Minneapolis - Consumer electronics and media retail store chain Best Buy announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire digital music service Napster for $121 million, or $2.65 per share -- nearly double the company's closing price on Friday. [more..]

Redwood City, Calif. - Video game publisher Electronic Arts announced on Sunday that it has terminated its discussions with "Grand Theft Auto" creators Take-Two Interactive on a possible $2 billion takeover of the company. [more..]

Los Angeles - News Corp.'s MySpace announced on Monday that McDonald's, Sony Pictures, State Farm, and Toyota have signed on as charter advertisers for its forthcoming MySpace Music service, and will sponsor free album downloads, playlists and other new features. [more..]

Paris - The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an international trade group of 18,000 newpapers, announced on Monday that it has petitioned the U.S. Justice Department, European Commission and Competition Bureau of Canada to block Google's proposed deal to provide search advertising for Yahoo. [more..]

Arlington, Va. - Just five months until the required transition of TV stations from analog to digital signals, the vast majority of U.S. consumers are now aware of the pending switch, according to new figures from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). [more..]

Munich, Germany - A German court has ordered Dutch collecting society Buma/Stemra and digital music service Beatport to stop distributing tracks in Germany for which German collecting society GEMA claims the rights.
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Washington - Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited as inventor of the World Wide Web, on Monday announced the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to ensure and extend the Web's free and open benefits to all the world's people. [more..]

London - Zemanta, a provider of multimedia tools for bloggers, has raised $650,000 in seed funding from Union Square Ventures, TechCrunch reported.
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London - Metallica's label Universal Music Group canceled an interview with the band scheduled with the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, after the reporter wrote that he had downloaded an unofficial version of the album from notorious file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak reported. [more..]

Washington - The Senate Commerce Committee has announced plans to hold an oversight hearing on the status of the digital TV transition on Sept. 23, Broadcasting & Cable reported. [more..]

Los Angeles - Giga Omni Media, a network of blogs covering information technology, has acquired TheAppleBlog, which covers the maker of iPods and Macs. [more..]

New York - The Wall Street Journal plans to a launch social networking features for its paying subscribers, that will allow them to create profiles using their real names, comment on stories and connect with one another, the Associated Press reports. [more..]

Los Angeles - Rainbow Media's newly-acquired Sundance Channel plans to launch a new video-on-demand service for cable and satellite systems that will offer some of the many films submitted and screened at the Sundance Film Festival that did not receive a theatrical release, the Los Angeles Times reports. [more..]

New York - Warner Music Group/Elektra Records band Third Eye Blind will solicit online collaboration with other musicians for their forthcoming album, releasing "stems" for each of the album's tracks onto the Internet through a partnership with Indaba Music. [more..]

New York - Viacom's MTV Networks on Monday announced the launch of Tribes, a series of demographic-focused vertical ad networks. [more..]

Seattle - Social music discovery service iLike said on Monday that Thievery Corporation will promote its fifth independent studio album, "Radio Retaliation," through an exclusive streaming preview via its iLike application on the Facebook social network. [more..]

San Francisco - LinkedIn, a social network targeting business professionals that counts 27 million users, on Monday launched its own online ad network, which will allow other sites to run ads placed on LinkedIn, TechCrunch reported. [more..]

Washington - The Slate Group, a Web publishing unit of The Washington Post that produces the online magazine Slate, said on Monday that it has launched a new business site called The Big Money. [more..]

Los Gatos, Calif. - Online DVD rental service Netflix on Monday announced a $10,000 contest, hosted in a plexi-glass living room New York's Times Square, that will see eight contestants attempt to break the Guinness World Record for most consecutive hours spent watching movies. [more..]

San Francisco - BitTorrent, Web distribution firm founded by the creator of the file-sharing software, said on Monday that Aeria Games and IAHGames will use the BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator service to provide distribution of their massively multiplayer online games and patches. [more..]