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Main Stories
o Vivendi, NBC Nearing Merger Deal, GE CEO Says
o Yahoo Settles With EMI Group Over Launchcast Infringement Suit
o Australian Music Industry Asks Harsher Sentences for Student Music Pirates
o Nintendo Cuts Price of GameCube Console in Japan, U.K., Europe
o Sony to Unveil "PSX" Souped-Up PlayStation 2 in Japan Next Week
o U.K. Use of Mobile Internet Trebles in Past Year
o Report: Affluent Americans Still Reign on Internet

o Briefly Noted: MTV Europe Music Awards - live SMS vote, TrivialPursuit.com, Sammy Studios - "Spy Fiction," MPAA screeners - anti-piracy measures, DivXNetworks, U. of Florida - "Icarus" anti-P2P software

Paris -- General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt announced on Friday that GE's TV network NBC and French media giant Vivendi Universal were finalizing their merger deal and said that he was optimistic that the companies would announce a definitive agreement soon. Analysts expect that the general terms of the more than $40-billion deal are expected to stay roughly the same as they were when announced last month, excepting fluctuations in share price and exchange rates.
http://www.vivendiuniversal.com/vu/en/home/index.cfm?f=true
http://www.ge.com/en
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o Yahoo Settles With EMI Group Over Launchcast Infringement Suit

Berlin -- Yahoo Inc. announced that it has settled a copyright infringement suit with EMI Group over Launchcast, Yahoo's Internet radio service. Yahoo said that it would make a one-time payment of an undisclosed amount under the agreement, which also grants Yahoo a license to stream EMI songs over Launchcast. EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music and Bertelsmann's BMG filed the copyright infringement lawsuit against Yahoo last May. The Internet company has already settled with Sony and Universal, while the lawsuit with BMG is still pending.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031002/25591_1.html 
http://www.emigroup.com 
http://docs.yahoo.com/info
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o Australian Music Industry Asks Harsher Sentences for Student Music Pirates

Sydney -- Three students have pleaded guilty to online music copyright infringement in Australia's first criminal hearing on the matter, but the Australian music industry says the deal they struck with prosecutors will result in too lenient a punishment, Australian IT reported. The students admittedly ran a site called "DJ Ace" that offered 390 CDs for download and received over 7 million hits. The Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), a non-profit arm of the Australian Recording Industry Association, asked the judge in the case to allow it to argue as a "victim" in the sentencing process to try to recoup the cost of its investigation. MIPI spokesman Michael Speck told Australian IT that it wanted to have a say in sentencing because "the case was watered down to nothing." "These guys will be getting away with the biggest rip-off of copy in Australian history, and they will probably get away with a slap on the wrist," added Speck. Magistrate John Andrews responded to the request by saying that MIPI's involvement in the sentencing process would be "totally inappropriate."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q5D621816
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33174.html 
http://www.aria.com.au
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o Nintendo Cuts Price of GameCube Console in Japan, U.K., Europe

London -- Japanese video game maker Nintendo on Friday cut the price of its GameCube video game console in Europe and Japan, following an announcement last week that saw the price slashed to just $99 in the U.S. Nintendo lowered the price of GameCube by 29% in Japan, to $126, and said the game console will now sell for about $132 in the U.K. and $115 on the European continent. Currently, the GameCube lags far behind international sales figures for both Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 2. Nintendo said that it sold four times the average number of GameCubes it normally sells -- about 61,000 -- during the week following the price cut to $99 in the U.S.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?S13821816
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ngc/index.html
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I42B22816
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o Sony to Unveil "PSX" PlayStation 2 Spinoff in Japan Next Week

Tokyo -- Sony announced that it will unveil its "PSX," a new all-in-one product featuring a PlayStation 2, TV tuner, DVD recorder and hard drive, at the CEATEC Japan 2003 trade show next week, Reuters reported. The company has said it plans to release the PSX in Japan by the end of the year, and in the U.S. and Europe early next year.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N23B62816
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o U.K. Use of Mobile Internet Trebles in Past Year

London -- The Mobile Data Association reported that mobile access to the Internet has trebled in the last 12 months, with 884 million page impressions viewed in August. The figure, from GSM network operators O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone, works out to a daily average to 28.5 million, compared to 9 million per day in August 2002. "An area of enormous growth is the ringtone/downloads market, the demand for which has rocketed due to increasing take-up of improved handsets with polyphonic sound," according to MDA Chairman Mike Short. The MDA expects page impressions to reach 8 billion by the end of the year.
http://www.mda-mobiledata.org
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o Report: Affluent Americans Still Reign on Internet

San Bruno, Calif. -- Internet users living in affluent households consumed an average of nearly 3,000 web pages in August, almost 300 more than the average user, according to new research by ComScore, a provider of Internet audience measurement services. Despite the narrowing of the digital divide, nearly 26 million Americans with a household income of $100,000 or more used the Internet during the month, spending an average of 27.6 hours online -- more than any other income segment, and over three hours more than with a household income of $15,000-$24,999. Of the retail sites most visited by the affluent, Neiman Marcus led the way, followed by Costco, IBM, Bed Bath & Beyond and Nike.
http://www.comscore.com

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(London) MTV Europe has announced that viewers will be able to vote for Best Song of the Year on their cell phones via a live SMS vote that will take place during the MTV Europe Music Awards live telecast on Nov. 6. Among participating wireless carriers are O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange in U.K., and O2 and Vodafone in Ireland.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?W28712816 
http://www.mtve.com/European

(New York) Game developer Bolenka Games Online North America has announced the launch of TrivialPursuit.com, a new site offering online and multiplayer versions of the popular board game. Licensed from Trivial Pursuit trademark owners Horn Abbot, the site will offer free samples and a subscription service featuring tournaments, multiplayer gaming and cash prizes, for an annual fee of $29.95 or monthly fee of $7.95.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030929/nym005_1.html
http://www.trivialpursuit.com

(Carlsbad, Calif.) Sammy Studios, the U.S. game publishing arm of the Japanese game machine manufacturer, announced that it will publish a version of Japanese developer Access Games' "Spy Fiction" title for PlayStation 2 in North America in the spring of 2004.
http://www.sammystudios.com/media

(Los Angeles) The Los Angeles Times on Friday reported on the host of DVD anti-piracy technologies that firms have begun pitching to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whose member movie studios this week banned distribution of "screener" copies of movies sent to Academy members voting on the Oscars, in a bid to clamp down on piracy. CinemaNow, a video-on-demand site, offered to host Oscar-hopeful films on its servers and provide passwords to voters; Flexplay Technologies is touting its DVDs that self-destruct after a given time period; Macrovision is developing technology to let DVDs play but not be copied; and firms including Technicolor and Digimarc are offering watermarking technology that could trace a leak back to the actual pirated disc and its recipient.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-screeners3oct03.story

(San Francisco) CNET News.com on Friday profiled San Diego-based video compression developer DivXNetworks, and the DivX codec that is increasingly being adopted by DVD player manufacturers and content owners as a supported format. Consumers have downloaded DivX more than 100 million times and encoded more than a billion files in the format, the company says. Additionally, consumer electronics firm Philips released a DivX-compatible DVD player in August, and the company recently inked a deal with an in-flight entertainment firm to encode 20th Century Fox movies in DivX for playback on airplanes.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5085986.html
http://www.divxnetworks.com

(San Francisco) Wired News reported on Friday on Icarus, the anti-piracy software tool being used by the University of Florida to prohibit students residing in campus dorms from accessing peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The program disallows any PC on the network from being used as a server -- preventing anyone from uploading copyrighted music or movies -- but also eliminates legitimate uses such as video game LAN parties. Icarus automatically detects P2P activity and disables network access for 30 minutes after a student's first offense; a second offense merits a five-day ban, and a third offense terminates access indefinitely. "What the University of Florida has done in its combination of policy, student education and technology is an excellent example of what can be done in the university system [to combat illegal file sharing]," Bruce Block, senior vice president of technology for the Recording Industry Association of America, told Wired News.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60613,00.html

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