Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
The Courts

Oz High Court Hears Landmark TV Guide Copyright Case 156

Posted by kdawson
from the just-the-facts-ma'am dept.
highways writes "It's rare that that a copyright case is heard in the Australian High Court, let alone a case heard by all seven sitting judges. At stake is a small company IceTV (which we discussed when it launched four years back) taking on Australia's largest television station, the Nine Network, over the copyright status of the weekly broadcast schedule. That is, the schedule itself, not any synopsis or description of the individual programs. Users of PVRs such as MythTV will be well aware of the hassle it is to get a reliable program schedule stream to use for recordings. The saga has gone on for more than two years with Nine unsuccessfully suing IceTV, but later winning on appeal. At issue is whether a list of facts like an electronic program guide is a 'compilation' protected under Australian copyright law. This has implications for the copyright status of many publicly available databases and the limits to which the information can be distributed."
Mozilla

Mobile Firefox Alpha 1 Released 148

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the smaller-better-deal dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today Mozilla released development builds of its next mobile browser, Fennec 1.0 Alpha 1. 'The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface. We really want to get Fennec in front of as many people as possible and get feedback.' To that end, Fennec has been made available for the desktop on Windows, Mac and Linux."
Cellphones

Software Holds Cell Phone Calls While Driving 452

Posted by kdawson
from the hang-up-and-drive dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian company Aegis Mobility has developed software that detects if a cell phone is moving at 'car' speeds. If so, the software, DriveAssistT, will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over. Calls are not blocked entirely; callers will be notified that the person appears to be driving, but they can still leave an emergency voice mail, which will be sent through immediately."

Comment: Re:p2p != illegal (Score 1) 393

by Medevo (#24947511) Attached to: University of Michigan Student Wants SafeNet Prosecuted

This attitude stems from the fact, I think, that music HAS been free for God knows how long on the radio.

Music, and TV, while you don't pay a cent for when you watch or listen still has a cost. For these systems the reason why they seem so happy to give it away for nothing is because of advertising.

Music isn't free on the radio, even if thats the public perception, and its not unreasonable that these companies would like make money from not free music on the internet. The problem is part of the effectiveness of advertising is not realizing that it actually has any impact on you, the ad companies don't want people to realize that they are paying for radio by listening as many will typically "pay" less.

Media companies and the advertising industry are inexorably linked currently. Without moving to a pay-per-consumption like many computer games (even though they are moving closer to the dollars of ads) or iTunes et al I doubt this problem will go away soon.

Blizzard Talks About WoW Stability and Service 100

Posted by Zonk
from the new-servers-can-only-be-good dept.
Via 1up, information from Producer Shane Dabiri on the future of the World of Warcraft service. He offers up details on the new server setups, new server sites, and the much-anticipated character transfer service. From the article: "Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available. "

Microsoft's Security Disclosures Come Under Fire 150

Posted by CowboyNeal
from the full-and-we-mean-full dept.
Old Banana writes "Is Microsoft silently fixing security vulnerabilities and deliberately obfuscating details about patches in its monthly security bulletins? Matthew Murphy, a security researcher who has worked closely with the MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center) in the past, is accusing the software maker of 'misleading' customers by not clearly spelling out exactly what is being patched in the MS06-015 bulletin released on April 11."

Are you still an ALCOHOLIC?