> Personally, the "is released" construction always strikes me as wrong, but I can't say precisely why. Partly I think it's because "released" is past tense, but "is" implies present tense. So "is released" seems to be mixing tenses. It also seems to make it sound like the "release" is something that is ongoing and continuous, when to my way of thinking, you release something once, and you talk about it in the past tense afterwards--thus, "has been released".

Maybe you're just thinking of "is released" as a form of "to release". It doesn't have to be -- once you've derived a participle from a verb, it's just an adjective, and you can use "to be" to link it to a noun like you can with any other adjective.

But there did used to be a verb construction like that for the perfect tense alongside the one involving "to have" that we have now. I think it was used with verbs that had more of a transitional sort of action, with "have" taking the stative sort of ones. You can still see it some places, like in the lyric "the Lord is come" from "Joy to the World". So maybe it's a holdover like that.

Djinn