Groupon Takes Another Stab at Digital Music

Four days into its promotion of an exclusive David Gray album, Groupon’s New York City page has added fewer than 1,500 units to the English singer-songwriter’s career sales of 12 million. The social commerce site’s $6 promotion for Gray’s live “Lost and Found” album ends on Friday. Groupon has offered only a few digital music deals, but they have been nonstarters. Last holiday season, a half-off Groupon promotion for a Rihanna album netted the Island Def Jam artist just 4,100 purchases. In contrast, a half-off deal for an Amazon.com gift card at rival site LivingSocial garnered more than 1 million buyers earlier this year. And Amazon itself sold an estimated 450,000 copies of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” after marketing the MP3 version of the album for 99 cents during two days in May.

Viacom, Universal Music Among New Reported Hack Victims

Hackers operating under the “AntiSec” banner claim to have posted data from websites of Viacom and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group (via Information Week). Neither entertainment company has commented on the purported security breaches; both Viacom-owned television networks and Universal Music record labels operate online direct-to-consumer shops. More at Digital Music News.

Amazon Squaring Off with California Over Sales Taxes

California is the latest and largest state to enact a tax-collection statute for Amazon.com and other online retailers, with a new law set to take effect Friday. The law will require online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers residing in California — but only if the retailer has some physical presence in the state itself. That presence can be established in two ways: either via in-state affiliates that the seller pays for customer referrals, or via in-state offices that the seller maintains for a related company (via the Los Angeles Times). As it has done in response to similar sales-tax laws in other states, Amazon informed its affiliates in California that it plans to stop paying them referral commissions. “We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive,” the company reportedly wrote to affiliates in a Wednesday email. But ending affiliate deals may not be enough for the Seattle-based company to escape all sales taxes, according to CNET. Amazon operates two subsidiaries in Northern California, including Kindle designer Lab126 in Cupertino.

More of Today’s News Headlines from CDSA

Hollywood’s Next Big Piracy Fight: Digital Merchandising (The Hollywood Reporter) Younger People Much More Likely To Cut Pay-TV Cord: J.D. Power (Multichannel News) Controversy in the Edit Suite: Final Cut Pro X (TVNewsCheck) Net Neutrality Rules Almost Official (GigaOm)

Studios, PayPal Shut Down Illegal Disc Operations

With the help of the Asia Pacific arm of the Motion Picture Association, PayPal June 22 permanently shut down the accounts of dozens of merchants who were using PayPal to sell counterfeit DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

The account closures followed a three-month investigation that identified merchants in mainland China who were marketing and shipping counterfeit discs to retail and wholesale customers worldwide.

“Our action today sends a strong message to all criminals that PayPal does not tolerate such illegal activity on our global payment platform, and we work closely with industry organizations, like the MPA, who alerted us to these intellectual property right violations,” said Julie Bainbridge, PayPal’s head of global brand risk management. “While the vast majority of business conducted on our platform is legitimate, we will investigate any and all reported violations of our acceptable use policy.”

Mike Ellis, president and managing director of MPA Asia Pacific, said some of the accounts had been in operation for years.

“Through this operation, PayPal has once again shown itself to be a consistent and reliable partner in the fight against copyright theft,” he said.
 

EA: Publisher Reaching New Markets with Free-to-Play Games

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz (registration required), EA’s Frank Gibeau says that the publisher’s online free-to-play games group serves a user base of 17 million worldwide — including markets that the company has never been able to penetrate with packaged media. When free-to-play services “get to scale,” Gibeau says, they “have huge audiences [and] are very profitable” — as profitable as packaged console titles. Moreover, free-to-play services “are not cannibalizing the main games and they actually reach markets that we’re not currently serving,” Gibeau says. “With ‘Need for Speed World,’ Russia and Brazil are number one and two...I can’t sell packaged goods in those territories. But I’m reaching an audience with ‘Need for Speed’ content.”

Studios Seek New Anti-Piracy Precedent in British High Court

Hollywood hopes to establish a new legal precedent in its global crusade against online infringement, with studios asking England’s High Court to order BT, the country’s largest broadband Internet service provider, to block customers from accessing the Newzbin website (via The Telegraph). The High Court had previously found the members-only Newzbin site, which allegedly offers links to pirated material, to have infringed copyrights. But following the court ruling, Newzbin relocated its operations overseas, outside the jurisdiction of British law. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association tells The Telegraph that the film industry chose BT for the test case because of the ISP’s reach of 5.6 million customers — along with the fact that the company has website-blocking technology already in place. A legislative proposal in the U.S. Senate, the PROTECT-IP Act, would give studios a similar right of action as they are claiming in the London court. The Motion Picture Association of America is among the lobbying groups urging the Senate to move forward with the anti-infringement bill. More on studios’ various anti-piracy initiatives at The Hollywood Reporter.

More of Today’s News Headlines from CDSA

Myspace To Be Sold to Specific Media for $35 Million (All Things Digital) Zynga IPO Could Raise $2 billion, File Wednesday: Source (Reuters) Dish Network Interested In Sirius, Pandora In Content Quest (Forbes) MPAA Applauds Movement of Pending Free Trade Agreements (MPAA) Netflix, Open Road Sign Multi-Year Streaming Deal (The Wrap) Father of PlayStation Retires in Sony Management Reshuffle (Guardian)

Google: half a million Android devices activated daily

At the Google I/O event earlier this year, Google shared some statistics about the growth rate of the Android mobile platform. At the time, the search giant said that approximately 400,000 new Android devices are activated every single day. The number of daily activations has since grown to 500,000, according to Andy Rubin, Google's Android chief.

That's a considerable increase from the 300,000 daily activation statistic that Google cited towards the end of 2010. The statistic reflects rising adoption of Google's mobile platform. Rubin says that Android activations are seeing a worldwide growth rate of 4.4 percent per week.

The breadth of hardware vendors shipping Android across a wide range of devices on many networks is a key factor that has contributed to Android's popularity. The availability of the iPhone on Verizon's network has apparently made a small dent in Android's US marketshare, but the platform remains strong and has continued its ascent.

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California Lawmaker ‘Considering’ Legislative Response to Supreme Court Ruling

Software publishers say that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively “slammed shut” the door on any further legislative attempts to regulate the sale or rental of violent videogames (via Joystiq). But the author of the California law that lay at the heart of the Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. lawsuit believes that there may yet be an opportunity for the state to act. “We’ll comb through [the Supreme Court decision] and see if there’s something that will pass constitutional muster,” Adam Keigwin, chief of staff for California state senator Leland Yee, tells All Things Digital. “If not, we’ll wait until there’s a change in the makeup of the court.” Five of the Supreme Court’s nine Justices held that the 2005 California law infringed on game publishers’ free-speech rights. Yet two Justices saw no such First Amendment problem with the law, while another two other Justices intimated that a change in the law’s wording may render it permissible.

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Sony DADC, Ibaraki, Japan

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