Microsoft forces Lindows to withdraw from Benelux countries with threats of €100,000 a day fines

Microsoft has forced Linux distie Lindows to withdraw from the Benelux countries after asking a Dutch court to levy a 100,000 Euro a day fine. The move by Lindows is the latest twist in a saga where Microsoft has pursued the company around the world alleging 'trademark infringement', even though Microsoft recently lost the opening rounds of its battle in the US courts. Having lost that opening round where the judge rulled that the word Windows was non-trademarkable, Microsoft has gone to courts around the world trying to get an injunction blocking access to the Lindows. ...more

VeriSign in dispute with China over Web addresses

American corporation takes on communist China's government. It's not yet a doomsday scenario, however, as the dispute concerns the Web-based registration of Chinese domain names. It was last week that a test scheme for multilingual domain names was launched, under the auspices of VeriSign, which allows registrations using Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. ...more

Microsoft launches unified advertising platform

Microsoft is planning to offer its vast Internet user base to advertisers through the new Digital Advertising Solutions programme. The system is designed to allow advertisers to hit their target audiences across devices ranging from PCs, to Xbox consoles, Web-enabled mobile phones and PDAs - anywhere in fact where there are users of Microsoft software. 'As today's consumers spend more and more time online across various digital devices like mobile phones and video games, advertisers are finding they can no longer reach their entire target audience by advertising on a single medium,' said Joanne Bradford, corporate VP of global sales and marketing. ...more

Microsoft signs deal with PicSearch to beef up MSN Search images

MSN has signed a deal with Swedish image search specialist Picsearch to provide its technology for the fledgling MSN Search. Picsearch already provides its technology for Ask Jeeves Inc and Lycos Europe. Whilst MSN Web Search is at least now in the same league as Google and Yahoo, the same cannot be said of MSN image search. ...more

Canadian abandons copy tax on digital music players

Canada's Supreme Court has upheld a lower court's ruling that a levy on digital music players may no longer be collected. The levy, which ranged from $2 for small devices to $25 for players with a capacity of 10GB or more, was collected by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), on behalf of musicians and record labels. It was designed to compensate them for monies allegedly lost due to unauthorised file sharing. ...more