T-Series Drags YouTube to Court

Entertainment major T-Series has taken video-sharing website YouTube to court, alleging violation of copyrights for its music products. Bhushan Kumar of T-Series filed a case against YouTube and its parent company Google Inc in the Delhi High Court.

On November 5, the court had issued a notice against YouTube and Google, and passed an interim order restraining them from "reproducing, adapting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, disseminating or displaying on their websites or otherwise infringing in any manner any audio visual works in which the SCIL (Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, which owns the T-Series brand) owns exclusive, valid and subsisting copyright".

"You can free download and upload on YouTube and the website is using our promotional materials without seeking our permission," said Kumar.

"We have been negotiating with them for a long time, but they get away by saying, 'Surfers are doing it, we are not doing anything'. But they are allowing surfers to use their website to do the crime and they should pay for it. It's harming our business."

"More hits means more revenues. People are flocking the website and it earns revenues in millions from advertisements. It encourages people to upload copyrighted work on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty," he added.

Kumar claimed that the revenue of the music industry had gone down by 40-50 percent because of the "illegal websites".

"After Google took over YouTube, it paid a huge amount of money to foreign music labels to allow them to use their promotional materials, but they are not doing the same for Indian music companies," he claimed.

SE Launches W910i in India

Sony Ericsson has launched its latest slim slider phone, the W910i, in India. With dimensions of 99.5 x 50 x 12.5 mm and a weight of just 86 grams, this Walkman phone has incorporated much of Sony Ericsson’s new mobile technology.

To start with, there's the new Shake Control system that allows users to change music tracks simply by waving the phone in the air. Secondly, the W910i has an auto-rotating display for the media section.

The W910i uses SE's new SenseMe playlist creation system. You can choose songs and create playlists based on your moods, than by artist or album. Tracks are presented in a unique visual that shows each song as dots in a matrix and places them according to tempo and style.

The phone has a 2 megapixel camera, and a secondary camera in front for video calling. It has some interesting gaming functions that allow you to control certain games by balancing the phone on your palm and moving it around. It also incorporates Sony’s Walkman v3.0.

The Sony Ericsson W910i Walkman phone is available in two colors – Hearty Red and Noble Black – and will retail for around Rs 19,000. Since we were lucky enough to get a prototype to test, you may want to check out our first impressions of the W910i here.