Blaming illegal file sharing and streaming, Sony Pictures is hinting that they may stop selling DVDs in Spain.

In reality this appears to be just posturing, perhaps intended to put pressure on the Spanish government to criminalize all illegal copying. Under current Spanish law copyright infringement is only illegal if it's done for profit.

According to the LA Times, Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton said, "Spain is on the brink of no longer being a viable home-entertainment market for us."

Spanish Minister of Culture, and former filmmaker, Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde appears to be firmly on the side of movie studios. He's currently backing legislation that would make it possible for the government to shut down websites for even providing links to unauthorized movie or music downloads with no judicial oversight.

He also apparently believes the people of Spain are simpletons who don't understand the concept of intellectual property. He has said "in Mediterranean countries, it's hard for people to understand that immaterial things can be worth as much as material things."

It seems unlikely that Sony Pictures would give up all revenue from DVD sales in Spain simply to make a point about piracy. And if they did decide to make such a poorly thought out business decision it certainly wouldn't stop downloaders from getting their movies through unauthorized sources.

If anything, it would increase unauthorized downloads while drastically reducing studio profits in Spain. If Sony wants to destroy their business that's between them and their shareholders.

But I would hate to be the executive responsible for explaining the decision to analysts at the next quarterly earnings call.

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EMI, one of the "Big 4" record labels, appears to be on the brink of being taken over by banking behemoth Citigroup after failing to sell off its North American artist distribution rights to other labels.

The label was looking to sell those artist rights to Sony and UMG for $300 million USD, but the negotiations broke down after the two sides could not agree on the price.

EMI, for its part, has a catalog with mega-stars such as Coldplay, Pink Floyd and some of The Beatles tracks.

Now, EMI must raise $180 million USD by June 15th, or face being taken over by creditor Citigroup, which will likely break up the label and sell all its assets to the highest bidders.

EMI was purchased in late 2007, right before "the Great Recession," for over $7 billion USD by Terra Firma Partners, which now owes Citi over $5 billion over the course of the following years.

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Christopher Scott, accomplice to the largest heist of credit card numbers, ever, has been sentenced to seven years in prison this week, following buddy Albert Gonzalez (pictured), the mastermind behind the scheme.

Gonzalez was convicted of stealing and reselling over 170 million credit and ATM card numbers, and received 20 years in prison for his role in over 20 counts of identity theft, wire fraud, computer fraud and conspiracy that led to $200 million in losses for banks, insurers and retail companies.

Scott was pegged as a "key lieutenant" to Gonzalez, with Gonzalez allegedly paying up to $400,000 to Scott for his services over the course of their years as thieves.

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In a decision that will likely take down the giant torrent indexer, a judge has ordered IsoHunt to remove all torrents linking to infringing content.

The massive site has over 30 million unique users per month, and was one of the largest public trackers behind The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

The MPAA had sued IsoHunt in 2007, and last year a judge ruled against the indexer, saying it created a venue for illegal file sharing.

Writes Judge Stephen Wilson: "It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs' works through defendants' websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market for consumers to purchase access to the same works." Continuing Wired), Wilson says: "Upwards of 95 percent of all dot-torrent files downloaded from defendants' websites return infringing material or works at least highly likely to be infringing."

Gary Fung, the owner of IsoHunt, must now remove all infringing content by April 12th, as well as start filtering against keywords. "It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine," says Fung of the request.

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As the headline states, the extremely popular Apple App Store is now available through Facebook as a group you can become a "fan" of.

The link let's you see the top game, both free and paid, as well as search for titles you may already know about.

There is a "Featured" category and a "Discussion" tab, which is full of user comments on games and other apps.

If you are a Facebook user and need your fix of apps you can check the Store here: http://www.facebook.com/AppStore

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MartinSchirr from AndroidForums has compiled a build of Fennec (Firefox Mobile) to run on Android devices, and has documented the browser running on video.

This is all the info provided (he's German), but the videos are more informative:
"maybe it is interesting for you.
I compile Fennec for Android.
It is running on my Motorola Milestone.
I made 2 Videos and a site with further information."

A thread for those testing: [APP] Fennec (Firefox) for Android

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The Hollywood Reporter is saying today that over 20,000 individuals have been sued for alleged illegal downloading of movies by the under-the-radar US Copyright Group, a firm based in the nation's capital.

Making the suits different from those in the past is that these suits are over small independent films, for example the films "Steam Experiment," "Far Cry," "Uncross the Stars," "Gray Man" and "Call of the Wild 3D."

All of the users were "caught" downloading the films from torrent trackers.

The Group says there are up to 30,000 more suits coming, for five different films.

The users were caught thanks to new German technology dubbed Guardaley IT, which "allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents." The software captures IP addresses when a user begins downloading, and then back checks the files to make sure it is the correct copyright protected movie.

We will certainly keep you updated.

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Adobe's Flash is one of the most used plug-ins available for current browsers as it allows for support of a good number of videos, games and other content on the Internet.

Google says the plug-in's interface is limited in capability, however, and varies depending on what OS or browser you are using, which leads in turn to security holes and an overall reduction in performance. They want to change that.

Says the Chromium blog:

"That's why we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API. This new API aims to address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in model. There is much to do and we're eager to get started.

As a first step, we've begun collaborating with Adobe to improve the Flash Player experience in Google Chrome. Today, we're making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.

We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:


* When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.

* Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome's auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.

* With Adobe's help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome's "sandbox" to web pages with Flash content.


Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser's HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.

These improvements will encourage innovation in both the HTML and plug-in landscapes, improving the web experience for users and developers alike. To read more about this effort, you can read this post on the Flash Player blog.

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Microsoft has announced today that they will be releasing a 64GB model of the Zune HD media device, double the largest capacity of currently available units.

The device will be available in Platinum, Black, Blue, Red, Green, Purple and Magenta when it goes on sale on April 12th.

As an added bonus, the company is slashing the price of the 32GB and 16GB models, dropping the MSRP to $270 and $200, a $20 cut.

The Zune HD was recently in the headlines when Microsoft announced that the much-anticipated v4.5 firmware was "coming soon," bringing with it SmartDJ and native Xvid support.

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A handful of tech journalists and bloggers have been given iPads to try out and the first reviews have appeared. They are overwhelmingly positive.

Most reviewers praised the iPad's speed. That's understandable considering it has a much faster CPU than any generation of the iPhone or iPod Touch, while most of the apps available for it now were actually designed with those devices in mind.

The user interface also got its share of kudos. The Houston Chronicle's Bob LeVitus calls the on screen keyboard "eminently usable," adding that in landscape mode he can almost touch type on it.

Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times called the iPad "a computer that's designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations."

But that leaves us to think about what other considerations might be important. Perhaps the biggest is what consumers will expect from a device priced about the same as a budget laptop.

As all the reviewers make clear, the iPad is no substitute for a laptop.

Everyone was quite pleased with its multimedia playback and e-book reader capabilities. But they were equally unanimous about its unsuitability for things like working with word processing or creating spreadsheets.

And then there's the content. If you're looking for e-books there will be plenty available, including not just commercial titles from big publishers, but also a number of public domain books from Project Gutenberg.

One potentially huge problem on the e-book front is the insistence by major publishers on controlling the price so as not to compete with their physical products. We've seen this strategy before with record labels.

In fact it was just this sort of paranoia that made it so difficult for anyone to start an online music store to cater to all the MP3 consumers.

Of course Apple was able to capitalize on MP3's popularity by picking a pricepoint for songs that satisfied the labels. But e-books don't have the built in customer base that MP3 already enjoyed prior to the launch of the iTunes store.

Apple isn't just trying to sell e-books. They're helping to create the market. As good an e-book reader as the iPad apparently is, if people aren't sold on buying books for it that's not going to do much for sales.

Of course it's an iPod as well, which means you can play your audio and video files on it. And according to all the reviews it's an excellent video player. It can also play video from a number of internet sources, most notably YouTube.

On the other hand, if you're looking to catch up on your favorite TV show on Hulu you're out of luck.

The iPad's lack of Flash support has been well documented and exhaustively debated. The good news is there are quite a few content providers moving to HTML5 just to support the iPad.

But there are still many others sticking with Flash, both for video and other content. There's no question your web surfing experience will be more limited with an iPad than a desktop, laptop or even a netbook.

Reviewers' hyperbole aside, the iPad's success will depend heavily on two things.

The first will be how much people are willing to pay for what amounts to a big iPod Touch with an e-book reader built-in. Despite numerous predictions this is something that is simply unknowable right now.

It's easy to say the iPad will succeed because it's a good product, but good products come and go all the time because people don't want or need them. It's equally easy to predict it will fail because people don't care about e-books and want Flash support.

The reality is the market for the iPad is unknown right now, and will be until they've been on sale for a while.

Which brings us to the other X factor. How will Apple respond to consumers?

Despite widespread public perception to the contrary, Apple is capable of adapting their strategy when necessary. The iPhone is a perfect example of this.

Barely more than two months after the original iPhone launched they slashed prices by $200. When the iPhone 3G debuted a year later they copied jailbreakers and opened the App Store.

At that time they also changed their business model for carriers because they were having a hard time getting carriers to agree to revenue sharing deals like they have with AT&T.

Even if sales of the first generation iPad aren't very good, they can still make it a success if they listen to customers.

You can read the reviews for yourself on websites for The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, PC Magazine, Boing Boing and TheRoot.

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As part of an effort to update patent law, New Zealand legislators have proposed a bill which would make it impossible to patent software. If it becomes law it would no doubt cause friction with US ACTA negotiators, who are pushing to make software patents standard internationally.

Currently they are recognized in just a few countries, including the US and Japan. Ironically there is a good chance that the court decision which started the software patent mess in the US has recently been reinterpreted, potentially invalidating nearly all of them.

Along with business processes, software has been the most controversial patent subject matter for several years. It's also behind much of the current smartphone patent war. If you own a phone with a touch screen, but not multi-touch, you can thank a software patent for it.

Other notable software patents include Amazon.com's infamous one-click patent for e-commerce websites and Netflix's patent on their queue system.

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