On the same day, RealNetworks sued Hollywood studios and the DVD Copy Control Association, and the MPAA sued RealNetworks over the less-than-month-old RealDVD software that allows users to save copies of DVDs.

Using DVD Copy Control Association v. Kaleidescape Inc as a legal precedent, Real sued for a declaratory judgment for the protection of RealDVD. According to the company, the action was a response to threats made by major movie studio parents Disney, Viacom, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, NBC Universal, and Warner Bros.

Yesterday, Nokia purchased a software vendor which competes against RIM's BlackBerry and Motorola's Good Technology Group. With these and lots of other changes now afoot, in which direction(s) is Nokia headed?

On the eve of the rollout of a new consumer-targeted phone, Nokia announced plans on Tuesday to acquire OZ Communications, a company that produces mobile messaging software in the same general ballpark as RIM and Motorola's Good Technology Group.

Japanese site PC Watch has started the global rumor mill churning with a report that Sony's Cell BE processor that powers the PS3 could still be a viable chip for the company's next next-gen console.

Without citing sources, PC Watch appears to be saying that a technological leap of the same scale as from the PlayStation 2 to the PS3, may no longer be affordable. As a result, the article says -- showing material from recent presentations on the Cell processor family as evidence -- Sony may be considering elevating what had been called the "PlayStation 3 +" project to PlayStation 4 status.

After tests are completed sometime this fall, the cloud provider announced this morning, customers will be able to deploy complete Windows Server-based machine images to Amazon's high-capacity computing cloud, eliminating hardware costs.

In what could be a waterspout moment, if you will, for cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer Jeff Barr announced this morning that his operation is currently hosting a private beta of hosted Microsoft Windows Server instances. Within the next three months, AWS customers will be able to deploy machine images with 32- or 64-bit versions of Windows Server -- including high-performance packages -- to Amazon's cloud, to be hosted remotely.

One moment it's all doom and gloom, and the next it's brighter days ahead. But with Congress actually uttering the "D" word in place of the "R" word as debate on the bailout bill continues, the market now consistently lacks stability.

With Congress having taken yesterday off for the Bank Holiday, investors saw opportunities and potential bargains everywhere they looked, especially with Apple stock trading at a 16-month low. So injecting a much-needed dose of confidence back into the markets, the buyers came back yesterday, giving Apple an 8% boost, responding to what was the single largest Dow 30 point drop in history by looking forward to better times.

Like Microsoft and Yahoo before it, Wal-Mart will soon shut down DRM servers for its old music service. But Wal-Mart customers only have one week to prepare, and that could mean hurriedly backing up the tracks they've already bought.

Wal-Mart made a bold move in February of this year, when it began offering DRM-free MP3 tunes on its Web site. This week, though, the mass merchandiser has infuriated many users by sending out a letter signaling the end of DRM support for earlier music downloads from the site.

The largest wellspring of news in America is rethinking how it gets its words out, and the future looks a lot like RSS. Meanwhile, one of its main competitors is suing a plug-in creator who brought social networking to "its" turf.

The wellspring in question is the Associated Press -- the colossal wire service that pumps news to over 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 TV and radio outlets. Years ago, that job was done by teletype, a clattering beast of a machine that emitted paper and ink, and around which newsrooms centered. If you've ever seen a movie where some cigar-chomping editor rips a story off a typewriter-looking object and starts snarling, you have seen a teletype. (Or, for Terry Gilliam fans, it's the machine into which the bug falls at the beginning of Brazil.)

6:28 pm PST September 30, 2008 - The Senate has given its blessing to the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008, which net radio operations such as Pandora hope will let them negotiate financial arrangements that will keep the music playing.

Reached for comment Tuesday night, an audibly relieved Tim Westergren, co-founder and CSO of Pandora, said, "We're pleased, and grateful too I guess. There were so many people who stepped up over the weekend -- listeners, bloggers. People mobilized so fast and so intensely over this issue. It's amazing."

Yusuf Mehdi is the new number-two for Microsoft's Online Services division -- but, as The Prisoner would be the first to ask, who is Number One?

Medhi, formerly Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships, has shifted his responsibilities from mergers and acquisitions to MSN and Microsoft's search properties. He takes most of the job's marketing and search tasks off the plate of Bill Veghte, the senior VP now focusing mainly on the Windows and Windows Live groups; Veghte picks up a new title, Senior Vice President for the Windows Business.

Firefox leads the way in open source software used in organizations, and the Web browser is being deployed abundantly on Linux and Windows PCs alike, according to new data from the Open Source Census released today.

Open source software deployment is higher in Europe than the US, and in government and finance than in other industries, says the Open Source Census (OSC), a six-month-old effort which is also accumulating data on use of open source software across Linux and Windows.

Sprint's Xohm WiMAX network barely got its feet on the ground before neutrality advocates began to tear apart the service's acceptable use and network management policy.

Sprint's terms of service include the passage: "XOHM may provide various Service plans with different characteristics, including different speeds and usage limitations.  You agree to comply with these limitations.  In addition, your use of the Service may not result in an excessive burden of system or network resources, may not weaken network performance, and may not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service.  To ensure a high-quality experience for its entire subscriber base, XOHM may use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing."

This morning London time, 16 members of the GSMA Association, including Microsoft, jointly announced the formation of a Mobile Broadband initiative, whose goal will be to endow notebook PCs in 91 countries with 2G and 3G.

The new marketing push appears to be an attempt to sheath a set of abbreviations that has yet to become part of the common vernacular -- namely, HSPA (formerly HSDPA and HSUPA), the software-upgraded "HSPA Evolved," and the GSMA group's hand-picked 3G successor, LTE -- into a more palatable brand name "Mobile Broadband" that consumers can accept. What it may also be is an effort to subtly distinguish HSPA from WiMAX -- a goal which would certainly please Qualcomm, a leading member of the new initiative, with a long record of opposing WiMAX.

Alcatel-Lucent's Tikitag, a venture whose objective is to enable an "Internet of things," plans to enter public beta on October 1 with an "RFID for the rest of us" solution that's already produced an array of intriguing applications.

Tikitag -- a product first announced at the the Demo show in San Diego earlier this month -- uses high frequency RFID (HFRFID) operating at 13.56 MHz to connect real world items such as business cards, stuffed toys, and paintings to the Web through passive RFID tags and active readers. The technology is also compatible with Near Field Communication (NFC), a standard based on HFRFID which is now being implemented in some mobile phones.

One of the most exciting innovations in JavaScript is a tiny little open source library that makes functionality directly assignable to objects rather than to events. The surprise is that Microsoft has signed on as its key distributor.

It is now an established fact that JavaScript is the functionality language of the Web; and although it was Netscape that introduced us to it, and although those responsible are now at Mozilla, it's Microsoft that has taken the lead in recent years in accelerating its evolution. One major step was its embrace of AJAX two years ago. Another step, announced yesterday, may be just as big: the inclusion in its standard JavaScript of a very small, very potent library called jQuery that alters the dynamics of how Web pages work.

Motorola first endorsed Google's Android platform almost a year ago. Yet now that HTC and T-Mobile are about to release the G1 phone, Motorola has confirmed to BetaNews that it will actually dive into the Android waters.

In a statement to BetaNews this morning, Motorola confirmed industry speculation that it is working on products for the Google-spearheaded Android platform. But a Motorola spokesperson refrained from commenting on published reports that the company is boosting its Android team from 50 to 350 developers.