The Pirate Bay (Piratebay.org), Bittorrent tracking website, was raided today by the Swedish police. This time it’s not a hoax. You can read the latest Pirate Bay news from here. The Pirate Bay owners always thought that they would not get any trouble from the authorities because the Swedish copyright laws are quite liberal. The site was quite famous for publishing e-mails from companies who threatened them with lawsuits. We shall see can they add this action by the police to their list of legal threats or is this the last we will hear of them.

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“This is the company that brought out Betamax – we don’t quite know where they’re going to go with this”. The executives or Microsoft are bashing Sony’s Blu-ray release strategy as hard as they can. But what really is the motive for this verbal attack?

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LG Electronics will launch a 4X Blu-ray writer, the GBW-H10N, in June. The writer has 4x BD-R writing speed. It has also 4.8x read speed for BD-ROM and BD-R single layer media, 4x speed for BD-ROM dual-layer and 2x speed for BD-RE single-layer media. Recommended retail price will be €799.

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Some things just don’t change. The optical disc recording has advanced from CD to DVD and now to Blu-ray but the physical foundation of the disc remains the same. Since 1982 the discs have been made of polycarbonate, and they will be in the future too. But is it necessarily a good thing, as we have seen that CDs are DVDs are easy to scratch, and scratches often cause issues with the playback and readability of the disc. With Blu-ray and HD-DVD the data density is much higher, but the vulnerable body of the disc remains the same.

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Torrentspy.com, part of Valence Media, has sued MPAA, accusing the group of paying a hacker to break into the site’s computers to steal passwords, e-mails and detailed information about the company’s finances and operations.

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First HD-DVD players are out and new movie titles are coming, but where is Blu-ray? I4U reports that Pioneer is planning to wait for Sony PlayStation 3 before releasing their Blu-ray player BDP-HD1 and that Panasonic is going to do the same with their DMP-BD10. It is interesting to speculate why the Blu-ray camp is stalling their releases. On the other hand, customers should get quite a mature products as the vendors don’t seem to have any hurry. Still the fact is that they are giving HD-DVD a head start, even though the first HD-DVD player from Toshiba seems to be far from impressive.

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More movie titles are slowly released in the high definition HD-DVD format. While the HD-DVD is highest quality currently available on the market, soon to be challenged by Blu-ray, the quality of the released movie titles has been surprising. The latest releases are Constantine, The Perfect Storm and Firewall…Does someone really want to see George Clooney and The Perfect Storm in high definition and actually pay for it?

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A federal judge on Monday granted final approval of a settlement between Sony BMG Music Entertainment and consumers who filed a class action lawsuit over copy-protection software installed on popular CDs, according to Reuters.

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Recordable Blu-ray media is already hitting the shelves in the United States, while the actual recorders are not yet available. The first generation of media uses single layer technology for 25GB recording capacity and is also available as rewritable. TDK is the first manufacturer that has started shipping the media, and TDK media will also be bundled with the Pioneer BDR-101A which is the first internal drive PC Blu-ray recorder to be available.

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According to DigiTimes, NEC has offered its own-brand DVD burners without burning software for sale in the European market at an average price of below US$30, lower than the US$33-35 quoted by Taiwanese OEM makers.

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