Audio Video News

Earlier this week the video-on-demand movie service called MovieBeam was reborn, and will offer movies from six major Hollywood studios in standard definition, and high definition movies from Warner Bros. and Disney. According to MovieBeam, Disney, Miramax, and Touchstone titles will be available day and date with the DVD release, while movies from other studios will conform to a 30-45 day window between DVD release and on-demand availability. Although MovieBeam has specified that around 10% of its titles will be in HD, there is no word yet as to whether the day and date titles specifically will be in HD.

The <A HREF="http://www.mpaa.org/">Motion Picture Association of America</A> (MPAA) has lauded a ruling by a Washington, DC federal appeals court. On Friday, February 16, the court upheld by a 2-1 vote a 1998 law that extended copyright protection for intellectual properties works by two decades. The extension was pushed through Congress by former president Bill Clinton, with strong backing from the Walt Disney Company, which feared that copyrights on icons like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck would soon move into the public domain. US copyright law now agrees with its European counterparts as a result of the revision.

The Motion Picture Association of America (<A HREF="http://www.mpaa.org">MPAA</A>) has partially caved into demands from voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to release screening copies of movies nominated for Academy Awards.

Movie studios, producers, writers, actors, and distributors are seeking a work- around of an edict issued only a couple of weeks ago by the <A HREF="http://www.mpaa.org">Motion Picture Association of America</A> (MPAA) that would ban free screening copies of Academy Award-nominated movies.