Last week the French legislature approved a new law which could radically change the landscape of digital audio. The so-called ‘iTunes Law’ is designed to break the control hardware manufacturers exert over the type of content that can be played by their digital music players and software. The result would be that companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Napster would have to make their data formats interoperable, thereby opening their systems to music from rivals. A regulatory body could be set up to police the sector.
Apple has not yet responded to this development but has previously called the bill “state-sponsored piracy.” The US based group, Americans for Technology Leadership (founded by technology companies), commented “Once government regulators take away a company’s intellectual property rights and dictate that they must allow competitors to benefit from their creations, they break the cycle of innovation that benefits consumers by destroying the incentive companies have to create new and better products.”
While it’s not surprising that technology companies would wish to defend their business models, consumers could be forgiven for finding the current plethora of differing standards, restrictive legal agreements and crippled playback formats a significant turn-off. Anyone who remembers vinyl, or even pre-DRM CDs, may recall a simpler world where all the players could play all the media and might wonder where things went awry? French Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said “Any artist’s work that is legally acquired should be playable on any digital device”.
The iTunes Law does, however, leave a get-out for the tech companies. A newly-added clause permits artists to exercise control over additional DRM. In short, artists could object to their music being transferred into other formats, thereby ensuring that current practices could continue unaffected. This loophole would require renegotiation of existing contracts, something Apple et al may wish to avoid given record companies’ desire to recoup perceived losses due to piracy. Lawyers observed that the new law is complex and its impact will be difficult to judge until it is tested in court.
The bill is likely to become law in France within a matter of weeks and its progress has kicked off a debate about access to digital content in countries across Europe including the UK, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. With several countries poised to review national copyright laws in the coming months, the iTunes Law could have wide-ranging impact.
We always thought that computer gaming was the near-exclusive domain of incommunicado male teenagers, but a new study by Parks Associates has found that 59% of all U.S. consumers who play games on a mobile phone are of the lady persuasion.
Predictably, the study found that it’s still the men who want to blast aliens, blow up things and take part in role-playing games, while women prefer less frenetic mobile gaming activities, like online trivia and card games.
John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates reckoned that women are the foundation of the gaming market, adding that, “as an industry, we need to cater to their preferences.”
UK British music recording industry trade association, the BPi, has today issued a statement that they have “successfully jumped the first hurdle in its battle to have unauthorised Russian download site AllofMP3.com declared illegal.”
The argument of the BPI is that AllofMP3 has no right to be selling the music, as they aren’t licensed to do so. AllofMP3 counter that they are “authorized by the license # LS-3М-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) and license # 006/3M-05 of the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (FAIR).”
We played with the Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop, at its first European showing yesterday. The machine we used was the only one in Europe and had been jetted in from development labs in Estonia.
As you can see from the close-up photo, the Skype button sits on the right, the microphone on the left and in the centre is a video camera, a la new Mac laptops. There’s an LED between the mic and video camera and another surrounding the Skype button.
Calling quality
SanDisk makes tons of memory related products but how many of you knew that they made memory adaptors and converts? Makes sense doesn’t it?
Setting about to download them to my iBook via my then current MS/USB adaptor was most perturbing experience. It refused to acknowledge that my beauties were there at all. Argh, panic! Logic prevailed and I reached for a PC laptop. While the PC saw the images, when I tried to copy them off the machine would get slower and slower to the point where it finally fell over.
It works with the many, varied versions of MemoryStick format, including plain old MemoryStick; MemoryStick Duo; MemoryStick PRO and MemoryStick PRO Duo.
As you know, we *heart* nice, new shiny gadgets and we love to sit on the (sometimes uncomfortable) cutting edge of technology.
With the Treo just about everything works. 
Moreover, the interface is fast and responsive and although Palm’s idea of multi-tasking is simply to close down whatever you’re doing and start up the next program (while remembering all the settings) it doesn’t suffer from the gradual slowdown to a crawl that constantly blighted our Windows experience.
Palm Treo 650
One of the challenges facing Stephen Carter’s replacement as head of the UK communications regulator Ofcom, is how the frequency spectrum released by the move to digital terrestrial TV will be allocated. Not only is the decision crucial for Ofcom, who must reconcile both the requirement to allow the market to operate while taking into account the British citizen, but it also figures in the BBC’s strategy around the impending licence settlement and the organisations’ worldwide ambitions.
How will displays receive the content to create the impetus for a large scale take up? The likely options are; Cable under what is expected to be a Virgin branded offering; Sky who are pushing HD to protect and grow their revenue; the BBC who are committed to both an alternative to Sky on Satellite and providing their content on all viable platforms and broadband, which looks increasingly viable by virtue of higher transfer rates to the home, along with improved digital compression technologies.
France, slower off the blocks in moving to a Digital Terrestrial TV service, with its’ amusingly acronym-ed TNT, has a solution that builds in HD capabilities, and for sure the UK will not wish to be seen falling behind mainland Europe.
Some of the most compelling games are often the simplest, and games don’t get much more basic than the age-old game of Battleships.
If you miss, you get a splashy sound (and quite possibly the derision of your chum across the room) and if you hit the target you get a gratifying kaboom (with the option to shout and jeer at your opponent’s misery).
Our opinion
We’re big fans of Pure Digital and their seemingly endless mission to push the features and functions of DAB radios. Their latest move is to launch a new portable DAB radio.
Recognising that what they’re selling is audio quality, Pure have done a deal with Sennheiser to have Sennheiser’s MX300 headphones included in the package.
Yo! Boom Boom! AOL’s produced a book* new ‘Action Sports On Demand’ website designed for skateboarders, snowboarders and other action sports athletes.
Taking a sniff around the suitably “yoot” style website, we clicked on the ‘About Us’ section, only to be greeted with one of those really annoying, pretentious dictionary-style definitions:
Spots! Yeah! Rad!