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If you were wondering what the Recording Industry Association of America is doing with the money they collect from strong-arm piracy law suits, this story from Reuters seems to say they're spending it on politicians. Earlier this month I wrote about XM Satellite Radio's newest batch of receivers, and what concessions they might have to make to get them...

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Is anyone really shocked that Reuters is reporting that Microsoft circulated a memo detailing an attack plan against Real Networks eerily similar to that used against Netscape? The question at this point is: What is Microsoft going to do to fend off today's competitors, like Mozilla, now that those tactics can't be used? Firefox is growing in popularity and the...

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As eBay's stock slides and the company tries to make the $2.6 billion purchase of Skype make sense, let alone money, several remora-like companies are popping up. TechCrunch has a story about Rapleaf, a company seeking to expand upon and improve eBay's customer feedback system. Rapleaf wants to move the closed-network of eBay feedback out into the open, and allow...

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When Microsoft grabbed Groove Networks in March 2005, the Deal's headline read, "Ozzie joins Microsoft as CTO," and rightly so. The acquisition was more about getting Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie to relocate to Redmond, Wash. than incorporating Groove's technology into Microsoft offerings. A year later, Ozzie is making an impression on Microsoft. Forbes has a story about recent changes...

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If you're looking for technical innovation in the motion picture industry I've got bad news for you. You have to be at least 21 years old to see it. Earlier this month two companies, CinemaNow and Movie Link, announced they had signed a deal to distribute digital copies of movies online. The caveat was that these downloaded copies could not...

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Last week when I was flipping through the channel guide on my DirecTV/TiVo receiver I came across an unusual message, it read "Recording of this program is not allowed by copyright." This was for the letterbox version of the movie "Jarhead," other pay-per-view versions of the movie were recordable. This is outrageous as far as I'm concerned. The integrated DirecTV...

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I'm always skeptical when I see a story about a study commissioned and paid for by a company who obviously benefits from the results of the study. CNET News.com has a story about a study conducted by Yale Braunstein, professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, which concluded that competition in the cable television market from phone companies...

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It must be comforting to Google execs when they check the news and piggybacked on a story about the pitfalls of their advertising model is a story about Time Warner Cable's plan to basically copy the auction-based model. Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt was at least honest about where the idea came from. In an interview with Reuters...

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The dark cloud hanging over the annual cable industry show sponsored by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association has taken the form of possible legal action over Cablevision's recently announced plan for hosted digitial video recorder servcies. No official word has come down, but programmers everywhere are looking into the legality of the service. Time Warner tried a similar program...

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For the past decade or so mainstream media companies have been experimenting with ways to use the Internet and new technologies to make money. According to this article from Reuters, the focus has shifted to using the Internet to save money. Blog technology company Pluck Corp.'s service, BlogBurst, will provide headlines and articles from a network of 600 bloggers for...

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