Warner Bros. Entertainment said Thursday that its home video division will release DVDs in the high-definition Blu-ray format. The move further tips the scales in an industry weighing the merits of two rival next-generation technologies. Warner, which had decided to distribute films in the popular HD DVD format, is now the second big Hollywood company …

For a few fearful minutes in late 2004, iMesh co-founder Talmon Marco thought Garth Brooks had sunk his company. Marco was in New York, showing off the technology behind the new iMesh peer-to-peer music service slated for release this Tuesday. The software was supposed to identify and block virtually any copyrighted song being downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. But this time, …

Early in 2005, more than a dozen Sony employees from the company’s consumer electronics divisions gathered for an unusual meeting in the tiny Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters of digital media start-up Kinoma. Kinoma Chief Executive Peter Hoddie, an Apple Computer alumnus, had been put in charge of high-profile Sony software development, including the Connect digital music project. For a company …

File-swapping company Grokster has agreed to stop distributing its peer-to-peer software, following a $50 million legal settlement announced Monday with Hollywood studios and record labels. Along with co-defendant StreamCast Networks, Grokster had been accused by the music and movie industries of contributing to widespread copyright infringement by people who used its software to download songs and films. Monday’s settlement comes …

eMusic, one of the oldest digital music subscription services still operating, is being sold by parent company Vivendi Universal after years of operating in the shadow of younger rivals. According to a short statement provided by VUNet, Vivendi’s online division, private New York equity group Dimensional Associates has agreed to buy the service for an undisclosed sum. Although VUNet is …

RealNetworks’ core music subscription service is migrating onto the Web on Monday, in a move that includes some of the first fruits of its recent antitrust settlement with Microsoft. The company is creating a new version of its Rhapsody digital music service that will let people search and listen to its catalog of songs from a Web page, instead of …

Though Sony BMG Music Entertainment faces a torrent of criticism and lawsuits stemming from copy-protection software on some of its CDs, the so-called rootkit controversy has not yet had much of an impact on sales, according to market trackers. Certainly, the pressure on Sony is mounting. On Monday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott charged that the entertainment giant violated Texas’ …

Apple Computer’s iTunes music store now sells more music than Tower Records or Borders, according to analyst firm the NPD Group. The research company tracks downloads from digital music stores, as well as people’s purchasing habits at offline retail stores. During the past three months, iTunes made it to the U.S. Top 10 sales list for the first time, NPD …

The EMI Group record label said music from its copy-protected CDs will soon play on Apple Computer’s iPod digital music players, but the iPod maker disagrees. For more than a year, the anti-copying technology loaded on some major label compact discs has been compatible only with Windows-based computers. Those CDs have allowed listeners to move digital files onto the computers, …

A file-swapping network that let college students download movies and music at blazing speeds on the Internet2 research network has closed its doors, the latest casualty of entertainment industry legal pressure. The i2Hub network emerged in early 2004, taking advantage of the supercharged network that connects college campuses to let students trade files at speeds far faster than is possible …