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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Pink Slips at Big Blue?

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

StealDVD? Well, You Were Asking for It…

Just hours after RealNetworks filed a preemptive lawsuit against the major Hollywood studios to avoid outcry over its RealDVD DVD-ripping software, Hollywood responded in kind. The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court in Los Angeles for a temporary restraining order to halt the sales of RealDVD, arguing it illegally bypasses DVD copyright protections. Said the MPAA, “RealNetworks’ RealDVD should be called StealDVD.”

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Sue. Rent. Rip. Return.

Turns out RealNetworks Inc.’s new DVD ripper RealDVD is as legal as its creator is litigious. Real debuted RealDVD this morning and along with it a preemptive lawsuit against the Hollywood interests that will inevitably attempt to litigate it into oblivion. Brought against the DVD Copy Control Association and a who’s-who of major studios, the suit asks the court to rule that RealDVD complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Dear Fellow Stockholder: Blah Blah Blah …

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Amazon Announces Video Service You May Actually Want to Use

About the best thing to be said about Amazon Unbox, the mediocre, odiously restrictive, video download service the retailer launched last year, is that it was … er … Windows-only, I guess. Which, obviously isn’t saying much.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

New From Google: Google Undersea Data Cable

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Monday, February 25, 2008

ABC Announces “Must Flee TV”

Leave it to ABC to devise a service that offers all the convenience of video-on-demand with all the annoyance and vapidity of broadcast TV in one joyless package. This morning the network and its affiliates announced fast-forward-disabled video on demand, which prevents viewers from bypassing commercials.

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

CES: Comast CEO Announces 4 MegaBatman-Per-Minute Internet

“Comcast 3.0.” That was the subject of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show today. And what is “Comcast 3.0?” Well, like Web 2.0 and 3.0, it’s a marketing term–in Comcast’s case, one for its transformation from “broadband” provider to a “wideband” provider.
In 2008, said Roberts, Comcast will begin upgrading its [...]

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Friday, November 23, 2007

Burst Case Scenarios

Burst has added another notch to its patent-infringement settlement belt. The scrappy three-man company, which once beat a $60 million settlement out of Microsoft over charges that the software giant had stolen its streaming media technology, has managed to squeeze a few million out of Apple as well.
Bringing an end to an often contentious [...]

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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

My DVD Business! It’s Melting, Melting … Melting

Time was, when a movie bombed at the box office, Hollywood studios could always slap it onto a DVD, ship it off to retail outlets and make some or all of their money back.
No longer. The salad days when you could rush dross like “Police Academy: Mission to Moscow” and “From Justin to Kelly” out [...]

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Thursday, August 9, 2007

Next Blockbuster Initiative: Renting Copies of Netflix Business Plan

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Movielink Tapped to Star in Blockbuster Remake of Netflix Business Plan

From top to bottom, Blockbuster is deliberately and willfully infringing on our patented methods. Netflix invented a 100 percent better mousetrap that Blockbuster copied.
- Netflix spokesperson Steve Swasey, April 5, 2006
Apparently, Blockbuster isn’t as hopelessly tethered to its VHS rental-business past as you might think. Yesterday, the video-rental retailer acquired studio-owned movie download [...]

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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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