New BT service allows copyright owners to set digital music rights in minutes

Musicians and copyright owners are to be given unprecedented control of their digital music. BT and media technology company Blueprint have combined to provide a new way in which owners can work directly with online music services. Under the Open Royalty Gateway component of the deal, copyright owners can use Windows Media Player to set the rules by which their music is offered to the retail channel. ...more

UK PTO workshop divides lawyers and engineers over patents

The extent of the division between attorneys and software engineers over software patents was crystallised at a series of workshops run by the UK Patent Office. Delegates comprised a mix of patent attorneys and software engineers and were tasked with testing a number of patent applications against different definitions of the 'technical contribution' criteria. It is this test that determines the approval of software patents in current law and within the formative CII directive on the issue at the EU. ...more

Thread Checker 1.0 released for Pentium processors

Finding bugs in computer programs can be difficult at the best of times, but multi-threaded programs provide a particular challenge. It is for this reason Intel has released debugging support for its Hyper-Threading technology. The software tool Thread Checker 1. ...more

Microsoft suspends IE changes

Microsoft has suspended planned changes to Internet Explorer, having decided that there is every chance that a patent on the embedding of interactive content in Web pages may be overturned. The US Patent Office is currently re-examining the patent, which is held by Eolas. Microsoft issued a brief statement saying, 'The action by the Patent Office may result in the cancellation of the Eolas patent. ...more

High-definition TV promised for Freeview this summer

The UK's four terrestrial broadcasters will offer Freeview digital viewers in London their first taste of high-definition TV this summer with a series of trial programmes. They are looking for 500 volunteers in the capital to test the service, known as DTT HD, which will include games from the World Cup in Germany. 'This trial will allow us to evaluate the technology and give us valuable insight into viewer attitudes to HD, helping to show the possibilities for HD broadcasts over DTT post-switch-over,' said Simon Fell, the controller of emerging technologies at ITV. ...more