France enacts its controversial, and now watered-down, law as regulators in Scandinavia scrutinize the music service. France’s diluted iTunes plan becomes law But Socialist Party still hopes to revise it, likely forcing copyright-protecting tech to be freely interoperable. August 4, 2006 Norwegian watchdog scrutinizes iTunes DRM Consumer council accuses Apple of unfair practices. Apple says …

A newly launched peer-to-peer trade association has offered to sit down and negotiate with music industry lawyers, while it simultaneously denounced its adversaries as obsolete and “tyrannosaurical.” P2P United, a group of six peer-to-peer businesses, held a coming-out event Monday in Washington, D.C. The lobbying effort is designed to demonstrate to the U.S. Congress that peer-to-peer companies are legitimate enterprises …

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, …

The cheaper end of the DLP (Digital Light Processing) projector market is plagued by the dreaded ‘acid-trip’, or ‘rainbow’ effect, a kind of visual distortion that causes red, green and blue motion-blur artefacting when you flit your eyes across the screen. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson (he of gonzo journalism fame), there is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a …

New technology is often blighted by teething problems, as early adopters of Sky’s HDTV service will confirm — ever since Sky’s high-definition broadcasts launched earlier this year, its HD receiver boxes have been plagued by complaints from disgruntled consumers. Thanks to a recent firmware upgrade, however, subscribers have been reporting that these problems with bugs and instability could be a …

By the time JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released last year, it had already been pre-ordered by over 100,000 people on Amazon.co.uk. The question is — will the same happen with the much-hyped Blu-ray and HD DVD disc formats? Online retailers Amazon.co.uk, Play.com and HMV.co.uk have now started accepting pre-orders for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, …

You have to hand it to Sony. The company danced around LCD for years, giving token gestures to the flat-screen fraternity and refusing to take it seriously. But all it took was a load of bouncing balls (and a decent product, of course) to make the Bravia range one of the most recognisible LCD ranges in existence, and a powerful …

Samsung’s stand at IFA 2006 would have brought tears to the eyes of HDTV’s early adopters. On display were the LE40M91 and LE40F7, which are the replacements for Samsung’s current crop of 40-inch LCD displays. The LE40M91 (pictured right) is an HD Ready set with a 1,366×768-pixel panel. It uses an LED backlight for better contrast and also offers Samsung’s …

All the talk at this month’s IFA trade show was about the arrival of ‘Full High-Definition’ TVs. Typical. We’ve only just got used to the HD Ready industry standard, and now there’s new jargon to get our heads round. ‘Full HD’ refers to screens with a maximum resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels. Unlike the earlier HD standard, which required a minimum …

We all know children should be doing homework, running errands for elderly neighbours or sweeping leaves off your driveway, but thanks to television, they’re a bunch of drooling, brain-dead idiots. So it makes perfect sense for Hannspree to make a range of televisions aimed squarely at this demographic. We spotted a range of the company’s heavily stylised TVs at IFA 2006, …

Crave has just come back from IFA 2006, the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin, Germany. ‘Funkausstellung’ means ‘radio show’, but IFA has moved on since the first event in 1924, when 180,000 visitors examined the first valve radio receivers. Today IFA is a consumer electronics show covering six main areas: television and entertainment, personal computer and games, sound and car media, …

Panasonic chose the Abbey Road Studios — the spiritual home of The Beatles — as the venue for the press launch of its first Blu-ray DVD player. Crave followed in the footsteps of the Fab Four across the famous zebra crossing and into the Abbey Road Studios, where we were greeted by several Japanese execs who proudly unveiled the DMP-BD10 Blu-ray …

Aiming to better compete with Apple Computer’s iTunes, Samsung on Friday announced that it will develop its own music service in conjunction with a new series of portable players that will debut later this year. Samsung is tapping New York-based MusicNet to power the service, which will offer both download sales and subscription options. The service will initially be available …

In the continuation of a long-running arms race, both Apple Computer and Microsoft have seen their music protection technologies come under fire in recent days. In the past month, separate programs have emerged to strip away the digital rights management (DRM) tools that the two technology giants use to protect music from unauthorized duplication. One of the programs counteracts Microsoft’s …

The music industry’s educational video about copyright law is full of baloney, according to several trade and public interest groups. The Consumer Electronics Association and Public Knowledge are among the groups to issue a joint statement condemning some statements on the Recording Industry Association of America’s video, which the RIAA has plans to distribute to the nation’s universities. The RIAA’s …