Ed Oswald

The DVR maker was handed a major victory Thursday after the USPTO upheld its patents to time-shifting technology that has become a staple of the TiVo service.

While not completely ending its court battle with EchoStar, it essentially would prevent the satellite company from using claims of patent invalidity in its ongoing appeal.

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AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that Apple is working on a 3G model of its iPhone set to debut next year.

Apple has a habit of trying to keep things under wraps. However, with that company partnering with others more often these days, and with those others apparently having less stringent policies on talking about future products, the curtains may be coming up prematurely on some of Apple's plans.

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The future of the fight against piracy may be a lot less certain following rumors that music label EMI would like to make cuts in the funding of trade groups.

The four major music publishing labels -- EMI, Warner, Sony BMG, and Universal -- reportedly make regular payments to international representative groups such as IFPI and the RIAA. IFPI alone gets about $132 million a year from the four publishers, and that amount could be similar for RIAA, although no data was available.

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Soon Adobe's popular document format will include functionality to support advertising, thanks to a new partnership with Yahoo.

The two companies are framing the service as a way to allow publishers to offer their content on an ad-supported basis. This could also accelerate the adoption of PDF as a way to deliver paper content to subscribers in electronic form.

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The Mountain View, Calif. search company is testing out new technology that would pinpoint a users location on a mobile phone even though it's not equipped with GPS capabilities.

Obviously without a GPS, the location given would not be as accurate as some may have come to expect. However, Google hopes to use the location indicator phones already provide to at least offer basic location-based services through an improved version of Google Maps.

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Although its not exactly a surprise, Apple reiterated the expiration date for the Boot Camp beta, saying Tiger users will lose access on December 31.

The company had previously stated that the Boot Camp beta would "terminate automatically without notice from Apple upon the next commercial release of the Apple Software, or December 31, 2007, whichever occurs first," according to the EULA.

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The IP address of a man using Google's Blogger service has been handed over to authorities after the company settled with council members of an Israeli town in the West Bank.

The blogger had been posting slanderous content about members of the council of Sha'arei Tikva. Under the terms of the settlement, Google would give the man up to 72 hours before a court hearing to come forth or his IP address would be handed over.

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Nancy Tullos, former Broadcom human relations chief, pled guilty Tuesday to charges of obstruction of justice. She will also assist the feds in their case against the company.

Broadcom recently corrected its books by some $2.2 billion as a result of the probe, the largest yet of any of the 200 companies now being investigated for stock option backdating.

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The two companies have signed an agreement that will bring the TiVo service to PCs in the near future. TV on the PC is a largely un-tapped market: approximately 50.8 million PC TV Tuners are said to be sold by 2011, according to In-Stat. Addressing this market could provide a solution to TiVo's considerable troubles in attracting new subscribers.

With the addition of the PC, the company will have a foothold in all the major avenues of media distribution -- cable, satellite, and now the computer. "The partnership with TiVo extends the TV experience for the connected digital home, enabling easy access anytime, anywhere to the most extensive TV content," Nero chief Richard Lesser said.

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A federal judge in Wisconsin said that the federal government's request for the records of sales by an indicted man raised some concerns, causing the US Attorney's Office to drop the subpoena.

Robert D'Angelo, indicted in October, is being charged with tax evasion and mail fraud. The feds were seeking to force Amazon to hand over the records of nearly 24,000 books the man had sold through the site over the past four years.

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The two companies will need to pay Michigan-based z4 nearly $160 million in total penalties for infringing on the company's rights to patents surrounding anti-piracy technologies.

z4's technology provided a method for software to be activated once it is installed. The same technology could also be used to deactivate the software in an effort to deter piracy.

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After a nearly five year wait, Google's long rumored "Gdrive" storage service appears set to take on similar offerings from Microsoft and AOL, according to media sources.

Rumors of such an offering began in earnest last year when the leaked notes to a presentation from CEO Eric Schmidt made a reference to a Google storage platform in March. However, the company would not comment and speculation continued.

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The research firm says that radio stations are complaining that the samples used were too small to produce reliable ratings data.

Arbitron still uses the over four decade old paper diary method of calculating ratings. The new system will electronically measure what people listen to.

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T-Mobile is set to defend its exclusive rights to iPhone sales within Germany on Thursday, as a German court will hear arguments for and against the deal.

While the company is making an unlocked version of the phone available, it is appealing the injunction filed against it by Vodafone. If successful, the company will end sales of that model, and possibly file suit against its rival to recover damages.

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Calling it a data breach is an understatement. The UK government has lost child benefit data on as many as 25 million people in its country, making it the largest loss of personal information ever reported.

The information was included on two discs and was only password protected and not encrypted, meaning it could be fairly easy to get at. The data includes names, dates of birth, bank account, and address details. The discs went missing from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) office.

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