Sony is ready for volume production of Blu-ray Disc (BD) pre-recorded discs, BD-ROM, which will be undertaken by Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (Sony DADC), according to sources in Taiwan's optical disc manufacturing industry.

Microsoft on Wednesday finally detailed the hardware specifications required to run its Vista operating system. The company also launched a "Get Ready" program to help consumers prepare for the upgrade.

Samsung, in light of fast growing demand for DVD+R/-R discs in China, turned aggressive early this quarter in marketing DVD+R/-R disc under its Pleomax brand name by making its products extensively available through Orbbit, its China sale agent and lowering retail prices, according to industry sources.

A new Trojan horse seeks out and wipes movies and MP3 music tracks that it believes have been illegally distributed through file-sharing networks.

Samsung is set to exhibit the first commercial prototype of a Hybrid Hard Disk (HHD) for notebooks and PCs that integrates NAND flash memory with rotating magnetic storage.

Pioneer is now shipping the industry's first Blu-ray Disc (BD) computer drives.

Retail sources in the UK have said that Microsoft has intimated to them that the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 will be priced such that console and peripheral combined are cheaper than Sony's PS3.

The Recording Industry Ass of America (RIAA) has filed a lawsuit against XM Satellite Radio over its new device, the Pioneer Inno, which allows users to save songs heard on the radio.

A software piracy case cost the UK taxpayer more than £19m in legal aid last year.

Microsoft's new Windows Media Player has been leaked a couple of days early. It is 22.9MB and this version is in RAR format. We have no idea of its history, but it does download, and hasn't got a virus attached that we could see.

Telewest is offering its UK TV viewers the chance to watch the World Cup in glorious high definition (HD) clarity following an agreement with ITV and the BBC.

CMC Magnetics, the largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, recently obtained certification from international vendors for 4x DVD-R DL (single-sided double-layer) discs, the first among Taiwanese makers and the second in the world next only to Japan-based Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM), according to industry sources.

The Australian Government has announced it will introduce major changes to the Australian Copyright Act. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the reforms would make laws fairer for consumers and tougher on copyright pirates.

Vanguard Disc, a second-tier maker of optical discs in Taiwan, is set to close due to competitive pressure in the CD-R disc industry and the failure of its shift to DVD-R production.

Mitsubishi Chemical Group Science and Technology Research Center has announced that it has developed a solution-based Organic Semiconductor Material, which is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of larger, cheaper flat-panel displays.

Sony will offer the world's first notebook PC equipped with a next-generation Blu-ray optical disk drive in Japan in June, a month behind Toshiba's launch last week of laptop PCs with HD DVD drives.

Popular Russian music download service AllofMP3, whose legal status has long been in question, shut down over the weekend and has yet to re-open. The site sold music without DRM copy protection for $0.02 per megabyte, far cheaper than sanctioned services such as iTunes.

It looks like the XBox360 has finally been broken to one degree or another.

Lite-On IT plans to start volume production in July of this year of half-height (H/H) Blu-ray Disc (BD) optical disc drives (ODDs) based on technology from Royal Philips Electronics as a result of the company taking over BenQ’s ODD unit, according to industry sources.

Following Microsoft's official announcement to offer an HD DVD drive as a peripheral to the Xbox 360 by the end of the year, Microsoft's executives said that the Xbox 360 games will not ship on HD DVD media any time soon.