Zune to be loaded with buzz band content

More details continue to leak out about the forthcoming Zune portable media player from Microsoft. The Zune Insider blog, written by a Microsoft employee working on Zune, reported yesterday that the player will come loaded with audio and video content from at least three buzz bands: electro funksters Hot Chip, the Jared Leto-fronted 30 Seconds to Mars, and Brazilian punk pop outfit Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS).

As previously reported, Microsoft has confirmed its plans to launch a would-be iPod killer in the fall in time for the holiday shopping season. The player will reportedly have Wi-Fi capability, meaning that users could transfer music from a PC without a cable.

Apple denies iPod Wi-Fi capability

Given that the reported inclusion of Wi-Fi capability in the Zune media player would do the iPod one better, most industry insiders expect the next generation of iPods to go Wi-Fi, as well. No so, according to a report in DigiTimes today. The site reported that Apple has dispatched its staff to its major markets in Asia to teach local sales how to demonstrate the new Wi-Fi products. But Apple's spokespeople in Taiwan, however, denied the report, a break from the company's trademark "no comment" on such matters.

YouTube says it wants to go legit with music videos

Long a home for music videos both old and new (before they're taken down) without the consent of the major record labels, YouTube said yesterday that it's ready to play nice and become a label-supported home for music videos like Yahoo, MTV, and MP3.com. YouTube officials told Reuters that the company is in talks with the major record labels on a business model for music videos on the site. "What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube," company cofounder Steve Chen told Reuters. "We're trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site." YouTube has said that its videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online. The site specializes in short, homemade comic clips created by users.

RIAA drops lawsuit against deceased man

Following an outcry from bloggers and digital-rights advocates, the Recording Industry Association of America has dropped its copyright-infringement lawsuit against Larry Scantlebury, a Michigan resident who passed away prior to the resolution of the case. The RIAA had said that Scantlebury had admitted that his stepson had illegally downloaded music over a file-sharing network as alleged and that the parties were in the process of settling the matter. Almost all of the RIAA's lawsuits against individuals accused of illegal file-sharing have concluded with the accused paying a settlement to the RIAA.

The group reportedly gave the Scantlebury family 60 days to grieve following the man's death before the suit would be resumed. "Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case," an RIAA spokesperson told Boing Boing after word of the 60-day delay was reported.

P2P wars continue as Altnet sues StreamCast

The slew of first- and second-generation peer-to-peer networks may have largely been reduced to rubble in recent months by the RIAA's legal wrath, but they're not going down without a fight--with each other. Morpheus maker StreamCast, which is the lone P2P to publicly say that it plans to fight the record industry's copyright-infringement lawsuit against it, was hit with a lawsuit this week from Kazaa associate Altnet. Altnet claims that StreamCast infringed on its patent for its "TrueNames" technology, which creates a hash mark for a song and lets a P2P operator track a song in a system.

The technology was once believed to play a vital role in P2P networks' transition from illegal to legal. In January of this year, StreamCast filed a lawsuit against Skype (founded by the original Kazaa developers) and Kazaa operator Sharman Networks, a move that stemmed from StreamCast's Morpheus being removed from Kazaa's FastTrack network in 2003. It's all quite legal morass, with Kazaa last month agreeing to settle the music industry's lawsuit against it.

"StreamCast have been given ample opportunity by all to mend their ways," Altnet's Michael Speck said in a statement. "Their determination to continue distributing infringing material has left us with no choice but to prosecute them. StreamCast's brazen patent piracy underpins its massive copyright-infringement business. They are simply running out of opportunities to go legal."