In a decision handed down in US District Court in New York this afternoon, representatives of the recording industry won summary judgment against P2P file-sharing software maker LimeWire, in a patent infringement suit first filed in 2006.

Though the case took almost four years to resolve, as Judge Kimba Wood wrote in her decision today, LimeWire may very well have sealed its fate in July 2008. At that time, Greg Bildson, the company's CTO/COO met with plaintiffs' attorneys to discuss a potential case settlement.

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Ever since it stopped billing itself as a producer of "replacements" for Intel CPUs, AMD has struggled with the platform question: the need for OEMs to produce PCs based on pre-determined patterns. Manufacturers can achieve price breaks when they buy parts in bulk, and platforms can help them do that; likewise, they can reap even more benefits down the road from selling popular platforms to the public.

It was Intel that figured out the platform formula first, ironically through the help of a brand it no longer uses: Centrino. Up until last year, although individual AMD processors have been successful in the consumer marketplace, and Opteron as a brand has reclaimed its respect among server makers, it's never been able to crack the nut for consumer-grade platforms. Last September, AMD announced it would try yet another spin on the platform approach, unveiling a new "Vision" brand for classes of PCs based on AMD processors. OEMs such as HP, Acer, and Dell would use these classes not to denote the processor in their PCs, but rather what those PCs are capable of doing.

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Part of the national broadband plan includes the construction of a nationwide 700MHz broadband network specifically for emergency first responders. Until now, there are no broadband connection services specifically for public safety, and they have been limited to commercial services.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted conditional approval of 21 petitions filed by cities, counties and states looking for waivers to move forward with the construction of regional interoperable wireless broadband networks. The Commission requires these broadband networks to be deployed under a common interoperability framework in coordination with the FCC's Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC). Under this framework, all networks will be technologically compatible and interoperable.

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In March, Apple sued smartphone maker HTC for 20 counts of patent infringement, alleging the company had "stolen [its] patented inventions" for the iPhone.

Today, HTC fired back at Apple in the same fashion, filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to stop the sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States. The complaint accuses Apple of five counts of infringement.

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There is a lot of anticipation for Windows Phone 7, but little reason for new phone buyers to pick up a Windows Phone right now. Even with the extremely attractive and powerful HTC HD2, users won't be able to upgrade their devices to Windows Phone 7 when the new OS hits the market at the end of this year. It's quite a dead end.

Therefore, Microsoft has been working on sweetening up the Windows Mobile 6 environment by dishing out free software. Yesterday, the Redmond company announced that Windows Mobile 6.x users would be getting turn-by-turn navigation for free, today, the software giant announced that Office Mobile 2010 is now a free upgrade for all Windows Mobile 6.5 users with the previous version of Office Mobile.

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It was inactivity from Congress on the matter of broadband Internet regulation that forced US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski into an almost impossible situation. Taking what appeared to him to be the only legal and rational approach available, he boldly suggested last week that the Commission set up a system for splitting hairs over which parts of broadband fall under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and which ones fall under Title I.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the FCC's effort to accomplish what Congress couldn't, that has spurred at least some parts of Congress into action. Yesterday, one of the House's leading net neutrality skeptics, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R - Fla.), made good on a pledge his office revealed to Betanews last October, drafting new legislation that would prevent the FCC from building a "Third Way" for itself, unless it could prove to Congress that there was an emergency, and it could provide a cost/benefit analysis supporting its theory.

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If you're a female human being, and your bust size has become such the object of public attention that suggestive but non-offensive photos of you turn up in a Google Images search for...well, that part of the body; and with photos in hand, a men's magazine begins a nationwide search for your identity and address, then has your privacy been violated?

In an extraordinary decision discovered earlier today by The Guardian's Roy Greenslade, the UK's Press Complaints Commission rejected the complaint of a woman whose photographs -- which she states were taken when she was an adolescent -- ended up among Google's most common image search results for the phrase "Epic Boobs." This despite the following facts: she says she was 15 when the photos were taken years earlier; the photos were uploaded to a supposedly private page operated by AOL's Bebo service back in 2006; she gave no one permission to use her image outside of Bebo; and she'd never had any contact with Loaded magazine prior to its search for "the Epic Boobs girl."

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A 151-page report released this morning by the Omnibus Broadband Initiative (OBI) of the Federal Communications Commission (PDF available here) acknowledges an estimated $23.5 billion funding gap between the amount that government and business combined are presently prepared to spend to equip rural and underserved areas with broadband service, and the amount it believes is necessary.

The report doesn't say the government needs to raise that much more money in the coming years -- for instance, through increased taxes. Rather, it acknowledges that broadband buildout is accomplished by private industry, which is spurred to make those investments with government "incentives." But since almost by definition, the underserved areas of the nation will also be those areas that will almost certainly never become profitable for carriers to service in the first place, the problem becomes that no amount of government incentives may be enough.

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With Clearwire and Sprint pushing for mobile WiMAX coverage in 80 U.S. markets by the end of 2010, and promising three new WiMAX-powered smartphones in the near future, it's easy to lose sight of the wireless technology as a solution for rural residential broadband.

Today, Kansas Broadband Internet (KBI) announced it is moving ahead with the construction of its own WiMAX network with PureWave as the exclusive hardware provider. The finished network will cover 18 counties, and more than 12,000 square miles. With only 33 residents per square mile, Kansas is one of the United States' ten least densely populated states.

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Google began offering free turn-by-turn navigation with Android 2.0 in late 2009, and Nokia announced at the beginning of 2010 that Ovi Maps navigation would be free on all its future handsets. Today Microsoft announced that it is following suit with free turn-by-turn navigation for Windows 6.x and up phones, powered by Bing Maps.

When getting directions with Bing, there will now be a "Navigate" button which starts the turn-by-turn voice navigation. The voice navigation feature was developed by the Microsoft Tellme team.

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With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year's time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome.

In a live presentation yesterday, Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner admitted that his group's March roadmap, which involved an interim release of Firefox 3.7, had too many steps. Now the group has decided to straighten out its path by grafting version 3.7's main additions onto a point release Firefox 3.6.4, and shifting gears to focus on version 4.0.

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I have lots of gripes about the iPad user experience. Apple describes the iPad as "magical." I find it "frustrating." Usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains why, indirectly answering the question I asked last month: "Is iPad just a proof of concept?" In a post with two dates -- April 26 and, today, May 10 (from the homepage) -- he explains in summary: "iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems."

Haha, with all the fuss about Apple being too strict about approving applications, maybe with iPad more strictness is needed to ensure usability. Or perhaps the problems are less the apps but fundamental weaknesses to Apple's iPad UI approach, some of which may be there for business reasons. Apple CEO has pitched iPad as the savior of print media, and big publishers have signed on for the ride. However, in Nielsen's UI studies, the out-dated print motif approach is one of iPad's biggest usability shortcomings.

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Verizon Wireless recently published a marketing video that covers the company's LTE trial deployment in Boston, Massachusetts, and though the majority of the video is dedicated to consumer reactions, there is a brief glimpse of the system running at an average 8.55 Megabits per second downstream and 2.80 Megabits per second upstream.

These speeds are actually a bit lower than those reportedly attainable on the first commercial LTE deployment in Scandinavia. The LTE deployment in Sweden reportedly never exceeded 12Mbps downlink and 5Mbps uplink when tested by management consulting firm Northstream in January.

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With Congress' dance card already overflowing with major social and policy reforms, including in the financial sector, the likelihood that it could pass a major reform to the Telecommunications Act for Internet regulation during the Obama Administration (however long it lasts) is quite low. Faced with a pair of no-win scenarios, the FCC last week opted to propose a "Third Way" for broadband regulation that could at least get its foot back in the door -- a way that literally asks judges and attorneys-general to substitute "telephone" for "broadband" in various clauses of existing law, except for those sections where doing so wouldn't make any sense.

With major wireless Internet providers feeling they gain little or nothing by allowing the FCC to extend its regulatory ability, companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast (which, after all, won that court decision last month) are fine with the status quo. But a statement from Sprint late last week was, by contrast with those of its competitors, so conciliatory and non-descript that it was interpreted by many industry watchers as outright support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

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Last week, we took a look at Mint's new app for Android, which lets users track their finances and budget on their mobile device in a safe, read-only app. Mint.com was acquired by Intuit Software in late 2009, meshing the free, Web-based personal finance service with Intuit's portfolio of financial, accounting, and budgeting services.

Today, Intuit announced it is expanding further into online healthcare services with its acquisition of North Carolina company Medfusion for an estimated $91 million in cash.

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