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I was just railing against TV irresponsibility, but what about film responsibility? Variety reports that the AMA and the World Health Organization have called for movies that “glamorize” smoking to be rated R: “As countries worldwide grapple with the devastating and increasing impact of tobacco use, the entertainment industry must …

Napster’s assets bought: Roxio, Inc. (Nasdaq: ROXI), the Digital Media Company, provider of the best selling digital media software in the world, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Napster, Inc. As part of the transaction, Roxio will receive …

Kurt Hanson exults: In a stunning victory for webcasting, both the Senate and the House of Representatives unanimously passed a revised version of H.R. 5469 late last night that clears the way for copyright owners to offer webcasters a percentage-of-revenues royalty rate, essentially allowing the parties to mutually agree to …

December 6 is the deadline to let the FCC know how you feel about even more restrictions on what you can do with digital content, specifically your ability to make copies of digital-broadcast television programs. Please see this report by CDT, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge outlining consumer questions posed …

Credible rumor has it that the Donnas new CD, their major label debut on Atlantic Spend the Night, has been “crippled” with the dreaded copy-protection. Our source reported that he was able to rip the CD on a Linux machine using CD Paranoia. Fat Chuck’s has a list of copy-protected …

Since bin Laden came up in the Miss Cleo/al Jazeera story, and I am feeling particularly surly at the moment, allow me to ask a question that has been clinging to my brain like a grapvine: Why can’t we find this asshole???? We have satellites that can do an endoscopy …

I am ever so pleased that the FTC went after Miss Cleo’s Psychic Douchebag Service for simply being a well-financed bunco operation: The operators of Miss Cleo’s psychic hot line agreed Thursday to cancel $500 million in customer bills to settle federal charges that the service fleeced callers while promising …

Our ace digital-service reviewing friend Brad Hill has just sized up Movielink: On Monday, November 11, the Movielink service finally rolled out a working model of its long-awaited Internet rental service. The catalog is so thin as to make this a concept opening, at best. But the service is completely …

As we have been reporting, various licensing deals are making the pay digital music services much more competitive with P2P: A spate of licensing deals this week finally will allow an array of online music companies to offer songs from most or all of the major record labels, setting the …

I can’t believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: Now, however, it appears that the ideal marriage of digital and analog technology has finally been made. When [Josh] Wink arrives at Ruzyne airport for his Friday, Nov. 15 appearance at Abaton, he won’t be waiting for two heavy …