The IRS wants PayPal’s help finding tax cheats who are hiding income in other countries.

Tax officials won permission from a federal court in San Jose to ask PayPal for account information for customers who have had money sent to financial institutions in 30 countries known to be tax havens, according to an Associated Press report. The request will involve transactions from 1999 to 2004.

PayPal, the online payment service owned by San Jose e-commerce giant eBay, said it has just received the summons and hasn’t decided yet how it will proceed. “We’re still evaluating our options,” spokeswoman Amanda Pires told the AP. “The privacy of our customers’ information is something we take really seriously.”

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Gnarls Barkley track Crazy has become the first song to top the hit parade without a record being sold. The duo’s melting pot brand of paranoid soul-pop hip-hop dance-slop shifted 31,000 legal downloads last week, and was crowned top of the pops by the Official UK Chart Company on Sunday. The CD hits shops today.

Downloads are now factored into the countdown because of increasingly weedy CD single sales.

Gnarls Barkley is a collaboration between Gorillaz producer Danger Mouse and RnB chanteur Cee-Lo. Their website offers this summation of their revolutionary jibber-creedo: “You are the best. You are the worst. You are average. Your love is a part of you… You must realise that hate is but a crime-ridden sub-division of love. You must reclaim what you never lost. You must take leave of your sanity, and yet be fully responsible for your actions.” Riiight.

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California (AHN) - A new digital music identification system that can search through 17 million songs in under 1 second has been launched in the United States by MusicIP, based in California.

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The Announcement

As most of you know by now, Monday was a ‘watershed moment’ in the brief history of online video: six major Hollywood studios announced plans to sell movies over the Internet - not rentals, mind you, but purchases of full-length movies in digital format that a consumer can download and watch any time they chose.

The Model

Two online movie services, Movielink and CinemaNow, will offer consumers a variety of movie titles for purchase and download. Movielink’s initial offering spans 300 titles, while CinemaNow will offer around 75 titles (again, these are just initial offerings). Pricing for new movies is expected to be between 20 and 30 dollars per download, while older titles would cost 10 dollars or more.

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Companies that develop inflight entertainment (IFE) systems for airlines have been in discussions with Apple about integrating the iPod and iTunes into IFE systems, according to several of the companies. Proposed applications include seatback-based iPod docks with USB and charging ports, allowing passengers to charge song and video purchases to frequent-flyer miles, and adding other ecommerce applications.

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Like many of you, it’s hard for me to remember a time when the word “Playstation” was not synonymous with gaming Sony has held the all mighty hardware throne for an astounding eleven years at the time of writing this. The same can be said for Nintendo’s 9 year reign with the NES and SNES from 1985 - 1994, and even more so with Atari’s 10 year reign ending with the collapse of the entire industry in 1981-1984. With that in mind, one must ask, is Sony placing to much faith in the Playstation moniker at this point or do they truly understand the business on such a level that the cat and mouse game they are playing with the PS3 and any information surrounding will ultimately pay off in the bolstering amount needed to save the ailing hardware giant.

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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Rather than share the sponsor spotlight like it must on “American Idol,” Coca-Cola North America opted to create its own music program. Taking the concept even further, the soft drink giant is bypassing traditional television to get “Stageside” out to its target audience.

Island Def Jam R&B star Ne-Yo is the first artist to be showcased on “Stageside.” The program is being distributed from its own Web site and via peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent in formats optimized for viewing on computers and on such portable devices as iPods and PSPs.

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Attacks launched over instant messaging and file sharing networks are up dramatically over last year, a security firm said Monday, and exploits are becoming ever more sophisticated.In the first quarter of 2006, malicious software attacks across instant messaging (IM), chat, and peer-to-peer (P2P) were up more than 700 percent over the same quarter last year, Foster City, Calif. FaceTime Communications said.

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It’s commonplace for obscure new acts in music to make their work available for free using the many distribution mediums that exist on the Internet. Hatred of the traditional music industry has allowed a great deal of stories involving the above to seep into the media in the years since the rise and fall of Napster. What the world has yet to see, however, is a band who earned high-ranking status before the Internet embracing the Internet as a distribution tool.

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Azureus has come out on top in the first annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards for p2p applications. The awards were created, “after lengthy discussions about how to recognize the Open Source community for the incredible work and contributions community members make to technology today,” says the winners’ site.
SourceForge.net says it hosts more than 115,000 projects and, “While we can’t recognize every worthy project and the worldwide teams that collaborate and build them, we can at least attempt to gather a list of those projects that, for one reason or another, resonate with users and the rest of the community.
“The projects were selected within each of the fourteen technology categories, and are based on activity ranking within those categories.’
And here are the top three (interesting that p2p apps comprise the first two):
Best Overall, Azureus BitTorrent Client, ” A powerful, full-featured, cross-platform java BitTorrent client.”

First Runner-Up, eMule, based on the eDonkey2000 network and which, “offers more features than the standard client”.
Second Runner-Up, 7-Zip, a, “file archiver with the high compression ratio” and which supports multiple format.

Seattle’s Webaroo says it’s new application will let people with laptops, PDAs, etc, surf without going online. “By extracting and caching the best subset of the web, Webaroo makes the web portable,” it says. And apparently, it’ll soon come pre-loaded with Acer systems. Webaroo servers scour the web to create Web Packs, which are downloaded so users can search the content anytime without a connection. When they re-connect, they sync devices to get updated content.
You’d still have to go online for real-time data, of course. But against that, as the New York Times puts it, “While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are busy building legions of data centers to capture the contents of the Web, a fledgling company has decided that it will squeeze the essential Internet onto a single laptop.”

Content copyright suits, anyone? Meanwhile, “Like many Internet start-up companies, Webaroo hopes to sell advertising,” says the story. “The idea is that the company will make it possible for advertisers to reach customers on their laptops and eventually on other mobile devices when they are not connected to the Internet.”

Robbie Williams’ manager has hailed the digital audio market and defended the singer’s outspoken views on music piracy. Tim Clark has spoken out as the star launches a new mobile phone which links to his online music and video.

Williams has irritated the music industry in the past by defending illegal downloading of music. He reportedly once called it a “great idea”.

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I can only giggle when I look at the stats files of this Free Lime Wire site to see how people arrive here. In any event. More news from the P2P scene tomorrow again! Cheers

A Swedish prosecutor says Big Six studio efforts to nail a man they say shared a movie online may have effectively slammed the door in their faces.
A Swedish appeal court yesterday ruled it couldn’t hear a case against a 27-year-old man who’d been fined the equivalent of 80 days’ salary by Sollentuna district court for breaking copyright laws, says The Local.
“He admitted making the Swedish action film ‘The Third Wave’ accessible to others through a file sharing programme.”

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People have complained about the price of recorded music for decades. It’s always seemed a little fishy that there was no price competition between the labels, and that CDs have always remained more expensive than cassettes, even though the discs are now dirt cheap to make. When music went digital, why did we see so few price points for individual tracks? Today, why are all the major labels simultaneously making noise about wanting Apple to offer variable pricing? The whole situation fueled paranoid claims about industry collusion and price-fixing that later turned out to be totally justified.

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