Prince To Adopt New Symbol: Tool

The still popular with some TechCrunch readers 80’s pop idol Prince has announced his intention to sue YouTube, The Pirate Bay and eBay for copyright infringement.

Prince said that in YouTube’s case it could not argue it had no control over which videos users posted on its site: “YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” Prince said.

Reuters noted that it is rare for an individual artist “of Prince’s stature to take on popular Web sites while some up-and-coming performers actually encourage online file sharing to create a fan base and buzz around a record.”

Prince was most recently in the news after he decided to give away his latest album “Planet Earth” with an English Sunday Newspaper; some reports indicated that most readers wouldn’t even take the album for free. To those few remaining fans Prince has, those who seek to share his music with others on YouTube: sorry folks, Prince doesn’t love you.

Update: apparently folks feel that Prince isn’t washed up, so strike that until I find another way to describe the act of giving away albums and punishing your diminishing fan base.

Twitter Adds Gmail Import Feature

Buried by the news this week of Twitter adding search was another Twitter feature release: invite friends.

The new invite friends option in Twitter allows users to invite friends by adding an email address or by importing Gmail contacts.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson writes that to date “Twitter has made it nearly impossible to find friends on Twitter. That’s a very big shortcoming of an inherently social service. It sort of makes me wonder how Twitter got any users at all.” According to Wilson the new feature overcomes that problem and that he “just tried it out and it worked great for me.”

See our previous Twitter coverage here.

Bolt Joins The Deadpool

Video sharing site Bolt has filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations.

The site has been on borrowed time since an acquisition by GoFish failed August 1. Bolt.com was sued by Universal Music in October 2006 and owes Universal $10 million from that suit; the funds from the GoFish acquisition were to have been used to settle the $10 million with Universal.

Bolt joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

'Simpsons Movie' marches to own toon overseas

By Frank Segers LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Limited international openings of new domestic champion "Rush Hour 3" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" hardly dented "The Simpsons Movie," which remained No.
'Rush Hour 3' leads weekend box office sales USA Today
'Rush Hour 3' overtakes North American box-office Channel News Asia
New York Times - Los Angeles Times - MarketWatch - Bloomberg
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Restrain Discipline on Partnered Lutheran Gay Clergy

Until August 11 of this year, gay clergy ordained within regular ecclesiastical channels of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) were expected to remain celibate, even if they were in long-term, committed relationships with their same-sex ...
Lutherans vote not to punish gay ministers Los Angeles Times
Gay Clergy OK'd By Evangelical Lutheran Church In America WBBM780
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (subscription) - Kansas City Star - WQAD - United Press International
all 136 news articles »


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MyLiveSearch Misses Launch Date, But The New Logo Is Top Notch

Some of you may remember our ridicule of the unlaunched Australian search engine MyLiveSearch back in May after a glowing but research-free Australian newspaper article about them. Being unlaunched is fine, but suggesting that Google is worried about them is a little over the top to say the least.

Dubbing itself the “world’s first live search engine” it promises to show us the 4/5 of the web that Google doesn’t index - this includes the grey web of dynamically created web pages as well as real time indexing of more traditional pages. Their sub tagline: “Searching the internet will never be the same!”

The company promised to debut the service in June. They missed that deadline and still haven’t launched. And frankly I probably never would have written about them again except that they’ve started emailing us again for coverage. They won’t tell us anything about the service, apart from the hyperbole. No demo’s or screen shots either.

But there is a bit of good news. They’ve ditched the old logo and have come up with something much more webtwoohified. Stay tuned. They promise to announce the (new) launch date shortly.