PayPlay has just launched "the world's largest MP3 download store" -- a store selling more than 1.3 million indie music tracks, with a search engine that allows you to search for your fave artists and get similar indie artists in the catalog. Previous to this PayPlay sold only DRM-crippled WMAs for $0.77, the MP3s sell for $0.88.
Motion Pictures Laboratories, Inc. (MovieLabs) is a non-profit startup based in Palo Alto funded by the six major Hollywood studios to advance research in areas the movie industry regards as critical.
It’s announced an open challenge offering grant money to people who submit proposed solutions to a number of problems the industry feels need to be addressed.
Promising proposals will receive grants anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 to continue research. Like CableLabs and DARPA, the only goal is to fund research — they won’t be in the business of bringing the solutions to market, and any successful invention will be the property of the inventor, Weinstein assured.
While there’s no mention of digital rights management on the MovieLabs site, the focus is primarily on anti-piracy efforts, including defeating and detecting camcorders in theaters and identifying copyrighted material , even if it’s been transformed (such as mashups or transcoding into alternate formats).
CBS Corporation announced on Wednesday that it has acquired U.K.-based social music network Last.fm, for $280 million in cash.
Last.fm, which was founded in 2002 and now counts more than 15 million users in over 200 countries, monitors what songs a user is listening to in iTunes or other applications, and then automatically creates a personalized streaming radio station based on recommendations from fellow users with similar tastes.
Sony/ATV Music Publishing announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Viacom's music publishing arm, Famous Music, for about $370 million.
Building on last month's news, EMI has announced today a new partnership with Amazon.com, where again the music label's entire catalog will be released DRM-free (to be launched "later this year".)
Similar to the proposed availability on iTunes, the tracks will be of higher quality than the typical $0.99 track. And unlike iTunes, the tracks will be sold in MP3 format, assuring the files are playable and transportable to just about any device imaginable.
The French Council of State decided last week that record companies can automatically track P2P users that share more than 50 files within 24 hours and keep their records for further legal proceedings.
The decision comes as a blow to the French National Commission for Data protection and the Liberties who ruled in the fall of 2005 that automatic surveillance of P2P networks violates local privacy laws.
New York, NY - AOL is set to bring user-generated video upload service UnCut out of beta and officially launch it in June. The new service will be implemented on many of AOL's platforms including AIM and the new social network service, Fred McIntyre, AOL's chief online video executive told Beet.TV.
Blinkx the San Francisco video search engine, has taken us into new bubble territory, going public on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and being valued at $355 million.
It raised about $50 million.
Its IPO is perfectly timed, because it hits all the hype buttons: Blinkx is search, it is video, and best of all, it is online advertising — an industry where the merger activity is at its most frantic levels since Cisco, Nortel and Lucent binged on billion-dollar infrastructure companies at the height of the last bubble.
Blinkx’s technology takes a video’s content — the spoken words within them - and translates it into searchable text, which is something different from what most sites do. Pluggd and others translation services are making headway in this area. It is powering video search for a Lycos, Looksmart and a division AOL.
Blinkx, meanwhile, tell they’re in this for the long haul, and they think they can make money by serving targeted advertisements.
LONDON (Reuters) - EMI announced on Monday terms of a recommended cash offer for the company from Maltby, a newly incorporated company from Terra Firma, for 265 pence per share, giving it an enterprise value of 3.2 billion pounds ($6.30 billion).
VIDEOEGG, which runs a video ad network over more than 70 online communities, named digital media veteran Adam Klein as president. Klein was most recently executive vice president of strategy and business development at EMI Music. Previously, he was an advisor to the chairman at MTV Networks, and before that president and COO of Ask Jeeves.
Company claims $1.5 million damages in suit.
PARIS -- Canal Plus will take legal action against French-based video clip hosting service Kewego for alleged copyright violations -- the first litigation of its kind in France.
The network believes Kewego has done too little to prevent the inclusion of Canal Plus content in the form of viral videos on its site despite repeated requests to take appropriate action since November.
A Canal Plus spokesman cited the positive steps taken by Google and Kewego's French competitor, DailyMotion, in developing tools that prevent posting of the network's content without prior permission.
Another move to stop media companies from suing MySpace: they’re launching “Take Down, Stay Down” today, which prevents videos being uploaded again if they’ve already been removed at the request of a copyright holder. The service is available to all content owners.
The technology, you can probably guess, is powered by Audible Magic - a content protection service that’s signing virtually all the video sites as they dodge lawsuits left and right. The tool joins other copyright protection tech on MySpace, like audio fingerprinting of tracks on MySpace music, video filtering and an automated take down system.
Below, a look inside YouTube’s decision-making process over the last eight months. Click on the thumbnail below for the full image.
France's Dailymotion SA says it will begin blocking users from putting pirated clips on its video-sharing site by using so-called fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic Corp.
The move represents an effort by closely-held Dailymotion, a popular site accessed by users around the world, to distance itself from the uploading and viewing of clips from TV shows and movies without their copyright holders' permission.
WASHINGTON--It was an atypical start for a Capitol Hill hearing--arguably the first time a politician ever paused his opening remarks to grab a digital video camera and capture the scene around him for a few seconds.
"I thought we could have the first ever YouTube video of a committee hearing from the chairman's perspective," Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said as he aimed the palm-sized silver gadget at a table lined with video tech executives, including YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, billionaire investor and HDNet founder Mark Cuban, and the CEOs of Slingbox and TiVo.
Other witnesses included the creator of the hit television series Everybody Loves Raymond and executives from the Disney and ESPN networks and Qualcomm's MediaFlO unit, which recently rolled out live TV capabilities for mobile phones.
The purpose of the morning meeting was to explore the future of video.
But it quickly became apparent that the hearing wasn't just a playful show-and-tell for the companies represented, as some politicians proceeded to put YouTube in the hot seat over its copyright policies.
full article here
Internet TV company Joost has raised $45 million in a whopper round of venture financing, giving it a significant war-chest to spend just as its product hits the market.
Lead investors were Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. CBS Corporation, Viacom and the foundation of Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing also participated.
Despite being relatively untested, Joost has gained publicity because it was started by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström. It has signed deals with several companies, including Viacom, CBS and Time Warner, to carry their content.
YouTube’s eagerly anticipated system for rightsholders to discover and flag unauthorized uploads of their material, “Claim Your Content,” has gotten bit closer to reality.
“It’s entering the testing phase,” YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante in an extended interview for BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting.
What seems to be happening is YouTube content creators are being divided into camps. Based on how I understand Claim Your Content might work — namely, that it won’t pro-actively screen and block infringing content — it’s doubtful YouTube will ever open up its new revenue-sharing program or “Claim Your Content” to all users, so if your home-produced video goes viral unexpectedly, don’t expect to cash in and defend your turf against copiers.
"Viacom's complaint in this action challenges the careful balance established by Congress when it enacted the Digital Millenium Copyright Act," Google's response begins. "The DMCA balances the rights of copyright holders and the need to protect the Internet as an important new form of communication. By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression. Google and YouTube respect the importance of intellectual property rights, and not only comply with their safe harbor obligations under the DMCA, but go well above and beyond what the law requires."
Google's response denies all allegations made by Viacom in the original complaint. Google requests a jury trial.
Specifically, in response to Viacom's allegation that Google and YouTube promote direct copyright infringement via public performance, Google cites the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. In response to Viacom's allegation that Google is making unauthorized copies of protected works, Google cites fair use. Google also cites the substantial non-infringing uses of YouTube.
Google's response is available for download here.
