Russia gets tough over online copyrights

Owners of Russian sites selling digital music face the prospect of up to five years in gaol after the country's president, Vladimir Putin, approved new copyright laws. The new laws give work published on the Internet the same copyright protection as physical books, videos and CDs. Sites such as AllofMp3. ...more

One in three software installs are pirate copies

Over one third of software packages installed in 2005 were pirate copies. The trade amounted to more that $34 billion according to research carried out by analysts IDC for the Business Software Alliance. On the positive side, the worldwide drive against piracy appears to have stemmed the tide in some of the world's emerging markets such as China, Russia, India and in Central/Eastern Europe and the Middle East & Africa. ...more

Apple rivals claim iTunes is doomed

Two of the main rivals to Apple's ongoing dominance of the music downloads market believe that the iTunes model, where users pay $1 per song, has no future. Both Napster and Yahoo! are staking their futures on subscription models, where customers pay a fixed fee each month for the right to stream, but not download, an unlimited number of songs. The drawback is that these cannot be copied onto a portable device such as an iPod, but new technology from Microsoft will change that. ...more

Adoption of Vista climbs 500 per cent - surveys

Adoption of Microsoft's flagship operating system has risen more than 500 per cent in a month, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. With a consumer launch at the end of January, February has been the first full month of Vista in public. The business version was launched at the end of November 2006. ...more

MatchCasts for World Cup 2002

Yahoo! promises 'revolutionary' coverage for the forthcoming World Cup in Korea and Japan... ...more