Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that provides seed funding for startups, has declared all-out war on Hollywood, calling for tech entrepreneurs to put forward ideas on what will be entertaining us 20 years from now. Y Combinator’s declaration of war is not so much a new call to arms as a statement of simple fact: The world is changing, and will always continue to do so. To fight against it is foolish. To embrace it, as we have seen, could just make your company the most valuable in the world.

A Thursday ruling from the Copyright Royalty Board could force Apple to follow through on a threat to close down the iTunes Music Store. The Board, a three-judge panel, which will determine how much money creators are paid for their works, could follow through on a request from the publishers association to increase payments from 9 cents to 15 cents a track. Apple has said that move would make the ITMS unprofitable, and that it would be shut down rather than operate at a loss.

CNN has this statement from Eddy Cue Apple’s VP for iTunes:

“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss – which is no alternative at all,” Cue wrote. “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.”

To which I reply, yeeeeeeeah, sure.

More after the break.

That’s right, according for first quarter 2007 reports, the Apple iTunes store has boosted it’s sales to become the 3rd largest music retailer in the US. Apple is now sitting ahead of Amazon at 9.8% of all music purchases, close behind Best Buy and Walmart. The findings also show that an astonishing 86.2% of all more »