Last week, eBay -- an investor in classified ad site Craiglist -- filed suit against it in Delaware for "unfairly diluting eBay's economic interest in Craigslist by more than 10 percent," according to details released just yesterday.

After the suit was issued, Craigslist's official blog said eBay's action came without any forewarning, and immediately struck the classified ad publisher as unethical. With most of the suit's details posted today (a considerable chunk of important data was redacted at the behest of Craigslist) in a public version of eBay's claim (PDF available here), it appears eBay is accusing Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster of implementing "self-dealing transactions" that were designed to benefit Craigslist at eBay's expense.

Today's news that Apple will offer movies for download on the same day as their DVD release was widely interpreted as a major breakthrough that will put iTunes in direct competition with Blockbuster. But there's a catch: Apple will only sell the movies, not rent them.

Movie download services ranging from CinemaNow to Vudu to iTunes have long been hamstrung by availability problems. Some movies can be purchased while others can be rented, and there is usually a delay before the films are available for download after their release on DVD.

Less than two weeks after it had agreed to be acquired by the Redmond giant, the small e-mail startup has walked away from the deal.

Negotiations had been ongoing between the two companies over the past few weeks, with an agreement reached in mid-April. Xobni distributes a plug-in for Outlook that shows how contacts are linked to one another.

With the number of Ruby developers projected by Gartner to more than quadruple to 4 million by 2013, start-up New Relic is getting into the act with an application management service for Ruby on Rails (RoR) that runs cross-platform.

Already in use among high profile Web sites that include Twitter, Hulu, and Helium.com, Ruby on Rails is an open source, database-driven Web application framework -- geared to ease of use and high productivity -- based on Ruby, an object-oriented programming language derived from Perl. Now, New Relic is launching a software-as-a-service (SaaS) package for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, for managing applications created in the emerging cross-platform Web development environment.

The artists' rights organization ASCAP will be receiving tens of millions in back royalties from 2006, from the leading Web radio broadcasters. But it's much less than what it had proposed, and way less than what royalties groups wanted last year.

A long-standing dispute over how much Internet streaming radio services owe in composers' royalties dating back to 2006 was settled yesterday in US District Court in New York. There, Judge William C. Conner issued a decision whose intricate formulas had their data, sadly, redacted from the public copy of the decision (PDF available here, black marks and all), although the end result is that AOL Radio, RealNetworks, and Yahoo will probably find themselves collectively owing more several million in back royalties.

There may, in the end, be a gap of at least four dollars per share between what Microsoft thinks it might possibly, perhaps, be willing to pay, and what Yahoo's shareholders definitely would like to see. Suddenly Redmond is looking soft.

During the founding days of America, one way for its first citizens to communicate indirectly with prospective business partners, while at the same time influencing the public markets, was by taking out notices in newspapers. These earliest editions were often tacked to public posts.

Adobe said Thursday it is looking to provide developers with a consistent runtime environment across multiple platforms, which allows for simpler and quicker development.

Adobe has lined up an impressive list of supporters to back the project, including ARM, Cisco, Intel, LG, Motorola, Qualcomm, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, among others. It has also gotten the blessing of several content providers including the BBC, MTV, and NBC.

AT&T has finally given the exact date for its Mobile TV with FLO launch and how much subscribers should expect to pay, putting it a full year behind Verizon's establishment of its almost identical service, V CAST.

The Mobile TV announcement from AT&T came at the CTIA wireless trade show in March, where it disclosed the handsets that would be featured at launch time -- LG Vu and Samsung Access -- and anticipated a debut in April.

In another expansion to their 18-month-old interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell introduced software tools designed to let systems administrators monitor Linux, Unix, and Windows servers from within Windows.

In an interview with BetaNews, Joe Wagner, senior VP and general manager of Novell's Systems and Resource Management unit, said Novell will work with Microsoft to enhance a product rolled out at this week's Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas: the Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 Crossplatform Extensions.

With all that Google has had on its plate over the past two years, you can imagine some projects have been shoved to the very back of the back burner. But only now is a February 2006 acquisition starting to heat up.

Over two years ago already, Google purchased the developer of an innovative set of blog traffic measurement tools called MeasureMap. Its key feature was providing blog proprietors with a near-real-time geographical plot of where its readers originated from, along with key data as to what readers were interested in and what they responded to.

Contrary to blog chatter today, Intel's creative relationship with McCann-Erickson, the firm responsible for a questionable ad last year, has not ended entirely, though $300 million of its media planning and buying will go elsewhere.

Omnicom Group's OMD will replace Universal McCann and Starcom who currently handle Intel Corp's $300 million dollar global account. The company announced its win yesterday, after a year-long review from Intel.

How does law enforcement solve the problem of holding spammers accountable, when federal anti-spam laws are still in their formative stages? In the case of a Colorado man, the answer was to leverage some help from the IRS.

A Colorado man was sentenced yesterday to 21 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty last December to charges of tax evasion and falsifying e-mail headers.

Some bloggers this week are suggesting that Microsoft is handing out "backdoor keys" to Windows security to police officers. Although Microsoft is denying the bulk of the rumors, a full explanation still seems a bit elusive.

In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, a Microsoft spokesperson denied that a technology unveiled at a law enforcement conference in Seattle on Monday would be used to equip officers and investigators with "backdoors" into Windows systems, as various blogs and news sources have since speculated.

Fortune cites sources indicating that AT&T is planning to cut the price of the 3G phone to attract new customers. Others say the magazine's got it all wrong. The truth? Nobody may be straight on this one.

The financial magazine's Scott Moritz created some waves Tuesday with a post to his online column this morning stating that when the 3G iPhone takes off this June, it will come with a subsidy to those who purchase it from the carrier.

Emerging from beta yesterday, build 115 of version 3.8 of the latest edition of Internet voice messaging platform Skype promises to focus on the messaging platform's single biggest gripe in recent months: call quality.

Download Skype 3.8.0.115 for Windows from BetaNews FileForum now.