Within a month of its release, RealNetworks' RealDVD was involved in two simultaneous lawsuits with the MPAA, who sought an injunction on the DVD ripping software they farcically called "StealDVD." Sale of the software was halted in October after only a few days of commercial availability.

Today, the software comes up in court before Judge Marylin H. Patel, the same district court judge who presided over the case late last year, and is most famous for her decision to shut down peer-to-peer music swapping service Napster nearly nine years ago.

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It's not every day that Apple throws numbers around. The company only sparingly uses them, and when it does, it's only to illustrate its most distinguished achievements. Today, the company dropped a couple: Nine months, and One billion downloads.

In the nine months that the iTunes App Store has been open, more than a billion applications have been downloaded, according to the company. That means iPhone/iTouch owners were downloading an average of 3.5 million applications per day, or roughly 33 applications per user.

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Tomas Norström, the Stockholm District Court Judge who presided over the Pirate Bay copyright infringement trial in Sweden is now himself under scrutiny for being a member of two copyright protection organizations, the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU), and Swedish Association for Industrial Property (SFIR).

While the guilty verdict against the four keepers of the Pirate Bay has already been appealed, Pirate Bay attorney Peter Althin said he has filed for a re-trial on the grounds that the court was biased.

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PBS has unveiled the beta site for online consumption of its most popular programs in the way that network counterparts ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW have already done.

Like Hulu, both clips and full-length episodes are presented in Flash, however, they are not embeddable in other sites, as they are through PBS' YouTube page. Videos include a pre-roll sponsorship slot and no in-video advertisements.

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Earlier this month, eBay began to jettison its mismatched properties, such as content location service StumbleUpon, and VoIP messenger software Skype to concentrate on its original strength, the online marketplace.

In the current economy however, those marketplace properties -- which include eBay, StubHub, and Shopping.com -- are actually creating significant drag on the company's revenue. EBay's first quarter earnings report yesterday showed that while the company's overall revenue dropped about 8%, revenue from its marketplace segment dropped nearly 18%. This was attributed to the strengthened US dollar devaluing overseas transactions, which account for more than half of eBay's business.

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Security company Check Point Software has begun accepting testers for its ZoneAlarm Full Disk Encryption for Laptops beta program, a program designed to make sensitive data saved on notebooks more difficult to extract if the computer is stolen.

While Full Disk Encryption is turned on, the user must enter an additional password before Windows starts up. Once in Windows, the software encrypts unused files, including even deleted and temporary ones, and decrypts only the files currently in use.

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If you were on the red team back in Format War II, also known as HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, you may have been left with substantial library of obsolete HD DVD titles. Warner Bros. is now offering a hand to those early adopters worried about having a dead library, a trade-in program called Red2Blu.

It hearkens back to box-top trade-in incentives from the heyday of breakfast cereals. For every Warner Bros. HD DVD you purchased, you can mail the cover art and $4.95 back to the company, and the company will send you the same movie on Blu-ray. There are 128 HD DVD titles from Warner Bros. that are available for trade, and each user can trade up to 25 discs.

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In February, the US Senate cut nearly $250 million in aid to the motion picture industry from the economic stimulus bill. Legislators determined that Hollywood studios didn't need the "bailout" after enjoying several months of record-breaking sales.

Yesterday, however, the Motion Picture Association of America attempted to show lawmakers how important the entertainment industry is to the global economy, releasing a study (PDF available here) which suggests, "The production and distribution of motion pictures and television programs is one of the nation's most valuable cultural and economic resources," and therefore worthy of hefty tax breaks.

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The European Commission's quest to end "roaming ripoffs" on text message and data charges incurred while roaming in the EU has come to a triumphant end.

The European Commission's proposal (PDF available here) to cap wholesale data roaming rates and roaming text costs was approved by the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in December and was approved yesterday by the European Parliament.

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Today, DivX and LG Electronics announced that the upcoming line of HDTVs from LG will carry the DivX Certification for full 1080p DivX playback. LG says its new line of TVs will be available in late May in the United States, and within the next eight days in Europe.

With the DivX 7 software package, users can compress a full HD movie onto a USB stick or SD card, or several on a standard DVD. The company says a 2-hour 1080p feature film (H.264 .mkv) can fit on an 8GB SD card. The companies mentioned that these TVs will be able to play back DivX content "from the PC or the Internet through the USB slot."

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The big news from AT&T's first quarter earnings report is that both revenue and profits dropped; revenue fell $1.7 million, and profit dropped by $4 million, or 9.7%.

While the company continues to suffer drain from its wireline services, AT&T's wireless business is booming, adding a net 1.2 million subscribers in the quarter. Of that 1.2 million, some 875,000 signed new contracts. Industry researchers at Changewave recently found that of all the mobile operators, AT&T consistently manages to attract and keep the most new subscribers, and many suspect the iPhone is responsible.

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Sugar Labs, makers of the icon-based GUI for the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 announced today the first beta of Sugar on a Stick, a live version of the operating system that can be booted from a USB stick as small as 1GB in size.

While One Laptop Per Child continues forth despite the crushing blows dealt by the economy, Sugar Labs has found that a Live distro of its linguistically-unencumbered interface will help it grow outside of the confines of the "$100 laptop". Based on Fedora LiveUSB, Sugar on a Stick boots to the Linux distribution, and stores all usage data on the USB device without any alteration to the host system.

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TiVo was definitely an early adopter with Amazon's movie download service, equipping its Series2 and Series3 set-top boxes with Amazon Unbox more than two years ago. As streaming video-on-demand has gained popularity, TiVo's roster of services has grown substantially.

Today, TiVo's version of the Amazon Video on Demand service gains more than 500 high-definition titles from major studios, including new-release films "Frost/Nixon," and "Twilight," and popular TV shows like "Gossip Girl," and "Californication."

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Today, Taiwan's Tatung University became the first university campus to be covered entirely by Mobile WiMAX (802.16e). The wireless broadband network launched today, and is accessible by more than 4,000 students and professors.

Considering analysts' suggestions that WiMAX is best used for fixed networks, and the opinion of industry leaders that it is not a viable mobile wireless standard, Tatung's experimental network could be the first wise and thoughtful deployment of the misunderstood mobile standard.

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German site Netbooknews.de posted a video today displaying a quick demo of the I-Buddie ultra-portable running Android. Though a number of manufacturers have openly discussed the idea of an Android netbook, and testers proved it could be loaded onto a standard Eee PC, none have yet displayed even a working prototype of a purpose-built Android netbook, until now.

There has been a recent spate of rumors about Android netbooks, speculating on a product from anyone from Acer to Nokia, but again, no commitments. The video from Netbooknews.de may show why.

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