A security bug in Adobe’s software means users were able to access Amazon’s video streaming service without payment, Reuters reports. The flaw was a rare example of a bug that gives extra functionality to users.
In a trade off between usability and security, Adobe technology permits the popular option of using video player verification to control [...]

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The NPD Group released numbers yesterday that made clear DVDs still dominate the movie landscape while consumers are spending just a teeny, tiny sliver on digital downloads. But don’t sound the alarm downloads are not dead in the water.
But this number doesn’t matter too much. DVDs are firmly entrenched in the U.S. entertainment scheme; people [...]

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Movie studios are studying how they might undercut the disk business in favor of digital downloads, and there’s a report from ContentAgenda.com that moviemakers may release movies to cable and satellite companies before they even appear on disk.
As it is now, a few movies make it to cable systems on the same day they are [...]

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Egypts Internet situation is in dire straits after two undersea cables in
the Mediterranean were accidentally severed yesterday, cutting off much of
the countrys access to the outside world. 70 percent of the nations Internet
has been disconnected, according to Egypts Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology, with
phone calls to Europe and the [...]

read full story of "Egypt says lay off music, movie downloads after ‘Net outage"

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have [...]

read full story of "MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study"

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.
In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth [...]

read full story of "MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study"

DRM on music may be dying, but network filtering of copyrighted material is alive and well. In fact, over the next few months, two different filtering initiatives from Big Content could both come to fruition, bringing the magic of Big Brother to colleges and ISPs near you. Its still a contested issue, but the situation [...]

read full story of "2008 shaping up to be “Year of Filters” at colleges, ISPs"

LAS VEGASComcast CEO Brian Roberts took to the stage this morning at CES to talk up his companys plan to offer HD movie downloads in four minutes. Eventually. In 2008, Comcast will begin rolling out the DOCSIS 3.0 protocol throughout its network, and the company hopes to offer speeds of up to 100Mbps over the [...]

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Companies that want to sell online content in the European Union know that the common market doesnt apply to everything; selling digital music or offering movie downloads in Europe means negotiating separate licensing agreements in different countries and launching multiple storefronts. Today, the European Commission announced a plan to create a single, European-wide market for [...]

read full story of "EU: one license, DRM scheme to rule them all"

Pop quiz: what music and movie downloading app is installed on over one third of the worlds computers, according to a new report from Digital Music News and media tracking specialist BigChampagne? The answer isnt iTunes, nor is it any other DRM-encumbered media program that has been blessed by Big Content. The answer is LimeWire*, [...]

read full story of "$40K to fill an iPod? One third of PCs use LimeWire instead (Updated)"