Over time, prosecutors said, Mr. Bedi told Mr. Davidson about an elaborate international conspiracy that had attacked Mr. Davidson's computer and was threatening Mr. Davidson and his family. The conspiracy allegedly involved a mysterious hard drive in a remote village of Honduras and a plot to infiltrate the United States government by Polish priests linked to Opus Dei. Mr. Bedi persuaded Mr. Davidson to pay the computer shop not only for data retrieval, but for personal protection, the authorities said.

The official YouTube video channel of American glam legends Kiss has been closed for breaching copyright laws - just weeks after bassist Gene Simmons controversially called for all rights breakers to be sued and jailed.

Simmons recently angered online communities by stating: "Make sure there are no incursions. Sue everybody. Be litigious. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line."

Oracle will deliver two Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) based on the OpenJDK project - one free and the other paid.

Messinger did not explain how the premium JVM would differ from the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware.

He did not say how Oracle would price the JVM, or explain how it would be offered, according to QCon Tweets.

Washington's proposed state income tax not only prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to spend $425,000 of his own money to help crush the measure at the polls, it also inspired Microsoft to launch a FUD campaign aimed at torpedoing the initiative. 'As an employer, we're concerned that I-1098 will make it harder to attract talent and create additional jobs in Washington state,' explained Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith.

All of which might make a cynic question what was really important to Microsoft - public education, or a $2B state income tax-free payday for its CEO?

Cooks Source magazine had been caught pulling a story off the internet and republishing it, without permission. Making matters worse, when called on it, the editor, Judith Griggs tried to lecture the original author, Monica Gaudio, with a hilariously wrong explanation of copyright and the public domain, and even (condescendingly) suggests Monica should pay her for the editing she needed to do on the story.

Nowhere in this is there any attempt to actually explain how she thought it was okay to repeatedly copy articles and photographs into a magazine while presenting them as if they had been specifically commissioned or licensed for the magazine.

Accused file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset was yesterday hit with a $1.5 million fine for downloading and distributing tunes by Richard Marx, Journey, Def Leppard, the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt, and others. Each of the 24 songs at issue in the case cost her $62,500. Meanwhile, the same offense in Germany might cost you €15 ($21) a song.

The cases are certainly not identical in their details, but they nicely illustrate just how different approaches to copyright infringement can be.

Oracle has hiked up the price of MySQL, killing low-priced support options and more than doubling what it charges for the commercial versions of the database.

The hike, which was anticipated, gives power to skeptics who'd questioned Oracle's motives for buying MySQL and who continue to fear for the future of MySQL.

SkySQL was formed in June, and it's composed entirely of former MySQL employees.

"We can go back and say to Oracle customers: you trusted us before, it's the same support and consulting team and experts in your field - why not trust us," Sandberg said.

The OpenOffice.org (OOo) community has declared independence from Oracle as members have joined the LibreOffice project, a fork of the open source office suite.

Oracle's uncompromising attitude has now instigated a mass exodus of OOo community members as independent contributors flock to LibreOffice.

The LibreOffice developers will continue to merge Oracle's improvements wherever possible, but statistics published recently show that a bulk of the project's code is coming from completely new contributors.

Following on from a Wall Street Journal investigation that uncovered the selling of user IDs (UIDs) to advertisers, Facebook first updated its API to encrypt UIDs and now says it discovered "instances where a data broker was paying developers for UIDs".

However as the number of privacy breaches grows the company will become more acutely aware that avenues it might have thought were open for it to abuse users' personal data are slowly being shut off.

He wrote to Apple to complain that his work was being distributed through their App Store, under terms that contradict the GPL's conditions and prohibit users from sharing the program.

All they would have to do is follow the license's conditions to help keep the software free. Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store, and they'd rather kick out GPLed software than change their own rules.