Police crack Egg fraud

The National Crime Squad (NCS) has uncovered what is believed to be the first case of attempted Internet bank fraud in the UK. The attempted fraud is believed to have involved bogus applications for accounts with the Internet bank Egg.com, which has emphasised that no money was actually stolen. ...more

German music service backs DRM-free downloads

Germany's leading alternative to iTunes as a source of music downloads has decided to abandon DRM for music from independent labels, with some success according to Jupiter Research. MusicLoad is the most successful ISP music store in Europe; so successful that Apple only recently claimed to be the market leader in Germany. Although it has long added DRM to its downloads in order to secure content from the major record companies, it recently revealed that such copy protection accounts for three quarters of complaints by its customers, noting that DRM 'makes the use of music quite difficult and hinders the development of a mass-market for legal downloads'. ...more

Time Warner sets aside $500 million legal fund over AOL Europe accounts

Time Warner has set aside a $500 million legal war chest to tackle pending Federal investigations into accounting practices related to AOL Europe in the run up to the merger with the ISP. The company says the $500 million is the company's best guess at the amounts needed to resolve these investigations. Time Warner says that some of this cash will be used to settle lawsuits brought by shareholders, although it admits that no official amount for such litigation has been earmarked because yet as it has no idea how much it is likely to come to. ...more

Is CeBIT on the rack?

CeBIT, the world's biggest technology and telecoms trade fair, will be a day shorter from next year in the face of cancellations from key exhibitors such as Nokia and Motorola. Dwindling attendances have forced the fair's organisers to re-evaluate their price structure for exhibitors and orientate themselves more clearly toward trade visitors. CeBIT has faced stiff competition from rival German consumer-electronics show IFA, which is held annually in Berlin, and has been growing as CeBIT shrinks. ...more

'DRM is important' - Microsoft exec

A senior Microsoft executive has joined the debate about the future of DRM by reiterating the company's commitment to developing and licensing DRM technologies. In an interview with Forbes, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, said that it is the company's job to provide 'important' DRM while it is up to content providers to decide whether to employ it. 'Certainly the content providers are the people who determine what the rights are,' he said. ...more