RIAA sues satellite radio broadcaster XM

The music industry trade association in the US, the Recording Industry Association of America, has filed a lawsuit against XM Radio, America's biggest satellite radio station alleging that it is promoting the theft of copyright material. The dispute is superficially about the Pioneer-manufactured Inno device that allows XM subscribers to record up to 50 hours of material. This works out as around 1,000 tune's worth of XM content for playback solely on the Inno device. ...more

Microsoft declares dividends all round

Microsoft is breaking with its traditions and paying out not one but two dividends. The cash-rich software giant has announced plans for a quarterly dividend, a four-year stock buyback plan and a special one-off dividend for shareholders. 'As we looked at our cash-management choices, our priorities were to increase our regular payments to shareholders, increase our stock-buyback efforts given our confidence in the company's growth prospects, and distribute additional resources in the form of a special one-time dividend,' said CEO Ballmer. ...more

Palm OS becomes Garnet

Access has announced that henceforth the Palm OS for handheld devices will be known as Garnet OS. The name-change is a consequence of Access's decision to relinquish the Palm brand shortly after it acquired PalmSource and its OS. Palm is now the exclusive property of the smartphone and PDA maker of that name. ...more

Adobe and Yahoo! partner to create PDF documents online

Adobe, the company behind the ubiquitous Acrobat PDF reader and Yahoo! have teamed up to promote each other's products. Adobe has agreed to add Yahoo! as its default web search for a future version of the Acrobat Reader. In return, Yahoo! will develop a co-branded version of the Yahoo! toolbar which will include the ability to create PDF documents online. ...more

Compaq iPAQ digital audio

Compaq expands the music-playing capabilities of the iPAQ range with the iPAQ Music Centre, the iPAQ Personal CD Player and an update for its iPAQ Personal Audio Player. With Compaq claiming it to be "the most advanced music management tool to hit the market", the Music Centre will manage a collection of 5,000 songs (roughly equivalent to 4000 CDs) in MP3 format on an internal hard drive. As well as MP3 tracks, it can deliver Internet radio. ...more