The ever-shrinking record album–its latest iteration being the compact disc–just got a lot more compact, or shall we say, micro.

Backed by four major music labels, SanDisk on Monday announced a new physical music format dubbed SlotMusic that s essentially an entire album on a MicroSD compact memory card. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are among the retailers that have already signed on to start selling the cards for the upcoming holiday season.

With CD sales continuing to flounder, this latest effort to boost physical media sales is aimed at users of the millions of cell phones and MP3 players with MicroSD slots. They can insert the card right into the slot and immediately hear the music. The card will also come with a USB sleeve so it can be plugged in directly to any USB-enabled computer.

SlotMusic cards will be sold without digital rights management restrictions and in the form of MP3 files from EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group.

Amazon.com said on Monday that its subsidiary, Internet Movie Database, would allow users to watch feature films and TV shows for no charge on its Web site, imdb.com.

Over 6,000 titles will be available, the company said, citing recent episodes of popular television shows like “24″ and “Heroes” or classic films like “Some Like It Hot.”

IMDB also said that the first episodes of new fall television shows like “Lipstick Jungle” and “30 Rock” will be available for free viewing before their first air date.

In what is likely to be a major shift in the company’s strategy, peer-to-peer startup Joost is going to stop making its desktop client.

The decision to suspend the client is likely to be announced soon. The company is going to a browser-only strategy, in which much of its content is going to be available through a browser-based player. Joost, will release a small plug-in that would embed itself in the browser and allow you to grab files using the P2P technologies. The web client is likely to have better quality than average video sites.

People have been avidly feeding music CDs into their computers for years, ripping digital copies of albums and transferring the files to their other computers and mobile devices.

This has not happened nearly as much with DVDs, for both practical and legal reasons. But that may soon change.

On Monday, RealNetworks, the digital media company in Seattle, will introduce RealDVD, a $30 software program for Windows computers that allows users to easily make a digital copy of an entire DVD — down to the extras and artwork from the box.

The software, which will go on sale on Real.com and Amazon.com this month, will allow buyers to make one copy of a DVD, playable only on the computer where it was made. The user can transfer that copy to up to five other Windows computers, but only by buying additional copies of the software for $20 each. The software does not work on high-definition Blu-ray discs, which the movie industry has even more aggressively sought to protect from illicit copying.

Now if you ask me, RealNetworks did not learn anything about the bad feeling people have with regards to DRM. Who on earth would want to buy a software to rip DVDs that limits the user on how to use the copy, when they can get a perfectly good and easy programs free or comercial that do not impose such restrictions.

Firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore will release his latest documentary exclusively on the Internet for free on September 23, eschewing a traditional theatrical rollout, he said on Thursday.

“Slacker Uprising” documents Moore’s 62-city tour of key swing states during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, when he tried to convince young non-voters to give voting a shot.

“This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans,” Moore said in a statement. “The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November.”

“Slacker Uprising,” budgeted modestly at over $2 million, was funded by Moore along with movie executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who hold international rights, said a spokesman for Moore.

Fans of such NBC shows as Knight Rider, Chuck, and 30 Rock will be able to see their season premieres first on Hulu.

NBC Universal, which created Hulu in partnership with News Corp., decided to debut the season premiers on the Web video.

While this is the first time that Hulu has streamed season premieres from a major network, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. NBC.com did it last year and according to Chris Albrecht over at Newteevee, HBO released Flight of the Conchords on the Web last year as well.

Still, the trend of premiering TV shows on the Web continues to illustrates how much TV networks and cable channels are beginning to respect the Internet as a distribution channel.

A blogger suspected of streaming songs from the unreleased Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy” on his Web site was arrested Wednesday and appeared in court, where his bail was set at $10,000.

FBI agents arrested 27-year-old Kevin Cogill on Wednesday morning on suspicion of violating federal copyright laws. Cogill appeared in court in the afternoon wearing a T-shirt; his girlfriend sat court and afterward said, “Rally the troops,” but declined further comment.

Federal authorities say Cogill posted nine unreleased Guns N’ Roses songs on his Web site in June. The songs were later removed.

In later posts, Cogill wrote that the FBI had questioned him and asked his readers if any of them knew a good attorney. He was represented Wednesday by a federal public defender.

According to an arrest affidavit, Cogill admitted to agents that he posted the songs on his Web site. Prosecutors said Wednesday the leak could result in a “significant” financial loss for the band.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has backed away from a DMCA take-down request to remove a YouTube video of a Tibetan protest at the Chinese consulate in New York.

The video in question (see below) was clearly not an example of copyright infringement. YouTube and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) both pushed back against the IOC, which then withdrew their complaint. As the EFF notes, however, the inaccurate title of the video was “Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony,” so in all likelihood, the IOC was filing DMCA notices for Olympics content, which has been springing up on YouTube faster than they can take it down.

Anthony Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project, was impressed that YouTube went beyond the call of duty in pushing back at the IOC. With the sheer volume of DMCA requests that YouTube must be fielding with the Olympics, taking the time to double-check the content is certainly impressive. At the same time, however, it highlights how much work YouTube has to do in terms of policing copyrighted content. The number of legal notices they have to respond to consume time and resources that might be put to better use.

Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

This week, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) is trying to broker a last-minute deal between webcasters and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies. The negotiations could reduce the per-song rate set by the federal panel last year.

Pioneer launched a 400GB Blu-ray disc just last month, but the firm’s already smashed its own capacity ceiling by unveiling a 500GB successor.

The latest disc tops the 400GB disc’s measly 16 layers by adding a further four layers, resulting in 20 layers each with a 25GB capacity.

Brendan Sheridan, Multimedia Division Product Manager at Pioneer, said that 25GB and 50GB Blu-ray discs might be enough for current demands, but that Pioneer envisages the need for “far greater capacities as HD streaming in particular becomes commonplace and users build larger files of digital content”.

Clips and highlights of Olympic events are to be made available on the video-sharing site YouTube, owned by Google, under an agreement with the International Olympic Committee, the IOC said in a statement.

“The IOC’s priority is to ensure that as many people as possible get to experience the magic of the Olympic Games and the inspirational sporting achievements of the Olympic athletes,” says Timo Lumme, IOC director of television and marketing.

“For the first time in Olympic history we will have complete global online coverage, and the IOC will have its own broadcast channel (which) will make fantastic Olympic footage available where young generations of sports fans are already going for online entertainment.” The Games open on Friday.

IOC said it wanted to tap into the youth market that Youtube carries with it. It will be offering three hours per day to viewers which will be a compilation of all the day’s action, as well as Games highlights.

Online pictures and reports of the Games will be available in 77 territories across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including India, South Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia, the IOC said.

The Video On Demand (VOD) clips start on August 6. The IOC’s channel will be available at www.youtube.com/beijing2008, but will be blocked within each territory served.

The service is meant to bring the Olympics to countries where digital rights have not been sold or have been acquired on a non-exclusive basis.

The financial deal is tiny compared to the traditional TV rights deals and completely different in nature given that essentially it is using the Youtube platform, the IOC said. There will be no promotional rights nor use of logos.

A U.S. appeals court ruled that Cablevision Systems Corp may go forward with its plan to introduce a new digital video recorder service that film studios and television networks had said violated their copyrights.

Reversing a lower-court ruling, the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said Cablevision’s proposed new service “would not directly infringe plaintiffs’ exclusive rights to reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works.”

The ruling could have a huge impact on the relationship between pay-TV operators and programmers, who are concerned that cheaper DVR functionality will lead to accelerating advertising viewership losses.

Cablevision appealed a March 2007 ruling in which it lost a battle to introduce a network-based DVR system, called Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder, or RS-DVR, which would allow subscribers to store TV programs on the cable operator’s computer servers.

By contrast, typical DVRs store programs on individual hard drives that are part of customers’ set-top boxes.

The case was brought by film studios and television networks including Time Warner Inc, News Corp, CBS Corp and Walt Disney Co.

The ruling could allow cable operators to save money by reduced capital spending on DVR set-top boxes as well as installation costs.

“The ruling is a huge win for cable operators,” said Craig Moffett, analyst at Bernstein Research. “Cable operators would no longer need to provide a unique piece of hardware for each individual subscriber in order to offer DVR functionality.