Online auction house QXL has been fined £34,000 by the U.K.’s Business Software Alliance for using 200 pirated software packages from Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec. QXL said in a statement that it had been using the software “unwittingly” and had now rectified the problem. But, according to Mike Newton, campaign relations manager for BSA UK, this is a widespread problem now that companies allow employees to download software freely from the Internet. IT Wire reports.

Magex, a global digital commerce service, has announced the beta testing of its digital rights management product for publishing content online. Magex’s digital commerce service provides a trusted payment infrastructure, allowing consumers to make fast and safe payments for the delivery of digital content such as music, business information, video and books via the Internet. The Magex product offers persistent copyright protection – from a book chapter, to corresponding graphics – via InterTrust’s digital rights management software platform. The full press release is at Internet Wire.

Macromedia demonstrated working prototype versions of its Web products and technologies
running on Mac OS X during Steve Jobs’ opening keynote Tuesday at
Seybold San Francisco 2000. The demonstration featured development builds of
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and the Macromedia Flash Player, all
running on an early build of Apple’s next-generation operating system.
The press release is at PR Newswire.

ZDNet UK reviews the Rio MP3 player: “A stunner of an MP3 player, but it’s low on memory and prone to the odd incompatibility tantrum.”

From a story at the EE Times: EDA and technology companies need to strategically build, acquire and protect their intellectual property if they intend to turn patent and copyright portfolios into revenue, according to members of the EDA Consortium’s Emerging Companies Committee. While “intangible assets” represented only 38 percent of the total market capitalization value of the 500 largest U.S. companies in 1982, “today that percentage has increased enormously,” said Irwin Gross, an IP litigator and partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “Almost 70 percent of the total value measured by the market cap of America’s 500 largest companies’ profits today is through intellectual property.”

Corel users may have to rethink their options, considering the state of the company these days, says a story from IT Week.

From a story at The Register: “Java appears to be the most sought after IT skill in the UK. The SSP/Computer Weekly Q2 survey of appointments data and trends, based on what employers were seeking in trade press and national newspaper ads, showed that C++ was still top. However, it was down 36 percent compared with the year-earlier quarter while second-place Java was up 70 percent, so Java has probably now passed C++. You might well have thought that Unix was in decline as well, and Windows rising – but that’s not what the survey shows. Unix is in fourth place.”

From a story at The Register: Virgin Mobile has staked its claim to the world’s first mobile phone with an in-built MP3 player. The phone has actually been around for a while and can be found Spain, Germany, Austria, Portugal, and Italy. However, in a further example of Virgin’s PR being ahead of the game, Virgin Mobile has knocked up a press release saying it is launching the phone in the UK.

EchoFactor, a company spinning off from Infonautics hopes to erase the problem webmasters have in keeping content fresh by finding relevant headlines from top websites and making them available to third parties at no charge. When it comes to development, EchoFactor is striving to be a model open-source citizen. “If we’re going with the premise that topic enthusiasts are getting information for free, let’s take it to the extreme and use open source for all development, Apache, Linux, PHP,” said Andrea Michalek, co-founder and chief technology officer. Check out the story at TechWeb.

Moving to ease verification engineers’ reuse and exchange of complex testbenches, Cadence Design Systems Inc. will open-source-license the TestBuilder testbench class library from the company’s Verification Cockpit product. TestBuilder is a C++ class library that provides testbench-authoring capabilities to create reusable random, constraint-driven self-checking tests, reports the EE Times.