The Amazon Kindle may be a failure as a new media platform, but it’s great for reading books, right?

Maybe not.

Based on the experience of Gear Diary’s Dan Cohen, buying a book on the Kindle platform is a game of digital Russian roulette.

Ad-supported online music service Spiral Frog suspended operations yesterday, nearly three years after its launch. SpiralFrog launched in Summer 2006 to much media fanfare, painting itself as a free alternative to .99/song iTunes, and as a legal alternative to illegal file-sharing sites. At that time, SpiralFrog CEO Robin Kent said, “Offering young consumers an easy-to-use […]

You almost have to feel sorry for the mainstream music industry. Almost. The major labels have teamed up with Napster to offer what they are calling “the world’s largest and most comprehensive MP3 store.” Yep – the labels are so intent on breaking Apple’s dominance in the world of digital music that they are giving […]

According to the Guardian’s Tim Anderson, DRM’d music is going to stage a comeback, and Apple’s going to be the one making it happen. The music industry wants to sell new services, like music subscriptions, and DRM’s is central to making these services viable. To succeed, though, subscription music services need to work with iPods […]

Speculation is running wild on the Web about Microsoft possibly building a content censor into the Zune software. It comes as a result of a New York Times article that looked at why NBC pulled its TV content from Apple’s iTunes store and is now distributing it for the Zune. NYT’s Saul Hansell writes: Late […]

Video search company blinkx today announced the availability of blinkx BBTV, a new online television service that leverages blinkx’s speech and visual recognition technology to deliver Internet television with contextually linked information. blinkx BBTV enables users to instantly browse or interact with online sources related to what they are watching, whether it’s Google, Wikipedia, IMDB […]

For a long time, people have thought that getting the music industry to switch to DRM-free MP3s for music downloads would open the doors to a consumer-friendly world of digital music competition. Now it’s starting to look like the music industry wil use DRM-free MP3s to enforce their traditional monopoly on what you hear, what […]

DRM’d music is dead. DRM’d video will be next. As CD sales plummet, the record labels have realized that they have to get with the 21st century. They have to have a place on your iPod, if they expect you to listen to them, and they have to get rid of DRM if they want […]

DRM’d music is roadkill, steamrolled by iPods, iTunes and fair use. Businessweek reports that Sony BMG is finalizing plans to sell songs without DRM, the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of […]

Portable media player manufactuer Neuros Technology has created the Unlocked Media brand to create a consumer friendly trademark out of the abstract idea of ‚ÄúDRM Free‚Äù media. The concept behind the Unlocked Media trademark is that it be made available for free to any entity that uses media using open standard technology which is available […]