In the HD DVD versus Blu-ray shin-kicking contest there are many victories claimed, most of them by the Blu-ray camp. This week is no exception, as the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies on Blu-ray outsold The Matrix trilogy on HD DVD. The good news is that together, consumers spent about $2m on these …

From iPods and iPhones to all the other sing-song gadgets, there’s no shortage of ways to get to your tunes. Free and legal music downloads blog A new service–dubbed We7–is about to hit the Net. It offers free and legal music downloads that can be transferred to any MP3 player. June 5, 2007 Nutsie launches in beta: iTunes on your …

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details. news analysis Apple has plunged into uncharted waters by stripping security software off some of its music. Never before has Apple sold songs without attaching antipiracy software–the digital rights management systems that prevent file sharing and are hated by many music fans. If successful, Apple’s bold gamble to do …

The concept of a Freeview receiver that can record isn’t new — for a while now companies such as Thomson, Sony and Humax have been making digital video recorders that give Freeview viewers Sky+ style features without making Murdoch any richer. The good news is that there are whole new set of these DVRs on their way, under the ‘Freeview …

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details. It used to be that music fans believed cryptic messages about Satan or the death of a band member were hidden within rock albums. Nowadays, the secrets buried in digital music are way too easy to find, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The consumer watchdog group, which …

In an ambitious music campaign to raise money for Darfur, Amnesty International is relying on a new widget to promote viral sales of re-recorded John Lennon songs on sites like MySpace.com and across the blogosphere. The campaign, called Instant Karma, will promote an album of the same name with Lennon song tracks recorded by U2, REM, Green Day and a …

BT sent a lovely chap called Dave to my flat last week to install its Vision PVR/on-demand box. Apparently we can’t be trusted to plug them in ourselves, so customers have to pay a £60 installation charge — but considering the 160GB PVR box only costs £30, this isn’t such a bad deal. The box itself, built by Philips but …

CBS has purchased Last.fm, a social-networking site devoted to music. What it plans to do with the site, however, isn’t clear yet. With the $280 million deal, announced Wednesday, CBS has acquired a popular social-media technology: the music “scrobbling” engine developed by Last.fm that analyzes what its members listen to. Based on scrobbling results, Last.fm offers recommendations for members’ playlists, …

Apple’s iTunes Store began selling DRM-free songs from EMI on Wednesday. DRM (digital rights management) software prevents owners from copying or freely using a digital file across multiple devices. As expected, all the songs from music label EMI that are sold on iTunes are now available in DRM-free versions. Shoppers have the option to purchase either a 256kbps AAC-encoded DRM-free …

Pam Carroll Commentary I believe that most vendors try to do the right thing by their customers, but occasionally things go wrong. It is significant news today then, that Sharp is undertaking a recall of its 42-inch LCD TV models due to a potentially serious overheating and electrical problem. For the proponents of LCDs who are trying desperately to stake …