Stories about: BMG

Google has laid speculation to rest -- it is buying YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock transaction.

Thirteen U.S. record companies sued file-sharing system operator Lime Wire in a New York court on Friday, accusing it of music piracy and demanding damages that could top US$476 million.

In a dramatic close to the legal battle between file-sharing software developer Kazaa and the entertainment industry, Kazaa said on Thursday that it has agreed to pay at least US$100 million to four record companies and an additional amount to motion picture companies to settle two lawsuits.

Yahoo this week became one of the first mainstream digital music sites to sell a song without DRM (digital rights management) copy protection.

Researchers at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering have developed a new digital rights management technology that they said will help organizations better protect multimedia content from unauthorized copying and distribution.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Monday released a draft version (http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft) of its new GPL (GNU General Public License) version 3 software license designed to address two increasingly important issues in the software industry: software patents and DRM (digital rights management).

As expected, Google launched a new video download service during a keynote by co-founder and President Larry Page at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas Friday.

The operators of the Kazaa file-sharing service have been given until Dec. 5 to update their software with a filter to screen out copyright material or else face the prospect of being shut down.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has rolled out a promised mail-in program that lets music buyers exchange CDs containing its controversial XCP copy protection software, but there appears to be no end to the entertainment giant's troubles. Security researchers now say they have now spotted new problems in the software Sony is giving users who want to remove its copy-protection products.

One day after hackers released malicious software that used controversial Sony BMG Music Entertainment copy-protection software to attack computers, Sony has decided to stop shipping the product, the company said Friday.

By now, you've probably heard the news that Sony, the media giant, has been quietly installing hidden software on PCs, when people buy music albums published by Sony BMG Music, and try to play them on their computers. The software, called Extended Copy Protection (or XCP) uses rootkit techniques similar to those used by viruses, Trojan horse programs, and spyware to hide the fact that it is installed from the user.