STANFORD, Calif. -- Movie studios are pressing credit card companies, PayPal and ad brokers not to do business with websites that offer unauthorized copies of full movies, said Scott Martin, Paramount Pictures’ executive vice president of intellectual property. Paramount and unspecified other studios, individually and through the MPAA, have in effect been saying to the businesses, “please” cut off the sites “or we'll go to Washington,” he told us after he took part in a panel discussion Friday at Stanford Law School. The reference to Washington relates to proposals in Congress to extend liability to companies that enable infringers, Martin said.

The report card is in and 3D TV has received a grade of “D” from 6th Ave. Electronics, Vice President of Store Operations Tom Galanis told attendees at the “3DTV 2011: What’s Next” event in New York Thursday. The industry “could have done a better job” launching 3D, Galanis said in a keynote, by standardizing active-shutter 3D glasses so they work across TV brands and selling 3D as a feature rather than as a separate category. “It should have been presented to consumers that they were buying a higher performance set that was capable of 3D,” he said. Lack of content also affected the ability to present a complete package to consumers.

XpanD’s Universal X103 3D glasses, which began shipping two weeks ago with a $129 suggested retail price, will likely be $100 in a year, XpandD Chief Strategy Officer Ami Dror told Consumer Electronics Daily Thursday in New York. “Prices will come down, but slowly,” he said. Economies of scale won’t come into play with 3D glasses as with typical CE products, he said, because of the cost of the two LCDs needed in each set. “The main cost is “in the lenses,” he said, adding that “whether we make five million or 50 million,” manufacturing expenses don’t drop.

E-waste and energy were dominant environmental lobbying issues on Capitol Hill for CE and IT companies in Q3, according to lobbying reports filed with Congress. An increasing number of technology companies are turning attention to smart grid issues, the reports show. Getting “sensible” energy efficiency and e-waste policies will remain CEA’s priorities in Congress and federal agencies, said Walter Alcorn, CEA vice president of environmental affairs.

The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move motion-sensing control systems will “be in short supply during the holiday season,” GameStop President Tony Bartel predicted on a Thursday earnings call.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee sentenced Sujata “Sue” Sachdeva to 11 years in prison for embezzling more than $34 million from Koss Corp., where she had worked as vice president of finance 19 years before her crimes were discovered last December. Prosecutors had sought a 15-20-year prison term. Sujata’s lawyers had argued for six or seven, pointing to her guilty plea and what they described as her remorse and her psychological problems.

Optoma and Wowwee Ltd.’s combo pico projector/audio docks appear to signal the start of a gradual merging of mini-projector technology into a range of other products.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Netflix plans soon to offer in the U.S. a streaming-only service like its $7.99 monthly offering in Canada, CEO Reed Hastings said at the Web 2.0 Summit. Hulu Plus will probably compete with Netflix, but “that’s probably healthy for us,” he said. “There’s going to be a whole lot of players, not only us.” Hastings expressed confidence that data networks will keep up with video’s demands. “Technology will keep making bandwidth faster and cheaper, essentially following Moore’s law.”

The Xbox 360 was the best-selling videogame home console system again in October, outselling the PS3 and Wii by wide margins, according to NPD data provided to Consumer Electronics Daily by an industry source. The research firm recently stopped providing hardware unit sales data to reporters (CED Oct 18 p5). But NPD continued to make other game industry sales data available, and the data again showed that overall U.S. sales were down from 2009.

By setting its own battery charger energy standard in advance of a proposed standard by the U.S. Department of Energy, California could influence the federal standard, the Natural Resources Defense Council said. The standard proposed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) would take effect 18 months earlier than the DOE’s proposed federal standard, so the state could ensure that the DOE’s specification is “sufficiently stringent and capture the benefits from the California standard,” NRDC said in comments. But Sony questioned the need for the state to pursue a battery charger standard when the DOE already has started a rulemaking.