Week in review: Judging tech

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chips in 2000. The complaint states that Capellas told AMD he had to stop buying its processors and said "he had a gun to his head." The complaint also states that Gateway executives said their company paid a high price for even its limited AMD dealings. The claim at the time was that Intel had "beaten them into 'guacamole'" in retaliation, the complaint states.

Later in the week, AMD Japan filed suits against Intel's Japanese subsidiary, Intel K.K.. It also launched a marketing campaign against Intel, running full-page ads in newspapers to outline the reasons for its lawsuit and to issue a call to action. The ad, which ran in newspapers from The New York Times to Capitol Hill's Roll Call, broadens AMD's legal fight into a battle for public opinion.

AMD's ad alleges Intel has harmed and curtailed competition in the chip industry, saying that Intel has strong-armed major customers into accepting exclusive deals and threatening retaliation should they do business with AMD. "For most competitive situations, this is just business. But from a monopolist, this is illegal," AMD claims in its ad.

Paul Otellini
CEO, Intel

Intel CEO Paul Otellini defended his company against AMD's new legal attacks. Otellini said his company has been involved in other antitrust suits, has faced similar issues before and expects to come out on top of this one as well.

"Intel has always respected the laws of the countries in which we operate," Otellini said in a statement. "We compete aggressively and fairly to deliver the best value to consumers. This will not change."

Roll video search
Google has launched a Web-based video search service. The service allows people to view content from the company's indexed database of video from Unicef, Greenpeace, CNET Networks and others that have uploaded material since April. The search engine complements Google's existing site, which lets people search the closed-caption text of, but not yet play back, television shows from PBS, CNN and others that Google has hosted.

The new content is marked by a triangle icon. To use the service, people must download Google Video Viewer. Once they have, they can watch an entire video piece or start viewing at the section that includes their search keywords.

Google's new video search tool is turning out to be a little more expansive than the company had planned, with users uploading copyrighted content ranging from the last "Matrix" movie to the "Family Guy" cartoons. Consumers browsing the service have uncovered links to full versions of feature-length movies, TV shows and other content.

A day after Google released its Video Viewer, a Norwegian programmer tweaked the application to make it play clips that are not on Google's servers. The search giant had restricted the Video Viewer, which is based on the open-source VLC player, to play back only those files stored on its servers. Jon Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, posted code on his Web site that he said removes that restriction.

A few days later, America Online quietly launched a new video-on-demand search service, opening the doors for millions of Internet users to view music videos, news segments and other content from parent company Time Warner, whose mountain of media holdings give AOL an advantage over rivals Google and Yahoo.

The beta service, called AOL Video, offers free access to search and play more than 15,000 licensed and originally produced video assets from Time Warner, including movies trailers from Warner Brothers, television programs, music videos and news clips from CNN, MSNBC and others.

News.com special focus
India is experiencing a tech renaissance, becoming a tech powerhouse that may challenge China for dominance in Asia. In a three-part special report, CNET News.com examines the manner in which Indian companies are raising their profile, India's experiences with Western-style growing pains in employee recruitment and retention, and how India has become the epicenter for projects on the cutting edge of computing hardware.

Also of note
Sun Microsystems plans to bolster its software lineup with the acquisition of integration specialist SeeBeyond for $387 million in cash...Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is dropping hints that he may be ready to license the brains of the Xbox game console to other companies...E-mails suggesting there was a conspiracy around Pope John Paul II's death or that Michael Jackson has passed away could be carrying a worm...Apple has switched to color screens for all its standard iPods and has updated its iTunes software to let people more easily download podcasts.

[mentorkyrom]

Suprising? $$$

no it's not suprising. It just means that record lables have VERy big pockets and can manage to slip some spare change into the right hands.


It's not suprising at all. Besides You have to have an INTENT for illegal downloads. So there are still may technicalities *(spelling?) that can be worked around. Also... The companys that make have the servers like grokster can simply move there servers off-shore where domestic laws have jurisdiction.

[hadaso]

The need for a protocol to communicate permissions

Two of this week's stories mentioned here indicate the need for a good protocol to specify the permisions that a file/content owner has specified for the use of content:

One of them is the story about people uploading pirated material to Google video search.

The other one is of course the supreme court ruling on P2P.

P2P needs a way to specify what may be done legally with a file. Then distributors of P2P software can include features to allow users to prefer material that has been granted use rights by the publishers in advance, and can make these settings as the default ones, showing that they are encouraging legal use of P2P file sharing and discouraging illegal use.

Search engines need it for about the same reason: to encourage people to prefer legal content. But also so uploaded materal could be required to have explicit permisions and the uploaders authenticated, at least to a point that they can be liable for illegal action. Certainly if someone makes another person's work available with permisions not granted by the rightful owner they are commitng a crime. Right now what peole do is just making files accessible, without explicitly specifying there is a permision to use the file. Adding such a permision is going a giant step to the criminal side, and most people that are willing to "share" copyrighted material that is not their own would not make that step. SO perhaps they would be able to make a file accessible. But downloaders would also be able to filter that file out for lack of permissions if they want to.

[Earl]

Who owns the copyright?

When you buy a movie,(or record) you have pay for the copyright, & if you wish to share it with someone, or a 100 it should be your right to do so.
Sharing with other has allways been good in life.