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Apple And Record Companies Charged In EU iTunes Row
The European Commission has dished out formal charges to Apple and ‘unnamed major record companies’, accusing them of restricting music sales in Europe.
The EU alleges that agreements between Apple and the record companies are guilty of breaking European Union rules that prohibit restrictive business practices. It’s far from the first time that the EU and other Northern European Countries has got wound up about Apple and iTunes.
“Consumers can only buy music from the iTunes online stores in their country of residence and are therefore restricted in their choice of where to buy music, and consequently what music is available and at what price,” said Jonathan Todd, European Commission spokesman.
“The statement of objections alleges that distribution agreements between Apple and major record companies contain territorial sales restrictions,” he added.
Promptly shifting the blame on to the record companies, Apple insisted that they’d tried to operate a single pan-European iTunes store accessible to peeps from any member state but were foiled by music labels and publishers imposing legal limits on the download rights.
The Commission first got involved back in 2005 after the UK consumer group Which? pointed out that iTunes purchasers in France and Germany were paying far less than us poor chumps in the UK (67 pence against 79 pence).
Apple and the record companies now have two months to defend themselves in writing or take part in an oral hearing which usually happens around a month after a written reply has been received.
This latest development is unrelated to yesterday’s deal between Apple and EMI.
Source
3 April, 2007
Apple And EMI Cut High Quality DRM-Free Music Deal
It wasn’t the bonanza of Beatles songs that some had hoped for, but Apple has just announced that all of EMI Music’s vast catalogue of digital music will be available for purchase without digital rights management from the iTunes Store from next month.
The DRM-free tracks from EMI will be encoded at a high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding – making them “virtually indistinguishable” in audio quality from the original – but at a higher price of $1.29 per song (compared to 99c for 128bps downloads).
Users wanting to ‘upgrade’ their library of previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions can do so if they’re prepared to fork out 30 cents a song.
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice — the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
“We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year,” he added.
Keen not to miss out on the quote-fest, Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, piped up: “EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favourite artists.”
Using the new DRM-free EMI downloads, users can enjoy the tracks without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on – something that was celebrated by a guy called Eric Chiu posting on the Engadget site who gleefully commented, “My BitTorrent Engine is ready to fire on full cylinder… Demonoid and Piratebay, be ready for the new era of EMI Music.”
Apple
EMI Music
2 April, 2007
Beatles Songs For iTunes?
After years of throwing squadrons of lawyers at each other, the big Apples – Apple Inc and Apple Corps – kissed and made up a few months ago and now it looks like they can’t stop the love.
Yesterday, record company giants EMI Group PLC announced that it planned to unveil “an exciting new digital offering” with Steve Jobs and the gang at Apple, leading pundits to conclude that The Beatles’ music catalogue is finally about to be made available through Apple’s iTunes online music store.
Spinning the expectation-o-meter right up to eleven, EMI revealed that their chief executive, Eric Nicoli, and Apple head honcho Jobs will be holding a news conference today, which will be supplemented by a “special live performance.”
The Beatles have famously refused to sign up to iTunes and other online music services for years, and many expect the download charts to be instantly filled up with the Fab Four’s songs as soon as their catalogue becomes available.
Of course, the fact that the story broke on April Fool’s Day has led some to think it might be a bit of a jolly wind-up wheeze, so I guess we’ll have to wait to see if the scheduled 1pm conference happens or not.
Mind you, if it is an April Fool’s it’s a pretty crummy one compared to Google’s TiSP Toilet wireless network one.
2 April, 2007
BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3G
The BBC are going to start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones within the month.
Three UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.
As well as the TV channels, eight radio stations will also be included – Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.
Appropriately enough the announcement by Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, was made at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress.
The BBC haven’t done a great deal of content on mobiles, not that they’re not keen on it, as you’ll be able to tell from the comments of Richard Halton, “The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.”
They hope to learn lots from this trial, as Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC said, “The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC’s future mobile strategy.”
We’ll keep our eyes on this.
30 March, 2007
Complete My Album Launched By Apple iTunes
As is often the case, there’s been rumours circling for a long time about the possibilities of Apple launching an add-service for iTunes, to give credits for tracks purchased.
Today they’ve announced it’s for real. The new Complete My Album will give iTunes users 79p credit per track for each track on an album that they decide to purchase, if they’ve bought the tracks individually first.
To illustrate, a user who’s already purchased three 79 pence singles and decides to buy the corresponding £7.99 album would be able to download the remaining songs to complete the album for just £5.62, without having to pay for the same tracks again.
Well done for Apple for launching this, but frankly, it only seems right anyway.
There’s two caveats. Customers only have 180 days from the purchase of the first track to buying the whole album, and it doesn’t looks like it’s going to be all albums as they’re referring to “qualifying albums.”
The music industry don’t really have an option in increasing the likelihood of punters buying more music from them. Complete My Album is just such a offering. As to whether people will be tempted into buying those extra tracks from the album, that they purposely didn’t buy when they were originally buying the track is quite another matter.
29 March, 2007
Yahoo Mail To Go Unlimited
Yahoo Mail will be upping the ante in the Web-based email market.
There’s been back and forth between Yahoo and Google, following Google launching Gmail with an at-the-time world-shattering 1GB of storage back in April 2004.
To mark their 10-year web-mail birthday, Yahoo are proposing giving people unlimited storage for their email, quite a step up from the 4MB that they launched with.
To put some numbers to the escalation of the demands for email, David Nakayama, Yahoo’s group vice president of engineering, points out that in the early days, Yahoo’s “total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

Now don’t expect all of this to be available today, as even Yahoo’s mighty mass of server farms might buckle under the demand. Instead they plan roll it out gradually over the coming months.
Don’t go thinking that you’ll be able to use your Yahoo mail account to hold all of your data, Yahoo will have anti-abuse limits in place to protect users, the details of which are currently unclear.
Many of us at Digital-Lifestyles swear by Gmail as our email package of choice, but we’ve hit the 2.8GB limit a few times of late and if Google don’t make the jump to copy Yahoo’s infinite offer, that may be enough for some of us to jump over to Yahoo. So come on Google.
29 March, 2007
LG-Google Handsets Coming From Deal
LG have signed a deal with Google to put some of their mobile services pre-loaded onto its handsets.
LG have committed to release at least ten new mobile phone and will jointly market them as LG-Google handsets.
The apps covered by the deal are Google Maps – which lets people view maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, and get driving directions, Gmail – the Java-driven, mobile focused version of their email service and Blogger Mobile – which, err … lets you blog while on the move, using images taken from the mobile phone.
Mr. Paul Bae, Vice President of the Product Planning Team at LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company really wants us all to know that “LG’s mobile devices, combined with Google, will provide consumers with easy access to their favourite Internet services even without a PC and make it easy for them to stay connected while in motion.” Wooo!
As we know LG don’t just do mobile phones, but a whole panoply of electronic bits, with a major focus on the home, so it’s interesting to hear from LG that they’ll be extending their relationship with Google to “develop digitalized home in the future.”
The financial terms of the deal were not revealed, indeed it’s unclear if LG will be sharing the income Google will derive from its advertising.
LG are being a little tarty about this. It’s not too long ago (end of 2006) that they signed a deal with Yahoo to pre-load Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo Messenger on many of its mobile phones. Clearly that wasn’t an exclusive deal and it will have covered different handsets we imagine.
28 March, 2007
Xbox 360 Elite Announced
There’s been lots of speculation going around the various blog sites about the release of a new version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360.
Yesterday Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox 360 Elite is a real product and will begin arriving in US stores on 29 April with an expected retail price of $480.
The confirmed spec of the 360 Elite is a combination of a 120Gb hard drive, new accessories bundled in, and to all of those HD TV fans, an HDMI port built in. Oh, and a return to a black case like the original Xbox. Microsoft tell us that the retail price of all of the bundled bits is over $600 if bought separately.
The HDMI port is an interesting move – yes it will make it simpler to get High Def screens connected (if you have a screen with an HDMI in port), but importantly it will let Elite owners play protected HD-DVD discs on the long-discussed add-on HD-DVD drive. HDMI connection is needed for the HDCP content protection scheme.

The new, large hard drive is a big step up from the previous version of 20Gb to 120Gb – all the more space for Microsoft to sell you TV shows, films and software to download – oh … and save you game positions to as well of course.
The hard drive is detachable and will also be sold separately so standard Xbox users will be able to get hold of them too. Expected US price is $180.
Alongside the goodies above are an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller in black and a headset, in … err, black. Do you get the black theme? There’ll be a couple of other new bits available separately too, a Play & Charge kit for the the wireless controller ($20) and a black rechargeable battery ($12)
Peter Moore, Corporate Vice President – Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft, turned the hyperbole meter way up to deliver the following, “Today’s games and entertainment enthusiast has an insatiable appetite for digital high-definition content. Xbox 360 Elite’s larger hard drive and premium accessories will allow our community to enjoy all that the next generation of entertainment has to offer.”
It’s worth noting that the first shots of the Elite, while looking slightly underground, are in fact taken by ‘Major Nelson,’ the pseudonym for Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Director of Programming. So ‘leaked’ photos are now coming from official sources!
Images courtesy of Major Nelson
28 March, 2007
Microsoft Vista Shifts 20 Million Copies
Microsoft says that its new Vista OS is flying off the shelves quicker than, err, hot software off a shovel, with a claimed 20 million copies shifted since its January 30 consumer release.
Microsoft’s Corporate VP Bill Veghte was clearly a chuffed fella, “We are encouraged to see such a positive consumer response to Windows Vista right out of the gate,” he purred in an official statement released on Monday.
“While it’s very early in the product lifecycle, we are setting a foundation for Windows Vista to become the fastest-adopted version of Windows ever,” he added.
The figures seem to stack up well against the 17 million copies of Windows XP sold in the two months following its release in 2001, but the PC market has increased exponentially since then: according to IDC, total worldwide PC shipments hit 136 million units in 2001, a figure dwarfed by last year’s 227 million total sales.
There seems to have been a bit of gentle manipulation with the figures by Microsoft too. As well as the boxed copy and new Vista PC sales, the company cunningly included those folks who had bought an XP PC over the holiday season and then gone on to redeem their free Vista upgrades later.
Although Windows marketing director Bill Mannion acknowledged that the upgrade program had nudged the sales figures in an upward direction, he played down the numbers saying that upgraders didn’t make up the “core component of the 20 million.”
A shift to higher-end versions of Vista has been also reported by both Microsoft and the PC makers, with Mannion saying that the pricey Ultimate edition has been doing good business: “We have relatively modest expectations for Ultimate, but it’s exceeding that on both new PCs and the packaged product.”
ZNet
27 March, 2007
Novell Linux Mocks “I’m a Mac” TV Adverts
Novell have done a great collection of spoof ads of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” series, you know, the ones that had a UK launch in January this year.
While playing to the same music and video style, it mocks the self congratulatory styles and adds a third character … Linux. Rather than the obvious blokes, it uses a woman to represent Linux.

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26 March, 2007