a few weeks they will start shipping their iPod competitor, the Bantam BA1000. The BA1000 has dimensions that are almost identical to the iPod's, but offers more features like the ability to record from FM.

Source: CNN.com

Hollywood sends enforcers with night-vision goggles into movie theaters and puts metal detectors outside advance screening rooms, but still the industry can't stop pirates from recording films and selling illegal copies before their theatrical debuts.

The problem is that the pirates are adopting ever more sophisticated technology, using tiny camcorders in purses and digital recorders about the size of a fountain pen.

MP3newswire.net has an article that mocks the RIAA's claims that file trading is hurting the record industry. The music industry has been wailing that the proof comes from the direct correlation between the rise in file trading and the fall of record sales. OK, guess what? DVD sales are up 61% this year alone. So the author has used the exact same logic (a direct correlation between the rise in file trading and the rise in DVD sales) to officially declare that file trading is responsible for the huge leap in DVD revenue.

Source: Design Technica

For several years now many visionaries have spoken about a time when our home theater systems would merge with our home computers.

It looks like this copyright CD mess the record companies are trying to foist on us is having another unintended effect. It seems some radio stations may not be able to play them on air either. As many store and play music from PCs, the stations have decided that if a CD doesn't function they are not going to go through any additional effort to make it work. They will simply chuck it from the playlist.

Source: ZDNet

If you are a fan of Pink or Outkast or Whitney Houston, very soon you better look at the label before buying that CD. That is because they are all Arista artists and this spring all of their albums will probably be copy-protected.

The success of the Rio and ReplayTV lines were tempered by a company fighting fiscal difficulty and repeated lawsuits from the entertainment industry. In the end, SonicBlue decided to capitulate to the realities of the market it helped build and shut its doors.