digital media

An appeals court has agreed with a 2013 ruling by Judge Denny Chin that Google's digitization of 20 million books did not violate copyright laws. Google's snippet feature - or snippet view, if you prefer - shows only a tiny portion of any given book at a time. As such, it has been ruled that any reading of an entire book would be far too great an undertaking to consider realistic. "Snippet view," said the appeals court ruling, "at best and after a large commitment of manpower, produces discontinuous, tiny fragments, amounting in the aggregate to no more than 16% of a book."

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It's not yet May the 4th and it's definitely not yet Christmas, but it seems that the Force will be in full, well, force this Friday. Come 10th of April, the Interwebs will most likely be clogged when hundreds of Star Wars fans try to download and stream all at once the Star Wars Digital HD collection which, for the first time, brings all, yes all, Star Wars film in digital format, HD quality. That means you can enjoy all of the good and the bad that Star Wars has to offer, wherever you are and on whatever device.

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Sometimes, you just want to take a note and have it magically appear in your online journal. With eQuil, you can. The hardware, which works with a responsive app, records your input and copies it to your iOS device. We got a look at eQuil here at Showstoppers, and what we saw was subtly impressive.

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If the fact that Target announced that they wont be carrying Beyonce's 2013 self-titled album weren't enough, the writing on the wall should be. Here we're seeing another big push in the war waged between artists, record labels, and those that would stand to lose profit at the hands of the oncoming digital revolution. While the release of Radiohead's "In Rainbows" had the record industry in a tizzy with its "pay whatever you want" model, Beyonce's "release as a surprise to iTunes first" model seems to be taking retail stores out a whole new door.

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For a long time the music industry was convinced the only way to protect their sales and digital tracks from pirates was to ladle in loads of DRM. DRM caused issues for music fans, preventing them from listening to their music on any device they wanted. Over time, DRM has been slowly phased out as it proved unable to stop piracy.

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We got a first look at the BitTorrent Bundle back in May when it was introduced as a new file format for content creators. Basically, this Bundle will allow those creators to package several items together for free with additional items being available for those who move forward and unlock it. We recently got a look at a BitTorrent Bundle in action when Madonna offered the secretprojectrevolution Bundle.

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The iPod, and generally most MP3 players, has revolutionized to some extent the way we enjoy and consume music, but has also somewhat lowered the taste for high-quality audio, a problem that musician Neil Young is seeking to solve with his new Pono portable music player and online store. And, if his optimism gets translated to reality, we might be seeing the products really soon.

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Though it seems like a bit of a strange headline to lead with, it would appear that VUDU's upgrade of their Disc to Digital software from Beta to full-fledged release may have hit a hiccup. That shouldn't be too much of deterrent from users working with this system, on the other hand, as the details remain the same: conversion of your DVD and Blu-ray disks into digital editions accessible from wherever you've got an internet connection. For a fee, of course.

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Google Magazines has opened its doors to the UK Play store, turning your Nexus 7 or other Android device into the digital equivalent of the table in the dentist's waiting room. Over a hundred titles are available at launch, Google UK says, including Glamour, Hello!, Men's Fitness, and Total Film, and a single purchase can be synchronized across all of the devices logged into the same Play account.

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Yahoo and NBC Sports have announced that they will be teaming up on sports reporting, broadcasts, and news coverage. The two companies have a goal of creating the largest dedicated sports news platforms in the US. According to the announcement, Yahoo Sports will combine its "premium sports news and events coverage" with the NBC Sports Groups digital brand and TV promotion and integration.

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The Electronic Software Ratings Board, as many of you already know, is the organization that assigns age-based ratings for video games here in the United States. At the moment, only a fraction of games get rated since the sheer number of digital games makes rating each and every one of them a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Today, the ESRB announced that it has made the process of rating digital games a whole lot easier for the itself and developers alike.

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Physical media has long been in a battle for its life, and this includes print publications. We've already seen other newspapers and magazine go the all-digital route, but today Newsweek announced that it's ending its print edition and will be going on digital starting in 2013. The publication also said that they could be facing job cuts in the process.

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