Sharman Networks, the company that distributed the file-sharing software, Kazaa, has finally come to an agreement with the media companies that have been chasing them for years throughout courts around the globe.
The details of the settlement was covered by secrecy clauses, but the Associated Press is reporting the settlement figure as $115m, which they say has mostly been paid by Sharman already. The media companies will drop all of their law suits.
As part of the settlement, Sharman has agreed to discourage online privacy using ”all reasonable means.’ How this is be achieved is unclear. Kazaa was specificaly designed to be distributed, making it’s very hard to have any control over the network. It’s design would make the use of filtering software, which would remove or block copyright material, difficult.
Being upbeat Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks, enthused, “This settlement marks the dawn of a new age of cooperation between P2P technology and content industries which will promise an exciting future for online distribution in general and Kazaa users in particular.”
It’s understood that the settlement doesn’t require the media companies to provide their content to Kazaa, but equally it doesn’t forbid Kazza carrying copyrighted material, if done ‘legitimately.’
Given the software has been downloaded over 398 million times to date, the media companies could well see the benefit utilising the P2P network.
There was some shock in November last year when Grokster, who like Sharman made software for distributed file-sharing networks, changed their minds and closed down their service.
We’ve just published a 
The Long Tail is an important manual for the new economics of the Internet and digital culture. As well as demystifying the numbers it provides an essential guide to how to navigate a world where everything is available, all the time. Score: 95%
The Long Tail effect is not limited to buying and selling, the process by which the book was written is a case in point. Anderson (editor in chief of Wired magazine) published the 
Some have taken this to mean that Anderson is sounding the death knell for blockbusters, something which he was at pains to counter on his blog, “Hits Aren’t Dead” he said, “I never said they were. What is dead is the monopoly of the hit. For too long hits or products intended to be hits have had the stage to themselves, because only hit-centric companies had access to the retail channel and the retail channel only had room for best-sellers. But now blockbusters must share the stage with a million niche products, and this will lead to a very different marketplace.”
Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, now ex-chairman of AOL-Time Warner, has said he was sorry for the merger between AOL and Time Warner. It is widely regarded as a deal that didn’t go very well, leading to internal wrangling and huge amounts of money being knocked of share values.
When pushed, Case said from the point of shareholders of the two companies, employees & customers – it didn’t go as he’d hoped, it had been a disappointment and a source for frustration. Given the wide range of those included by Case, we don’t know who else might be disappointed who wasn’t included.
Google Video has been serving videos to the Internet population for over a year and a half now, both 
Clicking on Watch their Ad link opens a new browser session and plays the video advert from … Google Video. All very neat.
The Murdoch empire continues to buy to part of the online world, as BSkyB announce the full purchase of Web publishing and design company, mykindaplace, a company that they’d invested in 2000 when they previously dabbled in buying bits of the Internet.
James Baker, Managing Director of Sky Networked Media, who will have the mykindaplace teams under his power, invented a new term to us “super-serve,” when he said “Working even more closely with mykindaplace will allow us to accelerate the expansion of our web portfolio. We intend to super-serve audiences in key content genres and target new users with a suite of content-rich sites thatdeepen customer relationships and drive new revenue.”
Following the surprise resignation of SMG’s Chief executive Andrew Flanagan, the pieces are in place for consolidation of the Scottish and Ulster media outfits that provide the Celts with their ITV services.
With many predicting the imminent departure of Charles Allen, ITV, a shareholder in SMG has troubles enough of it’s own to be ruled out of a takeover.
Yahoo! and Motorola have cuddled up in their synergetic beds and fluffed up their co-branding pillows to announce a new deal that will see Yahoo! Go pre-installed on millions of Motorola handsets next year.
With two of the mobile phone big boys onboard, we reckon there’s been a fair amount of backside-kicking going on at arch-rivals Google, who must be well miffed to see Yahoo grab such a huge chunk of the market.
With more and more phones offering internet access, punters want to be able to easily access services, search the web and grab their mail on the move.
There’s been tons of financial results coming out around now, but we’ve spared you from them – we’re nice like that. Today we felt it was worth an exception.
As is well known, one way Google does so well is by getting other sites (partners) to carry their clients advertising for them (of which Digital-lifestyles is one). In accounting-ese/jargon, they refer to it as Traffic Acquisition Costs or TAC. These increased to $785 million, up from $723 million in its first quarter. The TAC (see how quickly you can get into the swing of this jargon) remains at 32% of their advertising revenue, giving a rough understanding that Google take 68% of these ad earnings – pretty healthy in their favour.
YouTube is being sued by a video news service, Los Angeles News Service for infringing the copyright of their video material, in particular, the footage of the 1992 LA riots, including the horrific attack on a truck driver.
YouTube has made moves to reduce copyrighted material on their sites, including limiting the length of videos that can be uploaded.