Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and one of the key architects of the disastrous AOL-Time Warner deal, said Monday that he has resigned from Time Warner's board of directors.
Case had relinquished the role of chairman two years ago, but remained on the media conglomerate's board of directors, despite the opposition of shareholders angered by the fallout of AOL's purchase of Time Warner at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000.
Other key executives involved in the deal had already left the company in a management purge, including former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin and Bob Pittman, a former AOL executive.
Time Warner has agreed to pay a combined $510 million to settle shareholder lawsuits and regulatory charges that AOL fraudulently inflated its online advertising revenues and subscriber counts. The company also took massive write-downs and removed AOL from the beginning of its name.
Case said he intends to focus on his new investment company, Revolution LLC.
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Another rival for iTunes: Samsung Electronics is planning to enter the online music business with a service similar to Apple's popular iTunes, Choi Gee-sung, the head of the company's digital media business said.
Choi said that Samsung will cooperate with several partners, both foreign and donestic, in developing the service, but didn't say when it would be launched.
Apple dominates the online music business with its hot-selling iPod digital music player and iTunes service, which allows users to pay for songs and download them. The company introduced a new iPod in October that is capable of playing everything from TV shows to music videos.
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The more, the merrier: Sprint Nextel, the nation's third largest mobile phone provider, has introduced a wireless music download service using phones from Samsung Electronics and Sanyo Electric.
Sprint Nextel also said it expects a new high-speed data network it is building to have coverage for 130 million people by the middle of the month. The network can send e-mails and video at speeds similar to some home broadband networks.
Sprint Nextel and its bigger rivals Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless already sell phones that can store and play music that users transfer from their computers, but this is the first U.S. service that lets customers buy songs on the go.
Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless have said they plan to launch similar services next year.
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AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
