amazon

Amazon.com's French subsidiary has recently lost a court case concerning its practice of providing free shipping on book deliveries inside France on orders worth more than 20 euros. A lower court has ruled that the company is in violation of French ... law and has ordered Amazon.fr to cease this practice . The lawsuit brought on by the French Booksellers' Union last December requires the company to pay damages amounting to 100,000 euros as well as imposing a fine of 1,000 euros per day until it has fixed its illegal practice of providing free shipping to its customers. (Source: dailytech.com ) ... (view more)

Amazon has signed a deal to sell MP3 files from artists on the Sony label without copy protection. It's the first site to sign such deals with all four major record labels (Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner) and is a big step forward in its battle ... with rival iTunes. The agreement means Amazon can now offer songs without digital rights management (DRM) protection. That's where files are 'locked' so that they can only be used on particular computers or players. Some systems only allow the file to work on the computer which downloaded it, while others allow a limited number of machines to play the ... (view more)

A little more than a week ago, Wal-Mart Stores quietly chucked its video download offering into the waste bin. Introduced less than a year ago, Wal-Mart appears to have given up when Hewlett-Packard, its technology partner in the venture, cut ... support. (Source: zdnet.com ). This doesn't mean that downloading video directly to the consumer is a dead issue. This week, Netflix -- the company that sends DVD's to more than 7 million consumers in little red envelopes -- joined Apple and Amazon in experimenting with ways to offer complete media "choice" to the heretofore limited selections offered ... (view more)

Amidst all the recent hoopla over Amazon's proprietary Kindle reader and the 90,000 ebooks available for it, the popular press has overlooked an product using more than 15 times the number of ebooks being made available through Amazon. The Million ... Book Project, led by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, now offers through its Universal Library the complete texts of more than 1.5 million digitized books, with all available over the Internet for free. With a complimentary text reader, no less. (Source: ulib.org ) To understand how large an effort that is, keep in mind that a typical high ... (view more)

In 1975, Rock Bottom Productions introduced a product called the Pet Rock. It was cute and it was novel. Pet Rocks sold for $3.95 each, were the rage for the 1975 Christmas season, and they made its developer, Gary Dahl, a millionaire. The following ... year, you couldn't give a Pet Rock away. On November 26, 2007, Newsweek announced Amazon's new wireless reading device: the Kindle. According to Amazon, when it was made available for sale, Amazon's complete stock sold out in 5-1/2 hours. (Source: www.newsweek.com ) Any way you look at it, the Kindle is a bold move by Amazon, and could change all ... (view more)

Last week we reported on the release of a new legal downloading page called "SpiralFrog.com," which boasts free downloading but disallows users from uploading material to an iPod. Since it's not much of a competitor for iTunes (although it will ... surely take a few customers away), Amazon has a more deadly new weapon in its arsenal. Already firmly established as the world's largest online compact disc retailer, it's really not much of a leap for Amazon to take on Apple in this sphere. Although iTunes certainly retains great name recognition when it comes to online music sales, Amazon's recently ... (view more)

NBC Universal is not wasting any time sulking over their recent failure to reach a deal with Apple Inc. that would see the company offer shows from their hit fall lineup on the iTunes website. NBC Universal officially announced that all of the ... episodes for the new fall season will be made available on the Amazon Unbox digital downloading service. Amazon Inc. and NBC Universal have signed a lucrative contract that will see NBC television shows selling at $1.99 per episode on Unbox. New episodes are promised to be consistently uploaded onto the website the day after they air on network ... (view more)

Besides increased efficiency, widespread access to information, and improved communication, the advent of the Internet brought something else: confusion over legal rights. Recently, IBM joined the slew of snubbed patent owners and filed two lawsuits ... against Amazon.com, citing patent infringement. (Source: slashdot.org ) The lawsuits, which were filed in U.S District Court in Texas, allege that Amazon is using five IBM patents at the core of their operations. Ari Fishkind, Public Affairs Manager at IBM, stated that the patents "include technology that help present applications, store data, ... (view more)

Although many are eagerly anticipating the release of Microsoft's new operating system (OS), Windows Vista, don't expect to ring in the New Year with it. Although Microsoft has been working feverishly to get Vista out within the first few days of ... 2007, a post for the operating system on Amazon.com has the product listed for January 30. (Source: amazon.com ) Vista is of course Microsoft's number one project as it juggles goals for the coming year. The Redmond-based company recently assigned its upcoming personal digital music player, the "Zune", to Toshiba for manufacturing, perhaps as a ... (view more)

Amazon, the venerable online retailer best known for selling books, CDs, and DVDs, is said to begin offering downloadable films and television shows to Web users next month. A source close to the offering confirmed rumors that Amazon Digital Video ... will allow users to download video either on a pay-per-view basis or by subscription, where a one-time fee is paid to view movies over a certain time period. (Source: news.com ) This news follows closely on the heels of last week's rumors that Apple is heading in the same direction. Competing with Apple? This is not the first time that news has ... (view more)