Copyright Office gives Lexmark-duping cartridges the all clear

Static Control Components (SCC) is happily totting up damages to present to Lexmark following the US Copyright Office's decision that its printer-fooling microchips do not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). William 'Skip' London, General Counsel for SCC, said that the Office found that 'the DMCA allows aftermarket companies to develop software for the purpose of allowing the functional operability of remanufactured toner cartridges and printers.' The company fell into Lexmark's bad books for selling its Smartek chip that duped the printers into believing that recycled cartridges were genuine Lexmark ones. ...more

German chancellor calls for 3G rethink

Billions of euros of debt have been incurred to win 3G licences, but opinions on the matter are shifting in Europe. The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, has now added his voice to the call for a rethink. Speaking at the huge CeBIT technology trade show in Hannover, Schroeder applauded a recent decision by German telecom companies to bury their rivalries in order to pool the costs involved in a new communications infrastructure. ...more

DRM stops Bafta judges viewing films

DRM continues to backfire on its proponents. Steven Spielberg's latest picture, Munich, may fail to make the Bafta nominations after judges were unable to play the DVD sent to them. The disc has regional encoding, rendering it unplayable in UK DVD players. ...more

Yahoo! to launch desktop search in the New Year

Internet portal Yahoo! says it will release a desktop search in the New Year some three months after Google. Desktop search is the latest battleground between the major search engines as they seek to gain and retain customer loyalty as search itself increasingly becomes commoditised. Desktop search indexes the contents of a user's hard disk including email and files and presents them as part of the search results when a search query is requested. ...more

IDF Fall 2003: Intel introduces Compute Blade SBXL52

News on the enterprise front has been quieter this IDF (the Itanium 2 was launched at the last Spring IDF), with mobile processing hogging most of the limelight. There are a few things of note, however. For example, Intel has introduced its Enterprise Blade Server family, the first product of which is the Intel Server Compute Blade SBXL52. ...more