—The Filter: Peter Gabriel-backed music recommendation technology developer The Filter is moving into the DVD market. The company has signed up to provide Belgian online DVD home rental service DVDPost with its own movie recommendation widget. DVDPost has been running in France and the Benelux countries since 2002 and has 20,000 subscribers. The Filter's investors are Gabriel's Real World Group and Eden Ventures. —Spanish DTT: As global Freeview roll-outs continue, Spain's government says it wants its media industry to offer just one brand of digital terrestrial pay-TV box. The Ministry Of Industry has established a working party to develop a single brand to avoid consumer confusion. RapidTVNews. —Virgin Trains: Two years after it was supposed to be introduced, Virgin Trains has finally begun an on-board wi-fi service one its West Coast Mainline Pendolino service, which accounts for 70 percent of its trains. The service uses wi-fi hotspots from T-Mobile, so anyone who isn't a T-Mobile customer will have pay a minimum of £4.99 for one hour's access. Via Theregister.co.uk. Join ContentNext, along with Social Media and Mobile visionaries, for our third annual EconSM Conference in San Francisco on May 14th. Registration includes admission for our post-conference mixer. Register at www.econsm.com for the May ...

HarvardBiz: The Tricky Truth About Downsizing http://ow.ly/4DtO

HarvardBiz: The Tricky Truth About Downsizing http://bit.ly/b1kdH

It seems that opposition is mounting against the return of France’s ‘Three Strikes Law’ (Also known as Hadopi). Today, there’s a dramatic increase to condemn the three strikes law from the people rights holders claim to defend - artists. A blog posting that has already translated the news from French to English details the latest developments. The question they ask is, ‘who gets to control the future?’ “We,” the blog post begins, “the world of science-fiction, writers, translators, illustrators, critics, commentators, essayists, bookshop-owners, bloggers, publishers and collection editors, must express through this text our opposition to the Creation and Internet law.” That’s quite a list of people who oppose the new law. “It would be a truism to state that science-fiction concerns itself with the future and that many of its participants have denounced the possible, even probable, pitfalls (dérives) of industrial and technological societies;” the posting continues, “George Orwell’s name comes immediately to one’s lips, but also that of John Brunner, Norman Spinrad, Michel Jeury, J.-G. Ballard, Frederik Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and many others besides.” This law, which we are told will protect artists’ rights and copyright in general, seems to us a Trojan horse, deployed to try and establish control ...

Pirate Bay guilty verdict surges membership to over 42,000, and leads pollsters to predict it will surpass the 4% threshold necessary to get a Swedish seat in the assembly. The conviction of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site for facilitating copyright infringement continues to reverberate in that country. Many youth have been angered over what they see as an intrusion by foreign, primarily US-based, entertainment industry conglomerates into the private affairs of a sovereign country. They understand that copyright laws were essentially written in a world before digital content that no longer exists and paralyze the ability of citizens to freely communicate and interact with pone another. Adding fuel to the fire was the recent disclosure that the presiding judge in the Pirate Bay trial, Judge Tomas Norström, is an active member of several pro-copyright groups, rendering his decision anything but unbiased in the eyes of many. The Pirate Party, an advocate of copyright law reform, has seen its membership surge since the trial ended, rising from a little over 10,000 to well over 42,000. “We young people have a whole platform on the internet, where we have all our social contacts - it is there that we live,” said Malin Littorin-Ferm of the ...