The District Court of Stockholm's judgment against the Pirate Bay has been appealed, say reports. The keepers of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracking site were each sentenced to a year in prison and a combined 30 million kronor for violating copyright law and enabling others to do the same.

Legal representatives for the Pirate Bay's Carl Lundström are contesting the validity of the District Court's ruling. Their argument is based upon the notion that Lundström was charged as an accessory to copyright infringement without proof that he was aware of crimes being committed.

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Google Labs today officially announced the "Similar Images" and "Google News Timeline" tools, which have been deepening the well of useful search apps from the number one search provider since late last week.

Similar Images does exactly as its name suggests. When in Google Image search, queries for common or ambiguous terms frequently yield a lot of undesired results. A search for "colt," for example, could return images of a gun, a horse, a car, or an American football player: quite disparate results. By clicking the "Similar Images" tag under an appropriate picture, the search is narrowed to only the pictures that look similar to the chosen result.

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Starbucks really had its hands full with T-Mobile and AT&T hotspots last year. After the giant coffee seller dropped T-Mobile for AT&T, T-mobile then sued over a breach of contract, and the two mobile carriers ended up effectively splitting their Starbucks hotspot coverage between company-owned stores and franchises, with a goodly amount offering connectivity from both.

Now, more than 650 Starbucks in the UK and Ireland will undergo the same hotspot carrier swap, abandoning T-Mobile in favor of British Telecom. BT broadband, BT FON Wi-Fi, iPass, Boingo, and BT Openzone users will gain access the Internet at any Starbucks location in Britain, additionally, O2 iPhone users will have access included within their contract.

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Today, Microsoft announced updates to its "Smooth Streaming," which is a set of technologies for IIS and Silverlight designed to allow consistent full-screen high definition streaming.

Among Web servers, Microsoft's IIS enjoys about 33% market share (and slipping slightly) against market leader Apache, according to Netcraft analysis. Smooth Streaming leverages IIS Media Services (formerly known as IIS Media Pack) and Silverlight 3 to provide on-demand high-def media (720p to 1080p), or live adaptive streaming. The technology was first used with the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

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Adobe's already dominated the Internet with Flash, and now, the company has begun its move to the next connected platform: the home theater. This morning, Adobe introduced Flash for the Digital Home which is designed for use on connected HDTVs, set-top Boxes, Blu-ray players, and other such devices.

Familiar Flash-based videos, apps, and widgets will be available on home theater devices as soon as the second half of this year, Adobe says. Since the company has a strong backing from OEMs, chipmakers, cable companies, and content creators in its Open Screen Project, the delivery of Flash-based content is going to become much more uniform.

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Even though the United States' DTV transition has been handled with all the grace of a pianist wearing boxing gloves, there is still hope for a relatively smooth introduction to mobile DTV, despite the host of standards, brand names and incompatible technologies. The first market with a genuine mobile DTV deployment has been revealed.

Washington, D.C. will begin to broadcast mobile digital television in late summer, with the local CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox and ion stations participating. The stations will reportedly broadcast exactly the same shows and commercials that they're broadcasting to standard televisions.

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Microsoft's annual TechEd conference, which is taking place in Los Angeles this year from May 11 to 15, will play host to the official debut of Windows Mobile 6.5, the Windows Mobile Team Blog said today.

On The opening day of TechEd at 2:15 pm PDT, Stephanie Ferguson, the General Manager of Business Experiences at Microsoft, will lead the launch presentation of the Windows Mobile release that is meant to bridge the gap between old key-and-D-pad-driven interface with the touch-based interface.

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The most recent quarterly analysis from Futuresource Consulting estimates that 12 million non-PlayStation 3 Blu-ray players will ship this year, showing the substantial increase in support for the format which from July 2006 to January 2009 shipped only 10.7 million players, according to DisplaySearch.

Futuresource is putting a lot of stock in this year's holiday season, expecting shipments to exceed six million units in the fourth quarter alone.

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The four men behind the Pirate Bay torrent sharing site were sentenced to one year in prison and fined 30 million Kronor in damages this morning, after having faced charges from the Stockholm District Court of "promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws."

The court's statement to the media said, "By providing a Web site with...well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the Web site, the accused have incited the crimes that the filesharers have committed."

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Sony BMG, Warner, Atlantic, Arista, and Universal Music Group have been battling an intrepid group of Harvard Law scholars after 25-year old grad student Joel Tenenbaum was hauled into court for alleged copyright infringement through illegal file sharing.

In January, Tenenbaum and his counsel moved to invite the Courtroom View Network in to webcast the trial, feeling that it would be an issue of "keen public interest." While the motion was approved in the District court, the record labels involved in the case took the issue to the Court of Appeals, which today denied the District Court's ruling.

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After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.

In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met."

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You know those composite picture mosaics, where thousands of individual photographs are combined into a single, large image? National Geographic Digital Media has debuted a photo community tool that creates an infinitely zoomable loop of that sort called Infinite Photograph.

The application takes between 200 and 500 user-uploaded photographs from the My Shot public database and turns them into the finished mosaic which can be endlessly zoomed through. Eventually, National Geographic says the tool will be turned over to users to let them build an infinite photograph out of solely their own photos.

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Billboard magazine today said that sales of newly-priced iTunes tracks are trending downward as a result of last week's price increase. The publication's figures pertain to tracks that were formerly 99¢ and are now $1.29. A price increase of roughly 30% correlated to a 12.5% drop in sales. Meanwhile, tracks that were unchanged in price actually sold 10% more than the previous week, and sales were up 3% overall.

It is a path that labels do not want sales to follow. Before the changes went into effect, a major label executive who wished to remain anonymous, told Reuters, "If we can gain traction with $1.29 that will be good for greater margin."

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Conficker may have dominated security headlines this quarter, but Finnish security company F-Secure says the lesser-known "Sexy View" worm represented a new threat: the SMS and phone-based worm and the mobile botnet.

Sexy View is a social engineering worm which uses a device's contact list to spread. It sends a text message to all contacts with a link to a Web site that installs a malicious application that shares the phone's information (like its serial number) with the virus' creators. It targets devices running Symbian S60 3rd edition and was first found on Nokia 3250 handsets.

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The Maxthon development team announced this morning that advanced testers with a user level greater than 10 will now find a link in their Maxthon Passport that allows invite links to be sent to friends.

Maxthon is a customizable Web browser which offers skinning, tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, privacy controls and ad blocking, as well as third party toolbar support. But the key feature of Maxthon 3.0 is its use of dual rendering engines: both Trident and Webkit. While it strives to retain Internet Explorer-style compatibility with "compatible mode," (Trident) it offers the option to kick into "turbo mode" (Webkit) with reduced compatibility but higher speed.

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