Daily News Links

• Apple Inc. indicated it would open its iTunes store to other portable players besides its ubiquitous iPod if the world's major record labels abandoned the anti-piracy technology that serves as the industry's security blanket.  Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, made the case for abolishing the protections known as "Digital Rights Management," or DRM, in an open letter posted Tuesday on the Cupertino, California-based company's Web site. He also explained why Apple had decided against licensing its own DRM technology, known as "FairPlay," as an alternative method for making iTunes accessible to all portable players.  Read more here (from FindLaw) and read Jobs' essay here.
• New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a mobile phone could soon face a $US100 fine.  Read more here (from Australian IT).
• In the latest twist to online video-sharing, entertainment portal Lycos today unveiled a new feature, Mix, that lets users create playlists of video clips from the likes of YouTube, Google Video and MySpace video. Lycos plans to offer banner ad units and sponsorships around the Mix community features. Eventually, the company plans to offer licensed video content for Mix which would carry in-stream ads.  Read more here (from Media Post).
• Jeff Zucker, on his first day as chief executive of NBC Universal, came out swinging at YouTube, accusing the online video site of failing to deploy its technology to protect the copyrighted materials of traditional media companies.  Read more here (from the Financial Times).
• Austrian authorities said Wednesday they have uncovered a major international child pornography ring involving more than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries, including hundreds in the United States, who paid to view videos depicting infants and young children being sexually abused.  Read more here (from FindLaw).
• While acknowledging that YouTube dominates the user-generated video space, InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller believes that its reign won't last for long. "Those tools are going to be everywhere," he predicts. YouTube is "not going to be one place to go."  Read more here (from Broadcasting & Cable).
• The IOC is examining what to do about blogs posted by athletes during the Olympic Games, amid fears that it could lead to scurrilous rumours being broadcast on the internet.  Read more here (from the Sydney Morning Herald).
• Yahoo7 and ReelTime have overcome a dispute that has delayed the launch of ReelTime's internet movie service across its portal.  Read more here (from Australian IT).
• Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.  Read more here (from FindLaw).
• A freelance video blogger who refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigation will become the longest incarcerated journalist in modern American history on Tuesday. The freelancer, Josh Wolf, will pass Vanessa Leggett, an investigator and a journalist who served 168 days in 2001 and 2002 for refusing to surrender information in a murder case.  Wolf, 24, has been in prison since August, with a brief break in September related to his appeal, after refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigation of an anticapitalist protest in 2005 in which a police officer in San Francisco was injured and a squad car was slightly damaged by a small explosive device.  Read more here (from CNet News.com).
• News Corp.'s MySpace is in talks with online auction company eBay about a partnership. The idea is to let MySpace users buy and sell items from each other using eBay's technology and its PayPal payment system. MySpace users would be able to post items for sale on their profiles.  Read more here (from the Wall Street Journal).
• Often criticized for failing to tackle rampant illegal downloading of music and films, China closes 205 Web sites in a crackdown on piracy.  Read more here (from CNet News.com).
• Keeping information secure in this age of laptop-lugging workers is the tech industry's most formidable challenge, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday.  Read more here (from SiliconValley.com).
• User-generated Web content is becoming a vast new vulnerability hackers want to exploit, according to experts at the RSA Conference.  Read more here (from PC World).
• In the UK journalists who illegally sell or use personal information could go to jail for up to two years.  Read more here (from Media Guardian).
• Internal documents suggest the Canadian government is reluctant to impose consumer safeguards for the web because it wants to protect the competitive position of businesses that offer Internet access. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that senior advisers to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has previously declared a "consumer first" approach, are carefully heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies against so-called Net neutrality legislation.  Read more here (from CBC News).
• Maturing advertising models and lower costs of distribution lay the path for an explosion of Web video, say panelists at an MIT forum.  Read more here (from CNet News.com).
• Amazon.com Inc. and TiVo Inc. began testing on Wednesday a service that lets users watch videos rented or bought over the Internet directly on televisions, as part of a trend to link personal computers and TVs.  Read more here (from Reuters).
• Cable giant Comcast and social-networking site Facebook are joining forces to create a television series from user-generated videos. Called "Facebook Diaries," the series will be seen simultaneously on Facebook and Comcast's Ziddio.com, a video uploading Web site similar to YouTube.  Read more here (from Yahoo! News).
• The online video boom that has made a household word of YouTube and launched scores of similar sites hasn't been a boon to every video-sharing hub. Over the last year, eBaum's World--which helped to pioneer irreverent videos online--has seen its U.S. traffic fall by nearly a quarter from 5.5 million monthly visitors to 4.2 million, according to comScore Media Metrix. Its page views have dropped by 25% over the same year-long period ending December 2006.  Read more here (from Media Post).
• The UK Press Complaints Commission has made a landmark ruling on privacy, upholding Elle Macpherson's grievance.  Read more here (from Media Guardian).
• A judge on Monday blocked DirecTV from airing advertisements in which Jessica Simpson and William Shatner say its high-definition television service provides better pictures than Time Warner Cable's high-definition service.  Read more here (from FindLaw).
• A survey of advertisers has found that almost 90% of respondents say they will spend part of their budgets on marketing in video games, virtual communities.  Read more here (from CNet News.com).
• Jetstar is trying to add capacity to its online booking engine after a fare deal sent the website into meltdown.  Read more here (from the Sydney Morning Herald).
• News Corp.'s social-networking site MySpace is making its foray into Europe's mobile sector via a deal with Vodafone that allows customers to access, update and "pimp" their MySpace pages from their mobile phones.  Read more here (from Forbes).
• In the latest evolution of its ongoing social commerce strategy, Pontiac opened a community hub on Yahoo this week designed to tap into the "street-level" energy of fans from all its active and retired brands by uniting and introducing the hundreds of offline and online groups already in existence.   Read more here (from Media Post).
• Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys' fees. The decision is one of the first in the country to award attorneys fees to a defendant in an RIAA case over music sharing on the Internet.  Read more here (from EFF).
• Playing high-action video games for a few hours each day can improve your vision, according to US researchers.  Read more here (from PC World).

Comments

[Matt]

FYI - Access those Wall Street Journal articles for free with a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com

Andrew Tobias blogged this last week.