Attorneys for National Public Radio filed a motion in federal court yesterday for a re-hearing concerning the Copyright Royalty Board's decision to impose significantly higher "per-performance" royalty fees upon Internet streaming music providers, which include the online services of public radio stations.

But the hearing itself would be just the first step, NPR's motion itself states, as the broadcaster intends to appeal the CRB's proposal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds that the decision of the CRB's judges "was arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion and/or unsupported by sufficient evidence." Just the minimum fee alone, NPR contends, would be quintupled to $500 per channel; and from there, the inflation rate for performance royalties would rise by an even higher factor, rendering the whole business of Internet streaming unsustainable.

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Blockbuster CEO John Antioco, who oversaw the company's transition into the online rental business, will leave the company by the end of this year after 10 years with the company. The announcement came at the same time as a settlement was reached on his end of year bonus, which was far less than Antioco sought. He would also receive, as part of his severance package, less than is stated in his contract.

Antioco led the push into online rentals after Netflix's success began to cut into the company's bottom line. The result has been a sweeping restructuring of the company, which has cut into profits. While it isn't exactly clear if the company's financial health had anything to do with the changes, billionaire investor Carl Icahn was said to have led the charge to reduce the bonus and his severance package.

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Rambus will be allowed to continue to collect royalties on its memory chip technologies thanks to a stay of an order that would have forced it to lower its rates, however the extra money will need to be placed in escrow while it appeals.

The Federal Trade Commission had ruled in February that Rambus could charge a maximum royalty rate of .5 percent for DDR SDRAM, and .25 percent for SDRAM for a period of three years after the order is issued. Following this period, the company will be barred from collecting royalties.

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Toshiba and Hynix said Tuesday that they had settled their disputes over patents surrounding NAND memory chips, agreeing to cross-license each other's intellectual property surrounding the technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The settlement ends a nearly three-year fight between the two companies that resulted in several suits and countersuits.

Both companies tried to halt sales of the other's products into the US, but the courts dismissed both motions. Toshiba and Hynix had a previous agreement, extending from 1996 through 2002, however disagreements over the terms of a new deal caused the two sides to part ways. The term of the new deal is unknown, with the companies only sharing that it was "long term."

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A stalemate was declared in the tangle of copyright claims between wireless technology providers Qualcomm and Broadcom last Friday. After both sides watched their initial claims dismissed, Qualcomm agreed to dismiss its six remaining charges against Broadcom, and Broadcom withdrew three of its claims thereafter, thus removing a sizable barrier to the evolution of wireless standards.

But seizing the opportunity, Nokia responded by filing suit against Qualcomm in the EU, claiming it no longer holds exclusive rights to technology it licensed to Texas Instruments in 2000, for chips TI sells in Europe.

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The nation's second biggest movie retail chain said Monday that it would open its own online DVD rental service in order to stop the defection of customers to rivals Blockbuster and Netflix.

Movie Gallery, which operates both Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video, would debut the service later this year. A survey of the chain's customers showed that while many were renting new releases through its stores, but opting for the online services for older releases.

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Since the advent of the Web, network applications designers have been using HTTP to create a viable Internet applications platform. The relative success of these projects has varied, from the historic missteps of Microsoft's ActiveX, to Sun's incrementally more satisfactory Java, to Macromedia's resplendent - though often unresolved - Flash, to the more hopeful and practical AJAX, to Microsoft's more ambitious - and far more sensible - XAML. But through it all, the general consensus over whether the browser should play an active role has been on again-off again, drifting like a sine wave.

With Adobe's move today to evolve the Flash platform it acquired in the Macromedia takeover, the company is gambling on "off again." Still code-named "Apollo" (its final brand name has yet to be announced), the new Adobe runtime environment was made available to the general public this morning.

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Sprint is testing a new cell phone plan in San Francisco that allows its talkative users to have unlimited calling, messaging, and internet usage for $120 per month.

Currently its cheapest unlimited plan is $200 per month, but only includes mobile calls. This will include the above, minus data access for laptops. Those wishing for that service will need to pay an additional $30 per month.

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In a meeting of corporate attorneys at the Argyle Executive Forum in New York last Wednesday, Bloomberg News reported over the weekend, Intel's general counsel stated that e-mails for 151 employees who were to have been instructed to retain them as possible evidence in the AMD antitrust trial were lost by virtue of a single IT manager misreading a spreadsheet where the employees' names were first distributed.

Apparently the names were categorized across multiple tabs, if general counsel D. Bruce Sewell's remarks are accurate, and this single manager didn't click on the tab where the 151 were listed. As a result, they never received backup instructions.

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Most computer attacks originate in the United States, a study has found. Additionally, hackers are increasingly becoming more organized, creating crime rings that are becoming more effective in carrying out attacks.

The report, released by Symantec on Monday, details increasingly sophisticated networks are causing an increase in data theft and leakage, as well as targeted code which is being used to steal confidential information and then sell it on the black market.

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TechCrunch has hired a CEO in order to continue to expand its editorial operations, site owner Michael Arrington announced over the weekend. Heather Harde, who currently serves as the senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Fox Interactive Media, would begin working for the blog at the end of the month.

She will run all business aspects of the site, while Arrington will focus on the editorial, he wrote in a blog post. "TechCrunch has grown faster than I could manage over the last couple of years," he wrote. "Heather's job will be to leverage the opportunities that we have sometimes let slip by, and to manage our organic and acquisition growth going forward."

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Just over one year after Microsoft and a handful of hardware partners followed up a stupendous marketing campaign for something called "Origami" - which included a presentation to the press that asked the question, "What am I?" rather than answering it - Samsung revealed at the CeBIT conference in Hannover today its intention to upgrade the now-largely-forgotten UMPC platform with at least some of the key features it lacked.

For instance, the device whose category had been touted as providing "ubiquitous connectivity" - albeit without WiFi, broadband, or Bluetooth - will now have access to all three, at least in Samsung's trial run of its new Q1Ultra for the Korean market. ("Ultra," in this case, means "this time for real.")

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If you can't get people to use your product for free, you can always pay them to.

Microsoft is now offering to pay businesses through service or training credits if they get their employees to use its Live Search product at work. The amount of the payment would be based on the number of search queries served.

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In a new post-script to a message headed "OneCare's Dedication to Our Customers" originally posted yesterday on the Microsoft Windows Live OneCare Team blog, lead product manager Gina Narkunas declares the Outlook e-mail file deletion issue "fixed," but then attempts to explain that the .PST files containing the entirety of users' local e-mail stores weren't really deleted to begin with: "not that the files are deleted, just that they can't find them."

The message comes a day after a OneCare user accidentally discovered on his own that his .PST file, which he believed had been deleted when it was supposed to have been merely quarantined by OneCare, had actually been rendered "deleted" by Windows System Restore, which he had invoked earlier in trying to recover the .PST file. In attempting to address an unrelated bug, the user had rolled back his system restore, after which the .PST reappeared within OneCare's quarantine directory.

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Blu-ray is aiming to replace the DVD format within three years, and is practically claiming victory at the CeBIT technology show in Germany.

The European chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association says that by the end of that period, Blu-ray would be the only next-generation format left. It pointed to the launch of the PlayStation 3 as a major impetus for the format's eventual supremacy.

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