Cody Taylor

The trial of The Pirate Bay’s backers kicked off Monday in Sweden as the prosecutor laid out an opening statement and the labels asked for million in fines. Meanwhile, the defendants were tweeting from the dock.

As The Pirate Bay trial got underway, dozens of supporters gathered around the Court waving skull-and-crossbone flags as the parties entered the court house. Pro-piracy forces in Sweden had vowed to play along in the theater of the trial. The opening act was a spectacle; in court, on the streets and online.

Two Scottish companies, Picsel (Research) Ltd. and Picsel Technologies Ltd. have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in the U.S. District Court of Delaware. The lawsuit claims that the iPhone and iPod Touch use screen rendering technology that infringes on their patents.

For years Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge its patent portfolio has a precursor to interoperability discussions. Today, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization.

We’re talking about a distribution and its desktop environment that didn’t cross ways with Compiz. Until now. Yep, there is a special Elive E17 bundled with all the good 3D stuff. Knowing Elive’s reputation of being one of the most beautiful and stylish distributions out there, what can really go wrong if you combine two of Linux’s most valuable…

TechForensics writes “A few days’ testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files.” Read on for more details of this user’s findings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.