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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

CBS Digital Boss Quincy Smith’s Not-Quite Exit Interview: “Hulu’s a Great Service. That’s Part of the Problem.”

cbs_video_buttonsThe man who helped shape CBS’s standalone Web video strategy explains himself, for the record.

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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Google Steps Gingerly Into Music With “One Box”

madonnaGoogle insists, over and over, that it has no intention of getting into the content business. So how is it finessing its way into the music business? Very carefully.

The search giant is working on a new service that will provide searchers with streaming music, which sounds a whole lot like a content play at first blush. But Google will only be offering limited bits of music, and it will be relying on other companies–Lala.com, MySpace’s iLike and Imeem, sources say–to actually provide the tunes.

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Friday, July 17, 2009

Amazon Rethinks Its George Orwell Removal Policy

big-brother-is-watching-youjpg

Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.

Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.

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Think You Own the Book You Bought for Your Kindle? You Don’t, Says Amazon.

1984Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.

What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.

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Friday, April 10, 2009

AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid”

newsiesIt’s been a bad week for the venerable news service aggregator, which seemed hell-bent on confusing everyone about its Internet strategy. Time to sit down with VP Jim Kennedy, who explains that the AP does indeed have a strategy.

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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