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Always on the lookout for ways to push back against the recognition that any unauthorized copying is legal, the RIAA has filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in a copyright infringement case brought by a Las Vegas firm.

Righthaven LLC is a company formed by lawyer Steve Gibson and the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Its sole purpose was to purchase the right to bring copyright infringement lawsuits over online copying of newspaper articles.

When the terms of Righthaven's agreements with LVRJ and other newspapers was detailed in court filings several months ago, judges began dismissing their suits for a lack of standing. That's because the right to sue is an extension of the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders, and not a separate right which can be transferred separately.

That's not what the RIAA is arguing against. Instead their filing is in opposition to a ruling in one of Righthaven's failed lawsuits in which the judge stated it was possible for the republication of a copyrighted article, in its entirety, by a non-profit organization could be fair use.

In fact this is not a new concept at all. It was a key point raised by the Supreme Court in the most famous copyright case ever - the Betamax Case. In that case, the majority opinion read:

As of 11 AM, over 100,000 .XXX websites are live, ushering in a new "era" of porn.

After a decade of debates, the new top-level domain went public this year, allowing companies to have porn-only addresses.

Says the ICM registry (company behind handing out domains):

The Internet is home to a wealth of content, suitable for a wide range of ages and values. The adult entertainment industry has, and always will, account for a large amount of this content and while it is enjoyed by some, it is not suitable, or of interest, to all Internet users.

Regardless of your views on adult content, it's here to stay, so let's be adult about it.

The Android Market has started an excellent promotion today, offering 10 days of 10 popular apps for 10 cents.

Android's promotion is in celebration of 10 billion apps being downloaded from the market.

The first apps are:

SoundHound
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD
Minecraft - Pocket Edition
Swiftkey X
Endomondo Sports Tracker
Great Little War Game
Sketchbook Movile
Fieldrunners HD
Color & Draw for Kids (Phone)
Paper Camera

Google has announced today that their Voice Search feature in Android and iOS has now added Arabic and Hebrew support.

Thanks to the update, Voice Search now supports 29 languages in 37 countries.

Users in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, UAE, and Israel now have access.

Says Google:

When building support for Arabic and Hebrew into our language model we faced some unique challenges, including how to understand words with diacritics (accents that indicate a difference in pronunciation, a linguistic phenomenon called "Nikud" in Hebrew, and "Tashkil" in Arabic) and words appended with other words ("and" for example) that can have many different nuanced meanings.

To train our system we collected over one million utterances in Arabic and Hebrew, using the languages as they are spoken in the more populated parts of each country. For Arabic, we trained the system to recognize Gulf, Levant and Egyptian dialects. While initially we may not accurately recognize words spoken in every regional accent and dialect, one of the major benefits to Google's cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.

A new bill making its way through the US House Of Representatives would reallocate a significant amount of spectrum both to build a nationwide public safety network and provide additional wireless Internet service.

The proposal, called Jumpstarting Opportunity with Broadband Spectrum (JOBS) Act of 2011, was passed on from the Communications and Technology Subcommittee to the full House Energy & Commerce Committee.

In order to free up valuable spectrum currently used for digital TV, the bill would authorize the FCC to offer broadcasters payment in exchange for moving down from their current UHF assignments to VHF frequencies. While this sounds like a simple proposition, that's not necessarily the case.

When DTV broadcasts first began in the US, most broadcasters were using various UHF frequencies due to the limited bandwidth available on the VHF portion of the spectrum where most of their analog signals resided. When permanent digital frequencies were assigned by the FCC, the lower two portions of the VHF spectrum were avoided due to transmission problems.

The JOBS Act seems to make the assumption these same low VHF frequencies (formerly used for analog channels 2-5 would be viable for DTV broadcasts. However, it is ultimately broadcasters who will have to make this decision since the move would be strictly voluntary.

In addition to the potential issues for broadcasters, such a move could case problems for consumers. Some antennas commonly used for DTV reception aren't well suited for the lower range of the VHF spectrum.

But those are short term considerations. In the long term it seems inevitable TV will ultimately be just another data service absorbed into a common universal connection.

For some people, particularly in rural areas, there is every reason to believe that connection will be wireless due to the cost of running and maintaining wired connections in sparsely populated areas. At some point that will have to mean reallocating frequencies to increase data service options.

While this bill, at least as currently written, may not be the best way to accomplish that, it's something we need to be considering sooner rather than later.

In reality this bill has some major hurdles to overcome before it can be passed. A second provision would free up more spectrum currently used for public safety networks used primarily by state and local governments into a single national frequency range.

Like the DTV move, consolidation of the various public safety networks into a single nationally available range is probably inevitable, but there is significant resistance to it right now.

Another dealbreaker could be a provision forbidding the FCC from putting net neutrality requirements on sales of the newly freed spectrum.

At this point it may be purely hypothetical, but these challenges are realities which will have to be addressed eventually.

According to the latest comScore figures, Android and iOS continue to grow their smartphone market share in the U.S.

Android jumped 4.4 percentage points to 46.3 percent for the three-month period ended October 30th.

Apple, after seeing strong sales of the iPhone 4S and continued sales of other iPhones, jumped 1 percentage point to 28.1 percent.

BlackBerry, which used to have over 50 percent share n the U.S., fell another 4.5 percentage points to 17.2 percent.

Microsoft, with its now defunct Windows Mobile 6.5 and its latest Windows Phone 7.5 came in fourth at 5.4 percent share.

Samsung remained the top selling smartphone maker in the nation.

Verizon's upcoming Galaxy Nexus will cost $299 with contract when it inevitably hits the carrier this month.

Google and Samsung unveiled the flagship Android 4.0 phone earlier this year but all the companies involved have been utterly quiet on a release date.

The $299 price tag makes sense as Verizon has set that price point for its LTE phones.

As reported earlier, Verizon is unsurprisingly removing a major feature, Google's "Google Wallet" NFC-based service.

This is likely because Verizon is part of the joint "Isis" NFC payment system.

RIM has fired the two employees that were so drunk and unruly on a flight to China that the plane had to make an emergency landing.

Says the company: "RIM does not condone behaviour that conflicts with applicable laws and employees are expected to act, at all times, with integrity and respect."

Original Story:

RIM has suspended its two employees after their excessive drunkeness forced a flight to make an emergency landing.

45-year-old George Campbell of Conestogo and 38-year-old Paul Alexander Wilson of Kitchener were so belligerent on a recent flight from Toronto to Beijing that the crew had to physically handcuff them to their seats before eventually detouring and settling for an emergency landing in Vancouver.

The two have also plead guilty to mischief and will have to pay the airline $71,757 in restitution for the flight delay, the landing, and the hotel rooms for all 312 passengers. The flight made it to Beijing 18 hours late after an overnight in Vancouver.

Added RIM:

Based on the limited information available at this time, RIM has suspended the individuals involved pending further investigation.

As part of their punishment, neither can use Air Canada for one year.

HTC has seen its revenue fall for the first time in two years this quarter, as the smartphone maker struggles to keep up with the competition.

The Taiwanese-based company said today they made 31 billion Taiwanese dollars ($1.03 billion USD) in revenue for the month of November, down from 38.4 billion ($1.28 billion) last November.

HTC's figure was even more surprising because the company saw a 36 percent jump in October.

The company recently signed a deal to take a majority share of Beats Audio, including the technology in all its latest devices.

CEO Peter Chou has promised quad-core phones and tablets in 2012.

While supporters of SOPA, the US Internet censorship bill claiming to be aimed at combating online piracy, the reality is it would cast a wide net and make it significantly more difficult and expensive for many legitimate online services to operate.

One such service is Bookshare, an online library for people with various visual and reading disabilities, ranging from blindness to dyslexia. Bookshare provides unlimited access to specialized ebooks which can be translated into spoken words, Braille, or large print using various software and hardware.

The service is intended to fill a gap in many commercial products, which are designed specifically to disallow such conversions as a result of demands from publishers and authors preoccupied with piracy and performance royalties.

Bookshare is a completely legal service thanks to a specific provision in US Copyright law, found in Section 121, also known as the Chafee Amendment:

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for an authorized entity to reproduce or to distribute copies or phonorecords of a previously published, nondramatic literary work if such copies or phonorecords are reproduced or distributed in specialized formats exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities.

Yet another look into the future.

In a short 30 second video (not in English), Samsung shows what it imagines could be a tablet-like device in the near-future. The device is transparent, flexible and seemingly capable of outputting a quite decent 3D image too.

The video is yet another vision of the future posted for us all by the corporate world. Who knows when we could expect such devices, or if they will even come to fruition at all. Not that I doubt the technology can be developed, I just wonder if we'll even want or need it by then.

EU investigates Apple, e-book publishers over anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission, tasked with preventing anti-competitive behaviour in the European market, has revealed that it is investigating Apple Inc. and five publishers for breaching EU competition rules.

The investigation includes Apple, Hachette Livre, Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck.

EU regulators will focus on alleged illegal agreements that restrict competition in the emerging market, with Apple's iBook store, likely to come under EU scrutiny.

The EU's antitrust probe comes after the UK's Office of Fair Trading carried out a similar inquiry. The UK office is now working with the European Commission to extend the scope of the e-book enquiry across the entire European Union.

The Commission carried out unannounced inspections on companies related to the inquiry in March of this year.

Brand name lives on in UK and Germany.

Last week, Rhapsody and Best Buy completed a deal which saw Napster subscribers and assets absorbed by the Rhapsody music subscription service. This was widely seen as the end of the Napster brand's controversial lifespan since it was first developed in 1998.

Now, a Napster spokesman told The Register that while Napster is more-or-less gone in the United States, the brand will still be used for music subscriptions in the United Kingdom and Germany, since Rhapsody has no presence in either market.

"There is no intention to close Napster in either Germany or the UK," he said.

Groups raise questions about rollout pace, coverage.

The Federation of Small Businesses and the National Farmers Union (NFU) have raised questions about the rollout of 4G broadband services in the United Kingdom. The groups are concerned that the rollout is taking too long, and that it will leave hundreds of thousands of rural users out.

For businesses and home users in rural areas, getting a decent broadband connection can be a nightmare. In the UK, 3G mobile broadband gave rural customers options they didn't have before, but for a lot of users, the speed and service quality was not what they had expected.

The BBC covers the story of Hayley Gaffney, who signed up for 3G broandband only to find it so slow she couldn't carry out normal tasks. "The internet was an absolute nightmare," she said. "It just kept crashing because it was so slow."

"It was things like watching YouTube, uploading photos onto Facebook, just uploading the news feed on Facebook, getting my emails without getting them a few days later. Before it was so slow."

Now Gaffney is lucky enough to be part of a 4G broadband trial in Cornwall, which has boosted her speed to around 11 Mbps. "The internet really is amazing to what it was before," she said. Another 4G trial is taking place in central London currently, run by O2.

Samsung prepares for boom in orders.

The South-Korean firm plans to setup a new flash memory chip plant in China, it's second overseas manufacturing site for the chips. The development will cost Samsung a handsome $4 billion, but it will help it to prepare for an expected boom in smartphone and tablet computers that will rely on flash memory for storage.

The global NAND memory chip market is estimated at around $22 billion this year, and is expected to rise around 20 percent to $26 billion in 2012, with growth continuing for years after. The new Chinese line will start operating in 2013, and will enable Samsung to, "meet fast growing demand from our customers and at the same time strengthen our overall competitiveness in the memory industry," according to Jun Dong-soo, head of Samsung's memory business.

China is expected to overtake the United States as the top market in the world for electronics products, driven by the growth of income levels in the region.

Samsung's move helps its position in the global market, but is seen as a move to cater to Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei Technologies Co and ZTE Corp, who have seen steady rises in their smartphone and tablet market shares.