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A higher court in Germany has ruled this week that cyberlocker Rapidshare must proactively filter pirated content from its site.

The decision upholds similar rulings from lower courts, each of which said the cyberlocker did not do enough to prevent piracy on its servers.

Germany's ruling covers both music and book downloads and dated back to an original case in 2009 brought by GEMA, a German organization representing that country's composers, vocalists, and music publishers.

Although the ruling has not been made public yet, reports say Rapidshare will have to monitor all the files uploaded before they are made available to download via the site.

Because such an endeavor would be impossible for Rapidshare staff, the cyberlocker will clearly need to create a software or script to filter the content.

Apple announced earlier today that it has made a decision on what to do with its almost $100 billion in cash.

As of the company's latest quarterly earnings report, the company now has $97 billion in cash and cash equivalents on their books, more money than even the U.S. government has on hand.

Reads the tech company's investor page: "Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, will host a Conference Call on Monday, March 19, 2012 at 6:00 a.m. PT to announce the outcome of the Company's discussions concerning its cash balance. Apple will not be providing an update on the current quarter nor will any topics be discussed other than cash."

Many feel the company will give a special one-time dividend to investors, although there are many other options and routes the company can take.

You can listen to the call tomorrow here: Apple Conference Call

Capcom has confirmed that they intentionally included but then locked out numerous features of the just-released Street Fighter X Tekken in an effort to later sell that content as DLC (downloadable content).

On the retail disc, the content is available but locked down, including 14 new unannounced characters and costumes, character colors, gems and quick combo presets.

To unlock all the characters will cost you $20, and Capcom will only make them available later this year after the game is released for the Vita.

Each alternate costume will cost $1 and the gems and colors will likely cost a bit less than that. Altogether, to unlock all the character and clothes and other DLC, it will cost gamers $120 for the content which already exists on the retail disc.

Additionally, Capcom advertised a multiplayer feature for the Xbox 360 but removed it right before launch, quietly. In fact, the feature, which is a mix and match of online and offline players for scramble battles and pair play battles, is still noted in the instruction manual.

According to research firm IHS iSuppli, Apple is making less money per iPad 3 sold than they did on the corresponding iPad 2 models, for the most part.

The new tablet just went on sale on Friday in the U.S. and 9 other nations, where base models start at $500 just like in previous generations.

For example, the new 32GB LTE third generation iPad, which costs $729, costs Apple $375.10 to produce, including the bill of materials and manufacturing costs. The smaller capacity 16GB LTE version has an assembly cost of $358.30, while the largest 64GB LTE model has an assembly cost of $408.70.

Non-LTE versions, those that only include Wi-Fi capability, cost $316 for 16GB model, the 32GB model comes in at $333, and the 64GB version comes in at $366 total assembly costs.

As expected, the Retina Display and touchscreen are the most expensive component, at $137. The flash memory costs $16.80 (16GB), $33.60 (32GB), or $67.20 (64GB) and the ARM-based A5X processor comes in at $23. The new battery costs $42. The new-and-improved camera costs $12.35 while the WLAN/BT/FM module costs $15.

According to a new report, Google is expected to begin penalizing sites that overly use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, pushing them behind sites that have more solid content.

The report comes via SEL, who has an audio clip of Google engineer Matt Cutts discussing the situation at SXSW.

Google will "level the playing field" against "all those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO--versus those making great content and great sites."

"We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect," concludes Mutts.

Earlier in the week, the WSJ made a similar report, claiming Google was preparing to embark on their biggest rehaul of the search engine, to date.

Last year, Time Warner Cable released their TWC TV app for the iPad, Android, iPhone and desktop giving subscribers a chance to stream some live cable channels on their devices as long as they were connected to their home Wi-Fi.

As of today, in New York City customers will now have 26 local channels.

The company will be expanding the local channel offering to "a few more markets" by the end of the year, as well.

Full lineup:

WCBS HDTV (CBS)
WNBC HDTV (NBC)
NBC NY Nonstop
WNYW HD (Fox)
WABC HDTV (ABC)
Live Well HD
WABC News Now
WWOR HD (My9)
WPIX-HD (PIX11)
WPXN HD (ION)
WXTV HD (Univision)
WFUT HD (Telefutura)
WNJU HD (Telemundo)
WFME
WLIW (PBS)
World
WLNY (TV 10/55)
WMBC
WNJN HD (or WNJB or NJN1) - PBS
WNYE (NYC TV Life)
WRNN
WNET (Thirteen HD)
V-ME
Create
Kids13
Rise (Al Jazeera)

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has created a major exhibition celebrating the history of video games.

"The Art of Video Games" spans the last 40 years of video games, in all forms.

"While this exhibition is not the first exhibition that actually uses video games, it is the first I believe that actually looks at video games themselves as an art form," notes curator Chris Melissinos (via MI). The exhibition comes on the heels of a US Supreme Court ruling that ruled the First Amendment covers video games. "This is not about the art within video games," continues the curator. "This is about video games themselves as an artistic medium."

"The Art of Video Games" will spotlight 20 gaming systems starting with the Atari VCS and ending with the PS3. Additionally, the exhibition will spotlight 80 games, all of which are "touchstones" of their respective generations.

Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst and Flower will each be available with their original joysticks and controllers for visitors to play on wall-sized screens.

AT&T has lost a court case to 39-year-old Matt Spaccarelli, over smartphone data throttling.

Spaccarelli is an iPhone owner who has AT&T's grandfathered unlimited data plan. In 2010, the carrier discontinued the plan and moved to tiered pricing. In 2011, the carrier began to throttle heavy data users down from 3G to 2G. Spaccarelli says his device began to see the slow speeds after just 1.5GB of data used in a billing cycle by early 2012.

In his interview, Spaccarelli showed off horrendous 0.31 Mbps speed in California, down from the nationwide average of 1.7 Mbps. The iPhone owner claimed that due to AT&T's actions, he cannot stream video or even browse the Web without complications.

Judge Russell Nadel of small claims court has ruled this week that AT&T violated the terms of the unlimited data plan and must pay $850, "an estimation of the data usage over the remainder of Spaccarelli's contract, plus $85 for court costs."

The elated iPhone owner says he will use the money to get a new smartphone on a better carrier and also travel to the AT&T stockholders meeting in April.

According to the WSJ, Lady Gaga made an estimated $30 million through Twitter last year, capitalizing on her huge fan base.

The artist has almost 21 million followers on the microblogging platform. The $30 million figure was roughly one-third of her overall earnings last year, meaning Twitter likely made her more money than her CD sales did.

Lady Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter, beating out Justin Beiber, Katy Perry, Rihanna and President Barack Obama among others.

"She really engages them and re-tweets stuff they say as if she was one of them," says John Bonini, content marketing manager of Impact Branding & Design.

The singer's latest album "Born This Way" has sold over 6 million units and has spawned a number of #1 hits on the charts.

Sean Parker, former Facebook president and founder of Napster, has claimed today that Spotify will overtake iTunes in two years due to the store's "slowness."

Speaking at SXSW, Parker says the unlimited streaming service is much more capable of bringing in revenue for the record companies than Apple is. Parker has also invested $15 million in Spotify.

Spotify, which was wildly popular in Europe and expanded to the U.S. during the summer of 2011, allows users to choose music to listen to and stream, for free, for a limited amount of hours per month. Premium accounts, which range from $5-$10 per month, allow unlimited access to the music, including from mobile devices, and higher quality recordings.

Says Parker (via NME): "Spotify is returning a HUGE amount of money [to the record labels]. If we continue growing at its current rate in terms of subscribers and users, we will overtake iTunes in terms of the amount of revenue we contribute to the music labels in under two years. The iTunes store, to this day, is so slow. I'm amazed."

At CES this year, Asus revealed their MeMo tablet, a 7-inch quad-core beast that the company was set to sell for $249.

Today, sources are claiming that the MeMo will actually end up being the Google Nexus Tablet, and the price tag will be significantly lower.

According to a "senior employee at a supply chain company based in the United States," the Nexus Tablet is a "done deal" and will retail for either $149 or $199.

To get to that price tag, however, Asus will be stripping the quad-core Tegra 3 out of the tablet and replacing it with a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP 4.

If accurate, the device will launch at the CTIA Wireless show on May 8th and come with the latest version of Android 4.x Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Google Nexus S, the second flagship device from the search giant, will be getting the Ice Cream Sandwich Android update, say sources.

Built by Samsung, the popular device was the first with Android 2.3 Gingerbread (in vanilla form) and was supposed to be the first to get the latest updates.

If true, the sources say the update will be hitting the device in the "next few weeks."

Nexus S owners started receiving the update in December of last year, but there were severe battery life issues, causing the company to pull the update.

T-Mobile Nexus S users were able to download manually so that ROM is available out there, but other carriers were not so lucky.

If you are looking to sign up for a YouTube account, Google has made it easier to create the account, by using your Google+ social networking account.

Says YouTube: "Today we're adding a feature that lets you sign up for a new YouTube channel using your existing Google+ profile. You can now use your Google+ profile name and photo on a new YouTube channel, giving you one consistent identity across platforms when uploading videos, sharing, commenting and other public activities."

Google has said it plans to integrate all of the company's services with Google+, adding a social layer to applications and services hundreds of millions use every week.

If you still prefer to stay anonymous, you of course have the option to choose a regular username on YouTube.

However, if you have a login already, and a Google+ account, the integration is default.

J.D. Powers and Associates has released their latest smartphone satisfaction ratings, based on a survey of over 7000 smartphone owners.

The ratings work by combining key factors which are performance (35%); ease of operation (24%); features (21%); and physical design (20%).

1000 points is a perfect score, which no company received, but Apple unsurprisingly topped the list at 839. HTC followed close behind at 798 points, both beating out the industry average of 774.

Following the leaders were Samsung at 769 points, Motorola at 758 points, LG and RIM at 733 points and finally Nokia at 702 points. Palm actually rated lower, but it is hard to include the now dead company in the list.

Even though Dell recently announced they would be releasing a business tablet running Windows 8 the "exact day" the operating system is released, it appears the company will have some immediate competition.

The Verge says Lenovo will have a tablet running the upcoming OS on the same day, which they internally believe to be in mid-October.

Most speculate the device will be the 13.3-inch IdeaPad Yoga, which was unveiled at CES in January.

The IdeaPad Yoga is a 13.3-inch notebook that, when flipped, can be used as a standalone tablet.

Although there is not too much known about what the computer's final hardware will be, it is apparently just 0.67-inches thick and made to look like Lenovo's current IdeaPad U300 line. Lenovo says the laptop can be easily flipped to look like a tablet for made to stand V-shaped in "tent" mode, as seen in the pics. The device is very light at just 3.1 pounds.