The grind of Idol made film a breeze for Clarkson and Guarini: “From Justin to Kelly”, a 20th Century Fox movie musical about two students who fall in love on spring break in Miami, is set to open nationwide on June 20. The movie went from conception to completion in …

We mentioned last week that Wal-Mart has requested that its top 100 suppliers start using wireless inventory tracking equipment by 2005. Coincidentally, Microsoft addressed the same issue today: Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday that it would develop software and services that will help retailers, manufacturers and distributors use radio tags …

Wal-Mart has lowered DVD rental service prices: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer said it would offer a $15.54 monthly subscription rate for the service for customers who only want to have two DVDs rented at one time. When the company started the service in October, it had a subscription fee of …

I tend to avert my eyes from Africa as it seems to be an endless boiling cesspool of disease, corruption, incompetence, greed, stupidity, blood feud violence. The constant demand for emergency relief seems money down a bottomless pit of despair – I admit to full-blown compassion fatigue. Yet we need …

Somewhere between this nightmare and our own, different one, lies the answer: If hell had a special section reserved for recording industry executives, it would probably look a lot like Tepito. The Mexico City neighborhood is a mile and a half of exuberant, unabashed intellectual-property piracy: thousands of people eddying …

I freely admit to having a hard time following this one: This high-technology soap opera is complex, but here is a simplified version of events so far: SCO, which bought the licensing rights to the Unix operating system and its source code in 1995, sued I.B.M. in March, contending that …

Although newspaper and television companies (and in many cases, why bother to distinguish between the two?) got the milk and cookies from the FCC last week, at least we have the small mercy of Clear Channel feeling screwed as radio ownership rules weren’t generally liberalized: Despite the sweeping deregulation the …

First AOL and Microsoft, now TiVo and Gemstar-TV Guide International are dismissing litigation and making nice: The two companies announced Monday that they have dismissed a lawsuit Gemstar filed against TiVo in early 2000, which alleged that TiVo’s digital video recorder service infringed on Gemstar’s patent for electronic programming guide …

New interactive digital cable software from Redmond: Microsoft Corp. presented new software Monday to help cable television companies develop digital TV programming and services. The software, called Microsoft TV Foundation Edition, is a new technological platform designed to run on the digital cable boxes that sit atop many television sets. …

Just as the FCC ruling to loosen media ownership rules has caught the public’s attention, the studios are being sued for price fixing by Intertainer: The one thing about the Intertainer service on which everyone can agree is that it was ahead of its time. Founded in 1996 to deliver …