In the ongoing saga of Hollywood's bizarre and self-defeating attack on RealNetworks for its RealDVD offering, a judge has dismissed Real's countersuit claiming antitrust violations by the Hollywood studios in effectively creating a cartel that controls the encryption on DVDs and refusing to license it to Real for the purpose of its DVD backup solution. The court basically said that there is no harm to Real caused by any actions of the Hollywood studios, because the real "harm" is in the fact that it created an infringing product in RealDVD. This reasoning isn't surprising given the earlier rulings in this case, but is no less ridiculous when looked at in context (and with any bit of common sense). Full story...
Just as it considers kicking people offline via the Digital Economy Bill, it looks like the UK is getting set to move all sorts of government services online -- giving every UK citizen a unique webpage, where they can access all sorts of personalized gov't services.
We've seen all sorts of ridiculous claims by performance rights collection societies trying to demand performance rights for things that clearly were not intended as "performances.
In the last few years, there's been a push by some companies to bring back the immensely troubling "hot news doctrine," that appears to violate everything we know about the First Amendment and copyright law.
The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same -- often making claims like unauthorized downloading is "just like stealing a CD from a store.
Earlier this week, reader Jorvay sent over the news of how food giant Nestle had massively overreacted to an (admittedly disgusting) anti-Nestle video put together by Greenpeace and posted to YouTube.
The more of ACTA that leaks, the worse it seems. KEI has the details on another portion of ACTA that had not leaked yet, which focuses on setting up new institutions that would manage ACTA after it was implemented.
I had pointed this out in a comment yesterday, but with so many press reports suggesting that Viacom's filing found some sort of "smoking gun" in the YouTube emails concerning founders talking about "stealing" videos, it's worth pointing out that Viacom appears to have taken these quotes totally out of context.
Ah, leave it to The Onion to successfully encapsulate the state of the recording industry with a report that is basically as accurate as most of the reports that come out of the RIAA these days:
The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that the combined revenue brought in by Warner, Sony, EMI, Universal, and countless independent music labels in 2009 totaled $18.
David Herron alerts us to the news that it's finally occurred to the brain trust at Universal Music that, perhaps, CD prices were too high.
Last summer, we wrote about some reports that EA was going to require a constant internet connection for Command & Conquer 4.