Gowers considered cutting copyright lifespan

Andrew Gowers has revealed that he considered cutting the 50-year copyright limit on sound recordings in his government-sponsored review of UK intellectual property laws and only decided to recommend that the status quo be retained because it was 'politically prudent' to do so. Gowers told the Out-law podcast that, rather than concede the music industry's demand for longer protection up to 95 years, evidence submitted to the review suggested that there was a strong case for deciding that 50 years is too long. 'We certainly considered it, and if you look at the report that came from the academics that we commissioned to examine the arguments and examine the evidence they also argued very robustly that 50 years could be arguably more than enough,' Gowers said. ...more

PC Pro tests the brand new ATi graphics chips

ATi has announced the RADEON 9800, 9600 and 9200 chips, with the former two supporting the latest versions of the DirectX and OpenGL graphics standards. The top drawer chip is the 9800, upon which the likes of Hercules is basing its 3D Prophet 9800 Pro card. It boasts a 256-bit DDR memory interface and 8-pixel pipeline engine, along with programmable shader engines, full-speed full floating point precision and advanced filtering technologies (Anisotropic Filtering up to X16 and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing up to 6x). ...more

Copyright holders welcome new generation of P2P services

It wasn't so long ago when the phrase 'peer-to-peer' (P2P) was practically a curse word in the music and movie industries. But in the past month, two new services have emerged to utilize the technology for the legal, protected distribution of content - specifically video. One of them is BitTorrent, which developed the technology that at one point was used for one-third of all P2P traffic on the Internet. ...more

Mobile phones ring up the downloads

Mobile phone downloads have hit their stride, with declining prices fuelling a massive growth. Research firm Mintel predicts that this year, mobile phone downloads will number 760m in the UK alone, some 25 times the figure for 2002. This will create a market worth some three-quarters of a billion pounds. ...more

IT stocks recover in results week

In the week that Apple will announce its latest set of quarterly results, IT companies' stock prices rose to their pre-11 September level. Despite the current downturn in the computer market and fears that the events of 11 September may precipitate an economic recession, shares in the leading PC manufacturers have returned to or exceeded the level they were at before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Apple, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard are back where they were, while Dell's price is now at a higher level. ...more