French court finds against DVD copy protection

A French court has ruled that copy-protected DVDs infringe consumers' rights. The Paris Court of Appeal decided that the Content Scrambling System prevents French consumers from exercising their fair usage rights. The case was brought by a person who wanted to make a VHS copy of a DVD for his mother to see, as she did not have a DVD player. ...more

Branson breathes life into Virgin Mobile, NTL merger

Flamboyant entrepreneur Richard Branson has offered to forgo a ?42 million payday in order to finalise a deal with cable company NTL. Last month an $817m bid for the Virgin Mobile phone business was rejected by the board even though Branson, who owns a 71.3 per cent stake in the business had given the deal his backing. ...more

Giove satellite sends first signals

The Giove satellite has sent its first signals back to earth. The successful transmission and reception of the signals means that the European Galileo project is officially in business. Passing the milestone means another step in creating a global satellite navigation system that is ten times more accurate than the one currently in use. ...more

Home Page shuts down

FileMaker is to discontinue its Home Page Web authoring software on 1 February 2001. Take-up of the software has been small and FileMaker has decided that the large investment required to bring Home Page up-to-date was not commensurate with its limited distribution. FileMaker now intends to concentrate its Web activities around publishing databases on the Internet, allowing users to export content that can easily be incorporated by the leading Web authoring applications. ...more

Roxio bundles photo and video apps in latest authoring suite

Roxio brings its all its multimedia burning and authoring applications - covering photos, videos and music - together into the Roxio Creator 7 suite. The Easy CD & DVD Creator software is packaged together with PhotoSuite 7 Platinum and VideoWave 7 Pro. It will also have integrated links to the Roxio-owned Napster when it finally emerges again in Europe. ...more