intellectual property

It only took a few days after politicians returned from their summer holidays for Hollywood and the major record labels to resume their legislative push to rewrite and expand digital copyright law.

The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are lobbying for a pair of bills that enjoy bipartisan support. Both are designed to give the federal government more power to police copyright violations, and both are likely to run into opposition from political foes of the RIAA and MPAA.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the so-called Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act, … Read more

China's Godson-3 chip is ambitious if anything. It proposes to be everything a world-class processor should be--and then some.

Developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it also has a larger goal: microprocessor independence for China. "Their motivation is pretty clear. They don't want to be totally dependent on the outside world for something as important as microprocessors," said Tom Halfhill, an analyst at In-Stat.

But its singular head-turning feature is the proposed Intel "x86" compatibility mode.

"The most interesting part of the chip is that they're adding about 200 new instructions … Read more

Update on August 28 at 3:30 p.m. with comments on SLI and AMD-ATI

Nvidia is extending its support for Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors while it prepares to announce next-generation integrated graphics silicon.

The announcement marks an effort to expand Nvidia offerings on Intel's next high-end desktop platform, which had previously been referred to as "Bloomfield." Intel branded it Core i7 prior to the company's developer forum last week. Nvidia has already said that it has no intention to build a chipset for Intel's next-generation interconnect technology called QuickPath Interconnect or QPI, … Read more

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known … Read more

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States.

A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out."

"Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for … Read more

Dell's attempt to trademark the term "cloud computing" faced another setback last week after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent the company a "non-final" refusal of its application.

The PTO informed Dell on August 12 that its registration of the trademark for the term "cloud computing" was refused because "the applied-for mark merely describes a feature and characteristic of applicant's services...In addition to being merely descriptive, the applied-for mark appears to be generic in connection with the identified services and, therefore, incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for … Read more

With its tagline, "upload. share. archive.", it may have been inevitable that the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com would face allegations of copyright infringement.

Mygazines, which announced its launch in late July, allows users to upload and share magazines. Digital copies of the magazines on the site are easy to read, and users can comment on them, leave ratings, and use articles to create their own "custom" magazines.

The site is free to join, and there are no advertisements, but that hasn't allayed concerns of magazine publishers.

Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Warner's … Read more

Being fabless isn't so hip these days.

Rambus and MIPS Technologies are both chip companies that don't have their own chip fabrication facilities. Intel does. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rambus and MIPS are restructuring, while Intel's business is coasting on top of surging processor shipments.

Both Rambus and MIPS, which make a living off licensing intellectual property for chips, announced layoffs this week. Intel, meanwhile, is selling lots of its tiny Atom processors and seeing processor shipments surge overall.

Rambus said Thursday that it will reduce its workforce by approximately 90 positions and will take a restructuring charge … Read more

The International Olympic Committee has retracted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request it sent to YouTube over a Tibetan protest video.

According to Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the IOC requested earlier this week that YouTube remove the video called "Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony." The video, posted by Students for a Free Tibet, is a montage of scenes from Tibet protests around the world. The Olympic rings are shown in the video briefly a couple times.

YouTube initially removed the video, but subsequently questioned whether the IOC could truly file a DMCA claim … Read more