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Take this statistic with a grain of salt, but Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

Mozilla, which is behind the open-source Web browser, was trying to set a download record for the software. The 24-hour period lasted from 11:16 a.m. PDT Tuesday to the same time Wednesday, and Mozilla said it's waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.

Mozilla showed more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

(Credit: Mozilla)

The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was still going strong at more than 6,000 per minute Wednesday morning.

Next question: will it make a difference?

Mozilla fanned the fanboy flames with its download record attempt, but it's likely the majority of those who downloaded Firefox 3 at this stage will just use it to replace Firefox 2, not a competitor such as Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer or Apple's third-place Safari.

There's also a big difference between downloading Firefox, installing it, using it, and switching to it as the primary browser. One early sign shows at a minimum, though, that Firefox 3 usage is significant at more than 4 percent share, according to Net Applications.

And don't forget the error bars: it's impossible to say how many of the Firefox 3 copies were installed by enthusiasts trying to goose the number.

And while 8.3 million might well become an audited record, Adobe blogger and evangelist Ryan Stewart pointed out that Adobe gets 8 million installations of the Flash plug-in on an average day.

Don't let my note of skepticism detract from the occasion, though. This might have been just a PR stunt, but the fact that Mozilla's Download Day drew as much attention as it did indicates that Firefox is more than just a piece of software. It's a movement people want to belong to.

For full coverage, including reviews and videos, see CNET's Firefox 3 resource center.

Producer T Bone Burnett talked passionately about sound quality, or lack thereof on a radio program, Soundcheck, from WNYC on Monday. Burnett produced Robert Plant and Allison Krauss' awesome Raising Sand CD; the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack; as well as records by Bob Dylan, Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, and Counting Crows.

Turns out Burnett's no fan of CDs or downloads, stating that CD's inadequate sampling rate loses too much of the sound he heard while making and mixing records. He put it this way, "We've been fighting digital sound since it came out twenty years ago...music's gotten to a place that's harder to listen to."

Wow, the guy sounds like an audiophile to me, and he goes on about the degradation of sound from what he heard in the studio, "It's stepped down from tape to digital to compressed digital, so people are now listening to a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting." Tell it brother, but it's interesting Burnett never brought up vinyl or analog, though he did mention that it's only in the last few years that digital's gotten really good. I agree.

Digital losses have all taken their toll on the way people relate to music, so it's mostly background to other activities instead of the primary focus. Digitized sound is diluted to the point is ceases to connect with people on a visceral level. It's just there, a ghostly shadow of its original intent.

Walt Disney's music label is expanding the Web presence of popular shows, such as Hannah Montana

(Credit: Walt Disney Records)

LOS ANGELES--Only the mouse appears to thrive in a music sector pulverized by digital technology.

As the top four recording companies continue to see CD sales shrink and as they scurry to find profitable business models in the digital age, Walt Disney Records has grown 40 percent from last year according to Matt Fitz-Henry, the label's director of New Media.

Fitz-Henry, who spoke at a panel session at the iHollywood Conference on Monday, said that it's no secret how the company has found success in such a gloomy environment.

"What everybody in the music business is now talking about is the 360-deal," Fitz-Henry said. "The Disney company has been doing that for 50 years."

A 360 deal is the practice of promoting an artist across different entertainment genres and platforms, including the Web.

For example, Walt Disney Records oversees much of the work of Miley Ray Cyrus, of Hannah Montana fame.

Besides the TV show, Cyrus has released CDs, draws huge crowds of screaming young girls to her concerts and is scheduled to appear in Hannah Montana: The Movie. According to a story in Adweek, one of her two Web sites drew more than 280,000 unique visitors in April.

Another important ingredient is partnering with acts that appeal to children or tween-agers, a group that isn't likely to pirate the content. Some of the other properties on the label include franchises such as High School Musical and Camp Rock featuring the The Jonas Brothers.

According to Nielsen Soundscan, High School Musical 2 was the seventh largest selling digital album of 2007.

"The Internet is not only an important piece of our business, it's relevance continues to expand," Fitz-Henry said. Disney is focusing now on promoting acts in mobile by creating widgets that include audio, video, tour dates, Webisodes and photos.

Virgin Media and the British Polyphonic Industry will work together to "educate" broadband customers on avoiding legal action while downloading music with peer-to-peer software, the organizations said Friday.

A joint release posted on the British Polyphonic Industry (BPI) Web site said Virgin Media broadband customers using their accounts to illegally share music will receive letters from Virgin Media and the BPI. Customer names and addresses will not be disclosed to the BPI--which is comparable to the Recording Industry Association of America--and the release says the letters will be of an "informative" nature.

According to the BPI, the new campaign will provide advice on how to prevent misuse and find legal online sources of downloadable music, and it will also illustrate the potential dangers of downloading illicit files. Virgin Media said its broadband is a great platform for people to download music, but it wants "them to do so without infringing rights of musicians and music companies."

The educational information will also be posted on the Virgin Media Web site.

The BPI said research concludes that 6.5 million broadband accounts in the U.K. are used to access music without permission. Virgin Media, a cable, Internet, phone, and cell phone provider, is part of the larger Virgin Group. The company has 10 million customers total, and is the most popular residential broadband provider in the U.K., according to its Web site.

BPI CEO Geoff Taylor suggested that new partnerships with Internet service providers would reduce illegal downloading and said the partnership with Virgin Media was the first step toward reaching that goal.

In March, British technology Web site The Register said that Virgin Media and BPI were in talks to implement a three-strikes program through which users would be warned of their illicit activities before their service was cut off. But instead the education plan has been employed.

The Register claims to have examples of the Virgin Media letter (PDF) and the BPI letter (PDF) that will be sent to copyright-infringing users during the campaign's two-month trial period.

The Panasonic DMR-EH75V still costs $1,000 on Amazon.com.

Last fall, we noticed that old DVD recorders with hard drives were selling for $1,900 on the Internet, because manufacturers basically stopped making them (with some exceptions) and people still want them. The continued demand for DVD recorders with hard drives isn't surprising--many people want a simple DVR they can own, without a monthly free, that can easy burn their favorite shows to DVDs. It's a killer product, but unless you're willing to set up a home theater PC, you can't have it.

We have noticed, however, that some electronics retailers have been offering foreign DVD recorders with hard drives in the U.S., potentially to meet this hidden demand. ... Read more

Social-networking site MySpace.com has won a $234 million antispam judgment, according to the Associated Press.

On the losing side of the award--believed to be the largest ever under the 2003 Can-Spam Act--were defendants Walter Rines and Sanford Wallace, the so-called spam king. MySpace won the case against Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or show up for court.

"MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site," MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam told the AP. "We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members."

In March of last year, MySpace filed suit against Wallace, alleging he launched a phishing scam to fraudulently access MySpace profiles. Wallace was also accused of spamming thousands of MySpace users with unwanted advertisements and luring them to his Web sites.

MySpace said Wallace and Rines sent 735,925 messages to MySpace members. Under the Can-Spam Act, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted "willfully and knowingly," according to the report.

Wallace has previously been sued by the Federal Trade Commission and companies such as AOL and Concentric Network. In May 2006, Wallace and his company Smartbot.net were ordered by a federal court to turn over $4.1 million.

Wallace earned the nicknames "Spamford" and "spam king" for his past role as head of CyberPromotions, a company responsible for sending as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.

Count Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Prize winner and internationally known humanitarian, as a member of the free-music movement.

Tutu has become involved with SOS Records, a label that plans to let users decide which acts it signs. Tutu was in New York on Tuesday to help launch the label's site, which will offer open MP3s free of charge.

In a telephone interview with CNET News.com, Tutu, famous for helping to end forced segregation of blacks in his home country of South Africa, said that after hearing about the idea from SOS Records' CEO Steve Nowack--during a chance meeting in an airport--Tutu instantly loved the idea.

"I am participating because we all belong to the human family and each human being has been touched by music," Tutu said. "Until now, there are people who may not have been able to access music because of the barrier of finance. Steve's project is now going to break down that barrier.

Tutu also said that SOS Records is a way for up-and-coming artists to be discovered and "get their fair reward," adding that "the democratization of music is very close to my heart."

The idea is to go one step better than MySpace.com. Instead of enabling music acts to just post music to the site, Nowack wants to enlist users, who will rate the acts, to help discover the most talented performers.

Nowack, a Canadian who has been promoting largely unknown musicians, such as singer Naomi Striemer, is hoping to entice artists to post music to the site by offering a chance to work with big-name producers. He hasn't mentioned who the producers are, but said he has worked in the past with Carlos Santana and has other high-profile music connections.

Tutu said "it might be the hand of God" that led him to Nowack. The two met in an airport lobby and Tutu said that he "warmed to the idea" after Nowack approached him with it. Tutu said he has seen first hand of the power of music and said it should be made available to everyone.

"Music helped us in our struggle," Tutu said. "When we were fighting apartheid, we had a song that we sang to hold up our hope. We had a song we sang when we were in pain. We had songs for crying, and for when we were laughing. Music is in our veins."

Below is a clip of Tutu discussing apartheid and the problem of AIDS in Africa.

Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers' own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).

The movement toward consumers controlling their own health records and the means that will get them there raises several issues of concern, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Under a PCHR, a patient would set up a portal that could authorize their doctors, health care providers, researchers, and family members to provide and share information relating to the patient. Those records and information would be stored in the patient's PCHR, which would be hosted by Google Health or the Microsoft HealthVault.

Microsoft is working with New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Google is working with Cleveland Clinic to have those institutions provide their patients with an electronic copy of their own records.

Once patients give their approval, companies, government organizations, health-related operators, and others could create applications that would connect to the PCHR platforms.

But the authors of the report, Dr. Kenneth Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, raise a number of key questions concerning the PCHR service providers, such as whether the service providers will have a research mission and whether they would allow secondary use of any aggregated data of their users. And, of course, the issue of privacy was also addressed (PDF). The PCHR service providers are not under the same regulations as the health care industry, which restricts the sharing of patient information to only those people or entities whom the patient designates under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The report says that Google and Microsoft's databases of patient information may eventually grow to be larger and more up-to-date than the databases of other well-known medical research programs. As a result, researchers may find it easier and cheaper to team up with Microsoft and Google when doing their research, rather than relying on a number of sources for data to do their research.

Challenges in putting PCHRs to use include limitations by some laboratories in releasing medical results to patients, the fact that a substantial number of medical records are still paper-based, and that the U.S. currently has no universal patient identification system.

"Despite these challenges, many consumers with PCHRs will soon control a valuable resource--an integrated copy of their health care information across sites of care," the researchers note.

Executives from MySpace officially announced the creation of MySpace Music, a service that will be jointly operated by News Corp.'s MySpace and, at least initially, three out of the four top record labels.

The Thursday morning teleconference MySpace held with the press was anticlimactic since details about the service have been leaking for weeks.

The service will roll out gradually over the next three to four months and offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ringtones, and e-commerce offerings such as merchandise and ticket sales, said MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. The goal is to make MySpace a one-stop shop for everything music. Among the top four music companies, EMI was the lone holdout. A source with knowledge of the negotiations said that MySpace and EMI continue to seek a deal.

(For more on what lies ahead for EMI, read what the incoming chief of its digital unit, Douglas Merrill, had to say in this interview with CNET News.com from Wednesday: "Will former Google exec help save the music industry?")

The partnership with MySpace is another sign that the music industry has decided to embrace the Web and digital technology instead of waging war against it. As CD sales continue to shrink and piracy expands, the labels are moving toward the inevitable: a redefining of how they make money from music. With MySpace Music, the labels will get an equity stake in the new joint venture and a share of all the revenues the service collects.

To this point, none of the challengers to Apple's iTunes has been able to gather an audience of any relevance or able to cut licensing deals that would provide them with a music offering that equals or surpasses Apple's.

That changed today.

MySpace has 110 million users, 30 million who listen to music on the site. Combine those numbers with the 5 million music acts that promote themselves on the site and MySpace already has impressive music credentials. James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, said MySpace could help modernize the music industry.

"MySpace has the audience and environment to enable the music industry to get to the next digital level," McQuivey said. "What iTunes offers is a good buying experience but that's not all people do with music. They they talk about it, they share it, they try things out. Remember, this is the kind of activity that (record label) Universal Music Group was suing MySpace for previously."

McQuivey continued: "I think the labels said to themselves,'Oh, if we enable fans to have a fully immersive experience, they might spend more on music. MySpace can offer a place where all aspects of the music experience can be expressed. Imeem was getting close to this but MySpace, if they don't mess it up, should take the music industry to Music 2.0"

Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business at Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed that part of what attracted the record companies to MySpace was its audience.

"MySpace is already one of the largest music communities on the Internet," Hesse said during an interview with CNET News.com "We're aligning our efforts to reach fans through every conceivable platform."

DeWolfe did not disclose what prices might be, nor would he disclose information about the status of a copyright-infringement suit brought MySpace by Universal Music last year. A source said that the suit was settled for a large sum.

Although DeWolfe declined to discuss financial terms of the deal, the source said that it is non exclusive, meaning that the labels are free to make similar arrangements if they choose. Facebook has been reportedly talking to the labels about launching its own music service.