A French appeals court has ruled that movie companies must remove the copy protection from DVDs, and castigated them for inadequately labeling copy-protected movies.

The Paris court reversed an earlier ruling in favor of Le Studio Canal and Films Alain Sarde against consumer group UFC-Que Chosir, reports Afterdawn. The lobby group took up the case of a DVD owner who discovered he was unable to make a copy of the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive to play on a video recorder. This violated the basic rights the DVD owner had to make copies in a family context, the court ruled.

Source: The Register

In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.

The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created. Businesses will also choose whether they want their own technology managers to receive such data when an employee’s machine crashes.

Source: News.com

RealNetworks Inc. plans to unveil on Tuesday a new portable music service for digital music players as part of its subscription service portfolio, a source familiar with the plans said on Monday.

The Seattle-based company, which operates the Rhapsody subscription music service, will now let listeners rent music on a monthly basis that can be stored on a range of supported digital music players.

RealNetworks declined to comment.

The company plans to debut the service at a splashy New York press conference on Tuesday, followed later in the evening with a performance by Sony BMG artist Good Charlotte.

The company also plans to license digital rights management software from Microsoft Corp. the source said. Microsoft’s software, code-named Janus, will disable songs from playing on devices after a customer stops paying.

Only several devices on the market current support the software. They include some models made by Creative Technology Ltd. (CREA.SI: Quote, Profile, Research), Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) and iriver.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft finally told Web developers what they’ve wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards.

In a blog entry posted Friday, a member of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations Portable Network Graphics (PNG), an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a Web page styling standard.

“We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the Web design community,” Chris Wilson, lead program manager for the Web platform in IE, said in reference to support for the PNG standard. “Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that Web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely.”

While Microsoft and critics of its Web browser have focused most of their attention on IE’s security liabilities, the issue of standards support remains crucial to Web developers.

Glitches in IE’s standards support mean that developers have to code separately for IE and for browsers that hew more closely to the standards. IE enjoys about 90 percent browser market share despite losing some points to the Mozilla Foundation’s open-source Firefox browser.

Source: News.com

Netscape pioneers Mike Homer and Marc Andreessen are back on the start-up scene, launching a TiVo-like online network for distributing and viewing public TV, radio and grassroots media.

The free service, called the Open Media Network, is aimed initially at letting traditional public broadcasters and independent filmmakers distribute their work on the Net. But it will also allow ordinary computer users to publish their files.

Part TiVo, part BitTorrent file swapping, the network puts publishers’ content into a peer-to-peer distribution network that could help lower bandwidth costs substantially. The service then creates a TV-like program directory that potential viewers can use to find and subscribe to automatic downloads of individual shows.

Source: News.com