Topic: News

A software piracy case cost the UK taxpayer more than £19m in legal aid last year.

Microsoft's new Windows Media Player has been leaked a couple of days early. It is 22.9MB and this version is in RAR format. We have no idea of its history, but it does download, and hasn't got a virus attached that we could see.

Telewest is offering its UK TV viewers the chance to watch the World Cup in glorious high definition (HD) clarity following an agreement with ITV and the BBC.

CMC Magnetics, the largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, recently obtained certification from international vendors for 4x DVD-R DL (single-sided double-layer) discs, the first among Taiwanese makers and the second in the world next only to Japan-based Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM), according to industry sources.

The Australian Government has announced it will introduce major changes to the Australian Copyright Act. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the reforms would make laws fairer for consumers and tougher on copyright pirates.

Vanguard Disc, a second-tier maker of optical discs in Taiwan, is set to close due to competitive pressure in the CD-R disc industry and the failure of its shift to DVD-R production.

Mitsubishi Chemical Group Science and Technology Research Center has announced that it has developed a solution-based Organic Semiconductor Material, which is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of larger, cheaper flat-panel displays.

Sony will offer the world's first notebook PC equipped with a next-generation Blu-ray optical disk drive in Japan in June, a month behind Toshiba's launch last week of laptop PCs with HD DVD drives.

Popular Russian music download service AllofMP3, whose legal status has long been in question, shut down over the weekend and has yet to re-open. The site sold music without DRM copy protection for $0.02 per megabyte, far cheaper than sanctioned services such as iTunes.

It looks like the XBox360 has finally been broken to one degree or another.

Lite-On IT plans to start volume production in July of this year of half-height (H/H) Blu-ray Disc (BD) optical disc drives (ODDs) based on technology from Royal Philips Electronics as a result of the company taking over BenQ’s ODD unit, according to industry sources.

Following Microsoft's official announcement to offer an HD DVD drive as a peripheral to the Xbox 360 by the end of the year, Microsoft's executives said that the Xbox 360 games will not ship on HD DVD media any time soon.

Already having started production of HD DVD-R discs in May, CMC Magnetics stated it is preparing for volume production of 30GB single-sided dual-layer HD DVD-R discs in the third quarter, according to the company.

Two Chinese men have been jailed after they admitted running what was described by police as one of the UK's biggest ever pirate DVD factories.

Following on from the recent successful launch of Plextor's PX-760A ATAPI/IDE DVD-RW drive into the market, the company today announces the Serial-ATA version - PX-760SA.

Ritek has released details of the products and deevelopments it will showcase in Computex Taipei 2006, the annual event of the IT industry.

Press release: The new media allows for stunning, laser-etched designs right on the disc surface, giving consumers a no-hassle way to burn silkscreen-quality disc prints. Featuring LightScribe Media Version 1.2 technology, the new discs produce disc designs even faster than the previous version.

Warner Bros's video unit have unveiled plans to sell movies and television shows to BitTorrent for legal downloads from the Web site that was once blamed for aiding the swapping of illegally copied films and programs.

Software monolith Microsoft is planning to make its Windows Genuine Advantage online verification programme compulsory throughout the known world.

Footy fans unable to get to a TV when the World Cup kicks off next month can catch up with all the action on their mobile phone.