The once-extremely popular file sharing service LimeWire has been found liable of copyright infringement today in a 4-year-old lawsuit brought against them by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threatening to put the final nail in the company's coffin.

U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood noted that users of LimeWire perform "a substantial amount of copyright infringement" and that LimeWire "has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement."

The RIAA's lawsuit was seeking up to $150,000 USD per infringement, and the suit alleged that 93 percent of LimeWire's traffic was unauthorized file sharing. At its peak, LimeWire had 50 million unique users.

Adds the RIAA (via Wired): "LimeWire is one of the largest remaining commercial peer-to-peer services. Unlike other P2P services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court's decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators."

The RIAA and LimeWire will meet again with Judge Kimba Wood on June 1 to see how to proceed.

Read the full decision here: RIAA v. LimeWire.

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Samsung has said they plan to invest $21 billion USD into new businesses such as solar cells, LED tech and even bio-pharmaceuticals.

The statement adds that the investment will help develop five new businesses for the company, add 45,000 jobs, and add $40 billion in additional revenue by 2020.

"Governments around the world are now investing in green industries to address the issues of depleting energy resources and the protection of our planet's environment, which present pressing challenges to the global community," Samsung added in their prepared statement.

About 25 percent of the investment will be for solar cells "using crystalline silicon technology and thin film technology." Another 20 percent will be invested in rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles. An even larger chunk, around 35 percent, will be invested in LED technology ranging from TV back-lights to outdoor lighting.

The rest will be split between bio-pharmaceuticals and electronic healthcare equipment, says Samsung, which is currently a leader in the HDTV, mobile phone and chip markets.

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The Hollywood Reporter has reported today that producers of the recent Best Picture winning film "The Hurt Locker" are preparing to sue thousands of alleged pirates, and that the case could be filed as soon as this week.

The U.S. Copyright Group, which has sued tens of thousands of alleged torrent users this year, has teamed up with Voltage Pictures, the team behind the movie, and the filing is said to include "tens of thousands (of pirates), if not more."

The movie was leaked to the Internet, in full DVD quality, about 6 months before its nationwide release in the U.S. Despite winning Best Picture, the film only grossed $17 million USD.

When filed, the plaintiffs must subpoena ISP records, and lawyers for the U.S Copyright Group say 75 percent of ISPs asked have cooperated in doing so.

Back in April, the Group sued 50,000 users, and says that over 40 percent have already settled with no cases going to court.

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Google has announced that it will give YouTube fans a chance to share their videos with more privacy, offering "private" and now "unlisted" options alongside the standard "public" option.

For "private," you can invite up to 25 friends to view the video, and that is it. Unless you have been invited, you cannot view the video.

The new "unlisted" feature gives you the chance to remain "semi-private," by keeping the video not indexed in the YouTube search engine or on the user's personal channel. Anyone who has the link can watch the video, and they can share it as well, so your video will spread almost literally by "word of mouth."

That being said, the options should be welcomed by YouTube users that would like to keep their videos private, or private to a degree.

Read the full blog post here: YouTube Blog

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In early March, Apple sued rival smartphone maker HTC over violation of patents related to the iPhone, accusing HTC of infringing on up to 20 patents relating to the popular smartphone's hardware and user interface.

Today, HTC has counter-sued, claiming that Apple is infringing on five of their own patents.

The device maker is asking the International Trade Commission (ITC) to halt all sales and import of the Apple iPhone 3G/S, iPad and iPod Touch.

Says HTC in a press statement: "As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible. We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones."

From their end, Apple is looking for monetary damages and an injunction that would block HTC from selling most of their smartphones in the U.S.

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Top movie rental company Netflix has quietly begun offering HD streaming of its "Watch Instantly" streaming service for PC and Mac users, many months after it made HD streaming available to console and set-top box users.

Computer users, however, have had to stick with plain old SD streams, which is probably okay if you are watching on a monitor but discouraged users that wanted to connect their media servers to an HDTV and save on having to purchase a set-top box or console.

So far it seems the titles available for HD streaming is limited, but GL says it should be about half of all streams soon.

If you are unsure the movie you want is available for HD streaming on the PC, hover the mouse over the cover art and check if it says "HD Available."

As with HD streams through set-top boxes like Roku and the PS3, HD is only available up to 720p.

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Facebook, the second most viewed website in the United States, has increasingly seen criticism for the way it handles privacy matters and today the new setting changes have been deemed "unacceptable" by EU data protection authorities.

The authority, the Article 29 Working Party wrote in a letter that the new changes are "detrimental to the user."

The default settings, changed in the last month, made it so every user is searchable by search engines, even if the user does not explicitly sign off on it.

Third party applications can also take data from the profiles and use it to bring more personalized ads, but the group says that also should be explicitly signed off on by the user.

Finally, the group says "that it would breach data protection law if they use personal data contained on an individual profile page for commercial purposes without consent."

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Microsoft has announced that the Office 2010 suite, the latest in the long line of the popular word processing bundle, is now available online and in stores.

New to the 2010 version is the addition of Office Web apps, which are free for consumers to use online, allowing for saved files in the cloud as well as collaboration and sharing.

Says Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division: "Along with Office 2010, Microsoft also released the SharePoint 2010 collaboration suite. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 define the future of productivity. With the 2010 set of products, organizations will save, innovate, and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone, and browser."

Additionally to the Web apps are new broadcast capabilities for PowerPoint, auto-preview for Word and "Sparklines" for Excel which can "generate trend visualization graphics."

Microsoft has been actively promoting the Web apps as it competes with Google for cloud-based word processing. Google Docs is actively used by millions of users.

The physical version of Office 2010 Pro costs $500 and the download-only costs $350. The other versions are significantly cheaper, but still decently expensive, with the Home and Business versions costing $280 and $200 (physical; download only) and the Student version costing $149 and $119.

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AndroidPolice has posted a full report on the performance of the Google Nexus One running the upcoming Android 2.2, which has yet to be released to the public but has been tested by a developer from the site, Ian Douglas.

All the features of 2.2 will be revealed at the May 19th I/O conference, but so far all we know is that it will have Flash 10.1 built-in. Additionally, we know it has a new home screen.

To test the performance of the device running 2.2, Police is using a tool called Linpack. As the authors of the program could explain it better than I ever could, here is their description of the tool: "The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense N by N system of linear equations Ax = b, which is a common task in engineering. The solution is obtained by Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting, with 2/3*N3 + 2*N2 floating point operations. The result is reported in Millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second (MFLOP/s, sometimes simply called FLOPS).

This test is more a reflection of the state of the Android Dalvik Virtual Machine than of the floating point performance of the underlying processor. Software written for an Android device is written using Java code that the Dalvik VM interprets at run time." Naturally, the higher the number, the better.

The editors ran the HTC Hero (with Android 2.1) as well as the Nexus One with 2.1 first and got the following results: HTC Hero: 2MFLOPS (very slow) and the N1 (7 MFLOPS). The N1 running 2.2 got significantly higher numbers, 37.5MFLOPS, a 450 percent increase.

Very strong performance, and hopefully the standard for all new devices built with 2.2.

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