Digital Music

It appears that audacious online retailer BlueBeat won't be selling Beatles tunes anytime soon. The little-known website had been hawking Fab Four tracks for 25 cents apiece until a federal court in Los Angeles slapped the site with a temporary restraining order this week.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - US online music service Bluebeat said it plans to fight British recording label EMI over rights to stream and sell versions of Beatles songs.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed federal antitrust charges against Intel this week, with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission expected to follow suit. Security problems yet again snagged a lot of IT headline attention, including news about yet another flaw affecting Facebook and MySpace users. To mix things up, we've got IT angles to Beatles music and the Boston Celtics in there, too.

An announcement earlier this week that indicated that China's Baidu would start linking to licensed music downloads may not mark a fundamental change for the company, but according to officials involved in the deal, it is a step in the right direction.

In a contentious court battle launched by record label EMI, the brazen owner of online retailer BlueBeat has begun complying with a new court order to stop selling Beatles music online, after offering a quirky defense that he owns the copyright to the songs at issue.

EMI has filed suit against a Web site that has been brazenly selling MP3's of the Beatles re-mastered catalog for 25 cents per song.

BRUSSELS - EU lawmakers and governments agreed on new rights for Internet users Thursday, aiming to protect them from arbitrary crackdowns on those who illegally download music and movies on the Internet.

LONDON (Reuters) - Beatles record label EMI is suing U.S. music website BlueBeat.com, which it said was offering unauthorized downloads of the Fab Four's tracks for sale.

An announcement earlier this week that seemed to indicate that China's Baidu would start linking to licensed music downloads may not have been the major step it first appeared to be for the search company.

Seemingly unfazed by legal action from The Beatles' music label, an obscure online retailer in California continues to offer downloads of the Fab Four's entire music catalog. As of Wednesday afternoon, the music site BlueBeat.com was still selling MP3 versions of full Beatles albums, as well as individual tracks.

MADRID (AFP) - The inventor of the mobile phone said Wednesday the devices have become too complex, with a range of features from cameras to music, since he made the first-ever wireless call over three decades ago.

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Beyonce will later this month release a live concert DVD and companion CD, and a new song, "Video Phone" featuring Lady Gaga.

In an effort to promote its recently announced music search deal with Google, Lala on Tuesday said it would offer several free MP3 downloads for a limited time.

ISPs around the world may be forced to snoop on their subscribers and cut them off if they are found to have shared copyright-protected music on the Internet, under an international agreement being promoted by the U.S.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop singer Rihanna is due to speak for the first time about the night she was beaten by her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, saying in a TV interview that this could happen to anyone.

LOS ANGELES - A music service that plans to offer free song downloads said Monday that China's largest search engine will send users to the service in a deal that could cut online music piracy.

DENVER (Billboard) - MTV Urge ... Yahoo Music Unlimited ... Virgin Digital ... Since 2003 -- when iTunes launched in the United States -- all of these digital music services have come and gone, without challenging Apple's market dominance, despite the backing of resource-rich parent companies.

Stormy relationships between pirates and the music industry could start to settle down some, now that BitTorrent is developing new software aimed at eliminating any reason for ISPs to throttle peer-to-peer (P2P) network traffic. Meanwhile, a new survey suggests that instead of posing a menace to record companies, pirates are actually helping the music industry to survive, anyway.

Apple and Palm continue to play a cat-and-mouse game, and this time it was Apple's turn to do the chasing. Apple on Thursday released an iTunes software update that once again blocks the Palm Pre smartphone from syncing DRM-free music, photos and videos from the iTunes Store.

Store shelves will host cool gadgets that could be good buys as the holiday season rolls in. Some new cameras, including the Flip MinoHD from Cisco Systems and LifeCam Cinema from Microsoft, are lightweight devices that can shoot high-definition video. Another portable device, TwitterPeek, is a unique mobile messaging device exclusively for Twitter fans. For Apple's iPhone, Shure has released new earphones that can control video and music.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. digital media company RealNetworks Inc swung back into the black in the third quarter as cost-cutting offset sliding revenue from music and games.

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Google stepped onto the Internet music stage, unveiling a service for finding, listening to or buying songs online.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Google Inc on Wednesday partnered with Web services Lala and MySpace's iLike to give music fans an easier way to find, sample and buy songs on the Internet, expanding its music industry footprint.

Google on Wednesday unveiled a new music search feature that will include in its search results streaming music clips from partners like MySpace, Lala, Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody.

Internet radio station Pandora has added a sharing toolbar to its player that lets users share songs or stations via Facebook and Twitter.

LOS ANGELES - Online music retailer Lala is preparing to launch an iPhone application that its co-founder says paves the way for the end of downloading songs in the MP3 format.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft's MSN is in talks with MySpace about using the social network?s MySpace Music to help power music offerings on the software giant's online portal, technology blog AllThingsD said Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Online video search engine blinkx launched a new tool Tuesday to find and watch music videos on the Internet.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Facebook on Monday continued phasing Lala.com music service into its online shop, providing US users a way to buy music at the leading social networking service.