Ah, the poor dears. It seems that YouTube is infringing their intellectual property.
The English Premier League is to sue video-sharing site YouTube for alleged copyright infringement.
The football organisation said YouTube had “knowingly misappropriated” its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site…
Tut, tut.
From GMSV…
Yahoo stock is up more than 15 percent today after a New York Post report that Microsoft has formally renewed its effort to take over the Sunnyvale Internet giant at a price tag of $50 billion or more.
Many see the proposed takeover as a reaction by the Redmond, Wash. software sovereign to ever-increasing concerns about keeping up with the Googles, particularly after losing a recent bidding battle for online advertising specialist DoubleClick. With Google developing Internet-based software squarely challenging the dominance of Microsoft’s Office Suite, some think Microsoft has little choice but to move quickly and authoritatively.
Responding to such speculation last May, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told the Mercury News: “My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance,” adding that it would not be smart to sell “your right arm while keeping your left.” Yahoo is thus far keeping quiet about today’s report.
Assuming some kind of agreement is reached, it’s all but certain to face heavy antitrust scrutiny. As blogger Vindu Goel points out, the critical question for regulators will be whether the government should allow a company with a monopoly in one field of technology to boost its position to fight another company with a growing monopoly in another field.
Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link to the original NY Post scoop.
Not mine, alas, but found on the Web while looking for something else. Ah, the marvels of PhotoShop.
Doug Stewart is not amused by the Digger’s revolt over the AACS DVD key.
To put it frankly, the actions of the digg community are idiotic. They are not “brave”. R3 was not “censoring” their “speech” and the infantile kicking of the ox goad that resulted was ludicrous in the extreme. “Brave” users seeking to stick it to the MPAA “Man” would have posted the offending string on their own blogs and thus exposed themselves to potential litigation, rather than dragging an unwilling digg into the fight. If they seek the destruction of the community they take part in, I can think of no quicker route than to get the creators sued into oblivion.
So well-played, diggers. You managed to make Slashdotters seem principled and Farkers seem reasonable by comparison. Dunces.
From CNET News.com…
Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought just over a year ago.
Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn’t the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so users will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery.
This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared towards serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it’s the black sheep of popular photo sites — it’s got a different organizational system from most sites, it’s more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Another list. Compiled by ComputerWorld staff. Looks as arbitrary as any other list.
From Technology Review…
The world of Second Life is divided into thousands of individual regions, or “sims,” each 65,536 square meters in area (about 16 acres). Linden Lab’s data facilities include more than 20,000 servers, each running one to four sims. The simulation software controls everything going on in its sim, from rendering the terrain and the 3-D models that make up the environment to animating members’ avatars, retrieving their inventories, performing searches, sending instant messages to members in other sims, and communicating with storage databases. If an avatar crosses from one sim into another, every bit of information about that avatar must be handed over to the new sim. The more sims Linden adds to accommodate new members, the more communication goes on between sims, and the greater the burden on each server and on the “backbone” lines connecting them.
“I don’t believe [this architecture] is scalable, at least not to the sizes I want to see it scale to,” said Zero Linden, a “studio director,” or software development manager, at Linden Lab, at a smaller meeting on May 2. (Linden Lab identifies most of its employees only by their in-world names, which always include the surname “Linden.”) But there are “major architectural changes underfoot,” he says, designed to reduce the need for constant connectivity between servers…
Hmmm…. It’s not just Digg that’s been having trouble with restive users. It seems that Second Life is also having difficulties. Tech Review reports that:
The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world.
The main problem, in members’ eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it’s straining Linden Lab’s resources to the limit, including its developers’ ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don’t introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience.
“We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement,” said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. “At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale,” Ondrejka said.
Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life “grid” is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn’t keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatient over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren’t delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don’t work, purchases that aren’t completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support.
The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs “immediately,” before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far.
“People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers,” says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin…