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The Songwriters Guild of America has made it clear with a note this weekend, via Ars, that music piracy is worse than bank robbery, and that the FBI should begin prosecuting all file-sharers civilly and criminally.

"There are numerous economic crimes of much lesser magnitude (such as bank robbery) that are routinely and fully investigated, for which law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have significant resources," says the SGA. "By contrast, online copyright piracy dwarfs bank robbery in causing economic losses, yet the FBI has limited criminal investigative interest and no civil mandate whatsoever to pursue this devastating economic harm. This inequity must change."

The Guild goes on to say that the DOJ (Department of Justice) needs to class illegal file-sharing as a "serious" crime. "Unfortunately, this misguided attitude allows domestic and foreign pirates to decimate an industry—intellectual property—where the United States enjoys a true global competitive advantage," they add.

Additionally, the SGA says that the federal government should immediately begin bringing civil copyright lawsuits against offenders. Currently, any lawsuits against illegal file-sharers come from the private sector.

Sony has announced the launch of an extended warranty program for PlayStation 3 and PSP owners dubbed the PlayStation Protection Program.

Using the service you can extend your factory warranty to up to three years, with the first additional year (for the PS3) costing $45. To save money, a two year extension is just $60. Both consoles start with a one-year manufacturers warranty.

For the PSP, the warranty extension is even cheaper, at $30 for the first year or $40 for two years. Additionally, since handheld consoles are very prone to drops and accidents, Sony is offering accidental damage waiver for an additional $10 on the warranty. In two years, if you happen to drop your PSP down a flight of stairs and then accidentally step on it, Sony will replace it.

Says Sony: "The PlayStation brand has long been synonymous with the highest quality in engineering and design, and it's because of the reliability of the PS3 and PSP systems that we can offer the PlayStation Protection Plan. We have heard from consumers that they're interested in an extended service plan that's backed directly by SCEA and leverages our technical expertise. While both the PS3 and PSP systems are designed with future-proof technology and built for long lifecycles, we're looking forward to offering this service to consumers looking for added peace of mind."

Last month, Netflix announced it was sending out Wii streaming discs to all that signed up for them, giving Nintendo console owners a chance to watch movies and TV shows from Netflix's "Watch Instantly" collection through their console.

Yesterday, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said that almost one million Wii owners have now "participated" in the service, but it is unclear how many of those remain active, and how many of those just ordered the disc without ever expecting to use the service.

Netflix, during its last earnings report stated that it has about 14 million subscribers in the U.S., a number that has been greatly boosted by making the streaming service readily available to PS3, Xbox 360 and now Wii owners.

Samsung has announced the breakdown of which operating systems will be used on their upcoming smartphones, with Android being the clear winner.

The company said 50 percent of all new smartphones will come with the open source Android, the operating system that has been quickly growing in popularity since Google released it in late 2008.

Of the remaining share, 33 percent will use the Bada OS, Samsung's own new operating system, which had its first SDK released in December.

"Customer response for bada-based smartphones is very strong," adds Samsung.

It is unclear what operating system or systems will use up the last 17 percent, but the educated guess is Windows Phone 7.

Twitter will launch "embeddable" tweets starting Tuesday, allowing users to easily embed any tweet within a web document.

To date, trying to reproduce a quotable tweet is not an easy task, with the only options being either taking a screenshot and posting the image, or copying the quote and pasting it on your own HTML page. The first doesn't allow for Google and other search engines to index the tweet and the latter leaves out relevant info such as a member's name or avatar.

With the new feature, users can take a quick "snippet" of code that will include the author's name, links, avatar and a panel that allows you to head back to the original author's page.

You can view the Twitter blog post here: http://media.twitter.com/392/tweets-quotes

And an example of the embed (all links work in the original):

ABC's extremely popular streaming app for the iPad is set to get updated very soon, bringing 3G support. Currently the app only supports streaming movies and TV shows when connected to Wi-Fi.

The app was submitted to the App Store, pending approval in the past 10 days, and it should get approval soon.

The ABC app was at times the top free app available, and is currently number 6 in the iPad App Store.

While the Wi-Fi-only version was not a problem during the first weeks when the only iPad version available was Wi-Fi-only, Apple has since released a 3G-supporting version and most users take their device on the go. Wi-Fi is not always available when walking the streets.

AppAdvice says that "ABC didn't include a lower-quality, backup streaming capability in the first version of its app," because of its love for HD-quality streaming, as seen for example on ABC.com.

Despite the fact that they had already slashed prices on the Palm Pre Plus to very low prices, Verizon has dropped the price on the smartphone again, this time to $30 USD.

Additionally, the Plus comes with free Mobile Hotspot (formerly $30-a-month) and a BOGO (buy-one-get-one-free) option as well.

That's right, so little people want the Palm smartphone that it is being offered at 2 for $30 with free Mobile Hotspot. The Palm Pixi Plus, the little brother of the Pre, is priced at the same point currently but expect the price to drop to $9.99 or lower in the very near future.

Recently, HP agreed to purchase the struggling smartphone maker for $1.2 billion in cash, including assuming Palm's debt.

In Mid-April, Microsoft announced that it was releasing its formerly dubbed 'Pink' phones the Kin One and Kin Two, aimed at the teenager set.

Today, reports are stating that the phones go on pre-order this Thursday, with a May 13th release day.

Microsoft has not confirmed the dates, but the reports stem from leaked Verizon posters showing off the dates, so they seem pretty set in stone.

The phones will be available in the U.S. via Verizon and in the UL, Italy, Spain and Germany via Vodafone.

The Kin One specs:

- Has a compact full QWERTY keypad
- Multitouch screen
- 5MP camera with LED flash
- 4GB memory
- "Media player powered by Zune."

The Kin Two specs:

- Full QWERTY keypad
- Multitouch screen
- 8MP camera with LED flash, HD video recording
- 8GB memory
- "Media player powered by Zune."

Apple has announced today that on Friday the company sold its 1 millionth iPad tablet, just one month after its release.

The iPad, in its Wi-Fi-only version, was released on April 3rd, and quickly sold over 300,000 units.

Additionally, iPad owners have downloaded 12 million apps from the App Store, and over 1.5 million e-books from the newly launched iBookStore.

"One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone," says CEO Steve Jobs. "Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."

Developers have created 5000 apps specifically for the iPad, with some of the most popular being legal streaming movie and TV show services such as Netflix.

Users of older Android devices such as the T-Mobile G1 and even newer devices like the Motorola Droid have always complained about the lack of available room for apps downloaded from the Android Market.

Droid users, for example only get 256MB of space, and G1 users much less.

When the company launched the Nexus One, engineers said they were working on a solution, and it appears finally that an official "Apps2SD," the feature found in all rooted ROMs is on the way, giving users almost unlimited (who can possibly fill an 8GB microSD card with apps?) amount of room for their apps, and freeing up internal memory.

Issue 1151 in the Android Code page now says "future release" after months of saying "assigned." The engineer who changed the note, San, had the following to say:

Promised for the "near future" in early March, it appears that Android handsets on the Sprint network will finally receive the 2.1 firmware update.

XDA Developers revealed the screenshot today, a memo leaked from Sprint itself.

The memo says the Samsung Moment will get the update this weekend and the HTC Hero will get it in the next week.

A leaked Best Buy Mobile memo seems to point to the Hero update coming next week as well but seeing is believing in this situation.

The updates will not be OTA as they are both pretty large (80MB and 117MB respectively) so it seems like they will have to be downloaded manually.

Movie Gallery, the parent behind the once popular video rental chain Hollywood Video has announced today that they will close all 2415 remaining U.S. stores, liquidating all inventory and the stores over the next few months.

The company is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, for the second time since 2007.

There are 184 Hollywood Video chains that remain in Canada, and it is unclear whether they will be shut down.

The worst part of the news may be that Movie Gallery had 19,000 employees when they filed for bankruptcy, meaning at least 15,000 more people will be laid off soon from their jobs, depending on how many employees still remain since the bankruptcy filing.

The company is the second largest brick-and-mortar rental chain in the U.S. behind Blockbuster (which is struggling as well). Redbox and Netflix continue to strive, without the need for physical store.

As Apple and Adobe continue to fight over the positive or negative affects of Flash in the mobile universe, browser maker Skyfire has released Skyfire 2.0 for Android, which has pseudo-Flash support giving "access to Flash videos on a web page that otherwise would not play."

The company has said it is creating an iPhone version, that it hopes to submit to the App Store later in the year.

When we say pseduo-Flash support, we really mean it. When the browser identifies any Flash content in a web page, it sends that content to Skyfire's cloud servers which then converts it to HTML5 on-the-fly and streams it back in that format.

Apple has so far refused to allow Flash on "i" devices and at this point has said support is never coming. Skyfire says the cloud support allows for "faster and smoother video playback and extended battery life by off-loading more of the work to cloud servers."

While Android is way more open in terms of Flash than the iPhone OS, Android smartphone users will not see OS-level support of the format until the release of firmware 2.2 (Froyo), which is expected later this year. Skyfire could help those who do not want to wait.

Less than a week after computer maker HP agreed to purchase the struggling smartphone maker Palm $1.2 billion in cash, sources are noting that it will be removing Windows 7 from the Slate tablet, instead choosing to use a WebOS variant, arguably the best smartphone operating system available.

Sources say HP was not happy with the overall performance of Windows 7 on their unreleased tablet, saying the OS was too power-hungry. Additionally, a Windows 7 license will bring up the price of any final Slate product, and now that HP owns WebOS, the move makes sense.

TechCrunch says also that HP is set to drop the Intel processor used in the tablet, which would completely kill off any chance of Windows 7 being used.

The Slate, in its original state, would have run on Windows 7, would have been $549 at its cheapest, and had an 8.9-inch 1024x600 multi-touch screen. Additionally, the tablet had a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor, 1GB RAM, SDHC slot (with support up to 128GB), two cameras, a USB port, a SIM card slot, and five-hour battery life.

In just the next step in the ongoing battle between Adobe and Apple, the former company has decided to give away free smartphones running the Android operating system to its employees.

Although the company hasn't decided on which phone to give away, it is expected it will begin distributing the high-end HTC Incredible.

Adobe additionally announced that it will demo a version of Flash for Android in May, at the Google I/O conference.

The point of the free phones, (which are not mandatory) is a way to give employees more time to practice using Android, as well as Flash Player 10.1.

Google also said that all attendees of the I/O conference will be given either a Motorola Droid or a Nexus One.