Overturning an earlier decision, an Australian federal court has ruled that two Swiftel sysadmins can be sued by the music industry for alleged music piracy.

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Internet file-trading networks like Grokster and Morpheus can be held liable when their users copy music, movies and other protected works without permission.

One in three music discs sold worldwide is an illegal copy, creating a €3.8bn (£2.5bn) music pirate market.

Outside of Japan, DVD-RAM is generally ignored by the DVD enthusiast community. However, projections from Semico Research are showing a bright future for the DVD-RAM format which now finally starting to gain some popularity in western markets which have been slow for the format thus far.

The DVD+RW Alliance recently stated that in view of Taiwan’s major role in the global optical disc industry, it has decided to shift some of its bimonthly round robin tests from Japan to Taiwan.

Hope springs eternal, and the new Toshiba president, Atsutoshi Nishida who only took office on Friday, has vowed to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

DVD Fab Decrypter and DVDFab Platinum / Express / Gold were updated to version 2.9.1.0 introduce a new option do enable DMA, which supposedly speeds up copying process.

Sighting convenience, quality, lack of viruses and prosecution as justification, many netizens have given up on illegal fileswapping and have chosen a legal route to obtain their music downloads.

OES (Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories), the unit of Taiwan’s government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) that developed the forward versatile disc (FVD), have stated that it has received orders for a total of 20,000 FVD players from several Taiwan-based consumer electronics (CE) vendors, with delivery set for the second half of this year.

The approximate 300,000 people who've picked up a copy of the Backstreet Boys' "Never Gone" might not know it, but they're part of a growing skirmish between the record labels and digital music master Apple Computer.

The two, rival blue-laser optical storage formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, will not be coming together, Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi admitted yesterday.

Global DVD player revenues will fall for the first time ever this year, according to research from the Strategy Analytics Connected Home service.

Occasionally, some software crops up on the Interweb and you're amazed. Take RatDVD. It stands for "Real Advanced Technology" and came to birth somewhere between Russia and Denmark, the fruit of a team lead by Peter Jensen.

Microsoft has sued four online retailers in California and Virginia for selling pirated software, the world's largest software maker has said.

Press Release: PSP Movie Creator - Convert DVD movies and various video formats for optimized playback on PSP. Its ultra-fast DVD to PSP conversion speed plus advanced video editing features cannot be found anywhere else.

Researchers at Microsoft's Cambridge labs are developing a file-sharing technology that they say could make it easier to distribute big files such as films, television programs and software applications to end users over the Internet.

The PlayStation Portable (PSP) will soon be opened up to a new and potentially lucrative market - porn.

Seizures of fake DVDs are dramatically higher than the same period last year. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) confiscated 680,000 pirate DVDs between January and March - a 41% rise on the same period last year.

Executives at EMI Group on Monday said they planned to begin rolling out CDs with technology designed to limit copying. The technology allows buyers to burn onto CDs only three full copies of a disc's songs, and the burned discs cannot be copied.

Swedish wireless technology provider Ericsson inked a deal with Napster on Wednesday to supply music to cell phones.