On Monday 12th December, Francisco Javier Ocasio Gotay aka KoL received a Microsoft legal threat regarding a theme he released 5 months ago. Not content with threatening innocent bloggers on material related to Windows Vista, the company is moving onto its next attack plan by demanding that ported themes from Vista visual styles back to Windows XP be removed.
KoL was one of the first skinners on the scene back when it was discovered that a simple hack of the uxtheme.dll meant un-certified themes could run freely on Windows XP. A simple search on Google demonstrates just how much KoL has contributed to the skinning community. The theme is question is the VistaXP Visual Style which is based on Longhorn build 5203. Many have tried to copy the theme but lack the crisp feel of Vista.
The theme was originally released on 17th July 2005 and is arguably the best Vista port to date. The thread here at Neowin generated more than a 1000 comments and had nearly 300,000 visitors. It has taken the company nearly 5 months to contact KoL to ask him to remove the theme. Third party law firm, Seed IP contacted KoL 2 days ago.
When questioned Francisco is defiant that this will not prevent him from creating high quality themes in the future. “They say that the themes include Microsoft UI artwork, fonts and images that are subject of copyright, trademark and trade dress. That’s true and I think they took it down because of that but also because of the popularity of the skin” he said.
Like Neowin, KoL believes Microsoft should have alerted him months before this date and should pursue others that are distributing similar themes.
Clearly over at Redmond if you’re popular then be careful, first Messenger Plus! and now a theme designer…..watch out Google!
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Is Sumner Redstone late to the digital music party, or is it just getting started? Redstone’s Viacom will find out sometime next year, when his MTV unit will roll out its long-anticipated online music service. The company officially announced Tuesday the roll out of its Urge service in 2006, but said little else about the offering, which has been in the works for years.
In the meantime, plenty of competitors have opened shop on the Internet, to mixed results. To date, digital music sales seem to work best for companies that don’t need to make money selling digital music. Apple Computer has used its store primarily as a way to push its iPods; Yahoo! has used its music-subscription service to help serve ads; and News Corp.’s MySpace simply uses lets users listen to music free of charge. Napster, the only pure-play music retailer, has yet to make a penny.
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Google was set to launch on Thursday a new service intended to give searchers fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page.
Google Music will allow a user to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.
Items that can be purchased will have links to merchants for online ordering or downloading, she said. Initial merchant partners include Apple Computer’s iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon.com.
“We aren’t building out a music store,” Mayer said. “We are getting people to the iTunes store” and others.
Results will also include links to supplemental Google Web pages with more information about the music, including names of tracks on a CD and other CDs a band or artist has released. Google also will provide snippets of reviews from sites on the Web and links to those sites.
“This has been one of the longstanding unfilled user needs,” Mayer said. “We saw a search need where we weren’t providing users with the highest quality results that we could.”
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