Category: Stories
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Baidu sorry for medical scam ads
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Andrew Orlowski
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Unlicensed music distributor Baidu has admitted taking money from unlicensed medical companies. Baidu dominates the search business in China, the bulk of its revenue coming from pay-for-placement in its search pages, which it calls “Page Rank Bid”. The company says it will now stop the practice, which accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of…
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The BBC’s Tragic Twitterers
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Andrew Orlowski
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Here’s a conundrum. Top Media People want to come out of the shadows and get “closer to their listeners” – it’s what the Web 2.0 people urge them to do. BBC people in particular are obsessed with being seen to be bossy or “out-of-touch” – especially since three out of four license payers have a…
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Police vet live music, DJs for ‘terror risk’
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Andrew Orlowski
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A dozen London boroughs have implemented a “risk assessment” policy for live music that permits the police to ban any live music if they fail to receive personal details from the performers 14 days in advance. The demand explicitly singles out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community: garage and R&B, and MCs…
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OFCOM mulls legislation to save DAB
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Andrew Orlowski
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Parliament may need to step in with new legislation, to save the digital radio fail whale OFCOM admitted today. OFCOM’s Peter Davies made the comments in front of a critical audience at the Radio Academy’s Radio At The Edge conference today. Davies was put on the spot by moderator James Ashton. After years of trying…
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The Long Tail can seriously damage your business
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Andrew Orlowski
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The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his “Long Tail” proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will “sell less of more”. The graph has become iconic – a kind…
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A new economics of P2P file sharing
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Andrew Orlowski
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What happens when you put three economists from the internet, telecomms, and the music businesses in a room and don’t let them out until they’ve agreed on something useful? A paper published by the research unit of the British composers’ collection society today gives us a clue. The first results of a “knocking heads together”…