One of the stated goals of the European Commission over the past few years has been the fostering of a healthy and vital creative community, a kind of second or third Renaissance brought about by the rapid growth of digital media. But the key fuel for growing the content community as rapidly as the technology community will be the same fuel that tech requires: money. And online content creators aren't getting much of it, a continent-wide EU survey concludes this week, because a sizable plurality, if not a majority, of consumers there believe they're already paying for "free" content -- some too much so.

According to data compiled from member nations by the European Union's statistics and record-keeping agency Eurostat, which sampled survey responses from 211,651 individuals in 148,604 households, only 5% of Europeans reported having paid above and beyond their Internet service charges, for any kind of online content within the last three months of having received the survey. (For individuals 16-24 years of age, the number was closer to 10%.) Among the remainder who had not paid extra, about 49% said they would be unwilling to pay any extra for Internet content, regardless of whatever incentives they may be offered or whatever laws may be passed or enforced.

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For the last four years, Apple has reserved the September back-to-school season for upgrading its line of iPod media players. Rumors attributed to "music industry executives" this week indicate that this September will be no different.

A keynote in September gives the company the opportunity to hype up the latest generation of iPods while reminding parents that college kids can get one free if they buy a Mac.

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Perhaps you've noticed this yourself: Whenever you mis-type a URL with a name that's maybe one letter off from the proper one, you no longer get directed to a site with a zillion ads that masquerades as the real one that you've never seen before, and that you may never see again. While the practice of cybersquatting hasn't necessarily subsided, the Web had been suffering from a plague of domain tasters -- sites that set up shop on sound-alike URLs for five days at a time, or even less, knowing they could revoke their URL registrations within that "add grace period" (AGP) without paying a fee.

In the meantime, these domain testers could reap the rewards of serving up dozens of cheap pop-under ads, and maybe even planting a few bots in the process. It was getting so bad that the number of misappropriated URLs cancelled within ICANN's five-day AGP, for one month in early 2007, approached 50 million. And as few as ten registrants were responsible for the lion's share of those one-off names.

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A class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple and AT&T in the Eastern District of Louisiana on the grounds that Apple's "print and video advertisements [for the iPhone 3G S] in and on television, the Internet, the radio, newspapers, and direct mailers all touted the availability of MMS," but the functionality remains unavailable.

The complaint, filed one week ago, says "Millions of customers, including Louisiana residents, purchased the 3G and 3G S waiting for the day in June 2009 when the new application would be available which would allow MMS. Unfortunately, after downloading the new 3.0 software update application, MMS still did not work on both the 3G and 3G S...The only excuse offered by AT&T and Apple is a mouse-print disclaimer on the Web site, in barely readable font, which reads 'MMS Support from AT&T coming in late summer.'

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Debian developer Joey Hess this week pulled the covers off of Palm's WebOS, and showed some interesting things going on in the background. Apparently, Palm Inc. collects daily samples of the user's location, which apps he has installed and his usage of them, and app crash logs.

As expected, many have panicked at the thought of both Sprint and Palm harvesting their usage data. But Palm appears to be working within the realm of its Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, and the company's data-sharing policy has actually been a known issue since the Pre's release.

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Download Windows XP Mode (N) Release Candidate for Windows 7 from Fileforum now.

In a move which could very rapidly multiply the number of total users of Windows XP N way beyond the paltry number of users, mostly in Europe, who invested in the product in 2005, Microsoft this morning quietly released a separate version of the release candidate for its XP Mode virtualization system for Windows 7. This version creates a virtual envelope for Windows XP N, the version Microsoft created without Media Player 9 pre-installed, to appease the European Commission.

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It's always a kick to watch little David saunter onto the battlefield, load his slingshot and knock off the dominant, arrogant Goliath. We all enjoy rooting for the little guy, and whenever he prevails over the odds-on favorite, we can't help but feel that all is right with the world.

Sometimes, though, Goliath needs to pound his tiny adversary into the ground.

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This morning, Sony announced that it intends to "take the confusion out of digital book formats" and put all its weight behind the EPUB format. By the end of 2009, Sony will only sell EPUB books in its store, and will have dropped its proprietary DRM entirely in favor of Adobe's CS4 server side copy protection.

"A world of proprietary formats and DRMs creates silos and limits overall market growth," Steve Haber, president of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division said. "Consumers should not have to worry about which device works with which store. With a common format and common content protection solution (DRM), they will be able to shop around for the content they want regardless of where they get it or what device they use."

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Starting today, AMD is marketing a stepped-up version of its Dragon platform's top-of-the-line processor, the Phenom II X4 model 965, for a price of $245 in 1,000-unit quantities (the "tray" price, street prices may be a little higher). The "stepped-up" part of the bargain involves a feature that just two years ago, AMD's marketing team was saying didn't really matter anymore: frequency.

It's a clear sign of AMD's renewed confidence in its own architecture that it now offers a consumer-grade desktop CPU clocked at 3.4 GHz. During those bleak days of the company's under-performing Barcelona architecture, it tried hard to play down its unwillingness to break the 3.0 GHz barrier. For a company that's famous for being very straight with its customers, these explanations of why higher performance isn't the number one item on their wants list sounded like raising the white flag, in the midst of stiff competition from Intel's Core 2.

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Though the device has been leakier than a rowboat made of Swiss cheese, Microsoft has at last given the final word on the Zune HD's availability, and It's up for pre-order today.

Microsoft's multi-touch, HD radio packing MP3 player can be pre-ordered today on Amazon.com, Best Buy.com, Walmart.com, and the Microsoft store, (though as of 3:30am EST, only Best Buy had an active page.)

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Perhaps they don't use Microsoft Office at the courthouse in Tyler, Texas? Could there be no computers at all and just Selectric typewriters? I have to wonder following yesterday's injunction barring Microsoft from shipping Word.

I'm being snide because Tyler is the reputed "patent troll" capital of North America. Plaintiffs tend to win big judgments there, and surrounding vicinity, against companies like Microsoft. As such, it's easy to dismiss yesterday's court judgment as meritless. But is it?

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At a press event in New York City this week, Dell and two partners rolled out a new product that will compete in the home market versus kids' netbooks slated for release this fall by Eee maker Asus and Disney.

The upcoming Dell Inspiron Mini Nickelodeon Edition is based on a low-end, slimmed down version of Dell's current Mini 10 netbook, known internally as a "bear" edition, noted Bill Holden, a Dell product management executive, speaking with Betanews at the event.

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Download Apple Safari for Windows 4.0.3 from Fileforum now.

The latest security update to Apple's Safari 4 browser for Windows includes impressive speed gains in many departments, including page rendering -- gains the one-time speed champion desperately needs to remain competitive against Google Chrome 3. But a surprisingly poor performance score in one department -- declarations of AJAX objects on one of the tests in Betanews' benchmark suite -- is preventing the latest production version of Apple's browser from decidedly overpowering the latest production edition of Google's.

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In the second suit of its kind, DVD rental kiosk maker Redbox is suing 20th Century Fox in US District Court in Wilmington, Delaware, for allegedly intentionally delaying shipments of its DVD releases to Redbox.

In the first such suit at the end of 2008, Universal Studios Home Entertainment allegedly attempted to limit the availability of its titles in Coinstar-owned Redbox movie rental kiosks. The studio wanted its DVD releases to be off limits to Redbox for the first 45 days after release. The studio believed Redbox's $1 rentals have a devaluating effect on DVDs.

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Just as Microsoft and Nokia announced Office will be coming to Symbian S60, the mobile software company that makes Office-compatible readers for Symbian UIQ and S80 released a new productivity app for Android.

DataViz DocumentsToGo 2.0, released yesterday in the Android Market, is a portable productivity suite that lets users view, edit, and create new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and supports a number of formats including the latest Adobe .PDF files.

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