Sony have been ordered by a U.S. court to halt sales of its blockbuster PlayStation consoles in the United States and pay $90 million in damages to a California tech company, Immersion.

A top executive at Sony, one of Blu-ray's major backers, has opened the door to the possibility of unifying the format with its arch rival, HD-DVD.

Ritek, the second largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, anticipates good sales of DVD+R/-R discs for next quarter based on orders received, but will keep watching to ascertain whether the global demand will continue growing in the second half of this year, company CEO Gordon Yieh indicated.

In the US, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with Thomson, have announced the voluntary recall of 47,000 digital video disc player batteries.

TV channel Five has said it will be the first UK broadcaster to offer parts of its shows for sale as legal downloads. From Monday, viewers of motoring show Fifth Gear can pay £1.50 for "DVD quality" downloads of car reviews.

Almost eight out of ten UK businesses could be paying too much for their software licenses. Only 22 per cent of people responding to a FAST survey were sure they had the right number of licenses. Another 11 per cent did not know if their business was over or under-licensed and 41 per cent thought they were probably over-licensing.

The new Philips DVDR7200 is a DVD recorder that features an inbuilt Freeview digital terrestrial receiver and decoder.

Apple has shutdown a back door that allowed software called PyMusique to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store without Apple's DRM. Calling it an exploit, Apple have issued a statement saying that only users of iTunes 4.7, the current version of the software, would be able to access the iTunes Music Store.

The new Nintendo DS handheld console has set a new record for opening sales of consoles in the UK. Nintendo sold 87,000 DS consoles in the two days after the handheld device was launched last Friday, beating the record set by the company's GameCube almost three years ago.

14 million games console owners are still at risk of waking up to find their Xbox has become an ex-box. For when Microsoft issued a safety advisory for Xbox customers last month, it failed to address the underlying problem.

A new UK website has launched, offering cash in exchange for second-hand phones. Mopay says that if you send off your used phone - Freepost - to them they’ll send you a cheque in exchange.

Described by its developers as "the fair interface to the ITunes Music Store," PyMusique is a new application that lets users connect to Apple Computer's ITunes Music Store and download songs without Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions. PyMusique does so by bypassing the ITunes application interface all together--a clear violation of the ITunes Music Store's Terms of Service.

The Indian film and music industry has long been suffering due to CD and DVD piracy. The UK, allegedly accounts for 70 per cent of the market of pirated Bollywood films and music. And Pakistan is the biggest exporter of pirated discs.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two producers of optical discs in Taiwan, expect revenues from the sales of DVD+R/-R discs to exceed those of CD-R discs sometime this year because of growing global demand, according to the two companies.

Commercial grade optical recording applications are rather rare on the Linux platform, but now Nero steps in to fill in the void. Clearly aimed at the evergrowing numbers of Linux newbies that are attracted to the free and powerful software that Linux offers but are still attached to the point and click ease of Nero, NeroLINUX is free for registered Nero 6 owners.

Once again reports of the demise of Sony's PSX PVR-meets-PS2 have proved premature. Last month's move to suspend production appears to have simply heralded the launch of a new version of the product.

DVD recorders are beginning to drive the market for non-PC DVD hardware, a trend that keeps the overall global DVD hardware market on the rise, according to a report from marker research firm In-Stat. The DVD recorder market (not including units connected to PCs) doubled in size in 2004 and will grow by 87 per cent in 2005, the high-tech market research firm says.

Police have discovered a massive DVD copying factory in a raid on a house in Haringey. Officers seized more than 50,000 films, including many not yet released in British cinemas. Dozens of DVD copiers and thousands of labels were also removed.

Scientists at Philips have developed a material for non-volatile memory chips that's not only better than Flash in almost every respect, but keeps on getting better the smaller you shrink the memory cells.