Print this article
Pakman eats dots, avoids ghosts
The boss of Apple’s iTunes nearest rival eMusic has warned that recent deals struck between the music industry and UK internet providers could threaten the existence of legal sites.…
Comes With Music comes with old 5310
Nokia has said its Comes With Music free song download service is coming to the UK. The only snag: you’ll have to buy a phone that’s more than 12 months old.…
And getting the wrong guy
Exclusive Tiscali threatened to disconnect a customer for illegally downloading a TV show last week, after receiving a copyright infringement notice from a Hollywood studio. The only problem was the customer had quit the ISP months before the alleged transgression was made.…
Kazaa user destroyed evidence
Good grief, people. As things are, we'll never have to pay for recorded music ever again. Getting free music online is as easy as picking up five pound notes in the street (when no one's watching) - and the chances of facing a fine range from minimal to non-existent.…
Court boots Veoh suit, steels DMCA
Much to Google's delight, a federal judge has dismissed a porn infringement suit brought against online video site Veoh.com.…
Olympic delay for iPlayer tweak
BBC engineers have solved a mysterious, long-running bug that has meant iPlayer and live TV streams have frequently prompted the BT Home Hub, UK's most common router, to reset itself.…
Chinese Democracy, American Extremism
The FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.…
'A niche market'
An army of online deal seekers has called for a boycott of Boffer.co.uk, after the "daily deal" site fooled them into coveting a non-existent bovine sex device.…
Music store returns - minus 'Songs for Tibet'
The People's Republic has pardoned iTunes after access to the online music store was apparently blocked in reaction to selling a new Tibet-themed album during the Olympic games.…
Acquires facebooky wooky start-up?
Amazon.com is buying Shelfari – that is, according to the Seattle social networking start-up, but for now the online retail giant is keeping mum about the deal.…
Rumours of death of paper greatly exaggerated
The humble paper-based book isn't burnt just yet. Amazon is keeping schtum as to how many e-books it has sold, but evidence is mounting that predictions of iPod-grade sales and billion-dollar revenues were a smidge optimistic.…
Happiness is a warm laser sighted taser
In Sadville, they were close. But in our world, the relationship quickly took a turn for the worse. He dumped her. She walked into his office with a gun and tried to kidnap him. And when that failed, she broke into his apartment with handcuffs, some duct tape, a taser, a BB gun, and a dog named Gogi, shining some sort of "laser beam" onto his chest before he fled the scene and called the cops.…
What price bong waterproofing?
Amazon is planning a new student-friendly version of its Kindle e-book reader, according to McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Bueneman.…
PRS versus Dutch Buma
The UK's Performing Right Society has won a court case over its Dutch equivalent, Buma, preventing the issuing of a Europe-wide licence for online rights.…
Athletes blamed for rocking out to Tibetan protest songs
The Chinese government has blocked access to Apple's iTunes store.…
Widgets invade our living rooms
Intel blinked its square eyes again today, when it unveiled a tie-up with Yahoo! to make another stab at connecting the TV and internet.…
Web radio outfit struggling to cover royalties
This weekend saw a cry for help from personalised web radio outfit Pandora. It blubbed that music industry royalties are too high for it to survive on meagre web 2.0 advertising revenues.…
Windows leak blamed
A Dutch U2 fan on holiday in France overheard, and recorded, four tracks from the new U2 album and stuck them on YouTube.…
Old news sinks in
Why does the idea of legal P2P - something music fans have been clamouring for since the original Napster - still cause so much confusion?…
Made in China games better than reality
Video footage of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing included CGI images because of worries that broadcasters would not be able to properly film parts of the firework display.…
Blasts Italian fascists
Italian ISPs are doing their best to block access to torrent site the Pirate Bay, but the Swedish site has already acted to help Italians evade the ban.…
New invention has familiar ring
Apple will fill in some long-awaited missing features from its iPod and iPhone mobile players, a patent application published this week suggests. There's just one problem: Much of Apple's "invention" was dreamed up by Reg readers several years ago - and one embodiment is already on the market.…
Probe into commercial iPlayer delayed
The Competition Commission said today that its anti-trust investigation into Project Kangaroo, the joint internet TV venture by BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4, will take longer than expected.…
Verdict may be nullified
The Judge who presided over the first successful prosecution of an American P2P file sharer has hinted that he has changed his mind - and may nullify the trial.…
No hard drive? No problem
A US appeals court has given the thumbs up to Cablevision's new-age DVR, which stores recorded shows on remote servers rather than in-home hard drives.…
Farewell then, Social.FM
Social.fm, the company formerly known as Mercora, has closed down. The service, which allowed users to stream their music collections to each other, cites no reasons for shutting up shop.…
You can pry my email address from my cold, dead hands
At least 2.3 million people preferred to download Radiohead's In Rainbows from torrent sites rather than the band's own site, a survey this week reports, even though the cost was the same: Zero.…
...gotta go out and buy all my favourite movies again
Blu-ray backer Sony has announced that the format’s likely to outsell DVD globally in 2011, with over 5m Blu-ray discs having been sold around the world this year already.…
Defends Street View, scoffs at The Borings
As Google's government-approved spycar fleet drives across the UK, doing its best to photograph every inch of the country, the search giant cum global menace has told the world that "even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist."…
Olympic games
After foreign journalists complained that several web sites had been blocked at Olympic media centers in Beijing, it appears that access has been now restored to some, including the BBC's Chinese-language site.…
PC manufacturer back onstage with another DJ Ditty
Watch out Apple, because Dell is poised to unveil an MP3 player and music downloads service, according to company insiders.…
Staff know not to rip the public off now
The never-ending TV and radio phone-in scandal prompted more embarrassment at the BBC today, as Ofcom hit the corporation with fines totalling £400,000.…
Music Unlimited after all
Yahoo! now says it will reimburse all those people silly enough to purchase DRM-shackled tunes from its failed music store.…
This blanket is no comfort
In Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, set in WW2 London, a character called Slothrop begins to realize that everywhere he has sex, a V2 rocket subsequently lands on the same spot, obliterating the area. If you dig a little, you may notice something spookily similar with the idea of a Music Tax in the media.…
Quantum porn
Updated - but still NSFW In an attempt to upstage their former employer, a trio of ex-Googlers have launched a search engine of their own. They insist on calling it "Cuil" - pronounced "cool," apparently - and they say it "goes beyond today’s search techniques."…
PSP 3000 en-route?
Rumours have emerged that suggest Sony could be working on a new PSP that combines gaming with the qualities of an iPod and iPhone. Could these be true? Let’s examine the evidence……
Music Unlimited
Like Micro, like Hoo. Following in the footsteps of Steve Ballmer and company, Yahoo! plans to destroy the DRM servers propping up all those people misguided enough to purchase tunes from its failed music store.…
National Freetard Register cancelled - but freetards don't notice
Rejoice! "Three strikes and you're out" is dead in the UK. Music file sharers will no longer face the threat of seeing the household broadband connection severed. The plague that is currently endemic in France won't be jumping the English Channel.…
Nar-nar-nar-nar-nar(nia)
A British couple has lost the battle to keep the narnia.mobi domain name which they claimed was only registered so that their son could have a Narnia-related email address. The address will transfer to a company representing CS Lewis's estate.…
It's stealing, you know...
Thousands - or to be more precise, six thousands - of lucky alleged infringers a week are to be informed of the error of their ways, according to the terms of the deal struck this week between the British government and six major ISPs. They will in the first instance be "informed when their accounts are being used unlawfully to share copyright material and pointed towards legal alternatives."…
The revolution will not be podcast
Over five decades Neil Young has played a variety of roles including sixties protester, folk singer, Ronald Reagan supporter, grunge rocker and film maker. Now he's donning a new hat: Apple basher.…
Three Strikes RIP?
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between ISPs and the music business will lead to radically new "legal P2P" services, British Music Rights' Feargal Sharkey told us this morning. Licensing deals have already been signed, we reported recently.…
But menace them with what?
Six UK ISPs are to start sending out menacing letters to hundreds of thousands of suspected music pirates as part of a government plan to tackle illegal filesharing, the BBC reports. The deal and the names of the six are due to be unveiled on Thursday, and the ISPs are also said to have committed "to develop legal music services."…
Is it too little, too late?
Sky is launching a new music retail company in partnership with the world's biggest record company, Universal.…
Begin the Begun
As it plays catch-up in the Russian search market, Google will acquire a seasoned Russian ad firm for $140m in cash.…
Boxing Unbox
After failing to change the world with its Unbox video download service, Amazon has unveiled a new online storefront that serves up videos on demand.…
White Red label play
Blinkx is now offering a white label version of its transatlantic video search engine. But it prefers the name Red Label. "The Blinkx 'B' has always been red," CEO and founder Suranga Chandratillake tells The Reg.…
Nintendo keeps development kit to itself
Nintendo may have announced a new enhancement to the Wii controller, but don't expect many titles to take advantage of the new accuracy.…
EC ties strings to term extension
The European Commission today approved an extension to the life of sound recording copyright, from 50 to 90 years - but with a twist.…
Apple UK escapes price cuts
Apple no longer needs to lower the price of songs on iTunes UK in order to achieve pricing parity with the rest of Europe - fluctuating exchange rates have done the job for it.…