Media +Technology Intelligence
It’s long been clear that there were too many video stores in America for anyone’s good. In the go-go years of the early 1990s, national chains like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery were adding stores at a clip of nearly one a day, each. Regional chains and independent operators expanded as well, until there Read More …
The release of the Napster client in 1999 is seen by most in the music industry as a watershed event. It was the moment when millions of people began “trading” individual music tracks over the Internet and–in the received version of the story–stopped buying CDs. The industry’s response was, first, panic, then to attempt to get Read More …
For a market that amounted to only $113 million last year, e-books sure are attracting a lot of interest these days. Case in point: the DVD Forum Steering Committee, which administers the technical spec for the video disc format, recently considered a proposal to create a new specification for e-books based on the DVD format. The Read More …
The Authors Guild is not impressed with Amazon’s opposition to the Google Books settlement. In a 49-page brief (pdf) filed with Judge Denny Chin on Tuesday, the Kindle-maker warned of the potentially anti-competitive effects both of the blanket license in the agreement for Google to scan and sell orphan works and of the price-fixing power of the Read More …
Pity Judge Denny Chin, the federal district court jurist in New York presiding over the Google Book Search case (The Authors Guild, et. al. v. Google, Inc.). Having steered the long, complex class action to within sight of the finish line he suddenly finds himself the object of an intense last-minute lobbying campaign from interests that Read More …