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Japan on-board with YouTube money-making tools
Apple’s attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple’s legal counsel, O’Melveny & Myers, managed to get an open-source project called the iPodhash pulled from Bluwiki, a free Web site used to create Wiki pages, saying the project is illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Bluwiki’s founder, Sam Odio, complied with the takedown request, but in an interview Tuesday he said that iPodhash’s developer is not trying to get around Apple’s copy protection.
In late 2006 a coalition of 23 of Japan’s biggest TV broadcasters and copyright organizations, alarmed at the uncontrolled spread of their content on the Internet, were preparing to battle YouTube. Two years on, the video-sharing site has just signed a site-wide licensing agreement for its content and is telling Japanese content owners that user-uploads of copyrighted content aren’t necessarily a threat. Armed with a new tech toolkit to identify the owner of uploaded content, YouTube says it is committed to making money for its partners. At the forefront of this push to make money from videos is Content ID, the system YouTube uses to scan uploaded video clips and look for matches amongst a database of reference video provided by copyright holders. Faced with a match, content providers have three options: block the content, simply track it to get insight into who is watching it and when, or run ads around it to make money.
The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 10, the latest version of the free Linux-based operating system, with a wide range of improvements in areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security. The release also bundles in OpenOffice 3.0, the most recent edition of the open-source productivity suite. The new virtualization features include the ability to manage virtual hosts and storage remotely, which should appeal to network administrators with fragmented teams. Users can now also share their Internet connection with others, and Fedora 10 can also start up faster, thanks to a new graphical boot system dubbed Plymouth.
A Florida family practice doctor has been sentenced to 33 years and nine months in prison for receipt and possession of child pornography, the latest in a long line of child pornography cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Richard Carino was sentenced Monday after being found guilty on July 10. Carino, from New Port Richey, Florida, was apparently turned in by his wife at the time after she discovered child pornography on his home computer in mid-2005.
…And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.