Media giants Viacom International have finally lost patience with YouTube and demanded that they remove more than 100,000 of their video clips that have been posted up without permission.
The company – whose holdings include Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks, DreamWorks and Comedy Central – have calculated that YouTube has served up over 1.2 billion streams of its copyrighted video content.
As a result, Viacom have got out their big pointy DMCA stick and accused Google-owned YouTube of knowingly profiting from material stolen from them, as well as repeatedly breaking promises to filter out copyrighted works.
In a statement, a clearly miffed Viacom said: “Virtually every other distributor has acknowledged the fair value of entertainment content and has taken deliberate steps to concluding agreements with content providers.”
“YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it.”
Google have said that they’ll get the material down tout de suite, although not without adding a valedictory grumble, commenting, “It is unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from YouTube’s passionate audience which has helped to promote many of Viacom’s shows.”
Removing Viacom’s rich portfolio of popular clips may certainly result in loss of revenue for YouTube, but some media analysts reckon it could be a lose-lose situation all round, as both parties risk naffing off consumers.
Viacom has said that although it’s still down with the idea of distributing clips online via YouTube, it’ll only do so via, “a fair and authorised distribution model.”
Love has broken out between the two Apples – computers and music.
The terms of settlement are confidential.
Apple has warned Windows-based iTunes users to hold back from upgrading to Microsoft Vista, because the software may not work properly with their iPods.
The problems included poor animation speeds, an inability to play back music and video purchased from the iTunes store and data in media, contacts and calendars not synchronising. 
The Answer
The Fully-Fledged Feed Reader
High speed mobile phones and new gadgets are set to send revenue from mobile entertainment services soaring over the next five years, according to market research firm Informa Telecoms & Media.
“Advanced mobile content and services have been slow to take off, but this should not be confused with the deepening relationship that we have with our mobile phones,” commented report author Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
User-generated content is also expected to grow, with Informa predicting that revenue from user-generated services will hit $13.17 billion by 2011.
Sony Ericsson in Japan is launching the snazzy new W51S phone which comes in a striking clamshell package.
The Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED) icons look rather dandy to our weary eyes, although work-shirkers probably won’t like not being able to see who’s actually calling before flipping open the phone and getting an irate boss on the line.
The W51S measures up at 105 × 48 × 19.3 mm, with talk time quoted at 210 minutes, with a standby time of 270 hours. For the security conscious, there’s also a feature letting users remotely lock and delete data on the handset over the web (Palm Treo users have been able to do this for years via excellent software like 
Alexa ranking is something that some people judge their very existance by. They’re not concerned that their family is safe and secure around them, not that they’re in good health, or even take delight in how many friends they have close by. But how important Alexa tells them they to the Internet community – how much the Internet loves them. 
Sony Ericsson have let it be known via press invites that there’s a number of new handsets being released in Europe next Tuesday.
Towards the end of an 
Oboe, the MP3Tunes.com online music service is increasing its previous 1Gb of free music storage to unlimited storage to some of its registered users.
