From Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) – AT&T Inc. said on Wednesday it will offer its high-speed Internet subscribers a movie delivery service in partnership with Starz Entertainment Group, a unit of Liberty Media Corp..

Vongo, the service from Starz, will feature a co-branded AT&T and Vongo Web site at http://www.att.vongo.com with a 14-day free trial to AT&T high-speed Internet subscribers.

Vongo, which was unveiled earlier this year, offers subscribers unlimited access to more than 1,500 movie and video selections as well as live, streaming Starz TV channel for $9.99 a month.

An exerpt from an article via newsvine / AP

Internet merchants once viewed such chargebacks and other payment fraud as a cost of doing business, mainly because they are difficult and time-consuming to fight. But with fraud sapping hundreds of millions of dollars from online revenues, companies that do all or most of their business over the Internet are increasingly pushing back.

“Merchants are not willing to accept this any more. They are fighting tooth and nail,” said Kathleen Attinello, an executive vice president at Receivable Management Services, which fights chargebacks on behalf of online travel agencies, video game sites and other merchants.

Internet companies are trying to chip away at the fraud problem by hiring companies like RMS, employing technology that spots potential fraud before it happens and using payer-verification services such as those offered by Visa and MasterCard.

and another excerpt:

Fraud-weary merchants have adopted elaborate procedures for completing a sale, matching a customer’s shipping address to the billing address, verifying that the card hasn’t been reported lost or stolen and checking for any unusual activity on the card.

Card companies are also helping Web merchants fight back, offering payer-authentication services and other fraud-fighting tools and streamlining the process by which chargeback disputes are mediated.

“The rules have changed,” said Tom Sullivan, director of e-commerce risk at travel site Expedia.com and chairman of the Merchant Risk Council. “Internet merchants now have the ability to say, `Hey, this person accepted the terms and conditions explicitly, and as a result, shouldn’t be able to charge this back.”

The payer-authentication services, which Visa calls “Verified by Visa” and MasterCard calls “SecureCode,” run on the same platform and work much the same way.

For cardholders registered with the programs, Internet retailers can ask for a password registered with the cardholder’s bank, giving the retailer evidence of the purchase and leverage should a dispute arise.

Originally posted at Techcrunch by Michael Arrington

News Corp.’s Fox network has signed a six-year agreement with its affiliates that will allow it to show reruns of its television programs on the Internet.

ABC, CBS and NBC are all making similar experiments, and iTunes has a number of television shows available for download. The space is evolving fast. For example, experiments are being considered that will stop people from fast forwarding through commercials (bad idea) after a new study was published that say people skip ads in recorded shows (surprise!).

This is an area that we are turning our attention to. Expect upcoming reviews of the current state of the market for tv shows and movies on the Internet. And we’ll be looking at these in light of the “free” if illegal services that people are already using.
Read the article and comments at Techrunch: TechCrunch » TV Moves Aggressively to the Internet

IRS Wins Court Order to Search PayPal Records
By Gretchen Gallen
from Xbiz (additional info from cnn)

SAN JOSE, Calif. – More than two years after PayPal dropped the adult industry from its client list, the online payment processor is now under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service to help hunt for tax evaders.

Similar to the Justice Department’s recent demand from the four biggest Internet search outfits to hand over information on surfer habits, the IRS recently won a court order to have San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal hand over information on its more than 100 million clients who have allegedly used debit/credit cards to stash away unreported income in offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Curacao, Belize, the Bahamas, Western Samoa and about 20 more countries.

At issue with the IRS is that PayPal’s business model facilitates online money transfers to accounts outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Last year, the company reported an estimated $27 million was wire transferred out of the U.S.

The IRS first asked the court in October for access to PayPal records in its effort to crack open the offshore banking racket – on the heels of getting help from major credit card companies.

The IRS probe includes obtaining offshore bank account numbers, credit card numbers and PayPal account numbers in order to execute its search for alleged tax evaders. At present the order from the IRS is on an ask-only basis, but according to a report from the Associated Press, a firmer IRS demand for information on tax evaders is imminent.

The records probe extends from 1999-2004.

A PayPal spokesperson said that her company is considering the terms of the order and is reviewing the potential privacy threat to PayPal clients.

In a recent report on offshore banking, the IRS described it as a growing epidemic that is used by millions of American citizens to avoid paying income tax, or at least the majority of taxes owed. Offshore banking also is widely used by U.S. corporations to lower estimated taxes and remain competitive with other companies.

A typical transaction via an offshore account would include depositing a sum of money in an offshore account through a payment processor like PayPal and then withdrawing it using a credit card such as American Express, MasterCard or Visa.

After disallowing payment processing for adult companies several years ago, PayPal recently cracked down on processing for gambling sites and began imposing fines against both industries when its services are used for those types of transactions.

from CNN / Associated press:

Tax dodgers may lose friend in PayPal
Court: IRS can ask company about clients with offshore accounts
(excerpt)
PayPal enables individuals and businesses around the globe to send and receive money online. In 2005, users moved $27.5 billion through the money transmitter. The company, owned by eBay Inc., has 100 million account holders globally.

The request for information is an outgrowth of an IRS effort, begun several years ago, to trace money that American taxpayers hold offshore to avoid paying taxes. The IRS said many of those taxpayers access their money through credit and debit cards. The tax collectors have already obtained information from some credit card companies, merchants and payment processors.

“PayPal is another one of the mechanisms by which money stashed overseas might be spent,” Eileen O’Connor, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department Tax Division, told reporters.

In some cases, the IRS obtained credit card numbers but could not identify the cardholder. The IRS said PayPal might be able to lead the tax agency to those individuals.

The IRS also hopes PayPal can help them identify currently unknown taxpayers’ and their payment cards, as well as offshore bank accounts, that might be evidence of tax evasion.

The request covers transactions occurring from 1999 through 2004.