The U.S. Justice Department is making preliminary inquiries into whether Apple Inc unfairly dominates the digital music market, according to three people whose companies have been contacted by regulators.

They said the Justice Department contacted some music labels and digital music providers earlier this month.

DoJ staff have mostly asked the companies broad questions about the nature of the digital music market, according to two of the three sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity as the talks were confidential.

“It was a very preliminary conversation,” said one person.

Given Apple’s leading market share the broad questions inevitably involved iTunes, these people said.

Billboard magazine reported on March 6 that Apple had used its market dominance to prevent labels from agreeing to let Amazon.com exclusively debut new songs.

Spokespersons for Apple, Amazon and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Full Story ~ Reuters

A little Thursday evening lagniappe for all you Twilight fans. The Twilight Saga: New Moon movie is due in theaters on November 20th of this year. Here’s a little taste to wet your sanguine appetites.

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Famed filmmaker Sam Raimi will be lending his multibillion-dollar experience to another multibillion-dollar empire, Blizzard Entertainment. More than three years ago, Blizzard announced that a World of Warcraft (WoW) movie was in the works, and although we later learned that it would be live-action, little else has been revealed. Late yesterday, Blizzard, Legendary Pictures, and Warner Bros. announced that Sam Raimi would be directing the “major motion picture based on Blizzard Entertainment’s award-winning Warcraft universe.” To today’s youth, Raimi is probably best known for directing the Spider-Man movies, but he’s also responsible for cult classics Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, as well as this year’s horror flick, Drag Me to Hell. Of course, the mere fact that Uwe Boll will not be directing this movie is enough to please most fans as it is.

This is obviously something the nearly 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers will be eagerly waiting for, but it’ll be interesting to see if a Warcraft movie will appeal to non-WoW players. It’ll also be interesting to see how fans take to a live-action movie, since Blizzard’s cinematic trailers are always extremely good, and many gamers have clamored for a CGI Warcraft movie instead. We’ll have to wait awhile though, as Raimi won’t begin shooting Warcraft until he completes work on Spider-Man 4, which gets under way early next year. As such, don’t expect Warcraft until at least 2011.

A list of some of the actors and characters they will be portraying:

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Nokia has some seriously amazing people making their commercials these days; remember the epic “Fourth Screen” commercial? Recently, I found a commercial that’s been airing for the past few months for the N96, and they’re using old footage of martial arts icon Bruce Lee. During the ad, Lee is is playing ping pong with nunchucks (in addition to flashing his image on the phone itself).

Do they want the N96 to seem as legendary, or astonishingly capable as Lee was? Maybe. Is it an awe-inspiring video? Certainly.

Full Story

A lot of gamers would know Uwe Boll. He’s the guy who directed several movie adaptations for video games such as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. He’s also the brains behind the new Far Cry movie.

Despite his long history in making movie adaptations of video games though, Boll doesn’t seem to be Blizzard‘s prime choice for making the World of Warcraft movie. In fact, as MTV reports, they practically laughed at him when he offered to do so.

Boll recently got into contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard to make the movie. Boll relates the reply he got was a flat-out denial:

We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.

Source

Thank goodness Uwe Boll won’t get his hands on this popular game to make a movie. It’s been a good six or seven months, I’d say, since I pulled myself from the clutches of WoW (although I still have my level 70 toon just in case…), but still, if it was made into a movie, I’d prefer it be made into a good one. Blood Rayne was a serious letdown.

For all the Uwe Boll haters, the comment “not to you… especially not to you” has to be extremely humorous and rewarding. However, it is hard to dislike someone too much that doesn’t seem to mind putting that out there. I have to, at least, hand him that.

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I have one purpose and one purpose only for posting this movie trailer for Wargames 2 : The Dead Code.  It sucks and you have now been warned.  Here’s another once great title smashed to bits by a crappy follow-up that MGM should be ashamed and embarrassed to release.

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Just for yucks, here’s something funny to watch that’s safe for work and around the kiddies.

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Funny stuff. Good likeness.