Quark keynote addresses industry problems

Quark's keynote address at the Seybold conference in San Francisco focused on ways of dealing with the current downturn in the publishing industry. Jurgen Kurtz, vice president of product management, reminded his audience that the publishing industry is having to cope with advertising revenues down as much as 70 per cent, meaning that companies are being forced to cut staffing levels in order to keep costs down and re-purpose as much content as possible. QuarkXPress, he said, is the ideal tool for re-purposing content and the forthcoming version 5 is very much focused on making this process as automatic and simple as possible. ...more

US news agency sues YouTube

A US video news agency is suing YouTube for allowing users to upload video footage shot by the agency. The Los Angeles News Service claims that YouTube breached its copyright on several occasions, with one clip viewed more than 1,000 times in a single week. 'The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader's idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff's copyrighted works,' said Robert Tur, the agency's owner. ...more

Brit named Chairman of Sony

In a surprise move, Sony Corporation has appointed Sir Howard Stringer as the new Chairman and Group CEO. This is the first time that a non-Japanese has been put in charge of a company that has an almost iconic status in its home country. The move is part of a major shake-up in the Sony boardroom with seven members stepping down or moving to other parts of the Corporation. ...more

P2P activity continues to flourish

P2P activity continued to rise throughout 2005 hitting record levels in December, according to file sharing research firm BigChampagne. Worldwide there were an average 9.5 million simultaneous users, two million more than a year earlier. ...more

Pine launches new MP3 CD player

Throw away your Sony Discman and get ready to convert your favourite CDs into MP3 format, with the launch of a new CD player from Pine. The SM-300T will be available from February and can play both normal audio CDs and discs encoded with MP3 files. The unit is silver in colour and spherical in design and features a remote control unit attached to the headphone lead. ...more